since again taxes apply to transactions, not to possessions.
By definition, property taxes apply to possessions. Just because you wish we didn't have them doesn't mean they're not really taxes. I wish I didn't have to pay FICA and income taxes, but I don't deny that they're a tax rather than proof that I'm a slave who's owned by the government or something equally absurd.
Funny indeed. Having worked at both the university and National Lab levels, the IT departments I've encountered have more of the function of pushing so many restrictive security policies and pieces of corporate spyware to everyone's systems than of actually enabling researchers to be more productive...
Really, this is exactly what WinFS would've been perfect for, if MS had ever gotten it working and released it. As it is, I use hierarchical directory structure - top level is the research project, then date/experiment from there. Definitely subject to the kind of problems the original poster is encountering, though.
While there are some fields (computer programming being one of the few) that can be readily learned outside of formal education, there are many more that really can't. I certainly wouldn't want to ride in an airplane that had been designed by people who hadn't learned what's taught in accredited engineering programs, for example... Just because you can go get a business degree without learning anything doesn't mean that learning isn't the goal of modern education in general.
Further, if you're just looking for a job training program or a piece of paper to impress employers, then perhaps higher education isn't right for you anyway. Technical trade schools and the like exist for that, and are much more affordable. There is value that people find in a classical liberal arts education, but that value isn't in job prospects, but in "bettering themselves" through education. People wouldn't pay what they do for a humanities degree if the only reason to get it were to have a piece of paper to impress employers. Those degrees, at the undergraduate level, are essentially useless in the job market as far as any direct correlation between the knowledge they gain and applicability to any particular job.
Re:Why the heck modify the enzyme to produce gasol
on
Gasoline From Thin Air
·
· Score: 1
Why?
One reason would be that liquid fuels have a far greater energy density. You can't get nearly as far on a tank of propane as on a tank of gasoline. Practically speaking, liquid hydrocarbons are the gold standard of portable energy storage.
An even greater advantage to liquid fuels is the volumetric efficiency of the engine. Injecting gaseous propane displaces a large percentage of the air you could otherwise induct into an engine. Less fuel + air = less power output. In order to get the same power out of an engine running on gaseous fuel, you either need to boost the heck out of it, or make it a whole lot bigger.
That's just to start... there are good reasons that liquid hydrocarbon fuels have been dominant in the market for over a century. They have enormous technical advantages over the competing technologies, especially for transportation uses where power/weight ratio and range are important. Propane's got some advantages for indoor use (clean, breathable emissions), stationary use (run from large utility-filled tanks), etc. But for transportation, it's got some serious disadvantages even if this enzyme could magically create the fuel for free.
Sure, if you input more electrical energy than could possibly be obtained from combustion of the resulting hydrocarbons. Second law of thermodynamics strikes again...
Weight, cost, performance, emissions, economics... for passenger vehicles they really have a lot of disadvantages, despite the efficiency gained from running at a higher compression ratio. That efficiency gain makes them appealing and economical for heavy-duty commercial vehicles, but the advantages go to spark-ignition engines for light-duty purposes (except in odd cases like European countries setting massive tax penalties on gasoline versus diesel fuel to push the market in their desired direction). Diesels are great for certain applications, but saying they've no disadvantages aside from weight is a bit of a stretch.
Considering that the majority of burglaries are by druggies looking for something they can easily sell for cash to get their next hit, just making your place a little less attractive than the place next door might be all you need to do. A dog does quite well there.
It is inherently better. If you're spending half the lecture writing something on the board that could very well be flashed up there in an instant using PowerPoint or similar, you're wasting the students time.
Having taught a junior level engineering course (Applied Thermodynamics) for a couple of semesters while finishing up grad school, I'd tend towards the opposite conclusion on this particular point. If I just flashed stuff up there for an instant using PowerPoint, it would be very easy to go way too fast and skim over details that are intuitive to me since I know the material well, but are a mystery to the students who haven't seen it before. I found that the "old school" approach of using the chalk board (or white board, etc.) helped me keep the pace to something reasonable for the students to be able to have time to both take notes and also pay attention to what I was saying, and allowed for more interaction and free-form explanations. I did use PowerPoint to show some charts, pictures, etc. but found that for the material I was teaching, the chalk board was better for the bulk of the equations/derivations/example problems I was putting up there.
There are definitely some courses where the material lends itself more to being presented via PowerPoint or the like. There are some courses where visual aids would just be silly most of the time (e.g. some of the best history professors I had never used any). There are some courses where writing on a board works best. I had a few programming courses where code examples were shown on the big screen, and that would certainly be silly to spend all one's time writing out by hand. Mandating a one-size-fits-all approach of "thou shalt use this technology because the University spent money on it," would be counterproductive to say the least. Leave it to the professors to decide which technologies help and which would only be distractions or hindrances.
Fossil fuels are the cheapest way to produce energy as long as they do not have to pay for negative externalities.
And also if they do. There are existing, fairly stringent, federal regulations on emissions from power plants, vehicles, and other devices that use fossil fuels. When you include the cost of the scrubbers, catalytic converters, etc. that are required to meet these regulations and the cost of environmental permits, etc., fossil fuels are still far more economical than the alternatives, even if you neglect the negative externalities of those.
To be fair, we should consider the negative externalities of other sources too: for example, on the combustion engine vs electric debate in automobiles, few people take into account the environmental impact (or non-renewability) of the mining of nickel, lithium, and other substances used in the batteries. The long-term costs there are potentially far greater than those of the much smaller quantity of platinum/palladium/rhodium it takes to clean up the exhaust from a modern gasoline-powered vehicle. Similar issues exist with grid-level power generation. If we're going to consider the big picture for one source of energy (which we absolutely should do), we need to do so for all sources.
I'm not saying that alternative energy sources are worthless, we should just burn coal, etc. I am saying that fossil fuels are currently dominant for good reason, especially when all those external factors are considered.
Scramjets have no moving parts; it's a duct and a fuel injector. That's it. Wear is a non-issue here.
Figuring out what shape that duct needs to be in order to get stable combustion, however, is far from a trivial problem; it's not just the fluid dynamics of the supersonic flow that must be considered... thermodynamic losses can be large enough to quench the flame, and where in the duct those losses occur is as important as their magnitude. With most sorts of engines, second-law analysis is only something you look at to refine the efficiency of the technology once it's mature and functional. With scramjets, it's critical to making them work at all. Building one of these, with all our modern computer modeling technology, is kind of akin to building the first rockets with no computers at all.
Is hulu big enough yet to have original content? FOX NBC CBS and ABC will have to truly embrace the streaming stuff, and I think they have to a certain extent, so perhaps they won't go the way of the newspaper!
Hulu is a joint venture between NBC, FOX, and ABC. It exists to stream content generated by the broadcast networks who created it. Don't expect any original content there; it's not an independent provider.
I dunno... I have AT&T and I generally still have 1-2 bars of signal in places where my friends with iPhones drop coverage. I think it's more a sucky antenna issue than a bad coverage issue, at least around here.
That sentence can be made to fit some rules of grammar, but I challenge you to find any English speaker who considers that to actually be a grammatical sentence. It's an example of rules not being capable of fully defining whether a group of words constitutes a valid English sentence, since it clearly is not, despite what some rules may indicate. That, of course, is the key problem with speech recognition: language isn't governed by a neat set of simple rules that computers can be programmed to understand.
The Toshiba had a 129-MHz Toshiba TMPR3912U CPU which is something like 2 to 3 orders of magnitude slower than the 1Ghz A4. Sure it functioned but would you use it?
In 1998, the Pentium II was less than a year old, and 300 MHz speeds were typical for new desktop computers. 400 MHz was pretty high-end. Today, 2-3 GHz speeds and multiple cores are typical in desktop processors. I'd argue that a 129 MHz clock speed in 1998 was a heck of a lot closer to the state of the art at the time than a 1 GHz single-core processor is now.
The laws of physics apply if the mind is physical. If it is indeed "supernatural" or otherwise transcendent, then the laws of physics are not the driving force behind it. Certainly, to the significant extent that the mind interacts with the brain, physics will have an effect on the mind, but that doesn't mean that the mind is itself a mere artifact of physical phenomena. The question is philosophical in nature.
No. The human mind is created by the brain which is governed by the laws of physics.
You're veering into philosophy there, and begging the question while you're at it. While it's plausible that this could be the case, it's far from the only possibility, and is not the conclusion that most philosophers have arrived at. You may have faith that the mind is an illusion or a mere product of deterministic phenomena. Many of us disagree and believe that the mind does exist and, while it uses the brain, it isn't a mere product of it. Neither position can be scientifically proven, as it is a philosophical/metaphysical question rather than a scientific one, but the position that the mind is more than a mere product of physical phenomena has been far more convincing to most people throughout human history. Even if I didn't agree with it, I don't think I could work up the hubris to dismiss it out of hand.
All other questions (SSN, birth date, birth place) are not part of the census so if anyone asks they are not acting on behalf of the census office.
Actually, besides names, races, and address, the 2010 Census form does ask for both age and date of birth. (Which seems about as redundant as having mailed a letter a few weeks before the form that said they'd be mailing the form later.)
We have all sorts of off-shore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, and when Hurricanes Katrina and Rita came through back-to-back, none of 'em leaked a drop. There were some minor spills from beached tankers, but none from the drilling platforms and piping. It can most certainly be done safely. We're already doing it wherever NIMBY political obstructions don't prevent it.
The quality of the LCD makes a big difference. I'll notice eyestrain after a couple hours of reading on my Dell laptop at work. The HP I have at home, I didn't have a problem with even when using it to write my dissertation: can make it to the next meal/bathroom/etc. break before it becomes an issue. But having seen the non-backlit e-Ink displays, I can see how they'd eliminate the problem altogether.
Books are already cheaper on Kindle than paper, often by a fair amount. The problem is that right now e-Ink screens are really good only for continuous text streams without graphics.
The other problem is that there's no real bundled discount option for buying both the hard copy and the Kindle version. For myself, with books I intend to keep, I want a nice hardcover. For books I only intend to read once and throw away, I can get a used paperback cheaper than the Kindle copy even if I don't borrow from a library. The Kindle would be convenient at times, but if I have to essentially buy the book twice, rather than just paying an extra dollar or two on top of the price I'm already paying for the physical book, I'm not going to do it. If I have to choose between the electronic and physical copies, I'll go for the real thing.
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since again taxes apply to transactions, not to possessions.
By definition, property taxes apply to possessions. Just because you wish we didn't have them doesn't mean they're not really taxes. I wish I didn't have to pay FICA and income taxes, but I don't deny that they're a tax rather than proof that I'm a slave who's owned by the government or something equally absurd.
Those who argue with appeals to emotion use words like "honest" to mean "abides by the principles I preach". That's not a reasonable definition.
On the contrary, according to both common usage and the the dictionary, it's quite a reasonable definition.
Funny indeed. Having worked at both the university and National Lab levels, the IT departments I've encountered have more of the function of pushing so many restrictive security policies and pieces of corporate spyware to everyone's systems than of actually enabling researchers to be more productive...
Really, this is exactly what WinFS would've been perfect for, if MS had ever gotten it working and released it. As it is, I use hierarchical directory structure - top level is the research project, then date/experiment from there. Definitely subject to the kind of problems the original poster is encountering, though.
While there are some fields (computer programming being one of the few) that can be readily learned outside of formal education, there are many more that really can't. I certainly wouldn't want to ride in an airplane that had been designed by people who hadn't learned what's taught in accredited engineering programs, for example... Just because you can go get a business degree without learning anything doesn't mean that learning isn't the goal of modern education in general.
Further, if you're just looking for a job training program or a piece of paper to impress employers, then perhaps higher education isn't right for you anyway. Technical trade schools and the like exist for that, and are much more affordable. There is value that people find in a classical liberal arts education, but that value isn't in job prospects, but in "bettering themselves" through education. People wouldn't pay what they do for a humanities degree if the only reason to get it were to have a piece of paper to impress employers. Those degrees, at the undergraduate level, are essentially useless in the job market as far as any direct correlation between the knowledge they gain and applicability to any particular job.
Why?
One reason would be that liquid fuels have a far greater energy density. You can't get nearly as far on a tank of propane as on a tank of gasoline. Practically speaking, liquid hydrocarbons are the gold standard of portable energy storage.
An even greater advantage to liquid fuels is the volumetric efficiency of the engine. Injecting gaseous propane displaces a large percentage of the air you could otherwise induct into an engine. Less fuel + air = less power output. In order to get the same power out of an engine running on gaseous fuel, you either need to boost the heck out of it, or make it a whole lot bigger.
That's just to start ... there are good reasons that liquid hydrocarbon fuels have been dominant in the market for over a century. They have enormous technical advantages over the competing technologies, especially for transportation uses where power/weight ratio and range are important. Propane's got some advantages for indoor use (clean, breathable emissions), stationary use (run from large utility-filled tanks), etc. But for transportation, it's got some serious disadvantages even if this enzyme could magically create the fuel for free.
Sure, if you input more electrical energy than could possibly be obtained from combustion of the resulting hydrocarbons. Second law of thermodynamics strikes again ...
Weight, cost, performance, emissions, economics ... for passenger vehicles they really have a lot of disadvantages, despite the efficiency gained from running at a higher compression ratio. That efficiency gain makes them appealing and economical for heavy-duty commercial vehicles, but the advantages go to spark-ignition engines for light-duty purposes (except in odd cases like European countries setting massive tax penalties on gasoline versus diesel fuel to push the market in their desired direction). Diesels are great for certain applications, but saying they've no disadvantages aside from weight is a bit of a stretch.
Considering that the majority of burglaries are by druggies looking for something they can easily sell for cash to get their next hit, just making your place a little less attractive than the place next door might be all you need to do. A dog does quite well there.
It is inherently better. If you're spending half the lecture writing something on the board that could very well be flashed up there in an instant using PowerPoint or similar, you're wasting the students time.
Having taught a junior level engineering course (Applied Thermodynamics) for a couple of semesters while finishing up grad school, I'd tend towards the opposite conclusion on this particular point. If I just flashed stuff up there for an instant using PowerPoint, it would be very easy to go way too fast and skim over details that are intuitive to me since I know the material well, but are a mystery to the students who haven't seen it before. I found that the "old school" approach of using the chalk board (or white board, etc.) helped me keep the pace to something reasonable for the students to be able to have time to both take notes and also pay attention to what I was saying, and allowed for more interaction and free-form explanations. I did use PowerPoint to show some charts, pictures, etc. but found that for the material I was teaching, the chalk board was better for the bulk of the equations/derivations/example problems I was putting up there.
There are definitely some courses where the material lends itself more to being presented via PowerPoint or the like. There are some courses where visual aids would just be silly most of the time (e.g. some of the best history professors I had never used any). There are some courses where writing on a board works best. I had a few programming courses where code examples were shown on the big screen, and that would certainly be silly to spend all one's time writing out by hand. Mandating a one-size-fits-all approach of "thou shalt use this technology because the University spent money on it," would be counterproductive to say the least. Leave it to the professors to decide which technologies help and which would only be distractions or hindrances.
Fossil fuels are the cheapest way to produce energy as long as they do not have to pay for negative externalities.
And also if they do. There are existing, fairly stringent, federal regulations on emissions from power plants, vehicles, and other devices that use fossil fuels. When you include the cost of the scrubbers, catalytic converters, etc. that are required to meet these regulations and the cost of environmental permits, etc., fossil fuels are still far more economical than the alternatives, even if you neglect the negative externalities of those.
To be fair, we should consider the negative externalities of other sources too: for example, on the combustion engine vs electric debate in automobiles, few people take into account the environmental impact (or non-renewability) of the mining of nickel, lithium, and other substances used in the batteries. The long-term costs there are potentially far greater than those of the much smaller quantity of platinum/palladium/rhodium it takes to clean up the exhaust from a modern gasoline-powered vehicle. Similar issues exist with grid-level power generation. If we're going to consider the big picture for one source of energy (which we absolutely should do), we need to do so for all sources.
I'm not saying that alternative energy sources are worthless, we should just burn coal, etc. I am saying that fossil fuels are currently dominant for good reason, especially when all those external factors are considered.
Scramjets have no moving parts; it's a duct and a fuel injector. That's it. Wear is a non-issue here.
Figuring out what shape that duct needs to be in order to get stable combustion, however, is far from a trivial problem; it's not just the fluid dynamics of the supersonic flow that must be considered ... thermodynamic losses can be large enough to quench the flame, and where in the duct those losses occur is as important as their magnitude. With most sorts of engines, second-law analysis is only something you look at to refine the efficiency of the technology once it's mature and functional. With scramjets, it's critical to making them work at all. Building one of these, with all our modern computer modeling technology, is kind of akin to building the first rockets with no computers at all.
Is hulu big enough yet to have original content? FOX NBC CBS and ABC will have to truly embrace the streaming stuff, and I think they have to a certain extent, so perhaps they won't go the way of the newspaper!
Hulu is a joint venture between NBC, FOX, and ABC. It exists to stream content generated by the broadcast networks who created it. Don't expect any original content there; it's not an independent provider.
I dunno ... I have AT&T and I generally still have 1-2 bars of signal in places where my friends with iPhones drop coverage. I think it's more a sucky antenna issue than a bad coverage issue, at least around here.
That sentence can be made to fit some rules of grammar, but I challenge you to find any English speaker who considers that to actually be a grammatical sentence. It's an example of rules not being capable of fully defining whether a group of words constitutes a valid English sentence, since it clearly is not, despite what some rules may indicate. That, of course, is the key problem with speech recognition: language isn't governed by a neat set of simple rules that computers can be programmed to understand.
The Toshiba had a 129-MHz Toshiba TMPR3912U CPU which is something like 2 to 3 orders of magnitude slower than the 1Ghz A4. Sure it functioned but would you use it?
In 1998, the Pentium II was less than a year old, and 300 MHz speeds were typical for new desktop computers. 400 MHz was pretty high-end. Today, 2-3 GHz speeds and multiple cores are typical in desktop processors. I'd argue that a 129 MHz clock speed in 1998 was a heck of a lot closer to the state of the art at the time than a 1 GHz single-core processor is now.
The laws of physics apply if the mind is physical. If it is indeed "supernatural" or otherwise transcendent, then the laws of physics are not the driving force behind it. Certainly, to the significant extent that the mind interacts with the brain, physics will have an effect on the mind, but that doesn't mean that the mind is itself a mere artifact of physical phenomena. The question is philosophical in nature.
No. The human mind is created by the brain which is governed by the laws of physics.
You're veering into philosophy there, and begging the question while you're at it. While it's plausible that this could be the case, it's far from the only possibility, and is not the conclusion that most philosophers have arrived at. You may have faith that the mind is an illusion or a mere product of deterministic phenomena. Many of us disagree and believe that the mind does exist and, while it uses the brain, it isn't a mere product of it. Neither position can be scientifically proven, as it is a philosophical/metaphysical question rather than a scientific one, but the position that the mind is more than a mere product of physical phenomena has been far more convincing to most people throughout human history. Even if I didn't agree with it, I don't think I could work up the hubris to dismiss it out of hand.
And:
go (down)
All other questions (SSN, birth date, birth place) are not part of the census so if anyone asks they are not acting on behalf of the census office.
Actually, besides names, races, and address, the 2010 Census form does ask for both age and date of birth. (Which seems about as redundant as having mailed a letter a few weeks before the form that said they'd be mailing the form later.)
Interesting. Thanks for the info.
What's with the "xxx" directory? Programming = porn?
We have all sorts of off-shore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, and when Hurricanes Katrina and Rita came through back-to-back, none of 'em leaked a drop. There were some minor spills from beached tankers, but none from the drilling platforms and piping. It can most certainly be done safely. We're already doing it wherever NIMBY political obstructions don't prevent it.
The quality of the LCD makes a big difference. I'll notice eyestrain after a couple hours of reading on my Dell laptop at work. The HP I have at home, I didn't have a problem with even when using it to write my dissertation: can make it to the next meal/bathroom/etc. break before it becomes an issue. But having seen the non-backlit e-Ink displays, I can see how they'd eliminate the problem altogether.
Books are already cheaper on Kindle than paper, often by a fair amount. The problem is that right now e-Ink screens are really good only for continuous text streams without graphics.
The other problem is that there's no real bundled discount option for buying both the hard copy and the Kindle version. For myself, with books I intend to keep, I want a nice hardcover. For books I only intend to read once and throw away, I can get a used paperback cheaper than the Kindle copy even if I don't borrow from a library. The Kindle would be convenient at times, but if I have to essentially buy the book twice, rather than just paying an extra dollar or two on top of the price I'm already paying for the physical book, I'm not going to do it. If I have to choose between the electronic and physical copies, I'll go for the real thing.