What ID completely ignores is the fact that any universe that would have rules that would be shitty for life and intelligence would never realize it. In other words, there could have been a billion big bangs all that developed different laws. In all of these big bangs there might have been only one where all the laws arrived to allow for intelligence (humans) to observe it.
Exactly correct. Intelligent design (and likewise the similarly-worded strong anthropic principle) are unprovable because their contrapositive and its opposite are unprovably identical.
The best way to show this is to use the strong anthropic principle, which states that the Universe evolved to allow humans to exist (note "to", not "such that": this implies the purpose of the Universe is to create humans).
(bear with me, I'm munging logic definitions because the original assertion is poorly worded.)
Its contrapositive is "it is not possible for the Universe to have evolved in such a way that humans could not exist".
Its opposite is "it is possible for the Universe to have evolved in such a way that humans could not exist."
By the weak anthropic principle (the Universe evolved in such a way that humans could exist), we can see that the opposite cannot apply to our current Universe (obviously!). Since I can't disprove the negative, and there aren't really any other options for proving the positive (even brute force "exhausting all other possibilities" wouldn't work: you don't have another Universe to try it out on, and any work you do is bounded by this one, so all you've really stated is "it is not possible in this Universe to end up with a Universe that isn't like this Universe." Duh.) So the strong anthropic principle is unprovable.
The only thing you could eventually show is that the Universe had to evolve in exactly the way it did, which still doesn't prove the strong anthropic principle because there are no other examples to compare it to, and you don't know the full range of "possibilities" for this Universe, because you're inside it.
It might very well come that one day we discover through science some intelligent power that created everything
A lot of scientists use this argument as a catchall to somewhat placate people who are upset that we seem to be disturbing their (naively-created) worldview. I don't understand it, though. We fundamentally have no way of proving that an intelligent power outside the Universe created everything. If a giant head appeared in front of me now and said "I created the Universe", and I said "Prove it", fundamentally everything it does has to be explainable by physics that is possible to learn. If something happens outside of known physics, by definition, known physics isn't good enough, and I've simply encountered a being who understands the physics of the Universe better than me. And if all he does show is physics that's explainable to me, then I can explain everything he does, and that simply says that I've encountered another being in the Universe who understands physics. (The "Columbus scares the natives with an eclipse" example)
A god simply can't prove his own existence - regardless of what the Babel Fish argument tries to show. No god could show any evidence to convince a good, skeptic scientist. It's just a matter of faith (which is why all the religious people who try to claim that it's their faith that makes them believe amuses me: apparently their faith was pretty weak if it forces them to ignore facts rather than question and adapt their own beliefs). If I believe that a god exists (or doesn't exist!), recognizing all of the above, my faith is stronger than those who don't, because I would believe it despite the fact that I know it can't be proven.
Sigh. You know, there are *good* aspects of the electoral college. The bad aspects are obvious: they actually aren't required to vote the way that the state voted, so your votes actually only kinda "influence" the voting, they don't directly affect it. So maybe it should be changed to force electoral college voters to vote along the state's votes.
The good aspects are a little more subtle. See, there were many things that the founders of this country were worried about, and one of them was "rule by Virginia". At the time, Virginia was significantly more populous than other states, so in a direct popular election, Virginians could basically pick the president. The electoral college scheme actually forces the Presidential candidate to actually visit a much larger number of states than he would otherwise do.
Effectively, the electoral college turns the election of a president into an election of a president by the states - so, an election by *area*, rather than people. Thus making this country - you guessed it - the "united states".
I dunno. The electoral college never bothered me, because I don't think that California, Texas, and the East Coast should decide the country's fate. I think that would doom us into wasting the entire middle of the country as we massively build up the portions of the country that have influence. It should be noted that this happens in many other countries, and not in the US, so that's actually quite interesting. You can actually get power and phone service in Middle of Nowhere, New Mexico. That's not bad.
When discussing methods of voting, though, it's always important to remember that there is no fair voting system - period - and the only thing that matters is that everyone knows the rules of the game. In the case of the electoral college, they do.
I can't make up my mind whether this is the most straightforward explanation or not. It's true that we have very little observational data about galaxy formation. And I don't put too much stock into the semi-empirical galaxy formation models (e.g. the Kauffman et. al. stuff); too many ways to tweak them. But at the same time, you're constrained in what you can do in the Universe before decoupling by anisotropy observations, while the tiny value of the Compton y-parameter in the CBR constrains pushing stuff around by energy imput after decoupling.
Definitely agreed on the galaxy formation bit. I remember talking to a few cosmologists and asking them what they had changed to get results that looked believable (because back when I was an undergrad, the timescales and distribution of galaxies in the universe were nowhere *close* to reality) and it was basically that they had tweaked a whole bunch of different parameters and gotten something that looked right. Yah. Right. Then again, they do have more input parameters now - dark matter/dark energy density so it may be a little better.
I really do wonder about the whole "string formation" bit, because that sort of formation is exactly what you would expect from a cosmic string, which everyone used to invoke to try for galaxy formation before dark matter became everyone's favorite baby. Makes you wonder.
It would make me laugh if this did turn out to be an outlier - it's *always* possible, even with ridiculously low probabilities. You have to form *some* distribution, so why not a string?:) That'd make galaxy formation people really annoyed, wouldn't it? A chance formation hinting at some greater possibility. Heh.
Its rather amazing to me that you can just lay these facts out with lots of "it is" and a little you're wrong.
("it is" is contracted as "it's", not its. Its is the possessive of it.)
Er? Most of what I said was just logic. No grand unified theory is needed to show that the strong anthropic principle is unprovable. Look at its contrapositive and inverse: the two are untestably equal.
Now, if you're talking about me saying that the Big Bang had to happen because of the CMBR, read up on Big Bang theory. It's simple enough: the CMBR shows that the Universe was a tightly confined, uniform body. It is now not a tightly confined, nor uniform body. It grew to several orders of magnitude times its size, and it cooled immensely. That's virtually the definition of "explosion" in my book.
Why did galaxies arrise out of the "uniform fireball" in the first place?
The only reason we can see the CMBR is because photons and electrons decoupled, so light then travelled freely through space (as it does now). We can't see anything before then because it's too dense.
Galaxies arose out of the CMBR because the Universe was expanding and cooling. Galaxy was hot and small once - now it's big and cool. Use the midpoint theorem.:) Once it cooled enough for molecules, and gasses to form, it would only be a matter of time until galaxies form. The question is how long did it take, and how exactly they formed.
Actually I'm much more interested in how you combine relativity and quantum mechanics
Why does everyone think that relativity + quantum mechanics can't be joined? Relativity + quantum mechanics = quantum field theory. Fifty years old or so at this point. If you're talking about GR + QM, no, I can't combine those, and again, it doesn't make the slightest bit of difference, as I never alluded to GR (or QM, for that matter).
Most of what I said is logic. You don't need advanced physics to be able to comprehend bad logic. Trying to state that you can ever prove intelligent design is bad logic, because the two predictions will produce exactly the same results. In effect, they're the same prediction - they both predict "the Universe will form in exactly the way to produce the Universe" - a modified form of the weak anthropic principle. The way they differ is in "why", and science does not concern itself with that question, only "how".
Try realizing that neither of us have ANY of the answers when it really comes down to it- and if we did, they would be impossible to express to an unenlightened being in english.
I never said I had any answers. What I did say is that the statements linked to above were poorly formed, and that the fundamental question which they were trying to debate, with science, is unprovable, with science. That, I can have the answer for.
And I think it's naive to think that you can't find any answers for metaphysical questions. You can definitely logically restrict certain questions based on logical fallacies and frame out the basic structure of the questions. The fact that metaphysics is so riddled with emotional hotheads and crackpots is, in my opinion, a serious weakness of our current society.
Does the concept of a "universe" leave room for anything "outside" of it?
Yes, and no: depending on who you talk to, and the definition of Universe. The best one I can come up with is "all space which is connected (in a mathematical sense) and includes me at the present time". In that sense, regions of black holes are another Universe, for instance.
There are other statements like "the Universe is everything that can be observed", which is a much more limiting definition (fundamentally, there's a ton of spacetime outside all of humanity's forward and backward light cones), or "the Universe is everything", which, well, pretty much occludes all "outside"-ness, because as soon as you find something outside, it's not outside. Oookay.
Intiution tells me that the universe didn't start with a big bang
Sigh. Your intuition is wrong. If you had eyes in the microwave you wouldn't doubt the Big Bang at all. Giant, uniform fireball. Hmm.
than having been around all along but not doing anything overt since second 0 (or the end of day 6 if you want to get silly).
A deity doing something overt, externally, to a creation that it created would be impossible to discern from an act naturally occuring inside the creation itself.
Said simpler, the difference between a miracle and a coincidence is whether or not you believe it was a miracle.
Our perceptions operate at a very fundamental level of physics, allowing us to perceive time, though it is not really any different from so called spatial dimensions.
Ooh yes, it is quite different! It's got a negative signature in the metric tensor. Therefore, motion backwards in time requires unbounded energy, whereas motion in all directions in space requires none.
This is why many people say that "space and time switch roles" inside an event horizon: because motion backwards in time (while remaining inside the event horizon) becomes virtually free, whereas motion radially outward becomes unbounded in energy.
There's no way we could move freely in time without violating nasty bad things, or doing weird things with wormholes or negative matter density.
The most straightforward explanation is that the universe is older than we thought. That has already been postulated as a component of other theories-- various ideas about dark matter, the cosmological constant, etc.-- meaning it's not entirely contrary to current thinking.
Actually, the most straightforward explanation is that galaxies form differently than we think. Considering we have no evidence to the contrary (all we have are simulations), and we do have a fair amount of evidence on the value of the Hubble constant, and therefore an estimate of the age of the Universe, the theory that requires the least changes in the current model would be that galaxies form quicker, and differently, than current theory allows.
should be the MOST CHAOTIC, not the most ORGANIZED, as they apparently are (being in string formation).
Actually, you're messing up what chaotic means in this case. A string formation may or may not be chaotic, depending on the creation mechanism. In the early days of the Universe, matter would be uniform, not "chaotic". If it was formed as a string, then this would be consistent with an early age, because it hadn't had time for their peculiar velocities to distort the formation. If they didn't form as a string, then it wouldn't be consistent with an early age, because gravity wouldn't've had time to pull them into that shape (assuming it could).
The light that's coming from the farthest away from us is uniform - we call it the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. And, amazingly enough, it's incredibly uniform and isotropic. Anisotropies in the CMBR are incredibly small.
If you doubt the Big Bang, get a microwave telescope and look around you. If a Big Bang didn't happen, SOME gigantic, uniform explosion happened, because there's this gigantic, uniform explosion everywhere around you. And it's redshifted by something like z = 10,000 : around 100,000 years after the Big Bang, if my memory serves. That is the universe, as it was very, very close to the Big Bang.
This observation just shows that galaxies formed quicker and faster than theorists predicted. This is not a big deal.
After all, theorists for a while had a hard time explaining how galaxies formed at all. The string formation may suggest that cosmic strings (1-dimensional topological defects) may actually have existed in the early universe. Cosmic strings have been "down on their luck" theoretically recently, as the preponderance of dark matter and energy have convinced many people you don't actually need cosmic strings. This may start them thinking otherwise.
"faith" to believe that that universe was created by chance than it does to believe that SOME outside, intelligent force "caused" it to be (the details of which are certainly open to debate).
Chance has a perspective issue. Saying something happened by "chance" and saying that it was "planned" is a matter of belief, not of fact. Nowhere do scientists say why something happened. Just how. Trying to use scientific arguments to justify a "why" is flat wrong - you're trying to justify a statement that requires evidence outside of a proper frame of reference. It's similar to the problems with the strong anthropic principle - fundamentally, from our point of view, it's indistiguishable from its opposite (oddly enough, because of the weak anthropic principle). You can't tell the difference between a "chance" creation or a "designed" creation by an intelligent force because they produce exactly the same results, because fundamentally, you have to produce a universe capable of having humans (the weak anthropic principle). We have no knowledge of the number of "dead" universes, nor whether or not "dead" universes could even exist. Therefore, from our point of view, there's no way to prove which is correct, and which is incorrect, and therefore, it's a matter of belief, not of science.
Actually, that's not true for Beagle 2, just like it wouldn't've been true had Pathfinder failed. It was an uncontrolled landing - there's a bit of luck involved in it. You pick a relatively clear area, and try to land there. Airbags deploy, you bounce, hopefully you don't nail something sharp and pointy enough to puncture the airbags, and hope you land somewhere where an antenna can deploy.
Considering that Mars is a planet with an atmosphere, unlike the Moon, and with moderately variable air density, it can be a little bit difficult to predict exactly where something will land, so there's a measure of luck involved.
Well, actually, there's a measure of luck in ALL of these landings, because it's remote, and your statement of "a lack of information" is correct - they ALWAYS have a lack of information about the landing sites. That's why we send the probes there.:)
Some people think Failures in Time (FIT) rates will get better at 90nm than 130nm. Some think the opposite. Xilinx and Actel are arguing over it. Caches are epecially vulnerable. In a critical software application, this is unacceptable, and sometimes the cache needs to be disabled altogether.
Actually, it'd be better stated that Actel is arguing with the rest of the FPGA industry, as Actel's the only one that makes antifuse FPGAs. Xilinx is vocal, but almost everyone else would agree with them as well.
I've got a guess that Actel might be a little bit biased.
If you had to believe one or the other based on equal information, you'd tend to believe Xilinx: they can afford to give up the rad hard market, as it's not that large, so they really have very little incentive to lie. Actel, however, is completely unable to compete on price issues (god, their development kits/hardware/programmers are insane!) and so they'd have a strong incentive to lie about the reliability of the competition to get people to switch to them.
However, I also know that if I had wanted to fly a PLD on any NASA mission, I'd have to choose Actel. So someone believes them...
I wonder how many software errors will be caused by neutrons hitting the processor and upseting logic gates?
Er? I don't see many free neutrons running around in a normal environment, unless you're working near a nuclear reactor. That 11-minute half-life tends to make them go away - they're a negligible component of cosmic rays. Do you mean alphas? Alpha particle strikes on electronics are a known thing - that's why ECC is around.
Does anyone even care about the leetness of their speed with Apple stuff? I always thought the sort of people who used "the other computer" were more interested in doing normal everyday things that don't require much cpu power: word processing, email, web etc. Most of the people encoding audio and video and playing games are running x86.
Well, a huge number of design people use Macs, and image processing can be very processor intensive. Everyone knows Apple always quotes Photoshop benchmarks when trying to say that their computers are faster (with this version of photoshop! with these patches! with this filter! On Tuesdays! In March!)
That being said, there's one interesting point here - there are a lot of people who, after OS X, are switching to Apple because it's a Unix derivative that, for desktop use, is more polished than Linux. The scientific project I work on has just ported all of the analysis tools to OS X, because they like the Mac desktop better than the Linux one, so I think in addition to image processing/design tasks, developers may slowly switch to Mac as well.
One other interesting point now is that the reasons for sticking with x86 are quickly dwindling. It used to be a joke that Macs were faster. Macs, in many things, were three to four (yes, 3 to 4!) times slower at general-purpose tasks. Ever since the G5 was introduced, maybe it's still a joke because of Jobs's overzealous description of Apple's prowess, but it's not that much of a joke anymore. A dual 2GHz G5 is not a slow machine. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
At this point, the only things that can seriously keep people on x86 are software and price, and considering people still pay more than $1K for computers, I think it's safe to say that people are perfectly happy to spend way too much money on computers if they look nice and are well supported.
I think Apple is quite healthy: I'd be really surprised if Apple's market share doesn't continue to grow. If you're willing to shell out the money to shift to a Mac for the ease-of-use of OS X, then I don't think you're likely to shift back to x86.
It's wrong no matter the files being traded. You didn't pay to get the music. Nobody seems to care that some human beings paid for a studio and recorded the music for a record label that distributed it for them. Instead, it's, "Down with RIAA!"
What if I did pay for it? Did you forget there's fair use for using CDs? Or that (ha ha!) you're not paying for the CD (if I was, I could do whatever I want with it!) but the rights to listen to the music - which means I can listen to it wherever I want?
Ever try to rip a CD, to, oh, I don't know, use in an MP3 player for jogging, or to put on a compilation CD for use in a car MP3 player so you don't have to try to shift discs and nearly die while driving? I have - a lot, recently. And I'll come across one or two CDs, that, strangely enough - I can't rip one track. Why? Because the disc is screwed up.
Remember - I didn't pay for the physical CD. I paid for the rights to listen to the music. If the CD goes bad, I'm still entitled to listen to the music (remember that whole "archival copy" thing permitted by law?).
No judge has ever ruled that it's OK to use someone else's archival copy. That's true. But you're not talking about "law" here, you're talking about moral justification, and I definitely sure as hell think I'm morally justified in obtaining a copy of a CD I paid for.
The problem I have is that the RIAA's tactics have no way of determining whether or not you're a person who is simply downloading copies of music you already own, or someone who is legitimately taking music they don't own. They would prosecute you just the same.
The RIAA needs to get a clue, and understand "fair use" - and so do the courts, for that matter. I won't pay them $15 for a piece of plastic that cost them 2 cents to make. I will pay them $15 for music that I can do whatever the hell I want with, which includes putting it on an MP3 player, or on a compilation CD, or whatever.
And if that CD gets scratched, I damn well better be able to get another copy of it for less than $15 - for the cost of the CD, in fact. They don't offer a method of doing so, so I'll find another way.
False. When Windows with IE is priced the same as Windows without IE was, then what has happened is that the collective price of all other parts of Windows went down a little bit, to make room for IE under the same cap.
You could still buy Windows without IE after Windows with IE was released.
They were the same price.
The cost of Windows is a known, because they sold it by itself.
This is true now. There is no way to download a standalone Internet Explorer.
This was not true before. Microsoft most definitely offered a standalone download Internet Explorer, for free. Windows 95 did not come with IE originally, remember?
Then Microsoft sold a "Windows 95 with Internet Explorer". This wasn't bundled into the cost of Windows. Windows 95 with IE cost exactly the same as Windows 95. IE was free.
Painful?? Anything but. The kernel-image-... packages have been very risky to me in the past. For one, they built unix.o as a *module*, which is really stupid, and then placed initrd's that needed unix.o, and munged the placement of modules, leading to a system that can't fully boot - even when the system. They tend to use initrd's more than they need to, and you can *really* confuse a person with a bad initrd.
The make-kpkg tools have been far more stable, and they should be. All they're doing is what you'd normally do to build a kernel, with a bit of Debian packaging thrown in as well.
Plus, tons of people have hardware that really could use a tweak or two inside the kernel config (motherboards with AMD chipsets, for one, to enable DMA). It's worth knowing your hardware (lspci -vv helps here) and going through the kernel config to make sure you don't have one or two of the 'wacky' pieces of hardware.
You can bet that Intel's designers didn't anticipate those kinds of timing issues.
Actually, just to nitpick: they did.
There are two (maybe three? I can't remember off the top of my head) pipeline stages in the P4 which are "drive" stages - stages where the pipeline does nothing except wait for data to travel from one side of the chip to another.
It was part of Intel's design to allow the clockspeed of the chips to reach ~ 10 GHz.
Now, that being said, that's the fundamental design, not the current design. Almost definitely a modern chip can't run even twice as fast as its rated clock speed. The chance of the margins being that large are just zero.
Yeah, right. In your dreams. Iraq was primarily a play for the Iraqi oil supply.
I thought that was a pretty obvious joke.
I note that you didn't argue with the second comment, regarding the US Interstate system, which is actually a good analogy.
How many times can you make the same mistake? Solar panels cost money to buy. Solar panels cost money to launch (even up an elevator). Solar panels wear out. This means that the energy is not free. It may be cheaper, but certainly not cost free.
Solar panels will generate more power than can be used to send stuff up the elevator. And besides: solar panels wear out? Most solar panels have a predicted lifespan of 20 years, simply because that's a usual dumb guess as to how long things last. Other than micrometeorite pitting (which can be calculated and dealt with), there's not a heck of a lot that can go wrong with them.
They'll pay for themselves. Energy companies think so. Otherwise British Petroleum wouldn't be helping to fund research in space elevator and space power system technologies.
Many owners of diamonds would disagree with you.
I doubt it. They'd just claim the million-year long manufacturing process makes it worth the money. Besides, artificial diamonds are dirt cheap (compared to regular diamonds), and only going to get more dirt cheap, which only justifies what I said. Carbon's cheap. It's the manufacturing that's expensive, and if there's one thing humans are good at - it's developing manufacturing skills.
Sure. How much cheaper exactly? Even if it goes down by an order of magnitude, that's still $2 billion for even the seed elevator. That's still atleast as expensive as a launch vehicle, and that's just the seed elevator, very flimsy indeed.
C'mon. Now you're just making up numbers. Throw enough money into the development of the process, and the cost could be much, much less. And you don't have to pay that cost back, because it's industrial research. Other things will use it as well.
$20 billion? Reread all the proposals. That's for the total cost of the system. The elevator material itself will probably be a small fraction of that. The usual quote is half a billion to a billion dollars for each elevator - and that's the full elevator, not the seed elevator.
Economies of scale. If they can assembly-line produce a cable which is of sufficient strength - and, if you extrapolate based on current results, it certainly seems like they will, very soon, it'll be dirt cheap. Especially because it won't be just used for the space elevator. Something that has the potential to replace steel cables? That'd become very very quick indeed.
That's the beauty of investing in space elevator technology. It's just material science. Rockets are really only useful for one thing - rockets. I can count on one hand the number of people at my university working on rocket engines. It would take a lot more fingers to count the number of people working on carbon nanotubes.
Blah 2! NOW I remember the argument that I usually make that does involve the halting problem (I think - correct me if I'm wrong here). This is what I've stated before. Grr, for not looking up previous Slashdot comments...
The problem is that software bugs can't be analyzed in a systematic way - you can't write software which can locate problems in software infallibly. I think *that* is a restatement of the halting problem. For instance, you can't write a program that will determine if the voting program allows a person's vote to be incorrectly attributed to person A when the voted for person B.
Bare logic, however, can, because corner cases can be analyzed with simulations relatively trivially - packages already exist which do this.
Bleah, I make the wrong attribution, and everyone jumps all over me.
I should probably clarify - that was meant to be a joke (partially - the AC who responded was a total prick:) ). The additional info was actually quite helpful.
I *knew* that someone had done a treatise on why you can't trust just source code (and Kernighan could've done worse - he could've put the bug in the *kernel* of one of the operating systems, which generates a compiler... etc.) - I just couldn't remember the attribution of it.
The Halting Problem has nothing to do with the execution environment (compiler, OS, hardware, etc). The idea that you cannot trust software because of the execution environment was popularized by Brian Kernighan.
Bleah, I make the wrong attribution, and everyone jumps all over me.
Anyway, the conclusion's the same. Source code isn't enough to determine how a program works, because the runtime environment is far, far abstracted from the source code. After all, you've got
a) the compiler b) the operating system c) the hardware d) input/output
all of which are unknowns just having the source code.
So, maybe it is possible to determine the way a program works, if you have all of the "knowns" above. But does anyone think any of the electronic voting machine companies are capable of that?
Jeez. Give me bare logic anyday - that I can run through a corner-case simulation and look for runts, glitches, and anything else, and there's absolutely no ambiguity, anyway, whatsoever.
I mean, hell, it's important to remember electrical engineering here as well: DRAM is broken memory that someone made work, poorly. If you can't trust the system memory, then you can have all of the software you want, and it doesn't matter - you'll never figure out how the program works. (Yah, the risk of someone bringing in a portable alpha-source to attack system memory until the thing crashes in a way that they want is not likely, but it IS possible).
Bare logic, no software, stuck in a Faraday cage. That I'll trust more than paper.
And I can make a simple machine that reads an electronic record thousands of times over, with exactly the errors I want, just as simply. Or one that creates the electronic records wrong in the first place. And you'll have nothing you can go back and look at with your eyeballs and see the hole the voter punched.
"Your eyeballs" are only useful if the person can read. If the person can't, they're in the same state as the person who can't understand electronics. In other words, trust needs to start somewhere. Paper isn't fundamentally better than electronics - just because more people can read than can understand electronics doesn't mean that one is better than the other. Not *everyone* needs to be able to verify their vote. The verification needs to be possible, and possible by everyone. Note I said "possible".
Make the schematics/gerbers open. Then everyone knows exactly what the machine is doing, and concerned citizens can verify for themselves that it is not completely screwing up.
So here's my idea: You punch a hole in a peice of paper with a sharp metal thing that makes an electrical contact on the other side. Your vote can be counted elctronically, and you know you successfully made the hole, because the little light indicating your vote doesn't come on otherwise. Then your peice of paper goes in the box where it can be used to verify the accuracy of the electronic count.
How're you doing the electronic counting? Whatever does the electronic counting has the same ambiguity in it as the method I'm proposing. The only benefit is that it is independently recorded - which I never said you shouldn't do, except I wouldn't do it on paper (which is stupid).
What if there's a fire? Or twenty years from now, there arise allegations that a congressman who's remained in office for 20 years forged election results 20 years ago? Wouldn't you want to be able to check the results then? (Or that a state referendum was forged) What makes you think paper will last? (Especially the cheap crap they use for elections). You can make things that last longer than paper and are hardier than paper(regardless of what the popular media says - well documented data formats can last forever on media that's designed to last).
Yeah, right, how many multi-billion dollar grants do you know of?
Isn't that what the US Congress just gave to Iraq?
Or the US Interstate System?
The energy cost alone is about $10/kg.
Not necessarily. If you have loads running up and running down the elevator, the energy cost could be zero (in theory, of course - you can't practically do this). But the elevator could easily be powered from space, where the cost would be zero. You'd need to set something up to deal with the nightfall hours, but it could be done.
Further, the elevator has a lifespan- running cars up it will wear it out, over time, there are bound to be maintenance costs, the elevators will be occasionally cut by micrometeorites and space junk (and the estimates are that this will happen often, perhaps every few years.)
20 years is the target lifespan, and that's several e-foldings down to guarantee it. It'd probably last longer. But it doesn't matter. Economies of scale: build two, build one, doesn't matter.
The nanotubes are not cheap-currently thousands of dollars per gram.
They are made out of carbon. Carbon is cheap. It's the processing that's expensive, and that can, and will, be made cheaper.
You're picking one number, less than 10% of the likely cost, and claiming that because it is lower for space elevators that space elevators will win out. I'm sorry- but your argument is faulty.
No, I'm picking the fundamental number - that is, the lowest it could ever get to.
Look, rocketry has to suck. It throws away far too much energy in heat, and does so quite violently. I'll put this another way. With a space elevator, you don't need massive mechanical engineering to withstand launch stresses (why do you think that satellites fail so often? launch stresses suck), you don't need heat shields to protect for reentry, you don't need fuel to enter any orbit that needs to get to anywhere closer than Jupiter (outward) or Venus (inward). So suddenly satellites, probes, and everything else become even cheaper. If you factor in the increased weight needed, that raises the cost/pound for rocketry quite significantly.
If you want to insist that I can't ignore the initial cost of the space elevator, then you can't ignore the excess weight needed on space payloads in rocketry.
No. The vast majority of the cost of the rocket comes from the R&D stage of the vehicle; which is a one-time upfront cost. Bending metal is fairly cheap.
Cheap is not free.
No. Look. The typical propellent/payload ratio for a launch vehicle is comfortably under 50:1, usually nearer to 20:1, but let's use 50:1. Let's assume you use hydrocarbon fuel. About 60% of the mass of fuel is LOX- LOX is pennies per pound. Kerosene, perhaps a dollar or two. So the rocket fuel cost is well under $50/kg. That's not a significant fraction of the price. Absolutely no economies of scale are required. Got it?
Doesn't matter. If you have two systems, one of which has a recurring cost, and one has a one-time upfront cost only, the recurring cost system is going to lose, in the long run. I don't care if you can say "well, they can get it down to $10/kg" - whatever it is, the space elevator can get it under that. The elevator starts from $0/kg, and adds on the up front cost alone.
So you can charge whatever you want. If you have a small market, you charge a lot. If you have a large market, you charge a little. All it does is change the rate at which you pay back the loan.
Uh huh. Governments that don't care about money- now we're into science fiction.:-)
Governments give away money all the time. We call them "grants". They don't expect them to be paid back.
If the US government funded a space elevator to be built, fully, on their own, the launch costs would not be $500/kg. They'd be (virtually) free. Immediately. Instantaneously.
I find it appalling that the public is not allowed access to the source code to the software that runs these e-voting devices.
I find it appalling that there is software that runs these e-voting devices. You're talking about, in the simplest form, maybe what, a 4 state device? Why in the hell are they using an embedded system for something that would make a very good undergraduate EE project? C'mon, two flipflops and a bunch of EEPROMs containing pretty images would be good enough!
I don't want to check software code. That's stupid. More importantly, it is not possible, looking at the software code, to determine how the program would run. This is the Halting problem. You need to know the code, the compiler, the architecture, and the exact conditions at runtime in order to reconstruct its behavior.
Contrast that to a hardwired design, built on bare metal. There, you just need to publish the schematics, and *anyone* can *actually* figure out how it works, with no ambiguity.
That's the only way e-voting should work. No bugs, no problems, just hardware.
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I think the "It'll burn up, we just make it thin enough" argument is dubious btw.
You're missing something, then. It needs to be strong in the radial direction (resist push/pulls) It has no need to be thick whatsoever.
It will be wide at the top, but still not thick. It's a ribbon, not a cable.
It'd burn up in the atmosphere. Too much surface area, and not enough thickness to insulate the heat.
What ID completely ignores is the fact that any universe that would have rules that would be shitty for life and intelligence would never realize it. In other words, there could have been a billion big bangs all that developed different laws. In all of these big bangs there might have been only one where all the laws arrived to allow for intelligence (humans) to observe it.
Exactly correct. Intelligent design (and likewise the similarly-worded strong anthropic principle) are unprovable because their contrapositive and its opposite are unprovably identical.
The best way to show this is to use the strong anthropic principle, which states that the Universe evolved to allow humans to exist (note "to", not "such that": this implies the purpose of the Universe is to create humans).
(bear with me, I'm munging logic definitions because the original assertion is poorly worded.)
Its contrapositive is "it is not possible for the Universe to have evolved in such a way that humans could not exist".
Its opposite is "it is possible for the Universe to have evolved in such a way that humans could not exist."
By the weak anthropic principle (the Universe evolved in such a way that humans could exist), we can see that the opposite cannot apply to our current Universe (obviously!). Since I can't disprove the negative, and there aren't really any other options for proving the positive (even brute force "exhausting all other possibilities" wouldn't work: you don't have another Universe to try it out on, and any work you do is bounded by this one, so all you've really stated is "it is not possible in this Universe to end up with a Universe that isn't like this Universe." Duh.) So the strong anthropic principle is unprovable.
The only thing you could eventually show is that the Universe had to evolve in exactly the way it did, which still doesn't prove the strong anthropic principle because there are no other examples to compare it to, and you don't know the full range of "possibilities" for this Universe, because you're inside it.
It might very well come that one day we discover through science some intelligent power that created everything
A lot of scientists use this argument as a catchall to somewhat placate people who are upset that we seem to be disturbing their (naively-created) worldview. I don't understand it, though. We fundamentally have no way of proving that an intelligent power outside the Universe created everything. If a giant head appeared in front of me now and said "I created the Universe", and I said "Prove it", fundamentally everything it does has to be explainable by physics that is possible to learn. If something happens outside of known physics, by definition, known physics isn't good enough, and I've simply encountered a being who understands the physics of the Universe better than me. And if all he does show is physics that's explainable to me, then I can explain everything he does, and that simply says that I've encountered another being in the Universe who understands physics. (The "Columbus scares the natives with an eclipse" example)
A god simply can't prove his own existence - regardless of what the Babel Fish argument tries to show. No god could show any evidence to convince a good, skeptic scientist. It's just a matter of faith (which is why all the religious people who try to claim that it's their faith that makes them believe amuses me: apparently their faith was pretty weak if it forces them to ignore facts rather than question and adapt their own beliefs). If I believe that a god exists (or doesn't exist!), recognizing all of the above, my faith is stronger than those who don't, because I would believe it despite the fact that I know it can't be proven.
Of course, the electoral college ruins that
Sigh. You know, there are *good* aspects of the electoral college. The bad aspects are obvious: they actually aren't required to vote the way that the state voted, so your votes actually only kinda "influence" the voting, they don't directly affect it. So maybe it should be changed to force electoral college voters to vote along the state's votes.
The good aspects are a little more subtle. See, there were many things that the founders of this country were worried about, and one of them was "rule by Virginia". At the time, Virginia was significantly more populous than other states, so in a direct popular election, Virginians could basically pick the president. The electoral college scheme actually forces the Presidential candidate to actually visit a much larger number of states than he would otherwise do.
Effectively, the electoral college turns the election of a president into an election of a president by the states - so, an election by *area*, rather than people. Thus making this country - you guessed it - the "united states".
I dunno. The electoral college never bothered me, because I don't think that California, Texas, and the East Coast should decide the country's fate. I think that would doom us into wasting the entire middle of the country as we massively build up the portions of the country that have influence. It should be noted that this happens in many other countries, and not in the US, so that's actually quite interesting. You can actually get power and phone service in Middle of Nowhere, New Mexico. That's not bad.
When discussing methods of voting, though, it's always important to remember that there is no fair voting system - period - and the only thing that matters is that everyone knows the rules of the game. In the case of the electoral college, they do.
I can't make up my mind whether this is the most straightforward explanation or not. It's true that we have very little observational data about galaxy formation. And I don't put too much stock into the semi-empirical galaxy formation models (e.g. the Kauffman et. al. stuff); too many ways to tweak them. But at the same time, you're constrained in what you can do in the Universe before decoupling by anisotropy observations, while the tiny value of the Compton y-parameter in the CBR constrains pushing stuff around by energy imput after decoupling.
:) That'd make galaxy formation people really annoyed, wouldn't it? A chance formation hinting at some greater possibility. Heh.
Definitely agreed on the galaxy formation bit. I remember talking to a few cosmologists and asking them what they had changed to get results that looked believable (because back when I was an undergrad, the timescales and distribution of galaxies in the universe were nowhere *close* to reality) and it was basically that they had tweaked a whole bunch of different parameters and gotten something that looked right. Yah. Right. Then again, they do have more input parameters now - dark matter/dark energy density so it may be a little better.
I really do wonder about the whole "string formation" bit, because that sort of formation is exactly what you would expect from a cosmic string, which everyone used to invoke to try for galaxy formation before dark matter became everyone's favorite baby. Makes you wonder.
It would make me laugh if this did turn out to be an outlier - it's *always* possible, even with ridiculously low probabilities. You have to form *some* distribution, so why not a string?
Its rather amazing to me that you can just lay these facts out with lots of "it is" and a little you're wrong.
:) Once it cooled enough for molecules, and gasses to form, it would only be a matter of time until galaxies form. The question is how long did it take, and how exactly they formed.
("it is" is contracted as "it's", not its. Its is the possessive of it.)
Er? Most of what I said was just logic. No grand unified theory is needed to show that the strong anthropic principle is unprovable. Look at its contrapositive and inverse: the two are untestably equal.
Now, if you're talking about me saying that the Big Bang had to happen because of the CMBR, read up on Big Bang theory. It's simple enough: the CMBR shows that the Universe was a tightly confined, uniform body. It is now not a tightly confined, nor uniform body. It grew to several orders of magnitude times its size, and it cooled immensely. That's virtually the definition of "explosion" in my book.
Why did galaxies arrise out of the "uniform fireball" in the first place?
The only reason we can see the CMBR is because photons and electrons decoupled, so light then travelled freely through space (as it does now). We can't see anything before then because it's too dense.
Galaxies arose out of the CMBR because the Universe was expanding and cooling. Galaxy was hot and small once - now it's big and cool. Use the midpoint theorem.
Actually I'm much more interested in how you combine relativity and quantum mechanics
Why does everyone think that relativity + quantum mechanics can't be joined? Relativity + quantum mechanics = quantum field theory. Fifty years old or so at this point. If you're talking about GR + QM, no, I can't combine those, and again, it doesn't make the slightest bit of difference, as I never alluded to GR (or QM, for that matter).
Most of what I said is logic. You don't need advanced physics to be able to comprehend bad logic. Trying to state that you can ever prove intelligent design is bad logic, because the two predictions will produce exactly the same results. In effect, they're the same prediction - they both predict "the Universe will form in exactly the way to produce the Universe" - a modified form of the weak anthropic principle. The way they differ is in "why", and science does not concern itself with that question, only "how".
Try realizing that neither of us have ANY of the answers when it really comes down to it- and if we did, they would be impossible to express to an unenlightened being in english.
I never said I had any answers. What I did say is that the statements linked to above were poorly formed, and that the fundamental question which they were trying to debate, with science, is unprovable, with science. That, I can have the answer for.
And I think it's naive to think that you can't find any answers for metaphysical questions. You can definitely logically restrict certain questions based on logical fallacies and frame out the basic structure of the questions. The fact that metaphysics is so riddled with emotional hotheads and crackpots is, in my opinion, a serious weakness of our current society.
Does the concept of a "universe" leave room for anything "outside" of it?
Yes, and no: depending on who you talk to, and the definition of Universe. The best one I can come up with is "all space which is connected (in a mathematical sense) and includes me at the present time". In that sense, regions of black holes are another Universe, for instance.
There are other statements like "the Universe is everything that can be observed", which is a much more limiting definition (fundamentally, there's a ton of spacetime outside all of humanity's forward and backward light cones), or "the Universe is everything", which, well, pretty much occludes all "outside"-ness, because as soon as you find something outside, it's not outside. Oookay.
Intiution tells me that the universe didn't start with a big bang
Sigh. Your intuition is wrong. If you had eyes in the microwave you wouldn't doubt the Big Bang at all. Giant, uniform fireball. Hmm.
than having been around all along but not doing anything overt since second 0 (or the end of day 6 if you want to get silly).
A deity doing something overt, externally, to a creation that it created would be impossible to discern from an act naturally occuring inside the creation itself.
Said simpler, the difference between a miracle and a coincidence is whether or not you believe it was a miracle.
Our perceptions operate at a very fundamental level of physics, allowing us to perceive time, though it is not really any different from so called spatial dimensions.
Ooh yes, it is quite different! It's got a negative signature in the metric tensor. Therefore, motion backwards in time requires unbounded energy, whereas motion in all directions in space requires none.
This is why many people say that "space and time switch roles" inside an event horizon: because motion backwards in time (while remaining inside the event horizon) becomes virtually free, whereas motion radially outward becomes unbounded in energy.
There's no way we could move freely in time without violating nasty bad things, or doing weird things with wormholes or negative matter density.
The most straightforward explanation is that the universe is older than we thought. That has already been postulated as a component of other theories-- various ideas about dark matter, the cosmological constant, etc.-- meaning it's not entirely contrary to current thinking.
Actually, the most straightforward explanation is that galaxies form differently than we think. Considering we have no evidence to the contrary (all we have are simulations), and we do have a fair amount of evidence on the value of the Hubble constant, and therefore an estimate of the age of the Universe, the theory that requires the least changes in the current model would be that galaxies form quicker, and differently, than current theory allows.
should be the MOST CHAOTIC, not the most ORGANIZED, as they apparently are (being in string formation).
Actually, you're messing up what chaotic means in this case. A string formation may or may not be chaotic, depending on the creation mechanism. In the early days of the Universe, matter would be uniform, not "chaotic". If it was formed as a string, then this would be consistent with an early age, because it hadn't had time for their peculiar velocities to distort the formation. If they didn't form as a string, then it wouldn't be consistent with an early age, because gravity wouldn't've had time to pull them into that shape (assuming it could).
The light that's coming from the farthest away from us is uniform - we call it the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. And, amazingly enough, it's incredibly uniform and isotropic. Anisotropies in the CMBR are incredibly small.
If you doubt the Big Bang, get a microwave telescope and look around you. If a Big Bang didn't happen, SOME gigantic, uniform explosion happened, because there's this gigantic, uniform explosion everywhere around you. And it's redshifted by something like z = 10,000 : around 100,000 years after the Big Bang, if my memory serves. That is the universe, as it was very, very close to the Big Bang.
This observation just shows that galaxies formed quicker and faster than theorists predicted. This is not a big deal.
After all, theorists for a while had a hard time explaining how galaxies formed at all. The string formation may suggest that cosmic strings (1-dimensional topological defects) may actually have existed in the early universe. Cosmic strings have been "down on their luck" theoretically recently, as the preponderance of dark matter and energy have convinced many people you don't actually need cosmic strings. This may start them thinking otherwise.
"faith" to believe that that universe was created by chance than it does to believe that SOME outside, intelligent force "caused" it to be (the details of which are certainly open to debate).
Chance has a perspective issue. Saying something happened by "chance" and saying that it was "planned" is a matter of belief, not of fact. Nowhere do scientists say why something happened. Just how. Trying to use scientific arguments to justify a "why" is flat wrong - you're trying to justify a statement that requires evidence outside of a proper frame of reference. It's similar to the problems with the strong anthropic principle - fundamentally, from our point of view, it's indistiguishable from its opposite (oddly enough, because of the weak anthropic principle). You can't tell the difference between a "chance" creation or a "designed" creation by an intelligent force because they produce exactly the same results, because fundamentally, you have to produce a universe capable of having humans (the weak anthropic principle). We have no knowledge of the number of "dead" universes, nor whether or not "dead" universes could even exist. Therefore, from our point of view, there's no way to prove which is correct, and which is incorrect, and therefore, it's a matter of belief, not of science.
Actually, that's not true for Beagle 2, just like it wouldn't've been true had Pathfinder failed. It was an uncontrolled landing - there's a bit of luck involved in it. You pick a relatively clear area, and try to land there. Airbags deploy, you bounce, hopefully you don't nail something sharp and pointy enough to puncture the airbags, and hope you land somewhere where an antenna can deploy.
:)
Considering that Mars is a planet with an atmosphere, unlike the Moon, and with moderately variable air density, it can be a little bit difficult to predict exactly where something will land, so there's a measure of luck involved.
Well, actually, there's a measure of luck in ALL of these landings, because it's remote, and your statement of "a lack of information" is correct - they ALWAYS have a lack of information about the landing sites. That's why we send the probes there.
Some people think Failures in Time (FIT) rates will get better at 90nm than 130nm. Some think the opposite. Xilinx and Actel are arguing over it. Caches are epecially vulnerable. In a critical software application, this is unacceptable, and sometimes the cache needs to be disabled altogether.
Actually, it'd be better stated that Actel is arguing with the rest of the FPGA industry, as Actel's the only one that makes antifuse FPGAs. Xilinx is vocal, but almost everyone else would agree with them as well.
I've got a guess that Actel might be a little bit biased.
If you had to believe one or the other based on equal information, you'd tend to believe Xilinx: they can afford to give up the rad hard market, as it's not that large, so they really have very little incentive to lie. Actel, however, is completely unable to compete on price issues (god, their development kits/hardware/programmers are insane!) and so they'd have a strong incentive to lie about the reliability of the competition to get people to switch to them.
However, I also know that if I had wanted to fly a PLD on any NASA mission, I'd have to choose Actel. So someone believes them...
I wonder how many software errors will be caused by neutrons hitting the processor and upseting logic gates?
Er? I don't see many free neutrons running around in a normal environment, unless you're working near a nuclear reactor. That 11-minute half-life tends to make them go away - they're a negligible component of cosmic rays. Do you mean alphas? Alpha particle strikes on electronics are a known thing - that's why ECC is around.
Does anyone even care about the leetness of their speed with Apple stuff? I always thought the sort of people who used "the other computer" were more interested in doing normal everyday things that don't require much cpu power: word processing, email, web etc. Most of the people encoding audio and video and playing games are running x86.
Well, a huge number of design people use Macs, and image processing can be very processor intensive. Everyone knows Apple always quotes Photoshop benchmarks when trying to say that their computers are faster (with this version of photoshop! with these patches! with this filter! On Tuesdays! In March!)
That being said, there's one interesting point here - there are a lot of people who, after OS X, are switching to Apple because it's a Unix derivative that, for desktop use, is more polished than Linux. The scientific project I work on has just ported all of the analysis tools to OS X, because they like the Mac desktop better than the Linux one, so I think in addition to image processing/design tasks, developers may slowly switch to Mac as well.
One other interesting point now is that the reasons for sticking with x86 are quickly dwindling. It used to be a joke that Macs were faster. Macs, in many things, were three to four (yes, 3 to 4!) times slower at general-purpose tasks. Ever since the G5 was introduced, maybe it's still a joke because of Jobs's overzealous description of Apple's prowess, but it's not that much of a joke anymore. A dual 2GHz G5 is not a slow machine. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
At this point, the only things that can seriously keep people on x86 are software and price, and considering people still pay more than $1K for computers, I think it's safe to say that people are perfectly happy to spend way too much money on computers if they look nice and are well supported.
I think Apple is quite healthy: I'd be really surprised if Apple's market share doesn't continue to grow. If you're willing to shell out the money to shift to a Mac for the ease-of-use of OS X, then I don't think you're likely to shift back to x86.
It's wrong no matter the files being traded. You didn't pay to get the music. Nobody seems to care that some human beings paid for a studio and recorded the music for a record label that distributed it for them. Instead, it's, "Down with RIAA!"
What if I did pay for it? Did you forget there's fair use for using CDs? Or that (ha ha!) you're not paying for the CD (if I was, I could do whatever I want with it!) but the rights to listen to the music - which means I can listen to it wherever I want?
Ever try to rip a CD, to, oh, I don't know, use in an MP3 player for jogging, or to put on a compilation CD for use in a car MP3 player so you don't have to try to shift discs and nearly die while driving? I have - a lot, recently. And I'll come across one or two CDs, that, strangely enough - I can't rip one track. Why? Because the disc is screwed up.
Remember - I didn't pay for the physical CD. I paid for the rights to listen to the music. If the CD goes bad, I'm still entitled to listen to the music (remember that whole "archival copy" thing permitted by law?).
No judge has ever ruled that it's OK to use someone else's archival copy. That's true. But you're not talking about "law" here, you're talking about moral justification, and I definitely sure as hell think I'm morally justified in obtaining a copy of a CD I paid for.
The problem I have is that the RIAA's tactics have no way of determining whether or not you're a person who is simply downloading copies of music you already own, or someone who is legitimately taking music they don't own. They would prosecute you just the same.
The RIAA needs to get a clue, and understand "fair use" - and so do the courts, for that matter. I won't pay them $15 for a piece of plastic that cost them 2 cents to make. I will pay them $15 for music that I can do whatever the hell I want with, which includes putting it on an MP3 player, or on a compilation CD, or whatever.
And if that CD gets scratched, I damn well better be able to get another copy of it for less than $15 - for the cost of the CD, in fact. They don't offer a method of doing so, so I'll find another way.
False. When Windows with IE is priced the same as Windows without IE was, then what has happened is that the collective price of all other parts of Windows went down a little bit, to make room for IE under the same cap.
You could still buy Windows without IE after Windows with IE was released.
They were the same price.
The cost of Windows is a known, because they sold it by itself.
The cost of Windows + IE is also given.
IE = Windows + IE - Windows.
IE = (~$100) - (~$100)
IE = $0.
I know people try to justify completely screwed up crap with marketing, but come on. This is simple math.
This is true now. There is no way to download a standalone Internet Explorer.
This was not true before. Microsoft most definitely offered a standalone download Internet Explorer, for free. Windows 95 did not come with IE originally, remember?
Then Microsoft sold a "Windows 95 with Internet Explorer". This wasn't bundled into the cost of Windows. Windows 95 with IE cost exactly the same as Windows 95. IE was free.
Painful?? Anything but. The kernel-image-... packages have been very risky to me in the past. For one, they built unix.o as a *module*, which is really stupid, and then placed initrd's that needed unix.o, and munged the placement of modules, leading to a system that can't fully boot - even when the system. They tend to use initrd's more than they need to, and you can *really* confuse a person with a bad initrd.
The make-kpkg tools have been far more stable, and they should be. All they're doing is what you'd normally do to build a kernel, with a bit of Debian packaging thrown in as well.
Plus, tons of people have hardware that really could use a tweak or two inside the kernel config (motherboards with AMD chipsets, for one, to enable DMA). It's worth knowing your hardware (lspci -vv helps here) and going through the kernel config to make sure you don't have one or two of the 'wacky' pieces of hardware.
You can bet that Intel's designers didn't anticipate those kinds of timing issues.
Actually, just to nitpick: they did.
There are two (maybe three? I can't remember off the top of my head) pipeline stages in the P4 which are "drive" stages - stages where the pipeline does nothing except wait for data to travel from one side of the chip to another.
It was part of Intel's design to allow the clockspeed of the chips to reach ~ 10 GHz.
Now, that being said, that's the fundamental design, not the current design. Almost definitely a modern chip can't run even twice as fast as its rated clock speed. The chance of the margins being that large are just zero.
Yeah, right. In your dreams. Iraq was primarily a play for the Iraqi oil supply.
I thought that was a pretty obvious joke.
I note that you didn't argue with the second comment, regarding the US Interstate system, which is actually a good analogy.
How many times can you make the same mistake? Solar panels cost money to buy. Solar panels cost money to launch (even up an elevator). Solar panels wear out. This means that the energy is not free. It may be cheaper, but certainly not cost free.
Solar panels will generate more power than can be used to send stuff up the elevator. And besides: solar panels wear out? Most solar panels have a predicted lifespan of 20 years, simply because that's a usual dumb guess as to how long things last. Other than micrometeorite pitting (which can be calculated and dealt with), there's not a heck of a lot that can go wrong with them.
They'll pay for themselves. Energy companies think so. Otherwise British Petroleum wouldn't be helping to fund research in space elevator and space power system technologies.
Many owners of diamonds would disagree with you.
I doubt it. They'd just claim the million-year long manufacturing process makes it worth the money. Besides, artificial diamonds are dirt cheap (compared to regular diamonds), and only going to get more dirt cheap, which only justifies what I said. Carbon's cheap. It's the manufacturing that's expensive, and if there's one thing humans are good at - it's developing manufacturing skills.
Sure. How much cheaper exactly? Even if it goes down by an order of magnitude, that's still $2 billion for even the seed elevator. That's still atleast as expensive as a launch vehicle, and that's just the seed elevator, very flimsy indeed.
C'mon. Now you're just making up numbers. Throw enough money into the development of the process, and the cost could be much, much less. And you don't have to pay that cost back, because it's industrial research. Other things will use it as well.
$20 billion? Reread all the proposals. That's for the total cost of the system. The elevator material itself will probably be a small fraction of that. The usual quote is half a billion to a billion dollars for each elevator - and that's the full elevator, not the seed elevator.
Economies of scale. If they can assembly-line produce a cable which is of sufficient strength - and, if you extrapolate based on current results, it certainly seems like they will, very soon, it'll be dirt cheap. Especially because it won't be just used for the space elevator. Something that has the potential to replace steel cables? That'd become very very quick indeed.
That's the beauty of investing in space elevator technology. It's just material science. Rockets are really only useful for one thing - rockets. I can count on one hand the number of people at my university working on rocket engines. It would take a lot more fingers to count the number of people working on carbon nanotubes.
And that's without the government funding it.
Blah 2! NOW I remember the argument that I usually make that does involve the halting problem (I think - correct me if I'm wrong here). This is what I've stated before. Grr, for not looking up previous Slashdot comments...
The problem is that software bugs can't be analyzed in a systematic way - you can't write software which can locate problems in software infallibly. I think *that* is a restatement of the halting problem. For instance, you can't write a program that will determine if the voting program allows a person's vote to be incorrectly attributed to person A when the voted for person B.
Bare logic, however, can, because corner cases can be analyzed with simulations relatively trivially - packages already exist which do this.
Bleah, I make the wrong attribution, and everyone jumps all over me.
:) ). The additional info was actually quite helpful.
I should probably clarify - that was meant to be a joke (partially - the AC who responded was a total prick
I *knew* that someone had done a treatise on why you can't trust just source code (and Kernighan could've done worse - he could've put the bug in the *kernel* of one of the operating systems, which generates a compiler... etc.) - I just couldn't remember the attribution of it.
The Halting Problem has nothing to do with the execution environment (compiler, OS, hardware, etc). The idea that you cannot trust software because of the execution environment was popularized by Brian Kernighan.
Bleah, I make the wrong attribution, and everyone jumps all over me.
Anyway, the conclusion's the same. Source code isn't enough to determine how a program works, because the runtime environment is far, far abstracted from the source code. After all, you've got
a) the compiler
b) the operating system
c) the hardware
d) input/output
all of which are unknowns just having the source code.
So, maybe it is possible to determine the way a program works, if you have all of the "knowns" above. But does anyone think any of the electronic voting machine companies are capable of that?
Jeez. Give me bare logic anyday - that I can run through a corner-case simulation and look for runts, glitches, and anything else, and there's absolutely no ambiguity, anyway, whatsoever.
I mean, hell, it's important to remember electrical engineering here as well: DRAM is broken memory that someone made work, poorly. If you can't trust the system memory, then you can have all of the software you want, and it doesn't matter - you'll never figure out how the program works. (Yah, the risk of someone bringing in a portable alpha-source to attack system memory until the thing crashes in a way that they want is not likely, but it IS possible).
Bare logic, no software, stuck in a Faraday cage. That I'll trust more than paper.
And I can make a simple machine that reads an electronic record thousands of times over, with exactly the errors I want, just as simply. Or one that creates the electronic records wrong in the first place. And you'll have nothing you can go back and look at with your eyeballs and see the hole the voter punched.
"Your eyeballs" are only useful if the person can read. If the person can't, they're in the same state as the person who can't understand electronics. In other words, trust needs to start somewhere. Paper isn't fundamentally better than electronics - just because more people can read than can understand electronics doesn't mean that one is better than the other. Not *everyone* needs to be able to verify their vote. The verification needs to be possible, and possible by everyone. Note I said "possible".
Make the schematics/gerbers open. Then everyone knows exactly what the machine is doing, and concerned citizens can verify for themselves that it is not completely screwing up.
So here's my idea: You punch a hole in a peice of paper with a sharp metal thing that makes an electrical contact on the other side. Your vote can be counted elctronically, and you know you successfully made the hole, because the little light indicating your vote doesn't come on otherwise. Then your peice of paper goes in the box where it can be used to verify the accuracy of the electronic count.
How're you doing the electronic counting? Whatever does the electronic counting has the same ambiguity in it as the method I'm proposing. The only benefit is that it is independently recorded - which I never said you shouldn't do, except I wouldn't do it on paper (which is stupid).
What if there's a fire? Or twenty years from now, there arise allegations that a congressman who's remained in office for 20 years forged election results 20 years ago? Wouldn't you want to be able to check the results then? (Or that a state referendum was forged) What makes you think paper will last? (Especially the cheap crap they use for elections). You can make things that last longer than paper and are hardier than paper(regardless of what the popular media says - well documented data formats can last forever on media that's designed to last).
Yeah, right, how many multi-billion dollar grants do you know of?
Isn't that what the US Congress just gave to Iraq?
Or the US Interstate System?
The energy cost alone is about $10/kg.
Not necessarily. If you have loads running up and running down the elevator, the energy cost could be zero (in theory, of course - you can't practically do this). But the elevator could easily be powered from space, where the cost would be zero. You'd need to set something up to deal with the nightfall hours, but it could be done.
Further, the elevator has a lifespan- running cars up it will wear it out, over time, there are bound to be maintenance costs, the elevators will be occasionally cut by micrometeorites and space junk (and the estimates are that this will happen often, perhaps every few years.)
20 years is the target lifespan, and that's several e-foldings down to guarantee it. It'd probably last longer. But it doesn't matter. Economies of scale: build two, build one, doesn't matter.
The nanotubes are not cheap-currently thousands of dollars per gram.
They are made out of carbon. Carbon is cheap. It's the processing that's expensive, and that can, and will, be made cheaper.
You're picking one number, less than 10% of the likely cost, and claiming that because it is lower for space elevators that space elevators will win out. I'm sorry- but your argument is faulty.
No, I'm picking the fundamental number - that is, the lowest it could ever get to.
Look, rocketry has to suck. It throws away far too much energy in heat, and does so quite violently. I'll put this another way. With a space elevator, you don't need massive mechanical engineering to withstand launch stresses (why do you think that satellites fail so often? launch stresses suck), you don't need heat shields to protect for reentry, you don't need fuel to enter any orbit that needs to get to anywhere closer than Jupiter (outward) or Venus (inward). So suddenly satellites, probes, and everything else become even cheaper. If you factor in the increased weight needed, that raises the cost/pound for rocketry quite significantly.
If you want to insist that I can't ignore the initial cost of the space elevator, then you can't ignore the excess weight needed on space payloads in rocketry.
No. The vast majority of the cost of the rocket comes from the R&D stage of the vehicle; which is a one-time upfront cost. Bending metal is fairly cheap.
:-)
Cheap is not free.
No. Look. The typical propellent/payload ratio for a launch vehicle is comfortably under 50:1, usually nearer to 20:1, but let's use 50:1. Let's assume you use hydrocarbon fuel. About 60% of the mass of fuel is LOX- LOX is pennies per pound. Kerosene, perhaps a dollar or two. So the rocket fuel cost is well under $50/kg. That's not a significant fraction of the price. Absolutely no economies of scale are required. Got it?
Doesn't matter. If you have two systems, one of which has a recurring cost, and one has a one-time upfront cost only, the recurring cost system is going to lose, in the long run. I don't care if you can say "well, they can get it down to $10/kg" - whatever it is, the space elevator can get it under that. The elevator starts from $0/kg, and adds on the up front cost alone.
So you can charge whatever you want. If you have a small market, you charge a lot. If you have a large market, you charge a little. All it does is change the rate at which you pay back the loan.
Uh huh. Governments that don't care about money- now we're into science fiction.
Governments give away money all the time. We call them "grants". They don't expect them to be paid back.
If the US government funded a space elevator to be built, fully, on their own, the launch costs would not be $500/kg. They'd be (virtually) free. Immediately. Instantaneously.
where another simple machine is used to count it.
If you can make a simple machine which can optically inspect, error free, thousands of punch cards, sure, kudos to you.
I can make a simple machine that reads an electronic record thousands of times over, error free on every one much, much simpler.
I find it appalling that the public is not allowed access to the source code to the software that runs these e-voting devices.
I find it appalling that there is software that runs these e-voting devices. You're talking about, in the simplest form, maybe what, a 4 state device? Why in the hell are they using an embedded system for something that would make a very good undergraduate EE project? C'mon, two flipflops and a bunch of EEPROMs containing pretty images would be good enough!
I don't want to check software code. That's stupid. More importantly, it is not possible, looking at the software code, to determine how the program would run. This is the Halting problem. You need to know the code, the compiler, the architecture, and the exact conditions at runtime in order to reconstruct its behavior.
Contrast that to a hardwired design, built on bare metal. There, you just need to publish the schematics, and *anyone* can *actually* figure out how it works, with no ambiguity.
That's the only way e-voting should work. No bugs, no problems, just hardware.