Not at all. I just pointed out that your data is irrelevant to your claim. You can't judge science by what's written in a high school textbook. Your observations only point out out the sad state of science teaching in high schools, not any insight into the actual science of evolution. Point out some peer reviewed papers in journals on evolution that use the approach you mentioned and you'll have a point. Otherwise, it's a red herring.
So you are saying that old text books that have become outdated are never used in classes?
It happens. I'm not sure about in college classes where you generally have to buy your own books for every class, but some high schools may have some older books still in use.
Being out of date happens more often to Atlases. Generally though the science taught at the high school level doesn't change that much. High school textbooks on average last less than 10 years, getting throughly damaged by getting taken home and back to school by students one year after another. The hundred-plus year old scientific theories taught at the high school level generally don't change that frequently.
So what explains the discrepancies you've noticed? Generally theories are dumbed down or simplified at the high school level so that they are easier to understand by students who don't have the mathematical baggage of university-level scientists. This also happens at the college level between first year undergraduate and higher levels in some fields like economics.
So first, different authors will chose different ways of "simplifying" the material for the target audience. Then there is another thing that does change more often than the useful life of a high school textbook, and that's the political makeup of school boards. School boards are often politically elected, comprised of people who do not have a scientific background in all the subjects for which they a) set the curriculum and b) select textbooks. Those school board members in fact can have political or religious agendas (Kansas?) that guide those decisions. Economics indicated that where there's a demand, somebody will be willing to supply the goods, and therefore there are people willing to write textbooks targeted to particular common view points of what information should be taught in high schools. Those "flexible" textbook authors are probably not leading scholars in the subject matter.
To sum up: high school textbooks are not peer reviewed and, even if they were, peer-review might not inform the textbook procurement process which can be highly politicized. Since high school yearbooks do not go through a rigorous scientific process, to judge "science" and scientific theory based on what they contain is a fundamentally flawed exercise.
When it comes to college-level classes, the textbook publishing industry has great interest in revising common textbooks every few years. This suppresses the used textbook market and forces students to buy new books to get the new question and problem sets necessary for homework assignments. I suppose in the days of the Internet, it may discourage cheating via the online purchase of solution sets from students who took the course during a previous year, but frequent textbook updates were already common practice 25 years ago, before the Internet. Politicization of the textbook selection process is probably less since the people making decisions are academics instead of people elected at large, However I would expect politicisation of the textbook selection process still happens in certain environments, such as colleges run by religious fundamentalist organizations. Again, economics says that someone will be more than happy to supply those colleges with what they want, even if it's scientifically inaccurate.
In the US, it's probably going to last at least two more years. Because while the Real Estate industry is trying to convince everyone the market will hit bottom any day now, option ARMs are probably going to continue to depress the market and make financial shock waves for the next two years. Personally, I don't think we'll see light at the end of the tunnel for at least another 2 years after that. For a decade, US citizens have been running ever high debt loads and it's going to take quite a period of saving and paying off those debts before they start being comfortable spending more freely again.
Good ole' boys may have voted for W in 2000 and 2004 and gotten him elected. But it was his daddy's friends (who are anything but good ol' boys) who got him the funding necessary to take a shot at the GOP nomination in the first place.
Clearly, it's OK for CFOs to use spreadsheets since that's math-oriented and is to accountants what slide rules used to be for engineers. On the other hand, she's probably had to work hard to bypass gender prejudices and get to her position and, if she ever got caught using Word, some knuckle-dragging idiot might walk into her office and think she's the CFO's secretary. Hopefully with another generation or two, that won't be an issue anymore.
I read that blog but only figured it out the following day. The ones that are still so angry at SpaceX because they were afraid it was the end of the world, even though it was clear it was the media who chose not to air the story?
I think what's really bugging them is that they are still disappointed that it wasn't the End Times and that they were not caught up in the rapture. Thinking "It's time! Hallelujah!" and then feeling like an idiot is going to leave you set up for a lot of cognitive dissonance and a need to find somebody to whom to transfer your anger at your own idiocy. SpaceX is an anonymous corporation instead of their beloved and trusted news talking heads.
Yeah. A lot of mental "children" "Left behind" is what it sounds like to me
Show me one [monopoly] that has not been [government-created](in the USA at least)
How quickly they forget (and I mean not just you but everybody else who couldn't come up with a reply). Standard Oil.
Because a power or water company isn't really natural, its allowed and encouraged by the government. To say that it is natural is to say that if there was a world devoid of any government that was free-market that there would only be one of it when the society was at the height of its power.
You don't seem to understand the concept of Natural_monopoly. That's understandable, there's been a lot of TV pundits and self-interested CEOs spouting plenty of nonsensical "economic theory" ever since Reagan.
"An industry is said to be a natural monopoly (also called technical monopoly) if only one firm is able to survive in the long run, even in the absence of legal regulations or "predatory" measures by the monopolist.[2] It is said that this is the result of high fixed costs of entering an industry which causes long run average costs to decline as output expands."
Laying pipe for water delivery and laying cable for electrification have high fixed costs. Go back to Roman and pre-Roman times and the state delivered it because no private enterprise was capable of assembling the capital necessary to build the infrastructure. Also look at Hydraulic empires. Hydraulic empires are basically natural monopolies on goods essential to life, and where the monopoly power is exploited to obtain political power (not the other way around). History is ripe with this stuff.
Another cause of natural monopolies is Network effects. In an industry where network effects are important, an early participant that can build a super-majority market share has a major marketing advantage over any competitors that they can also turn into a significant monetary advantage. This is particularly true in the telecommunications industry. If the telecom industry wasn't regulated, the major player (Bell currently) could simply refuse to exchange communications with smaller competitors (or charge hefty connection fees - above and beyond traffic-based charges - as happens in the IP internetworking business) because new customers would be more likely to need to talk to their large client base.
And I would argue that there would be surely more than one phone company and in large cities more than one power and water companies in the theoretical society above.
And you would be wrong. For the phone company, see the above network effects. For water companies, see the above links on hydraulic empires. Power? I think it depends on whether you were close to a good candidate site for hydroelectric power or a similar power generation method with high fixed and low variable costs.
And somehow society has continued on over the last 500 years, without everyone blowing their own head off every time they have a bad day.
Well 30,000 annual deaths out 300 million averages out to nearly 0.1% over an average lifetime. Sure, that's less than auto accident deaths and nobody's talking about outlawing cars. That's a much better argument and comparison than the one you've chosen, BTW, although the economic impact of banning car ownership and driving permits would be much more severe than that of restricting firearm ownership. There's also already a much stricter standard for permitting car operation than for gun ownership, which hopefully already significantly decreases the car accident death rate down to current levels.
However, it takes a lot more than a bad day to overcome the self-preservation instinct in most people.
"In the end, say some researchers, occupation may not be much of a factor in suicide. Psychologists have long documented that among the top predictors for suicide are diagnosable mental disorder, co-morbid substance use, loss of social support and availability and access to a firearm."
Guns are a facilitator in successful suicides, not a necessary or sufficient condition. When you're severely depressed due to chemical issues or apparently insurmountable problems, it's a heck of a lot easier to get shit-faced, pull out your Colt or Glock and blow your brains out, than to successfully pull off any of the other alternatives for ending one's own life.
Unfortunately, when it comes to suicide, statistics older than about 30 years (let alone 500) are unreliable since many suicides would be covered up by family if possible so that the person could still get funeral rites from their church. So the historical impact of firearm availability on suicide levels would be impossible to determine due to cultural taboos, even if there had been attempts to gather statistics that far back. As would the mitigating effects of trauma medicine and the establishment of a societal and physical infrastructure for dealing with medical emergencies in the general population.
Regardless of the processors success, there is a reason Intel is now designing chips that are remarkably similar to the way AMD has been doing it for a while now.
Yes, it's called diminishing returns. Intel initially used large caches to make up for the lower performance of having a separate north bridge, because designing an interprocessor cache coherency mechanism and NUMA support is the tougher job. They could rely on their financial and manufacturing strengths to push fab and process improvements and support cache increases. However Intel have reached the point where the cache is already the biggest portion of the CPU's transistor budget. Scale-down process improvements can't help them as much to increase the cache if they also want to increase the number of cores.
Now Intel have to tackle integrating the north bridge and supporting NUMA at higher clock speeds than AMD dealt with when they started HT. Meanwhile, AMD have already got that part of their design debugged and ramped up, and almost certainly have some really good empirical data on real world performance and the strengths and weaknesses of their design approach that's now on it's 3rd major design iteration. They will be reaping the less risky benefits of increasing cache size as they move to new manufacturing processes with bigger transistor budgets and yet still have smaller transistor budgets than Intel at the same process size, thus reaping greater yields.
I can't help but wonder if Intel didn't expect AMD to stumble on the harder problem of NUMA, and was hoping to kill off AMD before Intel would ever have to tackle NUMA and north-bridge integration. That would have allowed Intel to tackle the problems at a more leisurely pace. It didn't help that they wasted years on the memory fiasco, trying to leverage their market dominance into splitting monopolistic profits with a RAM patent troll. While they've currently got the performance crown, I think Intel's behind the 8-ball now.
I remember when people talked about how the clock speed headroom of the incoming P4 was going to allow them stomp AMD on performance. I countered that I suspected the huge pipelines in the P4 meant that faulty branch predictions and other pipeline stalls would make it very hard for the P4 to come close to its maximum theoretical performance on real-world workloads and that AMD's processors would remain competitive. I think people are ignoring some significant details in a similar way here. Intel is facing a very complex engineering challenge, that's gotten more complex due to their procrastination. AMD's biggest challenge was finding funding for fab upgrades in a credit crunch, but it looks like they've found some Arab angel investors. By splitting off the fab company, they keep the critical IP and design talent and shed a lot of the debt. They've also got one of the best processor design managers ever, Dirk Meyer, running the slimmed down design company. I think they're in very good shape.
The gun is the only personal weapon that puts a 100-pound woman on equal footing with a 220-pound mugger, a 75-year old retiree on equal footing with a 19-year old gang banger, and a single guy on equal footing with a carload of drunk guys with baseball bats. The gun removes the disparity in physical strength, size, or numbers between a potential attacker and a defender.
The criminal's probably somewhat messed up mentally with a certain amount of misanthropic or anti-societal anger. So in practice, the criminal will find it easier to pull the trigger than the honest civilian. In addition, even a halfways intelligent criminal will make sure he has the drop on you. Then you're back where you started with an unarmed person against an armed crook because as soon as you look like you're reaching for a piece you'll be sprouting blood. And if you think that a 75 year old has the reaction time, eyesight, and strength to fire a gun as quickly and accurately as a 19-year old gang banger, you're an idiot. The 75 year-old's only chance is that the gang-banger got his shooting lessons from watching rapper music videos.
Generally, with an armed populace, he who shoots first wins. So you get a populace that's a combination of trigger happy gun owners causing a lot of friendly fire, and people who are rightfully apprehensive at being surrounded by trigger-happy fools.
Even if you take that line of reasoning to its logical conclusion and ban all weapons, we're still left with the ability to beat each other to death with our fists.
Well sure but as someone pointed out already
a) you can outrun or dodge a fist or a knife (no such luck with bullets)
b) It's a lot more hard work to kill somebody with a knife or your bare hands than to press a trigger and punch a lethal hole in them. Many people don't have the stomach for it.
c) it takes a lot more time to kill someone with a knife or body parts than it does with a gun. That gives other people, if present, more time to intervene.
Guns make it easier to kill others. Guns make it easier to kill yourself quickly before you can have second thoughts.
Ah, but how easily will US leaders be willing to declare war and send in the troops when there's no body bags coming home to upset the electorate? Would the US really have voted to bring the Iraq war to a close if there weren't nearly 5000 US casualties, and instead there was "only" hundreds of thousands of Iraqi war dead and millions displaced?
The cheap capacitors instead of the better quality ones? The cheaper voltage regulator circuits? There's a lot of discrete components on a motherboard, and varying levels of quality and tolerance options in the power circuits can make a huge difference in the quality and stability of a machine. They can also make an opposite difference in a low margin commodity business.
It powers the features that would normally drain huge power from the battery, notably the defroster and heater.
Not much point being efficient at generating electricity etc. if its primary function is to generate heat.
A Stirling engine is an external combustion engine. It generates waste heat as a byproduct of operation just like an internal combustion engine does. That allows the heat to be used for the defroster and heater. But it's primary function is no more to generate heat than it is with the engine in your car. However, unlike an internal combustion engine that requires fuel that can undergo controlled explosion, the stirling engine just requires a source of sufficiently high heat (efficiency of the stirling cycle is related to the difference in temperature between heat source and sink).
Hey, I'm all for risk management. In fact I'm glad that we're seeing more people becoming more concerned about the possible biological toxicity of what we can already make in terms of "nanomaterials". The smart people don't recommend completely suppressing those products, just adequate testing for their health and environmental impact. It's common sense to do so to prevent a nasty accident triggering an inevitable mindless backlash against all such products. For past examples, see asbestos and nuclear fission.
Bill's article seemed to argue that whole, potentially dangerous avenues of research should be closed or at least so tightly controlled that it would effectively smother progress in that research. A bit like a fear-driven version of the stem cell research funding ban (which was religiously driven instead). I don't know about you but the man who believes that is not a man I would want to see as CTO of my country.
It's been a few years since that article was published though, and maybe the initial steps in risk management that's been taken in some of those fields have mollified his view on the subject. People change. But the person who wrote that article is a completely inappropriate choice for a national CTO.
P.S. regarding the rained-out speech joke, I've always liked the following exchange from Spider Robinson's 1977 story God is an Iron:
"God is an iron," I said. "Did you know that?"
I turned to look at her and she was staring. She laughed experimentally, stopped when I failed to join in. "And I'm a pair of pants with a hole scorched through the ass?"
"If a person who indulges in gluttony is a glutton, and a person who commits a felony is a felon, then God is an iron."
Please accept my regards for your self-honesty and self-consistency. Your actions demonstrate that your faith informs your mind and actions rather than governing them blindly. While we may disagree on religion, we can at least do so respectfully.
I hope my GP statement above was sufficiently clear that it refers to the more blinkered fundamentalist individuals who still express ill-informed and venomous sentiments on comment forums across the Internet.
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Not at all. I just pointed out that your data is irrelevant to your claim. You can't judge science by what's written in a high school textbook. Your observations only point out out the sad state of science teaching in high schools, not any insight into the actual science of evolution. Point out some peer reviewed papers in journals on evolution that use the approach you mentioned and you'll have a point. Otherwise, it's a red herring.
Being out of date happens more often to Atlases. Generally though the science taught at the high school level doesn't change that much. High school textbooks on average last less than 10 years, getting throughly damaged by getting taken home and back to school by students one year after another. The hundred-plus year old scientific theories taught at the high school level generally don't change that frequently.
So what explains the discrepancies you've noticed? Generally theories are dumbed down or simplified at the high school level so that they are easier to understand by students who don't have the mathematical baggage of university-level scientists. This also happens at the college level between first year undergraduate and higher levels in some fields like economics.
So first, different authors will chose different ways of "simplifying" the material for the target audience. Then there is another thing that does change more often than the useful life of a high school textbook, and that's the political makeup of school boards. School boards are often politically elected, comprised of people who do not have a scientific background in all the subjects for which they a) set the curriculum and b) select textbooks. Those school board members in fact can have political or religious agendas (Kansas?) that guide those decisions. Economics indicated that where there's a demand, somebody will be willing to supply the goods, and therefore there are people willing to write textbooks targeted to particular common view points of what information should be taught in high schools. Those "flexible" textbook authors are probably not leading scholars in the subject matter.
To sum up: high school textbooks are not peer reviewed and, even if they were, peer-review might not inform the textbook procurement process which can be highly politicized. Since high school yearbooks do not go through a rigorous scientific process, to judge "science" and scientific theory based on what they contain is a fundamentally flawed exercise.
When it comes to college-level classes, the textbook publishing industry has great interest in revising common textbooks every few years. This suppresses the used textbook market and forces students to buy new books to get the new question and problem sets necessary for homework assignments. I suppose in the days of the Internet, it may discourage cheating via the online purchase of solution sets from students who took the course during a previous year, but frequent textbook updates were already common practice 25 years ago, before the Internet. Politicization of the textbook selection process is probably less since the people making decisions are academics instead of people elected at large, However I would expect politicisation of the textbook selection process still happens in certain environments, such as colleges run by religious fundamentalist organizations. Again, economics says that someone will be more than happy to supply those colleges with what they want, even if it's scientifically inaccurate.
You're right, it's for PR purposes. He adopted it when he got the part for Xenu, Barbarian Prosecutor.
In the US, it's probably going to last at least two more years. Because while the Real Estate industry is trying to convince everyone the market will hit bottom any day now, option ARMs are probably going to continue to depress the market and make financial shock waves for the next two years. Personally, I don't think we'll see light at the end of the tunnel for at least another 2 years after that. For a decade, US citizens have been running ever high debt loads and it's going to take quite a period of saving and paying off those debts before they start being comfortable spending more freely again.
Good ole' boys may have voted for W in 2000 and 2004 and gotten him elected. But it was his daddy's friends (who are anything but good ol' boys) who got him the funding necessary to take a shot at the GOP nomination in the first place.
Clearly, it's OK for CFOs to use spreadsheets since that's math-oriented and is to accountants what slide rules used to be for engineers. On the other hand, she's probably had to work hard to bypass gender prejudices and get to her position and, if she ever got caught using Word, some knuckle-dragging idiot might walk into her office and think she's the CFO's secretary. Hopefully with another generation or two, that won't be an issue anymore.
I read that blog but only figured it out the following day. The ones that are still so angry at SpaceX because they were afraid it was the end of the world, even though it was clear it was the media who chose not to air the story?
I think what's really bugging them is that they are still disappointed that it wasn't the End Times and that they were not caught up in the rapture. Thinking "It's time! Hallelujah!" and then feeling like an idiot is going to leave you set up for a lot of cognitive dissonance and a need to find somebody to whom to transfer your anger at your own idiocy. SpaceX is an anonymous corporation instead of their beloved and trusted news talking heads.
Yeah. A lot of mental "children" "Left behind" is what it sounds like to me
How quickly they forget (and I mean not just you but everybody else who couldn't come up with a reply). Standard Oil.
You don't seem to understand the concept of Natural_monopoly. That's understandable, there's been a lot of TV pundits and self-interested CEOs spouting plenty of nonsensical "economic theory" ever since Reagan.
"An industry is said to be a natural monopoly (also called technical monopoly) if only one firm is able to survive in the long run, even in the absence of legal regulations or "predatory" measures by the monopolist.[2] It is said that this is the result of high fixed costs of entering an industry which causes long run average costs to decline as output expands."
Laying pipe for water delivery and laying cable for electrification have high fixed costs. Go back to Roman and pre-Roman times and the state delivered it because no private enterprise was capable of assembling the capital necessary to build the infrastructure. Also look at Hydraulic empires. Hydraulic empires are basically natural monopolies on goods essential to life, and where the monopoly power is exploited to obtain political power (not the other way around). History is ripe with this stuff.
Another cause of natural monopolies is Network effects. In an industry where network effects are important, an early participant that can build a super-majority market share has a major marketing advantage over any competitors that they can also turn into a significant monetary advantage. This is particularly true in the telecommunications industry. If the telecom industry wasn't regulated, the major player (Bell currently) could simply refuse to exchange communications with smaller competitors (or charge hefty connection fees - above and beyond traffic-based charges - as happens in the IP internetworking business) because new customers would be more likely to need to talk to their large client base.
And you would be wrong. For the phone company, see the above network effects. For water companies, see the above links on hydraulic empires. Power? I think it depends on whether you were close to a good candidate site for hydroelectric power or a similar power generation method with high fixed and low variable costs.
Well 30,000 annual deaths out 300 million averages out to nearly 0.1% over an average lifetime. Sure, that's less than auto accident deaths and nobody's talking about outlawing cars. That's a much better argument and comparison than the one you've chosen, BTW, although the economic impact of banning car ownership and driving permits would be much more severe than that of restricting firearm ownership. There's also already a much stricter standard for permitting car operation than for gun ownership, which hopefully already significantly decreases the car accident death rate down to current levels.
However, it takes a lot more than a bad day to overcome the self-preservation instinct in most people.
"In the end, say some researchers, occupation may not be much of a factor in suicide. Psychologists have long documented that among the top predictors for suicide are diagnosable mental disorder, co-morbid substance use, loss of social support and availability and access to a firearm."
Guns are a facilitator in successful suicides, not a necessary or sufficient condition. When you're severely depressed due to chemical issues or apparently insurmountable problems, it's a heck of a lot easier to get shit-faced, pull out your Colt or Glock and blow your brains out, than to successfully pull off any of the other alternatives for ending one's own life.
Unfortunately, when it comes to suicide, statistics older than about 30 years (let alone 500) are unreliable since many suicides would be covered up by family if possible so that the person could still get funeral rites from their church. So the historical impact of firearm availability on suicide levels would be impossible to determine due to cultural taboos, even if there had been attempts to gather statistics that far back. As would the mitigating effects of trauma medicine and the establishment of a societal and physical infrastructure for dealing with medical emergencies in the general population.
Yes, it's called diminishing returns. Intel initially used large caches to make up for the lower performance of having a separate north bridge, because designing an interprocessor cache coherency mechanism and NUMA support is the tougher job. They could rely on their financial and manufacturing strengths to push fab and process improvements and support cache increases. However Intel have reached the point where the cache is already the biggest portion of the CPU's transistor budget. Scale-down process improvements can't help them as much to increase the cache if they also want to increase the number of cores.
Now Intel have to tackle integrating the north bridge and supporting NUMA at higher clock speeds than AMD dealt with when they started HT. Meanwhile, AMD have already got that part of their design debugged and ramped up, and almost certainly have some really good empirical data on real world performance and the strengths and weaknesses of their design approach that's now on it's 3rd major design iteration. They will be reaping the less risky benefits of increasing cache size as they move to new manufacturing processes with bigger transistor budgets and yet still have smaller transistor budgets than Intel at the same process size, thus reaping greater yields.
I can't help but wonder if Intel didn't expect AMD to stumble on the harder problem of NUMA, and was hoping to kill off AMD before Intel would ever have to tackle NUMA and north-bridge integration. That would have allowed Intel to tackle the problems at a more leisurely pace. It didn't help that they wasted years on the memory fiasco, trying to leverage their market dominance into splitting monopolistic profits with a RAM patent troll. While they've currently got the performance crown, I think Intel's behind the 8-ball now.
I remember when people talked about how the clock speed headroom of the incoming P4 was going to allow them stomp AMD on performance. I countered that I suspected the huge pipelines in the P4 meant that faulty branch predictions and other pipeline stalls would make it very hard for the P4 to come close to its maximum theoretical performance on real-world workloads and that AMD's processors would remain competitive. I think people are ignoring some significant details in a similar way here. Intel is facing a very complex engineering challenge, that's gotten more complex due to their procrastination. AMD's biggest challenge was finding funding for fab upgrades in a credit crunch, but it looks like they've found some Arab angel investors. By splitting off the fab company, they keep the critical IP and design talent and shed a lot of the debt. They've also got one of the best processor design managers ever, Dirk Meyer, running the slimmed down design company. I think they're in very good shape.
If your opponent has a gun or a club, you might be able to outrun them. Clubs are heavy.
The criminal's probably somewhat messed up mentally with a certain amount of misanthropic or anti-societal anger. So in practice, the criminal will find it easier to pull the trigger than the honest civilian. In addition, even a halfways intelligent criminal will make sure he has the drop on you. Then you're back where you started with an unarmed person against an armed crook because as soon as you look like you're reaching for a piece you'll be sprouting blood. And if you think that a 75 year old has the reaction time, eyesight, and strength to fire a gun as quickly and accurately as a 19-year old gang banger, you're an idiot. The 75 year-old's only chance is that the gang-banger got his shooting lessons from watching rapper music videos.
Generally, with an armed populace, he who shoots first wins. So you get a populace that's a combination of trigger happy gun owners causing a lot of friendly fire, and people who are rightfully apprehensive at being surrounded by trigger-happy fools.
Well sure but as someone pointed out already
a) you can outrun or dodge a fist or a knife (no such luck with bullets)
b) It's a lot more hard work to kill somebody with a knife or your bare hands than to press a trigger and punch a lethal hole in them. Many people don't have the stomach for it.
c) it takes a lot more time to kill someone with a knife or body parts than it does with a gun. That gives other people, if present, more time to intervene.
Guns make it easier to kill others. Guns make it easier to kill yourself quickly before you can have second thoughts.
Ah, but how easily will US leaders be willing to declare war and send in the troops when there's no body bags coming home to upset the electorate? Would the US really have voted to bring the Iraq war to a close if there weren't nearly 5000 US casualties, and instead there was "only" hundreds of thousands of Iraqi war dead and millions displaced?
No, three movements.
Yeah, cyclic aromatics also have a fairly high tendency to be unhealthy.
The cheap capacitors instead of the better quality ones? The cheaper voltage regulator circuits? There's a lot of discrete components on a motherboard, and varying levels of quality and tolerance options in the power circuits can make a huge difference in the quality and stability of a machine. They can also make an opposite difference in a low margin commodity business.
It's Fjordjira, you insensitive clod!
No, but watching Fox News and no other news program does.
Remember, the Republican party is no longer the party of William F Buckley. It's now the party of Hannity, Limbaugh, et al.
A Stirling engine is an external combustion engine. It generates waste heat as a byproduct of operation just like an internal combustion engine does. That allows the heat to be used for the defroster and heater. But it's primary function is no more to generate heat than it is with the engine in your car. However, unlike an internal combustion engine that requires fuel that can undergo controlled explosion, the stirling engine just requires a source of sufficiently high heat (efficiency of the stirling cycle is related to the difference in temperature between heat source and sink).
Heh, oops, Of course, it's the Carnot cycle that's theoretically the most efficient thermodynamic heat cycle.
Hey, I'm all for risk management. In fact I'm glad that we're seeing more people becoming more concerned about the possible biological toxicity of what we can already make in terms of "nanomaterials". The smart people don't recommend completely suppressing those products, just adequate testing for their health and environmental impact. It's common sense to do so to prevent a nasty accident triggering an inevitable mindless backlash against all such products. For past examples, see asbestos and nuclear fission.
Bill's article seemed to argue that whole, potentially dangerous avenues of research should be closed or at least so tightly controlled that it would effectively smother progress in that research. A bit like a fear-driven version of the stem cell research funding ban (which was religiously driven instead). I don't know about you but the man who believes that is not a man I would want to see as CTO of my country.
It's been a few years since that article was published though, and maybe the initial steps in risk management that's been taken in some of those fields have mollified his view on the subject. People change. But the person who wrote that article is a completely inappropriate choice for a national CTO.
P.S. regarding the rained-out speech joke, I've always liked the following exchange from Spider Robinson's 1977 story God is an Iron:
"God is an iron," I said. "Did you know that?"
I turned to look at her and she was staring. She laughed experimentally, stopped when I failed to join in. "And I'm a pair of pants with a hole scorched through the ass?"
"If a person who indulges in gluttony is a glutton, and a person who commits a felony is a felon, then God is an iron."
Please accept my regards for your self-honesty and self-consistency. Your actions demonstrate that your faith informs your mind and actions rather than governing them blindly. While we may disagree on religion, we can at least do so respectfully.
I hope my GP statement above was sufficiently clear that it refers to the more blinkered fundamentalist individuals who still express ill-informed and venomous sentiments on comment forums across the Internet.