I don't blame objects. I just control the objects as a way to keep the people from getting out of control. That's why we have drivers licenses. Maybe if we required anyone who wanted a gun to have training and regular tests of competence for their guns, and insurance, and register each gun, and get it inspected every year, and require each gun to have safety features the way that cars have antilock brakes, airbags and seatbelts, guns might be dragged back into some kind of safe degree of use. Since Americans demonstrate every year that the unrestrained, even underrestrained keeping and bearing arms is beyond their competence to manage, we need more restrictions on them.
But instead, gun fetishists act like guns don't kill over 29,000 Americans every year.
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
A well regulated ("supplied") militia is not strictly necessary to the security of a free state, as the past two centuries of freedom have demonstrated. We have that security, but we have a huge standing army instead of a militia. Though we do have a National Guard of (fairly) well supplied state militias, they have not completely protected that security, nor have they ever successfully protected a state against a tyrannical Federal government, and are unnecessary to protect against the many threats that our standing army protects us from.
Maybe we'd be more free with well supplied militias instead of the standing army that gets us into so much trouble (like driving us into Iraq, and into Vietnam, and into all manner of covert wars between, and squandering budgets on crony contractors...). But we're not backing up the 2nd Amendment by disbanding the Federal military or tearing down the Pentagon.
The 2nd Amendment is wrong. It's one of only two Constitutional instructions that justify themselves with an excuse (the other is copyright, which is also a compromise that's long outlived its usefulness or sanity). It should be repealed and replaced with something more fundamental to actual rights, like the right to bear arms that are necessary, not a blanket decree that arms are necessary. If the arms dealers weren't so powerful throughout our history, we'd already have repealed it, like other rules that conflict with people's lives in the real world.
Unfortunately, we've got the Amendment. Until we do repeal it, we've got to live with the violent, mass murderous consequences.
Finally our millions of fellow citizens can protect the security of our free states with guns from all the gross tyrannies perpetrated on us, like the attacks on practically every other Amendment in the Bill of Rights, and all throughout the Constitution. Those guns are our guarantee of liberty, and I expect those people with those guns to get out into the streets right away to fight off the tyrants. Thanks guys!
Today it's possible to do anything with Java, but no one developer can do everything -- there simply aren't enough hours in the day to learn it all.
Yes, after all, there are several other languages with which a single developer can do everything that computers can do these days. Somehow, though, I can't think of any.
What the hell does that have to do with whether opening Java's source is useful or not? What the hell does any of those complaints have to do with opening Java?
Something, maybe. But somehow, though, I can't think of it. Maybe if I were thinking in the right language, it would come to me.
Right there in the PopSci intro page to its slideshow, they say
the World Bank estimates that 16 of the world's 20 most polluted cities are found in China's industrial areas.
Then the slideshow presents "the World's 10 worst cities" (the title of the article), but only one is in China.
Let's say that China's 16 polluted cities are the least polluted of the 20 worst (there's no reason to believe that, but it's the minimum assumption). That means that #6-10 are Chinese. But somehow only one of them makes it to the list.
These cities are all polluted. How many are on the list of "the World's Most Secretly Polluted Cities", like ones in China, Russia and elsewhere that outsiders just aren't allowed to check out? How many African cities are polluted, but no one bothers to check? How many American cities are polluted, but the EPA is ordered to lie about them or ignore them?
I mean, if the reports can't even tell the truth about "20 - 16 = 4, not 9", how do we expect to learn the truth about something less obvious?
No, I don't subscribe to a deterministic genetic model of intelligence. Nor do I seem to in this discussion, where I have not cited that model, and have cited facts and logic contrary to that model.
However, if you are determined to defend your idea of intelligence regardless of the facts and logic I bring to dispute it, you could see it that way. You have failed to rebut a single point I've made, that I've backed up. You haven't backed up any of your own points, just asserted them.
I can't learn anything more from a discussion like this, and you don't seem to be either. So I'm going to move on. 'Bye.
Leonardo Davinci is reputed to be the last person who "knew everything" that there was to know during their lifetime. Even that wasn't true. But the scientific method has been the key to both creating and coping with a "data deluge".
Science suffers when there's too little data: scientists then must generate more by observation, or do something else that isn't science (and doesn't work nearly as well). Too much data is only a problem if you're willing to settle for imprecise/inaccurate results. I'm sure there are a lot more lazy scientists than since Leonardo's time, just with the inflation of the scientist population, but that doesn't mean we should dumb down scientists who just want to own a computer that spits out answers to the data they put in.
I'm still trying to find the way to determine just how much power to use in a given microwave oven to fry the RFID in a new US passport, without damaging the rest of the passport (like a burn mark, or discolored ink).
The Internet is how we cheaply destroy distance. It'll be interesting to see how US (and multinational/transnational) corporations use the Internet to ship thinking jobs outside the US where they're cheaper, even if they're not as high quality as Americans (even as American brainpower crumbles with our failing educational system and rising antiscience faithy culture).
I don't think so. The WikiMedia Foundation's benefactors show no sign of Google. Though Yahoo is listed as contributing hosting services in some unspecified amount.
The top benefactors give anywhere from $1M (for each of 3 years) to $100K (or some unspecified matching fund). I expect that if Google donated $50M, it would appear prominently on that page. Hell, if Google donated $100,000 it would be towards the top of that all too brief page.
No, it's completely obvious that most people cannot be trained to do "anything". Despite the strongest incentives, both constructive in rewards and threatening in damage, many people cannot learn to do many of the most sophisticated mental tasks, or anywhere close to it. Either in the normal course of childhood education, or through later remedial or accelerated methods.
Though that's something of a limit of how dumb we all are, that we're not smart enough to train people to do things well beyond our mutual current ability to train them to think. But if we were better at that, we'd be changing how smart they are. That would mostly require changing people's attitudes and habits, even at a very subtle level (subconscious habits like observation and association, structured analysis in verbal cues to recollection, etc). I never said that people's dumbness (or smartness) is an absolute life sentence, but it always has been, more or less, and we have no reason yet to believe that it will change qualitatively. Personality is not simply a matter of personal choice, it's largely determined by one's environment, including one's mental environment that's been determined by an accumulated lifetime of choices, some of which were made by others, such as one's parents and teachers, even if genetics plays only the smallest role of opportunity. We can't just decide in a day or a year to change our personalities, whether to become smarter or to make any of the changes that all manner of teachers, mentors and therapists take months, years or more than a lifetime to help us achieve. Of course we have to choose to change, but though that's necessary, it's not sufficient. We also need the methods of learning, and to start with a brain structured under a mind that can make that choice, that can then execute it.
You're now conflating "smart/dumb" with "ignorant/informed". The amount of info you have is related to your intellect, as your accurate and complete mental model would be empty without info, and your ability to create and maintain that model is largely your ability to gain, keep and retrieve that info. But without smarts, the COBOL programmer would never become one, or would struggle (sacrificing most time and capacity to learn much else) to become just that.
And you're conflating smarts with many other personal traits, as someone 2x as smart as someone their own age (which IQ very roughly measures, in a linear scale of a highly multidimensional - and otherwise nonlinear - quantity that's more qualitative than quantitative) could certainly live in a box under an underpass, but without being any less "smart". FWIW, most people living in boxes are schizophrenic, which means their mental model is of an inside world, not the one outside their heads that we all share. So they could possibly a kind of "parallel" smart, with high performance in the part of the mental model that depicts the outside world (including abstractions, like mathematics or language) that we all share. "Idiot savants", like something like 10% of all "autistic" people are claimed to be, can be extremely smart in some very specialized "trick" areas, like "lightning calculators" or uncanny multilingual abilities, but too dumb to tie their shoes or count their change, drive a car or even talk with other people in the room.
You're repeatedly conflating "smart" with various social value characteristics. It's not the same. Intellect, as I said, is all a matter of one's mental model and how one makes, keeps and uses it. That doesn't mean anything else except the ability to anticipate what will be found or happen in the real world. Knowing that one's model is more complete and/or detailed than other people's doesn't necessarily make one better than another whose isn't. Though usually smarter people are more valuable to themselves and others than if they were dumb (political utility of dumb masses aside). That is why the most intelligent people are almost always among any society's most venerated members, even if they and their soci
Maps.Google.com now includes a Wikipedia article layer along with other layers like traffic, terrain, streets and satellites. The layer is referred to as "Wikipedia"; the articles are shown as Wikipedia's trademarked logo icon on the map. Click the an icon and its linked article content pops up right in the browser (or Google Earth, if that's the viewer you're using) window.
That's fair use of Wikipedia's open content, so Google isn't required to pay Wikipedia a license fee or anything. But Google is obviously getting a huge value out of including Wikipedia content in Google's app and UI, including the Wikipedia logo, for which Google is making $BILLIONS a year, and its place in the stock market protected by cobranding with Wikipedia. I see no sign that Google is paying Wikipedia for all that traffic Google gets paid for which Wikipedia must pay to support on Wikipedia's servers.
That's an excellent feature of Google Maps, and probably completely blows away competitors like MapQuest and Yahoo Maps. Google should pay Wikipedia whatever it costs to operate the servers that are making Google so many $billions, and even more to keep Wikipedia the excellent resource that Google exploits so well. Probably at least $50 million a year would be good, and just another investment in Google's auxiliary infrastructure.
Or Google could just be evil and get it for free while millions of other people pay Google's tab.
No, there are indeed dumb and smart people. It's mostly personality, but there are certainly dumb and smart people. Intelligence is simply the accuracy of the model of the world outside your skull that you carry around inside your skull, and your ability (including your tendency) to keep that model updated. The outside world is big and complex, and different people's models have more or less detail in different areas. But though no one's model is complete and accurate in every way, there are indeed vast numbers of people who don't have a model that's accurate at all in any way. Those people are dumb. Some people are like that, but have a specialty or two with higher accuracy, and have some smarts, though it might be limited to one field or just a few. Other people's models are more complete, and some people are just good at keeping their model in sync with the outside world in every way that they come in contact with.
You are conflating "smart" with "valuable". While smart is usually valuable to someone, it's far from the only basis of value. Moms don't need to be smart to be valuable to their children, and bricklayers don't need to be smart to be valuable to architects.
If you can't tell that most people are dumb, you just haven't gotten to know enough people. I envy you.
Silicon is a metalloid, which has some properties of a metal (or some degree of those properties), and some properties that nonmetals have instead. That's why it can be made into a semiconductor.
That isn't news. This is the big story of 20th Century technology. Exploiting the glass properties of this metalloid is the real news.
I think humans like the idea of mechanical slaves so much that we're working as hard as we can to become stupid and mechanical ourselves, so they can understand us better and do the work for our lazy asses.
It seems to me that a pair of domes, one snapping just inside the other, could trap a sheet of plastic between them to seal perfectly at the edges of the facets, and distribute all the loads across the entire microfibrous sheet material as well as the polyhedral structure of the edges. Then vents could be cut in some facets, or sections of the sheet could be porous, starting from a sealed environment and making the desired "leakiness" down from there.
The sheet could be bands of material, rather than one large sheet, so long as the band is wider than the longest edge of the largest facet. Or even a "shingling" effect with narrower bands that span across a facet that's taller than the band across it is wide, so long as the bands are wrapped from the bottom of the dome up, so the higher rounds overlap on the outside the rounds lower than them, like an ace bandage around a limb. Clamping the strips between the concentric "snaptogether" domes could leave one unclamped edge of the band flanged out from the clamped edge, as "flashing" integrated with the dome that could cover the joint with an "accessory" module that extends out from that edge.
You'd just erect the first dome, then wrap it in the plastic, then lower the second, slightly larger dome over it to clamp them together with the wrapping trapped in place. Insert extra modules (like and adjacent dome joined at a facet (or a few, sacrificing their few interstitial edges) under any flash flanges, and presto: a sealed dome system.
I wonder whether domes could be erected quickly and easily enough around buildings for temporary protection from hurricanes, with a day's notice. Do you have citations showing that a 20m dome can survive a Cat5 hurricane (though not a flood or storm surge unless other methods were added to mitigate those effects) or F5 tornado? Would the pressure from the storm possibly leave the dome intact, but turn its contents into a margarita blender? Maybe quick, cheap temporary domes could be deployed after a storm has damaged/destroyed buildings in an area, as quick, strong temporary shelter under which recovery efforts could start safely, or even just protect from further damage (including robbery).
Most people can't even do a single job at a time competently, because they can't concentrate very well on anything. Some people can switch concentration among several focused subjects. Some of those people benefit from the subconscious working away while their conscious is working on the foreground task. And some of those people need so much stimulation at both conscious and subconscious levels that they need to multitask to stay interested at all. And of that last refined group, some of them work better when so stimulated and loaded up.
Yes, very productive smart people are the elite of the elite. Don't try this at home - professional driver on a closed course (not really, but we tell you that so you don't hurt yourself trying to keep up).
But of course the dumber people can't relate, and will first all try to do what smart people make look easy, and then will try to tell everyone, including the smart people, that one should try.
Fortunately, running circles around dumb people is what really smart people eat for breakfast.
I've been inside two geodesic dome houses, and neither of them leaked, nor were they shingled (which seems like a big pain in the ass completely contrary to the principle of the dome). The residents were very happy with the living conditions, and not just because they were into "science fiction". One had lived in it since the 1970s, and the other had worked pretty hard to get to be the latest resident of one that dated from a few years earlier.
The interior of the domes had cubical/rectangular rooms built within them, with the spaces between then and the dome structure used for storage, not living space. Nothing stops anyone from hanging floors inside the dome, or hanging walls from the floors. And above 3m high, the top floor can have a dome ceiling. The structure itself is very strong, so you can hang all kinds of stuff off it, like a hot tub on a non-reinforced floor (because it's hanging inside a distributed load webbing, not standing on a compressed pillar). The point is to use a very small amount of material and not have to worry about straining the structure as you do things with it.
I guess if you're like the hippies who just bought Stewart Brand's _Whole Earth Catalog_ as a conversation piece, a coffeetable book (rather than a book about how to make or do without coffee tables), you would just use a geodesic dome as a conversation piece. You'd fail to clamp plastic sheeting along the joints or caulk the joints properly, but you'd probably do that wrong on your regular old house, too.
Fuller was a geometer, a mathematician, not a magician. His designs can be executed spectacularly wrong, just as they're spectacularly right when executed right.
Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) is responsible for this abominable privacy invasion. Yes, he's the guy who made a big show of filibustering the FISA revisions that included telco amnesty for violating it (and the Wiretap Act, thousands or millions of times) earlier this year as he ran for president. FWIW, that FISA telco amnesty is heading to passage in the House today, after passing the Senate months ago and getting a "compromise" papered over to force the courts to give the amnesty according to controived legal technicalities. I haven't heard Dodd complaining lately, despite this endrun around his fillibuster.
But I guess that since Dodd's been taking bribes for decades as Senate Banking Committee Chair (or Ranking Member, when Republicans are the majority), and banks will get a lot more transaction processing work from the government (paid by our taxes), his position is bought and paid for.
This invasion is perfectly complementary to the FISA-breaking warrantless wiretapping that telcos want amnesty for. What the hell kind of right to privacy survives the government tracking our every financial transaction, for datamining and other snooping?
This country has gone insane. And by "this country" I mean the politicians and their corporate sponsors, as well as the hundreds of millions of people just watching them get away with it.
The supercomputer has a peak performance of 557 teraflops and achieved a speed of 450.3 teraflops on the Linpack application
The PS3's RSX video chip from nVidia does 1.8TFLOPS on specialized graphics instructions. If you're rendering, you get close to that performance. The PS3's CPU, the Cell, gets theoretical 204GFLOPS on its more general purpose (than the RSX) onchip DSP-type SPEs, and some more on its onchip 3.4GHz PPC. A higher end Cell with 8 (instead of 7 - less one for "chip utilities" - in the PS3's Cell) delivers about 100GFLOPS on Linpack 4096x4096. Overall a PS3 has about 2TFLOPS, so 278 PS3s have a theoretical peak equal to this supercomputer. But they'd cost only $11,200. YMMV.
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I don't blame objects. I just control the objects as a way to keep the people from getting out of control. That's why we have drivers licenses. Maybe if we required anyone who wanted a gun to have training and regular tests of competence for their guns, and insurance, and register each gun, and get it inspected every year, and require each gun to have safety features the way that cars have antilock brakes, airbags and seatbelts, guns might be dragged back into some kind of safe degree of use. Since Americans demonstrate every year that the unrestrained, even underrestrained keeping and bearing arms is beyond their competence to manage, we need more restrictions on them.
But instead, gun fetishists act like guns don't kill over 29,000 Americans every year.
A well regulated ("supplied") militia is not strictly necessary to the security of a free state, as the past two centuries of freedom have demonstrated. We have that security, but we have a huge standing army instead of a militia. Though we do have a National Guard of (fairly) well supplied state militias, they have not completely protected that security, nor have they ever successfully protected a state against a tyrannical Federal government, and are unnecessary to protect against the many threats that our standing army protects us from.
Maybe we'd be more free with well supplied militias instead of the standing army that gets us into so much trouble (like driving us into Iraq, and into Vietnam, and into all manner of covert wars between, and squandering budgets on crony contractors...). But we're not backing up the 2nd Amendment by disbanding the Federal military or tearing down the Pentagon.
The 2nd Amendment is wrong. It's one of only two Constitutional instructions that justify themselves with an excuse (the other is copyright, which is also a compromise that's long outlived its usefulness or sanity). It should be repealed and replaced with something more fundamental to actual rights, like the right to bear arms that are necessary, not a blanket decree that arms are necessary. If the arms dealers weren't so powerful throughout our history, we'd already have repealed it, like other rules that conflict with people's lives in the real world.
Unfortunately, we've got the Amendment. Until we do repeal it, we've got to live with the violent, mass murderous consequences.
Finally our millions of fellow citizens can protect the security of our free states with guns from all the gross tyrannies perpetrated on us, like the attacks on practically every other Amendment in the Bill of Rights, and all throughout the Constitution. Those guns are our guarantee of liberty, and I expect those people with those guns to get out into the streets right away to fight off the tyrants. Thanks guys!
Yes, after all, there are several other languages with which a single developer can do everything that computers can do these days. Somehow, though, I can't think of any.
What the hell does that have to do with whether opening Java's source is useful or not? What the hell does any of those complaints have to do with opening Java?
Something, maybe. But somehow, though, I can't think of it. Maybe if I were thinking in the right language, it would come to me.
Right there in the PopSci intro page to its slideshow, they say
Then the slideshow presents "the World's 10 worst cities" (the title of the article), but only one is in China.
Let's say that China's 16 polluted cities are the least polluted of the 20 worst (there's no reason to believe that, but it's the minimum assumption). That means that #6-10 are Chinese. But somehow only one of them makes it to the list.
These cities are all polluted. How many are on the list of "the World's Most Secretly Polluted Cities", like ones in China, Russia and elsewhere that outsiders just aren't allowed to check out? How many African cities are polluted, but no one bothers to check? How many American cities are polluted, but the EPA is ordered to lie about them or ignore them?
I mean, if the reports can't even tell the truth about "20 - 16 = 4, not 9", how do we expect to learn the truth about something less obvious?
No, I don't subscribe to a deterministic genetic model of intelligence. Nor do I seem to in this discussion, where I have not cited that model, and have cited facts and logic contrary to that model.
However, if you are determined to defend your idea of intelligence regardless of the facts and logic I bring to dispute it, you could see it that way. You have failed to rebut a single point I've made, that I've backed up. You haven't backed up any of your own points, just asserted them.
I can't learn anything more from a discussion like this, and you don't seem to be either. So I'm going to move on. 'Bye.
Leonardo Davinci is reputed to be the last person who "knew everything" that there was to know during their lifetime. Even that wasn't true. But the scientific method has been the key to both creating and coping with a "data deluge".
Science suffers when there's too little data: scientists then must generate more by observation, or do something else that isn't science (and doesn't work nearly as well). Too much data is only a problem if you're willing to settle for imprecise/inaccurate results. I'm sure there are a lot more lazy scientists than since Leonardo's time, just with the inflation of the scientist population, but that doesn't mean we should dumb down scientists who just want to own a computer that spits out answers to the data they put in.
You are repeating the talking points you heard on Rush Limbo, Anonymous Republican Coward. You people define "faithy".
Tom Delay, is that you?
I'm still trying to find the way to determine just how much power to use in a given microwave oven to fry the RFID in a new US passport, without damaging the rest of the passport (like a burn mark, or discolored ink).
The Internet is how we cheaply destroy distance. It'll be interesting to see how US (and multinational/transnational) corporations use the Internet to ship thinking jobs outside the US where they're cheaper, even if they're not as high quality as Americans (even as American brainpower crumbles with our failing educational system and rising antiscience faithy culture).
I don't think so. The WikiMedia Foundation's benefactors show no sign of Google. Though Yahoo is listed as contributing hosting services in some unspecified amount.
The top benefactors give anywhere from $1M (for each of 3 years) to $100K (or some unspecified matching fund). I expect that if Google donated $50M, it would appear prominently on that page. Hell, if Google donated $100,000 it would be towards the top of that all too brief page.
No, it's completely obvious that most people cannot be trained to do "anything". Despite the strongest incentives, both constructive in rewards and threatening in damage, many people cannot learn to do many of the most sophisticated mental tasks, or anywhere close to it. Either in the normal course of childhood education, or through later remedial or accelerated methods.
Though that's something of a limit of how dumb we all are, that we're not smart enough to train people to do things well beyond our mutual current ability to train them to think. But if we were better at that, we'd be changing how smart they are. That would mostly require changing people's attitudes and habits, even at a very subtle level (subconscious habits like observation and association, structured analysis in verbal cues to recollection, etc). I never said that people's dumbness (or smartness) is an absolute life sentence, but it always has been, more or less, and we have no reason yet to believe that it will change qualitatively. Personality is not simply a matter of personal choice, it's largely determined by one's environment, including one's mental environment that's been determined by an accumulated lifetime of choices, some of which were made by others, such as one's parents and teachers, even if genetics plays only the smallest role of opportunity. We can't just decide in a day or a year to change our personalities, whether to become smarter or to make any of the changes that all manner of teachers, mentors and therapists take months, years or more than a lifetime to help us achieve. Of course we have to choose to change, but though that's necessary, it's not sufficient. We also need the methods of learning, and to start with a brain structured under a mind that can make that choice, that can then execute it.
You're now conflating "smart/dumb" with "ignorant/informed". The amount of info you have is related to your intellect, as your accurate and complete mental model would be empty without info, and your ability to create and maintain that model is largely your ability to gain, keep and retrieve that info. But without smarts, the COBOL programmer would never become one, or would struggle (sacrificing most time and capacity to learn much else) to become just that.
And you're conflating smarts with many other personal traits, as someone 2x as smart as someone their own age (which IQ very roughly measures, in a linear scale of a highly multidimensional - and otherwise nonlinear - quantity that's more qualitative than quantitative) could certainly live in a box under an underpass, but without being any less "smart". FWIW, most people living in boxes are schizophrenic, which means their mental model is of an inside world, not the one outside their heads that we all share. So they could possibly a kind of "parallel" smart, with high performance in the part of the mental model that depicts the outside world (including abstractions, like mathematics or language) that we all share. "Idiot savants", like something like 10% of all "autistic" people are claimed to be, can be extremely smart in some very specialized "trick" areas, like "lightning calculators" or uncanny multilingual abilities, but too dumb to tie their shoes or count their change, drive a car or even talk with other people in the room.
You're repeatedly conflating "smart" with various social value characteristics. It's not the same. Intellect, as I said, is all a matter of one's mental model and how one makes, keeps and uses it. That doesn't mean anything else except the ability to anticipate what will be found or happen in the real world. Knowing that one's model is more complete and/or detailed than other people's doesn't necessarily make one better than another whose isn't. Though usually smarter people are more valuable to themselves and others than if they were dumb (political utility of dumb masses aside). That is why the most intelligent people are almost always among any society's most venerated members, even if they and their soci
Maps.Google.com now includes a Wikipedia article layer along with other layers like traffic, terrain, streets and satellites. The layer is referred to as "Wikipedia"; the articles are shown as Wikipedia's trademarked logo icon on the map. Click the an icon and its linked article content pops up right in the browser (or Google Earth, if that's the viewer you're using) window.
That's fair use of Wikipedia's open content, so Google isn't required to pay Wikipedia a license fee or anything. But Google is obviously getting a huge value out of including Wikipedia content in Google's app and UI, including the Wikipedia logo, for which Google is making $BILLIONS a year, and its place in the stock market protected by cobranding with Wikipedia. I see no sign that Google is paying Wikipedia for all that traffic Google gets paid for which Wikipedia must pay to support on Wikipedia's servers.
Google's Maps pages all say at their bottom "", but Wikipedia isn't even mentioned. The Where does Google Maps get its information? "Help" page credits NAVTEQ, TeleAtlas, DigitalGlobe and MDA Federal, but not Wikipedia. The detailed instructions on using the Wikipedia layer and others doesn't credit Wikipedia, just takes credit for exposing it.
That's an excellent feature of Google Maps, and probably completely blows away competitors like MapQuest and Yahoo Maps. Google should pay Wikipedia whatever it costs to operate the servers that are making Google so many $billions, and even more to keep Wikipedia the excellent resource that Google exploits so well. Probably at least $50 million a year would be good, and just another investment in Google's auxiliary infrastructure.
Or Google could just be evil and get it for free while millions of other people pay Google's tab.
No, there are indeed dumb and smart people. It's mostly personality, but there are certainly dumb and smart people. Intelligence is simply the accuracy of the model of the world outside your skull that you carry around inside your skull, and your ability (including your tendency) to keep that model updated. The outside world is big and complex, and different people's models have more or less detail in different areas. But though no one's model is complete and accurate in every way, there are indeed vast numbers of people who don't have a model that's accurate at all in any way. Those people are dumb. Some people are like that, but have a specialty or two with higher accuracy, and have some smarts, though it might be limited to one field or just a few. Other people's models are more complete, and some people are just good at keeping their model in sync with the outside world in every way that they come in contact with.
You are conflating "smart" with "valuable". While smart is usually valuable to someone, it's far from the only basis of value. Moms don't need to be smart to be valuable to their children, and bricklayers don't need to be smart to be valuable to architects.
If you can't tell that most people are dumb, you just haven't gotten to know enough people. I envy you.
Silicon is a metalloid, which has some properties of a metal (or some degree of those properties), and some properties that nonmetals have instead. That's why it can be made into a semiconductor.
That isn't news. This is the big story of 20th Century technology. Exploiting the glass properties of this metalloid is the real news.
I think humans like the idea of mechanical slaves so much that we're working as hard as we can to become stupid and mechanical ourselves, so they can understand us better and do the work for our lazy asses.
Or maybe it's just a coincidence.
It seems to me that a pair of domes, one snapping just inside the other, could trap a sheet of plastic between them to seal perfectly at the edges of the facets, and distribute all the loads across the entire microfibrous sheet material as well as the polyhedral structure of the edges. Then vents could be cut in some facets, or sections of the sheet could be porous, starting from a sealed environment and making the desired "leakiness" down from there.
The sheet could be bands of material, rather than one large sheet, so long as the band is wider than the longest edge of the largest facet. Or even a "shingling" effect with narrower bands that span across a facet that's taller than the band across it is wide, so long as the bands are wrapped from the bottom of the dome up, so the higher rounds overlap on the outside the rounds lower than them, like an ace bandage around a limb. Clamping the strips between the concentric "snaptogether" domes could leave one unclamped edge of the band flanged out from the clamped edge, as "flashing" integrated with the dome that could cover the joint with an "accessory" module that extends out from that edge.
You'd just erect the first dome, then wrap it in the plastic, then lower the second, slightly larger dome over it to clamp them together with the wrapping trapped in place. Insert extra modules (like and adjacent dome joined at a facet (or a few, sacrificing their few interstitial edges) under any flash flanges, and presto: a sealed dome system.
I wonder whether domes could be erected quickly and easily enough around buildings for temporary protection from hurricanes, with a day's notice. Do you have citations showing that a 20m dome can survive a Cat5 hurricane (though not a flood or storm surge unless other methods were added to mitigate those effects) or F5 tornado? Would the pressure from the storm possibly leave the dome intact, but turn its contents into a margarita blender? Maybe quick, cheap temporary domes could be deployed after a storm has damaged/destroyed buildings in an area, as quick, strong temporary shelter under which recovery efforts could start safely, or even just protect from further damage (including robbery).
No, you're clearly one of the dumb people who can't even do one thing at a time right. I mean, "whilst"? You've got too much time on your hands.
Most people can't even do a single job at a time competently, because they can't concentrate very well on anything. Some people can switch concentration among several focused subjects. Some of those people benefit from the subconscious working away while their conscious is working on the foreground task. And some of those people need so much stimulation at both conscious and subconscious levels that they need to multitask to stay interested at all. And of that last refined group, some of them work better when so stimulated and loaded up.
Yes, very productive smart people are the elite of the elite. Don't try this at home - professional driver on a closed course (not really, but we tell you that so you don't hurt yourself trying to keep up).
But of course the dumber people can't relate, and will first all try to do what smart people make look easy, and then will try to tell everyone, including the smart people, that one should try.
Fortunately, running circles around dumb people is what really smart people eat for breakfast.
I've been inside two geodesic dome houses, and neither of them leaked, nor were they shingled (which seems like a big pain in the ass completely contrary to the principle of the dome). The residents were very happy with the living conditions, and not just because they were into "science fiction". One had lived in it since the 1970s, and the other had worked pretty hard to get to be the latest resident of one that dated from a few years earlier.
The interior of the domes had cubical/rectangular rooms built within them, with the spaces between then and the dome structure used for storage, not living space. Nothing stops anyone from hanging floors inside the dome, or hanging walls from the floors. And above 3m high, the top floor can have a dome ceiling. The structure itself is very strong, so you can hang all kinds of stuff off it, like a hot tub on a non-reinforced floor (because it's hanging inside a distributed load webbing, not standing on a compressed pillar). The point is to use a very small amount of material and not have to worry about straining the structure as you do things with it.
I guess if you're like the hippies who just bought Stewart Brand's _Whole Earth Catalog_ as a conversation piece, a coffeetable book (rather than a book about how to make or do without coffee tables), you would just use a geodesic dome as a conversation piece. You'd fail to clamp plastic sheeting along the joints or caulk the joints properly, but you'd probably do that wrong on your regular old house, too.
Fuller was a geometer, a mathematician, not a magician. His designs can be executed spectacularly wrong, just as they're spectacularly right when executed right.
Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) is responsible for this abominable privacy invasion. Yes, he's the guy who made a big show of filibustering the FISA revisions that included telco amnesty for violating it (and the Wiretap Act, thousands or millions of times) earlier this year as he ran for president. FWIW, that FISA telco amnesty is heading to passage in the House today, after passing the Senate months ago and getting a "compromise" papered over to force the courts to give the amnesty according to controived legal technicalities. I haven't heard Dodd complaining lately, despite this endrun around his fillibuster.
But I guess that since Dodd's been taking bribes for decades as Senate Banking Committee Chair (or Ranking Member, when Republicans are the majority), and banks will get a lot more transaction processing work from the government (paid by our taxes), his position is bought and paid for.
This invasion is perfectly complementary to the FISA-breaking warrantless wiretapping that telcos want amnesty for. What the hell kind of right to privacy survives the government tracking our every financial transaction, for datamining and other snooping?
This country has gone insane. And by "this country" I mean the politicians and their corporate sponsors, as well as the hundreds of millions of people just watching them get away with it.
After all this time and effort, we finally found water on Mars, and we let it get away!
The Cell scored 50% of its theoretical rating on Linpack, at 100GFLOPS, as I said. For $400.
The PS3's RSX video chip from nVidia does 1.8TFLOPS on specialized graphics instructions. If you're rendering, you get close to that performance. The PS3's CPU, the Cell, gets theoretical 204GFLOPS on its more general purpose (than the RSX) onchip DSP-type SPEs, and some more on its onchip 3.4GHz PPC. A higher end Cell with 8 (instead of 7 - less one for "chip utilities" - in the PS3's Cell) delivers about 100GFLOPS on Linpack 4096x4096. Overall a PS3 has about 2TFLOPS, so 278 PS3s have a theoretical peak equal to this supercomputer. But they'd cost only $11,200. YMMV.
There's surely one way to know. But who watches their sysadmin's sysadmin?