Yeah, it's because we don't want to admit the Russians have ever done anything right. Or because we want to re-use the well.
It's not because it's an utterly retarded idea to use in this situation, and people keep bringing it up because they have a completely inaccurate idea of what the ocean bed is like. Nope.
That's exactly what I was worried about when the summary said they were increasing the kanji count by 10% due to electronics, as in cell phones and internet. That this was an instance where they were officially accepting the "languages are living, so any shit we say on the net is ipso-facto correct language". And there was a new kanji that meant roughly "doing it for teh lulz".
It's not that anyone objects to making a buck, or to having a buck handed to them on a silver platter, but I think any movie worth seeing is made by people who actually care about more than collecting a paycheck without embarrassing themselves.
That's it exactly. Especially when you consider how many don't even care about embarrassing themselves.
It has nothing to do with "disdain" for video games, or not playing the game, or anything strictly to do with game-movie adaptations. It's the non-essential relationship between game-movie adaptations and cheap cash-ins where nobody actually cares that the movie is trash so long as it makes a buck. The same thing that so many horrible movies share in common.
Think about another kind of adaptation that at least used to be associated with near-guaranteed suckitude: Comic book adaptations. Why? Because so many were made for no other reason than to try to score the comic-book geek crowd and maybe a couple action movie fans with low standards, nobody gave a shit if they sucked or not. The classic comic book movies that didn't suck were because they were universally loved characters and the creators wanted to reflect that by making a good movie. See: Superman 1 and 2. Then, a couple decades later, someone had the bright idea of "Hey, let's try making comic book movies that don't suck again!" And the modern comic book movie, where only some suck and some are fantastic movies unto themselves, was born.
All we need to get good game adaptation movies is for someone to decide to actually make a good one. The director doesn't even need to be a huge fan of the 'source material' or anything. They just need to want to make a good movie, and not be Uwe Boll, Jerry Bruckheimer, or Michael Bay.
I'm very glad to hear they've improved the technique. The whole "never been done at this depth before" aspect means I'm still glad they were forced to start two. There's no reason not to except for economic. Specifically BP's economics.
And yeah, I really don't think it's in their interest to prolong the leak even if they are collecting oil. Obviously if oil is leaking and can be collected, it's better to collect it, but it's hardly an economical way to harvest oil. That's why it seemed weird to point out how much money the oil they're collecting is worth in an argument about why they're doing all they can to stop it.
You're wasting your breath. He thinks that a freaking sub-8000 gallon/day seep off the coast of Santa Barbara proves that a man-made well leaking all over is harmless. Cus you know, that oil biodegrades before causing a problem, so why wouldn't 100 times more?
Asking "where's the critcism?" means you haven't been paying attention. There's tons of criticism in mainstream press. I see it every day as I track the news on the spill.
Why's he getting off better than Bush did with Katrina? Well, probably because he sacked the MMS head who screwed up instead of telling her that she did "a heckuva job". Little things like appearing to recognize when somebody has not, in fact, done a heckuva job seems to count for something.
I want to see more housecleaning at MMS and I'm quite disappointed that there hasn't been signs of it, yet. But then there's the AG's criminal investigation, which if half the things said about what BP did and didn't do before the spill are true is warranted. And then there's that outside of mobilizing the Coast Guard, what can the government do about the spill itself? All the people who can actually do something about it are in private industry. We're not talking about ferrying people out of a flooded area, we're talking about fixing something in an environment where it's never been fixed before.
And while I would agree with the hypothetical comment that the government should take more direct control over the actions of the oil companies in order to fix it, that's actually not a simple thing to do. We already have plenty of critics even in Congress saying that the regulatory action Obama has taken and has promised to take are going to have a stifling effect on private industry in the gulf. Hey idjits, I want to say to them, if this is what they're going to do then I want to stifle the ever loving fuck out of them.
Anyone who honestly thinks BP isn't doing E V E R Y T H I N G in its power to stem the flow is a fool.
I believe that BP has every incentive to stop the leak.
I also believe BP has every incentive to do so as cheaply as possible. For instance, they originally wanted to only drill one relief well until Congress insisted they start on another one. Why? Well because a relief well is not a guaranteed fixe. Sometimes the first one you drill doesn't do much, assuming you even succeed in hitting the foot-wide hole with the other foot-wide hole you're drilling at an angle through miles of rock.
I am not about to second-guess the engineers who are busting their ass working on fixes. I fully realize that what they are trying to do is exceedingly difficult -- I mean, that's part of why it's such a big problem. However that also applies to the relief wells. With the problems that keep coming up in all the other attempted solutions, just assuming that a single relief well will work on the first try seems ludicrous. Could the extra cost possibly outweigh the impact if the relief well fails and oil spews until they can go through the whole process of drilling another? Could you, as an engineer, justify that lack of redundancy when solving a problem of this magnitude?
But those decisions aren't made by engineers. Engineers quantify the risks as best they can, and executives make the decision off the summary middle management hands them. For them, maybe the cost vs risk works out? Maybe a mentality that you cut corners and do the minimum (or less) and just hope things work out is so entrenched that they would still try it even after things had already failed to work out?
And not that I don't think their Top Kill attempt was anything but sincere, but that's exactly why it strikes me as odd that you'd mention that $700000/day figure for siphoning oil as some kind of incentive for plugging the well. When they really fix the well it won't be usable anymore. So no more oil. Which gives them the opposite incentive. Again, this is just the thought train your observation led me down.
BP has already suffered a near crippling blow. They have lost *100 billion* dollars in market cap.... 10s of billions of dollars in additional market cap wiped out.
Oh noes, not market cap! That's the thing about market cap -- it can be wiped out instantly, but it can come back too, and the only people who lose anything are the ones who sold while it was down. If BP was planning on buying out a smaller oil company using shares of their stock, well, now would be a bad time to do that. Oh noes!
In the meantime, BP continues to make real profits to the tune of tens of millions per day.
I'm not saying it's not a blow, but it's hardly crippling. Companies can continue to operate and make substantial profits even after tremendous stock price drops. And if BP does continue to make money, then their stock price will recover.
And the sad thing is that the "punish BP" bloodlust is just going to result in thousands of decent Americans who work in the energy industry losing jobs in the inevitable restructurings that will come, and those jobs will end up going elsewhere, since we still will be consuming the oil here.
It's an odd mentality, where the cause-and-effect here wouldn't be the obvious "Executive negligence in their company losing many jobs", but rather "the public caring that the executives cut corners and ignored signs because it would cost time and thus money resulted in this disaster, and subsequent job loss".
Yes, obviously the solution is that we should not care!
No. If people attributed cause and effect correctly, maybe we'd get some real change around here.
Top execs will already pay the price when they get the boot from their cushy jobs for the poor oversight they have exercised. If they did something criminal, they should be prosecuted too.
Oh noes they'll be fired from their cushy jobs! They might have to lay low living off their scant millions for a while before getting a cushy VP job somewhere else because the last thing the incestuous network of corporate executives and board members want is to raise standards.
Nothing short of criminal prosecution will be any kind of real punishment. I'm not holding my breath on the end result, but at least one thing is going right.
But this... obsession... with personalizing "BP" as some sort of entity that has committed an evil act that we can "punish" in any way further than has already been done is baffling to me. People - it's *been* punished.
Yeah, by only making half as much net profit -- estimates of BP's efforts at cleanup and stopping the leak per day are about half of their net profit per day.
Oh, the punishment! Their Q2 and Q3 earnings statements will be less glowing! They may be penalized in the market, until the expected profits return! Please. Call me when they go into the red, even for a single quarter.
By the way, the obsession with personalizing a corporation as some sort of entity unto itself has been the obsession of the corporate executives since early last century. Is it any wonder that we have bought into the delusion that "BP" can do anything on its own? "Corporate personhood" is their baby.
If you want to end that delusion, I'm all for it. But realize that the executives themselves are on the other side of this one from you, as is for that matter the law.
If you use the cloth as an oil-sponge, then the amount of oil you can pick up is limited by the absorbency of the cloth. Any excess oil will seep through the cloth and continue polluting the water. The practicality of just squeezing it out is also questionable, since you have to do it every time the cloth becomes oil-logged (which would be very quick).
If instead it's an oil filter, then you can put as much oil-laden water through it as you want, with the oil remaining on one side, with the cloth absorbing some water and the rest passing through. For example you could pump the oil-water mix into a tank with a funnel in the bottom with this cloth as a barrier. In goes oil and water, out comes just water, with the amount of oil you can separate with a single cloth being limited only by the size of the oil container and perhaps the strength of the cloth.
Absorption isn't bad if it's practical, like the use of hair clippings to soak up oil. But as that example shows, you naturally need much more material to deal with the same amount of oil.
Ah, "Period," the word universally used by morons who hope that you won't think about the stupid thing they just said.
The price is set by the seller. The only portion of the market that has accepted that price is the portion of the market who buys it at that price. Were the seller to reduce the price, more of the market would accept that price and they would sell more. Desire for a product varies with the price of that product. Wanting a product at a hypothetical price-point of $0.01 is not the same as wanting the product at a price point of $100. Demand for a product varies with the price of that product.
We were talking about the value of the product to the pirate. You said it's non-zero, because they wanted it, but that does not mean they would want it if only available at retail price. Ergo pirated copies do not translate into lost retail sales. Even a pile of stupid like you understands that, which is why your attempts to dodge the obvious are so obvious and sad.
So non-zero value is the same as full retail value in your universe?
Is that the best you can do to refute the straightforward and plainly true statement that reducing the price of something increases the number of people who will want it, and therefore extrapolating the number of people who wanted something at $0 is the same as the number who would have wanted it had it only available at full price is wrong? Every salesman on earth knows this. There's a small disclaimer for situations where a higher price can give the perception of being a higher value, more prestigious, etc (like sports cars), but that's clearly not the realm we're dealing with here.
Pirated copies != lost sales. Don't claim to be in the same universe where real economics applies if you don't believe that.
You're quite correct. I'm advocating continuing to live a technological lifestyle without being oblivious to the consequences to the environment, or using the lame "but everything is natural!" excuse to not care about them.
I think two years is incredibly optimistic, but I would love for SpaceX to prove me wrong.
Indeed. Personally I'm betting they'll miss 2013, but match or beat 2015 which is the incredibly optimistic time scale for Ares-based manned missions to ISS.
Well, they had explicitly demonstrated that ability earlier when they did the launch pad test-firing. Being able to do that in the first place is a big advantage of liquid fueled rockets over solid fuel. But yeah, it's definitely cool being able to see that a real last-second abort works just like it did in the tests. Major kudos to the operations team (who I believe, like the previous test, are SpaceX employees which marks a break from traditional launches), and of course to the engineers and machinists and everyone else.
Any impact we make on the environment continues to be natural in its origins.
And? You can define "natural" to be equivalent to "things that exist", but in doing so you've simply failed to say anything at all.
Deforestation, industrial waste, air pollution and so on are all "natural". So what? That doesn't mean they are good ideas, or that we shouldn't be concerned with the consequences because those consequences are "natural". "Natural" in this context doesn't mean "okay"; that connotation is often inappropriate, but is right out with your definition.
The very fact that we can reason about the consequences of our actions means we should do so, rather than wipe out entire ecosystems as if we were unthinking cyanobacteria releasing oxygen into the environment. Saying it's "natural" because anything that exists is "natural" is to just abdicate responsibility for using our reason, as if we don't have a choice. Well, we do.
Please tell me you're being funny and are only pretending to be clueless as to how these species ended up in the situations that required us to save them.
Interesting. I've also heard a theory that Jupiter is responsible for disturbing Oort Cloud objects and drawing them into orbits that go through the inner solar system, so the increase in dangerous objects would roughly cancel the objects deflected or absorbed by Jupiter.
I think that theory still considers comets and other non-near-earth objects to be the primary threat, though.
Electrons will drift( look up 'electron mobility' on Wikipedia), but the GP is right in that it is the wave motion of the potentials that are primarily the means in which the information will travel. At the same time, he is just being a bit nit picky.
Agreed, and it's a pretty minor nit. Electrons do move (there would be no current if they did not), they just don't have to move all the way for the electric potential to reach the destination.
The nit I would have picked would have been with the phrase "the same electrons".
They're not even close to the same; the off-chip interface uses a huge amount more electrons and thus much higher current and thus much more power.
I think what person in the article is trying to say that usually to go from one chip to another, you usually need to provide a buffer (ie amplifier) on the output interface.
I assure you that the data is buffered before being sent on the on-chip interface, in essentially the same way.:)
The difference is in the size of those buffers; if you look closely at die photos you can easily make out the I/O transistors and they're often as large as entire sections of the core logic where you can't possibly make out individual transistors. The transistors driving output pins are ridiculously bigger because they are driving far more current to quickly drive a much larger capacitive load. Ergo they use much more power.
How do you think police issued tickets before radar guns were invented?
Well if I didn't know any better, and thought there was no way to measure velocity prior to the invention of radar, I might do as you have invited me to do and imagine that they just guessed and that this was good enough.
But since I do know better, I don't have to imagine. What they actually did was to time how long it took you to go between two points of known separation. Amazing, eh?
Even as late as the 90s some officers preferred this method, and sometimes near speed traps in the city you could see the markings on the curb that they drew. When it was explained to me by an officer, I believe he said the preference stemmed from when radar guns were new and tickets based on radar guns were being challenged successfully, while the stopwatch measurement of a trained officer was more likely to be believed by the judge.
In any event, "guess" was never the proper method.
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Yeah, it's because we don't want to admit the Russians have ever done anything right. Or because we want to re-use the well.
It's not because it's an utterly retarded idea to use in this situation, and people keep bringing it up because they have a completely inaccurate idea of what the ocean bed is like. Nope.
That's exactly what I was worried about when the summary said they were increasing the kanji count by 10% due to electronics, as in cell phones and internet. That this was an instance where they were officially accepting the "languages are living, so any shit we say on the net is ipso-facto correct language". And there was a new kanji that meant roughly "doing it for teh lulz".
It's not that anyone objects to making a buck, or to having a buck handed to them on a silver platter, but I think any movie worth seeing is made by people who actually care about more than collecting a paycheck without embarrassing themselves.
That's it exactly. Especially when you consider how many don't even care about embarrassing themselves.
It has nothing to do with "disdain" for video games, or not playing the game, or anything strictly to do with game-movie adaptations. It's the non-essential relationship between game-movie adaptations and cheap cash-ins where nobody actually cares that the movie is trash so long as it makes a buck. The same thing that so many horrible movies share in common.
Think about another kind of adaptation that at least used to be associated with near-guaranteed suckitude: Comic book adaptations. Why? Because so many were made for no other reason than to try to score the comic-book geek crowd and maybe a couple action movie fans with low standards, nobody gave a shit if they sucked or not. The classic comic book movies that didn't suck were because they were universally loved characters and the creators wanted to reflect that by making a good movie. See: Superman 1 and 2. Then, a couple decades later, someone had the bright idea of "Hey, let's try making comic book movies that don't suck again!" And the modern comic book movie, where only some suck and some are fantastic movies unto themselves, was born.
All we need to get good game adaptation movies is for someone to decide to actually make a good one. The director doesn't even need to be a huge fan of the 'source material' or anything. They just need to want to make a good movie, and not be Uwe Boll, Jerry Bruckheimer, or Michael Bay.
I'm very glad to hear they've improved the technique. The whole "never been done at this depth before" aspect means I'm still glad they were forced to start two. There's no reason not to except for economic. Specifically BP's economics.
And yeah, I really don't think it's in their interest to prolong the leak even if they are collecting oil. Obviously if oil is leaking and can be collected, it's better to collect it, but it's hardly an economical way to harvest oil. That's why it seemed weird to point out how much money the oil they're collecting is worth in an argument about why they're doing all they can to stop it.
You're wasting your breath. He thinks that a freaking sub-8000 gallon/day seep off the coast of Santa Barbara proves that a man-made well leaking all over is harmless. Cus you know, that oil biodegrades before causing a problem, so why wouldn't 100 times more?
Asking "where's the critcism?" means you haven't been paying attention. There's tons of criticism in mainstream press. I see it every day as I track the news on the spill.
Why's he getting off better than Bush did with Katrina? Well, probably because he sacked the MMS head who screwed up instead of telling her that she did "a heckuva job". Little things like appearing to recognize when somebody has not, in fact, done a heckuva job seems to count for something.
I want to see more housecleaning at MMS and I'm quite disappointed that there hasn't been signs of it, yet. But then there's the AG's criminal investigation, which if half the things said about what BP did and didn't do before the spill are true is warranted. And then there's that outside of mobilizing the Coast Guard, what can the government do about the spill itself? All the people who can actually do something about it are in private industry. We're not talking about ferrying people out of a flooded area, we're talking about fixing something in an environment where it's never been fixed before.
And while I would agree with the hypothetical comment that the government should take more direct control over the actions of the oil companies in order to fix it, that's actually not a simple thing to do. We already have plenty of critics even in Congress saying that the regulatory action Obama has taken and has promised to take are going to have a stifling effect on private industry in the gulf. Hey idjits, I want to say to them, if this is what they're going to do then I want to stifle the ever loving fuck out of them.
Anyone who honestly thinks BP isn't doing E V E R Y T H I N G in its power to stem the flow is a fool.
I believe that BP has every incentive to stop the leak.
I also believe BP has every incentive to do so as cheaply as possible. For instance, they originally wanted to only drill one relief well until Congress insisted they start on another one. Why? Well because a relief well is not a guaranteed fixe. Sometimes the first one you drill doesn't do much, assuming you even succeed in hitting the foot-wide hole with the other foot-wide hole you're drilling at an angle through miles of rock.
I am not about to second-guess the engineers who are busting their ass working on fixes. I fully realize that what they are trying to do is exceedingly difficult -- I mean, that's part of why it's such a big problem. However that also applies to the relief wells. With the problems that keep coming up in all the other attempted solutions, just assuming that a single relief well will work on the first try seems ludicrous. Could the extra cost possibly outweigh the impact if the relief well fails and oil spews until they can go through the whole process of drilling another? Could you, as an engineer, justify that lack of redundancy when solving a problem of this magnitude?
But those decisions aren't made by engineers. Engineers quantify the risks as best they can, and executives make the decision off the summary middle management hands them. For them, maybe the cost vs risk works out? Maybe a mentality that you cut corners and do the minimum (or less) and just hope things work out is so entrenched that they would still try it even after things had already failed to work out?
And not that I don't think their Top Kill attempt was anything but sincere, but that's exactly why it strikes me as odd that you'd mention that $700000/day figure for siphoning oil as some kind of incentive for plugging the well. When they really fix the well it won't be usable anymore. So no more oil. Which gives them the opposite incentive. Again, this is just the thought train your observation led me down.
BP has already suffered a near crippling blow. They have lost *100 billion* dollars in market cap. ... 10s of billions of dollars in additional market cap wiped out.
Oh noes, not market cap! That's the thing about market cap -- it can be wiped out instantly, but it can come back too, and the only people who lose anything are the ones who sold while it was down. If BP was planning on buying out a smaller oil company using shares of their stock, well, now would be a bad time to do that. Oh noes!
In the meantime, BP continues to make real profits to the tune of tens of millions per day.
I'm not saying it's not a blow, but it's hardly crippling. Companies can continue to operate and make substantial profits even after tremendous stock price drops. And if BP does continue to make money, then their stock price will recover.
And the sad thing is that the "punish BP" bloodlust is just going to result in thousands of decent Americans who work in the energy industry losing jobs in the inevitable restructurings that will come, and those jobs will end up going elsewhere, since we still will be consuming the oil here.
It's an odd mentality, where the cause-and-effect here wouldn't be the obvious "Executive negligence in their company losing many jobs", but rather "the public caring that the executives cut corners and ignored signs because it would cost time and thus money resulted in this disaster, and subsequent job loss".
Yes, obviously the solution is that we should not care!
No. If people attributed cause and effect correctly, maybe we'd get some real change around here.
Top execs will already pay the price when they get the boot from their cushy jobs for the poor oversight they have exercised. If they did something criminal, they should be prosecuted too.
Oh noes they'll be fired from their cushy jobs! They might have to lay low living off their scant millions for a while before getting a cushy VP job somewhere else because the last thing the incestuous network of corporate executives and board members want is to raise standards.
Nothing short of criminal prosecution will be any kind of real punishment. I'm not holding my breath on the end result, but at least one thing is going right.
But this ... obsession ... with personalizing "BP" as some sort of entity that has committed an evil act that we can "punish" in any way further than has already been done is baffling to me. People - it's *been* punished.
Yeah, by only making half as much net profit -- estimates of BP's efforts at cleanup and stopping the leak per day are about half of their net profit per day.
Oh, the punishment! Their Q2 and Q3 earnings statements will be less glowing! They may be penalized in the market, until the expected profits return! Please. Call me when they go into the red, even for a single quarter.
By the way, the obsession with personalizing a corporation as some sort of entity unto itself has been the obsession of the corporate executives since early last century. Is it any wonder that we have bought into the delusion that "BP" can do anything on its own? "Corporate personhood" is their baby.
If you want to end that delusion, I'm all for it. But realize that the executives themselves are on the other side of this one from you, as is for that matter the law.
Okay, you had oil-absorbent "diapers".
Doesn't the fact that this is the exact opposite -- an oil-repellent filter -- make it news?
If you use the cloth as an oil-sponge, then the amount of oil you can pick up is limited by the absorbency of the cloth. Any excess oil will seep through the cloth and continue polluting the water. The practicality of just squeezing it out is also questionable, since you have to do it every time the cloth becomes oil-logged (which would be very quick).
If instead it's an oil filter, then you can put as much oil-laden water through it as you want, with the oil remaining on one side, with the cloth absorbing some water and the rest passing through. For example you could pump the oil-water mix into a tank with a funnel in the bottom with this cloth as a barrier. In goes oil and water, out comes just water, with the amount of oil you can separate with a single cloth being limited only by the size of the oil container and perhaps the strength of the cloth.
Absorption isn't bad if it's practical, like the use of hair clippings to soak up oil. But as that example shows, you naturally need much more material to deal with the same amount of oil.
Ah, "Period," the word universally used by morons who hope that you won't think about the stupid thing they just said.
The price is set by the seller. The only portion of the market that has accepted that price is the portion of the market who buys it at that price. Were the seller to reduce the price, more of the market would accept that price and they would sell more. Desire for a product varies with the price of that product. Wanting a product at a hypothetical price-point of $0.01 is not the same as wanting the product at a price point of $100. Demand for a product varies with the price of that product.
We were talking about the value of the product to the pirate. You said it's non-zero, because they wanted it, but that does not mean they would want it if only available at retail price. Ergo pirated copies do not translate into lost retail sales. Even a pile of stupid like you understands that, which is why your attempts to dodge the obvious are so obvious and sad.
So non-zero value is the same as full retail value in your universe?
Is that the best you can do to refute the straightforward and plainly true statement that reducing the price of something increases the number of people who will want it, and therefore extrapolating the number of people who wanted something at $0 is the same as the number who would have wanted it had it only available at full price is wrong? Every salesman on earth knows this. There's a small disclaimer for situations where a higher price can give the perception of being a higher value, more prestigious, etc (like sports cars), but that's clearly not the realm we're dealing with here.
Pirated copies != lost sales. Don't claim to be in the same universe where real economics applies if you don't believe that.
Did you say ungodly?
Burn the blasphemous, heathen aerogel!
Wait, fuck...
You're quite correct. I'm advocating continuing to live a technological lifestyle without being oblivious to the consequences to the environment, or using the lame "but everything is natural!" excuse to not care about them.
It's subtle, I know.
But. But.If it's a dummy capsule then why can't we ...
Hehe
Oh nevermind, we'd never get enough politicians in the thing to make it worthwhile.
You might call 7 politicians launched into space not worthwhile, but I call it a start. ;)
I think two years is incredibly optimistic, but I would love for SpaceX to prove me wrong.
Indeed. Personally I'm betting they'll miss 2013, but match or beat 2015 which is the incredibly optimistic time scale for Ares-based manned missions to ISS.
Well, they had explicitly demonstrated that ability earlier when they did the launch pad test-firing. Being able to do that in the first place is a big advantage of liquid fueled rockets over solid fuel. But yeah, it's definitely cool being able to see that a real last-second abort works just like it did in the tests. Major kudos to the operations team (who I believe, like the previous test, are SpaceX employees which marks a break from traditional launches), and of course to the engineers and machinists and everyone else.
That's why Hitler and Stalin were so so gay for each other.
I thought it was their mutual love of mustaches.
[ ] You got the joke.
[x] Whoosh!
Any impact we make on the environment continues to be natural in its origins.
And? You can define "natural" to be equivalent to "things that exist", but in doing so you've simply failed to say anything at all.
Deforestation, industrial waste, air pollution and so on are all "natural". So what? That doesn't mean they are good ideas, or that we shouldn't be concerned with the consequences because those consequences are "natural". "Natural" in this context doesn't mean "okay"; that connotation is often inappropriate, but is right out with your definition.
The very fact that we can reason about the consequences of our actions means we should do so, rather than wipe out entire ecosystems as if we were unthinking cyanobacteria releasing oxygen into the environment. Saying it's "natural" because anything that exists is "natural" is to just abdicate responsibility for using our reason, as if we don't have a choice. Well, we do.
Please tell me you're being funny and are only pretending to be clueless as to how these species ended up in the situations that required us to save them.
Interesting. I've also heard a theory that Jupiter is responsible for disturbing Oort Cloud objects and drawing them into orbits that go through the inner solar system, so the increase in dangerous objects would roughly cancel the objects deflected or absorbed by Jupiter.
I think that theory still considers comets and other non-near-earth objects to be the primary threat, though.
Electrons will drift( look up 'electron mobility' on Wikipedia), but the GP is right in that it is the wave motion of the potentials that are primarily the means in which the information will travel. At the same time, he is just being a bit nit picky.
Agreed, and it's a pretty minor nit. Electrons do move (there would be no current if they did not), they just don't have to move all the way for the electric potential to reach the destination.
The nit I would have picked would have been with the phrase "the same electrons".
They're not even close to the same; the off-chip interface uses a huge amount more electrons and thus much higher current and thus much more power.
I think what person in the article is trying to say that usually to go from one chip to another, you usually need to provide a buffer (ie amplifier) on the output interface.
I assure you that the data is buffered before being sent on the on-chip interface, in essentially the same way. :)
The difference is in the size of those buffers; if you look closely at die photos you can easily make out the I/O transistors and they're often as large as entire sections of the core logic where you can't possibly make out individual transistors. The transistors driving output pins are ridiculously bigger because they are driving far more current to quickly drive a much larger capacitive load. Ergo they use much more power.
How do you think police issued tickets before radar guns were invented?
Well if I didn't know any better, and thought there was no way to measure velocity prior to the invention of radar, I might do as you have invited me to do and imagine that they just guessed and that this was good enough.
But since I do know better, I don't have to imagine. What they actually did was to time how long it took you to go between two points of known separation. Amazing, eh?
Even as late as the 90s some officers preferred this method, and sometimes near speed traps in the city you could see the markings on the curb that they drew. When it was explained to me by an officer, I believe he said the preference stemmed from when radar guns were new and tickets based on radar guns were being challenged successfully, while the stopwatch measurement of a trained officer was more likely to be believed by the judge.
In any event, "guess" was never the proper method.
Develop an oatmeal habit to counter my caffeine habit? Well, okay, but first I'll have to read up on what oatmeal withdrawal is like.