>>No, let's just rewrite the human genome so that people don't really want meat quite as much because........ global warming?
Note: this is from the same crowd that don't want to do geoengineering because it is "too easy" a solution to global warming. (It won't reduce our CO2 emissions, just prevent warming.)
Pretty far afield followup question: every time Work is performed, Entropy increases. Using the Landauer Principle, it seems like you could you consider information processing to be a sort of Work being done, leading to a similar increase in entropy. If our conscious minds are a form of information processing engine, could consciousness be a byproduct of the Work being conducted by the information processing, which manifests itself simply as extra heat being radiated by the system?
Java was never write-once, run-anywhere, no matter what the marketing hype suggested.
Differences in implementation on various platforms led to me having to reimplement some standard library code (like "StringBuffer") because Sun didn't think #defines were necessary in their run-anywhere environment.
It's a good example. The hub of a wagon wheel will be warm to the touch. That heat comes from the motion of the wheel. A sympathist can make the energy go the other way, from heat into motion. I pointed to the lamp. Or from heat into light.
There was an art to choosing your projects in the Fishery. It didn't matter if you made the brightest sympathy lamp or the most efficient heat-funnel in the history of Artificing. Until someone bought it, you wouldn't make a bent penny of commission.
Farmer's Riverworld series is a classic. I don't know if you'd call it forgotten, per se, since BBC made a movie out of it a few years back, but it's a really neat combination of sci-fi and stone age technologies in an afterlife setting for humanity on a distant planet. =)
>>To me, "acceptable latency" comes with the type of service, and the distance to the target
Indeed. The speed of light around the earth actually imposes human-noticeable latency if you're far enough away from a server. Technically I think light can circle the earth in 133ms, but based on a talk I went to, you're not going to get much faster than 100-200ms or so at a minimum if you're hopping one of the major oceans.
When I had Time Warner cable back in the late 90s, we'd get pretty good pings (30ms or so) to my university down the block, with about 1 out of 50 of the pings having some obscene latency, like over a second. This made playing FPSes nightmarish, as these long delay packets happened regularly, and would cause the game's latency coding to explode half the time. When I called them about it, they said that it was just a normal byproduct of the cable modems synching with the servers, and shouldn't affect my web browsing experience.:p I ended up having a long talk with the director of the entire cable modem program (it was still in beta when I got it) to explain to him that people who bought cable modems were often going to use it for more than just "web browsing".
Nowadays, I have UVerse, and the latency to www.google.com is about 30ms, and to my university about 50ms or so. So it's acceptable, but not really at the level I'd expect from their highest tier service.
Comicon is hardly impossible to sneak into, but they've stepped up security a lot in recent years. They check ID, put holograms on the badges, and the guards will most of the time demand you flip your badge over when you walk through the doors. And security really is all over the place. The con is a nonprofit and makes so much money, they can blow it on a thousand rent-a-cops.
(The easiest way to get in is to buy one from a professional forger of badges on ebay, really.)
I've been to enough conferences and simply walked into wrong rooms where other conferences were going on by accident, to be completely unimpressed by people "sneaking into" a conference that isn't the San Diego Comicon.
A lot of TV recyclers will come to your house and pick it up for free, especially if the TV works (so they can resell it).
I actually saw a pair of them in my apartment complex, asked them if they wanted a 300lb 36" CRT TV, and they jumped on it. Had the thing hauled out of there in under a minute.
Damn thing was so heavy, I couldn't get it up the stairs to begin with... had to hire a guy to help me.
The article is a bit outdated, but I mean that in the opposite sense of it reporting computer stats from 1995. It seems a bit a year out of date on its stats. Am I nitpicking? Sure.
The 28.8 modem was introduced in 1994, and I recall it being in fairly wide use by summer 1994. Likewise, 17" monitors were not unusual or prohibitively expensive back then. I had a decent enough 17" that ran maybe $300 or so. The Apple repair tech knocked it off my table, and I ended up with a really nice 17" Sony CRT and a massive (for the time) 24" monitor for my troubles. Ended up selling the 24" for a thousand bucks or so to pay rent, kept the Sony, and fixed the Shamrock.
Likewise, I had a Power Mac 6100 at the time, which released in 1994, but had a lot of the "upgrade recommended" features they listed for 1995. 8MB RAM standard, 72MB maximum, etc. 500MB HD though, which was a bit light. But it had built-in ethernet, which was an amazing experience in the dorms after living in dialup land for all of high school.
I got nostalgic for all the good times I had on that machine a while back, and reinstalled Marathon (which is available free now). You know what they say, though: you just can never go back to keyboard look.
The history is a bit more complicated than that. A lot of the advancements came from subjugated peoples that weren't Muslim.
Pure math was certainly advanced (algebra, etc.), but science has traditionally been looked upon with skepticism as they hold that physical laws exist only as long as Allah wills them to.
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>>No, let's just rewrite the human genome so that people don't really want meat quite as much because........ global warming?
Note: this is from the same crowd that don't want to do geoengineering because it is "too easy" a solution to global warming. (It won't reduce our CO2 emissions, just prevent warming.)
Excellent response, thanks.
Pretty far afield followup question: every time Work is performed, Entropy increases. Using the Landauer Principle, it seems like you could you consider information processing to be a sort of Work being done, leading to a similar increase in entropy. If our conscious minds are a form of information processing engine, could consciousness be a byproduct of the Work being conducted by the information processing, which manifests itself simply as extra heat being radiated by the system?
Java was never write-once, run-anywhere, no matter what the marketing hype suggested.
Differences in implementation on various platforms led to me having to reimplement some standard library code (like "StringBuffer") because Sun didn't think #defines were necessary in their run-anywhere environment.
>>Unpossible! Measure one or the other, but not both...
Well, kinda.
>>entropy in information theory is identical to the entropy in thermodynamics
Is there a name for this law?
Also, what does this say about the reality of information itself?
>And what are Japan, Germany, etc. going to do for energy once they've phased out their big, scary nuclear power plants?
More expensive and often less-clean alternatives.
People are batshit crazy over nuclear fears.
I'd rather live 10 miles away from a nuclear plant than 10 miles away from a coal-burner.
It's a good example. The hub of a wagon wheel will be warm to the touch. That heat comes from the motion of the wheel. A sympathist can make the energy go the other way, from heat into motion. I pointed to the lamp. Or from heat into light.
There was an art to choosing your projects in the Fishery. It didn't matter if you made the brightest sympathy lamp or the most efficient heat-funnel in the history of Artificing. Until someone bought it, you wouldn't make a bent penny of commission.
Farmer's Riverworld series is a classic. I don't know if you'd call it forgotten, per se, since BBC made a movie out of it a few years back, but it's a really neat combination of sci-fi and stone age technologies in an afterlife setting for humanity on a distant planet. =)
>>To me, "acceptable latency" comes with the type of service, and the distance to the target
Indeed. The speed of light around the earth actually imposes human-noticeable latency if you're far enough away from a server. Technically I think light can circle the earth in 133ms, but based on a talk I went to, you're not going to get much faster than 100-200ms or so at a minimum if you're hopping one of the major oceans.
When I had Time Warner cable back in the late 90s, we'd get pretty good pings (30ms or so) to my university down the block, with about 1 out of 50 of the pings having some obscene latency, like over a second. This made playing FPSes nightmarish, as these long delay packets happened regularly, and would cause the game's latency coding to explode half the time. When I called them about it, they said that it was just a normal byproduct of the cable modems synching with the servers, and shouldn't affect my web browsing experience. :p I ended up having a long talk with the director of the entire cable modem program (it was still in beta when I got it) to explain to him that people who bought cable modems were often going to use it for more than just "web browsing".
Nowadays, I have UVerse, and the latency to www.google.com is about 30ms, and to my university about 50ms or so. So it's acceptable, but not really at the level I'd expect from their highest tier service.
>>That is like asking if there are kids who want to weld for welding sake. Or fuck for fuck sake.
To be fair, while I've wielded sake in both hands, I've never fucked it. Seems painful.
So you're switching from "WMDs are a lie!" to "Reagan gave Hussein WMDs?"
Ok, good to know, thanks.
>For these reasons and the constant complaints about how FF will have "senior moments" and just freeze for a few seconds
Yeah, those occasional pauses were driving me crazy. I think they were fixed in FF9 or 10, though.
The individuals in a corporation are free to donate, since they can vote.
Corporations cannot vote, so they should not be able to bribe I mean donate to politicians.
They can still lobby.
Hussein had chemical weapons. He'd used them on the Kurds, and still had some in storage when we invaded.
Contrast this with Obama claiming the government has recouped its investment in GM, which will never happen unless GM triples in price.
They can't vote, but for the Lord knows what reason, we allow them to bribe our officials legally through campaign donations.
>>The usual amount is $1 or $2 million.
IIRC, the EPA estimate of human life went up to $10M before the recession, but downgraded the value to about $7M these days.
$7M seems pretty standard, actually:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life
Comicon is hardly impossible to sneak into, but they've stepped up security a lot in recent years. They check ID, put holograms on the badges, and the guards will most of the time demand you flip your badge over when you walk through the doors. And security really is all over the place. The con is a nonprofit and makes so much money, they can blow it on a thousand rent-a-cops.
(The easiest way to get in is to buy one from a professional forger of badges on ebay, really.)
I've been to enough conferences and simply walked into wrong rooms where other conferences were going on by accident, to be completely unimpressed by people "sneaking into" a conference that isn't the San Diego Comicon.
Ah, Capillary Action.
The source of all of my science fair projects.
A lot of TV recyclers will come to your house and pick it up for free, especially if the TV works (so they can resell it).
I actually saw a pair of them in my apartment complex, asked them if they wanted a 300lb 36" CRT TV, and they jumped on it. Had the thing hauled out of there in under a minute.
Damn thing was so heavy, I couldn't get it up the stairs to begin with... had to hire a guy to help me.
The article is a bit outdated, but I mean that in the opposite sense of it reporting computer stats from 1995. It seems a bit a year out of date on its stats. Am I nitpicking? Sure.
The 28.8 modem was introduced in 1994, and I recall it being in fairly wide use by summer 1994. Likewise, 17" monitors were not unusual or prohibitively expensive back then. I had a decent enough 17" that ran maybe $300 or so. The Apple repair tech knocked it off my table, and I ended up with a really nice 17" Sony CRT and a massive (for the time) 24" monitor for my troubles. Ended up selling the 24" for a thousand bucks or so to pay rent, kept the Sony, and fixed the Shamrock.
Likewise, I had a Power Mac 6100 at the time, which released in 1994, but had a lot of the "upgrade recommended" features they listed for 1995. 8MB RAM standard, 72MB maximum, etc. 500MB HD though, which was a bit light. But it had built-in ethernet, which was an amazing experience in the dorms after living in dialup land for all of high school.
I got nostalgic for all the good times I had on that machine a while back, and reinstalled Marathon (which is available free now). You know what they say, though: you just can never go back to keyboard look.
In my biology lab, we routinely ripped out hearts and kept them alive.
Oh wait, you meant the *man*.
Well, yeah, that could be an issue.
At least the immortal knight had a good explanation.
>>You know you're in trouble when the Vatican is more modern and forward thinking than you are.
The Vatican has run one of the oldest observatories in the world (http://vaticanobservatory.org/).
It may not fit in nicely with some people's ignorant worldview that the Vatican is anti-science, but there it is.
The history is a bit more complicated than that. A lot of the advancements came from subjugated peoples that weren't Muslim.
Pure math was certainly advanced (algebra, etc.), but science has traditionally been looked upon with skepticism as they hold that physical laws exist only as long as Allah wills them to.
>>What are the effects of too much exposure to light? Should I use a screen filter for my monitor?
You laugh, but it causes insomnia and ASPD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_sleep_phase_disorder).