I think people would be able to survive the G forces if they were embedded within a solution that they could breath. The trip would be short enough that the stresses on the heart and lungs would be minimal.
2000G is not minimal. The world record for survival is a nasa test at 52G. The man went blind for a week afterwards, and had some other complications as well. It's probably not the thing you want to try yourself, but if you do, make sure to have medical care available on site. You definitely don't want to do this before you are sent into space on your own!
I fail to see why being embedded in a fluid would make things better. In addition to the weight of your own body crushing your bones and organs, you now have the weight of the fluid as well. I guess you thought that with a fluid of the right density, you could "float" in it, without ever meeting the wall. Well, you may "float", but your body will still be subjected to 2000G. No matter what medium you are suspended in, you still need to obey Newtons second law: F=ma. If you are accelerated, your body will need to get pushed, whether it's by the fluid or the wall is not of importance. The only thing the fluid will cause is additional pressure above you, and other medical complications (you are supposed to breath air, not science-fiction movie-stuff, or too early born babies stuff)
What you need is a specially designed chair to distribute the load over as large area as possible. And that is exactly what astronauts already use.
If you are only talking about a short duration, you don't need to breath in it. If you are talking about prolonged exposure, it is not a short duration. But why not simply breath air?
This makes me wonder: if a truly autonomous, human-like, interactive robot were created tomorrow, would society accept it to the point where one winds up in every home (I dunno, doing the laundry or something) or would we reject it as just too creepy?
Given that quasi was designed as a cartoon/toddler, not as a grown-up slave, I'd say it would be us doing quasis laundry. This seems to be what we want anyway, someone to care for. Remember the tamagotchi-craze? Even with real-life animals, people want pets! Usually they don't even bother to teach them anything useful (although most animals can probably be trained to perform something useful).
These fragments will overlap and from these overlaps you will eventually be able to make perhaps even a complete picture. An example of this process is "diff" which most here will recognise as a programmers tool.
No. Diff is used for comparing different versions of at text-file. If you want to reconstruct a file from overlapping individual pieces, you need a different tool.
DNA is programming. Its molecular programming, but it is still programming.
Well, it might be, and it might not be. Before the digital computers, people speculated that the function of the brain might be emulated by a giant switchboard (or gears and pulleys) (linky). While a switchboard is somewhat like a digital computer, it is not the same thing. And while a computer is somewhat like a brain, they may not be the same. Similarly, DNA has some aspects that look like programming (which we are used to), but it isn't therefore necessarily the same. It's just that it's a human tendency to look for similarities in operation, when we do not understand it.
I suspect we will be able to tell that Dinos and Birds are, if not close cousins, then perhaps close 2nd cousins. In fact the birds by even be decendants. If decendants, then one would expect large amounts of dino DNA may still be found in bird DNA... and that it is just inactive or that its function is modified. The cell is a rather promiscous DNA xerox machine.
This isn't exactly a very surprising prediction. According to modern evolutionary classification, birds are dinosaurs. Just like apes are mammals. I fail to see why you would expect "inactive dino-DNA" in birds. Why must it be inactive? After all, birds are dinosaurs. It would be like expecting to find "inactive mammal-DNA" in apes. We don't, apes are mammals!
Furthermore, in evolutionary theory, we don't speak about "cousins". Either one species is a descendant from some other species, or it is not. For convenience, we group animals that are descendants from the same species, together in groups; such as mammals, insects, etc... We do not call them siblings (you are a sibling of tuna-fish), since it conveys little meaning. In that case, it would be better to say explicitly which animal you both descend from, or lacking that information, to postulize that it exists, and come up with a name for the group (e.g. Chordata, although there are probably closer groups). In view of this, calling evolutionary groups "cousins" conveys no meaning at all.
This is clearly along the idea that if you put enough monkeys in front of typewriters that they would create Shakespear's sonnets.
No, it is not analogous. Stitching DNA together is analogous to solving a jigsaw puzzle (as you yourself suggested). Getting monkeys to write Shakespeare is analogous to throwing a dice and coming up with the right answer. The two ideas are clearly distinct.
Every cell is a copy of every other cell in a given individual. As cells specialize they turn off some of the DNA. The DNA is still there.
No. Every cell is a copy of exactly one cell (with the exception of the fusion of an egg and sperm cell). That is why it is called cell division
It has been a long time since "Go To Statement Considered Harmful" by Edsger W. Dijkstra was released, marking the begining of the end for procedural based spaghetti code(or at least the acceptance of the inevitability of it's existence). Programs got too large and complex, and a new paradigm was needed.
Edsger Dijkstra was a troll. His "goto" paper is one of the most obvious examples of this. Now, just because you are a troll, doesn't mean you aren't right at times. Dijkstra was right almost all of the time. He rightly criticized a lot of "best practices" of his day. And coming from academia, he had the advantage of not having to offer anything better. Which he, by the way, didn't. Dijkstra preferred to write provably correct code in non-existing languages. Which is fine in academia...
Now, with the web, computer solutions are no longer a single entity, and can span across systems and even languages.I think there needs to be a similiar paper to stress standards and best practices, and to caution the use of bleeding edge technologies.
There are plenty. A quick web-search will likely reveal that there are more of them than you can expect to read in a full year. Programming is no longer such a niche area that a single professor can write a troll that will be quoted by almost everyone 30 years later.
But if Dijkstra lived today, he wouldn't even touch web-programming with a ten-foot pole. He would have been more likely to start by proving some formal properties of a new system designed for the same purpose as web-programming, but never implemented it himself. He would then write papers advocating people start using this system instead of the web. And he would be right, his system would be better... if it only ever got made!
It's not that people don't know web-programming as it exists today is too difficult. It's just that we fail to have better alternatives.
Perhaps something with a title like "Why you should learn less and do more". Although many people complain about Java's complexity(The architecture, not the language), it is a very good model of standards. It is this model of standards, not the language itself, that make it so revolutionary in this era of web computing. It is a sad day when marketing wins, again.
If you had read Dijkstras paper instead of just quoting the title, you would see that this is not in his spirit at all. See also my above comments.
Reality check: only two browsers conform to the HTML standard (render HTML correctly) as of now, which are Opera and Safari. By your argument, web devs should focus on a minority of the web surfers out there.
Actually, that wouldn't be such a bad situation. I'm sure that would bring most browsers up to standard pretty quickly.
However, web "designers" is the reason the HTML standard is such a mess that only two browsers are even able to conform to it. Originally, HTML was supposed to by Hyper-Text-Markup-Language, where the markup consisted of semantic latex-like tags. It isn't anymore. First we got the BLINK tag and COLOR keywords. Then we got javascript, CSS and all that shit. If I cared that much, I might be able to keep up with the alphabet soup, but frankly, I just despise it all. After all that work, all it has given us is a bunch of "designers" being able to wank off to their colorful pages that will only render correctly in Internet Explorer in a maximized window at 1024x768 resolution while autoplaying annoying music and asking you to download the flash plugin.
"Any web-page should be designed for any browser" means a lot of extra work must go into working around the inconsistencies of how HTML is rendered by today's browsers.
My experience is quite the opposite. Web "designers" have the option of using good old-fashioned html, the same way it was written 10 years ago. Instead they choose to go out of their way to make it incompatible with as many browsers as possible. And then they whine that it is all so difficult to make it work across browsers. Well, stop "designing", and stop complaining, and maybe I'll stop my ranting...
There is no such thing as fragile standards-compliant HTML, only fragile browsers. If the browsers rendered it correctly, web devs would be able to write it once and have it display the same on all browsers.
Your point is moot. Web-developers do not write standard-compliant HTML. Even if browsers accepted standard-compliant HTML, they wouldn't know how to write it. Even the w3.org validation page didn't validate correctly at one time.
And, although I like Linux a great deal, that has not exactly worked out for the best with each distro having its own kernel.
The alternative would be that the distros used different versions of the mainline kernel, compiled with different options. I fail to see how adding a few additional patches, and third-party drivers would make things much worse. Besides, most of the incompatibilities between different distros has not been caused by changing kernels. They are caused by different compile-time options, different choice of packages, difference in package systems, filesystem layout differences, different versions of shared libraries, and the ever-changing C++ ABI.
Do you think web designers would be happy to support several slightly different versions of Firefox?
I don't fucking much care what makes web "designers" happy. Instead they should focus on keeping us readers happy, which means that any web-page should be designed for any browser. That means IE, mozilla, opera, or simply whatever standard-conforming browser you have.
If your page is fragile enough to break if someone uses a version of firefox with a patch to change the name and logo, then it will surely also break between firefox 1.5.0.5 and 1.5.0.6. By your logic, browsers shouldn't be improved either.
Earth is increasingly short of fresh water.... space has unlimited comets with fresh water, just catch one
Minerals? -- space has more than one can imagine
Huh? Short of fresh water? There's a whole ocean of it, and it covers 71% of the planet! Oh, you mean it's salty? So what, do you think we can just drink whatever we find in space, without cleaning it up first?
Regarding minerals. Yes they are out there. But we are living on a pretty big rock ourselves. The minerals in space, are probably going to be most important for projects in space (if we ever get to that level of sophistication). Bringing them down to earth probably isn't worth the expense.
Space.... has SPACE -- using automated robots and orbiting factories to process raw minerals we will construct floating cities that will rival the best on earth
Unfortunately, at this time, automated robots are only useful for a very small minority of manufacturing tasks. And while orbiting factories sound like a neat idea, remember how much infrastructure is needed to keep just one factory running on earth.
Given todays technology, we can't just build a factory in space. We would have to build thousands of factories, in order to make them support each other. Among the things that need to be produced, are: air, water, food, energy, fuel, space rockets, human habitats and clothing, as well as replacement parts for everything that's in orbit (which includes screws, plastic bags, pencils, ball bearings, microprocessors, aspirin, etc...)!
Why did Europeans colonise the Americas? I mean, look at the expense!:rolls eyes:
Sorry, that's just not compareable. America was fertile farm-land, just waiting to be colonized. Once you had paid your ticket for transportation, and brought enough money and supplies for surviving a year (worst estimate, many did well with less), you would be able to survive by farming your own land. People fled to America, just to get an opportunity to live there.
In contrast; You can't just fly off to space and live off the land. In order to survive in space, you need a huge expensive infrastructure, and a constant reshipment of supplies, where supplies even consists of such elementary stuff as air, water, and food. It is possible to imagine that future technologies will make this easier, but as of now, we don't have such future technologies. People fled to America, but if someone started a colony in space, asked colonists to pay their own ticket, and to pay for all supplies that will be shipped in later, no sane people would move there.
In any foreseeable future, space can only get colonized through massive government subsidies, and there's no payoff in sight. Which is probably the reason why we haven't colonized it yet.
Gotta love it when trolls like the parent get modded up. Had the article mentioned trillions of write cycles, he'd be asking for quadrillions.
Of course I would. What I really want is unlimited write cycles. I dislike things that fail even when used according to manufacturer specifications. But with trillions of write cycles, you would have a few years of use, even in the worst case (assuming this new ram is about as fast as dram). With quadrillions of write cycles, it would be very unlikely that the ram would fail before other parts of the computer. I'd be relatively happy with that.
It's faster, quieter, hardier (you can drop it -- there are no moving parts), uses less power, and MTBF is comperable these days. Flash drives are viable alternatives to hard disks -- the main barrier at this point is price.
Well, they are not viable alternatives to DRAM. If you fail to see why this sucks, it's you who have a problem.
People don't buy sockets - they don't decide what upgrade to get based on the socket.
They choose the best performing CPU for their budget, then maybe the same for a graphics card. Once these two are selected they just chose the memory and motherboard that allows it all to fit together in a stable fashion (or overclock if that's your thing).
When I bought my computer, that's exactly the opposite of what I did.
First, I had to choose Intel or AMD. I chose AMD. Then, I had to find a motherboard I liked. Some of the criteria for the motherboard would be prize, linux compatibility, at least some good user-reviews on the net (and few bad reviews), more than 4G ram possible (NONE had that at the time), 939 socket (seemed more future-proof at the time), PCI express (seemed more future-proof at the time), serial ATA (seemed more future-proof at the time), and a reasonably modern chipset. Then I chose the rest of the components, in this order: power-supply, cabinet, sound-card, hard-disks, CPU, ram, DVD-burner, graphic card.
Currently if you're looking to upgrade you'll choose a Core based CPU. Once you've got that CPU, it's not really a huge leap of logic to conclude you won't buy an AM2 based board.
Currently, if I were looking for an upgrade, I'd buy an Athlon X2 cpu that plugs into the 939 socket on my motherboard. I already have a stable, reliable combination of components that I trust. "Upgrading" to Core 2 Duo would be akin to replacing everything. I could no longer trust my computer to perform the way I'm used to. Sorry, that's just not an option.
If an "upgrade" involves replacing more than a single component, it's not an "upgrade" anymore, it's a major rebuild! I'm not going to rebuild something that works perfectly well now. At least not if I relay on it in my daily life. In fact, I'd rather buy a new PC and keep my old as a backup!
Well, actually, "idiot" stems from greek, where it used to describe people who do not take part in the political system, or people with bad political judgement. (link here). Arguing that idiot is a medical term is as idiotic as arguing that it only applies to politics in greek city-states.
You are an idiot if you don't understand that "idiot" is a derogatory term implying that the person you speak of is stupid.
WE had it happen near here, a Sherriff was making women give sexual favors, he has his ass beat hard by one of the womens husbands and his 12 friends. This was before he was discovered... because they started spreading around town what he did.
Let me get this straight... You advocate mob rule?
You actually prefer a society where a single woman can accuse someone they don't like of some mild abuse of power, and it results in a mob of 12 people attacking him in a mob?
So, would you have been as proud of your actions if the man turned out to be innocent? Would you be as proud of your actions if the man died, or became a cripple for life, after simply "asking" for sexual favours? (this is not the same as rape, remember..). Would you have been as proud of your actions if it later happened to you?
So, to rephrase... Abusing power when you are in a government seat is not ok. Arbitrarily beating up people instead of using the justice system is ok. Mob rule is preferred to democracy. You are an idiot!
On the other hand, as abuses of authority go, this is fairly mild.
Mild, as compared to what? I'd say it's about as far an average security guard can go in abuse of "authority". A mild abuse would be to smile, swallow your anger, and let the traveller through...
But what I'm wondering is why people think it's a good idea to go out of your way to be rude or insulting. If you shout "pig" at every cop you pass in the street, pretty soon you will find somone who takes it to heart and will give you a bad time.
Hey, he wasn't shouting "pig" at every cop he passed in the street. He wasn't rude or insulting. He had written something insulting at a plastic bag. And the insulting thing was only insulting to Kip Hawley, a public figure (which therefore have to live with that sort of thing, the same way president Bush has to live with all the people making fun of him). The security guard may find such a political demonstration childish, immature, in bad taste, or simply disagree with it. That is not reason for harassing the traveller. It is akin to only allow republicans but not democrats on flights, or any number of other discriminatory practices against travellers.
and who is going to pay 200k a crack for something you could just as easily do by going skydiving ten times and then hiking over to the imax?
The same kind of people who can afford it. If the cost of a flight is not a biggie to you, it doesn't matter that it's a biggie to someone else. You already have a mansion (or ten, around the world), a personal helicopter (and pilot) (and jet), a garage full of sports cars, other expensive hobbies (like casino gambling, formula-1 racing, etc...); and so on. These kind of people exist. Virgin Galactic could have increased their prizes ten-fold, or hundred-fold, and they would still have customers.
Yet, the price isn't that high. It is actually only $200000, which means even I can afford it! All I've got to do is sell my house, and I'm space-born! Of course, after the flight, I still need a place to live, but hey, that's exactly where I (and most other people) started when moving out of home for the first time. Thus, the potential customers for this kind of flight even includes typical middle-aged middle-class people, with abnormal high enthusiasm for space-flights.
This statement is astonishing, particulary because it is coming from an AI "expert".
Quite the opposite, actually. It's a pretty down-to-earth statement, where the speaker identifies his position, but at the same time advices the audience that this position is not the only reasonable position to have, even among other experts, but that it is something that is constantly debated, even among experts.
the brain has allowed humans to create the most complex tools and technology the planet has ever seen, all the while not having to think about breathing or keeping our blood flowing, monitoring insane amounts of chemicals, repairing itself after injury, retaining intricate memories from decades ago, and even attempting to build machines to do the same thing, the brain is not that complicated or magical(note the searing sarcasm).
The human brain is not vastly different from the brain of other animals. Advances in biotechnology, computer technology, and other fields may even let us design devices with similar functionality. For some limited applications, we have already created devices that surpass the effectiveness of any brain. You "searing sarcasm" only points back at yourself.
It has been long understood in AI that the only way to get a machine to truly behave like a human is through pure volume of information. [snip] It is only through brute force of millions of facts that we can get a machine to even come close to the range of knowledge that the human brain contains which is the basis for projects like Cyc.
No it hasn't. If you had said "Some people have long believed that the only way...", you'd been right. But since no human-level AI has ever been created, no one has any idea how to achieve it. That includes the creators of Cyc. Cyc has not reached human-level AI. Cyc is nowhere near reaching human-level AI. Cyc has not brought us nearer an understanding of how to construct a human-level AI. Many prominent AI researchers view Cyc as a failure. It is not good at learning, and unlike a human brain, it becomes slower the more it knows.
This leads to another point: that the human body itself is perhaps the most complicated organism on earth.
Perhaps. And perhaps it is the fruit-fly, or maybe it's the oak-tree, or the malaria parasite. It depends upon what you mean by complicated.
Simply getting a robot to write its name in cursive is an enormous task to accomplish, as mechanical parts are no where near as efficient as human joints (although this is improving, they are still not sending the type of precise electrical signals to the brain like our bodies do).
Ever tried using one of those printers? I have one at home, that costs less than what I earn after one day at work (even after taxes have been paid), and it's able to write in cursive, colour, or even print images from my camera on photographic paper, with results indistuingishable from a real photograph. Now, try to do that by hand!
No, we don't need to be programmed to be able to catch a fly ball at a baseball game, we just judge where the ball is going. A robot must be told trajectory, wind speed, velocity of the ball, and all sorts of vector math just to be able to accomplish what we see to be a simple task. And on top of that, it can't learn how to do it again.
Actually, we are programmed to be able to catch a fly ball at a baseball game. Our genes have built in a lot of knowledge, and being able to predict trajectories of falling objects may have helped us hunting, back when we used to live that way. And a robot does not need to be told all those things you say. To be able to predict a trajectory, all you need to know is normal high-school physics: v_x = v_x_0-gt^2 and v_y = v_y_0. Then simply observe the ball, plug in v_x_0 and v_y_0, and get the results, just like a human brain would do. The fact that these processes aren't conscious to you, doesn't make the way the brain operates any more magic than
What I meant is that while movies and music require physical equipment to produce - microphones, instruments, video equipment, etc - books require a single person and - if you really want to go bare-bones - a pen and paper.
To be equally daft, I could say that music requires one or more musicians coming together for the duration of the song, playing various instruments, and recording on a $10 tape-recorder with built-in microphone, whereas a book requires years expensive research, years of writing, and even more years of editing, by intelligent well-educated people, before it's printed on specialized equipment that costs a fortune (a CD-burner is something everyone's got).
Even a nice computer is going to be cheaper than a recording studio rental for any significant period of time.
Even buying a studio is going to be cheaper than hiring an entire staff for editing and printing books.
Once you lose the cost of distrobution for books, on the other hand, you've cut out the vaaaast majority of your built-in costs.
No. If you by book mean anything printed on paper, such as a new volume of the Hardy boys, or some doctor romance novel, I agree. But then I could counter that with music, I mean a CD-release by some hotel- or street-musicians. But if you by music mean "The Wall", I happen to talk about "Encyclopedia Britannica" when it comes to books.
but the assumption with books was that you were paying a good chunk toward the physical 'stuff' the book is made out of. With that cost gone, it would seem books should be dirt-cheap, but clearly they're not...
Your assumption, not the assumtion.
All I'm saying is that it looks like, once again, media distroution companies are trying to wring every last cent out, rather than selling at a point that is both profitable and reasonable.
And how is that different from any other business? While I agree that the cost of CDs is absurdly high (I buy most of my DVDs at half the price of my CDs), and that this certainly smells like something only a monopoly or a cartel could do, the market for books and e-books is entirely different. There is real price-differentiation there.
Bullshit! Oil is NOT in short supply, only production.
Thank you for your insight. Now please explain why the free market can't just produce more oil. Maybe it's got something to do with oil itself being in short supply?
Bullshit! Oil does NOT come from dead dinosaurs, it distills and pools up from the hodge podge of magma below our feet.
Wow. You seem to know things better than the thousands of geophysicists who help the worlds oil companies in finding the oil. Because they seem to think that oil comes from old biomass (mostly trees, not dinosaurs). Of course there are bound to be cranks and crackpots around telling a different story, but I know who I prefer to listen to.
Meaningfulness nowadays is nowhere to be seen, but it doesn't matter: a chat-session about nothing is considered of more value than reading a book on your own. Just because it doesn't involve other people.
That depends upon who you ask (and it's probably not me you ask, if that's the answer you get)! But it also depends upon the book, and it depends upon who you chat with. For example, a chat session about nothing with Nelson Mandela is something I would value more than reading pretty much anything. On the other hand, if the subject I'm chatting with is the average Internet idiot, pretty much anything in print would be better.
Yes, and what was the energy to force ratio quoted in TFA? 700 watts (just a little less than 1 hp) to get 83 millinewtons of force?
No, it was 1 kW go get 16 mN (and some wishful thinking of future improvements). I don't know where you get your numbers, but a search in the article reveals none of the numbers 700 or 83.
They're going to need enormous improvements in efficiency before this concept could be practical, assuming that the device actually works.
Uhm,... so what is it about contributing to wikipedia that is considered "hip". I thought clubbing and DJing was "hip". Following stupid fashion trends is "hip". Enjoying unpopular bands and having a holier-than-thou attitude is "hip". Contributing to wikipedia? No, sorry!
I don't. Actually, it's one of the main reasons I'm not using windows. After having spent an hour or two installing the OS, I must spend an hour or two installing microsoft office, then an hour or five installing various updates, an extra hour getting up-to-date drivers for various hardware, and a zillion extra hours getting all kinds of other essential extras: cygwin, emacs, winzip, flash, acrobat reader, ghostview, ad-aware, a ntp client, a web-browser without millions of security holes, etc..., none of which even have something of remotely similar functionality in windows!
I can deal with windows breaking once in a while. I can deal with having to install all of this. What I can't fucking deal with, is having to install all of this every time windows breaks. Back in my youth I switched to linux for ideological reasons. I don't care anymore, as I've realized that I'm not going to save the world by my choice of operating system. But for obvious reasons, untill there is a commercial OS that is better than ubuntu, I'm not going to pay them a cent.
Currently there are three kinds of rechargeable batteries used for electonics and toys: [NiCd, NiMH, Rechargeable alkaline]
Uhm, no!
You forgot some very common types:
Alkaline - Most common. (or are all alkalines rechargeable?)
Li-Ion - Expensive, rechargeable, with high energy and power. Non-standard sizes only. Used in cellphones, digital cameras and other expensive high-tech gadgetry that ared used often, requires a lot of power, and must remain portable.
Litium - Expensive, non-rechargeable, with high energy and power, and long shelf-life (> 10 years). Not rechargeable. Cells are 3 volt, so standard, AA, AAA, C, D cells cannot be replaced, although 2 of them in series can. Comes as 9 volt batteries and as their own weird sizes (CR123A being the most common).
Heavy duty - The cheapest kind of battery. Has long shelf-life. Not rechargeable.
Lead - Well perhaps not commonly for electronics and toys, but... does the "portable" speakers for my mp3-player count?
Wow! You sure know what the majority of slashdotters are up to!
I mean, it's not like you are projecting your own beliefs onto others... Or assuming that everyone aspires to the same stereotype that you do... No, that wouldn't be right. I'm impressed with the detailed analysis you've done about slashdot readers HDTV shopping habits. Thank you!
Just because most people have to put up with it, doesn't mean it's a good idea. Personally, I find it much easier to just have to turn on my TV and playstation, than to turn my TV on, VCR off, DVD off, playstation on, only to find out that I have to switch cables anyway, because the playstation was disconnected because I used the nintendo last time. Given the choice between 1 and 20 input connectors, I would choose 20, even if they daisychain.
Daisychaining is good as a last resort. It should not be the default.
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2000G is not minimal. The world record for survival is a nasa test at 52G. The man went blind for a week afterwards, and had some other complications as well. It's probably not the thing you want to try yourself, but if you do, make sure to have medical care available on site. You definitely don't want to do this before you are sent into space on your own!
I fail to see why being embedded in a fluid would make things better. In addition to the weight of your own body crushing your bones and organs, you now have the weight of the fluid as well. I guess you thought that with a fluid of the right density, you could "float" in it, without ever meeting the wall. Well, you may "float", but your body will still be subjected to 2000G. No matter what medium you are suspended in, you still need to obey Newtons second law: F=ma. If you are accelerated, your body will need to get pushed, whether it's by the fluid or the wall is not of importance. The only thing the fluid will cause is additional pressure above you, and other medical complications (you are supposed to breath air, not science-fiction movie-stuff, or too early born babies stuff)
What you need is a specially designed chair to distribute the load over as large area as possible. And that is exactly what astronauts already use.
If you are only talking about a short duration, you don't need to breath in it. If you are talking about prolonged exposure, it is not a short duration. But why not simply breath air?
Given that quasi was designed as a cartoon/toddler, not as a grown-up slave, I'd say it would be us doing quasis laundry. This seems to be what we want anyway, someone to care for. Remember the tamagotchi-craze? Even with real-life animals, people want pets! Usually they don't even bother to teach them anything useful (although most animals can probably be trained to perform something useful).
No. Diff is used for comparing different versions of at text-file. If you want to reconstruct a file from overlapping individual pieces, you need a different tool.
Well, it might be, and it might not be. Before the digital computers, people speculated that the function of the brain might be emulated by a giant switchboard (or gears and pulleys) (linky). While a switchboard is somewhat like a digital computer, it is not the same thing. And while a computer is somewhat like a brain, they may not be the same. Similarly, DNA has some aspects that look like programming (which we are used to), but it isn't therefore necessarily the same. It's just that it's a human tendency to look for similarities in operation, when we do not understand it.
This isn't exactly a very surprising prediction. According to modern evolutionary classification, birds are dinosaurs. Just like apes are mammals. I fail to see why you would expect "inactive dino-DNA" in birds. Why must it be inactive? After all, birds are dinosaurs. It would be like expecting to find "inactive mammal-DNA" in apes. We don't, apes are mammals!
Furthermore, in evolutionary theory, we don't speak about "cousins". Either one species is a descendant from some other species, or it is not. For convenience, we group animals that are descendants from the same species, together in groups; such as mammals, insects, etc... We do not call them siblings (you are a sibling of tuna-fish), since it conveys little meaning. In that case, it would be better to say explicitly which animal you both descend from, or lacking that information, to postulize that it exists, and come up with a name for the group (e.g. Chordata, although there are probably closer groups). In view of this, calling evolutionary groups "cousins" conveys no meaning at all.
No, it is not analogous. Stitching DNA together is analogous to solving a jigsaw puzzle (as you yourself suggested). Getting monkeys to write Shakespeare is analogous to throwing a dice and coming up with the right answer. The two ideas are clearly distinct.
No. Every cell is a copy of exactly one cell (with the exception of the fusion of an egg and sperm cell). That is why it is called cell division
Edsger Dijkstra was a troll. His "goto" paper is one of the most obvious examples of this. Now, just because you are a troll, doesn't mean you aren't right at times. Dijkstra was right almost all of the time. He rightly criticized a lot of "best practices" of his day. And coming from academia, he had the advantage of not having to offer anything better. Which he, by the way, didn't. Dijkstra preferred to write provably correct code in non-existing languages. Which is fine in academia...
There are plenty. A quick web-search will likely reveal that there are more of them than you can expect to read in a full year. Programming is no longer such a niche area that a single professor can write a troll that will be quoted by almost everyone 30 years later.
But if Dijkstra lived today, he wouldn't even touch web-programming with a ten-foot pole. He would have been more likely to start by proving some formal properties of a new system designed for the same purpose as web-programming, but never implemented it himself. He would then write papers advocating people start using this system instead of the web. And he would be right, his system would be better... if it only ever got made!
It's not that people don't know web-programming as it exists today is too difficult. It's just that we fail to have better alternatives.
If you had read Dijkstras paper instead of just quoting the title, you would see that this is not in his spirit at all. See also my above comments.
Actually, that wouldn't be such a bad situation. I'm sure that would bring most browsers up to standard pretty quickly.
However, web "designers" is the reason the HTML standard is such a mess that only two browsers are even able to conform to it. Originally, HTML was supposed to by Hyper-Text-Markup-Language, where the markup consisted of semantic latex-like tags. It isn't anymore. First we got the BLINK tag and COLOR keywords. Then we got javascript, CSS and all that shit. If I cared that much, I might be able to keep up with the alphabet soup, but frankly, I just despise it all. After all that work, all it has given us is a bunch of "designers" being able to wank off to their colorful pages that will only render correctly in Internet Explorer in a maximized window at 1024x768 resolution while autoplaying annoying music and asking you to download the flash plugin.
My experience is quite the opposite. Web "designers" have the option of using good old-fashioned html, the same way it was written 10 years ago. Instead they choose to go out of their way to make it incompatible with as many browsers as possible. And then they whine that it is all so difficult to make it work across browsers. Well, stop "designing", and stop complaining, and maybe I'll stop my ranting...
Your point is moot. Web-developers do not write standard-compliant HTML. Even if browsers accepted standard-compliant HTML, they wouldn't know how to write it. Even the w3.org validation page didn't validate correctly at one time.
The alternative would be that the distros used different versions of the mainline kernel, compiled with different options. I fail to see how adding a few additional patches, and third-party drivers would make things much worse. Besides, most of the incompatibilities between different distros has not been caused by changing kernels. They are caused by different compile-time options, different choice of packages, difference in package systems, filesystem layout differences, different versions of shared libraries, and the ever-changing C++ ABI.
I don't fucking much care what makes web "designers" happy. Instead they should focus on keeping us readers happy, which means that any web-page should be designed for any browser. That means IE, mozilla, opera, or simply whatever standard-conforming browser you have.
If your page is fragile enough to break if someone uses a version of firefox with a patch to change the name and logo, then it will surely also break between firefox 1.5.0.5 and 1.5.0.6. By your logic, browsers shouldn't be improved either.
Huh? Short of fresh water? There's a whole ocean of it, and it covers 71% of the planet! Oh, you mean it's salty? So what, do you think we can just drink whatever we find in space, without cleaning it up first?
Regarding minerals. Yes they are out there. But we are living on a pretty big rock ourselves. The minerals in space, are probably going to be most important for projects in space (if we ever get to that level of sophistication). Bringing them down to earth probably isn't worth the expense.
Unfortunately, at this time, automated robots are only useful for a very small minority of manufacturing tasks. And while orbiting factories sound like a neat idea, remember how much infrastructure is needed to keep just one factory running on earth. Given todays technology, we can't just build a factory in space. We would have to build thousands of factories, in order to make them support each other. Among the things that need to be produced, are: air, water, food, energy, fuel, space rockets, human habitats and clothing, as well as replacement parts for everything that's in orbit (which includes screws, plastic bags, pencils, ball bearings, microprocessors, aspirin, etc...)!
Sorry, that's just not compareable. America was fertile farm-land, just waiting to be colonized. Once you had paid your ticket for transportation, and brought enough money and supplies for surviving a year (worst estimate, many did well with less), you would be able to survive by farming your own land. People fled to America, just to get an opportunity to live there.
In contrast; You can't just fly off to space and live off the land. In order to survive in space, you need a huge expensive infrastructure, and a constant reshipment of supplies, where supplies even consists of such elementary stuff as air, water, and food. It is possible to imagine that future technologies will make this easier, but as of now, we don't have such future technologies. People fled to America, but if someone started a colony in space, asked colonists to pay their own ticket, and to pay for all supplies that will be shipped in later, no sane people would move there.
In any foreseeable future, space can only get colonized through massive government subsidies, and there's no payoff in sight. Which is probably the reason why we haven't colonized it yet.
Of course I would. What I really want is unlimited write cycles. I dislike things that fail even when used according to manufacturer specifications. But with trillions of write cycles, you would have a few years of use, even in the worst case (assuming this new ram is about as fast as dram). With quadrillions of write cycles, it would be very unlikely that the ram would fail before other parts of the computer. I'd be relatively happy with that.
Well, they are not viable alternatives to DRAM. If you fail to see why this sucks, it's you who have a problem.
When I bought my computer, that's exactly the opposite of what I did.
First, I had to choose Intel or AMD. I chose AMD. Then, I had to find a motherboard I liked. Some of the criteria for the motherboard would be prize, linux compatibility, at least some good user-reviews on the net (and few bad reviews), more than 4G ram possible (NONE had that at the time), 939 socket (seemed more future-proof at the time), PCI express (seemed more future-proof at the time), serial ATA (seemed more future-proof at the time), and a reasonably modern chipset. Then I chose the rest of the components, in this order: power-supply, cabinet, sound-card, hard-disks, CPU, ram, DVD-burner, graphic card.
Currently, if I were looking for an upgrade, I'd buy an Athlon X2 cpu that plugs into the 939 socket on my motherboard. I already have a stable, reliable combination of components that I trust. "Upgrading" to Core 2 Duo would be akin to replacing everything. I could no longer trust my computer to perform the way I'm used to. Sorry, that's just not an option.
If an "upgrade" involves replacing more than a single component, it's not an "upgrade" anymore, it's a major rebuild! I'm not going to rebuild something that works perfectly well now. At least not if I relay on it in my daily life. In fact, I'd rather buy a new PC and keep my old as a backup!
[snip] execute code with performance, and sustain millions of read/write cycles without dying.
Wow! That means that in the worst case, it will last SEVERAL seconds!!!
(Wouldn't it be better to have something like trillions of read/write cycles, so we know it will at least last a few years?)
You are an idiot if you don't understand that "idiot" is a derogatory term implying that the person you speak of is stupid.
WE had it happen near here, a Sherriff was making women give sexual favors, he has his ass beat hard by one of the womens husbands and his 12 friends. This was before he was discovered... because they started spreading around town what he did.
Let me get this straight... You advocate mob rule?
You actually prefer a society where a single woman can accuse someone they don't like of some mild abuse of power, and it results in a mob of 12 people attacking him in a mob?
So, would you have been as proud of your actions if the man turned out to be innocent? Would you be as proud of your actions if the man died, or became a cripple for life, after simply "asking" for sexual favours? (this is not the same as rape, remember..). Would you have been as proud of your actions if it later happened to you?
So, to rephrase... Abusing power when you are in a government seat is not ok. Arbitrarily beating up people instead of using the justice system is ok. Mob rule is preferred to democracy. You are an idiot!
On the other hand, as abuses of authority go, this is fairly mild.
Mild, as compared to what? I'd say it's about as far an average security guard can go in abuse of "authority". A mild abuse would be to smile, swallow your anger, and let the traveller through...
But what I'm wondering is why people think it's a good idea to go out of your way to be rude or insulting. If you shout "pig" at every cop you pass in the street, pretty soon you will find somone who takes it to heart and will give you a bad time.
Hey, he wasn't shouting "pig" at every cop he passed in the street. He wasn't rude or insulting. He had written something insulting at a plastic bag. And the insulting thing was only insulting to Kip Hawley, a public figure (which therefore have to live with that sort of thing, the same way president Bush has to live with all the people making fun of him). The security guard may find such a political demonstration childish, immature, in bad taste, or simply disagree with it. That is not reason for harassing the traveller. It is akin to only allow republicans but not democrats on flights, or any number of other discriminatory practices against travellers.
The same kind of people who can afford it. If the cost of a flight is not a biggie to you, it doesn't matter that it's a biggie to someone else. You already have a mansion (or ten, around the world), a personal helicopter (and pilot) (and jet), a garage full of sports cars, other expensive hobbies (like casino gambling, formula-1 racing, etc...); and so on. These kind of people exist. Virgin Galactic could have increased their prizes ten-fold, or hundred-fold, and they would still have customers.
Yet, the price isn't that high. It is actually only $200000, which means even I can afford it! All I've got to do is sell my house, and I'm space-born! Of course, after the flight, I still need a place to live, but hey, that's exactly where I (and most other people) started when moving out of home for the first time. Thus, the potential customers for this kind of flight even includes typical middle-aged middle-class people, with abnormal high enthusiasm for space-flights.
This statement is astonishing, particulary because it is coming from an AI "expert".
Quite the opposite, actually. It's a pretty down-to-earth statement, where the speaker identifies his position, but at the same time advices the audience that this position is not the only reasonable position to have, even among other experts, but that it is something that is constantly debated, even among experts.
the brain has allowed humans to create the most complex tools and technology the planet has ever seen, all the while not having to think about breathing or keeping our blood flowing, monitoring insane amounts of chemicals, repairing itself after injury, retaining intricate memories from decades ago, and even attempting to build machines to do the same thing, the brain is not that complicated or magical(note the searing sarcasm).
The human brain is not vastly different from the brain of other animals. Advances in biotechnology, computer technology, and other fields may even let us design devices with similar functionality. For some limited applications, we have already created devices that surpass the effectiveness of any brain. You "searing sarcasm" only points back at yourself.
It has been long understood in AI that the only way to get a machine to truly behave like a human is through pure volume of information. [snip] It is only through brute force of millions of facts that we can get a machine to even come close to the range of knowledge that the human brain contains which is the basis for projects like Cyc.
No it hasn't. If you had said "Some people have long believed that the only way...", you'd been right. But since no human-level AI has ever been created, no one has any idea how to achieve it. That includes the creators of Cyc. Cyc has not reached human-level AI. Cyc is nowhere near reaching human-level AI. Cyc has not brought us nearer an understanding of how to construct a human-level AI. Many prominent AI researchers view Cyc as a failure. It is not good at learning, and unlike a human brain, it becomes slower the more it knows.
This leads to another point: that the human body itself is perhaps the most complicated organism on earth.
Perhaps. And perhaps it is the fruit-fly, or maybe it's the oak-tree, or the malaria parasite. It depends upon what you mean by complicated.
Simply getting a robot to write its name in cursive is an enormous task to accomplish, as mechanical parts are no where near as efficient as human joints (although this is improving, they are still not sending the type of precise electrical signals to the brain like our bodies do).
Ever tried using one of those printers? I have one at home, that costs less than what I earn after one day at work (even after taxes have been paid), and it's able to write in cursive, colour, or even print images from my camera on photographic paper, with results indistuingishable from a real photograph. Now, try to do that by hand!
No, we don't need to be programmed to be able to catch a fly ball at a baseball game, we just judge where the ball is going. A robot must be told trajectory, wind speed, velocity of the ball, and all sorts of vector math just to be able to accomplish what we see to be a simple task. And on top of that, it can't learn how to do it again.
Actually, we are programmed to be able to catch a fly ball at a baseball game. Our genes have built in a lot of knowledge, and being able to predict trajectories of falling objects may have helped us hunting, back when we used to live that way. And a robot does not need to be told all those things you say. To be able to predict a trajectory, all you need to know is normal high-school physics: v_x = v_x_0-gt^2 and v_y = v_y_0. Then simply observe the ball, plug in v_x_0 and v_y_0, and get the results, just like a human brain would do. The fact that these processes aren't conscious to you, doesn't make the way the brain operates any more magic than
What I meant is that while movies and music require physical equipment to produce - microphones, instruments, video equipment, etc - books require a single person and - if you really want to go bare-bones - a pen and paper.
To be equally daft, I could say that music requires one or more musicians coming together for the duration of the song, playing various instruments, and recording on a $10 tape-recorder with built-in microphone, whereas a book requires years expensive research, years of writing, and even more years of editing, by intelligent well-educated people, before it's printed on specialized equipment that costs a fortune (a CD-burner is something everyone's got).
Even a nice computer is going to be cheaper than a recording studio rental for any significant period of time.
Even buying a studio is going to be cheaper than hiring an entire staff for editing and printing books.
Once you lose the cost of distrobution for books, on the other hand, you've cut out the vaaaast majority of your built-in costs.
No. If you by book mean anything printed on paper, such as a new volume of the Hardy boys, or some doctor romance novel, I agree. But then I could counter that with music, I mean a CD-release by some hotel- or street-musicians. But if you by music mean "The Wall", I happen to talk about "Encyclopedia Britannica" when it comes to books.
but the assumption with books was that you were paying a good chunk toward the physical 'stuff' the book is made out of. With that cost gone, it would seem books should be dirt-cheap, but clearly they're not...
Your assumption, not the assumtion.
All I'm saying is that it looks like, once again, media distroution companies are trying to wring every last cent out, rather than selling at a point that is both profitable and reasonable.
And how is that different from any other business? While I agree that the cost of CDs is absurdly high (I buy most of my DVDs at half the price of my CDs), and that this certainly smells like something only a monopoly or a cartel could do, the market for books and e-books is entirely different. There is real price-differentiation there.
Bullshit! Oil is NOT in short supply, only production.
Thank you for your insight. Now please explain why the free market can't just produce more oil. Maybe it's got something to do with oil itself being in short supply?
Bullshit! Oil does NOT come from dead dinosaurs, it distills and pools up from the hodge podge of magma below our feet.
Wow. You seem to know things better than the thousands of geophysicists who help the worlds oil companies in finding the oil. Because they seem to think that oil comes from old biomass (mostly trees, not dinosaurs). Of course there are bound to be cranks and crackpots around telling a different story, but I know who I prefer to listen to.
That depends upon who you ask (and it's probably not me you ask, if that's the answer you get)! But it also depends upon the book, and it depends upon who you chat with. For example, a chat session about nothing with Nelson Mandela is something I would value more than reading pretty much anything. On the other hand, if the subject I'm chatting with is the average Internet idiot, pretty much anything in print would be better.
Yes, and what was the energy to force ratio quoted in TFA? 700 watts (just a little less than 1 hp) to get 83 millinewtons of force?
No, it was 1 kW go get 16 mN (and some wishful thinking of future improvements). I don't know where you get your numbers, but a search in the article reveals none of the numbers 700 or 83.
They're going to need enormous improvements in efficiency before this concept could be practical, assuming that the device actually works.
No shit, Sherlock!
Uhm, ... so what is it about contributing to wikipedia that is considered "hip". I thought clubbing and DJing was "hip". Following stupid fashion trends is "hip". Enjoying unpopular bands and having a holier-than-thou attitude is "hip". Contributing to wikipedia? No, sorry!
I can deal with windows breaking once in a while. I can deal with having to install all of this. What I can't fucking deal with, is having to install all of this every time windows breaks. Back in my youth I switched to linux for ideological reasons. I don't care anymore, as I've realized that I'm not going to save the world by my choice of operating system. But for obvious reasons, untill there is a commercial OS that is better than ubuntu, I'm not going to pay them a cent.
Currently there are three kinds of rechargeable batteries used for electonics and toys: [NiCd, NiMH, Rechargeable alkaline]
Uhm, no!
You forgot some very common types:
Wow! You sure know what the majority of slashdotters are up to!
I mean, it's not like you are projecting your own beliefs onto others... Or assuming that everyone aspires to the same stereotype that you do... No, that wouldn't be right. I'm impressed with the detailed analysis you've done about slashdot readers HDTV shopping habits. Thank you!
Daisychaining is good as a last resort. It should not be the default.
So what is that heating device used in the pictures?