You are certainly correct about the dictionary definition of the word 'Atheist' - but that avoids the point that an overwhelming majority of people who describe themselves as atheists are also disbelievers of all kinds of 'supernatural' matters, and disbelief in religion of necessity makes you an atheist.
So what word would you recommend for someone who rejects both God and Religion if not 'Atheist'?
I'm certainly one of those people.
For believers in religions and/or gods, I find that they typically want to label me as 'Agnostic' - which suggests some measure of doubt on my part. They are a little horrified when I tell them "No - I'm quite certain that there isn't a God."
For me, God is precisely as believable as the Tooth Fairy and Santa Clause. I really, truly cannot put any more conviction into it than that. This makes it very hard to take anything that religious people say seriously. If you met an adult who fervently believed in the Tooth Fairy and modelled their life on that basis, you'd think they were a certifyable lunatic!
What I fail to understand about believers is this. If I truly believed in the existance of a being with utterly unlimited powers who could see and hear absolutely everything and who could understand everything - yet who would be prepared to accept the terrible things that happen on Earth without offering help - and (worse) condem people he regards as 'sinners' to an infinite prison sentence beyond death in the most inhumane conditions with pain and torture...would I be able to live my daily life?
To follow such a dangerous, sadistic maniac with the fervor that people do would seem impossible to me even if I believed in him. Yet to oppose such a being and risk literally infinite punishment is an unacceptable risk too. I truly don't know what I would do. Certainly, the idea of just persuing my daily life in humdrum normality making the occasional trip to church would be impossible.
Even if I could somehow rationalise the bad things that this guy permits to happen, I couldn't *possibly* risk upsetting the guy. How is it that religious people ever come even close to breaking God's rules? Yet they clearly do it all the time! I'd be terrified that I'd picked the wrong God! What the Christian God wants may be 180 degrees off what some Wikkan believer thinks is the case - the consequences of being wrong would be rather serious.
How can religious people stand to live that way? I can only imagine that they are just totally lacking in critical thinking skills...but then that's a given for someone who might just as likely believe in Santa Clause.
Bibles are not required reading in schools. Science textbooks are.
Creationists can do whatever they like with their bibles - because my child isn't forced (by law) to go to a place to be fed with that information.
So there is a good case for schools to have to tell all sides of the story.
I think science books should also have stickers saying "The existance of the Tooth Fairy, God and Santa Clause are impossible to either prove or disprove by scientific means. This book teaches you the scientific method - and the conclusions you get as a result of doing that."
The trouble is that people will insist on equating 'evolution' with 'people came from monkeys'.
Whilst I'm personally convinced that humans evolved from apes - which in turn evolved (via a long chain of intermediates) from simple single-celled critters, that's largely irrelevent to what schools have to teach.
No matter what your religious beliefs are, it is essential that the principles of evolution are understood.
Evolution is EASY to demonstrate - take any drug-resistant disease for example.
If you take a population of (say) Tuberculosis-causing bugs in a hospital and start trying to kill them off by pumping their human hosts full of drugs, then they will evolve over a suprisingly short period of time to become immune to your particular suite of drugs. You had one species of bacteria - now you have a different species - and you saw it happen (in fact, you MADE it happen).
That's what evolution is all about - and I really don't see why anyone should have a problem with that being taught as THE TRUTH. It's essential that our future doctors and biochemists learn that evolution truly happens and is an important part of our daily lives. We can't have even the most religious of them doubting that evolution is an important mechanism - and we probably don't care much whether they believe that all humans are descended from Adam and Eve.
It's essentially impossible for science to prove that some supernatural force didn't create the entire universe in an instant with all modern creatures in existance and with fossil dinosaur bones and carbon-dateable mammoth carcasses being 'planted' by God to fool the unfaithful.
You just can't disprove that - any evidence you come up with to 'prove' that no God was involved can just be added to the pile of things God put into the initial state of the universe for whatever bizarre reasons he/she might have.
Science's only tool is Occams Razor which just isn't strong enough to generate 'Laws Of Nature' - ironically, it's a result of faith in the underlying simplicity of the universe. That's why the origin of species is just a theory (albeit a well accepted one with an immense body of evidence behind it).
However, you can convince people that bacteria will respond to an evolutionary pressure by changing their DNA and breeding their way into becoming a distinct new species. Because they do so over a sufficiently short time that humans can watch it happen, it's hard to claim that this isn't 'evolution'.
This isn't just something that happens to bacteria. I heard that marijuana plants in South & Central America that have been repeatedly sprayed with herbicides by anti-drug aircraft have now evolved into plants that are immune to all of the common herbicides. They now flourish because the herbicides are killing off weeds and other plants that encrouch on their fields.
The rules for building modules are there. Also some videos of a five module machine in operation. The final assembly of (hopefully) hundreds of these machines will come together at the Lego fan show "Brickfest '05".
...or the Lego soda can dispenser that takes coins or notes, sells three different kinds of drink and gives change!...or the Lego photocopier....or the Lego typewriter....or the effort that's currently underway for the next big Lego fan show where everyone makes a 'module' that takes small Lego soccer balls as input and rolls, lifts, throws, floats or otherwise transports them to an output hopper a foot or so away. Now imagine a few hundred of those machines connected end-to-end.
Using Lego's own bulk-buy service is OK - but it's not the cheapest way.
Their charge for vanilla 2x2 bricks is around 7c/brick. You can pick up a bulk bucket at WalMart with over 200 bricks for $6.95 - that's 3c/brick (well actually, it's a little higher than that because some of the bricks aren't *useful*).
Of course if all you want is yellow 2x2's then you'd have to buy a heck of a lot of buckets to get that many - so if *ALL* you want is one colour for one project then use the bulk-buy service - but if you want an inordinate amount of the stuff and you plan to build lots of huge things - then the buckets are the way to go.
I bought a couple of dozen of those buckets for $3 each one year when our local K-mart shut down - with that and other occasional lucky purchases, I have enough Lego that I never have to worry about whether I have enough!
Another thing is that if you have the time, you can sort out the bricks you don't need from those bulk buckets and sell the stuff you don't want on BrickLink.com
Whilst YOU don't want 40 Lego Giraffes, someone somewhere is building a Serengeti diorama and needs as many giraffes as they can get!
Buy lots and lots of those 'bulk buckets' - it's the cheapest way to buy Lego if all you want is large numbers of simple bricks. Watch out for toy sales at big stores and when you see some at a good price, clean out their shelves.
If you look at the parts count in the fancy kits and figure out the price-per-brick, it's pretty much the same for everything Lego make. The buckets are a slightly better deal in terms of price-per-brick - but because they contain *FAR* fewer of the relatively useless decorative parts, they end up being a MUCH better deal for people who want to build PC cases or Lego sculptures.
You can also find an occasional good deal on eBay. I once bought 20lbs of Lego for $70 which is by far the most amazing deal. The worst part ended up being sorting them into some kind of rational way. There are entire mailing lists devoted to Lego storage systems and the taxonomy of obscure Lego parts.
For specialised parts (eg if you absolutely must have 400 Lego soccer balls or you have an urge to build a pneumatic calculator and need 200 Lego pistons - or even if you utterly MUST have a JarJar Binks Minifig) - then go to www.bricklink.com - it's an ebay-like concept where lots of vendors can post parts lists and prices and you order online.
If you want to work in research and invent things for a living, you have a choice.
You can try to work by yourself, using your own equipment - patent whatever you come up with and earn money from the licensing/royalties. You take an enormous risk. Since the VAST proportion of inventions never make it into products, the odds are very good that you'll be poor for your entire life, scraping an existance. There is however, a very small chance that one of your inventions will earn you billions of dollars and make you a household name....OR...
You can work for a company who pays you a steady salary whether your inventions turn out to be useful or not. You'll never be rich - but you'll never be wondering how to pay the next bill either. That company takes all the risk for you - and in order to do that, they have to take all of the big earnings too.
On the average, you'll probably earn about the same either way - $100k per year for 40 years is $4M - that's probably about what you'd earn from the one or two great ideas an average researcher might have during their career.
But you don't get to have it both ways.
If you are supremely confident in your ability to come up with a great idea once a decade or so (and get it to market - which is definiely non-trivial) - then DON'T WORK FOR A BIG COMPANY.
But if you are risk-averse and you'd like to have a steady monthly income - go work for a research lab somewhere and live a moderately comfortable life, knowing full well that you may invent something earth-shattering and merely end up as a footnote in the history books.
I worked in the Philips research labs where the very first CD-ROM was made. We were working on designs for home computers with friendly user interfaces (touch screens, 256 colour graphics displays, GUI's - remember, this was before the Mac and before the invention of the mouse). We realised that these computers would need to have lots of reference 'books' online and therefore needed useful amounts of storage (more than the 20Mb hard drives and sub-megabyte floppies that were around at the time). We took a pre-production prototype Philips Audio CD player and (with the help of the audio group) hacked it so we could read the digital data into the 68000-based 'home computer' we'd designed for the project (which was called "C.H.R.I.S" - I forget what it stood for).
The very first CD-ROM we made (as a demo) was an interactive dictionary - with pictures, sound and text. There were hyper-links you could touch to link any word that was on-screen with it's definition, and buttons to have it speak the word to you. All of the nouns in the dictionary had pictures. (Our team's secretary read all of the words for us - she had a really nice voice!)
We didn't have the effort to do the entire dictionary - so we only did the letter 'O' (I have no recollection of why 'O' was chosen).
My work was in the authoring system - I wrote a paint program for making the pictures. (Remember that the only commercial paint software ran on custom Quantel hardware and cost a small fortune! If you wanted to paint digital pictures, you pretty much had to build your own hardware *and* software from scratch.)
We had a commercial artist come in and paint Oafs, Oak trees, Ocelots and so on.
We had severe problems with storage. It took a lot of state-of-the-art 20Mb hard drives to store even the data we had for the letter 'O'! The results were tranferred to 9 track tape and sent to the VAX in the Philips audio group which controlled the CD mastering system. They pressed 50 CD's for us because we were concerned that the error rates on those early systems would be so high as to make most of the copies unusable. As it turned out, all 50 CD's seemed to work.
As far as I know, not a single one of those first CD-ROMs still exists.
Anyway - none of us who worked on that project earned millions for it. We didn't expect to because that's what they pay you for.
However, I'd *REALLY* liked to have had one of those CD-ROMs.
Assuming you'd actually *use* the rotation feature:
Whilst 250 square meters is quite a lot, bear in mind that you can't have anything in the way of furniture within any significant distance of the hub because at some times, where that furniture would be becomes the door to your bathroom, kitchen or stairwell - which you presumably don't want to block.
For the same reason, you also can't have radial interior walls of any kind. So you can't have a spare guest bedroom or any kind of privacy except in the hub area.
The fact is that with the outer wall being entirely composed of windows (at least that's whate the photo's seem to indicate) and the inner wall being off-limits for putting furniture against - and no other interior walls being possible - you can't have any kind of tall book cases, free-standing wardrobes, etc. No place to hang that huge flat screen TV either.
You'll also find that the door to your kitchen is sometimes in your bedroom. What happens if you wake up in the middle of the night and in your befuddled state need the bathroom! It could be anywhere in the house!
I wonder how well sound-proofed they are? The rumbling of all the bearings from the apartments above and below could become a major pain.
There is no conceivable way for mankind to convert any form of energy into something to conveniently heat or cool our homes, power our cars or run our industries without screwing with the planet.
Even if you put massive solar power plants in orbit and beamed microwave energy to to earth so that absolutely NONE of earth's resources were being consumed, we'd STILL be dumping that amount of additional heat into the earth's atmosphere.
The very best thing we can do is cut back on the amount of power we have to convert by doing less and doing whatever has to be done with greater efficiency.
(But you've gotta admit - microwave power plants in orbit is *cool*)
So 1944 to 2004 is 60 years - 15 elections (excluding this one) - so the odds of the elections going the same way as the Redskin games (if there is no connection between them) is 1 in 32768.
With the vast numbers of unrelated binary-outcome public events happening close to the elections, it should be possible to find plenty of them with seemingly better predictive power than this one...
Numbers of Florida voters pushing out the wrong cardboard chads for example.
I'm deeply skeptical that this can be done for anything other than 2D operations - or exceedingly simple/slow 3D. You aren't going to be playing Doom3 on this card.
The design is based around FPGAS's (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) - which have a much lower density than full ASIC's.
A modern graphics chip has about a dozen full function floating point processors on it (for implementing shaders) and a large RAM cache (so that you get good performance from textures) and the highest possible bandwidth into it's main memory. I don't think you can come even close to that with FPGA's.
So, the best this activity can do is to come up with a card that does 2D graphics and does 3D only using the CPU and Mesa. That'll suck for anything that uses OpenGL rendering. But for 2D graphics, the majority of the drivers are ALREADY OpenSourced - 2D just isn't that difficult and the interfaces are pretty much standardised.
For what this guy says to be true, everyone would have to get sufficiently upset that they leave the net together...within a very short space of time.
If people leave gradually - then the incentive for spammers and spyware pushers and such to invade the net will decrease because the number of people they can reach will be decreasing.
The most likely realistic outcome is that the number of people on the web will gradually decrease - and so will the level of junk - until we reach a new equilibrium where the threshold of pain is not quite reached. The only question is where that new level is.
The net could get much smaller - and lose many advert-driven sites - but that would merely return us to where we were before the net was so overrun by people seeking entertainment and such online...except that the infrastructure is much better now.
Real enthusiasts with machines that are proof against most forms of junk and who have good spam filters will stay - and presumably see things gradually improve as time goes by.
Personally, I rather preferred the smaller, more elitist Internet where only fairly smart people hung out - and most web sites were put up by people with the pure motive of helping each other.
It is certainly ironic that the world seems to be rushing to convert cars from internal combustion to battery/electric - whilst rushing in the exact opposite direction (in this case) to convert laptops from battery/electric to internal combustion.
Is there something inherent in the scale of these devices that means that this kind of reversal makes sense?
According to the LOC website, they have 119 million items in the library.
They tell us that there are:
4.5 million maps. 14 million 'images'...so I guess we assume the rest are books and newspapers.
So in round numbers, let's say there are 50 million books and 50 million newspapers, periodicals, comic books, etc.
$260 million to scan all that stuff? $2.60 per book or newspaper? That seems a little unlikely. The book would have to be carried off the shelf to the scanning machine, mounted in the machine (which would clearly have to turn the pages and scan and index them 100% automatically), the title and such would probably have to be typed in manually, then the book carried back to the shelf and placed back in the correct place.
I find it hard to believe that a machine for scanning newspapers could be devised that could turn the pages automatically...but even without that, the project is still possible. At minimum wage, you'd need to pay people to scan a complete newspaper in maybe 20 minutes.
Then some significant fraction of the collection would probably be too fragile for the automatic page turning machines...the cost of hand-scanning those would be FAR more than the bulk of the books. Some books would be *so* fragile and valuable that scanning them would be a considerable expense.
Then there is the cost of the storage media. Suppose those 100 million books and newspapers had just 100 pages each on average. To get a readable image of the page you're going to need to scan at maybe 2000 x 2000 resolution. So we'll have something like 10^16 pixels, let's be generous and allow 100:1 compression ratios - and one byte per pixel. So we have 1000 terabytes. That's a lot - but to put it in context, it's only about a fifth of the amount that Google is estimated to have in their main cluster. Goggle spent $250 mil to buy that - so maybe only 20% of the LOC's budget needs to be for storage.
OCR'ing and indexing all that data would be an incredibly valuable thing - the extra storage is trivial and the cost can be low if you aren't in a hurry to get the project done. Just stick a few thousand PC's in a room and wait!
Dunno - $260 mil sounds like a low end estimate to me - but it seems do-able.
Actually, the reason it appeared on Slashdot (am guessing) is because it just showed up on Boingboing. You can see the BoingBoing article.
...but BoingBoing evidently got it from either Reuters or the article in Science Magazine. I also heard it on NPR - who probably got it from Reuters - who pretty much report that they heard it from Science Magazine - who published a paper by one of the original scientists who did the study.
To claim that Slashdot got the story from one specific source or another is hard to prove.
If Slashdot has to second-guess what other sources it's readers are using in order to exclude stories that are already 'well known' then we'll all be worse off. I don't read either BoingBoing or Memepool.
If the report had been filed ONLY in Science Mag - then most of us would be unaware of it. In order that everyone who is interested in it can actually hear about the story it has to be reported in more widely read places.
The big push here needs to be for Mozilla to refuse to support it.
We heard here yesterday that Mozilla has a far bigger market share than Debian does - and Mozilla actually does read mail and reject spam. So their refusal to participate in a Microsoft takeover of the world wide email system would have some real meaning.
It's good that Apache came out against it...what about 'sendmail'?
There also needs to be some promotion of a good alternative that's not IP-encumbered and which would hopefully have technical merits too...it's easy to refuse to support a proposed standard - but it's better to have a good reason to recommend a solid alternative.
OK - so suppose we buy into the 'sending physical objects' idea. The problem is how the recipients will recognise that it's there. If you sent a bazillion objects each the size of a penny in a scatter-shot approach - then you are no better off than transmitting radio - the chances of being hit by one is 1/Rsquared - just like radio - and the 'signal' is remarkably brief.
So send something bigger - but how big? Something the size of a baseball that could soft-land on their planet wouldn't work - we'd never find something like that if it landed in the middle of the pacific ocean or buried itself in ice at the poles or in sand in the sahara.
It has to be VERY big - like bigger than a house...but then accellerating a LOT of them up to an appreciable fraction of lightspeed gets EXPENSIVE.
Better that it have a radio on board to transmit to the civilisation on arrival.
But soft-landing is REALLY hard. You probably don't have good orbital parameters for the planet you are aiming for - after thousands of years in space, it would have to be smart enough to manouver to it's target. If it has all those computers on board then maybe it would be better to leave it in a relatively easy solar orbit and just have it broadcast radio on nice high power. It could start transmitting when it first hears signals coming from one of the planets - indicating that a radio-using civilisation is nearby.
If the sending civilisation is reasonably advanced, it could send a simple AI computer with a huge database to chat back and forth with the recieving civilisation. Include designs for a machine to send a reply back again.
Yeah - but there are too many other effects. The cooling of the atmosphere causing the air to bunch up over the night side of the earth - and causing a gravitational pull and a compression of the ground - the tendancy of bodies to go in a strai...oh screw it - centrifugal force - due to being on the outside of the earth's orbit instead of the inside. The sun pulling down instead of up changes the shapes of things.
You can come up with a dozen differences that are all too hard to estimate - and comparable to the size of the effect they describe in the article. The nice thing about the eclipse effect is that it has a fast onset, and the effect happens pretty amazingly close to that onset. That eliminates a VAST number of other variables any one of which would swamp this effect.
In fact, the high temperatures on re-entry for meteorites are over-blown. Only the surface of the rock gets hot, the interior can still be very cold. Rock is a pretty good thermal insulator. Think about it. If you put a 5lb rock into a white hot oven - and took it out again 30 seconds later, the middle would still be cold. It doesn't take many seconds for something at 50 times the speed of sound to travel through a few miles of atmosphere.
Also the outer layers of the rock (which DO get hot) tend to boil away, carrying the heat away in just the way that the heat shields on spacecraft (other than the shuttle) are designed to do.
Critters riding (frozen) in the center of the rock might well thaw out quite gently long after they hit the ground.
Hence, a robust space travelling bug would only need to be able to recover from beeing deeply frozen - it wouldn't have to be able to cope with high temperatures at any point in its journey.
Slashdot Mirror
You are certainly correct about the dictionary definition of the word 'Atheist' - but that avoids the point that an overwhelming majority of people who describe themselves as atheists are also disbelievers of all kinds of 'supernatural' matters, and disbelief in religion of necessity makes you an atheist.
So what word would you recommend for someone who rejects both God and Religion if not 'Atheist'?
I'm certainly one of those people.
For believers in religions and/or gods, I find that they typically want to label me as 'Agnostic' - which suggests some measure of doubt on my part. They are a little horrified when I tell them "No - I'm quite certain that there isn't a God."
For me, God is precisely as believable as the Tooth Fairy and Santa Clause. I really, truly cannot put any more conviction into it than that. This makes it very hard to take anything that religious people say seriously. If you met an adult who fervently believed in the Tooth Fairy and modelled their life on that basis, you'd think they were a certifyable lunatic!
What I fail to understand about believers is this. If I truly believed in the existance of a being with utterly unlimited powers who could see and hear absolutely everything and who could understand everything - yet who would be prepared to accept the terrible things that happen on Earth without offering help - and (worse) condem people he regards as 'sinners' to an infinite prison sentence beyond death in the most inhumane conditions with pain and torture...would I be able to live my daily life?
To follow such a dangerous, sadistic maniac with the fervor that people do would seem impossible to me even if I believed in him. Yet to oppose such a being and risk literally infinite punishment is an unacceptable risk too. I truly don't know what I would do. Certainly, the idea of just persuing my daily life in humdrum normality making the occasional trip to church would be impossible.
Even if I could somehow rationalise the bad things that this guy permits to happen, I couldn't *possibly* risk upsetting the guy. How is it that religious people ever come even close to breaking God's rules? Yet they clearly do it all the time! I'd be terrified that I'd picked the wrong God! What the Christian God wants may be 180 degrees off what some Wikkan believer thinks is the case - the consequences of being wrong would be rather serious.
How can religious people stand to live that way? I can only imagine that they are just totally lacking in critical thinking skills...but then that's a given for someone who might just as likely believe in Santa Clause.
Welcome to my world!
Creationism and Research in the same title! That's just too funny!
Bibles are not required reading in schools. Science textbooks are.
Creationists can do whatever they like with their bibles - because my child isn't forced (by law) to go to a place to be fed with that information.
So there is a good case for schools to have to tell all sides of the story.
I think science books should also have stickers saying "The existance of the Tooth Fairy, God and Santa Clause are impossible to either prove or disprove by scientific means. This book teaches you the scientific method - and the conclusions you get as a result of doing that."
The trouble is that people will insist on equating 'evolution' with 'people came from monkeys'.
Whilst I'm personally convinced that humans evolved from apes - which in turn evolved (via a long chain of intermediates) from simple single-celled critters, that's largely irrelevent to what schools have to teach.
No matter what your religious beliefs are, it is essential that the principles of evolution are understood.
Evolution is EASY to demonstrate - take any drug-resistant disease for example.
If you take a population of (say) Tuberculosis-causing bugs in a hospital and start trying to kill them off by pumping their human hosts full of drugs, then they will evolve over a suprisingly short period of time to become immune to your particular suite of drugs. You had one species of bacteria - now you have a different species - and you saw it happen (in fact, you MADE it happen).
That's what evolution is all about - and I really don't see why anyone should have a problem with that being taught as THE TRUTH. It's essential that our future doctors and biochemists learn that evolution truly happens and is an important part of our daily lives. We can't have even the most religious of them doubting that evolution is an important mechanism - and we probably don't care much whether they believe that all humans are descended from Adam and Eve.
It's essentially impossible for science to prove that some supernatural force didn't create the entire universe in an instant with all modern creatures in existance and with fossil dinosaur bones and carbon-dateable mammoth carcasses being 'planted' by God to fool the unfaithful.
You just can't disprove that - any evidence you come up with to 'prove' that no God was involved can just be added to the pile of things God put into the initial state of the universe for whatever bizarre reasons he/she might have.
Science's only tool is Occams Razor which just isn't strong enough to generate 'Laws Of Nature' - ironically, it's a result of faith in the underlying simplicity of the universe. That's why the origin of species is just a theory (albeit a well accepted one with an immense body of evidence behind it).
However, you can convince people that bacteria will respond to an evolutionary pressure by changing their DNA and breeding their way into becoming a distinct new species. Because they do so over a sufficiently short time that humans can watch it happen, it's hard to claim that this isn't 'evolution'.
This isn't just something that happens to bacteria. I heard that marijuana plants in South & Central America that have been repeatedly sprayed with herbicides by anti-drug aircraft have now evolved into plants that are immune to all of the common herbicides. They now flourish because the herbicides are killing off weeds and other plants that encrouch on their fields.
Evolution in action is undeniable.
Check out:
http://www.teamhassenplug.org/GBC/
The rules for building modules are there. Also some videos of a five module machine in operation. The final assembly of (hopefully) hundreds of these machines will come together at the Lego fan show "Brickfest '05".
...or the Lego soda can dispenser that takes coins or notes, sells three different kinds of drink and gives change! ...or the Lego photocopier. ...or the Lego typewriter. ...or the effort that's currently underway for the next big Lego fan show where everyone makes a 'module' that takes small Lego soccer balls as input and rolls, lifts, throws, floats or otherwise transports them to an output hopper a foot or so away. Now imagine a few hundred of those machines connected end-to-end.
That's pretty darned geeky if you ask me!
Using Lego's own bulk-buy service is OK - but it's not the cheapest way.
Their charge for vanilla 2x2 bricks is around 7c/brick. You can pick up a bulk bucket at WalMart with over 200 bricks for $6.95 - that's 3c/brick (well actually, it's a little higher than that because some of the bricks aren't *useful*).
Of course if all you want is yellow 2x2's then you'd have to buy a heck of a lot of buckets to get that many - so if *ALL* you want is one colour for one project then use the bulk-buy service - but if you want an inordinate amount of the stuff and you plan to build lots of huge things - then the buckets are the way to go.
I bought a couple of dozen of those buckets for $3 each one year when our local K-mart shut down - with that and other occasional lucky purchases, I have enough Lego that I never have to worry about whether I have enough!
Another thing is that if you have the time, you can sort out the bricks you don't need from those bulk buckets and sell the stuff you don't want on BrickLink.com
Whilst YOU don't want 40 Lego Giraffes, someone somewhere is building a Serengeti diorama and needs as many giraffes as they can get!
Buy lots and lots of those 'bulk buckets' - it's the cheapest way to buy Lego if all you want is large numbers of simple bricks. Watch out for toy sales at big stores and when you see some at a good price, clean out their shelves.
If you look at the parts count in the fancy kits and figure out the price-per-brick, it's pretty much the same for everything Lego make. The buckets are a slightly better deal in terms of price-per-brick - but because they contain *FAR* fewer of the relatively useless decorative parts, they end up being a MUCH better deal for people who want to build PC cases or Lego sculptures.
You can also find an occasional good deal on eBay. I once bought 20lbs of Lego for $70 which is by far the most amazing deal. The worst part ended up being sorting them into some kind of rational way. There are entire mailing lists devoted to Lego storage systems and the taxonomy of obscure Lego parts.
For specialised parts (eg if you absolutely must have 400 Lego soccer balls or you have an urge to build a pneumatic calculator and need 200 Lego pistons - or even if you utterly MUST have a JarJar Binks Minifig) - then go to www.bricklink.com - it's an ebay-like concept where lots of vendors can post parts lists and prices and you order online.
There is a pretty good FAQ on buying Lego here:
http://www.lionsgatemodels.com/FAQs.htm
If you want to work in research and invent things for a living, you have a choice.
...OR...
You can try to work by yourself, using your own equipment - patent whatever you come up with and earn money from the licensing/royalties. You take an enormous risk. Since the VAST proportion of inventions never make it into products, the odds are very good that you'll be poor for your entire life, scraping an existance. There is however, a very small chance that one of your inventions will earn you billions of dollars and make you a household name.
You can work for a company who pays you a steady salary whether your inventions turn out to be useful or not. You'll never be rich - but you'll never be wondering how to pay the next bill either. That company takes all the risk for you - and in order to do that, they have to take all of the big earnings too.
On the average, you'll probably earn about the same either way - $100k per year for 40 years is $4M - that's probably about what you'd earn from the one or two great ideas an average researcher might have during their career.
But you don't get to have it both ways.
If you are supremely confident in your ability to come up with a great idea once a decade or so (and get it to market - which is definiely non-trivial) - then DON'T WORK FOR A BIG COMPANY.
But if you are risk-averse and you'd like to have a steady monthly income - go work for a research lab somewhere and live a moderately comfortable life, knowing full well that you may invent something earth-shattering and merely end up as a footnote in the history books.
You have a choice.
I worked in the Philips research labs where the very first CD-ROM was made. We were working on designs for home computers with friendly user interfaces (touch screens, 256 colour graphics displays, GUI's - remember, this was before the Mac and before the invention of the mouse). We realised that these computers would need to have lots of reference 'books' online and therefore needed useful amounts of storage (more than the 20Mb hard drives and sub-megabyte floppies that were around at the time). We took a pre-production prototype Philips Audio CD player and (with the help of the audio group) hacked it so we could read the digital data into the 68000-based 'home computer' we'd designed for the project (which was called "C.H.R.I.S" - I forget what it stood for).
The very first CD-ROM we made (as a demo) was an interactive dictionary - with pictures, sound and text. There were hyper-links you could touch to link any word that was on-screen with it's definition, and buttons to have it speak the word to you. All of the nouns in the dictionary had pictures. (Our team's secretary read all of the words for us - she had a really nice voice!)
We didn't have the effort to do the entire dictionary - so we only did the letter 'O' (I have no recollection of why 'O' was chosen).
My work was in the authoring system - I wrote a paint program for making the pictures. (Remember that the only commercial paint software ran on custom Quantel hardware and cost a small fortune! If you wanted to paint digital pictures, you pretty much had to build your own hardware *and* software from scratch.)
We had a commercial artist come in and paint Oafs, Oak trees, Ocelots and so on.
We had severe problems with storage. It took a lot of state-of-the-art 20Mb hard drives to store even the data we had for the letter 'O'! The results were tranferred to 9 track tape and sent to the VAX in the Philips audio group which controlled the CD mastering system. They pressed 50 CD's for us because we were concerned that the error rates on those early systems would be so high as to make most of the copies unusable. As it turned out, all 50 CD's seemed to work.
As far as I know, not a single one of those first CD-ROMs still exists.
Anyway - none of us who worked on that project earned millions for it. We didn't expect to because that's what they pay you for.
However, I'd *REALLY* liked to have had one of those CD-ROMs.
Assuming you'd actually *use* the rotation feature:
Whilst 250 square meters is quite a lot, bear in mind that you can't have anything in the way of furniture within any significant distance of the hub because at some times, where that furniture would be becomes the door to your bathroom, kitchen or stairwell - which you presumably don't want to block.
For the same reason, you also can't have radial interior walls of any kind. So you can't have a spare guest bedroom or any kind of privacy except in the hub area.
The fact is that with the outer wall being entirely composed of windows (at least that's whate the photo's seem to indicate) and the inner wall being off-limits for putting furniture against - and no other interior walls being possible - you can't have any kind of tall book cases, free-standing wardrobes, etc. No place to hang that huge flat screen TV either.
You'll also find that the door to your kitchen is sometimes in your bedroom. What happens if you wake up in the middle of the night and in your befuddled state need the bathroom! It could be anywhere in the house!
I wonder how well sound-proofed they are? The rumbling of all the bearings from the apartments above and below could become a major pain.
Versus removing the GPS module and leaving it in your garage!
Modern cars have pretty much 100% tamper-proof odometers - why not just read off the number of miles you drove between smog checks or whatever?
Is it some complication like they can only charge for miles driven with California?
There is no conceivable way for mankind to convert any form of energy into something to conveniently heat or cool our homes, power our cars or run our industries without screwing with the planet.
Even if you put massive solar power plants in orbit and beamed microwave energy to to earth so that absolutely NONE of earth's resources were being consumed, we'd STILL be dumping that amount of additional heat into the earth's atmosphere.
The very best thing we can do is cut back on the amount of power we have to convert by doing less and doing whatever has to be done with greater efficiency.
(But you've gotta admit - microwave power plants in orbit is *cool*)
So 1944 to 2004 is 60 years - 15 elections (excluding this one) - so the odds of the elections going the same way as the Redskin games (if there is no connection between them) is 1 in 32768.
With the vast numbers of unrelated binary-outcome public events happening close to the elections, it should be possible to find plenty of them with seemingly better predictive power than this one...
Numbers of Florida voters pushing out the wrong cardboard chads for example.
I'm deeply skeptical that this can be done for anything other than 2D operations - or exceedingly simple/slow 3D. You aren't going to be playing Doom3 on this card.
The design is based around FPGAS's (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) - which have a much lower density than full ASIC's.
A modern graphics chip has about a dozen full function floating point processors on it (for implementing shaders) and a large RAM cache (so that you get good performance from textures) and the highest possible bandwidth into it's main memory. I don't think you can come even close to that with FPGA's.
So, the best this activity can do is to come up with a card that does 2D graphics and does 3D only using the CPU and Mesa. That'll suck for anything that uses OpenGL rendering. But for 2D graphics, the majority of the drivers are ALREADY OpenSourced - 2D just isn't that difficult and the interfaces are pretty much standardised.
For what this guy says to be true, everyone would have to get sufficiently upset that they leave the net together...within a very short space of time.
If people leave gradually - then the incentive for spammers and spyware pushers and such to invade the net will decrease because the number of people they can reach will be decreasing.
The most likely realistic outcome is that the number of people on the web will gradually decrease - and so will the level of junk - until we reach a new equilibrium where the threshold of pain is not quite reached. The only question is where that new level is.
The net could get much smaller - and lose many advert-driven sites - but that would merely return us to where we were before the net was so overrun by people seeking entertainment and such online...except that the infrastructure is much better now.
Real enthusiasts with machines that are proof against most forms of junk and who have good spam filters will stay - and presumably see things gradually improve as time goes by.
Personally, I rather preferred the smaller, more elitist Internet where only fairly smart people hung out - and most web sites were put up by people with the pure motive of helping each other.
Bring it on!
It is certainly ironic that the world seems to be rushing to convert cars from internal combustion to battery/electric - whilst rushing in the exact opposite direction (in this case) to convert laptops from battery/electric to internal combustion.
Is there something inherent in the scale of these devices that means that this kind of reversal makes sense?
According to the LOC website, they have 119 million items in the library.
...so I guess we assume the rest are books and newspapers.
They tell us that there are:
4.5 million maps.
14 million 'images'
So in round numbers, let's say there are 50 million books and 50 million newspapers, periodicals, comic books, etc.
$260 million to scan all that stuff? $2.60 per book or newspaper? That seems a little unlikely. The book would have to be carried off the shelf to the scanning machine, mounted in the machine (which would clearly have to turn the pages and scan and index them 100% automatically), the title and such would probably have to be typed in manually, then the book carried back to the shelf and placed back in the correct place.
I find it hard to believe that a machine for scanning newspapers could be devised that could turn the pages automatically...but even without that, the project is still possible. At minimum wage, you'd need to pay people to scan a complete newspaper in maybe 20 minutes.
Then some significant fraction of the collection would probably be too fragile for the automatic page turning machines...the cost of hand-scanning those would be FAR more than the bulk of the books. Some books would be *so* fragile and valuable that scanning them would be a considerable expense.
Then there is the cost of the storage media. Suppose those 100 million books and newspapers had just 100 pages each on average. To get a readable image of the page you're going to need to scan at maybe 2000 x 2000 resolution. So we'll have something like 10^16 pixels, let's be generous and allow 100:1 compression ratios - and one byte per pixel. So we have 1000 terabytes. That's a lot - but to put it in context, it's only about a fifth of the amount
that Google is estimated to have in their main cluster. Goggle spent $250 mil to buy that - so maybe only 20% of the LOC's budget needs to be for storage.
OCR'ing and indexing all that data would be an incredibly valuable thing - the extra storage is trivial and the cost can be low if you aren't in a hurry to get the project done. Just stick a few thousand PC's in a room and wait!
Dunno - $260 mil sounds like a low end estimate to me - but it seems do-able.
To claim that Slashdot got the story from one specific source or another is hard to prove.
If Slashdot has to second-guess what other sources it's readers are using in order to exclude stories that are already 'well known' then we'll all be worse off. I don't read either BoingBoing or Memepool.
If the report had been filed ONLY in Science Mag - then most of us would be unaware of it. In order that everyone who is interested in it can actually hear about the story it has to be reported in more widely read places.
More like loss of precision in large floating point numbers.
The big push here needs to be for Mozilla to refuse to support it.
We heard here yesterday that Mozilla has a far bigger market share than Debian does - and Mozilla actually does read mail and reject spam. So their refusal to participate in a Microsoft takeover of the world wide email system would have some real meaning.
It's good that Apache came out against it...what about 'sendmail'?
There also needs to be some promotion of a good alternative that's not IP-encumbered and which would hopefully have technical merits too...it's easy to refuse to support a proposed standard - but it's better to have a good reason to recommend a solid alternative.
OK - so suppose we buy into the 'sending physical objects' idea. The problem is how the recipients will recognise that it's there. If you sent a bazillion objects each the size of a penny in a scatter-shot approach - then you are no better off than transmitting radio - the chances of being hit by one is 1/Rsquared - just like radio - and the 'signal' is remarkably brief.
So send something bigger - but how big? Something the size of a baseball that could soft-land on their planet wouldn't work - we'd never find something like that if it landed in the middle of the pacific ocean or buried itself in ice at the poles or in sand in the sahara.
It has to be VERY big - like bigger than a house...but then accellerating a LOT of them up to an appreciable fraction of lightspeed gets EXPENSIVE.
Better that it have a radio on board to transmit to the civilisation on arrival.
But soft-landing is REALLY hard. You probably don't have good orbital parameters for the planet you are aiming for - after thousands of years in space, it would have to be smart enough to manouver to it's target. If it has all those computers on board then maybe it would be better to leave it in a relatively easy solar orbit and just have it broadcast radio on nice high power. It could start transmitting when it first hears signals coming from one of the planets - indicating that a radio-using civilisation is nearby.
If the sending civilisation is reasonably advanced, it could send a simple AI computer with a huge database to chat back and forth with the recieving civilisation. Include designs for a machine to send a reply back again.
Yeah - but there are too many other effects. The cooling of the atmosphere causing the air to bunch up over the night side of the earth - and causing a gravitational pull and a compression of the ground - the tendancy of bodies to go in a strai...oh screw it - centrifugal force - due to being on the outside of the earth's orbit instead of the inside. The sun pulling down instead of up changes the shapes of things.
You can come up with a dozen differences that are all too hard to estimate - and comparable to the size of the effect they describe in the article. The nice thing about the eclipse effect is that it has a fast onset, and the effect happens pretty amazingly close to that onset. That eliminates a VAST number of other variables any one of which would swamp this effect.
In fact, the high temperatures on re-entry for meteorites are over-blown. Only the surface of the rock gets hot, the interior can still be very cold. Rock is a pretty good thermal insulator. Think about it. If you put a 5lb rock into a white hot oven - and took it out again 30 seconds later, the middle would still be cold. It doesn't take many seconds for something at 50 times the speed of sound to travel through a few miles of atmosphere.
Also the outer layers of the rock (which DO get hot) tend to boil away, carrying the heat away in just the way that the heat shields on spacecraft (other than the shuttle) are designed to do.
Critters riding (frozen) in the center of the rock might well thaw out quite gently long after they hit the ground.
Hence, a robust space travelling bug would only need to be able to recover from beeing deeply frozen - it wouldn't have to be able to cope with high temperatures at any point in its journey.