What I've always wondered is how you avoid the whole thing just getting burned up before you get to hoist anyting up there: since the carbon material will be pretty conductive, you'll basically be building the worlds tallest lightning rod.
Close to zero. China isn't really red anymore either. They've both figured out that it's useless to fight market economy in general. Better to put it to use in favour of the leadership, which doesn't imply they also have to give people any political freedom. China never had any, and the russians' recently won ones are disapperaing fast. The way things are heading, the most apt label for both their systems will soon be "fascist", really.
Wheras misrepresenting the controversy as if it's a matter of whether "nature can survive" is really scientifically sound. I see a bright future for genetially modified straw men.
Your analogy is the flawed one. I was not drawing any parallell about them being made of carbon. I'm pointing out that it's they're simply using same type of carbon fibers already in volume production, as the article clearly states. And they are not nanoscale BTW (unlike nanotubes). These are merely micron-scale carbon fibers, easily visible under a good magnifying glass.
Back when Java was new and mysterious, there was a lot of talk about java chips figuring in the near future, and they would most probably be stack based, since the runtime spec is. Never really happened, but maybe it's time for that sort of thinking, now that instruction sets are virtual anyway?
So, nothing can ever be proven, except the absoluteness of your statement, right?
No, the "goes without saying for everything" of course also applies to my statements. In any case, my point wasn't to increase doubt about anything, it was to accept that things can be considered "true" for all practical purpouses even if it is possible to construct a shred of doubt if one employs enough creativity. And we have to, therwise we can never make any meaningful progress.
I dunno. There are lots of theme parks in the US. Had we had them, I'm sure many would still appreciate recordings of Columbus landing, or the first humans arriving.
Nothing can ever be proven to be. The is goes wihtout saying for everything. It's when you start to adamantly believe the less likely scenario that you have some backing up to do, and the arguments for fakery are all pathetic at best.
Now, it is beyond any doubt possible to send stuff to the moon. It's just a question of applying known physics and technology, doing lots of tests, and spending a helluva lot of money. Faking it and keeping it secret until now would probably have cost much more than just going fpr real, so even bother?
Not believing that we went to the moon doesn't give me a membership in a tinfoil-hat brigade.
BZZZZZZZT! Wrong. I'm afraid it does. But thanks for playing.
all of the "proof" so far only serves to convince me otherwise
You should consider more carefully the consequences of this type of reasoning, and the way it affects your likelyhood of arriving at correct or even meaningful conclusions.
I mean, of course you can use them for simple assignment, but the whole attraction of creating operators in stead of normal member functions is to be able to set up complex expressions with them, ineveitably creating quite a lot of fleeting intermediate results that you never even get a handle to.
One really cool thing about GC that rarely see brought up is that it allows a lot of more elegant and compact code constructs. I don't mean justs skipping the mem-management calls. I mean stuff like chaining calls (calling functions on anonymous returned values from other calls), and operator overloading, can actually be implemented and used in a sane way. Anyone who has tried to implement C++ operators for modestly complex objecs must have banged their head into the dilemma that you can't actually use those operators without creating memory leaks, or at least to avoid it requires so much fiddly work that it negates the benefit of using operators. With GC it is suddenly elegant again.
Forget the blatantly harmful critters, what I'm really scared of are other types of nano-malware: I just hope they as quickly as possible advance to the level where they can just plain take over my mind and make me unconditionally go and buy whatever it is they're peddling, and let the intermediate phase with ads flashing over my retina or invading my daydreams be as mercifully short as possible.
I've also tried various filling-in materials: chapstick, polishing wax, etc. They all seem to work as long as you can get the excess off cleanly. But I'm not certian if they work for the reason we like to think. One experiment left the scratch very visible, but the CD still working better. That got me wondering. So I tried filling with a positively opaque crayon (wiping away excess), and that worked too. I figured it could be done even quicker if I could skip the cleaning up, so I tried with a black fine-line felt marker, simly drawing a thin line on top of the scratch, and guess what: it not only worked fine, it could handle much larger defects than nothig else had been able to fix (well, actually there was a barely audible artifact, but aleast it played).
It has to be sad: this was on music CDs, so you can lose quite a lot of bits without serious harm to the result (and even a slightly audible tick is something you can live with), so it's not a fir comparison to software. But it did make me wonder: do all those remedies really help the machine read more bits correctly by repairing the refrective plane, as it is tempting to believe? Or do they simply allow the built in error correction do its job, by blocking the area where the (clear but warped) surface of the sratch would otherwise make the laser lose its tracking?
Well, just because some of it may have important functions, a lot of it probably doesn't. I mean, with random mutations, viruses inserting their stuff, old genes becoming obsolete, etc, a lot of stuff could end up in your DNA. And unless you believe in continuous divine intervbention at that level, there would really be no efficient mechanism to "clean up" any stuff that does nothing, as long as it does no harm. Why should there? It might be more exposed to loss and damage than other DNA, since it will not be missed, but that's hardly a powerful pressure for removal. For the smallest bactereia, compact DNA may be advantageous because replicating the DNA can actually constitute a noticeable part of the "materials requirements" for division, at least for certain elements/compunds, but for bulky beings like us it really doesn't matter much.
I'm sure we fill find interesting functions in unexpected places in the future too, so it might be rash to declare any particular section junk (at least until one studies what happpens without it), but I'd be very surprised if there's no junk either. How could there not be?
Slashdot Mirror
What I've always wondered is how you avoid the whole thing just getting burned up
before you get to hoist anyting up there: since the carbon material will be pretty conductive, you'll basically be building the worlds tallest lightning rod.
-for the wave of UFO sightings
Close to zero. China isn't really red anymore either. They've both figured out that it's useless to fight market economy in general. Better to put it to use in favour of the leadership, which doesn't imply they also have to give people any political freedom. China never had any, and the russians' recently won ones are disapperaing fast. The way things are heading, the most apt label for both their systems will soon be "fascist", really.
Wheras misrepresenting the controversy as if it's a matter of whether "nature can survive" is really scientifically sound. I see a bright future for genetially modified straw men.
Your analogy is the flawed one. I was not drawing any parallell about them being made of carbon. I'm pointing out that it's they're simply using same type of carbon fibers already in volume production, as the article clearly states. And they are not nanoscale BTW (unlike nanotubes). These are merely micron-scale carbon fibers, easily visible under a good magnifying glass.
They make cars, planes, and sporting helmets out of the stuff. So for chips-size applications: cheap enough by far.
Back when Java was new and mysterious, there was a lot of talk about java chips figuring in the near future, and they would most probably be stack based, since the runtime spec is. Never really happened, but maybe it's time for that sort of thinking, now that instruction sets are virtual anyway?
I'm in on it.
Oh shit, here they come....
So, nothing can ever be proven, except the absoluteness of your statement, right?
No, the "goes without saying for everything" of course also applies to my statements.
In any case, my point wasn't to increase doubt about anything, it was to accept that things can be considered "true" for all practical purpouses even if it is possible to construct a shred of doubt if one employs enough creativity. And we have to, therwise we can never make any meaningful progress.
This is news for nerds. News for sociologists is down the hall and to the left.
I dunno. There are lots of theme parks in the US. Had we had them, I'm sure many would still appreciate recordings of Columbus landing, or the first humans arriving.
But it's not like we're lost without them either.
you're foolish for believing that the government never lies to us.
Noone believes that, and being able to extract such a message from GP says something about your capacity for rational thinking.
that doesn't make it 100% absolute fact
Nothing can ever be proven to be. The is goes wihtout saying for everything. It's when you start to adamantly believe the less likely scenario that you have some backing up to do, and the arguments for fakery are all pathetic at best.
Now, it is beyond any doubt possible to send stuff to the moon. It's just a question of applying known physics and technology, doing lots of tests, and spending a helluva lot of money. Faking it and keeping it secret until now would probably have cost much more than just going fpr real, so even bother?
Not believing that we went to the moon doesn't give me a membership in a tinfoil-hat brigade.
BZZZZZZZT! Wrong. I'm afraid it does. But thanks for playing.
all of the "proof" so far only serves to convince me otherwise
You should consider more carefully the consequences of this type of reasoning, and the way it affects your likelyhood of arriving at correct or even meaningful conclusions.
you can't actually use those operators
I mean, of course you can use them for simple assignment, but the whole attraction of creating operators in stead of normal member functions is to be able to set up complex expressions with them, ineveitably creating quite a lot of fleeting intermediate results that you never even get a handle to.
One really cool thing about GC that rarely see brought up is that it allows a lot of more elegant and compact code constructs. I don't mean justs skipping the mem-management calls. I mean stuff like chaining calls (calling functions on anonymous returned values from other calls), and operator overloading, can actually be implemented and used in a sane way. Anyone who has tried to implement C++ operators for modestly complex objecs must have banged their head into the dilemma that you can't actually use those operators without creating memory leaks, or at least to avoid it requires so much fiddly work that it negates the benefit of using operators. With GC it is suddenly elegant again.
The normal bugs are all built of proteins and lipids. I'm not at all convinced it would know what to do with radicaly different stuff.
Forget the blatantly harmful critters, what I'm really scared of are other types of nano-malware: I just hope they as quickly as possible advance to the level where they can just plain take over my mind and make me unconditionally go and buy whatever it is they're peddling, and let the intermediate phase with ads flashing over my retina or invading my daydreams be as mercifully short as possible.
...of believers accusing the critics of "group think".
I'm off to patent shipping exactly three items in the same parcel.
I've also tried various filling-in materials: chapstick, polishing wax, etc. They all seem to work as long as you can get the excess off cleanly. But I'm not certian if they work for the reason we like to think. One experiment left the scratch very visible, but the CD still working better. That got me wondering. So I tried filling with a positively opaque crayon (wiping away excess), and that worked too. I figured it could be done even quicker if I could skip the cleaning up, so I tried with a black fine-line felt marker, simly drawing a thin line on top of the scratch, and guess what: it not only worked fine, it could handle much larger defects than nothig else had been able to fix (well, actually there was a barely audible artifact, but aleast it played).
It has to be sad: this was on music CDs, so you can lose quite a lot of bits without serious harm to the result (and even a slightly audible tick is something you can live with), so it's not a fir comparison to software. But it did make me wonder: do all those remedies really help the machine read more bits correctly by repairing the refrective plane, as it is tempting to believe? Or do they simply allow the built in error correction do its job, by blocking the area where the (clear but warped) surface of the sratch would otherwise make the laser lose its tracking?
Well, just because some of it may have important functions, a lot of it probably doesn't. I mean, with random mutations, viruses inserting their stuff, old genes becoming obsolete, etc, a lot of stuff could end up in your DNA. And unless you believe in continuous divine intervbention at that level, there would really be no efficient mechanism to "clean up" any stuff that does nothing, as long as it does no harm. Why should there? It might be more exposed to loss and damage than other DNA, since it will not be missed, but that's hardly a powerful pressure for removal. For the smallest bactereia, compact DNA may be advantageous because replicating the DNA can actually constitute a noticeable part of the "materials requirements" for division, at least for certain elements/compunds, but for bulky beings like us it really doesn't matter much.
I'm sure we fill find interesting functions in unexpected places in the future too, so it might be rash to declare any particular section junk (at least until one studies what happpens without it), but I'd be very surprised if there's no junk either. How could there not be?
"It is my belief that my soul is encoded in my pattern of neural connections [...] my own free will"
Does not compute.
For mpatient readers who can't be bothered to read the whole long parent post, here is a handy summary:
I am a transhumanist nut-job, you insensitive clod
The crabs weigh up to 12 kilograms (26 pounds) and measure up to two meters (6.5 feet) from pincher to pincher.
-and this increases every time the story is told.