The above is not meant to be a blanket description of "conservative". I'm just pointing out that the people who are generally referred to as "conservatives" in the USA are as far as you can possibly get from risk-averse. I'm not saying it's good thing or a bad thing (though I obviously do have a strong opinion on it), but the fact is that everything they stand for is increasing personal risk for citizens who live in America (they call it freedom), increasing risk for the country as a whole (the more honest ones call it "defending our interests abroad", ignoring the fact that pissing off the rest of the world in general and some militant subset of it in particular is a good way to get bitten back one way or another), and increasing the risk for the whole world (eg. everyone but the most hard-core climate change deniers agree that there is a finite chance that things might get out of hand). And sometimes things do get out of hand (like the explosion of the federal deficit in the Bush years), and then the people at the other side of the isle find themselves in the not-so-enviable position of having to fight a looming recession and getting the budget in control at the same time. While being criticised for causing the problem by the very culprits. Bunch of hypocrites.
Let's look at their consumer releases:
Windows 3.1: pretty stable
Windows 95: somewhat buggy
Windows 98: pretty good for the time, especially SE. Got a cult following, with some misguided people (I'm looking at you, Teresita) still using it while it should be long dead and buried
Windows Me: "disaster" doesn't start to describe it. I quickly learned to refuse to help friends with computer problems if they were using Me.
Windows XP: still installed on more than 20% of computers, more than 10 years after its launch
Windows Vista: mostly negative reception
Windows 7: well-liked
Windows 8: catastrophy?
You might want to read Jonathan Haidt. It's the reverse. Conservatives are (generally) risk-averse
Yeah, that's why they want guns everywhere, don't care about (social) safety nets or health insurance, radically denounce the precautionary principle (especially when it comes to environmental issues), love to start wars here and there, brought the country to near-default in a game of brinkmanship earlier this years...
Oh wait, you said "risk-averse"?
That and NAT violates the very foundations of the IP protocol: one device, one IP address. By doing so, it breaks stuff, most notable preventing technically simple low-latency internet telephony and videoconferencing. We've had a short preview of that in some early instant-messaging clients before NAT came in and ruined everything. Without NAT, low-latency internet telephony and videoconferencing will once more become a trivial-to-implement commodity. Skype and the likes will have to diversify into other business or slowly wither and die. Maybe we'll even finally see the end of traditional wired telephony.
Despite the lack of style, parent has a valid point. In most democratic nations, the UN is well-respected for all the things its diverse branches do, but not so in the US. And this seems to have mainly started with the war in Iraq. Although that war has since proven baseless and a generally bad idea, just as a majority of people in the majority of countries that voted against it (no it wasn't only France - you can count the *proponents* on your fingers) knew all along because their media retained their integrity (as opposed to the post-9/11 patriotic media in the US), the anti-UN sentiments in the US got a life on their own, and even the "intelligentsia" on/. seemingly haven't escaped the media's wave of brainwashing.
There are good reasons to hand over control to the UN. Most importantly, the 95% of the world that aren't US citizens are not democratically represented in the US government. (And no, most of us don't see the US as an international mainstay of fairness, freedom, democracy and human rights. Where in the world did you get that idea anyway? It's more like a faltering war-happy giant with a highly corrupt and dysfunctional government and a population half of whom are so clueless that they vote straight against their own interests because the TV tells them to. A faltering war-happy giant that happens to be on our side right now but that could become a really big menace really fast.) In the UN, items are voted on by delegates of member nations, who are usually appointed by democratically elected official. Yes, that's an indirect democracy, but that makes it no less a democracy. Otherwise, what about electoral colleges? Is that so much different?
Is it so difficult to understand that a lot of people outside of the US really would rather see the internet in more impartial hands?
Go ahead, mod me down for disagreeing with me. It's all worth it!
Oh, but I'm certainly not a proponent of video teaching. Except when it's for free, then it falls under the "you get what you pay for" rule (but even then, a minimal standard of quality should be observed, of course). At the same time, I don't think the errors in Khan's videos TFA points out will leave many viewers' fragile innocent minds permanently scarred with patently incorrect information (take for instance integrals: I think it's way more helpful to have some intuitive feeling for them than to have their definition rigidly pinned down). It cannot possibly come close to the devastation (and demotivation) wrought by an incompetent high-school science teacher. Teaching is not only about transfering knowledge - it's also about inspiring interest. One can give a dry and frigid lecture that is impeccable in content but will leave its oudience disgusted. There has to be some spontaneity in teaching, even if that comes at the cost of something inaccurate being said on occasion (you try to teach even a 30 course without the slightest misstep and without reading straight from paper). That is my point; I'm willing to forgive Khan's errors for the inspiring work he does, and I'm not convinced TFA's author will necessarily do a better job in that respect.
It's not that simple. The African continent has more than enough arable land to feed its population. The problem is that their traditional small-scale farming methods economically cannot compete with imported food from emerging nations with more efficient farming methods, and food from developed nations that is, in addition, heavily subsidized (directly as well as indirectly by keeping oil prices artificially low). So starting from the 1960s, Africa's farming output has been lagging behind its population growth, and yes, if international food prices suddenly jerk up, this causes famine in Africa in the short term. However, if international food prices would stay high for a prolonged period of time, market forces dictate that Africa would ramp up its own food production and would probably be better off in the long run.
It should be added that we, the developed countries, have played a very cynical role in creating the situation as it is now. On the one hand, we have been pushing aggressively for these African countries to open their markets and decrease government interference such as subsidies, but on the other hand, we're not playing the game by our own rules, taxing and bureaucratically encumbering food imports, and heavily subsidizing our own food production, thereby undercutting African farmers' prices and driving them out of business. If we would play it fair, we would lose, becoming hopelessly dependent on foreign food and creating a runaway trade deficit against which the current situation pales. We have to either continue subsidizing or close our markets. The utopian unencumbered (and unsubsidized) international trade we have so long been advocating is simply not in our best interests. In that respect, rising international shipping costs as a consequence of rising fuel prices might actually help us as well as those African farmers. Not to mention that it will economically favor less fuel-intensive farming methods...
Either way, don't give me the utter BS that we're keeping our fuel prices low out of altruism with those poor African countries; I find it hard to believe that anyone here on/. would be gullible enough to swallow that.
I speculate GP just made up an equation that is quite easy to prove, but otherwise pointless, presumably to make a point about people who speak or act based on prejudice about people who cannot prove pointless equations. It would, however, have been helpful if GP would have hit reply on the post he was replying to instead of on the/. summary; without context, his post appears just slightly more random than mine. Or is that because we're both playing the "parse this sentence" game?
That is a lesser evil than half of Africa starving to death because of increased food prices caused by carbon taxes on farmers in the US and elsewhere.
..."I know exactly what I’m going to say, because that’s what teaching means."
So, teaching means either you're a psychic who knows exactly how quick the students will be on the uptake and what questions they will ask in class, or you're teaching your stuff like a tape recorder, without looking into the classroom and gauging whether they are following you and without allowing them to ask questions? *shudder*
Yes, but just as the C-13 you're talking about is not absolutely pure, I strongly doubt that the waste C12 is 99.99% pure. That's a degree of purity that takes some doing to achieve even when chemical separation methods are available. I'm not saying it's fiendishly difficult, but it will come at a cost. And that's before converting it into diamond and bombarding it with nitrogen.
And again, I've always been talking on a per-bit basis. The number of bits that can be stored in one of these diamonds per unit of mass or volume using current methods has to be orders of magnitude lower than current DDR3 memory, so the diamond would have to be pretty darn cheap to compete with silicon using this (admittedly not entirely fair) criterion.
Actually, standing on the roofdeck of my apartment building just as that "June 2012 North American derecho" was rolling in, through the curtain of rain, I could see bright orange and blue flashes of light close to the ground about every 40 seconds. These were not lightning strikes; I think they were power lines being brought down by falling trees. And visibility was limited because of the rain. That storm must have caused hundreds of breaks over a large area of land. One needs quite a lot of people and equipment to fix all that in the time span of only a few days...
Working with researchers at Element Six, a British-based company that specializes in manufacturing artificial diamonds, they developed a new technique to create crystals that were even more pure: 99.99 percent carbon-12. Researchers then bombard the crystal with nitrogen to create the NV center, which interacts with a nearby carbon-13 atom.
These aren't your ordinary lab-grown diamonds. Natural carbon contains 1% carbon-13. As isotopes can't be separated by chemical methods, it takes a lot of effort/money to get that down to 0.01%. The physics of isotope separation is also the reason why Iran still doesn't have enough isotropically pure uranium to build 1 atom bomb, despite decades of effort and a nation-state budget. Granted, separating carbon isotopes is substantially easier than uranium isotopes, and much less carbon is needed to build a small diamond than uranium is needed to build an atom bomb, but I can assure you these isotopically-purified-then-bombarded-with-nitrogen diamonds are everything but cheap. And I'd be surprised if there would be a practical method to store nearly as many bits in them as in an over-the counter DDR3 chip.
Using a pair of impurities in ultra-pure, laboratory-grown diamonds, the researchers were able to create quantum bits and store information in them for nearly two seconds (...)
I doubt those are cheap. Especially compared to current silicon chips. Especially on a per-bit basis.
Anyhow, this whole discussion is kinda moot. It's just a "proof of concept" - another small step forward on the long road towards practical quantum computers.
I agree that GP is oversimplifying things, but aren't you doing the same thing?
Some people pay to cool 6 months out of the year. For them, the thinking goes exactly opposite: for every kWh of energy dissipated by the appliances in your house, you're consuming (roughly) another kWh to pump that thermal energy out of your house.
Also, if you're paying to heat, the cost of a kWh of heat produced by burning, say, natural gas is usually lower than the cost of a kWh of electricity. Even if you're heating with a heat pump, the amount of thermal energy the thing pumps into your house is higher than the amount of electric energy consumed by the pump.
Oh, and there's the monetary cost of consuming energy, but there's also the environmental cost, which the current system doesn't factor in.
Oh c'mon mods, you surely can do better than that... GP just answers a scientific question with a correct scientific answer and a helpful link to the relevant Wikipedia article (and points out that 30 seconds with google would have yielded the same answer, which I feel is legitimate). GP gets flamed for it by parent, and the flame gets modded... insightful???
Slashdot Mirror
The above is not meant to be a blanket description of "conservative". I'm just pointing out that the people who are generally referred to as "conservatives" in the USA are as far as you can possibly get from risk-averse. I'm not saying it's good thing or a bad thing (though I obviously do have a strong opinion on it), but the fact is that everything they stand for is increasing personal risk for citizens who live in America (they call it freedom), increasing risk for the country as a whole (the more honest ones call it "defending our interests abroad", ignoring the fact that pissing off the rest of the world in general and some militant subset of it in particular is a good way to get bitten back one way or another), and increasing the risk for the whole world (eg. everyone but the most hard-core climate change deniers agree that there is a finite chance that things might get out of hand). And sometimes things do get out of hand (like the explosion of the federal deficit in the Bush years), and then the people at the other side of the isle find themselves in the not-so-enviable position of having to fight a looming recession and getting the budget in control at the same time. While being criticised for causing the problem by the very culprits. Bunch of hypocrites.
Humor me...
Let's look at their consumer releases:
Windows 3.1: pretty stable
Windows 95: somewhat buggy
Windows 98: pretty good for the time, especially SE. Got a cult following, with some misguided people (I'm looking at you, Teresita) still using it while it should be long dead and buried
Windows Me: "disaster" doesn't start to describe it. I quickly learned to refuse to help friends with computer problems if they were using Me.
Windows XP: still installed on more than 20% of computers, more than 10 years after its launch
Windows Vista: mostly negative reception
Windows 7: well-liked
Windows 8: catastrophy?
because it makes you wish there was a way to unread it.
You might want to read Jonathan Haidt. It's the reverse. Conservatives are (generally) risk-averse
Yeah, that's why they want guns everywhere, don't care about (social) safety nets or health insurance, radically denounce the precautionary principle (especially when it comes to environmental issues), love to start wars here and there, brought the country to near-default in a game of brinkmanship earlier this years... Oh wait, you said "risk-averse"?
That and NAT violates the very foundations of the IP protocol: one device, one IP address. By doing so, it breaks stuff, most notable preventing technically simple low-latency internet telephony and videoconferencing. We've had a short preview of that in some early instant-messaging clients before NAT came in and ruined everything. Without NAT, low-latency internet telephony and videoconferencing will once more become a trivial-to-implement commodity. Skype and the likes will have to diversify into other business or slowly wither and die. Maybe we'll even finally see the end of traditional wired telephony.
Well, sir, you obviously must be speaking from experience, since you seem to have been huddled in a freezing cave (or more likely, your mom's basement) for the last 15 years. Welcome to the world of today, where, thanks to continuing technological advancement, it takes less than 4 years for an average solar panel to produce enough energy to create another one (and they last for 20-30 years...) Allow me to quickly run you through some of the milestones you missed while in stasis:
1997: http://www.csudh.edu/oliver/smt310-handouts/solarpan/pvpayback.htm
2008: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=solar-cells-prove-cleaner-way-to-produce-power
2012: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell_efficiency#Solar_cells_and_energy_payback
2050: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara_Solar_Breeder_Project
OK, that last one is a bit utopian with current technology, but given better superconductors and/or thermal insulators, and some more hikes in energy prices, I could see it becoming reality. The panels themselves are up to it...
Despite the lack of style, parent has a valid point. In most democratic nations, the UN is well-respected for all the things its diverse branches do, but not so in the US. And this seems to have mainly started with the war in Iraq. Although that war has since proven baseless and a generally bad idea, just as a majority of people in the majority of countries that voted against it (no it wasn't only France - you can count the *proponents* on your fingers) knew all along because their media retained their integrity (as opposed to the post-9/11 patriotic media in the US), the anti-UN sentiments in the US got a life on their own, and even the "intelligentsia" on /. seemingly haven't escaped the media's wave of brainwashing.
There are good reasons to hand over control to the UN. Most importantly, the 95% of the world that aren't US citizens are not democratically represented in the US government. (And no, most of us don't see the US as an international mainstay of fairness, freedom, democracy and human rights. Where in the world did you get that idea anyway? It's more like a faltering war-happy giant with a highly corrupt and dysfunctional government and a population half of whom are so clueless that they vote straight against their own interests because the TV tells them to. A faltering war-happy giant that happens to be on our side right now but that could become a really big menace really fast.) In the UN, items are voted on by delegates of member nations, who are usually appointed by democratically elected official. Yes, that's an indirect democracy, but that makes it no less a democracy. Otherwise, what about electoral colleges? Is that so much different?
Is it so difficult to understand that a lot of people outside of the US really would rather see the internet in more impartial hands?
Go ahead, mod me down for disagreeing with me. It's all worth it!
Oh, but I'm certainly not a proponent of video teaching. Except when it's for free, then it falls under the "you get what you pay for" rule (but even then, a minimal standard of quality should be observed, of course). At the same time, I don't think the errors in Khan's videos TFA points out will leave many viewers' fragile innocent minds permanently scarred with patently incorrect information (take for instance integrals: I think it's way more helpful to have some intuitive feeling for them than to have their definition rigidly pinned down). It cannot possibly come close to the devastation (and demotivation) wrought by an incompetent high-school science teacher. Teaching is not only about transfering knowledge - it's also about inspiring interest. One can give a dry and frigid lecture that is impeccable in content but will leave its oudience disgusted. There has to be some spontaneity in teaching, even if that comes at the cost of something inaccurate being said on occasion (you try to teach even a 30 course without the slightest misstep and without reading straight from paper). That is my point; I'm willing to forgive Khan's errors for the inspiring work he does, and I'm not convinced TFA's author will necessarily do a better job in that respect.
It's not that simple. The African continent has more than enough arable land to feed its population. The problem is that their traditional small-scale farming methods economically cannot compete with imported food from emerging nations with more efficient farming methods, and food from developed nations that is, in addition, heavily subsidized (directly as well as indirectly by keeping oil prices artificially low). So starting from the 1960s, Africa's farming output has been lagging behind its population growth, and yes, if international food prices suddenly jerk up, this causes famine in Africa in the short term. However, if international food prices would stay high for a prolonged period of time, market forces dictate that Africa would ramp up its own food production and would probably be better off in the long run.
/. would be gullible enough to swallow that.
It should be added that we, the developed countries, have played a very cynical role in creating the situation as it is now. On the one hand, we have been pushing aggressively for these African countries to open their markets and decrease government interference such as subsidies, but on the other hand, we're not playing the game by our own rules, taxing and bureaucratically encumbering food imports, and heavily subsidizing our own food production, thereby undercutting African farmers' prices and driving them out of business. If we would play it fair, we would lose, becoming hopelessly dependent on foreign food and creating a runaway trade deficit against which the current situation pales. We have to either continue subsidizing or close our markets. The utopian unencumbered (and unsubsidized) international trade we have so long been advocating is simply not in our best interests. In that respect, rising international shipping costs as a consequence of rising fuel prices might actually help us as well as those African farmers. Not to mention that it will economically favor less fuel-intensive farming methods...
Either way, don't give me the utter BS that we're keeping our fuel prices low out of altruism with those poor African countries; I find it hard to believe that anyone here on
Recommended reading: http://www.redorbit.com/news/international/1823226/what_is_crippling_food_production_in_africa/ and the original PNAS publication as well as other studies by the same authors.
I speculate GP just made up an equation that is quite easy to prove, but otherwise pointless, presumably to make a point about people who speak or act based on prejudice about people who cannot prove pointless equations. It would, however, have been helpful if GP would have hit reply on the post he was replying to instead of on the /. summary; without context, his post appears just slightly more random than mine. Or is that because we're both playing the "parse this sentence" game?
That is a lesser evil than half of Africa starving to death because of increased food prices caused by carbon taxes on farmers in the US and elsewhere.
How do you figure?
..."I know exactly what I’m going to say, because that’s what teaching means."
So, teaching means either you're a psychic who knows exactly how quick the students will be on the uptake and what questions they will ask in class, or you're teaching your stuff like a tape recorder, without looking into the classroom and gauging whether they are following you and without allowing them to ask questions? *shudder*
Yes, ships got lost, and sailors died from syphilis and scurvy (...)
Ummm... you do know how syphilis is contracted, don't you? Hint: it's not from sitting on a boat with an all-male crew...
Yes, but just as the C-13 you're talking about is not absolutely pure, I strongly doubt that the waste C12 is 99.99% pure. That's a degree of purity that takes some doing to achieve even when chemical separation methods are available. I'm not saying it's fiendishly difficult, but it will come at a cost. And that's before converting it into diamond and bombarding it with nitrogen.
And again, I've always been talking on a per-bit basis. The number of bits that can be stored in one of these diamonds per unit of mass or volume using current methods has to be orders of magnitude lower than current DDR3 memory, so the diamond would have to be pretty darn cheap to compete with silicon using this (admittedly not entirely fair) criterion.
Actually, standing on the roofdeck of my apartment building just as that "June 2012 North American derecho" was rolling in, through the curtain of rain, I could see bright orange and blue flashes of light close to the ground about every 40 seconds. These were not lightning strikes; I think they were power lines being brought down by falling trees. And visibility was limited because of the rain. That storm must have caused hundreds of breaks over a large area of land. One needs quite a lot of people and equipment to fix all that in the time span of only a few days...
Working with researchers at Element Six, a British-based company that specializes in manufacturing artificial diamonds, they developed a new technique to create crystals that were even more pure: 99.99 percent carbon-12. Researchers then bombard the crystal with nitrogen to create the NV center, which interacts with a nearby carbon-13 atom.
These aren't your ordinary lab-grown diamonds. Natural carbon contains 1% carbon-13. As isotopes can't be separated by chemical methods, it takes a lot of effort/money to get that down to 0.01%. The physics of isotope separation is also the reason why Iran still doesn't have enough isotropically pure uranium to build 1 atom bomb, despite decades of effort and a nation-state budget. Granted, separating carbon isotopes is substantially easier than uranium isotopes, and much less carbon is needed to build a small diamond than uranium is needed to build an atom bomb, but I can assure you these isotopically-purified-then-bombarded-with-nitrogen diamonds are everything but cheap. And I'd be surprised if there would be a practical method to store nearly as many bits in them as in an over-the counter DDR3 chip.
Using a pair of impurities in ultra-pure, laboratory-grown diamonds, the researchers were able to create quantum bits and store information in them for nearly two seconds (...)
I doubt those are cheap. Especially compared to current silicon chips. Especially on a per-bit basis.
Anyhow, this whole discussion is kinda moot. It's just a "proof of concept" - another small step forward on the long road towards practical quantum computers.
Umm, in what way was that a flamebait???
I know, but this is not even TFA, this is TF /. summary, you know, the stuff on top of the page with trolls and flames. ;)
I agree that GP is oversimplifying things, but aren't you doing the same thing?
Some people pay to cool 6 months out of the year. For them, the thinking goes exactly opposite: for every kWh of energy dissipated by the appliances in your house, you're consuming (roughly) another kWh to pump that thermal energy out of your house.
Also, if you're paying to heat, the cost of a kWh of heat produced by burning, say, natural gas is usually lower than the cost of a kWh of electricity. Even if you're heating with a heat pump, the amount of thermal energy the thing pumps into your house is higher than the amount of electric energy consumed by the pump.
Oh, and there's the monetary cost of consuming energy, but there's also the environmental cost, which the current system doesn't factor in.
Umm... did you realize you're re-posting a link from the summary?
The de-facto standard, I'm telling ya! Just like VMD!
"If you honestly believe that robust community builds better softer, than this makes more sense," Whitehurst said.
Obviously some journalist isn't very familiar with their subject matter.
Oh c'mon mods, you surely can do better than that... GP just answers a scientific question with a correct scientific answer and a helpful link to the relevant Wikipedia article (and points out that 30 seconds with google would have yielded the same answer, which I feel is legitimate). GP gets flamed for it by parent, and the flame gets modded... insightful???