Mom baked for three hours. The pie baked for three hours.
"Mom" and "The pie" are the subjects. The verb and entire predicate are identical. Understanding the language disambiguates these sentences, but the ambiguity is part of what defines humor.... except for the fact that "The pie baked for three hours" isn't good grammar. More properly, it's "the pie was baked for three hours". That's clarifies the statement because "was baked" is a passive construction.
I'm not sure if this is a good thing. Subsidies usually result in overproduction and overconsumption, financed by the taxpayer. If we want to "fix" the problem, let's tax petroleum to pay for all the defense costs of the oil shipping routes instead of the taxpayer paying more for other things.
They're not necessarily financed by the taxpayer. They could be free. They could even generate cash.
Every dollar spent on locally-generated oil is money that doesn't go overseas.
That money is taxed by the US government.
If the US Government encourages people to spend money on locally generated goods, they get more revenue. In other words, yes, it is possible for the government to make money by giving money away. Neat, that.
Stupid massively oversimplified example: Company A, in the Middle East, sells oil for $100/barrel. Company B, in the US, sells oil for $110/barrel. The US government subsidizes the US oil at $10/barrel. Assume the US company pays 10% in taxes, and the US government actually makes $1/barrel on the whole deal.
As I said, yes, this is oversimplified, and neglected gigantic amounts of things (like the fact that you do pay duty on foreign oil, etc.). But reducing a trade deficit is a very positive thing. And there's a definite bonus to subsidizing local companies to improve their market share.
You're talking Azimov's "Laws"? I find their continued currency frustrating. The might work intuitive in a hand-waving 1940s science fiction story. But when you try to find a place for them in modern Computer Science, they're just too vague and general to plug in anywhere. How on earth do you program "don't hurt people"? A machine that could even distinguish a people from an inanimate object would be a major breakthrough.
I think you're misunderstanding the point of the Three Laws. I've been really, really tempted to build a very simple Three Laws compliant robot just to explain exactly what they mean.
Fundamentally, the basic question of any autonomous artificial intelligence is "how do I figure out what to do?" and to do that, it needs to have some guiding principles. The Three Laws certainly can be those guiding principles, and they are certainly not too general to plug in somewhere.
Let me give you an example of how to build a basic Three Laws robot. Build a robot, with two ultrasonic motion sensors - one pointing outward, the other pointing downward. The one pointing outward is a "human sensor" - if there's an object closer than, say, 1 meter, there's a human present. Now add two spring-released sliding plates - one in front of the "human sensor", and one right above the "robot", which is below the downward-facing sensor.
You now can represent the Three Laws as a flowchart, and the robot as a state machine, with a "World" (OBJECT_FALLING, HUMAN_PRESENT, TOP_PLATE_OUT, BOTTOM_PLATE_OUT) and a "Command" list, with flags (COMMAND_FIRSTLAW, COMMAND_HUMAN, COMMAND_NORMAL).
The decision tree, with Three Laws embedded, then becomes something like
UpdateWorldState(); if (CommandExists(COMMAND_FIRSTLAW))
{// First law overrides all else
ProcessNextCommand(COMMAND_FIRSTLAW)
return;
} if (CommandExists(COMMAND_HUMAN))
{// Human commands override self-preservation
ProcessNextCommand(COMMAND_HUMAN);
return;
} if (CommandExists(COMMAND_NORMAL))
{// Other commands
ProcessNextCommand(COMMAND_NORMAL);
return;
} if (WorldState(OBJECT_FALLING & HUMAN_PRESENT & ~TOP_PLATE_OUT))
{// First Law
InsertCommand(TOP_PLATE, COMMAND_FIRSTLAW);
return;
} if (HumanCommandPresent())
{// Second Law
InsertCommand(TOP_PLATE, COMMAND_HUMAN);
return;
} if (WorldState(OBJECT_FALLING & ~BOTTOM_PLATE_OUT)
{// Third Law
InsertCommand(BOTTOM_PLATE, COMMAND_NORMAL);
return;
}
(where, presumedly, human commands are present until rescinded)
This robot would follow all of Asimov's Three Laws - it will stick the plate out to prevent a human's hand from gettin hurt if an object is falling to it, it will follow the human's orders, but it won't allow a human to get injured, and it will try to protect itself unless a human orders otherwise (it should also try to protect a human before protecting itself, but that state would never really happen in this setup).
You'll of course say this is an extremely simplistic setup, and it's not perfect. You're right. That's not the point - the point is that you can slowly, over time, build a Three Laws Safe robot over time, as the "World" state and "Command" lists become more complicated.
So, the answer to your question "how do you program 'don't hurt people'" is to have a robot evaluate the state of the world, estimate what the world state will be in the future, and determine if any of the Three Laws would be broken, and take action to prevent it. The action to "how do you recognize a human" is entirely dependent upon the sensory perceptions of the robot. So what if it mistakes something else for a human? It's just trying to fulfill its basic programming.
This should sound remarkably similar to another programm
Mp3.com lost, because they used really silly defenses that didn't have a snowball's chance in hell.
Yah, but that sets a precedent for a ROM site, not for people that download them. The point was that if someone tries to sue you for downloading ROMs of games that you own, I think most courts would laugh and toss the case.
Now, sueing the website that holds them is different.
Not only are you wrong, you contradict yourself. Go read 17 USC 106 for the core rights of copyright holders. Remember that they're negative -- they are rights to exclude others, not rights to actually do.
All of the provisions in that section apply to making copies, not to other uses of it. Specifically, they say that you can make a copy if it's required to use it (which, if you want to play a game on a computer, it is) and for archival purposes if the archives are destroyed when the program is lost.
Nothing in that section applies to other uses of the copyrighted object. So long as you're not copying it beyond the reasons stated above, you're fine.
You do not own the movie/music/game you buy. You pay for the right to use. Essentially a limited non-transferable (is some cases) license. Which are most cases is specific to individual package.... i.e. if I own the star wars dvd's that does not give me the right to download the xvid versions.
Except that the only right that a copyright holder has is the right of first sale, and no others. That is, once they give that copy to you, they can't prevent you from doing whatever you want with it - other than making a copy.
The additional provisions for computer programs were added because the object copyrighted is not physical - so copying is necessary in several instances. It would be nice to extend the fair use rights to media files as well, so then you could convert your Star Wars DVDs into XviD versions, and then I seriously doubt any court would bother if you downloaded it instead of converting it yourself.
But right now, you can, for instance, copy a computer program from a disk to a hard drive to use it. You can therefore copy a ROM from a game cart to use it. He completely misread the first provision.
Read the comments. He says that provision refers to loading a copy into RAM, like loading a program into RAM on a Windows computer. In short, two copies can be made from the original: one in RAM (from original to run program on computer) and one archive (replacement in case of failure), neither made from the other.
He didn't look too closely, then.
It never says that you're restricted to using the program on one machine. Since copying the game in a ROM is a prerequisite to playing the game in an emulator, it falls under provision 1.
It's exactly akin to making a copy in RAM, because it's required to make a copy to use it on the computer. Incidentally, it never says that only 1 copy can be made, as well. You can make as many as you want.
So, the rule is, you always pronounce the result in base 10, regardless of the base you're actually using?!?!?
"Forty" is a specific number, not a base representation. "Forty in base sixteen is represented two-eight." Just like "one, two, three, four" are specific numbers.
The pronunciations are baseless, as you can easily realize from the "teens" and from other languages (c.f. French, with 80 being "quatre-vingt", or "four twenties").
2A is not "twenty-A", it's "two-A". Saying "forty-two" is a baseless representation of a number.
Magnets utilize the electrostatic force... and that force is (kq1q2)/r^2..... the inversely proportional to the square of the distance. we talked about this in physics yesterday - only reason I knew:P
You apparently didn't listen close enough.
Magnets utilize the magnetostatic force, not the electrostatic force, which is attraction between charges, not magnets.
Magnetic attraction is far more complicated, because there aren't any "magnetic charges", just constrained loops of magnetism. It really depends on the shape of the magnets and their relative magnetization. It's quite nasty, and you can get results which are 1/r, 1/r^2, 1/r^3, depending on the specific orientations.
The attraction between two current-carrying wires, for instance, is proportionall to 1/r.
In the case of the attraction/repulsion between 2 magnetic poles, though, that's as close as you'll get to two "magnetic charges".
In that case, the force of attraction is, in fact, inversely proportional to the square of the distance. But it's
F = m1m2/(mu)r^2,
where mu is the magnetic permeability of the intervening material, and m1 and m2 are the pole strengths.
De Grey obviously hasn't thought about how the transfer of the mitochindrial DNA to the cell nucleus will affect the mitochondria. They need the DNA right where it is in order to function. Moving the DNA to the nucleus of the cell renders the mitochindria useless.
Again, on the SENS website, blockquoth I:
As usual, we're lucky - evolution has done the hardest part of this for us already. Mitochondria are very complex -- there are about 1000 different proteins in them, each encoded by a different gene. But nearly all of those genes are not in the mitochondrion's DNA at all! -- they are in the nucleus. The proteins are constructed in the cell, outside the mitochondrion, just like all non-mitochondrial proteins. Then, a complicated apparatus called the TIM/TOM complex (no kidding...) hauls the proteins into the mitochondron, through the membranes that make its surface. Only 13 of the mitochondrion's component proteins are encoded by its own DNA.
This gives us a wonderful opportunity: rather than fixing mitochondrial mutations, we can obviate them. We can make copies of those 13 genes, modified in fairly obvious ways so that the TIM/TOM machinery will work on them, and put these copies into the chromosomes in the nucleus.
It's important to remember that the mitochondrion is an odd little organelle: it was through symbiosis that mitochondria were taken into cells in the first place. So over time, the symbiosis has become more complicated, and the "independence" of the mitochondria became less and less. In fact, it's not an unreasonable step to believe that in time, what de Grey is saying would've happened by evolution alone.
Certainly in the earliest stages of the symbiosis, most of the proteins were made from the mitochondrial DNA, and now most of the proteins are made from nuclear DNA, so there's a clear progression. de Grey is just taking it to its logical conclusion: the obviation of the mitochondrial DNA and its obvious liability.
There's nothing on that page that proves your point beyond parroting "CO2 is toxic".
And, uh, it shows all of the side effects of too high CO2 concentration? Did you read that part? I have no idea why you quoted what you did, as the concentration of CO2 in the blood is not the same as the CO2 concentration in the air.
My point was that we have to stop pumping CO2 into the atmosphere at some point. This isn't a debatable point. If we keep doing it, we all die. Granted, that might be 10,000 years in the future, sure, but the point is that we can't keep pumping CO2 into the atmosphere arbitrarily. It's a silly point, but it's there to point out to people that "whether or not we need to stop emitting CO2" is a dumb question. We know we do. The question is just "how soon".
Given the fact that we know that a lot of CO2 is bad (as in, fatally, no escape bad), and we know that a little CO2 is normal, and we have no idea what the tipping point is, the fact that we're already 25% above the highest CO2 concentration ever seen in even paleohistorical data is a little worrying. It's even more worrying to consider the fact that the CO2 percentage is accelerating.
So again, the point should not be whether or not an increased CO2 percentage in the atmosphere is bad, because we know we have to stop doing it eventually. The point people should be talking about is how do we transition off of carbon-emitting fuels in the most efficient manner? We know we have to do it, and we don't know enough about the way that the atmosphere works to say by when we need to do it, so prudence says to do it as quickly and as efficiently as possible.
I find it laughable; I simply can't imagine that the vast majority of people would reject the option to live for hundreds or thousands of years. I think people get used to the idea that they're going to die, but I also think most people would jump at the chance to live for a long, long time.
There would be a moral outcry against longevity. It would come from an exceedingly vocal minority. Then I think the majority would collectively tell the fringe to stuff it.
Actually, if there was a moral outcry against longevity, the answer's clear: they can go kill themselves. Thankfully, even if negligible senescence is ever developed, nothing's stopping you from putting a gun to your head.
Of course, what they're really trying to say is they don't want other people to live forever, which just exposes them for the bastard murderers they are.
Some of the proteins outside our cells, however, are laid down early in our life and then never recycled at all, and some others are only recycled very very slowly. These long-lived proteins are susceptible to chemical reactions. Luckily, the function of long-lived proteins tends to be very simple -- they don't catalyse chemical reactions, for example, the way that enzymes do. In general they have a biophysical function -- they give a tissue elasticity (as in the artery wall) or transparency (as in the lens of the eye) or high tensile strength (as in ligaments). Occasional chemical reactions with other molecules in the extracellular space don't affect these functions very much -- at first. But in the long run, they can matter a lot, especially in the case of the artery wall, which becomes much more rigid and leads to high blood pressure. The type of chemical reaction that causes this loss of elasticity is one that results in a chemical bond (a cross-link) between two nearby proteins that were previously able to slide across or along each other.
Possible treatments are discussed, including devising a "one-shot" enzyme that the body could produce in small quantities which would break those crosslinks down. Obviously drug treatments are more likely for the forseeable future, but there are drug treatments that do attack those crosslinks that are in the works.
Yah, if you read more at the actual SENS website, you'll see in much more detail why the things he's talking about are the only ones you need to really worry about.
Macrocellular problems are mainly in the "cell loss/atrophy" and "extracellular junk" plus "crosslinking". Extracellular junk is stuff like plaques (Alzheimer's) and probably arthritis as well - it's what degrades people's life experience probably most significantly.
The really interesting one is the "perfect cure for cancer", WILT - whole-body interdiction of lengthening of telomeres. Basically, the idea is that you can say "I don't care about nuclear mutations. The body already has developed a perfect way of handling those problems - kill off the screwed up cell, and replace it." The main flaw in that is cancer, and so all you really need is a "perfect cure for cancer".
The perfect cure for cancer is to prevent cells from ever being able to replicate infinitely, by preventing them from lengthening their telomeres (telomeres shorten a little after each cell division, and when they run out, the cell dies) - then, a cancer cell can divide, but eventually, the whole thing up and breaks down. The problem with this, of course, is that your body needs to replicate indefinitely - so his suggestion is that we lengthen telomeres ex vivo - that is, outside the human body. So you go in, say, once every few years, for a treatment, and then you'll never get cancer. If you miss the treatment, though, you'll die, so it's a bit of a tradeoff.:)
Interestingly, that sounds like a bizarre idea, but it has benefits, because it also would be a cure for a rare disease - dyskeratosis congenita, who are naturally missing the ability to lengthen telomeres. (This of course means these people are cancer-immune: they only live ten years, which is the downside)
and I think cells are only capable of growing into that patten, not necessarily replacing bad sections.
If you have an entire bad section, it's not from aging - it's from injury, and that's not what he's talking about. It's just senescence - that is, the falling apart of the body as it gets older.
It's important to remember most major systems in your body replace themselves completely, on average every 7 years. Some much faster, like the lining of your stomach. So your body is quite capable of replacing cells one at a time, except for senescence.
One of the best things about this kind of research is that all of the problems he's suggesting we work on have real consequences now. So there's benefit to working on them individually, but we also should be thinking a bit more globally in treatment regarding it. If you can come up with something that gets rid of almost all extracellular junk, for instance, it'll take care of Alzheimer's, heart disease, and several other problems as well.
I have to disagree. Some of these models have nothing whatsoever to do with our universe (such as those with additional time dimensions).
The simple fact that you're saying "additional time dimensions" should clue you in that you're talking about a modified model of our own Universe - one with more time dimensions. You start with our own Universe and perturb it. That's all you can do. Without knowing anything about any other possible Universes, you don't know from where else to start perturbing.
If something can be explained by randomness, there is no need for another explanation.
"Random" is not an explanation. It is merely a statement that an explanation is not possible given the information available. That is, you've figured out the how, but you can't figure out the why.
Given that, if something is shown to be fundamentally random, than any explanation for its occurance is a postulate, not a hypothesis: it's a fundamental assumption which, while it has no provable basis, contradicts nothing.
Take something like the Schrodinger's cat gedankenexperiment, where you take open the box after 5 minutes, so it's fundamentally random whether or not the cat died. There is no explanation possible for why the cat died. It died because an atom decayed randomly.
I can't come up with a hypothesis for why the atom decayed to kill the cat, because there fundamentally is no information available to determine why. I can't use Occam's razor, because the "there is no reason" explanation requires as many assumptions as the "there is a reason" explanation - that is, it requires the assumptions that there is nothing capable (or equally, nothing capable that chose to interact, but that's just a modified version of the other explanation) of choosing it to decay. You might response "but there is no evidence for anything capable of choosing it to decay", which is true - but in this case, evidence of absence doesn't help, because there can not be any evidence anyway!
To add further explanation is to complicate things and requires a lot of work to prove.
But what you're adding isn't a provable statement, nor is it an explanation. It's a postulate, and that's the point. Both the postulate "God created the Universe" and "The Universe evolved randomly to where it is" lead to the exact same Universe we have to day - either by God's choice, or the weak anthropic principle.
And, as an aside:
It is, as having a will is more complex than not having a will - it's adding another factor.
No, it's not. Admitting that, for instance, a person has will doesn't add complexity, because it doesn't change how that person acts. It just changes why that person acts. You're not adding any factors into any hypothesis you make regarding how the person acts.
We do have other universes to compare to - we hypothesize about them and make mathematical models of them. We can show that some of them can't exist.
Nah, that's just ways to discover more about our own current Universe, because the modeling is based upon the rules of our own Universe. It's a self-consistency check. In other words, we're making mathematical models of modified versions of our own Universe. Not new Universes altogether.
It looks like the universe at the point of origin was simple. Intelligences are complex. To go from a simple origin to a more complex origin (who created the intelligence?) is bad logic.
I'm not talking about an intelligence, I'm talking about a will. Wills aren't complex or simple. They just are. This isn't an Occam's Razor issue in the tiniest bit.
I can't prove that you are a being in the same sense that I am. There's no possible way to do that - you would act exactly the same if you were a being whose actions were completely deterministic from the world around you rather than a being whose actions are determined by choices.
If, in fact, beings with will are simpler than beings without will, then I would conclude, by Occam's Razor, that all humans other than myself are not beings with will. I can prove that I have will (well, it's a postulate of one's existence: "I am") but not anyone else.
(It gets even worse when you try to bring Occam's Razor into it because of the different points of view involved.)
This was about the presence of clues in evolution about a creator.
It's completely relevant. The point that I'm making is that clues regarding a creator must be explainable via other methods. In other words, you can say "they're not clues", and I can say "they are clues", and we'd both be right. Both viewpoints are equally, unprovably, correct. "Random" implies a point of view.
The problem with assuming that there are these clues is that almost all the discoveries that were thought to be clues of God's work have turned out to be false, and could be explained far more simply. There comes a point where there is no more room for these clues, as almost everything can be explained - we are very close to that stage with evolution and biology.
Consider a computer intelligence, constrained inside a virtual world, with *no input* from the outside.
Could it deduce the existence off an outside world? No. Its existence could be entirely self-contained, and it could deduce that its existence is purely self-consistent, that it exists the way it does because the world is constructed the way it is. (This is the "weak anthropic argument", reformulated slightly).
Could it deduce that an intelligence created that world? No, of course not. Its "big bang" would be "moment of first execution", but everything after that followed rigidly defined rules, that are consistently followed inside its framework.
In precisely the same manner, we can't determine if an intelligence created this Universe, or if it simply was forced to evolve the way it did on its own. We have no "other Universe" to compare to.
We don't go out looking for clues about how He did it, because we don't assume anyone did it - if we did assume that, it would not be a useful scientific approach.
Ah, but here your journalism fails you. "Who" and "How" are two independent questions. Scientists don't look for a "who". They look for a "how". The answer to one does not answer the other.
Funny. You state that as fact. Were you here when God created this world to see it occur with your own eyes? If not then how could you possibly be so certain?
I can make it fact for you!
It's just a redefinition issue.
God: (n) - That which created the Universe.
By inclusion, then, God created the Earth.
The problem is whether or not God is a process, or a being. And the separation between those is unprovable (you can't prove the difference between a sentience and nonsentience unless you are the sentient being) and is a matter of belief.
Well, that's just one (silly) example. No one would ever suggest that we can raise CO2 levels arbitrarily. This is known. Greenhouses have elevated CO2 levels, which keep them warm in colder environments. Clearly this has to happen on Earth as a large scale. The question isn't if, it's when. Currently CO2 is at 375 ppm or so - it's supposed to be at 330 ppm. Is it still safe at 400? I don't know. 500? Got me. 10,000? Uh, no. At that point, normal humans start having mild problems breathing. I'd imagine that there's some wildlife that would die at that point.
Personally, I hate people talking about global warming. Too many people get uppity (like, you) about whether or not the change is human induced, or anything else. I don't care about the temperature shift. I care about CO2 levels being higher than thousands upon thousands of years, and continuing to rise at an accelerating rate. The rising CO2 levels will do something - clearly. At a high level they kill humans. At a low level, they do nothing. Clearly inbetween they do something else. So again, the questions isn't "should we stop emitting CO2?" but "when do we need to stop emitting CO2?" and in the absence of a clear answer on that, we should be planning to do it.
Yeah, except for that pesky ECONOMY
The Middle Eastern economy, yes. The economy of oil companies, sure. The US economy? No way - not when all that's being suggested is to not send huge amounts of money overseas for fuel, but instead to keep it in the US. But I won't get into that.
Besides, you're not going to convince me that economists have planned and worked out an orderly exit from CO2 emissions which minimizes the impact on the economy. They haven't.
Global temperatures are the product of a hideously complex system.
Which is why I'm saying don't bother with the temperature data. Just look at the CO2 data, which is not fluctuating like the temperature data is, at least not over the past 50 years. It's rising monotonically. If you look at the past 10,000 years, it fluctuates periodically - but nowhere near as much as it has now.
And we do know that humans cause those fluctuations - order-of-magnitude, it's the right amount for what humans have emitted (and it's not like you can account for every gram of CO2 emitted).
That's the point. Who cares if rapidly rising CO2 causes temperature rises? Given that CO2 is part of a balanced ecological cycle, the simple fact that CO2 is rising as fast as it is should be enough of a concern. Since we don't fully understand the global ecology, shoving very hard on one cycle is not exactly recommended.
But thanks for your insightful response. I especially liked the quiet suggestion that I'm high. Great job keeping the argument civil.
wouldn't it be cheaper simply to use the hydrogen to fuel internal combustion engine cars?
You get about a 50-100% boost (or more) in efficiency going from an Otto cycle in cars (which have a thermal bottleneck) to fuel cells (which do not).
That'll directly translate into gas mileage - or more importantly in the hydrogen case, storage volume. Hydrogen requires a little more careful storage than natural gas, so the lower the volume needed, the better, most likely.
The article points out that in The Hydrogen Economy, water vapor released by hydrogen fuel cells might act as a greenhouse gas and trap more solar heat.
The article neglects to realize that you can also have fuel cells which generate liquid water.
Global temperature has risen, fallen, and risen since 1880, even though carbon dioxide levels have steadily risen.
There's no doubt that CO2 levels have risen. There's also no doubt that they're far above what they've ever been over thousands of years (ice core data).
Who cares what the temperature data says? We know we can't arbitrarily raise the CO2 levels in the atmosphere ad infinitum. Putting off reducing CO2 emissions is just procrastination (and dangerous, for economic reasons, but ignoring that...). We have to stop raising the CO2 levels in the atmosphere. Why put off doing it?
Also, as a completely separate point, it's a little silly to treat US data from 1880 to 1920 as valid, but not for other countries. The US from 1880 to 1920 was not the US today. The difference in technology between the US and third world countries today is gigantic compared to the 1880s. Unless there's a known, valid reason not to use a country's data, it's cherry-picking.
Note: all fuels are just batteries. They've got stored energy which was built up by some process - in the case of fossil fuels, it's solar energy from a long, long time ago, combined with gravitational potential energy (from being squished under things).
Isn't one of the best sources of hydrogen for such things hydrocarbons?
Hydrocarbons have hydrogen that's easy to liberate - that is, you'll get more energy out of burning hydrogen than by separating it. You get less energy than you would by just burning the hydrocarbon, so if there was no other source of hydrogen, it'd be stupid.
However, hydrogen happens to be, shall we say, extremely plentiful.
Where does the hydrogen come from that it's so clean?
The sky. Well, only on a miserable day - more likely, from lakes and the ocean. That is, water.
Of course, it takes more energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen than you get by burning the hydrogen (but not much more - it's just efficiency factors here). So you need some way to generate that energy. Thankfully, you can just use electricity - and there are plenty of clean ways of generating electricity. You could even imagine geostationary solar power satellites beaming power down to water electrolysis hydrogen plants, if you want to be really silly. Other than spreading water around the country and the slightly increased heat generation, there's no environmental impact.
The entire point of the hydrogen economy is that while we can generate electricity, electric cars, to put it mildly, suck, because batteries suck. So even if we could replace all those power plants, how would we replace the oil we use to move cars around? And that's where hydrogen comes in.
Personally, I prefer hydrogen over other fuels (biodiesel) because hydrogen is essentially infinitely scalable, whereas biodiesel definitely has an upper limit. Our desire for fuel seems to have no bound, so replacing one solution with a scaling problem (oil) with another one (biodiesel) seems silly. Until we have portable fusion generators, hydrogen is probably the farthest-scaling solution, so it's nice to not be pansy and go for the best option.
Slashdot Mirror
Mom baked for three hours.
... except for the fact that "The pie baked for three hours" isn't good grammar. More properly, it's "the pie was baked for three hours". That's clarifies the statement because "was baked" is a passive construction.
The pie baked for three hours.
"Mom" and "The pie" are the subjects. The verb and entire predicate are identical. Understanding the language disambiguates these sentences, but the ambiguity is part of what defines humor.
I'm not sure if this is a good thing. Subsidies usually result in overproduction and overconsumption, financed by the taxpayer. If we want to "fix" the problem, let's tax petroleum to pay for all the defense costs of the oil shipping routes instead of the taxpayer paying more for other things.
They're not necessarily financed by the taxpayer. They could be free. They could even generate cash.
Every dollar spent on locally-generated oil is money that doesn't go overseas.
That money is taxed by the US government.
If the US Government encourages people to spend money on locally generated goods, they get more revenue. In other words, yes, it is possible for the government to make money by giving money away. Neat, that.
Stupid massively oversimplified example: Company A, in the Middle East, sells oil for $100/barrel. Company B, in the US, sells oil for $110/barrel. The US government subsidizes the US oil at $10/barrel. Assume the US company pays 10% in taxes, and the US government actually makes $1/barrel on the whole deal.
As I said, yes, this is oversimplified, and neglected gigantic amounts of things (like the fact that you do pay duty on foreign oil, etc.). But reducing a trade deficit is a very positive thing. And there's a definite bonus to subsidizing local companies to improve their market share.
You're talking Azimov's "Laws"? I find their continued currency frustrating. The might work intuitive in a hand-waving 1940s science fiction story. But when you try to find a place for them in modern Computer Science, they're just too vague and general to plug in anywhere. How on earth do you program "don't hurt people"? A machine that could even distinguish a people from an inanimate object would be a major breakthrough.
// First law overrides all else // Human commands override self-preservation // Other commands // First Law // Second Law // Third Law
I think you're misunderstanding the point of the Three Laws. I've been really, really tempted to build a very simple Three Laws compliant robot just to explain exactly what they mean.
Fundamentally, the basic question of any autonomous artificial intelligence is "how do I figure out what to do?" and to do that, it needs to have some guiding principles. The Three Laws certainly can be those guiding principles, and they are certainly not too general to plug in somewhere.
Let me give you an example of how to build a basic Three Laws robot. Build a robot, with two ultrasonic motion sensors - one pointing outward, the other pointing downward. The one pointing outward is a "human sensor" - if there's an object closer than, say, 1 meter, there's a human present. Now add two spring-released sliding plates - one in front of the "human sensor", and one right above the "robot", which is below the downward-facing sensor.
You now can represent the Three Laws as a flowchart, and the robot as a state machine, with a "World" (OBJECT_FALLING, HUMAN_PRESENT, TOP_PLATE_OUT, BOTTOM_PLATE_OUT) and a "Command" list, with flags (COMMAND_FIRSTLAW, COMMAND_HUMAN, COMMAND_NORMAL).
The decision tree, with Three Laws embedded, then becomes something like
UpdateWorldState();
if (CommandExists(COMMAND_FIRSTLAW))
{
ProcessNextCommand(COMMAND_FIRSTLAW)
return;
}
if (CommandExists(COMMAND_HUMAN))
{
ProcessNextCommand(COMMAND_HUMAN);
return;
}
if (CommandExists(COMMAND_NORMAL))
{
ProcessNextCommand(COMMAND_NORMAL);
return;
}
if (WorldState(OBJECT_FALLING & HUMAN_PRESENT & ~TOP_PLATE_OUT))
{
InsertCommand(TOP_PLATE, COMMAND_FIRSTLAW);
return;
}
if (HumanCommandPresent())
{
InsertCommand(TOP_PLATE, COMMAND_HUMAN);
return;
}
if (WorldState(OBJECT_FALLING & ~BOTTOM_PLATE_OUT)
{
InsertCommand(BOTTOM_PLATE, COMMAND_NORMAL);
return;
}
(where, presumedly, human commands are present until rescinded)
This robot would follow all of Asimov's Three Laws - it will stick the plate out to prevent a human's hand from gettin hurt if an object is falling to it, it will follow the human's orders, but it won't allow a human to get injured, and it will try to protect itself unless a human orders otherwise (it should also try to protect a human before protecting itself, but that state would never really happen in this setup).
You'll of course say this is an extremely simplistic setup, and it's not perfect. You're right. That's not the point - the point is that you can slowly, over time, build a Three Laws Safe robot over time, as the "World" state and "Command" lists become more complicated.
So, the answer to your question "how do you program 'don't hurt people'" is to have a robot evaluate the state of the world, estimate what the world state will be in the future, and determine if any of the Three Laws would be broken, and take action to prevent it. The action to "how do you recognize a human" is entirely dependent upon the sensory perceptions of the robot. So what if it mistakes something else for a human? It's just trying to fulfill its basic programming.
This should sound remarkably similar to another programm
Mp3.com lost, because they used really silly defenses that didn't have a snowball's chance in hell.
Yah, but that sets a precedent for a ROM site, not for people that download them. The point was that if someone tries to sue you for downloading ROMs of games that you own, I think most courts would laugh and toss the case.
Now, sueing the website that holds them is different.
Not only are you wrong, you contradict yourself. Go read 17 USC 106 for the core rights of copyright holders. Remember that they're negative -- they are rights to exclude others, not rights to actually do.
All of the provisions in that section apply to making copies, not to other uses of it. Specifically, they say that you can make a copy if it's required to use it (which, if you want to play a game on a computer, it is) and for archival purposes if the archives are destroyed when the program is lost.
Nothing in that section applies to other uses of the copyrighted object. So long as you're not copying it beyond the reasons stated above, you're fine.
You do not own the movie/music/game you buy. You pay for the right to use. Essentially a limited non-transferable (is some cases) license. Which are most cases is specific to individual package.... i.e. if I own the star wars dvd's that does not give me the right to download the xvid versions.
Except that the only right that a copyright holder has is the right of first sale, and no others. That is, once they give that copy to you, they can't prevent you from doing whatever you want with it - other than making a copy.
The additional provisions for computer programs were added because the object copyrighted is not physical - so copying is necessary in several instances. It would be nice to extend the fair use rights to media files as well, so then you could convert your Star Wars DVDs into XviD versions, and then I seriously doubt any court would bother if you downloaded it instead of converting it yourself.
But right now, you can, for instance, copy a computer program from a disk to a hard drive to use it. You can therefore copy a ROM from a game cart to use it. He completely misread the first provision.
Read the comments. He says that provision refers to loading a copy into RAM, like loading a program into RAM on a Windows computer. In short, two copies can be made from the original: one in RAM (from original to run program on computer) and one archive (replacement in case of failure), neither made from the other.
He didn't look too closely, then.
It never says that you're restricted to using the program on one machine. Since copying the game in a ROM is a prerequisite to playing the game in an emulator, it falls under provision 1.
It's exactly akin to making a copy in RAM, because it's required to make a copy to use it on the computer. Incidentally, it never says that only 1 copy can be made, as well. You can make as many as you want.
So, the rule is, you always pronounce the result in base 10, regardless of the base you're actually using?!?!?
"Forty" is a specific number, not a base representation. "Forty in base sixteen is represented two-eight." Just like "one, two, three, four" are specific numbers.
The pronunciations are baseless, as you can easily realize from the "teens" and from other languages (c.f. French, with 80 being "quatre-vingt", or "four twenties").
2A is not "twenty-A", it's "two-A". Saying "forty-two" is a baseless representation of a number.
Magnets utilize the electrostatic force... and that force is (kq1q2)/r^2 ..... the inversely proportional to the square of the distance. we talked about this in physics yesterday - only reason I knew :P
You apparently didn't listen close enough.
Magnets utilize the magnetostatic force, not the electrostatic force, which is attraction between charges, not magnets.
Magnetic attraction is far more complicated, because there aren't any "magnetic charges", just constrained loops of magnetism. It really depends on the shape of the magnets and their relative magnetization. It's quite nasty, and you can get results which are 1/r, 1/r^2, 1/r^3, depending on the specific orientations.
The attraction between two current-carrying wires, for instance, is proportionall to 1/r.
In the case of the attraction/repulsion between 2 magnetic poles, though, that's as close as you'll get to two "magnetic charges".
In that case, the force of attraction is, in fact, inversely proportional to the square of the distance. But it's
F = m1m2/(mu)r^2,
where mu is the magnetic permeability of the intervening material, and m1 and m2 are the pole strengths.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet
Again, on the SENS website, blockquoth I:
It's important to remember that the mitochondrion is an odd little organelle: it was through symbiosis that mitochondria were taken into cells in the first place. So over time, the symbiosis has become more complicated, and the "independence" of the mitochondria became less and less. In fact, it's not an unreasonable step to believe that in time, what de Grey is saying would've happened by evolution alone.
Certainly in the earliest stages of the symbiosis, most of the proteins were made from the mitochondrial DNA, and now most of the proteins are made from nuclear DNA, so there's a clear progression. de Grey is just taking it to its logical conclusion: the obviation of the mitochondrial DNA and its obvious liability.
There's nothing on that page that proves your point beyond parroting "CO2 is toxic".
And, uh, it shows all of the side effects of too high CO2 concentration? Did you read that part? I have no idea why you quoted what you did, as the concentration of CO2 in the blood is not the same as the CO2 concentration in the air.
My point was that we have to stop pumping CO2 into the atmosphere at some point. This isn't a debatable point. If we keep doing it, we all die. Granted, that might be 10,000 years in the future, sure, but the point is that we can't keep pumping CO2 into the atmosphere arbitrarily. It's a silly point, but it's there to point out to people that "whether or not we need to stop emitting CO2" is a dumb question. We know we do. The question is just "how soon".
Given the fact that we know that a lot of CO2 is bad (as in, fatally, no escape bad), and we know that a little CO2 is normal, and we have no idea what the tipping point is, the fact that we're already 25% above the highest CO2 concentration ever seen in even paleohistorical data is a little worrying. It's even more worrying to consider the fact that the CO2 percentage is accelerating.
So again, the point should not be whether or not an increased CO2 percentage in the atmosphere is bad, because we know we have to stop doing it eventually. The point people should be talking about is how do we transition off of carbon-emitting fuels in the most efficient manner? We know we have to do it, and we don't know enough about the way that the atmosphere works to say by when we need to do it, so prudence says to do it as quickly and as efficiently as possible.
I find it laughable; I simply can't imagine that the vast majority of people would reject the option to live for hundreds or thousands of years. I think people get used to the idea that they're going to die, but I also think most people would jump at the chance to live for a long, long time.
There would be a moral outcry against longevity. It would come from an exceedingly vocal minority. Then I think the majority would collectively tell the fringe to stuff it.
Actually, if there was a moral outcry against longevity, the answer's clear: they can go kill themselves. Thankfully, even if negligible senescence is ever developed, nothing's stopping you from putting a gun to your head.
Of course, what they're really trying to say is they don't want other people to live forever, which just exposes them for the bastard murderers they are.
http://www.gen.cam.ac.uk/sens/eclinks.htm
Blockquoth I:
Possible treatments are discussed, including devising a "one-shot" enzyme that the body could produce in small quantities which would break those crosslinks down. Obviously drug treatments are more likely for the forseeable future, but there are drug treatments that do attack those crosslinks that are in the works.
Yah, if you read more at the actual SENS website, you'll see in much more detail why the things he's talking about are the only ones you need to really worry about.
:)
Macrocellular problems are mainly in the "cell loss/atrophy" and "extracellular junk" plus "crosslinking". Extracellular junk is stuff like plaques (Alzheimer's) and probably arthritis as well - it's what degrades people's life experience probably most significantly.
The really interesting one is the "perfect cure for cancer", WILT - whole-body interdiction of lengthening of telomeres. Basically, the idea is that you can say "I don't care about nuclear mutations. The body already has developed a perfect way of handling those problems - kill off the screwed up cell, and replace it." The main flaw in that is cancer, and so all you really need is a "perfect cure for cancer".
The perfect cure for cancer is to prevent cells from ever being able to replicate infinitely, by preventing them from lengthening their telomeres (telomeres shorten a little after each cell division, and when they run out, the cell dies) - then, a cancer cell can divide, but eventually, the whole thing up and breaks down. The problem with this, of course, is that your body needs to replicate indefinitely - so his suggestion is that we lengthen telomeres ex vivo - that is, outside the human body. So you go in, say, once every few years, for a treatment, and then you'll never get cancer. If you miss the treatment, though, you'll die, so it's a bit of a tradeoff.
Interestingly, that sounds like a bizarre idea, but it has benefits, because it also would be a cure for a rare disease - dyskeratosis congenita, who are naturally missing the ability to lengthen telomeres. (This of course means these people are cancer-immune: they only live ten years, which is the downside)
and I think cells are only capable of growing into that patten, not necessarily replacing bad sections.
If you have an entire bad section, it's not from aging - it's from injury, and that's not what he's talking about. It's just senescence - that is, the falling apart of the body as it gets older.
It's important to remember most major systems in your body replace themselves completely, on average every 7 years. Some much faster, like the lining of your stomach. So your body is quite capable of replacing cells one at a time, except for senescence.
One of the best things about this kind of research is that all of the problems he's suggesting we work on have real consequences now. So there's benefit to working on them individually, but we also should be thinking a bit more globally in treatment regarding it. If you can come up with something that gets rid of almost all extracellular junk, for instance, it'll take care of Alzheimer's, heart disease, and several other problems as well.
I have to disagree. Some of these models have nothing whatsoever to do with our universe (such as those with additional time dimensions).
The simple fact that you're saying "additional time dimensions" should clue you in that you're talking about a modified model of our own Universe - one with more time dimensions. You start with our own Universe and perturb it. That's all you can do. Without knowing anything about any other possible Universes, you don't know from where else to start perturbing.
If something can be explained by randomness, there is no need for another explanation.
"Random" is not an explanation. It is merely a statement that an explanation is not possible given the information available. That is, you've figured out the how, but you can't figure out the why.
Given that, if something is shown to be fundamentally random, than any explanation for its occurance is a postulate, not a hypothesis: it's a fundamental assumption which, while it has no provable basis, contradicts nothing.
Take something like the Schrodinger's cat gedankenexperiment, where you take open the box after 5 minutes, so it's fundamentally random whether or not the cat died. There is no explanation possible for why the cat died. It died because an atom decayed randomly.
I can't come up with a hypothesis for why the atom decayed to kill the cat, because there fundamentally is no information available to determine why. I can't use Occam's razor, because the "there is no reason" explanation requires as many assumptions as the "there is a reason" explanation - that is, it requires the assumptions that there is nothing capable (or equally, nothing capable that chose to interact, but that's just a modified version of the other explanation) of choosing it to decay. You might response "but there is no evidence for anything capable of choosing it to decay", which is true - but in this case, evidence of absence doesn't help, because there can not be any evidence anyway!
To add further explanation is to complicate things and requires a lot of work to prove.
But what you're adding isn't a provable statement, nor is it an explanation. It's a postulate, and that's the point. Both the postulate "God created the Universe" and "The Universe evolved randomly to where it is" lead to the exact same Universe we have to day - either by God's choice, or the weak anthropic principle.
And, as an aside:
It is, as having a will is more complex than not having a will - it's adding another factor.
No, it's not. Admitting that, for instance, a person has will doesn't add complexity, because it doesn't change how that person acts. It just changes why that person acts. You're not adding any factors into any hypothesis you make regarding how the person acts.
We do have other universes to compare to - we hypothesize about them and make mathematical models of them. We can show that some of them can't exist.
Nah, that's just ways to discover more about our own current Universe, because the modeling is based upon the rules of our own Universe. It's a self-consistency check. In other words, we're making mathematical models of modified versions of our own Universe. Not new Universes altogether.
It looks like the universe at the point of origin was simple. Intelligences are complex. To go from a simple origin to a more complex origin (who created the intelligence?) is bad logic.
I'm not talking about an intelligence, I'm talking about a will. Wills aren't complex or simple. They just are. This isn't an Occam's Razor issue in the tiniest bit.
I can't prove that you are a being in the same sense that I am. There's no possible way to do that - you would act exactly the same if you were a being whose actions were completely deterministic from the world around you rather than a being whose actions are determined by choices.
If, in fact, beings with will are simpler than beings without will, then I would conclude, by Occam's Razor, that all humans other than myself are not beings with will. I can prove that I have will (well, it's a postulate of one's existence: "I am") but not anyone else.
(It gets even worse when you try to bring Occam's Razor into it because of the different points of view involved.)
This was about the presence of clues in evolution about a creator.
It's completely relevant. The point that I'm making is that clues regarding a creator must be explainable via other methods. In other words, you can say "they're not clues", and I can say "they are clues", and we'd both be right. Both viewpoints are equally, unprovably, correct. "Random" implies a point of view.
The problem with assuming that there are these clues is that almost all the discoveries that were thought to be clues of God's work have turned out to be false, and could be explained far more simply. There comes a point where there is no more room for these clues, as almost everything can be explained - we are very close to that stage with evolution and biology.
Consider a computer intelligence, constrained inside a virtual world, with *no input* from the outside.
Could it deduce the existence off an outside world? No. Its existence could be entirely self-contained, and it could deduce that its existence is purely self-consistent, that it exists the way it does because the world is constructed the way it is. (This is the "weak anthropic argument", reformulated slightly).
Could it deduce that an intelligence created that world? No, of course not. Its "big bang" would be "moment of first execution", but everything after that followed rigidly defined rules, that are consistently followed inside its framework.
In precisely the same manner, we can't determine if an intelligence created this Universe, or if it simply was forced to evolve the way it did on its own. We have no "other Universe" to compare to.
We don't go out looking for clues about how He did it, because we don't assume anyone did it - if we did assume that, it would not be a useful scientific approach.
Ah, but here your journalism fails you. "Who" and "How" are two independent questions. Scientists don't look for a "who". They look for a "how". The answer to one does not answer the other.
Funny. You state that as fact. Were you here when God created this world to see it occur with your own eyes? If not then how could you possibly be so certain?
I can make it fact for you!
It's just a redefinition issue.
God: (n) - That which created the Universe.
By inclusion, then, God created the Earth.
The problem is whether or not God is a process, or a being. And the separation between those is unprovable (you can't prove the difference between a sentience and nonsentience unless you are the sentient being) and is a matter of belief.
The situation is also a TAD bit different than your example.
Howso? The DNS server has no way of knowing about the content of the website that it returns the IP address for.
Likewise, the kenosisp2p server has no way of knowing about the content of the node that it returns the IP address for.
In the end though www.your-favorite-pirate-tracker.com would still probably go bust, unless the owner was rich.
Yup. But the DNS server that provided you with the IP address to www.your-favorite-pirate-tracker.com wouldn't be touched.
The technology may be different, but at least for the US we "know" that it was reliably recorded the way it was reported in the log books.
Why do we know this for the US, and not for other countries?
We know this...how? Remember...we're ignoring data. Did the tooth fairy tell you this?
Because CO2 is toxic to humans?
Well, that's just one (silly) example. No one would ever suggest that we can raise CO2 levels arbitrarily. This is known. Greenhouses have elevated CO2 levels, which keep them warm in colder environments. Clearly this has to happen on Earth as a large scale. The question isn't if, it's when. Currently CO2 is at 375 ppm or so - it's supposed to be at 330 ppm. Is it still safe at 400? I don't know. 500? Got me. 10,000? Uh, no. At that point, normal humans start having mild problems breathing. I'd imagine that there's some wildlife that would die at that point.
Personally, I hate people talking about global warming. Too many people get uppity (like, you) about whether or not the change is human induced, or anything else. I don't care about the temperature shift. I care about CO2 levels being higher than thousands upon thousands of years, and continuing to rise at an accelerating rate. The rising CO2 levels will do something - clearly. At a high level they kill humans. At a low level, they do nothing. Clearly inbetween they do something else. So again, the questions isn't "should we stop emitting CO2?" but "when do we need to stop emitting CO2?" and in the absence of a clear answer on that, we should be planning to do it.
Yeah, except for that pesky ECONOMY
The Middle Eastern economy, yes. The economy of oil companies, sure. The US economy? No way - not when all that's being suggested is to not send huge amounts of money overseas for fuel, but instead to keep it in the US. But I won't get into that.
Besides, you're not going to convince me that economists have planned and worked out an orderly exit from CO2 emissions which minimizes the impact on the economy. They haven't.
Global temperatures are the product of a hideously complex system.
Which is why I'm saying don't bother with the temperature data. Just look at the CO2 data, which is not fluctuating like the temperature data is, at least not over the past 50 years. It's rising monotonically. If you look at the past 10,000 years, it fluctuates periodically - but nowhere near as much as it has now.
And we do know that humans cause those fluctuations - order-of-magnitude, it's the right amount for what humans have emitted (and it's not like you can account for every gram of CO2 emitted).
That's the point. Who cares if rapidly rising CO2 causes temperature rises? Given that CO2 is part of a balanced ecological cycle, the simple fact that CO2 is rising as fast as it is should be enough of a concern. Since we don't fully understand the global ecology, shoving very hard on one cycle is not exactly recommended.
But thanks for your insightful response. I especially liked the quiet suggestion that I'm high. Great job keeping the argument civil.
wouldn't it be cheaper simply to use the hydrogen to fuel internal combustion engine cars?
You get about a 50-100% boost (or more) in efficiency going from an Otto cycle in cars (which have a thermal bottleneck) to fuel cells (which do not).
That'll directly translate into gas mileage - or more importantly in the hydrogen case, storage volume. Hydrogen requires a little more careful storage than natural gas, so the lower the volume needed, the better, most likely.
The article points out that in The Hydrogen Economy, water vapor released by hydrogen fuel cells might act as a greenhouse gas and trap more solar heat.
The article neglects to realize that you can also have fuel cells which generate liquid water.
Hence the "spreading water around the country".
Global temperature has risen, fallen, and risen since 1880, even though carbon dioxide levels have steadily risen.
There's no doubt that CO2 levels have risen. There's also no doubt that they're far above what they've ever been over thousands of years (ice core data).
Who cares what the temperature data says? We know we can't arbitrarily raise the CO2 levels in the atmosphere ad infinitum. Putting off reducing CO2 emissions is just procrastination (and dangerous, for economic reasons, but ignoring that...). We have to stop raising the CO2 levels in the atmosphere. Why put off doing it?
Also, as a completely separate point, it's a little silly to treat US data from 1880 to 1920 as valid, but not for other countries. The US from 1880 to 1920 was not the US today. The difference in technology between the US and third world countries today is gigantic compared to the 1880s. Unless there's a known, valid reason not to use a country's data, it's cherry-picking.
Note: all fuels are just batteries. They've got stored energy which was built up by some process - in the case of fossil fuels, it's solar energy from a long, long time ago, combined with gravitational potential energy (from being squished under things).
Isn't one of the best sources of hydrogen for such things hydrocarbons?
Hydrocarbons have hydrogen that's easy to liberate - that is, you'll get more energy out of burning hydrogen than by separating it. You get less energy than you would by just burning the hydrocarbon, so if there was no other source of hydrogen, it'd be stupid.
However, hydrogen happens to be, shall we say, extremely plentiful.
Where does the hydrogen come from that it's so clean?
The sky. Well, only on a miserable day - more likely, from lakes and the ocean. That is, water.
Of course, it takes more energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen than you get by burning the hydrogen (but not much more - it's just efficiency factors here). So you need some way to generate that energy. Thankfully, you can just use electricity - and there are plenty of clean ways of generating electricity. You could even imagine geostationary solar power satellites beaming power down to water electrolysis hydrogen plants, if you want to be really silly. Other than spreading water around the country and the slightly increased heat generation, there's no environmental impact.
The entire point of the hydrogen economy is that while we can generate electricity, electric cars, to put it mildly, suck, because batteries suck. So even if we could replace all those power plants, how would we replace the oil we use to move cars around? And that's where hydrogen comes in.
Personally, I prefer hydrogen over other fuels (biodiesel) because hydrogen is essentially infinitely scalable, whereas biodiesel definitely has an upper limit. Our desire for fuel seems to have no bound, so replacing one solution with a scaling problem (oil) with another one (biodiesel) seems silly. Until we have portable fusion generators, hydrogen is probably the farthest-scaling solution, so it's nice to not be pansy and go for the best option.