I'm not sure if that was posted in jest or not, but it's a commonly held belief that such a disclaimer protects one from liability, but that's just not the case. Nor is there any protection by adding the "Do not enter this site if you're a member of any law enforcement agency," citing some nonexistant Internet Privacy Protection Acy.
Actually there are thousands of industrial applications in which deionized water is essential, specifically because of it's nonconductance. And it doesn't have to be "pure" to be nonconductive, just mostly pure. I couldn't tell you what the impurity/conductance ratio is, but as long as it was hooked up to filtration and a deionizer system, it would be feasible. In fact, flourinert was specifically designed to replace DI water in industrial applications, due to its higher boiling point and lower freezing point.
So yeah, now your feet are firmly planted. Welcome back.
Water was by far the best, but has the obvious downsides of being well, ya know.
What? Oxidizing? Not if you submerse an object in the water, assuming your water is deaerated. If you want to preserve something, try sinking itin a lake.
Or did you mean conductive? Actually, deionized (pure) water is rather nonconductive. At 0.055uS/cm, that works out to 18Mohm/cm.
I'm not a chemist, but I don't think there are any elements on a motherboard that would react with pure water.
a mission consisting of 10.000 3-metre mirror telescopes.
I'm not sure what's more amazing - the fact that they've projected the number of telescopes they'll need out to 3 decimal places, or that it appears to be a perfect integer. Unless they rounded it off to the nearest thousandth.
It's projects like these that make you realize a lifetime is too short. I can't wait to see the results of this project in several decades, I just wish I could be around to witness the results of the first manned missions to these planets. If we don't blow ourselves up first. It's great to see all these space-related stories being featured. Hopefully this renewed interest in space exploration will become infectious worldwide. I can only imagine what the world will be like for my kids.
Oh wait.. I think I remember hearing something about getting laid being a requisite for producing offspring.. can anyone confirm this?
- The special effects will kick ass, but the storyline won't make sense - Most of the movie will be darkness - I'll run out of popcorn every 5 minutes and be required to visit special websites to obtain more - I can have popcorn, or a soda, but not both - The existing projectors won't be able to run the film at 24.9fps - Only 4 people can watch it a time
On the bright side, it'll be on Usenet 3 days before it hits theatres.
Cans don't change carbon dioxide into oxygen. They can't.
Oh shit, now you tell me. Look, if anyone gets this, I'm locked in an airtight container with only this computer and 30,000 cans. And I'm starting to get very, very sleepy.
That might work if the goal were to simply create an environment.. (and if there were water). That won't necessarily achieve the goal of creating a food source for astronauts. As a previous poster mentioned, with NASA's luck, the only plants to flourish would be toxic.
I think you failed to take into account the fact that roaches are revolting. And you just *know* something's going to go wrong and they'll end up having to eat those crunchy little bastards just to stay alive. I'm suprised Fear Factor hasn't picked up on that already and sent a capsule into orbit with 4 people and a few tons of cockroaches. First one to freak out and open the door loses.
Wrong. Diamonds are expensive because of an artificual supply constraint. American medical care is expensive because we shoulder the burden for the majority of medical research.
Also, prices aren't some absolute system where item or service X is worth Y dollars. An ounce of gold isn't "worth" anything, except what someone else is willing to pay for it. It turns out people are willing to pay a shit ton of cash to stay healthy/alive. Go figure.
Yeah.. every once a while I feel nostalgic, so I'll find a C64 or Nintendo emulator and fire up some classics. That's fun for all of 5 minutes, until I realize that old games really suck.
Why is this better than current implementations of multiple processors on one motherboard? Isn't it fundamentally the same thing, just using less space? Granted, using less space allows for more and more processors to be placed in the same area, just like making smaller transistors allows you to place more of them on the chip. But that's only really useful in a server environment, which is why it never really caught on among home users. Will this really provide any benefit for everyday users?
I wonder if we have reached the end of the race for processing power. Up until the 60s and 70s, car manufacturers were trying to create increasingly more powerful engines. In part because of the gas shortages of the 70s, but also due to the fact that people really can't do anything useful with 700HP, other than kill themselves really really fast. The focus shifted from power to economy. Maybe one day manufacturers will be touting that their laptops are so efficient they can power themselves from the kinetic energy of moving them around, like watches of today. This will be a sad day for most of us, because it means we will have to get off our asses every once in a while to keep our laptops running.
On a side note, how come nobody's posted anything about a Beowulf cluster of these?
How do you define sentient? And more importantly, who cares?
If you define sentient as self-aware, then any animal species could eventually become self aware. We don't know why it happened in humans, so it's hard to say whether or not it would happen to another species.
If you simply define sentience as aware (but not self-aware), then the issue is even less relevant to this particular sort of experimentation. We currently use all sorts of animals for experimentation, and (gasp) we even coerce dogs to lead the blind and sniff out explosives, drugs, and people.
It's very unlikely that a group of neurons in a petri dish will become conscious, if that's what you're worried about. But if they do, I'm sure they'll let you volunteer to read it stories and play checkers with it.
You can almost always assume that a given cell type in one organism will behave identically to a parallel cell in another. The species that the cell came from is all but insignificant.
I agree that at the cellular level, things behave similarly, and that we don't yet know enough to be concerned with the subtle differences between species. However, these subtle differences, if they exist, may turn out to be very significant. While the aspect of learning may be identical, what makes humans (and arguably some primates) the only animals that are self-aware? Intuitively, one would think there must be a difference in how our neurons behave when compared to less intelligent species.
I think it would be interesting to perform the same experiment with clusters of neurons from other species to see if some learned more quickly. Obviously they're simulating movement, which is a fundamental process of most living creatures. A brain would first have to become accustomed to it's entity (or body, or simulated body ie, a plane) before it could affect change in that entity, thereby affecting change in its environment. But what makes humans take longer to learn to move than say a horse? Is it simply a matter of having a more complex body? Perhaps the size of our brains is a limiting factor and it just takes longer for all those cells to get organized. Maybe both. I look forward to seeing future experiments along these lines.
Just because "built on New Technology technology" is redundant, doesn't mean someone wouldn't say it. My bank sent me my "PIN number," my friend sent me a "PDF file," etc, etc.
I know it's offtopic, but using the last word of an acronym, post acronym, happens all the time.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure if that was posted in jest or not, but it's a commonly held belief that such a disclaimer protects one from liability, but that's just not the case. Nor is there any protection by adding the "Do not enter this site if you're a member of any law enforcement agency," citing some nonexistant Internet Privacy Protection Acy.
IANAL. As always, do your own research.
Actually there are thousands of industrial applications in which deionized water is essential, specifically because of it's nonconductance. And it doesn't have to be "pure" to be nonconductive, just mostly pure. I couldn't tell you what the impurity/conductance ratio is, but as long as it was hooked up to filtration and a deionizer system, it would be feasible. In fact, flourinert was specifically designed to replace DI water in industrial applications, due to its higher boiling point and lower freezing point.
So yeah, now your feet are firmly planted. Welcome back.
Water was by far the best, but has the obvious downsides of being well, ya know.
What? Oxidizing? Not if you submerse an object in the water, assuming your water is deaerated. If you want to preserve something, try sinking it in a lake.
Or did you mean conductive? Actually, deionized (pure) water is rather nonconductive. At 0.055uS/cm, that works out to 18Mohm/cm.
I'm not a chemist, but I don't think there are any elements on a motherboard that would react with pure water.
Yeah, I know, they use periods to deliniate thousands in some countries. I'm sure someone will call me a dumbass though. Hopefully.
a mission consisting of 10.000 3-metre mirror telescopes.
I'm not sure what's more amazing - the fact that they've projected the number of telescopes they'll need out to 3 decimal places, or that it appears to be a perfect integer. Unless they rounded it off to the nearest thousandth.
It's projects like these that make you realize a lifetime is too short. I can't wait to see the results of this project in several decades, I just wish I could be around to witness the results of the first manned missions to these planets. If we don't blow ourselves up first. It's great to see all these space-related stories being featured. Hopefully this renewed interest in space exploration will become infectious worldwide. I can only imagine what the world will be like for my kids.
Oh wait.. I think I remember hearing something about getting laid being a requisite for producing offspring.. can anyone confirm this?
I can hardly wait
- The special effects will kick ass, but the storyline won't make sense
- Most of the movie will be darkness
- I'll run out of popcorn every 5 minutes and be required to visit special websites to obtain more
- I can have popcorn, or a soda, but not both
- The existing projectors won't be able to run the film at 24.9fps
- Only 4 people can watch it a time
On the bright side, it'll be on Usenet 3 days before it hits theatres.
Thanks for coming, I'll be here all week
you can clearly see the antigravity device, just like the one on Mars. And obviously that's a power plant on the lower right.
I'd die before I severed the torso from my Real Doll.
Glad you picked up on that ;)
Cans don't change carbon dioxide into oxygen. They can't.
Oh shit, now you tell me. Look, if anyone gets this, I'm locked in an airtight container with only this computer and 30,000 cans. And I'm starting to get very, very sleepy.
That might work if the goal were to simply create an environment.. (and if there were water). That won't necessarily achieve the goal of creating a food source for astronauts. As a previous poster mentioned, with NASA's luck, the only plants to flourish would be toxic.
--
I think you failed to take into account the fact that roaches are revolting. And you just *know* something's going to go wrong and they'll end up having to eat those crunchy little bastards just to stay alive. I'm suprised Fear Factor hasn't picked up on that already and sent a capsule into orbit with 4 people and a few tons of cockroaches. First one to freak out and open the door loses.
--
Not to mention you could show off the cool aquarium to your friends, and possibly impress some martian females when you get there. Chicks dig fish.
Or was that "smell like.."
--
Don't try skimping on the cup and drinking straight from the tap. Trust me on this.
--
Wrong. Diamonds are expensive because of an artificual supply constraint. American medical care is expensive because we shoulder the burden for the majority of medical research.
Also, prices aren't some absolute system where item or service X is worth Y dollars. An ounce of gold isn't "worth" anything, except what someone else is willing to pay for it. It turns out people are willing to pay a shit ton of cash to stay healthy/alive. Go figure.
--
I must get my Spectrum out and play some games.
Yeah.. every once a while I feel nostalgic, so I'll find a C64 or Nintendo emulator and fire up some classics. That's fun for all of 5 minutes, until I realize that old games really suck.
People are still watching TV? I'm not even sure why I pay for my cable anymore..
--
Correction..
by "that's only really useful in a server environment," I was referring to multiple processors.
--
Why is this better than current implementations of multiple processors on one motherboard? Isn't it fundamentally the same thing, just using less space? Granted, using less space allows for more and more processors to be placed in the same area, just like making smaller transistors allows you to place more of them on the chip. But that's only really useful in a server environment, which is why it never really caught on among home users. Will this really provide any benefit for everyday users?
I wonder if we have reached the end of the race for processing power. Up until the 60s and 70s, car manufacturers were trying to create increasingly more powerful engines. In part because of the gas shortages of the 70s, but also due to the fact that people really can't do anything useful with 700HP, other than kill themselves really really fast. The focus shifted from power to economy. Maybe one day manufacturers will be touting that their laptops are so efficient they can power themselves from the kinetic energy of moving them around, like watches of today. This will be a sad day for most of us, because it means we will have to get off our asses every once in a while to keep our laptops running.
On a side note, how come nobody's posted anything about a Beowulf cluster of these?
--
How do you define sentient? And more importantly, who cares?
If you define sentient as self-aware, then any animal species could eventually become self aware. We don't know why it happened in humans, so it's hard to say whether or not it would happen to another species.
If you simply define sentience as aware (but not self-aware), then the issue is even less relevant to this particular sort of experimentation. We currently use all sorts of animals for experimentation, and (gasp) we even coerce dogs to lead the blind and sniff out explosives, drugs, and people.
It's very unlikely that a group of neurons in a petri dish will become conscious, if that's what you're worried about. But if they do, I'm sure they'll let you volunteer to read it stories and play checkers with it.
You can almost always assume that a given cell type in one organism will behave identically to a parallel cell in another. The species that the cell came from is all but insignificant.
I agree that at the cellular level, things behave similarly, and that we don't yet know enough to be concerned with the subtle differences between species. However, these subtle differences, if they exist, may turn out to be very significant. While the aspect of learning may be identical, what makes humans (and arguably some primates) the only animals that are self-aware? Intuitively, one would think there must be a difference in how our neurons behave when compared to less intelligent species.
I think it would be interesting to perform the same experiment with clusters of neurons from other species to see if some learned more quickly. Obviously they're simulating movement, which is a fundamental process of most living creatures. A brain would first have to become accustomed to it's entity (or body, or simulated body ie, a plane) before it could affect change in that entity, thereby affecting change in its environment. But what makes humans take longer to learn to move than say a horse? Is it simply a matter of having a more complex body? Perhaps the size of our brains is a limiting factor and it just takes longer for all those cells to get organized. Maybe both. I look forward to seeing future experiments along these lines.
--
They're rat cells, not people cells. Killing rats isn't illegal; in fact, some people actually make money doing it.
Just because "built on New Technology technology" is redundant, doesn't mean someone wouldn't say it. My bank sent me my "PIN number," my friend sent me a "PDF file," etc, etc.
I know it's offtopic, but using the last word of an acronym, post acronym, happens all the time.
Five thousand "girls gone wild" say you're wrong.