I don't think there is value in having a huge number of languages. IMO languages mutate rapidly enough as it is. Their value is in communication so their is little point to preserving every idiom ever spoken.
Bringing this back to air traffic control imagine if pilots over the US spoke 200 languages and every little airport in the country needed to be able to speak to any pilot. Chances are you would drop the number of connections and go Language A > generic > Language B because for most things close enough works just fine.
We have done the same thing with closed source software.
EX: A coworker was having major issues with a closed source DLL so he decompiled it fixed the bug and then sent the update back to the company. We used his copy until they sent out and update.
However, IMO extending open or closed source software is mostly a waste of time, because minor tweaks to software you don't really understand tend to create more issues than they solve.
Re:please stop with the Ocean Uranium Crap
on
Google Goes Green
·
· Score: 2, Informative
"The concentration of uranium in soil ranges from 0.7 to 11 parts per million (up to 15 parts per million in farmland soil due to use of phosphate fertilizers), and 3 parts per billion of sea water is composed of the element." So there is far more uranium in the ground than the ocean but it's still fairly cheep to extract it from the ocean because of the insane amount of energy in tiny amounts of uranium.
Anyway, you don't extract uranium by boiling the sea you use some sort of ion exchange or http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4585627.html. If you used uranium from sea water you would increase the cost around 4%. And using Uranium from sea water is still 100's of times energy positive. So it works on an economic and energy basis. But it's pointless at this point in time we 100's of years of stock piled uranium already mined and waiting to be used.
Up to this point we have focused on extracting around 2% of the energy from high energy uranium ore. At this point we use depleted uranium in bullets even though it has more than 10,000 times the energy density of crude oil.
1) Try mapping out your system on a 2d grid and you will find some paths are faster but the worst case is slower than 1.414 times distance. (EX: Try the middle of one spoke to the middle of the next one.)
2) Try building a city with square buildings in a city with round roads and you end up wasting a lot of space.
3) Hub and spoke systems break down as you get further from the center and they don't align well with each other. You also end up with a lot more spokes in the center and or adding more as you step away from the center.
4) Once again your making assumptions on how people will travel. Consider what happens when someone adds a new football stadium and 300k people want to get to some random point in your city.
"Boring" city grids are efficient on several levels ex: you can get to any block by making at most 3 turns and any point within 4 turns.
You are falling into the classic trap of trying to make the data fit your assumptions not your assumptions fit the data. Let's say drug X causes 1% of people do die in 10 years and doubles the life expectancy of every one else would you take it? You will probably live much longer in great heath but you might just die so is it worth it? And what's the point of this?
Well most people focus on uncommon events. In the US there are around 4 violent crimes (Assault, rape, murder etc) per 1000 people per year. This might seem rare but with ~300,000,000 people that's around 1,200,000 per year. This is a fairly large number with numbers that large rare events are less important. The only meaningful way to talk about that many people is average behavior. One on one specific reactions are meaningful but you don't understand how 300 million lives interact so you need to look at the averages. And on average we are becoming less violent.
Anyway, people tend to investigate why a person becomes violent, but once you start talking about millions of people you need large samples sizes. A few people might come back from war and get extremely violent but the more important piece is what the quiet majority do. Studying the violent tells you nothing about the average. And my point in all of this is on average video games don't increase violence by an order of magnitude so if you really want to say they increase violence in the population at large you need to build a study that can look measure a weak interaction on an uncommon event.
PS: Real life is not the same a simulation which is not the same as video games. So to understand video games you need to study them and how people play them not real life or simulations.
The advantage of a grid is redundancy, 1 million people don't all want to go from A to B so forcing people to use a few highly congested areas is a bad idea. All non grid systems assume things will stay the way they are so as populations moves your system will become less efficient.
The problem is you need two grids one at low speed and another grid of limited access highway for long distances. And you have to deal with natural obstructions like rivers etc.
Going left right left right is the same distance but slower vs driving clear across town to make one turn. At worst a grid is 1.414 times as far as a road that goes exactly to your destination.
If you can't tell if someone is producing value by their output why do you need them? Someone can answer all the email you want, but if that's not their job then why would you evaluate them a useless metric? People are not productive just because you are looking at them. You need to give them something to do and then evaluate their output.
Ok, I think I understand your issue is practicality. And I think causality is important. IMO you could do a great study for around 20-30 million that would just about kill off most debate on this issue. But, how would you fund such a beast? (Ok, you might be able to interest the DoD as they are interested in violence, but it would be a touchy subject.)
Anyway, if you read a study conducted using the basic methods I originally suggested would you feel it said something meaningful about this subject? If not can you think of some study in that price range which would work in your opinion? Now compare your idea with the BS study's that many sociologists use and see why I might take issue with the quality of work up to this point.
I don't care if it's hard. There is no point to doing a study that will not demonstrate any meaningful facts.
PS: I have never read skeptics magazine, but the last study I did used over a million data points over 10 years so I might have unreasonable expectations.
But, how could you tell? The first new life forms would probably become food long before they started to evolve the 2nd time around. Let's face it the world is a harsher place now than it was before life started up. It's like trying to start up a new search engine after Google vs. before yahoo.
PS: Yea, its biology might be different so harder to digest edible but when you eat a poisonous plant it's still dead.
How would you prevent them from playing violent video games outside of the after school programs?
IMO: There is no need to do this.
The larger and more random the sample the less outside factors are important. It's true that 6 +/- hours a week for a few years might not be significant but that's still useful information. The simple truth is science works in the real world. So if you can't test a theory then it's meaningless.
EX: In theory you could setup a million fake families on some islands in the south pacific and test how this works but if the effects are so week you need to go that far then IMO it's insignificant. Workable theory needs to clearly rise above the random chaos or it has no predictive value. Real theory needs to predict a direction and magnitude of effects. Statements like "Video games increase violence" have no predictive value because they can be true if 1 act in the universe per trillion years or 1 act per person per second. But hey Think of the children whatever that means.
PS: At this point it seems like your trolling, but I have nothing better to do so whatever.
High energy radio active waste is an energy source. The vast majority of this so called waste is fuel. We extract around 2% of the available energy because that's the cheep part but the idea of high energy waste is silly if it's really hot then we can extract energy from it. If it's going to be around for million's of years then it's safe.
Read up on breeder reactors and take a real look at this issue.
PS: I seem to recall an issue where the concrete was producing more radiation than the "acceptable dose" before the plant went into operation. I can't find the details but background radiation is often well above the "acceptable" level inside a power plant and nobody bothers to tell people living in the area.
"In a double-blind experiment, neither the individuals nor the researchers know who belongs to the control group and the experimental group."
Expensive example: Setup 100 after school programs with video games and other activities. Randomly assign some centers with violent game X and others with popular non violent games. See what happens. The researchers at each center would not need to know which the experimental group was. You could even do the classic method of doing some false research to aka does diet soda influence violence.
PS: Yes good science costs $$$. Look at what it takes to run ITER and then get back to me with how unreasonable this would be.
Wind is cost effective right now. Hydro is cost effective right now. The best solar to electricity systems are about 45% efficiency but still pricey for now. However coal is cheep and we have a large enough supply that it should last 100 years with zero problems. We can run nuke plants for 10,000+ years. So energy is not a problem.
The real issue is we like our hydro carbons in easy to transport containers and oil is going up in price, but there is still a lot of oil out there in tar sands etc. Now we could manufacture oil, all it takes is energy CO2 and H20 but that seems like a bad idea. So we talk about hydrogen, or ethanol etc but right now oil is still cheep so it's up in the air.
In many ways we are drunk on oil and it's going to our heads, so some things will probably change. I walked to work today, other people telecommute, some took trains etc, but the millions who drive 30+ miles might need to find another life style. Some change could be good from an energy stand point I could walk 2 blocks to the mall, but it's easer to just go to amazon.com. That's right from an energy standpoint home delivery is cheep.
Think of it like this trains can transport one ton of stuff 400 miles on a gallon of fuel, but we still send truckers all over the country because it's fast and cheep. But at some point other methods could be the new fast and cheep.
PS: Corn to ethanol is a bad idea just like corn to fructose is a bad idea.
The part of your statement that I take issue with, is "people who say video games don't increase violence must think they do nothing."
There are a lot of options: Video games might make people non violent, smarter, thin, happy, or whatever. Or some video games like Doom could increase violence where realistic games like counter strike might decrease it. Or some video games like Doom could decrease violence but realistic games like counter strike might increase it. etc.
My point is people who want to demonstrate that some type of video game increase violence need to show this while taking into account what people would be doing if they where not playing games. Aka a true double blind study for some reasonable length of time.
If you look at the way gamers spend their free time they are often spending 30+% of their free time playing games. So among that group of people they would have to be 30% more violent in the rest of their life to make up for that gap. Which does not seem to be happening.
Is not the question. The question is "Do video games that are not designed to increase violent behavior increase violent behavior?" The single most obvious reason they would reduce violence is they take up significant quantities of time leaving time to be violent.
PS: I suspect video games reduce real world violence and I have yet to see any evidence to the contrary.
<my most nerdy post to/. yet in comic book guy voice>
There are a lot of non mainstream comics sold in the US some of which become hit's like:
-JtHM Johnny the Homicidal Maniac (short strips in the goth magazine Carpe Noctem, and later published by Slave Labor Graphics) -Powers (by Image Comics from 2000 to 2004 after which it was moved to Marvel Comics) -Y the last man.(published by Vertigo) -The Sandman (by once again by Vertigo which is part of DC Comics but focused on mature-readers)
But mostly non mainstream comics die off. The problem is Japan has a wider audience for such things and a willingness to accept a poorly drawn or extremely stylized B&W comic an interesting plot but such things tend to die in the US.
PS: There are a wide range of surprisingly good independent web comics like www.xkcd.com.
</my most nerdy post to/. yet in comic book guy voice>
The idea is if you don't buy the new toy you don't discard the old one.
EX: I had a 91' Volvo with ~230k miles which I replaced a few months ago with a brand new Acura TSX. The Acura get's ~50% more miles to the gallon but costs 500$ month. If it had cost 700$ a month I would have probably kept my Volvo for another few years because I don't drive all that much.
PS: Yea the car analogy is messed up because there are several reasons to buy a new car. However, when things cost more the tendency is to stick with what you have.
You can't extract meaning from works of fiction. You can guess the reason why authors uses specific backgrounds / events but a novelists job is to entertain so "it's interesting" is as valid as any other interpretation.
PS: Most forms of literary criticism are BS and a complete waste of time. It's best to focus on dead authors so they don't contradict you with an inconvenient truth?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think there is value in having a huge number of languages. IMO languages mutate rapidly enough as it is. Their value is in communication so their is little point to preserving every idiom ever spoken.
Bringing this back to air traffic control imagine if pilots over the US spoke 200 languages and every little airport in the country needed to be able to speak to any pilot. Chances are you would drop the number of connections and go Language A > generic > Language B because for most things close enough works just fine.
It depends on temperature and pressure but at Standard Atmospheric Pressure and 20 degrees Celsius
air weighs 1.2 kg/m^3 or 2.6 pounds/m^3.
So it's only 1.15 cubic meters or 49 cubic feet of air per day. My guess is the hole is around 2mm or 1/10th of an inch in size.
We have done the same thing with closed source software.
EX: A coworker was having major issues with a closed source DLL so he decompiled it fixed the bug and then sent the update back to the company. We used his copy until they sent out and update.
However, IMO extending open or closed source software is mostly a waste of time, because minor tweaks to software you don't really understand tend to create more issues than they solve.
"The concentration of uranium in soil ranges from 0.7 to 11 parts per million (up to 15 parts per million in farmland soil due to use of phosphate fertilizers), and 3 parts per billion of sea water is composed of the element." So there is far more uranium in the ground than the ocean but it's still fairly cheep to extract it from the ocean because of the insane amount of energy in tiny amounts of uranium.
Anyway, you don't extract uranium by boiling the sea you use some sort of ion exchange or http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4585627.html. If you used uranium from sea water you would increase the cost around 4%. And using Uranium from sea water is still 100's of times energy positive. So it works on an economic and energy basis. But it's pointless at this point in time we 100's of years of stock piled uranium already mined and waiting to be used.
Up to this point we have focused on extracting around 2% of the energy from high energy uranium ore. At this point we use depleted uranium in bullets even though it has more than 10,000 times the energy density of crude oil.
1) Try mapping out your system on a 2d grid and you will find some paths are faster but the worst case is slower than 1.414 times distance. (EX: Try the middle of one spoke to the middle of the next one.)
2) Try building a city with square buildings in a city with round roads and you end up wasting a lot of space.
3) Hub and spoke systems break down as you get further from the center and they don't align well with each other. You also end up with a lot more spokes in the center and or adding more as you step away from the center.
4) Once again your making assumptions on how people will travel. Consider what happens when someone adds a new football stadium and 300k people want to get to some random point in your city.
"Boring" city grids are efficient on several levels ex: you can get to any block by making at most 3 turns and any point within 4 turns.
You are falling into the classic trap of trying to make the data fit your assumptions not your assumptions fit the data. Let's say drug X causes 1% of people do die in 10 years and doubles the life expectancy of every one else would you take it? You will probably live much longer in great heath but you might just die so is it worth it? And what's the point of this?
Well most people focus on uncommon events. In the US there are around 4 violent crimes (Assault, rape, murder etc) per 1000 people per year. This might seem rare but with ~300,000,000 people that's around 1,200,000 per year. This is a fairly large number with numbers that large rare events are less important. The only meaningful way to talk about that many people is average behavior. One on one specific reactions are meaningful but you don't understand how 300 million lives interact so you need to look at the averages. And on average we are becoming less violent.
Anyway, people tend to investigate why a person becomes violent, but once you start talking about millions of people you need large samples sizes. A few people might come back from war and get extremely violent but the more important piece is what the quiet majority do. Studying the violent tells you nothing about the average. And my point in all of this is on average video games don't increase violence by an order of magnitude so if you really want to say they increase violence in the population at large you need to build a study that can look measure a weak interaction on an uncommon event.
PS: Real life is not the same a simulation which is not the same as video games. So to understand video games you need to study them and how people play them not real life or simulations.
The advantage of a grid is redundancy, 1 million people don't all want to go from A to B so forcing people to use a few highly congested areas is a bad idea. All non grid systems assume things will stay the way they are so as populations moves your system will become less efficient.
The problem is you need two grids one at low speed and another grid of limited access highway for long distances. And you have to deal with natural obstructions like rivers etc.
Going left right left right is the same distance but slower vs driving clear across town to make one turn. At worst a grid is 1.414 times as far as a road that goes exactly to your destination.
If you can't tell if someone is producing value by their output why do you need them? Someone can answer all the email you want, but if that's not their job then why would you evaluate them a useless metric? People are not productive just because you are looking at them. You need to give them something to do and then evaluate their output.
As for being fat. If you eat like a predator, you'll have a body like a predator. If you eat like a herbivore, you'll look like one.
I agree with my tribal elder's wisdom from the ages. (aka Citation needed.)
Ok, I think I understand your issue is practicality. And I think causality is important. IMO you could do a great study for around 20-30 million that would just about kill off most debate on this issue. But, how would you fund such a beast? (Ok, you might be able to interest the DoD as they are interested in violence, but it would be a touchy subject.)
Anyway, if you read a study conducted using the basic methods I originally suggested would you feel it said something meaningful about this subject? If not can you think of some study in that price range which would work in your opinion? Now compare your idea with the BS study's that many sociologists use and see why I might take issue with the quality of work up to this point.
I don't care if it's hard. There is no point to doing a study that will not demonstrate any meaningful facts.
PS: I have never read skeptics magazine, but the last study I did used over a million data points over 10 years so I might have unreasonable expectations.
Err, bad yoda like copy and paste says I.
*PS: Yea, its biology might be harder to digest but when you eat a poisonous plant it's still dead.
But, how could you tell? The first new life forms would probably become food long before they started to evolve the 2nd time around. Let's face it the world is a harsher place now than it was before life started up. It's like trying to start up a new search engine after Google vs. before yahoo.
PS: Yea, its biology might be different so harder to digest edible but when you eat a poisonous plant it's still dead.
How would you prevent them from playing violent video games outside of the after school programs?
IMO: There is no need to do this.
The larger and more random the sample the less outside factors are important. It's true that 6 +/- hours a week for a few years might not be significant but that's still useful information. The simple truth is science works in the real world. So if you can't test a theory then it's meaningless.
EX: In theory you could setup a million fake families on some islands in the south pacific and test how this works but if the effects are so week you need to go that far then IMO it's insignificant. Workable theory needs to clearly rise above the random chaos or it has no predictive value. Real theory needs to predict a direction and magnitude of effects. Statements like "Video games increase violence" have no predictive value because they can be true if 1 act in the universe per trillion years or 1 act per person per second. But hey Think of the children whatever that means.
PS: At this point it seems like your trolling, but I have nothing better to do so whatever.
High energy radio active waste is an energy source. The vast majority of this so called waste is fuel. We extract around 2% of the available energy because that's the cheep part but the idea of high energy waste is silly if it's really hot then we can extract energy from it. If it's going to be around for million's of years then it's safe.
Read up on breeder reactors and take a real look at this issue.
The other issue is the extreme levels nuke plants are regulated. For an idea just how silly this is: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE2DA1F3AF935A15751C1A966958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print
http://www.uic.com.au/ral.htm
PS: I seem to recall an issue where the concrete was producing more radiation than the "acceptable dose" before the plant went into operation. I can't find the details but background radiation is often well above the "acceptable" level inside a power plant and nobody bothers to tell people living in the area.
"In a double-blind experiment, neither the individuals nor the researchers know who belongs to the control group and the experimental group."
Expensive example: Setup 100 after school programs with video games and other activities. Randomly assign some centers with violent game X and others with popular non violent games. See what happens. The researchers at each center would not need to know which the experimental group was. You could even do the classic method of doing some false research to aka does diet soda influence violence.
PS: Yes good science costs $$$. Look at what it takes to run ITER and then get back to me with how unreasonable this would be.
Wind is cost effective right now. Hydro is cost effective right now. The best solar to electricity systems are about 45% efficiency but still pricey for now. However coal is cheep and we have a large enough supply that it should last 100 years with zero problems. We can run nuke plants for 10,000+ years. So energy is not a problem.
The real issue is we like our hydro carbons in easy to transport containers and oil is going up in price, but there is still a lot of oil out there in tar sands etc. Now we could manufacture oil, all it takes is energy CO2 and H20 but that seems like a bad idea. So we talk about hydrogen, or ethanol etc but right now oil is still cheep so it's up in the air.
In many ways we are drunk on oil and it's going to our heads, so some things will probably change. I walked to work today, other people telecommute, some took trains etc, but the millions who drive 30+ miles might need to find another life style. Some change could be good from an energy stand point I could walk 2 blocks to the mall, but it's easer to just go to amazon.com. That's right from an energy standpoint home delivery is cheep.
Think of it like this trains can transport one ton of stuff 400 miles on a gallon of fuel, but we still send truckers all over the country because it's fast and cheep. But at some point other methods could be the new fast and cheep.
PS: Corn to ethanol is a bad idea just like corn to fructose is a bad idea.
The part of your statement that I take issue with, is "people who say video games don't increase violence must think they do nothing."
There are a lot of options: Video games might make people non violent, smarter, thin, happy, or whatever. Or some video games like Doom could increase violence where realistic games like counter strike might decrease it. Or some video games like Doom could decrease violence but realistic games like counter strike might increase it. etc.
My point is people who want to demonstrate that some type of video game increase violence need to show this while taking into account what people would be doing if they where not playing games. Aka a true double blind study for some reasonable length of time.
"Recently, the offending rates for 14-17 year-olds reached the lowest levels ever recorded."
This is not a scientific study but see: http://www.gamerevolution.com/features/violence_and_videogames
If you look at the way gamers spend their free time they are often spending 30+% of their free time playing games. So among that group of people they would have to be 30% more violent in the rest of their life to make up for that gap. Which does not seem to be happening.
That was a well done straw man argument.
Do can media have an effect on people or not?
Is not the question. The question is "Do video games that are not designed to increase violent behavior increase violent behavior?" The single most obvious reason they would reduce violence is they take up significant quantities of time leaving time to be violent.
PS: I suspect video games reduce real world violence and I have yet to see any evidence to the contrary.
<my most nerdy post to /. yet in comic book guy voice>
/. yet in comic book guy voice>
There are a lot of non mainstream comics sold in the US some of which become hit's like:
-JtHM Johnny the Homicidal Maniac (short strips in the goth magazine Carpe Noctem, and later published by Slave Labor Graphics)
-Powers (by Image Comics from 2000 to 2004 after which it was moved to Marvel Comics)
-Y the last man.(published by Vertigo)
-The Sandman (by once again by Vertigo which is part of DC Comics but focused on mature-readers)
But mostly non mainstream comics die off. The problem is Japan has a wider audience for such things and a willingness to accept a poorly drawn or extremely stylized B&W comic an interesting plot but such things tend to die in the US.
PS: There are a wide range of surprisingly good independent web comics like www.xkcd.com.
</my most nerdy post to
FYI: "On December 15, 2004, Sprint and NEXTEL announced they would merge to form Sprint Nextel Corporation." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_Nextel
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz Processor with 2 x 4MB L2 Cache 260$
+ slight OC (80$)
= 4 cores at 3.0Ghz aka Pownage (Priceless)
Now most people don't need that much CPU, or a multi TB RAID 5 array etc but for those who do high end laptops are just a waste of cash.
I use a cheep laptop for on the go access to the internet, but when you want to get things done desktops cost less, expand easily and are just faster.
The idea is if you don't buy the new toy you don't discard the old one.
EX: I had a 91' Volvo with ~230k miles which I replaced a few months ago with a brand new Acura TSX. The Acura get's ~50% more miles to the gallon but costs 500$ month. If it had cost 700$ a month I would have probably kept my Volvo for another few years because I don't drive all that much.
PS: Yea the car analogy is messed up because there are several reasons to buy a new car. However, when things cost more the tendency is to stick with what you have.
You can't extract meaning from works of fiction. You can guess the reason why authors uses specific backgrounds / events but a novelists job is to entertain so "it's interesting" is as valid as any other interpretation.
PS: Most forms of literary criticism are BS and a complete waste of time. It's best to focus on dead authors so they don't contradict you with an inconvenient truth?
So use 3 people. 50, million votes at 1vote / min and 60$ / h = 50 million.
IMO 1 vote / min is vary slow and 60$/h for 3 people is on the high side but YMMV.
PS: I don't think there is any reasonable way for hand counting to cost more than 1$ / vote.