I find it darkly funny that so many on slashdot are so positive about this. Look, I think they are a great idea, in certain environments. But general distribution is crazy. In a suburban locale? Just give me some C4 and I reckon I can do some real damage and maybe make a profit out of holding a city to ransom. And no, even if the radiation is not lethal it will take a fortune to clean up, and property prices will crash.
Also if a company can dig it up then so can I and well... I'll leave that to your imagination. The point is we don't want to leave cities and people unnecessarily exposed. I just think this is way too risky.
Thanks for the wiki link. I have been interested in the Epic of Gilgamesh for many years (my desktop machine name is Gilgamesh, and this laptop is Enkidu) but I had not previously heard of the Epic of Atra-Hasis. The extent of borrowing from Atra-Hasis shows that the original flood story was not global but a local river flood. Some distortions just get bigger and bigger over time I guess.
The Carolina Bays are extremely interesting but they don't have the properties of impact craters. The strata directly underneath the Bays is undamaged. How can an impact crater leave the underlying strata undamaged? It can't. There must be some other explanation. But, when I first saw the photos etc I too thought "Holy cow, a swarm of meteorite impacts". But it ain't so. Pity.
No it's a job for Michael Riley in Supervolcano. Possibly my favourite disaster movie because it is told as a documentary and dramatisation by the survivors of the event and amazingly the science is good.
Um. So that means one foot of rock over your roof. Can it take it? I believe most roofs can only handle half that amount of volcanic ash, especially if it rains (which it will, typical volcano behaviour).
Huh? Normal users use a popup menu to copy and paste from what I have seen, this is common to all(?) windows apps and they use it. Me I'm old school I use ctrl-C and ctrl-V.... would never ever use an icon.
Wow. I think it is cool how his editor automatically puts in bold markups for spelling mistakes. (Not sure if I am being very sarcastic or not at all... yep I am being sarcastic)
So you get something written in a hurry. You throw X amount of hardware dollars at it. But the thing wont scale well because of the way it is written. So to be viable it has to handle 1,000 times as many users/visitors/items/whatever. And you need to now use X * $1k dollars or something. Good luck.
Throwing hardware at a problem is the same as throwing money at a problem. Expect to use a lot of money, don't expect to actually solve the problem.
The easiest areas to make advances in are ones where others have not bothered to look at. Typically fields that are the intersection of various disciplines. There are the obvious ones, but I strongly suspect that almost any serious such intersection, as in intersection of real sciences, would yield interesting scientific insights after minimal or moderate work. But most people shun these because they like to specialise. This is why polymaths are so prolific, they see connections across fields that others don't see because the others only have one field.
Look if someone wants to convert coffee grounds to usable hydrocarbons good for them. Just don't expect an industry or a significant impact from it. And yes I do agree with your last sentence, I just think that there will be a lot of silly suggestions along the way: this is one of them. Each has to have the numbers done on it. We just don't want something that can be done in a lab but doesn't scale or have any real impact on the problem.
My opinion (and that is all it is) is that we should look towards tailored bacteria that can turn cellulose into oils, or direct from sunlight and CO2 and water.
Used coffee grounds. So how much feedstock to the process is this per person. Um let me calculate that.... squat per day. What is the point of this? Think how much fuel you use per day. Measured in litres not millilitres. The trouble with these bullshit figures is that they are unrealistic, they assume suspension of disbelief. Remember in physics classes where they emphasised that you estimated the power of 10 (magnitude) so that you would have a reality check? Same here.
Of the distros I have tried Slackware is still the one I find a pleasure to admin. A couple of years back I moved on to Debian, not because it is better but because I cannot trust a distro that relies on one human being. However, Slack is very impressive. Easy to configure, ie it has a logical and easy to understand config scripts etc... some distros (yeah RedHat, I'm looking at you) are hopeless. In fact it is an ideal distro to learn Linux on. In comparison Debian is good but not as good as Slack. Redhat... have I said how much I hate Redhat...
Before anyone posts comments about "functional programming" I hope they read a bit about what it actually is. Compared to C and C++ functional programming is like programming on LSD the first time you try it... it works by magic. Essential to know this stuff, in fact I haven't touched it in a decade... about time I picked some of it back up again, eg Erlang.
What most people here seem to be calling "functional programming" is actually imperative.
It uses a special extruding and annealing process to line up all the electronic data pipes properly
OHH! You mean wires. Does this have to be done at a solar sunspot minimum to prevent unwanted magnetic storms causing the misalignment of the metallic crystal structure? You know it is important.
Free shipping! Can't beat that. But I need a holder for the pen, do you have any for more than $199... cause anything under that would just ruin the Feng Shui of my pixels.
But I am not talking of a wide angle view. I am talking of a view where there is only one colour. That is why I said there is only one microstate. However, what you describe is a different system, with many different states, obviously elevation dependent, perhaps we should also factor in polarisation depending on elevation (ie 90 degrees to position of sun). If you want to add all that in then yes there are quite a few microstates... but still small compared to the other systems mentioned.
I'm not an enormous fan of Asimov. I am just not that attracted to his writing style. However, I did like Foundation. And his argument I thought was and is still reasonable. That when you are dealing with hundreds of billions of people, not just billions, then human populations become predictable like the physics of gases, except for powerful individuals like the Mule. A reasonable enough premise to carry a movie.
I thought the David Lynch version had some inspired moments. But as a whole not very satisfying. And there were parts I wish I could forget... for example, anything on Geidi Prime.
The Sci-Fi channel version was much better. The special effects were not on the same scale but it had more of the intrigue and showed more of the complex inner world than Lynch's version.
As for Lynch. One of the most amazing and critical events in the whole book is the part where Jessica and Paul are in the tent when Paul first fully experiences the effects of The Spice. Treated so minimally in the movie. We don't even hear Paul tell his mother who her father really was. Disappointing.
2001 came out shortly after the time of Marshall McLuhan's mantra "the medium is the message", which argued that the medium of communication is a fundamental influence on the way we process information or content. 2001 is a communication via visual content rather than dialogue. I still find 2001 an amazing and deep movie, but none of the message is contained in the dialog. Consider an obvious scene: the reading of the lips of Bowman and Poole while they are discussing the possibility of shutting down HAL, the dialog is irrelevant. Or the scene on the moon where the team is looking at the monolith in Tycho, the way they touch it... reminiscent of the way the apes did, but now with opposable thumbs.
Or a more subtle one: when Bowman recovers Poole's body and brings it back to the Discovery HAL refuses him entry, there is then an extended quiet period where the discovery and the pod are shown facing each other. The pod seems to be offering up the body of Poole as a sacrifice. But in this moment we (again) see the three stages of evolution: Man, machine enhanced man (Bowman in the Pod) and Machine Intelligence. Man is dead, now is the time of the machine enhanced human, and the future humanity becoming or supplanted by machine intelligence.
No. This has a very strong mathematical and physical basis. In Statistical Mechanics one can start with looking at the number of possible combinations there are of objects in a physical system and then derive the likelihood that any change will maintain the properties or is a significant departure. A road is small set within the phase space of possible states of the system, random changes will usually end up in a set of objects that no longer define the concept of "road". This leads on directly to the concept and measurement of entropy. So the road / forest comparison is quite reasonable. The blue sky, well how many microstates are there in blue sky: one. So no matter how you permute it it will always be a blue sky.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah right. And they're going to undo this every 5-10 years at multiple sites. Please return to the real world.
I find it darkly funny that so many on slashdot are so positive about this. Look, I think they are a great idea, in certain environments. But general distribution is crazy. In a suburban locale? Just give me some C4 and I reckon I can do some real damage and maybe make a profit out of holding a city to ransom. And no, even if the radiation is not lethal it will take a fortune to clean up, and property prices will crash.
Also if a company can dig it up then so can I and well ... I'll leave that to your imagination. The point is we don't want to leave cities and people unnecessarily exposed. I just think this is way too risky.
Thanks for the wiki link. I have been interested in the Epic of Gilgamesh for many years (my desktop machine name is Gilgamesh, and this laptop is Enkidu) but I had not previously heard of the Epic of Atra-Hasis. The extent of borrowing from Atra-Hasis shows that the original flood story was not global but a local river flood. Some distortions just get bigger and bigger over time I guess.
The Carolina Bays are extremely interesting but they don't have the properties of impact craters. The strata directly underneath the Bays is undamaged. How can an impact crater leave the underlying strata undamaged? It can't. There must be some other explanation. But, when I first saw the photos etc I too thought "Holy cow, a swarm of meteorite impacts". But it ain't so. Pity.
No it's a job for Michael Riley in Supervolcano. Possibly my favourite disaster movie because it is told as a documentary and dramatisation by the survivors of the event and amazingly the science is good.
invest in Guns, Ammo, and Booze
Just don't use all three at once.
Um. So that means one foot of rock over your roof. Can it take it? I believe most roofs can only handle half that amount of volcanic ash, especially if it rains (which it will, typical volcano behaviour).
Huh? Normal users use a popup menu to copy and paste from what I have seen, this is common to all(?) windows apps and they use it. Me I'm old school I use ctrl-C and ctrl-V .... would never ever use an icon.
Brilliant. This explains so much about the universe. God is a fuckwit. It's obvious now that I think about it. Yeah, ok just trolling the IDiots.
Wow. I think it is cool how his editor automatically puts in bold markups for spelling mistakes. (Not sure if I am being very sarcastic or not at all ... yep I am being sarcastic)
So you get something written in a hurry. You throw X amount of hardware dollars at it. But the thing wont scale well because of the way it is written. So to be viable it has to handle 1,000 times as many users/visitors/items/whatever. And you need to now use X * $1k dollars or something. Good luck.
Throwing hardware at a problem is the same as throwing money at a problem. Expect to use a lot of money, don't expect to actually solve the problem.
The easiest areas to make advances in are ones where others have not bothered to look at. Typically fields that are the intersection of various disciplines. There are the obvious ones, but I strongly suspect that almost any serious such intersection, as in intersection of real sciences, would yield interesting scientific insights after minimal or moderate work. But most people shun these because they like to specialise. This is why polymaths are so prolific, they see connections across fields that others don't see because the others only have one field.
Only my opinion of course.
Look if someone wants to convert coffee grounds to usable hydrocarbons good for them. Just don't expect an industry or a significant impact from it. And yes I do agree with your last sentence, I just think that there will be a lot of silly suggestions along the way: this is one of them. Each has to have the numbers done on it. We just don't want something that can be done in a lab but doesn't scale or have any real impact on the problem.
My opinion (and that is all it is) is that we should look towards tailored bacteria that can turn cellulose into oils, or direct from sunlight and CO2 and water.
Used coffee grounds. So how much feedstock to the process is this per person. Um let me calculate that.... squat per day. What is the point of this? Think how much fuel you use per day. Measured in litres not millilitres. The trouble with these bullshit figures is that they are unrealistic, they assume suspension of disbelief. Remember in physics classes where they emphasised that you estimated the power of 10 (magnitude) so that you would have a reality check? Same here.
Of the distros I have tried Slackware is still the one I find a pleasure to admin. A couple of years back I moved on to Debian, not because it is better but because I cannot trust a distro that relies on one human being. However, Slack is very impressive. Easy to configure, ie it has a logical and easy to understand config scripts etc ... some distros (yeah RedHat, I'm looking at you) are hopeless. In fact it is an ideal distro to learn Linux on. In comparison Debian is good but not as good as Slack. Redhat ... have I said how much I hate Redhat ...
Ask him if he ever charged money when he helped friends out or his children's school. And if he didn't charge them, was his work substandard?
Before anyone posts comments about "functional programming" I hope they read a bit about what it actually is. Compared to C and C++ functional programming is like programming on LSD the first time you try it ... it works by magic. Essential to know this stuff, in fact I haven't touched it in a decade ... about time I picked some of it back up again, eg Erlang.
What most people here seem to be calling "functional programming" is actually imperative.
"Too much information" doesn't really come close in this case.
It uses a special extruding and annealing process to line up all the electronic data pipes properly
OHH! You mean wires. Does this have to be done at a solar sunspot minimum to prevent unwanted magnetic storms causing the misalignment of the metallic crystal structure? You know it is important.
Free shipping! Can't beat that. But I need a holder for the pen, do you have any for more than $199 ... cause anything under that would just ruin the Feng Shui of my pixels.
But I am not talking of a wide angle view. I am talking of a view where there is only one colour. That is why I said there is only one microstate. However, what you describe is a different system, with many different states, obviously elevation dependent, perhaps we should also factor in polarisation depending on elevation (ie 90 degrees to position of sun). If you want to add all that in then yes there are quite a few microstates ... but still small compared to the other systems mentioned.
I'm not an enormous fan of Asimov. I am just not that attracted to his writing style. However, I did like Foundation. And his argument I thought was and is still reasonable. That when you are dealing with hundreds of billions of people, not just billions, then human populations become predictable like the physics of gases, except for powerful individuals like the Mule. A reasonable enough premise to carry a movie.
I thought the David Lynch version had some inspired moments. But as a whole not very satisfying. And there were parts I wish I could forget ... for example, anything on Geidi Prime.
The Sci-Fi channel version was much better. The special effects were not on the same scale but it had more of the intrigue and showed more of the complex inner world than Lynch's version.
As for Lynch. One of the most amazing and critical events in the whole book is the part where Jessica and Paul are in the tent when Paul first fully experiences the effects of The Spice. Treated so minimally in the movie. We don't even hear Paul tell his mother who her father really was. Disappointing.
2001 came out shortly after the time of Marshall McLuhan's mantra "the medium is the message", which argued that the medium of communication is a fundamental influence on the way we process information or content. 2001 is a communication via visual content rather than dialogue. I still find 2001 an amazing and deep movie, but none of the message is contained in the dialog. Consider an obvious scene: the reading of the lips of Bowman and Poole while they are discussing the possibility of shutting down HAL, the dialog is irrelevant. Or the scene on the moon where the team is looking at the monolith in Tycho, the way they touch it ... reminiscent of the way the apes did, but now with opposable thumbs.
Or a more subtle one: when Bowman recovers Poole's body and brings it back to the Discovery HAL refuses him entry, there is then an extended quiet period where the discovery and the pod are shown facing each other. The pod seems to be offering up the body of Poole as a sacrifice. But in this moment we (again) see the three stages of evolution: Man, machine enhanced man (Bowman in the Pod) and Machine Intelligence. Man is dead, now is the time of the machine enhanced human, and the future humanity becoming or supplanted by machine intelligence.
Of course this is only scratching the surface.
No. This has a very strong mathematical and physical basis. In Statistical Mechanics one can start with looking at the number of possible combinations there are of objects in a physical system and then derive the likelihood that any change will maintain the properties or is a significant departure. A road is small set within the phase space of possible states of the system, random changes will usually end up in a set of objects that no longer define the concept of "road". This leads on directly to the concept and measurement of entropy. So the road / forest comparison is quite reasonable. The blue sky, well how many microstates are there in blue sky: one. So no matter how you permute it it will always be a blue sky.