It's a condition distinct from the healthy condition. When it's used as an excuse, it's an excuse. Alcoholism is the same way - it's a treatable personality disorder with many gross physical defects, as well as the subtle physical defects of the nervous and hormone system inherent in any psychological problem. Having a disease means responsiblity for getting treatment, when possible, not an excuse.
Your physical condition is perfectly healthy. Martial arts (if you're talking about East Asian, as the term usually indicates) were developed by smaller, unarmed healthy people to exploit their smaller size.
You've got some kind of resentment towards people with diseases, that equates the conditions with less responsibility. That's a disease, a personality disorder, whether you realize it or not. However minor, common and accepted it might be.
It's documented in the Wikipedia. I first used it during the 1970s, learning math as ratios and the definition of "*" as "by, of, for, to". In fact Greeks used ":" as a ratio, rather than our "/" or "÷"; their math was integral and ratiocentric (even "rational"). I started using it again in Web postings to help people recognize that they should multiply by the given denominator, rather than divide by it.
If you just plug the hours into the rate 2km/h for 3 h = 2/3 = 0.666... km/h (wrong) 2km:h * 3h = 2*3 = 6 km:h (right)
I put "pollution" in quotes because it's not like other pollution - it "explodes" in total mass->energy conversion. On Earth, it would certainly do a lot of damage, probably killing any people anywhere nearby, consuming whatever other life and equipment was nearby, irradiating for hundreds or thousands of miles. And upsetting an international weapons balance of terror that today looks like it's about 15 minutes from nuclear war already.
No one knows what "reasonable care" is for the material - it's not even brand new in any meaningful quantity. Our track record with other concentrated dangerous material is fairly bad, with every kind leaking and "falling into the wrong hands". The unprecedented danger of "uncontained" antimatter makes plutonium look like gunpowder: no extra technology is needed to "make a bomb", probably no telltale radiation is emitted until it's too late.
It's completely obvious, and should go without saying, that antimatter has no place on Earth, except perhaps in the tiniest miniscule quantities made in labs. That exist for maybe nanoseconds. Until we have enough to be dangerous, with containment tech that could allow it to proliferate or just possibly be mishandled.
The reason to make it in space is not the normal cost of launching it - I never said that. The reason is that it is obviously much too dangerous to risk interaction with humans on our own planet. Haven't you been following the news? I don't mean the past 60 years of news, starting with America nuking another country because it was necessary. Or the generations of irresponsible testing that's polluted America and the world, Or the leaks and explosions that have made us wish Chernobyl, for example, were on the Moon. I mean the news about various countries pushing us closer to extinction every day in a nuclear arms race. Humans are way too incompetent at dealing with each other to have antimatter within reach of these politicians, criminals and businessmen, the terrorists who are their stock in trade.
Antimatter factories orbiting the Moon wouldn't have to cost $TRILLIONS. Hundreds of billions, maybe. $500B is 5B barrels of $100 oil. At 2005 daily consumption of 85Mbbl:day, that's less than 2 months. Even the US share is about 8 months. Investing in the technology I mention would launch American industry fully into near space, built on abundant solar, colonize the solar system, and help keep weapons and extremely dangerous "toxics" off the Earth. And jumpstart an entire class of space manufacturing industry, not just antimatter production. Most of the war threats at the nuclear scale derive from international energy scarcity, which would be diminished by the results. If we spend the $500B, or even trillions, on oil, all we get is a few months or years burning up the little oil we've got into our atmosphere, until we're even worse off. Investing in sustainable energy industries, especially by switching to abundant energy in American (rather than foreign) hands, means a lot safer planet, extended into the solar system.
The original reply was gibberish. It went downhill from there, including the latest - your post. You need a caning, but I decline to participate in any of your weirdo fantasies. </CACKLING>
There's no people, or any other life on the Moon. It's bombarded with cosmic rays and other lethal environmental factors - that's why humans wear space suits and stay inside. ANWR's environment certainly is attached directly to the rest of the Earth. Not only in the extremely productive aquatic biome and the many land ecologies, to say nothing of the water cycles. It's also made of matter, which converts totally to energy when touched by antimatter. The Moon is separated from the Earth by a huge safety gap. You compare it to ANWR only because you're an Anonymous Coward who also hates the ANWR, thinking it's merely a "far away pristine environment", which people would want to protect only to protect any people there. Ignoramus.
The Moon is very well suited to industrial exploitation. Much more so than your ridiculous suggestion of ANWR, obviously made as a feeble joke, though now you're insisting it's serious. Hence my easy identification of your post's nonsense. The worst kind of nonsense: wrong, wrongheaded, and annoying.
You have now made it abundantly clear that you're an idiot. Stop trying so hard - you're just getting more idiotic, when you started out too idiotic already.
m-s can be pronounced "meters minus seconds". "m/s" can be pronounced "meters divided by seconds". "m:s" can be pronounced only "meters to seconds", "meters per second" or "meters by seconds", all of which indicate a product, not a dividend. I've been using the symbol in math and science for a couple of decades myself, and haven't had problems being understood. Until the poster who so obnoxiously attacked my post, who still can't grasp the basic concept - out of antipathy, not ambiguity.
You know HTML, SQL, CSS and are learning Perl. You're doing so out of enthusiasm. You're a geek.
Having a love life and an athletic body don't stop you from being a geek. You might not be a Linux geek, but you're a computer geek. You might be a geek, but that's not all that you are. You're intellectually curious, and you've got skills. You're more than just a "readonly geek" - you're a geek.
I agree. And the scenario is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. The Linux FS will be open source, so I can trust it more - after the usual crypto geeks have pawed through it. The MS FS, if it even were offered in spite of the MS way of "keeping it simple at the expense of security", will of course be closed source, therefore untrustable. Vista will be even more entrenched: proprietary crypto, unexamined, nearly certainly insecure, required, both for encryption and inevitable (but ineffective) DRM. Because MS is smart - but not that kind of smart.
The same people who don't distinguish properly between nerds and geeks also typically fail to distinguish between hacking and cracking. Or between producer and director. The failure of normals to accept nerds or geeks, or their differences, does not require me, a geek of many colors, to deny them my gifts.
According to the movie "Freaks", geeks are freaks by choice, not by nature. And according to Slashdot, fake nerds are nauganerds.
When people use the "/" symbol, it's hard to distinguish from its "divided by" meaning. Especially when the ratio is being used in arithmetic, as it was in the conversion I used, the ":" symbol is more clear, less ambiguous. As I showed in the link, not "everyone" uses only the "/" symbol for ratios. And ratios are absolutely not necessarily between like units, as in MPG. Ratios and the ":" symbol are exactly the accurate way to describe the relationship I mentioned.
If a reader can't understand the precise language, I can respect that - when they repond in a respectful manner. When they don't, I'm not responsible for their failure to be as clever as I am.
Using "/" for ratio units is problematic because the same symbol means "divided by", which is the inverse operation of "per", which is what the ratio actually represents. Many people use ":" to represent ratios, as I documented with a link. Just because a more useful convention is more technical than your own experience doesn't make your cruder convention more appropriate.
If you can't read ":" to understand it means a ratio, you're illiterate. If you think "immathematical" is a word, you're illiterate. If you're on the other guy's side after they insult me with their obnoxious mistake, and I merely respond in kind (with extra kind explanations), you're a jerk. If you're all of those, and an Anonymous Coward, I really don't care who's side you're on - especially if it's another Anonymous Coward.
Anonymous caribou Coward, you'd be more clear if you made any sense, or if you had the nerve to use even a real userID. So I invite you to go to ANWR, stick some antimatter up your ass, and file a full report. Anonymous illitsuitok Coward.
Most CPUs these days are largely parallel. They decompose sequential code into parallel pipelines, even to the point of speculatively computing a pipeline to keep it full, even if those results are not necessarily used by the later code - when the later code decides to execute the precomputed results, the CPU just supplies them - or discards them if the later code decides not to execute that sequence. All that sequential/parallel translation is fairly crude (compared to the elegant logic humans like to think we articulate), and every discarded sequence is wasted CPU: time, energy and opportunity. The bottleneck is the "parallelizability" of the sequential code.
And there are lots of parallel multiprocessor systems. Even a PC has a CPU, an MMU, usually a DSP for sound and a DSP (or more powerful) for video, several other CPUs (or simpler controllers) for keyboard, IDE, other buses, network, etc. The total power of those multiple chips, which can all run in parallel, is rarely used. And then of course most machines are networked, so each "local multiproc cluster" is part of a supercluster. But those complex compute topologies are very difficult to specify full task capacity with sequential languages.
We've also got FPGAs and other inherently multiprocessing architectures increasing in distribution. Unfortunately, nearly all code and coding culture is sequential. So we're dragging those new powerhouses, even more able to be more efficiently parallelized, along the same sequential path. I'm hopeful that new architectures like the Cell will transition us from sequential to parallel programming. Partly for the increased compute efficiency. But also because humans usually communicate with each other in parallel ways. Parallelizing programming can also make humans communicating with computers more familiar. That will also increase "efficiency", but in a more human guise: ease and comfort.
Intellectual curiosity doesn't make you a geek. Intellectual expertise - in any field or discipline, especially technical - makes you a geek. If you've got the rest of the package, like less physicality, fewer friends, insomnia, "microculture", Aspberger's symptoms, you're just a nerd. If you've got none of those, you're just a "normal". In that case, I feel bad for you.
If Google promised their Inet drive would be encrypted so only I could get the clear contents at my client end, I might believe them. If Microsoft tells me that, I certainly won't.
I generally agree. I also think the Moon is a great place for a laser fusion plant, especially the kind that emit a lot of neutrons.
But there's clearly momentum in the antimatter program. Financial, scientific, political. We need to look at a wide variety of energy systems, pronto - relying on petrofuel internal combustion for a century has really trashed the planet in many ways. Both antimatter and fusion programs could share a lot of lunar resources, so both communities driving us there will be more likely to get us there sooner than later.
Your point, you stupid fucking Anonymous illiterate Coward, is on the top of your head. I said "$25B:g", the article said "$250M:10mg". They're equivalent statements, Anonymous innumerate Coward asshole.
I said "According to TFA, positrons cost $25B:g" and "The Mars mission needs 10mg." At $25B:g, 10mg costs $250M.
My apologies for using the ":" character, commonly understood to mean a ratio. You do understand the distinction between the "M" and "m" characters I used, right?
According to TFA, positrons cost $25B:g to produce, though they project the cost will decrease with more R&D (more money). The Mars mission needs 10mg. The amount of energy, not dollars, required to produce the antimatter is not specified, but it's certainly larger than the amount that winds up in the produced antimatter. The antimatter will be produced at the Earth's surface, submerged in our atmosphere, where it can annihilate in contact with any of that matter it comes in contact with.
This is a perfect project to perform in space. The base lab should be on the Moon, using the vast incoming solar energy for power, lasered past the far side to power the reactor creating the antimatter. The antimatter industry is anticipating a large scale anyway, which justifies launching whatever equipment and personnel to the Moon is necessary. That should be small, because the Moon is made of materials useable for the project, including that abundant energy. And the minimization of risk of catastrophic antimatter "pollution" on (in) Earth is priceless. The launch of a new chapter in human industry in space, with specific immediate benefits including environmental protection and energy freedom, can transform our entire society for the better.
You are correct. I was thinking of a term to contrast the "nonlinear" parallel programs, and came up with the term that already means something else. Thanks for the correction.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a condition distinct from the healthy condition. When it's used as an excuse, it's an excuse. Alcoholism is the same way - it's a treatable personality disorder with many gross physical defects, as well as the subtle physical defects of the nervous and hormone system inherent in any psychological problem. Having a disease means responsiblity for getting treatment, when possible, not an excuse.
Your physical condition is perfectly healthy. Martial arts (if you're talking about East Asian, as the term usually indicates) were developed by smaller, unarmed healthy people to exploit their smaller size.
You've got some kind of resentment towards people with diseases, that equates the conditions with less responsibility. That's a disease, a personality disorder, whether you realize it or not. However minor, common and accepted it might be.
It's documented in the Wikipedia. I first used it during the 1970s, learning math as ratios and the definition of "*" as "by, of, for, to". In fact Greeks used ":" as a ratio, rather than our "/" or "÷"; their math was integral and ratiocentric (even "rational"). I started using it again in Web postings to help people recognize that they should multiply by the given denominator, rather than divide by it.
If you just plug the hours into the rate
2km/h for 3 h = 2/3 = 0.666... km/h (wrong)
2km:h * 3h = 2*3 = 6 km:h (right)
I put "pollution" in quotes because it's not like other pollution - it "explodes" in total mass->energy conversion. On Earth, it would certainly do a lot of damage, probably killing any people anywhere nearby, consuming whatever other life and equipment was nearby, irradiating for hundreds or thousands of miles. And upsetting an international weapons balance of terror that today looks like it's about 15 minutes from nuclear war already.
No one knows what "reasonable care" is for the material - it's not even brand new in any meaningful quantity. Our track record with other concentrated dangerous material is fairly bad, with every kind leaking and "falling into the wrong hands". The unprecedented danger of "uncontained" antimatter makes plutonium look like gunpowder: no extra technology is needed to "make a bomb", probably no telltale radiation is emitted until it's too late.
It's completely obvious, and should go without saying, that antimatter has no place on Earth, except perhaps in the tiniest miniscule quantities made in labs. That exist for maybe nanoseconds. Until we have enough to be dangerous, with containment tech that could allow it to proliferate or just possibly be mishandled.
The reason to make it in space is not the normal cost of launching it - I never said that. The reason is that it is obviously much too dangerous to risk interaction with humans on our own planet. Haven't you been following the news? I don't mean the past 60 years of news, starting with America nuking another country because it was necessary. Or the generations of irresponsible testing that's polluted America and the world, Or the leaks and explosions that have made us wish Chernobyl, for example, were on the Moon. I mean the news about various countries pushing us closer to extinction every day in a nuclear arms race. Humans are way too incompetent at dealing with each other to have antimatter within reach of these politicians, criminals and businessmen, the terrorists who are their stock in trade.
Antimatter factories orbiting the Moon wouldn't have to cost $TRILLIONS. Hundreds of billions, maybe. $500B is 5B barrels of $100 oil. At 2005 daily consumption of 85Mbbl:day, that's less than 2 months. Even the US share is about 8 months. Investing in the technology I mention would launch American industry fully into near space, built on abundant solar, colonize the solar system, and help keep weapons and extremely dangerous "toxics" off the Earth. And jumpstart an entire class of space manufacturing industry, not just antimatter production. Most of the war threats at the nuclear scale derive from international energy scarcity, which would be diminished by the results. If we spend the $500B, or even trillions, on oil, all we get is a few months or years burning up the little oil we've got into our atmosphere, until we're even worse off. Investing in sustainable energy industries, especially by switching to abundant energy in American (rather than foreign) hands, means a lot safer planet, extended into the solar system.
"To be great is to be misunderstood." - Jim Rose of The Residents
The original reply was gibberish. It went downhill from there, including the latest - your post. You need a caning, but I decline to participate in any of your weirdo fantasies.
</CACKLING>
What?
You're going 2 kilometers per hour. You're going for 3 hours. Do you divide the 2 kilometers by 3 hours, or multiply?
I can't believe I'm actually having this discussion.
Japanese researchers announced several months ago that they've eliminated the need for expensive acids in biodiesel reactors.
There's no people, or any other life on the Moon. It's bombarded with cosmic rays and other lethal environmental factors - that's why humans wear space suits and stay inside. ANWR's environment certainly is attached directly to the rest of the Earth. Not only in the extremely productive aquatic biome and the many land ecologies, to say nothing of the water cycles. It's also made of matter, which converts totally to energy when touched by antimatter. The Moon is separated from the Earth by a huge safety gap. You compare it to ANWR only because you're an Anonymous Coward who also hates the ANWR, thinking it's merely a "far away pristine environment", which people would want to protect only to protect any people there. Ignoramus.
The Moon is very well suited to industrial exploitation. Much more so than your ridiculous suggestion of ANWR, obviously made as a feeble joke, though now you're insisting it's serious. Hence my easy identification of your post's nonsense. The worst kind of nonsense: wrong, wrongheaded, and annoying.
You have now made it abundantly clear that you're an idiot. Stop trying so hard - you're just getting more idiotic, when you started out too idiotic already.
m-s can be pronounced "meters minus seconds". "m/s" can be pronounced "meters divided by seconds". "m:s" can be pronounced only "meters to seconds", "meters per second" or "meters by seconds", all of which indicate a product, not a dividend. I've been using the symbol in math and science for a couple of decades myself, and haven't had problems being understood. Until the poster who so obnoxiously attacked my post, who still can't grasp the basic concept - out of antipathy, not ambiguity.
You know HTML, SQL, CSS and are learning Perl. You're doing so out of enthusiasm. You're a geek.
Having a love life and an athletic body don't stop you from being a geek. You might not be a Linux geek, but you're a computer geek. You might be a geek, but that's not all that you are. You're intellectually curious, and you've got skills. You're more than just a "readonly geek" - you're a geek.
What's wrong with that?
I agree. And the scenario is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. The Linux FS will be open source, so I can trust it more - after the usual crypto geeks have pawed through it. The MS FS, if it even were offered in spite of the MS way of "keeping it simple at the expense of security", will of course be closed source, therefore untrustable. Vista will be even more entrenched: proprietary crypto, unexamined, nearly certainly insecure, required, both for encryption and inevitable (but ineffective) DRM. Because MS is smart - but not that kind of smart.
The same people who don't distinguish properly between nerds and geeks also typically fail to distinguish between hacking and cracking. Or between producer and director. The failure of normals to accept nerds or geeks, or their differences, does not require me, a geek of many colors, to deny them my gifts.
According to the movie "Freaks", geeks are freaks by choice, not by nature. And according to Slashdot, fake nerds are nauganerds.
When people use the "/" symbol, it's hard to distinguish from its "divided by" meaning. Especially when the ratio is being used in arithmetic, as it was in the conversion I used, the ":" symbol is more clear, less ambiguous. As I showed in the link, not "everyone" uses only the "/" symbol for ratios. And ratios are absolutely not necessarily between like units, as in MPG. Ratios and the ":" symbol are exactly the accurate way to describe the relationship I mentioned.
If a reader can't understand the precise language, I can respect that - when they repond in a respectful manner. When they don't, I'm not responsible for their failure to be as clever as I am.
Using "/" for ratio units is problematic because the same symbol means "divided by", which is the inverse operation of "per", which is what the ratio actually represents. Many people use ":" to represent ratios, as I documented with a link. Just because a more useful convention is more technical than your own experience doesn't make your cruder convention more appropriate.
If you can't read ":" to understand it means a ratio, you're illiterate. If you think "immathematical" is a word, you're illiterate. If you're on the other guy's side after they insult me with their obnoxious mistake, and I merely respond in kind (with extra kind explanations), you're a jerk. If you're all of those, and an Anonymous Coward, I really don't care who's side you're on - especially if it's another Anonymous Coward.
Anonymous caribou Coward, you'd be more clear if you made any sense, or if you had the nerve to use even a real userID. So I invite you to go to ANWR, stick some antimatter up your ass, and file a full report. Anonymous illitsuitok Coward.
Most CPUs these days are largely parallel. They decompose sequential code into parallel pipelines, even to the point of speculatively computing a pipeline to keep it full, even if those results are not necessarily used by the later code - when the later code decides to execute the precomputed results, the CPU just supplies them - or discards them if the later code decides not to execute that sequence. All that sequential/parallel translation is fairly crude (compared to the elegant logic humans like to think we articulate), and every discarded sequence is wasted CPU: time, energy and opportunity. The bottleneck is the "parallelizability" of the sequential code.
And there are lots of parallel multiprocessor systems. Even a PC has a CPU, an MMU, usually a DSP for sound and a DSP (or more powerful) for video, several other CPUs (or simpler controllers) for keyboard, IDE, other buses, network, etc. The total power of those multiple chips, which can all run in parallel, is rarely used. And then of course most machines are networked, so each "local multiproc cluster" is part of a supercluster. But those complex compute topologies are very difficult to specify full task capacity with sequential languages.
We've also got FPGAs and other inherently multiprocessing architectures increasing in distribution. Unfortunately, nearly all code and coding culture is sequential. So we're dragging those new powerhouses, even more able to be more efficiently parallelized, along the same sequential path. I'm hopeful that new architectures like the Cell will transition us from sequential to parallel programming. Partly for the increased compute efficiency. But also because humans usually communicate with each other in parallel ways. Parallelizing programming can also make humans communicating with computers more familiar. That will also increase "efficiency", but in a more human guise: ease and comfort.
Intellectual curiosity doesn't make you a geek. Intellectual expertise - in any field or discipline, especially technical - makes you a geek. If you've got the rest of the package, like less physicality, fewer friends, insomnia, "microculture", Aspberger's symptoms, you're just a nerd. If you've got none of those, you're just a "normal". In that case, I feel bad for you.
If Google promised their Inet drive would be encrypted so only I could get the clear contents at my client end, I might believe them. If Microsoft tells me that, I certainly won't.
I generally agree. I also think the Moon is a great place for a laser fusion plant, especially the kind that emit a lot of neutrons.
But there's clearly momentum in the antimatter program. Financial, scientific, political. We need to look at a wide variety of energy systems, pronto - relying on petrofuel internal combustion for a century has really trashed the planet in many ways. Both antimatter and fusion programs could share a lot of lunar resources, so both communities driving us there will be more likely to get us there sooner than later.
Your point, you stupid fucking Anonymous illiterate Coward, is on the top of your head. I said "$25B:g", the article said "$250M:10mg". They're equivalent statements, Anonymous innumerate Coward asshole.
I said "According to TFA, positrons cost $25B:g" and "The Mars mission needs 10mg." At $25B:g, 10mg costs $250M.
My apologies for using the ":" character, commonly understood to mean a ratio. You do understand the distinction between the "M" and "m" characters I used, right?
Your point? Or are you just melting down?
According to TFA, positrons cost $25B:g to produce, though they project the cost will decrease with more R&D (more money). The Mars mission needs 10mg. The amount of energy, not dollars, required to produce the antimatter is not specified, but it's certainly larger than the amount that winds up in the produced antimatter. The antimatter will be produced at the Earth's surface, submerged in our atmosphere, where it can annihilate in contact with any of that matter it comes in contact with.
This is a perfect project to perform in space. The base lab should be on the Moon, using the vast incoming solar energy for power, lasered past the far side to power the reactor creating the antimatter. The antimatter industry is anticipating a large scale anyway, which justifies launching whatever equipment and personnel to the Moon is necessary. That should be small, because the Moon is made of materials useable for the project, including that abundant energy. And the minimization of risk of catastrophic antimatter "pollution" on (in) Earth is priceless. The launch of a new chapter in human industry in space, with specific immediate benefits including environmental protection and energy freedom, can transform our entire society for the better.
You are correct. I was thinking of a term to contrast the "nonlinear" parallel programs, and came up with the term that already means something else. Thanks for the correction.