Promoting your new beliefs when you've recently changed is more a property of 20-year-olds than it is of atheists. Since more people have a religious upbringing than not, the population of noisy 20-year-old atheists is going to be quite apparent. On the other hand, recent young converts to pushy fundamentalism are a pain, too. The difference is, if you agree with the atheist he'll go away and stop bothering you, the religious guy wants to hold your hand and have a prayer session.
Identifying Hitler as conservative because of his facade of promoting Christianity is misleading at best. There's more to conservatism than religious support and stuffy moralism. In particular, no person who wants big government and high taxes can be a conservative, despite what that person claims.
The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.
John Adams
If AI is achieved, we may have gotten to Adam's goal. Alas, my fear is that for reasons entirely unrelated to this thread, we are losing liberty.
Computers are deterministic by preference, because they are most useful to us that way. However, they need not be deterministic. Thermal random noise generators are easy to make, and could be incorporated into a computer to make "nondeterministic" branches whenever they're needed.
If you have an old 35mm SLR with a removable standard 50mm lens, you may be able to stick the lens on the back of your telescope as a replacement for the normal eyepiece. Having the moon cover almost your entire field of vision is an experience not soon forgotten.
No protection is needed for the naked eye viewing of an eclipse provided that that you don't stare at it. Quick glimpse of 1/4 second, and don't look again for 30 seconds. No problem.
The "invisible hand" quote from Adam Smith is an analogy, and people like you are engaging in nothing but smear tactics when you claim that Chicago School economists belief in a literal invisible hand.
The gears in a transmission are the invisible hand that links the engine to the wheels.
Something like a climate model has a very exclusive audience
The final audience of a climate model is (economically) every person alive. If the models are as good as some climatologists claim, the final audience is every living thing on earth.
Making their code public doesn't mean they have to answer their phone. But they're going to have to answer to someone if it can be shown that their code deliberately produced false results, as was the case with the "hockey stick" scandal.
About a year ago I worked with a loudspeaker box design program. I found some peculiarities in the results, but at first I wasn't very concerned. Eventually I found I could get different results without changing the inputs. I became concerned and examined the code. The parts generating the display I didn't understand, the parts getting the input I didn't look at. I studied the formulae that determined the frequency response, and part of it was just plain WRONG.
You don't have to understand everything to find and fix errors.
Keyboard focus switching is a supplement to, not a replacement for, focus-follows-mouse. Alt-tabbing around becomes tedious when the window I want isn't in the 1st 2 or 3 windows on the list, or it's hard to determine which window is being selected. On the other hand, Alt-tab is good for revealing hidden windows the focus-follows-mouse can't reveal, but click-to-focus can't reveal it either.
One of the worst things is same-named menu items with different functions. One "Transform" item only allows 90 degree multiple rotations, another is much more versatile.
Focus-follows-mouse, and sloppy focus, allows entry on a non-raised window while reading information from the raised window. If the non-raised window would cover the area where data is being read, click-to-focus would make the procedure difficult or impossible.
Photoshop comes with a big book and it's difficult to do anything sophisticated without it. The help software is better than gimp's, but still inadequate.
FWIW, Photoshop's morphing capabilities are horrid.
Although 3D chips would be advantageous, they would not be as big a gain as it first appears. With devices and conductive layers, the electrically used portion of modern ICs is about 30 times as deep as the minimum feature size. (I've been out of the field for a decade, corrections appreciated.) That includes a few layers for the active devices and maybe 6 layers for conductors. So for a 20 nanometer process, 10,000 layers of which 1,000 are active device layers, the first nominal expectation is 1,000 times the processing power. Hovever, much of the area of inner layers is going to be vias (wires between layers), so the gain won't be 1000X. It would make a chip 1000 x 30 x 20e-9 = 600e-6 m thick. OK, that's less than what I first thought, it's about how thick chips are now. Two problems occur to me. The first is power dissipation, which others have mentioned. To some extent, this can be worked around by making designs that have low leakage, static (CMOS) design, slower clocks, and circuitry most of which is inactive at any given time. All of that decreases performance. The second problem is yield. Even when all other problems are solved, big chips have yields in the 50% range. Double the number of layers and you will cut the yield to 25%. At 100 layers (10 layers for active devices) the yield will be 0.1%. At 10,000 layers, not one working device could be made in the age of the universe.
There are some sped-up versions, although nowhere near 3.2 GHz. (For instance, a 25 MHz Z80). There isn't any point to having a 3.2 GHz Z80 if the Z80 architechure is preserved. Z80 instructions required 4 to 17 cycles to execute (IIRC) and multiple memory cycles whenever external data was accessed.
There are many, many things that could be done to improve the Z80 with modern technology and most would break compatibility in some manner. For instance, a great speedup could be made by putting the entire 64k memory space on die, but that would break anything that required memory-mapped external access. Pipelining and wider memory could make all instuctions single cycle, provided the memory access was multiport. A multiply instruction would be nice.
Really, there are better uses of technolgy available than investing $1M or so on a 3.2 GHz Z80.
Nonetheless, I understand the feeling. I'd like to see one, too.
You mention "an entire C64 or Apple II on one chip". The SOC philosophy is a good one, and for a long time chips have been available with many of the I/O functions on-chip. However, I doubt that there's anything that completely duplicates a C64 or Apple II. What could be done is to implement an 8 bit computer, inclding memory, on an FPGA. Then you'd just have to add power supply, level-shifters for RS-232 &c, power supply, disk drive, case... Fun games. Really, an emulator running on a modern computer would be less work.
I don't think there's much point to trying to deal with Venus as it is, so the excess atmosphere has got to go.
Pump the excess atmosphere out into space, or find a way to turn most of it into a stable, innocuous solid or liquid compound. Then deal with the excess solar radiation coming in (Make the planet more reflective? Change the orbit? [please be careful not to disturb Earth's orbit.] Put a shade in orbit around Venus?)
Viable alternatives are a better girlfriend or moissanite instead of diamond. I've read that the appearance of moissanite is superior to diamond, but indistinguishable to anyone but an expert.
Thanks for the reference. If I understand "ultrahard rhombohedral carbon polymorph of the R3m space group which structure is very close to diamond but with a partial occupancy of some of the carbon sites" correctly, they are saying that a flawed structure ("partial occupancy") is harder than a perfect structure. Wild.
The distinction between man-made things and those not man-made is important in many realms, and having a well-understood word that is not quite as clumsy as "non-man-made" is worthwhile. That word in that context is "natural"; one antonym is "artificial".
Note that there is a context in which man's activities are properly considered "natural", and that is when they are contrasted with "supernatural".
But, if you match the strength of the brittle material to the ultimate strength of the deformable material, you have met your design criterion.
That analysis fails 2 ways. First, it fails to account for shock loading. A transient load that is equivalent to the ultimate strength of steel could deform the steel, absorbing part of the shock, before the actual failure predicted by the ultimate strength took place. Second is the problem of stress concentration at flaws. The deformable material may flow in a way that reduces stress at the flaw, but a brittle material is likely to see the flaw expand, making things explosively worse.
Brittle materials need a greater safety margin or some form of design that works around their problem, such as embedding fibers of the brittle material in a plastic matrix.
Humans, through their superior intelligence and the development of sophisticated concepts like justice, have moved beyond the point where submission is or should be a leading behavior. Slaves submit. The failure in modern US society is not the failure to submit, but the failure to recognize and severely punish those who practice injustice.
It isn't a question of trusting the dog, but of understanding the dog. Most dogs (excepting tiny breeds and those bred to be vicious like pitbulls) are enthusiastic to be friendly and protective of their owner and family. An outsider who can't or won't befriend the dog when the owner encourages it is likely not to be a good person.
Slashdot Mirror
Promoting your new beliefs when you've recently changed is more a property of 20-year-olds than it is of atheists. Since more people have a religious upbringing than not, the population of noisy 20-year-old atheists is going to be quite apparent. On the other hand, recent young converts to pushy fundamentalism are a pain, too. The difference is, if you agree with the atheist he'll go away and stop bothering you, the religious guy wants to hold your hand and have a prayer session.
Identifying Hitler as conservative because of his facade of promoting Christianity is misleading at best. There's more to conservatism than religious support and stuffy moralism. In particular, no person who wants big government and high taxes can be a conservative, despite what that person claims.
Mussolini was Italian. Did he actually write that in English?
Step 0: Remove all networking/internet connections, including wireless
...
Step 7: Disable automatic updates
Step 8: Reconnect network/internet.
John Adams
If AI is achieved, we may have gotten to Adam's goal. Alas, my fear is that for reasons entirely unrelated to this thread, we are losing liberty.
Computers are deterministic by preference, because they are most useful to us that way. However, they need not be deterministic. Thermal random noise generators are easy to make, and could be incorporated into a computer to make "nondeterministic" branches whenever they're needed.
If you have an old 35mm SLR with a removable standard 50mm lens, you may be able to stick the lens on the back of your telescope as a replacement for the normal eyepiece. Having the moon cover almost your entire field of vision is an experience not soon forgotten.
No protection is needed for the naked eye viewing of an eclipse provided that that you don't stare at it. Quick glimpse of 1/4 second, and don't look again for 30 seconds. No problem.
The "invisible hand" quote from Adam Smith is an analogy, and people like you are engaging in nothing but smear tactics when you claim that Chicago School economists belief in a literal invisible hand.
The gears in a transmission are the invisible hand that links the engine to the wheels.
The final audience of a climate model is (economically) every person alive. If the models are as good as some climatologists claim, the final audience is every living thing on earth.
Making their code public doesn't mean they have to answer their phone. But they're going to have to answer to someone if it can be shown that their code deliberately produced false results, as was the case with the "hockey stick" scandal.
About a year ago I worked with a loudspeaker box design program. I found some peculiarities in the results, but at first I wasn't very concerned. Eventually I found I could get different results without changing the inputs. I became concerned and examined the code. The parts generating the display I didn't understand, the parts getting the input I didn't look at. I studied the formulae that determined the frequency response, and part of it was just plain WRONG.
You don't have to understand everything to find and fix errors.
Keyboard focus switching is a supplement to, not a replacement for, focus-follows-mouse. Alt-tabbing around becomes tedious when the window I want isn't in the 1st 2 or 3 windows on the list, or it's hard to determine which window is being selected. On the other hand, Alt-tab is good for revealing hidden windows the focus-follows-mouse can't reveal, but click-to-focus can't reveal it either.
One of the worst things is same-named menu items with different functions. One "Transform" item only allows 90 degree multiple rotations, another is much more versatile.
Focus-follows-mouse, and sloppy focus, allows entry on a non-raised window while reading information from the raised window. If the non-raised window would cover the area where data is being read, click-to-focus would make the procedure difficult or impossible.
Photoshop comes with a big book and it's difficult to do anything sophisticated without it. The help software is better than gimp's, but still inadequate.
FWIW, Photoshop's morphing capabilities are horrid.
Although 3D chips would be advantageous, they would not be as big a gain as it first appears. With devices and conductive layers, the electrically used portion of modern ICs is about 30 times as deep as the minimum feature size. (I've been out of the field for a decade, corrections appreciated.) That includes a few layers for the active devices and maybe 6 layers for conductors. So for a 20 nanometer process, 10,000 layers of which 1,000 are active device layers, the first nominal expectation is 1,000 times the processing power. Hovever, much of the area of inner layers is going to be vias (wires between layers), so the gain won't be 1000X. It would make a chip 1000 x 30 x 20e-9 = 600e-6 m thick. OK, that's less than what I first thought, it's about how thick chips are now. Two problems occur to me. The first is power dissipation, which others have mentioned. To some extent, this can be worked around by making designs that have low leakage, static (CMOS) design, slower clocks, and circuitry most of which is inactive at any given time. All of that decreases performance. The second problem is yield. Even when all other problems are solved, big chips have yields in the 50% range. Double the number of layers and you will cut the yield to 25%. At 100 layers (10 layers for active devices) the yield will be 0.1%. At 10,000 layers, not one working device could be made in the age of the universe.
There are some sped-up versions, although nowhere near 3.2 GHz. (For instance, a 25 MHz Z80). There isn't any point to having a 3.2 GHz Z80 if the Z80 architechure is preserved. Z80 instructions required 4 to 17 cycles to execute (IIRC) and multiple memory cycles whenever external data was accessed.
There are many, many things that could be done to improve the Z80 with modern technology and most would break compatibility in some manner. For instance, a great speedup could be made by putting the entire 64k memory space on die, but that would break anything that required memory-mapped external access. Pipelining and wider memory could make all instuctions single cycle, provided the memory access was multiport. A multiply instruction would be nice.
Really, there are better uses of technolgy available than investing $1M or so on a 3.2 GHz Z80.
Nonetheless, I understand the feeling. I'd like to see one, too.
You mention "an entire C64 or Apple II on one chip". The SOC philosophy is a good one, and for a long time chips have been available with many of the I/O functions on-chip. However, I doubt that there's anything that completely duplicates a C64 or Apple II. What could be done is to implement an 8 bit computer, inclding memory, on an FPGA. Then you'd just have to add power supply, level-shifters for RS-232 &c, power supply, disk drive, case... Fun games. Really, an emulator running on a modern computer would be less work.
I don't think there's much point to trying to deal with Venus as it is, so the excess atmosphere has got to go.
Pump the excess atmosphere out into space, or find a way to turn most of it into a stable, innocuous solid or liquid compound. Then deal with the excess solar radiation coming in (Make the planet more reflective? Change the orbit? [please be careful not to disturb Earth's orbit.] Put a shade in orbit around Venus?)
Viable alternatives are a better girlfriend or moissanite instead of diamond. I've read that the appearance of moissanite is superior to diamond, but indistinguishable to anyone but an expert.
Thanks for the reference. If I understand "ultrahard rhombohedral carbon polymorph of the R3m space group which structure is very close to diamond but with a partial occupancy of some of the carbon sites" correctly, they are saying that a flawed structure ("partial occupancy") is harder than a perfect structure. Wild.
The distinction between man-made things and those not man-made is important in many realms, and having a well-understood word that is not quite as clumsy as "non-man-made" is worthwhile. That word in that context is "natural"; one antonym is "artificial".
Note that there is a context in which man's activities are properly considered "natural", and that is when they are contrasted with "supernatural".
That analysis fails 2 ways. First, it fails to account for shock loading. A transient load that is equivalent to the ultimate strength of steel could deform the steel, absorbing part of the shock, before the actual failure predicted by the ultimate strength took place. Second is the problem of stress concentration at flaws. The deformable material may flow in a way that reduces stress at the flaw, but a brittle material is likely to see the flaw expand, making things explosively worse.
Brittle materials need a greater safety margin or some form of design that works around their problem, such as embedding fibers of the brittle material in a plastic matrix.
The mouth is a poor choice. You can die from the infection caused by the germs in his mouth entering the cuts in your knuckles caused by his teeth.
Humans, through their superior intelligence and the development of sophisticated concepts like justice, have moved beyond the point where submission is or should be a leading behavior. Slaves submit. The failure in modern US society is not the failure to submit, but the failure to recognize and severely punish those who practice injustice.
It isn't a question of trusting the dog, but of understanding the dog. Most dogs (excepting tiny breeds and those bred to be vicious like pitbulls) are enthusiastic to be friendly and protective of their owner and family. An outsider who can't or won't befriend the dog when the owner encourages it is likely not to be a good person.