"Simulations" sums it up. Just the word "simulations" is enough to suck up any conceivable amount of processing power they will ever have.
Folding@Home runs about a petaflop these days, so they're planning to build the equivalent of about 1,000 Folding@Homes. But Folding@Home is barely making a dent in the number of proteins scientists want to fold. Just this one existing simulation project could probably saturate the proposed exaflop computer.
What if they want to simulate battle field conditions? Surely the number of possible "moves" between millions of troops, with many possible sets of actions and equipment and hundreds of thousands of vehicles on any terrain on the planet represents a number of possibilities significantly greater than a game of chess, with it's mere 32 game pieces that can only act in turns in very strictly defined, non-linear ways on a 64-space game board. But depending on which mathematician you listen to, just the number of possible moves in chess might be in the vicinity of 10^10^50, or the much lesser 10^120. How much processing power would it take to "solve" chess? Well, by these estimates, if every atom in the entire universe were harnessed into a quantum computer, and it worked on the problem for the entire life of the universe, it wouldn't have time to finish solving the game.
An exaflop is nothing when it comes to simulation. Any competent group of college science students could probably propose simulation software that makes useful work for a yottaflop machine. And if they wanted to simulate something like evolution, they'd still have to use really high abstraction levels to simplify things enough to get any results within a human's lifespan. I wonder if a yottaflop can even simulate one insect at the molecular level in real time, much lessa mouse, or several organisms interacting with each other and their environment.
Back to the military: just accurately simulating the possible variations they might want to try to improve a single firearm might keep a computer like the one they propose busy for a long time. It's not a question of what they'd ever come up with to do with all that power, its a question of how to prioritize the countless project for which each of which could occupy all its time. Or to simplify, optimize, and abstract the problems they're working on enough to get results even with an exaflop to play with.
I agree with your breakdown of tasks, particularly their mixing up political, science, engineering, and just plain wishy-washy stuff. The line between science and engineering is vague, but they definitely tromp right over it and keep on going. When you achieve your scientific breakthrough and really understand the mechanisms, then you say "and the rest is just engineering." Engineering is stuff you can do with a bunch of bright, trained people following the established methods of the fields of engineering. It's the sort of stuff where you could solicit bids on a defined project and engineering companies would submit to meet your clearly defined criteria on a certain budget. GE's not about to bid on a job to "Reverse-engineer the brain." Building giant bridges, robotic manufacturing arms, and iPod Touches are engineering tasks. The Darpa Grand Challenge sort of straddles the line between engineering and science. Making nuclear fusion practical will undoubtedly require a lot of engineering, but only to build amazing apparatus- it's the science we need to do to figure out what those apparatus are that's the challenge. Only those three things you picked out could be done by engineers without requiring scientific breakthroughs, or politics, etc.
But wait a minute, the reason I'm commenting instead of just moding you up is that I disagree about the whole tree thing. Mature forests don't continue to sequester much carbon. The trees die, fall down, and rot, and the rotting releases most of the carbon back to the atmosphere. When the biomass of the forest reaches its peak, that's pretty much it for carbon sequestration. Yes, sometimes forests get buried and stuff, but you can't generally plan on that.
So the only way to really keep carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere using trees is to plant more and more acres of trees every year. I know the US was actually doing that for about a hundred years until corn ethanol subsidies reversed the trend and got farmers clear-cutting woods to grow more corn. But all that extra forest the US was growing every year for the past 100 years doesn't come close to sucking up the carbon we've been pumping out. And the future forecast, with a growing population, of continuing to radically increase the net forestation of the earth for many years to come is basically nil. And even if we did, there isn't enough surface area of the earth capable of supporting forest to offset our carbon emissions from coal and oil. We need something else to halt the growth of atmospheric carbon dioxide; sequestration, curbed emissions, or some combination.
I'm not qualified to assess the objectivity of his "damage index," but as he points out, a simple re-ordering of the data they actually presented is pretty convincing. You don't need his damage index at all, and his point stands. You can show damage vs. temperature representing both damage and temperature exactly the way the booster rocket team actually presented them at that meeting, and it's still convincing. Out of data from 46 launches, 8 had significant damage. Of those eight, five of them were in the seven coldest launches. None were in the 11 warmest launches. All three of the coldest launches had damage. With no attempt at all to categorize the severity of the damage, the a simple linear curve fit still shows a strong correlation between low temperature and damage.
Also, Tufte had interviewed people from both the management and engineering side who were at that meeting, and read notes and a summary of the meeting, and the analysis of the meeting from the Rogers Commission. The booster rocket engineers never presented their case in speech any more than they did in the graphs. They simply didn't have their information organized, in their graphs, in their talk, or in their heads. Any engineer or scientist should have been able to see that the point they were trying to convey was that launch temperature correlated to o-ring damage, and therefore they should show the correlation between launch temperature and o-ring damage, which they never really attempted to do in any way. Sure, management should have realized how disorganized their presentation was and sent them back to come up with some organized data, but it was the engineers job to present the case that they had a legitimate concern, and they completely failed to do so, despite having in their hands all the evidence they needed.
I don't have my copy of Visual Explanations handy, but I've read it and I was at a talk Tufte gave on this subject, and my recollection of it is rather different. Without directly criticizing Feynman, Tufte actually comes up with a significantly superior analysis of the root cause of the disaster. Feynman spread he blame around many places, finding bad science, bad engineering, inaccurate statistics, poor procedures and documentation, politics influencing design, and most importantly and famously, a disconnect between management and engineering leading to overconfidence. Everything he found is right. But Tufte took the analysis one step further and came up with a completely convincing "one point where it all went wrong." That point was the inability of the booster rocket contractor's team to effectively present information.
The day before the Challenger's final launch, the team that designed and manufactured the booster rockets called Mission Control and said that they thought the launch should be aborted because an O-ring on a booster would be likely to give out due to cold and cause the Challenger to explode. This team was not previously known for being overly cautious; in the previous history of the shuttle program, they had never before recommended aborting a mission. The next day, the challenger launched and the booster rocket blew up exactly the way the team that made it said it would.
This seems like an inconceivable oversight on the part of Mission Control. When the team that designed the rocket told them it was going to blow up, how could they possibly go ahead and launch? The hubris, the pride, the thick-headed showmanship.
Well, Tufte dug into this and found out exactly what happened. Mission control told the rocket team to prepare a presentation about why they thought it would go wrong. The team did so and presented that to Mission Control. Tufte interviewed many people about the specifics of that meeting and actually managed to reassemble the original slides shown during the talk. And anyone viewing the information presented by the booster rocket team to Mission Control will have trouble faulting Mission Control, because the presentation was absolutely incomprehensible.
The booster rocket team's argument was supposed to be that for each previous launch, the amount of subsequent damage found in the O-rings was inversely proportional to the temperature at launch. They had all the data. They were all scientists and engineers. Tufte used their data to construct a graph of O-ring damage vs. launch temperature. Showing that graph and the weather forecast for the launch day to anyone in charge would have gotten the mission cancelled in a second. But the team, that was there to argue that low temperatures correlated with O-ring damage, never presented a single intelligible piece of data demonstrating that, even though they had all that data with them. Instead, they showed a chart of O-ring damage vs. launch date, and another chart several pages later with temperature vs. launch date.
I've read Adventures of a Curious Character and have the utmost respect for Feynman. Every problem Feynman outlined in his analysis was a real problem that NASA should fix. But none of it really pinpointed the exact cause of the disaster. Feynman mostly chalks the failure to postpone launch to management's disconnect from engineering, from their mistakes and lack of understanding and therefore overestimating the safety of the shuttle. This puts the blame in the wrong place. The managers were no where near being so overconfident that when the engineers who designed the part that failed knew it would probably fail in exactly that way and tried to halt the launch, they'd just brush them aside and go ahead with it. They listened carefully; the engineers had data that would make a great case, but it was presented so incompetently that no one at that meeting would have thought they had a case at all, they simply appeared to be overly cautious, because they did not present any data demonstrating their point.
I like the analysis of Lawyer's contributions to this sort of disaster here:
lawyers; because they see only the legal aspects of any issue, they are prone to do great harm... in pursuit of insignificant legal points
The lawyers think- "Having these documents out is bad. But we could bring a legal challenge to their availability. If having them out is bad, it stands to reason that having a chance to try to get them back in is good."
It almost sounds reasonable, like the government's standard (and always grossly incorrect) estimate of increased tax receipts following a tax hike by multiplying the new rate by people's current reported income almost sounds reasonable.
What these companies need is some management oversight. Before launching a new PR campaign, most companies have a standard procedure of running it past the lawyers. But they should also be doing the opposite; when the lawyers come and say "hey, we could sue this small public-interest nonprofit into oblivion, which would undoubtedly accomplish halting the spread of this information on the internet," management should run that past PR and IT before implementing it.
The US should push for Cuban property to be given (or sold) to the Cuban population.
Effecting lasting vestment by the people is a matter of a functioning ongoing system more so than a matter of initial distribution. You bring up the Russian example. Russia actually had one of the most successful programs ever instituted to privatize their industry by giving it to the people.
Russia gave every citizen a voucher that could be used in auctions to bid upon state enterprises being privatized. There was a free market in these vouchers. Any group of people could band together to pool their vouchers to buy their portion of previously state-run industry and own it privately. Or they could sell their vouchers and get significant real value for them, and use that for whatever they needed it for. Either way, everyone got their share. The division of state run enterprises went very well for a while. Sure, too many enterprises were dolled out directly to the powerful and connected and bypassed the voucher auctions, but otherwise, it was a pretty good system.
The reason it didn't end up working was due to a lack of rule of law and to corruption, not a failure to give the property to the Russian population. Many foreign investors flocked to Russia to capitalize on their underpaid but highly educated population. Many people used their voucher money to start their own small businesses. Groups of people who pooled their vouchers tried to run the industries they bought.
But people in power took it all away; from the foreign investors, and from the local Russian population. If you wanted to get your raw materials imported, or keep your electricity on, or get work permits, or pass inspections, or have access to markets- it all required too many bribes to stay in business. In some instances, people with guns just came in and took everything. You can't have functioning capitalism if you don't have free competition, but instead have thugs come and take the profits from anyone who's successful.
A fair initial distribution of property in the privatization process is important, but as Russia has shown us, it is far from sufficient to ensure any kind of equality or lasting vestment for the people. The most important thing for giving people a fair shot is to weed out the corruption and follow rule of law.
You can hire any reputable consulting firm to have a bunch of economists and MBA's draw up a relatively efficient and equitable market based allocation program for privatizing state resources to the people. Unfortunately, it is much harder to take a system riddled with endemic corruption and full of powerful people used to ruling like czars and transform that into a system dominated by honesty and law. There is no easy prescription for this transformation; weeding out corruption is riddled with tricky political, psychological, social, and economic dilemmas to which there is no straight-forward solution.
I'll concede that Microsoft has written very little good software, and that they acquired a lot of their key assets by buying them out.
But Bill Gates isn't the richest man in the world because he was lucky to be in the right place at the right time, he's the richest man in the world because he had a critical and profound insight into the inevitable future of software and firmly went about placing himself in the business of profiting from that.
Of many important things he saw coming, he saw the standardized software platform. Previously, every operating system and program was written for a specific hardware platform, and by "hardware platform" I don't mean something like x86, I mean each individual model of computer. Buy a new computer, write a new operating system for it. Bill saw the future; the abstraction layers, the SDK's, the compatibility, the standards. And he had a vision to create and profit from the creation of the first cross-platform software. Not really cross-platform, but the idea of having a platform at all.
Listen to this Bill Gates speech from 1989, and you'll see the grasp he had on the future of the computer industry, and how he put himself in the middle of it. I'm sure dozens or hundreds of other computer users and especially researchers at universities saw all of this compatibility coming too, but they didn't take action to place themselves at the commercial center of this transformation.
There was luck, of course. I think the biggest streak of luck Microsoft had was the incompetence of their competitors. Commodore insanely mismanaged Amiga. IBM practically intentionally killed OS2, an operating system Bill Gates had already concluded was going to become the default standard until he saw IBM botching it and came in and swept the market out from under them with the radically inferior early Windows. Apple's products were always on-again off-again, alternatively brilliant and then disappointing, and always expensive. So Gates had help from the incompetence and mistakes of the competition. But by no means did he stumble into the right place at the right time; he saw exactly what it was the right time for, and aggressively put himself in the right place.
Self-awareness may turn out to be a property that self-organizes and arises without any special prodding from us; that would be marvelous, not to mention fortuitous, but hardly impossible - again, that's how nature did it. I call 3 billion years of dying when your brain didn't work well enough "special prodding." We did not spring full-formed from the mind of god. We came through an extremely long and painful process of trillions of deaths, deaths which in enough circumstances could be avoided through a better internal model of the environment, better insight, better reaction time, etc. that fortuitously lead to a survival advantage for intelligence in certain niches. It's neither spontaneous nor self-organizing. It's randomly organized in countless horrible, useless variations, until one in a thousand, million, or billion random differences happens to make it better instead of worse, and gets passed on.
I looks like they're trying to make up the difference for any losses they had on that before they caught their mistake through their pricing on SD/CF Adapters.
Oh come on, why are there 18 comments and no one's done this yet? Do I have to do everything myself? Let's get it out of the way:
_____________________________
That idiotic dumb-ass judge wouldn't know a good judicial decision if it bit him in his lame-ass ass. Where did he go to judge-school anyway, The Universduhity of Dumbasia?
I see it came from California. Everyone knows everybody in California is a stupid liberal anyway with their stupid activist liberal judges who just do whatever their retarded Governator tells them to do. Retards. Someone should shoot them all, wouldn't that be ironic? Here they all go crying "free speech, free speech," and then they get shot? Well, if you don't see the irony, then you're even dumber than that retarted freakin judge.
_____________________________
OK, now mod it + funny, - troll and we can be done with it.
I use Yahoo Shopping, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Answers, and Yahoo TV. Maybe there are better alternatives, but I like all of those. Oh, and sometimes the new Yahoo Maps does a better job than Google Maps or the new Mapquest.
I will be very disappointed if the sale goes through, because I don't do business with Microsoft, and will have to find alternatives to all of these.
I wonder how many people like me boycott Microsoft? If it's many, it won't be good for Yahoo's services. Microsoft has a history of running crappy, unpopular competitors to many of Yahoo's services. It strikes me as a bad investment when a company that's proved it's bad and unsuccessful at something plans to buy and manage a more-successful competitor. That doesn't sound like the market moving resources to higher value. It may be higher-value for Microsoft, because they don't give a crap about the future prospects of what Yahoo's built, they're just willing to barf out any amount of cash to make it look like Google doesn't dominate over them in online services as much as it does. But I think that, while it might be worth it to Microsoft, the net value of Yahoo's assets will depreciate under the mismanagement of Microsoft, and that Microsoft stock does not have a favorable outlook now. I think Yahoo's board would be smart to reject the offer, despite the price premium.
You're right that if a third party started to draw off supporters from one of the two major parties, it would kill both that major party and the upstart party. For example, Ralph Nader and the Greens draw almost exclusively from the Democrats, and the Constitution Party draws almost exclusively from the Republicans, and if either of them were to somehow get relatively big and successful, they'd kill their host party, while still not being big enough to get anywhere themselves.
But you're ignoring the possibility of a third party that draws support from both major parties.
You can't really have a new centrist party that compromises between Democrats and Republicans, because both the Republicrats and the Democrans have raced to center so effectively that there isn't any room between them for another party. But what about a third party with a mix of less centrist views, some of which appeal to members of one party and some to members of the other? I submit that both the Libertarians and Socialist parties are these kinds of parties. They both draw support from both sides of the isle these days. Now in reality, Republicans are so allergic to the word "socialism" that they'd never admit to being for any aspect of it, but the Religious Right's drive for social control mechanisms is very socialistic, as is the National ID, warrant-less surveillance society NeoCons want. Don't get me wrong; I don't think a party with predominantly socialist views in the US has any chance of drawing significant support, and I hope I'm right. But if they did, is it really clear where that support would be coming from?
Big picture: Traditionally in this country, Republicans are in favor of social controls and economic freedom, and Democrats are on favor of social freedom and economic controls. Libertarians are in favor of both social and economic freedom, and socialists are in favor of both social and economic controls. Either party should theoretically be able to draw support from either the Democrats or the Republicans, depending on which issues people find most important.
Take a look at Ron Paul. People call him ultra-conservative, and I've heard a lot of jokes about how "no one can be to the right of Ron Paul." I wonder which of his party-line ultra-conservative platform planks they're referring to - wanting to legalize illegal drugs? Legalize prostitution? Get out of Iraq immediately and avoid foreign entanglements in the future? Repeal the Patriot Act? Keep the federal government out of the abortion issue?
Yes, Ron Paul does also have a lot of standpoints that would appeal to hard-line conservatives, but that's my point, his standpoints based on individual liberty include viewpoints that are in line with - and other viewpoints that are entirely contrary to - both hard line Republicans and hard line Democrats. I don't see why it's so clear that Libertarians or Socialists would take votes overwhelmingly from one party.
Because he's running as a Republican this time, and the media (when bothering to mention him at all) wants to make him out to be an extremist (which he is, IMHO), they carelessly cast him as ultra-conservative. If he were running as a democrat, with all the same policy standpoints, they would just as carelessly be brushing him aside as ultra-liberal. What he really is is ultra-pro-personal-freedom, which is not inline with being either conservative or liberal in the US these days.
This is a statutory monopoly. Some people may argue it's a statutory monopoly only because it would be a natural monopoly anyway, so the distinction doesn't matter. I disagree. But we couldn't really know whether or not internet connectivity is a natural monopoly or not unless we were to try repealing the laws making these utilities statutory monopolies.
"The number of companies looking to sell them to private consumers has increased by as much as 33 percent in the last week alone... while last year there were two commercial rocket-belt manufacturers... there are now three."
Going from two to three would be a 50% increase, not "as much as 33 percent"
Almost any question we asked about the specifics of the rail gun, he wouldn't answer, no matter how much we bugged him about it. Velocity being chief among them. You know, something about national security clearance blah blah blah.
However, he did give us a test question that started with something like:
"Assume a rail gun fires a [whatever specifications] projectile at 0.001 c."
I think that's the velocity he gave on the question, it was a long time ago. Whether that's even remotely possible or in the correct vicinity or not I have no idea. It was probably just a joke on us, I can't imagine he'd risk using any number that was remotely accurate.
One other interesting tidbit he told us is that it fired a non-conductive plastic like ball. Everything I've seen written on rail guns online seems to contradict this design possibility, they require a conductive ball that conducts the current between the plates. He didn't get into a lot of specifics, but said this rail gun used a non-conductive low-mass ball about the size of a pool ball. He had some further explanation of how it worked with a non-conductive ball and mentioned it wasn't the conventional conception of a rail-gun, but unfortunately, I didn't know enough about rail guns or physics to be interested enough to bother understanding it all then when it was just an aside. I hadn't realized at the time that this was very unconventional information that I should be taking notes on.
I had a physics teacher who used to work at Los Alamos who did some consulting for the military on the side. In the late 80's/early 90's, they had him evaluate the results of some rail-gun tests. They were shooting a small ball projectile at tanks. The projectile left a perfectly round smooth bored hole all the way through the tank, wherever it was fired. The military wanted to know if they could use this to disable things (fire through the engine block) without destroying other things (people, electronics, paperwork, whatever) inside.
In evaluating it, they found that the internal air temperature flashed to something really high (like an oven) in the microsecond the ball travelled through, and that the vaporized steel from the first surface of the tank would kill everyone in the compartment.
It brings home what kind of speeds we're talking about here.
I'm waiting until they start listing the speeds of rail guns in terms of [decimal]c. Full of relativistic goodness. Of course, if they're only at Mach 8, they've got a way to go. The X-15 was near mach 7 and the scramjet tests have hit mach 10, and I'm sure those were more massive than the rail gun's projectiles.
Hey- I'm not a doctor, but I just wanted to mention something you should look into if you haven't- make sure the possibility of your father having NPH has been excluded. I mention it because the early-onset age for Alzheimer's and the slow walking thing are consistent with NPH, and NPH is almost always misdiagnosed as either Parkinson's or Alzheimer's. Also, NPH can be surgically remedied- although NPH causes brain-damage, and only a limited and widely varying degree of lost function can be restored following surgery, but it can stop the disease from progressing. If your Dad hasn't been screened for NPH, you should look into this. Screening starts with an MRI, and if the MRI appears symptomatic, then there's an (unfortunately arduous) positive testing procedure he can go through.
My Dad was diagnosed with both Parkinsons and Alzeheimer's, both early onset. I found NPH online and we asked his neurologist about it. It turns out his neurologist in an NPH specialist, and he hadn't screened my Dad for it, and it turned out my Dad had an unambiguously severe case of NPH. After the surgery, his walking recovered dramatically, he got back about 4-5 years of decline. Unfortunately, while he also improved significantly mentally, he's since lost it again. But he probably really has advanced Parkinsons in addition to NPH. A few years later, and his walking is still better than before the surgery.
I agree that I don't understand the super obsession with size (size doesn't matter, right?) but clearly to some people it does. I guess that, as a luxury product, it's just cool and sexy to have something really sleek and thin.
To me, the Thinkpad looks like a better laptop than the Macbook Air, because it's got an optical drive, three USB ports instead of one, built-in ethernet, and a faster processor. But why even compare these two laptops, instead of comparing a Macbook or Macbook Pro to whatever model of competing Thinkpads there are, unless size is one of your primary criteria? If size wasn't a primary consideration, you shouldn't be shopping for or comparing either of these two laptops, because you'd get more laptop for your money in something that isn't aimed specifically at being tiny.
And for those for whom it's all about size, the Apple's graduated to a different league than this Thinkpad. They're about the same footprint, but the Air tapers from.16" to.76", where the Thinkpad tapers from.73" to.92". The Air's thickest part is almost as thin as the Thinkpad's thinnest part. Assuming they're both 9" deep and that the cross-sectional area of these laptops were right trapezoids, which they're not quite, the Macbook's cross sectional area is 4.14 square inches, and the Thinkpad's is 7.43. It's a big difference.
Again, it's a difference that I, and probably most people on Slashdot don't really care about, but apparently some people do, and as I said, why compare ultra-slim notebooks at all if you aren't going to give them points for how ultra-slim they are? If there weren't a lot of people in the US willing to pay a thousand or more dollars extra for something slightly slimmer, Dynamism wouldn't have been around for all these years.
I think the lack of ports on the Air are a huge drawback, but I think it's Apple's attempt to start dragging us into a wireless future, and it's a future I don't think technology's ready for now, but will be in a few years. Once there's a decent wireless peripheral interface with broad support (wireless USB or whatever), and there's wireless charging, and maybe some new batteries that last much longer and last for many more recharging cycles, they can just make 0-port hermetically sealed laptops. That would be a cool future. I'd also want my Wi-Fi integrated such that it's functional at the BIOS level, so one could do OS upgrades and netboot and emergency recovery over WIFI. Apple's trying to nudge us this way, and so to them it's a "feature" that they took nearly all the ports off the computer, although it's a feature that would currently make my world a much more difficult one.
This new Thinkpad isn't trying to be visionary, and it isn't radically thinner. It's just the regular old incremental improvement, not much different in magnitude from the past 10 generations of thin Thinkpads in how much different it is from its predecessors. While I personally prefer its specs over the Air's, I prefer nearly any new Laptop's specs over the Air's, and I'm surprised people consider it news, because it looks to me like the slightly smaller, slightly faster future we're all used to on notebook revisions, while the Air was a much smaller, intentionally low-on-ports different vision of the suture that is sort of newsworthy.
Text on screen: "In 1970, the British Empire
lay in ruins, and foreign nationalists frequented the streets - many
of them Hungarian (not the streets - the foreign nationals). Anyway,
many of these Hungarians went into tobacconists' shops to buy cigarettes..."
A Hungarian tourist (John Cleese) approaches the
clerk (Terry Jones). The tourist is reading haltingly from a phrase
book.
Hungarian: "I will not buy this record, it
is scratched."
Clerk: "Sorry?"
Hungarian: "I will not buy this record, it
is scratched."
Clerk: "Uh, no, no, no. This is a tobacconist's."
Hungarian: "Ah! I will not buy this *tobacconist's*,
it is scratched."
Clerk: "No, no, no, no. Tobacco... um...
cigarettes." (holds up a pack)
Hungarian: "Ya! See-gar-ets! Ya! Uh... my
hovercraft is full of eels."
Clerk: "Sorry?"
Hungarian: "My hovercraft..." (pantomimes
puffing a cigarette) "... is full of eels." (pretends to strike
a match)
Clerk: "Ahh, matches!"
Hungarian: "Ya! Ya! Ya! Ya! Do you waaaaant... do you waaaaaant... to come back to my place, bouncy-bouncy?"
Clerk: "Here, I don't think you're using that
thing right."
Hungarian: "You great poof."
Clerk: "That'll be six and six, please."
Hungarian: "If I said you had a beautiful body,
would you hold it against me? I... I am no longer infected."
Clerk: "Uh, may I, uh..." (takes phrase
book, flips through it) "... Costs six and six... ah, here we
are." (speaks weird Hungarian-sounding words)
Hungarian punches the clerk. Meanwhile, a policeman
(Graham Chapman) on a quiet street cups his ear as if hearing a cry
of distress. He sprints for many blocks and finally enters the tobacconist's.
Cop: "What's going on here then?"
Hungarian: "Ah. You have beautiful thighs."
Cop: (looks down at himself) "WHAT?!?"
Clerk: "He hit me!"
Hungarian: "Drop your panties, Sir William;
I cannot wait 'til lunchtime." (points at clerk)
Cop: "RIGHT!!!" (drags Hungarian away
by the arm)
Hungarian: (indignantly) "My nipples explode
with delight!"
Scene switches to a courtroom. Characters are all
in powdered wigs and judicial robes, except publisher and cop.
Characters: Judge - Terry Jones; Bailiff - Eric
Idle; Lawyer - John Cleese; Cop - Graham Chapman; Publisher - Michael
Palin.
Bailiff: "Call Alexander Yalt!" (voices
sing out the name several times)
Judge: "Oh, shut up!"
Bailiff: (to publisher) "You are Alexander
Yalt?"
Publisher: (in a sing-songy voice) "Oh, I am."
Bailiff: "Skip the impersonations. You are
Alexander Yalt?"
Publisher: "I am."
Bailiff: "You are hereby charged that on the
28th day of May, 1970, you did willfully, unlawfully, and with malice
of forethought, publish an
You're claiming that "clone" is a homophone and I'm confusing two words with entirely different meanings because they sound the same. Or if not homophones, that I'm at least confusing different definitions of the same word. For your example of "speaker," Dictionary.com lists four definitions, and you make reference to two of the different meanings given there in your example.
However, you have entirely misapplied this in my case. I am using exactly the same, precisely defined, scientific definition of the word "clone," and you are wrong in claiming I'm trying to "compare scientific things based on linguistics." I'm comparing scientific things based upon science, and using the accurate scientific word for both things used with the exact same definition.
I'm quite curious what it is that you think "clone" means. Here are some examples of what it actually means. Note that they all apply to both the cloned animal and apple case.
From Dictionary.com: "a cell, cell product, or organism that is genetically identical to the unit or individual from which it was derived."
From Wikipedia: "In horticulture and biology, any organism whose genetic information is identical to that of a 'mother organism' from which it was created."
From Merriam Webster: "the aggregate of genetically identical cells or organisms asexually produced by a single progenitor cell or organism"
From University of Texas' Life Sciences Dictionary: "A population of cells all descended from a single cell."
From McGraw-Hill's Access Science: "Cloning
The asexual creation of a genetic copy, a capability possessed by plants but not by most animals. Thus, plants generate genetic copies spontaneously, and rooting "cuttings" is widely used by horticulturists to propagate millions of clones annually. In animals, only some lower invertebrates can be cloned by "cutting"; for example, earthworms when bisected will regenerate the missing half, resulting in two whole, genetically identical individuals. However, asexual reproduction and cloning do not normally occur in vertebrates except for the special case of identical twinning. This is despite the fact that individual cells, called blastomeres, within the very early embryo are totipotent; that is, each is capable, if evaluated on its own, of developing into a viable term pregnancy and infant."
I see in the Access Science entry, and other places, what I think is confusing you: there certainly are many different ways cloning can occur. That doesn't mean I'm using the word wrong. It's as if I said that both Bill Clinton and Pervez Musharraf became leaders of their countries, and you said I'm wrong because they came to power in different ways. While you're right there are distinctions to be made in different ways of "becoming leaders," and different methods of making "clones," I am entirely correct in calling both animal and plant clones "clones," just as I'm entirely correct in calling both Clinton and Musharraf "leaders." And it's the same definition of "clone" and "leader." The ability to draw further distinctions does not mean they don't both meet the same greater definition. You are trying to draw semantic distinctions that do not exist.
I don't even know what word you're looking for. "Artificial Cloning" doesn't apply, because they're both artificial: those Apple trees do not make natural clones, they are grafted artificially by people, usually onto foreign rootstock. Apples have their own natural method of procreation, which is trees sprouting from the seeds inside Apples, that we bypass entirely to create the artificial man-made c
Apples don't breed true. All commercial apples are clones. Every apple of a "variety" is a clone, unless it's one that came off the first tree ever that they used to found a new variety.
Not only are they clones, but they're the "bad" kind of "adult" clones that inherit genetic damage. If you're against cloned food, never eat anything with apples in it.
Some non-cloned, non-varietal mutt apples are pretty good, it's just hit-or-miss. If you're opposed to cloning, you can grow your own apples. Just plant the seeds from any apple and see what you get.
This a new Apple product. You could probably hold your breath during the wait for Griffin, Belkin, Kensington or somebody to release an external battery pack that connects to the magsafe port and gives you a bunch of additional battery life. Then it'll be about another 15-minutes until there's a Chinese knockoff of that product on ebay.
You'd better hurry and order the laptop and the extra battery soon though, Apple will probably release an even better laptop in a few days.
Seriously though, the Macbook Pro is due for an update anytime now.
This is actually really pioneering - I didn't see it before, but now it's clear - Sony is transforming itself into an entirely new kind of entertainment company. Instead of a company that sells entertaining media, they are becoming a company that provides entertainment to people directly through executing ludicrous business strategies that make us all collectively laugh out a giant OMG! WTF?
What comes next? Another incompatible proprietary format? Once branch of the company suing another again? Their most anticipated and highly promoted new product suffering months of production delays, shortfalls, and finally no demand? More exploding batteries? We'll all be kept on the edge of our seats wondering what hilarity or calamity will befall them (or their customers) next. Sony's taking the already popular "reality entertainment" to the next level.
Slashdot Mirror
"Simulations" sums it up. Just the word "simulations" is enough to suck up any conceivable amount of processing power they will ever have.
Folding@Home runs about a petaflop these days, so they're planning to build the equivalent of about 1,000 Folding@Homes. But Folding@Home is barely making a dent in the number of proteins scientists want to fold. Just this one existing simulation project could probably saturate the proposed exaflop computer.
What if they want to simulate battle field conditions? Surely the number of possible "moves" between millions of troops, with many possible sets of actions and equipment and hundreds of thousands of vehicles on any terrain on the planet represents a number of possibilities significantly greater than a game of chess, with it's mere 32 game pieces that can only act in turns in very strictly defined, non-linear ways on a 64-space game board. But depending on which mathematician you listen to, just the number of possible moves in chess might be in the vicinity of 10^10^50, or the much lesser 10^120. How much processing power would it take to "solve" chess? Well, by these estimates, if every atom in the entire universe were harnessed into a quantum computer, and it worked on the problem for the entire life of the universe, it wouldn't have time to finish solving the game.
An exaflop is nothing when it comes to simulation. Any competent group of college science students could probably propose simulation software that makes useful work for a yottaflop machine. And if they wanted to simulate something like evolution, they'd still have to use really high abstraction levels to simplify things enough to get any results within a human's lifespan. I wonder if a yottaflop can even simulate one insect at the molecular level in real time, much lessa mouse, or several organisms interacting with each other and their environment.
Back to the military: just accurately simulating the possible variations they might want to try to improve a single firearm might keep a computer like the one they propose busy for a long time. It's not a question of what they'd ever come up with to do with all that power, its a question of how to prioritize the countless project for which each of which could occupy all its time. Or to simplify, optimize, and abstract the problems they're working on enough to get results even with an exaflop to play with.
I agree with your breakdown of tasks, particularly their mixing up political, science, engineering, and just plain wishy-washy stuff. The line between science and engineering is vague, but they definitely tromp right over it and keep on going. When you achieve your scientific breakthrough and really understand the mechanisms, then you say "and the rest is just engineering." Engineering is stuff you can do with a bunch of bright, trained people following the established methods of the fields of engineering. It's the sort of stuff where you could solicit bids on a defined project and engineering companies would submit to meet your clearly defined criteria on a certain budget. GE's not about to bid on a job to "Reverse-engineer the brain." Building giant bridges, robotic manufacturing arms, and iPod Touches are engineering tasks. The Darpa Grand Challenge sort of straddles the line between engineering and science. Making nuclear fusion practical will undoubtedly require a lot of engineering, but only to build amazing apparatus- it's the science we need to do to figure out what those apparatus are that's the challenge. Only those three things you picked out could be done by engineers without requiring scientific breakthroughs, or politics, etc.
But wait a minute, the reason I'm commenting instead of just moding you up is that I disagree about the whole tree thing. Mature forests don't continue to sequester much carbon. The trees die, fall down, and rot, and the rotting releases most of the carbon back to the atmosphere. When the biomass of the forest reaches its peak, that's pretty much it for carbon sequestration. Yes, sometimes forests get buried and stuff, but you can't generally plan on that.
So the only way to really keep carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere using trees is to plant more and more acres of trees every year. I know the US was actually doing that for about a hundred years until corn ethanol subsidies reversed the trend and got farmers clear-cutting woods to grow more corn. But all that extra forest the US was growing every year for the past 100 years doesn't come close to sucking up the carbon we've been pumping out. And the future forecast, with a growing population, of continuing to radically increase the net forestation of the earth for many years to come is basically nil. And even if we did, there isn't enough surface area of the earth capable of supporting forest to offset our carbon emissions from coal and oil. We need something else to halt the growth of atmospheric carbon dioxide; sequestration, curbed emissions, or some combination.
I'm not qualified to assess the objectivity of his "damage index," but as he points out, a simple re-ordering of the data they actually presented is pretty convincing. You don't need his damage index at all, and his point stands. You can show damage vs. temperature representing both damage and temperature exactly the way the booster rocket team actually presented them at that meeting, and it's still convincing. Out of data from 46 launches, 8 had significant damage. Of those eight, five of them were in the seven coldest launches. None were in the 11 warmest launches. All three of the coldest launches had damage. With no attempt at all to categorize the severity of the damage, the a simple linear curve fit still shows a strong correlation between low temperature and damage.
Also, Tufte had interviewed people from both the management and engineering side who were at that meeting, and read notes and a summary of the meeting, and the analysis of the meeting from the Rogers Commission. The booster rocket engineers never presented their case in speech any more than they did in the graphs. They simply didn't have their information organized, in their graphs, in their talk, or in their heads. Any engineer or scientist should have been able to see that the point they were trying to convey was that launch temperature correlated to o-ring damage, and therefore they should show the correlation between launch temperature and o-ring damage, which they never really attempted to do in any way. Sure, management should have realized how disorganized their presentation was and sent them back to come up with some organized data, but it was the engineers job to present the case that they had a legitimate concern, and they completely failed to do so, despite having in their hands all the evidence they needed.
I don't have my copy of Visual Explanations handy, but I've read it and I was at a talk Tufte gave on this subject, and my recollection of it is rather different. Without directly criticizing Feynman, Tufte actually comes up with a significantly superior analysis of the root cause of the disaster. Feynman spread he blame around many places, finding bad science, bad engineering, inaccurate statistics, poor procedures and documentation, politics influencing design, and most importantly and famously, a disconnect between management and engineering leading to overconfidence. Everything he found is right. But Tufte took the analysis one step further and came up with a completely convincing "one point where it all went wrong." That point was the inability of the booster rocket contractor's team to effectively present information.
The day before the Challenger's final launch, the team that designed and manufactured the booster rockets called Mission Control and said that they thought the launch should be aborted because an O-ring on a booster would be likely to give out due to cold and cause the Challenger to explode. This team was not previously known for being overly cautious; in the previous history of the shuttle program, they had never before recommended aborting a mission. The next day, the challenger launched and the booster rocket blew up exactly the way the team that made it said it would.
This seems like an inconceivable oversight on the part of Mission Control. When the team that designed the rocket told them it was going to blow up, how could they possibly go ahead and launch? The hubris, the pride, the thick-headed showmanship.
Well, Tufte dug into this and found out exactly what happened. Mission control told the rocket team to prepare a presentation about why they thought it would go wrong. The team did so and presented that to Mission Control. Tufte interviewed many people about the specifics of that meeting and actually managed to reassemble the original slides shown during the talk. And anyone viewing the information presented by the booster rocket team to Mission Control will have trouble faulting Mission Control, because the presentation was absolutely incomprehensible.
The booster rocket team's argument was supposed to be that for each previous launch, the amount of subsequent damage found in the O-rings was inversely proportional to the temperature at launch. They had all the data. They were all scientists and engineers. Tufte used their data to construct a graph of O-ring damage vs. launch temperature. Showing that graph and the weather forecast for the launch day to anyone in charge would have gotten the mission cancelled in a second. But the team, that was there to argue that low temperatures correlated with O-ring damage, never presented a single intelligible piece of data demonstrating that, even though they had all that data with them. Instead, they showed a chart of O-ring damage vs. launch date, and another chart several pages later with temperature vs. launch date.
I've read Adventures of a Curious Character and have the utmost respect for Feynman. Every problem Feynman outlined in his analysis was a real problem that NASA should fix. But none of it really pinpointed the exact cause of the disaster. Feynman mostly chalks the failure to postpone launch to management's disconnect from engineering, from their mistakes and lack of understanding and therefore overestimating the safety of the shuttle. This puts the blame in the wrong place. The managers were no where near being so overconfident that when the engineers who designed the part that failed knew it would probably fail in exactly that way and tried to halt the launch, they'd just brush them aside and go ahead with it. They listened carefully; the engineers had data that would make a great case, but it was presented so incompetently that no one at that meeting would have thought they had a case at all, they simply appeared to be overly cautious, because they did not present any data demonstrating their point.
lawyers; because they see only the legal aspects of any issue, they are prone to do great harm... in pursuit of insignificant legal points
The lawyers think- "Having these documents out is bad. But we could bring a legal challenge to their availability. If having them out is bad, it stands to reason that having a chance to try to get them back in is good."
It almost sounds reasonable, like the government's standard (and always grossly incorrect) estimate of increased tax receipts following a tax hike by multiplying the new rate by people's current reported income almost sounds reasonable.
What these companies need is some management oversight. Before launching a new PR campaign, most companies have a standard procedure of running it past the lawyers. But they should also be doing the opposite; when the lawyers come and say "hey, we could sue this small public-interest nonprofit into oblivion, which would undoubtedly accomplish halting the spread of this information on the internet," management should run that past PR and IT before implementing it.
Effecting lasting vestment by the people is a matter of a functioning ongoing system more so than a matter of initial distribution. You bring up the Russian example. Russia actually had one of the most successful programs ever instituted to privatize their industry by giving it to the people.
Look at section 1.2.2 here and at this article from Reason.
Russia gave every citizen a voucher that could be used in auctions to bid upon state enterprises being privatized. There was a free market in these vouchers. Any group of people could band together to pool their vouchers to buy their portion of previously state-run industry and own it privately. Or they could sell their vouchers and get significant real value for them, and use that for whatever they needed it for. Either way, everyone got their share. The division of state run enterprises went very well for a while. Sure, too many enterprises were dolled out directly to the powerful and connected and bypassed the voucher auctions, but otherwise, it was a pretty good system.
The reason it didn't end up working was due to a lack of rule of law and to corruption, not a failure to give the property to the Russian population. Many foreign investors flocked to Russia to capitalize on their underpaid but highly educated population. Many people used their voucher money to start their own small businesses. Groups of people who pooled their vouchers tried to run the industries they bought.
But people in power took it all away; from the foreign investors, and from the local Russian population. If you wanted to get your raw materials imported, or keep your electricity on, or get work permits, or pass inspections, or have access to markets- it all required too many bribes to stay in business. In some instances, people with guns just came in and took everything. You can't have functioning capitalism if you don't have free competition, but instead have thugs come and take the profits from anyone who's successful.
A fair initial distribution of property in the privatization process is important, but as Russia has shown us, it is far from sufficient to ensure any kind of equality or lasting vestment for the people. The most important thing for giving people a fair shot is to weed out the corruption and follow rule of law.
You can hire any reputable consulting firm to have a bunch of economists and MBA's draw up a relatively efficient and equitable market based allocation program for privatizing state resources to the people. Unfortunately, it is much harder to take a system riddled with endemic corruption and full of powerful people used to ruling like czars and transform that into a system dominated by honesty and law. There is no easy prescription for this transformation; weeding out corruption is riddled with tricky political, psychological, social, and economic dilemmas to which there is no straight-forward solution.
Luck had very little to do with it.
I'll concede that Microsoft has written very little good software, and that they acquired a lot of their key assets by buying them out.
But Bill Gates isn't the richest man in the world because he was lucky to be in the right place at the right time, he's the richest man in the world because he had a critical and profound insight into the inevitable future of software and firmly went about placing himself in the business of profiting from that.
Of many important things he saw coming, he saw the standardized software platform. Previously, every operating system and program was written for a specific hardware platform, and by "hardware platform" I don't mean something like x86, I mean each individual model of computer. Buy a new computer, write a new operating system for it. Bill saw the future; the abstraction layers, the SDK's, the compatibility, the standards. And he had a vision to create and profit from the creation of the first cross-platform software. Not really cross-platform, but the idea of having a platform at all.
Listen to this Bill Gates speech from 1989, and you'll see the grasp he had on the future of the computer industry, and how he put himself in the middle of it. I'm sure dozens or hundreds of other computer users and especially researchers at universities saw all of this compatibility coming too, but they didn't take action to place themselves at the commercial center of this transformation.
There was luck, of course. I think the biggest streak of luck Microsoft had was the incompetence of their competitors. Commodore insanely mismanaged Amiga. IBM practically intentionally killed OS2, an operating system Bill Gates had already concluded was going to become the default standard until he saw IBM botching it and came in and swept the market out from under them with the radically inferior early Windows. Apple's products were always on-again off-again, alternatively brilliant and then disappointing, and always expensive. So Gates had help from the incompetence and mistakes of the competition. But by no means did he stumble into the right place at the right time; he saw exactly what it was the right time for, and aggressively put himself in the right place.
I looks like they're trying to make up the difference for any losses they had on that before they caught their mistake through their pricing on SD/CF Adapters.
Oh come on, why are there 18 comments and no one's done this yet? Do I have to do everything myself? Let's get it out of the way:
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That idiotic dumb-ass judge wouldn't know a good judicial decision if it bit him in his lame-ass ass. Where did he go to judge-school anyway, The Universduhity of Dumbasia?
I see it came from California. Everyone knows everybody in California is a stupid liberal anyway with their stupid activist liberal judges who just do whatever their retarded Governator tells them to do. Retards. Someone should shoot them all, wouldn't that be ironic? Here they all go crying "free speech, free speech," and then they get shot? Well, if you don't see the irony, then you're even dumber than that retarted freakin judge.
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OK, now mod it + funny, - troll and we can be done with it.
I use Yahoo Shopping, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Answers, and Yahoo TV. Maybe there are better alternatives, but I like all of those. Oh, and sometimes the new Yahoo Maps does a better job than Google Maps or the new Mapquest.
I will be very disappointed if the sale goes through, because I don't do business with Microsoft, and will have to find alternatives to all of these.
I wonder how many people like me boycott Microsoft? If it's many, it won't be good for Yahoo's services. Microsoft has a history of running crappy, unpopular competitors to many of Yahoo's services. It strikes me as a bad investment when a company that's proved it's bad and unsuccessful at something plans to buy and manage a more-successful competitor. That doesn't sound like the market moving resources to higher value. It may be higher-value for Microsoft, because they don't give a crap about the future prospects of what Yahoo's built, they're just willing to barf out any amount of cash to make it look like Google doesn't dominate over them in online services as much as it does. But I think that, while it might be worth it to Microsoft, the net value of Yahoo's assets will depreciate under the mismanagement of Microsoft, and that Microsoft stock does not have a favorable outlook now. I think Yahoo's board would be smart to reject the offer, despite the price premium.
You're right that if a third party started to draw off supporters from one of the two major parties, it would kill both that major party and the upstart party. For example, Ralph Nader and the Greens draw almost exclusively from the Democrats, and the Constitution Party draws almost exclusively from the Republicans, and if either of them were to somehow get relatively big and successful, they'd kill their host party, while still not being big enough to get anywhere themselves.
But you're ignoring the possibility of a third party that draws support from both major parties.
You can't really have a new centrist party that compromises between Democrats and Republicans, because both the Republicrats and the Democrans have raced to center so effectively that there isn't any room between them for another party. But what about a third party with a mix of less centrist views, some of which appeal to members of one party and some to members of the other? I submit that both the Libertarians and Socialist parties are these kinds of parties. They both draw support from both sides of the isle these days. Now in reality, Republicans are so allergic to the word "socialism" that they'd never admit to being for any aspect of it, but the Religious Right's drive for social control mechanisms is very socialistic, as is the National ID, warrant-less surveillance society NeoCons want. Don't get me wrong; I don't think a party with predominantly socialist views in the US has any chance of drawing significant support, and I hope I'm right. But if they did, is it really clear where that support would be coming from?
Big picture: Traditionally in this country, Republicans are in favor of social controls and economic freedom, and Democrats are on favor of social freedom and economic controls. Libertarians are in favor of both social and economic freedom, and socialists are in favor of both social and economic controls. Either party should theoretically be able to draw support from either the Democrats or the Republicans, depending on which issues people find most important.
Take a look at Ron Paul. People call him ultra-conservative, and I've heard a lot of jokes about how "no one can be to the right of Ron Paul." I wonder which of his party-line ultra-conservative platform planks they're referring to - wanting to legalize illegal drugs? Legalize prostitution? Get out of Iraq immediately and avoid foreign entanglements in the future? Repeal the Patriot Act? Keep the federal government out of the abortion issue?
Yes, Ron Paul does also have a lot of standpoints that would appeal to hard-line conservatives, but that's my point, his standpoints based on individual liberty include viewpoints that are in line with - and other viewpoints that are entirely contrary to - both hard line Republicans and hard line Democrats. I don't see why it's so clear that Libertarians or Socialists would take votes overwhelmingly from one party.
Because he's running as a Republican this time, and the media (when bothering to mention him at all) wants to make him out to be an extremist (which he is, IMHO), they carelessly cast him as ultra-conservative. If he were running as a democrat, with all the same policy standpoints, they would just as carelessly be brushing him aside as ultra-liberal. What he really is is ultra-pro-personal-freedom, which is not inline with being either conservative or liberal in the US these days.
This is a statutory monopoly. Some people may argue it's a statutory monopoly only because it would be a natural monopoly anyway, so the distinction doesn't matter. I disagree. But we couldn't really know whether or not internet connectivity is a natural monopoly or not unless we were to try repealing the laws making these utilities statutory monopolies.
from the article:
"The number of companies looking to sell them to private consumers has increased by as much as 33 percent in the last week alone... while last year there were two commercial rocket-belt manufacturers... there are now three."
Going from two to three would be a 50% increase, not "as much as 33 percent"
Almost any question we asked about the specifics of the rail gun, he wouldn't answer, no matter how much we bugged him about it. Velocity being chief among them. You know, something about national security clearance blah blah blah.
However, he did give us a test question that started with something like:
"Assume a rail gun fires a [whatever specifications] projectile at 0.001 c."
I think that's the velocity he gave on the question, it was a long time ago. Whether that's even remotely possible or in the correct vicinity or not I have no idea. It was probably just a joke on us, I can't imagine he'd risk using any number that was remotely accurate.
One other interesting tidbit he told us is that it fired a non-conductive plastic like ball. Everything I've seen written on rail guns online seems to contradict this design possibility, they require a conductive ball that conducts the current between the plates. He didn't get into a lot of specifics, but said this rail gun used a non-conductive low-mass ball about the size of a pool ball. He had some further explanation of how it worked with a non-conductive ball and mentioned it wasn't the conventional conception of a rail-gun, but unfortunately, I didn't know enough about rail guns or physics to be interested enough to bother understanding it all then when it was just an aside. I hadn't realized at the time that this was very unconventional information that I should be taking notes on.
I had a physics teacher who used to work at Los Alamos who did some consulting for the military on the side. In the late 80's/early 90's, they had him evaluate the results of some rail-gun tests. They were shooting a small ball projectile at tanks. The projectile left a perfectly round smooth bored hole all the way through the tank, wherever it was fired. The military wanted to know if they could use this to disable things (fire through the engine block) without destroying other things (people, electronics, paperwork, whatever) inside.
In evaluating it, they found that the internal air temperature flashed to something really high (like an oven) in the microsecond the ball travelled through, and that the vaporized steel from the first surface of the tank would kill everyone in the compartment.
It brings home what kind of speeds we're talking about here.
I'm waiting until they start listing the speeds of rail guns in terms of [decimal]c. Full of relativistic goodness. Of course, if they're only at Mach 8, they've got a way to go. The X-15 was near mach 7 and the scramjet tests have hit mach 10, and I'm sure those were more massive than the rail gun's projectiles.
Hey- I'm not a doctor, but I just wanted to mention something you should look into if you haven't- make sure the possibility of your father having NPH has been excluded. I mention it because the early-onset age for Alzheimer's and the slow walking thing are consistent with NPH, and NPH is almost always misdiagnosed as either Parkinson's or Alzheimer's. Also, NPH can be surgically remedied- although NPH causes brain-damage, and only a limited and widely varying degree of lost function can be restored following surgery, but it can stop the disease from progressing. If your Dad hasn't been screened for NPH, you should look into this. Screening starts with an MRI, and if the MRI appears symptomatic, then there's an (unfortunately arduous) positive testing procedure he can go through.
My Dad was diagnosed with both Parkinsons and Alzeheimer's, both early onset. I found NPH online and we asked his neurologist about it. It turns out his neurologist in an NPH specialist, and he hadn't screened my Dad for it, and it turned out my Dad had an unambiguously severe case of NPH. After the surgery, his walking recovered dramatically, he got back about 4-5 years of decline. Unfortunately, while he also improved significantly mentally, he's since lost it again. But he probably really has advanced Parkinsons in addition to NPH. A few years later, and his walking is still better than before the surgery.
So, how many people just learned about SeeqPod for the first time due to the actions of the RIAA?
Yes, it's 265 million processor hours on Intel 4004's.
I agree that I don't understand the super obsession with size (size doesn't matter, right?) but clearly to some people it does. I guess that, as a luxury product, it's just cool and sexy to have something really sleek and thin.
.16" to .76", where the Thinkpad tapers from .73" to .92". The Air's thickest part is almost as thin as the Thinkpad's thinnest part. Assuming they're both 9" deep and that the cross-sectional area of these laptops were right trapezoids, which they're not quite, the Macbook's cross sectional area is 4.14 square inches, and the Thinkpad's is 7.43. It's a big difference.
To me, the Thinkpad looks like a better laptop than the Macbook Air, because it's got an optical drive, three USB ports instead of one, built-in ethernet, and a faster processor. But why even compare these two laptops, instead of comparing a Macbook or Macbook Pro to whatever model of competing Thinkpads there are, unless size is one of your primary criteria? If size wasn't a primary consideration, you shouldn't be shopping for or comparing either of these two laptops, because you'd get more laptop for your money in something that isn't aimed specifically at being tiny.
And for those for whom it's all about size, the Apple's graduated to a different league than this Thinkpad. They're about the same footprint, but the Air tapers from
Again, it's a difference that I, and probably most people on Slashdot don't really care about, but apparently some people do, and as I said, why compare ultra-slim notebooks at all if you aren't going to give them points for how ultra-slim they are? If there weren't a lot of people in the US willing to pay a thousand or more dollars extra for something slightly slimmer, Dynamism wouldn't have been around for all these years.
I think the lack of ports on the Air are a huge drawback, but I think it's Apple's attempt to start dragging us into a wireless future, and it's a future I don't think technology's ready for now, but will be in a few years. Once there's a decent wireless peripheral interface with broad support (wireless USB or whatever), and there's wireless charging, and maybe some new batteries that last much longer and last for many more recharging cycles, they can just make 0-port hermetically sealed laptops. That would be a cool future. I'd also want my Wi-Fi integrated such that it's functional at the BIOS level, so one could do OS upgrades and netboot and emergency recovery over WIFI. Apple's trying to nudge us this way, and so to them it's a "feature" that they took nearly all the ports off the computer, although it's a feature that would currently make my world a much more difficult one.
This new Thinkpad isn't trying to be visionary, and it isn't radically thinner. It's just the regular old incremental improvement, not much different in magnitude from the past 10 generations of thin Thinkpads in how much different it is from its predecessors. While I personally prefer its specs over the Air's, I prefer nearly any new Laptop's specs over the Air's, and I'm surprised people consider it news, because it looks to me like the slightly smaller, slightly faster future we're all used to on notebook revisions, while the Air was a much smaller, intentionally low-on-ports different vision of the suture that is sort of newsworthy.
A tobacconist's shop.
Text on screen: "In 1970, the British Empire lay in ruins, and foreign nationalists frequented the streets - many of them Hungarian (not the streets - the foreign nationals). Anyway, many of these Hungarians went into tobacconists' shops to buy cigarettes ..."
A Hungarian tourist (John Cleese) approaches the clerk (Terry Jones). The tourist is reading haltingly from a phrase book.
Hungarian: "I will not buy this record, it is scratched."
Clerk: "Sorry?"
Hungarian: "I will not buy this record, it is scratched."
Clerk: "Uh, no, no, no. This is a tobacconist's."
Hungarian: "Ah! I will not buy this *tobacconist's*, it is scratched."
Clerk: "No, no, no, no. Tobacco ... um ...
cigarettes." (holds up a pack)
Hungarian: "Ya! See-gar-ets! Ya! Uh ... my
hovercraft is full of eels."
Clerk: "Sorry?"
Hungarian: "My hovercraft ..." (pantomimes
puffing a cigarette) "... is full of eels." (pretends to strike
a match)
Clerk: "Ahh, matches!"
Hungarian: "Ya! Ya! Ya! Ya! Do you waaaaant ... do you waaaaaant ... to come back to my place, bouncy-bouncy?"
Clerk: "Here, I don't think you're using that thing right."
Hungarian: "You great poof."
Clerk: "That'll be six and six, please."
Hungarian: "If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me? I ... I am no longer infected."
Clerk: "Uh, may I, uh ..." (takes phrase
book, flips through it) "... Costs six and six ... ah, here we
are." (speaks weird Hungarian-sounding words)
Hungarian punches the clerk. Meanwhile, a policeman (Graham Chapman) on a quiet street cups his ear as if hearing a cry of distress. He sprints for many blocks and finally enters the tobacconist's.
Cop: "What's going on here then?"
Hungarian: "Ah. You have beautiful thighs."
Cop: (looks down at himself) "WHAT?!?"
Clerk: "He hit me!"
Hungarian: "Drop your panties, Sir William; I cannot wait 'til lunchtime." (points at clerk)
Cop: "RIGHT!!!" (drags Hungarian away by the arm)
Hungarian: (indignantly) "My nipples explode with delight!"
Scene switches to a courtroom. Characters are all in powdered wigs and judicial robes, except publisher and cop.
Characters: Judge - Terry Jones; Bailiff - Eric Idle; Lawyer - John Cleese; Cop - Graham Chapman; Publisher - Michael Palin.
Bailiff: "Call Alexander Yalt!" (voices sing out the name several times)
Judge: "Oh, shut up!"
Bailiff: (to publisher) "You are Alexander Yalt?"
Publisher: (in a sing-songy voice) "Oh, I am."
Bailiff: "Skip the impersonations. You are Alexander Yalt?"
Publisher: "I am."
Bailiff: "You are hereby charged that on the 28th day of May, 1970, you did willfully, unlawfully, and with malice of forethought, publish an
You're claiming that "clone" is a homophone and I'm confusing two words with entirely different meanings because they sound the same. Or if not homophones, that I'm at least confusing different definitions of the same word. For your example of "speaker," Dictionary.com lists four definitions, and you make reference to two of the different meanings given there in your example.
However, you have entirely misapplied this in my case. I am using exactly the same, precisely defined, scientific definition of the word "clone," and you are wrong in claiming I'm trying to "compare scientific things based on linguistics." I'm comparing scientific things based upon science, and using the accurate scientific word for both things used with the exact same definition.
I'm quite curious what it is that you think "clone" means. Here are some examples of what it actually means. Note that they all apply to both the cloned animal and apple case.
From Dictionary.com: "a cell, cell product, or organism that is genetically identical to the unit or individual from which it was derived."
From Wikipedia: "In horticulture and biology, any organism whose genetic information is identical to that of a 'mother organism' from which it was created."
From Merriam Webster: "the aggregate of genetically identical cells or organisms asexually produced by a single progenitor cell or organism"
From University of Texas' Life Sciences Dictionary: "A population of cells all descended from a single cell."
From McGraw-Hill's Access Science: "Cloning
The asexual creation of a genetic copy, a capability possessed by plants but not by most animals. Thus, plants generate genetic copies spontaneously, and rooting "cuttings" is widely used by horticulturists to propagate millions of clones annually. In animals, only some lower invertebrates can be cloned by "cutting"; for example, earthworms when bisected will regenerate the missing half, resulting in two whole, genetically identical individuals. However, asexual reproduction and cloning do not normally occur in vertebrates except for the special case of identical twinning. This is despite the fact that individual cells, called blastomeres, within the very early embryo are totipotent; that is, each is capable, if evaluated on its own, of developing into a viable term pregnancy and infant."
I see in the Access Science entry, and other places, what I think is confusing you: there certainly are many different ways cloning can occur. That doesn't mean I'm using the word wrong. It's as if I said that both Bill Clinton and Pervez Musharraf became leaders of their countries, and you said I'm wrong because they came to power in different ways. While you're right there are distinctions to be made in different ways of "becoming leaders," and different methods of making "clones," I am entirely correct in calling both animal and plant clones "clones," just as I'm entirely correct in calling both Clinton and Musharraf "leaders." And it's the same definition of "clone" and "leader." The ability to draw further distinctions does not mean they don't both meet the same greater definition. You are trying to draw semantic distinctions that do not exist.
I don't even know what word you're looking for. "Artificial Cloning" doesn't apply, because they're both artificial: those Apple trees do not make natural clones, they are grafted artificially by people, usually onto foreign rootstock. Apples have their own natural method of procreation, which is trees sprouting from the seeds inside Apples, that we bypass entirely to create the artificial man-made c
Apples don't breed true. All commercial apples are clones. Every apple of a "variety" is a clone, unless it's one that came off the first tree ever that they used to found a new variety.
Not only are they clones, but they're the "bad" kind of "adult" clones that inherit genetic damage. If you're against cloned food, never eat anything with apples in it.
Some non-cloned, non-varietal mutt apples are pretty good, it's just hit-or-miss. If you're opposed to cloning, you can grow your own apples. Just plant the seeds from any apple and see what you get.
This a new Apple product. You could probably hold your breath during the wait for Griffin, Belkin, Kensington or somebody to release an external battery pack that connects to the magsafe port and gives you a bunch of additional battery life. Then it'll be about another 15-minutes until there's a Chinese knockoff of that product on ebay.
You'd better hurry and order the laptop and the extra battery soon though, Apple will probably release an even better laptop in a few days.
Seriously though, the Macbook Pro is due for an update anytime now.
This is actually really pioneering - I didn't see it before, but now it's clear - Sony is transforming itself into an entirely new kind of entertainment company. Instead of a company that sells entertaining media, they are becoming a company that provides entertainment to people directly through executing ludicrous business strategies that make us all collectively laugh out a giant OMG! WTF?
What comes next? Another incompatible proprietary format? Once branch of the company suing another again? Their most anticipated and highly promoted new product suffering months of production delays, shortfalls, and finally no demand? More exploding batteries? We'll all be kept on the edge of our seats wondering what hilarity or calamity will befall them (or their customers) next. Sony's taking the already popular "reality entertainment" to the next level.