This is exactly the sort of thing I pay taxes for. I'd like to know if Nerds and Retards are more or less likely to have sex than the average person. It was really eating me alive not knowing.
I've always found it ironic that the people who claim to want something better for illegal immigrants want to allow all illegal immigrants to stay, and those who are afraid illegal immigrants are ruining the economy want them to go. Their positions really should be reversed. Illegal immigrants are a boon to our economy. They are a labor force which can be paid less than minimum wage, and can be exploited without protection of law. They benefit us at their own expense. If anything, people who want to crack down on illegal immigration are likely to help Mexico and Mexicans in the long run, since with proper immigration reform, the worst abuses will no longer be allowed and we will be forced to find some other way to deal with our least desirable jobs. That may involve a massive expansion of our guest worker program, or substantially larger quotas or new citizens from Mexico. Broadening the scope just a little, I think most people would accept (if they think about it for a minute) that having laws which you don't enforce is bad for everyone. It allows for selective prosecution, exploitation, and a disrespect and disregard for laws in general.
The fact that I don't have my facts straight on the nuances of British television, really has very little bearing on my arguments regarding global warming (most of which you didn't respond to by the way). In fact the very quotes you provide lend credence to my main point which is that the Global Warming has many "over-dramatisation[s] and unwarranted extrapolation of scientific facts". Carl Wunsch seemed to recognize that the controversy needs a more balanced and reasoned approach. More specifically, from his Wiki page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Wunsch
I believe that climate change is real, a major threat, and almost surely has a major human-induced component. But I have tried to stay out of the climate wars because all nuance tends to be lost, and the distinction between what we know firmly, as scientists, and what we suspect is happening, is so difficult to maintain in the presence of rhetorical excess. In the long run, our credibility as scientists rests on being very careful of, and protective of, our authority and expertise... I am on record in a number of places as complaining about the over-dramatization and unwarranted extrapolation of scientific facts. Thus the notion that the Gulf Stream would or could "shut off" or that with global warming Britain would go into a "new ice age" are either scientifically impossible or so unlikely as to threaten our credibility as a scientific discipline if we proclaim their reality
Similarly, another professor at MIT in meteorology no less, was featured prominently in the Documentary. His position reflects my position well: His position with regard to the IPCC can be summed up with this quotation: "Picking holes in the IPCC is crucial. The notion that if you're ignorant of something and somebody comes up with a wrong answer, and you have to accept that because you don't have another wrong answer to offer is like faith healing, it's like quackery in medicine - if somebody says you should take jelly beans for cancer and you say that's stupid, and he says, well can you suggest something else and you say, no, does that mean you have to go with jelly beans?"
I guess what I'm trying to get across to you is that the kind of misrepresentation of the facts that you decry is present on both sides of the debate in roughly equal amounts. It is a byproduct of television and movies. I've been on television, and one thing that is clear to me is that in television and movies, "The Story" comes first, and the facts come in distant second. Alarmists would have you believe that oceans are likely to rise 20 feet, in the not too distant future, and that carbon dioxide from fossil fuels is the primary cause. This kind of hyperbole does a tremendous amount of damage to the credibility of the Global Warming movement. I'll grant you that The Great Global Warming Swindle probably has a number of errors and exaggerations, but no more so than a movie like An Inconvenient Truth. You are correct that the scientists largely agree on the facts surrounding Global Warming, but if you look a little closer, you'll find that what they don't agree on is the implication those facts have, how to remedy the situation, and the magnitude and immediacy of the threat.
The Great Global Warming Swindle is a BBC Documentary (notorious right wing Oil loving company there) featuring many people whom I consider credible people within the scientific community, including the Co-Founder of Greenepeace Patrick Moore who show that the Global Warming movement is primarily political in nature, and is more about being anti-corporate than pro-environment. This is largely the reason why Patric Moore resigned from the organization he confounded in disgust. Regarding the so called consensus, regarding global warming, they have an interview in there with a scientist who was on a list of 2500 climate scientists who contributed to a paper regarding the human origin of global warming who had to sue to get his name removed from the paper. They told him he'd contributed, so his name would be listed, but he told them they didn't listen to anything he was trying to tell them. If you don't thing people get anything out of believing in global warming, that is just flat wrong. If you try to do science suggesting global warming is caused by anything other than man, your funding tends to get pulled real quick. Now I'm not saying global warming is not occurring. You're right, the data clearly shows that. The degree to which it is human caused is widely debated, however. It seems obvious to me that anyone with even a cursory training in science should see that climate is an unbelievably complex field, and we aren't even close to understanding how it works. Occam's Razor tells us that variations in solar output are of far greater importance that anything man is doing. Currently, global warming is also occurring on mars as well as Jupiter. Now before you set out to write your flaming response that I am a shill for the Oil Companies, or I am just selfish, or have my head up my ass, thing to yourself, "Is that a scientific response?". After doing thorough research, I have come to several informed conclusions: 1) Global warming is occurring. 2) Humans are contributing to global warming (how could we not be, again, Occam's Razor) 3) The amount by which we are contributing to global warming is vastly overstated by the Global Warming Movement. 4) The Global Warming movement is primarily an anti corporate movement which uses the scare of global warming to motivate change which is ultimately good, but when taken too far, can cripple economies not only here in the first world, but with even more tragic consequences in the third world. 5) The Global Warming scare is like telling someone that for every Big Mac they eat, they will lose one day off of their life. It may motivate people to make changes which would be good for them, but it does so by telling a lie which may have drastic consequences for third parties. 6) The illusion that environmentalism doesn't hurt anyone, and therefore we should do anything possible to that goal is plain wrong. There is no sense of balance in the debate over what to do about it, and people who don't mouth the party line are branded a heretics.
Most of this is covered quite well in the first link I provided. Watch it, it may just change your mind. Assuming your mind is open to change.
I was never great at all of the hot keying, but it never really bothered me. The thing that always bothered me was that groups would always funnel down to the target point, when sometimes, you would rather have them spread out. For instance, a group of marines spread out in a long front are an easy match for a siege tank, whereas the same group clumped together would be toast. Similarly, it would be nice to be able to group a group of mutalisks flying formation in front of a group of guardians, and have them stay roughly that way when approaching their target. This may just be too difficult to accomplish, but it would add tactics which are just infeasible without formations.
Three Mile Island is an example of the worst case scenario for an American Style nuclear plant, and the average radiation dose received by those near the plant was similar to the amount you receive from a chest Xray. The containment worked, and though the failure was costly financially, and more importantly in terms of public opinion, the safety measures in place in Three Mile Island worked. You'll notice that the grandparent post didn't mention USSR as an example of safe use of nuclear power. The kind of containment used in the US did not exist in Soviet style reactors. Had Chernobyl been built with proper containment, it would have been as relatively minor an occurance as Three Mile Island. The fact is that a Coal Plant located at Three Mile Island would have released more radioactivity into the surrounding community that Three Mile Island ever did, and Three Mile Island is the only example you have. A relatively benign event which has occurred once in 40 years, yea, I'd call that pretty safe.
>>Nice try. Unfortunately, as I understand it, you can't beat the Carnot cycle no matter what technology you use.
I'm not sure why the above post was rated informative. I'm not even sure what the point was. The grandparent post was talking about developing new technologies for extracting work from smaller thermal gradients, and the parent said it's not possible because the Carnot Cycle is the most efficient technology. That makes no sense. No engine in history uses the Carnot Cycle. There is no Carnot Cycle engine. There may be engines which approach its efficiency (namely the Stirling engine), but none of this discussion has any bearing on the fact that currently it is a difficult engineering challenge to harness energy from diffuse energy sources with low temperature gradients. Was I missing the point of the above post?
Just like the speed limit is a law. When the speed limit is 65, it doesn't mean that I can't go faster than 65. It just means that if I do, there may be consequences. Moores Law is kind of like that. It has become a self fulfilling prophecy. It has become the defacto standard for that industry. If you advance at less than that rate, you're in trouble. It seems pretty clear to me that 40 years ago, he set a realistic goal, which today everybody has accepted as the standard, just like we have accepted a speed limit of 65 or 70 as the standard. There's no reason it couldn't be 50, or 90. We all just roughly drive at that speed. Same with Moores Law, everyone more or less drives at that speed.
In 2000, the will of the people... as a whole... was that Al Gore be President. He got 500,000 more votes than any other candidate. That fact is incontrovertible.
You are most certainly mistaken. It is very contravertable that Al Gore got 500,000 more popular votes. You conviently neglect to mention that over 1 million votes weren't even counted in California Alone. Absentee ballots are usually not counted if they cannot affect the outcome of the vote. Al Gore only won the popular vote if you assume the breakdown of the absentee ballots exactly reflected the breakdown of the counted votes. This is usually not the case. The absentee vote us usually more conservative. If anything, he 2000 election highlighted one of the reasons the electoral college is necessary. If we had to rely on the popular vote, rather than counting and recounting Florida (which was a huge ordeal), we instead would have had to count and recount the entire nation. Can you imagine what a nightmare that would have been. As you mentioned, there was only one election in the last 100 years in which the popular vote (maybe) didn't result in the same outcome as the electoral vote. I'd say that means the electoral college has served us well. Think of it this way. The 2000 election was essentially a tie. Some people resolve ties by a coin flip. We use the electoral college. It essentially says that in the case of a tie, the small states break the tie.
And I further call bullshit on your bullshit. If we assume your rate of 20% which I believe is a bit low for those of us living in California, and we add the 15% which you forgot to include as social security taxes, that brings us to 35% (and don't tell me that you only pay 7.5% in social security taxes. The fact that they hide the other 7.5% on your employers side of the balance sheet doesn't mean you don't pay it in the end.) Now add the 9% California income tax, and you are at 44% (Which by the way was very close to what they actually took out of my first bonus check I ever recieved from the company I work for. Now we add in a sales tax of 8%, and getting over 50%. Now I will grant you that for the nation as a whole, the tax rate is substantially lower. As a matter of fact according to wikipedia, the tax burden of America as a whole is about 31.6% http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Freedom_Day . But it is clear that it is not very difficult to be taxed over 50%. As a matter of fact, last year, my wife and I did a calculation to figure out how much money she would keep for each dollar she earned (granted, this is an incremental income calculation and therefore should not be compared in quite the same way). It turned out that she would only keep 42 cents for every dollar she earned, and that doesn't even include sales tax. And that's for a combined income of less than $150,000 per year. So to sum up. The statement that most of us pay over 50% in taxes is most likely false. The statement that many of us pay over 50% in taxes (which is what the grandparent said)is clearly true. It is especially true if you live in California, are single, and don't own a home.
I don't have the numbers currently in front of me, so I'll do my best from memory, but I've done the calculations before.
An internal combustion engine (ICE) combined with the mechanical transmission is hopelessly inefficient. The ICE is somewhere between 12% and 25% efficient at converting the heat in the gasoline to kinetic energy. The turbines at your typical power plant are somewhere in the neighborhood of 70%. With transmission losses somewhere in the neighborhood of 40% (Meaning 60% efficient) and battery efficiency being roughly 75%. This means the overall efficiency is on the order of.7*.6*.75 = 31.5% efficient (on the same order as, but a little better than ICE) It turns out that the amount of polution is roughly the same, but a little less than and ICE as well. The only reason electric cars don't currently make sense, is that the initial extra cost of the battery/charging solution swamps the savings in gas costs. I figured the cost of electricity to power your car is roughly equivalent to $1.25 per gallon of gasoline. $12,000 (this is what a current conversion kit for a Prius costs) amortized over 150,000 miles at 20 mpg add another equivalent of roughly $4 per gallon to the equivalent electric solution. If we could cut that capital investment to $6000, the electric solution would be equivalent to roughly $3 per gallon gas, so at $3 per gallon, I believe it starts making sense to research electric cars. At $5 a gallon, it already makes financial sense (You'll notice they already make economic sense in europe where they are being developed, and they are an economic wash in the United States where they are not being deveoloped as fast.) Look up some of the numbers. They are not that hard to find. It can acutally be quite fun.
I agree with your sentiments. I've been tracking a number of technologies over a fairly long timespan, and a good rule of thumb I've noticed is that if they are researching in the lab and have a somewhat working prototype, we are 5-10 years from the first commercial product, and when we get that first commercial product, we are about 5 years from widescale deployment (assuming the technology gets proper funding, and actually becomes accepted) This rule has worked for WiFi, bluetooth, cell phones, dvd players, etc. Using this rule, I'd say we are about 5 years from seeing widescale adoption of OLED's about 5 years from seeing HD-DVD (or Blue Ray) in widescale use. As for a 1.2 petabyte hard drive, I'd say that's probably 5-10 years out (Probably closer to 10), but I doubt the above referenced company will have anything to do about it.
I imagine that the answer to this is that the average TV purchased today is physically larger than the average TV it replaces. If I replace a 26" TV at 200 W with a 50" TV at 300 W, I have nearly 4 times the viewing surface for 50% more power. Thus you have a 0% increase in number of TV's with a 50% increase in power usage.
Anyone that thinks women understand women any better than men do, hasn't spent much time around women. The fact is that women are incomprehensible by either men or women. I've as much as been told this by my wife. The only difference between men and women in this regard is that men seem to think that you should be able to understand a woman, women don't think this. It's like a man and a woman are going on a walk, and the man says, "Where are we going?" The woman says, "For a walk". The man says, "But where are we walking to?" And the woman says, "We are just walking". Understanding a woman is like getting to the destination, but with a woman, there is no destination. There is just the walk.
I'm a parent of a teenager, and I want 1 for my house. Anyone who has teenagers knows that they are like locusts. If they congregate at your house, your fridge will be empty, and your furnature and carpets distroyed. A little selective usage could ensure that they congregate at the other kids houses. I half expect to get modded as Funny on this, but I'm thinking it should be modded insightful.
I asked a friend of mine in the insurance industry once how long people would live if we eliminated all natural causes. He said given current accident rates, people would live on average about 800 years. I do wonder if a lifespan was 800 years on average, we might be more careful, but I doubt it. If you think about it, this number means that roughly 1 in 10 people die in accidents over the course of a lifetime. That sounds about right to me. As for people dying of diseases, I believe that most of the diseases associated with end of life are heavily related to aging itself, so many of the diseases you mention may be lessened or eliminated through extending lifespan.
I know that people have already discussed the possibility of mounting a rocket on an asteroid, and it has many problems (namely that the asteroid rotates, and it would be difficult to mount the rocket) But if we are talking about parking a spacecraft next to an asteroid, why couldn't you simply mount an ion engine on opposite sides of a space craft, and point one beam at the asteroid, and one beam in the opposite direction. Wouldn't this beam impact the asteroid, and thus impart a thrust. I realize this would theoretically cost twice the energy of mounting the same ion beam on the asteriod, but it could fire continuously. Does the ion beam spread out too fast, because if it could stay collumated, I would think it could be quite effective.
Yes, that was my point exactly. Thank you for clarifying. I'm glad someone else sees it this way. The good news is that in 20-30 years when George is out of the picture, someone who can write decent dialogue and direct worth a damn can come along and salvage these movies. I'm still looking forward to seeing "The Phantom Edit" It's my understanding that even a decent editing job can turn the Phantom Menace from a crap-fest into a pretty decent movie.
I disagree. Writing a good story and putting together good visual effects are what Lucas is great at. What he can't do is write decent dialogue, or direct properly. That's why Empire Strikes Back was so good. He didn't write the dialogue, or direct. The story, however, was his.
One of the key points he makes in I believe it was the Magic Cauldron (but it may have been the Cathedral and the Bazaar) is that software is fundamentally a service and not a product. If buy software as a product, it is in the interest of the person who makes the product to make a crappy product so you will need to buy the upgrades/extensions. If you buy software as a service, whenever you are unhappy with the service, you can move to a new service provider. Open source software fits the service model. Propriatary software fits the product model.
Often times it is your responsibility as a citizen to break a law which is unjust. As an example, take Rosa Parks sitting in the front of the Bus. You might argue that she should have petitioned the beaurocratic goverment for redress, but that would not have been nearly as quick for such a clear injustice. You might argue that Rosa Parks was at least willing to stand up and take responsibility for breaking the law, but that is not always ethically required either. Take for instance the people who helped people escape from the South on the Underground Railroad. I think ethically in that case, exposing oneself to capture would reduce the number of slaves one could help, and thus hiding from the law is ethically justified. Now I'm not trying to equate slavery or racism with intellectual property in terms of importance, so let me give you a more direct example. I would argue that copyright law in its current form is at best unjust, and at worst, unconstitutional. If you look at the writings of the founding fathers, they viewed copyright as a necessary evil, but evil none the less. Copyright is not an inherent right in the same way as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are inherent. Instead, copyright is a social contract which is designed to benefit the public rather than the individual. Look it up. Benefit to the individual is only the means by which the benefit to the public is accomplished. To get more specific, take the various revisions George Lucas has made to his Star Wars films. Now I agree that no one has the right to compel him to release these films. Once he does, however, in a very real sense, they belong to all of us. The social experience we all shared of the original films, and the cultural impact are not and should not be owned by him. I'm not saying others should be able to profit from his work, necessarily, but I am saying that he has no right to retract the original work from the public stage. That destroys the notion that copyright is a social contract. To illustrate my point, lets say the Shakespear family decided they didn't like how Romeo and Juliet ended, and they wanted to retract the original, and substitute a version where they live happily ever after. Most people would agree that this would be an outrage. George Lucas is attempting this very thing with Star Wars, and I have therefore downloaded the original versions. I own the original versions on video tape, but they are rapid decaying. I also own the DVD versions, but they are not the same as the originals. Legally I may or may not be right, however, as I see it, I am preserving history which I am entitled to do. I have also paid for this movie twice, and would gladly do so a third time if the originals are released. George Lucas, however, has no right to alter history simply because he didn't like the way it occurred the first time around. I'm guessing you will disagree, but that's just an opinion. Legally, my decision is ambiguous, however ethically, I believe I am in the right. Take that for what you will.
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This is exactly the sort of thing I pay taxes for. I'd like to know if Nerds and Retards are more or less likely to have sex than the average person. It was really eating me alive not knowing.
I've always found it ironic that the people who claim to want something better for illegal immigrants want to allow all illegal immigrants to stay, and those who are afraid illegal immigrants are ruining the economy want them to go. Their positions really should be reversed. Illegal immigrants are a boon to our economy. They are a labor force which can be paid less than minimum wage, and can be exploited without protection of law. They benefit us at their own expense. If anything, people who want to crack down on illegal immigration are likely to help Mexico and Mexicans in the long run, since with proper immigration reform, the worst abuses will no longer be allowed and we will be forced to find some other way to deal with our least desirable jobs. That may involve a massive expansion of our guest worker program, or substantially larger quotas or new citizens from Mexico. Broadening the scope just a little, I think most people would accept (if they think about it for a minute) that having laws which you don't enforce is bad for everyone. It allows for selective prosecution, exploitation, and a disrespect and disregard for laws in general.
The fact that I don't have my facts straight on the nuances of British television, really has very little bearing on my arguments regarding global warming (most of which you didn't respond to by the way). In fact the very quotes you provide lend credence to my main point which is that the Global Warming has many "over-dramatisation[s] and unwarranted extrapolation of scientific facts". Carl Wunsch seemed to recognize that the controversy needs a more balanced and reasoned approach. More specifically, from his Wiki page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Wunsch
I believe that climate change is real, a major threat, and almost surely has a major human-induced component. But I have tried to stay out of the climate wars because all nuance tends to be lost, and the distinction between what we know firmly, as scientists, and what we suspect is happening, is so difficult to maintain in the presence of rhetorical excess. In the long run, our credibility as scientists rests on being very careful of, and protective of, our authority and expertise... I am on record in a number of places as complaining about the over-dramatization and unwarranted extrapolation of scientific facts. Thus the notion that the Gulf Stream would or could "shut off" or that with global warming Britain would go into a "new ice age" are either scientifically impossible or so unlikely as to threaten our credibility as a scientific discipline if we proclaim their reality
Similarly, another professor at MIT in meteorology no less, was featured prominently in the Documentary. His position reflects my position well:
His position with regard to the IPCC can be summed up with this quotation: "Picking holes in the IPCC is crucial. The notion that if you're ignorant of something and somebody comes up with a wrong answer, and you have to accept that because you don't have another wrong answer to offer is like faith healing, it's like quackery in medicine - if somebody says you should take jelly beans for cancer and you say that's stupid, and he says, well can you suggest something else and you say, no, does that mean you have to go with jelly beans?"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lindzen
I guess what I'm trying to get across to you is that the kind of misrepresentation of the facts that you decry is present on both sides of the debate in roughly equal amounts. It is a byproduct of television and movies. I've been on television, and one thing that is clear to me is that in television and movies, "The Story" comes first, and the facts come in distant second. Alarmists would have you believe that oceans are likely to rise 20 feet, in the not too distant future, and that carbon dioxide from fossil fuels is the primary cause. This kind of hyperbole does a tremendous amount of damage to the credibility of the Global Warming movement. I'll grant you that The Great Global Warming Swindle probably has a number of errors and exaggerations, but no more so than a movie like An Inconvenient Truth. You are correct that the scientists largely agree on the facts surrounding Global Warming, but if you look a little closer, you'll find that what they don't agree on is the implication those facts have, how to remedy the situation, and the magnitude and immediacy of the threat.
The Great Global Warming Swindle is a BBC Documentary (notorious right wing Oil loving company there) featuring many people whom I consider credible people within the scientific community, including the Co-Founder of Greenepeace Patrick Moore who show that the Global Warming movement is primarily political in nature, and is more about being anti-corporate than pro-environment. This is largely the reason why Patric Moore resigned from the organization he confounded in disgust. Regarding the so called consensus, regarding global warming, they have an interview in there with a scientist who was on a list of 2500 climate scientists who contributed to a paper regarding the human origin of global warming who had to sue to get his name removed from the paper. They told him he'd contributed, so his name would be listed, but he told them they didn't listen to anything he was trying to tell them. If you don't thing people get anything out of believing in global warming, that is just flat wrong. If you try to do science suggesting global warming is caused by anything other than man, your funding tends to get pulled real quick. Now I'm not saying global warming is not occurring. You're right, the data clearly shows that. The degree to which it is human caused is widely debated, however. It seems obvious to me that anyone with even a cursory training in science should see that climate is an unbelievably complex field, and we aren't even close to understanding how it works. Occam's Razor tells us that variations in solar output are of far greater importance that anything man is doing. Currently, global warming is also occurring on mars as well as Jupiter. Now before you set out to write your flaming response that I am a shill for the Oil Companies, or I am just selfish, or have my head up my ass, thing to yourself, "Is that a scientific response?". After doing thorough research, I have come to several informed conclusions:
1) Global warming is occurring.
2) Humans are contributing to global warming (how could we not be, again, Occam's Razor)
3) The amount by which we are contributing to global warming is vastly overstated by the Global Warming Movement.
4) The Global Warming movement is primarily an anti corporate movement which uses the scare of global warming to motivate change which is ultimately good, but when taken too far, can cripple economies not only here in the first world, but with even more tragic consequences in the third world.
5) The Global Warming scare is like telling someone that for every Big Mac they eat, they will lose one day off of their life. It may motivate people to make changes which would be good for them, but it does so by telling a lie which may have drastic consequences for third parties.
6) The illusion that environmentalism doesn't hurt anyone, and therefore we should do anything possible to that goal is plain wrong. There is no sense of balance in the debate over what to do about it, and people who don't mouth the party line are branded a heretics.
Most of this is covered quite well in the first link I provided. Watch it, it may just change your mind. Assuming your mind is open to change.
I was never great at all of the hot keying, but it never really bothered me. The thing that always bothered me was that groups would always funnel down to the target point, when sometimes, you would rather have them spread out. For instance, a group of marines spread out in a long front are an easy match for a siege tank, whereas the same group clumped together would be toast. Similarly, it would be nice to be able to group a group of mutalisks flying formation in front of a group of guardians, and have them stay roughly that way when approaching their target. This may just be too difficult to accomplish, but it would add tactics which are just infeasible without formations.
Three Mile Island is an example of the worst case scenario for an American Style nuclear plant, and the average radiation dose received by those near the plant was similar to the amount you receive from a chest Xray. The containment worked, and though the failure was costly financially, and more importantly in terms of public opinion, the safety measures in place in Three Mile Island worked. You'll notice that the grandparent post didn't mention USSR as an example of safe use of nuclear power. The kind of containment used in the US did not exist in Soviet style reactors. Had Chernobyl been built with proper containment, it would have been as relatively minor an occurance as Three Mile Island. The fact is that a Coal Plant located at Three Mile Island would have released more radioactivity into the surrounding community that Three Mile Island ever did, and Three Mile Island is the only example you have. A relatively benign event which has occurred once in 40 years, yea, I'd call that pretty safe.
>>Nice try. Unfortunately, as I understand it, you can't beat the Carnot cycle no matter what technology you use.
I'm not sure why the above post was rated informative. I'm not even sure what the point was. The grandparent post was talking about developing new technologies for extracting work from smaller thermal gradients, and the parent said it's not possible because the Carnot Cycle is the most efficient technology. That makes no sense. No engine in history uses the Carnot Cycle. There is no Carnot Cycle engine. There may be engines which approach its efficiency (namely the Stirling engine), but none of this discussion has any bearing on the fact that currently it is a difficult engineering challenge to harness energy from diffuse energy sources with low temperature gradients. Was I missing the point of the above post?
Just like the speed limit is a law. When the speed limit is 65, it doesn't mean that I can't go faster than 65. It just means that if I do, there may be consequences. Moores Law is kind of like that. It has become a self fulfilling prophecy. It has become the defacto standard for that industry. If you advance at less than that rate, you're in trouble. It seems pretty clear to me that 40 years ago, he set a realistic goal, which today everybody has accepted as the standard, just like we have accepted a speed limit of 65 or 70 as the standard. There's no reason it couldn't be 50, or 90. We all just roughly drive at that speed. Same with Moores Law, everyone more or less drives at that speed.
To Paraphrase Winston Churchill...
America is the worst country in the world... Except for all of the other countries in the world.
And another gem from Churchill...
You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing... After they've tried everything else.
In 2000, the will of the people... as a whole... was that Al Gore be President. He got 500,000 more votes than any other candidate. That fact is incontrovertible.
You are most certainly mistaken. It is very contravertable that Al Gore got 500,000 more popular votes. You conviently neglect to mention that over 1 million votes weren't even counted in California Alone. Absentee ballots are usually not counted if they cannot affect the outcome of the vote. Al Gore only won the popular vote if you assume the breakdown of the absentee ballots exactly reflected the breakdown of the counted votes. This is usually not the case. The absentee vote us usually more conservative. If anything, he 2000 election highlighted one of the reasons the electoral college is necessary. If we had to rely on the popular vote, rather than counting and recounting Florida (which was a huge ordeal), we instead would have had to count and recount the entire nation. Can you imagine what a nightmare that would have been. As you mentioned, there was only one election in the last 100 years in which the popular vote (maybe) didn't result in the same outcome as the electoral vote. I'd say that means the electoral college has served us well. Think of it this way. The 2000 election was essentially a tie. Some people resolve ties by a coin flip. We use the electoral college. It essentially says that in the case of a tie, the small states break the tie.
And I further call bullshit on your bullshit. If we assume your rate of 20% which I believe is a bit low for those of us living in California, and we add the 15% which you forgot to include as social security taxes, that brings us to 35% (and don't tell me that you only pay 7.5% in social security taxes. The fact that they hide the other 7.5% on your employers side of the balance sheet doesn't mean you don't pay it in the end.) Now add the 9% California income tax, and you are at 44% (Which by the way was very close to what they actually took out of my first bonus check I ever recieved from the company I work for. Now we add in a sales tax of 8%, and getting over 50%. Now I will grant you that for the nation as a whole, the tax rate is substantially lower. As a matter of fact according to wikipedia, the tax burden of America as a whole is about 31.6% http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Freedom_Day . But it is clear that it is not very difficult to be taxed over 50%. As a matter of fact, last year, my wife and I did a calculation to figure out how much money she would keep for each dollar she earned (granted, this is an incremental income calculation and therefore should not be compared in quite the same way). It turned out that she would only keep 42 cents for every dollar she earned, and that doesn't even include sales tax. And that's for a combined income of less than $150,000 per year. So to sum up. The statement that most of us pay over 50% in taxes is most likely false. The statement that many of us pay over 50% in taxes (which is what the grandparent said)is clearly true. It is especially true if you live in California, are single, and don't own a home.
I don't have the numbers currently in front of me, so I'll do my best from memory, but I've done the calculations before.
.7*.6*.75 = 31.5% efficient (on the same order as, but a little better than ICE) It turns out that the amount of polution is roughly the same, but a little less than and ICE as well. The only reason electric cars don't currently make sense, is that the initial extra cost of the battery/charging solution swamps the savings in gas costs. I figured the cost of electricity to power your car is roughly equivalent to $1.25 per gallon of gasoline. $12,000 (this is what a current conversion kit for a Prius costs) amortized over 150,000 miles at 20 mpg add another equivalent of roughly $4 per gallon to the equivalent electric solution. If we could cut that capital investment to $6000, the electric solution would be equivalent to roughly $3 per gallon gas, so at $3 per gallon, I believe it starts making sense to research electric cars. At $5 a gallon, it already makes financial sense (You'll notice they already make economic sense in europe where they are being developed, and they are an economic wash in the United States where they are not being deveoloped as fast.) Look up some of the numbers. They are not that hard to find. It can acutally be quite fun.
An internal combustion engine (ICE) combined with the mechanical transmission is hopelessly inefficient. The ICE is somewhere between 12% and 25% efficient at converting the heat in the gasoline to kinetic energy. The turbines at your typical power plant are somewhere in the neighborhood of 70%. With transmission losses somewhere in the neighborhood of 40% (Meaning 60% efficient) and battery efficiency being roughly 75%. This means the overall efficiency is on the order of
I agree with your sentiments. I've been tracking a number of technologies over a fairly long timespan, and a good rule of thumb I've noticed is that if they are researching in the lab and have a somewhat working prototype, we are 5-10 years from the first commercial product, and when we get that first commercial product, we are about 5 years from widescale deployment (assuming the technology gets proper funding, and actually becomes accepted) This rule has worked for WiFi, bluetooth, cell phones, dvd players, etc. Using this rule, I'd say we are about 5 years from seeing widescale adoption of OLED's about 5 years from seeing HD-DVD (or Blue Ray) in widescale use. As for a 1.2 petabyte hard drive, I'd say that's probably 5-10 years out (Probably closer to 10), but I doubt the above referenced company will have anything to do about it.
I imagine that the answer to this is that the average TV purchased today is physically larger than the average TV it replaces. If I replace a 26" TV at 200 W with a 50" TV at 300 W, I have nearly 4 times the viewing surface for 50% more power. Thus you have a 0% increase in number of TV's with a 50% increase in power usage.
Anyone that thinks women understand women any better than men do, hasn't spent much time around women. The fact is that women are incomprehensible by either men or women. I've as much as been told this by my wife. The only difference between men and women in this regard is that men seem to think that you should be able to understand a woman, women don't think this. It's like a man and a woman are going on a walk, and the man says, "Where are we going?" The woman says, "For a walk". The man says, "But where are we walking to?" And the woman says, "We are just walking". Understanding a woman is like getting to the destination, but with a woman, there is no destination. There is just the walk.
:)
Stick that in your new age pipe and smoke it
I'm a parent of a teenager, and I want 1 for my house. Anyone who has teenagers knows that they are like locusts. If they congregate at your house, your fridge will be empty, and your furnature and carpets distroyed. A little selective usage could ensure that they congregate at the other kids houses. I half expect to get modded as Funny on this, but I'm thinking it should be modded insightful.
It should read, "In other words, you'll be forced to invest in retirement homes weather you want to or not."
I asked a friend of mine in the insurance industry once how long people would live if we eliminated all natural causes. He said given current accident rates, people would live on average about 800 years. I do wonder if a lifespan was 800 years on average, we might be more careful, but I doubt it. If you think about it, this number means that roughly 1 in 10 people die in accidents over the course of a lifetime. That sounds about right to me. As for people dying of diseases, I believe that most of the diseases associated with end of life are heavily related to aging itself, so many of the diseases you mention may be lessened or eliminated through extending lifespan.
I know that people have already discussed the possibility of mounting a rocket on an asteroid, and it has many problems (namely that the asteroid rotates, and it would be difficult to mount the rocket) But if we are talking about parking a spacecraft next to an asteroid, why couldn't you simply mount an ion engine on opposite sides of a space craft, and point one beam at the asteroid, and one beam in the opposite direction. Wouldn't this beam impact the asteroid, and thus impart a thrust. I realize this would theoretically cost twice the energy of mounting the same ion beam on the asteriod, but it could fire continuously. Does the ion beam spread out too fast, because if it could stay collumated, I would think it could be quite effective.
Yes, that was my point exactly. Thank you for clarifying. I'm glad someone else sees it this way. The good news is that in 20-30 years when George is out of the picture, someone who can write decent dialogue and direct worth a damn can come along and salvage these movies. I'm still looking forward to seeing "The Phantom Edit" It's my understanding that even a decent editing job can turn the Phantom Menace from a crap-fest into a pretty decent movie.
I disagree. Writing a good story and putting together good visual effects are what Lucas is great at. What he can't do is write decent dialogue, or direct properly. That's why Empire Strikes Back was so good. He didn't write the dialogue, or direct. The story, however, was his.
One of the key points he makes in I believe it was the Magic Cauldron (but it may have been the Cathedral and the Bazaar) is that software is fundamentally a service and not a product. If buy software as a product, it is in the interest of the person who makes the product to make a crappy product so you will need to buy the upgrades/extensions. If you buy software as a service, whenever you are unhappy with the service, you can move to a new service provider. Open source software fits the service model. Propriatary software fits the product model.
I also like to form my own opinions.
That he got the magazines from a library which was throwing them out. Why would they want them back (other than to claim the $10000 prize.)
Often times it is your responsibility as a citizen to break a law which is unjust. As an example, take Rosa Parks sitting in the front of the Bus. You might argue that she should have petitioned the beaurocratic goverment for redress, but that would not have been nearly as quick for such a clear injustice. You might argue that Rosa Parks was at least willing to stand up and take responsibility for breaking the law, but that is not always ethically required either. Take for instance the people who helped people escape from the South on the Underground Railroad. I think ethically in that case, exposing oneself to capture would reduce the number of slaves one could help, and thus hiding from the law is ethically justified. Now I'm not trying to equate slavery or racism with intellectual property in terms of importance, so let me give you a more direct example. I would argue that copyright law in its current form is at best unjust, and at worst, unconstitutional. If you look at the writings of the founding fathers, they viewed copyright as a necessary evil, but evil none the less. Copyright is not an inherent right in the same way as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are inherent. Instead, copyright is a social contract which is designed to benefit the public rather than the individual. Look it up. Benefit to the individual is only the means by which the benefit to the public is accomplished. To get more specific, take the various revisions George Lucas has made to his Star Wars films. Now I agree that no one has the right to compel him to release these films. Once he does, however, in a very real sense, they belong to all of us. The social experience we all shared of the original films, and the cultural impact are not and should not be owned by him. I'm not saying others should be able to profit from his work, necessarily, but I am saying that he has no right to retract the original work from the public stage. That destroys the notion that copyright is a social contract. To illustrate my point, lets say the Shakespear family decided they didn't like how Romeo and Juliet ended, and they wanted to retract the original, and substitute a version where they live happily ever after. Most people would agree that this would be an outrage. George Lucas is attempting this very thing with Star Wars, and I have therefore downloaded the original versions. I own the original versions on video tape, but they are rapid decaying. I also own the DVD versions, but they are not the same as the originals. Legally I may or may not be right, however, as I see it, I am preserving history which I am entitled to do. I have also paid for this movie twice, and would gladly do so a third time if the originals are released. George Lucas, however, has no right to alter history simply because he didn't like the way it occurred the first time around. I'm guessing you will disagree, but that's just an opinion. Legally, my decision is ambiguous, however ethically, I believe I am in the right. Take that for what you will.