Are you positive the universe is not deterministic. What if we find out that quantum effects are only unexplained deterministic effects caused by our inability to observe enough dimensions (or other aspects) of the universe's space.
It comes down to another basic philosophical concept, you can't really prove anything is anything (or even exists) without proving everything else first. Without a known point of reference everything is based on an unknown. Thus Descartes's quest for the only thing he could prove as his reference..."Cogito, ergo sum" (Latin: "I think, therefore I am")
Rich0 you can't cluster timings very easily. You could cluster based on individual calls, but take the instance where your circuit (call) is open for hours at a time...thats a long time to wait for it to fail over.
Digital phone transmissions (and I use that in a light sense cause ISDN, and SS7 are not as digital as newer stuff) are stateful and highly depend on a channel timing signals. If it was true analog back to the carrier you could do such a thing pretty seamlessly, but its not (its digital+encapsulated analog)
Essentially what you are talking about in the circuit switched world is running two sets of equipment in tandem. And unfortunately milliseconds do count here so the equipment becomes very specialized and very specific.
On one of my most recent pilot works for a carrier which I probably shouldn't name (if they could hear me now). Used channel-banking/re-muxing equipment to insulate the circuits from individual truck lines, then we translated from TDM cards to VoIP to our application servers. Which provided enough of a buffer to logically switch calls over in real-time (of course pulling call data from one location to another was kind of tough cause we needed to record it all) but hey thats why it wasn't cheap to do.
In a lot of mid to low size telecom deployments you are usually going direct from the carrier to the a telecom card in a server (like a dialogic digital T1 card). And unfortunately because of bad design either at the hardware/driver/api or at some software levels you usually loose the ability to control or sense the timing slips on individual channels, leaving the one of items in the stack (software/driver/card) leaving the line open for a little to long, not allowing the carrier to sense a busy out and fail the circuit to a different one. Not to mention that most telecom standards for long haul trunking do not have method for retransmitting the metadata (DNIS/CLI, clocking, etc) to a failover circuit (meaning you need to reinitialize the call...or hangup).
But yes if you have some of the newer stuff and some of the more expensive equipment you can do it.
No give away your drugs attached to a package with an advertisement on it. And also start selling pill reminders, and ancillary products. You can compete with free (you just need to also accept free to do so).
Ask most successful business men about if they would rather own something completely or have a market where there is healthy competition, and most will tell you that they will do anything to block competitors.
So if we look at the GPL and many other open source licenses we have a problem where the intellectual property can not be completely controlled. Now in a market where you can make money by fairly offering support and ancillary services why would they view this as bad?
If you own the intellectual property behind a product you have the ability to 'strike out'. You can screw up marketing, sales, development, etc and still be protected from someone else doing the same thing better. But if you sell services for GPL/Open products you have to conduct business the 'proper way', and deliver a better product then your competitors.
I'm not trying to bash the windows here, as if you look at Bill's investment work outside of Microsoft he tends to do the same thing; look for something that he can take 100% ownership of a marketplace. And I doubt you will find too many CEOs of large companies who would not take the chance to do the exact same thing. Even though most of these people have business/economics knowledge of how capitalism should work with healthy competition & innovation; they would much rather be unmerciful and dominate to make more money now, and find a way to be charitable, or 'play nice' later. Basically if they can own it, they will, and if something stands in their way they will try to crush it, denounce it, or produce FUD against it.
Mainly why people in the telecom industry have been clamoring for it. Its very difficult to take over the termination of a circuit switched system without some interruption for the end user. And its also not aways easy to busy out all channels on a line as calls drop off so you can free up a machine for patching.
Of course many of the reasons is a lot of commercial telecom apps are badly implemented and need better management controls.
It depends on what material you use. And assuming you want to also use some of the simpler sugars to add to the energy output.
Collect a couple of semi's worth of green grass clippings, then stick them in a pile or in a rail/truck cargo container for 2-3 days, and you do have a large amount of energy getting released there. Of course if you dried it cleaned & sterilized it that would be much better. But that takes time & money.
For complete breakdown you might be talking 3-6 months, but the more it breaks down the less energy you can extract later.
Of course it depends on the efficiency too...you might convert 100% of the cellulose at 20% efficiency, but be able to convert 50% of the cellulose at 50% efficiency. But now I've gone way beyond the data available.
But yeah the article is using the shell sugar conversion plant to try to make it sound like this process is almost ready for production, where as it really needs a lot more research.
Now what I wasn't to know is if you could find a better process to go from cellulose to electricity without ethanol or gasoline conversion first.
Sure you can. You just need to get the cost of the conversion + transportation to lower than the cost to farm it locally. Yes its possible but decomposition is a large factor. Collection and transport is also pretty difficult compared to farms. With individuals you'll have varying yields and level of quality. Where as farm raised material will be more consistent and efficient to gather. Also much collected yard waste is currently used for fertilizer and mulch production to help grow food and other plants; or recycled by the individual to help reduce the need to more fertilizers.
You have no idea how much ariable(sic) land is in the United Sates, do you? Approximately 18% of the US land is arable. Approx 31% of that is used to feed Americans. Then on top of that we have a growing fresh-water supply shortage (which makes land non-arable). And due to our over-growing of the land we do farm we loose approx 1 million acres a year. We also are increasing our need of our arable land for food by roughly 1% each year. Also a large portion of the other 59% of the arable land is being used for feed, export, industrial use, etc...switching more land from one use to another puts pressure on all those areas.
Of course if we removed all our homes and cities that occupy arable land and moved them into the deserts, then stopped spending so much water irrigating deserts we might have much more available.
But last time I looked at maps of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Wisconsin, etc there wasn't too much fertile land with access to water and transportation that wasn't occupied by people, farms, or forests (which are important to keep for other reasons).
FTA: The sweet spot, about 1000 degrees per second, transfers roughly half the celluloseâ(TM)s energy into hydrocarbons. âoeIf we can get 100 percent yield, we estimate the cost to be about a dollar per gallon,â Huber says.
He is transferring 50% of the cellulose's energy to a gas-like hydrocarbon solution, not 50% of the energy in that of gas.
Although collecting large amounts of easy to process cellulose materials will cost money too. You can't just go around picking up everyone's grass clippings and store them, or take a week transporting them. Nature also breaks down cellulose, and dissipates the energy they are extracting. So you would need to gather this material, ship it, process it and/or store it in ways that prevent decomposition....and all that costs money.
And most likely means things like switchgrass farms, or some other dedicated farming, so its concentrated in one place (easy for processing and transport). But then you have the problem of that farm land competing with our food growing farm land...which causes land prices to rise, causing increased food costs.
Because they don't have a process... According to the article they can make this high-octane cellular extraction in small quantities.
This is not a large scale production process running at 50% capacity, its an lab-scale process which can see a 50% energy extraction. Extracting more energy might require a completely different method.
Also where they heat the cellulose 1000 degrees per second will probably not scale very easily to the hundreds to thousands of gallons needed in mass production (its easy to do to a few ounces...a lot harder for a few gallons).
The 50% efficiency is how much of the biomass energy they can convert to the "high-octane liquid". Can they get to 100%? No...you cannot extract 100% energy from something, also the process that is getting you 50% yields will probably require much more energy then what you are doing right now.
Also does this $1/gallon figure account for the energy needed to raise/cool this biomass the 1000 degrees per second? Also the cost of getting the biomass? And the cost of collecting (and probably liquifing/straining/etc this biomass. Is this $1/gallon number include current tax rates for transportation maintenance? I have a funny feeling that that might just be the cost to actually execute the refinement assuming everything else was free.
Its like arguing that internet security makes companies loose billions of dollars. But the question really is how much money did they make vs if there was no internet?
Everyone highlights the cost of opensource, but mentions nothing of the gain.
If the world all used one type of software for everything imagine the cost to innovation that would have been lost over the years.
The fact is that in economics everything has a cost, it doesn't matter if its time, money, lost opportunities, etc. The question is really has Open source software created more then $60 billion in equivilent jobs, money, innovations, companies, products, derivative ideas, laws political/ideological change, etc. I would think so as last time I checked Google alone is worth $169 billion, Redhat $3.75 billion, Novell $2.25 billion, Yahoo $38.15 billion, IBM $170.81 billion. I'm guessing some portion of those companies has something to do with open source existing.
So really the headline should be, Open source created hundreds of billions of dollars, but cost companies $60 billion to support. (not so news worthy now).
Have you ever attended your local government meetings? Do you know what that property tax goes to? Last time I was at my local municipalities meetings we were debating how to get money to repave a major road, keep our police department building loans from being foreclosed, and then having to loose 3 major tax paying businesses because we raised taxes last year. If you want muni wireless maybe you should help out solving some of these other issues too. Believe it or not but most municipalities are always on the edge of never-ending debt. And before you say its corruption and bad deals that cause that, most of the time the bad deals and corruption happen is because the local governments don't have enough manpower to properly look into and research everything they fund (so they get swindled & duped many times). So if you want to fix things, why not volunteer to review and comment on that next highway improvement project, or research how consolidating two major roads could save some money...hell its your money after all.
Actually the history of Science clashing with Religion goes back long before Newton. The greek priests used to have issues with using mechanical devices to make statues of gods move. Some thought it was morally wrong, but of course in the end manufacturing 'acts of god' brought in better offerings. And you can go back before that. On the other hand to good thing about religious run civilizations like Egypt, was that the discovery of scientific principals was instantly adopted as something that the gods intended for that person to discover (sometimes I think that might have been a slightly better way to do it).
The other thing is there is a difference between "Intelligent Design" and believing in a design created with intelligence. The former was solidified with all sorts of crazy notions and rules, instead of it remaining purely the fact that everything may have been planned to turn out this way. Of course some people easily get confused with "Intelligent Design" and the concept of an intelligent design (sort of like "The Flat Tax", and a truly flat, tax design not being identical).
The down side with an intelligent design that no one in religion tends to want to deal with. Is that if things were designed to end up in the way they are, at which point does the design end and free will begin? Does it end...could we be destined by some complex intelligent design of matter, physical laws, events, etc to get to some later fate. Uh oh...that would sort of crush the god gave us free will thing wouldn't it?
So I end with this one question...If god designed the universe with a grand design that is so complex that we haven't figured it out yet. Do you really think you could ever conceptually grasp the entire thing in our limited intelligence, without ourselves being god? Isn't it just possible that every concept we have is wrong, but partially right? So why does it all have to be opposed to eachother?
Exactly. If you assume that everything is created by an all knowing, all powerful (truly omnipotent) being/entity/etc you interesting points that date back to the founding of philosophy and science itself.
1. There is nothing stopping this entity from creating everything if 6 days. As being all powerful time would not be a challenge at all (it could be done in a femtosecond). The universe could have been created in its current state 30 seconds ago...how would we know.
2. If this entity created such detailed designs such as physical laws, gravity, particles, fields, etc that all seem to work in a logical and coherent manner. Such an entity would probably not have issues seeing the need for a process in which the universe changes/evolves/etc.
3. Thus if there was a intelligence behind such a massive design, would it not have designed the nature of the universe itself around such a 'ultimate plan', including the mechanics and science of the universe itself. If so how can science be opposed to such beliefs, is science not just details 'encoded into that existence.
4. If time/matter/etc constraints does not matter to this entity, would it not know all possible events, all possible knowledge, how everything 'turns out'. If such conditions/outcomes are all known, what would the point of creation actually be? If they are not known, can this entity truly be all-powerful?
5. If this entity created evidence of a history of evolution, it would have been for a reason. So is it not then religiously correct to study such evidence? Under the same logic, if the universe was created 30 seconds ago, and all memories/matter/etc was created in the current state, should you ignore your memories of yesterday...how about your education, or raised beliefs.
I could go on with these thought-experiments for years. Or you could go read the works of some old-greek/roman/early-Christian/muslium/etc people and think about them for yourself.
But basically I've gone by the idea that if god created the universe, and the universe is governed by science, then wouldn't god have to have been a scientist (among other things).
Vertical space is a great asset, that why at both my home and work laptop docks I have a 19" rotated vertically. When your writing code, reading articles, etc you get the best of both worlds.
To determine with certainty if a complex system is deterministic you would need to have a model as complex as the real thing, and observe the states in over a long period or their entirety.
So this means the only real way you could determine if our universe was deterministic, would be:
a) observe the universe as a whole outside of time b) create a complete model of our universe within our universe that could have a outcome prior to our universe.
The question for the matrix theory is 'can you make a non-deterministic system inside a deterministic system'.
Which if you think about it is the exact question of our brains/body/universe (as we know them right now). If everything behaves in a deterministic faction based on a set of physical laws, can 'free will' (a non-deterministic system) exist within those conditions. Is there the ability to have a "ghost within the machine"?
Slashdot Mirror
Are you positive the universe is not deterministic. What if we find out that quantum effects are only unexplained deterministic effects caused by our inability to observe enough dimensions (or other aspects) of the universe's space.
It comes down to another basic philosophical concept, you can't really prove anything is anything (or even exists) without proving everything else first. Without a known point of reference everything is based on an unknown. Thus Descartes's quest for the only thing he could prove as his reference..."Cogito, ergo sum" (Latin: "I think, therefore I am")
Rich0 you can't cluster timings very easily. You could cluster based on individual calls, but take the instance where your circuit (call) is open for hours at a time...thats a long time to wait for it to fail over.
Digital phone transmissions (and I use that in a light sense cause ISDN, and SS7 are not as digital as newer stuff) are stateful and highly depend on a channel timing signals. If it was true analog back to the carrier you could do such a thing pretty seamlessly, but its not (its digital+encapsulated analog)
Essentially what you are talking about in the circuit switched world is running two sets of equipment in tandem. And unfortunately milliseconds do count here so the equipment becomes very specialized and very specific.
On one of my most recent pilot works for a carrier which I probably shouldn't name (if they could hear me now). Used channel-banking/re-muxing equipment to insulate the circuits from individual truck lines, then we translated from TDM cards to VoIP to our application servers. Which provided enough of a buffer to logically switch calls over in real-time (of course pulling call data from one location to another was kind of tough cause we needed to record it all) but hey thats why it wasn't cheap to do.
In a lot of mid to low size telecom deployments you are usually going direct from the carrier to the a telecom card in a server (like a dialogic digital T1 card). And unfortunately because of bad design either at the hardware/driver/api or at some software levels you usually loose the ability to control or sense the timing slips on individual channels, leaving the one of items in the stack (software/driver/card) leaving the line open for a little to long, not allowing the carrier to sense a busy out and fail the circuit to a different one. Not to mention that most telecom standards for long haul trunking do not have method for retransmitting the metadata (DNIS/CLI, clocking, etc) to a failover circuit (meaning you need to reinitialize the call...or hangup).
But yes if you have some of the newer stuff and some of the more expensive equipment you can do it.
No give away your drugs attached to a package with an advertisement on it. And also start selling pill reminders, and ancillary products. You can compete with free (you just need to also accept free to do so).
Ask most successful business men about if they would rather own something completely or have a market where there is healthy competition, and most will tell you that they will do anything to block competitors.
So if we look at the GPL and many other open source licenses we have a problem where the intellectual property can not be completely controlled. Now in a market where you can make money by fairly offering support and ancillary services why would they view this as bad?
If you own the intellectual property behind a product you have the ability to 'strike out'. You can screw up marketing, sales, development, etc and still be protected from someone else doing the same thing better. But if you sell services for GPL/Open products you have to conduct business the 'proper way', and deliver a better product then your competitors.
I'm not trying to bash the windows here, as if you look at Bill's investment work outside of Microsoft he tends to do the same thing; look for something that he can take 100% ownership of a marketplace. And I doubt you will find too many CEOs of large companies who would not take the chance to do the exact same thing. Even though most of these people have business/economics knowledge of how capitalism should work with healthy competition & innovation; they would much rather be unmerciful and dominate to make more money now, and find a way to be charitable, or 'play nice' later. Basically if they can own it, they will, and if something stands in their way they will try to crush it, denounce it, or produce FUD against it.
Mainly why people in the telecom industry have been clamoring for it. Its very difficult to take over the termination of a circuit switched system without some interruption for the end user. And its also not aways easy to busy out all channels on a line as calls drop off so you can free up a machine for patching.
Of course many of the reasons is a lot of commercial telecom apps are badly implemented and need better management controls.
It depends on what material you use. And assuming you want to also use some of the simpler sugars to add to the energy output.
Collect a couple of semi's worth of green grass clippings, then stick them in a pile or in a rail/truck cargo container for 2-3 days, and you do have a large amount of energy getting released there. Of course if you dried it cleaned & sterilized it that would be much better. But that takes time & money.
For complete breakdown you might be talking 3-6 months, but the more it breaks down the less energy you can extract later.
Brazil and Argentina have a lot of good farm land...I wonder if we might go looking for WMDs there now.
I guess you could say which is more efficient...photosynthesis or solar panels? Thats why I'd like to see how efficient such a conversion would be.
Of course it depends on the efficiency too...you might convert 100% of the cellulose at 20% efficiency, but be able to convert 50% of the cellulose at 50% efficiency. But now I've gone way beyond the data available.
But yeah the article is using the shell sugar conversion plant to try to make it sound like this process is almost ready for production, where as it really needs a lot more research.
Now what I wasn't to know is if you could find a better process to go from cellulose to electricity without ethanol or gasoline conversion first.
and before you argue I typo'ed 69% to 59%
Of course if we removed all our homes and cities that occupy arable land and moved them into the deserts, then stopped spending so much water irrigating deserts we might have much more available.
But last time I looked at maps of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Wisconsin, etc there wasn't too much fertile land with access to water and transportation that wasn't occupied by people, farms, or forests (which are important to keep for other reasons).
FTA: The sweet spot, about 1000 degrees per second, transfers roughly half the celluloseâ(TM)s energy into hydrocarbons. âoeIf we can get 100 percent yield, we estimate the cost to be about a dollar per gallon,â Huber says.
He is transferring 50% of the cellulose's energy to a gas-like hydrocarbon solution, not 50% of the energy in that of gas.
Although collecting large amounts of easy to process cellulose materials will cost money too. You can't just go around picking up everyone's grass clippings and store them, or take a week transporting them. Nature also breaks down cellulose, and dissipates the energy they are extracting. So you would need to gather this material, ship it, process it and/or store it in ways that prevent decomposition....and all that costs money.
And most likely means things like switchgrass farms, or some other dedicated farming, so its concentrated in one place (easy for processing and transport). But then you have the problem of that farm land competing with our food growing farm land...which causes land prices to rise, causing increased food costs.
Because they don't have a process... According to the article they can make this high-octane cellular extraction in small quantities.
This is not a large scale production process running at 50% capacity, its an lab-scale process which can see a 50% energy extraction. Extracting more energy might require a completely different method.
Also where they heat the cellulose 1000 degrees per second will probably not scale very easily to the hundreds to thousands of gallons needed in mass production (its easy to do to a few ounces...a lot harder for a few gallons).
The 50% efficiency is how much of the biomass energy they can convert to the "high-octane liquid". Can they get to 100%? No...you cannot extract 100% energy from something, also the process that is getting you 50% yields will probably require much more energy then what you are doing right now.
Also does this $1/gallon figure account for the energy needed to raise/cool this biomass the 1000 degrees per second? Also the cost of getting the biomass? And the cost of collecting (and probably liquifing/straining/etc this biomass. Is this $1/gallon number include current tax rates for transportation maintenance? I have a funny feeling that that might just be the cost to actually execute the refinement assuming everything else was free.
Of course it needs to be developed for free...not too many people are going to pay to play it.
$0 cost + a few dozen monthly subscriptions = enough money to pay for the crack smoked while thinking of a NASA MMO.
Its like arguing that internet security makes companies loose billions of dollars. But the question really is how much money did they make vs if there was no internet?
Everyone highlights the cost of opensource, but mentions nothing of the gain.
If the world all used one type of software for everything imagine the cost to innovation that would have been lost over the years.
The fact is that in economics everything has a cost, it doesn't matter if its time, money, lost opportunities, etc. The question is really has Open source software created more then $60 billion in equivilent jobs, money, innovations, companies, products, derivative ideas, laws political/ideological change, etc. I would think so as last time I checked Google alone is worth $169 billion, Redhat $3.75 billion, Novell $2.25 billion, Yahoo $38.15 billion, IBM $170.81 billion. I'm guessing some portion of those companies has something to do with open source existing.
So really the headline should be, Open source created hundreds of billions of dollars, but cost companies $60 billion to support. (not so news worthy now).
Thus the "your weird ferroabsorptive paint" part in the original post.
Have you ever attended your local government meetings? Do you know what that property tax goes to? Last time I was at my local municipalities meetings we were debating how to get money to repave a major road, keep our police department building loans from being foreclosed, and then having to loose 3 major tax paying businesses because we raised taxes last year. If you want muni wireless maybe you should help out solving some of these other issues too. Believe it or not but most municipalities are always on the edge of never-ending debt. And before you say its corruption and bad deals that cause that, most of the time the bad deals and corruption happen is because the local governments don't have enough manpower to properly look into and research everything they fund (so they get swindled & duped many times). So if you want to fix things, why not volunteer to review and comment on that next highway improvement project, or research how consolidating two major roads could save some money...hell its your money after all.
Actually the history of Science clashing with Religion goes back long before Newton. The greek priests used to have issues with using mechanical devices to make statues of gods move. Some thought it was morally wrong, but of course in the end manufacturing 'acts of god' brought in better offerings. And you can go back before that. On the other hand to good thing about religious run civilizations like Egypt, was that the discovery of scientific principals was instantly adopted as something that the gods intended for that person to discover (sometimes I think that might have been a slightly better way to do it).
The other thing is there is a difference between "Intelligent Design" and believing in a design created with intelligence. The former was solidified with all sorts of crazy notions and rules, instead of it remaining purely the fact that everything may have been planned to turn out this way. Of course some people easily get confused with "Intelligent Design" and the concept of an intelligent design (sort of like "The Flat Tax", and a truly flat, tax design not being identical).
The down side with an intelligent design that no one in religion tends to want to deal with. Is that if things were designed to end up in the way they are, at which point does the design end and free will begin? Does it end...could we be destined by some complex intelligent design of matter, physical laws, events, etc to get to some later fate. Uh oh...that would sort of crush the god gave us free will thing wouldn't it?
So I end with this one question...If god designed the universe with a grand design that is so complex that we haven't figured it out yet. Do you really think you could ever conceptually grasp the entire thing in our limited intelligence, without ourselves being god? Isn't it just possible that every concept we have is wrong, but partially right? So why does it all have to be opposed to eachother?
Exactly. If you assume that everything is created by an all knowing, all powerful (truly omnipotent) being/entity/etc you interesting points that date back to the founding of philosophy and science itself.
1. There is nothing stopping this entity from creating everything if 6 days. As being all powerful time would not be a challenge at all (it could be done in a femtosecond). The universe could have been created in its current state 30 seconds ago...how would we know.
2. If this entity created such detailed designs such as physical laws, gravity, particles, fields, etc that all seem to work in a logical and coherent manner. Such an entity would probably not have issues seeing the need for a process in which the universe changes/evolves/etc.
3. Thus if there was a intelligence behind such a massive design, would it not have designed the nature of the universe itself around such a 'ultimate plan', including the mechanics and science of the universe itself. If so how can science be opposed to such beliefs, is science not just details 'encoded into that existence.
4. If time/matter/etc constraints does not matter to this entity, would it not know all possible events, all possible knowledge, how everything 'turns out'. If such conditions/outcomes are all known, what would the point of creation actually be? If they are not known, can this entity truly be all-powerful?
5. If this entity created evidence of a history of evolution, it would have been for a reason. So is it not then religiously correct to study such evidence? Under the same logic, if the universe was created 30 seconds ago, and all memories/matter/etc was created in the current state, should you ignore your memories of yesterday...how about your education, or raised beliefs.
I could go on with these thought-experiments for years. Or you could go read the works of some old-greek/roman/early-Christian/muslium/etc people and think about them for yourself.
But basically I've gone by the idea that if god created the universe, and the universe is governed by science, then wouldn't god have to have been a scientist (among other things).
Vertical space is a great asset, that why at both my home and work laptop docks I have a 19" rotated vertically. When your writing code, reading articles, etc you get the best of both worlds.
To determine with certainty if a complex system is deterministic you would need to have a model as complex as the real thing, and observe the states in over a long period or their entirety.
So this means the only real way you could determine if our universe was deterministic, would be:
a) observe the universe as a whole outside of time
b) create a complete model of our universe within our universe that could have a outcome prior to our universe.
The question for the matrix theory is 'can you make a non-deterministic system inside a deterministic system'.
Which if you think about it is the exact question of our brains/body/universe (as we know them right now). If everything behaves in a deterministic faction based on a set of physical laws, can 'free will' (a non-deterministic system) exist within those conditions. Is there the ability to have a "ghost within the machine"?