I agree. The biggest roadblock is the computer geeks themselves. Computer science is controlled by a bunch of aged computer geeks who still have the mentality of Charles Babbage and Lady Ada when it comes to designing and programming computers. Here are some more roadblocks:
Hey guys. The original question was not whether or not DNA/RNA can form but what is the probability that it can form randomly by itself from a stew of available chemicals? Has this ever been observed? If not, how does one ascribe the probability of it happening randomly by itself?
So, even if the likelihood of DNA or RNA randomly forming was a billion-to-one, that would still mean that it has happened on a billion planets.
Sor far, nobody has ventured a probability figure based on observation. I take it that nobody knows since the random formation of DNA/RNA strands has never been observed. However, it should be possible for a bio-chemist to figure out the likelihood of the right molecules getting together in some primordial soup. What if the probability is zero? Has anybody here thought of this possibility? I guess not.
Supposing that life started with random DNA strands that somehow self-organized, how did the DNA strands form? Randomly, all by themselves? How likely is that? Anyone knows?
The US has missed several advancements in nuclear technology.
Well, this is good because it means that the US has the opportunity to move straight to the latest and safest state of the art nuclear power plant technology.
All in all, no, sorry, I don't think AMD merely "always plays second fiddle" like they used to with their K6 etc....Although they certainly need to watch out if Intel really delivers on Penryn and whatever else they sure have in the pipeline.
Nobody is arguing that AMD is as technologically capable as any other CPU company. Their engineering know-how is second to none. AMD's problem is marketing and selling in an Intel-dominated market. Right now, Intel's customers have no compelling reason to switch to AMD. AMD announced a huge loss not too long ago while Intel is sitting on a huge pile of cash and can do whatever it wants. My argument is that AMD needs to define a market of its own (through IP) where it can maneuver at ease, one in which Intel will be at a disadvantage. This new market must also be one that threatens to destroy the old one, putting Intel on a defensive.
AMD must come up with a new way of doing things that is so advantageous to its cuctomers that they would be willing to break from the past. If they can do that, they will be the new king of the hill. I believe they can. The opportunity is there but will not be for long because there are many other fish in the water. Some unknown startup may come from behind and steal the pot of gold while those two Goliaths are fighting over market share.
I don't see this as a problem. Artists and painters (think Sixtine Chapel, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, etc...) have been using their arms for ages. The trick is that you don't have to keep your arms up all the time. Every so often you must step back to take a look at your work and you drop your arms when you do. All it takes is short rest periods between work.
Personally, I believe that the multi-touch interface is perfect for parallel computer programming. In the future, programming will become almost entirely compositional. Just drag'm and drop'm.
If this is how it ends for AMD, this is how it goes.
AMD is fighting a losing battle. Intel defined the current market and AMD cannot beat them at their own game. They are condemned to always play second fiddle unless they can find a way to redefine the market. They can only do so by reassessing the current state of the art in multicore CPU architecture and computer programming and correct what is wrong with it. And there is a lot that is wrong with it. I call it The Age of Crappy Concurrency. Check it out.
Now that the industry is transitioning to massive parallelism, AMD has the chance of a lifetime to change the computing landscape in its favor and leave Intel and everybody else in the dust.
Forget the rules. It won't happen because it's just plain stupid. It's stupid for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that any conventional propulsion system (propellers or rocket engines) is too disruptive for city transportation because of noise, wind, dust, safety, etc... Unless we have a revolution in physics (should not be discounted as a possibility) that allows us to build crafts with no visible means of propulstion that can stop on a dime, forget it.
To this non-physicist, MOND looks just like string theory -- New! Exciting! but no real predictions, just lots of knobs you can twiddle to get any result you want.
You mean, like the knobs that were twiddled in the other theories (e.g., the use of Newtonian's G and other constants) to get the results their authors wanted.
Whether gravity falls off at a slightly slower rate or there is a large volume of unknown matter in the universe the end result will be the same, so why do people so quickly call others idiots when they suggest an alternate explanation?
That's because the end result will not be the same as you assume. If gravity does not diminish exactly at 1/r^2 over large distances as GR and Newtonian physics assume, it would throw a monkey wrench into everything. It would bring a lot of other issues into question such as the Big Bang theory and the accelerated expansion of the universe. Heck, even our calculations of distances may be off. There is too much at stake and a lot of people have invested a lot into the status quo and will fight teeth and nails against almost any change. Accusing others of being crackpots in order to discredit them is a very good tactic because it has worked in the past. Scientists are not saints, the last I checked.
Do you really think that a self taught dumbass like yourself can revolutionize programming language with stupid fucking requirements like fine grained parallelism? Get the fuck off slashdot, you're fucking worthless.
ahahahaha... You're funny as hell. I can imagine you jumping up and down and foaning at the mouth all over the keyboard when you wrote this. Thanks for the laughs, anonymous dudette. ahahaha... AHAHAHA... ahahaha...
>"Einstein fanatics"?! "demigod"?! You sound like a crackpot UFO conspiracy theorist. If you think there are flaws with the current models, the only acceptable way to address those concerns is with science. Not ad-hominem attacks against people who are demonstrably smarter and more polite than you.
Yes, ad-hominem attacks really destroy YOUR position.
Isn't it amazing that these guys can feel free to treat anybody who do not agree with them as crackpots and conspiracy theorists while accusing them of engaging in ad hominems?
But we 1/r^2 is a good approximation for any gravitational fields near us.
Yes, 1/r^2 it works pretty well for relatively short distances but it may not be so for long distances. Which is the reason that some physicists don't think there is any missing mass (dark matter) at all and that both GR and Newtonian physics may need to be revised (GR uses Newton's G). This would create all sorts of problems because it would also bring other matters into question such as the supposed accelerated expansion of the universe. The Einstein fanatics and the Big Bang proponents refuse to consider it as a possibility (a lot of careers depend on Big Bang and Esintein being right). Einstein is a demigod in some circles and his wisdom must not be questioned. As a result little funding is allocated for research in this area. That's too bad. We are probably missing some very exciting physics in the process.
For one thing, we read here every day about the endless ways in which software farks up.
Hold on a second. Not to take away from the actual intent of your post (which I agree with) but let me see if I get this straight. A simple robot with a simple robot brain is not reliable and cannot be trusted with weapons, right? By contrast, an extremely complex human brain is reliable enough to be trusted? Either I am missing something or Fred Brooks was wrong about reliability being inversely proportional to complexity. This seems not to be the case as far as the brain is concerned. The more complex it gets, as it learns, the more reliable it gets. By golly, if the brain can do it, so can we. If not, why not? I see no reason that highly complex software should be inherently unreliable. There must be something fundamentally wrong with the way we create software. We need to find out how the brain does it, IMO, and do likewise.
Since you're being a nitpick: they're not in "zero g", they're in orbit. There is a difference. One means there are no (or, in practical terms, very little) gravitational forces acting on you; the other means you're hurtling through space fast enough that you counteract gravitational forces trying to pull you down to the planet.
Zero G and free fall are equivalent from the point of view of the object, according to GR and Newtonian physics. No unbalanced force and all that.
I guess you'd describe a plane in freefall as having no up and no down either then. The Earth's gravity is only about 10% weaker on the ISS than it is on the surface.
I am not sure what your point is but that is not what microgravity means, IMO. Microgravity in orbit is the gravitational attractions between the orbiting masses. It's very minute, to the point of being imperceptible to the astronauts. You need highly sensitive instruments to measure it.
Astronauts added the school bus-sized room called Harmony during a 6.5-hour spacewalk Friday, using a robotic arm to lift it from the shuttle's cargo bay and install it on the station.
Uh... I don't think anything was "lifted". In zero G, there is no up and down, AFAIK.
You're kidding me? Physicists believe in all sorts of crap without empirical proof. For example, they believe in the superposition of quantum states even though superposition can never be observed. Why? because, as soon as you do, it collapses. Kinda like this kid I used to know who claimed he could jump as high as a tall building but only when nobody was looking. ahahaha... Yeah, right. Ever wonder why, with all this talk about quantum computers during the last two decades, you still can't buy one from Dell? It's because it's all based on religious bullshit, that's why. ahahaha...
Time travel, wormholes, black holes, parallel universes, uploading one's brain to a computer, etc... are just a few religious beliefs that a lot of scientists and the majority of stupid Slashdot geeks have. ahahaha...
So don't tell me that science requires no faith. It's all about faith and religion! May the best religion win. So go ahead, mark me as a troll or flame bait, you religious freak. And see if I care. ahahaha... AHAHAHA... ahahaha...
Slashdot Mirror
IT workers and their know-it-all attitudes.
I agree. The biggest roadblock is the computer geeks themselves. Computer science is controlled by a bunch of aged computer geeks who still have the mentality of Charles Babbage and Lady Ada when it comes to designing and programming computers. Here are some more roadblocks:
Half a Century of Crappy Computing
Parallel Programming, Math and the Curse of the Algorithm
The Age of Crappy Concurrency: Erlang, Tilera, Intel, AMD, IBM, Freescale, etc...
Parallel Computers and the Algorithm: Square Peg vs. Round Hole
Killing the Beast
Hey guys. The original question was not whether or not DNA/RNA can form but what is the probability that it can form randomly by itself from a stew of available chemicals? Has this ever been observed? If not, how does one ascribe the probability of it happening randomly by itself?
So, even if the likelihood of DNA or RNA randomly forming was a billion-to-one, that would still mean that it has happened on a billion planets.
Sor far, nobody has ventured a probability figure based on observation. I take it that nobody knows since the random formation of DNA/RNA strands has never been observed. However, it should be possible for a bio-chemist to figure out the likelihood of the right molecules getting together in some primordial soup. What if the probability is zero? Has anybody here thought of this possibility? I guess not.
Supposing that life started with random DNA strands that somehow self-organized, how did the DNA strands form? Randomly, all by themselves? How likely is that? Anyone knows?
The US has missed several advancements in nuclear technology.
Well, this is good because it means that the US has the opportunity to move straight to the latest and safest state of the art nuclear power plant technology.
All in all, no, sorry, I don't think AMD merely "always plays second fiddle" like they used to with their K6 etc. ...Although they certainly need to watch out if Intel really delivers on Penryn and whatever else they sure have in the pipeline.
Nobody is arguing that AMD is as technologically capable as any other CPU company. Their engineering know-how is second to none. AMD's problem is marketing and selling in an Intel-dominated market. Right now, Intel's customers have no compelling reason to switch to AMD. AMD announced a huge loss not too long ago while Intel is sitting on a huge pile of cash and can do whatever it wants. My argument is that AMD needs to define a market of its own (through IP) where it can maneuver at ease, one in which Intel will be at a disadvantage. This new market must also be one that threatens to destroy the old one, putting Intel on a defensive.
AMD must come up with a new way of doing things that is so advantageous to its cuctomers that they would be willing to break from the past. If they can do that, they will be the new king of the hill. I believe they can. The opportunity is there but will not be for long because there are many other fish in the water. Some unknown startup may come from behind and steal the pot of gold while those two Goliaths are fighting over market share.
Your arms get tired after a while.
I don't see this as a problem. Artists and painters (think Sixtine Chapel, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, etc...) have been using their arms for ages. The trick is that you don't have to keep your arms up all the time. Every so often you must step back to take a look at your work and you drop your arms when you do. All it takes is short rest periods between work.
Personally, I believe that the multi-touch interface is perfect for parallel computer programming. In the future, programming will become almost entirely compositional. Just drag'm and drop'm.
If this is how it ends for AMD, this is how it goes.
AMD is fighting a losing battle. Intel defined the current market and AMD cannot beat them at their own game. They are condemned to always play second fiddle unless they can find a way to redefine the market. They can only do so by reassessing the current state of the art in multicore CPU architecture and computer programming and correct what is wrong with it. And there is a lot that is wrong with it. I call it The Age of Crappy Concurrency. Check it out.
Now that the industry is transitioning to massive parallelism, AMD has the chance of a lifetime to change the computing landscape in its favor and leave Intel and everybody else in the dust.
So quick to dismiss this?
Uh... They're a bunch of stupid geeks? ahahaha...
Forget the rules. It won't happen because it's just plain stupid. It's stupid for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that any conventional propulsion system (propellers or rocket engines) is too disruptive for city transportation because of noise, wind, dust, safety, etc... Unless we have a revolution in physics (should not be discounted as a possibility) that allows us to build crafts with no visible means of propulstion that can stop on a dime, forget it.
And Fusion reactor research can never come to a conclusion until or unless we get a fusion reactor
We have existence proof that fusion exists. We don't have existence proof that aliens exist and are broadcasting with EM radiation.
And AI research can never come to a conclusion until or unless we get an artificially intelligent computer or other construct.
We have existence proof that intelligence exists. We don't have existence proof that aliens exist and are broadcasting with EM radiation.
To this non-physicist, MOND looks just like string theory -- New! Exciting! but no real predictions, just lots of knobs you can twiddle to get any result you want.
You mean, like the knobs that were twiddled in the other theories (e.g., the use of Newtonian's G and other constants) to get the results their authors wanted.
Whether gravity falls off at a slightly slower rate or there is a large volume of unknown matter in the universe the end result will be the same, so why do people so quickly call others idiots when they suggest an alternate explanation?
That's because the end result will not be the same as you assume. If gravity does not diminish exactly at 1/r^2 over large distances as GR and Newtonian physics assume, it would throw a monkey wrench into everything. It would bring a lot of other issues into question such as the Big Bang theory and the accelerated expansion of the universe. Heck, even our calculations of distances may be off. There is too much at stake and a lot of people have invested a lot into the status quo and will fight teeth and nails against almost any change. Accusing others of being crackpots in order to discredit them is a very good tactic because it has worked in the past. Scientists are not saints, the last I checked.
Do you really think that a self taught dumbass like yourself can revolutionize programming language with stupid fucking requirements like fine grained parallelism? Get the fuck off slashdot, you're fucking worthless.
ahahahaha... You're funny as hell. I can imagine you jumping up and down and foaning at the mouth all over the keyboard when you wrote this. Thanks for the laughs, anonymous dudette. ahahaha... AHAHAHA... ahahaha...
>"Einstein fanatics"?! "demigod"?! You sound like a crackpot UFO conspiracy theorist. If you think there are flaws with the current models, the only acceptable way to address those concerns is with science. Not ad-hominem attacks against people who are demonstrably smarter and more polite than you.
Yes, ad-hominem attacks really destroy YOUR position.
Isn't it amazing that these guys can feel free to treat anybody who do not agree with them as crackpots and conspiracy theorists while accusing them of engaging in ad hominems?
Whoops. I seem to have given a knee-jerk response to a troll.
It's better to be a troll than an ass kisser any day. Orders of magnitude better. ahahaha...
Do you really expect language like that to cause somebody to re-evaluate some of the most well-verified physical laws ever postulated?
Ah, an Einstein and Big Bang fanatic, I see. I can spot one a mile away.
But we 1/r^2 is a good approximation for any gravitational fields near us.
Yes, 1/r^2 it works pretty well for relatively short distances but it may not be so for long distances. Which is the reason that some physicists don't think there is any missing mass (dark matter) at all and that both GR and Newtonian physics may need to be revised (GR uses Newton's G). This would create all sorts of problems because it would also bring other matters into question such as the supposed accelerated expansion of the universe. The Einstein fanatics and the Big Bang proponents refuse to consider it as a possibility (a lot of careers depend on Big Bang and Esintein being right). Einstein is a demigod in some circles and his wisdom must not be questioned. As a result little funding is allocated for research in this area. That's too bad. We are probably missing some very exciting physics in the process.
For one thing, we read here every day about the endless ways in which software farks up.
Hold on a second. Not to take away from the actual intent of your post (which I agree with) but let me see if I get this straight. A simple robot with a simple robot brain is not reliable and cannot be trusted with weapons, right? By contrast, an extremely complex human brain is reliable enough to be trusted? Either I am missing something or Fred Brooks was wrong about reliability being inversely proportional to complexity. This seems not to be the case as far as the brain is concerned. The more complex it gets, as it learns, the more reliable it gets. By golly, if the brain can do it, so can we. If not, why not? I see no reason that highly complex software should be inherently unreliable. There must be something fundamentally wrong with the way we create software. We need to find out how the brain does it, IMO, and do likewise.
Since you're being a nitpick: they're not in "zero g", they're in orbit. There is a difference. One means there are no (or, in practical terms, very little) gravitational forces acting on you; the other means you're hurtling through space fast enough that you counteract gravitational forces trying to pull you down to the planet.
Zero G and free fall are equivalent from the point of view of the object, according to GR and Newtonian physics. No unbalanced force and all that.
I guess you'd describe a plane in freefall as having no up and no down either then. The Earth's gravity is only about 10% weaker on the ISS than it is on the surface.
I am not sure what your point is but that is not what microgravity means, IMO. Microgravity in orbit is the gravitational attractions between the orbiting masses. It's very minute, to the point of being imperceptible to the astronauts. You need highly sensitive instruments to measure it.
except they are not at zero G they are in microgravity.
Very little difference, IMO.
Astronauts added the school bus-sized room called Harmony during a 6.5-hour spacewalk Friday, using a robotic arm to lift it from the shuttle's cargo bay and install it on the station.
Uh... I don't think anything was "lifted". In zero G, there is no up and down, AFAIK.
Science is a method, it requires no faith.
You're kidding me? Physicists believe in all sorts of crap without empirical proof. For example, they believe in the superposition of quantum states even though superposition can never be observed. Why? because, as soon as you do, it collapses. Kinda like this kid I used to know who claimed he could jump as high as a tall building but only when nobody was looking. ahahaha... Yeah, right. Ever wonder why, with all this talk about quantum computers during the last two decades, you still can't buy one from Dell? It's because it's all based on religious bullshit, that's why. ahahaha...
Time travel, wormholes, black holes, parallel universes, uploading one's brain to a computer, etc... are just a few religious beliefs that a lot of scientists and the majority of stupid Slashdot geeks have. ahahaha...
So don't tell me that science requires no faith. It's all about faith and religion! May the best religion win. So go ahead, mark me as a troll or flame bait, you religious freak. And see if I care. ahahaha... AHAHAHA... ahahaha...
or may be, in Soviet Russia, the cockroaches nuke *YOU*.
In Soviet Russia, packs of rat-size cockroaches walk the streets of Tchernobyl.