That economies of scale is a red herring argument. Right now electric cars are expensive because the basic technology is expensive - you won't drive down the prices a lot by having a lot of (rich) buyers. The thing really needed is more research, which hopefully will *really* drive down prices.
What if that doesn't work? Well, if you aren't willing to take risks, you wouldn't be able to accomplish anything. A few $B among the US's GDP is almost nothing.
The billion dollars are there to drive research for better technology, which hopefully will drive down prices. And when compared to subsidies that other industries get (e.g. the big oils), that few billion dollars is just a drop in the bucket. Look, a few $B may be a lot of money for an individual, but when talking about a whole industry, it's not a lot at all. If anything, it's underfunded.
Portable harddrive - if you're going to see me, at least one person is gonna bring a laptop these days.
What if we both bring our laptops? Gigabit ethernet. Ok, that needs time and some skills to set up, so if you're not a techie or are not comfortable with me touching your computer, portable harddrive. But file transfers on GE, when done right, are often a lot faster than USB.
Unless you're sure that women are, on average, less productive than men in IT.
What if that's actually the fact? You have two disjoint groups and the sum/average/whatever statistical measure of one of them is less than the other - is there anything wrong with that? It's actually mathematically very unlikely that the two disjoint groups are perfectly equal.
It CAN still happen that women are treated unfairly, btw. It can happen that women, as a group and averaged out, are less productive by 2% but are underpaid by 13%; it can happen that women are more productive by 2% but are underpaid by 13%; it can happen that women are less productive by 50% but are only underpaid (compared to men) by 13%; etc. Sensational arguments like "are you sure they're less productive..." are actually nothing more than feel-good hot air that avoids looking at the real problem - what is actually causing the difference and is the difference fair? You know, you can perfectly have a different between pays and yet it's still perfectly fair. So, why are you so sure the current difference isn't fair, for women as a whole group (i.e. anecdotal evidence is meaningless)?
The factor of 1.5 is how much longer your car can run on a gallon of gas. But THAT's different from how much gallon of gas is saved (look at the question carefully, again) for every mile you travel.
I kind of feel it's a trick question though. Most people just look at the odometer and calculate how far their car went before needing another trip to the gas station - that's the average Joe's conception of fuel economy. Sure that doesn't have a linear relation to how much money you actually have to pay for gas, per mile - which is actually the most important thing for your bank account. But at this moment, that doesn't seem to be the #1 concern of the average Joe on his car, yet.
When I was in Hong Kong, I just had to pay $51 USD per month and they'll give you unlimited 3G data with tethering, tons of voice minutes, wifi access at their hotspots throughout the city, and an legally unlocked iPhone 3GS.
Now I'm in Palo Alto, that barely buys me a voice plan. And even if I give them 2x what I did in Hong Kong, I'm still capped. And AT&T's reception in cities (like San Fran) sucks - yet it's Hong Kong that has more frickin' high rise buildings to block the 3G signals - and in Hong Kong 3G fucking works. I really, REALLY have no idea how any of you guys can try to defend AT&T over their crap service.
You grossly overestimate the average intelligence of the human race. Except for the people here in Slashdot, very few people can actually make the mental connection between a drive icon in My Computer to mobile phone. For those who can, even fewer can find out the correct directory to navigate to for uploading his music files.
Now, iTunes? It has the iPhone icon in it. It requires more clicks, but everybody knows what it means.
It's quite easy to find two papers saying completely opposite things in bleeding edge studies, yes. But I wouldn't say the judgement between the two papers would be totally "your own beliefs".. you can still examine the methodology and see which one makes more sense (or has flaws in it), for example. And then you can ask your friends or even Google if the paper is popular enough. Science doesn't really give you the truth immediately, but at least the method to arrive to the conclusion is open, so you can still take part in refining it.
Maybe get around that with TrueCrypt hidden partitions and even hidden OSes? You give them one password for laptop searches. But you actually use another for your real corporate work.
Yes. That argument makes sense, until you find out the interns don't really understand the theory as well.
"WTF is Unicode? Why can't I just use char?"
"Right. Unicode is an encoding scheme, and it encodes more than 256 symbols."
"But C strings are made of chars!"
And that, came from an MPhill of Computer Science. He could have asked me when in doubt, or he could have asked Google. But he ended up writing seriously broken code, couldn't work out why all the CJK text is screwed up for a whole week, and then complained to me that the toolkit is buggy. Pretty soon, he was fired.
Theory and application goes hand in hand in computer science. It's a mental framework for you to understand what already exists and also for you to create what doesn't yet exist more effectively. If you can't work out how things work or why things don't work from your theory, you're just as good as having no theory.
Rotary phone! You're lucky to have a rotary phone! In our office, all we use for communication are large, heavy, stone tablets. When our CEO goes overseas for meetings, we have a team carrying the Ark of Covenant containing all the contracts carved in stone. THAT, and IE6, is what a company with a long and glorious history should be using. You little startups need to get off our lawn.
Oh, I had always dreamed of paper tapes! Would have made my job so much easier. I've been simulating a universe myself with nothing but rocks, and I had to visualize what the living things in my simulation would see by my imagination!
Just yesterday slashdotters laughted how Microsoft is burning money on their online division like Bing and other properties, how it's completely useless. Which one it is now, to think long term or not to think?
They're burning money, yes. But not on anything that gives people surprises. If they're truly doing something massively innovative and useful at the same time, people should be surprised. In terms of investment, it's always possible to increase your risk a whole lot, but it's much more difficult to increase your profit.
They do. Again, don't think about it like they're real objects, think about it from a mathematical perspective.
If two 2D circles exist in a 3D space, their z coordinates are the same (they're not tilted), and the distance between their (x,y) centers is smaller than the total of their radii - then they intersect. If distance > radii, then they don't intersect. Really simple.
Same 2D circles, z coordinate differ by 0.000000001, and assuming you don't tilt them - then they DON'T intersect no matter how they're arranged. Now, you can move one of the circles in any way you want without having any collisions (collisions, again, having mathematical definitions) against the other circle.
There's no "looks like" here. It's just mathematics.
You don't need to imagine the shape of the object in 4D space. It's really simple - a purely 3D object in 4D space occupies no "volume" in the 4D space because its height along the 4th dimension is zero. So when you lift a torus, or any 3D object up in the 4th dimension, the object effectively disappears from the original 3D space. Then, as long as you don't move the object back to its old coordinate along the 4th dimension, you can move it in any 3D way you want.
As for how the linking works for the torus, perhaps you can think about it from a 3D perspective.
The moment the torus is lifted in the 4th dimension, you'd see its disappear because it's 4th coordinate is different from yours. It's just like a Flatlander would see a ring disappear from their world if a 3D person lifts it along the 3rd dimension.
Then, fixed to the modified coordinate in the 4th dimension, you move the ring along 3D space such that its projection intersects the other torus. Then, you put the 3D torus down in the 4th dimension.
What you see from the original torus' 3D space would be that the other torus suddenly appears and it intersects the original torus. No breaking involved.
I don't really understand what you meant.. but there are no 4D toruses in the video - it's totally ok to have 3D, 2D, 1D and point objects in a mathematical 4D space. The point of allowing movements in a fourth dimension is to allow the toruses to be joined without breaking them.
So we're inferring a 4th spatial dimension in a game,
which uses our perception of a 3 dimensional construct,
displayed on a 2 dimensional screen,
stored on a 1 dimensional memory space,
played by people with 0 life.
The video doesn't describe what the 10 dimensions in string theory really means - it simply describes what a mathematical model of 10 dimensions can probably do if we use the first 3 to model our familiar 3D world.
Yes you can - you simply aren't thinking in 2D. The operation required is to make 2 2D circles intersect in 2D space, but you have access to 3D space. So what you do, is to take one 2D circle up, move it in 3D space such that it intersects the other 2D circle. And then you put that 2D circle down. Now the two circles perfectly intersect each other in 2D space.
Slashdot Mirror
That economies of scale is a red herring argument. Right now electric cars are expensive because the basic technology is expensive - you won't drive down the prices a lot by having a lot of (rich) buyers. The thing really needed is more research, which hopefully will *really* drive down prices.
What if that doesn't work? Well, if you aren't willing to take risks, you wouldn't be able to accomplish anything. A few $B among the US's GDP is almost nothing.
The billion dollars are there to drive research for better technology, which hopefully will drive down prices. And when compared to subsidies that other industries get (e.g. the big oils), that few billion dollars is just a drop in the bucket. Look, a few $B may be a lot of money for an individual, but when talking about a whole industry, it's not a lot at all. If anything, it's underfunded.
Portable harddrive - if you're going to see me, at least one person is gonna bring a laptop these days.
What if we both bring our laptops? Gigabit ethernet. Ok, that needs time and some skills to set up, so if you're not a techie or are not comfortable with me touching your computer, portable harddrive. But file transfers on GE, when done right, are often a lot faster than USB.
We'd already be walking around with 500GB USB sticks.
Or worse, we'd be walking around with 1Gbps wireless connections and we'd be streaming HD movies from YouTube.
So unless they've figured out how to cram like 1PB or even 1EB on an optical disc, they're walking down a blind alley.
Unless you're sure that women are, on average, less productive than men in IT.
What if that's actually the fact? You have two disjoint groups and the sum/average/whatever statistical measure of one of them is less than the other - is there anything wrong with that? It's actually mathematically very unlikely that the two disjoint groups are perfectly equal.
It CAN still happen that women are treated unfairly, btw. It can happen that women, as a group and averaged out, are less productive by 2% but are underpaid by 13%; it can happen that women are more productive by 2% but are underpaid by 13%; it can happen that women are less productive by 50% but are only underpaid (compared to men) by 13%; etc. Sensational arguments like "are you sure they're less productive..." are actually nothing more than feel-good hot air that avoids looking at the real problem - what is actually causing the difference and is the difference fair? You know, you can perfectly have a different between pays and yet it's still perfectly fair. So, why are you so sure the current difference isn't fair, for women as a whole group (i.e. anecdotal evidence is meaningless)?
The factor of 1.5 is how much longer your car can run on a gallon of gas. But THAT's different from how much gallon of gas is saved (look at the question carefully, again) for every mile you travel.
I kind of feel it's a trick question though. Most people just look at the odometer and calculate how far their car went before needing another trip to the gas station - that's the average Joe's conception of fuel economy. Sure that doesn't have a linear relation to how much money you actually have to pay for gas, per mile - which is actually the most important thing for your bank account. But at this moment, that doesn't seem to be the #1 concern of the average Joe on his car, yet.
When I was in Hong Kong, I just had to pay $51 USD per month and they'll give you unlimited 3G data with tethering, tons of voice minutes, wifi access at their hotspots throughout the city, and an legally unlocked iPhone 3GS.
Now I'm in Palo Alto, that barely buys me a voice plan. And even if I give them 2x what I did in Hong Kong, I'm still capped. And AT&T's reception in cities (like San Fran) sucks - yet it's Hong Kong that has more frickin' high rise buildings to block the 3G signals - and in Hong Kong 3G fucking works. I really, REALLY have no idea how any of you guys can try to defend AT&T over their crap service.
Let's send our children to gas chambers so that we can all think of the children while making sure they won't be fucked, ever.
Yes, this is sarcasm, move along.
You grossly overestimate the average intelligence of the human race. Except for the people here in Slashdot, very few people can actually make the mental connection between a drive icon in My Computer to mobile phone. For those who can, even fewer can find out the correct directory to navigate to for uploading his music files.
Now, iTunes? It has the iPhone icon in it. It requires more clicks, but everybody knows what it means.
It's quite easy to find two papers saying completely opposite things in bleeding edge studies, yes. But I wouldn't say the judgement between the two papers would be totally "your own beliefs".. you can still examine the methodology and see which one makes more sense (or has flaws in it), for example. And then you can ask your friends or even Google if the paper is popular enough. Science doesn't really give you the truth immediately, but at least the method to arrive to the conclusion is open, so you can still take part in refining it.
Maybe get around that with TrueCrypt hidden partitions and even hidden OSes? You give them one password for laptop searches. But you actually use another for your real corporate work.
However, he died in a suicide bombing attack soon after he filed the petition, so the petition no longer matters.
Yes. That argument makes sense, until you find out the interns don't really understand the theory as well.
"WTF is Unicode? Why can't I just use char?"
"Right. Unicode is an encoding scheme, and it encodes more than 256 symbols."
"But C strings are made of chars!"
And that, came from an MPhill of Computer Science. He could have asked me when in doubt, or he could have asked Google. But he ended up writing seriously broken code, couldn't work out why all the CJK text is screwed up for a whole week, and then complained to me that the toolkit is buggy. Pretty soon, he was fired. Theory and application goes hand in hand in computer science. It's a mental framework for you to understand what already exists and also for you to create what doesn't yet exist more effectively. If you can't work out how things work or why things don't work from your theory, you're just as good as having no theory.
Nice example for kids to follow. The first bunch of students who causes the next Depression get A grades! World War III? AAA!!
Rotary phone! You're lucky to have a rotary phone! In our office, all we use for communication are large, heavy, stone tablets. When our CEO goes overseas for meetings, we have a team carrying the Ark of Covenant containing all the contracts carved in stone. THAT, and IE6, is what a company with a long and glorious history should be using. You little startups need to get off our lawn.
Oh, I had always dreamed of paper tapes! Would have made my job so much easier. I've been simulating a universe myself with nothing but rocks, and I had to visualize what the living things in my simulation would see by my imagination!
Just yesterday slashdotters laughted how Microsoft is burning money on their online division like Bing and other properties, how it's completely useless. Which one it is now, to think long term or not to think?
They're burning money, yes. But not on anything that gives people surprises. If they're truly doing something massively innovative and useful at the same time, people should be surprised. In terms of investment, it's always possible to increase your risk a whole lot, but it's much more difficult to increase your profit.
They do. Again, don't think about it like they're real objects, think about it from a mathematical perspective.
If two 2D circles exist in a 3D space, their z coordinates are the same (they're not tilted), and the distance between their (x,y) centers is smaller than the total of their radii - then they intersect. If distance > radii, then they don't intersect. Really simple.
Same 2D circles, z coordinate differ by 0.000000001, and assuming you don't tilt them - then they DON'T intersect no matter how they're arranged. Now, you can move one of the circles in any way you want without having any collisions (collisions, again, having mathematical definitions) against the other circle.
There's no "looks like" here. It's just mathematics.
You don't need to imagine the shape of the object in 4D space. It's really simple - a purely 3D object in 4D space occupies no "volume" in the 4D space because its height along the 4th dimension is zero. So when you lift a torus, or any 3D object up in the 4th dimension, the object effectively disappears from the original 3D space. Then, as long as you don't move the object back to its old coordinate along the 4th dimension, you can move it in any 3D way you want.
As for how the linking works for the torus, perhaps you can think about it from a 3D perspective.
The moment the torus is lifted in the 4th dimension, you'd see its disappear because it's 4th coordinate is different from yours. It's just like a Flatlander would see a ring disappear from their world if a 3D person lifts it along the 3rd dimension.
Then, fixed to the modified coordinate in the 4th dimension, you move the ring along 3D space such that its projection intersects the other torus. Then, you put the 3D torus down in the 4th dimension.
What you see from the original torus' 3D space would be that the other torus suddenly appears and it intersects the original torus. No breaking involved.
I don't really understand what you meant.. but there are no 4D toruses in the video - it's totally ok to have 3D, 2D, 1D and point objects in a mathematical 4D space. The point of allowing movements in a fourth dimension is to allow the toruses to be joined without breaking them.
So we're inferring a 4th spatial dimension in a game,
which uses our perception of a 3 dimensional construct,
displayed on a 2 dimensional screen,
stored on a 1 dimensional memory space,
played by people with 0 life.
The video doesn't describe what the 10 dimensions in string theory really means - it simply describes what a mathematical model of 10 dimensions can probably do if we use the first 3 to model our familiar 3D world.
Neither can 2 rings lain on a table
Yes you can - you simply aren't thinking in 2D. The operation required is to make 2 2D circles intersect in 2D space, but you have access to 3D space. So what you do, is to take one 2D circle up, move it in 3D space such that it intersects the other 2D circle. And then you put that 2D circle down. Now the two circles perfectly intersect each other in 2D space.
Survival of the fittest is the law of nature. War is just as natural as reproduction, it does not dehumanize anything.