If you think that parsing 'gimme' into 'give me' with the implicit 'and I will pay for it.' at the end is anything close to simple, I have a monkey who writes Shakespeare to sell you.
Some people have the mental capability to adapt to and learn new interfaces and protocols after the age of 6 or so, and some do not. (and lots of people with various abilities inbetween) Age, while a factor, is less than half the story.
The reason almost all people can handle 'gimme a burger and fries' without any problem, and yet can't handle a touch screen to do the same thing, is that they learned the complexities of speech at an age when learning comes naturally, and they have been using it many times each day for decades. The trouble comes when these people who can't learn new interfaces look at a computer program, don't (can't?) realize that other people figure out new interfaces as easily and naturally as they figure out 'gimme', and assume that the programmer made an unintuitive program. Sometimes a better interface is needed - badly - but often there is no interface that both the computer and the idiot can handle. (computers can't handle 'gimme' yet) And the idiot can't handle that concept either.
According to wikipedia, solid information on the minimum lethal dose of cyanide is not known and in fact may vary considerably from person to person. Concentrations well below lethal doses are detectable by smell - most chemical tests are far more sensitive than the human nose. I think that you are the one that needs to 'Look it up'. Celebrities are not by any means the only type of person that should not comment on things they know little about.
This article gives some numbers, they are not 'barely detectable' at all.
Capitalism has been used to describe everything from Laissez-faire economics to the golden rule (aka. he who has the gold makes the rules) Could you please be more specific?
That would be an utter disaster. It didn't even work in Athens. Read your history. And I would suggest Democracy in America as well.
Your suggestion would be like asking for patches to the linux kernel from everybody in the world, and them implimenting at least one patch from everybody that submitted one.
Yup. Vulcan is what you get when you use logic to decide what to do, instead of using logic to justify your actions afterwards. (like most people do. )
Because most Christians aren't generic Christians. They are members of specific denominations, each with rather specific theological teachings. While it is possible to come up with a Christian theology that does not conflict with currently accepted theories regarding history, (history of life, geology and human history.) A lot of Christians (most?) belong to sects where the theology IS in conflict with the evidence and the scientific theories.
Examples include
~4000 years ago all landmass on the earth was covered in water for about 1 year.
All human languages derive from the one language that was spoken until sometime after this flood
The earth was formed either from random space junk or nothing at all sometime between 6000 and 13000 years ago.
New species cannot arise short of god creating new ones, because animals 'bring forth after their own kind'
In addition to this, many Christian theologies are set up so that if any of these pieces are admitted to be mistaken, then all of the other parts of the faith can also be questioned, as they mostly rely on traditional teachings and specific interpretations of biblical passages. For example, if the age of the earth is admitted to be greater than a literal reading of genesis allows, then the existance of adam is questioned, because they both rely on the same logic "the bible said so". And if this is questioned then the fall is questioned, no Adam, no fall - which leads to doubts about Christ's atonement.....
It is a house built on a foundation that looked like stone a few centuries ago. But when scientists stick their shovels into the few places they can reach, they are finding sand. Instead of searching for bedrock, many of these Christians are banning shovels near their house, and trying to scrape the sand^H^H^H^Hstone, back.
I'm running ubuntu dapper - other than a 'you are not running windows media 9 -try anyway?' message the cnn video works just fine.(mplayer plugin)
About the only trouble I've had with multimedia on linux is gettin it installed in the first place. Those are legal issues, and the installing keeps getting easier. Takes about 10 minutes now (find which packages I need, apt-get install...)
DVD's work just fine - easier than win2k. - What are the kind of troubles you've had anyway?
"The center is a point, so your argument is valid only if all collisions are perfectly centered -- which they are not."
According to the video the center where most of the collisions take place is quite small. But anyway, you are right. However, the larger the whole thing is and the smaller the 'center' is the closer a 'the center is a point' model is to actuall operation. This is one of the reasons that Bussard says that output goes as radius^7. Bigger is better. As for the errors, each tangential error is not cumulative. The directions of the error velocity is mostly random - and should mostly cancel out. I imagine you will lose all of your energy to bremsstrahlung radiation before these errors cause trouble.
No citations anywhere? That is not good. If, as the origonal poster claimed, this paper has caused IEC devices to be ignored I would expect something about it. Other than 'horribly and obviously wrong' what could cause such silence?
I was basing my post on earlier reading about Bussard. I have now been able to watch the video.
From the video he is apparently talking about fermentation from cane sugar, using the fusion plant for processing. Oops on my part. You are right about one thing, Bussard is waaaay too optimistic about the economic results of a working reactor. I think he has been stuck in a lab too long to see how the world works (outside of government R&D funds that is...)
Numbers from the video: 6000 tons ethanol/day/30 "mile square" cane fields (30 miles^2 or 30*30 miles^2??) big difference. If it is the smaller number then we need 52,000 square miles of cane fields to match world oil consumption. the larger figure - Brazil might be big enough...
I think that what Bussard is proposing is not ethanol from fermentation, but direct synthesis from CO2 and H2O or similar. Very energy intensive I imagine...
I am anything but an expert on this - the math is mostly over my head.[1] But I skimmed the paper...
The paper starts with plasmas with a Maxwellian ion and electron energy distribution, and an isotropic velocity direction for them. (ie. no prefered, or essentially random directions) This is the case for plasma at the center of the sun for example, and is close for tokamaks etc. Both assumptions are not true at all in Bussards reactor. Or a basic farnsworth fusor for that matter.
The paper only seems to deal with non-maxwellian and anisotropic plasmas (both at the same time)[2] in a small part of the appendix. That part concludes that this can result in 2-4 times faster rate of fusion than otherwise, but that the power losses in maintaining these distributions are prohibitive. It is in these power loss calculations that the paper and bussards reactor designs totally part company. The paper assumes that the most efficient way to recycle the energy of particles that collide - but do not fuse - and in the collision get energies and directions that are not desired, is to extract them, and run their energy through a carnot engine, with the big inefficiencies of any heat engine.[3]
Bussards reactor simply makes most collisions occur at the center of the reactor. Any rebounding ions that did not fuse have a velocity direction out of the center (there is no other direction to go) and the electric field that accelerated them to the center in the first place simply causes the to bounce out and straight back in - almost perfect preservation of direction, with little energy loss - and no recycleing energy losses at all.
In short, the paper makes assumptions that do not apply to bussards reactor, and is mostly irrelavant. Guestamating from what I got out of this paper and what I know about bussards reactor design (I had read a lot about fusors and looked at bussards reactor before this) Bussards reactor could easily output more energy than bremsstrahlung losses.
[1] I actually have had enough math to stumble through much of this, but when I see an equation all I see is greek letters. Contrast this with english I see words and sentances, not latin charactors. (To the point I can't spell most words I read with no effort.) I have to decipher equations slowly, so I do not try most of the time.
[2]The paper does several times look at non-maxwellian and isotropic, or maxwellian and anisotropic plasmas, but only seems to do both once in little detail.
[3]This is a basic mistake that I see over and over from people who should know better. Heat is a macro property. It does not exist at the scale of atoms - and fusion deals with pieces of atoms. At this scale, there is only kinetic and various potential energies. The best way to recycle kinetic energy of particles into kinetic energy of particles is not through a carnot engine.
Prefixes and suffixes gain and lose meanings all the time. Like the suffix 'le' - as in nibble, dabble, jiggle, wiggle, and giggle. In fact, many of the original words themselves are gone. some remain - nip, dab, jig (dance a jig) but wig and gig are gone. (I think).
This is a new word entering the language, as well as a fundamental failure on the part of some speakers to understand that the well defined elements of the language, ain't. (ie. they change - and so are not well defined)
Did you know that the word for 'not' in french, 'pas'* (silent s) actually means 'step'? It came from overuse of the phrase 'I won't walk another step'. It is now part of most lower french dialects.
* yes, I know officially it is "nu' [thing] pas" but that is formal french, which isn't really spoken. For most french speakers, the nu makes as much sound as the s in pas. They still think they say it though, just like we don't think we say 'u bedder lissen tu wud I juss tol u' but many of us do anyway...;)
Less than 200 years ago, if someone asked you 'What are you doing?' while you were laying brick, you would be considered an uneducated hick if you said 'I am building a house.' The proper way to say this was 'I build a house' (say it with a german accent now...)
This is how languages change. Your examples of y'all and you-all, along with the related yous are trying to make up for the fact that the word thou is no longer in the language. (you used to be plural - terms like 'you jerk' made as much sense as 'those cat')
100 years from now using the word 'regardless' may sound as silly as 'Thou art a pedant.' When it comes to what is in the language, the dictionary really does not matter, it simply documents what was in the language at a particular time.
And if tuna got that high, it could be because there were so few tuna that a small fishing fleet would be enough to drive it into extinction. No more tuna to eat, and it's prey/predators have to undergo some adjustments that we may not like.
Sorry, but the CPI has almost nothing to do with real inflation - even if inflation is defined as price increases.
See this article, skip dpwn to 'indirect manipulation'. The short of it, inflation - using the flawed definition of increasing prices - is closer to 10% than 2%.
Second, your examples of unstable gold prices are deeply flawed, simply because you measure them in terms of US dollars. A tailored suit costs about the same in gold now as it did 200 years ago. Investment demand can only exist when you do not have a gold standard. (and investment demand is a key cause of gold's volatility - but it is nothing more than a reflection of underlying volitility in the US dollar.)
"When the currency isn't pegged to some commodity, the Fed can make adjustments to track whatever they want. By manipulating the monetary supply..."
Any manipulation of the money supply artifically changes prices. Prices determine whether suppliers increase or derease production, whether consumers demand more or less, or switch to something else, whether they save, invest, or go into business themselves. Artifical price changes can cause demand to exceed supply - without motivating suppliers to increase supply, and many other similar distortions. In almost every case an artificial price change trades a short term benifit for a long term loss. The result is disbalanced and fragile economies - what we see today almost worldwide - and usually ends in crashes.
About the only thing that your post was right about is the fact that even a gold standard can have inflation and deflation - it just usually is not big enough to harm the economy - and it sometimes helps. Fiat currencies always end in disaster.
Which one is easier depends largely on the size of the election you are fooling with. For a city councilman seat in a city of 20,000 or so, you are right. Fraud of 100 or so votes could easily win the election, and compared to bribing X CEO who is providing the voting machines the fraud is much simpler. But 100 or so votes won't change a US Senate race in California, or most other states either. You would need at least 20,000 fraudulent votes, which would be about 200x harder. But bribing the CEO isn't any harder, and likely only 2-10x more expencive for the US Senate than for the City Council.
For the large races, controling the electronic voting machines is by far the easiest to both do and hide.
However, as a geek and Utah resident, I have to say I really don't think Hatch would listen on 'digital privacy' issues regardless of the format of the letter.
I'd rather have a loony liberal junior Senator than Hatch - issues don't matter any more. No junior Senator could do as much damage to this nation as Hatch is/will. Digital rights etc. are just a small part of that.
Slashdot Mirror
If you think that parsing 'gimme' into 'give me' with the implicit 'and I will pay for it.' at the end is anything close to simple, I have a monkey who writes Shakespeare to sell you.
Some people have the mental capability to adapt to and learn new interfaces and protocols after the age of 6 or so, and some do not. (and lots of people with various abilities inbetween) Age, while a factor, is less than half the story.
The reason almost all people can handle 'gimme a burger and fries' without any problem, and yet can't handle a touch screen to do the same thing, is that they learned the complexities of speech at an age when learning comes naturally, and they have been using it many times each day for decades. The trouble comes when these people who can't learn new interfaces look at a computer program, don't (can't?) realize that other people figure out new interfaces as easily and naturally as they figure out 'gimme', and assume that the programmer made an unintuitive program. Sometimes a better interface is needed - badly - but often there is no interface that both the computer and the idiot can handle. (computers can't handle 'gimme' yet) And the idiot can't handle that concept either.
T
This article gives some numbers, they are not 'barely detectable' at all.
T
That would be an utter disaster. It didn't even work in Athens. Read your history. And I would suggest Democracy in America as well.
Your suggestion would be like asking for patches to the linux kernel from everybody in the world, and them implimenting at least one patch from everybody that submitted one.
Yup. Vulcan is what you get when you use logic to decide what to do, instead of using logic to justify your actions afterwards. (like most people do. )
This is correct, Heat kills CF bulbs. NEVER put one into your oven. ;) (enclosed light fixtures can be bad too...)
T
Because most Christians aren't generic Christians. They are members of specific denominations, each with rather specific theological teachings. While it is possible to come up with a Christian theology that does not conflict with currently accepted theories regarding history, (history of life, geology and human history.) A lot of Christians (most?) belong to sects where the theology IS in conflict with the evidence and the scientific theories.
Examples include
In addition to this, many Christian theologies are set up so that if any of these pieces are admitted to be mistaken, then all of the other parts of the faith can also be questioned, as they mostly rely on traditional teachings and specific interpretations of biblical passages. For example, if the age of the earth is admitted to be greater than a literal reading of genesis allows, then the existance of adam is questioned, because they both rely on the same logic "the bible said so". And if this is questioned then the fall is questioned, no Adam, no fall - which leads to doubts about Christ's atonement.....
It is a house built on a foundation that looked like stone a few centuries ago. But when scientists stick their shovels into the few places they can reach, they are finding sand. Instead of searching for bedrock, many of these Christians are banning shovels near their house, and trying to scrape the sand^H^H^H^Hstone, back.
T
I'm running ubuntu dapper - other than a 'you are not running windows media 9 -try anyway?' message the cnn video works just fine.(mplayer plugin)
About the only trouble I've had with multimedia on linux is gettin it installed in the first place. Those are legal issues, and the installing keeps getting easier. Takes about 10 minutes now (find which packages I need, apt-get install...)
DVD's work just fine - easier than win2k. - What are the kind of troubles you've had anyway?
Something like this?
(had to, this is my wallpaper at the moment)
"The center is a point, so your argument is valid only if all collisions are perfectly centered -- which they are not."
According to the video the center where most of the collisions take place is quite small. But anyway, you are right. However, the larger the whole thing is and the smaller the 'center' is the closer a 'the center is a point' model is to actuall operation. This is one of the reasons that Bussard says that output goes as radius^7. Bigger is better. As for the errors, each tangential error is not cumulative. The directions of the error velocity is mostly random - and should mostly cancel out. I imagine you will lose all of your energy to bremsstrahlung radiation before these errors cause trouble.
No citations anywhere? That is not good. If, as the origonal poster claimed, this paper has caused IEC devices to be ignored I would expect something about it. Other than 'horribly and obviously wrong' what could cause such silence?
T
I was basing my post on earlier reading about Bussard. I have now been able to watch the video.
From the video he is apparently talking about fermentation from cane sugar, using the fusion plant for processing. Oops on my part. You are right about one thing, Bussard is waaaay too optimistic about the economic results of a working reactor. I think he has been stuck in a lab too long to see how the world works (outside of government R&D funds that is...)
Numbers from the video: 6000 tons ethanol/day/30 "mile square" cane fields (30 miles^2 or 30*30 miles^2??) big difference. If it is the smaller number then we need 52,000 square miles of cane fields to match world oil consumption. the larger figure - Brazil might be big enough...
T
I think that what Bussard is proposing is not ethanol from fermentation, but direct synthesis from CO2 and H2O or similar. Very energy intensive I imagine...
What if you synthesise it directly from CO2 and water? The big reason why this is not done is that it takes a lot of energy....
No fertilizer needed.
I am anything but an expert on this - the math is mostly over my head.[1] But I skimmed the paper...
The paper starts with plasmas with a Maxwellian ion and electron energy distribution, and an isotropic velocity direction for them. (ie. no prefered, or essentially random directions) This is the case for plasma at the center of the sun for example, and is close for tokamaks etc. Both assumptions are not true at all in Bussards reactor. Or a basic farnsworth fusor for that matter.
The paper only seems to deal with non-maxwellian and anisotropic plasmas (both at the same time)[2] in a small part of the appendix. That part concludes that this can result in 2-4 times faster rate of fusion than otherwise, but that the power losses in maintaining these distributions are prohibitive. It is in these power loss calculations that the paper and bussards reactor designs totally part company. The paper assumes that the most efficient way to recycle the energy of particles that collide - but do not fuse - and in the collision get energies and directions that are not desired, is to extract them, and run their energy through a carnot engine, with the big inefficiencies of any heat engine.[3]
Bussards reactor simply makes most collisions occur at the center of the reactor. Any rebounding ions that did not fuse have a velocity direction out of the center (there is no other direction to go) and the electric field that accelerated them to the center in the first place simply causes the to bounce out and straight back in - almost perfect preservation of direction, with little energy loss - and no recycleing energy losses at all.
In short, the paper makes assumptions that do not apply to bussards reactor, and is mostly irrelavant. Guestamating from what I got out of this paper and what I know about bussards reactor design (I had read a lot about fusors and looked at bussards reactor before this) Bussards reactor could easily output more energy than bremsstrahlung losses.
[1] I actually have had enough math to stumble through much of this, but when I see an equation all I see is greek letters. Contrast this with english I see words and sentances, not latin charactors. (To the point I can't spell most words I read with no effort.) I have to decipher equations slowly, so I do not try most of the time.
[2]The paper does several times look at non-maxwellian and isotropic, or maxwellian and anisotropic plasmas, but only seems to do both once in little detail.
[3]This is a basic mistake that I see over and over from people who should know better. Heat is a macro property. It does not exist at the scale of atoms - and fusion deals with pieces of atoms. At this scale, there is only kinetic and various potential energies. The best way to recycle kinetic energy of particles into kinetic energy of particles is not through a carnot engine.
Not if you are only selling half as much at $80 as you were at $50.
Granted, this has not been even close to the case, but if alternate fuels become avalible it is a possibility.
Prefixes and suffixes gain and lose meanings all the time. Like the suffix 'le' - as in nibble, dabble, jiggle, wiggle, and giggle. In fact, many of the original words themselves are gone. some remain - nip, dab, jig (dance a jig) but wig and gig are gone. (I think).
This is a new word entering the language, as well as a fundamental failure on the part of some speakers to understand that the well defined elements of the language, ain't. (ie. they change - and so are not well defined)
Did you know that the word for 'not' in french, 'pas'* (silent s) actually means 'step'? It came from overuse of the phrase 'I won't walk another step'. It is now part of most lower french dialects.
* yes, I know officially it is "nu' [thing] pas" but that is formal french, which isn't really spoken. For most french speakers, the nu makes as much sound as the s in pas. They still think they say it though, just like we don't think we say 'u bedder lissen tu wud I juss tol u' but many of us do anyway...;)
Less than 200 years ago, if someone asked you 'What are you doing?' while you were laying brick, you would be considered an uneducated hick if you said 'I am building a house.' The proper way to say this was 'I build a house' (say it with a german accent now...)
This is how languages change. Your examples of y'all and you-all, along with the related yous are trying to make up for the fact that the word thou is no longer in the language. (you used to be plural - terms like 'you jerk' made as much sense as 'those cat')
100 years from now using the word 'regardless' may sound as silly as 'Thou art a pedant.' When it comes to what is in the language, the dictionary really does not matter, it simply documents what was in the language at a particular time.
Well said.
Free markets do not work when everyone/no one owns something of value.
How do you control a school of fish, short of a fish farm?
And if tuna got that high, it could be because there were so few tuna that a small fishing fleet would be enough to drive it into extinction. No more tuna to eat, and it's prey/predators have to undergo some adjustments that we may not like.
See this article, skip dpwn to 'indirect manipulation'. The short of it, inflation - using the flawed definition of increasing prices - is closer to 10% than 2%.
Second, your examples of unstable gold prices are deeply flawed, simply because you measure them in terms of US dollars. A tailored suit costs about the same in gold now as it did 200 years ago. Investment demand can only exist when you do not have a gold standard. (and investment demand is a key cause of gold's volatility - but it is nothing more than a reflection of underlying volitility in the US dollar.)
"When the currency isn't pegged to some commodity, the Fed can make adjustments to track whatever they want. By manipulating the monetary supply..."
Any manipulation of the money supply artifically changes prices. Prices determine whether suppliers increase or derease production, whether consumers demand more or less, or switch to something else, whether they save, invest, or go into business themselves. Artifical price changes can cause demand to exceed supply - without motivating suppliers to increase supply, and many other similar distortions. In almost every case an artificial price change trades a short term benifit for a long term loss. The result is disbalanced and fragile economies - what we see today almost worldwide - and usually ends in crashes.
About the only thing that your post was right about is the fact that even a gold standard can have inflation and deflation - it just usually is not big enough to harm the economy - and it sometimes helps. Fiat currencies always end in disaster.
For the large races, controling the electronic voting machines is by far the easiest to both do and hide.
He is the Democrat.
However, as a geek and Utah resident, I have to say I really don't think Hatch would listen on 'digital privacy' issues regardless of the format of the letter.
I'd rather have a loony liberal junior Senator than Hatch - issues don't matter any more. No junior Senator could do as much damage to this nation as Hatch is/will. Digital rights etc. are just a small part of that.