You could have made the same arguments about going to the moon in the 60s. Assuming automagical advances in technology is not going to get us anywhere. It has been about 50 years since the Orion project and we still don't have anything better for getting us to 0.1c for a trip to a nearby star. Not much has changed when it comes to propulsion technology. Our computers and electronics and robotics are a lot better though, which is pretty important for an unmanned mission. But we are still mostly stuck with the same chemical rocket propulsion that we had then. Nuclear pulse is the only way we really have of practically getting to interstellar speeds and we can't launch from Earth. It would have to be launched from either the moon or a Lagrange point. While it would be best to leave it unmanned so that we wouldn't have to worry about life support or reducing the pulsed accelerations down to human g-force levels, if something were to break it would be nice to have at least one human there to fix it.
It may be half a millenium before we can improve on pulsed nuke propulsion and that would be more than enough time to make it to Gliese 581 and transmit images of the system back here. Assume 100 years to get the lunar infrastructure in place and build the small-city sized ship. Another 50 years to make it to Gliese 581 and another 20 years for the images to reach us back on earth. So in less than 200 years we could have images of the most interesting nearby star system and maybe even evidence of non-terrestrial life. The only thing stopping us is political will and defeatist attitudes like yours. If we are going to spend money on space exploration we may as well spend it on an exciting adventure lasting generations. That's not to say that manned missions to Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn (especially jovian moons like Io, Europa, and Titan) would not be worthwhile, but there is no truly revolutionary knowledge to be gained from them.
It is interesting that the seller is claiming a 7200 rpm spindle speed. If that's true then I don't understand why this would be a Caviar Green. The same seller is also selling an unannounced 3TB Seagate XT internal drive, although he may have just pulled a Goflex drive out of its enclosure for that one.
You definitely need a 64 bit OS to fully see the drive. Well unless you can manage a hack like using larger block sizes. You also need a controller that supports 3TB and also has Linux drivers (not that hard to find).
Furthermore, there is absolutely 0 (legitimate) reason to be running XP on a machine which will recognize a 3TB drive at the hardware level. None. If you can come up with a reason, there's probably a better way to do it than your proposed approach, long term.
In what way is Windows Vista or Windows 7 better than XP? There is no reason to "upgrade". I guess if you are running Windows Vista/7 you probably need a 3TB drive just to contain your ever expanding WinSxS folder. Windows Vista and 7 are the most bloated operating systems the world has ever known. 40 to 60 GB for an operating system partition? Are you kidding me? Even Linux is getting bloated these days, but its not even in the same league as the newer Windows OSes. One particularly nice thing about Linux or OSX or Windows XP is that they will actually fit on an SSD. Good luck with your Windows 7 partition on a 60 gig SSD. I could easily fit 10 normal OSes on the same size disk. The insane bloat of post XP Windows is the main reason why I am planning to phase out my Windows use (except for games) and migrate to a combination of a small, streamlined, Linux distro and OSX (on a hackintosh partition) for apps like Adobe Premiere that don't have a Linux version. Really the only legitimate use for Windows 7 or Vista is for games and most of my favorite games won't even run on Vista or Win7. Eventually games won't be backward compatible with XP and I will have to dual boot Windows 8 and XP to support all of my games.
Because the external drive only has a 2 year warranty and because they are able to include hardware to try to minimize the many compatibility issues in breaking the 2TB barrier. Seagate is still expected to release their own (7200 rpm) 3TB internal drive by Christmas. Now that WD has announced there will be more pressure for Seagate to announce their version as well.
AFAIK the purpose of the "Green" product line is not performance (aka RAID), but energy saving.
The purpose of the "green" drives is marketing spin to make 1980s era spindle speeds sound like a good thing. "Slow" becomes "saving the planet" or "saving money on electricity" even though the actual power savings are minimal. Maybe a 2-3 watt savings compared to a 7200 rpm drive. I have enough offline 5400 rpm storage as it is. I don't want any more. I'll wait for the overpriced Caviar Black version. Or maybe Seagate will finally at least announce their own 7200 rpm 3TB drive.
I was expecting to read some radical plan for getting to the Gliese 581 star system with some kind of Orion nuclear pulse starship built from a moonbase. Instead I read about interplanetary travel and even airships. Interstellar travel is exactly what we should be planning. We've already mostly explored our own system with robotic probes. Time to move on. I picture large scale uranium mining on the moon similar to the mining operations in the film Moon, and a huge spaceship manufacturing base. Something like that is what we really need to get the the next phase of space exploration. In addition to building solar system sized interferometer telescope arrays to see which systems are worth visiting. Although Gliese 581 is an obvious choice. Nasa should be focusing on a permanent lunar settlement as its next immediate goal.
Actually a parsec is a unit of distance as the link you posted indicates. The amount of misinformation in these comments could power an improbability drive for millenia.
I was considering a Leaf, but I live in the third most expensive state in the US for electricity. The Leaf battery pack is supposed to be rated at 24 kwh. So a full charge will cost me at least $4.00 (assuming 100% charging efficiency) and at 75-80 mph highway speed will only get me about 60 miles of range. That's about 6.7 cents per mile. Compare that to a 2000-2006 Honda Insight, which should get at least 50 mpg even at 75-80 mph. 50 mpg at $2.50 per gallon is only about 5 cents per mile. Another car I'm considering is the Mini which is rated for about 36 mpg highway at 55 mph and would probably get more like 33 mpg or so at 80 mph. So the Mini would cost me about 7.5 cents per mile. Still less than a cent more per mile than the Leaf. Considering all the compromises necessary for a plug-in vehicle that savings doesn't seem worth it.
My commute is 70 miles round trip with no charging on the other end. I read that the 100 mile range is for a 55 mph speed. At 75-80 mph I heard the Leaf would only have a range of about 60 miles. So as much as I like the idea of a PHEV, I have given up on it. I think an electric vehicle really only makes sense in states like Idaho or Washington where electricity is only 5 cents a kwh or something. In Massachusetts, New York, or Connecticut it doesn't seem to make much sense economically. I may get a 2006 Honda Insight or maybe a Mini while I wait for the Volkswagen L1 diesel hybrid which hopefully will be sold in the US too supposedly sometime around 2013. I'm not holding my breath though. Which is why I'm considering a 2006 Insight. It may be the most efficient car available in expensive electricity states for quite a while.
Second, low levels of antibiotic use in the swine industry is usually only during the first month after weaning.
If this is true then I don't see the problem. Just one month of prophylactic use? My understanding is that they were used for growth enhancement until they were fully grown adults.
Third, to all those bragging about being from the EU, where there is a total ban on prophylactic antibiotics a word of caution. The total amount of antibiotics used in EU agriculture is not actually lower than it was before the ban. The difference is that instead of giving antibiotics to prevent infection, and improve production they are now given to tread disease outbreaks that wouldn't of otherwise happened and to try and minimize reductions in production.
You realize that argument could just as easily be applied toward prophylactic antibiotic use in the human population. Would you advocate selling antibiotics over the counter and recommending that people take them daily for their entire lives to prevent infection?
Most of the resistance business is about penicillin derivatives, tetracyclines and vancomycin, all of which come from the 1950s or earlier.
Huh? You have a reference for that? Nearly all of our current antibiotics, including the ever popular fluoroquinolones like ciprofloxacin and levofloxacin are susceptible to resistant bacterial growth. In fact quinolones are some of the highest risk antibiotics you can take in terms of developing C. Difficile and MRSA "superbug" infections. Some of the newest antibiotics may not be associated with resistance simply because they haven't been used much yet.
From the wikipedia article:
Quinolones in comparison to other antibiotic classes have the highest risk of causing colonization with MRSA and Clostridium difficile.
Resistance to quinolones can evolve rapidly, even during a course of treatment. Numerous pathogens, including Staphylococcus aureus, enterococci, and Streptococcus pyogenes now exhibit resistance worldwide.[79] Widespread veterinary usage of quinolones, in particular in Europe, has been implicated.[80]
There are three known mechanisms of resistance.[87] Some types of efflux pumps can act to decrease intracellular quinolone concentration. In Gram-negative bacteria, plasmid-mediated resistance genes produce proteins that can bind to DNA gyrase, protecting it from the action of quinolones. Finally, mutations at key sites in DNA gyrase or topoisomerase IV can decrease their binding affinity to quinolones, decreasing the drugs' effectiveness.
Whatever else you may think about the Tea Party, their initial protests were organized through the blogosphere (and mostly still are),
Unfortunately by using the blogosphere, whatever that is, for organizing they are excluding the older generations of libertarian-minded who do not have facebook or twitter accounts. I am a libertarian and would even be willing to pick up a gun and fight for freedom, but I don't do facebook or twitter. I thought the 'Tea Party' was just a derogatory expression referring to Libertarians or quasi-libertarians. Now I see that they are some kind of quasi-libertarian group.
Also, I thought MySpace->Facebook was just a place where narcissistic exhibitionists show off and try to collect as many pseudo-friends as possible while maintaining a sort of mailing list for minute-by-minute updates of everything they do for their thousands of adoring fans, er, friends I mean, who are also giving minute-by-minute updates to their thousands of adoring fans etc. A place where everyone is constantly talking about themselves, and where no one is listening because they are all too busy talking about themselves and don't give a shit about anyone but themselves anyway.
For a political movement you really need to use a method of communication that doesn't exclude a sizable percentage of the voting populace. As for twitter, I've heard the name, but I have no idea what it is. Some method of communication that generation z likes to use I guess. As a fortysomething, I use email and instant messaging sometimes, but mostly I use the telephone to communicate. I might send a text message on my cell phone once every month or two. I also sometimes post on web forums, but don't really consider it an efficient form of communication.
While I am not aware of a particular DVR that uses the louder volume of a commercial in their detection algorithm, it is certainly a useful thing to have. The more differences between the commercials and the program the easier it is to get to a near 100% detection rate. Currently we can still use blank frame detection, but what if advertisers smarten up and request that the blank frame be overwritten?
Exactly. Our proto-fascist government responds only to what is most profitable for the megacorporations, but this is one area where I think the citizens have to take a little responsibility. Most supermarkets have some kind of grass fed "organic" beef available for a higher price. If no one bought the cheap stuff, not only would cows live a much more pleasant life before being executed, but people might find that their steaks and hamburgers taste noticeably better. Anyone who has had steak in Argentina or Uruguay (and maybe Brazil?) can attest to the fact that it tastes much, much better over there. I asked a local why he thought this was so. He suggested it may have something to do with feeding them grass and allowing them to graze as they would in the wild. I think it probably also has something to do with having a slightly different sub-species of cow. Nevertheless I definitely notice a taste difference between the "naturally raised" meat and the factory processed stuff. Enough of a difference that that is all I have bought for years now. I'm not rich so I just buy a bit less to make up for the higher cost.
Gliese 581d was the last big discovery in this system. So what makes Gliese 581g more likely to support life? Just how many life supporting planets can there be in that system? I would say that between Gliese 581d and Gliese 581g we have more than enough reason to launch an Orion style nuclear pulse probe toward the Gliese 581 system. I wish that as humans we could just get together, pool our resources, and build the friggin thing. In a couple of centuries we would know if we have company in this little corner of the Milky Way. It's the first time we've had such a good target to shoot for. Only 20 light years away and not one but possibly two habitable planets. It definitely seems like the most interesting target that is that close by. We've already sent a radio message to the Gliese 581 system. We'll have to wait at least 40 years for a response.
I know, I know, they're naked-woman adjacent, and all that.
Exactly. Hence the appeal. For some of us that's the closest we're ever going to get. Note that we are not talking about clean bras and underwear. Maybe that's where your confusion lies. Bras and underwear that have actually been worn still contain many molecules from the actual female organism.
As for your reaction, you do realize that not everyone is a cross-dresser. Frankly I don't see the appeal because, as you say, they are just clothes. But whatever floats your boat I guess.
We didn't have video rental when I was a kid you, insensitive clod. If it wasn't in the cinema or on television you couldn't watch it. Although some of my friends did have cable TV. And you couldn't rent computer games. You had to either buy one or give a 5 1/4" floppy to a friend and ask him to make you a copy from a game that he bought. Now get off my lawn!
I think an important distinction between the music situation and the book situation is that many people (still the majority) perceive the paper product as having more value than the digital one. In music it's a digital format either way. The only difference is whether it has lossy compression or not. A lot of people cannot hear the difference between a 320kbps mp3 and a flac or wav version, but there is a niche market of people who can. Right now it is like publishers are selling 64 kbps MP3s for the same price as the uncompressed PCM version. Over the years, if and when cheap (say $50 or less) e-ink reader displays reach a point where they are virtually indistinguishable from ink on paper you may find more people making the jump to digital formats. For the moment they are not really comparable. I have only recently started purchasing direct download music because 320 kbps bit rate mp3s are finally available. I don't buy much though because I still prefer the uncompressed PCM versions.
Stephen King had pretty significant numbers for Ur which was ebook only
That's a fair comparison. Has it ever occurred to you that the ebook version sold so well because there was no paper version available? If my favorite author comes out with a new book and it is only available as an ebook I would buy it even though I have never purchased an ebook in my life and have no plans to until and unless they are priced to reflect their lack of publishing/printing costs. IOW, I won't be buying any ebooks until they cost significantly less than their paper versions or until paper books have been discontinued entirely.
What is more, if we define rational thought as that which is unemotional
But why would we do that? Emotions are a quick fight/flight substitute for rational thought. They are sort of competing for the the same goal of affecting our decisions or actions, but they are very different. If you see/hear a grenade being tossed through your window do you run because of fear/panic or because of a thought: "That grenade will probably explode soon, harming or killing me. I should vacate the premises as quickly as...*boom*" Rational thought is just logical thought. A series of interlocking syllogisms if you will. Talking to yourself in your head in a way that "makes sense" as opposed to word salads.
I think something more basic would be a good starting point. How about feelings before emotions? Think of things like "I am hungry.", "I am tired", "It burns.", "It is cold.", etc.
But those are emotions. I guess the meanings of the words emotion and feeling are pretty close. They seem to share the same defining characteristics. I think responses to physical stimuli are just a subcategory of emotions in general. They are basically still evaluations of "bad for me or good for me and in what way". If you walk out in the snow barefoot you will have a direct response to the unpleasant physical sensation of "cold". That direct response is just a very basic sort of emotion. In that sense I wonder of pleasure and pain are really just another subcategory of emotion. The most basic evaluations of "good for me or bad for me" that we can have.
I forgot to add that much of the content of an emotion is about precisely in what way this particular input from the outside world is good for me or bad for me. That's what makes each emotion we feel unique. The fact that every experience we have is unique, if only to a small extent. There is a one to one correspondence between the uniqueness of each event or object that we perceive in the outside world and the uniqueness of each emotion we have in response to that event or object. If I, as an ugly person, see a breathtakingly beautiful girl my mixed bittersweet emotional response will be very different from the mostly "good for me" response of a beautiful person because the event of seeing her affects us in very different ways. Sweet temptation for him, and bittersweet longing/frustration for me. These responses aren't thoughts per se. They happen instantly before we have time to come up with any words. But you may also end up thinking about the event in a way that corresponds with the emotional response to it. Another poster brought up our "animal heritage", and I think that is what gave us these responses. Very often events happen too quickly. There is no time to think about them and ponder our actions in response. Emotions are our backup: insta-thoughts about something that could harm us. Fight or flight.
Emotions are evaluations of inputs that are perceived as being from the outside world. You think, "that is good for me" or "that is bad for me" (happy or sad) in response to something. All of our other emotions are just thousands of variations of that. You can even have an emotion based on a mixture of good and bad. In fact this is probably often the case. In an isolation tank or asleep we can still have emotions because we are creating our own imaginary inputs to judge as good for us or bad for us. We are just electrochemical bio-machines ourselves, but we have this complex and subtle evaluation response to anything and everything that we perceive. So the first step in making an emotional machine is giving it the ability to judge. Although even before that it needs the ability to value its own existence. If it doesn't have anything that it values it has nothing to base its evaluations on. So I guess that's the tricky part. Giving it an "I" to care about. If he's right about not being able to divorce thought and emotion (I'm skeptical on that count) then he will have to create artificial life before he can create artificial intelligence even of the brain-in-a-jar category.
In that benchmark an overclocked I7 beat an overclocked 1075T. I7s can be had pretty cheap these days so I don't see a compelling reason to get the 1075T. I think AMD is mainly selling to the mainstream folks who don't overclock or run very demanding software. I do like AMD and they are kicking ass in the GPU market, but they have yet to catch up to Intel, which shouldn't even be that hard since Intel has been moving forward at a snails pace for a while now. AMD has been getting lots of catch-up time and they have been blowing it. I hope they can turn that around. Instead of beating intel at their own game of massive SMP they should be trying to beat them at single threaded performance. The majority of the apps I use on a daily basis are still single threaded.
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You could have made the same arguments about going to the moon in the 60s. Assuming automagical advances in technology is not going to get us anywhere. It has been about 50 years since the Orion project and we still don't have anything better for getting us to 0.1c for a trip to a nearby star. Not much has changed when it comes to propulsion technology. Our computers and electronics and robotics are a lot better though, which is pretty important for an unmanned mission. But we are still mostly stuck with the same chemical rocket propulsion that we had then. Nuclear pulse is the only way we really have of practically getting to interstellar speeds and we can't launch from Earth. It would have to be launched from either the moon or a Lagrange point. While it would be best to leave it unmanned so that we wouldn't have to worry about life support or reducing the pulsed accelerations down to human g-force levels, if something were to break it would be nice to have at least one human there to fix it.
It may be half a millenium before we can improve on pulsed nuke propulsion and that would be more than enough time to make it to Gliese 581 and transmit images of the system back here. Assume 100 years to get the lunar infrastructure in place and build the small-city sized ship. Another 50 years to make it to Gliese 581 and another 20 years for the images to reach us back on earth. So in less than 200 years we could have images of the most interesting nearby star system and maybe even evidence of non-terrestrial life. The only thing stopping us is political will and defeatist attitudes like yours. If we are going to spend money on space exploration we may as well spend it on an exciting adventure lasting generations. That's not to say that manned missions to Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn (especially jovian moons like Io, Europa, and Titan) would not be worthwhile, but there is no truly revolutionary knowledge to be gained from them.
It is interesting that the seller is claiming a 7200 rpm spindle speed. If that's true then I don't understand why this would be a Caviar Green. The same seller is also selling an unannounced 3TB Seagate XT internal drive, although he may have just pulled a Goflex drive out of its enclosure for that one.
http://forums.storagereview.com/index.php/topic/28840-so-i-bought-the-new-3tb-goflex-desk/page__p__262945__hl__seagate%203tb%20goflex__fromsearch__1&#entry262945
You definitely need a 64 bit OS to fully see the drive. Well unless you can manage a hack like using larger block sizes. You also need a controller that supports 3TB and also has Linux drivers (not that hard to find).
Furthermore, there is absolutely 0 (legitimate) reason to be running XP on a machine which will recognize a 3TB drive at the hardware level. None. If you can come up with a reason, there's probably a better way to do it than your proposed approach, long term.
In what way is Windows Vista or Windows 7 better than XP? There is no reason to "upgrade". I guess if you are running Windows Vista/7 you probably need a 3TB drive just to contain your ever expanding WinSxS folder. Windows Vista and 7 are the most bloated operating systems the world has ever known. 40 to 60 GB for an operating system partition? Are you kidding me? Even Linux is getting bloated these days, but its not even in the same league as the newer Windows OSes. One particularly nice thing about Linux or OSX or Windows XP is that they will actually fit on an SSD. Good luck with your Windows 7 partition on a 60 gig SSD. I could easily fit 10 normal OSes on the same size disk. The insane bloat of post XP Windows is the main reason why I am planning to phase out my Windows use (except for games) and migrate to a combination of a small, streamlined, Linux distro and OSX (on a hackintosh partition) for apps like Adobe Premiere that don't have a Linux version. Really the only legitimate use for Windows 7 or Vista is for games and most of my favorite games won't even run on Vista or Win7. Eventually games won't be backward compatible with XP and I will have to dual boot Windows 8 and XP to support all of my games.
Because the external drive only has a 2 year warranty and because they are able to include hardware to try to minimize the many compatibility issues in breaking the 2TB barrier. Seagate is still expected to release their own (7200 rpm) 3TB internal drive by Christmas. Now that WD has announced there will be more pressure for Seagate to announce their version as well.
AFAIK the purpose of the "Green" product line is not performance (aka RAID), but energy saving.
The purpose of the "green" drives is marketing spin to make 1980s era spindle speeds sound like a good thing. "Slow" becomes "saving the planet" or "saving money on electricity" even though the actual power savings are minimal. Maybe a 2-3 watt savings compared to a 7200 rpm drive. I have enough offline 5400 rpm storage as it is. I don't want any more. I'll wait for the overpriced Caviar Black version. Or maybe Seagate will finally at least announce their own 7200 rpm 3TB drive.
I was expecting to read some radical plan for getting to the Gliese 581 star system with some kind of Orion nuclear pulse starship built from a moonbase. Instead I read about interplanetary travel and even airships. Interstellar travel is exactly what we should be planning. We've already mostly explored our own system with robotic probes. Time to move on. I picture large scale uranium mining on the moon similar to the mining operations in the film Moon, and a huge spaceship manufacturing base. Something like that is what we really need to get the the next phase of space exploration. In addition to building solar system sized interferometer telescope arrays to see which systems are worth visiting. Although Gliese 581 is an obvious choice. Nasa should be focusing on a permanent lunar settlement as its next immediate goal.
Actually a parsec is a unit of distance as the link you posted indicates. The amount of misinformation in these comments could power an improbability drive for millenia.
I was considering a Leaf, but I live in the third most expensive state in the US for electricity. The Leaf battery pack is supposed to be rated at 24 kwh. So a full charge will cost me at least $4.00 (assuming 100% charging efficiency) and at 75-80 mph highway speed will only get me about 60 miles of range. That's about 6.7 cents per mile. Compare that to a 2000-2006 Honda Insight, which should get at least 50 mpg even at 75-80 mph. 50 mpg at $2.50 per gallon is only about 5 cents per mile. Another car I'm considering is the Mini which is rated for about 36 mpg highway at 55 mph and would probably get more like 33 mpg or so at 80 mph. So the Mini would cost me about 7.5 cents per mile. Still less than a cent more per mile than the Leaf. Considering all the compromises necessary for a plug-in vehicle that savings doesn't seem worth it.
My commute is 70 miles round trip with no charging on the other end. I read that the 100 mile range is for a 55 mph speed. At 75-80 mph I heard the Leaf would only have a range of about 60 miles. So as much as I like the idea of a PHEV, I have given up on it. I think an electric vehicle really only makes sense in states like Idaho or Washington where electricity is only 5 cents a kwh or something. In Massachusetts, New York, or Connecticut it doesn't seem to make much sense economically. I may get a 2006 Honda Insight or maybe a Mini while I wait for the Volkswagen L1 diesel hybrid which hopefully will be sold in the US too supposedly sometime around 2013. I'm not holding my breath though. Which is why I'm considering a 2006 Insight. It may be the most efficient car available in expensive electricity states for quite a while.
Second, low levels of antibiotic use in the swine industry is usually only during the first month after weaning.
If this is true then I don't see the problem. Just one month of prophylactic use? My understanding is that they were used for growth enhancement until they were fully grown adults.
Third, to all those bragging about being from the EU, where there is a total ban on prophylactic antibiotics a word of caution. The total amount of antibiotics used in EU agriculture is not actually lower than it was before the ban. The difference is that instead of giving antibiotics to prevent infection, and improve production they are now given to tread disease outbreaks that wouldn't of otherwise happened and to try and minimize reductions in production.
You realize that argument could just as easily be applied toward prophylactic antibiotic use in the human population. Would you advocate selling antibiotics over the counter and recommending that people take them daily for their entire lives to prevent infection?
Most of the resistance business is about penicillin derivatives, tetracyclines and vancomycin, all of which come from the 1950s or earlier.
Huh? You have a reference for that? Nearly all of our current antibiotics, including the ever popular fluoroquinolones like ciprofloxacin and levofloxacin are susceptible to resistant bacterial growth. In fact quinolones are some of the highest risk antibiotics you can take in terms of developing C. Difficile and MRSA "superbug" infections. Some of the newest antibiotics may not be associated with resistance simply because they haven't been used much yet.
From the wikipedia article:
Quinolones in comparison to other antibiotic classes have the highest risk of causing colonization with MRSA and Clostridium difficile.
Resistance to quinolones can evolve rapidly, even during a course of treatment. Numerous pathogens, including Staphylococcus aureus, enterococci, and Streptococcus pyogenes now exhibit resistance worldwide.[79] Widespread veterinary usage of quinolones, in particular in Europe, has been implicated.[80]
There are three known mechanisms of resistance.[87] Some types of efflux pumps can act to decrease intracellular quinolone concentration. In Gram-negative bacteria, plasmid-mediated resistance genes produce proteins that can bind to DNA gyrase, protecting it from the action of quinolones. Finally, mutations at key sites in DNA gyrase or topoisomerase IV can decrease their binding affinity to quinolones, decreasing the drugs' effectiveness.
Whatever else you may think about the Tea Party, their initial protests were organized through the blogosphere (and mostly still are),
Unfortunately by using the blogosphere, whatever that is, for organizing they are excluding the older generations of libertarian-minded who do not have facebook or twitter accounts. I am a libertarian and would even be willing to pick up a gun and fight for freedom, but I don't do facebook or twitter. I thought the 'Tea Party' was just a derogatory expression referring to Libertarians or quasi-libertarians. Now I see that they are some kind of quasi-libertarian group.
Also, I thought MySpace->Facebook was just a place where narcissistic exhibitionists show off and try to collect as many pseudo-friends as possible while maintaining a sort of mailing list for minute-by-minute updates of everything they do for their thousands of adoring fans, er, friends I mean, who are also giving minute-by-minute updates to their thousands of adoring fans etc. A place where everyone is constantly talking about themselves, and where no one is listening because they are all too busy talking about themselves and don't give a shit about anyone but themselves anyway.
For a political movement you really need to use a method of communication that doesn't exclude a sizable percentage of the voting populace. As for twitter, I've heard the name, but I have no idea what it is. Some method of communication that generation z likes to use I guess. As a fortysomething, I use email and instant messaging sometimes, but mostly I use the telephone to communicate. I might send a text message on my cell phone once every month or two. I also sometimes post on web forums, but don't really consider it an efficient form of communication.
Twitter, Facebook and the like have the advantage of anonymity when organizing and implementing plans.
Facebook and Twitter are anonymous?
While I am not aware of a particular DVR that uses the louder volume of a commercial in their detection algorithm, it is certainly a useful thing to have. The more differences between the commercials and the program the easier it is to get to a near 100% detection rate. Currently we can still use blank frame detection, but what if advertisers smarten up and request that the blank frame be overwritten?
Exactly. Our proto-fascist government responds only to what is most profitable for the megacorporations, but this is one area where I think the citizens have to take a little responsibility. Most supermarkets have some kind of grass fed "organic" beef available for a higher price. If no one bought the cheap stuff, not only would cows live a much more pleasant life before being executed, but people might find that their steaks and hamburgers taste noticeably better. Anyone who has had steak in Argentina or Uruguay (and maybe Brazil?) can attest to the fact that it tastes much, much better over there. I asked a local why he thought this was so. He suggested it may have something to do with feeding them grass and allowing them to graze as they would in the wild. I think it probably also has something to do with having a slightly different sub-species of cow. Nevertheless I definitely notice a taste difference between the "naturally raised" meat and the factory processed stuff. Enough of a difference that that is all I have bought for years now. I'm not rich so I just buy a bit less to make up for the higher cost.
Gliese 581d was the last big discovery in this system. So what makes Gliese 581g more likely to support life? Just how many life supporting planets can there be in that system? I would say that between Gliese 581d and Gliese 581g we have more than enough reason to launch an Orion style nuclear pulse probe toward the Gliese 581 system. I wish that as humans we could just get together, pool our resources, and build the friggin thing. In a couple of centuries we would know if we have company in this little corner of the Milky Way. It's the first time we've had such a good target to shoot for. Only 20 light years away and not one but possibly two habitable planets. It definitely seems like the most interesting target that is that close by. We've already sent a radio message to the Gliese 581 system. We'll have to wait at least 40 years for a response.
I know, I know, they're naked-woman adjacent, and all that.
Exactly. Hence the appeal. For some of us that's the closest we're ever going to get. Note that we are not talking about clean bras and underwear. Maybe that's where your confusion lies. Bras and underwear that have actually been worn still contain many molecules from the actual female organism.
As for your reaction, you do realize that not everyone is a cross-dresser. Frankly I don't see the appeal because, as you say, they are just clothes. But whatever floats your boat I guess.
We didn't have video rental when I was a kid you, insensitive clod. If it wasn't in the cinema or on television you couldn't watch it. Although some of my friends did have cable TV. And you couldn't rent computer games. You had to either buy one or give a 5 1/4" floppy to a friend and ask him to make you a copy from a game that he bought. Now get off my lawn!
I think an important distinction between the music situation and the book situation is that many people (still the majority) perceive the paper product as having more value than the digital one. In music it's a digital format either way. The only difference is whether it has lossy compression or not. A lot of people cannot hear the difference between a 320kbps mp3 and a flac or wav version, but there is a niche market of people who can. Right now it is like publishers are selling 64 kbps MP3s for the same price as the uncompressed PCM version. Over the years, if and when cheap (say $50 or less) e-ink reader displays reach a point where they are virtually indistinguishable from ink on paper you may find more people making the jump to digital formats. For the moment they are not really comparable. I have only recently started purchasing direct download music because 320 kbps bit rate mp3s are finally available. I don't buy much though because I still prefer the uncompressed PCM versions.
Stephen King had pretty significant numbers for Ur which was ebook only
That's a fair comparison. Has it ever occurred to you that the ebook version sold so well because there was no paper version available? If my favorite author comes out with a new book and it is only available as an ebook I would buy it even though I have never purchased an ebook in my life and have no plans to until and unless they are priced to reflect their lack of publishing/printing costs. IOW, I won't be buying any ebooks until they cost significantly less than their paper versions or until paper books have been discontinued entirely.
What is more, if we define rational thought as that which is unemotional
But why would we do that? Emotions are a quick fight/flight substitute for rational thought. They are sort of competing for the the same goal of affecting our decisions or actions, but they are very different. If you see/hear a grenade being tossed through your window do you run because of fear/panic or because of a thought: "That grenade will probably explode soon, harming or killing me. I should vacate the premises as quickly as...*boom*" Rational thought is just logical thought. A series of interlocking syllogisms if you will. Talking to yourself in your head in a way that "makes sense" as opposed to word salads.
I think something more basic would be a good starting point. How about feelings before emotions? Think of things like "I am hungry.", "I am tired", "It burns.", "It is cold.", etc.
But those are emotions. I guess the meanings of the words emotion and feeling are pretty close. They seem to share the same defining characteristics. I think responses to physical stimuli are just a subcategory of emotions in general. They are basically still evaluations of "bad for me or good for me and in what way". If you walk out in the snow barefoot you will have a direct response to the unpleasant physical sensation of "cold". That direct response is just a very basic sort of emotion. In that sense I wonder of pleasure and pain are really just another subcategory of emotion. The most basic evaluations of "good for me or bad for me" that we can have.
I forgot to add that much of the content of an emotion is about precisely in what way this particular input from the outside world is good for me or bad for me. That's what makes each emotion we feel unique. The fact that every experience we have is unique, if only to a small extent. There is a one to one correspondence between the uniqueness of each event or object that we perceive in the outside world and the uniqueness of each emotion we have in response to that event or object. If I, as an ugly person, see a breathtakingly beautiful girl my mixed bittersweet emotional response will be very different from the mostly "good for me" response of a beautiful person because the event of seeing her affects us in very different ways. Sweet temptation for him, and bittersweet longing/frustration for me. These responses aren't thoughts per se. They happen instantly before we have time to come up with any words. But you may also end up thinking about the event in a way that corresponds with the emotional response to it. Another poster brought up our "animal heritage", and I think that is what gave us these responses. Very often events happen too quickly. There is no time to think about them and ponder our actions in response. Emotions are our backup: insta-thoughts about something that could harm us. Fight or flight.
Emotions are evaluations of inputs that are perceived as being from the outside world. You think, "that is good for me" or "that is bad for me" (happy or sad) in response to something. All of our other emotions are just thousands of variations of that. You can even have an emotion based on a mixture of good and bad. In fact this is probably often the case. In an isolation tank or asleep we can still have emotions because we are creating our own imaginary inputs to judge as good for us or bad for us. We are just electrochemical bio-machines ourselves, but we have this complex and subtle evaluation response to anything and everything that we perceive. So the first step in making an emotional machine is giving it the ability to judge. Although even before that it needs the ability to value its own existence. If it doesn't have anything that it values it has nothing to base its evaluations on. So I guess that's the tricky part. Giving it an "I" to care about. If he's right about not being able to divorce thought and emotion (I'm skeptical on that count) then he will have to create artificial life before he can create artificial intelligence even of the brain-in-a-jar category.
In that benchmark an overclocked I7 beat an overclocked 1075T. I7s can be had pretty cheap these days so I don't see a compelling reason to get the 1075T. I think AMD is mainly selling to the mainstream folks who don't overclock or run very demanding software. I do like AMD and they are kicking ass in the GPU market, but they have yet to catch up to Intel, which shouldn't even be that hard since Intel has been moving forward at a snails pace for a while now. AMD has been getting lots of catch-up time and they have been blowing it. I hope they can turn that around. Instead of beating intel at their own game of massive SMP they should be trying to beat them at single threaded performance. The majority of the apps I use on a daily basis are still single threaded.