Yes, my dog never gets as far as you would expect in a given time because he has to investigate things on the way. And I think he's looking for evidence of life - certainly if you saw what he puts his nose into you'd agree it was pretty organic.
Computers may not yet pass the Turing test, but it's pretty good that we've managed to get them up to pooch standard.
Most of the human race couldn't write The Marriage of Figaro (sic). You're confusing high culture (play written by senior French civil servant) with culture, i.e. tribally distinct behavior patterns.
As an example, while we're on France around the Revolution, Mariane is often portrayed in French painting as bare breasted. The acceptability of this is an example of a cultural difference between the French of the period and the US of the Superbowl incident. If one tribe of chimpanzees has a characteristic behavior pattern that differs from that of another tribe - there is some ground for discussing whether this is a cultural difference akin to the difference between French and American beach behavior, or the difference between American and European uses of knives and forks.
Slightly off-topic, but irresistible. Intel has fallen into the US-centric error of not checking brand names around the world. For those who don't know (probably most reasonably normal people) John Prescott is a British politician who is famous for being very overweight, loud, aggressive - and nobody seems to know exactly what it is he does. He's kind of like Dick Cheney only not at all like Dick Cheney, if you see what I mean.
Since the Prescotts seem to have distinctly underwhelming performance, perhaps it isn't as inappropriate a name as it might be.
Nice one in the header. For those who don't know, unobtainium was the superdense metal needed to make the balance weights for the crankshafts of single cylinder motorcycle engines with unfeasibly small flywheels. Then the Japanese came along and reinvented balance shafts.
There's probably a perfectly simple way to make superheavy elements, too. We just need to get the quarks and the gluons into separate bottles, then just weigh the ingredients and get out the Magimix. All this colliding heavy nuclei at high speed may look good and make for big budgets, but all real progress is made with test tubes and Bunsen burners.
This thread seems to have been entirely taken over by the supporters of the "gun makers don't kill people, people do" proposition. In a way it's comforting to know that the Ayn Rand for God Society is unlikely to die out for lack of members, but, dear people, perhaps you could just for once in a while concede that unbridled capitalism doesn't always lead to the greatest good for the greatest number. Please note I'm following the guidelines and not using points for negative moderation, just trying to suggest that some of you have an extremely narrow notion of society.
For the record, Amnesty International is a pressure group. It's not one I support, but I acknowledge its right to exist. And, contrary to the belief of the posters who think they have no solutions and simply whine about everything, they have a belief and a method. The belief is that the world can be made to be a better place by putting gentle pressure on unpleasant governments to treat their people better, especially the ones who dare not to toe the government line. The method is by writing to individuals and corporations encouraging them to behave better, and by publicising what they see as abuses. You may not like this, but they are free to hold this view and to propagate it.
In an earlier age, before Mammon bought the rights to mainstream Christianity, priests used to preach sermons attacking bad rulers. They tried to shame them into behaving better, or make them think that the long terms consequences could be personally unpleasant (Hell.) Alongside them we had philosophers and teachers trying to propose ways of improving society. This probably takes some of the credit for why nowadays we rarely kill people for minor crimes, why you can criticise the government without being tortured to death, and why on the whole you can get through life in most Western countries without ever carrying a gun or a knife and without ever being seriously attacked. Even in the US, a substantial proportion of the population do not possess guns, and I do not believe they only stay alive and healthy because our friendly local NRA members are standing on the street corners protecting us.
Amnesty International tries to bring about change by a similar approach. They may feel that there is an inconsistency between William Gates III giving away large amounts of money to charitable causes - which he does - and Microsoft doing business with the Chinese government. They may feel that, if the Chinese government wishes to oppress its people, attack the people of Tibet, and threaten the successful and rather more democratic government of Taiwan, it would be nice if the rest of the world did not encourage them in this for the sake fo a few dollars. As I say, you may not like it, I may think they are impractical, but they are entitled to their views.
I actually had part of a sample on my desk at one point in the early 90s. It was about 3/4 of a turn from an experimental helix, and the reason that it was 3/4 of a turn was that when the current had been put through the helix it had abruptly stopped superconducting and broken up. As I understand it, this is the big problem with superconductors: the runaway thermal destruction the moment the combination of temperature and field strength exceeds the superconducting envelope.
It's interesting how all the big ideas of the 1940s and 1950s have come to nothing: no people walking around on the Moon or Mars, no widespread personal jet aircraft, no fusion reactors, nuclear power limited by safety concerns and the availability of cooling water, limited use of superconducting magnets, lasers being used in CD players rather than as enormous weapons. Fifty years later, most research seems to be into making things smaller and smaller, or making tiny quantities of exotic things (as in this case.) Surely the remaining proponents of the Big Ideas should have learned to stay quiet by now?
Whatever Al-Queda has done, it has significantly slowed down air travel. The bit in the middle is just as fast, but the delays on departure and arrival are now very much greater. Since I first started traveling by air on business (over 25 years ago...) air travel has got progressively harder and less pleasant, though much cheaper. Gone are the days when you drove up to the airport, parked the car, walked to the terminal, hung around for half an hour and then took off. In fact, their airport now seems to be the major part of the whole business, what with retail opportunities and endless corridors, shuttle trains, conveyors and other irrelevant crap. As a result, in Europe at least, the train door to door is often quicker and much less stressful than the airplane.
As rail speeds increase, so does the damage that can be done by a terrorist. A 650km/h maglev sounds interesting at first sight - but how much damage could be done by a well placed bomb? Although the thing contains no fuel on board, the combination of released kinetic and magnetic energy would, I guess, be pretty destructive. And because the infrastructure (track) is so expensive, the cost of any damage would be enormous.
Now consider a conventional technology HST. At 300km/h the kinetic energy is less than a quarter that at 650km/h, and the risk of major track damage from a derailment or explosion is less. My conclusion: the risk to a conventional HST from things on board is far less than a maglev. Chances are that the security on a high speed maglev line would be as intrusive and time consuming as that on airplanes. So in fact, the real city center to city center time for a maglev might not be significantly faster than a conventional HST. And it costs more. It's the usual balance: faced with the choice between spending shitloads of money on a technology that may actually have few benefits, and very much less money on a technology that is known to work well, governments do not have the same choices as private citizens. While, as a private individual, I might have a hankering to do my commute in a Porsche, even though it won't be any quicker or more comfortable than my VW, governments should be accountable for public money and make the "obvious" economic decision.
And in China, where most people are still desperately poor, the government has even more responsibility to make the economic decision rather than the vanity decision.
I wonder who modded this flamebait? It's surely a valid point, if sarcastically expressed. Summits do not achieve anything unless powerful external interests are pushing the participants. If a "summit" is set up merely out of a perceived need, or because somebody wishes to become an agonist to enhance their own position, it is unlikely to achieve anything.
If the RIAA section of the recording industry was really being forced into a corner and there was a clear enemy rather than a disparate group of separate interests, commercial forces would push things to the negotiating table.
In the cases of AIDS, poverty and global pollution, the First World is not being forced into negotiation by the Third World because the Third World has so little power. Not surprisingly, activism, political activity and the threat of terrorism achieve more than talking-about-things. Sad but true.
Unfortunately there isn't a launcher in the world big enough to get your design to Mars. Extraterrestrial robots are a nice balance of what people would like and what is actually feasible. This is extremely difficult to do, which is why it takes genius engineers to design them.
Ariel Sharon and his squatter supporters are not Israel. The scared conscripts being forced to confront the Palestinians are not Israel. Just like messrs Bush and Blair are not the US and the UK respectively. Let's face it, people who support FOSS are more likely to be in favor of cooperation and internationalism than to support some unpleasant old man who clings to the past and seems capable of learning nothing except hatred (and that goes for the Palestinians and Arafat too..) So get over it. Just learn to discriminate between people, who are much the same everywhere, and the men (it's mostly men) who manage to get into power and who also tend to be similar, but in a most unpleasant way.
Of course you can fit a Diesel to a Series II Land Rover, but it will not run on cooking oil. The seals may fail and so may the injection pump. Also be prepared to run through loads of engine and gear oil, and have the roadholding of something that doesn't hold the road very well. Unless, like me, you *really needed* to be able to transport loads of logs over unmade roads for a few years, forget it.
(And the chance that the police will need remote control to stop you is also remote - you will need a calendar to measure the 0-60 time. I think too there is a solenoid operated cutoff valve that you would need to replace to avoid being stopped by an EMP weapon, but I may be remembering the wrong model.)
I would be interested to see what the EM pulse gun does to my old mechanical injection Diesel, which requires no electric power whatsoever to run (and, since it has stick shift, can even be push-started). My new variable wastegate turbo with solenoid controlled injection is, of course, another matter
I guess the Sussex police have some wonderful scheme for preventing criminals from finding out that older cars will not be affected. That, or banning cars with mechanical control systems from the UK. They should get together with the British member of parliament who came up with the brilliant idea of abolishing spam by requiring all email addresses to carry the UK postcode of the originator, and start a think tank.
Seriously, why does anyone allow these m***ns to embarrass their colleagues by pronouncing on stuff they don't understand?
Greetings to another ex-Triumph owner. However, the problem was largely that BSA preferred to pay its directors and staff inflated salaries, and not pay for a decent electrical system on the bikes. Since Beagle 2 was done on the cheap, we may be seeing the same syndrome.
Re:Why 2BCE?
on
USB Menorah
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
Shock horror. Genuinely informative responses to a query posted on/.
Thanks to the people who took the trouble to respond.
Specialist electronics distributors supply all kinds of rack cabinets in different sizes (including depths) and finishes, many with integral rails, wiring tracks, and a range of doors, ventilator panels etc. They are basically commodity items. Reinventing this particular wheel is likely to be hard work and result in a product less good than the commercial one.
It's worth remembering that steel or aluminum cases lose quite a lot of heat through the walls while wooden boxes are insulators, so commercial cases are more tolerant of poor thermal design.
True, true. The shocking thing is how extreme or special interest governments get elected while people who would clearly be disadvantaged by their election fail to vote. What percentage of registered US voters actually voted for Bush (or, for that matter, Clinton?)
It may be truly cynical, but I'm slowly coming round to the view that if the gap betwen rich and poor is growing, and the poor cannot be bothered to vote to stop it, they may not deserve anything different. (ducks)
I'm not a nanotechnologist but I have had a fair bit to do with the behavior of atoms on surfaces, especially metals. I think that Smalley seems to have a much closer grasp on the real world than Drexler. The idea of a nanobot twisting a pi-bond here and snapping a sigma-bond there seems quite ludicrous; where such reactions occcur in the real world it is because of the properties of the exact molecules involved and is reaction-specific. You can't just say "well, this works with an iron atom in a hemoglobin molecule, so let's make a different carrier molecule with the same geometry, put it on a robot arm and use it to collect up nickel atoms, or whatever". Biology works because over billions of years a limited group of reactions has been found to work on a limited range of materials, in bulk and in carrier liquids. The notion that this means you can just build little tiny cranes and waggle atoms around does not follow.
From reading the letters I don't think Drexler has really addressed the problems raised by Smalley fingers at all, he just tries to brush the problems aside.
apart from the obvious question of what makes being conservative a good thing (or do you think that burning brides for their dowries is just a quaint ethnic folkway?), India has elected Communist state governments in the past. One of my most eye-opening experiences, in fact, was being taken round Mumbai by a Communist councillor and getting a first hand view on the difference between US lunatic fringe communism, Russo/chinese dictatorship communism, and genuinely elected communism...
Just because a section of the Indian middle class is prepared to work with the US for their own gain, just as they did with the British, does not mean that they will continue to do so as soon as they perceive that their advantage lies elsewhere. Whatever makes you think that when the Indian (and Chinese) economies overtake the US in GDP, the US will still be ruling the world? And what makes you think that India is less likely to side instead with the EU, which is currently seen as a more Muslim-friendly bloc than the US? The fear coming off Condoleeza Rice and Rumsfeld just because the EU is starting a tiny military planning unit, is almost palpable. They know how insecure US power really is, in a world which in population terms outnumbers the US and Canada 20 to 1.
Indian Open Source may be very good for the progress of the software trade and in the short term it will be good for US corporations benefiting from low prices. But ask folk in Pittsburgh what happens in the long term when things are done more cheaply (and better) abroad.
is the idea that individuals can be repeatedly prosecuted in order to "clarify the law". If a law was so badly designed or so obscurely drafted, or if the education of state prosecutors and judges is so neglected, that a valid prosecution fails, it should be up to the representative government to redraft the law or address the training of law officers.
Anybody who has been engaged in a long drawn out legal case with many hearings knows that it is one of the worst things that can happen to anybody, and even if one is eventually successful it may take years to recover. What is happening in Guantanamo Bay is deplorable, but surely what is happening in this case is deplorable on a smaller scale. To me, both cases are like prosecuting a small scale cannabis seller because the guy running the big operation selling crack is too powerful and the police badly need a drugs bust for the statistics.
Re:hot and cold outside
on
Eating in Space
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· Score: 2, Informative
Facing a vacuum does not make a freezer. Ever heard of a Dewar (vacuum) flask? I don't know, 19th century technology and already forgotten about in the 21st.
Slashdot Mirror
Computers may not yet pass the Turing test, but it's pretty good that we've managed to get them up to pooch standard.
As an example, while we're on France around the Revolution, Mariane is often portrayed in French painting as bare breasted. The acceptability of this is an example of a cultural difference between the French of the period and the US of the Superbowl incident. If one tribe of chimpanzees has a characteristic behavior pattern that differs from that of another tribe - there is some ground for discussing whether this is a cultural difference akin to the difference between French and American beach behavior, or the difference between American and European uses of knives and forks.
Since the Prescotts seem to have distinctly underwhelming performance, perhaps it isn't as inappropriate a name as it might be.
There's probably a perfectly simple way to make superheavy elements, too. We just need to get the quarks and the gluons into separate bottles, then just weigh the ingredients and get out the Magimix. All this colliding heavy nuclei at high speed may look good and make for big budgets, but all real progress is made with test tubes and Bunsen burners.
For the record, Amnesty International is a pressure group. It's not one I support, but I acknowledge its right to exist. And, contrary to the belief of the posters who think they have no solutions and simply whine about everything, they have a belief and a method. The belief is that the world can be made to be a better place by putting gentle pressure on unpleasant governments to treat their people better, especially the ones who dare not to toe the government line. The method is by writing to individuals and corporations encouraging them to behave better, and by publicising what they see as abuses. You may not like this, but they are free to hold this view and to propagate it.
In an earlier age, before Mammon bought the rights to mainstream Christianity, priests used to preach sermons attacking bad rulers. They tried to shame them into behaving better, or make them think that the long terms consequences could be personally unpleasant (Hell.) Alongside them we had philosophers and teachers trying to propose ways of improving society. This probably takes some of the credit for why nowadays we rarely kill people for minor crimes, why you can criticise the government without being tortured to death, and why on the whole you can get through life in most Western countries without ever carrying a gun or a knife and without ever being seriously attacked. Even in the US, a substantial proportion of the population do not possess guns, and I do not believe they only stay alive and healthy because our friendly local NRA members are standing on the street corners protecting us.
Amnesty International tries to bring about change by a similar approach. They may feel that there is an inconsistency between William Gates III giving away large amounts of money to charitable causes - which he does - and Microsoft doing business with the Chinese government. They may feel that, if the Chinese government wishes to oppress its people, attack the people of Tibet, and threaten the successful and rather more democratic government of Taiwan, it would be nice if the rest of the world did not encourage them in this for the sake fo a few dollars. As I say, you may not like it, I may think they are impractical, but they are entitled to their views.
Put it down to age and reading the word "room" in the article: it wasn't deliberate.
It's interesting how all the big ideas of the 1940s and 1950s have come to nothing: no people walking around on the Moon or Mars, no widespread personal jet aircraft, no fusion reactors, nuclear power limited by safety concerns and the availability of cooling water, limited use of superconducting magnets, lasers being used in CD players rather than as enormous weapons. Fifty years later, most research seems to be into making things smaller and smaller, or making tiny quantities of exotic things (as in this case.) Surely the remaining proponents of the Big Ideas should have learned to stay quiet by now?
As rail speeds increase, so does the damage that can be done by a terrorist. A 650km/h maglev sounds interesting at first sight - but how much damage could be done by a well placed bomb? Although the thing contains no fuel on board, the combination of released kinetic and magnetic energy would, I guess, be pretty destructive. And because the infrastructure (track) is so expensive, the cost of any damage would be enormous.
Now consider a conventional technology HST. At 300km/h the kinetic energy is less than a quarter that at 650km/h, and the risk of major track damage from a derailment or explosion is less. My conclusion: the risk to a conventional HST from things on board is far less than a maglev. Chances are that the security on a high speed maglev line would be as intrusive and time consuming as that on airplanes. So in fact, the real city center to city center time for a maglev might not be significantly faster than a conventional HST. And it costs more. It's the usual balance: faced with the choice between spending shitloads of money on a technology that may actually have few benefits, and very much less money on a technology that is known to work well, governments do not have the same choices as private citizens. While, as a private individual, I might have a hankering to do my commute in a Porsche, even though it won't be any quicker or more comfortable than my VW, governments should be accountable for public money and make the "obvious" economic decision.
And in China, where most people are still desperately poor, the government has even more responsibility to make the economic decision rather than the vanity decision.
If the RIAA section of the recording industry was really being forced into a corner and there was a clear enemy rather than a disparate group of separate interests, commercial forces would push things to the negotiating table.
In the cases of AIDS, poverty and global pollution, the First World is not being forced into negotiation by the Third World because the Third World has so little power. Not surprisingly, activism, political activity and the threat of terrorism achieve more than talking-about-things. Sad but true.
Unfortunately there isn't a launcher in the world big enough to get your design to Mars. Extraterrestrial robots are a nice balance of what people would like and what is actually feasible. This is extremely difficult to do, which is why it takes genius engineers to design them.
Because it should be 4000 miles from the center, obviously. They're rocket scientists, they know these things.
Ariel Sharon and his squatter supporters are not Israel. The scared conscripts being forced to confront the Palestinians are not Israel. Just like messrs Bush and Blair are not the US and the UK respectively. Let's face it, people who support FOSS are more likely to be in favor of cooperation and internationalism than to support some unpleasant old man who clings to the past and seems capable of learning nothing except hatred (and that goes for the Palestinians and Arafat too..) So get over it. Just learn to discriminate between people, who are much the same everywhere, and the men (it's mostly men) who manage to get into power and who also tend to be similar, but in a most unpleasant way.
- Load the initial boot loader into the core memory using the front panel switches
- Load the proper boot loader from tape using the initial boot loader
- Change a couple of memory locations (too lazy to splice tape on bootstrap loader)
- Reset and boot
What was so difficult about that we needed to change it?(And the chance that the police will need remote control to stop you is also remote - you will need a calendar to measure the 0-60 time. I think too there is a solenoid operated cutoff valve that you would need to replace to avoid being stopped by an EMP weapon, but I may be remembering the wrong model.)
I would be interested to see what the EM pulse gun does to my old mechanical injection Diesel, which requires no electric power whatsoever to run (and, since it has stick shift, can even be push-started). My new variable wastegate turbo with solenoid controlled injection is, of course, another matter
Seriously, why does anyone allow these m***ns to embarrass their colleagues by pronouncing on stuff they don't understand?
Greetings to another ex-Triumph owner. However, the problem was largely that BSA preferred to pay its directors and staff inflated salaries, and not pay for a decent electrical system on the bikes. Since Beagle 2 was done on the cheap, we may be seeing the same syndrome.
Thanks to the people who took the trouble to respond.
I'm just curious. It's like a program to work out the day of the week on which Christmas Day fell that only went back to the time of Constantine.
It's worth remembering that steel or aluminum cases lose quite a lot of heat through the walls while wooden boxes are insulators, so commercial cases are more tolerant of poor thermal design.
It may be truly cynical, but I'm slowly coming round to the view that if the gap betwen rich and poor is growing, and the poor cannot be bothered to vote to stop it, they may not deserve anything different. (ducks)
From reading the letters I don't think Drexler has really addressed the problems raised by Smalley fingers at all, he just tries to brush the problems aside.
Just because a section of the Indian middle class is prepared to work with the US for their own gain, just as they did with the British, does not mean that they will continue to do so as soon as they perceive that their advantage lies elsewhere. Whatever makes you think that when the Indian (and Chinese) economies overtake the US in GDP, the US will still be ruling the world? And what makes you think that India is less likely to side instead with the EU, which is currently seen as a more Muslim-friendly bloc than the US? The fear coming off Condoleeza Rice and Rumsfeld just because the EU is starting a tiny military planning unit, is almost palpable. They know how insecure US power really is, in a world which in population terms outnumbers the US and Canada 20 to 1.
Indian Open Source may be very good for the progress of the software trade and in the short term it will be good for US corporations benefiting from low prices. But ask folk in Pittsburgh what happens in the long term when things are done more cheaply (and better) abroad.
Anybody who has been engaged in a long drawn out legal case with many hearings knows that it is one of the worst things that can happen to anybody, and even if one is eventually successful it may take years to recover. What is happening in Guantanamo Bay is deplorable, but surely what is happening in this case is deplorable on a smaller scale. To me, both cases are like prosecuting a small scale cannabis seller because the guy running the big operation selling crack is too powerful and the police badly need a drugs bust for the statistics.
Facing a vacuum does not make a freezer. Ever heard of a Dewar (vacuum) flask? I don't know, 19th century technology and already forgotten about in the 21st.