Bards were being taken to task for the effects on minors of the so-called Epic industry. Under-18s are spending their spare time hanging around the edges of feasting halls listening to the morally dubious output of singers like Homer, and this would be fueling an obesity epidemic if we could only find a way to grow more food.
For those who have missed this stuff, Homer's latest efforts encourage minors to daydream, imagining themselves fighting pointless battles against African coastal cities,killing the men, enslaving the women and carrying off the treasure. Frequently the good guys get killed by the bad guys, and in the latest release the player who scores the most points does so by shooting large numbers of men and hanging prostitutes from a clothesline, after completing a set of tasks which include having frequent sex with a variety of women none of whom seem to have any male relatives to take care of them.
In a press conference, a High Priest of Ba'al said that listening to this kind of thing would lead in the end to anti-social behavior such as refusing to take part in infant sacrifice....oh, I can't go on, it's impossible to satirise these guys. Even the Onion finds that reality just outruns their imaginations.
As other posters have pointed out, this is not about the value of art. It's about the value assigned to something by linking it with a famous name. The joke is that we don't even have Leonardo or Botticelli around to cash in on their fame: the "value" of something being by Leonardo da Vinci is purely notional. If a program can identify that a painting over which experts disagree is "really" a Giovanni Ferrari rather than "really" a Leonardo, the value decreases enormously despite the fact that someone thought the painting was good enough to be a Leonardo in the first place. It isn't even about originality: at this remove we do not know whether Leonardo was original or whether he copied the ideas of someone else whose work is now lost.
So, since this is purely a commercial program whose purpose is to provide a notional valuation based on association with celebrity, expect it to be extensively challenged. Too much is at stake. The art experts will soon weigh in there: the brush strokes being evaluated are actually those of the atelier assistants who did most of the work, the bits actually by the master defy analysis by a machine, and so on. Part of the value of the art market depends on gambling: finding the missed masterpiece, having a painting lose value owing to wrong attribution only to have the perceived value of the "real" artist increase as fashion changes. Anything that introduces apparent certainty will partly destroy the churning process that pushes art prices upwards, and no-one in the market wants that.
The price of art is as unrelated to the long-term assignment of aesthetic values as the price of CDs is unrelated to the actual merits of the performers. That's the sad reflection on our society.
Quote: Shadow uses a series of magnets for propulsion, driven by the main diesel motor. An 110kW Magnet Motor drives four 50kW Magnet Motors mounted on the each of the Shadow's four hub
This is so technologically illiterate I almost despair, though I think it means
Shadow uses electric motors for propulsion, driven by a generator attached to the main Diesel engine. There is a 110KW generator and 50KW motors mounted on the hubs (the difference between 200KW and 110KW can be supplied by the Li Ion batteries to provide full power for short periods.)
Of course, it could be deliberate technical obfuscation to throw Osama off the track . And bears are Catholics and the Pope poos in the woods.
Am I right in thinking that if the original BASIC language had been released under the GPL, this nonsense would never have happened? (Except that Microsoft would have had to invent a language called, I don't know, BillSharp, and ensure that none of the constructs resembled BASIC, just as C# is in no way whatsoever a Java ripoff. But would it ever have gained the same acceptance?)
Slightly off-topic maybe, but the entire archival publication vs copyrights thing reinforces my belief that the US, having defeated the Soviet Union, is now turning into a cross between the Soviet Union and the Roman Empire. And this is not intended as flamebait, it's intended as a rational suggestion. The aristocratic party in the Roman state maintained power by laying claim to the control of religion, and by keeping secret the essential data of the State - for instance, only the aristocracy had access to which days were, and were not, legal for public business. Plebeians could not easily pursue litigation because they were denied access to necessary information. Copyrights, patents and secrecy are being used by the new aristocracy - corporates - to prevent the rest of us from mounting any kind of challenge to their monopolies. The aristocrats also controlled access to knowledge of world events, and the army. As a result, the average Roman citizen could be kept ignorant of any events that the patricians did not want them to find out about. Substitute State and Party for Patricians and you have a major feature of the Soviet Empire. Add restrictions in travel, especially the prevention of movement and free speech for suspected dissidents - look at the no-fly list - and the current US administration is borrowing from the Soviet Empire too. What with the claim to be the custodians of morality (God is angry with you if you have the wrong kind of consensual sex but supports you if you screw people over in the interests of power or profit) it's a dirty picture. Against this is the "old" America - the ideas that built the place in the first place. Copyrights? Ignore everybody else's until well into the 20th Century. Freedom of thought. Separation of Church and State. Unwillingness to get involved in the politics of foreigners. Self-sufficiency.
It's good that the Library of Congress is still part of Old America, and it's good that the Internet still provides an equivalent of the Soviet samizdat - but over the next few years these things will need defending as never before.
And history provides a precedent. During WW1 the British government behaved like the US government to-day, creating draconian secrecy laws in the face of a supposed threat from German spies. Even to-day, Civil Servants are still trying to preserve that secrecy, the result of a wartime overreaction. That's nearly 90 years of weakened democracy, resulting in a country where, for instance, government IT foulups are never investigated publicly because it might embarrass the Civil Servants responsible, and as a result billions are still wasted in systems that don't work. I could go on, but you get my drift. We should support these projects for access to knowledge not just because they are interesting, but because they are part of a view of society that created the modern world, not a view that is trying to drag us back to the past (and the past was pretty horrible, if you had to live there.)
Indeed, don't blame the lawyers, blame the legal system and the clients. Agreed, many lawyers are well paid (but not all) but in a way they have an impossible job. They have to represent the interests of rampant egomaniacs who are born liars, in a legal system produced ultimately by politicians with the attention span of a gnat and a desire to stay in power. It's a bit like being a soldier with the main risk being heart attack, nervous breakdown, marital breakdown, rather than getting shot in the head.
Before deciding to become a lawyer, ask yourself the question: given how I feel about _users_, how would I feel about working with clients who are the kind of people who end up in expensive lawsuits and so, for the most part, are not friendly, cooperative individuals who get on well with other people. And demand that you listen to their idiotic ramblings and read their pathetic documents and, instead of laughing at them, take them seriously because they are paying? Because, don't forget, to be a hotshot lawyer you have big outgoings and you have to keep the cash flowing. And telling Mr. Moneybags to anglo saxon sexual intercourse(1) off because his case is piss(2) poor will soon result in a negative cashflow situation. So please, focus your ire on the honest businessmen of SCO who are spending the company funds on this stuff.
(1) Now the Christian Right is in charge, I think we need to be careful about using naughty words. (2)But not when it comes to words from the Bible, of course.
All this conjunction stuff is so much horse manure. Venus is INSIDE the earth's orbit and Jupiter is OUTSIDE it. They are both a very long way apart.
Yes, I know this is obvious to anyone with an education, but I'd like a little more precision in statements about planets. Jupiter and Venus cannot be at their closest when their positions seen from Earth coincide because at this point they cannot be in a direct line with the Sun - think about it. Their apparent positions in the sky may be closest, but at the point at which they are actually closest they must be visually separated from the point of view of Earth.
And for some of these posters who are wilfully misunderstanding the whole thing, the best place to see Venus and Jupiter (reasonably) close together is the Uffizi, in Firenze (Florence) Italy. There is a story that at one time the Uffizi used to show only one large Botticelli at a time so as not tog et the visitors over-excited.
Once upon a time the British had an empire (bear with me, this is relevant). This meant that all the mindless, violent thugs thrown up by society could be drafted into the army and sent where most of them would die of disease, some would die in battle, and some would grow up to be Imperial administrators and complain about the low level of troops we got nowadays. This kept the violent thugs away from civil society and enabled political and social development in the UK.
Learning from this, the US did the same for many years. There was a nice big civil war in which all the people too aggressive to survive in a developing civil society obligingly killed one another. Then there were gold rushes and the development of the West, and the antisocial thugs were able to go and fight one another over land and gold until eventually civilisation caught up with them.
And now? The thugs are too dim bulb to get into the armed services, which don't work by getting killed en masse any more. So they hang around civil society and become gang members and drug dealers, and we have to catch them and lock them up. Some of them grow out of it and some don't.
Games are an expression of the way homo sapiens sapiens was originally designed to work. Blaming them for our lack of ways of dealing with psychopaths is easy because actually fixing the problem is very hard. Never before have we had a society where the majority of sociopaths and psychopaths aren't simply killed off before they reach the age of 21 or so.
Sometimes I wonder if the answer isn't simply to execute not only all killers, but everyone who commits an unprovoked violent assault on another person with a weapon. The effect would be much the same as the policy that built the British Empire and the US.
I'm not really putting this forward seriously, but what are the objective reasons why this is a Bad Idea?
Unfortunately you need to be a talented graphic artist, photographer or designer to produce work of the quality of the Anything and Everything site. It's a bit like the way professional photographers used to demonstrate that they could take good pictures with a Kodak Brownie. Now if Google could develop an algorithm to rank photoblogs by artistic merit, that would be something useful.
Industrial means all kinds of control systems and factory automation, as well as robotics and vehicle systems. These are made in large (not consumer large, but still large) quantities. Basically you want as much processing power as possible (because it is much cheaper to be able to use, say, Java than have to code assembler) while minimising power requirements. In the 80s when X86 meant the 8086, 8088 (dog) and 80286, NEC brought out the very nice V40 chip which was a low power CMOS X86 with some onboard peripherals. This plus a CMOS redesign of the rest of the system enabled the company I then worked for to redesign a datalogger the size of a 17" CRT monitor to one the size of a modern laptop computer (think reducing the UPS battery size and PSU by a factor of 3.) So yes, you are quite wrong.
An important target for the embedded market is computers that run when vehicles are not being used, i.e. draining the battery. If it was possible to use real computers rather than ARM machines, a lot of cheap software out there would suddenly become available for use, expanding the market.
Obviously I was too terse. A little learning is a dangerous thing... I was objecting to P=VI. The power dissipated in an AC circuit, or indeed any circuit where the voltage is changing and inductance or capacitance is present, is neither instantaneously equal to VI, nor is the energy dissipated the integral of VI by t. Clearly some people were so anxious to show how clever they were, they didn't make it to the second half of the original post.
In fact, V=IR is of limited real world use. To be really pedantic, it is the sum of all the instantaneous potential differences around a loop that is equal to the series resistance multiplied by the current. When AC is applied to real world devices like tungsten lamps, there is temperature variation of the resistive part which makes the whole equation much more complex. I stand by my original comment, which is that in real-world AC applications, which EEs come up against daily, the simple formulae are of limited use.
And, if we are being really sticky, voltage and current are measured in vector fields. Unfortunately/. doesn't allow me to reproduce the formulae I had to master as an undergraduate, but they are more fun than the simple versions suggest.
I don't mind people correcting my mistakes, but I do mind people who don't really know the subject trying to be clever.
Since you ask, by the time the water was output it had gone through several processes. However, the last process required a treatment which resulted in a raw output at a pH of about 9.5, and a chromium content of about 1-2 parts per billion. This actually suited the water company since their bacteria need a tiny amount of chromium. To recycle the water at this point would have required an expensive two stage treatment to remove the last tiny amount of chromium and then lower the pH, followed by another pass through the DI system. Since the water company preferred to have the water just as it was, there was no point. Even so, the plant consumed less than 1/3 the water of a conventional plant. It is still running, though I have long ceased to have anything to do with it.
Ahem! an inclined plane is not a machine until a second component moves on it. And a wheel/axle requires a pivot. As Archimedes observed, give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the Earth.
I had on the output from a plating plant. We had to meter the output water because it was as clean as the input water, and the water company refunded the normal waste treatment charge on it.
If you live near a reservoir, go and look at that. Scum floats on it, fish crap in it, the odd sheep or wading bird dies in it. And then it gets treated and you drink it. What exactly is your problem with what Singapore is doing, people?
Am I insulted by the idea of being modeled by a Pentium? I think I deserve at least a couple of Opterons. And, the day I'm having today, I'd need at least 4G of Ram and a dedicated interrupt controller.
It's a pity that in a battlefield simulation all that processing power would be wasted as I'd just be an immediate civilian casualty, but with luck I might manage to drop my old Laserjet 5M out the window on one of the combatants first.
I know someone who runs a small specialist company that outsources financial and IT-related services for small businesses, many of whom are plumbers, electricians and carpenters. Some of these people are brilliant at their jobs - but they don't have the financial mindset. And some of them are now doing _very_ well - because their better financial and credit control gives them an edge over their competitors.
Also, how many comp sci graduates start in the mailroom? I submit that, other things being equal, a graduate with practical skills in the industry will have the edge over a new graduate joining the same industry but without those skills. At the moment we have a division of labor which means that even management is over specialised. What makes you think that fashion will last through the next ten or twenty years, when today's new graduates will be reaching senior levels?
Eventually the lessons of Barings and Enron will filter through. As usual, it will be by new companies springing up with diferent business models.
I'm beginning to think that nowadays every tech article has to include at least 1 really stupid claim, either so the authors can laugh at the stupid journos who pass them on uncritically, or because it's the bit the journalist will think he understands and that will make a headline. Any kind of machinery requires differentiated structures, and anything involving electricity requires localised anisotropy - or how will you get your current flows separate in order to do anything useful? DNA has a differentiated structure but it is not a machine, it is a recording medium (parenthetically, it's just as well the RIAA wasn't around when life evolved: "What do you mean, you can replicate DNA? That's illegal file-sharing!") and the machines that do something useful with it are all multi-molecular. It's unlikely a few billion years (sorry, George) of evolution will be seriously wrong about this. I don't mind Slashdot contributors including marketoid claims in headers, but they might at least quarantine them in quotes and put a [sic] at the end so we know that they know what we know.
Yes, take up a skilled trade, or preferably two, one of which is IT related. Most plumbers, electricians and carpenters are not capable of running a business because they lack the organisational and IT skills that are needed nowadays. If you are capable of doing comp sci and becoming a plumber, you could end up running Kohler...well, I exaggerate a bit but I think the point is valid.
Rudolf Diesel, the inventor of the engine, graduated from University and then went and trained as a skilled mechanic. Isaac Newton could use a lathe by the time he got to Cambridge. And Alan Turing could machine his own relays. Apart from the career options, acquiring both academic and practical skills makes you a more rounded person, and thus more employable generally.
When tape video cameras first emerged at reasonable prices, wedding photographers were interested but worried that their profit margin would be eroded by the editing cost of getting 3 hours of footage down to the 10 mins that a third party would actually watch. But they soon discovered that Joe Public is so uncritical of seeing his own picture that he actually wanted the unedited 3 hours. Existing video cameras are basically weapons of mass boredom, and on bad days I think that a license should be required before anyone is allowed to distribute thr results beyond the immediate family.
Yes, I'm feeling crabby. But at least I'm agreeing with someone.
Your generation doesn't know how lucky it is. I wish we had had clickable points on phase diagrams in my day, instead of getting looked down on by lecturers when we asked stupid questions (that nobody else in class knew the answer to either...) And we had to make our own steel out of charcoal, magnetite and a lot of clay...and we were lucky, our neighbors were still living in the Bronze Age.
This is largely marketing speak, IMHO. Glasses are supercooled liquids but inevitably contain a certain amount of crystallised material. Ceramics are crystalline, but unless they are single-crystal will usually contain a certain amount of glass in the matrix. This is one reason why ceramics usually have a softening range rather than a sudden melting temperature as with pure crystals. (The other is that the variation in crystal structure also creates a range of melting.)
I suspect the actual achievement here is managing to produce a transparent lens from a high refractive index material, but explain that to the masses who buy low-end digital cameras.
(Not enough room to get in the "You insensitive clod" as well.)
Amazing how Newton's status has changed. In the early 70s the Cambridge Union Society actually sold off a copy of the Principia cheap (as the guy who beat me to it gloated at me at considerable length). They wouldn't do that nowadays when virtually every Latin edition is worth a great deal of money. Just as it's extremely difficult to spend any time in Florence without becoming aware of the Dante connection, it's quite difficult to spend time in Cambridge, England without encountering Newton. Whatever his faults - and he was clearly not an easy person to get on with - he made major contributions to optics, pure physics, chemistry, mathematics and the running of the Royal Mint. Other people around at the time did remarkable work - Hooke, Boyle, Liebniz - but Newton surpassed them al for sheer output, breadth and depth. Logically, nowadays, with a much larger and better educated population we should be throwing up lots of Newtons. Why aren't we? Is it because all the relatively easy science and maths has now been done and it takes large organisations and computing power to make any advance at all? Or is it because clever people get pulled off into business or celebrity before they really have a chance to do any work that will really endure?
Spending on science actually underpins national security, the economy, health care and the environment. And I guess that soft sciences like psychology and sociology have an impact on social security (as well as national security, if you take criminology into account.) So you are right in stating the attitude of dumb-cluck voters, but wrong in that you don't understand how the world works. I don't know enough about the overall pattern of US R&D to be able to say which possible administration would do the best job, but I do know that an administration that does not understand the fundamental importance of science is not in America's - or the world's - long term interest. And if you are aged less than 70, you should be very interested in the long term.
It's about time we took "trial by peers" seriously. How many people on that jury could even set the time on a VCR?
Software parents will likely continue like this while being technically literate is a negative for being a judge, and being literate in anything is likely to have you removed from a jury. It's high time that juries in specialist trials were recruited from (perhaps retired) people with skills from the appropriate areas - yes, and paid - so that the arguments could be properly understood.
Slashdot Mirror
For those who have missed this stuff, Homer's latest efforts encourage minors to daydream, imagining themselves fighting pointless battles against African coastal cities,killing the men, enslaving the women and carrying off the treasure. Frequently the good guys get killed by the bad guys, and in the latest release the player who scores the most points does so by shooting large numbers of men and hanging prostitutes from a clothesline, after completing a set of tasks which include having frequent sex with a variety of women none of whom seem to have any male relatives to take care of them.
In a press conference, a High Priest of Ba'al said that listening to this kind of thing would lead in the end to anti-social behavior such as refusing to take part in infant sacrifice....oh, I can't go on, it's impossible to satirise these guys. Even the Onion finds that reality just outruns their imaginations.
So, since this is purely a commercial program whose purpose is to provide a notional valuation based on association with celebrity, expect it to be extensively challenged. Too much is at stake. The art experts will soon weigh in there: the brush strokes being evaluated are actually those of the atelier assistants who did most of the work, the bits actually by the master defy analysis by a machine, and so on. Part of the value of the art market depends on gambling: finding the missed masterpiece, having a painting lose value owing to wrong attribution only to have the perceived value of the "real" artist increase as fashion changes. Anything that introduces apparent certainty will partly destroy the churning process that pushes art prices upwards, and no-one in the market wants that.
The price of art is as unrelated to the long-term assignment of aesthetic values as the price of CDs is unrelated to the actual merits of the performers. That's the sad reflection on our society.
Am I right in thinking that if the original BASIC language had been released under the GPL, this nonsense would never have happened? (Except that Microsoft would have had to invent a language called, I don't know, BillSharp, and ensure that none of the constructs resembled BASIC, just as C# is in no way whatsoever a Java ripoff. But would it ever have gained the same acceptance?)
The aristocratic party in the Roman state maintained power by laying claim to the control of religion, and by keeping secret the essential data of the State - for instance, only the aristocracy had access to which days were, and were not, legal for public business. Plebeians could not easily pursue litigation because they were denied access to necessary information. Copyrights, patents and secrecy are being used by the new aristocracy - corporates - to prevent the rest of us from mounting any kind of challenge to their monopolies.
The aristocrats also controlled access to knowledge of world events, and the army. As a result, the average Roman citizen could be kept ignorant of any events that the patricians did not want them to find out about.
Substitute State and Party for Patricians and you have a major feature of the Soviet Empire. Add restrictions in travel, especially the prevention of movement and free speech for suspected dissidents - look at the no-fly list - and the current US administration is borrowing from the Soviet Empire too. What with the claim to be the custodians of morality (God is angry with you if you have the wrong kind of consensual sex but supports you if you screw people over in the interests of power or profit) it's a dirty picture.
Against this is the "old" America - the ideas that built the place in the first place. Copyrights? Ignore everybody else's until well into the 20th Century. Freedom of thought. Separation of Church and State. Unwillingness to get involved in the politics of foreigners. Self-sufficiency.
It's good that the Library of Congress is still part of Old America, and it's good that the Internet still provides an equivalent of the Soviet samizdat - but over the next few years these things will need defending as never before.
And history provides a precedent. During WW1 the British government behaved like the US government to-day, creating draconian secrecy laws in the face of a supposed threat from German spies. Even to-day, Civil Servants are still trying to preserve that secrecy, the result of a wartime overreaction. That's nearly 90 years of weakened democracy, resulting in a country where, for instance, government IT foulups are never investigated publicly because it might embarrass the Civil Servants responsible, and as a result billions are still wasted in systems that don't work. I could go on, but you get my drift. We should support these projects for access to knowledge not just because they are interesting, but because they are part of a view of society that created the modern world, not a view that is trying to drag us back to the past (and the past was pretty horrible, if you had to live there.)
Before deciding to become a lawyer, ask yourself the question: given how I feel about _users_, how would I feel about working with clients who are the kind of people who end up in expensive lawsuits and so, for the most part, are not friendly, cooperative individuals who get on well with other people. And demand that you listen to their idiotic ramblings and read their pathetic documents and, instead of laughing at them, take them seriously because they are paying? Because, don't forget, to be a hotshot lawyer you have big outgoings and you have to keep the cash flowing. And telling Mr. Moneybags to anglo saxon sexual intercourse(1) off because his case is piss(2) poor will soon result in a negative cashflow situation. So please, focus your ire on the honest businessmen of SCO who are spending the company funds on this stuff.
(1) Now the Christian Right is in charge, I think we need to be careful about using naughty words.
(2)But not when it comes to words from the Bible, of course.
Yes, I know this is obvious to anyone with an education, but I'd like a little more precision in statements about planets. Jupiter and Venus cannot be at their closest when their positions seen from Earth coincide because at this point they cannot be in a direct line with the Sun - think about it. Their apparent positions in the sky may be closest, but at the point at which they are actually closest they must be visually separated from the point of view of Earth.
And for some of these posters who are wilfully misunderstanding the whole thing, the best place to see Venus and Jupiter (reasonably) close together is the Uffizi, in Firenze (Florence) Italy. There is a story that at one time the Uffizi used to show only one large Botticelli at a time so as not tog et the visitors over-excited.
Learning from this, the US did the same for many years. There was a nice big civil war in which all the people too aggressive to survive in a developing civil society obligingly killed one another. Then there were gold rushes and the development of the West, and the antisocial thugs were able to go and fight one another over land and gold until eventually civilisation caught up with them.
And now? The thugs are too dim bulb to get into the armed services, which don't work by getting killed en masse any more. So they hang around civil society and become gang members and drug dealers, and we have to catch them and lock them up. Some of them grow out of it and some don't.
Games are an expression of the way homo sapiens sapiens was originally designed to work. Blaming them for our lack of ways of dealing with psychopaths is easy because actually fixing the problem is very hard. Never before have we had a society where the majority of sociopaths and psychopaths aren't simply killed off before they reach the age of 21 or so.
Sometimes I wonder if the answer isn't simply to execute not only all killers, but everyone who commits an unprovoked violent assault on another person with a weapon. The effect would be much the same as the policy that built the British Empire and the US.
I'm not really putting this forward seriously, but what are the objective reasons why this is a Bad Idea?
Yes, I know it's impossible/impracticable
So yes, you are quite wrong.
An important target for the embedded market is computers that run when vehicles are not being used, i.e. draining the battery. If it was possible to use real computers rather than ARM machines, a lot of cheap software out there would suddenly become available for use, expanding the market.
I was objecting to P=VI. The power dissipated in an AC circuit, or indeed any circuit where the voltage is changing and inductance or capacitance is present, is neither instantaneously equal to VI, nor is the energy dissipated the integral of VI by t.
Clearly some people were so anxious to show how clever they were, they didn't make it to the second half of the original post.
In fact, V=IR is of limited real world use. To be really pedantic, it is the sum of all the instantaneous potential differences around a loop that is equal to the series resistance multiplied by the current. When AC is applied to real world devices like tungsten lamps, there is temperature variation of the resistive part which makes the whole equation much more complex. I stand by my original comment, which is that in real-world AC applications, which EEs come up against daily, the simple formulae are of limited use.
And, if we are being really sticky, voltage and current are measured in vector fields. Unfortunately /. doesn't allow me to reproduce the formulae I had to master as an undergraduate, but they are more fun than the simple versions suggest.
I don't mind people correcting my mistakes, but I do mind people who don't really know the subject trying to be clever.
Obviously another person who never uses AC.
Since you ask, by the time the water was output it had gone through several processes. However, the last process required a treatment which resulted in a raw output at a pH of about 9.5, and a chromium content of about 1-2 parts per billion. This actually suited the water company since their bacteria need a tiny amount of chromium. To recycle the water at this point would have required an expensive two stage treatment to remove the last tiny amount of chromium and then lower the pH, followed by another pass through the DI system. Since the water company preferred to have the water just as it was, there was no point. Even so, the plant consumed less than 1/3 the water of a conventional plant. It is still running, though I have long ceased to have anything to do with it.
Ahem! an inclined plane is not a machine until a second component moves on it. And a wheel/axle requires a pivot. As Archimedes observed, give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the Earth.
If you live near a reservoir, go and look at that. Scum floats on it, fish crap in it, the odd sheep or wading bird dies in it. And then it gets treated and you drink it. What exactly is your problem with what Singapore is doing, people?
It's a pity that in a battlefield simulation all that processing power would be wasted as I'd just be an immediate civilian casualty, but with luck I might manage to drop my old Laserjet 5M out the window on one of the combatants first.
Also, how many comp sci graduates start in the mailroom? I submit that, other things being equal, a graduate with practical skills in the industry will have the edge over a new graduate joining the same industry but without those skills. At the moment we have a division of labor which means that even management is over specialised. What makes you think that fashion will last through the next ten or twenty years, when today's new graduates will be reaching senior levels?
Eventually the lessons of Barings and Enron will filter through. As usual, it will be by new companies springing up with diferent business models.
I'm beginning to think that nowadays every tech article has to include at least 1 really stupid claim, either so the authors can laugh at the stupid journos who pass them on uncritically, or because it's the bit the journalist will think he understands and that will make a headline.
Any kind of machinery requires differentiated structures, and anything involving electricity requires localised anisotropy - or how will you get your current flows separate in order to do anything useful? DNA has a differentiated structure but it is not a machine, it is a recording medium (parenthetically, it's just as well the RIAA wasn't around when life evolved: "What do you mean, you can replicate DNA? That's illegal file-sharing!") and the machines that do something useful with it are all multi-molecular. It's unlikely a few billion years (sorry, George) of evolution will be seriously wrong about this. I don't mind Slashdot contributors including marketoid claims in headers, but they might at least quarantine them in quotes and put a [sic] at the end so we know that they know what we know.
Rudolf Diesel, the inventor of the engine, graduated from University and then went and trained as a skilled mechanic. Isaac Newton could use a lathe by the time he got to Cambridge. And Alan Turing could machine his own relays. Apart from the career options, acquiring both academic and practical skills makes you a more rounded person, and thus more employable generally.
When tape video cameras first emerged at reasonable prices, wedding photographers were interested but worried that their profit margin would be eroded by the editing cost of getting 3 hours of footage down to the 10 mins that a third party would actually watch. But they soon discovered that Joe Public is so uncritical of seeing his own picture that he actually wanted the unedited 3 hours. Existing video cameras are basically weapons of mass boredom, and on bad days I think that a license should be required before anyone is allowed to distribute thr results beyond the immediate family.
Yes, I'm feeling crabby. But at least I'm agreeing with someone.
Your generation doesn't know how lucky it is. I wish we had had clickable points on phase diagrams in my day, instead of getting looked down on by lecturers when we asked stupid questions (that nobody else in class knew the answer to either...)
And we had to make our own steel out of charcoal, magnetite and a lot of clay...and we were lucky, our neighbors were still living in the Bronze Age.
I suspect the actual achievement here is managing to produce a transparent lens from a high refractive index material, but explain that to the masses who buy low-end digital cameras.
Amazing how Newton's status has changed. In the early 70s the Cambridge Union Society actually sold off a copy of the Principia cheap (as the guy who beat me to it gloated at me at considerable length). They wouldn't do that nowadays when virtually every Latin edition is worth a great deal of money.
Just as it's extremely difficult to spend any time in Florence without becoming aware of the Dante connection, it's quite difficult to spend time in Cambridge, England without encountering Newton. Whatever his faults - and he was clearly not an easy person to get on with - he made major contributions to optics, pure physics, chemistry, mathematics and the running of the Royal Mint. Other people around at the time did remarkable work - Hooke, Boyle, Liebniz - but Newton surpassed them al for sheer output, breadth and depth. Logically, nowadays, with a much larger and better educated population we should be throwing up lots of Newtons. Why aren't we? Is it because all the relatively easy science and maths has now been done and it takes large organisations and computing power to make any advance at all? Or is it because clever people get pulled off into business or celebrity before they really have a chance to do any work that will really endure?
Spending on science actually underpins national security, the economy, health care and the environment. And I guess that soft sciences like psychology and sociology have an impact on social security (as well as national security, if you take criminology into account.) So you are right in stating the attitude of dumb-cluck voters, but wrong in that you don't understand how the world works. I don't know enough about the overall pattern of US R&D to be able to say which possible administration would do the best job, but I do know that an administration that does not understand the fundamental importance of science is not in America's - or the world's - long term interest. And if you are aged less than 70, you should be very interested in the long term.
Software parents will likely continue like this while being technically literate is a negative for being a judge, and being literate in anything is likely to have you removed from a jury. It's high time that juries in specialist trials were recruited from (perhaps retired) people with skills from the appropriate areas - yes, and paid - so that the arguments could be properly understood.