Is there really an Anthropomorphic principle or should that have read Anthropic Principle?
I'd be interested to know what the Anthropomorphic principle was... the laws of the universe are structured such that man-shaped being have to exist, perhaps?
Um... ok, here is a Washington Post piece from yesterday titled "Democrats Reject Key 9/11 Panel Suggestion."
Which doesn't quote any named Democratic sources at all. And, in reporting on statements that unnamed Congressional aides gave, says only that they are not going to implement them in the first 100 hours. Which is obviously a contradiction of the promise made by Pelosi, but a far cry from rejecting them outright. In any case the main thrust of the original post was that the Democrats did not have a platform, not that they weren't going to stick to the platform.
Regarding the rest of your comment. I have read the "new direction" missive. Do you have any substantive criticisms of it? Raising minimum wage doesn't sound like an empty platitude to me. It sounds like a concrete, realistic goal.
I have not commented at all on the wisdom or appropriateness of any of the proposed actions the Democratic members of Congress say they plan to take. Whether they are good ideas or not was not germane to responding to the original post which said they had nothing other than fear. Would you concede that they did have things other than fear? (Platitudes does not sound like fear mongering to me.)
Before evaluating the appropriatness of the solutions proposed by any party, we have to be able to have a rational discussion about them. For myself, I look for solutions not acrimony when confronted with problems. I think criticism of a proposed solution is completely appropriate. However, it is not productive if there is no rigor to the criticism. How can anything good come out of name calling and casting of vague aspersions? I think the challenge in confronting something with which we are unhappy is lucidly describing exactly what we don't like and offering some course for finding a better solution.
Heh! Not really. This last election was all about fear mongering. The dems gained seats in the legislature entirely by talking about how people should be afraid of the other party being in control. They certainly didn't win seats by actually spelling out contstructive, real-world things they'd actually, successfully do that would actually be helpful in any way.
I don't think you are being 100% honest in saying the Democrats didn't present anything they planned to do. Pelosi had a rather prominent and publicized platform for a Democratically controlled house. The party website spells it out.
Whether they will be succesful is not something they can guarantee since they could not achieve a veto-proof control of the legislature and the current President is from the opposing party
I think the GP post was being a bit unnecessarily partisan, but I don't think the tone of discussion is improved by endulging in more partisan attacks.
In fact, just yesterday they made it clear they were already going to break one of their loudest campaign promises (to implement all of the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission).[snip]Say you don't know exactly what I mean.
I don't know exactly what you mean.
Can you site some sort of reference for this? I'm guessing by the way you phrase the above assertion (i.e. "they made it clear") that it was not an overt statement to the effect of "we are not going to implement all of the recommendations..."
Is this the collider that could possibly create a black hole that would destroy the planet?
I don't think there is really much to worry about.
It's also worth noting that while the collisions in HLC will be on the order of 10^12 electron volts... cosmic ray collisions with the earth on the order of 10^20 electron volts occur on a regular basis. If any Earth consuming blackholes were going to be created... they'd probably have already happened.
It's important to note that "spin" really refers to the electrons.
I'm not sure why you say this. It is clear from the article that they are talking about nuclear spin, not electron spin. In fact the basis of the experiment seems to be the nuclear magnetic moment... it is definitely not an electron artifact... There is a quote from the researcher (an assistant professor of physics) refering to nuclear spin in the second paragraph of the article.
Your explanation of spin is a little off the mark as well... You seem to be confusing a couple of different concepts. I'd say spin is really a quanity associated with a particle more than anything else... much like charge. And it is not on off. One of the main divisions of particles is into fermions and bosons based on whether there spin is an non-integer or integer, and thus whether they obey the exclusion principle or not. The wave/particle nature of electrons is only tenously connected to the concept of spin, in as much as they are both quantum mechanical concepts.
I'm really forced to wonder if the Slashdot group-think would hate Diebold as much as they do if Gore won in 2000 or Kerry won in 2004. I sincerely doubt it. If anything, they'd probably be considered as heroes in that case.
Given that past stories and comments are archived on Slashdot and the availability of tools to search those past articles and comments, I failed to see a reason that you cannot provide some supporting evidence for your assertion of "group-think" on the topic of Diebold. Given you're main assertion is built on this assumption that "group-think" hatred of Diebold exists, it is hard to take it seriously when you provide no evidence or references.
My perception is that most statements in the current discussion are not at all partisan. Comments seem to focus on the technical merits of Diebold versus other voting systems.
However, you are definitely asserting something partisan in your post. That the dislike for Diebold is directly connected to the fact that Democrats were not elected as president in 2000 and 2004. I'm not sure how the 2000 results are relevant as Diebold was not deploying voting machines at that time, but what evidence do you have the Diebold dislike sprung from the election results of 2004? The first story I found on Diebold in a search of Slashdot on Google was this one from 2003. Obviously, the Kerry/Bush election did not affect it.
I agree more rigor and research is needed by everyone in forming strong opinions. Knee-jerk reactions influenced by our prejudices does not serve us well. It is difficult for me to apply those principles to the particular view you espouse though, as you've not provided any hints as to where to find the facts upon which you've based your view. My own investigations unfortunately have not turned up a lot of support for your point of view either.
However realize when you buy an Ipod, you're agreeing to use it the way Apple says you can. That means no changing it so it suddenly plays videos if it didn't before. You can, they likely won't hurt you, but the device itself has an agreement somewhere built into it.
I do not concede this point at all. I'm definitely not agreeing to anything when I buy an iPod. Now, I know some folks (and courts) want to say that opening an iPod package or using an iPod signifies my consent to some onerous licensing agreement... but I feel (hope?) that eventually sanity and rationality will win out on the whole idea that vendors/manufacturers can modify the implied agreement (hallowed for, literally, millenia) that is embodied in the sale of a good, after the fact.
If I pay for something and someone gives it to me, I'm free to do with it whatever I please. Why does a manufacturer by virtue of manufacturing something have a right to modify that? Suppose that a manufacturer used a third-party to put items in packaging. Would that third party now have the right to incorporate a shrink wrap license that was binding into the packaging? If not, why not? Generally, their is at least one reseller in between myself and the manufacturer. They are generally not a party to the shrink wrap license. So when I paid the reseller for the iPod, what was I buying from them? If I'm buying a "right to use" (as licensed) from Apple, why did I pay a third party who is not a party to the license? Why didn't I have to pay Apple? If opening a package is significant of intent to enter into a contract (of which you were unaware prior to opening the package), what else might be? Walking into a room? Watching a television program? I hope that the miriad contradicitions embodied by this whole power grab will eventually cause it to fall under its own weight.
Yes, those crazy Brits. How dare they corrupt our language like that. Oh wait...
Well, I certainly didn't mean it in a perjorative sense. More in the sense that if you used "a" as a pronoun to a person in America, they wouldn't no what the hell you were talking about. In any case, "a man" is definitely using it as a preposition.
This story does not seem to make sense based on some back of the envelope calculations. If we assume they are talking about capacitors, which they don't seem to state in the article, they'd need a tremendously heavy one to store the energy.
Based on the Wikipedia energy density figures, an assumption they have a capacitor that has ten times the energy density of a supercapacitor, and the idea that an electric motor will be 5 times as efficient as an internal combustion engine, it turns out that you'd need 176 times the mass of capacitor as gasoline to run this car. If we use a weight of gas of 6.25 pounds, the capacitor weight for the vehicle will be 1100 pounds for each gallon of gas you would have needed.
Obviously, many of my assumptions could be off. They may have come up with a non-battery electric storage device that is many, many times the energy density of an existing super capacitor. However, it would seem the underlying technical advances necessary for such electricity storage would have had a lot of other applications that were lower hanging fruit than a car.
Nice spin there. All he did was call one lady hot. BFD! As much as I think the governator is a joke, this is just getting ridiculous.
While I agree that his comments were not disparaging, he definitely did more than call one lady hot. He characterized a group of people in a particular way based on their race. I think mainly the idea is that it was probably in poor taste for a governor to say. I imagine that some people might interpret it as being indicative of a predilection for making generalizations about people based on their race, and perhaps not all of those generalization are so benign.
This is a common fallacy when people have just a rudimentary understanding of physics and no other applicable
example of this would be an M1 Abrams vs a small Toyota.
heaviest vehicle with a strong frame that you can possibly find.
Your example relies on a signficant difference in mass as well as overall rigidity of the two vehicles in question. Deformable frames being about absorbing energy (and momentum, being an inelastic collision) in an impact. An M1 brings way more Kinetic Energy to the impact than can be absorbed by a deforming frame of a Toyota.
The safety of the passengers is dependent on how quickly the vehicle passenger compartment decelerates, as that will determine with what force they impact the interior of the vehicle (the so-called "second impact"). The M1 will not decelerate very much, but it is because of the mass disparity, not that it is rigid.
Obviously a crumple zone cannot absorb an unlimited amount of energy, but up to the amount it can absorb it is definitely good for you, whether you are hitting something rigid or not.
The cable and satellite companies will almost certainly throw a fit about products like the Slingbox. Now, they are able to ensure not only that each house can its own paid-for cable connection, but also levy per-TV fees for cable/satellite box rentals. The slingbox and its ilk attach to the
I'm not sure this is an accurate description of why the cable companies would be against it. Cable companies don't like set top boxes because they are a significant liability and rental fees don't really cover the cost of ownership. That's why they created the cableCard standard to get out of the set top box business.
However they do charge a premium for extra TV's and part of that is dictated by deals with content providers. I'm not saying that cable companies are innocent of wrong doing but content providers often have draconian contract terms that cannot be addressed by the cable companies by themselves.
You don't seem to have much evidence for your assertion that ISPs are reluctant to deal with bots. I know that both ISPs your mention have aggressive programs to battle spam that is generated or relayed by users. It is really a very tough problem to deal with.
How do you identify a bot infected computer? What do you do to a customer with a bot infected computer that he is probably not aware of? What preventative steps can you take that will not interfere with legitimate customer traffic?
While technical savvy folks can generally think of solutions to problems, they often neglect the issue of scalability... every solution has to work in an environment that may deal with a million emails a second! Customers get very irate when they are disconnected, sandboxed, and refused further service until they run (free) anti-virus software on their computer. Customer care organizations within an ISP are generally very resistant to any program that will involve turning off customer service or restricting it, because that causes tremendous expense for them in terms of customer calls. ("What does this web page mean? How do I get rid of it?") It is not just about engineering a solution but also deploying it holistically within a company that has issues other than technology.
Other solutions that make managing the problem easier are also very expensive and slow to implement across a customer base of millions. SMTP AUTH deployments are tremendously expensive in terms of customer care, customer education, and engineering efforts. Everything is complicated by scale and working within the confines of a business with other requirements apart from just technical ones.
ISPs spend millions on efforts to combat spam. The anti-spam industry is expected to hit $1.7 billion in revenues by 2008. If you have the answer to all these problems, start a company and sell it. You will be very successful.
Granted spallation does occur, but cross-section for knocking nucleons out of a nucleus with gamma rays is vanishingly small. And secondary isotope creation from freed nucleons has to be an even smaller possibility.
Much more likely as a possibility for nucleosynthesis from Gamma rays would be beta plus decay, where a proton becomes a neutron and ejects a positron (and neutrino). But I don't think that would happen significantly either. Almost all the gamma rays are going to be absorbed via photoelectric, compton, or pair production.
But even given both of those mechanisms, you aren't going to end up with a radioactive world from just gammas.
I'm an RA at an "Artificial Intelligence" lab. In the Fall, I'll be working on my PhD, studying "artificial intelligence." I have a membership to the American Association for "Artificial Intelligence," which is one of the most respected organizations in the field of "Artificial Intelligence."
The question I have of "true" AI is will it have artificial arguments from authority?
I think the what people are really looking for in terms of science fiction-y type AI is sentience, not really intelligence. So will accelerating progress with digital integrated circuits at some point lead to sentience or can we develop AI that is not sentient but comparable in intelligence to a human? Do we want to develop AI that is sentient? Imagine if you have a game with a sentient AI opponent? Is it ethical to kill such an opponent or to turn the game off?
I'm also assuming that the gamma rays aren't powerful enough to turn surface matter into radioactive isotopes that pollute the atmosphere and ocean, or to do that to the atmosphere itself. In that case, it's more proper to say that the Earth is poisoned, not fried.
I think your confusing types of radiation here. Gamma rays are electromagnetic radiation and will not create radioactive isotopes no matter how intense they are. Generally, what they are going to do is ionize atoms and heat things up. Damage to biologicals from Gamma rays is via ionization and heat effects.
If there were a very intense neutron burst, that could potentially "activate" some materials, i.e. transmute them into a radioacive isotopes. However, neutron burst are not going to be something we have to worry about at this distance from the event.
If telepathy were possible, and explainable in scientific terms, that would be cool.
What, if it was possible and was not explainable in scientific terms, it wouldn't be cool?
There are lots of things that are possible and not yet explainable in scientific terms. Otherwise, what would scientist spend there time doing?
[snip]Sodium ions (from dissolved salt) are negative[snip]
Sodium ions from a salt are definitely not negative. Sodium like many other akalai metals tends to lose its outermost electron and form a positive ion. I think you'd have a hard time getting sodium to pick up an extra electron.
It makes the rest of the explanation a bit hard to swallow.
No. I'm buying into present-day powdered-donut stuffing fatass-wedged hairpiece cheat fuck liar middle managers. Don't have to romanticize inventors. They're right there in TFA.
I can't imagine why you'd ever have a negative relationship with your manager... or why you might have been fired.
Given our dismal level of overall education I doubt it would be long before some random neighborhood in the US would be visible from space. I know one of these is proposed for construction here in Georgia, and somehow the idea of "rural south" and "nuclear power plant" in the same sentence worries me.
Plant Hatch, a nuclear power plant, has been operating in Baxley, Georgia for 31 years. Baxley, a town of four thousand, definitely qualifies as "rural south."
If nuclear power in the rural south worries you, then you have had a lot to be worried about for a long time.
Second, in this country (and others) a person is responsible for their own actions, including their words. So if you want to go on a forum and blast someone you better be able to back up your facts - otherwise you can get sued.
This is not accurate. Defamation (libel or slander) in the United States requires not only that the statements be false, but also that you made them with malice.
This kind of stuff is serious. You may not think it is a big deal, but to a multi-million/billion dollar company it is a HUGE deal. You can't just point the fingers and blame the big guys, the little guy also has to take responsibility for reckless acts. Right on for Juniper and hopefully they will be able to slam the people who are saying false things about them.
The "also" statement above seems to imply a long and hallowed tradition of "big guys" (i.e. multi-*illion dollar companies) taking responsibility for reckless acts. Please provide some references for that. You also seem to gloss over the inequities and difficulty in getting fair treatment from the civil court system between an entity with effectively unlimited legal resources and an individual who probably has little if any disposable income to spend on defending himself from a suit. The threat of tort can be used to discourage criticism without regard for the validity of the claim, since most people don't have the resources to defend themselves. Then too, corporations can apparently rely on folks like yourself to assume they are correct. To wit, your whole final statement about the alledged false things said.
As for your ridiculous sign comment....you don't know the law do you? You are allowed, via your constitutional right, and go and protest a company. You are allowed to have a sign accusing them of doing evil and bad things...but the moment you LIE that company can sue you into extinction.
Sued into extinction? At best a company should recover damages and perhaps have a punitive reward. What public interest is served by allowing a company to sue someone into extinction? It's certainly not in my interest.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd be interested to know what the Anthropomorphic principle was... the laws of the universe are structured such that man-shaped being have to exist, perhaps?
Which doesn't quote any named Democratic sources at all. And, in reporting on statements that unnamed Congressional aides gave, says only that they are not going to implement them in the first 100 hours. Which is obviously a contradiction of the promise made by Pelosi, but a far cry from rejecting them outright. In any case the main thrust of the original post was that the Democrats did not have a platform, not that they weren't going to stick to the platform.
Regarding the rest of your comment. I have read the "new direction" missive. Do you have any substantive criticisms of it? Raising minimum wage doesn't sound like an empty platitude to me. It sounds like a concrete, realistic goal.
I have not commented at all on the wisdom or appropriateness of any of the proposed actions the Democratic members of Congress say they plan to take. Whether they are good ideas or not was not germane to responding to the original post which said they had nothing other than fear. Would you concede that they did have things other than fear? (Platitudes does not sound like fear mongering to me.)
Before evaluating the appropriatness of the solutions proposed by any party, we have to be able to have a rational discussion about them. For myself, I look for solutions not acrimony when confronted with problems. I think criticism of a proposed solution is completely appropriate. However, it is not productive if there is no rigor to the criticism. How can anything good come out of name calling and casting of vague aspersions? I think the challenge in confronting something with which we are unhappy is lucidly describing exactly what we don't like and offering some course for finding a better solution.
I don't think you are being 100% honest in saying the Democrats didn't present anything they planned to do. Pelosi had a rather prominent and publicized platform for a Democratically controlled house. The party website spells it out.
Whether they will be succesful is not something they can guarantee since they could not achieve a veto-proof control of the legislature and the current President is from the opposing party
I think the GP post was being a bit unnecessarily partisan, but I don't think the tone of discussion is improved by endulging in more partisan attacks.
I don't know exactly what you mean.
Can you site some sort of reference for this? I'm guessing by the way you phrase the above assertion (i.e. "they made it clear") that it was not an overt statement to the effect of "we are not going to implement all of the recommendations..."
It's also worth noting that while the collisions in HLC will be on the order of 10^12 electron volts... cosmic ray collisions with the earth on the order of 10^20 electron volts occur on a regular basis. If any Earth consuming blackholes were going to be created... they'd probably have already happened.
I'm not sure why you say this. It is clear from the article that they are talking about nuclear spin, not electron spin. In fact the basis of the experiment seems to be the nuclear magnetic moment... it is definitely not an electron artifact... There is a quote from the researcher (an assistant professor of physics) refering to nuclear spin in the second paragraph of the article.
Your explanation of spin is a little off the mark as well... You seem to be confusing a couple of different concepts. I'd say spin is really a quanity associated with a particle more than anything else... much like charge. And it is not on off. One of the main divisions of particles is into fermions and bosons based on whether there spin is an non-integer or integer, and thus whether they obey the exclusion principle or not. The wave/particle nature of electrons is only tenously connected to the concept of spin, in as much as they are both quantum mechanical concepts.
Given that past stories and comments are archived on Slashdot and the availability of tools to search those past articles and comments, I failed to see a reason that you cannot provide some supporting evidence for your assertion of "group-think" on the topic of Diebold. Given you're main assertion is built on this assumption that "group-think" hatred of Diebold exists, it is hard to take it seriously when you provide no evidence or references.
My perception is that most statements in the current discussion are not at all partisan. Comments seem to focus on the technical merits of Diebold versus other voting systems.
However, you are definitely asserting something partisan in your post. That the dislike for Diebold is directly connected to the fact that Democrats were not elected as president in 2000 and 2004. I'm not sure how the 2000 results are relevant as Diebold was not deploying voting machines at that time, but what evidence do you have the Diebold dislike sprung from the election results of 2004? The first story I found on Diebold in a search of Slashdot on Google was this one from 2003. Obviously, the Kerry/Bush election did not affect it.
I agree more rigor and research is needed by everyone in forming strong opinions. Knee-jerk reactions influenced by our prejudices does not serve us well. It is difficult for me to apply those principles to the particular view you espouse though, as you've not provided any hints as to where to find the facts upon which you've based your view. My own investigations unfortunately have not turned up a lot of support for your point of view either.
I do not concede this point at all. I'm definitely not agreeing to anything when I buy an iPod. Now, I know some folks (and courts) want to say that opening an iPod package or using an iPod signifies my consent to some onerous licensing agreement... but I feel (hope?) that eventually sanity and rationality will win out on the whole idea that vendors/manufacturers can modify the implied agreement (hallowed for, literally, millenia) that is embodied in the sale of a good, after the fact.
If I pay for something and someone gives it to me, I'm free to do with it whatever I please. Why does a manufacturer by virtue of manufacturing something have a right to modify that? Suppose that a manufacturer used a third-party to put items in packaging. Would that third party now have the right to incorporate a shrink wrap license that was binding into the packaging? If not, why not? Generally, their is at least one reseller in between myself and the manufacturer. They are generally not a party to the shrink wrap license. So when I paid the reseller for the iPod, what was I buying from them? If I'm buying a "right to use" (as licensed) from Apple, why did I pay a third party who is not a party to the license? Why didn't I have to pay Apple? If opening a package is significant of intent to enter into a contract (of which you were unaware prior to opening the package), what else might be? Walking into a room? Watching a television program? I hope that the miriad contradicitions embodied by this whole power grab will eventually cause it to fall under its own weight.
Well, I certainly didn't mean it in a perjorative sense. More in the sense that if you used "a" as a pronoun to a person in America, they wouldn't no what the hell you were talking about. In any case, "a man" is definitely using it as a preposition.
The word a in that phrase is an article, not a pronoun. In other context it might be a preposition or even a pronoun for British speakers of English.
This story does not seem to make sense based on some back of the envelope calculations. If we assume they are talking about capacitors, which they don't seem to state in the article, they'd need a tremendously heavy one to store the energy.
Based on the Wikipedia energy density figures, an assumption they have a capacitor that has ten times the energy density of a supercapacitor, and the idea that an electric motor will be 5 times as efficient as an internal combustion engine, it turns out that you'd need 176 times the mass of capacitor as gasoline to run this car. If we use a weight of gas of 6.25 pounds, the capacitor weight for the vehicle will be 1100 pounds for each gallon of gas you would have needed.
Obviously, many of my assumptions could be off. They may have come up with a non-battery electric storage device that is many, many times the energy density of an existing super capacitor. However, it would seem the underlying technical advances necessary for such electricity storage would have had a lot of other applications that were lower hanging fruit than a car.
While I agree that his comments were not disparaging, he definitely did more than call one lady hot. He characterized a group of people in a particular way based on their race. I think mainly the idea is that it was probably in poor taste for a governor to say. I imagine that some people might interpret it as being indicative of a predilection for making generalizations about people based on their race, and perhaps not all of those generalization are so benign.
a faraday cage-type material?? You mean like a, uh, conductor?
~I am the King of the Echo People!~
~It's a hair supplement.~
~He was a good cat!~
Your example relies on a signficant difference in mass as well as overall rigidity of the two vehicles in question. Deformable frames being about absorbing energy (and momentum, being an inelastic collision) in an impact. An M1 brings way more Kinetic Energy to the impact than can be absorbed by a deforming frame of a Toyota.
The safety of the passengers is dependent on how quickly the vehicle passenger compartment decelerates, as that will determine with what force they impact the interior of the vehicle (the so-called "second impact"). The M1 will not decelerate very much, but it is because of the mass disparity, not that it is rigid.
Obviously a crumple zone cannot absorb an unlimited amount of energy, but up to the amount it can absorb it is definitely good for you, whether you are hitting something rigid or not.
I'm not sure this is an accurate description of why the cable companies would be against it. Cable companies don't like set top boxes because they are a significant liability and rental fees don't really cover the cost of ownership. That's why they created the cableCard standard to get out of the set top box business.
However they do charge a premium for extra TV's and part of that is dictated by deals with content providers. I'm not saying that cable companies are innocent of wrong doing but content providers often have draconian contract terms that cannot be addressed by the cable companies by themselves.
You don't seem to have much evidence for your assertion that ISPs are reluctant to deal with bots. I know that both ISPs your mention have aggressive programs to battle spam that is generated or relayed by users. It is really a very tough problem to deal with.
How do you identify a bot infected computer? What do you do to a customer with a bot infected computer that he is probably not aware of? What preventative steps can you take that will not interfere with legitimate customer traffic?
While technical savvy folks can generally think of solutions to problems, they often neglect the issue of scalability... every solution has to work in an environment that may deal with a million emails a second! Customers get very irate when they are disconnected, sandboxed, and refused further service until they run (free) anti-virus software on their computer. Customer care organizations within an ISP are generally very resistant to any program that will involve turning off customer service or restricting it, because that causes tremendous expense for them in terms of customer calls. ("What does this web page mean? How do I get rid of it?") It is not just about engineering a solution but also deploying it holistically within a company that has issues other than technology.
Other solutions that make managing the problem easier are also very expensive and slow to implement across a customer base of millions. SMTP AUTH deployments are tremendously expensive in terms of customer care, customer education, and engineering efforts. Everything is complicated by scale and working within the confines of a business with other requirements apart from just technical ones.
ISPs spend millions on efforts to combat spam. The anti-spam industry is expected to hit $1.7 billion in revenues by 2008. If you have the answer to all these problems, start a company and sell it. You will be very successful.
Granted spallation does occur, but cross-section for knocking nucleons out of a nucleus with gamma rays is vanishingly small. And secondary isotope creation from freed nucleons has to be an even smaller possibility.
Much more likely as a possibility for nucleosynthesis from Gamma rays would be beta plus decay, where a proton becomes a neutron and ejects a positron (and neutrino). But I don't think that would happen significantly either. Almost all the gamma rays are going to be absorbed via photoelectric, compton, or pair production.
But even given both of those mechanisms, you aren't going to end up with a radioactive world from just gammas.
The question I have of "true" AI is will it have artificial arguments from authority?
I think the what people are really looking for in terms of science fiction-y type AI is sentience, not really intelligence. So will accelerating progress with digital integrated circuits at some point lead to sentience or can we develop AI that is not sentient but comparable in intelligence to a human? Do we want to develop AI that is sentient? Imagine if you have a game with a sentient AI opponent? Is it ethical to kill such an opponent or to turn the game off?
I think your confusing types of radiation here. Gamma rays are electromagnetic radiation and will not create radioactive isotopes no matter how intense they are. Generally, what they are going to do is ionize atoms and heat things up. Damage to biologicals from Gamma rays is via ionization and heat effects.
If there were a very intense neutron burst, that could potentially "activate" some materials, i.e. transmute them into a radioacive isotopes. However, neutron burst are not going to be something we have to worry about at this distance from the event.
How can they be including code from Apple and Linux? Wouldn't that produce licensing incompatibilities?
Sodium ions from a salt are definitely not negative. Sodium like many other akalai metals tends to lose its outermost electron and form a positive ion. I think you'd have a hard time getting sodium to pick up an extra electron.
It makes the rest of the explanation a bit hard to swallow.
I can't imagine why you'd ever have a negative relationship with your manager... or why you might have been fired.
Plant Hatch, a nuclear power plant, has been operating in Baxley, Georgia for 31 years. Baxley, a town of four thousand, definitely qualifies as "rural south."
If nuclear power in the rural south worries you, then you have had a lot to be worried about for a long time.
This is not accurate. Defamation (libel or slander) in the United States requires not only that the statements be false, but also that you made them with malice.
This kind of stuff is serious. You may not think it is a big deal, but to a multi-million/billion dollar company it is a HUGE deal. You can't just point the fingers and blame the big guys, the little guy also has to take responsibility for reckless acts. Right on for Juniper and hopefully they will be able to slam the people who are saying false things about them.
The "also" statement above seems to imply a long and hallowed tradition of "big guys" (i.e. multi-*illion dollar companies) taking responsibility for reckless acts. Please provide some references for that. You also seem to gloss over the inequities and difficulty in getting fair treatment from the civil court system between an entity with effectively unlimited legal resources and an individual who probably has little if any disposable income to spend on defending himself from a suit. The threat of tort can be used to discourage criticism without regard for the validity of the claim, since most people don't have the resources to defend themselves. Then too, corporations can apparently rely on folks like yourself to assume they are correct. To wit, your whole final statement about the alledged false things said.
As for your ridiculous sign comment....you don't know the law do you? You are allowed, via your constitutional right, and go and protest a company. You are allowed to have a sign accusing them of doing evil and bad things...but the moment you LIE that company can sue you into extinction.
Sued into extinction? At best a company should recover damages and perhaps have a punitive reward. What public interest is served by allowing a company to sue someone into extinction? It's certainly not in my interest.