I read all the questions and the Liftport replies. Nothing but spin. Specific practical questions like "how are you going to weave 1 cm long nano tubes into a strong thread that doesn't pull apart?" were answered with vague generalizations that had almost nothing to do with the question being asked. Sorry, but the underlying message is clear: "very little chance of a space elevator in our lifetimes"
"We need to perfect nuclear power engineering, software, and extremely long term storage processes as soon as possible."
You have wonderfully and accurately summarized that a) oil production has peaked (although you did not say it that way) b) ethanol cannot save us. So why do you think nuclear energy is the answer? Where is the uranium to run an additional 50 nuclear power stations going to come from? Like fossil fuels, uranium is a finite resource. Sounds like you're still trying to rearrange the deck chairs on the titanic to me.
Yes, this idea has already been considered and implemented, but it does not work very well. In South Africa, the Tugela-Vaal water transfer scheme has been in operation from 1974 or thereabouts. If you want to read about it, check out this article. Scroll a little more than halfway down the page to the heading that says "Transfer Schemes". The Tugela-Vaal scheme is illustrative because its primary function is to transfer water from the Tugela River, over the Drakensberg mountains to the Vaal River. The fact that they can run the pumps in reverse as turbines for peak power periods, is really only an added bonus, it is NOT the primary reason for the existence of the whole thing. So why doesn't your idea really work? Well there are just too many losses. Energy is lost to: evaporation from the dam surface, compression of the water, heating of the water, friction (viscocity), the inefficiencies of the turbines/pumps etc etc. Each loss is fairly small by itself. But when you add them all up, it turns out that storing energy by raising water basically sucks. Sorry:(
Isn't it curious that CNN picked the honda accord as a comparison? Consider: a) The honda hybrid tech is not as good as toyota's b) The honda accord gets the worst gas mileage of all the honda hybrids. Then they suddenly generalise the calculation to all hybrids. Hmmm...
Let's do the same calculation for a Prius versus a Camry. Let's say the Prius averages 40mi/gal and the Camry 25mi/gal (I think I am being generous to the Camry here.) Let's take gas at $3 per gallon and 75 000 mi covered in 5 years. Do the math and the money saved comes out to $3 369.
Funny, I *always* wanted to believe that CNN was an objective news source.
I wish to repond to this. Chess (as played by humans) is definitely not ALL about logic and calculation. It is ALSO about creativity, ingenuity and occasionally heroism. That is the beauty of the game. To be able to study a game between two GMs and be able to see and appreciate those human qualities - that is what makes it special. I don't care if computers can finally calculate fast enough to beat the best human players. Chess is a lot more than that, otherwise humans would have given up playing it long ago.
I hear you. But the same thing happens with all research in the U.S. Take the ITER fusion project. Its going to cost a bomb and for what? So that the U.S. can have a "cheap" unlimited source of power which no third world country in the world can afford because of its technological complexity. Yet there is an unlimited source of energy right outside my window. Its called the "sun". Sad.
I guess I have to challenge this one too. Of course ideas are superceeded or improved upon. Understanding is refined as the field matures... But here is an argument why you should do exactly the opposite to what you suggest:
The historical development of ideas, from their first suggestion to their eventual refinement, represents a natural progression in human understanding and cognition. When you try to short-cut that cognitive development you are invariably left with weak, poorly formed ideas. Great old papers should be read so that you can gain insight into this development of ideas and it may help you understand things much better than before.
This claim is difficult to back up with any sort of scientific test. As some evidence, one field of education (physics education) specialises in short-cutting the historical development of ideas and as we in the field know, teaching physics is a spectacular failure (though some would deny it). As a personal piece of evidence (does not count for much, but I don't have any other evidence at hand), I can say I never really felt entirely comfortable with Schrodinger's equation and its probabilistic interpretation until I went back and read Schrodinger's and Born's original papers. That is when I realised that Schrodinger's wave equation describes a wave in configuration space. Also, his subsequent fights with Bohr, where he tried to defend a matter wave interpretation of the wave function, reveal much about the type of ontological misclassification which humans fall into. Now isn't that amazing? Schrodinger spent a lot of time trying to defend an ontological standpoint that the wave function represented a material wave even though he was the person who derived the wave equation and should have known better. Is it any wonder then that my students, who don't even really understand where the wave function and wave equation come from, think that the wave function represents a material wave? I would have had none of this insight without reading the original papers.
Qwest - "Ride the light". Light has no mass. It cannot be ridden.
I agree with all your other points, but I do have to take issue with this one. Although light does not have mass, it is still a wave, and it has momentum. In fact there are examples in physics of particles "surfing" on electromagnetic waves. Ask the guys over at SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) how they accelerate the electrons in their accelerator. They will tell you "radio waves". Basically the electrons "surf" down the accelerator on electromagentic waves. So, in conclusion, "riding the light" is not as much of a misnomer as you think it is.
Touchy aren't we? Yes, your submission is poorly written. I am doing a cross disciplinary PhD which involves linguistics and I had to read it three times before I could make sense of it. Your response to this criticism is utterly uncalled for. Pathetic.
If they were really serious, you would think they might present a few links to real solid evidence from that open letter. You know, comparisons of screens or whatever. Perhaps they are planning on litigation? I doubt it. Plus, as some have already pointed out, window switching has been around in older Apple OS's and was then dropped.
No, not true. It does not say so at the top of the page, but if you go to the bottom of this page, you will see that they indeed to have velocity engine.
Re:Compliments not Competes with 802.11
on
Is Bluetooth Dead?
·
· Score: 1
That would be "complements" not "compliments" I can hardly imagine Mr. Bluetooth patting Mr. Airport on the back and telling him what an excellent chap he is...
What amazes me is that if you are proficient in LaTeX (which you posting suggests), why would you ever want to switch from a type-setter to a wordprocessor? Why don't you just stick with LaTeX? Its faster, easier, a more effective way to write etc... You probably know the deal...
Notice this comment was posted on a slow Sunday afternoon (EST). Very clever, because they know that/.'ers can't resist a challenge like that. Feel sorry for them on Monday morning though...
How ridiculous is this? Study after study shows that so called "stock pickers" never do any better than random chance on the stock market. Do you think this is going to be any better? Do you think anyone is capable of making predictions better than chance in this situation? I think not. What amazes me the most is that even though what DARPA is doing flies directly in the face of all the research, they are still investing money in this project rather than spending it in developing statistical models and regression equations which have been shown (by research) over and over again to have more predictive power than humans.
Well, I skimmed the article. I am presuming you are the author. If so, you are either the most uneducated person to post such a wide-ranging opinion piece, or you are just a troll. Probably both. Most of what you say is so ridiculous that it is not worth arguing about, but I will respond to one statement which is within my range of expertise: MS Word is NOT a good program. Here is why: A good word processor should be a typesetter like LaTeX. I am not punting LaTeX here. My criteria for "good" are as follows: 1. Most important: something that preserves your data. I want to read papers I write now in 20 years time. And I want them to look the same. MS Word will never achieve that. They change their document format all the time. 2. I want something which looks good. By going for a binary document format MS produced something which will never look really professional. There is just too much computational overhead. 3. The biggest dupe of all is that the user needs WYSIWYG'ness. In fact it should the the opposite. Seeing the final product is distracting. A proper system lets you do your "word processing" in two stages: First you get your ideas down. Then you make it look nice.
Anyway, all these problems could have easily been solved if MS had opted for a mark-up (XML style) document format from the beginning. (If you want an example of all this in action go and try Apple's Keynote software. And use it the way it was designed to work by producing your slides first and then formatting them by altering the masters.) So no, I think MS Word is terrible and I have provided ample evidence to back that statement up. I don't hate microsoft, but to think that MS Word is better --- because MS managed to establish an intellectual and creative monopoly on desktop wordprocessing and as a result you have not been exposed to any alternatives --- is just stupid. Whatever
No, it is not nit-picking or sour grapes or anything else. What you are seeing is a wholesale shift in public discourse over the nature of the crime. The shift is being fostered by the govt. and the mass media. The shift from "infringement" to "theft" raises the states of the crime from civil to criminal. This is a powerful shift because it turns the perpetrators into petty criminals. It also serves to obscure the real debate that should be taking place about intellectual/creative property. As others have pointed out, America started out with a system which deliberately forced "intellectual property" into the public domain after the author was dead. But this is irrelevent to a larger debate about the way music is now supported by large recording/publishing companies who control who they sign and what gets published. Thus good musicians who don't have the lowest common denominator appeal of Britany Spears cannot actually get a contract. There is also another lesser publicised debate about a much more insidious problem to do with scientific intellectual property and in particular human genes. We are going to be pretty fucked one day when we discover some company owns the rights to our entire genome.
Now, I have absolutely no sympathy for file sharers who get prosecuted by the RIAA for copyright infringement (and no, it is not theft and anyone who uses that word I am going to pick a fight with). I do however think that there are some pretty scary things going on in the corridors of power right now. The problem is that these two debates have gotten mixed up with each other.
Now, I know nothing about these things, but isn't MS Word meant to be switching to some sort of XML file format? If you want to make a word processor cross-platform you need some sort of mark-up language system. That is essentially what LaTeX does. Such a move would put the monkeys out of business wouldn't it? It would also mean that Apple could write their own software to read and compose MS Word documents without any trouble. Of course Microsoft could write the most anally retentive and unreadable XML system under the sun and drive everyone crazy... Any insights?
Shoot me if I am being simple minded, but I think this is going to turn into a serious problem.
I think Apple is marginalising itself. The beauty of having Office v.X for the Mac is that I can handle all the files which my PC using friends and collegues send. I can edit them and send them back. (For example using "track changes" in Word.) The question them becomes: Will Apple ever be able to produce its own software which will read MS Word, Excel and Powerpoint files properly (And I mean properly, with no errors - you would be surprised how pissed off people get when there is a slight inconsistency between the platforms), provide the same functionallity as Office and so on and so forth? I somehow doubt it. This is a hard problem. The imperfections of the open source efforts is testimony to this.
I myself use LaTeX when I can since I intend to be able to read my work in 20 years time, but if it turns out that the problems mentioned above start to become real problems, I will probably be forced to switch to a PC and make it dual-boot with Linux. And that really makes me very sad because I like my Mac.
Why is this behaviour "awefully weird"? The U.S. routinely engages in such practices. Perhaps these examples will futher enlighten you: (1) Currently the U.S. subsidizes its farmers to the tune of $8 billion over the next 5 years. In addition the U.S. is negotiating trade agreements with third world countries. These countries are (a)in these agreements (if agreement is reached) forbidden to subsidize their farmers, (b) forbidden to protect their farmers from lower priced U.S. imports which will cripple the local farming industry. In fact, if such a country wants to get any financial support from the world bank etc... they are obliged to follow such economic policies which place them at a disadvantage as compared to the first world. Talk about damned whatever you do.
(2)(Happily as of a news report this morning this situation may be improving but....) Up until today, the U.S. government has used threats of economic reprisals in the form of trade tarrifs and/or sanctions etc... to stop poor African countries from buying generic alternatives to expensive anti-retroviral drugs for combatting Aids. Now, on the one hand, you could argue that intellectual property of the big pharmaceutical companies is being protected. On the other hand, the lives of millions of poeple have been held to ransom so as to protect the profits of American and British drug companies. The drug companies' stance becomes laughable when you consider that no poor country can afford the drugs anyway, so almost none are being bought.
we use Safari not because it's there, but rather because it's really, really good. Not perfect, sure - but it has a real future, and it's getting better all the time.
No, I beg to disagree. I own a mac and use Safari and I hate to say it: It really really sucks. I base that statement, not on how pretty the web pages look (they look very pretty) or how quickly they are rendered, but on the fact that it regularly fails to render everything correctly. This is the most important thing for a casual user - being able to see the page they want to look at. Safari fails dismally at that.
Slashdot Mirror
I read all the questions and the Liftport replies. Nothing but spin. Specific practical questions like "how are you going to weave 1 cm long nano tubes into a strong thread that doesn't pull apart?" were answered with vague generalizations that had almost nothing to do with the question being asked. Sorry, but the underlying message is clear: "very little chance of a space elevator in our lifetimes"
Yes, this idea has already been considered and implemented, but it does not work very well. In South Africa, the Tugela-Vaal water transfer scheme has been in operation from 1974 or thereabouts. If you want to read about it, check out this article. Scroll a little more than halfway down the page to the heading that says "Transfer Schemes". The Tugela-Vaal scheme is illustrative because its primary function is to transfer water from the Tugela River, over the Drakensberg mountains to the Vaal River. The fact that they can run the pumps in reverse as turbines for peak power periods, is really only an added bonus, it is NOT the primary reason for the existence of the whole thing. So why doesn't your idea really work? Well there are just too many losses. Energy is lost to: evaporation from the dam surface, compression of the water, heating of the water, friction (viscocity), the inefficiencies of the turbines/pumps etc etc. Each loss is fairly small by itself. But when you add them all up, it turns out that storing energy by raising water basically sucks. Sorry :(
Isn't it curious that CNN picked the honda accord as a comparison? Consider: a) The honda hybrid tech is not as good as toyota's b) The honda accord gets the worst gas mileage of all the honda hybrids. Then they suddenly generalise the calculation to all hybrids. Hmmm...
Let's do the same calculation for a Prius versus a Camry. Let's say the Prius averages 40mi/gal and the Camry 25mi/gal (I think I am being generous to the Camry here.) Let's take gas at $3 per gallon and 75 000 mi covered in 5 years. Do the math and the money saved comes out to $3 369.
Funny, I *always* wanted to believe that CNN was an objective news source.
I wish to repond to this. Chess (as played by humans) is definitely not ALL about logic and calculation. It is ALSO about creativity, ingenuity and occasionally heroism. That is the beauty of the game. To be able to study a game between two GMs and be able to see and appreciate those human qualities - that is what makes it special. I don't care if computers can finally calculate fast enough to beat the best human players. Chess is a lot more than that, otherwise humans would have given up playing it long ago.
you have obviously never hear of a metonym or metonymy
I hear you. But the same thing happens with all research in the U.S. Take the ITER fusion project. Its going to cost a bomb and for what? So that the U.S. can have a "cheap" unlimited source of power which no third world country in the world can afford because of its technological complexity. Yet there is an unlimited source of energy right outside my window. Its called the "sun". Sad.
I guess I have to challenge this one too. Of course ideas are superceeded or improved upon. Understanding is refined as the field matures... But here is an argument why you should do exactly the opposite to what you suggest:
The historical development of ideas, from their first suggestion to their eventual refinement, represents a natural progression in human understanding and cognition. When you try to short-cut that cognitive development you are invariably left with weak, poorly formed ideas. Great old papers should be read so that you can gain insight into this development of ideas and it may help you understand things much better than before.
This claim is difficult to back up with any sort of scientific test. As some evidence, one field of education (physics education) specialises in short-cutting the historical development of ideas and as we in the field know, teaching physics is a spectacular failure (though some would deny it). As a personal piece of evidence (does not count for much, but I don't have any other evidence at hand), I can say I never really felt entirely comfortable with Schrodinger's equation and its probabilistic interpretation until I went back and read Schrodinger's and Born's original papers. That is when I realised that Schrodinger's wave equation describes a wave in configuration space. Also, his subsequent fights with Bohr, where he tried to defend a matter wave interpretation of the wave function, reveal much about the type of ontological misclassification which humans fall into. Now isn't that amazing? Schrodinger spent a lot of time trying to defend an ontological standpoint that the wave function represented a material wave even though he was the person who derived the wave equation and should have known better. Is it any wonder then that my students, who don't even really understand where the wave function and wave equation come from, think that the wave function represents a material wave? I would have had none of this insight without reading the original papers.
I agree with all your other points, but I do have to take issue with this one. Although light does not have mass, it is still a wave, and it has momentum. In fact there are examples in physics of particles "surfing" on electromagnetic waves. Ask the guys over at SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) how they accelerate the electrons in their accelerator. They will tell you "radio waves". Basically the electrons "surf" down the accelerator on electromagentic waves. So, in conclusion, "riding the light" is not as much of a misnomer as you think it is.
Touchy aren't we? Yes, your submission is poorly written. I am doing a cross disciplinary PhD which involves linguistics and I had to read it three times before I could make sense of it. Your response to this criticism is utterly uncalled for. Pathetic.
If they were really serious, you would think they might present a few links to real solid evidence from that open letter. You know, comparisons of screens or whatever. Perhaps they are planning on litigation? I doubt it. Plus, as some have already pointed out, window switching has been around in older Apple OS's and was then dropped.
No, not true. It does not say so at the top of the page, but if you go to the bottom of this page, you will see that they indeed to have velocity engine.
That would be "complements" not "compliments" I can hardly imagine Mr. Bluetooth patting Mr. Airport on the back and telling him what an excellent chap he is...
What amazes me is that if you are proficient in LaTeX (which you posting suggests), why would you ever want to switch from a type-setter to a wordprocessor? Why don't you just stick with LaTeX? Its faster, easier, a more effective way to write etc... You probably know the deal...
Notice this comment was posted on a slow Sunday afternoon (EST). Very clever, because they know that /.'ers can't resist a challenge like that. Feel sorry for them on Monday morning though...
How ridiculous is this? Study after study shows that so called "stock pickers" never do any better than random chance on the stock market. Do you think this is going to be any better? Do you think anyone is capable of making predictions better than chance in this situation? I think not. What amazes me the most is that even though what DARPA is doing flies directly in the face of all the research, they are still investing money in this project rather than spending it in developing statistical models and regression equations which have been shown (by research) over and over again to have more predictive power than humans.
Well, I skimmed the article. I am presuming you are the author. If so, you are either the most uneducated person to post such a wide-ranging opinion piece, or you are just a troll. Probably both. Most of what you say is so ridiculous that it is not worth arguing about, but I will respond to one statement which is within my range of expertise: MS Word is NOT a good program. Here is why: A good word processor should be a typesetter like LaTeX. I am not punting LaTeX here. My criteria for "good" are as follows: 1. Most important: something that preserves your data. I want to read papers I write now in 20 years time. And I want them to look the same. MS Word will never achieve that. They change their document format all the time. 2. I want something which looks good. By going for a binary document format MS produced something which will never look really professional. There is just too much computational overhead. 3. The biggest dupe of all is that the user needs WYSIWYG'ness. In fact it should the the opposite. Seeing the final product is distracting. A proper system lets you do your "word processing" in two stages: First you get your ideas down. Then you make it look nice. Anyway, all these problems could have easily been solved if MS had opted for a mark-up (XML style) document format from the beginning. (If you want an example of all this in action go and try Apple's Keynote software. And use it the way it was designed to work by producing your slides first and then formatting them by altering the masters.) So no, I think MS Word is terrible and I have provided ample evidence to back that statement up. I don't hate microsoft, but to think that MS Word is better --- because MS managed to establish an intellectual and creative monopoly on desktop wordprocessing and as a result you have not been exposed to any alternatives --- is just stupid. Whatever
No, it is not nit-picking or sour grapes or anything else. What you are seeing is a wholesale shift in public discourse over the nature of the crime. The shift is being fostered by the govt. and the mass media. The shift from "infringement" to "theft" raises the states of the crime from civil to criminal. This is a powerful shift because it turns the perpetrators into petty criminals. It also serves to obscure the real debate that should be taking place about intellectual/creative property. As others have pointed out, America started out with a system which deliberately forced "intellectual property" into the public domain after the author was dead. But this is irrelevent to a larger debate about the way music is now supported by large recording/publishing companies who control who they sign and what gets published. Thus good musicians who don't have the lowest common denominator appeal of Britany Spears cannot actually get a contract. There is also another lesser publicised debate about a much more insidious problem to do with scientific intellectual property and in particular human genes. We are going to be pretty fucked one day when we discover some company owns the rights to our entire genome.
Now, I have absolutely no sympathy for file sharers who get prosecuted by the RIAA for copyright infringement (and no, it is not theft and anyone who uses that word I am going to pick a fight with). I do however think that there are some pretty scary things going on in the corridors of power right now. The problem is that these two debates have gotten mixed up with each other.
Now, I know nothing about these things, but isn't MS Word meant to be switching to some sort of XML file format? If you want to make a word processor cross-platform you need some sort of mark-up language system. That is essentially what LaTeX does. Such a move would put the monkeys out of business wouldn't it? It would also mean that Apple could write their own software to read and compose MS Word documents without any trouble. Of course Microsoft could write the most anally retentive and unreadable XML system under the sun and drive everyone crazy... Any insights?
I use Shimano :)
Shoot me if I am being simple minded, but I think this is going to turn into a serious problem.
I think Apple is marginalising itself. The beauty of having Office v.X for the Mac is that I can handle all the files which my PC using friends and collegues send. I can edit them and send them back. (For example using "track changes" in Word.) The question them becomes: Will Apple ever be able to produce its own software which will read MS Word, Excel and Powerpoint files properly (And I mean properly, with no errors - you would be surprised how pissed off people get when there is a slight inconsistency between the platforms), provide the same functionallity as Office and so on and so forth? I somehow doubt it. This is a hard problem. The imperfections of the open source efforts is testimony to this.
I myself use LaTeX when I can since I intend to be able to read my work in 20 years time, but if it turns out that the problems mentioned above start to become real problems, I will probably be forced to switch to a PC and make it dual-boot with Linux. And that really makes me very sad because I like my Mac.
Why is this behaviour "awefully weird"? The U.S. routinely engages in such practices. Perhaps these examples will futher enlighten you: (1) Currently the U.S. subsidizes its farmers to the tune of $8 billion over the next 5 years. In addition the U.S. is negotiating trade agreements with third world countries. These countries are (a)in these agreements (if agreement is reached) forbidden to subsidize their farmers, (b) forbidden to protect their farmers from lower priced U.S. imports which will cripple the local farming industry. In fact, if such a country wants to get any financial support from the world bank etc... they are obliged to follow such economic policies which place them at a disadvantage as compared to the first world. Talk about damned whatever you do. (2)(Happily as of a news report this morning this situation may be improving but....) Up until today, the U.S. government has used threats of economic reprisals in the form of trade tarrifs and/or sanctions etc... to stop poor African countries from buying generic alternatives to expensive anti-retroviral drugs for combatting Aids. Now, on the one hand, you could argue that intellectual property of the big pharmaceutical companies is being protected. On the other hand, the lives of millions of poeple have been held to ransom so as to protect the profits of American and British drug companies. The drug companies' stance becomes laughable when you consider that no poor country can afford the drugs anyway, so almost none are being bought.
Yes, a sad, sad day. When will it stop? When you have killed everyone else on the planet?
Its Burt Rutan