By designing (or should I say architecturizing) your own rules you begin to exclude groups of people, such as those whose first language is not English.
Then the Germans had better stop joining words together however they please. It creates these big, long words which are incomprehensible to non-native speakers. They seem to do it willy-nilly!
This guy seems a little harsh and just a bit jealous of the success of Gordon Cormack's article.
Let me explain why he's irritated, as somebody who has conducted spam filter statistical tests and made publications on the topic.
Yes, it is irritating when somebody demonstrates that his method is better than yours. However, most researchers are able to accept this, and continue improving their own work.
However, what is far more irritating (by an order of magnitude at least) is when somebody "demonstrates" the inferiority of your work, and they do so in a completely scientifically bogus way.
Let me give a concrete example. Suppose you were Galileo. You have just put forth the postulate that all objects fall at the same speed regardless of mass. A "debunker" attempts to demonstrate that this isn't true by dropping an iron ball and a feather. Obviously, the feather falls much more slowly.
"Ha ha, neener, neener!" cries the debunker. Of course, Galileo knows his method is flawed. If people actually listen to this supposed debunker, Galileo might become very, very irritated indeed.
what's the difference between "writing" a response and err, "architecting" a response?
You're being purposefully dense.
To architect a response would imply careful consideration, artistic presentation, and stunning aesthetics. I don't necessarily agree that that's what he's done here, but obviously that is what he meant to convey with his choice of words.
And if you disagree with verbing words, you have better stop "inputting" data into a computer, or "Googling" for answers, or "bookmarking" links, or "forking" processes.
Haven't you ever Googled something? Haven't you ever input data into a computer? (The use of the word input as a verb is, of course, the result of verbing, and it's now considered acceptable usage.) In recent years it has become common in English to "verb" nouns. In fact, I just did it. English, like any other language, evolves over time.
To deny this fact makes you just another prescriptivist language maven, completely disconnected from reality and any sense of the advancement of human language.
Folks, don't listen to this dinosaur. He's not insightful, he's simply living in the past.
How the hell can you say that? For many people the company pays for your ticket and room, you get the hell out of the office for a few days, you get to forget about your usual work, you get to see a different city, and you get to drink a lot.
Who the hell cares whether the actual content of the show is any good?
And what, exactly, is the difference between "Unbearded" and "Beardless"
It's simple, really. If a person once had a beard, but now has none, he is "unbearded." You know, as in "Gahh! I got drunk and passed out and my friends unbearded me in my sleep!"
"Beardless" would indicate never having had a beard at all.
Here's an idea I've been pondering for a while. The ISP corps will never go for it, of course, but if I was an ISP, here's how I'd handle the bandwidth caps.
Each customer starts with 100 "bandwidth tokens" per month. For every gigabyte downloaded, you pay one bandwidth token. You can go negative, but only for a certain fixed number of weeks, before your service is temporarily shut off.
Now, here's the cool part:
If you are one of the users who does not use all 100 tokens per month, you can sell them to the people who need them! This could be coordinated through a special web site, or people could list them in the classifieds, or sell them on Ebay if they wish.
I have no idea what my monthly bandwidth usage is, but it's certainly nowhere near 100 gigs per month. I'd still have plenty of tokens left over, and if these tokens sell for, say, $0.50 each, I could potentially get a pretty nice discount on my bandwidth.
And the free market, NOT the ISP, will determine the true value of the tokens, since they are privately traded with no ISP intervention. Instead of having the ISP tell us how much a gigabyte is worth, we decide it for ourselves.
As penence, you must watch no less than 5 episodes of Myth Busters.
I was in total agreement with you till this point. I enjoy Myth Busters too, but their "experiments" are anything but scientific. They rarely use any sort of control. They don't cover all the variables. They don't record any real data. It's fun to watch, and it helps dispel some of the more implausible myths, but I wouldn't trust those guys to tell me whether or not RF energy could give me cancer. They simply don't have the skill as scientists and experimenters.
Like I said, the show is cool. But completely unscientific.
sending data through the body has not been acheived before.
MIT did this years ago. It was a cool project, really.
Presumably Microsoft has solved some specific engineering problems.
We've known how to stick electrodes on the body for nearly a century.
They also probably spent a lot of money on solving them.
I can replicate their results in my den with $10 worth of equipment. I doubt they spent much more than this, plus whatever ridiculous salary the "researcher" was paid.
Why shouldn't they be entitled to financial reward?
Because they are an illegal monopoly who continues to press into markets they have no business playing in? And because the idea is frigging obvious?
Divide by the square of the factor between meters and feet.
If you have trouble remembering the conversion factor, well... Of course you do, most people have trouble remembering something they don't use on a daily basis. It isn't because there's something "difficult" about it.
What makes this gun so revolutionary is a) safety for the user. No gunpowder to go boom at inconvienent times
Yeah, instead you have a giant capacitor bank charged to millions of volts.
If you shorted that bank out with a chunk of metal (oh, say a fifty pound steel rod), the current discharge would instantaneously melt it, and the magnetic field caused by the pulse would compress the metal vapor to enormous pressures. When the current finally stops (because the caps have fully discharged), the magnetic field will collapse, and the metal vapor, which is now at extreme pressure, will blow out in all directions with unbelievable force.
I'd say such an explosion could take out half the ship.
They are almost certainly going to use a bank of capacitors. No other device is capable of sourcing that much current with such a fast rise time. How they charge the capacitors is a different issue.
We're talking megajoules of energy released in microseconds, perhaps even nanoseconds. The power will be at least in the terawatt range. But only for a brief instant.
I could think of (magic/magnetic) shields that flicker positive/negative (or just rotation of north pole) so that the projectile will blow away itself using its own speed.
Conservation of momentum. You cannot blow a projectile into "harmless" bits, because the total momentum of the pieces remains the same. Instead of getting hit by one big projectile, you get hit by a bunch of dust, or vapor, or droplets of liquid metal. The total impact impulse will remain the same.
You also can't just deflect the projectile, because the force applied to deflect the projectile would be equally applied to the deflector device. Even if you did this via a magnetic field, the deflector would suffer damage.
There's simply not much you can do to stop a projectile moving at such velocities.
Like the way we are 'dominating' iraq? We are in no position to go out and conquor the world.
The only reason we are not currently in absolute control of Iraq is that the actions we would have to take to do so would be highly unpopular. Our difficulties arise from having to play within the bounds of a very restrictive set of rules.
It would be very simple to gas the entire region. Or nuke it. Or simply send the troops out with the orders to spray bullets at any Iraqi they encounter, be it man, woman, or child. We can't do this for what should be obvious reasons. But there is nothing technically standing in the way.
If we chose to be ruthless, the place would be a clean slate by now.
Just what we need. More deployed weapons which make the United States absolutely unbeatable.
Doesn't it bother the rest of the civilized world in the slightest that we (the USA) are slowly moving into a position where we could just walk across the planet and dominate it?
Always good to see the Americans pushing the arms race to even more absurd heights.
The people who overclock know that they can burn up their chip
Maybe Intel is just tired of accomodating people who burn their chip up trying to overclock it, then think to themselves, "Hey, I can just blame this on a faulty heatsink." God forbid they actually admit that they blew a hundred bucks on a chip and proceded to burn it to a crisp for a piddly 5% performance boost.
If you burn up your chip and then lie to Intel in order to get a replacement, you're a loser, you're ripping Intel off, and you're fucking it up for everyone else by forcing Intel to implement anti-overclocking provisions such as this one.
Having said that, people always figure a way around the limitations anyway.
Heh! My website still runs on a dual Celeron 300A box. A few months ago I finally had to clock it back down to 300, because the fans are starting to gunk up and can't cool it properly at 450 anymore.
I expect those things to keep chugging along for another five years, at least...
... won't the added humidity to the environment cause unintended climate effects
No, because the typical source of hydrogen is electrolyzed water. Hence you are simply recreating the water where the hydrogen came from in the first place. However, since it takes energy to split water, and that energy presumably came from fossil fuels, you are definitely causing an environmental impact.
Also, burning hydrocarbons releases water as well as CO2. If the excess water had a large environmental impact, we would have noticed it by now. The CO2 is much more important in terms of environmental impact.
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Then the Germans had better stop joining words together however they please. It creates these big, long words which are incomprehensible to non-native speakers. They seem to do it willy-nilly!
That's what you're saying. Right?
It's elitism, nothing less.
Prescriptivism is the only thing elitist here.
Let me explain why he's irritated, as somebody who has conducted spam filter statistical tests and made publications on the topic.
Yes, it is irritating when somebody demonstrates that his method is better than yours. However, most researchers are able to accept this, and continue improving their own work.
However, what is far more irritating (by an order of magnitude at least) is when somebody "demonstrates" the inferiority of your work, and they do so in a completely scientifically bogus way.
Let me give a concrete example. Suppose you were Galileo. You have just put forth the postulate that all objects fall at the same speed regardless of mass. A "debunker" attempts to demonstrate that this isn't true by dropping an iron ball and a feather. Obviously, the feather falls much more slowly.
"Ha ha, neener, neener!" cries the debunker. Of course, Galileo knows his method is flawed. If people actually listen to this supposed debunker, Galileo might become very, very irritated indeed.
You're being purposefully dense.
To architect a response would imply careful consideration, artistic presentation, and stunning aesthetics. I don't necessarily agree that that's what he's done here, but obviously that is what he meant to convey with his choice of words.
And if you disagree with verbing words, you have better stop "inputting" data into a computer, or "Googling" for answers, or "bookmarking" links, or "forking" processes.
Haven't you ever Googled something? Haven't you ever input data into a computer? (The use of the word input as a verb is, of course, the result of verbing, and it's now considered acceptable usage.) In recent years it has become common in English to "verb" nouns. In fact, I just did it. English, like any other language, evolves over time.
To deny this fact makes you just another prescriptivist language maven, completely disconnected from reality and any sense of the advancement of human language.
Folks, don't listen to this dinosaur. He's not insightful, he's simply living in the past.
How the hell can you say that? For many people the company pays for your ticket and room, you get the hell out of the office for a few days, you get to forget about your usual work, you get to see a different city, and you get to drink a lot.
Who the hell cares whether the actual content of the show is any good?
Downtrodden means "oppressed or tyrannized." I think the word you're looking for is "crestfallen" :-)
It's simple, really. If a person once had a beard, but now has none, he is "unbearded." You know, as in "Gahh! I got drunk and passed out and my friends unbearded me in my sleep!"
"Beardless" would indicate never having had a beard at all.
Each customer starts with 100 "bandwidth tokens" per month. For every gigabyte downloaded, you pay one bandwidth token. You can go negative, but only for a certain fixed number of weeks, before your service is temporarily shut off.
Now, here's the cool part:
If you are one of the users who does not use all 100 tokens per month, you can sell them to the people who need them! This could be coordinated through a special web site, or people could list them in the classifieds, or sell them on Ebay if they wish.
I have no idea what my monthly bandwidth usage is, but it's certainly nowhere near 100 gigs per month. I'd still have plenty of tokens left over, and if these tokens sell for, say, $0.50 each, I could potentially get a pretty nice discount on my bandwidth.
And the free market, NOT the ISP, will determine the true value of the tokens, since they are privately traded with no ISP intervention. Instead of having the ISP tell us how much a gigabyte is worth, we decide it for ourselves.
Think of it as milli-(bits per second) not (milli-bits) per second. Makes much more sense.
I was in total agreement with you till this point. I enjoy Myth Busters too, but their "experiments" are anything but scientific. They rarely use any sort of control. They don't cover all the variables. They don't record any real data. It's fun to watch, and it helps dispel some of the more implausible myths, but I wouldn't trust those guys to tell me whether or not RF energy could give me cancer. They simply don't have the skill as scientists and experimenters.
Like I said, the show is cool. But completely unscientific.
sending data through the body has not been acheived before.
MIT did this years ago. It was a cool project, really.
Presumably Microsoft has solved some specific engineering problems.
We've known how to stick electrodes on the body for nearly a century.
They also probably spent a lot of money on solving them.
I can replicate their results in my den with $10 worth of equipment. I doubt they spent much more than this, plus whatever ridiculous salary the "researcher" was paid.
Why shouldn't they be entitled to financial reward?
Because they are an illegal monopoly who continues to press into markets they have no business playing in? And because the idea is frigging obvious?
If you have trouble remembering the conversion factor, well... Of course you do, most people have trouble remembering something they don't use on a daily basis. It isn't because there's something "difficult" about it.
Absolutely correct. But whether natural or man-made, a temperature change of even a few degrees will extinct hundreds of species.
I wasn't trying to make an environmental point, merely using it as an argument to demonstrate the chaotic behavior of complex systems like the Earth.
I can't wait for a few consecutive cool years so people like you [...]
People like me? I think you've jumped to conclusions here. You don't know anything about my opinions on the matter.
Yeah, instead you have a giant capacitor bank charged to millions of volts.
If you shorted that bank out with a chunk of metal (oh, say a fifty pound steel rod), the current discharge would instantaneously melt it, and the magnetic field caused by the pulse would compress the metal vapor to enormous pressures. When the current finally stops (because the caps have fully discharged), the magnetic field will collapse, and the metal vapor, which is now at extreme pressure, will blow out in all directions with unbelievable force.
I'd say such an explosion could take out half the ship.
Our conventional weapons are incapable of shooting down an airliner? We need a rail gun to do it?
Quick, somebody tell the Air Force! They should all be flying these super-invulnerable 747s!
They are almost certainly going to use a bank of capacitors. No other device is capable of sourcing that much current with such a fast rise time. How they charge the capacitors is a different issue.
We're talking megajoules of energy released in microseconds, perhaps even nanoseconds. The power will be at least in the terawatt range. But only for a brief instant.
Conquest.
K = 1/2 mv^2.
2*16.9e6 = 20*v^2.
v=1300 m/s.
Conservation of momentum. You cannot blow a projectile into "harmless" bits, because the total momentum of the pieces remains the same. Instead of getting hit by one big projectile, you get hit by a bunch of dust, or vapor, or droplets of liquid metal. The total impact impulse will remain the same.
You also can't just deflect the projectile, because the force applied to deflect the projectile would be equally applied to the deflector device. Even if you did this via a magnetic field, the deflector would suffer damage.
There's simply not much you can do to stop a projectile moving at such velocities.
The only reason we are not currently in absolute control of Iraq is that the actions we would have to take to do so would be highly unpopular. Our difficulties arise from having to play within the bounds of a very restrictive set of rules.
It would be very simple to gas the entire region. Or nuke it. Or simply send the troops out with the orders to spray bullets at any Iraqi they encounter, be it man, woman, or child. We can't do this for what should be obvious reasons. But there is nothing technically standing in the way.
If we chose to be ruthless, the place would be a clean slate by now.
Doesn't it bother the rest of the civilized world in the slightest that we (the USA) are slowly moving into a position where we could just walk across the planet and dominate it?
Always good to see the Americans pushing the arms race to even more absurd heights.
Maybe Intel is just tired of accomodating people who burn their chip up trying to overclock it, then think to themselves, "Hey, I can just blame this on a faulty heatsink." God forbid they actually admit that they blew a hundred bucks on a chip and proceded to burn it to a crisp for a piddly 5% performance boost.
If you burn up your chip and then lie to Intel in order to get a replacement, you're a loser, you're ripping Intel off, and you're fucking it up for everyone else by forcing Intel to implement anti-overclocking provisions such as this one.
Having said that, people always figure a way around the limitations anyway.
Heh! My website still runs on a dual Celeron 300A box. A few months ago I finally had to clock it back down to 300, because the fans are starting to gunk up and can't cool it properly at 450 anymore.
I expect those things to keep chugging along for another five years, at least...
No, because the typical source of hydrogen is electrolyzed water. Hence you are simply recreating the water where the hydrogen came from in the first place. However, since it takes energy to split water, and that energy presumably came from fossil fuels, you are definitely causing an environmental impact.
Also, burning hydrocarbons releases water as well as CO2. If the excess water had a large environmental impact, we would have noticed it by now. The CO2 is much more important in terms of environmental impact.
Stick to your day job, please. Somebody could get killed.