Any sucessful part of AI research spins off into its own well-functioning discipline... optical character recognition, dictation software, text-to-speech, etc...AI research is the umbrella under which only the unsolved problems still lie
The technologies you mentioned are hardly "solved problems." I even hesitate to call them "well-functioning." They sort of work, but there's a lot of room for improvement. OCR is practically worthless for anything that's not a computer font (yeah, new methods for reading captchas appear all the time, but new types of captchas get deployed which need a better OCR to read them in response...all the while, the letters can still be recognized by humans). Dictation software still runs into "Dear Aunt let's so double the killer delete select all" issues and text-to-speech still fails at reading paragraphs with proper inflections so that the text sounds natural.
I'd be ecstatic if just those technologies you mentioned reached human-level status in 20 years. Having a fully functional AI is out of the question. Computers can do many, many things better than humans, but humans are still light years ahead of the most powerful computers in other things. Can you listen to a song and isolate the sounds from a particular instrument? The human voices? Special effects in a movie as different from the music? Can you isolate what one person is saying in the middle of a crowded room by just honing in on their voice and filtering out the others? Can you switch to try to listen to somebody else by picking up their voice?
The human mind is an INCREDIBLE filter and processing computer for all the inputs we get. We're simply not anywhere close to duplicating that functionality.
Seriously though, I know UV is ionizing radiation. But when you recommended that he "walk outside on a sunny day" you were trying to use that to show that non-ionizing radiation isn't dangerous. That would be a flawed argument if that was all the data we have, because although you can find a correlation between sunlight exposure and cancer, you can't separate the ionizing from non-ionizing sunlight exposure from your data. You can say that blocking the UV light with sunscreen shows a decreased risk from cancer, but unless your sunscreen users have a zero-incidence of cancer, you can't say the non-ionizing exposure has no effect. You can merely conclude the ionizing is much worse.
Are you arguing that the sun happens to put out 0 (or near 0) radiation in the frequncies used by cell phones?
I'm arguing that the sun's radiations at the frequencies used by cell phones, after they've been absorbed and scattered by magnetic fields and the earth's atmosphere, are at a lower power level than cell phones. Because if they weren't, I assume the sun's radiations would be jamming the cell phone transmissions.
Again, you should keep in mind that I'm not arguing cell phones are dangerous here. Like I said before, even this study says the increased risk goes from negligible to greater but still negligible. Nor am I arguing the non-ionizing radiation is causing cancer through the same mechanism as ionizing radiation. What I'm saying is that even if non-ionizing radiation can't directly damage your dna, how would you know that dielectric heating won't cause adverse effects that lead to cancer and tumors without performing the studies?
Walk outside on a sunny day. You have just exposed your head to far more non-ionizing radiation than a cell phone.
First, the sun does cause cancer. Just so you know, you should avoid getting too much direct sunlight. Wear sunscreen on exposed skin.
Second, frequency matters (which is why people are worried about the UV spectrum of sunlight, not the visible spectrum). The frequency is directly related to the energy of the electromagnetic wave. Now, I'm not a crackpot who thinks everyone should stop using cell phones and turn off their wireless routers, but it's just not as simple as, "studies are irrelevant, it's non-ionizing radiation, therefore it must be safe." The studies are important. So far, it looks like it's pretty harmless (at the power levels of cell phones and routers). A bunch of studies showing no correlation to cancer, and studies like this one showing an increased risk from almost zero to a higher number that is still almost zero. Still wouldn't have known that without the study.
Someday we are going to tap directly into the power of the earth's magnetic field.
We've been doing that for a quite a while. We use this energy to move metal. Specifically, we use it to move magnetized metal needles so they'll point north.
Although there's a lot of energy in earth's magnetic field, it's spread over a really large volume. The energy density isn't all that large, and you can't use it for much more than powering compasses. We're not going to stop the earth's core from spinning anytime soon by "tapping" into that. We're definitely not doing that before the earth's magnetic field flips again. When it does that, it's going to temporarily collapse, and all the bad things you're afraid of are going to happen anyway.
I'm not anti-science, just bewildered at the trends and drivers for growth (even on campus) that come from the pursuit for the research dollar.
I think you misunderstood my argument. I didn't think you were anti-science. Your comment led me to believe you're a well-meaning guy who is concerned about the welfare of people who are less fortunate than you. I think you set your sights on the wrong problem though.
The reason so much R&D money is being spent in things like anti-aging and anti-obesity is because these are unsolved problems. The diseases listed in your wikipedia link are solved problems. If the economy in the third world countries catch up, they disappear. Dengue Fever, for example, is transmitted by mosquitoes. If you have the resources to invest in mosquito control, the problem disappears (such as the mosquito eradication program in the united states back in the 1960's, which is why we don't have a dengue problem here--the antiviral drug isn't necessary to end the disease). Most of those other diseases, such as parasites, also go away once people start living in more sanitary conditions. If you want examples of a disease that isn't as vain as "limp dicks" that gets plenty of R&D, just look at cancer. That problem can't be solved with by simply improving the economy, so there's a lot of R&D investment.
So the question is, why do those diseases still exist? Lack of resources. And if the R&D resources get shifted to solve those problems, the resources to pay for the newly found medicine will still be non-existent, and the "solution" won't get deployed. Case in point, AIDS medication. People with AIDS in the US can lead relatively normal lives with the available medication (ok, they still have their share of problems, but their life expectancy is significantly higher than it would be without the medication). In Africa, they can't afford it, because the patents make those medicines way too expensive to buy from the first-world pharmaceutical companies, and they can't produce it cheaply in those countries without paying the royalties to those same pharm companies. Your study, coming from the "Commission on Intellectual Property Rights" was a biased study designed to fight this particular criticism in favor of maximizing the amount of cash the pharmaceuticals get to squeeze out of their patents. The obvious flaw is that the same countries that DO respect patents, are those that can't afford the already existing drugs.
However, even those AIDS drugs aren't the solution to the problem. Again, that's another disease that mostly goes away with an improved economy and education. If you understand how AIDS is transmitted, you can completely avoid it (assuming the hospitals in your country check their donated blood and organs for diseases, as well as having the resources to keep their surgical instruments sterilized). That's why the united states has a significantly lower incidence of the disease even though people with it can live longer and therefore would be able to transmit it to more people over a longer period of time. Since the vast majority of people here understand how the disease is transmitted, and has access to condoms, the problem doesn't spread out of control.
while not wanting to bring the mood down, innit funny how much R&D goes into "curing" Western maladies like erectile dysfunction and pickled brain cells while millions die each year from neglected diseases
What's wrong with that? The third world diseases you linked to are an economic problem, and no R&D is required to solve them. That's why those diseases are virtually non-existent in wealthy nations.
You might argue that we need to shift resources in order to help those people, but you can't argue that the direction of R&D research needs to shift. That wouldn't help, they'd still need the funds to deploy whatever cure they come up with.
The main reason Apple wants to control 3rd-party apps on the phone is because they've got a commitment to AT&T not to allow users to circumvent their traditional cell phone profit centers. This is: Ringtones, SMS, and cell phone minutes. If the thing were an open platform, the first thing people would install would be a VOIP client and an SMS app that uses email addresses instead of SMS phone numbers to send messages.
I hear this a lot. You must not have had AT&T before you bought an iphone. I had cingular because between them and t-mobile, they were the most open carriers in the US. My nokia phone with cingular has bluetooth services that let me upload and download files to it and use it as a modem (so obviously it's not AT&T's fault that the only bluetooth service on the iphone is for headsets. Verizon crippled all their phones like that, with AT&T it's only the iPhone), it lets me upload mp3's and use any of them as ringtones (so obviously it's not AT&T's fault that you can only make ringtones out of iTunes-bought files--unless you have garage band and a mac).
If we want to ever colonize the universe, since there is no way of guaranteeing that other intelligences won't be at least as aggressive...the odds are that any aliens we encounter will shoot first. They'd be stupid not to. Their mechanical scouts will do likewise, to ensure their host worlds' survival.
Actually, they'd be stupid to take that course of action, even assuming aggressive behavior. The reason that as humans we've achieved so much is that we're social animals, despite all our aggressive instincts. The ability to cooperate can be advantageous to your survival.
Since we can assume these intelligent aliens can understand the benefits of cooperation, the only reason they'd have to destroy us would be the fear that we'll destroy them. If they shoot first, they run the risk of finding out the hard way that we're actually more advanced than they are. Retaliation will be a bitch.
If they are smart they'll spy on us first. If we're more advanced, they'll send a small party to communicate and try to establish contact, so they can gain knowledge about our technology. They won't tell us where their planet is located until they can trust us. If we kill the messengers, they stay hidden. If we're less advanced, they don't have anything to fear from us, they don't need to shoot first.
If they're aggressive, they'll enslave us. If they're reasonably non-aggressive, they'll collaborate with us. That leaves the case where we're all at about the same technological level. Then if they're overly aggressive or if we kill the messengers and if they can destroy us for sure in one shot, they should. If not, we figured out MAD ourselves a few decades back, right? Again, retaliation is a bitch.
As to your statement about Time Warner, I used to just assume that the DTV local affiliate networks fell under the "must carry" and "in the clear" rules, but I've seen a great deal of debate about it, and many on the mythtv users mailing list seem to be running into your situation.
When I looked into those rules, what I was told was that as long as time warner was carrying the non-hd versions of those channels in the clear, they were not doing anything illegal by encrypting the HD channels.
When I move, I'll be able to go the OTA route like you. I really wish there were HD tuners with cablecard compatibility that could be used with mythtv, but I don't think the powers that be will ever allow that.
Yeah, I have a mythtv box with an HDHomeRun but I'm living in an apartment building where the over-the-air channels are impossible to tune, and where time warner encrypts all of the hd channels except for the weather ones (they started encrypting basic channels soon after I got my hdhomerun too). I love my mythtv box, but it's useless for HD at the moment.
Huh? Recycling waste heat from a internal combustion engine? That sounds like someone is trying to violate the Kevin-Planck statement of the second law of thermodynamics!
As I understand it, there's only a violation if that someone claims they can use ALL of the heat to do work (thermal efficiency of 1). If some heat is still being dispersed into a cooler temperature environment, it's still perfectly doable. After all, are you going to tell me you can't use waste heat from the ICE to heat up some water?
I'm not an expert in the subject (I'm an electrical engineer, so I've only gotten very basic freshman-level introductions to the laws of thermodynamics), but I think there's a well-known upper bound to how efficient recovery of heat to do work can be. Some googling led to wikipedia which tells me that upper bound is the efficiency of the Carnot Cycle. Apparently it's not quite possible to reach it, but you're not violating thermodynamics if you're below it.
Hang on a sec.. This would be the same 2007 that Oil hit an all time high...Don't you think that maybe.. Just maybe.. The fact that people don't have the money to spend on fripperies, and are actually worried about their ability to keep roof over head is also a factor in this?
By comparison, they say sales peaked at the year 2000. Wasn't that also about when Napster peaked?
Thanks. A comment from someone telling me that I actually made some sense is worth more to me than an arbitrary number anyway.
However, I think your going to burn for putting forth a false deity: TrekkieGod.:)
Hah. One of my friends was actually using the TrekkiePope avatar for a short while. He might be in even more trouble, for actually worshiping the TrekkieGod. It was also highly appropriate, since he should be considered infallible in his trek knowledge.
If you like Ogg, why don't you sell iPod 2nd generation on eBay by reason of "It doesn't play my favorite format", buy a player which can play natively instead of still using iPod and hacking its firmware?...If they don't enable ogg while everything is open and free to implement, they are sending a message. It is up to you and others to respond to that message by not buying it.
The overall reason people buy iPods and hack the firmware is because they like the iPod hardware (and size, looks etc), and wish it would do something else. What's wrong with that? We're all geeks here, and we're all attracted to the idea of making something good better. Either way, the reason *I* got an iPod was because I got it for free with my macbook with their "buy a mac, get a nano" promotion they had for college students last summer.
Since I can't replace my nano's firmware and get it to do what I want, I could sell it and buy a new one like you said, but I don't use an mp3 player enough to really care. Wouldn't have gotten one if it wasn't free. I might end up giving it away to a family member who has never heard of ogg.
I got an iPod nano 2nd generation when I bought my macbook, and I would really like to put rockbox on it because I have a lot of songs in vorbis format. Unfortunately Apple started encrypting their firmware in so that people can't easily replace them. I believe the same thing is true with most of the new iPods, not just the nanos, so be sure to check the rockbox site to make sure it's compatible before buying an iPod if you're counting on the vorbis compatibility.
You can't ask who created God, because creation (by the way we understand it) implies "time", a dimension that God Himself created.
That's pretty circular. If creation implies time (and it does), how can God "create" time before there was any?
The problem isn't that I disbelieve God's existence just because we can't scientifically prove it. It's that there's no reason to believe in God just to explain something we have no scientific knowledge of. That complicates things instead of simplifying it. "Where did all the matter in the universe come from?" I don't know the answer to that, but regardless of how difficult it is to conceive of one, it's even harder to imagine "where did a being capable of creating all the matter in the universe come from." If you have to stop going back at some point, might as well stop with the simplest case until you have reason to believe otherwise.
And if you have personal reasons to believe otherwise, there's nothing wrong with that. Just don't try to force it upon those who don't see it your way, and don't let anyone try to force their views on you. When you reach a point where nobody has evidence to prove one way or the other, it all comes down to personal preferences and beliefs, and it's absolutely senseless to be angry when someone just because they disagree. On the other hand, I find discussing these different views in an open-minded way a fun thing to do.
From 1947-1977 (the first half covered) the mean household income (adjusted for inflation) goes from $26,322 to $51,925. That's almost double the household income. From 1978-2005 (the second half), it goes from $54,764 to $73,304. That's a little more than a 1/3 increase. So the rate at which our income is increasing has dropped drastically.
Household income? I think that has a lot more to do with the increase of women entering the workforce in that period, rather than the income per person doubling.
When the person you're talking to finds something outrageous about you, do you think it isn't going to get around? Worse, let's say they are a rabid fundamentalist and find out about your Wiccan postings on the web. Sure, it isn't any of their business..
The only thing relevant in that entire discussion is that it's not any of their business. It's not ethical for a company to fire an employee to keep the business of a prejudiced client. This particular idiot is prejudiced against the Wiccan beliefs of this guy. The next client might be prejudiced against his race. What you do is respectfully tell the client to keep his beliefs isolated from business in the same way your employee is keeping his off-work activities away from work. If your client is not willing to do that, you say that you're very sorry that he's not willing to get past him and wish him good luck finding what he needs from your competitors. Tell him you'll welcome him back with open arms if he ever decides that the way your company conducts business is more important than the personal activities of an employee.
Can your employer afford this sort of nonsense? Not usually. So much so that if your off-hours activities affect you, your job or your employer in any way you are going to need to find a new job that didn't get burned.
If it's really the case that a company can't afford to do business ethically, then society is seriously fucked up and needs to change. And you can't accomplish this change by reinforcing your prejudiced crazy clients beliefs. Someone needs to tell them that their complaints about the behavior of people's privates lives to their bosses isn't accepted behavior.
Finally, if you think your off-hours activities have no effect on your job, what would you say about a cop that belongs to the KKK or other white power group and patrols a black inner city area during the day?
Same thing I'd say about a bus driver, a teacher, a stripper, or about anyone else belonging to the KKK. That they are racist fucks. And until the day when that particular cop proves that he's not doing his job correctly because he doesn't care about the black neighborhood, until the day the bus driver doesn't let a black person walk into the bus, until the day the teacher starts telling the students about her beliefs (or mistreats her non-white students), or the stripper refuses to give a lap dance to the black customer, they can keep their damn jobs. It's not illegal to be a racist fuck. I don't agree with them, and they're idiots, but they're entitled to their idiot opinions as long as they can keep it separated from their jobs.
We shouldn't need a private-sector solution. The government should be designing cites with far fewer left turns.
I know you're joking, but Brasilia was originally designed like that. The idea wasn't to eliminate the left wing (heh, heh...the city was also designed in a shape that resembles an airplane or bird from an aerial view, depending on who you ask), but to make traffic lights unnecessary. Didn't quite scale as the city grew, and there are traffic lights now, but the idea was awesome...
If a modern platformer came out that required that much camera babysitting, people would complain that it caused the game to be unplayable.
It's called Ninja Gaiden. The only reason it didn't quite reach "unplayable" status was because every single other thing about the game was just awesome. Either way, there were enough complaints about it that caused the re-release of essentially the exact same game (Ninja Gaiden Black + Sigma) with a few added bonuses and the ability to control the camera.
Haven't played Galaxy so I don't know what the state with that is, but I agree with you that playing Mario 64 today would annoy me to no end, regardless of how much fun I had with it back in the day.
The difference is we are talking about semiconductor devices. Losses from these semiconductor devices are primarily due to leakage and switching.
Ok. That really doesn't change anything.
As long as we're still using silicon, leakage will be roughly 0.5 V^2/R, no matter how much current you pump through the transistors.
What the hell do you mean, 'no matter how much current you pump through the transistors?' You gave me R for a reason. Here's where your formula comes from: P = V*I, I=V/R, transistor is only on 50% of the time (50% duty cycle). 0.5 * V * (V/R). I don't know R for that memory chip, nor do I know the current, so I don't know the power loss.
The power lost here is roughly 0.5 f C V^2, where f is the switching frequency and C is the capacitance (material dependent).
That comes from the reactive power, and it's actually 0.5 * 2*pi * f * C * V^2. The impedance of a capacitor is 1/(2*pi*f*C). Thus the power equation is the same equation as above, but the impedance of a purely resistive circuit was just R.
The V^2's means that reducing the voltage has a significant impact on losses.
Yes, but the voltage applied influences the current drawn, so it's not that current is irrelevant.
If we note that R and C are completely determined by the material (silicon) and the fabrication process
Which are pretty important variables. Do you know anything about the fabrication process of this new memory? Or the number of transistors? More transistors = more devices drawing power.
we can see that as long as the frequency is held constant, the voltage is a reasonable metric for comparing power consumption in silicon devices.
Also a very, very bad assumption, considering that the whole point of the thing seems to be that this memory can be clocked faster.
This occurred to me, as well. I wonder how each group would have done with some sort of characters that mean nothing to either group. Something like the transformers font, or those symbols on the predator's arm bomb thing...
I would expect humans to do even worse if they can't recognize the symbols. Yes, it might be that our need to recognize the number and assign a "name" for it would slow us down, but you can't turn this off by giving us something that we won't recognize. Instead, if we see a character we don't immediately recognize, we'll spend even *more* time trying to find patterns in it to try to categorize it as something we do recognize. Instead of thinking, "two", we'll think, "that sort of looks like a square with an infinity symbol in the middle and a diagonal slash...oh, it's gone."
Science is about testable theories and Occam's razor, which can indeded be applied to the "Religious concept", when applied to these, you come to the conclusion that these beliefs are empty being not testable in any way..
I'm not religious, but I take issue with that. There's no part of the scientific method that says that if things are not testable they cannot be true. You simply cannot apply the scientific method to something a hypothesis that offers no predictions, therefore it's not science, and shouldn't be treated as such (therefore ID in a science curriculum is a really bad thing). However, there's nothing that says that if a belief isn't scientific it is also not true. Why don't you try this statement on for size? "There is no phenomenon that cannot be explained by a science." You obviously believe it to be true (and so do I), but it's utterly untestable and it's not a scientific statement. Whenever you run into something that you can't currently explain you can always say, "we don't know how it works now, but as our scientific knowledge advances, we might figure it out" and move the goal posts just like the religious people keep doing when you offer scientific evidence that something they believed needed a god to occur actually doesn't.
I also take issue with your use of Occam's razor. A lot of people have this misunderstanding about it, but it does not state that, all things being equal, the simplest explanation is the correct one. It states that, all things being equal, the simplest explanation is more likely to be the correct one. That's not due to some magic of the universe that forces all things to be as simple as possible. It's simply due to a conscious logical choice. If you have two theories making the exact same predictions, why would you use the more complicated theory that makes more assumptions and contains more variables to come up with the same answer? There's more room for error in the more complicated theory, and the added complexity is, as far as you can tell from observation, unnecessary.
Of course, religious people don't like this and claim that Science cannot apply to their religious belief.
No, scientific people believe that. I can't come up with a single testable prediction out of a hypothesis that says that there's a god. I can pray for something to happen, but if he gets to decide whether or not he's going to answer my prayers, it's not repeatable. Therefore, it's not falsifiable and not a scientific theory. Similarly, you can't falsify the hypothesis that there's no god. By Occam's Razor, both "hypotheses" yield the exact same result (whatever I ask for in my prayers may or may not happen), and thus the addition of a God is an extra complexity that doesn't give you anything. That does not mean that we've proven God doesn't exist. It just means that there's no logical reason why you'd use the more complex theory if it doesn't give you any advantages.
Actually, I like to ask that of zealots all the time. My usual phrasing is "So, what caused the Big Bang?", or "What was there before the Big Bang?" The zealots I ask this of are of course scientists, or really simply people who hated going to church and want to piss off their parents...So, to turn your question back on yourself, "Where did the Big Bang come from? What were its origins?"
I don't know why the Big Bang happened. And I'm not ashamed to say that. I'd be ashamed if I told you with absolute certainty that "God did it," because I have no reason to be certain and it would be a lie. I would not be ashamed to tell you that I think God did it, or that I have faith God did it and I certainly don't think less of people who hold that belief. I just couldn't claim that I know for a fact my religion is right or claim that science must be wrong because science doesn't explain everything. Religion also doesn't explain everything and it fails to account for how the magical beings came to be.
Scientists don't use the Big Bang to explain how the universe was "created". That's a misconception held by people. The evidence merely strongly insinuates that the universe expanded from a very dense state to the state we know today. The expansion from that point on is the theory. What happened "before" is something for which we completely lack knowledge of. In fact, whether we can talk about what happened "before" at all is debatable, since it is possible that time itself was created with the Big Bang.
Therefore, when you ask a scientist "what caused the big bang?" or "what was there before the big bang?" they shouldn't feel like you've caught them at a contradiction of their beliefs. They'll answer, "I don't know." Religious scientists might believe God did it, but if they're reputable scientists they'll recognize that as being something of their faith, not something they should mix with science. If it's not falsifiable, it's not science. It may even be right, but it's not science.
I don't know why people must think of religion vs. science as a battle between good and evil, "evil" being whichever side you're not on. The logical thing to do is to believe the science where there is evidence to do so, and believe whatever makes your quality of life better where science doesn't have the answers. Don't tell me the Earth is flat, there's proof that's not the case. Don't tell me the Earth is 6,000 years old, there's proof that's not the case. You want to tell me that God was responsible for the creation of the universe? Fine, if believing that will make you live a happier life, then you most definitely should believe that (and you may even be right, I certainly can't prove you wrong there). Don't try to put that belief in a science curriculum. Not because it's not right, but because it's not science. In science, when you lack evidence, the answer is "I don't know."
Slashdot Mirror
The technologies you mentioned are hardly "solved problems." I even hesitate to call them "well-functioning." They sort of work, but there's a lot of room for improvement. OCR is practically worthless for anything that's not a computer font (yeah, new methods for reading captchas appear all the time, but new types of captchas get deployed which need a better OCR to read them in response...all the while, the letters can still be recognized by humans). Dictation software still runs into "Dear Aunt let's so double the killer delete select all" issues and text-to-speech still fails at reading paragraphs with proper inflections so that the text sounds natural.
I'd be ecstatic if just those technologies you mentioned reached human-level status in 20 years. Having a fully functional AI is out of the question. Computers can do many, many things better than humans, but humans are still light years ahead of the most powerful computers in other things. Can you listen to a song and isolate the sounds from a particular instrument? The human voices? Special effects in a movie as different from the music? Can you isolate what one person is saying in the middle of a crowded room by just honing in on their voice and filtering out the others? Can you switch to try to listen to somebody else by picking up their voice?
The human mind is an INCREDIBLE filter and processing computer for all the inputs we get. We're simply not anywhere close to duplicating that functionality.
<colbert>I accept your apology.</colbert>
Seriously though, I know UV is ionizing radiation. But when you recommended that he "walk outside on a sunny day" you were trying to use that to show that non-ionizing radiation isn't dangerous. That would be a flawed argument if that was all the data we have, because although you can find a correlation between sunlight exposure and cancer, you can't separate the ionizing from non-ionizing sunlight exposure from your data. You can say that blocking the UV light with sunscreen shows a decreased risk from cancer, but unless your sunscreen users have a zero-incidence of cancer, you can't say the non-ionizing exposure has no effect. You can merely conclude the ionizing is much worse.
Are you arguing that the sun happens to put out 0 (or near 0) radiation in the frequncies used by cell phones?I'm arguing that the sun's radiations at the frequencies used by cell phones, after they've been absorbed and scattered by magnetic fields and the earth's atmosphere, are at a lower power level than cell phones. Because if they weren't, I assume the sun's radiations would be jamming the cell phone transmissions.
Again, you should keep in mind that I'm not arguing cell phones are dangerous here. Like I said before, even this study says the increased risk goes from negligible to greater but still negligible. Nor am I arguing the non-ionizing radiation is causing cancer through the same mechanism as ionizing radiation. What I'm saying is that even if non-ionizing radiation can't directly damage your dna, how would you know that dielectric heating won't cause adverse effects that lead to cancer and tumors without performing the studies?
First, the sun does cause cancer. Just so you know, you should avoid getting too much direct sunlight. Wear sunscreen on exposed skin.
Second, frequency matters (which is why people are worried about the UV spectrum of sunlight, not the visible spectrum). The frequency is directly related to the energy of the electromagnetic wave. Now, I'm not a crackpot who thinks everyone should stop using cell phones and turn off their wireless routers, but it's just not as simple as, "studies are irrelevant, it's non-ionizing radiation, therefore it must be safe." The studies are important. So far, it looks like it's pretty harmless (at the power levels of cell phones and routers). A bunch of studies showing no correlation to cancer, and studies like this one showing an increased risk from almost zero to a higher number that is still almost zero. Still wouldn't have known that without the study.
We've been doing that for a quite a while. We use this energy to move metal. Specifically, we use it to move magnetized metal needles so they'll point north.
Although there's a lot of energy in earth's magnetic field, it's spread over a really large volume. The energy density isn't all that large, and you can't use it for much more than powering compasses. We're not going to stop the earth's core from spinning anytime soon by "tapping" into that. We're definitely not doing that before the earth's magnetic field flips again. When it does that, it's going to temporarily collapse, and all the bad things you're afraid of are going to happen anyway.
I think you misunderstood my argument. I didn't think you were anti-science. Your comment led me to believe you're a well-meaning guy who is concerned about the welfare of people who are less fortunate than you. I think you set your sights on the wrong problem though.
The reason so much R&D money is being spent in things like anti-aging and anti-obesity is because these are unsolved problems. The diseases listed in your wikipedia link are solved problems. If the economy in the third world countries catch up, they disappear. Dengue Fever, for example, is transmitted by mosquitoes. If you have the resources to invest in mosquito control, the problem disappears (such as the mosquito eradication program in the united states back in the 1960's, which is why we don't have a dengue problem here--the antiviral drug isn't necessary to end the disease). Most of those other diseases, such as parasites, also go away once people start living in more sanitary conditions. If you want examples of a disease that isn't as vain as "limp dicks" that gets plenty of R&D, just look at cancer. That problem can't be solved with by simply improving the economy, so there's a lot of R&D investment.
So the question is, why do those diseases still exist? Lack of resources. And if the R&D resources get shifted to solve those problems, the resources to pay for the newly found medicine will still be non-existent, and the "solution" won't get deployed. Case in point, AIDS medication. People with AIDS in the US can lead relatively normal lives with the available medication (ok, they still have their share of problems, but their life expectancy is significantly higher than it would be without the medication). In Africa, they can't afford it, because the patents make those medicines way too expensive to buy from the first-world pharmaceutical companies, and they can't produce it cheaply in those countries without paying the royalties to those same pharm companies. Your study, coming from the "Commission on Intellectual Property Rights" was a biased study designed to fight this particular criticism in favor of maximizing the amount of cash the pharmaceuticals get to squeeze out of their patents. The obvious flaw is that the same countries that DO respect patents, are those that can't afford the already existing drugs.
However, even those AIDS drugs aren't the solution to the problem. Again, that's another disease that mostly goes away with an improved economy and education. If you understand how AIDS is transmitted, you can completely avoid it (assuming the hospitals in your country check their donated blood and organs for diseases, as well as having the resources to keep their surgical instruments sterilized). That's why the united states has a significantly lower incidence of the disease even though people with it can live longer and therefore would be able to transmit it to more people over a longer period of time. Since the vast majority of people here understand how the disease is transmitted, and has access to condoms, the problem doesn't spread out of control.
What's wrong with that? The third world diseases you linked to are an economic problem, and no R&D is required to solve them. That's why those diseases are virtually non-existent in wealthy nations.
You might argue that we need to shift resources in order to help those people, but you can't argue that the direction of R&D research needs to shift. That wouldn't help, they'd still need the funds to deploy whatever cure they come up with.
I hear this a lot. You must not have had AT&T before you bought an iphone. I had cingular because between them and t-mobile, they were the most open carriers in the US. My nokia phone with cingular has bluetooth services that let me upload and download files to it and use it as a modem (so obviously it's not AT&T's fault that the only bluetooth service on the iphone is for headsets. Verizon crippled all their phones like that, with AT&T it's only the iPhone), it lets me upload mp3's and use any of them as ringtones (so obviously it's not AT&T's fault that you can only make ringtones out of iTunes-bought files--unless you have garage band and a mac).
Actually, they'd be stupid to take that course of action, even assuming aggressive behavior. The reason that as humans we've achieved so much is that we're social animals, despite all our aggressive instincts. The ability to cooperate can be advantageous to your survival.
Since we can assume these intelligent aliens can understand the benefits of cooperation, the only reason they'd have to destroy us would be the fear that we'll destroy them. If they shoot first, they run the risk of finding out the hard way that we're actually more advanced than they are. Retaliation will be a bitch.
If they are smart they'll spy on us first. If we're more advanced, they'll send a small party to communicate and try to establish contact, so they can gain knowledge about our technology. They won't tell us where their planet is located until they can trust us. If we kill the messengers, they stay hidden. If we're less advanced, they don't have anything to fear from us, they don't need to shoot first.
If they're aggressive, they'll enslave us. If they're reasonably non-aggressive, they'll collaborate with us. That leaves the case where we're all at about the same technological level. Then if they're overly aggressive or if we kill the messengers and if they can destroy us for sure in one shot, they should. If not, we figured out MAD ourselves a few decades back, right? Again, retaliation is a bitch.
When I looked into those rules, what I was told was that as long as time warner was carrying the non-hd versions of those channels in the clear, they were not doing anything illegal by encrypting the HD channels.
When I move, I'll be able to go the OTA route like you. I really wish there were HD tuners with cablecard compatibility that could be used with mythtv, but I don't think the powers that be will ever allow that.
Yeah, I have a mythtv box with an HDHomeRun but I'm living in an apartment building where the over-the-air channels are impossible to tune, and where time warner encrypts all of the hd channels except for the weather ones (they started encrypting basic channels soon after I got my hdhomerun too). I love my mythtv box, but it's useless for HD at the moment.
Which HD DVR do you have that doesn't encrypt the media files on the hard drive?
As I understand it, there's only a violation if that someone claims they can use ALL of the heat to do work (thermal efficiency of 1). If some heat is still being dispersed into a cooler temperature environment, it's still perfectly doable. After all, are you going to tell me you can't use waste heat from the ICE to heat up some water?
I'm not an expert in the subject (I'm an electrical engineer, so I've only gotten very basic freshman-level introductions to the laws of thermodynamics), but I think there's a well-known upper bound to how efficient recovery of heat to do work can be. Some googling led to wikipedia which tells me that upper bound is the efficiency of the Carnot Cycle. Apparently it's not quite possible to reach it, but you're not violating thermodynamics if you're below it.
By comparison, they say sales peaked at the year 2000. Wasn't that also about when Napster peaked?
Thanks. A comment from someone telling me that I actually made some sense is worth more to me than an arbitrary number anyway.
However, I think your going to burn for putting forth a false deity: TrekkieGod.Hah. One of my friends was actually using the TrekkiePope avatar for a short while. He might be in even more trouble, for actually worshiping the TrekkieGod. It was also highly appropriate, since he should be considered infallible in his trek knowledge.
The overall reason people buy iPods and hack the firmware is because they like the iPod hardware (and size, looks etc), and wish it would do something else. What's wrong with that? We're all geeks here, and we're all attracted to the idea of making something good better. Either way, the reason *I* got an iPod was because I got it for free with my macbook with their "buy a mac, get a nano" promotion they had for college students last summer.
Since I can't replace my nano's firmware and get it to do what I want, I could sell it and buy a new one like you said, but I don't use an mp3 player enough to really care. Wouldn't have gotten one if it wasn't free. I might end up giving it away to a family member who has never heard of ogg.
I got an iPod nano 2nd generation when I bought my macbook, and I would really like to put rockbox on it because I have a lot of songs in vorbis format. Unfortunately Apple started encrypting their firmware in so that people can't easily replace them. I believe the same thing is true with most of the new iPods, not just the nanos, so be sure to check the rockbox site to make sure it's compatible before buying an iPod if you're counting on the vorbis compatibility.
That's pretty circular. If creation implies time (and it does), how can God "create" time before there was any?
The problem isn't that I disbelieve God's existence just because we can't scientifically prove it. It's that there's no reason to believe in God just to explain something we have no scientific knowledge of. That complicates things instead of simplifying it. "Where did all the matter in the universe come from?" I don't know the answer to that, but regardless of how difficult it is to conceive of one, it's even harder to imagine "where did a being capable of creating all the matter in the universe come from." If you have to stop going back at some point, might as well stop with the simplest case until you have reason to believe otherwise.
And if you have personal reasons to believe otherwise, there's nothing wrong with that. Just don't try to force it upon those who don't see it your way, and don't let anyone try to force their views on you. When you reach a point where nobody has evidence to prove one way or the other, it all comes down to personal preferences and beliefs, and it's absolutely senseless to be angry when someone just because they disagree. On the other hand, I find discussing these different views in an open-minded way a fun thing to do.
Household income? I think that has a lot more to do with the increase of women entering the workforce in that period, rather than the income per person doubling.
The only thing relevant in that entire discussion is that it's not any of their business. It's not ethical for a company to fire an employee to keep the business of a prejudiced client. This particular idiot is prejudiced against the Wiccan beliefs of this guy. The next client might be prejudiced against his race. What you do is respectfully tell the client to keep his beliefs isolated from business in the same way your employee is keeping his off-work activities away from work. If your client is not willing to do that, you say that you're very sorry that he's not willing to get past him and wish him good luck finding what he needs from your competitors. Tell him you'll welcome him back with open arms if he ever decides that the way your company conducts business is more important than the personal activities of an employee.
Can your employer afford this sort of nonsense? Not usually. So much so that if your off-hours activities affect you, your job or your employer in any way you are going to need to find a new job that didn't get burned.If it's really the case that a company can't afford to do business ethically, then society is seriously fucked up and needs to change. And you can't accomplish this change by reinforcing your prejudiced crazy clients beliefs. Someone needs to tell them that their complaints about the behavior of people's privates lives to their bosses isn't accepted behavior.
Finally, if you think your off-hours activities have no effect on your job, what would you say about a cop that belongs to the KKK or other white power group and patrols a black inner city area during the day?Same thing I'd say about a bus driver, a teacher, a stripper, or about anyone else belonging to the KKK. That they are racist fucks. And until the day when that particular cop proves that he's not doing his job correctly because he doesn't care about the black neighborhood, until the day the bus driver doesn't let a black person walk into the bus, until the day the teacher starts telling the students about her beliefs (or mistreats her non-white students), or the stripper refuses to give a lap dance to the black customer, they can keep their damn jobs. It's not illegal to be a racist fuck. I don't agree with them, and they're idiots, but they're entitled to their idiot opinions as long as they can keep it separated from their jobs.
I know you're joking, but Brasilia was originally designed like that. The idea wasn't to eliminate the left wing (heh, heh...the city was also designed in a shape that resembles an airplane or bird from an aerial view, depending on who you ask), but to make traffic lights unnecessary. Didn't quite scale as the city grew, and there are traffic lights now, but the idea was awesome...
It's called Ninja Gaiden. The only reason it didn't quite reach "unplayable" status was because every single other thing about the game was just awesome. Either way, there were enough complaints about it that caused the re-release of essentially the exact same game (Ninja Gaiden Black + Sigma) with a few added bonuses and the ability to control the camera.
Haven't played Galaxy so I don't know what the state with that is, but I agree with you that playing Mario 64 today would annoy me to no end, regardless of how much fun I had with it back in the day.
Oh right, I'm an EE.
The difference is we are talking about semiconductor devices. Losses from these semiconductor devices are primarily due to leakage and switching.Ok. That really doesn't change anything.
As long as we're still using silicon, leakage will be roughly 0.5 V^2/R, no matter how much current you pump through the transistors.What the hell do you mean, 'no matter how much current you pump through the transistors?' You gave me R for a reason. Here's where your formula comes from: P = V*I, I=V/R, transistor is only on 50% of the time (50% duty cycle). 0.5 * V * (V/R). I don't know R for that memory chip, nor do I know the current, so I don't know the power loss.
The power lost here is roughly 0.5 f C V^2, where f is the switching frequency and C is the capacitance (material dependent).That comes from the reactive power, and it's actually 0.5 * 2*pi * f * C * V^2. The impedance of a capacitor is 1/(2*pi*f*C). Thus the power equation is the same equation as above, but the impedance of a purely resistive circuit was just R.
The V^2's means that reducing the voltage has a significant impact on losses.Yes, but the voltage applied influences the current drawn, so it's not that current is irrelevant.
If we note that R and C are completely determined by the material (silicon) and the fabrication processWhich are pretty important variables. Do you know anything about the fabrication process of this new memory? Or the number of transistors? More transistors = more devices drawing power.
we can see that as long as the frequency is held constant, the voltage is a reasonable metric for comparing power consumption in silicon devices.Also a very, very bad assumption, considering that the whole point of the thing seems to be that this memory can be clocked faster.
I would expect humans to do even worse if they can't recognize the symbols. Yes, it might be that our need to recognize the number and assign a "name" for it would slow us down, but you can't turn this off by giving us something that we won't recognize. Instead, if we see a character we don't immediately recognize, we'll spend even *more* time trying to find patterns in it to try to categorize it as something we do recognize. Instead of thinking, "two", we'll think, "that sort of looks like a square with an infinity symbol in the middle and a diagonal slash...oh, it's gone."
I'm not religious, but I take issue with that. There's no part of the scientific method that says that if things are not testable they cannot be true. You simply cannot apply the scientific method to something a hypothesis that offers no predictions, therefore it's not science, and shouldn't be treated as such (therefore ID in a science curriculum is a really bad thing). However, there's nothing that says that if a belief isn't scientific it is also not true. Why don't you try this statement on for size? "There is no phenomenon that cannot be explained by a science." You obviously believe it to be true (and so do I), but it's utterly untestable and it's not a scientific statement. Whenever you run into something that you can't currently explain you can always say, "we don't know how it works now, but as our scientific knowledge advances, we might figure it out" and move the goal posts just like the religious people keep doing when you offer scientific evidence that something they believed needed a god to occur actually doesn't.
I also take issue with your use of Occam's razor. A lot of people have this misunderstanding about it, but it does not state that, all things being equal, the simplest explanation is the correct one. It states that, all things being equal, the simplest explanation is more likely to be the correct one. That's not due to some magic of the universe that forces all things to be as simple as possible. It's simply due to a conscious logical choice. If you have two theories making the exact same predictions, why would you use the more complicated theory that makes more assumptions and contains more variables to come up with the same answer? There's more room for error in the more complicated theory, and the added complexity is, as far as you can tell from observation, unnecessary.
Of course, religious people don't like this and claim that Science cannot apply to their religious belief.No, scientific people believe that. I can't come up with a single testable prediction out of a hypothesis that says that there's a god. I can pray for something to happen, but if he gets to decide whether or not he's going to answer my prayers, it's not repeatable. Therefore, it's not falsifiable and not a scientific theory. Similarly, you can't falsify the hypothesis that there's no god. By Occam's Razor, both "hypotheses" yield the exact same result (whatever I ask for in my prayers may or may not happen), and thus the addition of a God is an extra complexity that doesn't give you anything. That does not mean that we've proven God doesn't exist. It just means that there's no logical reason why you'd use the more complex theory if it doesn't give you any advantages.
I don't know why the Big Bang happened. And I'm not ashamed to say that. I'd be ashamed if I told you with absolute certainty that "God did it," because I have no reason to be certain and it would be a lie. I would not be ashamed to tell you that I think God did it, or that I have faith God did it and I certainly don't think less of people who hold that belief. I just couldn't claim that I know for a fact my religion is right or claim that science must be wrong because science doesn't explain everything. Religion also doesn't explain everything and it fails to account for how the magical beings came to be.
Scientists don't use the Big Bang to explain how the universe was "created". That's a misconception held by people. The evidence merely strongly insinuates that the universe expanded from a very dense state to the state we know today. The expansion from that point on is the theory. What happened "before" is something for which we completely lack knowledge of. In fact, whether we can talk about what happened "before" at all is debatable, since it is possible that time itself was created with the Big Bang.
Therefore, when you ask a scientist "what caused the big bang?" or "what was there before the big bang?" they shouldn't feel like you've caught them at a contradiction of their beliefs. They'll answer, "I don't know." Religious scientists might believe God did it, but if they're reputable scientists they'll recognize that as being something of their faith, not something they should mix with science. If it's not falsifiable, it's not science. It may even be right, but it's not science.
I don't know why people must think of religion vs. science as a battle between good and evil, "evil" being whichever side you're not on. The logical thing to do is to believe the science where there is evidence to do so, and believe whatever makes your quality of life better where science doesn't have the answers. Don't tell me the Earth is flat, there's proof that's not the case. Don't tell me the Earth is 6,000 years old, there's proof that's not the case. You want to tell me that God was responsible for the creation of the universe? Fine, if believing that will make you live a happier life, then you most definitely should believe that (and you may even be right, I certainly can't prove you wrong there). Don't try to put that belief in a science curriculum. Not because it's not right, but because it's not science. In science, when you lack evidence, the answer is "I don't know."