his is not something 'the environmentalists' need to do - their job, inasmuch as they have any official role, is to do exactly what they do: point out the dangers, because that is what they are qualified to do, as opposed to eg. you.
So what exactly makes one "qualified" to be an environmentalist? It certaintly isn't a thorough and practical knowledge of technologies and how they effect the environment, or even how the environment itself operates. =Smidge=
Hydroelectric is an indirect form of solar energy, unless you honestly propose that the gravitational pull of the moon is responsible for refilling Lake Mead.
Well, to start it's actually a negative-sum since not all of the carbon trapped by the plant is returned to the atmosphere as CO2. Regardless of process there is always some 'left over' biomass that can be buried or used as compost, and effectively reduces total carbon in the atmosphere.
Now consider that most cities today are not terribly choked by vehicle emissions. There definately is a higher concentration of pollution in urban areas, of course, but a large part of this is from sulphur and nitrates. Biofuels contain no sulphur and produce fewer nitrates when burned, so net pollution would still decrease (unless you're expecting a substantial increase in fuel usage in urban areas). =Smidge=
*disabling karma since we're going a tad offtopic*
Well that's fine, but what constitutes "Government" in this case?
The school district is what requests (and ultimately pays for) a public school building, addition or renovation. I'm not sure I can agree that a school board constitutes "government."
However, the design of both the Acme Co. office and the new school are controlled by the "real" government. There are two notable exceptions that I'm aware of:
First, public school districts are not under jurisdiction of local (town or county) codes and ordinances. The only exception is utilities: water, electric, gas and other fuels, sewer/sanitary systems. Examples include requirements for underground fuel oil tanks and chemical waste disposal. Acme Co. would be under jurisdiction of local building codes, although these are invariably just copies of the state building codes with a few extra restrictions.
Second, public schools are required to accept the "lowest qualified bidder" from a publically announced bid with all sorts of rules. "Qualified" is determined by so many dollars worth of previous public contract work, insurance and bonding requirements, and can demonstrate in an interview that they didn't miss anything when preparing their bid. Even if the contractor is notorious for sh*t work, they are "qualified" if their paperwork is in order.
Of course, the school board can pass a resolution to override the qualification, but that's very difficult to accomplish. =Smidge=
I do a lot of work in public school construction. Not that I will stand here and claim that the public school buildings which I helped design are the pinnacle of engineering and construction - far from it - I would like to ask you to quantify "far better construction and design." Both private and public school construction are designed and built according to the state mandated codes, which is enforced by the state education department.
To complete the analogy with Diebold machines: Both the existing voting machines and new Diebold machines are supposedly held to the same state laws and regulations... except Diebold machines are not. Diebold is obviously capable of designing a secure and auditable system, which is required by many state voting laws, but they obviously aren't doing it.
This would be like having the same contractor who can build a perfect office complex for a private client, but refuses even create a usable building for the government. There just isn't any excuse for that. =Smidge=
I'm pretty sure it's not illegal for companies to agree to make thier products compatable, or for one company to independently make thier product compatable with another. Especially when there is nothing preventing competing companies from adopting the same standards. (Price fixing, though, most certaintly is illegal.)
The real reason is hot dogs are packaged by weight: 1 pack = 10 hotdogs = 1 pound.
Buns are baked in pairs. Take a close look at them next time; you get four pairs of buns that are "stuck together" with the cuts on the outside. This is an artifact of the manufacturing process. It would be possible to put 10 buns in a package (and some companies do) but "four pairs" makes a nice, neat, squarish package without having to seperate a pair. There are always exceptions of course.
I think a bigger problem is that too many people become involved with politics without bothering to understand it.
My father, for example, will always vote for the "right to life" candidate. He couldn't tell you anything about any of the candidate's other policies, his political history, and sometimes doesn't even know the guy's name. All he sees is "right to life" on the ballot and votes down the line.
And if it's not about banning abortion, it's about some other relatively trivial issue like "under God" in the pledge.
This is the kind of behavior that makes our "democracy" such a joke. =Smidge=
For fight pedantic with pedantic: unless the object's temperature is 0 Kelvin, it's radiating heat.
Similarly, a hot object is also receiving radiated heat from other, cooler objects that surround it.
"Radiant Cooling" simply means you are removing heat energy from a space via radiation absorption by means of a surface of object that you are actively keeping at a lower temperature than the surroundings. In other words, the space is being cooled by radiating the heat, not by some magical device that emits "anti-heat" radiation.
This contrasts traditional HVAC systems that use convection as their primary means of removing heat from a space. =Smidge=
Photovoltaic panels get hot because they absorb all that sunlight with only ~20% efficiency. Install the heat exchanger in close proximity to the back of the solar cells to make use of this high temperature and take advantage of the shade it provides (prevent the heat sink from being heated by the sun as well. Now your microturbine may be only 5%, but that's effectively ~25% overall for the PV-turbine system combined.
Make that a concentrating PV and your efficiency increases for both systems.
I beg to differ; If you make an object cooler that the surroundings, there will be a net radiative heat transfer from the surroundings to that object. It's been done.
The catch is, if you're going to use an existing radiant heat floor/wall/ceiling system, you have to keep the temperature of the surface above the dew point or things will get wet. =Smidge=
1) Your faulty DNA, if you are infertile for genetic reasons. Evolution wants to weed you out. Deal with it.
2) Humans are not monogamous. I don't have my finger on any studies right now, but I get the feeling that more fathers end up raising kids that aren't really thiers than you might be willing to conceed.
Or here's a thought: He doesn't leave the computer on 24/7?
If we assume he has a 700W electric refrigerator (which is large if he lives alone) that runs for 10 minutes every hour (which is pretty frequent), a 300W computer that he uses 2 hours a day with a 75W LCD monitor, and a 150W television (~20" or so) that he uses 2 hours a day:
That leaves him with a full 1150 watt-hours per day for everything else, such as lighting, cooking and heating. If he has natural gas appliances and home/domestic water heating, he only needs electricity to run the controls and ignition which is virtually negligable. That leaves about 1000 watt-hours a day for lighting, which is certaintly doable if you sleep all night and are out of the house all day... and moreso if you use flourecent lighting where possible and turn the lights off when nobody's in the room.
I couldn't live the way I do on 5kWh/day, but I certaintly believe it is possible. =Smidge=
1: How does this vary from how local town governments already create laws to protect local ecology?
2 & 3: So what do you need the soil for?
4: Guess those Canadians aren't going to have any orange juice with their breakfast...
5: No argument here.
6: We're doing a pretty good job of this. In fact, tree farming has INCREASED the acerage of forest land on the North American continent. Thanks to deliberate planting and selective harvesting, annual growth exceeds harvests and losses (insect, disease, fire) by almost 50%.
Thanks to this, the planet is getting overall greener. As a species, we plant more trees than we cut down. However, I support protection of rainforests because of teh rich biology in these regious that has yet to be fully studied.
7: I fully support the practice of eugenics. Some people just should not be breeding.
8: An amazing conclusion I'm sure you came to all by yourself...
If you REALLY want to conserve the planet and its resources, STOP RECYCLING. Recycling paper and plastics uses MORE energy, causes MORE pollution, and costs MORE money than burying it and making new. The only materials that are really worth recycling at this time are metals. =Smidge=
Logan will not divulge the names of the chemicals until they are patented....
"It's very exciting," Logan told New Scientist, "because these are totally natural chemicals with an effectiveness that compares favourably to harsher chemicals such as DEET
Emphasis mine. You can't, or at least shouldn't be able to, patent nature. That's absurd. If the wording hasn't been butchered, it appears that he is not patenting a recipe, he's patenting the chemical itself.
But hey, maybe I'll take it one step further and patent a "recipe" for bonding two Hydrogen atoms to a single Oxygen atom. =Smidge=
Well I'm sure they were deliberately supressing research on this just to fuck with the people who've been missing limbs for years. And of course you can easily twist those words to make it seem like only victims of that attack will be given access to the technology.
Or it could be that the bombing was just a recent, widely known event that can be used to stir emotions and pique interest in the research. Average Joe loses a leg because he didn't use jack stands while working on his car? Sad, but it doesn't compare to dozens of people killed and hundreds injured in a terrorist attack. Maybe something like that just sticks into the researcher's minds and becomes more of a motivation? Or maybe he was personally effected by it? =Smidge=
Seriously, how would it even be possible to 'turn off' every XP machine that isn't running WGA?
You would either need to have something on the machines that 'calls home' -- which would surely have been noticed by now -- or you would have to somehow connect to every machine.
What if you have an XP machine that has no internet connection and therefore no WGA? What happens to those?
The only way I can see this working is if there is already a 'death clock' ticking away in every XP machine, and if it doesn't receive the command to deactivate from WGA, it disables your OS. If this is the case, I'm sure there's a lot of legal issues that need to be adressed.
Machines without WGA won't be updated, or sill be updated manually by people who likely know a little more about what they are doing than the average John Q. User, so they can't effectively issue an update to add this kill switch functionality. It has to be there already if it exists at all. =Smidge=
No, it could be that in other conditions it has no effect whatsoever. I know you're probably just trying to make a joke, but the exception is not always the exact polar opposite to the norm.
Regarding driving like a moron: If you're using a cell phone while driving, you're probably already a moron. The cell phone is coincidental, not causal.:) =Smidge=
I re-read the article and... nobody is claiming what you are. Nobody is claiming these little robots have achieved any cognitive ability.
There is nothing in the article that suggests they were pre-programmed to process this data into a specific structure, and then communicate that structure. In fact, the article explicitly states that there wasn't!
The only claim here is that they can establish a unique and arbitrary "language" with which they can exchange information, and independently agree on the meaning of the "words" (at least as far as correlating the "word" with their own sensor data). That is all they are doing - forming, as a group, a sound pattern that correlates to a given sensor input. That is the very definition of language.
What is interesting is that, supposedly, there is no predefined method of translating the data into sound. It is an emergent characteristic of the group. If this research is repeatable, it could lend valuable insight on how language is learned and how creatures communicate. =Smidge=
Initially programmed to merely recognise stimuli from their sensors...
The article does not meantion any "language framework" that the robots were given. Instead, it seems the robots worked out amung themselves how to produce unique output ("words") based on particular input from their sensors.
I'm sure we're not talking oxford dictionary here, or even anything that can be considered nouns and verbs. However, you have a self-emerging pattern of sounds unique to a given stimulus, with each entity in the group capable of associating that stimulus with that sound, thus allowing them to exchange information about their environment without sharing the actual sensor data. Isn't that what a language is? =Smidge=
Slashdot Mirror
his is not something 'the environmentalists' need to do - their job, inasmuch as they have any official role, is to do exactly what they do: point out the dangers, because that is what they are qualified to do, as opposed to eg. you.
So what exactly makes one "qualified" to be an environmentalist? It certaintly isn't a thorough and practical knowledge of technologies and how they effect the environment, or even how the environment itself operates.
=Smidge=
Hydroelectric is an indirect form of solar energy, unless you honestly propose that the gravitational pull of the moon is responsible for refilling Lake Mead.
=Smidge=
Well, to start it's actually a negative-sum since not all of the carbon trapped by the plant is returned to the atmosphere as CO2. Regardless of process there is always some 'left over' biomass that can be buried or used as compost, and effectively reduces total carbon in the atmosphere.
Now consider that most cities today are not terribly choked by vehicle emissions. There definately is a higher concentration of pollution in urban areas, of course, but a large part of this is from sulphur and nitrates. Biofuels contain no sulphur and produce fewer nitrates when burned, so net pollution would still decrease (unless you're expecting a substantial increase in fuel usage in urban areas).
=Smidge=
That's hard to do when you're transcribing something off of paper, unless you like looking back and forth a lot.
=Smidge=
*disabling karma since we're going a tad offtopic*
Well that's fine, but what constitutes "Government" in this case?
The school district is what requests (and ultimately pays for) a public school building, addition or renovation. I'm not sure I can agree that a school board constitutes "government."
However, the design of both the Acme Co. office and the new school are controlled by the "real" government. There are two notable exceptions that I'm aware of:
First, public school districts are not under jurisdiction of local (town or county) codes and ordinances. The only exception is utilities: water, electric, gas and other fuels, sewer/sanitary systems. Examples include requirements for underground fuel oil tanks and chemical waste disposal. Acme Co. would be under jurisdiction of local building codes, although these are invariably just copies of the state building codes with a few extra restrictions.
Second, public schools are required to accept the "lowest qualified bidder" from a publically announced bid with all sorts of rules. "Qualified" is determined by so many dollars worth of previous public contract work, insurance and bonding requirements, and can demonstrate in an interview that they didn't miss anything when preparing their bid. Even if the contractor is notorious for sh*t work, they are "qualified" if their paperwork is in order.
Of course, the school board can pass a resolution to override the qualification, but that's very difficult to accomplish.
=Smidge=
I do a lot of work in public school construction. Not that I will stand here and claim that the public school buildings which I helped design are the pinnacle of engineering and construction - far from it - I would like to ask you to quantify "far better construction and design." Both private and public school construction are designed and built according to the state mandated codes, which is enforced by the state education department.
To complete the analogy with Diebold machines: Both the existing voting machines and new Diebold machines are supposedly held to the same state laws and regulations... except Diebold machines are not. Diebold is obviously capable of designing a secure and auditable system, which is required by many state voting laws, but they obviously aren't doing it.
This would be like having the same contractor who can build a perfect office complex for a private client, but refuses even create a usable building for the government. There just isn't any excuse for that.
=Smidge=
Sounds like you have a chronic case of Bit Rot!
=Smidge=
Computer data is a gas; It expands to fill its container.
=Smidge=
I'm pretty sure it's not illegal for companies to agree to make thier products compatable, or for one company to independently make thier product compatable with another. Especially when there is nothing preventing competing companies from adopting the same standards. (Price fixing, though, most certaintly is illegal.)
The real reason is hot dogs are packaged by weight: 1 pack = 10 hotdogs = 1 pound.
Buns are baked in pairs. Take a close look at them next time; you get four pairs of buns that are "stuck together" with the cuts on the outside. This is an artifact of the manufacturing process. It would be possible to put 10 buns in a package (and some companies do) but "four pairs" makes a nice, neat, squarish package without having to seperate a pair. There are always exceptions of course.
In the end, the real reason is habit.
=Smidge=
In addition to what the coward above said, I'd also like to point out that "democracy" was in quotes for a reason.
Good job linking to Wikipedia, though. I'm sure some clueless mod will give you +Insightful points for it.
=Smidge=
I think a bigger problem is that too many people become involved with politics without bothering to understand it.
My father, for example, will always vote for the "right to life" candidate. He couldn't tell you anything about any of the candidate's other policies, his political history, and sometimes doesn't even know the guy's name. All he sees is "right to life" on the ballot and votes down the line.
And if it's not about banning abortion, it's about some other relatively trivial issue like "under God" in the pledge.
This is the kind of behavior that makes our "democracy" such a joke.
=Smidge=
For fight pedantic with pedantic: unless the object's temperature is 0 Kelvin, it's radiating heat.
Similarly, a hot object is also receiving radiated heat from other, cooler objects that surround it.
"Radiant Cooling" simply means you are removing heat energy from a space via radiation absorption by means of a surface of object that you are actively keeping at a lower temperature than the surroundings. In other words, the space is being cooled by radiating the heat, not by some magical device that emits "anti-heat" radiation.
This contrasts traditional HVAC systems that use convection as their primary means of removing heat from a space.
=Smidge=
Photovoltaic panels get hot because they absorb all that sunlight with only ~20% efficiency. Install the heat exchanger in close proximity to the back of the solar cells to make use of this high temperature and take advantage of the shade it provides (prevent the heat sink from being heated by the sun as well. Now your microturbine may be only 5%, but that's effectively ~25% overall for the PV-turbine system combined.
Make that a concentrating PV and your efficiency increases for both systems.
Every little bit helps.
=Smidge=
I beg to differ; If you make an object cooler that the surroundings, there will be a net radiative heat transfer from the surroundings to that object. It's been done.
The catch is, if you're going to use an existing radiant heat floor/wall/ceiling system, you have to keep the temperature of the surface above the dew point or things will get wet.
=Smidge=
No Freecell? Screw that.
=Smidge=
1) Your faulty DNA, if you are infertile for genetic reasons. Evolution wants to weed you out. Deal with it.
2) Humans are not monogamous. I don't have my finger on any studies right now, but I get the feeling that more fathers end up raising kids that aren't really thiers than you might be willing to conceed.
=Smidge=
Or here's a thought: He doesn't leave the computer on 24/7?
If we assume he has a 700W electric refrigerator (which is large if he lives alone) that runs for 10 minutes every hour (which is pretty frequent), a 300W computer that he uses 2 hours a day with a 75W LCD monitor, and a 150W television (~20" or so) that he uses 2 hours a day:
700 * 1/6 * 24 = 2800 Watt-hours/day
375 * 2 = 750 Watt-hours/day
150 * 2 = 300 Watt-hours/day
That leaves him with a full 1150 watt-hours per day for everything else, such as lighting, cooking and heating. If he has natural gas appliances and home/domestic water heating, he only needs electricity to run the controls and ignition which is virtually negligable. That leaves about 1000 watt-hours a day for lighting, which is certaintly doable if you sleep all night and are out of the house all day... and moreso if you use flourecent lighting where possible and turn the lights off when nobody's in the room.
I couldn't live the way I do on 5kWh/day, but I certaintly believe it is possible.
=Smidge=
1: How does this vary from how local town governments already create laws to protect local ecology?
2 & 3: So what do you need the soil for?
4: Guess those Canadians aren't going to have any orange juice with their breakfast...
5: No argument here.
6: We're doing a pretty good job of this. In fact, tree farming has INCREASED the acerage of forest land on the North American continent. Thanks to deliberate planting and selective harvesting, annual growth exceeds harvests and losses (insect, disease, fire) by almost 50%.
Thanks to this, the planet is getting overall greener. As a species, we plant more trees than we cut down. However, I support protection of rainforests because of teh rich biology in these regious that has yet to be fully studied.
7: I fully support the practice of eugenics. Some people just should not be breeding.
8: An amazing conclusion I'm sure you came to all by yourself...
If you REALLY want to conserve the planet and its resources, STOP RECYCLING. Recycling paper and plastics uses MORE energy, causes MORE pollution, and costs MORE money than burying it and making new. The only materials that are really worth recycling at this time are metals.
=Smidge=
Emphasis mine. You can't, or at least shouldn't be able to, patent nature. That's absurd. If the wording hasn't been butchered, it appears that he is not patenting a recipe, he's patenting the chemical itself.
But hey, maybe I'll take it one step further and patent a "recipe" for bonding two Hydrogen atoms to a single Oxygen atom.
=Smidge=
Well I'm sure they were deliberately supressing research on this just to fuck with the people who've been missing limbs for years. And of course you can easily twist those words to make it seem like only victims of that attack will be given access to the technology.
Or it could be that the bombing was just a recent, widely known event that can be used to stir emotions and pique interest in the research. Average Joe loses a leg because he didn't use jack stands while working on his car? Sad, but it doesn't compare to dozens of people killed and hundreds injured in a terrorist attack. Maybe something like that just sticks into the researcher's minds and becomes more of a motivation? Or maybe he was personally effected by it?
=Smidge=
Seriously, how would it even be possible to 'turn off' every XP machine that isn't running WGA?
You would either need to have something on the machines that 'calls home' -- which would surely have been noticed by now -- or you would have to somehow connect to every machine.
What if you have an XP machine that has no internet connection and therefore no WGA? What happens to those?
The only way I can see this working is if there is already a 'death clock' ticking away in every XP machine, and if it doesn't receive the command to deactivate from WGA, it disables your OS. If this is the case, I'm sure there's a lot of legal issues that need to be adressed.
Machines without WGA won't be updated, or sill be updated manually by people who likely know a little more about what they are doing than the average John Q. User, so they can't effectively issue an update to add this kill switch functionality. It has to be there already if it exists at all.
=Smidge=
No, it could be that in other conditions it has no effect whatsoever. I know you're probably just trying to make a joke, but the exception is not always the exact polar opposite to the norm.
:)
Regarding driving like a moron: If you're using a cell phone while driving, you're probably already a moron. The cell phone is coincidental, not causal.
=Smidge=
I re-read the article and... nobody is claiming what you are. Nobody is claiming these little robots have achieved any cognitive ability.
There is nothing in the article that suggests they were pre-programmed to process this data into a specific structure, and then communicate that structure. In fact, the article explicitly states that there wasn't!
The only claim here is that they can establish a unique and arbitrary "language" with which they can exchange information, and independently agree on the meaning of the "words" (at least as far as correlating the "word" with their own sensor data). That is all they are doing - forming, as a group, a sound pattern that correlates to a given sensor input. That is the very definition of language.
What is interesting is that, supposedly, there is no predefined method of translating the data into sound. It is an emergent characteristic of the group. If this research is repeatable, it could lend valuable insight on how language is learned and how creatures communicate.
=Smidge=
From the article:
Initially programmed to merely recognise stimuli from their sensors...
The article does not meantion any "language framework" that the robots were given. Instead, it seems the robots worked out amung themselves how to produce unique output ("words") based on particular input from their sensors.
I'm sure we're not talking oxford dictionary here, or even anything that can be considered nouns and verbs. However, you have a self-emerging pattern of sounds unique to a given stimulus, with each entity in the group capable of associating that stimulus with that sound, thus allowing them to exchange information about their environment without sharing the actual sensor data. Isn't that what a language is?
=Smidge=
Oddly, the word for "Ball" is pronounced remarkably similar to the English "Sarah Connor."
=Smidge=