Lemmings was the worst for me. There's a point when you're trying to get inside your house from the car, and you think that if your girlfriend would just go stand right over there with her arms out you could bounce off her and you'd be vectored right in through the entryway. Oh, but it's locked, so maybe you need to give your little brother a pickaxe and bounce him at the door to see if he can dig through. If it goes "clink", you need another route of entry.
And that's the point when you know it's time to find another source of entertainment.
I spent a few years teaching myself photoshop in college. Then for a while I dated a girl whose primary hobby was acrylic painting; so the summer we were apart I entertained myself by trying to learn to paint. (how cute, I know.)
Everytime I screwed up with the damn brush, my brain reached for "undo" and my command-Z fingers twitched.
That power connector looks fairly nonstandard. Is it just to reduce socket size to leave room for the tiny connector panel, or does this thing have an external power supply like the cube did?
I played maplestory for a couple of days. Now I can't convince myself to open the app, even at times when I'm bored off my skull with nothing to do.
Maple learned NOTHING from the problems and failures of previous MMORPGs. There is no balanced economics (the economy is already developing the same problems as EQ due to an infinite influx of money and items).
Gaining experience happens at a reasonable rate for the first few levels. Then it takes so long that there is literally nothing else to do... after the first 5 quests or so you need to get your character to level 35+ to really be able to work on the rest of them. There's nothing to do during this time but kill monsters. So players go to "training grounds" where low-level monsters spawn rapidly. After level 20, expect to spend about an hour per level pretty much standing in place holding down the "attack" key while mushrooms spawn in front of your swinging sword. I gained two levels by taping down the key on my keyboard and reading a novel. There's nothing else to do, as I'd long since done all the quests I was powerful enough to do, and bought all the armor and weapons I was experienced enough to equip.
These training ground rooms are by far the most efficient way to level... so they're packed with players. As a result, Maplestory runs twenty identical channels. Most of these worlds are pretty empty, but the training grounds are totally packed, all the time.
There is no player interaction, at all, besides trading and chatting. (Oh, you can form parties, the only apparent effect being that you share experience from kills among the group. This is cool if you can talk a higher-level character into joining your party, but sucks if you are the higher level character).
Seriously, it's kind of fun for the first 20 levels or so. Then it becomes utterly mind-numbing, worse than any other game I've played in years. You have to spend an hour just levelling on monsters that can't hurt you for every minute worth of actual content you experience.
Where is the problem in making a final layer of paint finish on the tin circuitry?
Heat. Paint is a shitty conductor of heat, and heat dissipation is already a nightmare in many electronics. Now add an insulating layer of on top of everything? Damm....
Also, expense. Try painting all the exposed solder joints on a PCB while leaving the chips and heatsinks unpainted. Not easy...
My reasons for use of yellow dog have nothing to do with annoyance with X86 hardware. It differs from PPC hardware in interesting ways that give each their niche.
Rather, it's because I'm annoyed with windows. While I have ~6 functioning computers around at any one time, I do the majority of my office, graphics design, and development work on a Mac: Windows is broken and Linux doesn't run Adobe.
As an active consultant and developer, I upgrade my current desktop mac every 18-24 months.* This means I inevitably have multiple old macs sitting around in closets. When I need to put together a quick server for file backup or web app testing, I grab one and throw YDL on it.
Incidentally, though, when I do have x86 hardware lying around, I use that and debian instead. YDL can be kind of a PITA.
We use the heat generated by the decay of radioactive elements to fuel our generators. We do nothing like smashing atoms into smaller bits.
Nonsense. In spontaneous radioactive decay, a large nucleus (say of Radium or Uranium), spontaneously emits a particle of some sort. The emission of an alpha particle (two protons and two neutrons) reduces the weight of a nucleus by 4. The emission of a beta particle converts one neutron into a proton, thus changing one element into the other. For example, a common natural decay chain for Uranium-235 goes: U-238 (emit alpha) -> Thorium-231 (emit beta) -> Protactinium-231 (emit alpha) -> Actinium 227 (emit alpha) -> Thorium 227 etc., eventually leading to Lead-207, which is stable.
In nuclear fission, by contrast, the emission is NOT spontaneous, but is induced by the impact of a moderately high-energy neutron into the atomic nucleus. This disrupts the nucleus causing it to break into smaller nuclei called fission products. The fission products of Uranium-235 generally include isotopes of Iodine, Cesium, Strontium, Xenon, and Barium, none of which appear in the natural decay chain of U-235.
So, you are in fact 100% incorrect. In a fission reactor, the capture of neutrons by nuclei does in fact "split atoms", and those reactors are most definitely not fueled by "the decay of radioactive elements", if by decay you mean natural decay. It is an induced chain reaction, and is a very different process with very different products.
A power source which generates energy from the heat produced by radioactive decay is called a radioisotope thermal generator and is a very different beast from a fission reactor. They are commonly used on spacecraft, and are generally fairly small.
Yeah, yeah, a vegan diet is supposed to prevent cancer and heart disease, but the bone records show that the serfs in grain culture had poorer health than the hunter-gatherer peoples preceding them.
To take this thread even further offtopic than it already is, you're comparing apples and oranges. Before the 19th century, most people, particularly serfs, were chronically malnourished. When that's the case, the extra calories and protein in meat are a gem to be treasured, so certainly vegan serf in the 16th century wouldn't have been as healthy.
In the developed 21st century, though, food is abundant and our evolved tastes for sweet and fatty things, designed to help us scrounge every last calorie in a subsistence life, are deadly to us, causing us to massively overeat.
With abundant food, it is easy to get full nutrition (yes, including protein) from plant material. Meat isn't necessary anymore, and folks who choose to eat vegetarian or vegan can avoid some of the potential drawbacks of it.
But now we can actually bring the thread (which went lifepan->bible->cain and abel->meat vs. vegan) back on topic, in a modern society, limiting your caloric intake and avoiding using meat as your primary calorie source can in fact help you live longer. What's crucial is that you mantain a diet that has good diversity of calories (carbs, protein, and fats) and is nutritionally complete with respect to vitamins and amino acids. But, in out modern world of fresh produce etc., that's 100% doable.
Note that you don't have to avoid meat entirely to gain lifespan benefits. But, you're not doing yourself any favors if you eat two pounds of steak a day, either.:-) (Note that carbs can also be a danger because they put sugar into your blood more quickly, so your body responds by storing them as fat. Moderation, and exercise to burn off the sugar before it gets stored will go a long way towards increasing your lifespan.)
they'd probably settle for guerilla warfare amongst the civilian population where an armed robot isn't a feasible option. Hm, not a far cry from terrorism.
Yeah, exactly.
People fight when they 1) have a grudge, 2) are poor 3) feel they're being taked advantage of 4) are scared or 5) are disenfranchised and feel they don't have a say in their own future.
How they fight depends on their circumstances. If they're wealthy, they use technology at arm's length and/or send other people (usually their own poor) to fight. This is how the US does it.
If they're outnumbered or outgunned, they fall back on guerilla tactics and/or terrorist tactics. This is how the iraqi insurgents fight.
Take for example Israel and Palestine. Both populations feel they have a historical and religious claim to the land. But the israelis are wealthy workers who have jobs and a vote. So they send tanks and helicopters. Palestinians are dirt poor, live under continuous occupation (=disenfranchisement) and are outgunned. So they blow themselves up and use guerilla tactics.
If the USA were under occupation by a superior force, we'd fall back on insurgent and/or terrorist tactics, too. Go watch "Red Dawn". As a matter of fact, that's how we won our independence. We couldn't defeat the british regulars on the field, so we slinked through the forests and sniped their leaders... an evil, terrorist tactic by 17th century standards.
Robots won't change this scene at all. They'll just change the balance of power and drive the other side to new tactics, as you suggest. We get all high and might about how the other side uses unspeakable insurgent and/or terrorist tactics, but we would do exactly the same thing if the conditions were reversed.
It's just too bad that nobody tosses tea into the harbor anymore.
They do. Just nobody pays attention. The reasons people use such violent tactics these days is because in the age of sensationalist profit-driven news reporting, if you don't make a big noise nobody even hears about it.
BTW, throwing tea in the harbor in 1773 is about equivalent moneywise to torching 15 hummers to make a political statement in 2003. That guy is headed to jail, and nobody is singing his praise...
You just made the most stereotypical warmonger fallacy with this statement:
I believe the number of people who want to see the agenda of a country [nasty description of evil Iran] achieve ascendancy over [wholesome description of the USA] is rather small
Yeah, of course. Nobody wants to see the mullahs take over the world. So? How does that imply that we should go to war? The uttermost wingnut error is this dogma:
"A is evil. Therefore we should go to war with them" "B is evil. Therefore we should go to war with them"
I'm no pacifist. Sometimes war is the right answer. But it isn't in all cases. The grandparent makes a point that reducing the risks of war may create a situation in which a powerful nation is more likely to start wars at the drop of a hat. Since in general wars kill people, starting more of them is not a a priori a good idea. You have to argue that a specific war is worth the cost, and you haven't done that with respect to, e.g., Iran.
Pointing out solely that Iran has an evil agenda does not in any way shape or form refute the grandparent's argument. Yes, they're evil. So what? That's irrelevant: the point wasn't about the nature of the agendas in question, it was about the effects of the policies pursued in support of those agendas. A very different question.
Your attitude, (which you call "common sense"), that violence is the only effective strategy against bad people, is neanderthal and ignorant of history. Even in the bloody 20th century, significantly more oppressive regimes and dictatorships were overthrown by nonviolent means than via wars. Yes, sometimes, war can overthrow a dictator and bring peace and democracy afterwards (as WWII). Sometimes, though, war can fail in its goals and set the stage for the rise of brutal dictatorships (as we failed to free Vietnam, but set the stage for Pol Pot). How many examples do you want of wars fought by the US that failed to bring democracy to the target country and/or gave rise to a brutal dictator afterwards?
Different situations require different responses.
History most definitely does *not* support your implicit assumption that a nation more willing to go on the warpath to enforce its agenda increases the likelihood of that agenda "winning". More often, that kind of attitude just fuels resentment and defensiveness, leading to a bigger fight and a lot more people dead, which isn't in anyone's best interests. There are a lot of arguments to be made that a more warlike America would do a great deal of harm to the cause of democracy around the world.
Already, anti-US rhetoric and consequent terrorist recruiting in the middle east has tripled as a result of the Iraq war. From that aspect, it would seem that a little more caution might be advised, not less. There may also be positive outcomes... we'll have to wait and see. But there's no "obvious" data to support your attitude.
Glassification has always been a good idea, and it's been around forever. It unfortunately costs an incredible lot of electricity, but then again it's pretty much the same industrial process as that used to separate aluminum from ore --- by melting the rock with graphite electrodes. So we know we can do it.
In other important strategies, I feel like the whole problem is that the engineers have been trying to make storage vessels out of metals. Well, guess what - on the 10 kiloyear timescale, metals corrode. They oxidize, they have galvanic interactions, you name it.
What's more stable? Minerals. Rock. Ceramics. Glasses. These get mentioned occasionally, including in TFA which essentially says "ceramics would solve the problem, but nobody's ever made a large enough ceramic container. It would be easy, but it hasn't been done". Well jeez - so do it. Or store the stuff in lots of smaller containers, if that means we can use existing ceramic ovens. You want nonreactive? Alumina ceramic is great. Hell, we even have a whole industry to make pure quartz glass... it's called pyrex.
Or take a nice geostable rock like marble or basalt and fricking quarry storage chambers directly out of solid rock.
You want stable storage? Make ceramic or stone vessels with non-smooth inner walls, say with a 5L capacity and 10cm-thick walls. Glassify your waste and pour the liquid glass into the container, and then slap a ceramic or stone lid on while it's still liquid. Maybe the lid has a couple of fingers that reach down into the liquid, so when it cools it holds the lid on nice and tight, no metals or adhesives required.
Then that shit isn't going to leach into the environment in any bio-accumulative way for probably hundreds of kiloyears.
This has seemed obvious to me for over a decade, but who listens? Nobody listens to poor Zathras...
The article claims this is because of the danger that hybrid cars will eat into the tax income, since they consume less gas and therefore don't pay as much tax.
But the fact is that very few people drive such hybrids, even in California. Far more Californians drive gas-guzzling SUVs; a drive through LA used to surround you with Ford Explorers, but now those seem to be outnumbered by the much larger vehicles like Expeditions and such. A gas tax is a better way to collect income and provide a market incentive to reduce air pollution (as opposed to a regulation, like smog checks, which are expensive to enforce and provide an incentive to cheat rather than to conserve).
So really, this is just a proposal to make sure that people who actually switch to efficient technologies keep subsidizing those who don't. It's completely retarded. It is not only counterproductive to the desire to reduce fuel consumption and air pollution, but requires that the state spend an additional $100 per car just to implement.
Expensive + counterproductive to societal goals = bad government. Bad government! No cookie!
Everyone knows the current patent system is fscked and overflowing with frivolous applications.
This article doesn't even begin to discuss the existential issues facing IP law in the 21st century: IP concepts from the 1800's that simply can't handle issues of modern technology. Like the protection of gene sequences or genetically modified organisms, which don't really fit, conceptually, under patent or copyright concepts. Or the copyrighting of media in an age when copying is free but design and marketing are expensive. Or software, which is... well, is it an invention that should be patented, or art that should be copyrighted? Or algorithms... and on and on.
We also have over 100 years of evidence that patents do not encourage innovation. James Watt didn't use his patent on the steam engine for financial security while he developed an improved version... instead he spent 40 years litigating to extend the patent and prevent the introduction of improvements by competitors. Some historians believe Watt's patent set the industrial revolution back 15-20 years. I'm quite certain the slashdot crowd can think of plenty of contemporary examples where patent abuse and litigation is setting back technological progress.
We need entirely new concepts of IP and new ways of dealing with them. The system needs a complete overhaul, not tweaks, and TFA doesn't even talk about the core problems underlying the disaster that is our IP environment.
"Tax and Spend" makes more sense to me than "Just Spend".
I believe the appropriate term for the GOP's current guiding philosophy is "Borrow and Spend".
And despite what another reply to the parent said, It's ridiculous. Even if supply-side is true (the evidence is that supply-side tax cuts produce only a little growth, if any), the philosophy does not endorse borrowing into deep deficit. We are already experiencing a sell-off of the dollar due to foreign investors' lack of confidence in US credit. If that gets worse, it will fsck the US economy. If it becomes a runaway selloff (like a run on a bank), it will/dev/null the US economy for 20 years and fsck the world economy in the process.
I don't think it will. I just doubt the plane will hold together with that much pressure on it
Why not? The Space Shuttle goes more than twice that fast during reentry into the atmosphere, and held together under "that much pressure" more that a hundred consecutive times. It only failed last time because of gross damage to the leading edge of a wing.
You don't think NASA's engineers are smart enough to calculate the pressure at mach 10 and build accordingly?
I wouldn't be too stunned if the flight fails (since it is a new technology), but I doubt it will be from the hull being to weak to withstand the forces placed on it at speed.
Information cannot arise spontaneously and randomly, but requires a higher source of information.... Computers cannot program themselves, but need a programmer and the programs arise in the programmers MIND.
A fascinating thesis, given that much of my research involves observations of computers that program themselves. Through evolution. Ultra-simple programs with only 15 lines of code evolve without external intervention to solve numerous mathematical tasks requiring hundreds or thousands of lines of code.
I see it happen every day.
Do you know, by the way, any information theory? Can you define the word "information" in a rigorously scientific way? If so, can you actually support the statement that all information requires a "higher source" of information? Or are you just blowing supposition?
Creationists believe that a great MIND is behind everything, things that are perceivable as well as things that are imperceptible.
And who knows, they may even be right. Where they go whacko is in invoking this MIND to explain phenomena that are easily explainable in its absence. i.e. Physical processes, like evolution, for which simple and understood mechanisms are fully sufficient for a complete explanation.
Evolution, on the other hand, is a belief that information (that's what DNA is - information) has the ability to become both more complex, and more orderly over a period of time.
Complete and utter hogwash. I work in a laboratory whose whole raison d'etre is the study of evolution from a perspective of mathematics, computer science, and information theory. I have never, not even once, heard a definition of evolution that mentioned complexity or "orderliness". Not even a suggestion of such.
The theory of evolution makes no statements about the change in complexity of a genome over time. Given an environment in which complexity was adaptive, a genome may evolve to be more complex. Given an environment in which complexity was maladaptive, a genome may evolve to be less complex. The process of evolution doesn't give a rat's ass about complexity.
It's a common creationist argument that increase in complexity is not possible by stepwise evolution, and therefore complex organisms like humans could not evolve. I've never seen a single sound logical step in support of that statement, however. And since I see increasing complexity in evolving genomes on a daily basis (given conditions which reward complexity), I'm inclined to simply blow off that argument.
You are describing natural selection, not evolution.
Um, no, I'm not.
That's what gives us specifically breeded creatures like English Pointers and Scottish Terriors.
Um, that would in fact be artificial selection, directed by humans, i.e. not "natural". However, it is still evolution - which requires variation and selection, but doesn't require that the selection be "natural".
You can have evolution in nature, absent humans, via natural selection, or you can have directed evolution, i.e. breeding, via artificial selection. Both are forms of "change over time" i.e. evolution.
By the way, evolution was known and characterized for quite a while before Darwin. What wasn't known was the mechanism... how does the change occur over time. Natural selection was Darwin's great insight: it explained evolution, which was already known. (Wallace independently came to the same conclusion, and called it "survival of the fittest", which is why we have the two more-or-less equivalent terms.) So again, you've got it backwards.
I appreciate the effort, but you really have no clue what you're talking about.
I'm sorry if I used sloppy terminology. I was using the term evolution to mean...
I know, and I'm sorry if it seemed I jumped on you. It's just a pet peeve of mine. People get touchy about correct use of the words in their own fields of study.
I thought that microevolution refered to variation within a group of similar species (dog, wolf), and macroevolution to a fish evolving into a frog. Why is the distinction nonexistant? I'm sincerely curious.
Two quick answers: one, variation does not imply evolution... to evolve, one needs variation plus selection. A measurable change must occur. Once a measurable change has occurred... how sure are you that the new, changed organisms actually are the same species?
Second, to delineate the difference between evolution within a species and evolution from one species to another, you have to clearly define species, and draw a solid line between what is a species and what isn't. Such a line doesn't exist: biology is a continuum. The words we use to discuss it are largely for our own convenience, and we need to remember that when we get hung up on differences between "macro" and "micro" or "species" and "subspecies".
Anyway, try any definition you like of "species" or "macro" vs. "micro" and I can come up with half a dozen border cases in just a few seconds. We feel, emotionally, like we know what the difference is. But when you get into it scientifically, you discover that you just can't draw lines the way you thought you could:There's always an in-between.
Voting for a third party has, proportionally, far greater impact on things than a vote for either Republican or Democrat. A vote for a third party candidate has a noticeable impact on the party's future funding and publicity. A Green/Libertarian/Constitution/Socialist vote in 2004 is an investment in 2008 and beyond. It is an investment in true change.
Bullshit. Game theorists have long since proven that a popular plurality voting system guarantees a two-party system, period. Third/alternative parties are simply not stable. The oversimplified analysis is that a strong third party will always split the available votes with the party most similar to it, handing the election to the less-similar party.
I feel disenfranchised too, but voting for a third party won't get me anywhere. Until the voting system is rebuilt with a system that accurately represents the will of the electorate, third parties are mathematically proven to be a waste of your vote, because only two effective parties can coexist.
Get over it.
Since this is a site for nerds, there are good introductions to the math and science behind improved voting systems at www.electionmethods.org (which only deals with votes for a single office) and www.accuratedemocracy (which deals with multi-winner elections, budget decisions, etc.)
Take the time to educate yourself, maybe we can build a better democratic system sometime this century.
I agree. Most molecular biologists who are in the intelligent design camp are not against "micro-evolution", but are instead against "macro-evolution" -- primodial soup-type theories of genesis of life.
"Macro-evolution" is not usually used to mean the primorial-soup business, it's generally used to mean large-scale changes in body morphology and/or speciation. Which is a completely specious definition; it's 100% impossible to draw a clear line between what's "micro" and what's "macro". Border cases can always be found to counterexample any attempt.
The primordial soup business... how we got to using amino acids, DNA, membranes, ribosomes, all that jazz, sometimes called "early evolution"... is all really speculative compared to archaeology. Which is not to say there aren't interesting results in research in that field, but science is a lot further from a cohesive story than with respect to the archaeological record.
I learnt somewhere that not only are octopus eyes as complex as human eyes they are actually better "designed" since they do not have blind spots.
This is quite right. The difference is simple: the photoreceptors all have to feed into a neural network for processing, and then the outputs of that neural network are connected by axons (wires, basically) that run down into the optical nerve to transmit the information from the brain.
The cephalopod retina does this the way you'd expect: photoreceptors up front receiving the light, neural network behind it, axonal connections behind that.
The eye in all chordate (spinal-cord bearing, i.e. mammals, birds, reptiles) organisms is built the other way around: the photoreceptors are at the back of the retina, with the neural net in front of them and the axonal network in front of that. Before light reaches your photoreceptors, it has to pass through several layers of cells. Your "blind spot" is the area right on top of the optical nerve where the axons go back through the whole layered structure, taking up the room that might otherwise be used for photoreceptors. Take a look at the photo on the wikipedia page about the retina. In that cross-section of the retina, the light comes in from the left.
From an engineering point of view, it's totally retarted. But evolved organisms have this kind of kludge all the time, because once you have a structure locked in, it's really hard to get away from it by mutation. You could concieve of a series of organisms with a few mutations at a time where by the end the structure of the retina was reversed and they had better eyes. BUT, the organisms in the middle of the series would probably be blind so you'd never get to the end.
Another fantastic example is the fact that our lungs are above and in front of our stomach, but our nose is above our mouth. This requires our air-path and food-path to cross each other, opening the possibility of choking to death. How stupid is that? But the number and combination of mutations required to restructure the entire neck and jaw so that your trachea could be behind your throat... just too unlikely.
Particularly things like body-plan order that happen early in development tend to get really locked in by evolution. This is why we can see so many "bad engineering decisions" in biological organisms.
Slashdot Mirror
Lemmings was the worst for me. There's a point when you're trying to get inside your house from the car, and you think that if your girlfriend would just go stand right over there with her arms out you could bounce off her and you'd be vectored right in through the entryway. Oh, but it's locked, so maybe you need to give your little brother a pickaxe and bounce him at the door to see if he can dig through. If it goes "clink", you need another route of entry.
And that's the point when you know it's time to find another source of entertainment.
I spent a few years teaching myself photoshop in college. Then for a while I dated a girl whose primary hobby was acrylic painting; so the summer we were apart I entertained myself by trying to learn to paint. (how cute, I know.)
Everytime I screwed up with the damn brush, my brain reached for "undo" and my command-Z fingers twitched.
That power connector looks fairly nonstandard. Is it just to reduce socket size to leave room for the tiny connector panel, or does this thing have an external power supply like the cube did?
I can't find the answer on Apple's site.
I played maplestory for a couple of days. Now I can't convince myself to open the app, even at times when I'm bored off my skull with nothing to do.
... after the first 5 quests or so you need to get your character to level 35+ to really be able to work on the rest of them. There's nothing to do during this time but kill monsters. So players go to "training grounds" where low-level monsters spawn rapidly. After level 20, expect to spend about an hour per level pretty much standing in place holding down the "attack" key while mushrooms spawn in front of your swinging sword. I gained two levels by taping down the key on my keyboard and reading a novel. There's nothing else to do, as I'd long since done all the quests I was powerful enough to do, and bought all the armor and weapons I was experienced enough to equip.
... so they're packed with players. As a result, Maplestory runs twenty identical channels. Most of these worlds are pretty empty, but the training grounds are totally packed, all the time.
Maple learned NOTHING from the problems and failures of previous MMORPGs. There is no balanced economics (the economy is already developing the same problems as EQ due to an infinite influx of money and items).
Gaining experience happens at a reasonable rate for the first few levels. Then it takes so long that there is literally nothing else to do
These training ground rooms are by far the most efficient way to level
There is no player interaction, at all, besides trading and chatting. (Oh, you can form parties, the only apparent effect being that you share experience from kills among the group. This is cool if you can talk a higher-level character into joining your party, but sucks if you are the higher level character).
Seriously, it's kind of fun for the first 20 levels or so. Then it becomes utterly mind-numbing, worse than any other game I've played in years. You have to spend an hour just levelling on monsters that can't hurt you for every minute worth of actual content you experience.
I'm not sure you could have a fully-loaded Winchester without at least some type of active cooling...
This fully-loaded winchester does fine with completely passive air cooling. It even says so in the table, scroll down the page and take a look.
What's wrong with yours?
Where is the problem in making a final layer of paint finish on the tin circuitry?
Heat. Paint is a shitty conductor of heat, and heat dissipation is already a nightmare in many electronics. Now add an insulating layer of on top of everything? Damm....
Also, expense. Try painting all the exposed solder joints on a PCB while leaving the chips and heatsinks unpainted. Not easy...
I first read that as "John Edwards", and it scared the living sh*t out of me!
My reasons for use of yellow dog have nothing to do with annoyance with X86 hardware. It differs from PPC hardware in interesting ways that give each their niche.
Rather, it's because I'm annoyed with windows. While I have ~6 functioning computers around at any one time, I do the majority of my office, graphics design, and development work on a Mac: Windows is broken and Linux doesn't run Adobe.
As an active consultant and developer, I upgrade my current desktop mac every 18-24 months.* This means I inevitably have multiple old macs sitting around in closets. When I need to put together a quick server for file backup or web app testing, I grab one and throw YDL on it.
Incidentally, though, when I do have x86 hardware lying around, I use that and debian instead. YDL can be kind of a PITA.
We use the heat generated by the decay of radioactive elements to fuel our generators. We do nothing like smashing atoms into smaller bits.
Nonsense. In spontaneous radioactive decay, a large nucleus (say of Radium or Uranium), spontaneously emits a particle of some sort. The emission of an alpha particle (two protons and two neutrons) reduces the weight of a nucleus by 4. The emission of a beta particle converts one neutron into a proton, thus changing one element into the other. For example, a common natural decay chain for Uranium-235 goes: U-238 (emit alpha) -> Thorium-231 (emit beta) -> Protactinium-231 (emit alpha) -> Actinium 227 (emit alpha) -> Thorium 227 etc., eventually leading to Lead-207, which is stable.
In nuclear fission, by contrast, the emission is NOT spontaneous, but is induced by the impact of a moderately high-energy neutron into the atomic nucleus. This disrupts the nucleus causing it to break into smaller nuclei called fission products. The fission products of Uranium-235 generally include isotopes of Iodine, Cesium, Strontium, Xenon, and Barium, none of which appear in the natural decay chain of U-235.
So, you are in fact 100% incorrect. In a fission reactor, the capture of neutrons by nuclei does in fact "split atoms", and those reactors are most definitely not fueled by "the decay of radioactive elements", if by decay you mean natural decay. It is an induced chain reaction, and is a very different
process with very different products.
A power source which generates energy from the heat produced by radioactive decay is called a radioisotope thermal generator and is a very different beast from a fission reactor. They are commonly used on spacecraft, and are generally fairly small.
To take this thread even further offtopic than it already is, you're comparing apples and oranges. Before the 19th century, most people, particularly serfs, were chronically malnourished. When that's the case, the extra calories and protein in meat are a gem to be treasured, so certainly vegan serf in the 16th century wouldn't have been as healthy.
In the developed 21st century, though, food is abundant and our evolved tastes for sweet and fatty things, designed to help us scrounge every last calorie in a subsistence life, are deadly to us, causing us to massively overeat.
With abundant food, it is easy to get full nutrition (yes, including protein) from plant material. Meat isn't necessary anymore, and folks who choose to eat vegetarian or vegan can avoid some of the potential drawbacks of it.
But now we can actually bring the thread (which went lifepan->bible->cain and abel->meat vs. vegan) back on topic, in a modern society, limiting your caloric intake and avoiding using meat as your primary calorie source can in fact help you live longer. What's crucial is that you mantain a diet that has good diversity of calories (carbs, protein, and fats) and is nutritionally complete with respect to vitamins and amino acids. But, in out modern world of fresh produce etc., that's 100% doable.
Note that you don't have to avoid meat entirely to gain lifespan benefits. But, you're not doing yourself any favors if you eat two pounds of steak a day, either.
they'd probably settle for guerilla warfare amongst the civilian population where an armed robot isn't a feasible option. Hm, not a far cry from terrorism.
... an evil, terrorist tactic by 17th century standards.
Yeah, exactly.
People fight when they 1) have a grudge, 2) are poor 3) feel they're being taked advantage of 4) are scared or 5) are disenfranchised and feel they don't have a say in their own future.
How they fight depends on their circumstances. If they're wealthy, they use technology at arm's length and/or send other people (usually their own poor) to fight. This is how the US does it.
If they're outnumbered or outgunned, they fall back on guerilla tactics and/or terrorist tactics. This is how the iraqi insurgents fight.
Take for example Israel and Palestine. Both populations feel they have a historical and religious claim to the land. But the israelis are wealthy workers who have jobs and a vote. So they send tanks and helicopters. Palestinians are dirt poor, live under continuous occupation (=disenfranchisement) and are outgunned. So they blow themselves up and use guerilla tactics.
If the USA were under occupation by a superior force, we'd fall back on insurgent and/or terrorist tactics, too. Go watch "Red Dawn". As a matter of fact, that's how we won our independence. We couldn't defeat the british regulars on the field, so we slinked through the forests and sniped their leaders
Robots won't change this scene at all. They'll just change the balance of power and drive the other side to new tactics, as you suggest. We get all high and might about how the other side uses unspeakable insurgent and/or terrorist tactics, but we would do exactly the same thing if the conditions were reversed.
It's just too bad that nobody tosses tea into the harbor anymore.
They do. Just nobody pays attention. The reasons people use such violent tactics these days is because in the age of sensationalist profit-driven news reporting, if you don't make a big noise nobody even hears about it.
BTW, throwing tea in the harbor in 1773 is about equivalent moneywise to torching 15 hummers to make a political statement in 2003. That guy is headed to jail, and nobody is singing his praise...
Yeah, of course. Nobody wants to see the mullahs take over the world. So? How does that imply that we should go to war? The uttermost wingnut error is this dogma:
"A is evil. Therefore we should go to war with them"
"B is evil. Therefore we should go to war with them"
I'm no pacifist. Sometimes war is the right answer. But it isn't in all cases. The grandparent makes a point that reducing the risks of war may create a situation in which a powerful nation is more likely to start wars at the drop of a hat. Since in general wars kill people, starting more of them is not a a priori a good idea. You have to argue that a specific war is worth the cost, and you haven't done that with respect to, e.g., Iran.
Pointing out solely that Iran has an evil agenda does not in any way shape or form refute the grandparent's argument. Yes, they're evil. So what? That's irrelevant: the point wasn't about the nature of the agendas in question, it was about the effects of the policies pursued in support of those agendas. A very different question.
Your attitude, (which you call "common sense"), that violence is the only effective strategy against bad people, is neanderthal and ignorant of history. Even in the bloody 20th century, significantly more oppressive regimes and dictatorships were overthrown by nonviolent means than via wars. Yes, sometimes, war can overthrow a dictator and bring peace and democracy afterwards (as WWII). Sometimes, though, war can fail in its goals and set the stage for the rise of brutal dictatorships (as we failed to free Vietnam, but set the stage for Pol Pot). How many examples do you want of wars fought by the US that failed to bring democracy to the target country and/or gave rise to a brutal dictator afterwards?
Different situations require different responses.
History most definitely does *not* support your implicit assumption that a nation more willing to go on the warpath to enforce its agenda increases the likelihood of that agenda "winning". More often, that kind of attitude just fuels resentment and defensiveness, leading to a bigger fight and a lot more people dead, which isn't in anyone's best interests. There are a lot of arguments to be made that a more warlike America would do a great deal of harm to the cause of democracy around the world.
Already, anti-US rhetoric and consequent terrorist recruiting in the middle east has tripled as a result of the Iraq war. From that aspect, it would seem that a little more caution might be advised, not less. There may also be positive outcomes
Glassification has always been a good idea, and it's been around forever. It unfortunately costs an incredible lot of electricity, but then again it's pretty much the same industrial process as that used to separate aluminum from ore --- by melting the rock with graphite electrodes. So we know we can do it.
... it's called pyrex.
In other important strategies, I feel like the whole problem is that the engineers have been trying to make storage vessels out of metals. Well, guess what - on the 10 kiloyear timescale, metals corrode. They oxidize, they have galvanic interactions, you name it.
What's more stable? Minerals. Rock. Ceramics. Glasses. These get mentioned occasionally, including in TFA which essentially says "ceramics would solve the problem, but nobody's ever made a large enough ceramic container. It would be easy, but it hasn't been done". Well jeez - so do it. Or store the stuff in lots of smaller containers, if that means we can use existing ceramic ovens. You want nonreactive? Alumina ceramic is great. Hell, we even have a whole industry to make pure quartz glass
Or take a nice geostable rock like marble or basalt and fricking quarry storage chambers directly out of solid rock.
You want stable storage? Make ceramic or stone vessels with non-smooth inner walls, say with a 5L capacity and 10cm-thick walls. Glassify your waste and pour the liquid glass into the container, and then slap a ceramic or stone lid on while it's still liquid. Maybe the lid has a couple of fingers that reach down into the liquid, so when it cools it holds the lid on nice and tight, no metals or adhesives required.
Then that shit isn't going to leach into the environment in any bio-accumulative way for probably hundreds of kiloyears.
This has seemed obvious to me for over a decade, but who listens? Nobody listens to poor Zathras...
The article claims this is because of the danger that hybrid cars will eat into the tax income, since they consume less gas and therefore don't pay as much tax.
But the fact is that very few people drive such hybrids, even in California. Far more Californians drive gas-guzzling SUVs; a drive through LA used to surround you with Ford Explorers, but now those seem to be outnumbered by the much larger vehicles like Expeditions and such. A gas tax is a better way to collect income and provide a market incentive to reduce air pollution (as opposed to a regulation, like smog checks, which are expensive to enforce and provide an incentive to cheat rather than to conserve).
So really, this is just a proposal to make sure that people who actually switch to efficient technologies keep subsidizing those who don't. It's completely retarded. It is not only counterproductive to the desire to reduce fuel consumption and air pollution, but requires that the state spend an additional $100 per car just to implement.
Expensive + counterproductive to societal goals = bad government. Bad government! No cookie!
Dumb dumb dumb dumb....
On the contrary, an empty article.
... well, is it an invention that should be patented, or art that should be copyrighted? Or algorithms ... and on and on.
... instead he spent 40 years litigating to extend the patent and prevent the introduction of improvements by competitors. Some historians believe Watt's patent set the industrial revolution back 15-20 years. I'm quite certain the slashdot crowd can think of plenty of contemporary examples where patent abuse and litigation is setting back technological progress.
Everyone knows the current patent system is fscked and overflowing with frivolous applications.
This article doesn't even begin to discuss the existential issues facing IP law in the 21st century: IP concepts from the 1800's that simply can't handle issues of modern technology. Like the protection of gene sequences or genetically modified organisms, which don't really fit, conceptually, under patent or copyright concepts. Or the copyrighting of media in an age when copying is free but design and marketing are expensive. Or software, which is
We also have over 100 years of evidence that patents do not encourage innovation. James Watt didn't use his patent on the steam engine for financial security while he developed an improved version
We need entirely new concepts of IP and new ways of dealing with them. The system needs a complete overhaul, not tweaks, and TFA doesn't even talk about the core problems underlying the disaster that is our IP environment.
"Tax and Spend" makes more sense to me than "Just Spend".
/dev/null the US economy for 20 years and fsck the world economy in the process.
I believe the appropriate term for the GOP's current guiding philosophy is "Borrow and Spend".
And despite what another reply to the parent said, It's ridiculous. Even if supply-side is true (the evidence is that supply-side tax cuts produce only a little growth, if any), the philosophy does not endorse borrowing into deep deficit. We are already experiencing a sell-off of the dollar due to foreign investors' lack of confidence in US credit. If that gets worse, it will fsck the US economy. If it becomes a runaway selloff (like a run on a bank), it will
I don't think it will. I just doubt the plane will hold together with that much pressure on it
Why not? The Space Shuttle goes more than twice that fast during reentry into the atmosphere, and held together under "that much pressure" more that a hundred consecutive times. It only failed last time because of gross damage to the leading edge of a wing.
You don't think NASA's engineers are smart enough to calculate the pressure at mach 10 and build accordingly?
I wouldn't be too stunned if the flight fails (since it is a new technology), but I doubt it will be from the hull being to weak to withstand the forces placed on it at speed.
Not with 50km range, it doesn't.
Information cannot arise spontaneously and randomly, but requires a higher source of information. ... Computers cannot program themselves, but need a programmer and the programs arise in the programmers MIND.
A fascinating thesis, given that much of my research involves observations of computers that program themselves. Through evolution. Ultra-simple programs with only 15 lines of code evolve without external intervention to solve numerous mathematical tasks requiring hundreds or thousands of lines of code.
I see it happen every day.
Do you know, by the way, any information theory? Can you define the word "information" in a rigorously scientific way? If so, can you actually support the statement that all information requires a "higher source" of information? Or are you just blowing supposition?
Creationists believe that a great MIND is behind everything, things that are perceivable as well as things that are imperceptible.
And who knows, they may even be right. Where they go whacko is in invoking this MIND to explain phenomena that are easily explainable in its absence. i.e. Physical processes, like evolution, for which simple and understood mechanisms are fully sufficient for a complete explanation.
Evolution, on the other hand, is a belief that information (that's what DNA is - information) has the ability to become both more complex, and more orderly over a period of time.
... how does the change occur over time. Natural selection was Darwin's great insight: it explained evolution, which was already known. (Wallace independently came to the same conclusion, and called it "survival of the fittest", which is why we have the two more-or-less equivalent terms.) So again, you've got it backwards.
Complete and utter hogwash. I work in a laboratory whose whole raison d'etre is the study of evolution from a perspective of mathematics, computer science, and information theory. I have never, not even once, heard a definition of evolution that mentioned complexity or "orderliness". Not even a suggestion of such.
The theory of evolution makes no statements about the change in complexity of a genome over time. Given an environment in which complexity was adaptive, a genome may evolve to be more complex. Given an environment in which complexity was maladaptive, a genome may evolve to be less complex. The process of evolution doesn't give a rat's ass about complexity.
It's a common creationist argument that increase in complexity is not possible by stepwise evolution, and therefore complex organisms like humans could not evolve. I've never seen a single sound logical step in support of that statement, however. And since I see increasing complexity in evolving genomes on a daily basis (given conditions which reward complexity), I'm inclined to simply blow off that argument.
You are describing natural selection, not evolution.
Um, no, I'm not.
That's what gives us specifically breeded creatures like English Pointers and Scottish Terriors.
Um, that would in fact be artificial selection, directed by humans, i.e. not "natural". However, it is still evolution - which requires variation and selection, but doesn't require that the selection be "natural".
You can have evolution in nature, absent humans, via natural selection, or you can have directed evolution, i.e. breeding, via artificial selection. Both are forms of "change over time" i.e. evolution.
By the way, evolution was known and characterized for quite a while before Darwin. What wasn't known was the mechanism
I appreciate the effort, but you really have no clue what you're talking about.
I'm sorry if I used sloppy terminology. I was using the term evolution to mean ...
... to evolve, one needs variation plus selection. A measurable change must occur. Once a measurable change has occurred ... how sure are you that the new, changed organisms actually are the same species?
I know, and I'm sorry if it seemed I jumped on you. It's just a pet peeve of mine. People get touchy about correct use of the words in their own fields of study.
I thought that microevolution refered to variation within a group of similar species (dog, wolf), and macroevolution to a fish evolving into a frog. Why is the distinction nonexistant? I'm sincerely curious.
Two quick answers: one, variation does not imply evolution
Second, to delineate the difference between evolution within a species and evolution from one species to another, you have to clearly define species, and draw a solid line between what is a species and what isn't. Such a line doesn't exist: biology is a continuum. The words we use to discuss it are largely for our own convenience, and we need to remember that when we get hung up on differences between "macro" and "micro" or "species" and "subspecies".
Anyway, try any definition you like of "species" or "macro" vs. "micro" and I can come up with half a dozen border cases in just a few seconds. We feel, emotionally, like we know what the difference is. But when you get into it scientifically, you discover that you just can't draw lines the way you thought you could:There's always an in-between.
oops, fixed links:
ElectionMethods.org and AccurateDemocracy.com.
Voting for a third party has, proportionally, far greater impact on things than a vote for either Republican or Democrat. A vote for a third party candidate has a noticeable impact on the party's future funding and publicity. A Green/Libertarian/Constitution/Socialist vote in 2004 is an investment in 2008 and beyond. It is an investment in true change.
Bullshit. Game theorists have long since proven that a popular plurality voting system guarantees a two-party system, period. Third/alternative parties are simply not stable. The oversimplified analysis is that a strong third party will always split the available votes with the party most similar to it, handing the election to the less-similar party.
I feel disenfranchised too, but voting for a third party won't get me anywhere. Until the voting system is rebuilt with a system that accurately represents the will of the electorate, third parties are mathematically proven to be a waste of your vote, because only two effective parties can coexist.
Get over it.
Since this is a site for nerds, there are good introductions to the math and science behind improved voting systems at www.electionmethods.org (which only deals with votes for a single office) and www.accuratedemocracy (which deals with multi-winner elections, budget decisions, etc.)
Take the time to educate yourself, maybe we can build a better democratic system sometime this century.
I agree. Most molecular biologists who are in the intelligent design camp are not against "micro-evolution", but are instead against "macro-evolution" -- primodial soup-type theories of genesis of life.
... how we got to using amino acids, DNA, membranes, ribosomes, all that jazz, sometimes called "early evolution" ... is all really speculative compared to archaeology. Which is not to say there aren't interesting results in research in that field, but science is a lot further from a cohesive story than with respect to the archaeological record.
"Macro-evolution" is not usually used to mean the primorial-soup business, it's generally used to mean large-scale changes in body morphology and/or speciation. Which is a completely specious definition; it's 100% impossible to draw a clear line between what's "micro" and what's "macro". Border cases can always be found to counterexample any attempt.
The primordial soup business
This is quite right. The difference is simple: the photoreceptors all have to feed into a neural network for processing, and then the outputs of that neural network are connected by axons (wires, basically) that run down into the optical nerve to transmit the information from the brain.
The cephalopod retina does this the way you'd expect: photoreceptors up front receiving the light, neural network behind it, axonal connections behind that.
The eye in all chordate (spinal-cord bearing, i.e. mammals, birds, reptiles) organisms is built the other way around: the photoreceptors are at the back of the retina, with the neural net in front of them and the axonal network in front of that. Before light reaches your photoreceptors, it has to pass through several layers of cells. Your "blind spot" is the area right on top of the optical nerve where the axons go back through the whole layered structure, taking up the room that might otherwise be used for photoreceptors. Take a look at the photo on the wikipedia page about the retina. In that cross-section of the retina, the light comes in from the left.
From an engineering point of view, it's totally retarted. But evolved organisms have this kind of kludge all the time, because once you have a structure locked in, it's really hard to get away from it by mutation. You could concieve of a series of organisms with a few mutations at a time where by the end the structure of the retina was reversed and they had better eyes. BUT, the organisms in the middle of the series would probably be blind so you'd never get to the end.
Another fantastic example is the fact that our lungs are above and in front of our stomach, but our nose is above our mouth. This requires our air-path and food-path to cross each other, opening the possibility of choking to death. How stupid is that?
But the number and combination of mutations required to restructure the entire neck and jaw so that your trachea could be behind your throat
Particularly things like body-plan order that happen early in development tend to get really locked in by evolution. This is why we can see so many "bad engineering decisions" in biological organisms.