The "profile" of one "best" person is not a statistically reliable indicator of what type of people to look for. From your description this person looks like a statistical outlier; there are many thousands of people out there who "barely gives a crap about the job" and are really lousy at what they do.
If you want to establish more reliable criteria for people to look for, you should establish a population of maybe the 10 best programmers or even the 20-50 best programmers you have run into during your 20 years in the business and look for commonalities among them, their driving forces, their passions and so on.
I have run into a few geniuses in the field where I'm at and I have found only two common factors among them; they are very intelligent and they are good at what they are doing. Apart from that, I have found them to be very different from each other when it comes to personal traits, interests and political opinions. I could not guess that they would have the level of skill that they had. Only in some cases the person was "socially awkward" and/or had an "exotic" taste for clothing where I could figure that either this is a total fool or an utter genius and the latter turned out to be true. In another case one guy was dressed as a "goth" with piercings and makeup, it was easy to dismiss him but after a while I realised that there was more to him than his style and looks.
I generally don't delete files by mistake but there was one day when I did. I had a directory with.rar files that I wanted to remove while doing other things that involved repetitive tasks. So I issued rm *.rar in the directory I was at and removed the files that I wanted. Since the tasks were repetitive I issued commands from the command history and when I was in another directory I mistakenly brought up and entered the rm *.rar command again. Not funny.
I think it would be useful if there were some sort of prefix (like I enter !rm, !chmod, !format instead of rm, chmod, format) that prevents the given command to be either stored in the command history or be prevented from being invoked from the command history again.
at 1:30. So vocal fry is also used for accentuation and is not merely a trick to compensate for lacking vocal abilities in singing. Vocal fry is also used to activate the vocal cords so as to help building up a vocal technique with a smoother transition between what is called "chest voice" and "head voice" without disconnecting or bursting into falsetto when reaching higher registers or "slamming" into chest voice when transitioning from higher registers into lower.
Well then, there are four ALUs in each core and not two cores. Just because the said performance is higher per core in the next generation CPU doesn't make it right to double the core count the way AMD has done. Hyperthreading or SMT as other CPU manufacturers than Intel call it can allow for more than just two threads per core. The implementation AMD has done is merely an enhanced version of SMT, no more no less.
Sure everything is nice and dandy in theory whereas in practice things are not so shiny and the Bulldozer family has failed miserably to impress even with their line of Opteron 6200 CPUs on server benchmarks. As the per-core licensing scheme is becoming the standard licensing scheme among servers, the Bulldozer family of CPUs looks very unattractive right now.
Or, by not actually doubling the core count and just calling hyperthreaded cores "modules", AMD can provide a (low) middle ground between n- and 2n-core processors without doubling the license cost for server operators.
Yeah, it's like AMD's new Bulldoer family of CPUs. They have all of a sudden doubled the core count of the CPUs so that their line of quad cores is now "octocores" and their octocore Opteron 6200 family of CPUs now have a whooping 16 cores.
What they did was implementing a form of hyperthreading by throwing in an extra integer ALU into each core. They changed the name "core" to "module" and now falsely claim that each "module" now has two cores. If that were true then the old Sun UltraSPARC T1 would be 32 core, the Pentum D would actually be quad core (as it is also specified to have two ALUs per core), and all Intel processors that support hyperthreading can double their core count.
Tests done by Anandtech and other people indicate an underwhelming performance on these CPUs so I was a little confused as to why they would resort to such a cheap and fraudulent marketing trick, but I have now figured out what this is all about. As many people state, the Bulldozer is mainly targeted at the server market with their Opterons (that also has shown abysmal results in server benchmarks) and when it comes to servers, not only the workload is different but also the software licensing. A lot of server grade software is actually licensed on a per-core basis, i.e. the license you pay for a certain piece of software is based upon the number of cores you intend to run it on and not the number of systems as is the case with PC grade software. Microsoft used to charge their server software on a per-CPU basis or per-chip basis but they are already transitioning into a per-core license model starting with their SQL Server Enterprise 2012.
So, by doubling the core count instead of just calling it hyperthreading, they can generate twice the license income for software producers.
It is discussed in Kahneman's prospect theory. Shefrin Statman (1985) and Odean (1998) found that investors have a strong preference to hold on to stocks that are selling below purchase price, so that they will avoid becoming "losers", and to sell stocks that are selling above the purchase price, so that they will come out as "winners". The taxation is also an influencing factor here. In prospect theory these people are called selling winners and keeping losers.
While it is good for safety I can also see how it can get abused. Perhaps Steve Ballmer is having a bad day and something funny just happens in a cab, a few days later, this incident goes up on TV. Microsoft loses one of its biggest customers, 1000 U.S. employees have to leave and Ballmer gets fired. Perhaps corporate secrets leak out because someone happened to have a cell phone conversation in a cab. Barrack Obama is revealed to have an affair. This list can go on...
So, while I can understand it is good for safety, there are some serious privacy issues that need to be addressed.
> It is a fairly respectable desktop machine even today
I hope you do realize that you cannot compare it to a desktop computer just by looking at the specs. A desktop computer with the same performance as this phone would be pretty awful.
As for the hard drives, the first multi-gigabyte hard drives came somewhere before the mid nineties but it took a few years before they reached the consumer market. I bought my first multi-gig hard drive 1997 and that particular model had been around for at least a year when I bought it. It wasn't cheap but it was fully existent.
I think it is in place to post the following information about files systems and the risk of data corruption:
(the information within this post is derived from a forum discussion with a user named "Kebabbert" so credits should go to him(/her never met him irl) for the excellent information on this post)
Regarding shortcomings in hardware RAID, here is a whole PhD dissertation showing that normal file systems are unreliable:
Dr. Prabhakaran found that ALL the file systems shared
...ad hoc failure handling and a great deal of illogical inconsistency in failure policy...such inconsistency leads to substantially different detection and recovery strategies under similar fault scenarios, resulting in unpredictable and often undesirable fault-handling strategies.
We observe little tolerance to transient failures;...none of the file systems can recover from partial disk failures, due to a lack of in-disk redundancy.
"Detecting and recovering from data corruption requires protection techniques beyond those provided by the disk drive. In fact, basic protection schemes such as RAID [13] may also be unable to detect these problems. ..
As we discuss later, checksums do not protect against all forms of corruption"
"Recent work has shown that even with sophisticated RAID protection strategies, the "right" combination of a single fault and certain repair activities (e.g., a parity scrub) can still lead to data loss [19]."
CERN discusses how their data was corrupted in spite of hardware RAID:
"The paper explains that the best RAID-6 can do is use probabilistic methods to distinguish between single and dual-disk corruption, eg. "there are 95% chances it is single-disk corruption so I am going to fix it assuming that, but there are 5% chances I am going to actually corrupt more data, I just can't tell". I wouldn't want to rely on a RAID controller that takes gambles:-)"
In other words, RAID-5 and RAID-6 are not safe at all and if you care about your data you should migrate to other solutions. In the past the disks were small and you were much less likely to run into problems. Today when the hard drives are big and RAID clusters are even bigger you are much more likely to run inte problems. Assume that there is a 0.00001% chance that you run into problems, if the hard drives are large and fast enough you will run into problems quite frequently.
I took the "porn" part as a joke and didn't raise a brow about it, but I guess that we're all different. I wouldn't call 8TB of storage "hoarding", it's actually kind of nice to have a large redundant array of storage to work with. You don't have to worry about running out of space anytime soon and duplicating hard disk images for virtual machines without considering storage limitations is really nice. Then we have people working with video editing which takes a lot of storage space uncompressed , especially when it is in Hi-Def so there are indeed legit reasons for using such a large storage capacity. Maybe 36TB is kind of pushing it but then again, who are we to judge if someone decides to get that sort of equipment for his or her own money?
The Swedish company Neonode released the Neonode N1 bwfore the iphone and it had a slide unlock. Here's a ruling from a Dutch court addressing this:
"Apple’s patent for swiping onscreen to unlock a device was filed in late 2005, although a little-known Swedish mobile phone manufacturer Neonode was already implementing a similar mechanism on a Windows CE-powered device called the N1M. Further, Samsung has put forward as evidence some articles from 1992 about a “touchscreen toggle design," as well as early examples of software that use a sliding toggle switch from the early 2000s. All these point to the claim that Apple was not first to market slide-to-unlock mechanisms, but these were already present in existing technologies and, therefore, cannot be patented."
Here's a video of the Neonode N2 showing how the unlock slide function works. The N2 was released after the iphone but as stated, the N1 which was released before the iphone had the very same feature.
From my experience the gender of the synthetic voices has been male by default so I don't recognize this. The default voice on the old Amiga narrator.device was male. The default voice on loud-reading software used to be NeoSpeech Paul which has been one of the best English spoken computer narrator compilations out there. The GPS software I have used have both male and female voices in different languages to choose from, I have primarily used TomTom and Navigon. I cannot recall that I preferred one gender over the other. Telephone voices on the other hand have from my experience been dominated by females, and we're talking about automated phone services and phone queue notifications. But seriously, I wouldn't care whether the voice is male or female.
There may or may not be some bearing in the statements regarding the gender of the computer voice although I seriously doubt it. But when I read the following:
"What's interesting to me is how they seem to intentionally make her speech sound artificial -- they could choose to make her speech more seamless and human-like, but they choose instead to highlight the technology,"
I seriously started to believe that this article is paid for by Apple. Making a really good and natural voice is a very difficult undertaking and I have not yet heard a perfect and seamless computer voice that sounds as natural as a real human.
There are plenty of plastic objects in the sea causing a lot of problems for the sea-living animals and I don't think we need to add to these problems. Check out the following video:
Regarding WebOS, I've had a positive stance on it even though I've never used it. The reason why is that I believe in a Linux based mobile OS that competes with Android and it seems to have more potential than iOS. In a similar manner I have been promoting the MeeGo simply because it is more open than Android and presumably the WebOS. Having this trio of mobile OSes well-spread can only be healthy for the mobile market.
I don't know if I'm ready to bring out the pitchforks just yet. He didn't imply that the energy being extracted from the Thorium is done without any nuclear reaction, on the contrary there is a fission process involved according to the article. I think he rather meant that Thorium per se is not fissile, it must be converted into U_233 which is fissile on the other hand, which is where the "super-heating" in the energy extraction process comes into the picture I believe. I think his point is that you cannot pack a critical mass of Thorium and make a bomb out of it like you can with Plutonium or Uranium-238. The "Thorium Fuel Cycle" is documented on Wikipedia and confirms this.
But I must agree that 1 g being able to generate the same energy as 7500 gallons of gasoline sounds a little utopian to me. When I looked up how much energy that can be extracted from Uranium-238 in a nuclear reactor I found that 1 gram of U-238 yields the same energy as about 150 gallons of diesel fuel. It sure is a lot of energy but nowhere near the 7500 gallons that is claimed in the article. So I'm a bit skeptical about this, but who knows 1 gram of antimatter can produce the same amount of energy as 600 000 gallons of diesel fuel. Maybe the contraption of his is more efficient than a traditional nuclear reactor, it doesn't hurt to question it though. A fact is that the newer generation nuclear reactors aka breeder reactors are claimed to be safer and much more efficient than current generation nuclear reactors and they are using Thorium in the reaction process if I read Wikipedia correctly. But these are reactors made for large scale production of electricity and not something that you put in a vehicle.
I don't know if I'm ready to bring out the pitchforks just yet. I think he means that Thorium per se is not fissile, it must be converted into U_233 which is fissile on the other hand, which is where "super-heated" comes into the picture I believe. I think his point is that you cannot pack a critical mass of Thorium and make a bomb out of it like you can with Plutonium or Uranium-238. The "Thorium Fuel Cycle" is documented on Wikipedia and confirms this.
But I must agree that 1 g can generate the same energy as 7500 gallons of gasoline sounds a little utopian to me. When I looked up how much energy that can be extracted from Uranium-238 in a nuclear reactor I found that 1 gram of U-238 yields the same energy as about 150 gallons of diesel fuel. It sure is a lot of energy but nowhere near the 7500 gallons that is claimed in the article. So I'm a bit skeptical about this, but who knows 1 gram of antimatter can produce the same amount of energy as 600 000 gallons of diesel fuel. Maybe the contraption of his is more efficient than a traditional nuclear reactor, it doesn't hurt to question it though.
The problem with facebook is that whatever information you post there can be used against you. So the best approach imo if you want to use it is to learn to truly understand the consequences of posting there and what you should avoid doing. This requires more than a regular common sense because everything you post there can be and is judged by someone and it is far from always clear how this can put you into disadvantage in different irl situations.
Just relax, it won't happen anytime soon. Even an a small 1W semiconductor-based laser requires significant cooling if used for sustained duration. A 1W laser can put paper on fire at most. Lasers that are used for surgery are in the 20W range. Lasers that are found in cutting machines are in the 500W range. Lasers that are designed for cutting hardened steel and stainless steel operates in the 1000W range. They are anything but portable and if they don't have a good water/liquid cooling they only last a fraction of a second before they explode. Bigger lasers are commonly gas lasers (most commonly using CO or CO2 as medium) and are not as efficient as semi-conductor/solid-state lasers. But still, even a 500W semi-conductor laser will be just as big as an acetylene burner and require a lot of cooling to operate.
Oh, by the way, there are actually portable acetylene torches that can easily fit into a pocket and they have been sold during at least the past two decades as far as I can recall. The first I've seen was a small box containing two 15ml mini tubes (one for the oxygen and the other for the acetylene) that were contained in a small box that you hold while welding (it was designed as an all-in-one unit). I really wonder why people are not worried about them...
I didn't know about the 3 phase AC motors. After some research into IFF1/IE3 charts their efficiency ranges from 75% (smaller motors) to upwards 96% (larger 375kW motors). But comparing a variable rpm application such as a car in terms of efficiency with an industry-grade application where the motors operate at a constant rpm sounds a bit too much of a wishful thinking. I don't buy that a variable rpm motor operates at a 95% efficiency at all rpms, I need proof.
I assumed some kind of a variable rpm DC motor but lets assume that we use an AC motor with an efficiency of say 90% (which I find a bit too optimistic), then the efficiency lands down on 32% which is slightly below a Diesel engine's efficiency. So what this guy is saying still sounds like fraud and quackery.
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The "profile" of one "best" person is not a statistically reliable indicator of what type of people to look for. From your description this person looks like a statistical outlier; there are many thousands of people out there who "barely gives a crap about the job" and are really lousy at what they do.
If you want to establish more reliable criteria for people to look for, you should establish a population of maybe the 10 best programmers or even the 20-50 best programmers you have run into during your 20 years in the business and look for commonalities among them, their driving forces, their passions and so on.
I have run into a few geniuses in the field where I'm at and I have found only two common factors among them; they are very intelligent and they are good at what they are doing. Apart from that, I have found them to be very different from each other when it comes to personal traits, interests and political opinions. I could not guess that they would have the level of skill that they had. Only in some cases the person was "socially awkward" and/or had an "exotic" taste for clothing where I could figure that either this is a total fool or an utter genius and the latter turned out to be true. In another case one guy was dressed as a "goth" with piercings and makeup, it was easy to dismiss him but after a while I realised that there was more to him than his style and looks.
I generally don't delete files by mistake but there was one day when I did. I had a directory with .rar files that I wanted to remove while doing other things that involved repetitive tasks. So I issued rm *.rar in the directory I was at and removed the files that I wanted. Since the tasks were repetitive I issued commands from the command history and when I was in another directory I mistakenly brought up and entered the rm *.rar command again. Not funny.
I think it would be useful if there were some sort of prefix (like I enter !rm, !chmod, !format instead of rm, chmod, format) that prevents the given command to be either stored in the command history or be prevented from being invoked from the command history again.
For examples of using vocal fry in singing look at the following clip that is "I Don't Wanna Miss a Thing" by Aerosmith:
...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vo_0UXRY_rY
pay particular attention at 0:31, 0:39, 0:48,
Or look for example att "Angels" by Robbie Williams:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fl4q2WBCywg
at 1:30. So vocal fry is also used for accentuation and is not merely a trick to compensate for lacking vocal abilities in singing. Vocal fry is also used to activate the vocal cords so as to help building up a vocal technique with a smoother transition between what is called "chest voice" and "head voice" without disconnecting or bursting into falsetto when reaching higher registers or "slamming" into chest voice when transitioning from higher registers into lower.
Well then, there are four ALUs in each core and not two cores. Just because the said performance is higher per core in the next generation CPU doesn't make it right to double the core count the way AMD has done. Hyperthreading or SMT as other CPU manufacturers than Intel call it can allow for more than just two threads per core. The implementation AMD has done is merely an enhanced version of SMT, no more no less.
Sure everything is nice and dandy in theory whereas in practice things are not so shiny and the Bulldozer family has failed miserably to impress even with their line of Opteron 6200 CPUs on server benchmarks. As the per-core licensing scheme is becoming the standard licensing scheme among servers, the Bulldozer family of CPUs looks very unattractive right now.
Or, by not actually doubling the core count and just calling hyperthreaded cores "modules", AMD can provide a (low) middle ground between n- and 2n-core processors without doubling the license cost for server operators.
Yes, this is what I think they should have done.
So your conclusion is that AMD did this to increase the total cost of their platform, making their chips less attractive to buy?
I totally agree with you, their strategy don't make any sense at all. They probably didn't realize that this would be the consequences.
Yeah, it's like AMD's new Bulldoer family of CPUs. They have all of a sudden doubled the core count of the CPUs so that their line of quad cores is now "octocores" and their octocore Opteron 6200 family of CPUs now have a whooping 16 cores.
What they did was implementing a form of hyperthreading by throwing in an extra integer ALU into each core. They changed the name "core" to "module" and now falsely claim that each "module" now has two cores. If that were true then the old Sun UltraSPARC T1 would be 32 core, the Pentum D would actually be quad core (as it is also specified to have two ALUs per core), and all Intel processors that support hyperthreading can double their core count.
Tests done by Anandtech and other people indicate an underwhelming performance on these CPUs so I was a little confused as to why they would resort to such a cheap and fraudulent marketing trick, but I have now figured out what this is all about. As many people state, the Bulldozer is mainly targeted at the server market with their Opterons (that also has shown abysmal results in server benchmarks) and when it comes to servers, not only the workload is different but also the software licensing. A lot of server grade software is actually licensed on a per-core basis, i.e. the license you pay for a certain piece of software is based upon the number of cores you intend to run it on and not the number of systems as is the case with PC grade software. Microsoft used to charge their server software on a per-CPU basis or per-chip basis but they are already transitioning into a per-core license model starting with their SQL Server Enterprise 2012.
So, by doubling the core count instead of just calling it hyperthreading, they can generate twice the license income for software producers.
It is discussed in Kahneman's prospect theory. Shefrin Statman (1985) and Odean (1998) found that investors have a strong preference to hold on to stocks that are selling below purchase price, so that they will avoid becoming "losers", and to sell stocks that are selling above the purchase price, so that they will come out as "winners". The taxation is also an influencing factor here. In prospect theory these people are called selling winners and keeping losers.
Also, keep in mind that as a consumer when you buy a new computer you want the system to also run next-gen operating systems and software seamlessly.
While it is good for safety I can also see how it can get abused. Perhaps Steve Ballmer is having a bad day and something funny just happens in a cab, a few days later, this incident goes up on TV. Microsoft loses one of its biggest customers, 1000 U.S. employees have to leave and Ballmer gets fired. Perhaps corporate secrets leak out because someone happened to have a cell phone conversation in a cab. Barrack Obama is revealed to have an affair. This list can go on...
So, while I can understand it is good for safety, there are some serious privacy issues that need to be addressed.
> I wonder if U of I is planning on doing any dinosaur resurrections with their new super computer.
Well, I suppose they could throw in a mainframe emulator while flipping the bird at IBM...
> It is a fairly respectable desktop machine even today
I hope you do realize that you cannot compare it to a desktop computer just by looking at the specs. A desktop computer with the same performance as this phone would be pretty awful.
As for the hard drives, the first multi-gigabyte hard drives came somewhere before the mid nineties but it took a few years before they reached the consumer market. I bought my first multi-gig hard drive 1997 and that particular model had been around for at least a year when I bought it. It wasn't cheap but it was fully existent.
Yeah, when looking at his post it seems that things can never get boring around him;)
I think it is in place to post the following information about files systems and the risk of data corruption:
...ad hoc failure handling and a great deal of illogical inconsistency in failure policy...such inconsistency leads to substantially different detection and recovery strategies under similar fault scenarios, resulting in unpredictable and often undesirable fault-handling strategies.
..
/raid6.pdf
:-)"
(the information within this post is derived from a forum discussion with a user named "Kebabbert" so credits should go to him(/her never met him irl) for the excellent information on this post)
Regarding shortcomings in hardware RAID, here is a whole PhD dissertation showing that normal file systems are unreliable:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/ [...] t-risk/169
Dr. Prabhakaran found that ALL the file systems shared
We observe little tolerance to transient failures;...none of the file systems can recover from partial disk failures, due to a lack of in-disk redundancy.
Regarding shortcomings in hardware RAID:
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/adsl/Public [...] fast08.pdf
"Detecting and recovering from data corruption requires protection techniques beyond those provided by the disk drive. In fact, basic protection schemes such as RAID [13] may also be unable to detect these problems.
As we discuss later, checksums do not protect against all forms of corruption"
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/adsl/Public [...] icde10.pdf
"Recent work has shown that even with sophisticated RAID protection strategies, the "right" combination of a single fault and certain repair activities (e.g., a parity scrub) can still lead to data loss [19]."
CERN discusses how their data was corrupted in spite of hardware RAID:
http://storagemojo.com/2007/09/19/ [...] -research/
Here is a whole site that only talks about the lacks and shortcomings in RAID-5:
http://www.baarf.com
Lacks and shortcomings in RAID-6:
http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel [...]
"The paper explains that the best RAID-6 can do is use probabilistic methods to distinguish between single and dual-disk corruption, eg. "there are 95% chances it is single-disk corruption so I am going to fix it assuming that, but there are 5% chances I am going to actually corrupt more data, I just can't tell". I wouldn't want to rely on a RAID controller that takes gambles
In other words, RAID-5 and RAID-6 are not safe at all and if you care about your data you should migrate to other solutions. In the past the disks were small and you were much less likely to run into problems. Today when the hard drives are big and RAID clusters are even bigger you are much more likely to run inte problems. Assume that there is a 0.00001% chance that you run into problems, if the hard drives are large and fast enough you will run into problems quite frequently.
I took the "porn" part as a joke and didn't raise a brow about it, but I guess that we're all different. I wouldn't call 8TB of storage "hoarding", it's actually kind of nice to have a large redundant array of storage to work with. You don't have to worry about running out of space anytime soon and duplicating hard disk images for virtual machines without considering storage limitations is really nice. Then we have people working with video editing which takes a lot of storage space uncompressed , especially when it is in Hi-Def so there are indeed legit reasons for using such a large storage capacity. Maybe 36TB is kind of pushing it but then again, who are we to judge if someone decides to get that sort of equipment for his or her own money?
The Swedish company Neonode released the Neonode N1 bwfore the iphone and it had a slide unlock. Here's a ruling from a Dutch court addressing this:
"Apple’s patent for swiping onscreen to unlock a device was filed in late 2005, although a little-known Swedish mobile phone manufacturer Neonode was already implementing a similar mechanism on a Windows CE-powered device called the N1M. Further, Samsung has put forward as evidence some articles from 1992 about a “touchscreen toggle design," as well as early examples of software that use a sliding toggle switch from the early 2000s. All these point to the claim that Apple was not first to market slide-to-unlock mechanisms, but these were already present in existing technologies and, therefore, cannot be patented."
Here's a video of the Neonode N2 showing how the unlock slide function works. The N2 was released after the iphone but as stated, the N1 which was released before the iphone had the very same feature.
From my experience the gender of the synthetic voices has been male by default so I don't recognize this. The default voice on the old Amiga narrator.device was male. The default voice on loud-reading software used to be NeoSpeech Paul which has been one of the best English spoken computer narrator compilations out there.
The GPS software I have used have both male and female voices in different languages to choose from, I have primarily used TomTom and Navigon. I cannot recall that I preferred one gender over the other.
Telephone voices on the other hand have from my experience been dominated by females, and we're talking about automated phone services and phone queue notifications. But seriously, I wouldn't care whether the voice is male or female.
There may or may not be some bearing in the statements regarding the gender of the computer voice although I seriously doubt it. But when I read the following:
"What's interesting to me is how they seem to intentionally make her speech sound artificial -- they could choose to make her speech more seamless and human-like, but they choose instead to highlight the technology,"
I seriously started to believe that this article is paid for by Apple. Making a really good and natural voice is a very difficult undertaking and I have not yet heard a perfect and seamless computer voice that sounds as natural as a real human.
There are plenty of plastic objects in the sea causing a lot of problems for the sea-living animals and I don't think we need to add to these problems. Check out the following video:
Chris Jordan on the Midway Project
Regarding WebOS, I've had a positive stance on it even though I've never used it. The reason why is that I believe in a Linux based mobile OS that competes with Android and it seems to have more potential than iOS. In a similar manner I have been promoting the MeeGo simply because it is more open than Android and presumably the WebOS. Having this trio of mobile OSes well-spread can only be healthy for the mobile market.
I don't know if I'm ready to bring out the pitchforks just yet. He didn't imply that the energy being extracted from the Thorium is done without any nuclear reaction, on the contrary there is a fission process involved according to the article. I think he rather meant that Thorium per se is not fissile, it must be converted into U_233 which is fissile on the other hand, which is where the "super-heating" in the energy extraction process comes into the picture I believe. I think his point is that you cannot pack a critical mass of Thorium and make a bomb out of it like you can with Plutonium or Uranium-238. The "Thorium Fuel Cycle" is documented on Wikipedia and confirms this.
But I must agree that 1 g being able to generate the same energy as 7500 gallons of gasoline sounds a little utopian to me. When I looked up how much energy that can be extracted from Uranium-238 in a nuclear reactor I found that 1 gram of U-238 yields the same energy as about 150 gallons of diesel fuel. It sure is a lot of energy but nowhere near the 7500 gallons that is claimed in the article. So I'm a bit skeptical about this, but who knows 1 gram of antimatter can produce the same amount of energy as 600 000 gallons of diesel fuel. Maybe the contraption of his is more efficient than a traditional nuclear reactor, it doesn't hurt to question it though. A fact is that the newer generation nuclear reactors aka breeder reactors are claimed to be safer and much more efficient than current generation nuclear reactors and they are using Thorium in the reaction process if I read Wikipedia correctly. But these are reactors made for large scale production of electricity and not something that you put in a vehicle.
I don't know if I'm ready to bring out the pitchforks just yet. I think he means that Thorium per se is not fissile, it must be converted into U_233 which is fissile on the other hand, which is where "super-heated" comes into the picture I believe. I think his point is that you cannot pack a critical mass of Thorium and make a bomb out of it like you can with Plutonium or Uranium-238. The "Thorium Fuel Cycle" is documented on Wikipedia and confirms this.
But I must agree that 1 g can generate the same energy as 7500 gallons of gasoline sounds a little utopian to me. When I looked up how much energy that can be extracted from Uranium-238 in a nuclear reactor I found that 1 gram of U-238 yields the same energy as about 150 gallons of diesel fuel. It sure is a lot of energy but nowhere near the 7500 gallons that is claimed in the article. So I'm a bit skeptical about this, but who knows 1 gram of antimatter can produce the same amount of energy as 600 000 gallons of diesel fuel. Maybe the contraption of his is more efficient than a traditional nuclear reactor, it doesn't hurt to question it though.
The problem with facebook is that whatever information you post there can be used against you. So the best approach imo if you want to use it is to learn to truly understand the consequences of posting there and what you should avoid doing. This requires more than a regular common sense because everything you post there can be and is judged by someone and it is far from always clear how this can put you into disadvantage in different irl situations.
I recommend watching the episode "Non Sequitur" of the series Star Trek Voyager for some insight into how creepy things can get.
Just relax, it won't happen anytime soon. Even an a small 1W semiconductor-based laser requires significant cooling if used for sustained duration. A 1W laser can put paper on fire at most. Lasers that are used for surgery are in the 20W range. Lasers that are found in cutting machines are in the 500W range. Lasers that are designed for cutting hardened steel and stainless steel operates in the 1000W range. They are anything but portable and if they don't have a good water/liquid cooling they only last a fraction of a second before they explode. Bigger lasers are commonly gas lasers (most commonly using CO or CO2 as medium) and are not as efficient as semi-conductor/solid-state lasers. But still, even a 500W semi-conductor laser will be just as big as an acetylene burner and require a lot of cooling to operate.
Oh, by the way, there are actually portable acetylene torches that can easily fit into a pocket and they have been sold during at least the past two decades as far as I can recall. The first I've seen was a small box containing two 15ml mini tubes (one for the oxygen and the other for the acetylene) that were contained in a small box that you hold while welding (it was designed as an all-in-one unit). I really wonder why people are not worried about them...
I didn't know about the 3 phase AC motors. After some research into IFF1/IE3 charts their efficiency ranges from 75% (smaller motors) to upwards 96% (larger 375kW motors). But comparing a variable rpm application such as a car in terms of efficiency with an industry-grade application where the motors operate at a constant rpm sounds a bit too much of a wishful thinking. I don't buy that a variable rpm motor operates at a 95% efficiency at all rpms, I need proof.
I assumed some kind of a variable rpm DC motor but lets assume that we use an AC motor with an efficiency of say 90% (which I find a bit too optimistic), then the efficiency lands down on 32% which is slightly below a Diesel engine's efficiency. So what this guy is saying still sounds like fraud and quackery.