NASAâ(TM)s David Hathaway has adjusted his expectations of Solar Cycle 24 downwards. He is quoted in the New York Times here Specifically, he said:
"Still, something like the "Dalton Minimum - two solar cycles in the early 1800s that peaked at about an average of 50 sunspots - lies in the realm of the possible."
As an iPhone fan boy, I am not under the impression that the iPhone is the end-all-be-all for all time. I only think it is the end-all-be-all for the duration of my contract. I am eagerly awaiting the day when I can get an Android or Qt-based phone. But even if they are available, I might stick with Apple. Apple can get away with the AppStore BS because they have market momentum. But as these stories proliferate, developers will become wary and port to other platforms. Apple will then be forced to let go, or let the market slip away.
In the end I will win, iPhone or not because competition will always ensure my next phone is better. I want Android and Nokia to make my iPhone suck, because Apple will be forced to do better. I think this is why they may be making a tablet that isn't bundled to a carrier. It gets them out of the phone market, but keeps them in the mobile market space. Leave the phones to the phone companies, let Apple focus on computers.
Or to put it another way, the effort to create the fuel is the effort removed from its pursuit of survival, and therefore is at a competitive disadvantage to other naturally occurring organisms. Perhaps they could find a pair of organisms that work together to make an environment ideal for each other while being hostile to any other bacteria not contributing to the goal. While the efficiency may be reduced (the volume of "helpers") will decrease from the maximum production) you'll get more stable production over the long term, decreasing maintenance costs.
I imagine an additional helper to create a toxin or hunts contamination down and destroys it leaving the producers to produce.
Just a thought.
Well, assuming there is a viable competitor to gasoline (never mind the somewhat dubious claims of photosynthetic efficiency, they are claiming over 10%, with photosynthesis being about 2%-4% in the real world) You will only manage to set the upper price for gas. Given that the gas is pretty much completely speculatively priced, the availability of a competition would be to put a practical price limit. This is good in that it ensures gas will be cheap. This is bad because it ensures gas will be cheap. It is counter to the environmental agenda which is to get us off of fossil fuels. Ensuring its cheapness is a step in the wrong direction.
Furthermore, as pointed out by others, the algae needs a substantial amount of water and land to scale. This in and of itself is an environmental burden.
I think the real answer lies with photo-electric solar cells. The only downside to those is the many greenhouse gasses used in their manufacture. I see that as temporary as we discover and invent to materials to make the cells out of.
From his blog:
"For all of our UK readers, now is the time for all good citizens to come to the aid of their country (and science). The Met Office refuses to release data and methodology for their HadCRUT global temperature dataset after being asked repeatedly. Without the data and procedures there is no possibility of replication, and without replication the Hadley climate data is not scientifically valid. This isnâ(TM)t just a skeptic issue, mind you, others have just a keen an interest in proving the data.
What is so bizarre is this. The FOI request by Steve McIntyre to the Met Office was for a copy of the data sent to Peter Webster. If the restrictions on the data hold for Steve McIntyre, why did they not prevent release of the data to Webster?
When asked by Warwick Hughes for this data, Dr. Jones famously replied:
Even if WMO agrees, I will still not pass on the data. We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it."
While not excusing the criminal behavior, I love it when people create a problem that just doesn't ever happen in the real world then point to the techs for being dumb. What I mean is, I've seen memory modules go bad, but I've NEVER seen memory modules work themselves out of a slot. They click in there and stay. I've seen monitor power cords work themselves out, memory chips go bad, but never a memory module.
Another repair tech expose took an old PATA ribbon cable and cut some wires. That wasn't a real test either. PATA cables are not a wear item. If they do go bad, it is a result of recent handling and is detected immediately.
While you know the problem, the techs have the opposite problem - their experience works against them.
So when simulating an error, please make it plausible.
Modify a boot loader (GRUB, LILO) to require updates via the internet. When you can't resolve after 10 days, or the kill switch is flipped, it automatically writes over the hard drive. The idea is a system-level service would re-write the boot loader periodically with a new time stamp as long as the network service does not activate the kill switch. Of course, you should always keep a backup of your system somewhere in case you pass the cut-off:-)
MySQL has its fan boys from circa 1994-2001. During this period, the MySQL license was much more permissive, and gained a certain momentum from PHP that carries it through to this day. At the same time, PostgreSQL was still using Cygwin on Windows, the INSTALL had a table of contents, and was lacking performance enhancements (particularly on Windows). Eventually Cygwin was dropped and the threading was happy on windows, and the performance enhancements were good. Along with this came a much shorter INSTALL file and all reason to use MySQL had disappeared. But once you know something, people like to keep on using it. Then MySQL got things like triggers, foreign key constraints and full ACID compliance. So in the end it ended being a wash.
However, and not to start a flame war, it seems that PostgreSQL, having been feature-complete (ACID, foreign keys, etc) maintained a performance edge. But also to this day MySQL has a very fast table implementation, provided you don't need things like ACID compliance. For a variety of applications, this is "good enough" and the trade-offs of feature completeness vs performance are worth it.
Disclaimer: I have used both extensively in the past. I prefer PostgreSQL, but now use neither. Now I only do SQLite (embedded tables) or Oracle (for hot replication).
"I am sure there is a god. I am just not sure of his relevance"
And given that, how would one prosecute under this new law? Would they seek prosecution of something that is questionably relevant? And if he is relevant, can't god dish out his wrath as he sees fit? I don't think he needs our help thankyouverymuch. And if his isn't relevant or capable, what do we care?
Back in college, my psyc prof spent some time going over those "personality" screenings and directly told us how to pass. He in effect, gave us the answer key (for those of us taking notes) on how to present ourselves via test results. His statements about how the scoring is done already invalidated the test. He also covered multi-colored ink blots and told us how to handle those too.
But despite what I know, every time I see an ink blot, I think "ink blot, symmetrical about [X,Y] axis." What's that make me? I don't see anything. Just ink on folded paper. I've stared at these things and my answer never changes. because you know, its still an ink blot.
Why do you think we are of an concern to them? Allegedy - Allegedy - the UFO just sat there at the edge of the crater for a while, then moved off once the astronauts came out. The aliens are not the ones concerned. So why would they be concerned about our ability to use chemical-based engines to reach our first orbital body if the travel between stars?
As for our government control, that Russian hacker who got arrested for breaking tin to NASA computers allegedly had recovered images with alien craft. Now finally the astronauts have started to acknoledge alien contact
But what you fail to realize, and what I am inquiring about, is the feedback mechanism. There needs to exist some feedback from the child's viability to his father to apply evolutionary selection force for this to work. However, children are not that plentiful, nor are they have to communicate genetically with their parents.
Unless - and this is out there - that the kids DID communicate genetically with their parents at one point in human history, where this behavior provided a feedback. And that might just be it. If you mate with a ugly, deformed inbred family member, you would not want that lineage to continue. Instead, you'd want to select fresher, non-inbred offspring. This would provide a selection pressure and reinforce the males that exhibited this behavior.
I am satisfied with this answer. That tribes would at times, inbreed, because an inbred next generation is better than no next generation, while wanting to get to fresh, non-inbred population members. Corollary: Inbred traits are ugly, non-inbred traits are defined as attractive. This then could psychologically be applied to women in general, so this behavior would be practiced on the whole population, giving rise to a general "attractiveness" mechanism. But you need in-breeders to do it.
Ah, but that is another test. The "if I am planning for more later..." test. That is not one of attractiveness. Corollary to that is that you have the belief that your next partner is going to be more attractive.
But lets look at the no/low cost argument. While the first is always the largest by volume, the second still has more than enough ammo to result in fertilization, same for 2nd and 3rd attempts. So the question now becomes is what is withheld forming an advantage for the next? Given the repletion rate of ejaculate, you're looking at about 24 hours. Are men so evolutionarily pressured that we should be getting action more often than every night?
My question is one of the feedback look of "quality". You mention this, but somehow there needs to be feedback from the offspring back to the man to have him hold back on the fatties. it is this feedback mechanism that I seek to understand. There should be no difference, because there cannot be a feedback to bias for this.
What!? No, evolution is not directed. It is only punctuated equilibrium. That is, survival of the fittest. The DNA does not know how to combine itself to be more successful. Rather it relies on outside factors for its selection. Given a constantly changing world, there is no consistent direction. Each species fills its niche in a genetic cat-and-mouse game, which is wholly undirected.
The shape of the penis - with a mushroom shaped head has been proven to be of advantage in moving other males seminal fluid out of the way and providing optimum placement of the newer mate's seminal fluid. Given viability is measured in just a few days, this would mean that women genetically speaking, have gotten it on with more than one partner in a 3-day period, thus biasing for makes with a special head shape. Those dirty girls!
(But be aware that only in Greek decedent cultures is monogamy really stressed. Prior to their discovery of one mom and one dad per child, women in many cultures were shared between men. Or, in matriarchal societies, many men were shared with women. Children were regarded as proportional to whomever the partners were. If you put more in, the child was more yours. After the Greeks discovered that was not the case - that regardless of how many men, there was only one father, we see society sequester the women at home, where they can't socialize with other men, ensuring that her children were his.
The day that I, as a nontechnical software user, can meaningfully participate in an open-source project is the day that open source will truly have won.
Show me an instance of this with Apple. In fact, I would argue the opposite - that their strict control of the platform has allowed them to focus on only approving software that specifically fits the customer's needs the best. As apposed to the open source model which is one tool, a million uses. With apple you get the universal 1-piece screw driver. With open source you get the Craftsmen all-in-one screw driver with 36 bits and 6 handles in 4 colors.
I wonder what the evolutionary mechanics are to this. Why race to an attractive woman's egg more than an unattractive one? Seems that from a male perspective, it doesn't matter who the recipient is as long as the generic material is transferred, so men should always give it 100%. So we then arrive at the idea that men hold back on ugly partners. Now, why put yourself at a competitive disadvantage for unattractive women? What kind of evolutionary penalty is there? Does our reproductive system recognize that prettier people make for more successful future generation's mating? This would I believe be a new discovery in genetics and evolution. That our selves are organized just not for the immediate generation but successive generations as well.
Additionally, what does this mean for intercultural, interracial dating, where different societies find other societies' traits as attractive or repugnant?
Any other ideas on why giving it your all might not produce a favorable genetic distribution?
Looking at it, after your strip the 4 O atoms, it looks like you'd get 2CO + N2 (carbon monoxide and Nitrogen gas). Anyone know what the real reaction would be? NO2 + C? (could you then feed the NO2 into your engine, or yourself?)
I have to say this is one of the better rulings. The judge is enlightened to know that multi-tasking computers can serve many users at once. The idea that one IP=one user is completely a windows-centric perspective, which is even less true since windows 2000 (ish, not exact).
Now this should raise the bar for RIAA and MPAA, who only collect IP addresses. Now they need to associate the activity with the user's account. Given that this information is not usually available, it is a coffin nail for those organizations.
Well LASIK treatment is out for you, but you can still have PRK. Healing time is a week, and you won't ever have as good vision as a LASIK candidate, but it might improve your vision to be more useful in uncorrected situations. Not to mention making glasses and contacts easier to find/wear.
Well, at 32, I do notice a slightly longer accommodation time in some circumstances, over just 4 years ago, but my vision is still excellent.
Ah yes. There are many new advancements in interocular lenses. There are the classic single-focal (which medicare covers), multifocal, toric and so many new ones. They even have some that can accommodate (be focused by your eye).
Combined with laser treatments surgery (of the lens) including Wavefront(tm) you can have vision better than you probably ever could. Some laser treatments are resulting in 80/20 which is about the same visual acuity as a fox.
It seems that our tech is not just replacing, but augmenting our natural abilities when it comes to the eye.
When we put more consideration into TCP ISNs than we do an identifier someone has for life. We even worked hard to randomize this so that the connection is not easy to hijack if SSNs are being sent.
Don't believe the fluff. Vision declines for several reasons. First, you'll have general focal point problems. Either myopia, hyperopia, or astigmatism (both at the same time - yes two focal points) those can happen at any age. But around 40, your crystalline lens in your eye begins to stiffen. This is presbyopia. The lens cannot bend and this is a lack of "accommodation". Then this lens as a result of UV exposure degrades and you get cataracts. Then you need lens replacement surgery. This is all before we even get to the back of the eye. Floaters in the various humors. Glaucoma (too much humor pressure distorts and damages the optic nerve) , Then, we can start worrying about the retina and things below...
Slashdot Mirror
"Still, something like the "Dalton Minimum - two solar cycles in the early 1800s that peaked at about an average of 50 sunspots - lies in the realm of the possible."
As an iPhone fan boy, I am not under the impression that the iPhone is the end-all-be-all for all time. I only think it is the end-all-be-all for the duration of my contract. I am eagerly awaiting the day when I can get an Android or Qt-based phone. But even if they are available, I might stick with Apple. Apple can get away with the AppStore BS because they have market momentum. But as these stories proliferate, developers will become wary and port to other platforms. Apple will then be forced to let go, or let the market slip away. In the end I will win, iPhone or not because competition will always ensure my next phone is better. I want Android and Nokia to make my iPhone suck, because Apple will be forced to do better. I think this is why they may be making a tablet that isn't bundled to a carrier. It gets them out of the phone market, but keeps them in the mobile market space. Leave the phones to the phone companies, let Apple focus on computers.
You can find an example of this material here
Or to put it another way, the effort to create the fuel is the effort removed from its pursuit of survival, and therefore is at a competitive disadvantage to other naturally occurring organisms. Perhaps they could find a pair of organisms that work together to make an environment ideal for each other while being hostile to any other bacteria not contributing to the goal. While the efficiency may be reduced (the volume of "helpers") will decrease from the maximum production) you'll get more stable production over the long term, decreasing maintenance costs. I imagine an additional helper to create a toxin or hunts contamination down and destroys it leaving the producers to produce. Just a thought.
Well, assuming there is a viable competitor to gasoline (never mind the somewhat dubious claims of photosynthetic efficiency, they are claiming over 10%, with photosynthesis being about 2%-4% in the real world) You will only manage to set the upper price for gas. Given that the gas is pretty much completely speculatively priced, the availability of a competition would be to put a practical price limit. This is good in that it ensures gas will be cheap. This is bad because it ensures gas will be cheap. It is counter to the environmental agenda which is to get us off of fossil fuels. Ensuring its cheapness is a step in the wrong direction. Furthermore, as pointed out by others, the algae needs a substantial amount of water and land to scale. This in and of itself is an environmental burden. I think the real answer lies with photo-electric solar cells. The only downside to those is the many greenhouse gasses used in their manufacture. I see that as temporary as we discover and invent to materials to make the cells out of.
From his blog: "For all of our UK readers, now is the time for all good citizens to come to the aid of their country (and science). The Met Office refuses to release data and methodology for their HadCRUT global temperature dataset after being asked repeatedly. Without the data and procedures there is no possibility of replication, and without replication the Hadley climate data is not scientifically valid. This isnâ(TM)t just a skeptic issue, mind you, others have just a keen an interest in proving the data. What is so bizarre is this. The FOI request by Steve McIntyre to the Met Office was for a copy of the data sent to Peter Webster. If the restrictions on the data hold for Steve McIntyre, why did they not prevent release of the data to Webster? When asked by Warwick Hughes for this data, Dr. Jones famously replied: Even if WMO agrees, I will still not pass on the data. We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it."
While not excusing the criminal behavior, I love it when people create a problem that just doesn't ever happen in the real world then point to the techs for being dumb. What I mean is, I've seen memory modules go bad, but I've NEVER seen memory modules work themselves out of a slot. They click in there and stay. I've seen monitor power cords work themselves out, memory chips go bad, but never a memory module. Another repair tech expose took an old PATA ribbon cable and cut some wires. That wasn't a real test either. PATA cables are not a wear item. If they do go bad, it is a result of recent handling and is detected immediately. While you know the problem, the techs have the opposite problem - their experience works against them. So when simulating an error, please make it plausible.
Modify a boot loader (GRUB, LILO) to require updates via the internet. When you can't resolve after 10 days, or the kill switch is flipped, it automatically writes over the hard drive. The idea is a system-level service would re-write the boot loader periodically with a new time stamp as long as the network service does not activate the kill switch. Of course, you should always keep a backup of your system somewhere in case you pass the cut-off :-)
MySQL has its fan boys from circa 1994-2001. During this period, the MySQL license was much more permissive, and gained a certain momentum from PHP that carries it through to this day. At the same time, PostgreSQL was still using Cygwin on Windows, the INSTALL had a table of contents, and was lacking performance enhancements (particularly on Windows). Eventually Cygwin was dropped and the threading was happy on windows, and the performance enhancements were good. Along with this came a much shorter INSTALL file and all reason to use MySQL had disappeared. But once you know something, people like to keep on using it. Then MySQL got things like triggers, foreign key constraints and full ACID compliance. So in the end it ended being a wash. However, and not to start a flame war, it seems that PostgreSQL, having been feature-complete (ACID, foreign keys, etc) maintained a performance edge. But also to this day MySQL has a very fast table implementation, provided you don't need things like ACID compliance. For a variety of applications, this is "good enough" and the trade-offs of feature completeness vs performance are worth it. Disclaimer: I have used both extensively in the past. I prefer PostgreSQL, but now use neither. Now I only do SQLite (embedded tables) or Oracle (for hot replication).
"I am sure there is a god. I am just not sure of his relevance"
And given that, how would one prosecute under this new law? Would they seek prosecution of something that is questionably relevant? And if he is relevant, can't god dish out his wrath as he sees fit? I don't think he needs our help thankyouverymuch. And if his isn't relevant or capable, what do we care?
Back in college, my psyc prof spent some time going over those "personality" screenings and directly told us how to pass. He in effect, gave us the answer key (for those of us taking notes) on how to present ourselves via test results. His statements about how the scoring is done already invalidated the test. He also covered multi-colored ink blots and told us how to handle those too.
But despite what I know, every time I see an ink blot, I think "ink blot, symmetrical about [X,Y] axis." What's that make me? I don't see anything. Just ink on folded paper. I've stared at these things and my answer never changes. because you know, its still an ink blot.
Why do you think we are of an concern to them? Allegedy - Allegedy - the UFO just sat there at the edge of the crater for a while, then moved off once the astronauts came out. The aliens are not the ones concerned. So why would they be concerned about our ability to use chemical-based engines to reach our first orbital body if the travel between stars?
As for our government control, that Russian hacker who got arrested for breaking tin to NASA computers allegedly had recovered images with alien craft. Now finally the astronauts have started to acknoledge alien contact
Alien moon base
But what you fail to realize, and what I am inquiring about, is the feedback mechanism. There needs to exist some feedback from the child's viability to his father to apply evolutionary selection force for this to work. However, children are not that plentiful, nor are they have to communicate genetically with their parents.
Unless - and this is out there - that the kids DID communicate genetically with their parents at one point in human history, where this behavior provided a feedback. And that might just be it. If you mate with a ugly, deformed inbred family member, you would not want that lineage to continue. Instead, you'd want to select fresher, non-inbred offspring. This would provide a selection pressure and reinforce the males that exhibited this behavior.
I am satisfied with this answer. That tribes would at times, inbreed, because an inbred next generation is better than no next generation, while wanting to get to fresh, non-inbred population members. Corollary: Inbred traits are ugly, non-inbred traits are defined as attractive. This then could psychologically be applied to women in general, so this behavior would be practiced on the whole population, giving rise to a general "attractiveness" mechanism. But you need in-breeders to do it.
Ah, but that is another test. The "if I am planning for more later..." test. That is not one of attractiveness. Corollary to that is that you have the belief that your next partner is going to be more attractive.
But lets look at the no/low cost argument. While the first is always the largest by volume, the second still has more than enough ammo to result in fertilization, same for 2nd and 3rd attempts. So the question now becomes is what is withheld forming an advantage for the next? Given the repletion rate of ejaculate, you're looking at about 24 hours. Are men so evolutionarily pressured that we should be getting action more often than every night?
My question is one of the feedback look of "quality". You mention this, but somehow there needs to be feedback from the offspring back to the man to have him hold back on the fatties. it is this feedback mechanism that I seek to understand. There should be no difference, because there cannot be a feedback to bias for this.
What!? No, evolution is not directed. It is only punctuated equilibrium. That is, survival of the fittest. The DNA does not know how to combine itself to be more successful. Rather it relies on outside factors for its selection. Given a constantly changing world, there is no consistent direction. Each species fills its niche in a genetic cat-and-mouse game, which is wholly undirected.
The shape of the penis - with a mushroom shaped head has been proven to be of advantage in moving other males seminal fluid out of the way and providing optimum placement of the newer mate's seminal fluid. Given viability is measured in just a few days, this would mean that women genetically speaking, have gotten it on with more than one partner in a 3-day period, thus biasing for makes with a special head shape. Those dirty girls!
(But be aware that only in Greek decedent cultures is monogamy really stressed. Prior to their discovery of one mom and one dad per child, women in many cultures were shared between men. Or, in matriarchal societies, many men were shared with women. Children were regarded as proportional to whomever the partners were. If you put more in, the child was more yours. After the Greeks discovered that was not the case - that regardless of how many men, there was only one father, we see society sequester the women at home, where they can't socialize with other men, ensuring that her children were his.
The day that I, as a nontechnical software user, can meaningfully participate in an open-source project is the day that open source will truly have won.
Show me an instance of this with Apple. In fact, I would argue the opposite - that their strict control of the platform has allowed them to focus on only approving software that specifically fits the customer's needs the best. As apposed to the open source model which is one tool, a million uses. With apple you get the universal 1-piece screw driver. With open source you get the Craftsmen all-in-one screw driver with 36 bits and 6 handles in 4 colors.
I wonder what the evolutionary mechanics are to this. Why race to an attractive woman's egg more than an unattractive one? Seems that from a male perspective, it doesn't matter who the recipient is as long as the generic material is transferred, so men should always give it 100%. So we then arrive at the idea that men hold back on ugly partners. Now, why put yourself at a competitive disadvantage for unattractive women? What kind of evolutionary penalty is there? Does our reproductive system recognize that prettier people make for more successful future generation's mating? This would I believe be a new discovery in genetics and evolution. That our selves are organized just not for the immediate generation but successive generations as well.
Additionally, what does this mean for intercultural, interracial dating, where different societies find other societies' traits as attractive or repugnant?
Any other ideas on why giving it your all might not produce a favorable genetic distribution?
This is the Bender principal. Not only do you consume alcohol for fuel, but you get to go on a "bender" every day!
Looking at it, after your strip the 4 O atoms, it looks like you'd get 2CO + N2 (carbon monoxide and Nitrogen gas). Anyone know what the real reaction would be? NO2 + C? (could you then feed the NO2 into your engine, or yourself?)
I have to say this is one of the better rulings. The judge is enlightened to know that multi-tasking computers can serve many users at once. The idea that one IP=one user is completely a windows-centric perspective, which is even less true since windows 2000 (ish, not exact).
Now this should raise the bar for RIAA and MPAA, who only collect IP addresses. Now they need to associate the activity with the user's account. Given that this information is not usually available, it is a coffin nail for those organizations.
Well LASIK treatment is out for you, but you can still have PRK. Healing time is a week, and you won't ever have as good vision as a LASIK candidate, but it might improve your vision to be more useful in uncorrected situations. Not to mention making glasses and contacts easier to find/wear.
Well, at 32, I do notice a slightly longer accommodation time in some circumstances, over just 4 years ago, but my vision is still excellent.
Ah yes. There are many new advancements in interocular lenses. There are the classic single-focal (which medicare covers), multifocal, toric and so many new ones. They even have some that can accommodate (be focused by your eye).
Combined with laser treatments surgery (of the lens) including Wavefront(tm) you can have vision better than you probably ever could. Some laser treatments are resulting in 80/20 which is about the same visual acuity as a fox.
It seems that our tech is not just replacing, but augmenting our natural abilities when it comes to the eye.
When we put more consideration into TCP ISNs than we do an identifier someone has for life. We even worked hard to randomize this so that the connection is not easy to hijack if SSNs are being sent.
Don't believe the fluff. Vision declines for several reasons. First, you'll have general focal point problems. Either myopia, hyperopia, or astigmatism (both at the same time - yes two focal points) those can happen at any age. But around 40, your crystalline lens in your eye begins to stiffen. This is presbyopia. The lens cannot bend and this is a lack of "accommodation". Then this lens as a result of UV exposure degrades and you get cataracts. Then you need lens replacement surgery. This is all before we even get to the back of the eye. Floaters in the various humors. Glaucoma (too much humor pressure distorts and damages the optic nerve) , Then, we can start worrying about the retina and things below...