If ANY company starts off with the plan "get lots of money", they WILL fail.
Almost. If they start off with the plan "get lots of money right now", they will fail. If they start out with the plan "let's make something customers want for a little while, then soak them until they shrivel up", they become monopolies.
Publicly traded corporations have Boards and CEO's who are responsible to the shareholders. The company has a charter which in most cases states that the Board is _required_ to run the company in a way which "maximizes profits" for the shareholders.
And this is what pisses me off. Nowhere is the customer considered. What ever happened to the concept of corporations having a charter to operate in the public interest? All this stuff so many companies have been pulling lately doesn't seem to be in the public interest -- it's strictly in their shareholders' interests.
It's the 1886 U.S. Supreme Court decision to consider corporations as "people". Even in the United States, one must be alleged to have done a very serious crime to receive the death penalty, which is the Government-sanctioned destruction of a "person". Sickening, but true.
Take the root word, corporate, and then ad the 'ist suffix to it and voila!, you've got a handy word that pigeonholes a certain group of people. Individual people I might add, and that's an important distinction because corporations are really just fictional creations used to describe the relationship of certain groups of people to each other and the rest of society.
That's SORT OF true. It's actually a bit closer to the way hierarchical religions tend to work: it is indeed comprised of people, but the people are indoctrinated to have the same primary belief system. Specifically that the most important thing your group can do is make more money.
By the way, morality in many other aspects has never stopped old time American companies in the past. Need examples? How about Phillip Morris: is it moral to sell something to people that will harm them for sure and shorten their life span almost surely? Still, people have no problem investing in this company.
Phillip Morris? Who is Phillip Morris? Do you mean the more politically correct named Altria?;)
From an AC: Chabotc: all I can say is that you are stupid/uninformed individual who is unable to recognize difference between local community standards and norms and globally enforced federal censorship.
Actually, this is precisely the problem. The idea of "local community standards" is the root of all censorship. That is, it starts from Joe Fundie saying, "I don't want my son/daughter/etc. to be able to see foo." Then Joe Fundie gets his buddies together to force the local community to "do something". And the local leaders pressure regional/state and then Federal legislators to ban the viewing of "foo" whether their own neighbors are bothered by it or not.
"All US citizens helped kill over a million iraquis including over 500,000 children."
I suppose the fact that the Iraqi government has spent most of its money on weapons projects instead of food and agriculture has nothing to do with the problem over there.
It might also have something to do with the fact that the United States, over the objections of even Great Britain(!), has not permitted chemicals necessary for cleaning municipal water to enter the country. This is a violation of Article 45 of the Geneva Convention, but then the US only uses the UN when it's a convenient scapegoat.
XP has, for a while now, been essentially billed as an upgrade to Win 9x/ME rather than Win 2K. (look in your favorite software site -- you see upgrades for Win 9x but NOT Win 2K) And at least stability-wise, Win XP is a drastic improvement over Win 9x.
... is that it's undefined. It literally means whatever the politicians want it to mean. It's being co-opted as "anything I don't like, perpetrated by someone I don't like," and Microsoft doesn't like VB and IIS viruses because they might eventually be bad for business.
I wouldn't say carbon exists *as* a metal, but agree that is does have metallic qualities.
Actually carbon is more of a semiconductor - if you look at the periodic table it is in the same column ('group'?) as Silicon and Germanium, and is why it has semi-conductor properties.
Actually you're wrong. Graphite has electrons in a conduction band at absolute zero, which is the definition of a metal. Si and Ge are semiconductors (as is one allotrope of tin); a semiconductor is an "insulator" with a small band gap. Graphite (and bismuth and antimony) is called a semi-metal, though, but that's because there is much less than one electron per atom in the conduction band.
One of the reasons buckball chemistry is likely to continue to make surprises is that carbon is one of the few elements (tin being the only other I can recall at the moment) that exists both as a metal -- graphite, and as a nonconductor -- diamond, in stable allotropes at room temperature.
The interesting thing about buckyballs is that their bonding is somewhat of a cross between the two: it is a polyaromatic (like graphite) but it is a molecular solid (similar to, but not exactly like, diamond).
Hun? Someone want to explain to me how this is worthy of a nobel prize? I understand that it is neat... but how does it better our society? A cure for AIDS would be much more worthy, even if it isn't as technically challenging IMHO... Wasn't the prize supposed to be about the best scientific discovery that helps society???
No, the Nobel Prize in Physics goes to whoever makes the greatest contribution to... physics! Someone who developed a key procedure to eliminate the plague of AIDS would be likely to win the Nobel Prize for Medicine though.
Does anyone know if a BEC maintains a mass consistent with the sum of its pieces, and how much comparative space it takes up?
Yes. Just like any other state of matter. Liquid helium below the lambda transition is a Bose-Einstein condensate also, but it is in liquid form rather than a gas form.
Since cooling matter down to nearly absolute zero halts motion
Bzzt. At near absolute zero you approach what is called "zero-point motion". Quantum mechanical oscillators still vibrate at their lowest energy level (their energy being (1/2)*h*(frequency)). So even at absolute zero you don't have electrons flying all over the place. (Actually, room temperature is virtually absolute zero on an electronic basis anyway -- most electronic excited states are effectively in the thousands of kelvin).
Southerners didn't free slaves until Union troops started invading and killing.
People in southern states (including, sadly to say, my home state of Georgia) get terribly bent out of shape whenever someone tries to remove the most potent symbol remaining of that very slavery -- the Confederate battle flag -- from official State areas (in Georgia, the state flag).
Many people thought prohibition was a good idea until they tried it.
Amazingly, many people still do. The entire War on Drugs futility is based on that bizarre belief that Prohibition, recognized as such a colossal failure that the Constitution itself needed amended to stop it, will work today.
Nobody started fixing the US economy until it collased [sic] in 1929.
And the temporary "solutions" that FDR added on top of the real fixes put the economy in such peril that only the incredible spending of WWII could bail us out.
Germany didn't respect its Jews until it killed 6 million of them.
Almost. It started respecting homosexuals when one was primarily involved in breaking Enigma, and Jews when one (Einstein) helped produced the atomic bomb before they could.
And the US people didn't give the FBI, CIA and airport security the people and resources they needed until the WTC came down.
And, of course, this means that al-Qaeda is going to find a way to make a colossal killing from buying puts on airline stocks just before the bombing unless the SEC gets increased funding also....
One possibility of this type of "exotic" life might be based on charged metal clusters in a liquid ammonia ocean. Redox reactions could occur with solvated electrons in NH3 (solvated electrons don't last more than a microsecond or so in water, and NH3 is known to spontaneously form unlike higher amines). With a sufficient collection of transition metals (perhaps from asteroid collision), there should be the potential for sufficiently diverse intermetallic ions that a truly un-Earthlike life might evolve.
Realistically, you can have it only one way or the other. I personally would favor the US Government purchasing the US drug companies and then going to a no-patent system. Unfortunately, a major side effect of this is that know-nothing professional critics of the Government would constantly harp on failures (most drugs never reach FDA Phase I, although from some of the writing so far I suspect a lot of Slashdrones don't know that). Then, inevitably (because most USians -- I am one BTW -- are dolts of the first order), blowhard politicians would do slash-and-burn cuts to a nationalized drug production agency.
Powerful beowulf-style or MOSIX-style clusters cost next to nothing, compared to the kinds of figures these companies throw around daily. Computing power of this kind is enough to simulate nuclear explosions, where the physics is bleeding-edge (vaporised edge?). I think it can handle chemical interactions in a human body, where the systems are much less, ummm, explosive, and reasonably well-behaved.
Once you know the energies of each chemical bond, the valency of each atom, and the chemical structure of each compound, the rest is fairly simple maths. Provided the energy of an interaction exceeds the threshold at which a reaction will take place, the interaction will (generally) result in the lowest energy-state. That can all be modelled on a computer, without much difficulty.
Bullshit. Computer modeling of chemical reactions is very primitive, even with the fastest computers available, and the problem is not very parallelizable; a lot of drugs are comprized of several dozen to a few hundred atoms. In vivo reactions are even more difficult, because of the vast number of proteins the molecule may encounter. Although inorganic reactions frequently do go cleanly to a single product, organic reactions, even in laboratory settings, often produce a wide array of products. Since the systems are much more complex in vivo, all reasonably possible reaction products (and with large molecules there are a/lot/ of them) must be checked for safety as well. If these simulations were as efficient as you propose, no one would hire synthetic organic chemists at all....
Contrary to popular belief, nuclear power is not even safe in the aspect of global warming. To mine for all of that uranium needed to produce nuclear power, you are emitting carbon dioxide into the environment.
Oh, boy, here we go again. If we develop wind fields, we might have to move materials out to the fields, using... (GASP!) fossil fuel-burning transport vehicles! And occasionally repair work has to be done, which means technicians go to the site in... trucks! (Oh, NO! Let's never consider wind power ever again!) Seriously, the amount of CO2 used in mining (and transport) of pitchblende is miniscule.
And what if one of these nuclear powered space shuttles happens to explode while it's in the Earth's atmosphere? Talk about spreading carcinogenic materials on a global scale.
More silly FUD. Assuming the absolute worst-case (a tropospheric explosion which destroys the titanium casing), the number of people impacted is almost certain to be nil. The launches would take place out of Florida heading out into the Atlantic Ocean. If it explodes before takeoff, the affected area will be fairly small (although cleanup would be expensive). If not, the fallout would hit the ocean.
What's even worse, though, is that there's no comparison in your analysis with radiation background. It would come as a shock to many people in the US (although hopefully not such a large fraction elsewhere) that every living thing is radioactive! 14CO2 becomes fixed into everything carbon in your body, and 40K is part of the ion-exchange engine for cell membranes. The rocket would need a relatively small amount of UO2 at any rate, and unless the equipment had an unbelievable malfunction, the (over this scale) harmless uranium would be what is dispersed, not fission products.
Did you see the recent blockbuster hit "The Animal" ??? okay maybe not a blockbuster hit (not as far as any real human critics are concerned) but I happen to know for a FACT that that script was written almost entirely by a computer program working from a set of about 25 assumptions and 300 or so rules.
Nah. Only humans could fsck up a movie that badly.
quote: "One kilogram of ordinary matter contains approximately 1025 nuclei" maybe i'm wrong but wouldn't the mass of a given number of nuclei be a function of what type of nuclei they are? for instance a uranium nucleus would be much heavier than a hydrogen nucleus.
The approximation is the 25 in the exponent. 25 plus-or-minus one gives you a factor of 100 range; normal matter is just a little more than that (1-244 for Pu244, the heaviest nucleus naturally occurring on earth).
Mod this up as funny. Although I think the sublink to the Texas and Georgia laws are actually legit (I live in GA and I know a lot of nitwits who live here), the rest of it is hilarious.
You know what I would like to see the percent of Cops that break the law... I have a feeling that number would be the same as the number of citizens that break the law.
So people with specialized training, who are (hopefully) psychologically profiled and placed out in service of the public to protect them from people who "break the law" have no higher culpability than Joe Sixpack?! The logical upshot of this would, of course, be that everyone should get a handgun and a permit, be given arrest powers against everyone else, and disband the police altogether. (For why shouldn't I be my own police since the uniformed people are "no better"?)
Slashdot Mirror
They are there to SELL US THINGS WE WANT.
If ANY company starts off with the plan "get lots of money", they WILL fail.
Almost. If they start off with the plan "get lots of money right now", they will fail. If they start out with the plan "let's make something customers want for a little while, then soak them until they shrivel up", they become monopolies.
And this is what pisses me off. Nowhere is the customer considered. What ever happened to the concept of corporations having a charter to operate in the public interest? All this stuff so many companies have been pulling lately doesn't seem to be in the public interest -- it's strictly in their shareholders' interests.
It's the 1886 U.S. Supreme Court decision to consider corporations as "people". Even in the United States, one must be alleged to have done a very serious crime to receive the death penalty, which is the Government-sanctioned destruction of a "person". Sickening, but true.
Boobies. The robot will have boobies. Big, bouncy ones, hopefully.
The perfect movie for a typical Hollywood starlet... they can be full of silicone, but she can still say they are real.
Take the root word, corporate, and then ad the 'ist suffix to it and voila!, you've got a handy word that pigeonholes a certain group of people. Individual people I might add, and that's an important distinction because corporations are really just fictional creations used to describe the relationship of certain groups of people to each other and the rest of society.
That's SORT OF true. It's actually a bit closer to the way hierarchical religions tend to work: it is indeed comprised of people, but the people are indoctrinated to have the same primary belief system. Specifically that the most important thing your group can do is make more money.
By the way, morality in many other aspects has never stopped old time American companies in the past. Need examples? How about Phillip Morris: is it moral to sell something to people that will harm them for sure and shorten their life span almost surely? Still, people have no problem investing in this company.
;)
Phillip Morris? Who is Phillip Morris? Do you mean the more politically correct named Altria?
From an AC:
Chabotc: all I can say is that you are stupid/uninformed individual who is unable to recognize difference between local community standards and norms and globally enforced federal censorship.
Actually, this is precisely the problem. The idea of "local community standards" is the root of all censorship. That is, it starts from Joe Fundie saying, "I don't want my son/daughter/etc. to be able to see foo." Then Joe Fundie gets his buddies together to force the local community to "do something". And the local leaders pressure regional/state and then Federal legislators to ban the viewing of "foo" whether their own neighbors are bothered by it or not.
"All US citizens helped kill over a million iraquis including over 500,000 children."
I suppose the fact that the Iraqi government has spent most of its money on weapons projects instead of food and agriculture has nothing to do with the problem over there.
It might also have something to do with the fact that the United States, over the objections of even Great Britain(!), has not permitted chemicals necessary for cleaning municipal water to enter the country. This is a violation of Article 45 of the Geneva Convention, but then the US only uses the UN when it's a convenient scapegoat.
XP has, for a while now, been essentially billed as an upgrade to Win 9x/ME rather than Win 2K. (look in your favorite software site -- you see upgrades for Win 9x but NOT Win 2K) And at least stability-wise, Win XP is a drastic improvement over Win 9x.
Really no news here, then IMO.
... is that it's undefined. It literally means whatever the politicians want it to mean. It's being co-opted as "anything I don't like, perpetrated by someone I don't like," and Microsoft doesn't like VB and IIS viruses because they might eventually be bad for business.
Actually carbon is more of a semiconductor - if you look at the periodic table it is in the same column ('group'?) as Silicon and Germanium, and is why it has semi-conductor properties.
Actually you're wrong. Graphite has electrons in a conduction band at absolute zero, which is the definition of a metal. Si and Ge are semiconductors (as is one allotrope of tin); a semiconductor is an "insulator" with a small band gap. Graphite (and bismuth and antimony) is called a semi-metal, though, but that's because there is much less than one electron per atom in the conduction band.
Talking about Pikachu made you think of hentai?! I don't even want to know what you'd think of if someone mentioned a Bulbasaur.... *shudder*
The interesting thing about buckyballs is that their bonding is somewhat of a cross between the two: it is a polyaromatic (like graphite) but it is a molecular solid (similar to, but not exactly like, diamond).
No, the Nobel Prize in Physics goes to whoever makes the greatest contribution to... physics! Someone who developed a key procedure to eliminate the plague of AIDS would be likely to win the Nobel Prize for Medicine though.
Yes. Just like any other state of matter. Liquid helium below the lambda transition is a Bose-Einstein condensate also, but it is in liquid form rather than a gas form.
Bzzt. At near absolute zero you approach what is called "zero-point motion". Quantum mechanical oscillators still vibrate at their lowest energy level (their energy being (1/2)*h*(frequency)). So even at absolute zero you don't have electrons flying all over the place. (Actually, room temperature is virtually absolute zero on an electronic basis anyway -- most electronic excited states are effectively in the thousands of kelvin).
Unfortunately, it's even worse than that.
Southerners didn't free slaves until Union troops started invading and killing.
People in southern states (including, sadly to say, my home state of Georgia) get terribly bent out of shape whenever someone tries to remove the most potent symbol remaining of that very slavery -- the Confederate battle flag -- from official State areas (in Georgia, the state flag).
Many people thought prohibition was a good idea until they tried it.
Amazingly, many people still do. The entire War on Drugs futility is based on that bizarre belief that Prohibition, recognized as such a colossal failure that the Constitution itself needed amended to stop it, will work today.
Nobody started fixing the US economy until it collased [sic] in 1929.
And the temporary "solutions" that FDR added on top of the real fixes put the economy in such peril that only the incredible spending of WWII could bail us out.
Germany didn't respect its Jews until it killed 6 million of them.
Almost. It started respecting homosexuals when one was primarily involved in breaking Enigma, and Jews when one (Einstein) helped produced the atomic bomb before they could.
And the US people didn't give the FBI, CIA and airport security the people and resources they needed until the WTC came down.
And, of course, this means that al-Qaeda is going to find a way to make a colossal killing from buying puts on airline stocks just before the bombing unless the SEC gets increased funding also....
One possibility of this type of "exotic" life might be based on charged metal clusters in a liquid ammonia ocean. Redox reactions could occur with solvated electrons in NH3 (solvated electrons don't last more than a microsecond or so in water, and NH3 is known to spontaneously form unlike higher amines). With a sufficient collection of transition metals (perhaps from asteroid collision), there should be the potential for sufficiently diverse intermetallic ions that a truly un-Earthlike life might evolve.
Realistically, you can have it only one way or the other. I personally would favor the US Government purchasing the US drug companies and then going to a no-patent system. Unfortunately, a major side effect of this is that know-nothing professional critics of the Government would constantly harp on failures (most drugs never reach FDA Phase I, although from some of the writing so far I suspect a lot of Slashdrones don't know that). Then, inevitably (because most USians -- I am one BTW -- are dolts of the first order), blowhard politicians would do slash-and-burn cuts to a nationalized drug production agency.
Powerful beowulf-style or MOSIX-style clusters cost next to nothing, compared to the kinds of figures these companies throw around daily. Computing power of this kind is enough to simulate nuclear explosions, where the physics is bleeding-edge (vaporised edge?). I think it can handle chemical interactions in a human body, where the systems are much less, ummm, explosive, and reasonably well-behaved.
/lot/ of them) must be checked for safety as well. If these simulations were as efficient as you propose, no one would hire synthetic organic chemists at all....
Once you know the energies of each chemical bond, the valency of each atom, and the chemical structure of each compound, the rest is fairly simple maths. Provided the energy of an interaction exceeds the threshold at which a reaction will take place, the interaction will (generally) result in the lowest energy-state. That can all be modelled on a computer, without much difficulty.
Bullshit. Computer modeling of chemical reactions is very primitive, even with the fastest computers available, and the problem is not very parallelizable; a lot of drugs are comprized of several dozen to a few hundred atoms. In vivo reactions are even more difficult, because of the vast number of proteins the molecule may encounter. Although inorganic reactions frequently do go cleanly to a single product, organic reactions, even in laboratory settings, often produce a wide array of products. Since the systems are much more complex in vivo, all reasonably possible reaction products (and with large molecules there are a
Contrary to popular belief, nuclear power is not even safe in the aspect of global warming. To mine for all of that uranium needed to produce nuclear power, you are emitting carbon dioxide into the environment.
Oh, boy, here we go again. If we develop wind fields, we might have to move materials out to the fields, using... (GASP!) fossil fuel-burning transport vehicles! And occasionally repair work has to be done, which means technicians go to the site in... trucks! (Oh, NO! Let's never consider wind power ever again!) Seriously, the amount of CO2 used in mining (and transport) of pitchblende is miniscule.
And what if one of these nuclear powered space shuttles happens to explode while it's in the Earth's atmosphere? Talk about spreading carcinogenic materials on a global scale.
More silly FUD. Assuming the absolute worst-case (a tropospheric explosion which destroys the titanium casing), the number of people impacted is almost certain to be nil. The launches would take place out of Florida heading out into the Atlantic Ocean. If it explodes before takeoff, the affected area will be fairly small (although cleanup would be expensive). If not, the fallout would hit the ocean.
What's even worse, though, is that there's no comparison in your analysis with radiation background. It would come as a shock to many people in the US (although hopefully not such a large fraction elsewhere) that every living thing is radioactive! 14CO2 becomes fixed into everything carbon in your body, and 40K is part of the ion-exchange engine for cell membranes. The rocket would need a relatively small amount of UO2 at any rate, and unless the equipment had an unbelievable malfunction, the (over this scale) harmless uranium would be what is dispersed, not fission products.
Did you see the recent blockbuster hit "The Animal" ??? okay maybe not a blockbuster hit (not as far as any real human critics are concerned) but I happen to know for a FACT that that script was written almost entirely by a computer program working from a set of about 25 assumptions and 300 or so rules.
Nah. Only humans could fsck up a movie that badly.
quote: "One kilogram of ordinary matter contains approximately 1025 nuclei" maybe i'm wrong but wouldn't the mass of a given number of nuclei be a function of what type of nuclei they are? for instance a uranium nucleus would be much heavier than a hydrogen nucleus.
The approximation is the 25 in the exponent. 25 plus-or-minus one gives you a factor of 100 range; normal matter is just a little more than that (1-244 for Pu244, the heaviest nucleus naturally occurring on earth).
Mod this up as funny. Although I think the sublink to the Texas and Georgia laws are actually legit (I live in GA and I know a lot of nitwits who live here), the rest of it is hilarious.
You know what I would like to see the percent of Cops that break the law... I have a feeling that number would be the same as the number of citizens that break the law.
So people with specialized training, who are (hopefully) psychologically profiled and placed out in service of the public to protect them from people who "break the law" have no higher culpability than Joe Sixpack?! The logical upshot of this would, of course, be that everyone should get a handgun and a permit, be given arrest powers against everyone else, and disband the police altogether. (For why shouldn't I be my own police since the uniformed people are "no better"?)
Why is it, that when people talk about God from a humanist point of view, they never use any flippin' logic?!
;)
Maybe it's because any discussion of God and logic in the same sentence is self-contradictory?