I mean really, Salon isn't that good of a news magazine. They require payment for mediocre articles, you can't even read the article if you have Norton Ad-Blocker active, their political commentary is out-of-kilter with most of the libertarian Slashdot audience... Why exactly should we care that Salon has a celebrity interview article?
That's funny, the solutions that you propose are exactly what Bush's "No Child Left Behind" program was written to put in place: Funding based on Standardized Test Results.
The theory is that students are being pushed up the grade levels solely for high school "success" statistics, not because the children are learning. The "child left behind" is the one that learns nothing, but is treated as if they are ready to enter adult society. This solution to force the standardization of tests is what is being fought by the teachers unions, because it would reveal that many teachers are failing to teach, and are instead just "moving them along".
Having used a little XML at work, I was under the impression that the data is text based... yet from the FAQ:
Q. Why did Microsoft change the file formats for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint? A.... By creating a new robust, yet compact, structure based on industry standards such as XML and ZIP, the new default file formats speed document creation while reducing the size of (Office) files and improving data recovery in corrupted files.
Do you think this means that they are going to create an XML file that is a bunch of ZIP-compressed binary Objects, or are they creating the file as XML plaintext then compressing it and calling it a new "standard"? Using ZIP checksums could help with error detections in Office files, but if the Office Save functions didn't kludge about so much, shouldn't we expect not to have corrupted saves to begin with? Or by XML-izing the document, do they believe that one part of the save can fail without losing the entire document?
Yes, I understand that, you understand that, but what it is going to do is add fuel to the fire that "These 'big shot' scientists are resisting review of their own views when they shout we should review ours; when they do review their data, they find their base assumptions are wrong; assumptions that are used in the secular view of a godless universe. If their model is wrong when assumed right, and they assume our model is wrong, then are their godless universe assumptions also implicitly wrong?"
The Plasma Cosmology guy's view is that things like Singularities, Red Shift, the early Accelleration periods of the universe... all those are just fudged data with outright lies propping them up too. the argument is that for the last 30 years, astronomers have been ignoring 1/4th of the known fundamental forces in all of their data captures, and have written all of their formulas based on an incomplete data set. This is a view just as contrarian to modern physics as the guy who doesn't believe in the arrow of time...
Everyone knows that the Big Bang happened. I mean if it didn't, then modern scientific teachings are just as wrong as the Creationists they disparage; it would cancel the logic behind the assumption that the universe has a finite and deterministic beginning; Astronomers everywhere would lose their fund...
In the supreme court, the Liberal/Conservative monickers actually represent the traditional labels for these titles:
Liberals are for Change
Conservatives are for Remaining the Same
In Congress, the term "Liberal" has become synonymous with Socialist, mostly because the Liberal Democrats have (over the last 50+ years) promoted legislation with Socialist (providing for the Commons at the expense of the Individual) results. The modern Conservative Republicans exceedingly fall under the term "Neo-Conservative", falling away from the traditional budget hawk positions to a Nationalistic "protect the citizens at all costs".
Gone are the Democrats and Republicans of our fathers' era...
I have a Windows XP Home CD; I bought it to upgrade my OS in 2002. I had a 8GB hard drive at the time, was stupid and put the install on a 2GB partition, not realizing how much more disk space applications take when they want to be installed on the C: drive...
I bought a new hard drive, made one big 20GB partition, installed XP again. The old drive was formatted and thrown in as a slave.
Last year, the computer was acting up by randomly hardware faulting the USB device, so I got a new computer with a new copy of WinXP Pro. I copied everything to the new PC, and mothballed the old hardware.
I start it up last month to be a spare PC; get the old hard drive, install WinXP Home again, and a week later the damn motherboard shorted out. I buy a new barebones system, throw a new hard drive in, and install WinXP Home again... only this time, Microsoft's install process says that my CD Key is no longer valid.
Now, I've grossed at least 4 installs with a net of zero working installations of WinXP Home... How is DRM and these sorts of copy protections supposed to help me, the legitimate and honest consumer? I didn't spread around copies of WinXP, I had legitimate problems with the installations. Do I really own my own software if I can't get past the authorization?
And only in America are there those that believe that Saddam's government didn't have the refining capabilities to work with the uranium. At the very least, he was persuing the material to experiment with, with the full intention of proceding towards modern weaponry.
Lest we forget, his government was 90% of the way to completing a French-built nuclear reactor (before it was severely damaged in 1981). The French abandoned the project in 1984; Iraq rebuilt the plant without outside assistance in 1988. After invading Kuwait, in late 1990 Iraq began converting the plant to produce weapons grade plutonium. The plant was leveled by Desert Storm air attacks in Feb 1991.
It is idiotic to believe that Iraq technology remained static for 10 years, and it is rather naive to believe that with that length of time to aquire material with the illbegotten oil-for-food revenue, that he didn't already have the equipment within his country to refine whatever uranium he was able to import. But this is America, where we allow people to believe whatever they want to believe...
It seems that when she was moving back to college after winter break, she threw the tower in the back of the van laying on its side... Problem is, it was one of those Slot A motherboards, with the CPU mounted vertically. After the 4 hours of jostling, the chip worked its way loose, but not ALL the way loose....
What would happen is, she would use the computer, and after about 40 minutes, something would heat up, expand a bit, and one of the pins on the CPU daughterboard would lose connection to the motherboard, and the machine would reset. Thinking this was just normal Windows weirdness, I tell her run virus check, update the video drivers, yada yada... (its not the first time she had windows eaten by a virus)
Well, one day it just gives up the ghost, lets out a puff of blue smoke, and the whole machine shuts down... fortunately, the hard drive wasn't damaged & she got her reports, but the chip, ram and motherboard had to be tossed...
Now she buys her computers with a replacement policy.
But if people actually read the article, then they wouldn't be able to blindly bash the Bush Adminstration... There's nothing in the article that could not have been done by American companies and universities, if they hand't been spending all their time whining about federal funding.
This method is taking Unfertilized Embryo cells and replacing its nucleus with the chromosomes of the Adult Host. If the Embryo grows to maturity, it would be considered a Clone of the Adult (but it couldn't, because it isn't implanted into a womb). The Scientists culture the cells in the lab, take the developing Clone, chop it into its component Embryonic Stem Cells, and now the Embryonic Stem Cells can be used in other Adult Hosts to treat ailments...
Now, some may argue that destroying the blastocyst of the Clone (same genetic material as adult) is the same as destroying the blastocyst of a fetus (unique genetic material from adults). Personally, I'd rather use the method above, than have to resort to nastier methods (such as developing a [sub-]human species specifically for harvesting.... )
Why does Newsweek carry editorials by Bill Kristol?
So they can claim that they are "balanced", and can "fairly" discuss all sides of an issue. So they can pad the magazine with 90% content of one side of the story, 10% with the differing viewpoint. It just seems that LinuxWorld got tired of their dissenting viewpoint, and cut it.
And why not, you wouldn't put a column on "Visual Basic Tips" in a Mac magazine, it just doesn't fit the demographics. This is just another example of a media outlet who is catering to its readership (in grand old capitalist fashion) and trimming things to bring in more advertising support. It works for the New York Times catering to the liberal northeast, it'll work here.
Of course, the down side is that more people can now be dismissive of the content in LinuxWorld, because it only provides the banner-waving viewpoint, but if that helps draw in more subscribers, then go for it.
Not that surprising, when you figure that the majority of Slashdot editors fall on the Democratic side of the fence...
Ms. Huffington went to great lengths to insist that she's commissioned a multitude of Democratic party aligned writers to contribute articles to her site.. There are 14 authors on the front page today, and we've got: Tips from Cronkite on how to fix the Democratic party, Sen Corzine blasting Bush on not supporing one of his bills, Huffington making fun of Tom Delay, Rep Markly criticizing the Bush administration over N.K. nukes, another critiquing Bush's foreign policy, a critique of the wildlife commission, a critique of the Republican religious base...
I've been thinking along these lines lately, wondering if we all have it wrong because of how we observe the passing of time. We think that because we "remember" a previous event, we sequence our events, declare that time is a line and thus reversable. Yet, aren't memories just chemical reactions? We want to remember something, our neurons are firing in realtime to rebuild the picture of the event, we recall the event in realtime, and compare the two perceptions in realtime.
Imagine the universe is a giant state machine. It isn't that hard to picture, since we have lots of things in nature that have discrete states (electron levels, quantum objects, etc). Each "tick" of the machine is one plank interval of time, where we resolve things like momentum, accellerations, etc to create a new state based on the previous position of variables.
We still have things like "cause and effects", because effects are just the unwinding of the state engine based on the configuration a number of temporal ticks beforehand. We still have free will, because the "future" is literally unwritten... everything is a direct consequence of our actions in realtime.
How does one travel in time in an engine like this? Well, to "travel" you have to recreate the quatum states (positions, energy level, etc), and immerse yourself in the construct. There would be discontinuities in the state engine, and the only way to set that up is to exist outside of the processing to reconfigure the code... something we will not have the ability to do (for a long time, if ever).
The last thing that bugs me about conventional (ha!) time travel is the whole deal of conservation of energy. Futhermore, Energy with a duration (time) is Power. In order for you to move between timelines, are you not moving the mass and energy (that make up "you") into a closed system? In the traditional time travel model, you want to jump out of the "present", move to the past for a long duration, and jump back to shortly after "present". If spacetime is dimensional, then shouldn't the power (energy over time) spent in the past be equal to an amount of power extracted from the future? If the net energy of the universe from just before your jump ino the past is equal to just after you return to the present, is energy still conserved by definition? Maybe someone else would want to add their comments.
In the article, they say that they solved the equations by hand, and programmed it from scratch. They were given photographs of a "flat" scene at such a close range that it caused perspective issues with the height of the threads in the tapestry...
a tapestry that was suspended in purified water, free floating in 3 dimensions...
with a camera that was held at varying heights above the tapestry, since they were suspended by scaffolding over the work of art...
art that was bumped by the photographers as they were moving the photograph backing under the tapestry in the water, which created eddys that moved the fabric, causing it to stretch in some photos and bunch up in other photos...
not to mention that in some frames, an outside doorway was left open, which changed the lighting contrasts...
oh, and they had over 200 CDs worth, which I conservatively calculate at 170GBs of images that needed stitching at full scale.
You know what, maybe for efficiency, we could set up one place we could send our taxes, and they could send all the money back to the states for us? We could call it Income tax Redistribution for States...
Judging how Hollywood works these days, it's either him or Haley Joel Osment... where else are you gonna find another science fiction type-cast teen actor?
I recall reading in my middle-school years (aka junior high) a rather unique story about replicating robots. The story was written in the 1960s-1970s
Essentially, the premise is that a meteor falls out of the sky one night, where it is observed by a few people. When they arive at the site, it is bustling with miniature robots. They call the government, and the gov shows up to observe, but by then the robots have built little buildings. Some robots are strip-mining, and they eventually build a little refinery, then more robots, then a bigger refinery... and a launch pad. By the end of the story (and by the time anyone realized they were in danger), the robots had built themselves little rockets, and were now shooting their seeds of new robot colonies around the country, soon to dominate the world, totally dispassionate for whatever was there to begin with... it just wasn't in their programming.
To boil the story down, some long forgotten alien race had created the ultimate automated factory, traveling from star system to star system to collect rare materials, and ship it back for the long ride home at sub-light speeds. Its a self propagating system, that as they spread from system to system, asteroid to moon to planet, the geometric growth would provide their civilization every material they would ever need...
This may go the way of the MPEG accelerator card of the mid-90s
Ok, but during that 2 year window of opportunity, when every gamer wants a physics processor add-on to eek out another 5 FPS, I think they'd still want to milk it for every dollar they can get... Just ask the people who invented the Hollywood DVD PCI card... It almost quadrupled their stock value back in 1994, you have to believe they made some money off of it.
No, it just has to be cheaper than the cost of the energy losses to transport the power + the cost of the infrastructure. The losses, while low, are not insignificant, plus you have voltage attenuation issues to deal with (see Surge Impedance Loading)
Given that the cost of EHV transmission is on the order of a US$1 million per mile, and you're talking several hundred miles, and that total cost has to be invested before the first dollar of actual energy can flow... there's a significan prohibitor right there. Especially when a generator company looks at the existing grid, sees that they only have to run several hundred feet of wire to tap into an existing substation, and they decide to build the installation there.
Answer is much, much cheaper. So much so that there's barely any energy transfer across the Rocky mountains today as it is... that's why the north american electric grid is separated into 3 AC systems... Eastern, Western, and Texas.
Please, let Enterprise die an honorable death, and I will love you more!
The worst thing I felt was wrong with Enterprise was the unneccessary trip down time-travel lane... SciFi just can't seem to leave that plot device alone, and it corrupts many more stories than it helps. You start out Enterprise with this great start to a story (human kind just learning warp travel, the universe is open!), and years of canon material, and what do they do? Introduce a time-travelling war between two factions barely mentioned in the other series, and you've scrambled any hope of living up to your audience's expectations.
Battlestar Galactica has quite a different approach, an almost documentary like feel to the action. Everything has a matter-of-fact explanation (so far) with no magicks, psychics, time-travelling, quantum flux capacitors, whatever. Like Firefly, and any good science fiction story, the characters' storyline progresses outside of the science that carries it... There were some good character building episodes to Enterprise, don't get me wrong, but when you have things like the Fast Aging Clone episode, I can't put that aside. That's what I feel is the biggest difference, and why Enterprise disappoints.
(1) The Bush Administration does not have a "religiously imposed dogma on science and progress". There is a significant segment of the American population that is concerned about scientists initiating the process of conception for the sole purpose of ripping apart the component stem cells while receiving federal funding to do so. Corporations and universities are welcome to continue studying embryonic stem cells, just not while using federal research grants.
(2) Unlike the aformentioned Embryonic Stem Cells, this process is another form of Adult Stem Cell research, which is using the patient's own stem cells to culture and augment existing organs. There has never been any political problems with this branch of stem cell research, and the Bush Administration has advanced this research alternative several times as the preferred path.
(3) Bone Marrow has long been known to be a source of red blood cells as well as muscle stem cells. If they are partially differentiated as marrow cells, they are still in the same family as cardiovascular muscles, and thus are a prime candidate for this type of injection research. It would be like taking neurons from the brain and injecting them into the spinal column, to see if the cells can merge and augment the spinal tissues.
Part of the problem of degenerative diseases is that there is a genetic problem with the adult, so transplanting cells with the same genetic makeup within the same adult will not magically create a missing protein... that is where we need to initiate aditional research with inter-adult stem cell research, and proceed from there.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean really, Salon isn't that good of a news magazine. They require payment for mediocre articles, you can't even read the article if you have Norton Ad-Blocker active, their political commentary is out-of-kilter with most of the libertarian Slashdot audience... Why exactly should we care that Salon has a celebrity interview article?
That's funny, the solutions that you propose are exactly what Bush's "No Child Left Behind" program was written to put in place: Funding based on Standardized Test Results.
The theory is that students are being pushed up the grade levels solely for high school "success" statistics, not because the children are learning. The "child left behind" is the one that learns nothing, but is treated as if they are ready to enter adult society. This solution to force the standardization of tests is what is being fought by the teachers unions, because it would reveal that many teachers are failing to teach, and are instead just "moving them along".
Having used a little XML at work, I was under the impression that the data is text based... yet from the FAQ:
... By creating a new robust, yet compact, structure based on industry standards such as XML and ZIP, the new default file formats speed document creation while reducing the size of (Office) files and improving data recovery in corrupted files.
Q. Why did Microsoft change the file formats for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint?
A.
Do you think this means that they are going to create an XML file that is a bunch of ZIP-compressed binary Objects, or are they creating the file as XML plaintext then compressing it and calling it a new "standard"? Using ZIP checksums could help with error detections in Office files, but if the Office Save functions didn't kludge about so much, shouldn't we expect not to have corrupted saves to begin with? Or by XML-izing the document, do they believe that one part of the save can fail without losing the entire document?
Yes, I understand that, you understand that, but what it is going to do is add fuel to the fire that "These 'big shot' scientists are resisting review of their own views when they shout we should review ours; when they do review their data, they find their base assumptions are wrong; assumptions that are used in the secular view of a godless universe. If their model is wrong when assumed right, and they assume our model is wrong, then are their godless universe assumptions also implicitly wrong?"
The Plasma Cosmology guy's view is that things like Singularities, Red Shift, the early Accelleration periods of the universe... all those are just fudged data with outright lies propping them up too. the argument is that for the last 30 years, astronomers have been ignoring 1/4th of the known fundamental forces in all of their data captures, and have written all of their formulas based on an incomplete data set. This is a view just as contrarian to modern physics as the guy who doesn't believe in the arrow of time...
Everyone knows that the Big Bang happened. I mean if it didn't, then modern scientific teachings are just as wrong as the Creationists they disparage; it would cancel the logic behind the assumption that the universe has a finite and deterministic beginning; Astronomers everywhere would lose their fund...
Oh.
- Liberals are for Change
- Conservatives are for Remaining the Same
In Congress, the term "Liberal" has become synonymous with Socialist, mostly because the Liberal Democrats have (over the last 50+ years) promoted legislation with Socialist (providing for the Commons at the expense of the Individual) results. The modern Conservative Republicans exceedingly fall under the term "Neo-Conservative", falling away from the traditional budget hawk positions to a Nationalistic "protect the citizens at all costs".Gone are the Democrats and Republicans of our fathers' era...
I have a Windows XP Home CD; I bought it to upgrade my OS in 2002. I had a 8GB hard drive at the time, was stupid and put the install on a 2GB partition, not realizing how much more disk space applications take when they want to be installed on the C: drive...
I bought a new hard drive, made one big 20GB partition, installed XP again. The old drive was formatted and thrown in as a slave.
Last year, the computer was acting up by randomly hardware faulting the USB device, so I got a new computer with a new copy of WinXP Pro. I copied everything to the new PC, and mothballed the old hardware.
I start it up last month to be a spare PC; get the old hard drive, install WinXP Home again, and a week later the damn motherboard shorted out. I buy a new barebones system, throw a new hard drive in, and install WinXP Home again... only this time, Microsoft's install process says that my CD Key is no longer valid.
Now, I've grossed at least 4 installs with a net of zero working installations of WinXP Home... How is DRM and these sorts of copy protections supposed to help me, the legitimate and honest consumer? I didn't spread around copies of WinXP, I had legitimate problems with the installations. Do I really own my own software if I can't get past the authorization?
And only in America are there those that believe that Saddam's government didn't have the refining capabilities to work with the uranium. At the very least, he was persuing the material to experiment with, with the full intention of proceding towards modern weaponry.
Lest we forget, his government was 90% of the way to completing a French-built nuclear reactor (before it was severely damaged in 1981). The French abandoned the project in 1984; Iraq rebuilt the plant without outside assistance in 1988. After invading Kuwait, in late 1990 Iraq began converting the plant to produce weapons grade plutonium. The plant was leveled by Desert Storm air attacks in Feb 1991.
It is idiotic to believe that Iraq technology remained static for 10 years, and it is rather naive to believe that with that length of time to aquire material with the illbegotten oil-for-food revenue, that he didn't already have the equipment within his country to refine whatever uranium he was able to import. But this is America, where we allow people to believe whatever they want to believe...
My sister managed to catch her computer on fire.
It seems that when she was moving back to college after winter break, she threw the tower in the back of the van laying on its side... Problem is, it was one of those Slot A motherboards, with the CPU mounted vertically. After the 4 hours of jostling, the chip worked its way loose, but not ALL the way loose....
What would happen is, she would use the computer, and after about 40 minutes, something would heat up, expand a bit, and one of the pins on the CPU daughterboard would lose connection to the motherboard, and the machine would reset. Thinking this was just normal Windows weirdness, I tell her run virus check, update the video drivers, yada yada... (its not the first time she had windows eaten by a virus)
Well, one day it just gives up the ghost, lets out a puff of blue smoke, and the whole machine shuts down... fortunately, the hard drive wasn't damaged & she got her reports, but the chip, ram and motherboard had to be tossed...
Now she buys her computers with a replacement policy.
But if people actually read the article, then they wouldn't be able to blindly bash the Bush Adminstration... There's nothing in the article that could not have been done by American companies and universities, if they hand't been spending all their time whining about federal funding.
This method is taking Unfertilized Embryo cells and replacing its nucleus with the chromosomes of the Adult Host. If the Embryo grows to maturity, it would be considered a Clone of the Adult (but it couldn't, because it isn't implanted into a womb). The Scientists culture the cells in the lab, take the developing Clone, chop it into its component Embryonic Stem Cells, and now the Embryonic Stem Cells can be used in other Adult Hosts to treat ailments...
Now, some may argue that destroying the blastocyst of the Clone (same genetic material as adult) is the same as destroying the blastocyst of a fetus (unique genetic material from adults). Personally, I'd rather use the method above, than have to resort to nastier methods (such as developing a [sub-]human species specifically for harvesting.... )
Why does Newsweek carry editorials by Bill Kristol?
So they can claim that they are "balanced", and can "fairly" discuss all sides of an issue. So they can pad the magazine with 90% content of one side of the story, 10% with the differing viewpoint. It just seems that LinuxWorld got tired of their dissenting viewpoint, and cut it.
And why not, you wouldn't put a column on "Visual Basic Tips" in a Mac magazine, it just doesn't fit the demographics. This is just another example of a media outlet who is catering to its readership (in grand old capitalist fashion) and trimming things to bring in more advertising support. It works for the New York Times catering to the liberal northeast, it'll work here.
Of course, the down side is that more people can now be dismissive of the content in LinuxWorld, because it only provides the banner-waving viewpoint, but if that helps draw in more subscribers, then go for it.
Not that surprising, when you figure that the majority of Slashdot editors fall on the Democratic side of the fence...
Ms. Huffington went to great lengths to insist that she's commissioned a multitude of Democratic party aligned writers to contribute articles to her site.. There are 14 authors on the front page today, and we've got: Tips from Cronkite on how to fix the Democratic party, Sen Corzine blasting Bush on not supporing one of his bills, Huffington making fun of Tom Delay, Rep Markly criticizing the Bush administration over N.K. nukes, another critiquing Bush's foreign policy, a critique of the wildlife commission, a critique of the Republican religious base...
Not bad! Way to change minds and win friends!
I've been thinking along these lines lately, wondering if we all have it wrong because of how we observe the passing of time. We think that because we "remember" a previous event, we sequence our events, declare that time is a line and thus reversable. Yet, aren't memories just chemical reactions? We want to remember something, our neurons are firing in realtime to rebuild the picture of the event, we recall the event in realtime, and compare the two perceptions in realtime.
Imagine the universe is a giant state machine. It isn't that hard to picture, since we have lots of things in nature that have discrete states (electron levels, quantum objects, etc). Each "tick" of the machine is one plank interval of time, where we resolve things like momentum, accellerations, etc to create a new state based on the previous position of variables.
We still have things like "cause and effects", because effects are just the unwinding of the state engine based on the configuration a number of temporal ticks beforehand. We still have free will, because the "future" is literally unwritten... everything is a direct consequence of our actions in realtime.
How does one travel in time in an engine like this? Well, to "travel" you have to recreate the quatum states (positions, energy level, etc), and immerse yourself in the construct. There would be discontinuities in the state engine, and the only way to set that up is to exist outside of the processing to reconfigure the code... something we will not have the ability to do (for a long time, if ever).
The last thing that bugs me about conventional (ha!) time travel is the whole deal of conservation of energy. Futhermore, Energy with a duration (time) is Power. In order for you to move between timelines, are you not moving the mass and energy (that make up "you") into a closed system? In the traditional time travel model, you want to jump out of the "present", move to the past for a long duration, and jump back to shortly after "present". If spacetime is dimensional, then shouldn't the power (energy over time) spent in the past be equal to an amount of power extracted from the future? If the net energy of the universe from just before your jump ino the past is equal to just after you return to the present, is energy still conserved by definition? Maybe someone else would want to add their comments.
In the article, they say that they solved the equations by hand, and programmed it from scratch. They were given photographs of a "flat" scene at such a close range that it caused perspective issues with the height of the threads in the tapestry...
a tapestry that was suspended in purified water, free floating in 3 dimensions...
with a camera that was held at varying heights above the tapestry, since they were suspended by scaffolding over the work of art...
art that was bumped by the photographers as they were moving the photograph backing under the tapestry in the water, which created eddys that moved the fabric, causing it to stretch in some photos and bunch up in other photos...
not to mention that in some frames, an outside doorway was left open, which changed the lighting contrasts...
oh, and they had over 200 CDs worth, which I conservatively calculate at 170GBs of images that needed stitching at full scale.
You know what, maybe for efficiency, we could set up one place we could send our taxes, and they could send all the money back to the states for us? We could call it Income tax Redistribution for States...
Nah, it would never work.
You want to implement Visual Basic for Applications, for OS X?
Sounds like its time to rise against the bourgeois proletariat... So here's a rather interesting simulation...
Is there any reason why the entire review is showing up on the slashdot.org front page?
Someone needs to clip it down...
Judging how Hollywood works these days, it's either him or Haley Joel Osment... where else are you gonna find another science fiction type-cast teen actor?
I recall reading in my middle-school years (aka junior high) a rather unique story about replicating robots. The story was written in the 1960s-1970s
Essentially, the premise is that a meteor falls out of the sky one night, where it is observed by a few people. When they arive at the site, it is bustling with miniature robots. They call the government, and the gov shows up to observe, but by then the robots have built little buildings. Some robots are strip-mining, and they eventually build a little refinery, then more robots, then a bigger refinery... and a launch pad. By the end of the story (and by the time anyone realized they were in danger), the robots had built themselves little rockets, and were now shooting their seeds of new robot colonies around the country, soon to dominate the world, totally dispassionate for whatever was there to begin with... it just wasn't in their programming.
To boil the story down, some long forgotten alien race had created the ultimate automated factory, traveling from star system to star system to collect rare materials, and ship it back for the long ride home at sub-light speeds. Its a self propagating system, that as they spread from system to system, asteroid to moon to planet, the geometric growth would provide their civilization every material they would ever need...
See, that's what I can't understand... We voted for Bush/Gore in 2000, he didn't come into office until 2001.
So, the beginning of the bubble pop took place during Clinton's administration's oversight (or lack there-of).
This may go the way of the MPEG accelerator card of the mid-90s
Ok, but during that 2 year window of opportunity, when every gamer wants a physics processor add-on to eek out another 5 FPS, I think they'd still want to milk it for every dollar they can get... Just ask the people who invented the Hollywood DVD PCI card... It almost quadrupled their stock value back in 1994, you have to believe they made some money off of it.
No, it just has to be cheaper than the cost of the energy losses to transport the power + the cost of the infrastructure. The losses, while low, are not insignificant, plus you have voltage attenuation issues to deal with (see Surge Impedance Loading)
Given that the cost of EHV transmission is on the order of a US$1 million per mile, and you're talking several hundred miles, and that total cost has to be invested before the first dollar of actual energy can flow... there's a significan prohibitor right there. Especially when a generator company looks at the existing grid, sees that they only have to run several hundred feet of wire to tap into an existing substation, and they decide to build the installation there.
Answer is much, much cheaper. So much so that there's barely any energy transfer across the Rocky mountains today as it is... that's why the north american electric grid is separated into 3 AC systems... Eastern, Western, and Texas.
Please, let Enterprise die an honorable death, and I will love you more!
The worst thing I felt was wrong with Enterprise was the unneccessary trip down time-travel lane... SciFi just can't seem to leave that plot device alone, and it corrupts many more stories than it helps. You start out Enterprise with this great start to a story (human kind just learning warp travel, the universe is open!), and years of canon material, and what do they do? Introduce a time-travelling war between two factions barely mentioned in the other series, and you've scrambled any hope of living up to your audience's expectations.
Battlestar Galactica has quite a different approach, an almost documentary like feel to the action. Everything has a matter-of-fact explanation (so far) with no magicks, psychics, time-travelling, quantum flux capacitors, whatever. Like Firefly, and any good science fiction story, the characters' storyline progresses outside of the science that carries it... There were some good character building episodes to Enterprise, don't get me wrong, but when you have things like the Fast Aging Clone episode, I can't put that aside. That's what I feel is the biggest difference, and why Enterprise disappoints.
I can't let this one go.
(1) The Bush Administration does not have a "religiously imposed dogma on science and progress". There is a significant segment of the American population that is concerned about scientists initiating the process of conception for the sole purpose of ripping apart the component stem cells while receiving federal funding to do so. Corporations and universities are welcome to continue studying embryonic stem cells, just not while using federal research grants.
(2) Unlike the aformentioned Embryonic Stem Cells, this process is another form of Adult Stem Cell research, which is using the patient's own stem cells to culture and augment existing organs. There has never been any political problems with this branch of stem cell research, and the Bush Administration has advanced this research alternative several times as the preferred path.
(3) Bone Marrow has long been known to be a source of red blood cells as well as muscle stem cells. If they are partially differentiated as marrow cells, they are still in the same family as cardiovascular muscles, and thus are a prime candidate for this type of injection research. It would be like taking neurons from the brain and injecting them into the spinal column, to see if the cells can merge and augment the spinal tissues.
Part of the problem of degenerative diseases is that there is a genetic problem with the adult, so transplanting cells with the same genetic makeup within the same adult will not magically create a missing protein... that is where we need to initiate aditional research with inter-adult stem cell research, and proceed from there.