You think the US is the only country that would respond in kind? Newsflash: Both the British and the French have reserved the right to respond to terror attacks with nuclear weapons. I suspect the Russians or Chinese would do so as well.
Newsflash: we British don't have any nuclear weapons of our own. Instead our taxpayers fund very expensive submarines full of rented US missiles to which the US government holds the key. We can't even fire them without permission.
Scorched fucking earth in Afghanistan. The American people called for retaliation, and they got it.
That's generally what happens when you provide logistical support and a base of operations to a terrorist organization that attacks a Great Power. You think Afghanistan would have come out better if Bin Ladin had murdered ~3,000 Chinese or Russians instead of ~3,000 Americans?
Bin Laden was in Afghanistan not because the Taleban invited him but because the CIA did. He was an American puppet for as long as it suited the US to stir up Muslim fundamentalists against communism. Then the US 'won the war against communism', and suddenly their CIA trained and CIA funded fundamentalist friends were looking around for a new target.
The Taleban were anything but nice people, of course - they were also CIA clients, after all - but you really cannot blame the people of Afghanistan for Bin Laden. He isn't Afghani, andthe Afghans didn't invite him.
It would be a bit like - oooh, I don't know - blaming Fidel Castro for Guantanamo.
It's also highly likely that versions of at least some of them were around before Mr Riddick's businesses claim to have 'designed' them. In the early days of graphical computing clip art got copied around even more than it does now. In this case if someone had authentic prior art, and could demonstrate it, they could sue Mr Riddick for copyright infringement, which would be deeply sweet.
If you were producing graphics on a computer before about 1986, it could be well worth scanning your collection for images which match any of the disputed images...
I've used my real name on the net for 25 years...
on
Linked In Or Out?
·
· Score: 1
And my address and even my phone number are out there for anyone to see. It's caused me no problems whatever, so far.
I think the paranoia is just foolishness and a waste of energy.
I'd say that's right. I don't imagine any judge would be fooled by this.
The judge will take one look and say, no, obviously you can't agree to a contract by clicking a button, whether or not you're a cat. And that document is not a valid contract anyway. Case dismissed.
That is, unless you live in a very backward country.
While I agree it's unlikely that the nuclear weapons would actually detonate, the probability of the breach of containment of nuclear materials would be very high indeed.
The reactor... maybe. It's pretty hard to tear through a few meters of hull along the long axis and then still have enough energy to rip apart anywhere from 1/2 meter to a full meter of that which encloses the reactor vessel. How often to car engine blocks shatter and turn into little pieces in accidents?
Let's reiterate the forces involved, shall we? thirty thousand tons, closing speed one hundred kilometers an hour. Yes, it's pretty hard to rip through a metre of steel. But thirty thousand tons at one hundred kilometers an hour is going to eat that for breakfast, and then start wondering what to have for lunch.
Yes, the containment is very strong. But the forces we are talking about are very large.
And getting one to detonate? Let's assume that you did manage to set fire to one of the explosive blocks. Because you would not have managed a properly timed explosion all the way around, you would get at best a fizzle and more likely nothing more then the ignition of the explosive blocks.
As I said, unlikely.
And the now misshapen lump of plutonium would simply fall to the bottom of the ocean without going off.
Where it is unbelievably toxic, and mutates over time into other radioactive elements which are still more toxic. Sellafield has dumped more than a quarter of a ton of plutonium into the Irish sea over the past fifty years, under the impression that it would sink to the bottom and do no harm. It doesn't. It corrodes, disperses in the water, decays into americium, and is then precipitated out where salt water meets freshwater. Which is to say in river estuaries. Which is to say where people live (me included).
So no, the warheads almost certainly would not go off. That does not make them safe.
A head on collision was bound to happen even if they knew the other sub was there. The French drive on the right, the British on the left.
Good for a laugh, but inaccurate. 'Vessels navigating narrow passages shall pass to starboard of one another...' - in other words, the British also drive on the right.
The collision of two submarines would actually be unlikely to release vast amounts of radiation, although it could scatter scores of nuclear warheads across the seabed. This is actually enormously unlikely since the weapons are stored in the most structurally secure portion of the vessel, in their own launch tubes. Most likely they would stay in the tubes in all but the most severe impact. Remember, submarines are not made out of porcelain. They are made out of various metals and in a collision (as opposed to an explosion) they would not likely separate into many pieces. Just think of the physics involved - when two cars collide head-on at over 50 mph they do not typically disintegrate. The total energy is vastly higher here, but the relative speed is much slower, and a lot of the energy involved will be absorbed by the water in the way that air doesn't.
(My emphasis.)
Oh no it isn't. Both submarines (remarkably similar boats, actually) are publicly admitted to be capable of 25 knots (46.3 km/h) submerged, and are probably capable of a fair bit more. The masses, meantime, are huge. Probably most of the time these boats run at very much less than their maximum speed, but nevertheless a closing speed impact of 100 km/h is by no means impossible. Granted they're metal and will tend to bend and tear rather than shattering, with a combined mass of thirty thousand tons that's a pretty staggering amount of kinetic energy.
While I agree it's unlikely that the nuclear weapons would actually detonate, the probability of the breach of containment of nuclear materials would be very high indeed.
Submarines are the last part of Mutual Assured Destruction. Even if one country manages to wipe out another's land-based missile launch capability, the submarine-based missiles still have a good chance of being launched in retaliation and finding their targets.
It's for that deterrent reason that I think making submarines easy to track would be a very bad idea. It would open up the possibility for one country to have confidence it could attack another with little threat of retaliation.
Yes, but, thankfully, there aren't any longer any nations seriously prepared to wage all-out nuclear war with one another (possible exceptions being Israel and North Korea, but neither have the arsenals to destroy the planet).
Meantime, there's a serious risk that nuclear submarines could become the first part of Mutually Unintended Destruction, where just a few missiles launched in error could lead to a chain of events which would end the world.
Ignoring for the moment farces like this one, we'd all be a lot safer without them.
Censorship is the active banning of material, it also means it is illegal to own the material.
Refusing classification because the rating system lacks a suitable rating even though one exists for identical content in other media is a minor lacking in the ratings system.
If you think the two are identical then you're just trying to use paranoia to sensationalise the real problem which, as I said previously, is extremely counter-productive.
But by your own account, it is illegal to own unrated games, so that is state-sponsored censorship.
I'm just finishing work on a mod for an RPG. The publishers of the RPG want to publish the mod, but want us to tone down some of the content in order to do so. This is because if they publish it it would push the classification of their game into 'Adults Only', which for commercial reasons they don't want. We probably aren't going to agree...
I don't have any problem with our work being rated 'Adults only'. It is intended for adults. But I do have a problem with it being banned outright - that seems to me a dangerous intrusion into free speech.
I don't want my daughters to become sexualized sluts at 13, any more than I want my boys to become homicidal maniacs. And just because you don't care doesn't mean I shouldn't either.
Is watching women lick vegetables going to turn your daughters into sexualised sluts? If it is, what does that say about your parenting skills?
Do you guys really want to try to explain to four-year-olds what the women are doing? If not, then do you really want to declare decidedly non-adult events like the Super Bowl off-limits until you can, because someone thinks it's funny to put sexually suggestive ads on before 9 PM?
If you can see anything remotely sexually suggestive in women licking fruit, you've got issues, guy!
See, this is what those of us in the civilised world find so bizarre about the United States. You're perfectly happy to show ads (and programmes) containing violence, but some women in perfectly decent underwear? Banned.
I've been a shareholder in and a director of a number of small software companies over the years. While shares in a public company can readily be translated into cash it is much more difficult to get any value out of your shareholding in a private company unless the company is floated.
10% does not buy you much in terms of voting rights to steer the direction of the company, and if you fall out with the people with the majority shareholding, 10% of a private company is effectively worthless - the other shareholders can block you from selling you shares to a third party, and are unlikely to offer you 10% of a fair valuation of the company if you want to sell out.
So - unless the company is sold or floated - you are unlikely to see very much value in this shareholding.
A machine does not have to reproduce the mechanisms of the human mind in order to display intelligence; it has to emulate the performance. If the inputs are similar and the outputs are similar what happens in the middle is unimportant.
There is this general faulty reasoning that _understanding is the property of a representation_. That's just wrong. Just as temperature is not a property of molecules, understanding is not a property of a representation. It is a property of a process. In order to display the same "intelligent" behavior we do, machines have to go through the same process.
There is no ghost in the machine. The human brain is at best a Turing complete computing engine - at best, because we can prove that is not possible to be more. And we can prove that (modulo limited store, which is also an issue for human brains) our computers are also Turing complete. So it is not possible that our computers cannot do what a human brain can do - although admittedly we don't yet know how to program them to do it.
But we will find out, and when we do, I predict we'll look at the trivial little programs and say to ourselves 'is that really all?'
In the mean time I suggest to you that, apart from the purely academic interest of finding out how people tick, is isn't nearly as useful to program machines to do what people can do as to do what people can't do.
Disclosure: I am a Hofstadterian, so I am biased here.
There are basically three types of AI-peoples: The neverlands, the hype masters, and the hope monks. The neverlands, like Searle, deny that intelligence is a product of information-processing. Searle has made it into a sport the claims that AI will never happen because it does not have the "causal powers of the brain".
Then there are these types, like those reported here. Hypeware at its best. Look, it's alive, it's (F*CKING GASP) becoming self aware, etc hype hype hype ad-nauseum. But look at its innards _very_ closely, and it's pretty empty in there.
I think you'd find that if we could look into the functioning of the human mind in as much detail as we can look into an AI program, you'd find that it's pretty empty in there, too. I believe that intelligence is an emergent property of a lot of fairly simple processes. Yes, that's a matter of belief, not of proof.
There are so many pitfalls involved that it's impossible to mention all faulty premises involved in each project. But just for starters, consider this: when we program a machine to deal with the number 2, it usually goes into binary form 10 and there it stays, ready for manipulation. But how plausible is this psychologically? NOT AT ALL! When _we think_ of a "2", hordes of disparate, subliminar images come to mind, such as the gestalt of the digit, the sound of it, the fact that it's a prime (if you're math inclined), a couple (if you're a therapist), even-ness, odd-ness, the words "two" "too", and a huge number of semi-visible mental imagery.
Whenever you see a hyped AI project, just consider how it deals with the numeral 2. Most likely it's a _fake_. The process through which it goes through is not psychologically plausible. Which means that it will fail to understand human concepts.
A machine does not have to reproduce the mechanisms of the human mind in order to display intelligence; it has to emulate the performance. If the inputs are similar and the outputs are similar what happens in the middle is unimportant.
Is it wrong to abuse online comments/reviews, sure, but it's no different that paying people to stand in line on a product launch day or hiring false paparazzi to follow an up-and-coming celeb.
No. Exactly. None of these things are acceptable. None of them are done by ethical businesses. If you're prepared to do business with people who do things like this, what does that say about your ethics?
Of course it's not completely carbon neutral. But it would be hard to find any energy source with a lower carbon cost.
Did I say otherwise? I'm simply saying the lunch, though relatively cheap, is not free. (And more of the carbon bill is ongoing then you think. Flooding wetlands, as dams inevitably do, removes important carbon sinks.) The fact that some of the bill was paid 73 years ago doesn't change that. Though I actually raise the point in connection with the question of building new dams, which comes up pretty often.
The point is, though, that building a generating plant of a particular capacity is going to cost more or less the same amount of carbon irrespective of the technology. And wetlands are only carbon sinks if they're left as wetlands and continue to lay down peat. In today's world, that isn't going to happen - in most places if the valley isn't flooded, it's going to be farmed, and farming it will not only not sink carbon, it will release the carbon which was previously sunk in the peat.
If we are going to continue to consume energy -and we could all do a lot more in reducing our energy consumption - then the energy has to be produced. So I'll go with 'lowest carbon', thank you very much.
Hydro power may be cheaper than fossil fuel, but it's not free. Same goes for its carbon footprint.
Errrr... walk me through that one more time. The electricity which powers this house, and thus the computer I'm writing this on, comes from a hydro electric dam built in 1935. Yes, while it was being built a fair amount of CO2 was produced in making the cement for the concrete and powering the machines which were used in construction. But the amount of energy used in construction is not significantly greater for a hydro plant than a coal burning plant of similar capacity.
And since then, what? Where is the carbon generated? Where is there carbon involved in the process to be released? The answer is, there isn't any. And the carbon cost of building the dam has been amortised over seventy years so far, and counting.
Of course it's not completely carbon neutral. But it would be hard to find any energy source with a lower carbon cost.
So when does the rest of the world get to benefit from this perpertual motion device ?
Nothing can be over 100% efficient, ever, unless you want to start violating the conservation of energy and thermodynamics laws.
Do read before replying, it saves embarrassment. Heat pumps do allow you to get more heat energy out than the energy used to drive the pump. OK, the energy isn't magically created, it's moved from somewhere else - so what you're doing is refrigerating either the air outside or the ground outside (both of which are ultimately heated by the sun). So, no - ye cannae break the laws of physics, Jim. But a heat pump nevertheless yields more energy than you use to drive it.
Thus far, I have yet to see an "iPhone killer" do anything of the sort.
If Palm wants to do so, they're going to have to do everything the iPhone does and do it better. That means the interface and the integration, as well.
The device has a keyboard. It isn't a good keyboard, but even so it's a whole lot better than the keyboard on the iPhone - and the lack of a keyboard is a significant part of the reason I don't have an iPhone. The contacts management software which was demo'ed is way better than the iPhone's. And if, as claimed, the device has good Microsoft Exchange support, then for many commercial users it's one better than the iPhone on that count as well.
Sure, it isn't a better music player. It may not be a better movie viewer. But the iPhone, despite being very pretty, isn't actually a very good telephone - contacts management is poor, reception is poor, battery life isn't good, sound quality is so-so. It's a great phone for people who don't use a mobile phone for their work - but most people do.
Of course, the iPhone's killer app is the iTunes store. For non-technical users it is quite simply the easiest way to locate, buy and install software to the phone. Palm (and Google and RIM and Microsoft) have to equal that, and it will not be easy.
The serious problem with any witch-hunt - we'll take paedophilia as an example, because it's the current one - is that banning speech about an issue prevents rational discussion of that issue.
When Charles Dickens was concerned about the condition of children in Victorian London, he wrote novels about it. When Robert Burns wanted to express his opposition to slavery, he wrote poems about it. The novels and poems reached a far wider audience and ultimately affected political change far more effectively than dry factual accounts.
I'm not arguing that paedophilia is acceptable. It's clearly an abuse of power for adults to prey on non adults. But the boundaries of that condition do have to be explored: why is the age of consent for heterosexual sex in Estonia, Hungary, Italy, Israel and parts of Germany 14, in Denmark, Iceland, France and Greece 15, in Finland and most of the United Kingdom 16, in Northern Ireland 17? Why, in the United States, is sex legal at the age of 14 in many conservative mid-west states, but illegal until 18 in liberal California?
There's also a concept in many parts of the world that sex between two people of roughly the same age is allowable able at a considerably younger age than sex between a young person and a significantly older person - and that seems to me entirely reasonable.
But so long as there is a witch-hunt in progress we can't have rational discourse about these things. We certainly can't use fiction to explore the issues. Could Nabokov's Lolita even be published today? This is in the end a civil liberties argument - not because children don't need protecting, of course children need protecting. But so does freedom of speech.
the one you want to be in is the is the one which decelerates your body most smoothly
That would be the one with more mass.
Assuming equal rigidity, yes. The point is, modern cars are designed to absorb energy by crumpling in a progressive manner on impact. Trucks don't do this. So in modern cars very little energy is transmitted to the occupants, whereas in trucks very little energy is absorbed by the structure... And when they do bend (which, given enough energy, inevitably they do) they tend to bend in the passenger cell, because that's the weakest area of the truck.
If you can't do the math, look at the fatality statistics. They tell you all you need to know. Occupants of SUVs are between one and a half and twice as likely to be killed as occupants of cars.
Slashdot Mirror
You think the US is the only country that would respond in kind? Newsflash: Both the British and the French have reserved the right to respond to terror attacks with nuclear weapons. I suspect the Russians or Chinese would do so as well.
Newsflash: we British don't have any nuclear weapons of our own. Instead our taxpayers fund very expensive submarines full of rented US missiles to which the US government holds the key. We can't even fire them without permission.
Scorched fucking earth in Afghanistan. The American people called for retaliation, and they got it.
That's generally what happens when you provide logistical support and a base of operations to a terrorist organization that attacks a Great Power. You think Afghanistan would have come out better if Bin Ladin had murdered ~3,000 Chinese or Russians instead of ~3,000 Americans?
Bin Laden was in Afghanistan not because the Taleban invited him but because the CIA did. He was an American puppet for as long as it suited the US to stir up Muslim fundamentalists against communism. Then the US 'won the war against communism', and suddenly their CIA trained and CIA funded fundamentalist friends were looking around for a new target.
The Taleban were anything but nice people, of course - they were also CIA clients, after all - but you really cannot blame the people of Afghanistan for Bin Laden. He isn't Afghani, andthe Afghans didn't invite him.
It would be a bit like - oooh, I don't know - blaming Fidel Castro for Guantanamo.
Riddick's designs are so simple and generic that they could easily have been drawn (or typed) by someone else from scratch without ever having seen Riddick's version.
It's also highly likely that versions of at least some of them were around before Mr Riddick's businesses claim to have 'designed' them. In the early days of graphical computing clip art got copied around even more than it does now. In this case if someone had authentic prior art, and could demonstrate it, they could sue Mr Riddick for copyright infringement, which would be deeply sweet.
If you were producing graphics on a computer before about 1986, it could be well worth scanning your collection for images which match any of the disputed images...
And my address and even my phone number are out there for anyone to see. It's caused me no problems whatever, so far.
I think the paranoia is just foolishness and a waste of energy.
I'd say that's right. I don't imagine any judge would be fooled by this.
The judge will take one look and say, no, obviously you can't agree to a contract by clicking a button, whether or not you're a cat. And that document is not a valid contract anyway. Case dismissed.
That is, unless you live in a very backward country.
While I agree it's unlikely that the nuclear weapons would actually detonate, the probability of the breach of containment of nuclear materials would be very high indeed.
The reactor... maybe. It's pretty hard to tear through a few meters of hull along the long axis and then still have enough energy to rip apart anywhere from 1/2 meter to a full meter of that which encloses the reactor vessel. How often to car engine blocks shatter and turn into little pieces in accidents?
Let's reiterate the forces involved, shall we? thirty thousand tons, closing speed one hundred kilometers an hour. Yes, it's pretty hard to rip through a metre of steel. But thirty thousand tons at one hundred kilometers an hour is going to eat that for breakfast, and then start wondering what to have for lunch.
Yes, the containment is very strong. But the forces we are talking about are very large.
And getting one to detonate? Let's assume that you did manage to set fire to one of the explosive blocks. Because you would not have managed a properly timed explosion all the way around, you would get at best a fizzle and more likely nothing more then the ignition of the explosive blocks.
As I said, unlikely.
And the now misshapen lump of plutonium would simply fall to the bottom of the ocean without going off.
Where it is unbelievably toxic, and mutates over time into other radioactive elements which are still more toxic. Sellafield has dumped more than a quarter of a ton of plutonium into the Irish sea over the past fifty years, under the impression that it would sink to the bottom and do no harm. It doesn't. It corrodes, disperses in the water, decays into americium, and is then precipitated out where salt water meets freshwater. Which is to say in river estuaries. Which is to say where people live (me included).
So no, the warheads almost certainly would not go off. That does not make them safe.
A head on collision was bound to happen even if they knew the other sub was there. The French drive on the right, the British on the left.
Good for a laugh, but inaccurate. 'Vessels navigating narrow passages shall pass to starboard of one another...' - in other words, the British also drive on the right.
(My emphasis.)
Oh no it isn't. Both submarines (remarkably similar boats, actually) are publicly admitted to be capable of 25 knots (46.3 km/h) submerged, and are probably capable of a fair bit more. The masses, meantime, are huge. Probably most of the time these boats run at very much less than their maximum speed, but nevertheless a closing speed impact of 100 km/h is by no means impossible. Granted they're metal and will tend to bend and tear rather than shattering, with a combined mass of thirty thousand tons that's a pretty staggering amount of kinetic energy.
While I agree it's unlikely that the nuclear weapons would actually detonate, the probability of the breach of containment of nuclear materials would be very high indeed.
Submarines are the last part of Mutual Assured Destruction. Even if one country manages to wipe out another's land-based missile launch capability, the submarine-based missiles still have a good chance of being launched in retaliation and finding their targets.
It's for that deterrent reason that I think making submarines easy to track would be a very bad idea. It would open up the possibility for one country to have confidence it could attack another with little threat of retaliation.
Yes, but, thankfully, there aren't any longer any nations seriously prepared to wage all-out nuclear war with one another (possible exceptions being Israel and North Korea, but neither have the arsenals to destroy the planet).
Meantime, there's a serious risk that nuclear submarines could become the first part of Mutually Unintended Destruction, where just a few missiles launched in error could lead to a chain of events which would end the world.
Ignoring for the moment farces like this one, we'd all be a lot safer without them.
Dammit, Penfold! The secret has leaked!
Crumbs, chief!
Censorship is the active banning of material, it also means it is illegal to own the material.
Refusing classification because the rating system lacks a suitable rating even though one exists for identical content in other media is a minor lacking in the ratings system.
If you think the two are identical then you're just trying to use paranoia to sensationalise the real problem which, as I said previously, is extremely counter-productive.
But by your own account, it is illegal to own unrated games, so that is state-sponsored censorship.
I'm just finishing work on a mod for an RPG. The publishers of the RPG want to publish the mod, but want us to tone down some of the content in order to do so. This is because if they publish it it would push the classification of their game into 'Adults Only', which for commercial reasons they don't want. We probably aren't going to agree...
I don't have any problem with our work being rated 'Adults only'. It is intended for adults. But I do have a problem with it being banned outright - that seems to me a dangerous intrusion into free speech.
I don't want my daughters to become sexualized sluts at 13, any more than I want my boys to become homicidal maniacs. And just because you don't care doesn't mean I shouldn't either.
Is watching women lick vegetables going to turn your daughters into sexualised sluts? If it is, what does that say about your parenting skills?
Do you guys really want to try to explain to four-year-olds what the women are doing? If not, then do you really want to declare decidedly non-adult events like the Super Bowl off-limits until you can, because someone thinks it's funny to put sexually suggestive ads on before 9 PM?
If you can see anything remotely sexually suggestive in women licking fruit, you've got issues, guy!
See, this is what those of us in the civilised world find so bizarre about the United States. You're perfectly happy to show ads (and programmes) containing violence, but some women in perfectly decent underwear? Banned.
What is that about?
I've been a shareholder in and a director of a number of small software companies over the years. While shares in a public company can readily be translated into cash it is much more difficult to get any value out of your shareholding in a private company unless the company is floated.
10% does not buy you much in terms of voting rights to steer the direction of the company, and if you fall out with the people with the majority shareholding, 10% of a private company is effectively worthless - the other shareholders can block you from selling you shares to a third party, and are unlikely to offer you 10% of a fair valuation of the company if you want to sell out.
So - unless the company is sold or floated - you are unlikely to see very much value in this shareholding.
A machine does not have to reproduce the mechanisms of the human mind in order to display intelligence; it has to emulate the performance. If the inputs are similar and the outputs are similar what happens in the middle is unimportant.
There is this general faulty reasoning that _understanding is the property of a representation_. That's just wrong. Just as temperature is not a property of molecules, understanding is not a property of a representation. It is a property of a process. In order to display the same "intelligent" behavior we do, machines have to go through the same process.
There is no ghost in the machine. The human brain is at best a Turing complete computing engine - at best, because we can prove that is not possible to be more. And we can prove that (modulo limited store, which is also an issue for human brains) our computers are also Turing complete. So it is not possible that our computers cannot do what a human brain can do - although admittedly we don't yet know how to program them to do it.
But we will find out, and when we do, I predict we'll look at the trivial little programs and say to ourselves 'is that really all?'
In the mean time I suggest to you that, apart from the purely academic interest of finding out how people tick, is isn't nearly as useful to program machines to do what people can do as to do what people can't do.
Disclosure: I am a Hofstadterian, so I am biased here.
There are basically three types of AI-peoples: The neverlands, the hype masters, and the hope monks. The neverlands, like Searle, deny that intelligence is a product of information-processing. Searle has made it into a sport the claims that AI will never happen because it does not have the "causal powers of the brain".
Then there are these types, like those reported here. Hypeware at its best. Look, it's alive, it's (F*CKING GASP) becoming self aware, etc hype hype hype ad-nauseum. But look at its innards _very_ closely, and it's pretty empty in there.
I think you'd find that if we could look into the functioning of the human mind in as much detail as we can look into an AI program, you'd find that it's pretty empty in there, too. I believe that intelligence is an emergent property of a lot of fairly simple processes. Yes, that's a matter of belief, not of proof.
There are so many pitfalls involved that it's impossible to mention all faulty premises involved in each project. But just for starters, consider this: when we program a machine to deal with the number 2, it usually goes into binary form 10 and there it stays, ready for manipulation. But how plausible is this psychologically? NOT AT ALL! When _we think_ of a "2", hordes of disparate, subliminar images come to mind, such as the gestalt of the digit, the sound of it, the fact that it's a prime (if you're math inclined), a couple (if you're a therapist), even-ness, odd-ness, the words "two" "too", and a huge number of semi-visible mental imagery.
Whenever you see a hyped AI project, just consider how it deals with the numeral 2. Most likely it's a _fake_. The process through which it goes through is not psychologically plausible. Which means that it will fail to understand human concepts.
A machine does not have to reproduce the mechanisms of the human mind in order to display intelligence; it has to emulate the performance. If the inputs are similar and the outputs are similar what happens in the middle is unimportant.
Is it wrong to abuse online comments/reviews, sure, but it's no different that paying people to stand in line on a product launch day or hiring false paparazzi to follow an up-and-coming celeb.
No. Exactly. None of these things are acceptable. None of them are done by ethical businesses. If you're prepared to do business with people who do things like this, what does that say about your ethics?
Caveat emptor.
Of course it's not completely carbon neutral. But it would be hard to find any energy source with a lower carbon cost.
Did I say otherwise? I'm simply saying the lunch, though relatively cheap, is not free. (And more of the carbon bill is ongoing then you think. Flooding wetlands, as dams inevitably do, removes important carbon sinks.) The fact that some of the bill was paid 73 years ago doesn't change that. Though I actually raise the point in connection with the question of building new dams, which comes up pretty often.
The point is, though, that building a generating plant of a particular capacity is going to cost more or less the same amount of carbon irrespective of the technology. And wetlands are only carbon sinks if they're left as wetlands and continue to lay down peat. In today's world, that isn't going to happen - in most places if the valley isn't flooded, it's going to be farmed, and farming it will not only not sink carbon, it will release the carbon which was previously sunk in the peat.
If we are going to continue to consume energy -and we could all do a lot more in reducing our energy consumption - then the energy has to be produced. So I'll go with 'lowest carbon', thank you very much.
Hydro power may be cheaper than fossil fuel, but it's not free. Same goes for its carbon footprint.
Errrr... walk me through that one more time. The electricity which powers this house, and thus the computer I'm writing this on, comes from a hydro electric dam built in 1935. Yes, while it was being built a fair amount of CO2 was produced in making the cement for the concrete and powering the machines which were used in construction. But the amount of energy used in construction is not significantly greater for a hydro plant than a coal burning plant of similar capacity.
And since then, what? Where is the carbon generated? Where is there carbon involved in the process to be released? The answer is, there isn't any. And the carbon cost of building the dam has been amortised over seventy years so far, and counting.
Of course it's not completely carbon neutral. But it would be hard to find any energy source with a lower carbon cost.
the efficiency is well over 100%
So when does the rest of the world get to benefit from this perpertual motion device ?
Nothing can be over 100% efficient, ever, unless you want to start violating the conservation of energy and thermodynamics laws.
Do read before replying, it saves embarrassment. Heat pumps do allow you to get more heat energy out than the energy used to drive the pump. OK, the energy isn't magically created, it's moved from somewhere else - so what you're doing is refrigerating either the air outside or the ground outside (both of which are ultimately heated by the sun). So, no - ye cannae break the laws of physics, Jim. But a heat pump nevertheless yields more energy than you use to drive it.
Thus far, I have yet to see an "iPhone killer" do anything of the sort.
If Palm wants to do so, they're going to have to do everything the iPhone does and do it better. That means the interface and the integration, as well.
The device has a keyboard. It isn't a good keyboard, but even so it's a whole lot better than the keyboard on the iPhone - and the lack of a keyboard is a significant part of the reason I don't have an iPhone. The contacts management software which was demo'ed is way better than the iPhone's. And if, as claimed, the device has good Microsoft Exchange support, then for many commercial users it's one better than the iPhone on that count as well.
Sure, it isn't a better music player. It may not be a better movie viewer. But the iPhone, despite being very pretty, isn't actually a very good telephone - contacts management is poor, reception is poor, battery life isn't good, sound quality is so-so. It's a great phone for people who don't use a mobile phone for their work - but most people do.
Of course, the iPhone's killer app is the iTunes store. For non-technical users it is quite simply the easiest way to locate, buy and install software to the phone. Palm (and Google and RIM and Microsoft) have to equal that, and it will not be easy.
The serious problem with any witch-hunt - we'll take paedophilia as an example, because it's the current one - is that banning speech about an issue prevents rational discussion of that issue.
When Charles Dickens was concerned about the condition of children in Victorian London, he wrote novels about it. When Robert Burns wanted to express his opposition to slavery, he wrote poems about it. The novels and poems reached a far wider audience and ultimately affected political change far more effectively than dry factual accounts.
I'm not arguing that paedophilia is acceptable. It's clearly an abuse of power for adults to prey on non adults. But the boundaries of that condition do have to be explored: why is the age of consent for heterosexual sex in Estonia, Hungary, Italy, Israel and parts of Germany 14, in Denmark, Iceland, France and Greece 15, in Finland and most of the United Kingdom 16, in Northern Ireland 17? Why, in the United States, is sex legal at the age of 14 in many conservative mid-west states, but illegal until 18 in liberal California?
There's also a concept in many parts of the world that sex between two people of roughly the same age is allowable able at a considerably younger age than sex between a young person and a significantly older person - and that seems to me entirely reasonable.
But so long as there is a witch-hunt in progress we can't have rational discourse about these things. We certainly can't use fiction to explore the issues. Could Nabokov's Lolita even be published today? This is in the end a civil liberties argument - not because children don't need protecting, of course children need protecting. But so does freedom of speech.
No you need to see a therapist ...
Where is Lucy van Pelt when you need her?
the one you want to be in is the is the one which decelerates your body most smoothly
That would be the one with more mass.
Assuming equal rigidity, yes. The point is, modern cars are designed to absorb energy by crumpling in a progressive manner on impact. Trucks don't do this. So in modern cars very little energy is transmitted to the occupants, whereas in trucks very little energy is absorbed by the structure... And when they do bend (which, given enough energy, inevitably they do) they tend to bend in the passenger cell, because that's the weakest area of the truck.
If you can't do the math, look at the fatality statistics. They tell you all you need to know. Occupants of SUVs are between one and a half and twice as likely to be killed as occupants of cars.