I invested into stocks. One doubled in 2 weeks, the other went from $115 to $2 with reverse splits. On average stocks do good, but you can't really call them a safety net, because there are no guarantees. Higher return only comes at higher risk. And in fact the SS administration could invest the money for everyone, like mutual funds do, spreading the individual risk, so people are not hung out to dry like the little fish in a sea full of sharks.
Sooner or later we'll have some kind of encrypted GUID indentifying us instead of the 9 letter SS number, a GUID that can be applied on the whole planet. Unfortunately privatizing SS is like privatizing the military or the police, or even education and healhcare. I'd rather have some benevolent global gov't issue these numbers than a private corporation, but unfortunately the only forum that ever had a chance to be a "league of nations" or a global gov't is the UN, whose credibility was recently undermined by Bush. I guess the powers that be are fed up that in the UN countries with no military, no resources, or who otherwise would be completely ignored, get a full vote each, simply because they are split into two countries, and outvote the US simply to say look, here we are, give us cash because we have no other way to make some. One whacky solution would be to split the US into 50 states to the US gets 50 votes. The other solution is what Bush is pushing, saying I'm the UN, I'm boss, kiss my ass. Neither one is a good solution, and frankly, the whole point of any global gov't is to stop the risk of a totalitarian global gov't, which means having to listen to those with no power, no voice, instead of just invading them and clubbing them down, even if they are idiots.
Culture and civilization hasn't ever been produced by the millionares. Newton, Archimedes, Einstein, Van Gogh, Mark Twain, Tagore, Ramanunjan - I don't think any of these folks were millionares, or made a ton off of the fruits of their labor, or has anyone made a ton off the fruits of their labor. They made a very decent living, but that's about it. This DRM stuff is pushed not by the innovators, creators and inventors, but by the control freaks who smell cash and domination. Soon you'll have to pay for intellectual property rights to teach kids pythagoras' formula for triangles, and public libraries will be outlawed, or actually just transformed into venues to collect revenues for IP stuff.
Yeah, well go ahead. Go wipe everyone out, and see if you have complete agreement among those of you who are left. Good luck. In the meantime I think education is too the key to handle clashing ideologies. At the very least everyone should read an excerpt from Socrates, so they can apply it to their own ideology. As far as resources go, as long there is sunlight, there is a resource for life on Earth. Education is even the solution to overpopulation too. There is nothing more beautiful than an educated person, who's free, in charge of his full disciples, in charge of his inner childish self and ego. It's like with soldiers - they need to be forged, they don't become good soldiers on their own without practicing discipline. (For all the bad the a war is, sometimes you just have to be able to fight back. A good soldier is one who loves peace above all.) There is nothing more laughable than an army turning back running away in chaos everyone for their own life at the sound of the first gun shot. Similarly, it takes practice to become a good person, a person who can look beyond the immediate self.
.Net is the biggest load of crap to hit computing ever since Java. While java was perfect for applets and net security, now it's bastardized into an everyday programming platform. Java is slow,.Net is slow, unless they are preloaded-precompiled and provided with a ton of resources. Remember the speed, size and efficiency of C? Java and.Net do not remove enough complexity from C to justify the speed decrease, Basic used to do that a lot better. The only good thing about Java is being a good teaching tool of abstract concepts.
The other thing with Java and.Net is that now you can better monitor and yank the rug out from under competing apps, because the bytecode instructions are more detailed now. Back in the days if you wanted to throttle your competitor's app running on your OS, you couldn't simply slow down CPU instructions like MOV, ADD, because they are too generic. Now you can have a few targeted instructions that get slowed down unless the app can properly "authenticate" itself with the OS, all in the name of security. Now sysadmins can monitor "managed code" based on what instructions it tries to execute, even without having commented sourcecode, and forbid/allow it to run, all in the name of security. Come on, having original commented sourcecode to review and compile beats the pants off any other way of "trusting" Something is either obfuscated or it ain't, whether it's sourcecode, managed code, or assembler. If it's not obfuscated, then you can't really say it's not open source. Yes, there is an upside to this too, when an app crashes and tells you the contents of the CPU registers, the bytcode stuff is at least more descriptive. Trying to make sense out of compiler generated assembler and why it's crashing, that's a major undertaking. But still, if you got the original human written, commented, human readable sourcecode, nothing even comes close to that. Fixing the bytecode portion without fixing the sourcecode that generated that bytecode shouldn't be the way. So what's the point of having bytecode in the first place? C/C++ is portable enough, as mozilla and other projects show, and instead of compiling on the fly each time, compile once for each platform and distribute the binaries. Compiling on the fly is for small applets of 200 KB or so, not 30 MB apps.
Hahaha. Yeah man, this is the stupidest story ever. They worry about nuclear proliferation. You pretty much can't stop people from using even a compressed gas cylinder or fertilizer to do bad things. Intent is hard to control, but that's you're only chance. Sure you have mentally ill people like Nero, and they are sometimes hard to pick out, but humanity got where it is because of cooperation, and cooperation is built on trust, at least some kind of trust. For instance, you take for granted that 95% of sentences told to you are true. If it were the other way around, with 95% lies and only 5% truth, you wouldn't have a society, everyone would be on their own. When trust is abused, everyone loses. Education is the answer to wars, at least to the threaten the survival of the whole planet kind of wars. If you have a war where a few people die, piss on it, nobody lives forever, but something where the whole planet dies, you can educate people to recognize they are not all that, and there are bigger and more important things in the world then themselves. Simply shoving a religion down their throat that guarantees an afterlife will not make them care enough about this world.
Way for the EU to make money. I mean they have an incentive to punish just like cops have an incentive to catch you for speeding, because it's money in the bank for them.
Yeah man talk about 2000 Amps continuous operation in a 25 kg (55 lb) device - I saw that 25 kg number tossed at http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7403 With 2000 amps you probably don't need a solar furnace because it's self heating anyway inside a 25 kg device - cross section can't be that big, considering you can't use tinfoil thin stuff, because you need a pressure rating, to withstand vacuum. But does the 25 kg include the solar panels, or is that provided to us, as much as we want? For 2000 amps you need quite a farm of solar panels. Once you account for all the efficiencies, including ohmic heating, mining/grinding/powder separating robots coming home to recharge, etc, you're probably looking at a 5kW solar power station. Solar panels can be paperthin though. You can probably only do this fast enough if you use very hot temperatures, otherwise ionic mobilities and diffusion rates/reaction rates may be too slow. Still, you're looking at quite some foaming, whatever you do, that's a massive amount of gas, especially if it's released at high temperatures - at 1000C the volume is 4x that of room temp volume, and at 1000C I calculate you're dealing with 0.5L gas/sec, at 1 atm pressure, which sounds manageable, but it's still a lot. You may also need some massive heat exchangers when dealing with such high throughputs, especially that there is nothing to thermally contact with - no atmosphere to air cool, no cooling water tower, so all you can do is radiatively cool, unless you dig holes deep into the surface, but "geothermal" is a great insulator in the long run - here on Earth you can pump warm water into the ground in the summer, and get it back in the winter.
Extra Notes: Thinking about colder temperatures, such as some acid digestion/liquid system, whether based on water or phosphoric acid fuel cell stuff may be too time consuming (may need a day to digest at room temp), and one problem is that titanium in any kind of solution loves going round trips between electrodes, doing a Ti3+-Ti4+ redox cycle, wasting your time. Why do they talk about ilmenite FeTiO3, when it only has 30% oxygen, when sodium-aluminum-silicate has 50%? Just magnetically eliminate ilmenite and don't waste your time with it, when it comes to oxygen - you should get O2+aluminum (I think, unless you get O2+silicon, or O2+Al/Si Alloy instead) - so you may not even need titanium-iron for construction, at least for start, you may have plenty aluminum. Also, with extra reagents such as water/hydrogen/phosphoric acid your recovery of these reagests would be less than 100%. True you may be able to get just enough hydrogen/helium/nitrogen from the rocks to replenish yourself, but those are very precious things. So forget it, just use sodium-alumino-silicate, melt it into an ionic liquid, (you just need to kickstart the melting a bit, the rest will ohmicaly self heat) and just drive electricity through it.
I wonder what the ping-time is - that is, you issue a command, it flies for a few minutes with the speed of light in space, reaches the rover, then it answers back with diagnostics/images. Talk about lag - it's kind of like playing with a very very slow response joystick - you tilt it left then back, twiddle your thumb for a few minutes to see if it worked.
One crucial difference between land and information: land became property when it became scarce, while there is no such thing as scarce with information. The only scarce thing is developer time, and even that isn't that scarce given global overpopulation. Sooner or later another developer will do something at a lower cost, unless you don't allow them to via erecting artificial barriers.
Yeah, the patent system is not a way to level the playing field for all to come to the table and share, but yet another additional weapon of those on power to keep the rest under. It's all about control. But hey, you can always wait 20 years til the patents expire - in this case til 2016 - so quit your crying. When patents become eternal, that's when it will all really suck. You think they ain't lobbying for it? The way it goes is like with copyright.. founding fathers start with 14 years in 1796, creep up to 70 by 2000, add extra 20 years in 2000 so now it's 90 years, add extra 20 years in 2020, etc. Then we'll retrofit existing free IP to fit our new 'information economy' - similar to what happened with land from nomadic free land for all to the agricultural this acre is mine transition. Then you'll have to pay for even Euclid's Geometry, because someone will stick a pole down, and call it 'mine.'
Yeah well the problem is undefined because it doesn't specify the independent variable. Are you integrating versus r? When someone hears the problem, they automatically assume integrating vs. r, because pi is a constant, and there is no reason to assume we're integrating vs. z, or k, or lambda or whatever not even mentioned in the problem. The proper statement would have been what's the result of integral 4*pi*rquared*dr, which would have yielded her answer, without ambiguity.
Of course there is the other side of ths story too, in how much tolerance and divergence from your own morality is acceptable, before you start bitching, or even leap into action. In fact, a very nice moral rule is to be as tolerant as possible. So tolerating the existance of a group excluding gays is not quite the same as tolerating someone getting killed right next to you in the street, or tolerating genocide in Africa. As far as bitching goes, the threshhold could be quite low, you could start bitching at the slightest nuance of things out of whack, but leaping into action is quite another thing, because that has a lot more consequences, you better evaluate what you do carefully, but you can run your mouth all over the place a lot easier.
You can't just ignore what goes on somewhere and always look the other way. At the very least you can speak up for it, and bear the consequences. If the nazi's are building up their power right next to you, are you just gonna look the other way and donate your money to someone else? That aint gonna do diddly squat. Or, if there is genocide in Africa, where kids are killed just because someone's moral views doesn't include your own moral views, is that fine? They beat up a guy next to you in the street, close to killing him, are you gonna just say hey, it's not my problem, it's their morality, I don't agree with it, so I'm just ignoring it? When God asked Kain about where is your brother Abel, Kain shrugged it off, and said: Am I my brother's keeper? Well, what do YOU think, as a moral relativist, ARE YOU? I think you have a say in what humanity is like, you have a one person vote in it, to shape it and mold "the law of the land", "the rules we live by", and you excersize it by bitching and caring about issues. Sure, the majority may overpower you with their wish, with their view on how humanity should be, but that doesn't mean you don't have the right to at least try to exert an effort to change things, to how you think things should be. At the very least if you and someone who disagrees with you on an issue, yet you share a common ground on something more basic, more axiomatic values, then there is room for constructive discussion. For example, you both want to live happily, you just think there are different ways to go about it, that oppose each other, thinking the opponent's view yields less happiness, then at least there is room for discussion over how one moral rule and it's outcomes affect other values, and then you can do statistics, surveys, experiments, and come to some commong ground by evaluating the measurement results. Not everything has an answer, but there is room for debate if you happen to share some common moral values, even if those values were chosen by moral relativists.
Actually, I've tried to steal power on highways by driving behind semis and buses. It just doesn't work. Your car's frame and screws will get rattled to pieces via fatigue, because the turbulent wind behind them shakes you from side to side. Your tires will wear faster, and you don't gain much anyway, because, even though you're travelling in lower density air, the turbulent shear and friction takes back way more than anything you gain. If you found a smooth, non-turbulent laminar flow wake, then things would be different. You'd probably have to ride bumper to bumper with a bus or semi to feel any benefit.
Bicycle competitors, skiers and marathon runners use each other's wind shadow to save energy, but the speeds involved are slower, and the air is less turbulent in the wake behind them.
Of course the real artist at stealing hydrodynamic shadow and uplift are the wild geese with their v-flying formation. They save huge amounts of energy with their flying pattern. Now I'm getting the idea to test driving behind a semi slightly to hind left or right, not right behind it. But I think you need very good senses to home in, because if you don't ride the v wave the truck creates - similar to what ships create on the water surface - always downward downpressure like a surfer riding a wave, you might be actually spending gas to climb up the hind side of the wave and chase it like that. You'd need some really cool pressure gauges and a computer controlling the cruise on your car to actually keep up with it, just the right pace. Geese have feathers for senses, but you don't inside your car. Unless you put on your feather headset and stick your head out the window.
You probably implied why, but just to make sure, let's state why: The air drag your car feels is proportional to the square of speed. Stick your palm out the window to test. At 1 mph almost none of the gas is spent on fighting air, because the air has time to get behind you. At such speed your gas goes to fight friction in the tires bending and relaxing, and the pistons, cylinders, gears rubbing up against each other inside the engine. But at 90 mph a very significant portion is spent on air drag friction on top of the tire and internal engine friction. The actual formula is
F=1/2 * A * Cd * r * V^2
where
F - is the force pulling your car or your palm back
A - cross sectional area of your palm or car
Cd - is the drag coefficient dependent on shape of your car or palm - i.e. do you look like a parachute or a bullet to the incoming wind, because even if you have the same square footage area facing the wind, its shape matters
r - air density, dependent on temperature, humidity, barometric pressure/altitude
Yeah, well try using the macro recording function in openoffice calc, and look at the garbage. There is still ways to go, but you never know, sooner or later it's bound to happen. Excel 97/VBA was an apex of the software world, just like Windows 95 and Netscape were, but unfortunately not much has happened since then. Same old same old anymore, with a new face on the old stuff, and perhaps less bugs. When you sit still, the market will mature and your product become a commodity, and commodity prices get very close to the marginal cost of production, which in case of software is 0. But still, I wouldn't call the hogs of java, dotnet and openoffice a step forward. Remember the days when 64K ram got you what you wanted? There is no reason why everything needs to be 40-120 Megs just to get up and running these days, maybe 5 megs instead of 640K. But you know, it's hard to sell harware unless software demands it, and it's hard to sell software unless the hardware demands it. There isn't such a thing as free lunch, if you get software for free, they'll milk you on the hardware. Remember the myth that linux is supposed to function well on old computers? Yeah, try running kernel 2.6 and KDE 3.9 and see how far you get. On the other hand gigantic software libraries that contain everything make software development easier, which is where the real bang your head against the wall cost is, but even so, it feels fishy, somehow you feel it shouldn't have to be quite such a resource hog.
Star Trek has been soul food for people with open minds. It's always been a story of moral questions, even if it was under the guise of scientific mumbo-jumbo. Unlike Star Wars, where the adolescent view of evil dark side and the good light side fight, Star Trek always probed the grey areas where good/evil don't really make sense. It was always about how to be human when faced with radically new circumstances. Holographic doctors treated with dignity, just like the rest of the crew, fighting the Borg collective that thinks it's perfect, and it only gets anywhere by assimilating, never creating something from scratch. You name it.. if that's not food for thought, than I don't know what is. The new scifi series, like Andromeda or Stargate fall back to the adolescent posturing, and zero challenge to your moral views. I guess the establishment had enough of free thinkers, now it's time to make everybody dumb and controllable by peer pressure - welcome Apprentice, Survivor, Americal Idol, Fear Factor.
If you care about the person you're talking to in any way, you will give honest advice, on how to change oil, where to go buy something, or what software you think is best suited for a problem. We're always willing to give lots of opinions and advice while talking to each other. Sometimes you get obnoxious and won't quit bugging alcoholics, druggies and people addicted to cigarettes to quit. What's your business if they smoke? It's just not right, you think, come on man, have some sense, do it right, but they go, you know what, it's nonya biznitz so leave me alone, punk. That's how free software advocates get obnoxious, they think they know what's right for you, and they believe in this stuff.
Dude, can't you see that MS is actually sponsoring this FUD? What's better than attack them, everyone gang up on MS, you bad dog, in the meantime chanting 'you violated software patents.' The whole idea here is to get you chanting dumbass broad patents as something very valid.
You can't friggin make profit in this business, simply because of the nature of information, which is infinite, unlike material things. If I have an apple, and give it to you, I don't have it anymore. It's either you or me. If I have a thought, a joke, a secret, a gossip, and tell it to you, I don't lose the original, I'm still free to enjoy it. (Heck, even air, which we consume free, should carry a pricetag, because it's not infinite. Just think of the free market regulating deforestation.) Imagine if the same was possible with apples, with cars. You got a new 2005 Rolls Royce? Hold on lemme beam a copy of it into my garage, a la star trek. Ehh, I'm bored of it, I'd rather make a copy of Pete's Lamborghini. Would Pete be willing to share it with me? Sure. Ahh, you say copyright - Lamborghini copyrighted the thing. Well sooner of later people get fed up, and just group together to build a lamborghini themselves, one guy building a screw, the other a button, and they all copy each other's work. How you gonna stop them? You'll forbid giving things away for free? Then how about for 1 cent a bundle? Ahh, that's where patents come in - now you can't build a screw without permission. Well, how about what we did 20 years ago, in the expired patents? That's still gonna work. Well, let's extend patents to 200 years. It's a dark spiral, slippery slope going this way, way to stifle innovation.
With material things one vendor cannot give away the thing and crush all the competitors, because there is marginal cost. But with software, there is no such thing as marginal cost. Take Netscape for instance - success was coming, but it was just soo easy to put them out of business, because Internet Explorer was free. What's your guarantee that as soon as success comes around, someone won't undermine you the same way? You can pretty much just make a living at this, because as soon as you get too successful, you'll be put out of business. Instantly. Patents won't help, because they don't matter, with patents what matters is who got the deeper pockets for lawyers to keep a trial going for a decade. In the end the free market drives the prices to the marginal cost, which is 0, unless there is continuous need for new capital investment. These days this continuous need to reinvent the same wheels in the language of the day is what keeps prices going, but frankly, what radically new stuff have you seen in software since say 1995 (Mac/Win95 GUI/Internet/RelationalDB)? Where is the new stuff? This software field is maturing now. All we see these days is the same old stuff with lower prices, and some big iron corporations running around like the chicken with the head cut off, erecting new legal schemes to lock in and control before prices do fall to 0. The only real advancing thing anymore is hardware, even if slower than it used to be, and software is just there to keep up with it. Your major reason to upgrade is simply because old software won't handle your gigabytes of space, or USB gadgets. There is a need for 'new' information, just like there is a need for new books, and new movies. But that needs radically new things, innovation, not just the same old thing with a new face slapped on it. You can only command a price if you innovate, when you provide customers something new, that they really want, and if you sit still, all your prices will fall to commodity prices. The other way to command a price is of course to become a monopoly where you patent mouseclicks and keyboards even with prior art present, then go beat everyone up in court over it.
It'd be so nice if people could freely share and build on each other's work, instead of everyone having to climb the same hill, redoing the same work. Remember what Newton said? He could see farther because he was standing on shoulders of giants. How did Newton make a living off of producing information? He wasn't selling or licensing the stuff. There was a free exchange, with credit given where credit is due, and as far as money goes, your reputation earned you a stipend, where some rich sul
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I invested into stocks. One doubled in 2 weeks, the other went from $115 to $2 with reverse splits. On average stocks do good, but you can't really call them a safety net, because there are no guarantees. Higher return only comes at higher risk. And in fact the SS administration could invest the money for everyone, like mutual funds do, spreading the individual risk, so people are not hung out to dry like the little fish in a sea full of sharks.
Sooner or later we'll have some kind of encrypted GUID indentifying us instead of the 9 letter SS number, a GUID that can be applied on the whole planet. Unfortunately privatizing SS is like privatizing the military or the police, or even education and healhcare. I'd rather have some benevolent global gov't issue these numbers than a private corporation, but unfortunately the only forum that ever had a chance to be a "league of nations" or a global gov't is the UN, whose credibility was recently undermined by Bush. I guess the powers that be are fed up that in the UN countries with no military, no resources, or who otherwise would be completely ignored, get a full vote each, simply because they are split into two countries, and outvote the US simply to say look, here we are, give us cash because we have no other way to make some. One whacky solution would be to split the US into 50 states to the US gets 50 votes. The other solution is what Bush is pushing, saying I'm the UN, I'm boss, kiss my ass. Neither one is a good solution, and frankly, the whole point of any global gov't is to stop the risk of a totalitarian global gov't, which means having to listen to those with no power, no voice, instead of just invading them and clubbing them down, even if they are idiots.
Culture and civilization hasn't ever been produced by the millionares. Newton, Archimedes, Einstein, Van Gogh, Mark Twain, Tagore, Ramanunjan - I don't think any of these folks were millionares, or made a ton off of the fruits of their labor, or has anyone made a ton off the fruits of their labor. They made a very decent living, but that's about it. This DRM stuff is pushed not by the innovators, creators and inventors, but by the control freaks who smell cash and domination. Soon you'll have to pay for intellectual property rights to teach kids pythagoras' formula for triangles, and public libraries will be outlawed, or actually just transformed into venues to collect revenues for IP stuff.
Yeah, well go ahead. Go wipe everyone out, and see if you have complete agreement among those of you who are left. Good luck. In the meantime I think education is too the key to handle clashing ideologies. At the very least everyone should read an excerpt from Socrates, so they can apply it to their own ideology. As far as resources go, as long there is sunlight, there is a resource for life on Earth. Education is even the solution to overpopulation too.
There is nothing more beautiful than an educated person, who's free, in charge of his full disciples, in charge of his inner childish self and ego. It's like with soldiers - they need to be forged, they don't become good soldiers on their own without practicing discipline. (For all the bad the a war is, sometimes you just have to be able to fight back. A good soldier is one who loves peace above all.) There is nothing more laughable than an army turning back running away in chaos everyone for their own life at the sound of the first gun shot. Similarly, it takes practice to become a good person, a person who can look beyond the immediate self.
.Net is the biggest load of crap to hit computing ever since Java. While java was perfect for applets and net security, now it's bastardized into an everyday programming platform. Java is slow, .Net is slow, unless they are preloaded-precompiled and provided with a ton of resources. Remember the speed, size and efficiency of C? Java and .Net do not remove enough complexity from C to justify the speed decrease, Basic used to do that a lot better. The only good thing about Java is being a good teaching tool of abstract concepts. .Net is that now you can better monitor and yank the rug out from under competing apps, because the bytecode instructions are more detailed now. Back in the days if you wanted to throttle your competitor's app running on your OS, you couldn't simply slow down CPU instructions like MOV, ADD, because they are too generic. Now you can have a few targeted instructions that get slowed down unless the app can properly "authenticate" itself with the OS, all in the name of security. Now sysadmins can monitor "managed code" based on what instructions it tries to execute, even without having commented sourcecode, and forbid/allow it to run, all in the name of security. Come on, having original commented sourcecode to review and compile beats the pants off any other way of "trusting" Something is either obfuscated or it ain't, whether it's sourcecode, managed code, or assembler. If it's not obfuscated, then you can't really say it's not open source. Yes, there is an upside to this too, when an app crashes and tells you the contents of the CPU registers, the bytcode stuff is at least more descriptive. Trying to make sense out of compiler generated assembler and why it's crashing, that's a major undertaking. But still, if you got the original human written, commented, human readable sourcecode, nothing even comes close to that. Fixing the bytecode portion without fixing the sourcecode that generated that bytecode shouldn't be the way. So what's the point of having bytecode in the first place? C/C++ is portable enough, as mozilla and other projects show, and instead of compiling on the fly each time, compile once for each platform and distribute the binaries. Compiling on the fly is for small applets of 200 KB or so, not 30 MB apps.
The other thing with Java and
Hahaha. Yeah man, this is the stupidest story ever. They worry about nuclear proliferation. You pretty much can't stop people from using even a compressed gas cylinder or fertilizer to do bad things. Intent is hard to control, but that's you're only chance. Sure you have mentally ill people like Nero, and they are sometimes hard to pick out, but humanity got where it is because of cooperation, and cooperation is built on trust, at least some kind of trust. For instance, you take for granted that 95% of sentences told to you are true. If it were the other way around, with 95% lies and only 5% truth, you wouldn't have a society, everyone would be on their own. When trust is abused, everyone loses. Education is the answer to wars, at least to the threaten the survival of the whole planet kind of wars. If you have a war where a few people die, piss on it, nobody lives forever, but something where the whole planet dies, you can educate people to recognize they are not all that, and there are bigger and more important things in the world then themselves. Simply shoving a religion down their throat that guarantees an afterlife will not make them care enough about this world.
Way for the EU to make money. I mean they have an incentive to punish just like cops have an incentive to catch you for speeding, because it's money in the bank for them.
Yeah, no kidding man, India keeps launching satellites. I guess a new world is coming, we better start learning how to speak hindu or chinese.
5kW my ass.. I meant 5000A instead of 2000A, but for electrolysis heating you need 2-5V, so that's 5000A x (2..5)V=10..25kW.
Yeah man talk about 2000 Amps continuous operation in a 25 kg (55 lb) device - I saw that 25 kg number tossed at
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7403
With 2000 amps you probably don't need a solar furnace because it's self heating anyway inside a 25 kg device - cross section can't be that big, considering you can't use tinfoil thin stuff, because you need a pressure rating, to withstand vacuum. But does the 25 kg include the solar panels, or is that provided to us, as much as we want? For 2000 amps you need quite a farm of solar panels. Once you account for all the efficiencies, including ohmic heating, mining/grinding/powder separating robots coming home to recharge, etc, you're probably looking at a 5kW solar power station. Solar panels can be paperthin though.
You can probably only do this fast enough if you use very hot temperatures, otherwise ionic mobilities and diffusion rates/reaction rates may be too slow. Still, you're looking at quite some foaming, whatever you do, that's a massive amount of gas, especially if it's released at high temperatures - at 1000C the volume is 4x that of room temp volume, and at 1000C I calculate you're dealing with 0.5L gas/sec, at 1 atm pressure, which sounds manageable, but it's still a lot. You may also need some massive heat exchangers when dealing with such high throughputs, especially that there is nothing to thermally contact with - no atmosphere to air cool, no cooling water tower, so all you can do is radiatively cool, unless you dig holes deep into the surface, but "geothermal" is a great insulator in the long run - here on Earth you can pump warm water into the ground in the summer, and get it back in the winter.
Extra Notes: Thinking about colder temperatures, such as some acid digestion/liquid system, whether based on water or phosphoric acid fuel cell stuff may be too time consuming (may need a day to digest at room temp), and one problem is that titanium in any kind of solution loves going round trips between electrodes, doing a Ti3+-Ti4+ redox cycle, wasting your time. Why do they talk about ilmenite FeTiO3, when it only has 30% oxygen, when sodium-aluminum-silicate has 50%? Just magnetically eliminate ilmenite and don't waste your time with it, when it comes to oxygen - you should get O2+aluminum (I think, unless you get O2+silicon, or O2+Al/Si Alloy instead) - so you may not even need titanium-iron for construction, at least for start, you may have plenty aluminum. Also, with extra reagents such as water/hydrogen/phosphoric acid your recovery of these reagests would be less than 100%. True you may be able to get just enough hydrogen/helium/nitrogen from the rocks to replenish yourself, but those are very precious things. So forget it, just use sodium-alumino-silicate, melt it into an ionic liquid, (you just need to kickstart the melting a bit, the rest will ohmicaly self heat) and just drive electricity through it.
I wonder what the ping-time is - that is, you issue a command, it flies for a few minutes with the speed of light in space, reaches the rover, then it answers back with diagnostics/images. Talk about lag - it's kind of like playing with a very very slow response joystick - you tilt it left then back, twiddle your thumb for a few minutes to see if it worked.
One crucial difference between land and information: land became property when it became scarce, while there is no such thing as scarce with information. The only scarce thing is developer time, and even that isn't that scarce given global overpopulation. Sooner or later another developer will do something at a lower cost, unless you don't allow them to via erecting artificial barriers.
Yeah, the patent system is not a way to level the playing field for all to come to the table and share, but yet another additional weapon of those on power to keep the rest under. It's all about control. But hey, you can always wait 20 years til the patents expire - in this case til 2016 - so quit your crying. When patents become eternal, that's when it will all really suck. You think they ain't lobbying for it? The way it goes is like with copyright.. founding fathers start with 14 years in 1796, creep up to 70 by 2000, add extra 20 years in 2000 so now it's 90 years, add extra 20 years in 2020, etc. Then we'll retrofit existing free IP to fit our new 'information economy' - similar to what happened with land from nomadic free land for all to the agricultural this acre is mine transition. Then you'll have to pay for even Euclid's Geometry, because someone will stick a pole down, and call it 'mine.'
Yeah well the problem is undefined because it doesn't specify the independent variable. Are you integrating versus r? When someone hears the problem, they automatically assume integrating vs. r, because pi is a constant, and there is no reason to assume we're integrating vs. z, or k, or lambda or whatever not even mentioned in the problem. The proper statement would have been what's the result of integral 4*pi*rquared*dr, which would have yielded her answer, without ambiguity.
Of course there is the other side of ths story too, in how much tolerance and divergence from your own morality is acceptable, before you start bitching, or even leap into action. In fact, a very nice moral rule is to be as tolerant as possible. So tolerating the existance of a group excluding gays is not quite the same as tolerating someone getting killed right next to you in the street, or tolerating genocide in Africa. As far as bitching goes, the threshhold could be quite low, you could start bitching at the slightest nuance of things out of whack, but leaping into action is quite another thing, because that has a lot more consequences, you better evaluate what you do carefully, but you can run your mouth all over the place a lot easier.
You can't just ignore what goes on somewhere and always look the other way. At the very least you can speak up for it, and bear the consequences. If the nazi's are building up their power right next to you, are you just gonna look the other way and donate your money to someone else? That aint gonna do diddly squat. Or, if there is genocide in Africa, where kids are killed just because someone's moral views doesn't include your own moral views, is that fine? They beat up a guy next to you in the street, close to killing him, are you gonna just say hey, it's not my problem, it's their morality, I don't agree with it, so I'm just ignoring it? When God asked Kain about where is your brother Abel, Kain shrugged it off, and said: Am I my brother's keeper? Well, what do YOU think, as a moral relativist, ARE YOU? I think you have a say in what humanity is like, you have a one person vote in it, to shape it and mold "the law of the land", "the rules we live by", and you excersize it by bitching and caring about issues. Sure, the majority may overpower you with their wish, with their view on how humanity should be, but that doesn't mean you don't have the right to at least try to exert an effort to change things, to how you think things should be. At the very least if you and someone who disagrees with you on an issue, yet you share a common ground on something more basic, more axiomatic values, then there is room for constructive discussion. For example, you both want to live happily, you just think there are different ways to go about it, that oppose each other, thinking the opponent's view yields less happiness, then at least there is room for discussion over how one moral rule and it's outcomes affect other values, and then you can do statistics, surveys, experiments, and come to some commong ground by evaluating the measurement results. Not everything has an answer, but there is room for debate if you happen to share some common moral values, even if those values were chosen by moral relativists.
Actually, I've tried to steal power on highways by driving behind semis and buses. It just doesn't work. Your car's frame and screws will get rattled to pieces via fatigue, because the turbulent wind behind them shakes you from side to side. Your tires will wear faster, and you don't gain much anyway, because, even though you're travelling in lower density air, the turbulent shear and friction takes back way more than anything you gain. If you found a smooth, non-turbulent laminar flow wake, then things would be different. You'd probably have to ride bumper to bumper with a bus or semi to feel any benefit. Bicycle competitors, skiers and marathon runners use each other's wind shadow to save energy, but the speeds involved are slower, and the air is less turbulent in the wake behind them. Of course the real artist at stealing hydrodynamic shadow and uplift are the wild geese with their v-flying formation. They save huge amounts of energy with their flying pattern. Now I'm getting the idea to test driving behind a semi slightly to hind left or right, not right behind it. But I think you need very good senses to home in, because if you don't ride the v wave the truck creates - similar to what ships create on the water surface - always downward downpressure like a surfer riding a wave, you might be actually spending gas to climb up the hind side of the wave and chase it like that. You'd need some really cool pressure gauges and a computer controlling the cruise on your car to actually keep up with it, just the right pace. Geese have feathers for senses, but you don't inside your car. Unless you put on your feather headset and stick your head out the window.
You probably implied why, but just to make sure, let's state why: The air drag your car feels is proportional to the square of speed. Stick your palm out the window to test. At 1 mph almost none of the gas is spent on fighting air, because the air has time to get behind you. At such speed your gas goes to fight friction in the tires bending and relaxing, and the pistons, cylinders, gears rubbing up against each other inside the engine. But at 90 mph a very significant portion is spent on air drag friction on top of the tire and internal engine friction. The actual formula is
F=1/2 * A * Cd * r * V^2
where
F - is the force pulling your car or your palm back
A - cross sectional area of your palm or car
Cd - is the drag coefficient dependent on shape of your car or palm - i.e. do you look like a parachute or a bullet to the incoming wind, because even if you have the same square footage area facing the wind, its shape matters
r - air density, dependent on temperature, humidity, barometric pressure/altitude
V^2 - your velocity squared
Yeah, well try using the macro recording function in openoffice calc, and look at the garbage. There is still ways to go, but you never know, sooner or later it's bound to happen. Excel 97/VBA was an apex of the software world, just like Windows 95 and Netscape were, but unfortunately not much has happened since then. Same old same old anymore, with a new face on the old stuff, and perhaps less bugs. When you sit still, the market will mature and your product become a commodity, and commodity prices get very close to the marginal cost of production, which in case of software is 0. But still, I wouldn't call the hogs of java, dotnet and openoffice a step forward. Remember the days when 64K ram got you what you wanted? There is no reason why everything needs to be 40-120 Megs just to get up and running these days, maybe 5 megs instead of 640K. But you know, it's hard to sell harware unless software demands it, and it's hard to sell software unless the hardware demands it. There isn't such a thing as free lunch, if you get software for free, they'll milk you on the hardware. Remember the myth that linux is supposed to function well on old computers? Yeah, try running kernel 2.6 and KDE 3.9 and see how far you get.
On the other hand gigantic software libraries that contain everything make software development easier, which is where the real bang your head against the wall cost is, but even so, it feels fishy, somehow you feel it shouldn't have to be quite such a resource hog.
Star Trek has been soul food for people with open minds. It's always been a story of moral questions, even if it was under the guise of scientific mumbo-jumbo. Unlike Star Wars, where the adolescent view of evil dark side and the good light side fight, Star Trek always probed the grey areas where good/evil don't really make sense. It was always about how to be human when faced with radically new circumstances. Holographic doctors treated with dignity, just like the rest of the crew, fighting the Borg collective that thinks it's perfect, and it only gets anywhere by assimilating, never creating something from scratch. You name it .. if that's not food for thought, than I don't know what is. The new scifi series, like Andromeda or Stargate fall back to the adolescent posturing, and zero challenge to your moral views. I guess the establishment had enough of free thinkers, now it's time to make everybody dumb and controllable by peer pressure - welcome Apprentice, Survivor, Americal Idol, Fear Factor.
What's the execution speed? Forget about MHz (i.e. million instructions per second), how about 1 instruction/day? Imagine trying to debug such code :)
If you care about the person you're talking to in any way, you will give honest advice, on how to change oil, where to go buy something, or what software you think is best suited for a problem. We're always willing to give lots of opinions and advice while talking to each other. Sometimes you get obnoxious and won't quit bugging alcoholics, druggies and people addicted to cigarettes to quit. What's your business if they smoke? It's just not right, you think, come on man, have some sense, do it right, but they go, you know what, it's nonya biznitz so leave me alone, punk. That's how free software advocates get obnoxious, they think they know what's right for you, and they believe in this stuff.
Atta-go-boy!
Dude, can't you see that MS is actually sponsoring this FUD? What's better than attack them, everyone gang up on MS, you bad dog, in the meantime chanting 'you violated software patents.' The whole idea here is to get you chanting dumbass broad patents as something very valid.
You can't friggin make profit in this business, simply because of the nature of information, which is infinite, unlike material things. If I have an apple, and give it to you, I don't have it anymore. It's either you or me. If I have a thought, a joke, a secret, a gossip, and tell it to you, I don't lose the original, I'm still free to enjoy it. (Heck, even air, which we consume free, should carry a pricetag, because it's not infinite. Just think of the free market regulating deforestation.) Imagine if the same was possible with apples, with cars. You got a new 2005 Rolls Royce? Hold on lemme beam a copy of it into my garage, a la star trek. Ehh, I'm bored of it, I'd rather make a copy of Pete's Lamborghini. Would Pete be willing to share it with me? Sure. Ahh, you say copyright - Lamborghini copyrighted the thing. Well sooner of later people get fed up, and just group together to build a lamborghini themselves, one guy building a screw, the other a button, and they all copy each other's work. How you gonna stop them? You'll forbid giving things away for free? Then how about for 1 cent a bundle? Ahh, that's where patents come in - now you can't build a screw without permission. Well, how about what we did 20 years ago, in the expired patents? That's still gonna work. Well, let's extend patents to 200 years. It's a dark spiral, slippery slope going this way, way to stifle innovation.
With material things one vendor cannot give away the thing and crush all the competitors, because there is marginal cost. But with software, there is no such thing as marginal cost. Take Netscape for instance - success was coming, but it was just soo easy to put them out of business, because Internet Explorer was free. What's your guarantee that as soon as success comes around, someone won't undermine you the same way? You can pretty much just make a living at this, because as soon as you get too successful, you'll be put out of business. Instantly. Patents won't help, because they don't matter, with patents what matters is who got the deeper pockets for lawyers to keep a trial going for a decade. In the end the free market drives the prices to the marginal cost, which is 0, unless there is continuous need for new capital investment. These days this continuous need to reinvent the same wheels in the language of the day is what keeps prices going, but frankly, what radically new stuff have you seen in software since say 1995 (Mac/Win95 GUI/Internet/RelationalDB)? Where is the new stuff? This software field is maturing now. All we see these days is the same old stuff with lower prices, and some big iron corporations running around like the chicken with the head cut off, erecting new legal schemes to lock in and control before prices do fall to 0. The only real advancing thing anymore is hardware, even if slower than it used to be, and software is just there to keep up with it. Your major reason to upgrade is simply because old software won't handle your gigabytes of space, or USB gadgets. There is a need for 'new' information, just like there is a need for new books, and new movies. But that needs radically new things, innovation, not just the same old thing with a new face slapped on it. You can only command a price if you innovate, when you provide customers something new, that they really want, and if you sit still, all your prices will fall to commodity prices. The other way to command a price is of course to become a monopoly where you patent mouseclicks and keyboards even with prior art present, then go beat everyone up in court over it.
It'd be so nice if people could freely share and build on each other's work, instead of everyone having to climb the same hill, redoing the same work. Remember what Newton said? He could see farther because he was standing on shoulders of giants. How did Newton make a living off of producing information? He wasn't selling or licensing the stuff. There was a free exchange, with credit given where credit is due, and as far as money goes, your reputation earned you a stipend, where some rich sul