If BSG had been on HBO, it probably wouldn't have made it past the second season. With rare exceptions like The Sopranos, HBO has a long history of canceling great shows at about the 2nd season mark.
HBO is all about pushing subscription sales. Yes they have really awesome shows, but unless they are "mainstream" enough to convince new subscribers it just isn't worth it for them. Deadwood and Rome were awesome, but they didn't have the same kind of audience appeal as Entourage and Sopranos where you're left out of the water cooler conversation on monday unless you have a subscription.
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And no, overpopulation won't be a problem becasue humans, like all biological creatures will only expand to meet the amount of food that is available.
The rest will starve.
Typically when overpopulation is used in terms of humans, it has more to do with the social issues rather than survival. Overpopulation can cause life to be hell well before the food runs out.
What, exactly are the rights you have granted your government and how did you go about doing that?
Typically constitutions grant certain responsibilities and rights associated with achieving those responsibilities. If you want to restrict or assign more rights in the US... like say the power to tax income, you amend the document (16th amendment).
A recent report by the Washington Post reports that over $49 Million in farm subsidies has gone to people who make more than cut off $2.5 Million per year. I've never been a fan of subsidies to begin with, I bet you can imagine how I feel when anyone making millions a year gets a check for free money
Subsidies to ensure excess capacity in case something goes wrong for a strategically important commodity; I don't see a huge problem. Bailing out the automakers on the other hand is nowhere near as important or useful.
We didn't win in Vietnam because the Vietnamese were willing to take horrific casualties, not because we weren't willing to attack with maximum force. Hell, we firebombed villages and deforested entire regions, what exactly else should we have done?
Improve the propaganda machine. The biggest problem in Vietnam was that the US didn't quite appreciate the power of television, and therefore did a poor job of managing the news coming out of the region.
It is entirely relevant. If a human is not a "person", then what precisely is it? They are animals, no?
Not necessarily, they could exist as a special case of human, appendage of the mother, or something else. There's a reason why the idea of a "person" has been debated for centuries, it's one of those big questions with no perfect answer.
The question is where to draw the line, and I think that's the only question. PETA and I draw it pretty far back, others will trade lots of animal cruelty for some physical pleasure, stopping I guess just short of bestiality.
Shouldn't a tolerant open-minded society allow individuals to draw their own line? (So long as the consequences of such actions do not do harm to or disrupt the rights of other people)
So PETA is in the awkward and unenviable position of reminding people of their own moral standards. Not PETA's standards, but the audience's. Most people avoid information about the cruel and inhumane treatment of their meat products. The only explanation I have for this is that they lack the willpower or perhaps the technical knowledge to make the decision they believe to be right.
Special interest groups usually start off with the idea of education, but bend towards becoming the moral authority on how that information should be interpreted. I like the educational portion of PETA, MADD, Greenpeace, etc. a lot of that information needs to get out and wouldn't come from other sources. Where things break down is they take action to force you to act on that information in a specific way.
Over the years, after being asked to defend being vegetarian, I understand PETA's position pretty well. People ask, idly, "why" and expect an answer related to cholesterol or "energy" or some shit. That's not my reason at all. I was raised vegetarian, being from South India, so it's pretty easy for me to be all self-righteous and you can see some of that in this post too. It used to be a lot worse. At some point, how you were raised is not enough of an explanation, and you have to either figure out the real reasons independent of your parents or just shrug it off and start eating meat. So as soon as I even mention pain and suffering, people start the handwaving and cut me off because even though they asked, I'm the jerk for actually telling them. They don't want to make the decision independent of how they were raised, I guess. In fairness, I don't know if I could either.
On the flip side, there are many people who enjoy animal bloodsports like cock-fighting, dog-fighting, bull fighting, etc because its something accepted in the culture they grew up with. I would expect a PETA person asking an attendee at a bull fight to defend it would also waive off any discussion about culture, drama, entertainment, and history.
I'm not somebody who enjoys animal cruelty, in fact I cringe away from it; but at the same time, I'm not going to condemn somebody who for whatever reason enjoys such things.
This is the same type of hypocrisy that pro-life supporters inevitably run into: a fetus is not capable of anything more than an "animal" is, yet we shouldn't kill it because it is alive and has rights.
There really is no hypocrisy - the pro-life/pro-choice argument surrounds what exactly constitutes a "person," and ignores animals as outside of the scope of discussion.
Said currency is backed against itself (ie worthless) and guaranteed by treaty to the European banks.
It's backed like every other currency, by its ease of trade, and relative risk of value. Far from being worthless, right now US treasuries are seen as one of the safest investments around the world.
IOW, National Westminster, Barclays, HBOS, Lloyd's TSB, Credit Suisse, etc, etc, etc, owns all your Yank arses and every cubic inch of American soil, which they could call in an. time they want but won't because they know that as long as they don't call in that loan made in the Teens they own you.
You have it backwards... because of debt, the Fed owns THEM. All those companies have a strong interest in keeping the US reserve healthy, because a large amount of their capital is tied to it.
As a technician, RoHS is the bane of my existence. It doesn't flow right, it doesn't wet right, and it doesn't cool right.
Because RoHS solder is not a true eutectic alloy it tends to separate when thermal conditions aren't precisely right. As a consequence, many manufacturers had huge runs of products that stayed soldered just long enough to get out the door and frequently out of warranty.
The problem is many companies think you just change the alloy to lead free, turn the ovens on a little hotter and everything is fine. When I started work on lead free process development 8 years ago, it became quickly evident that lead free solders require much more than a process "tweak" to the old eutectic systems. Every aspect basically needs to be redeveloped - as you said lead free solder doesn't behave the same.
At the most basic level, instead of 1 tin-lead eutectic alloy, there are a series of different lead-free alloy replacements that you choose from depending on your application and reliability requirements. From there you need new fluxes(to deal with different oxides), equipment (improve accuracy because of less self-alignment and higher temps), and procedures (to make the changes work correctly), all specifically optimized to the alloy and application you are working on.
Lead-free isn't as easy as leaded solders, but if you've done your due diligence in developing the process correctly it really isn't that bad.
If we discover a large meteor heading straight towards Earth, we might only have a few months to get a rocket up and detonate the target off its course. All other missions pale in comparison to one that could save humanity. I don't think we should focus on particular missions within our solar system, so much as the ability to launch a successful ground-to-asteroid mission within weeks, if need be...
This kind of fear mongering sounds like George W. Bush... in Spaaaace. Spend billions and billions of dollars on an unlikely threat, and even if the demonstration is successful, it will have a marginal chance of success in a real situation.
I haven't picked up a soldering iron in a while, but I've heard that non-lead solder has a lot more structural problems than lead solder. Will this stuff have related problems?
As an engineer working on lead-free solder development for electronics, the problems that can arise are specific to the application. The industry has developed a number of different alloys that perform under specific conditions. Instead of just choosing a tin-lead solder that works pretty much everywhere, developers need to understand the types of reliability stresses their product will see and choose the best alloy to meet those requirements. For example lead-free solders that work well in a thermal cycling environment tend to not perform as well under shock conditions. From an assembly side of things, a lot of the problems arise from using old SnPb equipment and materials for soldering joints using leadfree solders. Different reflow temperatures, wetting characteristics, and oxides, means that you just can't use the same old eutectic flux and soldering iron and expect the same quality of results.
Lead-free solders aren't necessarily problematic, they just require a little more understanding to properly use.
HOWEVER, in both cases, they are simply high refined representations/emulations of an object. No matter how detailed the picture of the apple becomes, it never becomes a real apple. No matter how fine the granularity of the responses of the AI becomes, it's still just a collection of little functions that passed the point of "photorealism" from a conversational perspective. That doesn't mean it's self aware.
You've stopped looking at the analogy too soon. What happens when the "image" becomes three dimensional, then as it progresses when it share's all the same physical properties? To go Star Trek for a minute, is an apple from a replicator really any different than an apple grown from a tree? It's not too far fetched to think that AI will share many of the same functional properties as the human brain. Just because how those functions are accomplished are different, doesn't necessarily mean that the net effect "conciousness" is.
Oh yes, you can. Perhaps not everything can be reused, but I certainly would not dismiss those things that can be reused, patented, licensed, manufactured, and sold here on Earth.
NASA is in the business of developing space exploration not profit. In fact one of their goals is to "Encourage the pursuit of appropriate partnerships with the emerging commercial space sector," which would place them in a position to not seek huge sums of money for licensing technology. The NASA balance sheet doesn't even mention licensing which means it makes up a negligible amount of income. To add to that, there is a big difference between developing technology for a specific scientific application, and developing for the commercial sector. Unlike other commercialized technology which can easily be licensed as a turn-key solution, much of what NASA has developed would need further refinement for the market.
Should they really cost this much? Are we sure that there isn't a lot of contractor pocket-lining going on? It seems to me like we're using a lawn sprinkler to fill up a dixie cup. Yeah, it'll get the job done but it'll take about ten gallons of water to put five ounces in the cup.
Well you're designing and building highly complicated one use projects. Things are cheap in the modern age because once you create one you can sell a million. For space technology you can't spread out that R&D cost. You also have a situation where the requirements are incredibly high, and each time technology progresses so do the requirements. The problems aren't stagnant, everytime we come up with a solution, we start to ask more questions (can we make it more safe, more efficient, improve reliability, etc)
If I seem disappointed and ungrateful it's just that putting rinky dink modular stations in orbit is 1970's technology. We should have moon colonies right now using mass drivers to fire off raw materials to the lagrange points where we'd be building giant wheel and cylinder habitats.
The next logical steps aren't always an easy progression as one may think. We eradicated smallpox and polio 40 years ago, why aren't we now completely healthy supercreatures?
Looking at our space program, it's like going back home and seeing the people you went to school with who peaked in high school and are hanging around the old haunts just looking underachieving and pathetic. I mean yeah, it's cool to point and laugh if these were the people you hated in high school but if they were your friends, it's just very sad. NASA peaked as Apollo and has been underachieving ever since.
It's like going home and that talented music player who you thought could become a superstar now has a nice day job, a family, and plays in a band at night. It's not pathetic that he didn't reach the level of expectations you had for him. NASA has been doing some great real science over the past 20 years, and most of the problems have been around these putting people in space spectacles that have marginal value.
Exactly. Think about it. The individuals that have "gamed the system" have done so, helping to close the "short-term inaccuracy". Consider it arbitrage trading, and they're closing the perceived and actual value of a company gap.
This all happens before the knowledge is public, leading to a more *accurate* market/evaluation.
Because this happens before knowledge is public, you have less accuracy because the market as a whole doesn't have time to digest all the information to identify what the new value should be. The most dangerous element of the market is uncertainty. So yes, a CEO selling off all his stock can lead to directional correctness as investors know the stock is overvalued. However, without any other indicators the market doesn't know how overvalued and you end up with a crapshoot of volitility that may overshoot the true market value to the downside.
I'd much prefer if the government just got it's nose out of the market. The only thing insider traders do is lead to a more accurate market..
More accurate? The accuracy ends up being the same in the long run as the information eventually gets out to the public. Profiting with inside trading is accomplished through short-term inaccuracy, where the market is unable to regulate to the correct price before a few individuals have gamed the system. So not only do a few people profit, you get an increase in economic instability from excess uncertainty.
Now let's say you're knocking back a few beers with your Intel buddy, and he tells you the i7 CPUs are failing en masse, the management is crumbling and AMD is poised to deliver a fatal blow. So in short, you are now in possession of insider information. So the question is, would you sell your stock or wait till you lose it?
First, if things were that bad, it wouldn't be insider trading because a large number of people would know (orders not getting fulfilled, OEM returns, industry reports). Second, if your buddy was involved at a level to where the information was so valuable as to constitute insider information, he likely wouldn't just tell you over a few beers since he'd be on the hook for a little jail time. Insider information usually points towards an executive level conspiracy, rather than just blabbing at the bar.
Secondly, there's no stealing. You agreed, I agreed. We might have different information, but that's hardly a secret. And the person who is "more correct" will drive the market to correct itself. (See prediction markets).
Market regulation is meant for both long and short term stability. Allowing the use of information that can be abused by certain individuals can cause fear and panic. So while in the long-run the market will work itself out, in the short-term there could be excessive economic stress.
I bothered to read every letter of a contract I signed with a company I once worked for and it had the peculiar verbage something to the effect of "... every idea or product developed by the employee during their employment at CompanyX is intellectual property of CompanyX." I got some clarification which resulted in the understanding that that particular phrase was left open so that if I went home and wrote an NLP engine from scratch while I was employed, it was their intellectual property. Let's just say at that time I needed the money and my foot in the door so I did take that temporary position.
Have you ever tried to discuss your home projects with your employer? Basically, your employer doesn't want to be in a situation where there is potential conflict, so they just grab everything. They put in that clause as a catch-all, when really what they want is right to first refusal. Present your idea, let them say they aren't interested, then work with them on an agreement that allows you to retain rights on a project you work on so long as it's clearly accomplished outside of your work schedule and without their resources.
Let her find whatever she enjoys. Math and science are tools, and there are a number of fields that leverage these tools at the graduate level. Medicine, behavioral science, business, etc. all have heavy math when you get beyond the "intro to -" level.
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HBO is all about pushing subscription sales. Yes they have really awesome shows, but unless they are "mainstream" enough to convince new subscribers it just isn't worth it for them. Deadwood and Rome were awesome, but they didn't have the same kind of audience appeal as Entourage and Sopranos where you're left out of the water cooler conversation on monday unless you have a subscription.
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Typically when overpopulation is used in terms of humans, it has more to do with the social issues rather than survival. Overpopulation can cause life to be hell well before the food runs out.
Typically constitutions grant certain responsibilities and rights associated with achieving those responsibilities. If you want to restrict or assign more rights in the US... like say the power to tax income, you amend the document (16th amendment).
Hey you can do that with people's identities... copy identity, buy car with copied identity... nobody hurt.
Impossibly high standards, unlimited liability, government regulation, coupled with private sector profits.
Subsidies to ensure excess capacity in case something goes wrong for a strategically important commodity; I don't see a huge problem. Bailing out the automakers on the other hand is nowhere near as important or useful.
Improve the propaganda machine. The biggest problem in Vietnam was that the US didn't quite appreciate the power of television, and therefore did a poor job of managing the news coming out of the region.
Not necessarily, they could exist as a special case of human, appendage of the mother, or something else. There's a reason why the idea of a "person" has been debated for centuries, it's one of those big questions with no perfect answer.
Shouldn't a tolerant open-minded society allow individuals to draw their own line? (So long as the consequences of such actions do not do harm to or disrupt the rights of other people)
Special interest groups usually start off with the idea of education, but bend towards becoming the moral authority on how that information should be interpreted. I like the educational portion of PETA, MADD, Greenpeace, etc. a lot of that information needs to get out and wouldn't come from other sources. Where things break down is they take action to force you to act on that information in a specific way.
On the flip side, there are many people who enjoy animal bloodsports like cock-fighting, dog-fighting, bull fighting, etc because its something accepted in the culture they grew up with. I would expect a PETA person asking an attendee at a bull fight to defend it would also waive off any discussion about culture, drama, entertainment, and history.
I'm not somebody who enjoys animal cruelty, in fact I cringe away from it; but at the same time, I'm not going to condemn somebody who for whatever reason enjoys such things.
There really is no hypocrisy - the pro-life/pro-choice argument surrounds what exactly constitutes a "person," and ignores animals as outside of the scope of discussion.
Restrictions of spam, net neutrality, protection of personally identifiable information...
It's backed like every other currency, by its ease of trade, and relative risk of value. Far from being worthless, right now US treasuries are seen as one of the safest investments around the world.
You have it backwards... because of debt, the Fed owns THEM. All those companies have a strong interest in keeping the US reserve healthy, because a large amount of their capital is tied to it.
Specialized alloys, processes and improved design for reliability.
The problem is many companies think you just change the alloy to lead free, turn the ovens on a little hotter and everything is fine.
When I started work on lead free process development 8 years ago, it became quickly evident that lead free solders require much more than a process "tweak" to the old eutectic systems. Every aspect basically needs to be redeveloped - as you said lead free solder doesn't behave the same.
At the most basic level, instead of 1 tin-lead eutectic alloy, there are a series of different lead-free alloy replacements that you choose from depending on your application and reliability requirements. From there you need new fluxes(to deal with different oxides), equipment (improve accuracy because of less self-alignment and higher temps), and procedures (to make the changes work correctly), all specifically optimized to the alloy and application you are working on.
Lead-free isn't as easy as leaded solders, but if you've done your due diligence in developing the process correctly it really isn't that bad.
This kind of fear mongering sounds like George W. Bush... in Spaaaace. Spend billions and billions of dollars on an unlikely threat, and even if the demonstration is successful, it will have a marginal chance of success in a real situation.
As an engineer working on lead-free solder development for electronics, the problems that can arise are specific to the application. The industry has developed a number of different alloys that perform under specific conditions. Instead of just choosing a tin-lead solder that works pretty much everywhere, developers need to understand the types of reliability stresses their product will see and choose the best alloy to meet those requirements. For example lead-free solders that work well in a thermal cycling environment tend to not perform as well under shock conditions. From an assembly side of things, a lot of the problems arise from using old SnPb equipment and materials for soldering joints using leadfree solders. Different reflow temperatures, wetting characteristics, and oxides, means that you just can't use the same old eutectic flux and soldering iron and expect the same quality of results.
Lead-free solders aren't necessarily problematic, they just require a little more understanding to properly use.
You've stopped looking at the analogy too soon. What happens when the "image" becomes three dimensional, then as it progresses when it share's all the same physical properties? To go Star Trek for a minute, is an apple from a replicator really any different than an apple grown from a tree?
It's not too far fetched to think that AI will share many of the same functional properties as the human brain. Just because how those functions are accomplished are different, doesn't necessarily mean that the net effect "conciousness" is.
NASA is in the business of developing space exploration not profit. In fact one of their goals is to "Encourage the pursuit of appropriate partnerships with the emerging commercial space sector," which would place them in a position to not seek huge sums of money for licensing technology. The NASA balance sheet doesn't even mention licensing which means it makes up a negligible amount of income.
To add to that, there is a big difference between developing technology for a specific scientific application, and developing for the commercial sector. Unlike other commercialized technology which can easily be licensed as a turn-key solution, much of what NASA has developed would need further refinement for the market.
Well you're designing and building highly complicated one use projects. Things are cheap in the modern age because once you create one you can sell a million. For space technology you can't spread out that R&D cost. You also have a situation where the requirements are incredibly high, and each time technology progresses so do the requirements. The problems aren't stagnant, everytime we come up with a solution, we start to ask more questions (can we make it more safe, more efficient, improve reliability, etc)
The next logical steps aren't always an easy progression as one may think. We eradicated smallpox and polio 40 years ago, why aren't we now completely healthy supercreatures?
It's like going home and that talented music player who you thought could become a superstar now has a nice day job, a family, and plays in a band at night. It's not pathetic that he didn't reach the level of expectations you had for him. NASA has been doing some great real science over the past 20 years, and most of the problems have been around these putting people in space spectacles that have marginal value.
Because this happens before knowledge is public, you have less accuracy because the market as a whole doesn't have time to digest all the information to identify what the new value should be. The most dangerous element of the market is uncertainty.
So yes, a CEO selling off all his stock can lead to directional correctness as investors know the stock is overvalued. However, without any other indicators the market doesn't know how overvalued and you end up with a crapshoot of volitility that may overshoot the true market value to the downside.
More accurate? The accuracy ends up being the same in the long run as the information eventually gets out to the public. Profiting with inside trading is accomplished through short-term inaccuracy, where the market is unable to regulate to the correct price before a few individuals have gamed the system. So not only do a few people profit, you get an increase in economic instability from excess uncertainty.
First, if things were that bad, it wouldn't be insider trading because a large number of people would know (orders not getting fulfilled, OEM returns, industry reports). Second, if your buddy was involved at a level to where the information was so valuable as to constitute insider information, he likely wouldn't just tell you over a few beers since he'd be on the hook for a little jail time.
Insider information usually points towards an executive level conspiracy, rather than just blabbing at the bar.
Market regulation is meant for both long and short term stability. Allowing the use of information that can be abused by certain individuals can cause fear and panic. So while in the long-run the market will work itself out, in the short-term there could be excessive economic stress.
Have you ever tried to discuss your home projects with your employer? Basically, your employer doesn't want to be in a situation where there is potential conflict, so they just grab everything. They put in that clause as a catch-all, when really what they want is right to first refusal. Present your idea, let them say they aren't interested, then work with them on an agreement that allows you to retain rights on a project you work on so long as it's clearly accomplished outside of your work schedule and without their resources.
Let her find whatever she enjoys. Math and science are tools, and there are a number of fields that leverage these tools at the graduate level. Medicine, behavioral science, business, etc. all have heavy math when you get beyond the "intro to -" level.