Isn't it possible that within a few hundred years there will be a method found to actually use these stored materials for further energy extraction?
You mean, such as using a breeder reactor to turn low-energy waste to high-energy fuel? Why, yes, theoretically, we could do that--if by "theoretically" you mean "as a requirement of making world-destroying nuclear weapons", that is.
We stopped using breeder reactors simply to keep from making plutonium. Which would take care of the worst of the nuclear waste, and only leave irradiated scrap from aroud decomissoned reactors.
Wasn't the mythical philsopher's stone* [something] that could aid in tranmutating objects without requiring the laws of equality
No. The mythical philosipher's stone was an alchemical creation that could be used to either turn lead into an equal weight of gold (which is, after all, theoretically possible if you could manipulate the atomic structure directly) or create the Elixer of Life, which granted immortality (which is fairly impossible, given the necessity of aging.)
As somone else already noted, "sorcerer's stone" was a re-naming of the same for the first Harry Potter book, by a British publisher who really, REALLY didn't know the American market.
It will take you far longer than you imagine to get over your last election.
Not really. We've been a fiercly divided, doomed-to-fail radical mess for going on 2 1/2 centuries now. Worst thing that could happen is a few years of civil war--and we're a LONG way from that.
The mockery I refered to was your bizare electoral college system, the blantant corruption and cases of distortion and obsufication of the vote.
Don't read too much on the internet. By the standard of proof they use here, every president since Jesus has been an amoral worthless tool of "the man."
We know that about half of the country wanted Bush to be President again. And we know that in four years, he'll step down and his replacement will have to get at least that much support again.
At any rate, Democracy was never meant to eliminate corruption. It was meant to aling the needs of the corrupt and the amoral who sieze power with those of the country as a whole, by requiring them to govern at least passingly according to the will of the people.
Surely factually correct is what it is supposed to be?
Not quite. "Accurate to contempoary assessment." It doesn't have to be TRUE, it has to be what is COMMONLY ACCEPTED.
(Really, really nitpicking here--but the point is, your theory as to the "real" atomic weight of iron should be put in a journal, not an encyclopedia.)
BTW. Not all of us gave a damm about some former colony's mockery of the democratic process.
You obviously cared enough to comment.
Oh, and getting over an election isn't a "mockery" of the democratic process. It *is* the democratic process.
Does this mean it's not going to be useful in my lifetime?
No. It's already useful enough for what encyclopedias are usually used for -- brief information by non-experts working on something almost unrelated.
Don't trust your doctoral thesis for it unless you're entering a two-century long undergraduate program, thoguh. Then again, don't trust your thesis to ANY third-tier source, either.
Wikipedia's process for moving from an idea to a collection of badly edited articles to a real encyclopedia is, at the risk of soundling like someone from the 90s, exactly the same as the process by which any community learns.
On an infinite timeline, Wikipedia is going to beat the snot out of anyone else--in about 200 years, it will have incorporated everything written before the 21st century into itself.
To speed it along on a realistic pace, the only things that can be done are either contributions or, *gasp*, donations specifically earmarked to hire fact-checkers and editors.
It would make sense that the the most popular "take with you" version of these would be on a PocketPC running Microsoft CE.
According to Documents-to-Go, who makes one of two major competing word processors for Palm (and the one bundled with the hardware), Pocket Word et al aren't up to snuff.
Third, strategy, guile, and "fighting spirit" play a much larger role in a real confrontation then either size or physical fighting technique. "It's not the size of the man in the fight, but the size of the fight in the man," as the cliche goes.
What part of "all else being equal" didn't you understand?
Which is why it's a horrible phrase to use to measure skill, and a rather foolish proclomation of said ability. But it's what the other guy started with, so rather than bicker about definition I left it there.
If you took a black belt from a belt-factory and put them up against a green belt from a rigorous, classical, high-bar school, the green-belt may very well wind up winning the majority of matches.
(And if you grabbed a real 97-lbs weakling whose idea of martial arts is Soul Calbur, he might actually kill a 300-lbs ultra-fit black belt. The UFBB would be more likely to win, but nothing's certain.)
Strength matters, and reach matters, but skill matters considerably more than either.
Very true. Which is why I didn't say "green belt" or "random punk." When our meter of skill is "black belt", we can assume identical values for skill given identical variables.
If the smaller man is more skilled, or actually is stronger, the larger man is out of luck. But I think a 97-pound strong man would have to be less than four feet tall (i.e., REALLY small) to have a greater lift/weight ratio than the 194 lbs man -- and if you're measuring unadjusted dead lift and the 194 lbs. man is fit, the 97 lbs man is going to be noticably shaped well beyond the human norm.
I know some 97 pound black belts who can kick your ass through the room.
And when they meet a 194 lbs black belt, they probably get thrown in turn. "All else being equal, the stronger man wins."
A true "black belt" wouldn't walk around with the belt showing in any case; doing so only invites aggrivation, and gives away the small man's most important method of defense: underestimation.
Everything from then on has been graphics updates, new weapons, new themes, but nothing really original.
Off-the shelf Real Differences between Quake and Halo (not all original to Halo, but still...)
Weapons that need to be reloaded
"Attack with butt of weapon" as a universal option
Stealth
Vehicles
A plot portrayed with cut-scenes instead of hard-to-read text.
Regenerating shields and for Halo 2:
Not knowing how dead you are
Just one of those would make for a rather different game--and most of them did. All told, they're as different from Quake as Quake was from Doom or Wolfenstein.
Maybe if they had relied more on function than form by using something a bit more portable like standard ASCII files, they wouldn't have this problem.
Turning a WP or MSW file into plain-text for archival purposes would be horrific. Part of the reason why these files are kept is so that various footnotes, references, citations, and whatnot will remain and be auto-updated as a document is quoted, revised, and altered.
An open archive format that retained all of the information would be useful to an extent, but it'd have to come from Novel & Microsoft, not the end-users.
This is the advocation of signal dilution. In network security monitoring one doesn't always want every packet, they only want relevant packets. When polling a population one doesn't want every vote but rather only the votes from people who are making informed and intelligent decisions.
Voting is not computing. You do NOT want your computer programs to get together and form a government against you; you want them to do exactly what you want.
Even a NULL vote is important--it flags you as someone who can be swayed, which means that the issues that are important to you will be considered at the mainstream level.
If your statements are logical, then is the following statement logical as well: "If God is all powerful, can he create a rock so massive that even he can't lift it? See its a paradox so God CAN'T exist." These statements are purely irrational and have no place in the realm of scientific reason.
Wrong. These statements are nonscientific, but that doesn't mean that they're irrational. Science isn't even a subset of reason--they're distinctly different qualities, once you get past the basics.
The questions are questions of philosiphy--similar to "how do we know there isn't a grand conspiracy trying to hide that we're all in an alien labratory on TV?"
The answers, FWIW:
* Since there's no way to tell if we were created 5 minutes ago, we just need to act on the knowledge we have, but keep an open mind to watch out for abberant data.
* Once something is so massive that there is nothing an order of magnitude larger than it to push off from, the verb "lift" becomes "move."
The same effect that all the other mounds of evidence in favor of evolution have so far had on the debate.
Prove what I ate for breakfast today last year.
Science can tell us how well we know the past, but it cannot tell us everything. I.D.--which is distinct from creationism--should be taught in schools, perhaps as an "anti-science" class that details the limitations of our rational evidence-only way of thinking.
At the least, it could give the students ammunition to shut down ignorant history teachers who believe the screed that half of the major figures in history were homosexual. Not that we have any way of knowing that they weren't, but we sure as heck can't tell that they were.
If Kerry wins it tomorrow, he'd better have those unnamed countries who supposedly have divisions of combat-ready troops they're eager to throw into the Iraq meat grinder.
Kerry doesn't have a time machine. Our allies are not going to suddenly forgive our slights to them and jump into Iraq, and Kerry's never said that he could do that.
but for N. Korea, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iran...
We'd better have a president who can get allies to come fight with us, or else we're going to either lose or use nukes against terrorists.
I need the following before I will even consider Linux:
* Palm OS support - must sync calendar, todo list, et al.
* Palm OS document support, in the form of Documents-to-Go or very similar files. I must be able to take a document from the desktop, send it to the palm, read it with RTF formatting, and bring it and its changes back.
* Word processor with proper word count -- selection based and "new words" tracking.
And we won't even get into the whole "actually use Excel files" or "play games without driving self crazy" problems.
The right-wing snapping (And they do have Fox News, the Post, et al; it's not as lopsided as they tell you it is) makes it impossible to have a reasonable discussion about Kerry.
I cannot trust anything that they say about him, because how they report things I have seen is totally inconsistent with what he actually says. The best case in my mind is the "Global test."
To paraphrase Kerry: "The president has moved unilaterally in the past, and there are times when that is called for and if President I would do so when required. But when the President moves unilaterally, he has to be able to justifty that action to his country and his allies--he has to be able to pass the Global Test."
And the Republicans moved those last two words to the very front, as some sort of mystery veto. Almost as if they think that unilateral action shouldn't have ANY diplomatic consequences.
As for Ms. Cheney: Kerry's statement was probably true. It's not putting words in her mouth; it's putting a face to the almost unanimous statement among homosexuals. While I will argue that it is legally a choice, I have NEVER met a single homosexual or bisexual who will say they "chose" to be that way.
As for inconsistencey: If you ran Bush's campaign speeches of 2000 against this year's, you could probably have a pretty good debate on the issues. But y'know what? Getting attacked and then going to war has a way of justifying folk who re-evaluate their positions. As does changing situations at home, discovering mismanagement abroad, etc.
Kerry started to panic and started launching random attacks at anything that moved, apparently using his wife and Edwards' wife to throw some more ad hominem slams into the fire, either that or those women are almost unprecendently petty and immature.
I hope you're not suggesting that Bush & Cheny have been somehow above the frey.
Ms. Cheney's going to go down in history for saying that referring to an outed lesbian as such on a question about homosexuality is a tawdry political trick.
To say nothing of the "vast right-wing conspiracy" (which is more properly referred to as "the republican party and supporters") and theiy dynamic campaign to misquote and distort the image of the frontrunner Democrat for the past two and a half years.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't it possible that within a few hundred years there will be a method found to actually use these stored materials for further energy extraction?
You mean, such as using a breeder reactor to turn low-energy waste to high-energy fuel? Why, yes, theoretically, we could do that--if by "theoretically" you mean "as a requirement of making world-destroying nuclear weapons", that is.
We stopped using breeder reactors simply to keep from making plutonium. Which would take care of the worst of the nuclear waste, and only leave irradiated scrap from aroud decomissoned reactors.
Wasn't the mythical philsopher's stone* [something] that could aid in tranmutating objects without requiring the laws of equality
No. The mythical philosipher's stone was an alchemical creation that could be used to either turn lead into an equal weight of gold (which is, after all, theoretically possible if you could manipulate the atomic structure directly) or create the Elixer of Life, which granted immortality (which is fairly impossible, given the necessity of aging.)
As somone else already noted, "sorcerer's stone" was a re-naming of the same for the first Harry Potter book, by a British publisher who really, REALLY didn't know the American market.
It will take you far longer than you imagine to get over your last election.
Not really. We've been a fiercly divided, doomed-to-fail radical mess for going on 2 1/2 centuries now. Worst thing that could happen is a few years of civil war--and we're a LONG way from that.
The mockery I refered to was your bizare electoral college system, the blantant corruption and cases of distortion and obsufication of the vote.
Don't read too much on the internet. By the standard of proof they use here, every president since Jesus has been an amoral worthless tool of "the man."
We know that about half of the country wanted Bush to be President again. And we know that in four years, he'll step down and his replacement will have to get at least that much support again.
At any rate, Democracy was never meant to eliminate corruption. It was meant to aling the needs of the corrupt and the amoral who sieze power with those of the country as a whole, by requiring them to govern at least passingly according to the will of the people.
Surely factually correct is what it is supposed to be?
Not quite. "Accurate to contempoary assessment." It doesn't have to be TRUE, it has to be what is COMMONLY ACCEPTED.
(Really, really nitpicking here--but the point is, your theory as to the "real" atomic weight of iron should be put in a journal, not an encyclopedia.)
BTW. Not all of us gave a damm about some former colony's mockery of the democratic process.
You obviously cared enough to comment.
Oh, and getting over an election isn't a "mockery" of the democratic process. It *is* the democratic process.
Does this mean it's not going to be useful in my lifetime?
No. It's already useful enough for what encyclopedias are usually used for -- brief information by non-experts working on something almost unrelated.
Don't trust your doctoral thesis for it unless you're entering a two-century long undergraduate program, thoguh. Then again, don't trust your thesis to ANY third-tier source, either.
We're not talking about a work of art. We're talking about a reference material for common conversation.
Factual mediocracy IS what an encyclopedia is supposed to be!
Wikipedia's process for moving from an idea to a collection of badly edited articles to a real encyclopedia is, at the risk of soundling like someone from the 90s, exactly the same as the process by which any community learns.
On an infinite timeline, Wikipedia is going to beat the snot out of anyone else--in about 200 years, it will have incorporated everything written before the 21st century into itself.
To speed it along on a realistic pace, the only things that can be done are either contributions or, *gasp*, donations specifically earmarked to hire fact-checkers and editors.
It would make sense that the the most popular "take with you" version of these would be on a PocketPC running Microsoft CE.
According to Documents-to-Go, who makes one of two major competing word processors for Palm (and the one bundled with the hardware), Pocket Word et al aren't up to snuff.
Got somone claiming differently?
Third, strategy, guile, and "fighting spirit" play a much larger role in a real confrontation then either size or physical fighting technique. "It's not the size of the man in the fight, but the size of the fight in the man," as the cliche goes.
What part of "all else being equal" didn't you understand?
Um, black belt generally...
Which is why it's a horrible phrase to use to measure skill, and a rather foolish proclomation of said ability. But it's what the other guy started with, so rather than bicker about definition I left it there.
If you took a black belt from a belt-factory and put them up against a green belt from a rigorous, classical, high-bar school, the green-belt may very well wind up winning the majority of matches.
(And if you grabbed a real 97-lbs weakling whose idea of martial arts is Soul Calbur, he might actually kill a 300-lbs ultra-fit black belt. The UFBB would be more likely to win, but nothing's certain.)
Strength matters, and reach matters, but skill matters considerably more than either.
Very true. Which is why I didn't say "green belt" or "random punk." When our meter of skill is "black belt", we can assume identical values for skill given identical variables.
If the smaller man is more skilled, or actually is stronger, the larger man is out of luck. But I think a 97-pound strong man would have to be less than four feet tall (i.e., REALLY small) to have a greater lift/weight ratio than the 194 lbs man -- and if you're measuring unadjusted dead lift and the 194 lbs. man is fit, the 97 lbs man is going to be noticably shaped well beyond the human norm.
I know some 97 pound black belts who can kick your ass through the room.
And when they meet a 194 lbs black belt, they probably get thrown in turn. "All else being equal, the stronger man wins."
A true "black belt" wouldn't walk around with the belt showing in any case; doing so only invites aggrivation, and gives away the small man's most important method of defense: underestimation.
There was co-op in Quake.
I *did*, however, neglect to mention "co-op on the same TV in the same room on the same couch."
Off-the shelf Real Differences between Quake and Halo (not all original to Halo, but still...)
Weapons that need to be reloaded
"Attack with butt of weapon" as a universal option
Stealth
Vehicles
A plot portrayed with cut-scenes instead of hard-to-read text.
Regenerating shields
and for Halo 2:
Not knowing how dead you are
Just one of those would make for a rather different game--and most of them did. All told, they're as different from Quake as Quake was from Doom or Wolfenstein.
Maybe if they had relied more on function than form by using something a bit more portable like standard ASCII files, they wouldn't have this problem.
Turning a WP or MSW file into plain-text for archival purposes would be horrific. Part of the reason why these files are kept is so that various footnotes, references, citations, and whatnot will remain and be auto-updated as a document is quoted, revised, and altered.
An open archive format that retained all of the information would be useful to an extent, but it'd have to come from Novel & Microsoft, not the end-users.
*SLAP*
Call me back when you're not allowed to comlain like that.
This is the advocation of signal dilution. In network security monitoring one doesn't always want every packet, they only want relevant packets. When polling a population one doesn't want every vote but rather only the votes from people who are making informed and intelligent decisions.
Voting is not computing. You do NOT want your computer programs to get together and form a government against you; you want them to do exactly what you want.
Even a NULL vote is important--it flags you as someone who can be swayed, which means that the issues that are important to you will be considered at the mainstream level.
If your statements are logical, then is the following statement logical as well: "If God is all powerful, can he create a rock so massive that even he can't lift it? See its a paradox so God CAN'T exist." These statements are purely irrational and have no place in the realm of scientific reason.
Wrong. These statements are nonscientific, but that doesn't mean that they're irrational. Science isn't even a subset of reason--they're distinctly different qualities, once you get past the basics.
The questions are questions of philosiphy--similar to "how do we know there isn't a grand conspiracy trying to hide that we're all in an alien labratory on TV?"
The answers, FWIW:
* Since there's no way to tell if we were created 5 minutes ago, we just need to act on the knowledge we have, but keep an open mind to watch out for abberant data.
* Once something is so massive that there is nothing an order of magnitude larger than it to push off from, the verb "lift" becomes "move."
The same effect that all the other mounds of evidence in favor of evolution have so far had on the debate.
Prove what I ate for breakfast today last year.
Science can tell us how well we know the past, but it cannot tell us everything. I.D.--which is distinct from creationism--should be taught in schools, perhaps as an "anti-science" class that details the limitations of our rational evidence-only way of thinking.
At the least, it could give the students ammunition to shut down ignorant history teachers who believe the screed that half of the major figures in history were homosexual. Not that we have any way of knowing that they weren't, but we sure as heck can't tell that they were.
If Kerry wins it tomorrow, he'd better have those unnamed countries who supposedly have divisions of combat-ready troops they're eager to throw into the Iraq meat grinder.
Kerry doesn't have a time machine. Our allies are not going to suddenly forgive our slights to them and jump into Iraq, and Kerry's never said that he could do that.
but for N. Korea, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iran...
We'd better have a president who can get allies to come fight with us, or else we're going to either lose or use nukes against terrorists.
Plucker?
Last I checked, Plucker was a reader, not an editor.
Ok, here's a challenge for you.
I need the following before I will even consider Linux:
* Palm OS support - must sync calendar, todo list, et al.
* Palm OS document support, in the form of Documents-to-Go or very similar files. I must be able to take a document from the desktop, send it to the palm, read it with RTF formatting, and bring it and its changes back.
* Word processor with proper word count -- selection based and "new words" tracking.
And we won't even get into the whole "actually use Excel files" or "play games without driving self crazy" problems.
*sigh*
The right-wing snapping (And they do have Fox News, the Post, et al; it's not as lopsided as they tell you it is) makes it impossible to have a reasonable discussion about Kerry.
I cannot trust anything that they say about him, because how they report things I have seen is totally inconsistent with what he actually says. The best case in my mind is the "Global test."
To paraphrase Kerry: "The president has moved unilaterally in the past, and there are times when that is called for and if President I would do so when required. But when the President moves unilaterally, he has to be able to justifty that action to his country and his allies--he has to be able to pass the Global Test."
And the Republicans moved those last two words to the very front, as some sort of mystery veto. Almost as if they think that unilateral action shouldn't have ANY diplomatic consequences.
As for Ms. Cheney: Kerry's statement was probably true. It's not putting words in her mouth; it's putting a face to the almost unanimous statement among homosexuals. While I will argue that it is legally a choice, I have NEVER met a single homosexual or bisexual who will say they "chose" to be that way.
As for inconsistencey: If you ran Bush's campaign speeches of 2000 against this year's, you could probably have a pretty good debate on the issues. But y'know what? Getting attacked and then going to war has a way of justifying folk who re-evaluate their positions. As does changing situations at home, discovering mismanagement abroad, etc.
Kerry started to panic and started launching random attacks at anything that moved, apparently using his wife and Edwards' wife to throw some more ad hominem slams into the fire, either that or those women are almost unprecendently petty and immature.
I hope you're not suggesting that Bush & Cheny have been somehow above the frey.
Ms. Cheney's going to go down in history for saying that referring to an outed lesbian as such on a question about homosexuality is a tawdry political trick.
To say nothing of the "vast right-wing conspiracy" (which is more properly referred to as "the republican party and supporters") and theiy dynamic campaign to misquote and distort the image of the frontrunner Democrat for the past two and a half years.
From that description, it doesn't seem very useful for exceptional Joe either, only for GNU/Joes developing Hurd.
Or running servers. Web servers, print servers, file servers... heck, it might even work for supercomputers for all I know.