I think we need a better definition of the anthropic principle. My proposal is: "There is at least one universe which contains at least one species thinking it's the center of said universe."
Where does personal responsibility - specifically, facing the consequences of your actions - enter in your world?
Indeed!
How about the responsibility for cramming disastrous "abstinence only" programs on kids with the KNOWLEDGE that these dumbfuck programs INCREASE infection rates in kids?
Seriously? What evil egotistical deluded monster persists in an idiotic course of action when they KNOW the consequences of that action is to cause an increase in infection and disease in children? When they KNOW that the consequence of their action is to increase child pregnancies?
How about some PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY from the idiots "pushing abstinence only programs? How about them coming out with a huge apology saying "Oops, I thought it was a good idea and I thought it would work and I thought it would help protect kids, BUT I WAS WRONG. It was a mistake and I know know it's a bad idea and I now know it doesn't work and I now know it hurts kids, and I am sincerely and deeply regretful for my mistake and for all of the harm I accidentally caused with my crusade."
How about that? When are we going hear them apologize and get on board with proper sex education, an action that that we know has the consequence of reducing disease and reducing pregnancy in children?
The only thing WORSE than some evil person causing malicious harm is some deluded holier-than-thou crusader trying to "help" people and going on a crusade of causing harm. An ordinary malicious person generally just lies-cheats-steals-assaults people till he gets whatever selfish thing it was he wanted, but the deluded crusader will dedicate himself to his cause as a lifelong mission, and all of the ruined lives and even dead bodies he trails in his wake only serves as further proof to him that he needs to work harder "fixing" the problem. The fact that teen pregnancies and STDs and even AIDS and death INCREASE only serves as further proof to him that his "treatment" should be increased.
And his opponent expects to raise about $3,000 from local voter contributions, out of his anticipated $35,000 or so warchest.
You are sooooooo right! The only proper politician is one beholden to the lobbyists and corporate contributors that supply 90+% of the money to buy his election.
I still have no idea why anyone would give this guy money or vote for him.
Why?
The very fist panel here is almost enough to make me wish I lived in Kansas just so I could vote for him. And an excellent title - It's Like A Flamewar with a Forum Troll, but with an Eventual Winner. Apparently a LOT of people are willing to donate $8.34 (or more) to downmod a Troll out of office.
I looked over the rest of his site, which only reaffirmed that first impression. He seems like a smart funny reasonable... and yes sci&tech savvy guy trying to a troglodyte out of office. Then I skimmed his opponent's site (which has even less info), which does nothing to diminish that first impression.
I reject your argument on the basis that accepting it as fact would establish inconvenient bias in my Fair And Balanced quip tagging conservatives as humor-retarded.
I've gotten used to putting up with all sorts of nasty behavior from Windows over the years, and I guess I could eventually reluctantly learn to get used to the ass fucking.... but I had to dump Vista when it insisted on shitting in my mouth after each ass fucking.
Why do you call him "clueless" when you supported his argument?
you apparently forgot that Republicans are responsible for ending slavery in the US
You apparently forgot civil war parties had absolutely zero resemblance to modern political alignments.
With LBJ's help, they also overcame the opposition of the Democratic leadership in the House and a Democrat filibuster in the Senate to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Exactly.
Conservative Democrats opposed the Civil Rights Act. Conservative/B> racist Democratic politicians and conservative/B> racist Democratic voters then fled the Democratic party to the Republican party. Prior to that, in each region of the country Democrats were slightly more liberal/progressive than Republicans on civil rights. The liberal/progressive Democratic president made a major issue of the civil rights act, which amplified the perception and the reality of the Democratic party being the more liberal/progressive. Political alignments then changed radically, with Republicans taking up a racist strategy to sweep the South.
That was pretty well THE event that set up today's alignment of Democrats as "the liberal party" and Republicans as the "the conservative party".
As he said, Historical trends through the last two centuries have born this out worldwide: liberal views/values/norms steadily become adopted over time while those of conservatives are abandoned.
Which is exactly what happened in the example you cited.
Hell, look at the current gay marriage issue. The war is effectively OVER, but most people just haven't realized it yet.
In 1967, when the Supreme Court nationally legalized interracial marriage, 72% of the national population opposed interracial marriage. Today a majority support legal recognition for same sex couples.
Opposition today against gay unions is primarily amongst senior citizens. The younger generation, under-35, overwhelmingly supports legal recognition.
Nothing can stand against the force of a generational shift. The battle is over, people just don't realize it yet. The younger generation ALWAYS wins, even if they have to bury the older generation to do it. Conservatives are fighting change tooth and nail, obstructing progress at every turn, but they can do no more than fight a battle of delay. The war is over, but the battle bloodily lingers on, conservatives fighting to preserve dying "traditional" discrimination. Exactly as they did (and all too often STILL do) against interracial marriage.
as long as the pro-drug boosters are pretending like it can't be addictive... The definition of addiction at no point states that pot can't be addictive
Right. People can exhibit addictive behavior about virtually anything.
Lets put it this way - I am aware of no credible scientific basis that pot is any more addictive than chocolate.
President Ronald Reagan, Senator Fred Thompson, Ambassador Shirley (Temple) Black, Congressman "Sonny" Bono, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Mayor Clint Eastwood
Hmmm, I think I detect a pattern in there....
President Ronald Reagan: Republican. Senator Fred Thompson: Republican. Congressman "Sonny" Bono: Republican. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger: Republican. Mayor Clint Eastwood: Now self describes as libertarian, but has been registered as a Republican since 1951 and still blatantly sides Republican.
Shirley (Temple) Black - I don't think ambassador really fits in with elected officials, but you listed he so I'll cover her anyway: Shirley (Temple) Black: Republican. Delegate to the United Nations. 1969 President Richard Nixon: Republican. Ambassador to Ghana. 1974-76 President Ford: Republican. Ambassador to Czechoslovakia. 1989-92 President George H.W. Bush: Republican.
Hollywood is stereotypically Democratic, it is routinely used by Republicans as a raging Icon Of Evil, and anytime any "Hollywood Liberal" comments on any political/social issue you hear Republicans having apoplectic fit screaming that Hollywood fame gives them no right or expertise to comment on such issues and that they should just shut-the-fuck-up. Yet it seems Republicans are the ones more inclined to line up behind a candidate who's primary qualification is their acting ability / acting fame.
The short answer is the fact that they are explicitly designed to secure the computer against the owner.
The TPM technical specification explicitly addresses the owner as an enemy in discussing chip security requirements to secure the system against potential attack vectors by the owner.
You realise they ship disabled, right?
Yes. I am a programmer and I have read the 332 page TCPA Main TCG Architecture v1_1b.pdf technical specification from cover to cover. I am well aware of all of the myths and facts of Trusted Computing. I am intimately familiar with the technical capabilities and mechanisms of the TPM.
The fact that the specification suggests that they should be shipped in a disabled state is irrelevant. They are still designed to consider the owner to be the enemy. They are still designed to be secure against the owner, and when activated to secure the computer against the owner.
And more importantly the fact that they may be shipped initially disabled is completely irrelevant because activating them will become cooercive if they become common. If you "decline" to activate the Trust chip you get increasingly locked out of everything. You get locked out of any Trust-enabled software, you get locked out of any Trust-sealed file and file types, you are unable to read trusted e-mail or other documents, you get locked out of any Trust-activated internet connection protocols and even locked out of any Trust-utilizing websites. But beyond that, the Trusted Computing Group has created Trusted Network Connect (TNC). What TNC is deny a network connection if you decline to activate your Trust chip. And even if you do activate the chip, TNC denies you a network connection if your system software is unapproved, denies you a network connection if you are not running the mandated approved system software. Right now TNC is being advertised to corporations to lock down their internal networks. However several years ago the Presidential Advisor for Cyberspace Security gave a keynote speech at a Washington D.C. World Summit and called on ISPs to forcibly impose exactly this sort of system as a condition for internet access (to protect us against terrorist cyber attack of course). Obviously ISP's can't just impose such a system today - but Microsoft's intent was for the TMP to be a a motherboard requirement for all Vista compatible PCs, and presumably they still intend a motherboard TMP requirement for the next release of Windows. ALL new PCs would come with a TMP installed by default, whether you want it or not. And if ALL new PCs ship with this chip, and the typical replacement cycle of PCs is just a few years, then it doesn't take many years at all for close to 100% of the PC install base to have these chips on board. And yes, at that point it does become possible for ISPs to make them mandatory. ISPs would merely say old obsolete non-compliant hardware is "no longer supported".
That of course is a worst case scenario. However activating the TMP becomes extremely cooercive long before you get locked off of the internet for declining. The Trust system can and WILL easily lock you out of many lesser things long before anything gets anywhere near that doomsday scenario.
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Note that I am an extremely reasonable person and I have extremely reasonable and minimal requirements to drop my opposition to TMPs completely. All I want is the mere option to buy otherwise identical chips that are NOT locked against the owner, that do NOT lock the computer against the owner. All I want is the option for people to be able to buy systems where they owner IS permitted to get the Master Key locking their computer.
I am going to get technical for a moment. If you know TMP technical details, great. If you don't, you can just gloss over it. My example suggestion, one of many possible solutions, would be to permit people to get a printed copy of their chip PrivEKey when they buy their system, and to enable the chip to export the
>Under ordinary situations it shouldn't cost much energy simply to pump a charge back and forth between what are essentially two capacitors.
Really? How do you do that?
With ordinary caps it is virtually free. The first half of the transfer is obvious - if you simply connected the two caps then half the charge would run over to the second one. Two half-charged caps. What you actually do is connect the two caps with an inductor between them. An inductor acts like "momentum" for current. The charge on the first cap wants to bleed off. That pressure drives a current carrying half the charge into the second cap. That current turns the inductor into an electromagnet, the inductor builds up magnetic field energy. At the half way point both cap are half charged the electricity is happy, but now the inductor is stuck with a magnetic field and that energy wants to collapse. The collapsing of the magnetic field becomes a mirror image of how the field formed - the same amount of current is driven through in the same direction by the dying magnetic field. This drives the second half of the charge into the second cap.
One you have the full charge moved to the second cap then you cut the circuit. If you don't cut the circuit then the entire process would run back the other way. The full charge swings back over to the first cap again. It's an oscillator with the charge swinging back and forth like a pendulum between the two caps. That is one of the basic electronic oscillator circuits, although it doesn't usually use two caps. Instead normally one cap bleeds all the way to zero then the "momentum" of the inductor carries everything to the same capacitor charge in the opposite direction. Again it's just like a pendulum swinging, but in this case midpoint is zero charge on one cap instead centering on half-charge across two caps.
The only meaningful loss of energy when transferring charge from one capacitor to another in the resistance of the wiring. That loss should be minimal.
I am mostly self-taught in electronics. I figured out how all the other circuit components worked from playing with a really great 200-in-1 electronics kit as a child, but it wasn't until years later that I understood anything about inductors.
add work somewhere... the permitivity of the material drops... charge at high capacitance, and discharge a low
Chuckle, I was trying to say exactly that in less technical terms last post. Permitivity is pretty much what I was describing by the "counter field in the material", and that that change lowered the energy you get back when you pull the charge out.
If your electrode is fixed to the material, the only way to cycle it is to switch the field on the electrode.
Under ordinary situations it shouldn't cost much energy simply to pump a charge back and forth between what are essentially two capacitors. However in this case the heat material is doing work from that charge. The work-based counter field built up in the material will lose you energy when you pull the charge back out. But it costs energy to run a heat pump, period. No surprises there.
This thing could be extremely efficient or dismally inefficient. We'd really need some sort of test results on that. Perhaps I'm just being a cynic, but the fact that no efficiency was mentioned might be because the efficiency figures have "negative advertizing value". Chuckle.
If your electrode is fixed to the material, the only way to cycle it is to switch the field on the electrode.
Any arrangment of physically moving parts is going to cost you just as much work to do the pumping. Physically moving charged plates at all with respect to each other would probably be a killer. I was thinking of rotating disk of material through a fixed field - the work based counter-charge in the material would create a work drag against the spinning which is OK - but the problem I missed at first is that arranging thermal contact with the moving disk is a bit messy. I think it's going to be hard for any moving-parts setup to beat simply pumping the charge around electronically .
Oh, and another though I had. It seems entirely reasonable and beneficial to make the material layers extremely thin, perhaps even a small fraction of a millimeter thick each and stack up lots of them. Making ordinary thin film capacitors the layers much thinner than that is typical. That could get the operating voltage down to 10,000V or less. A merely mildly-annoying voltage, less than a TV tube.
Good. I hope Infineon goes friking bankrupt and dies. They are one of the manufacturers of Trusted Platform Modules. That puts them right near the top of my shit-list.
Doh.... yeah.... that technically proper solution didn't even cross my mind. My first reaction was to hackishly defeat the troublesome parser. I closed and re-opened italic tags in the middle of euro to hide the word from the system. Chuckle.
Either you put the fluid in the field (wasting the precious narrow space there) or you put it outside the field, in which case the heat has to leak through the electrical contacts.
Ahh! No!:) You don't put the fluid in the crucial space inside the field, and you don't put the fluid outside the field attempting to leech the heat through the contacts. I just thought of a third option! One that solves both issues!
If we were in a face-to-face conversation I'd give you a moment to puzzle it over, let you try to figure it out yourself if you want. But I'll just post it below. Quit reading here if you want to puzzle it over yourself.
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Picture a horizontal positive electrode bar across the top, and a far distance down negative electrode across the bottom. (A useless electric field at the moment.) Now run electrode "fingers" like a comb down from the top electrode. Now you run similar fingers up from the bottom, right between the fingers coming down from the top. The distance between the comb-fingers is your electric field distance, and the heat-material is in solid contact with both electrodes. So instead of having 2-D sheet of this heat material laid between a pair of 2-D sheet electrodes, you have an almost 1-D line of heat-material snaking back and forth a hundred times between an alternating comb of lots of 1-D electrode fingers. And now you make *this* entire arrangement a reasonably thin solid 2-D sheet. Now you can use the 3rd dimension to run the fluid above and below this sheet, right in contact with the heat-material. You could hang rows of these heat-sheets in a bath of fluid.
Sometimes times I describe a less than ideal designs just to prove some point or concept on here, but in this case I think this might actually be a really good practical design. Maybe I should go get a patent on it:D
Hmmm, I just thought of something. Since these electrodes are high voltage but essentially zero current, you can get by with a microscopically thin electrode coating painted or otherwise deposited on the surface of a sheet of heat material. Thermo-conductivity through such a thin electrode would be a total non issue. That makes my comb design completely unnecessary. Oh well. Another get-rich-quick idea flies out the window. Oh well.... at least it was fun coming up with the idea anyway.
On carbon dating, and the broader issue of evolution and related science, there are basically two sides making contradictory claims and giving the public contradictory information. Clearly the information from one side is unreliable. Clearly one side is either willfully lying, or is so smug in their certainty of their Truth that they are ignorantly and blindly spewing false dogma. Either way there is one side confusing and misleading the public with junk data and junk arguments.
The problem then is to spot which side is which, to spot which side is maliciously or ignorantly giving us bad information, to figure out which side can't be trusted. And your example - carbon dating cars at 10,000 years old - is an ideal example for figuring out which side has the good science and which side is junk. But first we need to look at how carbon dating operates.
Carbon14 is radioactive, and is constantly slowly breaking down towards zero. It is created by the radiation bombarding the top of the atmosphere. So *in the atmosphere* the rate of C14 break down exactly balances with the rate it is being created, so that *the atmosphere* has a steady level of C14.
Once carbon *leaves the atmosphere*, the C14 level slowly steadily breaks down towards zero. *This* is what carbon dating measures - how long ago it was it was constant-level atmospheric carbon. This is the *only* thing it measures. Now consider a plant - it used photosynthesis to consume CO2 from the air and convert it into sugars and starches and everything else that makes up the plant. Essentially all of the carbon in the plant came from CO2 from the air. The entire plant is built out of CO2 from the air. Carbon dating measures when the CO2 left the atmosphere - it measures when the plant "ate" that CO2 and incorporated it into the makeup of the plant. The plant stopped "eating" CO2 the day it died. The carbon in a dead plant represents the day it died, and the few years just before when it was growing and building up that material. That is the date you measure when you carbon date a dead plant.
Now consider animals. Animals are built out of the food they eat. Animals either eat plants - eating the carbon from the plant - or the animal is a predator which eats plant-eating-animals. Either way the animal is ultimately built out of plant-carbon. So when you carbon date animal tissue, you're not actually dating the animal. You are dating the plant's-carbon which the animal is built from, you are dating the plant it ate, and specifically you are dating when that plant collected that carbon from the air.
The only thing carbon dating measures is when that carbon was collected out of the atmosphere. For plants and animals, that date is within a few years of the day the plant or animal died. Even the most precise carbon dating has a margin of error of hundreds of years, so the date the carbon left the atmosphere is for all practical purposes the same date the plant or animal died.
Now consider a car. Cars aren't alive, they don't eat. Cars are not made from atmospheric CO2. They aren't built out of freshly dead plants with their freshly collected CO2 from the air.
You can't use carbon dating on a car. The carbon in a car generally came from some mineral or some oil deposit. New cars are built out of "old" carbon, carbon where the C14 is already broken down. New cars are built out of old carbon, and that old carbon is going to date as old.
It is almost ridiculously improbable for someone to study and learn how to preform a reliable carbon dating test without also learning that carbon dating *only* works on organic matter, without learning and knowing that carbon dating a car is a totally invalid test with totally bogus results. *IF* someone actually ran such a test, they were almost certainly aware that the results would be totally bogus.
Anyone preforming and reporting a carbon date on a car either has no understanding of what they are doing
t does appear that evolutionary science is completely rewritten every few years
Details are being filled in, but it's hardly being "completely rewritten".
Amongst other things, we have a continuous and complete fossil record for a significant chunk of the tree of life in Phylum Foraminifera. A record spanning thousands of species and over a hundred million years, tracing diverse current species back to their common ancestor. Not merely a complete sequence of transitional species, but continuous intermediate forms along each speciation event. A virtual videotape of evolution in action.
How do we have such a perfect record for this chunk of life when fossils are usually so rare and random? Foraminifera are tiny animals with mineral skelletons called 'tests', and they live in the ocean by the trillions. Millions of them are dying every day, continuously raining down on the deep cold dark inert sea floor. A continuous rain of ideal fossil tests in the slowly accumulating sea floor sediment. Perfectly time-layered in the slowly accumulating sediment.
In the 1970's we developed advanced drilling techniques for deep sea oil exploration, and we started pulling up long exploratory drill cores from the sea floor. Cores incidentally loaded with perfectly layered Foraminifera fossils by the tens and of thousands. Scientists can pull up an unlimited supply of these fossils essentially at will.
Foraminifera are not nearly as big and glamorous as mammals, but scientifically it's the equivalent of a complete record tracing lions and sheep and bats and other mammals back to their common ancestor.
So yes, based on the fossil record and far more other evidence, all of the fundamentals of evolution are proven way beyond any reasonable doubt. Common descent is true.
You're essentially right that the grandparent post's design doesn't work. If you simply stack and cycle them the linear conduction effects will always cancel out. However by cycling them out of phase as he described does spike one of them to a slightly higher temperature (shorter time at a higher temp, longer time at a cool temp). Thermal radiation is a nonlinear effect, so one side radiates a minute amount more than the other side. His design will incidentally pump a minuscule fraction of a degree. I programmed up a digital simulation and it is a barely detectable effect.
With a different design you can do a non-moving-parts setup. If you have a conductive fluid, you can pass a current through it in a magnetic field. This electromagnetic interaction exerts a force directly on the fluid - a pump with no moving parts. When you reverse the direction of the current it reverses the direction it pumps the fluid. So you can electrically pump the fluid through coils on this heating/cooling material to carry the cold into the refrigerator and pump the heat out to a radiator coil, and then reverse the fluid direction at the same time you reverse the polarity on the heating/cooling material. No moving parts except for the fluid. Probably not the best design, but just a proof-of-concept that a non-moving-parts design is possible.
magnetic cooling doesn't have this problem, because we can use a permanent magnet with a several cm gap, and balance material moving into the gap with material moving out.
Mightn't that approach work here? You have a fixed electric field capacitor and rotate a disk of this material through it?
I realize that the electric field gradient that this stuff wants is pretty extreme, to reach that field you want the gap as narrow as possible, and that working in such a narrow gap is a challenge, but it might be better to cycle the material through the field than to try to cycle the electric field?
Slashdot Mirror
I think we need a better definition of the anthropic principle. My proposal is: "There is at least one universe which contains at least one species thinking it's the center of said universe."
That's the egotistical principal.
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Where does personal responsibility - specifically, facing the consequences of your actions - enter in your world?
Indeed!
How about the responsibility for cramming disastrous "abstinence only" programs on kids with the KNOWLEDGE that these dumbfuck programs INCREASE infection rates in kids?
Seriously? What evil egotistical deluded monster persists in an idiotic course of action when they KNOW the consequences of that action is to cause an increase in infection and disease in children? When they KNOW that the consequence of their action is to increase child pregnancies?
How about some PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY from the idiots "pushing abstinence only programs? How about them coming out with a huge apology saying "Oops, I thought it was a good idea and I thought it would work and I thought it would help protect kids, BUT I WAS WRONG. It was a mistake and I know know it's a bad idea and I now know it doesn't work and I now know it hurts kids, and I am sincerely and deeply regretful for my mistake and for all of the harm I accidentally caused with my crusade."
How about that? When are we going hear them apologize and get on board with proper sex education, an action that that we know has the consequence of reducing disease and reducing pregnancy in children?
The only thing WORSE than some evil person causing malicious harm is some deluded holier-than-thou crusader trying to "help" people and going on a crusade of causing harm. An ordinary malicious person generally just lies-cheats-steals-assaults people till he gets whatever selfish thing it was he wanted, but the deluded crusader will dedicate himself to his cause as a lifelong mission, and all of the ruined lives and even dead bodies he trails in his wake only serves as further proof to him that he needs to work harder "fixing" the problem. The fact that teen pregnancies and STDs and even AIDS and death INCREASE only serves as further proof to him that his "treatment" should be increased.
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Politics... teaching/protecting children... condoms... computers....
Wow. Did you by any chance have latest xkcd comic on-the-brain before you posted?
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Most everyone I've ever worked with in the tech industry, tends to be quite conservative...and I'd guess they lean more towards the Republicans.
Yeah, everyone knows Slashdot is a major haven of rightwing radicals. In fact it's one of the biggest and last holdouts of Bush supporters.
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Yeeeahhhhh.....
And his opponent expects to raise about $3,000 from local voter contributions, out of his anticipated $35,000 or so warchest.
You are sooooooo right! The only proper politician is one beholden to the lobbyists and corporate contributors that supply 90+% of the money to buy his election.
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I still have no idea why anyone would give this guy money or vote for him.
Why?
The very fist panel here is almost enough to make me wish I lived in Kansas just so I could vote for him. And an excellent title - It's Like A Flamewar with a Forum Troll, but with an Eventual Winner. Apparently a LOT of people are willing to donate $8.34 (or more) to downmod a Troll out of office.
I looked over the rest of his site, which only reaffirmed that first impression. He seems like a smart funny reasonable... and yes sci&tech savvy guy trying to a troglodyte out of office. Then I skimmed his opponent's site (which has even less info), which does nothing to diminish that first impression.
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I reject your argument on the basis that accepting it as fact would establish inconvenient bias in my Fair And Balanced quip tagging conservatives as humor-retarded.
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I've gotten used to putting up with all sorts of nasty behavior from Windows over the years, and I guess I could eventually reluctantly learn to get used to the ass fucking.... but I had to dump Vista when it insisted on shitting in my mouth after each ass fucking.
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Gahhh, I forgot to preview :/
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Why do you call him "clueless" when you supported his argument?
you apparently forgot that Republicans are responsible for ending slavery in the US
You apparently forgot civil war parties had absolutely zero resemblance to modern political alignments.
With LBJ's help, they also overcame the opposition of the Democratic leadership in the House and a Democrat filibuster in the Senate to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Exactly.
Conservative Democrats opposed the Civil Rights Act. Conservative/B> racist Democratic politicians and conservative/B> racist Democratic voters then fled the Democratic party to the Republican party. Prior to that, in each region of the country Democrats were slightly more liberal/progressive than Republicans on civil rights. The liberal/progressive Democratic president made a major issue of the civil rights act, which amplified the perception and the reality of the Democratic party being the more liberal/progressive. Political alignments then changed radically, with Republicans taking up a racist strategy to sweep the South.
That was pretty well THE event that set up today's alignment of Democrats as "the liberal party" and Republicans as the "the conservative party".
As he said, Historical trends through the last two centuries have born this out worldwide: liberal views/values/norms steadily become adopted over time while those of conservatives are abandoned.
Which is exactly what happened in the example you cited.
Hell, look at the current gay marriage issue. The war is effectively OVER, but most people just haven't realized it yet.
In 1967, when the Supreme Court nationally legalized interracial marriage, 72% of the national population opposed interracial marriage.
Today a majority support legal recognition for same sex couples.
Opposition today against gay unions is primarily amongst senior citizens. The younger generation, under-35, overwhelmingly supports legal recognition.
Nothing can stand against the force of a generational shift. The battle is over, people just don't realize it yet. The younger generation ALWAYS wins, even if they have to bury the older generation to do it. Conservatives are fighting change tooth and nail, obstructing progress at every turn, but they can do no more than fight a battle of delay. The war is over, but the battle bloodily lingers on, conservatives fighting to preserve dying "traditional" discrimination. Exactly as they did (and all too often STILL do) against interracial marriage.
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Wow, Air America still exists? I could have sworn they died and closed up shop.
Conservatives are braindamaged incompetent at comedy, and liberals are braindamaged incompetent at talk radio.
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The only thing better than Lewis Black in the Senate would be Lewis Black in the UN.
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it's closely monitored by the Dr. and pharmacist to ensure that it's not being abused
I don't know where you're from, but we don't need y'all foreigners round here.
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as long as the pro-drug boosters are pretending like it can't be addictive...
The definition of addiction at no point states that pot can't be addictive
Right. People can exhibit addictive behavior about virtually anything.
Lets put it this way - I am aware of no credible scientific basis that pot is any more addictive than chocolate.
And for a little amusing non-scientific research:
Results 1 - 10 of about 1,680,000 for chocolate addictive
Results 1 - 10 of about 1,530,000 for pot addictive
Results 1 - 10 of about 1,610,000 for chocoholic
Results 1 - 10 of about 286 for potoholic
(Interesting - apparently there are Phantom Of The Opera POTO-holics, chuckle)
Results 1 - 10 of about 61,300 for "chocolate addict"
Results 1 - 10 of about 3,240 for "pot addict"
Results 1 - 10 of about 41,600 for "chocolate addiction"
Results 1 - 10 of about 9,780 for "pot addiction"
Results 1 - 2 of 2 for "chocolate cost me my job"
No results found for "pot cost me my job"
Results 1 - 1 of 1 for "chocolate ruined my marriage"
No results found for "pot ruined my marriage"
Results 1 - 10 of about 325,000 for "death by chocolate"
Results 1 - 10 of about 173 for "death by pot"
(Most of those links are say "not one documented case of death by pot", and quite a few talk of pot roast, pot pie, pot noodles, or pot hole hehe)
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President Ronald Reagan, Senator Fred Thompson, Ambassador Shirley (Temple) Black, Congressman "Sonny" Bono, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Mayor Clint Eastwood
Hmmm, I think I detect a pattern in there....
President Ronald Reagan: Republican.
Senator Fred Thompson: Republican.
Congressman "Sonny" Bono: Republican.
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger: Republican.
Mayor Clint Eastwood: Now self describes as libertarian, but has been registered as a Republican since 1951 and still blatantly sides Republican.
Shirley (Temple) Black - I don't think ambassador really fits in with elected officials, but you listed he so I'll cover her anyway:
Shirley (Temple) Black: Republican.
Delegate to the United Nations. 1969 President Richard Nixon: Republican.
Ambassador to Ghana. 1974-76 President Ford: Republican.
Ambassador to Czechoslovakia. 1989-92 President George H.W. Bush: Republican.
Hollywood is stereotypically Democratic, it is routinely used by Republicans as a raging Icon Of Evil, and anytime any "Hollywood Liberal" comments on any political/social issue you hear Republicans having apoplectic fit screaming that Hollywood fame gives them no right or expertise to comment on such issues and that they should just shut-the-fuck-up. Yet it seems Republicans are the ones more inclined to line up behind a candidate who's primary qualification is their acting ability / acting fame.
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What's so bad about a TPM?
The short answer is the fact that they are explicitly designed to secure the computer against the owner.
The TPM technical specification explicitly addresses the owner as an enemy in discussing chip security requirements to secure the system against potential attack vectors by the owner.
You realise they ship disabled, right?
Yes. I am a programmer and I have read the 332 page TCPA Main TCG Architecture v1_1b.pdf technical specification from cover to cover. I am well aware of all of the myths and facts of Trusted Computing. I am intimately familiar with the technical capabilities and mechanisms of the TPM.
The fact that the specification suggests that they should be shipped in a disabled state is irrelevant. They are still designed to consider the owner to be the enemy. They are still designed to be secure against the owner, and when activated to secure the computer against the owner.
And more importantly the fact that they may be shipped initially disabled is completely irrelevant because activating them will become cooercive if they become common. If you "decline" to activate the Trust chip you get increasingly locked out of everything. You get locked out of any Trust-enabled software, you get locked out of any Trust-sealed file and file types, you are unable to read trusted e-mail or other documents, you get locked out of any Trust-activated internet connection protocols and even locked out of any Trust-utilizing websites. But beyond that, the Trusted Computing Group has created Trusted Network Connect (TNC). What TNC is deny a network connection if you decline to activate your Trust chip. And even if you do activate the chip, TNC denies you a network connection if your system software is unapproved, denies you a network connection if you are not running the mandated approved system software. Right now TNC is being advertised to corporations to lock down their internal networks. However several years ago the Presidential Advisor for Cyberspace Security gave a keynote speech at a Washington D.C. World Summit and called on ISPs to forcibly impose exactly this sort of system as a condition for internet access (to protect us against terrorist cyber attack of course). Obviously ISP's can't just impose such a system today - but Microsoft's intent was for the TMP to be a a motherboard requirement for all Vista compatible PCs, and presumably they still intend a motherboard TMP requirement for the next release of Windows. ALL new PCs would come with a TMP installed by default, whether you want it or not. And if ALL new PCs ship with this chip, and the typical replacement cycle of PCs is just a few years, then it doesn't take many years at all for close to 100% of the PC install base to have these chips on board. And yes, at that point it does become possible for ISPs to make them mandatory. ISPs would merely say old obsolete non-compliant hardware is "no longer supported".
That of course is a worst case scenario. However activating the TMP becomes extremely cooercive long before you get locked off of the internet for declining. The Trust system can and WILL easily lock you out of many lesser things long before anything gets anywhere near that doomsday scenario.
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Note that I am an extremely reasonable person and I have extremely reasonable and minimal requirements to drop my opposition to TMPs completely. All I want is the mere option to buy otherwise identical chips that are NOT locked against the owner, that do NOT lock the computer against the owner. All I want is the option for people to be able to buy systems where they owner IS permitted to get the Master Key locking their computer.
I am going to get technical for a moment. If you know TMP technical details, great. If you don't, you can just gloss over it. My example suggestion, one of many possible solutions, would be to permit people to get a printed copy of their chip PrivEKey when they buy their system, and to enable the chip to export the
>Under ordinary situations it shouldn't cost much energy simply to pump a charge back and forth between what are essentially two capacitors.
Really? How do you do that?
With ordinary caps it is virtually free. The first half of the transfer is obvious - if you simply connected the two caps then half the charge would run over to the second one. Two half-charged caps. What you actually do is connect the two caps with an inductor between them. An inductor acts like "momentum" for current. The charge on the first cap wants to bleed off. That pressure drives a current carrying half the charge into the second cap. That current turns the inductor into an electromagnet, the inductor builds up magnetic field energy. At the half way point both cap are half charged the electricity is happy, but now the inductor is stuck with a magnetic field and that energy wants to collapse. The collapsing of the magnetic field becomes a mirror image of how the field formed - the same amount of current is driven through in the same direction by the dying magnetic field. This drives the second half of the charge into the second cap.
One you have the full charge moved to the second cap then you cut the circuit. If you don't cut the circuit then the entire process would run back the other way. The full charge swings back over to the first cap again. It's an oscillator with the charge swinging back and forth like a pendulum between the two caps. That is one of the basic electronic oscillator circuits, although it doesn't usually use two caps. Instead normally one cap bleeds all the way to zero then the "momentum" of the inductor carries everything to the same capacitor charge in the opposite direction. Again it's just like a pendulum swinging, but in this case midpoint is zero charge on one cap instead centering on half-charge across two caps.
The only meaningful loss of energy when transferring charge from one capacitor to another in the resistance of the wiring. That loss should be minimal.
I am mostly self-taught in electronics. I figured out how all the other circuit components worked from playing with a really great 200-in-1 electronics kit as a child, but it wasn't until years later that I understood anything about inductors.
add work somewhere... the permitivity of the material drops... charge at high capacitance, and discharge a low
Chuckle, I was trying to say exactly that in less technical terms last post. Permitivity is pretty much what I was describing by the "counter field in the material", and that that change lowered the energy you get back when you pull the charge out.
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If your electrode is fixed to the material, the only way to cycle it is to switch the field on the electrode.
Under ordinary situations it shouldn't cost much energy simply to pump a charge back and forth between what are essentially two capacitors. However in this case the heat material is doing work from that charge. The work-based counter field built up in the material will lose you energy when you pull the charge back out. But it costs energy to run a heat pump, period. No surprises there.
This thing could be extremely efficient or dismally inefficient. We'd really need some sort of test results on that. Perhaps I'm just being a cynic, but the fact that no efficiency was mentioned might be because the efficiency figures have "negative advertizing value". Chuckle.
If your electrode is fixed to the material, the only way to cycle it is to switch the field on the electrode.
Any arrangment of physically moving parts is going to cost you just as much work to do the pumping. Physically moving charged plates at all with respect to each other would probably be a killer. I was thinking of rotating disk of material through a fixed field - the work based counter-charge in the material would create a work drag against the spinning which is OK - but the problem I missed at first is that arranging thermal contact with the moving disk is a bit messy. I think it's going to be hard for any moving-parts setup to beat simply pumping the charge around electronically .
Oh, and another though I had. It seems entirely reasonable and beneficial to make the material layers extremely thin, perhaps even a small fraction of a millimeter thick each and stack up lots of them. Making ordinary thin film capacitors the layers much thinner than that is typical. That could get the operating voltage down to 10,000V or less. A merely mildly-annoying voltage, less than a TV tube.
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Good. I hope Infineon goes friking bankrupt and dies.
They are one of the manufacturers of Trusted Platform Modules.
That puts them right near the top of my shit-list.
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Doh.... yeah.... that technically proper solution didn't even cross my mind.
My first reaction was to hackishly defeat the troublesome parser. I closed and re-opened italic tags in the middle of euro to hide the word from the system. Chuckle.
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Either you put the fluid in the field (wasting the precious narrow space there) or you put it outside the field, in which case the heat has to leak through the electrical contacts.
Ahh! No! :) You don't put the fluid in the crucial space inside the field, and you don't put the fluid outside the field attempting to leech the heat through the contacts. I just thought of a third option! One that solves both issues!
If we were in a face-to-face conversation I'd give you a moment to puzzle it over, let you try to figure it out yourself if you want. But I'll just post it below. Quit reading here if you want to puzzle it over yourself.
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Picture a horizontal positive electrode bar across the top, and a far distance down negative electrode across the bottom. (A useless electric field at the moment.) Now run electrode "fingers" like a comb down from the top electrode. Now you run similar fingers up from the bottom, right between the fingers coming down from the top. The distance between the comb-fingers is your electric field distance, and the heat-material is in solid contact with both electrodes. So instead of having 2-D sheet of this heat material laid between a pair of 2-D sheet electrodes, you have an almost 1-D line of heat-material snaking back and forth a hundred times between an alternating comb of lots of 1-D electrode fingers. And now you make *this* entire arrangement a reasonably thin solid 2-D sheet. Now you can use the 3rd dimension to run the fluid above and below this sheet, right in contact with the heat-material. You could hang rows of these heat-sheets in a bath of fluid.
Sometimes times I describe a less than ideal designs just to prove some point or concept on here, but in this case I think this might actually be a really good practical design. Maybe I should go get a patent on it :D
Hmmm, I just thought of something. Since these electrodes are high voltage but essentially zero current, you can get by with a microscopically thin electrode coating painted or otherwise deposited on the surface of a sheet of heat material. Thermo-conductivity through such a thin electrode would be a total non issue. That makes my comb design completely unnecessary. Oh well. Another get-rich-quick idea flies out the window. Oh well.... at least it was fun coming up with the idea anyway.
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Cars are still carbon dated at 10,000 years old
Ahh! Excellent example!
On carbon dating, and the broader issue of evolution and related science, there are basically two sides making contradictory claims and giving the public contradictory information. Clearly the information from one side is unreliable. Clearly one side is either willfully lying, or is so smug in their certainty of their Truth that they are ignorantly and blindly spewing false dogma. Either way there is one side confusing and misleading the public with junk data and junk arguments.
The problem then is to spot which side is which, to spot which side is maliciously or ignorantly giving us bad information, to figure out which side can't be trusted. And your example - carbon dating cars at 10,000 years old - is an ideal example for figuring out which side has the good science and which side is junk. But first we need to look at how carbon dating operates.
Carbon14 is radioactive, and is constantly slowly breaking down towards zero. It is created by the radiation bombarding the top of the atmosphere. So *in the atmosphere* the rate of C14 break down exactly balances with the rate it is being created, so that *the atmosphere* has a steady level of C14.
Once carbon *leaves the atmosphere*, the C14 level slowly steadily breaks down towards zero. *This* is what carbon dating measures - how long ago it was it was constant-level atmospheric carbon. This is the *only* thing it measures. Now consider a plant - it used photosynthesis to consume CO2 from the air and convert it into sugars and starches and everything else that makes up the plant. Essentially all of the carbon in the plant came from CO2 from the air. The entire plant is built out of CO2 from the air. Carbon dating measures when the CO2 left the atmosphere - it measures when the plant "ate" that CO2 and incorporated it into the makeup of the plant. The plant stopped "eating" CO2 the day it died. The carbon in a dead plant represents the day it died, and the few years just before when it was growing and building up that material. That is the date you measure when you carbon date a dead plant.
Now consider animals. Animals are built out of the food they eat. Animals either eat plants - eating the carbon from the plant - or the animal is a predator which eats plant-eating-animals. Either way the animal is ultimately built out of plant-carbon. So when you carbon date animal tissue, you're not actually dating the animal. You are dating the plant's-carbon which the animal is built from, you are dating the plant it ate, and specifically you are dating when that plant collected that carbon from the air.
The only thing carbon dating measures is when that carbon was collected out of the atmosphere. For plants and animals, that date is within a few years of the day the plant or animal died. Even the most precise carbon dating has a margin of error of hundreds of years, so the date the carbon left the atmosphere is for all practical purposes the same date the plant or animal died.
Now consider a car. Cars aren't alive, they don't eat. Cars are not made from atmospheric CO2. They aren't built out of freshly dead plants with their freshly collected CO2 from the air.
You can't use carbon dating on a car. The carbon in a car generally came from some mineral or some oil deposit. New cars are built out of "old" carbon, carbon where the C14 is already broken down. New cars are built out of old carbon, and that old carbon is going to date as old.
It is almost ridiculously improbable for someone to study and learn how to preform a reliable carbon dating test without also learning that carbon dating *only* works on organic matter, without learning and knowing that carbon dating a car is a totally invalid test with totally bogus results. *IF* someone actually ran such a test, they were almost certainly aware that the results would be totally bogus.
Anyone preforming and reporting a carbon date on a car either has no understanding of what they are doing
t does appear that evolutionary science is completely rewritten every few years
Details are being filled in, but it's hardly being "completely rewritten".
Amongst other things, we have a continuous and complete fossil record for a significant chunk of the tree of life in Phylum Foraminifera. A record spanning thousands of species and over a hundred million years, tracing diverse current species back to their common ancestor. Not merely a complete sequence of transitional species, but continuous intermediate forms along each speciation event. A virtual videotape of evolution in action.
How do we have such a perfect record for this chunk of life when fossils are usually so rare and random? Foraminifera are tiny animals with mineral skelletons called 'tests', and they live in the ocean by the trillions. Millions of them are dying every day, continuously raining down on the deep cold dark inert sea floor. A continuous rain of ideal fossil tests in the slowly accumulating sea floor sediment. Perfectly time-layered in the slowly accumulating sediment.
In the 1970's we developed advanced drilling techniques for deep sea oil exploration, and we started pulling up long exploratory drill cores from the sea floor. Cores incidentally loaded with perfectly layered Foraminifera fossils by the tens and of thousands. Scientists can pull up an unlimited supply of these fossils essentially at will.
Foraminifera are not nearly as big and glamorous as mammals, but scientifically it's the equivalent of a complete record tracing lions and sheep and bats and other mammals back to their common ancestor.
So yes, based on the fossil record and far more other evidence, all of the fundamentals of evolution are proven way beyond any reasonable doubt. Common descent is true.
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You're essentially right that the grandparent post's design doesn't work. If you simply stack and cycle them the linear conduction effects will always cancel out. However by cycling them out of phase as he described does spike one of them to a slightly higher temperature (shorter time at a higher temp, longer time at a cool temp). Thermal radiation is a nonlinear effect, so one side radiates a minute amount more than the other side. His design will incidentally pump a minuscule fraction of a degree. I programmed up a digital simulation and it is a barely detectable effect.
With a different design you can do a non-moving-parts setup. If you have a conductive fluid, you can pass a current through it in a magnetic field. This electromagnetic interaction exerts a force directly on the fluid - a pump with no moving parts. When you reverse the direction of the current it reverses the direction it pumps the fluid. So you can electrically pump the fluid through coils on this heating/cooling material to carry the cold into the refrigerator and pump the heat out to a radiator coil, and then reverse the fluid direction at the same time you reverse the polarity on the heating/cooling material. No moving parts except for the fluid. Probably not the best design, but just a proof-of-concept that a non-moving-parts design is possible.
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magnetic cooling doesn't have this problem, because we can use a permanent magnet with a several cm gap, and balance material moving into the gap with material moving out.
Mightn't that approach work here? You have a fixed electric field capacitor and rotate a disk of this material through it?
I realize that the electric field gradient that this stuff wants is pretty extreme, to reach that field you want the gap as narrow as possible, and that working in such a narrow gap is a challenge, but it might be better to cycle the material through the field than to try to cycle the electric field?
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