While we're on the topic of stereotypes: It seems that instead the researchers made a female robot that just sits there submissively and flutters its eyelids.
The instant you burn something to run a heat engine you lose about half of its exergy (that is, the energy potentially available to do work). The best thing that hydrogen power has going for it is NOT that hydrogen is great (it isn't. As fuels go, it's inconvenient in a lot of ways), but that you can use it with fuel cells which are not limited by the Carnot efficiency (they're basically batteries). Using H2 in a heat engine is taking the worst of both worlds.
The punishment does fit the crime if you have the right set of values.
From the article:
Professor Landsburg, an economist at the University of Rochester, has calculated the relative value to society of executing murderers and hackers. [...]
The benefits of executing a hacker would be greater [than of executing a murderer], he argues, because the social costs of hacking are estimated to be so much higher: $50 billion per year.
In other words: If you measure good in dollars, killing hackers is God's work.
What disturbs me is that this reflects a larger trend in the U.S. towards a frightening kind of capitalist moralism: That money in fact is the only value. There's a utopian idea that the efficiency of unrestrained capitalism will make everyone's dreams come true (or at least the dreams of those who matter. Those others are "lazy," or "slobs," or generally "worthless." [I quote slashdot posts.])
The apparent fall of Communism has left us Americans with overconfidence in Capitalism as Truth, and too many of us are forgetting that democracy is built on higher civic values.
The Anarcho-Capitalists need to remember that corporate government - the organizational structure within a company - is just as much government as is civic government. It is also inherently authoritarian, a heirarchical militarisitic structure starting with the CEO, the five-star general, and ending with the mailroom clerk, the new Private with his face in the mud. Society is built on checks and balances, and a capable civic government is a vital check on the power of the corporate machine.
>1) Got a girlfriend and discovered more important things they could be doing.
With all due respect, I snicker. There are more important things they could be doing, but that ain't one of them. Contrary to popular opinion, you don't become a valuable member of society and a full person just because you've "finally got a girl friend." It is a myth that creates desperate people, and the world has too many.
>2) Learned how to program, got into open source, and changed their IRC handle and will now deny to the death that they ever used the old one.
Good call. The world needs more people like these.
>3) Became a drug addict and dropped out of school.
Yeah, seen it. Or arrested. Sucks, doesn't it?
>I do, however, oppose putting Warez traders in jail, as they will no longer have their mothers coming downstairs every afternoon nagging them to get a job. Many of them are in fact quite intelligent, and will become productive members of society once they get out of their parents' house, and get some education and/or therapy.
Amen!
What's interesting is the possibility of modeling electronics around this fact. Analog electronics may see a resurgence, and we lose the ability to squeeze more clock cycles out of our digital systems each second.
I wish Firefox didn't get associated with the FTP protocol in Windows. When it asks me "Do you want Firefox to be your default browser?" I say "Yes," but I only mean "I want to use Firefox as my default http client."
It's a great web browser. It sucks for FTP.
When I type an FTP URL into the "Run" dialog, I'd rather have a proper FTP browser (like WinSCP, or yes, even Explorer!) than Firefox. I found the registry keys that change this, and have some.reg files that I keep around to change my settings, but they keep getting changed back. It's an annoyance.
More on modelers: I've been using SPatch forever, which is a wonderful little freeware spline based model. Hash Animation Master uses nothing but splines. 3dsMax has had support for splines and NURBS since forever.
And on games: Quake III did this. Curved surfaces were stored as such, and tesselated, with LOD, at runtime. And this is an old-school BSP+PVS engine!
I saw that but didn't buy it, since when you're actively pumping coolant, I was under the impression that you didn't really need a ton of conductivity in anything but the heat exchangers.
When I first saw that they were using liquid metal, my first thought was "Why?!" Water has a gigantic heat capacity, and is in may ways the Ideal Coolant.
But then I saw: "Electromagnetic pump with no moving parts." So it looks like they're sacrificing some of the coolant properties of water so that they can use something very electrically-conductive, and gain the advantage of silent operation.
That said, IIRC there are no-moving-parts water pumps that use electrochemical effects (something with electrolysis and dragging ions through the water), but I've always assumed that they're limited to small flow rates.
Now I want to know how this no-moving-parts liquid-metal-pump works. Maybe use a square-cross-sectioned pipe with an insulating top and bottom and conductive sides; pass a current between the sides, and put large permanent magnets above and below? Or do it linear-induction-motor style? Hmmm...
Romance IS shallow, almost by definition. It's performance art, nothing more. I cringe every time I think about Valentine's Day.
If two people want to spend time together when doing so doesn't either:
Give them the socially-desirable status of being "in a relationship."
Give them the expectation of sex
...then they have something a little more meaningful. If they're simply expected to perform socially-mandated rituals for each other (For guys: Being a convenient boyfriend. For girls: Giving oral sex.), then it's nothing but but a two-person service-barter economy.
But I digress. Slashdot isn't the place for this. More appropriately: In Soviet Russia, moody melancholy posts make you!
Don't worry; I'm not so paranoid to think that you're involved in an elaborate conspiracy to sell a hard drive enclosure! Any true conspiracy theorist can tell you that you'd need at least a black helicopter or two for that...
Perhaps, so as to avoid future misunderstandings, the two of us can start a conspiracy to get the W3C to add a <joke> tag to the next draft of HTML...
Evolution happens when there are "evolutionary pressures" - things that make some individuals die, and others live to reproduce. Right now, the biggest killers - and so the greatest pressures - are diseases. Hopefully we will evolve more immunity to them. That said, microbes tend to evolve faster than we do.
Slashdot Mirror
While we're on the topic of stereotypes: It seems that instead the researchers made a female robot that just sits there submissively and flutters its eyelids.
I find myself in real-world situations frantically repeating "CTRL-Z, CTRL-Z!!!" Does that count?
The instant you burn something to run a heat engine you lose about half of its exergy (that is, the energy potentially available to do work). The best thing that hydrogen power has going for it is NOT that hydrogen is great (it isn't. As fuels go, it's inconvenient in a lot of ways), but that you can use it with fuel cells which are not limited by the Carnot efficiency (they're basically batteries). Using H2 in a heat engine is taking the worst of both worlds.
The punishment does fit the crime if you have the right set of values.
From the article:
In other words: If you measure good in dollars, killing hackers is God's work.
What disturbs me is that this reflects a larger trend in the U.S. towards a frightening kind of capitalist moralism: That money in fact is the only value. There's a utopian idea that the efficiency of unrestrained capitalism will make everyone's dreams come true (or at least the dreams of those who matter. Those others are "lazy," or "slobs," or generally "worthless." [I quote slashdot posts.])
The apparent fall of Communism has left us Americans with overconfidence in Capitalism as Truth, and too many of us are forgetting that democracy is built on higher civic values.
The Anarcho-Capitalists need to remember that corporate government - the organizational structure within a company - is just as much government as is civic government. It is also inherently authoritarian, a heirarchical militarisitic structure starting with the CEO, the five-star general, and ending with the mailroom clerk, the new Private with his face in the mud. Society is built on checks and balances, and a capable civic government is a vital check on the power of the corporate machine.
>1) Got a girlfriend and discovered more important things they could be doing.
With all due respect, I snicker. There are more important things they could be doing, but that ain't one of them. Contrary to popular opinion, you don't become a valuable member of society and a full person just because you've "finally got a girl friend." It is a myth that creates desperate people, and the world has too many.
>2) Learned how to program, got into open source, and changed their IRC handle and will now deny to the death that they ever used the old one.
Good call. The world needs more people like these.
>3) Became a drug addict and dropped out of school.
Yeah, seen it. Or arrested. Sucks, doesn't it?
>I do, however, oppose putting Warez traders in jail, as they will no longer have their mothers coming downstairs every afternoon nagging them to get a job. Many of them are in fact quite intelligent, and will become productive members of society once they get out of their parents' house, and get some education and/or therapy.
Amen!
Steam clouds rising from the Pacific? The Coast Guard better be careful or else some guy in an inflatable raft will make them listen to Reason.
Awesome. Mod parent up, informative!
Ever heard of significant figures? Show me a sensor that can return values with 83,431 digits of precision!
NASA got to the moon with fewer than 12 digits of Pi...
Is this news?
What's interesting is the possibility of modeling electronics around this fact. Analog electronics may see a resurgence, and we lose the ability to squeeze more clock cycles out of our digital systems each second.
La Cosa Nostra sells pizzas. Guaranteed on time.
I wish Firefox didn't get associated with the FTP protocol in Windows. When it asks me "Do you want Firefox to be your default browser?" I say "Yes," but I only mean "I want to use Firefox as my default http client."
It's a great web browser. It sucks for FTP.
When I type an FTP URL into the "Run" dialog, I'd rather have a proper FTP browser (like WinSCP, or yes, even Explorer!) than Firefox. I found the registry keys that change this, and have some .reg files that I keep around to change my settings, but they keep getting changed back. It's an annoyance.
More on modelers: I've been using SPatch forever, which is a wonderful little freeware spline based model. Hash Animation Master uses nothing but splines. 3dsMax has had support for splines and NURBS since forever.
And on games: Quake III did this. Curved surfaces were stored as such, and tesselated, with LOD, at runtime. And this is an old-school BSP+PVS engine!
Agreed: This is not new.
Doesn't matter how many neurons you add; he'll still only be able to solve linearly-seperable problems.
:-)
Should I not make references to Perceptions on Slashdot?
(Silly ANNs.)
Yes, you should.
If she's into that, it might actually be worth the time you spend with her.
(Many women shy away from geeks. When they do, they're doing you a favor.)
I saw that but didn't buy it, since when you're actively pumping coolant, I was under the impression that you didn't really need a ton of conductivity in anything but the heat exchangers.
Thanks for the reply. Anybody know about Intel?
I know AMD opened a plant in Germany, but, apart from that, don't Intel and AMD still make their CPUs in the States?
When I first saw that they were using liquid metal, my first thought was "Why?!" Water has a gigantic heat capacity, and is in may ways the Ideal Coolant.
But then I saw: "Electromagnetic pump with no moving parts." So it looks like they're sacrificing some of the coolant properties of water so that they can use something very electrically-conductive, and gain the advantage of silent operation.
That said, IIRC there are no-moving-parts water pumps that use electrochemical effects (something with electrolysis and dragging ions through the water), but I've always assumed that they're limited to small flow rates.
Now I want to know how this no-moving-parts liquid-metal-pump works. Maybe use a square-cross-sectioned pipe with an insulating top and bottom and conductive sides; pass a current between the sides, and put large permanent magnets above and below? Or do it linear-induction-motor style? Hmmm...
Romance IS shallow, almost by definition. It's performance art, nothing more. I cringe every time I think about Valentine's Day.
If two people want to spend time together when doing so doesn't either:
But I digress. Slashdot isn't the place for this. More appropriately:
In Soviet Russia, moody melancholy posts make you!
Yeah. That's the spirit.
Don't worry; I'm not so paranoid to think that you're involved in an elaborate conspiracy to sell a hard drive enclosure! Any true conspiracy theorist can tell you that you'd need at least a black helicopter or two for that...
Perhaps, so as to avoid future misunderstandings, the two of us can start a conspiracy to get the W3C to add a <joke> tag to the next draft of HTML...
Nobody is glad to see Clippy!
Evolution happens when there are "evolutionary pressures" - things that make some individuals die, and others live to reproduce. Right now, the biggest killers - and so the greatest pressures - are diseases. Hopefully we will evolve more immunity to them. That said, microbes tend to evolve faster than we do.
...and toast. Buttered.
Cause and effect: They don't get viruses because they don't get laid.