I know, because I use it daily as a CAD operator, and can attest that BOEING/SPIRIT aerosystems uses it exclusively for their avionics designs, as to Gulfstream, Bell helicopter, and a number of others.
Now, I'll pay attention when there is a FOSS program for linux that can do what Dassault Systeme's Catia (Not solid works, Catia.) can do.
Amusingly, Dassault used to release a version of catia for use on Caldera Unix, but they stopped doing so in favor of win32 and win64. A version intended for running on linux should be pretty trivial to cook up then, considering it already has unix-awareness.
*Professional note: I am a professional CAD/CAM draftsman, and use this software every day. It would be VERY nice if I could get away from the Microsoft feature creep bloating on my professional workstation, and at the same time cut down on operating and deployment costs by using Linux.
With an AI, the solution would be a hybrid design.
You have your ANN which is the seat of the AI's conciousness, but you attach an ordinary sequential computer (running ordinary software) to some of it's motor and sensory neurons.
The idea here, is that the ANN can control the "dumb" sequential processing computer for such answers. It can consciously input data via the motor neurons, then receive sensory stimulation back from it. This *WOULD* make the AI into a mathematical prodigy, at least compared to pure ANN approaches, at least for things that are not NP-Complete or NP-Hard.
Look at wolves. Social hierarchy, Dominant breeding pair, excludes sex between other members within social hierarchy. No penis barbs.
Conversely-- Look at lions. Single (or perhaps 2) adult males with usually at least 3x as many adult females. Rigorously enforced sexual dominance within social hierarchy. Penis barbs are present.
Other possible considerations: Length of copulatory time, (Wolves==Protracted due to enlarged penile swelling; Lions; Short, vigorous, repetitious.) Possible compensatory vaginal stimulation (Penile swelling of male wolf penis exerts protracted tugging pressure against female organs, possible compensatory mechanism in the species? In case of humans, prolonged sexual contact/female orgasm might trigger the hormonal reactions to induce ovulation?)
The real point I was trying to make, is not whether rocks are insulting or conductive; It was that rocks are sufficiently conductive to heat that a large enough surface area of them exposed to a heat source will still dissipate that heat sufficiently for the task at hand.
(The bright IR light from your campfire heats up the rocks close to the fire, because the rate of bombardment exceeds the saturation tipping point for re-radiation/dispersion. But, the rocks 20 feet away receive significantly less of that same IR, being dispersed over more surface of more rocks, and those rocks do not get hot from your campfire. They are able to effectively absorb the energy you are supplying to them without crossing the tipping point. Running a very very long run of copper heat pipe through the bedrock has the same effect; it increases the surface area that the thermally charged coolant will come into contact with, so that total rate of diffusion over any given square cm of rock face will be sufficiently small as to prevent reaching the tipping point, and to ensure reliable disposal of the thermal energy.)
EG-- Even if the rate of diffusion was very low, (highly insulating material) as long as you are spreading thermal energy at a finite RATE over a large enough area, that rate of diffusion would still exceed rate of production, and thus the surface would be effective as a heat sink.
Even bare naked copper tubing in the vacuum of space (As long as it is in the shade) could be an effective heat sink via radiative energy emission as IR photons, if you have a large enough surface area for said tubing, assuming the possibility for exceedingly large arrays, and a rate of IR diffusion greater than 0.
Lunar regolith has a greater rate of diffusion than does radiative emission, so you would require far less "Plumbing" to dump your thermal waste products (than dumping into space via an IR emittance based cooler). This would be an engineering problem, in which you would need to determine how much energy you could dump into the regolith, and how quickly without reaching the saturation tipping point for the regolith. (EG, at what rate of input does the rock stop being able to leak heat away reliably, and instead start to function as an easy bake oven.)
Blanket arguments like "Rock is an insulator, you can't use it like a heat sink!" are wrong-headed. You most certainly can use it as a heat sink-- you just have to be more intelligent about it, and would require a much larger sink than you would if it were made of a more thermally conductive material, like metal.
Cake is made of many disparate components of disparate organisms. (Eggs from some bird, Flour from some grass's seeds, Refined sugar from some plant, Oil from some kind of seed, etc...) Each process requiring a very complex set of events to come into being, and ultimately requiring another step after that to become cake... And that's just assuming a naked cake without frosting. Thus, occam's razor would say that the probability of the cake being made by accident from nature is extremely small.
Compare to ambiogenesis: The "Complex" bits, such as the combination of primordial amino acids into complex proteins, has been replicated in a laboratory by simulating asteroid impact pressures and temperatures. The simulations showed that the formation of complex life-precursor proteins was very prevelent when the simulated asteroids contained simple organic molecules, which later space probes such as the stardust cometary probe have found to be present in our extraterrestrial neighborhood. Given the lack of competition that early chemical replicators would have to deal with, only a small number (one or two) impacts of the millions that would have been occuring daily for the primordial earth producing a self-replicating life precursor would have been all that was needed to kick the process into gear.
A better analogy would be the creation of cheese, not the creation of cake. Many anthropologists suggest that cheese was an accidentally produced food stuff from storing milk in unsterilized containers. Even without humans, cheese can still occur naturally, just in very small amounts, as long as there are lactating animals, and bacteria ready to digest it. (Cheese being a natural consequence of said digestion.)
No, But solid rock can be a reasonably good heat sink, and the moon is not totally devoid of shallow moisture.
It is feasible that some means of dispersing the heat from a datacenter into a very long network of copper tubing snaked through the bedrock of the cave system would be a suitable solution.
The issue then, is how to get signal in and out of the isolated data center reliably without an on-station maintenance crew. Solar particles would do very very nasty things to a large antenna array...
If you note, their sample involves *anhydrous* silicagel based aerogel, which would not be indicative of silica aerogel that is being employed as home insulation.
The silica gel would absorb water due to it's high hygroscopic tendencies, and then lose a lot of the IR transparency they are discussing. As seen here
Also, Carbon aerogels are another beast entirely, and are EXTREMELY IR opaque.
(In typical slashdot fashion--) I have not read the article.
However, I am familiar enough with existing ultra-capacitors to know that the proposal given by the summary is not exactly new. This is the fairly obvious evolution of existing activated carbon based ultra-capacitors. Obligagory wikipedia
The difference between the two would be that the electrolyte soaked aerogel would have far greater effective surface area than would the activated carbon, which effectively WOULD increase it's charge storage capacity. However, the aerogel is vastly more expensive to fabricate than nanopourous activated carbon, and so price per unit would also increase dramatically.
(All?) Aerogels are created via the evaporation of a solvent; The solid component of the aerogel is suspended in a solvent, which is then slowly evaporated, leaving the solid material in the suspended state. This places some rather non-trivial limitations on the thicknesses, and volumes of aerogel you can reasonably create, and also places ecological constraints on such a facility, since you would have to be dealing with thousands of gallons of solvent in order produce commercial volumes of the stuff, and that means that you are either venting solvent vapor and pouring money down a rat-hole to make it-- OR, you are heavily invested in bulky reclamation systems to recapture the solvent, which limits the realistic amount of throughput your factory can handle. (You would be limited by how much solvent you can effectively process due to physical size constraints of your factory floor.)
As an American citizen of the United States, I will try to answer your question as best I can based on my own observations. As always, Anectdote != Data, so take this with a sizable quantity of salt.
The reasons why the American Public does not hoist our government officials up by their jolly rodgers appear to be:
1) The masses are made purposefully ignorant and complacent. As long as Superbowl Sunday, cheap beer, condoms/birth control, and tasty but unhealthy food are easily obtained, Little things like the right to speak publicly about any topic lose relevance.
2) Politicos play the popularity game to get elected; They give the politically vocal crowd a token offering (say, " Tougher laws on child porn!") then do whatever the hell they want after that. The people that elected them elected them pretty much exclusively for that token offering, and feel satisfied with their "purchase", because of item 1).
3) Our government actively lies to us, flagrantly, and consistently. It has strong financial connections to the vast majority of our media outlets in an almost "China-like" manner. [Newscorp and pals, I am looking at YOU.] You can find evidence of these two in some of the wikileaks documents. These lies reinforce item 1).
4) Most of my countrymen have the equivilent of ADHD when it comes to their attention span. Anything that does not immediately or directly relate to themselves personally is considered somebody else's problem, and they just tune it out.
5) There is a prevalent, and growing culture of anti-intellectualism, caused by multiple interested (non-government) factions of society. (The religious types being only one.)
In short, the reason why other citizens of my country are not out in the streets rioting like they are in the middle east, is because the vast majority of my countrymen are ignorant slobs who are too distracted by "Teh SHINY!", "Daaa.. She's got BOOOBIES!", "I iz drunk and stuff!", or "Larnin' is hard, yo!"
Nevermind that we have record unemployment, that nearly EVERY state government in the country is basically bankrupt and that wellfare infrastructure is poised to implode spectacularly, and a whole host of other "OMG! The sky is falling!" shit is going on--- As long as their lifestyles are not heavily impacted, they really don't care. That's why you have all those government employees picketing in WI to keep their ability to demand sweetheart deals on pensions, pay rates and other benefits--- and Very few picketing to have the runaway senators of WI return and do their job the legal way.
Much like how the entities which comprise the infrastructure of the internet consistently ignored the IP4 depletion problem, and are just NOW starting to look at IP6-- The same kind of thing will have to happen in the US before you get massive civil unrest and riots in the streets all over here: They will wait until they have totally destroyed the system they depend upon, then demand to know why it broke, like a spoiled and petulant child.
Remember, this is the country where manufacturers of hair dryers are mandated by law to put a great big idiogram on a tag on the cord of said blow dryers, telling consumers not to use them in the shower, because it will electrocute you if you do. People really are that ignorant here, and it gets worse when you get into government.
A friend of mine is the janitor man at a city hall in another state. He tells me that they had to do a training course to tell city hall employees how to secure doors. (You know, how to turn the lock?) That's how bad it is.
Piracy groups do not claim ownership nor authorship of the original product. Take for instance, "Adobe Photoshop"-- The pirate group's verbiage for that product is-- GASP-- "Adobe Photoshop". Name attribution is clearly given to Adobe Inc. EG, Razor 1911 (or any other 0-day group) does not claim that the work of Adobe is theirs. What they take credit for is bringing it to you, and hacking it for you.
As such, the "taking undue credit" argument does not follow with the situation it is raised against. That would be more in line with EG, Microsoft misappropriating GPL code from another, lesser known product-- incorporating it into a microsoft product, declaring a microsoft copyright, and failing to attribute the original author in any way.
That is not what consumer-pirates do.
One could argue that the attribution that the "Taking credit" argument is trying to debate is the flow of currency toward the author, but that STILL does not follow, and only results in a tortured argument. The flow of currency to the creator is tangential to accreditation, or claims of ownership. The best you could do is to say that piracy steals the power to revoke the use of the product from other people. (The old, "I own it, and if you don't pay me X, then you just can't have any!") THis is because digital piracy creates perfect copies. (The de-facto retort of "Oh yeah, Well my magic replicator will make my own, so [raspberry]!"
Thus the real argument is not over attribution, (Who made what, who deserves credit for creating what initially, etc...) but rather over control. A classic example would be "fettuccine Alfredo." Anyone with the recipe can create "Alfred's" famous fettuccine, and Alfred can't do a damn thing about it. Alfred still gets attribution (The name of the dish literally means "Fettuccine the way Alfredo makes it."), but he does not have control. He cannot remove his dish from everyone's table in the world, and as such cannot use that as a means for extortion, which is exactly what copyright is about.
Copyright was originally meant to secure a revenue stream for creators of new forms of art, so that those people would have money to continue creating art-- with the goal of enriching the commons. Current copyright is about how to abuse this monopoly to extort money from the masses, while doing nothing, for as long as is inhumanly possible, by PREVENTING the transition of works into the commons at all costs.
The case with Alfred's noodles is that his recipe has been incorporated into the commons. It cannot be removed/destroyed, because everyone has the recipe. Likewise, pirated software is software that has moved (De-facto, if illegally) out of private control and into the control of the commons. That is exactly what software piracy *IS*. It has nothing to do with attribution.
The psp has a 333mhz (top speed) CPU that lacks an MMU (so you cant even use swap), and 32mb of RAM. The heavy lifting is mostly done by the GPU, and clever hacking.
The system *IS* underpowered. It barely does all the things I listed.
No, buy SECOND HAND sony, THEN hack the shit out of it.
Like I did with my PSP Fat, which is now an ebook reader, a portable movie player, an email client (*can* be used to send, but the IME is terrible. I only use it to check.) a portable PS1 emulator for any PS1 title I care to wrap, and a delightful casual play platform for classic 90s consoles.
When it was under the control of Sony? It played maybe a handful of overpriced, somewhat fun games? At best?
Sony says that hackers killed the PSP; From what it looks like to me, the PSP was restricted and underpowered, and was just unattractive to developers compared with the PS3 and the 360. EG-- it was doomed from the beginning for what Sony had in mind.
Now, Sony says the PS3 is getting killed by hackers; From where I am watching the death of the PS3 has been long and protracted, and was notable long before this year in console hacking-- The PS3 is overpriced, has a limited consumer market, has been playing catchup to both the Wii and the 360, and has been doing so since launch. The Wii and the 360 both have hackers (Wii has Homebrew channel and IOS loaders-- 360 has JTAG, and the permitted XNA) and yet both seem to be doing quite well. Hackers dont seem to be the real problem here. Sony is.
No, you should blame BOTH, and several other industries (music, Movie, etc.) for their involvement.
The DMCA is the result of the "Content Industry" (A loosely knit market segment of all of the US companies involved in financing the creation of, then marketing the exploitation of, ephemeral properties such as software, music, and video performances) telling congress that John and Jane public weren't playing by "the rules", and that they needed a means to ensure that John and Jane stopped exposing the brokenness of the content industry's exploitation schemes. "Congress" is a loosely knit association of individual senators and representatives of various states, who all have a single recurring goal which has a rather large operating expense: getting re-elected. While no member of congress would openly admit it, "campaign contributions" have a magical way of influencing government policies, and the threat of their being withheld scares the shit out of them; causing a phenomenon similar to "moral panic" that is commonly seen in fundamentalists.
The DMCA is a law given by congress to appease the content industry, that was underwritten by the content industry, to ensure that the content industry will be protected by the government, so that the content industry can continue to supply campaign contributions to government employees, and to create more government jobs for government employees. It is a classic case of "Scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours." In short, it is a shining example of everything that is wrong with the US political system, and illustrates brilliantly exactly why we both need campaign finance reform, and why we will never get it.
The DMCA (and it's ilk) is the new prohibition; Complete with "Contraband goods".
I will blame all entities responsible for this affront on personal liberty in the name of corporate and government profit. Sony deserves all the ire that all the others involved have earned.
I have no doubt that there are people who would approve of any arbitrary law as long as they profited from it. However, if that same law unduly imposes against another, that support is the result of a lack of integrity on the part of the supporter.
highly exagerated example:
Person X owns slaves, because law Z permits him to own them, and damnit, being able to force people to clean up after you is damn convenient. Person X claims that because it is not illegal to own slaves, that there is no problem whatsoever with such ownership, that arguments about how the slaves should have rights are just rhetoric from people that need to sit back and chill, because the law does not give rights to slaves, and the whole thing is just plain silly to argue over.
Nevermind the subtle truth behind the phrase "there but by the grace of god go I." (You can strip out any religiousity and still have a truism.) Person X is only in favor of slavery while he is the slave OWNER. His tune would change instantly if he was suddenly made into a slave himself. For this reason, his position lacks integrity.
The same kind of rationality can be applied to both the positions people hold on "child pornography", and on "Racial hate speech". The people that are for "Blanket" prosecution of these things (Really? cartoons?) would radically change their tune if they were the ones on the receiving end of the penal cudgel. (Just think how much stereotypical soccer mom would squirm on the bench after being charged with child porn for taking that cute picture of their 3 year old on the training potty--something that HAS happened.) For this reason, their support of such laws lacks integrity.
Society benefits from concise, practical, and reasonable legislation. Laws against child exploitation, for instance. (as in, child prostitution, etc.) It does not benefit (in the long run) by legislation that makes a privately held thought or impulse so taboo that ANYTHING remotely related to it is prosecutable. The latter only opens the door to witch-hunts, like this story is about, or to such insane outcomes as registering children as sex offenders for photographing themselves while naked. (Which has, and does continue to happen.)
Laws should be crafted for specific criminal acts, with a specific criminal intent. They should not be crafted to cater to moral panic, or to penalize nebulous and ambiguous activities.
Duct-taping a 10 year old girl to a bed, ramming a big black dildo in her and taking pictures is, and should be illegal, because you are harming a child, physically, emotionally, and mentally. Making a cartoon of such a sordid activity should be socially unacceptable, but not illegal, because no children are actively harmed by the enterprise. Arguments to the effect of "It promotes the real activity" lack credibility or integrity unless the person saying that argument is also against television dramas depicting physical violence, or destruction of property (pretty much all primetime TV in the US) and also believe that all actors that have been employed to create such television content should be charged with the simulated crimes they helped depict--OR they have highly documented evidence that creating or viewing such a sordid thing (simulated cartoon child exploitation) directly promotes non-criminals to become criminals.
So, as I see it, you are either against such stupid legislation, are a hypocritical bastard that lacks integrity, or are a fringe radical with insane opinions. Mod me troll if you wish, but that wont' change this simple fact, and my karma can take it.
however, the number of known civilizations (planet wise) is still 1, out of the 1,235. This makes a rather large dent in the computational threshold potential for Drake's famous equasion.
While there might be lots of dirtballs, and even more planets in need of a collossally sized gas-x pill, the number of potentially habitable is small, and of those the number that would be reasonably extrapolated to contain life would be even smaller, and the number with active civilizations even smaller still.
I would like to preface this with an apology, since it will seem barbed and pointed, but I consider these to be important questions.
However, When I was in public school, it seemed to me that each successive year that I attended the teachers riggorously went over THE SAME EXACT material that had been administered the year before for quite possibly the first 2/3 of the school year, followed by some very tiny token gesture of new content.
Exactly how many times does the public school system feel it needs to "teach" its students what a noun is, for example? Also, given the observation above, why does the school system think it is justified to bore students to the point that they become jaded and impatient with their educators and ultimately end up "Hating" the entire prospect of being "educated"- A condition that from my own observations of my peers in the adult work environment, persists LONG into their adult life?
If you look at early children, say ages 5 to 6, you will find genuine and honest curiosity, and a willingness (if not eagerness) to learn in most of them. Coincidentally, you'll find that this is about the age of your average kindergarten student. Somehow, through some freak process that remains elusive, these same kids have an alarming propensity to become bull-headed, truant, and to start resisting being educated by the age of 10 to 12... I would wager it is because of several things:
1) Children learn through play. The education system teaches through repitition, regimented assesment, and mandates. (I know it does this for standardization and metrics purposes; these useful things for lawmakers, staticians, and schoolboards are not so useful nor healthy for children, especially young ones that have only a nebulous view of cause and effect.)
2) The educational system bars children from learning "Cool" things, even if the student in question shows a brilliant aptitude for it, if such subject matter is in any way able to be conflated as "dangerous", or worse "Disruptive." Instead it focuses on regimented, pre-proscribed, and totally "safe" curriculum which ultimately destroys any motivation to TRY to learn something new, and engaging later. If other students are like I was, it is because the system that operates in US public schools seems to actively prohibit such subject matter, or to denegrate that subject matter into something draconian, and boring.
Some major victims of this process are science, math, and computer technology, though literature and art also suffer.
Science can be, and should be FUN. Putting a 2 liter bottle of soda into an ultrasonic denture cleaning machine is fun, and cool. Learning why it causes a volcanic eruption of sweet fizz due to phonons and neucleation is empowering, which can become fun as well. (Where do you think the diet cola and mentos trick came from?) Learning about boolean logic and programming should also be fun; It should not be boiled down into a denaturated and lifeless exercise.
The reasons for shelving the more successful "Fun" approach to education are many-fold, but the big ones are these:
a) The teacher is not competent to teach the subject in question, and has only rudimentary knowledge of the subject him/herself, and actively crafts a curriculum that would avoid exposing this fact. (Teaching the test)
b) The school's legal counsel has 'suggested' to the school that teaching kids such things might cast the school in a negative, 'non-conformist' light, which would reflect badly on it when it comes time to renew government finance...
c) The school administrators erroniously believe that the students "are not ready" for such stimulating educational experiences. (You would never know when a student is 'ready' for such an experience until you expose them to one. See D)
d) The faculty staff do not want to deal with an empowered and 'eager to demonstrate what they learned' student body. (EG, they don't want to deal with mentos fountains on the school steps, or with genuine hacker talent cutti
As a matter of personal opinion on the deity described in the bible, I would agree with you on the "Literary contrivance" part, given what's below...
However, I would argue that the "Created in our image" line in geneis refers more to the mind of said god, since all previous creations had been created without free will. (Angels are servitors with specific functions, animals follow their instincts, but what drives the will of man?) Further, an incorporeal being could not realistically be depicted in a corporeal form alone; what was depicted was the essence of that being; the creative intellect itself.
As for the whole "Women obey men" thing-- The biblical narrative has Adam being created first, with Eve being created from Adam's flesh. (No, I don't believe such jiggery pokery, for those that would try to contrive such a reference.) The book of genesis gives this as the reason women should obey men-- adam came first. Likewise in the same short passage, it outright says that while women should obey men, men should respect and value women as if she were his equal. (In direct contravention of the agenda of the practice of patriarchy as it is normally manifested.)
That said, I don't think "God" has a gender. It would not make sense for such a pre-eminent being to have one; sex implies that there are others to have sex with-- a statement the bible explicitly denies. (the whole "There is only ONE god." thing.) From a non-religious and non-theological viewpoint, it is further silly to ascribe a gender to such a unique entity, because of the presumed nature of that entity: Having "always existed" pretty much quashes any evolutionary process by which gender would have been incorporated into this being, and despite what some theologists might claim, the concept of gender is not axiomatic. There exist many organisms that simply do not posess a definite gender. (Jellyfish, Sponges, some species of worms, most microbes, nearly all fungi, etc-- Some might be hermaphroditic and have sexual reproduction, but the members are of both genders simultanously, such as with jellyfish, sponges, fungi and the worms; or are fully asexual without any semblence of sexual relation at all-- like most microbes.) Sex is a relatively "new" thing evolutionarily speaking-- meaning that if "God" really did create life on earth, the first lifeforms he created were asexual, and given the well established fossil record concerning the evolution of hominids, then any physically litteral interpretation of "In his image" would imply that asexuality is the ideal, and that sex is part of the degeneracy that the bible rails against. (amusing, considering the catholic doctrine of "original sin" --- [which does not exist in the bible in any place I have read, which is the whole thing and most of the aprochryphal books. The sin of Eve was to disobey god, and the sin of Adam was in obeying his wife over obeying God. Not sex.] One could argue that god shaped evolution, and used evolution as the process by which he converted "lifeless mud" into "living souls"-- but doing so requires strong detatchment from any strictly and fundementally literal interpretation to the story of Genesis, and consigns it to being at least partially metaphorical. (The book of Genesis does not pass muster as a perfectly literal history, as the acts it depicts do not coincide with fossilized geological history.)
From a theological viewpoint, the bible (and several apochryphal books) outright state that angels have no gender, and do not have sex, being spiritual beings, and created perfect from the beginning (and thus have no need to reproduce sexually--being immortal and all that.) By inferrence, this would mean that god considers sexuality to be a necessary function because of the imperfect nature of physical lifeforms. (Duh, they die! Unless you want to keep rebuilding them all the time, you have to make them so they make more of themselves, or else they will all die out!) (Extra credit-- Read the first few chapters of the apochryphal book of Enoch for some amusin
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They already do, and it is one of the leading software packages used in Aerospace.
CATIA
I know, because I use it daily as a CAD operator, and can attest that BOEING/SPIRIT aerosystems uses it exclusively for their avionics designs, as to Gulfstream, Bell helicopter, and a number of others.
Catia is the SHIT.
No joke about AutoCad...
Now, I'll pay attention when there is a FOSS program for linux that can do what Dassault Systeme's Catia (Not solid works, Catia.) can do.
Amusingly, Dassault used to release a version of catia for use on Caldera Unix, but they stopped doing so in favor of win32 and win64. A version intended for running on linux should be pretty trivial to cook up then, considering it already has unix-awareness.
*Professional note: I am a professional CAD/CAM draftsman, and use this software every day. It would be VERY nice if I could get away from the Microsoft feature creep bloating on my professional workstation, and at the same time cut down on operating and deployment costs by using Linux.
With an AI, the solution would be a hybrid design.
You have your ANN which is the seat of the AI's conciousness, but you attach an ordinary sequential computer (running ordinary software) to some of it's motor and sensory neurons.
The idea here, is that the ANN can control the "dumb" sequential processing computer for such answers. It can consciously input data via the motor neurons, then receive sensory stimulation back from it. This *WOULD* make the AI into a mathematical prodigy, at least compared to pure ANN approaches, at least for things that are not NP-Complete or NP-Hard.
Look at wolves. Social hierarchy, Dominant breeding pair, excludes sex between other members within social hierarchy. No penis barbs.
Conversely-- Look at lions. Single (or perhaps 2) adult males with usually at least 3x as many adult females. Rigorously enforced sexual dominance within social hierarchy. Penis barbs are present.
Other possible considerations: Length of copulatory time, (Wolves==Protracted due to enlarged penile swelling; Lions; Short, vigorous, repetitious.) Possible compensatory vaginal stimulation (Penile swelling of male wolf penis exerts protracted tugging pressure against female organs, possible compensatory mechanism in the species? In case of humans, prolonged sexual contact/female orgasm might trigger the hormonal reactions to induce ovulation?)
That would be syphilis.
Other bacteriological STDs could theoretically be spread between species as well.
Wikipedia actually has a page on this subject , which in and of itself is starkly disturbing. (then again, so is my knowing about such page to begin with... However, I attribute this more to the "wikipedia effect" than to sexual degeneracy.)
The raw videos are data. The subjective recollections on the events that were recorded are anectdotes. One depicts real events, the other does not.
The real point I was trying to make, is not whether rocks are insulting or conductive; It was that rocks are sufficiently conductive to heat that a large enough surface area of them exposed to a heat source will still dissipate that heat sufficiently for the task at hand.
(The bright IR light from your campfire heats up the rocks close to the fire, because the rate of bombardment exceeds the saturation tipping point for re-radiation/dispersion. But, the rocks 20 feet away receive significantly less of that same IR, being dispersed over more surface of more rocks, and those rocks do not get hot from your campfire. They are able to effectively absorb the energy you are supplying to them without crossing the tipping point. Running a very very long run of copper heat pipe through the bedrock has the same effect; it increases the surface area that the thermally charged coolant will come into contact with, so that total rate of diffusion over any given square cm of rock face will be sufficiently small as to prevent reaching the tipping point, and to ensure reliable disposal of the thermal energy.)
EG-- Even if the rate of diffusion was very low, (highly insulating material) as long as you are spreading thermal energy at a finite RATE over a large enough area, that rate of diffusion would still exceed rate of production, and thus the surface would be effective as a heat sink.
Even bare naked copper tubing in the vacuum of space (As long as it is in the shade) could be an effective heat sink via radiative energy emission as IR photons, if you have a large enough surface area for said tubing, assuming the possibility for exceedingly large arrays, and a rate of IR diffusion greater than 0.
Lunar regolith has a greater rate of diffusion than does radiative emission, so you would require far less "Plumbing" to dump your thermal waste products (than dumping into space via an IR emittance based cooler). This would be an engineering problem, in which you would need to determine how much energy you could dump into the regolith, and how quickly without reaching the saturation tipping point for the regolith. (EG, at what rate of input does the rock stop being able to leak heat away reliably, and instead start to function as an easy bake oven.)
Blanket arguments like "Rock is an insulator, you can't use it like a heat sink!" are wrong-headed. You most certainly can use it as a heat sink-- you just have to be more intelligent about it, and would require a much larger sink than you would if it were made of a more thermally conductive material, like metal.
The cake analogy is faulted.
Cake is made of many disparate components of disparate organisms. (Eggs from some bird, Flour from some grass's seeds, Refined sugar from some plant, Oil from some kind of seed, etc...) Each process requiring a very complex set of events to come into being, and ultimately requiring another step after that to become cake... And that's just assuming a naked cake without frosting. Thus, occam's razor would say that the probability of the cake being made by accident from nature is extremely small.
Compare to ambiogenesis: The "Complex" bits, such as the combination of primordial amino acids into complex proteins, has been replicated in a laboratory by simulating asteroid impact pressures and temperatures. The simulations showed that the formation of complex life-precursor proteins was very prevelent when the simulated asteroids contained simple organic molecules, which later space probes such as the stardust cometary probe have found to be present in our extraterrestrial neighborhood. Given the lack of competition that early chemical replicators would have to deal with, only a small number (one or two) impacts of the millions that would have been occuring daily for the primordial earth producing a self-replicating life precursor would have been all that was needed to kick the process into gear.
A better analogy would be the creation of cheese, not the creation of cake. Many anthropologists suggest that cheese was an accidentally produced food stuff from storing milk in unsterilized containers. Even without humans, cheese can still occur naturally, just in very small amounts, as long as there are lactating animals, and bacteria ready to digest it. (Cheese being a natural consequence of said digestion.)
No, But solid rock can be a reasonably good heat sink, and the moon is not totally devoid of shallow moisture.
It is feasible that some means of dispersing the heat from a datacenter into a very long network of copper tubing snaked through the bedrock of the cave system would be a suitable solution.
The issue then, is how to get signal in and out of the isolated data center reliably without an on-station maintenance crew. Solar particles would do very very nasty things to a large antenna array...
The adventures of Danish Man and Bun Boy, in "The sticky sweetness of the uncanny valley!" Coming to an Android platform near you!
If you note, their sample involves *anhydrous* silicagel based aerogel, which would not be indicative of silica aerogel that is being employed as home insulation.
The silica gel would absorb water due to it's high hygroscopic tendencies, and then lose a lot of the IR transparency they are discussing.
As seen here
Also, Carbon aerogels are another beast entirely, and are EXTREMELY IR opaque.
Incorrect; Both commonly created aerogel species (Silicon dioxide aerogel, and carbon based aerogel) are extremely opaque at infrared wavelengths.
(In typical slashdot fashion--) I have not read the article.
However, I am familiar enough with existing ultra-capacitors to know that the proposal given by the summary is not exactly new. This is the fairly obvious evolution of existing activated carbon based ultra-capacitors. Obligagory wikipedia
The difference between the two would be that the electrolyte soaked aerogel would have far greater effective surface area than would the activated carbon, which effectively WOULD increase it's charge storage capacity. However, the aerogel is vastly more expensive to fabricate than nanopourous activated carbon, and so price per unit would also increase dramatically.
(All?) Aerogels are created via the evaporation of a solvent; The solid component of the aerogel is suspended in a solvent, which is then slowly evaporated, leaving the solid material in the suspended state. This places some rather non-trivial limitations on the thicknesses, and volumes of aerogel you can reasonably create, and also places ecological constraints on such a facility, since you would have to be dealing with thousands of gallons of solvent in order produce commercial volumes of the stuff, and that means that you are either venting solvent vapor and pouring money down a rat-hole to make it-- OR, you are heavily invested in bulky reclamation systems to recapture the solvent, which limits the realistic amount of throughput your factory can handle. (You would be limited by how much solvent you can effectively process due to physical size constraints of your factory floor.)
As an American citizen of the United States, I will try to answer your question as best I can based on my own observations. As always, Anectdote != Data, so take this with a sizable quantity of salt.
The reasons why the American Public does not hoist our government officials up by their jolly rodgers appear to be:
1) The masses are made purposefully ignorant and complacent. As long as Superbowl Sunday, cheap beer, condoms/birth control, and tasty but unhealthy food are easily obtained, Little things like the right to speak publicly about any topic lose relevance.
2) Politicos play the popularity game to get elected; They give the politically vocal crowd a token offering (say, " Tougher laws on child porn!") then do whatever the hell they want after that. The people that elected them elected them pretty much exclusively for that token offering, and feel satisfied with their "purchase", because of item 1).
3) Our government actively lies to us, flagrantly, and consistently. It has strong financial connections to the vast majority of our media outlets in an almost "China-like" manner. [Newscorp and pals, I am looking at YOU.] You can find evidence of these two in some of the wikileaks documents. These lies reinforce item 1).
4) Most of my countrymen have the equivilent of ADHD when it comes to their attention span. Anything that does not immediately or directly relate to themselves personally is considered somebody else's problem, and they just tune it out.
5) There is a prevalent, and growing culture of anti-intellectualism, caused by multiple interested (non-government) factions of society. (The religious types being only one.)
In short, the reason why other citizens of my country are not out in the streets rioting like they are in the middle east, is because the vast majority of my countrymen are ignorant slobs who are too distracted by "Teh SHINY!", "Daaa.. She's got BOOOBIES!", "I iz drunk and stuff!", or "Larnin' is hard, yo!"
Nevermind that we have record unemployment, that nearly EVERY state government in the country is basically bankrupt and that wellfare infrastructure is poised to implode spectacularly, and a whole host of other "OMG! The sky is falling!" shit is going on--- As long as their lifestyles are not heavily impacted, they really don't care. That's why you have all those government employees picketing in WI to keep their ability to demand sweetheart deals on pensions, pay rates and other benefits--- and Very few picketing to have the runaway senators of WI return and do their job the legal way.
Much like how the entities which comprise the infrastructure of the internet consistently ignored the IP4 depletion problem, and are just NOW starting to look at IP6-- The same kind of thing will have to happen in the US before you get massive civil unrest and riots in the streets all over here: They will wait until they have totally destroyed the system they depend upon, then demand to know why it broke, like a spoiled and petulant child.
Remember, this is the country where manufacturers of hair dryers are mandated by law to put a great big idiogram on a tag on the cord of said blow dryers, telling consumers not to use them in the shower, because it will electrocute you if you do. People really are that ignorant here, and it gets worse when you get into government.
A friend of mine is the janitor man at a city hall in another state. He tells me that they had to do a training course to tell city hall employees how to secure doors. (You know, how to turn the lock?) That's how bad it is.
What do fungiform extraterrestrials from the planetoid of pluto have to do with companies being litigious?
However, this is a non-sequitor.
Piracy groups do not claim ownership nor authorship of the original product. Take for instance, "Adobe Photoshop"-- The pirate group's verbiage for that product is-- GASP-- "Adobe Photoshop". Name attribution is clearly given to Adobe Inc. EG, Razor 1911 (or any other 0-day group) does not claim that the work of Adobe is theirs. What they take credit for is bringing it to you, and hacking it for you.
As such, the "taking undue credit" argument does not follow with the situation it is raised against. That would be more in line with EG, Microsoft misappropriating GPL code from another, lesser known product-- incorporating it into a microsoft product, declaring a microsoft copyright, and failing to attribute the original author in any way.
That is not what consumer-pirates do.
One could argue that the attribution that the "Taking credit" argument is trying to debate is the flow of currency toward the author, but that STILL does not follow, and only results in a tortured argument. The flow of currency to the creator is tangential to accreditation, or claims of ownership. The best you could do is to say that piracy steals the power to revoke the use of the product from other people. (The old, "I own it, and if you don't pay me X, then you just can't have any!") THis is because digital piracy creates perfect copies. (The de-facto retort of "Oh yeah, Well my magic replicator will make my own, so [raspberry]!"
Thus the real argument is not over attribution, (Who made what, who deserves credit for creating what initially, etc...) but rather over control. A classic example would be "fettuccine Alfredo." Anyone with the recipe can create "Alfred's" famous fettuccine, and Alfred can't do a damn thing about it. Alfred still gets attribution (The name of the dish literally means "Fettuccine the way Alfredo makes it."), but he does not have control. He cannot remove his dish from everyone's table in the world, and as such cannot use that as a means for extortion, which is exactly what copyright is about.
Copyright was originally meant to secure a revenue stream for creators of new forms of art, so that those people would have money to continue creating art-- with the goal of enriching the commons. Current copyright is about how to abuse this monopoly to extort money from the masses, while doing nothing, for as long as is inhumanly possible, by PREVENTING the transition of works into the commons at all costs.
The case with Alfred's noodles is that his recipe has been incorporated into the commons. It cannot be removed/destroyed, because everyone has the recipe. Likewise, pirated software is software that has moved (De-facto, if illegally) out of private control and into the control of the commons. That is exactly what software piracy *IS*. It has nothing to do with attribution.
The psp has a 333mhz (top speed) CPU that lacks an MMU (so you cant even use swap), and 32mb of RAM. The heavy lifting is mostly done by the GPU, and clever hacking.
The system *IS* underpowered. It barely does all the things I listed.
No, buy SECOND HAND sony, THEN hack the shit out of it.
Like I did with my PSP Fat, which is now an ebook reader, a portable movie player, an email client (*can* be used to send, but the IME is terrible. I only use it to check.) a portable PS1 emulator for any PS1 title I care to wrap, and a delightful casual play platform for classic 90s consoles.
When it was under the control of Sony? It played maybe a handful of overpriced, somewhat fun games? At best?
Sony says that hackers killed the PSP; From what it looks like to me, the PSP was restricted and underpowered, and was just unattractive to developers compared with the PS3 and the 360. EG-- it was doomed from the beginning for what Sony had in mind.
Now, Sony says the PS3 is getting killed by hackers; From where I am watching the death of the PS3 has been long and protracted, and was notable long before this year in console hacking-- The PS3 is overpriced, has a limited consumer market, has been playing catchup to both the Wii and the 360, and has been doing so since launch. The Wii and the 360 both have hackers (Wii has Homebrew channel and IOS loaders-- 360 has JTAG, and the permitted XNA) and yet both seem to be doing quite well. Hackers dont seem to be the real problem here. Sony is.
No, you should blame BOTH, and several other industries (music, Movie, etc.) for their involvement.
The DMCA is the result of the "Content Industry" (A loosely knit market segment of all of the US companies involved in financing the creation of, then marketing the exploitation of, ephemeral properties such as software, music, and video performances) telling congress that John and Jane public weren't playing by "the rules", and that they needed a means to ensure that John and Jane stopped exposing the brokenness of the content industry's exploitation schemes. "Congress" is a loosely knit association of individual senators and representatives of various states, who all have a single recurring goal which has a rather large operating expense: getting re-elected. While no member of congress would openly admit it, "campaign contributions" have a magical way of influencing government policies, and the threat of their being withheld scares the shit out of them; causing a phenomenon similar to "moral panic" that is commonly seen in fundamentalists.
The DMCA is a law given by congress to appease the content industry, that was underwritten by the content industry, to ensure that the content industry will be protected by the government, so that the content industry can continue to supply campaign contributions to government employees, and to create more government jobs for government employees. It is a classic case of "Scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours." In short, it is a shining example of everything that is wrong with the US political system, and illustrates brilliantly exactly why we both need campaign finance reform, and why we will never get it.
The DMCA (and it's ilk) is the new prohibition; Complete with "Contraband goods".
I will blame all entities responsible for this affront on personal liberty in the name of corporate and government profit. Sony deserves all the ire that all the others involved have earned.
Natch! Good point!
I have no doubt that there are people who would approve of any arbitrary law as long as they profited from it. However, if that same law unduly imposes against another, that support is the result of a lack of integrity on the part of the supporter.
highly exagerated example:
Person X owns slaves, because law Z permits him to own them, and damnit, being able to force people to clean up after you is damn convenient. Person X claims that because it is not illegal to own slaves, that there is no problem whatsoever with such ownership, that arguments about how the slaves should have rights are just rhetoric from people that need to sit back and chill, because the law does not give rights to slaves, and the whole thing is just plain silly to argue over.
Nevermind the subtle truth behind the phrase "there but by the grace of god go I." (You can strip out any religiousity and still have a truism.) Person X is only in favor of slavery while he is the slave OWNER. His tune would change instantly if he was suddenly made into a slave himself. For this reason, his position lacks integrity.
The same kind of rationality can be applied to both the positions people hold on "child pornography", and on "Racial hate speech". The people that are for "Blanket" prosecution of these things (Really? cartoons?) would radically change their tune if they were the ones on the receiving end of the penal cudgel. (Just think how much stereotypical soccer mom would squirm on the bench after being charged with child porn for taking that cute picture of their 3 year old on the training potty--something that HAS happened.) For this reason, their support of such laws lacks integrity.
Society benefits from concise, practical, and reasonable legislation. Laws against child exploitation, for instance. (as in, child prostitution, etc.) It does not benefit (in the long run) by legislation that makes a privately held thought or impulse so taboo that ANYTHING remotely related to it is prosecutable. The latter only opens the door to witch-hunts, like this story is about, or to such insane outcomes as registering children as sex offenders for photographing themselves while naked. (Which has, and does continue to happen.)
Laws should be crafted for specific criminal acts, with a specific criminal intent. They should not be crafted to cater to moral panic, or to penalize nebulous and ambiguous activities.
Duct-taping a 10 year old girl to a bed, ramming a big black dildo in her and taking pictures is, and should be illegal, because you are harming a child, physically, emotionally, and mentally. Making a cartoon of such a sordid activity should be socially unacceptable, but not illegal, because no children are actively harmed by the enterprise. Arguments to the effect of "It promotes the real activity" lack credibility or integrity unless the person saying that argument is also against television dramas depicting physical violence, or destruction of property (pretty much all primetime TV in the US) and also believe that all actors that have been employed to create such television content should be charged with the simulated crimes they helped depict--OR they have highly documented evidence that creating or viewing such a sordid thing (simulated cartoon child exploitation) directly promotes non-criminals to become criminals.
So, as I see it, you are either against such stupid legislation, are a hypocritical bastard that lacks integrity, or are a fringe radical with insane opinions. Mod me troll if you wish, but that wont' change this simple fact, and my karma can take it.
however, the number of known civilizations (planet wise) is still 1, out of the 1,235. This makes a rather large dent in the computational threshold potential for Drake's famous equasion.
While there might be lots of dirtballs, and even more planets in need of a collossally sized gas-x pill, the number of potentially habitable is small, and of those the number that would be reasonably extrapolated to contain life would be even smaller, and the number with active civilizations even smaller still.
I would like to preface this with an apology, since it will seem barbed and pointed, but I consider these to be important questions.
However, When I was in public school, it seemed to me that each successive year that I attended the teachers riggorously went over THE SAME EXACT material that had been administered the year before for quite possibly the first 2/3 of the school year, followed by some very tiny token gesture of new content.
Exactly how many times does the public school system feel it needs to "teach" its students what a noun is, for example?
Also, given the observation above, why does the school system think it is justified to bore students to the point that they become jaded and impatient with their educators and ultimately end up "Hating" the entire prospect of being "educated"- A condition that from my own observations of my peers in the adult work environment, persists LONG into their adult life?
If you look at early children, say ages 5 to 6, you will find genuine and honest curiosity, and a willingness (if not eagerness) to learn in most of them. Coincidentally, you'll find that this is about the age of your average kindergarten student. Somehow, through some freak process that remains elusive, these same kids have an alarming propensity to become bull-headed, truant, and to start resisting being educated by the age of 10 to 12... I would wager it is because of several things:
1) Children learn through play. The education system teaches through repitition, regimented assesment, and mandates. (I know it does this for standardization and metrics purposes; these useful things for lawmakers, staticians, and schoolboards are not so useful nor healthy for children, especially young ones that have only a nebulous view of cause and effect.)
2) The educational system bars children from learning "Cool" things, even if the student in question shows a brilliant aptitude for it, if such subject matter is in any way able to be conflated as "dangerous", or worse "Disruptive." Instead it focuses on regimented, pre-proscribed, and totally "safe" curriculum which ultimately destroys any motivation to TRY to learn something new, and engaging later. If other students are like I was, it is because the system that operates in US public schools seems to actively prohibit such subject matter, or to denegrate that subject matter into something draconian, and boring.
Some major victims of this process are science, math, and computer technology, though literature and art also suffer.
Science can be, and should be FUN. Putting a 2 liter bottle of soda into an ultrasonic denture cleaning machine is fun, and cool. Learning why it causes a volcanic eruption of sweet fizz due to phonons and neucleation is empowering, which can become fun as well. (Where do you think the diet cola and mentos trick came from?) Learning about boolean logic and programming should also be fun; It should not be boiled down into a denaturated and lifeless exercise.
The reasons for shelving the more successful "Fun" approach to education are many-fold, but the big ones are these:
a) The teacher is not competent to teach the subject in question, and has only rudimentary knowledge of the subject him/herself, and actively crafts a curriculum that would avoid exposing this fact. (Teaching the test)
b) The school's legal counsel has 'suggested' to the school that teaching kids such things might cast the school in a negative, 'non-conformist' light, which would reflect badly on it when it comes time to renew government finance...
c) The school administrators erroniously believe that the students "are not ready" for such stimulating educational experiences. (You would never know when a student is 'ready' for such an experience until you expose them to one. See D)
d) The faculty staff do not want to deal with an empowered and 'eager to demonstrate what they learned' student body. (EG, they don't want to deal with mentos fountains on the school steps, or with genuine hacker talent cutti
As a matter of personal opinion on the deity described in the bible, I would agree with you on the "Literary contrivance" part, given what's below...
However, I would argue that the "Created in our image" line in geneis refers more to the mind of said god, since all previous creations had been created without free will. (Angels are servitors with specific functions, animals follow their instincts, but what drives the will of man?) Further, an incorporeal being could not realistically be depicted in a corporeal form alone; what was depicted was the essence of that being; the creative intellect itself.
As for the whole "Women obey men" thing-- The biblical narrative has Adam being created first, with Eve being created from Adam's flesh. (No, I don't believe such jiggery pokery, for those that would try to contrive such a reference.) The book of genesis gives this as the reason women should obey men-- adam came first. Likewise in the same short passage, it outright says that while women should obey men, men should respect and value women as if she were his equal. (In direct contravention of the agenda of the practice of patriarchy as it is normally manifested.)
That said, I don't think "God" has a gender. It would not make sense for such a pre-eminent being to have one; sex implies that there are others to have sex with-- a statement the bible explicitly denies. (the whole "There is only ONE god." thing.) From a non-religious and non-theological viewpoint, it is further silly to ascribe a gender to such a unique entity, because of the presumed nature of that entity: Having "always existed" pretty much quashes any evolutionary process by which gender would have been incorporated into this being, and despite what some theologists might claim, the concept of gender is not axiomatic. There exist many organisms that simply do not posess a definite gender. (Jellyfish, Sponges, some species of worms, most microbes, nearly all fungi, etc-- Some might be hermaphroditic and have sexual reproduction, but the members are of both genders simultanously, such as with jellyfish, sponges, fungi and the worms; or are fully asexual without any semblence of sexual relation at all-- like most microbes.) Sex is a relatively "new" thing evolutionarily speaking-- meaning that if "God" really did create life on earth, the first lifeforms he created were asexual, and given the well established fossil record concerning the evolution of hominids, then any physically litteral interpretation of "In his image" would imply that asexuality is the ideal, and that sex is part of the degeneracy that the bible rails against. (amusing, considering the catholic doctrine of "original sin" --- [which does not exist in the bible in any place I have read, which is the whole thing and most of the aprochryphal books. The sin of Eve was to disobey god, and the sin of Adam was in obeying his wife over obeying God. Not sex.] One could argue that god shaped evolution, and used evolution as the process by which he converted "lifeless mud" into "living souls"-- but doing so requires strong detatchment from any strictly and fundementally literal interpretation to the story of Genesis, and consigns it to being at least partially metaphorical. (The book of Genesis does not pass muster as a perfectly literal history, as the acts it depicts do not coincide with fossilized geological history.)
From a theological viewpoint, the bible (and several apochryphal books) outright state that angels have no gender, and do not have sex, being spiritual beings, and created perfect from the beginning (and thus have no need to reproduce sexually--being immortal and all that.) By inferrence, this would mean that god considers sexuality to be a necessary function because of the imperfect nature of physical lifeforms. (Duh, they die! Unless you want to keep rebuilding them all the time, you have to make them so they make more of themselves, or else they will all die out!) (Extra credit-- Read the first few chapters of the apochryphal book of Enoch for some amusin
Think of it this way: It helps combat both rising fuel costs, AND the rising obesity epidemic!
It's win-win!