You're being manipulated. Evidence that Tea Partiers are violent has been almost entirely fabricated; when pressed for concrete evidence, nobody can actually produce any despite significant motivation. If you feel otherwise, please feel free to link the video on YouTube that proves your point.
Skip the part where you link to more vague hit pieces on the New York Times, please. I'm asking for concrete evidence, which in this age of video-cameras-on-every-phone is hardly asking for much.
IMHO, Tea Partiers are the ones trying to stop the full-on march to fascism, not create it. You can not create a fascist government regime by campaigning to strip the government of power! That's just stupid. Look to the ones trying to collect government power.
then gained much of it back once I started eating "normal" food,
Unfortunately, "normal food" in the United States is actively bad for you. It's actually pretty easy to eat healthy in the US with only a little judgment, but it doesn't happen automatically the way it does in some cultures, where you'd have to go out of your way to come even close to matching our sugar and HFCS consumption. This proves rather less about the virtue of low-carb dieting and more about how nasty our current food environment is.
That doesn't even make sense. Do away with "the top" and you'll just create a new "the top" to deal with. Your view is a caricature so strange I don't even know where you got it from. From what I can see, anti-government people (which right now also include "government is good in general but right now we've got too much of it") pretty much do want to cut at all levels. I for one could live with fewer czars.
The Intellivoice sounds like a closer fit to what we're talking about, as it enabled a new form of game, rather than functioning as backwards compatibility.
No idea if that's what the original poster meant. But it definitely does show that augmenting consoles is a very old idea... older than many people reading about it.:)
Somewhere around here I still have an Intellivoice, and all four released games for it (I don't count the baseball one). You have not lived until you've heard a little 4KB cartridge (not a typo! in fact, 4KB was twice the usual size; and yes, I'm using bytes because I think measuring games in kilobits is a crock) babbling away at you. An amazing amount of voice was shoehorned into those things. Online MP3s that have samples of even a single thing it could say are themselves larger than all released games combined.
The problem you have is not that you have a wrong idea of programming, but that you have a wrong idea of mathematics. Most people only get educated into a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of mathematics and subconsciously think that something like the quadratic equation is the height of mathematical expression complexity.
However, nothing stops a mathematician from examining the consequences of much larger systems, such as might look like a program, and in fact mathematicians do. There's research into large numbers, research into large proof systems that make most programs look like small beans (go read the Principia Mathematica... or rather, go skim the Principia Mathematica and run screaming), research into all sorts of things that are definitely math but look a lot more like a program than you think if you've only been education with conventional primary school mathematics, or even if you've gotten a bachelor's degree in computer science, which does not generally cover the Curry-Howard isomorphism. (I didn't even get it in my masters program, I had to learn it myself.)
There is no feasible way of drawing a distinction between mathematics and programs. You might be able to draw a legal one, but as always happens when you try to introduce colors to bits, the coloring just won't stand up to the sort of sandblaster scrutiny that will be applied by the plaintiffs and defendants.
You might observe that few programmers appear to be thinking mathematically when they program, to which I'd follow up with an observation that no, no they don't and boy does it show! But note carefully that's a characteristic of the programmer, not the program. The programmer may not understand math, and may crank out a mathematical system of breathtaking worthlessness and with few or none of the properties the programmer would have found desirable (like "actually doing what it's supposed to do"), but it is not written into the definition of mathematics that something is only mathematics if it is "useful" or "good". It's still all just a term-rewriting system when you get down to it, and any attempt to draw a barrier around "term rewriting system" and "real-world program" is simply doomed to failure.
It's all just assembler, and all assembler can do is basic arithmetic, moving numbers around in memory in a manner very easy to characterize mathematically, and some very mathematical conditionals. You might be able to fool yourself into thinking you've somehow transcended these primitives into a "non-math" domain... but you haven't.
Who said anything about damaging to any life forms that evolved there? It doesn't matter, there isn't any sensory data available that will allow seeing anything like we see here.
Besides, it is possible to theorize about what life forms could exist there. If you agree that for any definition of life that is useful, it must be able to perform some computation (in a physical sense) that allows it to stay ahead of entropy, then information theory has a lot to say about what conditions life could exist in. High temperatures have too much entropy for any conceivable process to overcome them. While life on Earth itself demonstrates that we are not necessarily at the top end of the possible temperature scale, you're not going to see life in molten rock or in a star. There aren't any processes that could remove entropy from a system faster than the local environment is shoving it in, so therefore, no meaningful information-rich structure can survive.
Very high heat environments are not the places to be looking for life.
I would also observe that "molten rock" is not famous for its transparency, let alone "gaseous rock". It may be an "atmosphere", but there won't be anybody observing any sort of "rainbow". The word "atmosphere" may be deceptive in this context; think less "open sky" and more "sea of blindingly hot lava so hot it's gaseous, not that you have any reason to care about this distinction".
Mexican coke has been spotted at our corner convenience store in Ann Arbor, Michigan. If it's gotten this far, that pretty much proves it's not just a "Mexican" thing. There are Mexicans here, but they are a small minority compared to many other minorities here.
I'd imagine people would be willing to pay a premium for video games from other regions as well if it was possible to play them....
You don't need to imagine, I can tell you it's true. Import video game stores have been selling Japanese games for many years. If you look a bit, you can probably find one near you. And when I say "Japanese", I mean, the exact same discs you'd pick up over there, unlocalized for English. The localization situation has been improving, with more of the quirky exotics getting localized by companies like Atlus, but there's still a lot of good stuff that doesn't make it over for one reason or another.
So, you do apparently agree that the global warming predictions have been wrong over the past ten years?
Actually, I do understand what chaotic systems are. I don't think you do. It does not mean "random", nor does it mean "magic", and it certainly doesn't mean "Well, even if my predictions are wrong I know they will eventually be right again later", which, frankly, betrays a deep misunderstanding of chaos. Chaos means that once your predictions are wrong, they will keep getting more wrong! If you can't get 10 years right, you can't get 20 years right, and you can't get 30 years right, and so on. Chaos does not mean the system will eventually come back around to your previous now-outmoded predictions.
Climate predictions have been wrong, and they were wrong in a way that was never anticipated. A chaotic system couldn't even be predicted 10 years into the future, but somehow, the chaos will resolve itself on the 100 years span, through some sort of magic. I'd ask you this: If being wrong about the climate ten years away isn't enough to falsify global warming theories, what exactly is? Since the answer appears to be "nothing".
(Yeah, I ignored the rest of your post, because it really doesn't matter. Using theories that couldn't predict the past to extract "signals" is not valid mathematics. Before we can extract a signal we first have to make correct predictions, something climate science hasn't done yet. My "more science" isn't getting done anytime soon, since even if a perfect theory arose, we'd have to wait at least ten years to even guess if it's correct. Or perhaps more, since that would just be "chaos in action", right? Of course, bear in mind that whatever answer you give here should be applied to global warming theories too. They haven't managed 10+ years of correctness yet either.)
it's absolutely bonkers unless you know a priori (that is, before you see the data) what kind of curve you expect to see, and you fit against a reasonable sample of the data.
But we do have an expected curve. In fact, the expected curve is the entire point of this exercise! We expect that since mankind's CO2 contributions are the dominant factor in the climate on Earth that temperatures will continue up with CO2. I have endless IPCC reports that show this temperature line just going up; no error bars, no babble about "weather", just a line going up.
This line going up does not fit the data. Explaining why it doesn't fit the data doesn't change the wrongness of the predictions.
If the global warming advocates couldn't get the next 10 years right when they made their predictions in 1999, why are we still pretending that they can get the next 100 years right? If 10 years is "just weather", then so is 100!
The truth is simple. Theories based on global warming being the dominant factor in climate have failed to correctly predict the climate. This means they are wrong. No excuses, no complexity, no endless stream of words can get you out of that. That's science. Only by leaving science can you say that it was wrong, but it's right anyhow because it feels right or something. That's where we are right now with AGW. Maybe more science will find an AGW signal, but it's effectively impossible at this point that it will be even remotely as large as it has been claimed up to this point, and it seems pretty likely it'll still be swamped by natural variations.
You obviously didn't follow the link. The experiments are being done. It's military funded and they're not telling us everything, but clearly the results were good enough to continue ramping up. (Total failure would either cancel the project or move it in some other direction. Probably the former.)
and the physics dubious (the consensus is mainly on the "it's not going to work" side, but it's not clear cut)
The only such "consensus" that I know about is from a guy who used assumptions about how electrons behave based on equations based on preconditions that do not hold; I find Bussard's response compelling. I do not trust that analysis. Bussard fusion may yet not work, but not for that reason.
Besides, the time for posturing and insulting people for examining data and coming to their own conclusions is coming to a close; experimental data is at hand. It doesn't matter what theories say will or won't work when the experiment is done.
You don't appear to have actually read my message, you seem to have read what you assume my message would contain instead. If they "understood perfectly" that they will reduce their net incomes with this move, they wouldn't do it. Therefore, they don't understand.
Read that link I sent; in fact, read the book. It's quite interesting. It's counterintuitive, but quite simple and you can see examples of this stuff where ever you look.
The game companies get their cut at the time of first sale. The selling cost of the game already includes in the price the value to the customer of the ability to resell the product. The assumption the game companies are making is that if they lock this out, they can sell more product at the current prices, but instead what will happen is that they will be have to drop their prices some amount to account for the fact that it is less valuable to the purchasers.
This is a fairly standard element of elementary economics; for instance, see this chapter of Price Theory, where virtually this exact problem is problem number 12 in chapter two of the book.
Which just goes to show that for all the supposed value of an MBA, people in business still routinely fail to apply even the simplest economics to their own worlds.
There is nothing magic about science just because it is big. If anything, it is more likely to be wrong, not less. A 30-year prediction in fusion research is exactly as valuable as a 30-year prediction about the progress of any other science, which is to say, worthless.
No, it is not a promise about the progress of the actually-useful grid. Rationally, saying that the actually-useful plant is 30 years away is only barely not equivalent to saying "We do not believe this will ever be practical.", once future certainty depreciation is taken into account.
If you want fusion in any sane timeframe, keep an eye on the alternate approaches like Bussard fusion. That may not work either, but at least they're honest enough to say so, rather than pretending that success is inevitable.
E100 fuel isn't being chosen by racing because it's a "better fuel". In fact, they don't really care; what matters to them is that everybody is using the same fuel. It's being chosen in an attempt to make a decidedly non-green sport look greener. No other reason.
I can't speak for IndyCar, but I know that one of the other race series is switching to ethanol, and in conjunction with that, the maximum permitted fuel tank size is rising, because it doesn't get the same mileage and they'd have to pit a lot more often, changing the balance of the race. I consider this less than a ringing endorsement.
It puts you on the front line of seeing what decisions people are making and why. It's actually a very important perspective.
I am a developer for a company that sells products and provides in-house phone support. If you asked someone about my product and they piped up and then said at the end "I support this product", you might be tempted to say "Oh, you aren't a developer so you don't know what you're talking about." But the support dude has a better picture of some things than I do, because he's actually there, talking to customers directly, and part of my job is making sure I get that information from him. Because there's just no replacement for that sort of thing; the CEO is even further from customers than I am, my manager tries to keep on top of such things but still doesn't talk directly to customers as much as our support crew.
Of course, I have a better picture than the support dude does of some other things, too, but I'd be a moron if I discounted the support perspective because they're "below" me, or for some other dumb reason.
Running a game store may not qualify you to discuss video game company strategy, and actually Gord tries to sometimes IIRC and at that point I believe he oversteps a bit. But it's the best qualification there is for having a firm grasp on what people are looking for and how people buy, and you ignore that at your own peril... well, "your own peril" if you're a video game company, anyhow, you're probably not in any peril.
You can get this by being an employee too, but A: he did it for a very long time and B: being the business owner and being very, very directly affected by the issues will have a stronger focus on the issues than "somebody who works at Gamestop over Christmas" would.
You're assuming that nanotech and interstellar drives + enough fuel to power said interstellar drive are readily-available and cheap enough in this hypothetical civilization to make it feasible for Joe "Sixpack" E.T. to go out and buy himself a self-replicating computer-building solar-system consuming interstellar probe.
No, I'm not. I said "entity". This may be one individual, a company, a collective which we have no name for, a government, whatever.
The alternative that all the resources are so evenly spread out and no collective of any kind of sufficient size to fund this project exists (because, what, they fight too much all the time?) is the stretch.
Also, keep in mind that the emerging scientific consensus is that tool-using intelligent life is probably extremely rare in the Universe (on the order of a few such independent instances in every galaxy or so).
I said: "Is life or intelligent life or evolution profoundly less likely than we think it is?"
I recently complained that I mostly left Slashdot when people no longer even bothered actually reading the comment, in their zeal to post some zinger. I think this comment of mine rather proves the point, what with two people jumping up with objections that I had already explicitly mentioned...:-/ Guess I'll upgrade that "mostly".
"Maybe something did colonize our solar system that way, and for ethical reasons chose to simulate all future life on Earth while they tore our solar system apart for their own needs. This could even have happened a bare few years ago in real time, even as the simulation crossover point could well have been millions of years ago subjective."
One thing I forgot: Why would a civilization choose to send out such colonies? The civilization may not care, but it only takes one entity in that civilization who gets fed up with the neighbors, the restrictions, or for any other reason wants to own their own world to send out such a probe. This entity gets loaded onto the probe, goes to sleep, and wakes up in their own solar system. No issues with delay, massive economic payback for the entity that did this (energy to send probe pays off with an entire star, that's a lot of payback). In order for our galaxy not to be full of this sort of colony, it has to be the case that this is absolutely, positively never desirable. Even to an otherwise irrational entity who has the power to make this happen. Never, ever, ever.
Assuming you can't skirt around the light barrier then that basically means sending small groups of people (or aliens or whatever) across trillions of miles, probably in some kind of hibernated state, in the hope that they'll bump into a habitable somewhere, set up shop, and begin to populate.
That is a grotesquely 20th century view of interstellar colonization. It may or may not be on the edge of feasibility with fusion-based propulsion, it probably is with implausible anti-matter propulsion, but it's quite questionable whether it works physically, let alone economically.
What is way more plausible is something involving a nanotech-based seed that can start up a virtual society that fits easily within a few kilograms of payload. That seems feasible today. That doesn't seem like something we could build today, but it involves no fundamental breakthroughs in physics. This would tear apart the entire target solar system and turn it into computronium.
Two things come out of that: First, this should have happened before there was any interesting life on Earth to be ethically worried about, assuming such beings would even care. Second, we should be able to see the outcome of such radical changes as the entire solar output of stars would be used. But we don't. We just see stars.
This doesn't resolve the paradox, because our understanding of physics still says at least one civilization should have gotten to this point, and once they do, a wave of near-lightspeed colonization should still occur. (Where "near-lightspeed" may still be 10% of lightspeed or something; on this scale, it doesn't matter.) It turns out "colonization" looks nothing like it does on Star Trek, but it still is colonization and we'd still see it, if not in actual "communication". But we don't.
The Fermi paradox remains. These sorts of explanations show it to be a deeper problem than they understood in Fermi's time, but it remains. Is there something wrong with our understanding of physics? (Is the max computational limit far lower than it seems, by many orders of magnitude? Is there some easy way to build a pocket universe such that all civilizations, with 100% totality, choose to escape into a pocket universe rather than colonize this one? If so, we have no hint of that in our most sophisticated theories.) Is there something wrong with our understanding of the universe? (Are we simulated? Maybe something did colonize our solar system that way, and for ethical reasons chose to simulate all future life on Earth while they tore our solar system apart for their own needs. This could even have happened a bare few years ago in real time, even as the simulation crossover point could well have been millions of years ago subjective. Is there actually some sort of superior being preventing this from happening, a god, a God, or some sort of Saberhagen-style Berserkers? Is life or intelligent life or evolution profoundly less likely than we think it is?) As my parentheticals indicate, there are still many possibilities, but in my opinion, the Fermi paradox remains a profound challenge for the conventional, secular humanist/athiest, WYSIWYG-view of the universe. (And I do mean "challenge", not "disproof".)
I can only think of one title in Video Game History that had both dynamic maps and interactive elements that were different every time: Larn. It's a 20 year old DOS title that used nothing but ASCII characters. But hey, it rocked since it was new every time.
I almost hate to do this to you, but... are you aware that that's actually just one member of the genre called "roguelikes"? My preference is for Angband, but you should also try Nethack. There are tens of other good ones. (IIRC, Angband is closer to Larn writ large, but Nethack has its own charms.)
I'm sorry for the hundreds of hours I just sucked out of your life. Perhaps you should just ignore this message and forget about it.
And all of this manifests... how? My Roku only plays Netflix. (Or rather, only played now that I've sent it back.) How do I get it to play anything else?
Right now, it's all 100% talk, and has been for a while. GPL'ed code doesn't mean crap if I can't change the box at all.
There is unlikely to be any student assignment that can't be completed with Open Office. In my experience, there's a lot of people that still simply don't know about the alternatives, so they buy Office up-front, only to find out about Open Office later. Paying a subscription radically increases the chance that one of their friends will pass them a copy of Open Office, so Microsoft gets $15 instead of $200.
Slashdot Mirror
You're being manipulated. Evidence that Tea Partiers are violent has been almost entirely fabricated; when pressed for concrete evidence, nobody can actually produce any despite significant motivation. If you feel otherwise, please feel free to link the video on YouTube that proves your point.
Skip the part where you link to more vague hit pieces on the New York Times, please. I'm asking for concrete evidence, which in this age of video-cameras-on-every-phone is hardly asking for much.
IMHO, Tea Partiers are the ones trying to stop the full-on march to fascism, not create it. You can not create a fascist government regime by campaigning to strip the government of power! That's just stupid. Look to the ones trying to collect government power.
Unfortunately, "normal food" in the United States is actively bad for you. It's actually pretty easy to eat healthy in the US with only a little judgment, but it doesn't happen automatically the way it does in some cultures, where you'd have to go out of your way to come even close to matching our sugar and HFCS consumption. This proves rather less about the virtue of low-carb dieting and more about how nasty our current food environment is.
That doesn't even make sense. Do away with "the top" and you'll just create a new "the top" to deal with. Your view is a caricature so strange I don't even know where you got it from. From what I can see, anti-government people (which right now also include "government is good in general but right now we've got too much of it") pretty much do want to cut at all levels. I for one could live with fewer czars.
The Intellivoice sounds like a closer fit to what we're talking about, as it enabled a new form of game, rather than functioning as backwards compatibility.
No idea if that's what the original poster meant. But it definitely does show that augmenting consoles is a very old idea... older than many people reading about it. :)
Somewhere around here I still have an Intellivoice, and all four released games for it (I don't count the baseball one). You have not lived until you've heard a little 4KB cartridge (not a typo! in fact, 4KB was twice the usual size; and yes, I'm using bytes because I think measuring games in kilobits is a crock) babbling away at you. An amazing amount of voice was shoehorned into those things. Online MP3s that have samples of even a single thing it could say are themselves larger than all released games combined.
The problem you have is not that you have a wrong idea of programming, but that you have a wrong idea of mathematics. Most people only get educated into a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of mathematics and subconsciously think that something like the quadratic equation is the height of mathematical expression complexity.
However, nothing stops a mathematician from examining the consequences of much larger systems, such as might look like a program, and in fact mathematicians do. There's research into large numbers, research into large proof systems that make most programs look like small beans (go read the Principia Mathematica... or rather, go skim the Principia Mathematica and run screaming), research into all sorts of things that are definitely math but look a lot more like a program than you think if you've only been education with conventional primary school mathematics, or even if you've gotten a bachelor's degree in computer science, which does not generally cover the Curry-Howard isomorphism. (I didn't even get it in my masters program, I had to learn it myself.)
There is no feasible way of drawing a distinction between mathematics and programs. You might be able to draw a legal one, but as always happens when you try to introduce colors to bits, the coloring just won't stand up to the sort of sandblaster scrutiny that will be applied by the plaintiffs and defendants.
You might observe that few programmers appear to be thinking mathematically when they program, to which I'd follow up with an observation that no, no they don't and boy does it show! But note carefully that's a characteristic of the programmer, not the program. The programmer may not understand math, and may crank out a mathematical system of breathtaking worthlessness and with few or none of the properties the programmer would have found desirable (like "actually doing what it's supposed to do"), but it is not written into the definition of mathematics that something is only mathematics if it is "useful" or "good". It's still all just a term-rewriting system when you get down to it, and any attempt to draw a barrier around "term rewriting system" and "real-world program" is simply doomed to failure.
It's all just assembler, and all assembler can do is basic arithmetic, moving numbers around in memory in a manner very easy to characterize mathematically, and some very mathematical conditionals. You might be able to fool yourself into thinking you've somehow transcended these primitives into a "non-math" domain... but you haven't.
Who said anything about damaging to any life forms that evolved there? It doesn't matter, there isn't any sensory data available that will allow seeing anything like we see here.
Besides, it is possible to theorize about what life forms could exist there. If you agree that for any definition of life that is useful, it must be able to perform some computation (in a physical sense) that allows it to stay ahead of entropy, then information theory has a lot to say about what conditions life could exist in. High temperatures have too much entropy for any conceivable process to overcome them. While life on Earth itself demonstrates that we are not necessarily at the top end of the possible temperature scale, you're not going to see life in molten rock or in a star. There aren't any processes that could remove entropy from a system faster than the local environment is shoving it in, so therefore, no meaningful information-rich structure can survive.
Very high heat environments are not the places to be looking for life.
I would also observe that "molten rock" is not famous for its transparency, let alone "gaseous rock". It may be an "atmosphere", but there won't be anybody observing any sort of "rainbow". The word "atmosphere" may be deceptive in this context; think less "open sky" and more "sea of blindingly hot lava so hot it's gaseous, not that you have any reason to care about this distinction".
Mexican coke has been spotted at our corner convenience store in Ann Arbor, Michigan. If it's gotten this far, that pretty much proves it's not just a "Mexican" thing. There are Mexicans here, but they are a small minority compared to many other minorities here.
You don't need to imagine, I can tell you it's true. Import video game stores have been selling Japanese games for many years. If you look a bit, you can probably find one near you. And when I say "Japanese", I mean, the exact same discs you'd pick up over there, unlocalized for English. The localization situation has been improving, with more of the quirky exotics getting localized by companies like Atlus, but there's still a lot of good stuff that doesn't make it over for one reason or another.
So, you do apparently agree that the global warming predictions have been wrong over the past ten years?
Actually, I do understand what chaotic systems are. I don't think you do. It does not mean "random", nor does it mean "magic", and it certainly doesn't mean "Well, even if my predictions are wrong I know they will eventually be right again later", which, frankly, betrays a deep misunderstanding of chaos. Chaos means that once your predictions are wrong, they will keep getting more wrong! If you can't get 10 years right, you can't get 20 years right, and you can't get 30 years right, and so on. Chaos does not mean the system will eventually come back around to your previous now-outmoded predictions.
Climate predictions have been wrong, and they were wrong in a way that was never anticipated. A chaotic system couldn't even be predicted 10 years into the future, but somehow, the chaos will resolve itself on the 100 years span, through some sort of magic. I'd ask you this: If being wrong about the climate ten years away isn't enough to falsify global warming theories, what exactly is? Since the answer appears to be "nothing".
(Yeah, I ignored the rest of your post, because it really doesn't matter. Using theories that couldn't predict the past to extract "signals" is not valid mathematics. Before we can extract a signal we first have to make correct predictions, something climate science hasn't done yet. My "more science" isn't getting done anytime soon, since even if a perfect theory arose, we'd have to wait at least ten years to even guess if it's correct. Or perhaps more, since that would just be "chaos in action", right? Of course, bear in mind that whatever answer you give here should be applied to global warming theories too. They haven't managed 10+ years of correctness yet either.)
But we do have an expected curve. In fact, the expected curve is the entire point of this exercise! We expect that since mankind's CO2 contributions are the dominant factor in the climate on Earth that temperatures will continue up with CO2. I have endless IPCC reports that show this temperature line just going up; no error bars, no babble about "weather", just a line going up.
This line going up does not fit the data. Explaining why it doesn't fit the data doesn't change the wrongness of the predictions.
If the global warming advocates couldn't get the next 10 years right when they made their predictions in 1999, why are we still pretending that they can get the next 100 years right? If 10 years is "just weather", then so is 100!
The truth is simple. Theories based on global warming being the dominant factor in climate have failed to correctly predict the climate. This means they are wrong. No excuses, no complexity, no endless stream of words can get you out of that. That's science. Only by leaving science can you say that it was wrong, but it's right anyhow because it feels right or something. That's where we are right now with AGW. Maybe more science will find an AGW signal, but it's effectively impossible at this point that it will be even remotely as large as it has been claimed up to this point, and it seems pretty likely it'll still be swamped by natural variations.
You obviously didn't follow the link. The experiments are being done. It's military funded and they're not telling us everything, but clearly the results were good enough to continue ramping up. (Total failure would either cancel the project or move it in some other direction. Probably the former.)
The only such "consensus" that I know about is from a guy who used assumptions about how electrons behave based on equations based on preconditions that do not hold; I find Bussard's response compelling. I do not trust that analysis. Bussard fusion may yet not work, but not for that reason.
Besides, the time for posturing and insulting people for examining data and coming to their own conclusions is coming to a close; experimental data is at hand. It doesn't matter what theories say will or won't work when the experiment is done.
The latest Bussard fusion news, from yesterday. Fairly encouraging; it's hard to estimate exactly how successful the tests were but we can rule out total failure, I think.
I would currently place Bussard's success probability as much higher than ITER's.
You don't appear to have actually read my message, you seem to have read what you assume my message would contain instead. If they "understood perfectly" that they will reduce their net incomes with this move, they wouldn't do it. Therefore, they don't understand.
Read that link I sent; in fact, read the book. It's quite interesting. It's counterintuitive, but quite simple and you can see examples of this stuff where ever you look.
The game companies get their cut at the time of first sale. The selling cost of the game already includes in the price the value to the customer of the ability to resell the product. The assumption the game companies are making is that if they lock this out, they can sell more product at the current prices, but instead what will happen is that they will be have to drop their prices some amount to account for the fact that it is less valuable to the purchasers.
This is a fairly standard element of elementary economics; for instance, see this chapter of Price Theory, where virtually this exact problem is problem number 12 in chapter two of the book.
Which just goes to show that for all the supposed value of an MBA, people in business still routinely fail to apply even the simplest economics to their own worlds.
There is nothing magic about science just because it is big. If anything, it is more likely to be wrong, not less. A 30-year prediction in fusion research is exactly as valuable as a 30-year prediction about the progress of any other science, which is to say, worthless.
No, it is not a promise about the progress of the actually-useful grid. Rationally, saying that the actually-useful plant is 30 years away is only barely not equivalent to saying "We do not believe this will ever be practical.", once future certainty depreciation is taken into account.
If you want fusion in any sane timeframe, keep an eye on the alternate approaches like Bussard fusion. That may not work either, but at least they're honest enough to say so, rather than pretending that success is inevitable.
E100 fuel isn't being chosen by racing because it's a "better fuel". In fact, they don't really care; what matters to them is that everybody is using the same fuel. It's being chosen in an attempt to make a decidedly non-green sport look greener. No other reason.
I can't speak for IndyCar, but I know that one of the other race series is switching to ethanol, and in conjunction with that, the maximum permitted fuel tank size is rising, because it doesn't get the same mileage and they'd have to pit a lot more often, changing the balance of the race. I consider this less than a ringing endorsement.
Ah, the I want you to hit me as hard as you can approach?
It puts you on the front line of seeing what decisions people are making and why. It's actually a very important perspective.
I am a developer for a company that sells products and provides in-house phone support. If you asked someone about my product and they piped up and then said at the end "I support this product", you might be tempted to say "Oh, you aren't a developer so you don't know what you're talking about." But the support dude has a better picture of some things than I do, because he's actually there, talking to customers directly, and part of my job is making sure I get that information from him. Because there's just no replacement for that sort of thing; the CEO is even further from customers than I am, my manager tries to keep on top of such things but still doesn't talk directly to customers as much as our support crew.
Of course, I have a better picture than the support dude does of some other things, too, but I'd be a moron if I discounted the support perspective because they're "below" me, or for some other dumb reason.
Running a game store may not qualify you to discuss video game company strategy, and actually Gord tries to sometimes IIRC and at that point I believe he oversteps a bit. But it's the best qualification there is for having a firm grasp on what people are looking for and how people buy, and you ignore that at your own peril... well, "your own peril" if you're a video game company, anyhow, you're probably not in any peril.
You can get this by being an employee too, but A: he did it for a very long time and B: being the business owner and being very, very directly affected by the issues will have a stronger focus on the issues than "somebody who works at Gamestop over Christmas" would.
No, I'm not. I said "entity". This may be one individual, a company, a collective which we have no name for, a government, whatever.
The alternative that all the resources are so evenly spread out and no collective of any kind of sufficient size to fund this project exists (because, what, they fight too much all the time?) is the stretch.
I said: "Is life or intelligent life or evolution profoundly less likely than we think it is?"
I recently complained that I mostly left Slashdot when people no longer even bothered actually reading the comment, in their zeal to post some zinger. I think this comment of mine rather proves the point, what with two people jumping up with objections that I had already explicitly mentioned... :-/ Guess I'll upgrade that "mostly".
"Maybe something did colonize our solar system that way, and for ethical reasons chose to simulate all future life on Earth while they tore our solar system apart for their own needs. This could even have happened a bare few years ago in real time, even as the simulation crossover point could well have been millions of years ago subjective."
One thing I forgot: Why would a civilization choose to send out such colonies? The civilization may not care, but it only takes one entity in that civilization who gets fed up with the neighbors, the restrictions, or for any other reason wants to own their own world to send out such a probe. This entity gets loaded onto the probe, goes to sleep, and wakes up in their own solar system. No issues with delay, massive economic payback for the entity that did this (energy to send probe pays off with an entire star, that's a lot of payback). In order for our galaxy not to be full of this sort of colony, it has to be the case that this is absolutely, positively never desirable. Even to an otherwise irrational entity who has the power to make this happen. Never, ever, ever.
That is a grotesquely 20th century view of interstellar colonization. It may or may not be on the edge of feasibility with fusion-based propulsion, it probably is with implausible anti-matter propulsion, but it's quite questionable whether it works physically, let alone economically.
What is way more plausible is something involving a nanotech-based seed that can start up a virtual society that fits easily within a few kilograms of payload. That seems feasible today. That doesn't seem like something we could build today, but it involves no fundamental breakthroughs in physics. This would tear apart the entire target solar system and turn it into computronium.
Two things come out of that: First, this should have happened before there was any interesting life on Earth to be ethically worried about, assuming such beings would even care. Second, we should be able to see the outcome of such radical changes as the entire solar output of stars would be used. But we don't. We just see stars.
This doesn't resolve the paradox, because our understanding of physics still says at least one civilization should have gotten to this point, and once they do, a wave of near-lightspeed colonization should still occur. (Where "near-lightspeed" may still be 10% of lightspeed or something; on this scale, it doesn't matter.) It turns out "colonization" looks nothing like it does on Star Trek, but it still is colonization and we'd still see it, if not in actual "communication". But we don't.
The Fermi paradox remains. These sorts of explanations show it to be a deeper problem than they understood in Fermi's time, but it remains. Is there something wrong with our understanding of physics? (Is the max computational limit far lower than it seems, by many orders of magnitude? Is there some easy way to build a pocket universe such that all civilizations, with 100% totality, choose to escape into a pocket universe rather than colonize this one? If so, we have no hint of that in our most sophisticated theories.) Is there something wrong with our understanding of the universe? (Are we simulated? Maybe something did colonize our solar system that way, and for ethical reasons chose to simulate all future life on Earth while they tore our solar system apart for their own needs. This could even have happened a bare few years ago in real time, even as the simulation crossover point could well have been millions of years ago subjective. Is there actually some sort of superior being preventing this from happening, a god, a God, or some sort of Saberhagen-style Berserkers? Is life or intelligent life or evolution profoundly less likely than we think it is?) As my parentheticals indicate, there are still many possibilities, but in my opinion, the Fermi paradox remains a profound challenge for the conventional, secular humanist/athiest, WYSIWYG-view of the universe. (And I do mean "challenge", not "disproof".)
I almost hate to do this to you, but... are you aware that that's actually just one member of the genre called "roguelikes"? My preference is for Angband, but you should also try Nethack. There are tens of other good ones. (IIRC, Angband is closer to Larn writ large, but Nethack has its own charms.)
I'm sorry for the hundreds of hours I just sucked out of your life. Perhaps you should just ignore this message and forget about it.
And all of this manifests... how? My Roku only plays Netflix. (Or rather, only played now that I've sent it back.) How do I get it to play anything else?
Right now, it's all 100% talk, and has been for a while. GPL'ed code doesn't mean crap if I can't change the box at all.
There is unlikely to be any student assignment that can't be completed with Open Office. In my experience, there's a lot of people that still simply don't know about the alternatives, so they buy Office up-front, only to find out about Open Office later. Paying a subscription radically increases the chance that one of their friends will pass them a copy of Open Office, so Microsoft gets $15 instead of $200.