It's not about the speed of recursion, its about the inevitable memory footprint issue. A loop, while seldom as elegant, doesn't carry the memory overhead of a recursive function which must reach its boundary condition before beginning it's calculations.
Using a language like LISP or Scheme, you learn to love recursion for its elegance. But when you start trying to apply that love to real world problems you run into significant memory issues, along with a lot of flack from fellow programmers who don't appreciate being forced to read dense recursive code.
You're obsessed with this earth-devouring crap. I don't believe that either, but it is not remotely the same thing to have a cosmic ray event moving at C relative to the planet and a man-made event that is happening at our exact base velocity.
Just because you don't agree with something, doesn't make it fallacious. Give me a good argument why I'm wrong, or piss off.
It's fallacious because we've never done it, never measured it, never experimented with it. We think we know what's going to happen, but if we really knew then we wouldn't bother doing the experiment.
I agree that the LHC is probably not going to do anything unusual. I am merely commenting on the absurd proof put forward in the summary, which has no actual experimental content, only baseless assumptions about the universe.
It's like if I said that the sky was blue because the moon attracts green and red wavelengths...It doesn't mean the sky's not blue, it just means that the argument is crap. iirc, that fallacy is currently my.sig.
That's actually a number of fallacies in and of itself, not the least being the ever-popular "Strawman", and the statistical "base rate" fallacy; if making a pb&j were dangerous we would have abundantly proven this by experimentation, likewise breathing. And if I'd actually said something so stupid as "breathing may cause a black hole" you might be justified in the stupid shit that you're saying.
Saying that you know the consequences of an action that has never been attempted is pretty much the opposite of science. I'm surprised you would defend it. We might as well have not built the LHC at all, since you already know all the outcomes.
I agree, as far as "science doesn't deal with deduction, as opposed to induction."
This proof, however, lacking any experimental results or direct observation of the phenomena in question, is unquestionably a deductive proof. It's quite a simple one actually:
"If cosmic rays spawn world devouring strings/black holes, then we'd see a marked absence of quasars and neutron stars" "We don't see a marked absence of quasars and neutron stars" "Therefore cosmic rays don't spawn world devouring strings/black holes"
This is fricking modus tolens; it's one of the most basic deductive constructs. Saying therefore, that his proof is fallacious is perfectly legitimate.
Agreed. The standards of "proof" have dropped a lot lately, apparently.
Any proof of the form, "If it were going to happen, it already would have happened" are intrinsically fallacious (Appeal to Probability), and doubly so in a situation like with the LHC where we are doing something that (to our knowledge) has never been done on this planet before.
That's all you can ever do. I've never seen a backup system, even a big financial system, that couldn't be compromised by having 3 catastrophic failures...Past that point, everyone has to go to the hard backups.
Yea, never dismiss the old standard of posting it online and making storage someone else's problem.
But yea, if you are serious about storing, store on HDD, and keep an offsite backup. If you're careful with your offsites (i.e. you make a new FULL backup on a semi-regular basis), you can use DVDs, but like everyone else has already said, optical media is a crapshoot, and if you depend on it, you can depend on it letting you down.
Considering that you're still under a TB, I'd invest in a pair of externals, and switch 'em back and forth to your offsite every 6 months or so. (That sounds complex, but we're really just talking about leaving one at Mom's on Easter and switching it out at X-mas or whatever).
Only professional CDs have that sort of shelf life, because they're physically stamped. The consumer grade ones use a type of photosensitive dye that DOES decompose in less than a decade.
Yea, my shelling money out of my pocket so the neighboring coal fired power plant will spew a little less mercury into my yard makes me selfish, while your implicit support of those plants makes you a selfless hero.
Even now, with the crappy 15% efficiency panels that are common on the market, Solar does more than break even over the design life of the panels. I'd far rather my pork subsidy money go to that rather than, for example, handouts to the coal and oil industries, or subsidies to million acre corporate farms.
And that money drives demand. It helps create economies of scale, which drive the price down and make it more economical to use renewable power. Considering the shit the government wastes money on, that's one thing I actually agree with.
But it's typical of people like you to point hysterically at any money the government spends that you don't agree with and make a stink.
Well, yea, that was hyperbole. The worst I've heard of was a place in Iceland where they set of extremely minor magma event by accidentally hitting a magma pocket while drilling a borehole, and that thing in Indonesia where they kicked off that "mud volcano" doing gas exploration.
Still, I wouldn't advocate intentionally trying to cause an event.
The big problem with that is that it's a lot more efficient to move the power with high tension cables than it is to turn it into H2 and try and move that.
If it doesn't make economic sense to do the wires, then it really doesn't make sense to do the H2. Just the electrolysis alone is about 3 times more inefficient than the power loss on the very longest of electrical setups.
What it always comes down to is that, unless you have a dramatically good, local, geothermal setup, you're not going to be able to compete with a crappy coal fired plant...Partly because the coal is efficient (though crazy toxic) and partly because the geo stuff is used less frequently, so you have to pay a premium on the equipment.
But what if it triggers a worse disaster? Tectonic plates are under tremendous stress all the time...What if all the extra water makes it slip by a kilometer instead of a meter?
Not saying that it would, but I've never seen a geologist who could say with certainty what would happen. We really don't have enough information to even make an educated guess.
Sure. The limit iirc is something like 4,000 miles for AC, and 7,000 for DC. But that is a lot of infrastructure to put into place for a marginal source of power generation.
Obviously it makes sense for Niagra Falls but are you going to put in all that infrastructure for an untried setup, knowing that it'll all be wasted if the project turns out to be uneconomical? It's only in the last 10 years in this country that people have even seriously considered building large scale solar/windfarms as a genuine competitor to traditional coal and gas power plants.
People who have this idea of one mega-plant in the midwest somewhere really don't take into account all the wires and towers and capacitors and transformers and substations, etc, that will have to be created to move that power around, and all the continual maintenance they will require.
Local sources (and in this context 400miles is on the edge of local) are almost always more efficient than truly distant sources.
I guess I should have said, "Current power producers" rather than "Big Business"...Business doesn't give a damn where their power comes from, as long as its cheap. The problem is the big existing power companies. I'm not denying that you're going to be giving someone money, but I do believe that it is better to give money to a company like First Solar or their competitors in order to help reduce the overall dependence on large fossil fuel power plants.
New Nuclear plants are good, but there are plenty of new coal plants also in the works and I really don't want to see any more of that than there has to be.
Power is their product; it's cheaper for them if your usage is consistent, because it's easier on their infrastructure but don't fool yourself into thinking that they don't want you to buy more product.
We see similar problems with water conservation in situations where the water utility is privately owned/managed. They have no percentage in reducing consumption because they need that money.
Oil companies! Coal companies! Everyone is trying to sell as much of their product as possible. Even now, the emphasis is almost always on building new plants/drilling more oil/whatever and less on conservation, or (my preference) improving efficiency.
Too bad they didn't have Wikipedia at your school because they have a gigantic article explaining all about Nuclear waste reprocessing, and how it's not actually hard to do.
The reason we don't do it is philosophical, not technical. I suggest you educate yourself.
Most of the proposed new plants are based on designs purchased from other countries, who, unlike us, have been building new plants and researching new designs right up to the present day. Japan has some really amazing designs that are different from anything in operation in this country today.
Saying that we're going to be doing nothing but building more 1970's style plants is completely inaccurate.
The worry is that they'll accidentally tap a high pressure area, and cause a blowout (e.g a small volcano). Or that the water that they inject into the ground (so they can harvest the energy from the steam) will "lubricate" a fault line, and cause a plate to shift. Or that some of the steam will come out where you don't want it to come out, or form pressure elsewhere, causing a rupture.
A lot of it though is that whole, "We've never done it before, so as far as we know it could do anything." There was a percentage of scientists, who, at the time of the detonation of the first atomic bomb, weren't quite sure that the bomb wouldn't ignite the atmosphere and end life on earth as we know it...Like the people at CERN who aren't quite sure we won't spark an Earth devouring Black Hole with the LHC.
Not to say that the geothermal concerns are that implausible, it's just that no one really knows.
There are so few places on earth that are really suitable for geo and tidal energy. Solar is better than break even on a large scale, as is wind, but that's different from being as cheap as coal (which is damn cheap).
I think, by and large, the renewable stuff needs to come from individuals and small power producers who can afford not to take the easy road for the biggest buck. There is no question that it is valuable technology.
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It's not about the speed of recursion, its about the inevitable memory footprint issue. A loop, while seldom as elegant, doesn't carry the memory overhead of a recursive function which must reach its boundary condition before beginning it's calculations.
Using a language like LISP or Scheme, you learn to love recursion for its elegance. But when you start trying to apply that love to real world problems you run into significant memory issues, along with a lot of flack from fellow programmers who don't appreciate being forced to read dense recursive code.
You're obsessed with this earth-devouring crap. I don't believe that either, but it is not remotely the same thing to have a cosmic ray event moving at C relative to the planet and a man-made event that is happening at our exact base velocity.
Just because you don't agree with something, doesn't make it fallacious. Give me a good argument why I'm wrong, or piss off.
It's fallacious because we've never done it, never measured it, never experimented with it. We think we know what's going to happen, but if we really knew then we wouldn't bother doing the experiment.
I agree that the LHC is probably not going to do anything unusual. I am merely commenting on the absurd proof put forward in the summary, which has no actual experimental content, only baseless assumptions about the universe.
It's like if I said that the sky was blue because the moon attracts green and red wavelengths...It doesn't mean the sky's not blue, it just means that the argument is crap. iirc, that fallacy is currently my .sig.
That's actually a number of fallacies in and of itself, not the least being the ever-popular "Strawman", and the statistical "base rate" fallacy; if making a pb&j were dangerous we would have abundantly proven this by experimentation, likewise breathing. And if I'd actually said something so stupid as "breathing may cause a black hole" you might be justified in the stupid shit that you're saying.
Saying that you know the consequences of an action that has never been attempted is pretty much the opposite of science. I'm surprised you would defend it. We might as well have not built the LHC at all, since you already know all the outcomes.
I agree, as far as "science doesn't deal with deduction, as opposed to induction."
This proof, however, lacking any experimental results or direct observation of the phenomena in question, is unquestionably a deductive proof. It's quite a simple one actually:
"If cosmic rays spawn world devouring strings/black holes, then we'd see a marked absence of quasars and neutron stars"
"We don't see a marked absence of quasars and neutron stars"
"Therefore cosmic rays don't spawn world devouring strings/black holes"
This is fricking modus tolens; it's one of the most basic deductive constructs. Saying therefore, that his proof is fallacious is perfectly legitimate.
I've noticed that my very oldest CDs stand up better than the newer ones.
By the same token, I have 20 year old 3.5 inch floppies that still do fine.
When the media goes to mass market, the quality goes in the crapper.
Agreed. The standards of "proof" have dropped a lot lately, apparently.
Any proof of the form, "If it were going to happen, it already would have happened" are intrinsically fallacious (Appeal to Probability), and doubly so in a situation like with the LHC where we are doing something that (to our knowledge) has never been done on this planet before.
That's all you can ever do. I've never seen a backup system, even a big financial system, that couldn't be compromised by having 3 catastrophic failures...Past that point, everyone has to go to the hard backups.
Yea, never dismiss the old standard of posting it online and making storage someone else's problem.
But yea, if you are serious about storing, store on HDD, and keep an offsite backup. If you're careful with your offsites (i.e. you make a new FULL backup on a semi-regular basis), you can use DVDs, but like everyone else has already said, optical media is a crapshoot, and if you depend on it, you can depend on it letting you down.
Considering that you're still under a TB, I'd invest in a pair of externals, and switch 'em back and forth to your offsite every 6 months or so. (That sounds complex, but we're really just talking about leaving one at Mom's on Easter and switching it out at X-mas or whatever).
Only professional CDs have that sort of shelf life, because they're physically stamped. The consumer grade ones use a type of photosensitive dye that DOES decompose in less than a decade.
Like the 10 commandments? ;)
you shall have no other gods before me.
The Jews weren't monotheists originally. They believed in the existence of other gods, but they were only supposed to worship one.
Yea, my shelling money out of my pocket so the neighboring coal fired power plant will spew a little less mercury into my yard makes me selfish, while your implicit support of those plants makes you a selfless hero.
Even now, with the crappy 15% efficiency panels that are common on the market, Solar does more than break even over the design life of the panels. I'd far rather my pork subsidy money go to that rather than, for example, handouts to the coal and oil industries, or subsidies to million acre corporate farms.
And that money drives demand. It helps create economies of scale, which drive the price down and make it more economical to use renewable power. Considering the shit the government wastes money on, that's one thing I actually agree with.
But it's typical of people like you to point hysterically at any money the government spends that you don't agree with and make a stink.
Well, yea, that was hyperbole. The worst I've heard of was a place in Iceland where they set of extremely minor magma event by accidentally hitting a magma pocket while drilling a borehole, and that thing in Indonesia where they kicked off that "mud volcano" doing gas exploration.
Still, I wouldn't advocate intentionally trying to cause an event.
The big problem with that is that it's a lot more efficient to move the power with high tension cables than it is to turn it into H2 and try and move that.
If it doesn't make economic sense to do the wires, then it really doesn't make sense to do the H2. Just the electrolysis alone is about 3 times more inefficient than the power loss on the very longest of electrical setups.
What it always comes down to is that, unless you have a dramatically good, local, geothermal setup, you're not going to be able to compete with a crappy coal fired plant...Partly because the coal is efficient (though crazy toxic) and partly because the geo stuff is used less frequently, so you have to pay a premium on the equipment.
But what if it triggers a worse disaster? Tectonic plates are under tremendous stress all the time...What if all the extra water makes it slip by a kilometer instead of a meter?
Not saying that it would, but I've never seen a geologist who could say with certainty what would happen. We really don't have enough information to even make an educated guess.
Sure. The limit iirc is something like 4,000 miles for AC, and 7,000 for DC. But that is a lot of infrastructure to put into place for a marginal source of power generation.
Obviously it makes sense for Niagra Falls but are you going to put in all that infrastructure for an untried setup, knowing that it'll all be wasted if the project turns out to be uneconomical? It's only in the last 10 years in this country that people have even seriously considered building large scale solar/windfarms as a genuine competitor to traditional coal and gas power plants.
People who have this idea of one mega-plant in the midwest somewhere really don't take into account all the wires and towers and capacitors and transformers and substations, etc, that will have to be created to move that power around, and all the continual maintenance they will require.
Local sources (and in this context 400miles is on the edge of local) are almost always more efficient than truly distant sources.
It's called "democracy", and the devils deal is, if you tell the public to go piss up a rope, you're out of a job.
I guess I should have said, "Current power producers" rather than "Big Business"...Business doesn't give a damn where their power comes from, as long as its cheap. The problem is the big existing power companies. I'm not denying that you're going to be giving someone money, but I do believe that it is better to give money to a company like First Solar or their competitors in order to help reduce the overall dependence on large fossil fuel power plants.
New Nuclear plants are good, but there are plenty of new coal plants also in the works and I really don't want to see any more of that than there has to be.
Power is their product; it's cheaper for them if your usage is consistent, because it's easier on their infrastructure but don't fool yourself into thinking that they don't want you to buy more product.
We see similar problems with water conservation in situations where the water utility is privately owned/managed. They have no percentage in reducing consumption because they need that money.
Oil companies! Coal companies! Everyone is trying to sell as much of their product as possible. Even now, the emphasis is almost always on building new plants/drilling more oil/whatever and less on conservation, or (my preference) improving efficiency.
Too bad they didn't have Wikipedia at your school because they have a gigantic article explaining all about Nuclear waste reprocessing, and how it's not actually hard to do.
The reason we don't do it is philosophical, not technical. I suggest you educate yourself.
Most of the proposed new plants are based on designs purchased from other countries, who, unlike us, have been building new plants and researching new designs right up to the present day. Japan has some really amazing designs that are different from anything in operation in this country today.
Saying that we're going to be doing nothing but building more 1970's style plants is completely inaccurate.
The worry is that they'll accidentally tap a high pressure area, and cause a blowout (e.g a small volcano). Or that the water that they inject into the ground (so they can harvest the energy from the steam) will "lubricate" a fault line, and cause a plate to shift. Or that some of the steam will come out where you don't want it to come out, or form pressure elsewhere, causing a rupture.
I don't know enough about it, but there are valid concerns. There was a deal a few years back in Indonesia where a gas company accidentally sparked a nasty mud volcano thru exploratory drilling.
A lot of it though is that whole, "We've never done it before, so as far as we know it could do anything." There was a percentage of scientists, who, at the time of the detonation of the first atomic bomb, weren't quite sure that the bomb wouldn't ignite the atmosphere and end life on earth as we know it...Like the people at CERN who aren't quite sure we won't spark an Earth devouring Black Hole with the LHC.
Not to say that the geothermal concerns are that implausible, it's just that no one really knows.
There are so few places on earth that are really suitable for geo and tidal energy. Solar is better than break even on a large scale, as is wind, but that's different from being as cheap as coal (which is damn cheap).
I think, by and large, the renewable stuff needs to come from individuals and small power producers who can afford not to take the easy road for the biggest buck. There is no question that it is valuable technology.
Meh. Don't feed the AC's. Only one in a million has anything worthwhile to say.