it is impossible to get within a few hundred years, let alone decades
If you're looking at things that happened more than 10,000 years ago, getting it within a few hundred years is all the accuracy you need. But just thinking about how isotopic ratios are measured, you can see that it would give the most precise measurements near the half life of Carbon 14 (5,730 years) with accuracy increasing from the time the plant or animal died up to 5,730 years and decreasing thereafter. The actual accuracy would also vary by the size and purity of the sample as well as the sensitivity of the instrument used, so you can't really speak in general terms about the accuracy of carbon dating.
Usually when I see a post moderated as informative, it leads me to believe it may contain information of some kind. I think this would be better characterized as insightful.
If anyone does't understand what the parent is talking about, the half-life of Carbon 14 is 5,730±40 years. That means that 52,000 years is a little more than 9 half-lives. By taking 1/2 and raising it to the power of 9, we can conclude that about 0.2% of the original carbon 14 will remain in the oldest layers of sediment.
As for the question of where the Carbon 14 is coming from, we know that it's formed by cosmic radiation striking the atmosphere, and that the amount in the atmosphere varies slightly from year to year. As this article has explained, the purpose of this research is to get a better idea of how much Carbon 14 was in the atmosphere every year so that we can get a better idea of how old a piece organic matter might be based on it's isotopic ratio (the fraction of the carbon that is Carbon 14).
Microsoft uses anti-aliasing to make things look smoother
The catch is that it will also make fine details appear blurry, which increases eye-strain as your eyes attempt to focus on an image which can't be brought into focus. This is the problem that the retina display addresses. By increasing the resolution so that fine details appear sharp, it eliminates the potential for eye-strain. No amount of technical mumbo-jumbo can achieve that, you have to actually increase the number of pixels.
And he dismisses "almost no apps" and "no accessories" and "inferior screen" as not really being that important
The hilarious thing is that he cites a few ports and the keyboard cover that almost no one will ever use as being the "killer features" that make the surface a better value.
If you want to store more photos, why don't you get a bigger SD card for your camera. At $700/64GB the iPad makes for a very expensive SD card replacement, if that's actually the role you've envisioned for it.
Nevertheless, apple offers the iPad camera connection kit for people who would like to use the iPad as you've described. My brother has the camera connection kit, but he never uses it. I think Apple offers it simply to overcome this objection at the time of sale, since once you actually have an iPad, it'll never occur to you to use it this way.
It's a lot like the keyboard dock (which Apple no longer sells) in that regard. Once you use the iPad, you really see that there's no sense attaching a keyboard to it. But there are a lot of people who think they're really clever and say "it needs a physical keyboard," that's why MS has this clever keyboard cover doohickey. They don't expect people to actually use it, but the still want to be able to sell it to people who think it needs to be a laptop because they can't wrap their brains around the concept of a tablet. It's really just a clever bit of hand-holding to help bridge legacy users such as yourself into the modern world of tablets and wireless computing.
They can't build robots capable of the same wide variety of fine, rapid movements as people. Assembling the device robotically would require a large number of purpose build machines to carry out each step. That would add years to the amount of time it takes to bring a product to market, which is unacceptable in consumer electronics.
There are ac couple reasons you can't make a direct comparison like this. For starters, Apple releases new versions three times as often, but they each cost much less. Overall, if you want to stay up-to-date the costs are similar.
Apples strategy brings smaller changes to the market more frequently. While there are a small number of arithmetically challenged users who view this is overly expensive, the adoption is actually much easier because the individual changes are smaller and cost less. That means people are less likely to resent and skip entire upgrades (like Windows Vista) because they aren't expected to learn an entirely new set of features with each new upgrade.
In essence, Apple is asking people to take three small steps while MS expects them to be willing to climb one large step.
Also, Apple doesn't sell upgrades, they sell the actual OS for $20. So if you don't want to pay three times as much, you can skip as many upgrades as you want and the cost to get the latest version remains the same.
That's a meaningless claim unless you know the number that were pre-ordered. It's an entirely new product, so MS was probably conservative with the size of their initial order.
The latest Xcode, however, won't run on my 2-year-old quad-core MacBook Pro.
That's strange, because it works fine on my 3-year old dual core MacBook Pro (13" mid 2009 model). I have Xcode 4.5.1 running as I type this, and that's the latest version.
Speech can really be abusive, so people naturally think that the government should take steps to prevent that abuse. The problem is actually the way people think of government. People don't feel it's their responsibility to deal with abusive speech, the same way people think the government should protect them from violent criminals. In reality, the government can protect you from neither, but giving up power to them diminishes your personal sovereignty all the same.
The problem with that comparison is that it's comparing the transmission of spoken messages to the transcription of text. It's much easier to mishear something than it is to misread it. It's easy enough to make a word for word copy of text, while you'll forget and have to reconstruct parts of a sentence if you repeat it verbally.
I wouldn't be concerned with minor typographical errors, it's unlikely they could actually result in changed meaning. For the sake of argument, look at the dead sea scrolls, which are thousands of years old, and compare with the modern hebrew bible. What you'll find is that they are largely identical. So even over long spans of time, it seems that minor typographical errors won't add up to significant changes.
The problem areas with the text itself are the time between when the events occurred and when they were written down, and stories that were added to the text after the fact. We know that peoples memories change over time, and the more time passes the more details they fill in. So, it seems that the different authors filled in the details a little differently. But the details are hardly the point of the stories they wrote. The link you provided points out stories we know weren't included in the earliest manuscripts of the text, but since we don't have the originals, there may be (and probably are) others.
However, the real problem one which applies to all forms of human communication. The foundation of communication is shared experience. We experience concepts and then learn to associate words with them. But we all have different experiences, and have associated them to words differently. That means that when one person talks, what he's saying and what the other person's hearing are going to be different conceptually. I have an identical twin brother and even with him, I run into these kind of misunderstandings.
So when it comes to reading the Bible, some of which is probably 3500 years old, there are going to be some language barriers even if it's "perfectly" translated. The person writing it would have had many experiences that most of us will never have.
Could you go out and become a spendthrift tomorrow?
Sure. I've spent a lot of money in past. It's just shifting priorities on my part. I'm trying to to start a business for myself so I need to be frugal right now. Who knows what I may decide in the future? It's a behavior I've consciously chosen.
When I think back on regrettable things I've done, the only things I can honestly say were out of my control were situations where I was lied to or important information was withheld from me or I was similarly misled. I feel some regret over my mistakes too, but they just don't bother me the same way. When I realize my mistake, it empowers me because I know I don't have to repeat it. When I've been misled, it's disempowering because the same thing can happen again and there isn't much I can do about it unless I'm willing to forgo a lot of opportunities out of fear or paranoia.
Your free will isn't as all-powerful as you think it is.
I seem to be able to decide for myself which products I buy. I can't recall the last time I bought something and later regretted it, but then again I don't buy much. I don't have some superhuman form of free-will. I just take the time to think about what I'm doing before I do it. Just because some people don't do this doesn't mean that everyone lacks self-control. If you were to legislate to the lowest common denominator, you'd have to legally prescribe every action a person can take to make sure they were all safe.
On the other hand, I do seem to be incapable of resisting the government. The threat of imprisonment is enough to compel me to pay my taxes and conform to federal rules and regulations. So you can see why I'd be concerned by frivolous government interventions such as this ban. Every one of them has the potential to harm me.
There's nothing wrong with enlisting the support of others to stop abuse, but there are other ways of doing that which don't have so much collateral damage.
"Like" in Facebook is used to indicate interest, as in "I'd like to see more stuff like this." So when someone says something like:
“I’ve deleted 5 people, this is the only place that I have any intolerance. If you like that dude, even just on the Internet, we are enemies. No apologies.”
It's basically a misunderstanding of what Facebook means when someone says they like something. This is a problem, because it's not easily resolved. You could add a "show me more stories like this" button, but that's not an action word so it's more confusing and doesn't evoke the same emotional response. You could add a "dislike" button, but then you have the question of how you interpret the dislike. Do you show them more things like that assuming they like to dislike it, or do you show them fewer assuming that they dislike disliking it.
Does anyone else have any ideas about how you can resolve this and still retain an intuitive, uncluttered interface that people would want to use?
The people I know who take them do so to extend life, improve health, brain function, weight loss, etc. . . and prevent illness or death. Many people have told me that vitamin C will prevent or help treat a cold, though I haven't found the evidence to be compelling.
So no, it's not all about increasing your number of years.
I agree that these kind of pop-psychology hacks don't really have anything meaningful to add to this discussion. In fact, if they are registered psychologists, issuing a diagnosis without actually interviewing the person is essentially a form of medical malpractice. Though you see this kind of analysis done on television often enough these days.
That said, Kurzweil is obviously a hack, and doesn't seem to any rational basis for the conclusions he draws. For example, he will tell you that at some point, since computers will be as powerful as a human brain, computers will be capable of the same kind of thought as humans. Since we don't know much about consciousness or how it comes about, or even what it really is, this is not a reasonable conclusion. In fact, no reasonable conclusion can be drawn because there simply isn't enough information available. This kind of hand-waving is something you'd expect from a theologian trying to justify their personal philosophy. That's really what this guy is doing.
Using 9 smaller engines allowed them to use the Falcon 1 as a testbed so that they could work the kinks out on a smaller, less expensive rocket then scale up to a much larger rocket without making a lot of changes. It seems to have worked, since they haven't had any total failures during the Falcon 9's development (thereby saving $$$).
How can you have a right to something that someone else provides to you? What if they don't wan't to? Will you force them to give it to you? Wouldn't that interfere with their ability to live their own lives as they choose?
Maybe it would be better to say that we should endeavor to provide internet access to everyone for the sake of human progress. It's a little disingenuous to pretend that by failing to provide you with internet access they've actually denied you something to which you were rightly entitled.
Still, it is interesting to note that Apple didn't make a special announcement or even post a press release to announce the launch of its newest media players, especially as the competition heats up before the holiday season.
Care to elaborate on that? Do you mean the competition between the various Apple players? Or are you suggesting there are other serious players in this market?
If that's the case, you need to add the odds that exactly 2 engines will fail to the above calculation. There are 36 possible configurations where exactly two engines will fail, each has a probability of (1/36)^2*(35/36)^7: 36*(1/36)^2*(35/36)^7 = 2.3% so the overall probability of a successful flight would be 77.6% + 20.0% + 2.3% = 99.9% leaving a truly minuscule probability that you'd ever see a launch failure due to this problem, assuming that one engine failure will not cause failures in additional engines.
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If you're looking at things that happened more than 10,000 years ago, getting it within a few hundred years is all the accuracy you need. But just thinking about how isotopic ratios are measured, you can see that it would give the most precise measurements near the half life of Carbon 14 (5,730 years) with accuracy increasing from the time the plant or animal died up to 5,730 years and decreasing thereafter. The actual accuracy would also vary by the size and purity of the sample as well as the sensitivity of the instrument used, so you can't really speak in general terms about the accuracy of carbon dating.
Usually when I see a post moderated as informative, it leads me to believe it may contain information of some kind. I think this would be better characterized as insightful.
If anyone does't understand what the parent is talking about, the half-life of Carbon 14 is 5,730±40 years. That means that 52,000 years is a little more than 9 half-lives. By taking 1/2 and raising it to the power of 9, we can conclude that about 0.2% of the original carbon 14 will remain in the oldest layers of sediment.
As for the question of where the Carbon 14 is coming from, we know that it's formed by cosmic radiation striking the atmosphere, and that the amount in the atmosphere varies slightly from year to year. As this article has explained, the purpose of this research is to get a better idea of how much Carbon 14 was in the atmosphere every year so that we can get a better idea of how old a piece organic matter might be based on it's isotopic ratio (the fraction of the carbon that is Carbon 14).
The catch is that it will also make fine details appear blurry, which increases eye-strain as your eyes attempt to focus on an image which can't be brought into focus. This is the problem that the retina display addresses. By increasing the resolution so that fine details appear sharp, it eliminates the potential for eye-strain. No amount of technical mumbo-jumbo can achieve that, you have to actually increase the number of pixels.
The hilarious thing is that he cites a few ports and the keyboard cover that almost no one will ever use as being the "killer features" that make the surface a better value.
If you want to store more photos, why don't you get a bigger SD card for your camera. At $700/64GB the iPad makes for a very expensive SD card replacement, if that's actually the role you've envisioned for it.
Nevertheless, apple offers the iPad camera connection kit for people who would like to use the iPad as you've described. My brother has the camera connection kit, but he never uses it. I think Apple offers it simply to overcome this objection at the time of sale, since once you actually have an iPad, it'll never occur to you to use it this way.
It's a lot like the keyboard dock (which Apple no longer sells) in that regard. Once you use the iPad, you really see that there's no sense attaching a keyboard to it. But there are a lot of people who think they're really clever and say "it needs a physical keyboard," that's why MS has this clever keyboard cover doohickey. They don't expect people to actually use it, but the still want to be able to sell it to people who think it needs to be a laptop because they can't wrap their brains around the concept of a tablet. It's really just a clever bit of hand-holding to help bridge legacy users such as yourself into the modern world of tablets and wireless computing.
They can't build robots capable of the same wide variety of fine, rapid movements as people. Assembling the device robotically would require a large number of purpose build machines to carry out each step. That would add years to the amount of time it takes to bring a product to market, which is unacceptable in consumer electronics.
There are ac couple reasons you can't make a direct comparison like this. For starters, Apple releases new versions three times as often, but they each cost much less. Overall, if you want to stay up-to-date the costs are similar.
Apples strategy brings smaller changes to the market more frequently. While there are a small number of arithmetically challenged users who view this is overly expensive, the adoption is actually much easier because the individual changes are smaller and cost less. That means people are less likely to resent and skip entire upgrades (like Windows Vista) because they aren't expected to learn an entirely new set of features with each new upgrade.
In essence, Apple is asking people to take three small steps while MS expects them to be willing to climb one large step.
Also, Apple doesn't sell upgrades, they sell the actual OS for $20. So if you don't want to pay three times as much, you can skip as many upgrades as you want and the cost to get the latest version remains the same.
That's a meaningless claim unless you know the number that were pre-ordered. It's an entirely new product, so MS was probably conservative with the size of their initial order.
That's strange, because it works fine on my 3-year old dual core MacBook Pro (13" mid 2009 model). I have Xcode 4.5.1 running as I type this, and that's the latest version.
Speech can really be abusive, so people naturally think that the government should take steps to prevent that abuse. The problem is actually the way people think of government. People don't feel it's their responsibility to deal with abusive speech, the same way people think the government should protect them from violent criminals. In reality, the government can protect you from neither, but giving up power to them diminishes your personal sovereignty all the same.
The problem with that comparison is that it's comparing the transmission of spoken messages to the transcription of text. It's much easier to mishear something than it is to misread it. It's easy enough to make a word for word copy of text, while you'll forget and have to reconstruct parts of a sentence if you repeat it verbally.
I wouldn't be concerned with minor typographical errors, it's unlikely they could actually result in changed meaning. For the sake of argument, look at the dead sea scrolls, which are thousands of years old, and compare with the modern hebrew bible. What you'll find is that they are largely identical. So even over long spans of time, it seems that minor typographical errors won't add up to significant changes.
The problem areas with the text itself are the time between when the events occurred and when they were written down, and stories that were added to the text after the fact. We know that peoples memories change over time, and the more time passes the more details they fill in. So, it seems that the different authors filled in the details a little differently. But the details are hardly the point of the stories they wrote. The link you provided points out stories we know weren't included in the earliest manuscripts of the text, but since we don't have the originals, there may be (and probably are) others.
However, the real problem one which applies to all forms of human communication. The foundation of communication is shared experience. We experience concepts and then learn to associate words with them. But we all have different experiences, and have associated them to words differently. That means that when one person talks, what he's saying and what the other person's hearing are going to be different conceptually. I have an identical twin brother and even with him, I run into these kind of misunderstandings.
So when it comes to reading the Bible, some of which is probably 3500 years old, there are going to be some language barriers even if it's "perfectly" translated. The person writing it would have had many experiences that most of us will never have.
I doubt this would be happening in the middle of the dorms. More likely it would be on land that the universities aren't currently using.
Sure. I've spent a lot of money in past. It's just shifting priorities on my part. I'm trying to to start a business for myself so I need to be frugal right now. Who knows what I may decide in the future? It's a behavior I've consciously chosen.
When I think back on regrettable things I've done, the only things I can honestly say were out of my control were situations where I was lied to or important information was withheld from me or I was similarly misled. I feel some regret over my mistakes too, but they just don't bother me the same way. When I realize my mistake, it empowers me because I know I don't have to repeat it. When I've been misled, it's disempowering because the same thing can happen again and there isn't much I can do about it unless I'm willing to forgo a lot of opportunities out of fear or paranoia.
I seem to be able to decide for myself which products I buy. I can't recall the last time I bought something and later regretted it, but then again I don't buy much. I don't have some superhuman form of free-will. I just take the time to think about what I'm doing before I do it. Just because some people don't do this doesn't mean that everyone lacks self-control. If you were to legislate to the lowest common denominator, you'd have to legally prescribe every action a person can take to make sure they were all safe.
On the other hand, I do seem to be incapable of resisting the government. The threat of imprisonment is enough to compel me to pay my taxes and conform to federal rules and regulations. So you can see why I'd be concerned by frivolous government interventions such as this ban. Every one of them has the potential to harm me.
There's nothing wrong with enlisting the support of others to stop abuse, but there are other ways of doing that which don't have so much collateral damage.
"Like" in Facebook is used to indicate interest, as in "I'd like to see more stuff like this." So when someone says something like:
It's basically a misunderstanding of what Facebook means when someone says they like something. This is a problem, because it's not easily resolved. You could add a "show me more stories like this" button, but that's not an action word so it's more confusing and doesn't evoke the same emotional response. You could add a "dislike" button, but then you have the question of how you interpret the dislike. Do you show them more things like that assuming they like to dislike it, or do you show them fewer assuming that they dislike disliking it.
Does anyone else have any ideas about how you can resolve this and still retain an intuitive, uncluttered interface that people would want to use?
The people I know who take them do so to extend life, improve health, brain function, weight loss, etc. . . and prevent illness or death. Many people have told me that vitamin C will prevent or help treat a cold, though I haven't found the evidence to be compelling.
So no, it's not all about increasing your number of years.
I agree that these kind of pop-psychology hacks don't really have anything meaningful to add to this discussion. In fact, if they are registered psychologists, issuing a diagnosis without actually interviewing the person is essentially a form of medical malpractice. Though you see this kind of analysis done on television often enough these days.
That said, Kurzweil is obviously a hack, and doesn't seem to any rational basis for the conclusions he draws. For example, he will tell you that at some point, since computers will be as powerful as a human brain, computers will be capable of the same kind of thought as humans. Since we don't know much about consciousness or how it comes about, or even what it really is, this is not a reasonable conclusion. In fact, no reasonable conclusion can be drawn because there simply isn't enough information available. This kind of hand-waving is something you'd expect from a theologian trying to justify their personal philosophy. That's really what this guy is doing.
Using 9 smaller engines allowed them to use the Falcon 1 as a testbed so that they could work the kinks out on a smaller, less expensive rocket then scale up to a much larger rocket without making a lot of changes. It seems to have worked, since they haven't had any total failures during the Falcon 9's development (thereby saving $$$).
How can you have a right to something that someone else provides to you? What if they don't wan't to? Will you force them to give it to you? Wouldn't that interfere with their ability to live their own lives as they choose?
Maybe it would be better to say that we should endeavor to provide internet access to everyone for the sake of human progress. It's a little disingenuous to pretend that by failing to provide you with internet access they've actually denied you something to which you were rightly entitled.
The mammoth caracas they excavated was buried in permafrost, so these half-life numbers would not apply.
I guess the difference is whether you want to use the device to listen to music, or if you're ok with just looking at pictures of it.
Care to elaborate on that? Do you mean the competition between the various Apple players? Or are you suggesting there are other serious players in this market?
That's because gold is so heavy!
If that's the case, you need to add the odds that exactly 2 engines will fail to the above calculation. There are 36 possible configurations where exactly two engines will fail, each has a probability of (1/36)^2*(35/36)^7: 36*(1/36)^2*(35/36)^7 = 2.3% so the overall probability of a successful flight would be 77.6% + 20.0% + 2.3% = 99.9% leaving a truly minuscule probability that you'd ever see a launch failure due to this problem, assuming that one engine failure will not cause failures in additional engines.