Because if you fly on the shuttle, the odds of being wiped out are about 1 in 65. Hence, if we had enough shuttles, we could wipe out civilization in 100 years with no need for a natural disaster.
Seriously, space exploration is great, and so is experimental aircraft testing, but let's get a working system for getting people into space. The shuttle isn't it.
Well, first things first. I never said the semiconductor industry would find it too expensive, or even impractical. In fact, once enough research has been done to take care of the hard parts of using a new semiconductor substrate, I think it's inevitable. Diamond is a better material in many ways than silicon.
Now, back to the differences. Here is a description of how silicon is made. It is essentially a 90-year old process for growing single crystals of metal, using a crystal the metal naturally grows into (given fairly normal temperatures and pressures). The big feat here is using an environment to promote purity, and the scale at which it is done. Here is an article that mentions how diamond crystals are grown. Note that this technology, while successfully making a diamond about 35 years ago, is still in its infancy for mono-crystalline diamonds (which is all that matters in this discussion), and that diamond is not the default state for carbon in a relatively normal environment. Note that CVD is nothing new for semiconductor fabrication, so the mere mention of it isn't a stumbling block for the industry. Also, the crystal diameter for diamond is around 160mm (in 2002) vs. 400mm (in 2004) for silicon, and thickness measured in centimeters for diamond vs. meters for silicon.
Which brings me back to my original point. Silicon is relatively easy to work with, and all the hard parts about silicon (maintaining purity, crystal growth process, doping, polishing) are going to be just as hard when working with diamond, if not harder. Then there's the new challenges that diamond adds to the mix, some of which are still being researched.
Get a simple, yet detailed, colour mask on a stick, a la masquerade ball masks. Only hold it in front of your face for the machine transaction. How could anyone say you were planning anything nefarious, with the exception of bypassing the camera on the machine. You'd be identified by every other camera in the building, just not the one that sold you the service. If you did something wrong, it would be trivial for them to ID you if they have half-decent security, yet you've at least attempted to maintain some level of privacy.
But given the cool laws in the U.S. nowadays, that would still probably get you a visit from the boys in the black SUVs.
Outlook/OE shows the url when you hover over the link? Which version is that? I've never seen a description of the link before clicking. I naturally assumed the only option was to not click or grab your ankles and hope it didn't hurt.
The two most promising methods for making diamonds that I've heard of were listed in a Wired article posted on/. previously. One used a solution put under pressure to make (at the time) yellow diamonds, the other used carbon vapour deposition to make pure carbon diamonds (which are white). Both are distinguishable from natural diamonds, using spectrometry or some such. The yellow ones had certain metals in them that natural yellow diamonds didn't have. The white, vapour deposition, ones were distinguishable because they had no impurities. So you could take either one to a lab that could do the tests and find out if you had an artificial one or not. Now for the big questions. If you were looking for a big rock to hang on your finger, would you rather save the money and/or get a bigger rock, or be able to say that it was dug out of the ground instead? And if you're looking for purity, say for a semi-conducting material, would prefer the lab-grown one where you can do batch testing for purity, or the field-collected one, where you have to pretty much test each one and still not be guaranteed that there isn't a chemical change in one part or another of it? You can bet where the semiconductor industry will go with that one.
While you're mostly right, there are a couple significant things different between silicon (especially pure silicon) and diamond. Silicon is an element, diamond is a form of an element. Soot can be pure carbon, too, but it doesn't share all the properties of diamond. That said, there was a Wired article posted on/. in the last year or two about a company that was making diamonds using vapour deposition. I doubt that will be more expensive than anything that has to be done with silicon (expecially once you include doping and insulating layers), but it is a different animal.
Thank God the cost of anal probes and specimen storage is not approaching zero.
As you seem to be keeping track of this, and I haven't found any resources to do so, could you please tell me when the costs start going down so I'll know when to pull out my cast iron underwear? Thanks.
A witty saying proves nothing, nor does a bland, forgettable one. But a witty saying usually provies the framework to prove, or disprove, it.
Here's an example: "In capitalism man abuses man, while in communism it's the other way around." Capitalism assumes such a thing will happen (greed is the driving factor). Communism doesn't (altruism is the driving factor). I practice something that looks very much like communism at home, but prefer capitalism in the larger world. Why? Because most people are more concerned about themselves than they are about others, myself included (Given the preference, I'd rather someone else die in some random accident than me. Given an ultimatum to the same effect, I'd pick myself. Fuck terrorists). And this gets down to the crux of the witty saying. Both systems are open to corruption. The difference is, capitalism acknowledges, and harnesses, the flaws of it's members, while communism tries to pretend they don't exist (and of course it's important for our fine leaders to have heat, better food, nicer clothes than the common man he's supposed to be a part of).
And now the facts behind Ben Frankilin's witty saying. We have yet to have a governing framework where some body hasn't abused it's power. So, in giving your government unilaterally increased power (not of the clear and present danger nature, i.e., a declaration of war against an actual territory and political leadership) to deal with a transient issue (and Al Qaeda is as transient as Cuba's leadership), you leave yourself with a problem that is as great as or greater than the one you were trying to solve. Unless you think it is only altruism that drives people into politics.
So yes, Voltaire is correct in his witty saying, "A witty saying proves nothing." but note that that is not the same as "A witty saying is incorrect."
Yes, clever, sly and intelligent. Like the leaders who have (and continue to) evaded tens or hundreds of thousands of troops with the best military technology available. And who have located people naive and gullible enough to take a suicide mission and fly planes into buildings.
And if you think the terrorists who mentioned that they didn't need to land are stupid, how about the whole law-enforcement and security branches that didn't think that was worth pursuing until 9/12?
Exactly my opinion. Purely function-driven code already isn't covered by copyright (copyright an array traversing algorithm? right), but other, more artistic or implementation-specific things are (icons, comments, etc.). Patenting in software almost never works - pretty much the entire industry is built upon previous ideas. I think this guy has fallen for the trap of when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail. And his hammer is patent law, not copyright.
Heh, did my first OSS conversion the other day. I didn't want to totally disrupt their lives, or spend 3 weeks trying to install whichever flavour of Linux on their system, but I took care of the biggest pains. At least they can't make, and drink, a coffee during boot anymore. Spybot/Ad-Aware got rid of 85 classes of spyware, and the system was actually usable again. Then I added Firefox/Thunderbird to handle web/email needs while reducing the risks of popups/adware/spam/viruses. The interesting thing is they would be the last to call themselves computer literate, yet they were like, "whatever, just get this crap off our system, and keep it off." They were happy with Firefox 1.0, and were quite impressed with how fast everything loaded. The install for both was painless, and converted them from IE/OE with almost no hitches. It was interesting, however I don't think my parents would be able to handle it. Any change at all is a bad thing for them.
Another one of my pet peeves that is when people write enormously long sentences that run over the entire width of my screen and that have a lot of subclauses even though the same message, that might actually have held my interest if it were presented more succinctly, could have been split up in multiple shorter sentences that are easier to understand.
All of which, like your post, is grammatically correct.
Well, my definition of dumb is someone who is ignorant, and unwilling to mitigate that ignorance, or even determine the price of mitigating their ignorance. This is not to say my mom is dumb because she doesn't understand the intricacies of computers, but she would be if she didn't seek advice before blithely following links to various sites or opening emails from people she doesn't even know.
I personally am not as current on hardware as I'd like to be, so I read up before I buy something, or ask someone I trust instead. I'm aware that I can't know everything about computers, but acknowledging that you don't know everything isn't a bad thing, either.
I'll save my mod points for someone who's actually worth it. You are not.
Even if whoever wrote that is lying, a measureable portion of HIV+ people are going to be in the group of people who didn't do anything that can be construed as unsafe with the exception of having sex with a single partner who they thought they could trust for a number of years. Some people got HIV because of their parents' indiscretions. What would you say to them? People aren't always easy to judge, and some people have been lied to for years by their partners. Sure, some are gullible, but others just aren't paranoid (read: normal). I think it's also fair to say that that group is a small portion of HIV+ people in North America, and probably most of Europe, too. But only 10% of people are left handed, so are you going to call me a liar for saying I'm left handed?
The biggest invalidity in what you said about your reasons for posting was this. Your reply implies belief in his statement, and treats it with utter disregard. Had you said he was full of shit, I wouldn't have argued with you. But people start calling you down, and you say "well, he was probably lying anyway". He very well could be. But even if what he said is not true of himself, it is true of someone, and that someone would have little choice but to believe you would at least be thinking this, whether or not you said it.
Sure, there's some amount of preparation before you die, but that still isn't doing it. I can train for parachuting, but no one will agree that I've done it until I jump out of a plane, and rightly so.
Before I die, I plan on getting together with my buddies and beating that secret out of you. Now, to start the first part of my plan. Hmm, where can I find some buddies. It can't be that hard....
I'd moderate you offtopic, but I don't have any points. The article title is "Things To To Before You Die". I'm suspecting that LifeGems are reserved for the article "Things To Do After You Die". Although I'll be happy to scrape together $1000 for the first Darwin Award-recieving "gem" who tries to make this relevant to the current article...
I didn't know that five-year-olds posted on/., or that they planned on being centigenarians. Well, to be honest, I kinda figured the first part, but never dreamed that any of the five-year-olds posting on/. thought more than 2 minutes ahead.
And if we followed your logic, we could start breeding humans with anencephaly, or a congenital vegetative state, and have a decent model for testing a number of things on. Does that not seem somehow wrong to you?
Another good reference is the construction of the pyramids. I have yet to hear a good explanation for how the stones were moved or how the various shafts were kept so straight. Knowledge that they could consistently use, which we have yet to rediscover.
Yes, but once I can create my own energy sources, my own shelter, and my own food, maybe I would have the time to make creative works in one field or other. Then all I need to live is a piece of land.
Slashdot Mirror
Because if you fly on the shuttle, the odds of being wiped out are about 1 in 65. Hence, if we had enough shuttles, we could wipe out civilization in 100 years with no need for a natural disaster.
Seriously, space exploration is great, and so is experimental aircraft testing, but let's get a working system for getting people into space. The shuttle isn't it.
Well, first things first. I never said the semiconductor industry would find it too expensive, or even impractical. In fact, once enough research has been done to take care of the hard parts of using a new semiconductor substrate, I think it's inevitable. Diamond is a better material in many ways than silicon.
Now, back to the differences. Here is a description of how silicon is made. It is essentially a 90-year old process for growing single crystals of metal, using a crystal the metal naturally grows into (given fairly normal temperatures and pressures). The big feat here is using an environment to promote purity, and the scale at which it is done. Here is an article that mentions how diamond crystals are grown. Note that this technology, while successfully making a diamond about 35 years ago, is still in its infancy for mono-crystalline diamonds (which is all that matters in this discussion), and that diamond is not the default state for carbon in a relatively normal environment. Note that CVD is nothing new for semiconductor fabrication, so the mere mention of it isn't a stumbling block for the industry. Also, the crystal diameter for diamond is around 160mm (in 2002) vs. 400mm (in 2004) for silicon, and thickness measured in centimeters for diamond vs. meters for silicon.
Which brings me back to my original point. Silicon is relatively easy to work with, and all the hard parts about silicon (maintaining purity, crystal growth process, doping, polishing) are going to be just as hard when working with diamond, if not harder. Then there's the new challenges that diamond adds to the mix, some of which are still being researched.
Get a simple, yet detailed, colour mask on a stick, a la masquerade ball masks. Only hold it in front of your face for the machine transaction. How could anyone say you were planning anything nefarious, with the exception of bypassing the camera on the machine. You'd be identified by every other camera in the building, just not the one that sold you the service. If you did something wrong, it would be trivial for them to ID you if they have half-decent security, yet you've at least attempted to maintain some level of privacy.
But given the cool laws in the U.S. nowadays, that would still probably get you a visit from the boys in the black SUVs.
Outlook/OE shows the url when you hover over the link? Which version is that? I've never seen a description of the link before clicking. I naturally assumed the only option was to not click or grab your ankles and hope it didn't hurt.
The two most promising methods for making diamonds that I've heard of were listed in a Wired article posted on /. previously. One used a solution put under pressure to make (at the time) yellow diamonds, the other used carbon vapour deposition to make pure carbon diamonds (which are white). Both are distinguishable from natural diamonds, using spectrometry or some such. The yellow ones had certain metals in them that natural yellow diamonds didn't have. The white, vapour deposition, ones were distinguishable because they had no impurities. So you could take either one to a lab that could do the tests and find out if you had an artificial one or not. Now for the big questions. If you were looking for a big rock to hang on your finger, would you rather save the money and/or get a bigger rock, or be able to say that it was dug out of the ground instead? And if you're looking for purity, say for a semi-conducting material, would prefer the lab-grown one where you can do batch testing for purity, or the field-collected one, where you have to pretty much test each one and still not be guaranteed that there isn't a chemical change in one part or another of it? You can bet where the semiconductor industry will go with that one.
While you're mostly right, there are a couple significant things different between silicon (especially pure silicon) and diamond. Silicon is an element, diamond is a form of an element. Soot can be pure carbon, too, but it doesn't share all the properties of diamond. That said, there was a Wired article posted on /. in the last year or two about a company that was making diamonds using vapour deposition. I doubt that will be more expensive than anything that has to be done with silicon (expecially once you include doping and insulating layers), but it is a different animal.
Thank God the cost of anal probes and specimen storage is not approaching zero.
As you seem to be keeping track of this, and I haven't found any resources to do so, could you please tell me when the costs start going down so I'll know when to pull out my cast iron underwear? Thanks.
A witty saying proves nothing, nor does a bland, forgettable one. But a witty saying usually provies the framework to prove, or disprove, it.
Here's an example: "In capitalism man abuses man, while in communism it's the other way around." Capitalism assumes such a thing will happen (greed is the driving factor). Communism doesn't (altruism is the driving factor). I practice something that looks very much like communism at home, but prefer capitalism in the larger world. Why? Because most people are more concerned about themselves than they are about others, myself included (Given the preference, I'd rather someone else die in some random accident than me. Given an ultimatum to the same effect, I'd pick myself. Fuck terrorists). And this gets down to the crux of the witty saying. Both systems are open to corruption. The difference is, capitalism acknowledges, and harnesses, the flaws of it's members, while communism tries to pretend they don't exist (and of course it's important for our fine leaders to have heat, better food, nicer clothes than the common man he's supposed to be a part of).
And now the facts behind Ben Frankilin's witty saying. We have yet to have a governing framework where some body hasn't abused it's power. So, in giving your government unilaterally increased power (not of the clear and present danger nature, i.e., a declaration of war against an actual territory and political leadership) to deal with a transient issue (and Al Qaeda is as transient as Cuba's leadership), you leave yourself with a problem that is as great as or greater than the one you were trying to solve. Unless you think it is only altruism that drives people into politics.
So yes, Voltaire is correct in his witty saying, "A witty saying proves nothing." but note that that is not the same as "A witty saying is incorrect."
Yes, clever, sly and intelligent. Like the leaders who have (and continue to) evaded tens or hundreds of thousands of troops with the best military technology available. And who have located people naive and gullible enough to take a suicide mission and fly planes into buildings.
And if you think the terrorists who mentioned that they didn't need to land are stupid, how about the whole law-enforcement and security branches that didn't think that was worth pursuing until 9/12?
Exactly my opinion. Purely function-driven code already isn't covered by copyright (copyright an array traversing algorithm? right), but other, more artistic or implementation-specific things are (icons, comments, etc.). Patenting in software almost never works - pretty much the entire industry is built upon previous ideas. I think this guy has fallen for the trap of when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail. And his hammer is patent law, not copyright.
Yes, but I installed 2 million from my one download. Honest.
Heh, did my first OSS conversion the other day. I didn't want to totally disrupt their lives, or spend 3 weeks trying to install whichever flavour of Linux on their system, but I took care of the biggest pains. At least they can't make, and drink, a coffee during boot anymore. Spybot/Ad-Aware got rid of 85 classes of spyware, and the system was actually usable again. Then I added Firefox/Thunderbird to handle web/email needs while reducing the risks of popups/adware/spam/viruses. The interesting thing is they would be the last to call themselves computer literate, yet they were like, "whatever, just get this crap off our system, and keep it off." They were happy with Firefox 1.0, and were quite impressed with how fast everything loaded. The install for both was painless, and converted them from IE/OE with almost no hitches. It was interesting, however I don't think my parents would be able to handle it. Any change at all is a bad thing for them.
So, is this how the teamsters practice?
Another one of my pet peeves that is when people write enormously long sentences that run over the entire width of my screen and that have a lot of subclauses even though the same message, that might actually have held my interest if it were presented more succinctly, could have been split up in multiple shorter sentences that are easier to understand.
All of which, like your post, is grammatically correct.
Well, my definition of dumb is someone who is ignorant, and unwilling to mitigate that ignorance, or even determine the price of mitigating their ignorance. This is not to say my mom is dumb because she doesn't understand the intricacies of computers, but she would be if she didn't seek advice before blithely following links to various sites or opening emails from people she doesn't even know.
I personally am not as current on hardware as I'd like to be, so I read up before I buy something, or ask someone I trust instead. I'm aware that I can't know everything about computers, but acknowledging that you don't know everything isn't a bad thing, either.
I'll save my mod points for someone who's actually worth it. You are not.
Even if whoever wrote that is lying, a measureable portion of HIV+ people are going to be in the group of people who didn't do anything that can be construed as unsafe with the exception of having sex with a single partner who they thought they could trust for a number of years. Some people got HIV because of their parents' indiscretions. What would you say to them? People aren't always easy to judge, and some people have been lied to for years by their partners. Sure, some are gullible, but others just aren't paranoid (read: normal). I think it's also fair to say that that group is a small portion of HIV+ people in North America, and probably most of Europe, too. But only 10% of people are left handed, so are you going to call me a liar for saying I'm left handed?
The biggest invalidity in what you said about your reasons for posting was this. Your reply implies belief in his statement, and treats it with utter disregard. Had you said he was full of shit, I wouldn't have argued with you. But people start calling you down, and you say "well, he was probably lying anyway". He very well could be. But even if what he said is not true of himself, it is true of someone, and that someone would have little choice but to believe you would at least be thinking this, whether or not you said it.
Sure, there's some amount of preparation before you die, but that still isn't doing it. I can train for parachuting, but no one will agree that I've done it until I jump out of a plane, and rightly so.
Before I die, I plan on getting together with my buddies and beating that secret out of you. Now, to start the first part of my plan. Hmm, where can I find some buddies. It can't be that hard....
I'd moderate you offtopic, but I don't have any points. The article title is "Things To To Before You Die". I'm suspecting that LifeGems are reserved for the article "Things To Do After You Die". Although I'll be happy to scrape together $1000 for the first Darwin Award-recieving "gem" who tries to make this relevant to the current article...
I didn't know that five-year-olds posted on /., or that they planned on being centigenarians. Well, to be honest, I kinda figured the first part, but never dreamed that any of the five-year-olds posting on /. thought more than 2 minutes ahead.
And if we followed your logic, we could start breeding humans with anencephaly, or a congenital vegetative state, and have a decent model for testing a number of things on. Does that not seem somehow wrong to you?
Another good reference is the construction of the pyramids. I have yet to hear a good explanation for how the stones were moved or how the various shafts were kept so straight. Knowledge that they could consistently use, which we have yet to rediscover.
Yes, but once I can create my own energy sources, my own shelter, and my own food, maybe I would have the time to make creative works in one field or other. Then all I need to live is a piece of land.
You are my hero. I'm glad I was at home when I read this, and your parent post.
Yes. Once the Louisville Slugger mod is used, neither Xerox nor the Secret Service is interested in the printer's output.