I agree that I would like a 3.5" jack but at the same time I also understand why there isn't one. This is sort of the elegance in design AshtangiMan likes in the iPhone. Everything is done through a single port on the G1 rather than having to place multiple ports on it. If you want to use earphones other than the ones provided or plug it into your car stereo you can get an adapter fairly inexpensively.
I know that's not a perfect solution but then what is? It is six of one (single port with adapters) or half a dozen of the other (multiple ports).
I think part of the reason that the articles don't give you these specifics is that he's referring to functions granted by third party apps. Shazam (the app that identifies music) and ShopSavy (one of the programs that will read bar codes) aren't made by T-Mobile/Google so for them to say 'the G1 lets you do this' might get them in some legal trouble. Also there's simply the fact that when these articles were written the apps might not have been available or the reviewers didn't know about them.
Think of it this way, when you see an ad or an article for a computer from Dell they won't tell you that you can play World of Warcraft on it. The writers have no idea if you own World of Warcraft and if you should it is pretty much assumed you can do so unless there are special circumstances (which the writers probably will tell you about). The G1 is much more like a computer than other phones. What you are able to do with it is limited by the hardware, which most articles and ads are happy to describe, and the software, which can be a big unknown.
In the interest of full disclosure I have a G1 myself and have had it for about a week and think it is overall the greatest phone design in the world right now. The shape is comfortable for use as a phone and it has all the hardware I currently want, like a real keyboard instead of a touch screen substitute. This is important since those features can't change. As for the rest of the design, yes, there are bits that irritate me. Currently the only bluetooth service supported is earpiece. I can't send audio from the music or video player to the earpiece. The main button on the earpiece does not begin voice dialing and I'm not wildly crazy about how their voice dialing works. When I am viewing where I am on a map I would like to be able to search for things around me like gas stations or bookstores and when it is tracking my location on the map I wish it would hold my location in the center of the map and smoothly scroll rather than moving to the edge of the map and then sliding everything over.
However these are all pretty petty annoyances for the most part and because the software is so open people are able to write replacement apps to fix these problems. Already someone has taken the existing mail app and modified it to include some left out capabilities like BCC.
Yes, it is possible to do the same thing with the iPhone but it is (as I understand it) considerably more problematic.
I've wanted a game with most of those features as well and I actually don't believe they are as impossible as most of the others have said.
Ecosystem: I think this is more difficult than you are making it out to be simply because of the amount of computer power required to handle the decision making of all the creatures. It is far from impossible but I wouldn't say it's "not difficult".
I think this is definitely doable. UO's economy failed for a lot of reason but just because that doesn't mean it is impossible.
This one I've seen done. I'd just like to see it done better.
The last one is really tricky. Like people say, if you make it doable by a player some people will do it just for fun and you'll eventually end up with a barren world. That said the solution would probably be to make it a theoretical possibility but a practical impossibility. It isn't as though one person can wipe out an entire species unless the species is seriously endangered to begin with. With large enough populations over large enough areas it will be pretty much impossible for that to happen. Of course this is somewhat at odds with allowing people to have a direct effect on the world and it would require huge amounts of computing power to control so many creatures.
..What's the secret? Or is it something that involves long years of meditation and fence-painting?...
Unfortunately I can tell other people how to do this. It was the result of an irreproducible accident that involves a coronal mass ejection coinciding with two charged particle beams traveling in opposite directions, an intense magnetic field, a crossed proton stream and a case of non-dairy creamer.
Well, true, but we are four dimensional in the same sense that the creature living on the torus is really three dimensional, since the surface of the torus is not flat. When I speak of becoming a four dimensional entity it would be more correct to say you need to become a fully functional four dimensional entity, most likely with a fifth dimensional warpage.
It isn't valid because a 3-torus is a 4 dimensional shape. To be more accurate it is valid, but not in a way you can conceive of.
Think of it in these terms; you are a two dimensional creature. Your world is defined solely by X and Y coordinates and is of a finite size. Take two opposite sides and bring them together and now your world is a tube. The only edges you can perceive are the ends of the tube. Take the two ends of the tube and bring them together. You are now living on a standard torus (not a 3-torus). As far as you are concerned there is no "edge" to the torus. Roam as much as you want to but you will never reach an edge. The only way for you to experience an "edge" would be if you stepped up one dimension and became three dimensional.
A 3-torus is a similar construct but instead of being a two dimensional world with the X edges and the Y edges brought together it is a three dimensional world in which the X edges, Y edges, and Z edges have all been brought together. From your three dimensional perspective there is no "edge" and the only way to perceive one is to step up a dimension and become a four dimensional entity.
It's not all that unbelievable. I recall seeing something on TV recently where an electric motorcycle was raced against an internal combustion motorcycle and it turned out the electric one was quicker. Both bikes were drag race style bikes.
The electric motorcycle was quicker (crossing the finish line first) but not faster (had a lower top speed). I believe it had something to do with the power range of the electric motor in relation to the power range of the IC engine. It also possibly had to do with the electric bike not having to shift gears, but don't quote me on that.
I'm sure some other slashdotter can provide better specifics as to why it happened.
Well, my guess is they wouldn't have to exempt you from income tax. They could just give you a tax credit based on how much work they get from your machine.
Also they could only exempt you from Federal income tax. You would still need to pay state income tax.
However if they are going to do all that then they aren't building a real botnet but something more along the lines of a distributed network. Everyone participating knows they are participating and installs software to do so.
Of course it should probably be pointed out, belatedly, that the article in question doesn't mention botnets at all. The article and an Airforce botnet are two different things the original poster conflated.
You are probably thinking about the Posse Comitatus Act (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act). However what that act really prohibits is the use of military forces as peace officers within US borders. Hacking into citizen's machines to use them as part of a botnet wouldn't fall under that.
A couple of people have brought up the Third Amendment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution) which covers the quartering of soldiers in private homes. I am not a Constitutional lawyer but I'm guessing that doesn't really apply either in a strict literal sense or in the spirit of what the authors intended. The intent was purely in people being forced to quarter soldiers. There's no mention of whether or not the military has the right to seize assets they might need, which is closer to what they would be doing in this case.
If I had to guess (and I would have to) I would think the Fifth Amendment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution) is probably more applicable. Its final clause is "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation". Hacking your system and using CPU cycles and bandwidth without permission would seem to constitute at least a form of taking of my property. They may not physically take it but they take control of it and even though I get it back later the clause doesn't say it's ok for them to take property as long as they bring it back.
I believe according to the link you sent that the Chandrasekhar limit is the upper limit for how massive a non-rotating star can be before it collapses into a black hole (there are obviously plenty of stars with more mass than this but they have rotation or other things that prevent them from collapsing). What the article is talking about is a theoretical lower limit for how small something can be before naturally forming into a black hole. This is not necessarily the same since you could have a smaller body that is acted upon by some natural force that causes it to form a black hole at a mass lower than the Chandrasekhar limit.
You do realize that most goods imported are imported on ships rather than airplanes, right? The reason for this is because while it is possible to import everything by airplane (as was done in the Berlin airlift) it is much more expensive to do so. In the case of a person traveling across the ocean the extra energy can be justified by the convenience of rapid travel. Most shipped items however don't have to be anywhere in any particular hurry so if it takes a few weeks for them on a boat it is no big deal.
Similarly a space elevator can be used for things such as hauling materials and supplies up to geosynchronous orbit and if it takes days or weeks or even months that's no big deal since the materials don't care. In the mean time the energy saved on transporting literally hundreds of millions of tons (eventually) of payload into space via elevator would be immense.
That's kind of what I was thinking after (and actually before) I read the article. I know a bit about how traditional Japanese swords (shinsakuto) are made so I was very suspicious of the idea of a company that makes 600 ton casings that also makes shinsakuto.
Japan has certain laws concerning when you are allowed to call something shinsakuto. These laws are intended to protect the culture of sword making similar to how the German laws of reinheitsgebot protect the culture of German brewing. It is quite possible in Japan to make swords not following these laws but the sword cannot then be called shinsakuto.
Even the best non-shinsakuto swords only cost around 200,000* yen as opposed to the 1,000,000 yen the article mentions, so it seems pretty clear that the swords of Japan Steel Works are shinsakuto.
One of the laws governing the production of shinsakuto swords is that a licensed smith can only produce two shinsakuto swords per month. Since the article only mentioned the company having a single swordsmith that would mean 24 swords per year or around $240,000 of production. Even if they had an army of swordsmiths (and there aren't all that many licensed shinsakuto smiths in Japan) you could get up to maybe $10-20 million of production per year. Compare this with $100 million just as a down payment on one of the enormous casings, multiple by three or four for how many they produce per year, multiply by another factor to account for full payment (I'm guessing down payment probably isn't more than 1/2 the final cost) and you are looking at $500-$1000 million per year easily, and of course they produce things besides nuclear casings and swords.
My guess, given that others have pointed out that they have guided tours of the facility, is that they have a single swordsmith, or possibly a small handful, who produce shinsakuto more as an item of interest than as a real commercial product. Given that, calling the company a sword maker is sort of like calling Disney a silhouette maker because of the one lady who works in a little shop on Mainstreet USA at Disneyland.
Of course in defense of the poster he isn't the one really sensationalizing. It is the article itself that calls them a sword maker.
*For the most part I am doing a quick and dirty calculation of 100 yen to the dollar. I know this isn't the current exchange rate but at least it is close enough in the neighborhood for a Fermi calculation.
So yes, if someone made a copy of me and killed the copy, I'd be dead. But I'd also still be alive.
This seems to be the core of your argument but I'm afraid it just doesn't hold up. By the definitions of the words you cannot be dead and alive. You are either one or the other. This has less to do with linear or non-linear thinking and has more to do with the definitions of the words. It may be nearly impossible to define where one ends and the other begins but you can't be both anymore than something could be over and under the same thing at the same instant.
Likewise when you say there are two of 'me' you are building an argument around the improper use of a word. Me is singular. If there is more than one then you use the word 'we'. There cannot be two of me. If you poke me with a needle then I will feel it. If you poke someone else with a needle and I don't feel it then you didn't poke me. You poked them. They may be the most perfect copy of me possible, but they still are not me.There may be me and a copy of me. There may even be two copies of me. However, there can never be two of me.
This isn't to say that other people may not choose to treat my copy as me. From their perspective the copy of me is absolutely as good as the original and the two of us may be viewed as interchangeable, but the same could happen if I had a twin. Their perspective does not alter reality.
Saying that I am who I believe myself to be sounds great but it isn't really true. For one thing that would mean that those people in asylums because they believe they are from Alpha Centauri really are from Alpha Centauri. Obviously they are not. For another thing it isn't a case of who I believe I am. What you are really saying is if the copy believes it's me then it is. So if your copy goes out and knocks over a liquor store while believing it is you do you really believe the police should arrest you?
As far as the Prestige goes, that was a huge problem I had with the movie. I have a really hard time with the idea that I do this trick and then die, but a copy of me goes off and lives my life so that's all right.
I can never quite understand how people think that making a copy of themselves means they personally will live forever. The copy is a separate individual from you and when you die, you are dead. Granted there's now a copy of you running around but that's all it is, a copy. It isn't you.
Think of it in the converse; if someone made a copy of you and the copy died would you be dead?
I have my own theory; so many things in this world annoy me that they couldn't have happened by random chance. Instead they are proof of some supreme cosmic being who shaped the world just to piss me off.
I call my theory Belligerent Design. (with all credit to Lore Sjoberg for that joke).
I think the key word in that sentence is 'synthesizing'. They weren't saying it wasn't possible for it to happen. Just that we couldn't do it ourselves.:)
I did not read TFA but I read another article about him a few days ago, so I'm not sure if the article mentions it but these are specialized legs. What I mean by that is that he uses these legs only for races. When he walks around he uses a different pair of legs because those legs perform better for walking. Most likely some of the trickier aspects of normal locomotion such as climbing stairs, walking on a shifting surface like sand, or walking over an uneven surface would be considerably more difficult.
Not really. An awful lot of astronomy is done by theorizing something exists and then looking for it. This creates the very common situation of 'No one has ever found this before, but we fully expected it to be out there'.
..Just because Linden Labs decided to publish an exchange rate for their dollars and real dollars doesn't mean their dollars are a good investment vehicle...
Just to pick nits but LindenLabs doesn't really publish an exchange rate, at least not in the sense that you would seem to imply. What LL really does is act as a middle man between two players exchanging LindenDollars for US Dollars. The person selling the LindenDollars sets the sell rate at whatever they wish and their money goes into a big pool with a tag for that exchange amount. When another player wishes to purchase LindenDollars they set the buy rate at whatever the maximum is that they are willing to pay and if there is anything in the pool at that sell value or less it is purchased at the sell value originally tagged. LL makes a little bit of money from the deal as a brokerage fee.
The exchange rates published by LL are the low, high, and average exchanges of the day so the values aren't set at all by LL. Now technically, yes, you are correct when you say LL publishes an exchange rate but the implication in that statement seems to me to be that they set that exchange rate. In this they no more set the exchange rate than, say, the Wall Street Journal when it publishes the exchange rate of the US dollar against the Yen. The value isn't really arbitrarily set but is set by the faith people hold in the currency.
None of which is to really say that people investing large amounts of money into LindenDollars aren't being foolish. It seems to be a very high risk investment. Just that there is a bit more backing up the value of the LindenDollar than a company saying 'this is it'.
I've done a bit of personal research on this myself. The simplest solution is to look locally for a company that installs photovoltaic systems and ask them.
You need to do this because there are a lot of variables. The amount of sunlight you get per day is completely different in San Diego and Seattle. The direction the roof runs (a variable they can't really take into account until you have a house in mind) effects the efficiency. If your system is going to run independent of the electrical grid then the amount of electricity you use needs to be calculated so the size of the batteries you need can be figured out. If the system connects to the grid then the laws concerning how your electrical use is calculated need to be known, and they will vary from place to place. Some brands of cells are more efficient. Some brands of cells have longer warranties.
There's really just too much for your average layman to be able to give you really good advice.
I've always thought that if a paintable solar cell became a reality and it was cheap enough to produce and robust enough to withstand the wear that a simple solution would be to paint the streets and parking lots with it. I'm relatively sure there's more square feet of roadway than rooftops and of course the two aren't mutually exclusive so you can do both.
However the article is still a bit thin on details and efficiency still needs to be considered. It's great to theorize that if this stuff is only half as efficient as current solar cells, but what if it is only 10%? What if it is only 1%? My guess is that the article doesn't list any efficiency because it is incredibly low at the moment and all they have really done is a sort of proof of concept by generating a faint but measurable electrical charge.
Slashdot Mirror
Multiple ports wasn't meant to refer to an extreme. Even 2 ports is 'multiple'.
I agree that I would like a 3.5" jack but at the same time I also understand why there isn't one. This is sort of the elegance in design AshtangiMan likes in the iPhone. Everything is done through a single port on the G1 rather than having to place multiple ports on it. If you want to use earphones other than the ones provided or plug it into your car stereo you can get an adapter fairly inexpensively.
I know that's not a perfect solution but then what is? It is six of one (single port with adapters) or half a dozen of the other (multiple ports).
I think part of the reason that the articles don't give you these specifics is that he's referring to functions granted by third party apps. Shazam (the app that identifies music) and ShopSavy (one of the programs that will read bar codes) aren't made by T-Mobile/Google so for them to say 'the G1 lets you do this' might get them in some legal trouble. Also there's simply the fact that when these articles were written the apps might not have been available or the reviewers didn't know about them.
Think of it this way, when you see an ad or an article for a computer from Dell they won't tell you that you can play World of Warcraft on it. The writers have no idea if you own World of Warcraft and if you should it is pretty much assumed you can do so unless there are special circumstances (which the writers probably will tell you about). The G1 is much more like a computer than other phones. What you are able to do with it is limited by the hardware, which most articles and ads are happy to describe, and the software, which can be a big unknown.
In the interest of full disclosure I have a G1 myself and have had it for about a week and think it is overall the greatest phone design in the world right now. The shape is comfortable for use as a phone and it has all the hardware I currently want, like a real keyboard instead of a touch screen substitute. This is important since those features can't change. As for the rest of the design, yes, there are bits that irritate me. Currently the only bluetooth service supported is earpiece. I can't send audio from the music or video player to the earpiece. The main button on the earpiece does not begin voice dialing and I'm not wildly crazy about how their voice dialing works. When I am viewing where I am on a map I would like to be able to search for things around me like gas stations or bookstores and when it is tracking my location on the map I wish it would hold my location in the center of the map and smoothly scroll rather than moving to the edge of the map and then sliding everything over.
However these are all pretty petty annoyances for the most part and because the software is so open people are able to write replacement apps to fix these problems. Already someone has taken the existing mail app and modified it to include some left out capabilities like BCC.
Yes, it is possible to do the same thing with the iPhone but it is (as I understand it) considerably more problematic.
I've wanted a game with most of those features as well and I actually don't believe they are as impossible as most of the others have said.
..What's the secret? Or is it something that involves long years of meditation and fence-painting?...Unfortunately I can tell other people how to do this. It was the result of an irreproducible accident that involves a coronal mass ejection coinciding with two charged particle beams traveling in opposite directions, an intense magnetic field, a crossed proton stream and a case of non-dairy creamer.
Well, true, but we are four dimensional in the same sense that the creature living on the torus is really three dimensional, since the surface of the torus is not flat. When I speak of becoming a four dimensional entity it would be more correct to say you need to become a fully functional four dimensional entity, most likely with a fifth dimensional warpage.
...Or is the idea of an edge just not valid?It isn't valid because a 3-torus is a 4 dimensional shape. To be more accurate it is valid, but not in a way you can conceive of.
Think of it in these terms; you are a two dimensional creature. Your world is defined solely by X and Y coordinates and is of a finite size. Take two opposite sides and bring them together and now your world is a tube. The only edges you can perceive are the ends of the tube. Take the two ends of the tube and bring them together. You are now living on a standard torus (not a 3-torus). As far as you are concerned there is no "edge" to the torus. Roam as much as you want to but you will never reach an edge. The only way for you to experience an "edge" would be if you stepped up one dimension and became three dimensional.
A 3-torus is a similar construct but instead of being a two dimensional world with the X edges and the Y edges brought together it is a three dimensional world in which the X edges, Y edges, and Z edges have all been brought together. From your three dimensional perspective there is no "edge" and the only way to perceive one is to step up a dimension and become a four dimensional entity.
I mean those guys are no rocket scientists.
What? Oh.....
It's not all that unbelievable. I recall seeing something on TV recently where an electric motorcycle was raced against an internal combustion motorcycle and it turned out the electric one was quicker. Both bikes were drag race style bikes.
The electric motorcycle was quicker (crossing the finish line first) but not faster (had a lower top speed). I believe it had something to do with the power range of the electric motor in relation to the power range of the IC engine. It also possibly had to do with the electric bike not having to shift gears, but don't quote me on that.
I'm sure some other slashdotter can provide better specifics as to why it happened.
Well, my guess is they wouldn't have to exempt you from income tax. They could just give you a tax credit based on how much work they get from your machine.
Also they could only exempt you from Federal income tax. You would still need to pay state income tax.
However if they are going to do all that then they aren't building a real botnet but something more along the lines of a distributed network. Everyone participating knows they are participating and installs software to do so.
Of course it should probably be pointed out, belatedly, that the article in question doesn't mention botnets at all. The article and an Airforce botnet are two different things the original poster conflated.
You are probably thinking about the Posse Comitatus Act (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act). However what that act really prohibits is the use of military forces as peace officers within US borders. Hacking into citizen's machines to use them as part of a botnet wouldn't fall under that.
A couple of people have brought up the Third Amendment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution) which covers the quartering of soldiers in private homes. I am not a Constitutional lawyer but I'm guessing that doesn't really apply either in a strict literal sense or in the spirit of what the authors intended. The intent was purely in people being forced to quarter soldiers. There's no mention of whether or not the military has the right to seize assets they might need, which is closer to what they would be doing in this case.
If I had to guess (and I would have to) I would think the Fifth Amendment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution) is probably more applicable. Its final clause is "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation". Hacking your system and using CPU cycles and bandwidth without permission would seem to constitute at least a form of taking of my property. They may not physically take it but they take control of it and even though I get it back later the clause doesn't say it's ok for them to take property as long as they bring it back.
I believe according to the link you sent that the Chandrasekhar limit is the upper limit for how massive a non-rotating star can be before it collapses into a black hole (there are obviously plenty of stars with more mass than this but they have rotation or other things that prevent them from collapsing). What the article is talking about is a theoretical lower limit for how small something can be before naturally forming into a black hole. This is not necessarily the same since you could have a smaller body that is acted upon by some natural force that causes it to form a black hole at a mass lower than the Chandrasekhar limit.
Yeah, but real geeks will keep these in their shirt pockets, requiring a project projector pocket protector.
You do realize that most goods imported are imported on ships rather than airplanes, right? The reason for this is because while it is possible to import everything by airplane (as was done in the Berlin airlift) it is much more expensive to do so. In the case of a person traveling across the ocean the extra energy can be justified by the convenience of rapid travel. Most shipped items however don't have to be anywhere in any particular hurry so if it takes a few weeks for them on a boat it is no big deal.
Similarly a space elevator can be used for things such as hauling materials and supplies up to geosynchronous orbit and if it takes days or weeks or even months that's no big deal since the materials don't care. In the mean time the energy saved on transporting literally hundreds of millions of tons (eventually) of payload into space via elevator would be immense.
That's kind of what I was thinking after (and actually before) I read the article. I know a bit about how traditional Japanese swords (shinsakuto) are made so I was very suspicious of the idea of a company that makes 600 ton casings that also makes shinsakuto.
Japan has certain laws concerning when you are allowed to call something shinsakuto. These laws are intended to protect the culture of sword making similar to how the German laws of reinheitsgebot protect the culture of German brewing. It is quite possible in Japan to make swords not following these laws but the sword cannot then be called shinsakuto.
Even the best non-shinsakuto swords only cost around 200,000* yen as opposed to the 1,000,000 yen the article mentions, so it seems pretty clear that the swords of Japan Steel Works are shinsakuto.
One of the laws governing the production of shinsakuto swords is that a licensed smith can only produce two shinsakuto swords per month. Since the article only mentioned the company having a single swordsmith that would mean 24 swords per year or around $240,000 of production. Even if they had an army of swordsmiths (and there aren't all that many licensed shinsakuto smiths in Japan) you could get up to maybe $10-20 million of production per year. Compare this with $100 million just as a down payment on one of the enormous casings, multiple by three or four for how many they produce per year, multiply by another factor to account for full payment (I'm guessing down payment probably isn't more than 1/2 the final cost) and you are looking at $500-$1000 million per year easily, and of course they produce things besides nuclear casings and swords.
My guess, given that others have pointed out that they have guided tours of the facility, is that they have a single swordsmith, or possibly a small handful, who produce shinsakuto more as an item of interest than as a real commercial product. Given that, calling the company a sword maker is sort of like calling Disney a silhouette maker because of the one lady who works in a little shop on Mainstreet USA at Disneyland.
Of course in defense of the poster he isn't the one really sensationalizing. It is the article itself that calls them a sword maker.
*For the most part I am doing a quick and dirty calculation of 100 yen to the dollar. I know this isn't the current exchange rate but at least it is close enough in the neighborhood for a Fermi calculation.
This seems to be the core of your argument but I'm afraid it just doesn't hold up. By the definitions of the words you cannot be dead and alive. You are either one or the other. This has less to do with linear or non-linear thinking and has more to do with the definitions of the words. It may be nearly impossible to define where one ends and the other begins but you can't be both anymore than something could be over and under the same thing at the same instant.
Likewise when you say there are two of 'me' you are building an argument around the improper use of a word. Me is singular. If there is more than one then you use the word 'we'. There cannot be two of me. If you poke me with a needle then I will feel it. If you poke someone else with a needle and I don't feel it then you didn't poke me. You poked them. They may be the most perfect copy of me possible, but they still are not me.There may be me and a copy of me. There may even be two copies of me. However, there can never be two of me.
This isn't to say that other people may not choose to treat my copy as me. From their perspective the copy of me is absolutely as good as the original and the two of us may be viewed as interchangeable, but the same could happen if I had a twin. Their perspective does not alter reality.
Saying that I am who I believe myself to be sounds great but it isn't really true. For one thing that would mean that those people in asylums because they believe they are from Alpha Centauri really are from Alpha Centauri. Obviously they are not. For another thing it isn't a case of who I believe I am. What you are really saying is if the copy believes it's me then it is. So if your copy goes out and knocks over a liquor store while believing it is you do you really believe the police should arrest you?
As far as the Prestige goes, that was a huge problem I had with the movie. I have a really hard time with the idea that I do this trick and then die, but a copy of me goes off and lives my life so that's all right.
I can never quite understand how people think that making a copy of themselves means they personally will live forever. The copy is a separate individual from you and when you die, you are dead. Granted there's now a copy of you running around but that's all it is, a copy. It isn't you.
Think of it in the converse; if someone made a copy of you and the copy died would you be dead?
Kind of brings new meaning to Blue Screen of Death.
Windows Genome has detected an error in your base pairs and is now shutting down.
I have my own theory; so many things in this world annoy me that they couldn't have happened by random chance. Instead they are proof of some supreme cosmic being who shaped the world just to piss me off.
I call my theory Belligerent Design. (with all credit to Lore Sjoberg for that joke).
I think the key word in that sentence is 'synthesizing'. They weren't saying it wasn't possible for it to happen. Just that we couldn't do it ourselves. :)
I did not read TFA but I read another article about him a few days ago, so I'm not sure if the article mentions it but these are specialized legs. What I mean by that is that he uses these legs only for races. When he walks around he uses a different pair of legs because those legs perform better for walking. Most likely some of the trickier aspects of normal locomotion such as climbing stairs, walking on a shifting surface like sand, or walking over an uneven surface would be considerably more difficult.
Not really. An awful lot of astronomy is done by theorizing something exists and then looking for it. This creates the very common situation of 'No one has ever found this before, but we fully expected it to be out there'.
Just to pick nits but LindenLabs doesn't really publish an exchange rate, at least not in the sense that you would seem to imply. What LL really does is act as a middle man between two players exchanging LindenDollars for US Dollars. The person selling the LindenDollars sets the sell rate at whatever they wish and their money goes into a big pool with a tag for that exchange amount. When another player wishes to purchase LindenDollars they set the buy rate at whatever the maximum is that they are willing to pay and if there is anything in the pool at that sell value or less it is purchased at the sell value originally tagged. LL makes a little bit of money from the deal as a brokerage fee.
The exchange rates published by LL are the low, high, and average exchanges of the day so the values aren't set at all by LL. Now technically, yes, you are correct when you say LL publishes an exchange rate but the implication in that statement seems to me to be that they set that exchange rate. In this they no more set the exchange rate than, say, the Wall Street Journal when it publishes the exchange rate of the US dollar against the Yen. The value isn't really arbitrarily set but is set by the faith people hold in the currency.
None of which is to really say that people investing large amounts of money into LindenDollars aren't being foolish. It seems to be a very high risk investment. Just that there is a bit more backing up the value of the LindenDollar than a company saying 'this is it'.
I've done a bit of personal research on this myself. The simplest solution is to look locally for a company that installs photovoltaic systems and ask them.
You need to do this because there are a lot of variables. The amount of sunlight you get per day is completely different in San Diego and Seattle. The direction the roof runs (a variable they can't really take into account until you have a house in mind) effects the efficiency. If your system is going to run independent of the electrical grid then the amount of electricity you use needs to be calculated so the size of the batteries you need can be figured out. If the system connects to the grid then the laws concerning how your electrical use is calculated need to be known, and they will vary from place to place. Some brands of cells are more efficient. Some brands of cells have longer warranties.
There's really just too much for your average layman to be able to give you really good advice.
I've always thought that if a paintable solar cell became a reality and it was cheap enough to produce and robust enough to withstand the wear that a simple solution would be to paint the streets and parking lots with it. I'm relatively sure there's more square feet of roadway than rooftops and of course the two aren't mutually exclusive so you can do both.
However the article is still a bit thin on details and efficiency still needs to be considered. It's great to theorize that if this stuff is only half as efficient as current solar cells, but what if it is only 10%? What if it is only 1%? My guess is that the article doesn't list any efficiency because it is incredibly low at the moment and all they have really done is a sort of proof of concept by generating a faint but measurable electrical charge.
Still, it does make me hopeful.