Most materialists would accept mental states are distinct from brain states and that mental states are a different level of abstraction from brain activity. Think of a typical desktop computer. If you observe someone else use the computer and simultaneously observe the electrical activity of CPU (and rest of the hardware) at transistor level, you would have a hard time mapping the program function to CPU activity. It would be absurd to hold a dualist position over that hardship, to claim that since you can't tell which program is running and what it is doing from low level analysis of CPU activity, the execution is actually carried out by (or augmented by) something non-CPU (or non-physical.) The program really runs on the physical system, and there is one-to-one correspondence between physical states of the CPU, the software running (i.e. firefox) and state of software (i.e. waiting for/. to load) but understanding what a program does/is doing requires different levels of abstraction. This is actually functionalism but I don't know any hard-line materialists that says mental states are explained away by physical states. Functionalists would be comfortable with many-to-one correspondence of physical states to mental states, materialists may claim one-to-one correspondence, that is as far as the difference goes.
There used to be a very primitive way of enforcing blocking of sites: ttnet DNS's were not correctly resolving names. This lead to public aphaty on censorship issue, as anyone and their dog knew how to use alternate DNSes or if all else fails, TOR. The prime minister himself said "I can access the banned sites, you can too." The blocked site list (which must be constructed by internet users, as there is no transparency about the process at all) is absurdly long but most didn't care - they didn't even notice. Most sites are banned without a court order (not that those banned on court orders are more sensible) and on grounds of "obscenity" defined by middle aged religious conservative bureaucrat men. Now that the institutions, mechanisms and laws are in place, they are making the next step: trying to bypass filters becomes a crime. Moreover ISP passwords will be tied to RW ID, so you will use the same login if you are the same guy. No, thanks. Current situation is less than ideal, but the proposed one is a disaster.
I am not allowing other people to decide what I should *know.* Turkish culture does not value intellectual freedoms as much as westerners do and the government might be acting to people's will (IMHO they don't. Those do not have a problem with current internet censorship are basically not interested in the issue. There is a very small minority pushing for less freedom, a much bigger minority pushing for more freedom while the real majority does not care) but that is beside the point. I don't care if I am in the minority, even if I am just one guy, I am not letting the other people or the government to decide what information I have access to, especially since the said information is freely available to remaining parts of the world. The censorship is a violation of my rights, majority cannot take away my rights.
I don't think Middle East is upset about death of OBL at all. Muslims are not the most progressive bunch but few would consider flying planes into buildings to kill civilians as a honorable way of fighting, even those who consider fighting against USA is fighting for a good cause (and many don't). He was not liked and assassination is culturally more acceptable anyway.
I read all of your posts but I still don't get your point. You (including those who are arguing with you) seem to think that my money is tucked under my pillow while I am thinking about what to do with it. It doesn't. I get paid via a bank. Except for a little amount of cash I withdraw for daily purchases, the money never leaves the bank until I purchase something. Meanwhile I am being paid interest, which is slightly higher than inflation (at least for TRL and daily interest rates in Turkey.) So my money is *always* worth more tomorrow even though there is inflation. Nominal value of the currency goes down but my purchasing power increases as long as I don't spend. Also, while the money is in the bank, it is given as credit to other people, who have to produce stuff with it such that they earn more than their interest rate. If there were deflation (and interest rates are sufficiently low) I might keep my money under my pillow and still get more purchasing power as long as I don't spend it. But in that case, noone else could use that money for investments. What is good about such a scenario? If there is deflation and interest rates are sufficiently high, I will still keep my money in the bank but the bank will have a harder time lending out that money. The borrowers will need to be much more efficient with the money they borrow. However you cannot be more efficient just because you need to; the net effect of such a situation will be driving all but the most successful investors out of the market, bank being unable to pay me interest and me going back to keeping my money under my pillow.
I don't know about GP, but the kind of orbital assembly meant in context of Mars missions is simply docking in LEO (or for the return craft, LMO). That might not be so simple either, but not too hard. It has been demonstrated in LEO in excess of a hundred times without single major mishap. Think lunar orbit rendezvous of Apollo, rather than building a complete spacecraft in LEO.
The whole point of gas core design is that it can heat your propellant to much higher temperatures than a solid core can withstand. Radiative heating, quartz, vortex etc. are just design details to contain gas core and keep it from contacting propellant.
We have the technology. It is just impossible to send humans and their living quarters and their supplies and a research station and a return vehicle and return trip supplies on a SINGLE chemical rocket. Once you start using more than one chemical rocket for this list, even at just two, it becomes possible. (Unless you can do the smart thing and use a single nuclear rocket instead.) We already have demonstrated that we can resupply a spacecraft in orbit, do docking and assembly in orbit, do precision landings, survive long enough for the trip in space etc. The mission to Mars probably shall not use chemical rockets, but if we decide to use that technology, there are plenty of possibilities to make it happen. We can even colonize Mars with current *propulsion* technology (but new technologies are required for other aspects of colonization) : Aldrin Mars cyclers (basically Mir, ISS like stations in an interplanetary orbit) are sufficient for regular travels or resupply missions.
The process in Turkey works like this: Someone goes to court claiming a web site at a certain URL and/or IP is doing something forbidden (copyright infringements are just one example.) The court checks whether the claim is true and if it is, whether the service provider removes it once notified. If the claim is true and the service provider is unwilling to remove the offending content the URL name and/or IP block is forbidden. While the courts can decide whether or not ban a site, they don't have options to specify how the ban will be limited to only offenders. The law is so flawed that a single person can ban all internet sites that allow users to upload content or make comments, or sites that share root name or IP block with such a site with little effort. You don't even need anonymity or breaking laws in process of doing so; free speech is less restricted in RL that on internet in Turkey.
The conspiracy theories rely on lack of transparency in releasing of the documents. Noone knows why document X gets released before Y. The order *does* have a non-random feel to it. It doesn't make sense to pick documents randomly anyway. But who choses what is released and on what grounds?
The comparison should be with traditional nuclear reactors. They are not "easy" in any absolute sense either. MSR's have a peculiar materials and chemical engineering demands, but they should be easier to operate on the long run.
Lubricant use is pretty niche too; 80% of molybdenum is used in making steel and iron alloys. Granted, that figure includes non-MoS2 use, but electronics industry will probably start synthesis from pure Mo instead of purifying products of existing MoS2 plants.
Now, in a typical plasticized polymer made from polydisperse monomers (such as polysulfides used in shuttle o-rings), there is usually not a single temperature at which the sealant material turns from elastic to brittle
Correction: The shuttle o-rings were made of FKM, not polysulfide (PS). There are a lot of differences between the two, however the basics are same. Those differences make FKM turn from elastic to brittle more sharply (in a narrower temperature range) than PS and at a much higher temperature.
You are absolutely correct that Mr. Feynman was a genius at simplification. The sad fact is, the material did not need to be simplified. *All* sealants have an operating temperature window, below which they are not resilient enough, too hard or even brittle. If there will be any movement at all (and there is a lot of it in a rocket launch) the sealant must be above that temperature, otherwise it will fail. When it fails, whatever it is supposed to seal, is not sealed anymore. That part is *not* rocket science.
Now, in a typical plasticized polymer made from polydisperse monomers (such as polysulfides used in shuttle o-rings), there is usually not a single temperature at which the sealant material turns from elastic to brittle. Instead there is a there is a gentle hardening with lower temperatures while the material retains its elasticity for a wide temperature range, then the material gets less resilient and harder quickly, then the material gets brittle. Roughly these are elastic, plastic and brittle phases. The sealant must be used in the elastic range, but for short periods of time it may work in in the plastic range. That does not mean one can rely on using a seal that is not resilient if the time is short, rather it means that the failure is progressive. It may be that you are done moving the sealant before it has time to fail completely. Apparently, NASA launched knowing full well that the sealants are not in the elastic range for many times, and classified partial sealant failures as success, and used the "success" of prior launches as a proof of sealants ability to withstand cold weather. Of course hindsight is 20/20, but for the life of me, I cannot see how Thiokol engineers had been overruled *initially* so that such data could be gathered. What made NASA directors to ever think that polymers phase diagrams are negotiable?
The obvious fix is to present erotic pictures iff the gambler picks correct color. If I get the original paper correctly, presenting erotic pictures and hubble photographs before heading to casino should work just as well - as long as your gamblers are extrovert chicks.
And boo effing hoo for the cop who's PO'd that his version of events is not golden anymore, or for the DA who's seen his conviction ratio drop. It's almost routine now for DNA evidence, for example, to exonerate people who've spent years in prison, falsely convicted after some crooked cop lied in court to frame him and the DA went along with the sham just to get his numbers up. How many innocent people have lost years of their lives because of this? Have we executed anyone because on this? Even person, even one year, is intolerable. (And does anything ever happen to the cop and DA who set someone up for the crime they didn't commit? Nope.)
As an engineer in R&D, my job involves asking questions to physical systems in the form of experiments and interpreting the results to get my answers. I can tell you with very high degree of certainty that nature lies as often as cooked cops do. Alternatively, you could say I am as often stupid in interpreting the results of an experiment as a crooked cop lies. If I were to tell a jury what CSI's GC-MS results mean, my explanation would probably be just often as wrong as when I am interpreting the results of my GC (I am lucky or rich enough to have a GC-MS in my lab.) No *thing* is evidence, only the interpretation of the physical world is "evidence" and that interpretation might be wrong. It might be honestly wrong, or it might be the lab technician is crooked just like a cop might be. There is only one way to avoid executing innocent people: don't execute anyone. That is actually a simple and very effective way.
If you are not telling lies knowingly, you are seriously misinformed. Saddam did none of what you have described i your first paragraph. I can't even write a sensible refutation. You are just completely, utterly wrong.
Well, the following are facts: 1) Iraq-Turkey border was drawn by British oil prospectors. 2) Iraq-Turkey border does not make sense from a historical, ethnic or geographical pow. Unlike many politically motivated borders in ME and Africa, it is not at all straight. In a sense it is the most complicated border of Turkey. 3) Middle eastern, especially Iraqi, oil is very shallow and not yet depleted. 4) There are wells in the Syrian and Iraqi sides of border, visible by naked eye from border (not necessarily flywheel type) 5) Turkey does not produce any appricable amount of oil, and the little amount it does produce is not produced very near border (except for Batman wells.)
However, that is the extend of my knowledge. I don't know how succesful were the British prospectors. I don't know for sure that Turkish side of the border does not have any oil reserves. For all I know, we might have a lot of oil but may be not utilising reserves for ethnic-strategic purposes.
You are wrong. Oil was the concern to the point of Iraq-Turkey border being drawn by British oil prospectors. You can see the results with the naked eye. Turkey has virtually no reserves, the border does not follow any geographical, historic feature or an ethnic border and on both Syrian and Iraqi borders, you can see oil pumps working from Turkey only a few kms away.
The problem is neither vision nor ergonomics. Unless you have energy efficient, cheap and fast memory, processors and ccd, digital photography cannot be done at consumer level regardless of how you package it. Availability of affordable computer to transfer, store and manipulate those photographs is also important (although not as critical as availability of cam components.) None of these can be developed and produced with a single vision of producing a digital camera (except perhaps cheap ccd) because there is not enough volume. These technologies must become available for larger aplications and then adapted for digital cameras. Digital photography arrived when it arrived becuase that is when electronics and computer technology made it viable.
Slashdot Mirror
Most materialists would accept mental states are distinct from brain states and that mental states are a different level of abstraction from brain activity. Think of a typical desktop computer. If you observe someone else use the computer and simultaneously observe the electrical activity of CPU (and rest of the hardware) at transistor level, you would have a hard time mapping the program function to CPU activity. It would be absurd to hold a dualist position over that hardship, to claim that since you can't tell which program is running and what it is doing from low level analysis of CPU activity, the execution is actually carried out by (or augmented by) something non-CPU (or non-physical.) The program really runs on the physical system, and there is one-to-one correspondence between physical states of the CPU, the software running (i.e. firefox) and state of software (i.e. waiting for /. to load) but understanding what a program does/is doing requires different levels of abstraction. This is actually functionalism but I don't know any hard-line materialists that says mental states are explained away by physical states. Functionalists would be comfortable with many-to-one correspondence of physical states to mental states, materialists may claim one-to-one correspondence, that is as far as the difference goes.
There used to be a very primitive way of enforcing blocking of sites: ttnet DNS's were not correctly resolving names. This lead to public aphaty on censorship issue, as anyone and their dog knew how to use alternate DNSes or if all else fails, TOR. The prime minister himself said "I can access the banned sites, you can too." The blocked site list (which must be constructed by internet users, as there is no transparency about the process at all) is absurdly long but most didn't care - they didn't even notice. Most sites are banned without a court order (not that those banned on court orders are more sensible) and on grounds of "obscenity" defined by middle aged religious conservative bureaucrat men. Now that the institutions, mechanisms and laws are in place, they are making the next step: trying to bypass filters becomes a crime. Moreover ISP passwords will be tied to RW ID, so you will use the same login if you are the same guy. No, thanks. Current situation is less than ideal, but the proposed one is a disaster.
I am not allowing other people to decide what I should *know.* Turkish culture does not value intellectual freedoms as much as westerners do and the government might be acting to people's will (IMHO they don't. Those do not have a problem with current internet censorship are basically not interested in the issue. There is a very small minority pushing for less freedom, a much bigger minority pushing for more freedom while the real majority does not care) but that is beside the point. I don't care if I am in the minority, even if I am just one guy, I am not letting the other people or the government to decide what information I have access to, especially since the said information is freely available to remaining parts of the world. The censorship is a violation of my rights, majority cannot take away my rights.
A great idea, having a numbers station for peanuts.
I don't think Middle East is upset about death of OBL at all. Muslims are not the most progressive bunch but few would consider flying planes into buildings to kill civilians as a honorable way of fighting, even those who consider fighting against USA is fighting for a good cause (and many don't). He was not liked and assassination is culturally more acceptable anyway.
Alfresco community edition is good enough. I have been using it for two years now and after initial hair loss, it is painless.
I read all of your posts but I still don't get your point. You (including those who are arguing with you) seem to think that my money is tucked under my pillow while I am thinking about what to do with it. It doesn't. I get paid via a bank. Except for a little amount of cash I withdraw for daily purchases, the money never leaves the bank until I purchase something. Meanwhile I am being paid interest, which is slightly higher than inflation (at least for TRL and daily interest rates in Turkey.) So my money is *always* worth more tomorrow even though there is inflation. Nominal value of the currency goes down but my purchasing power increases as long as I don't spend. Also, while the money is in the bank, it is given as credit to other people, who have to produce stuff with it such that they earn more than their interest rate. If there were deflation (and interest rates are sufficiently low) I might keep my money under my pillow and still get more purchasing power as long as I don't spend it. But in that case, noone else could use that money for investments. What is good about such a scenario? If there is deflation and interest rates are sufficiently high, I will still keep my money in the bank but the bank will have a harder time lending out that money. The borrowers will need to be much more efficient with the money they borrow. However you cannot be more efficient just because you need to; the net effect of such a situation will be driving all but the most successful investors out of the market, bank being unable to pay me interest and me going back to keeping my money under my pillow.
I don't know about GP, but the kind of orbital assembly meant in context of Mars missions is simply docking in LEO (or for the return craft, LMO). That might not be so simple either, but not too hard. It has been demonstrated in LEO in excess of a hundred times without single major mishap. Think lunar orbit rendezvous of Apollo, rather than building a complete spacecraft in LEO.
The whole point of gas core design is that it can heat your propellant to much higher temperatures than a solid core can withstand. Radiative heating, quartz, vortex etc. are just design details to contain gas core and keep it from contacting propellant.
I guess that is possible but I don't see the point. What is the advantage of doing stuff en route to Mars rather than in Earth and Mars orbits?
We have the technology. It is just impossible to send humans and their living quarters and their supplies and a research station and a return vehicle and return trip supplies on a SINGLE chemical rocket. Once you start using more than one chemical rocket for this list, even at just two, it becomes possible. (Unless you can do the smart thing and use a single nuclear rocket instead.) We already have demonstrated that we can resupply a spacecraft in orbit, do docking and assembly in orbit, do precision landings, survive long enough for the trip in space etc. The mission to Mars probably shall not use chemical rockets, but if we decide to use that technology, there are plenty of possibilities to make it happen. We can even colonize Mars with current *propulsion* technology (but new technologies are required for other aspects of colonization) : Aldrin Mars cyclers (basically Mir, ISS like stations in an interplanetary orbit) are sufficient for regular travels or resupply missions.
The process in Turkey works like this: Someone goes to court claiming a web site at a certain URL and/or IP is doing something forbidden (copyright infringements are just one example.) The court checks whether the claim is true and if it is, whether the service provider removes it once notified. If the claim is true and the service provider is unwilling to remove the offending content the URL name and/or IP block is forbidden. While the courts can decide whether or not ban a site, they don't have options to specify how the ban will be limited to only offenders. The law is so flawed that a single person can ban all internet sites that allow users to upload content or make comments, or sites that share root name or IP block with such a site with little effort. You don't even need anonymity or breaking laws in process of doing so; free speech is less restricted in RL that on internet in Turkey.
The conspiracy theories rely on lack of transparency in releasing of the documents. Noone knows why document X gets released before Y. The order *does* have a non-random feel to it. It doesn't make sense to pick documents randomly anyway. But who choses what is released and on what grounds?
The comparison should be with traditional nuclear reactors. They are not "easy" in any absolute sense either. MSR's have a peculiar materials and chemical engineering demands, but they should be easier to operate on the long run.
Lubricant use is pretty niche too; 80% of molybdenum is used in making steel and iron alloys. Granted, that figure includes non-MoS2 use, but electronics industry will probably start synthesis from pure Mo instead of purifying products of existing MoS2 plants.
Now, in a typical plasticized polymer made from polydisperse monomers (such as polysulfides used in shuttle o-rings), there is usually not a single temperature at which the sealant material turns from elastic to brittle
Correction: The shuttle o-rings were made of FKM, not polysulfide (PS). There are a lot of differences between the two, however the basics are same. Those differences make FKM turn from elastic to brittle more sharply (in a narrower temperature range) than PS and at a much higher temperature.
You are absolutely correct that Mr. Feynman was a genius at simplification. The sad fact is, the material did not need to be simplified. *All* sealants have an operating temperature window, below which they are not resilient enough, too hard or even brittle. If there will be any movement at all (and there is a lot of it in a rocket launch) the sealant must be above that temperature, otherwise it will fail. When it fails, whatever it is supposed to seal, is not sealed anymore. That part is *not* rocket science.
Now, in a typical plasticized polymer made from polydisperse monomers (such as polysulfides used in shuttle o-rings), there is usually not a single temperature at which the sealant material turns from elastic to brittle. Instead there is a there is a gentle hardening with lower temperatures while the material retains its elasticity for a wide temperature range, then the material gets less resilient and harder quickly, then the material gets brittle. Roughly these are elastic, plastic and brittle phases. The sealant must be used in the elastic range, but for short periods of time it may work in in the plastic range. That does not mean one can rely on using a seal that is not resilient if the time is short, rather it means that the failure is progressive. It may be that you are done moving the sealant before it has time to fail completely. Apparently, NASA launched knowing full well that the sealants are not in the elastic range for many times, and classified partial sealant failures as success, and used the "success" of prior launches as a proof of sealants ability to withstand cold weather. Of course hindsight is 20/20, but for the life of me, I cannot see how Thiokol engineers had been overruled *initially* so that such data could be gathered. What made NASA directors to ever think that polymers phase diagrams are negotiable?
The obvious fix is to present erotic pictures iff the gambler picks correct color. If I get the original paper correctly, presenting erotic pictures and hubble photographs before heading to casino should work just as well - as long as your gamblers are extrovert chicks.
And boo effing hoo for the cop who's PO'd that his version of events is not golden anymore, or for the DA who's seen his conviction ratio drop. It's almost routine now for DNA evidence, for example, to exonerate people who've spent years in prison, falsely convicted after some crooked cop lied in court to frame him and the DA went along with the sham just to get his numbers up. How many innocent people have lost years of their lives because of this? Have we executed anyone because on this? Even person, even one year, is intolerable. (And does anything ever happen to the cop and DA who set someone up for the crime they didn't commit? Nope.)
As an engineer in R&D, my job involves asking questions to physical systems in the form of experiments and interpreting the results to get my answers. I can tell you with very high degree of certainty that nature lies as often as cooked cops do. Alternatively, you could say I am as often stupid in interpreting the results of an experiment as a crooked cop lies. If I were to tell a jury what CSI's GC-MS results mean, my explanation would probably be just often as wrong as when I am interpreting the results of my GC (I am lucky or rich enough to have a GC-MS in my lab.) No *thing* is evidence, only the interpretation of the physical world is "evidence" and that interpretation might be wrong. It might be honestly wrong, or it might be the lab technician is crooked just like a cop might be. There is only one way to avoid executing innocent people: don't execute anyone. That is actually a simple and very effective way.
If you are not telling lies knowingly, you are seriously misinformed. Saddam did none of what you have described i your first paragraph. I can't even write a sensible refutation. You are just completely, utterly wrong.
73 MPa is not 73 atmospheres, it is a bit more than 720 atm.
Written like an engineer. To the mathematician the magnitude does not mean a thing, the ordering does.
Well, the following are facts:
1) Iraq-Turkey border was drawn by British oil prospectors.
2) Iraq-Turkey border does not make sense from a historical, ethnic or geographical pow. Unlike many politically motivated borders in ME and Africa, it is not at all straight. In a sense it is the most complicated border of Turkey.
3) Middle eastern, especially Iraqi, oil is very shallow and not yet depleted.
4) There are wells in the Syrian and Iraqi sides of border, visible by naked eye from border (not necessarily flywheel type)
5) Turkey does not produce any appricable amount of oil, and the little amount it does produce is not produced very near border (except for Batman wells.)
However, that is the extend of my knowledge. I don't know how succesful were the British prospectors. I don't know for sure that Turkish side of the border does not have any oil reserves. For all I know, we might have a lot of oil but may be not utilising reserves for ethnic-strategic purposes.
You are wrong. Oil was the concern to the point of Iraq-Turkey border being drawn by British oil prospectors. You can see the results with the naked eye. Turkey has virtually no reserves, the border does not follow any geographical, historic feature or an ethnic border and on both Syrian and Iraqi borders, you can see oil pumps working from Turkey only a few kms away.
The problem is neither vision nor ergonomics. Unless you have energy efficient, cheap and fast memory, processors and ccd, digital photography cannot be done at consumer level regardless of how you package it. Availability of affordable computer to transfer, store and manipulate those photographs is also important (although not as critical as availability of cam components.) None of these can be developed and produced with a single vision of producing a digital camera (except perhaps cheap ccd) because there is not enough volume. These technologies must become available for larger aplications and then adapted for digital cameras. Digital photography arrived when it arrived becuase that is when electronics and computer technology made it viable.