There are also quite a few people who (probably for quaint religeous reasons), still rely on the analog wireless broadcasts to receive their pre-scheduled, pre-chosen video stream.
Analog television signals can convey the subtle nuances of a scene in a way that the average wood-eyed viewer could never notice, but that a trained videophile such as myself can spot like night and day. Also, cathode-ray tubes impart a dynamic character and emphasis to the even-numbered harmonics that impart a "holographic" like quality to the images, while still retaining the overall linearity of sweep azimuth and elevation granted by the intrinsic behavior of electrons given thermal energy by a heated cathode with a low work-function and accelerated inside a synchronized magnetic or electrostatic field. You'd never catch me watching digital TV on some cheap LCD display, buddy! Even an idiot can tell that the greens are heavily excoriated and taste entirely wrong.
Division by zero is mathematically undefined. The best you can do is take the limit of the quotient as the denominator approaches zero plus an infinitesimal amount. The denominator is a number smaller than any number you can think of, which results in infinity for an answer in that case, but the denominator isn't zero.
"Podmates! A new threat from the wretched third planet has presented itself!" roared K'breel, Glorious Elder Speaker of the High Council, the his gelatinous tendrils quivering with excitement. "The detestable ape-people of the Northwestern Continent, having failed pitifully in their invasion of our homeworld with their pathetic wheeled war vehicles, have now attempted to enslave the population of an old adversary to construct their monstrous interplanetary weapons of destruction. Fortunately for our cause, due to the design faults of their primitive neurological systems, and in no small part the assistance of our hidden operatives, their economies have collapsed as a result of their insatiable lust for accumulating worthless structures of planetary rock and decayed photosynthetic matter! They have turned against one another in their uncomprehending rage, bringing the hour of our ultimate victory within sight!"
When one journalist timidly asked of K'breel to confirm the rumors that a new Great Speaker had arisen among the citizens of the Northwestern Continent, who had been prophisized to lead the ape-people to final victory in the interminable conflict, K'breel ordered his gelsacs to be pierced on the spot.
Fortunately, I've never actually been hit with either a 5.56 or a 7.62 myself. But I've seen people get hit, and I'm not sure if there were multiple hits on the same plate or not. In Lebanon two years ago we couldn't even exchange our equipment for two weeks
Sorry about that. We'll try to get those US taxpayer dollars to you on the first of the month from now on.
It's apparently so illegal that I can find dozens of websites offering me private healthcare services if I'm a UK resident. I can't find a single European country where it's "ILLEGAL" to get private medical care. You can make the choice to live or die here if you have enough money. If your insurance company decides that your treatment isn't worth paying for, and you can't pay for it yourself, you're as shit out of luck as when the government decides your treatment isn't worth paying for. You can't go to any other company because you have a preexisting condition, and so many times claims are denied not even for a reason, but just because "We don't wanna pay." I can't imagine anyone who has had actual EXPERIENCE with the US healthcare system would have any reason to defend it, except libertarians who think it's all fantastic because it's "free market."
National healthcare probably only works for countries that still actually have some concept of "nation" and "people" left, unlike the US which is becoming just a random conglomeration of consumers with the libertarian as the nadir, someone who thinks they've reached the pinnacle of human achievement when they can sit in their house-fortress tax free and yell "I'm the king of the castle!" and declare the triumph of the free market while getting reamed 6 ways to Sunday by Blue Cross, AEtna, Sony, and 573 multinationals. You're the useful idiot, AC, and next time you take time out from snuggling your dog-eared copy of Atlas Shrugged to snark at me like a little whiny bitch, why not post under an actual user name? It might give you a hint of credibility.
One of the examples was an elderly lady who needed a hip replacement, her country would not pay for it due to her age. They believed she would not contribute enough to society for long enough to warrant the surgery costs, never mind the contribution she made for the 80 years prior to needing the hip replacement.
Substitute "not contribute enough to the health insurance company's bottom line" for "not contribute enough to society" and how is that situation any different from the situation in the United States? Furthermore, I have no idea how this elderly lady who couldn't afford a hip replacement in her home country could have saved money by flying to the US, a country with one of the highest health care costs in the world. Do we have some kind of free hip replacement surgery for foreigners program that I'm not aware of? I seriously doubt that if the government refuses to pay for a procedure in a "socialist" country that no place would do it if you came to them with cash.
It must be nice to be so totally secure in one's socioeconomic position in society that one can declare with absolutely certainty that one should never be asked to pay for anyone else's misfortune, and to be completely content with the fact that if the situation were reversed no assistance would be available for oneself. You libertarians must lead some pretty fucking charmed lives.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1104233&cid=26606043
You have stolen my intellectual property! However I will happily license all further Funny moderated comments involving Nvidia, spheres, and chessboards to you for say, US $10 million.
The US currently consumes 20.8 million barrels of oil per day - the majority of which goes to automotive fuel. I don't know if anyone has run the numbers, but it would be a neat intellectual exercise to calculate, based on the energy density of an average acre of fully grown hemp or switchgrass and factoring in the energy requirements of harvesting, exactly how many cubic kilometers of fully grown plants one would have to harvest and convert per day to get the energy density of 20.8 million barrels of petroleum. I'm betting it's a pretty staggering figure.
Nothing is fully renewable that is suitable for realistically providing power for the typical modern life.
You're absolutely correct - the only way that modern life has come to be is to redress the net energy balance that fossil fuels have given us. Once fossil fuels cease to exist, technological civilization ceases to exist. That people believe that it would be possible to sustain a 6 billion person human population at our current level of energy consumption for high tech devices, hundreds of millions of cars, airplanes, etc. on the power of solar collectors, the wind, tides, and geothermal energy hardly passes a sanity check. That the end of technological civilization was an inevitability troubled me for a long time until I realized that technological "progress", while giving me great pleasure to take part in, is essentially pointless. There's really nothing to "progress" towards. If the laws of thermodynamics dictate that humanity is destined to spend the majority of its time on this planet at a pre-industial level, then so what?
Even if you manage to find sources of fossil fuels buried deep in the crust or under the oceans, eventually the energy cost of extracting those sources will equal the amount of energy recovered, at which point the source is useless. There could be a trillion barrels of oil locked in some reservoir under the ocean, but if the energy cost of extracting one barrel of that oil becomes equal to the potential energy stored in one barrel of oil that resource is forever worthless; it will be worthless whatever the price of oil is. The minute advanced extraction technologies enter the equation one starts running up against the one-to-one dilemma very quickly. With petroleum the low hanging fruit is all that's worth picking.
Did you know the Space Shuttle is comprised of 2.5 million parts making it the most complex machine ever built? Of these parts, steel valves are considered critical and of the highest order to resolve before launch.
Though the Shuttle has a huge amount of redundancy, there are an amazing number of parts which are "must work' devices, i.e. failure of the part would almost certainly lead to catastrophic loss of the vehicle. The main engine flow control valves are of course one of these, but there are many others which are not so obvious, such as the payload bay latching mechanism. If this doesn't work, you're stuck in orbit with an open payload bay and cannot re-enter. The explosive bolts that secure the payload are also must-work devices, if they fail due to vibration on launch you might have the payload come loose inside the bay during ascent - a very bad thing to happen. Also, they must not fail to work when releasing the payload, or the payload might become lodged half in and half out of the Shuttle, preventing re-entry.
The commandment "Thou Shalt Not Kill" in the Old Testament was in no way intended to be a universally applicable law - it applied only in an intratribal way to the ancient Israelites, the same as all the other commandments. It certainly did not apply to the way the Israelites interacted with other groups, and in no way applied to God. The only reason there's any contradiction in that material is if one is determined to interpret it from a New Testament perspective post-Christ where the Ten Commandments (with modifications) were extrapolated by Christians to hold universally. There's nothing wrong with that, but trying to examine the Old Testament from the perspective of more recent theology is certainly going to cause problems. For the original writers of the Torah no such contradictions existed.
Unless you design something like a 1920x1200 FPS that sends complete video data to the client (as opposed to having the client render anything on its own)
I find your ideas intriguing and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Those who preach "diversity" and "tolerance" the loudest are those who benefit the most from their targets taking the advice to heart. Globalism and multicultural ideals are simply ideological weapons used to undercut people's innate tribal identities and instincts for the benefit of some other group who have no intention of playing by the same rules - an evolutionary strategy which pays rich rewards to those who can effectively implement it.
The anti-nuclear lobby has nowhere near the kind of clout that you seem to attribute to it. I can think of only 1 reactor project off the top of my head in the United States that was canceled due to environmentalist pressure (the Shoreham plant on Long Island).
It's often claimed that Three Mile Island was the catalyst that caused the eco lobby to sink nuclear power projects in the United States. What's not often mentioned is that power companies and their investors took a hard look at nuclear power after 3 Mile Island. Even if not a single person is injured in a reactor cock-up and any radioactive emissions are completely contaiend, you suddenly have a massive cleanup project on your hands that will be enormously expensive to complete. It was not lost on power companies and their shareholders that an American nuclear plant, with what was assumed to be the highest safety standards and top quality operators, could be turned from a $2 billion asset to a $1 billion liability in the space of half an hour.
The majority of nuclear plants that have been canceled over the past 20 years have been canceled not because of environmentalist pressure, but simply because the ROI wasn't there. It has also not helped that the economic policies of the U.S. have tried to keep fuel prices artificially low for the better part of three decades; indeed one of the great dangers of the current economic situation is that fuel prices are ridiculously low and the impetus that may have existed to begin seriously working on alternative sources as the prices were driven up over the past years is being lost. Once the world's economic engines begin to come out of their torpor (however long it may take) the U.S. may find itself in a position where the result of energy companies consistently only caring about short-term profits will leave us in a state where the massively inflated prices of last summer will seem like a bargain.
Personally, I see TFA as nothing more than CYA. The few scientists left publicly espousing the "anthropogenic global warming" myth are realizing that the scientific community of the world has moved on as the evidence against that theory has piled up.
Science has found that AGW is BS, and that man simply cannot do anything to affect the global climate in any meaningful way.
What science? Which scientists are these? What credentials do they have? What research projects have they been involved in? Come on man, you must have been here long enough to realize that you can't just say "Science believes ____" on a controversial topic and expect it to be the grounds for any kind of convincing argument.
We do all kinds of things today considered impossible in earlier times. The one I think about the most is the scientist who proved heavier than air flight was impossible, or maybe the patent clerk who quit from the US Patent office over a century ago because Everything Had Been Invented already.
Unfortunately, the argument from history is a logical fallacy. Simply because someone at some point believed that something was impossible and turned out to be incorrect does not mean that one should draw the conclusion that all scientific problems are just a matter of will, and that science can overcome any problem that presents itself if enough hard work is put in. This is not being a Luddite (who got bad rap to begin with, as they were not opposed to "technology" in general, only a certain application), but a healthy skepticism which itself embodies the principles of the scientific method and could prevent one making fatal errors in judgement.
When we're[1] set free to invent things, we can do extraordinary things. I view events of the last 3 or 4 decades as more of a problem of declining freedom than anything else.
No argument with you here. If anything the last 3 or 4 decades have been a period where illusory freedom has been slowly substituted for real freedom to the point where people often can't tell the difference. Sure, you're free to choose between Coke and Pepsi, Honda or GM, voting red or blue, what kind of porn you want to watch, or what type of rebellious tattoo you want to get, but if the false dichotomies you're offered end up not satisfying your spirit you're pretty much out of luck.
The 50s and 60s were an exciting time of exponential technological progress.
And that's most likely the heart of the problem -
exponential functions go asymptotic pretty quickly. The low hanging fruit gets picked first.
Not to mention that there will be no time for fossil fuel reserves the size of which powered humanity's Industrial Revolution to re-accumulate. Unless a new intelligent species is able to make the jump directly from Iron Age technology to photovoltaic or nuclear power, they will be SOL on ever developing a technological civilization.
I worked for a music technology retailer for a few years recently, and the Band-In-A-Box software is still a huge seller. It was easily in the top 5 of our most sold product while I was there.
Slashdot Mirror
I think these guys are trying to bring back the concept, with 64 interconnected processing "tiles" on a chip.
There are also quite a few people who (probably for quaint religeous reasons), still rely on the analog wireless broadcasts to receive their pre-scheduled, pre-chosen video stream.
Analog television signals can convey the subtle nuances of a scene in a way that the average wood-eyed viewer could never notice, but that a trained videophile such as myself can spot like night and day. Also, cathode-ray tubes impart a dynamic character and emphasis to the even-numbered harmonics that impart a "holographic" like quality to the images, while still retaining the overall linearity of sweep azimuth and elevation granted by the intrinsic behavior of electrons given thermal energy by a heated cathode with a low work-function and accelerated inside a synchronized magnetic or electrostatic field. You'd never catch me watching digital TV on some cheap LCD display, buddy! Even an idiot can tell that the greens are heavily excoriated and taste entirely wrong.
From my own personal, ah, experiments, I can only confirm the nonexistence of Xenu and possibly reincarnation.
Division by zero is mathematically undefined. The best you can do is take the limit of the quotient as the denominator approaches zero plus an infinitesimal amount. The denominator is a number smaller than any number you can think of, which results in infinity for an answer in that case, but the denominator isn't zero.
"Podmates! A new threat from the wretched third planet has presented itself!" roared K'breel, Glorious Elder Speaker of the High Council, the his gelatinous tendrils quivering with excitement. "The detestable ape-people of the Northwestern Continent, having failed pitifully in their invasion of our homeworld with their pathetic wheeled war vehicles, have now attempted to enslave the population of an old adversary to construct their monstrous interplanetary weapons of destruction. Fortunately for our cause, due to the design faults of their primitive neurological systems, and in no small part the assistance of our hidden operatives, their economies have collapsed as a result of their insatiable lust for accumulating worthless structures of planetary rock and decayed photosynthetic matter! They have turned against one another in their uncomprehending rage, bringing the hour of our ultimate victory within sight!"
When one journalist timidly asked of K'breel to confirm the rumors that a new Great Speaker had arisen among the citizens of the Northwestern Continent, who had been prophisized to lead the ape-people to final victory in the interminable conflict, K'breel ordered his gelsacs to be pierced on the spot.
Fortunately, I've never actually been hit with either a 5.56 or a 7.62 myself. But I've seen people get hit, and I'm not sure if there were multiple hits on the same plate or not. In Lebanon two years ago we couldn't even exchange our equipment for two weeks
Sorry about that. We'll try to get those US taxpayer dollars to you on the first of the month from now on.
http://www.privatehealth.co.uk/
http://www.axappphealthcare.co.uk/
etc. etc.
It's apparently so illegal that I can find dozens of websites offering me private healthcare services if I'm a UK resident. I can't find a single European country where it's "ILLEGAL" to get private medical care. You can make the choice to live or die here if you have enough money. If your insurance company decides that your treatment isn't worth paying for, and you can't pay for it yourself, you're as shit out of luck as when the government decides your treatment isn't worth paying for. You can't go to any other company because you have a preexisting condition, and so many times claims are denied not even for a reason, but just because "We don't wanna pay." I can't imagine anyone who has had actual EXPERIENCE with the US healthcare system would have any reason to defend it, except libertarians who think it's all fantastic because it's "free market."
National healthcare probably only works for countries that still actually have some concept of "nation" and "people" left, unlike the US which is becoming just a random conglomeration of consumers with the libertarian as the nadir, someone who thinks they've reached the pinnacle of human achievement when they can sit in their house-fortress tax free and yell "I'm the king of the castle!" and declare the triumph of the free market while getting reamed 6 ways to Sunday by Blue Cross, AEtna, Sony, and 573 multinationals. You're the useful idiot, AC, and next time you take time out from snuggling your dog-eared copy of Atlas Shrugged to snark at me like a little whiny bitch, why not post under an actual user name? It might give you a hint of credibility.
One of the examples was an elderly lady who needed a hip replacement, her country would not pay for it due to her age. They believed she would not contribute enough to society for long enough to warrant the surgery costs, never mind the contribution she made for the 80 years prior to needing the hip replacement.
Substitute "not contribute enough to the health insurance company's bottom line" for "not contribute enough to society" and how is that situation any different from the situation in the United States? Furthermore, I have no idea how this elderly lady who couldn't afford a hip replacement in her home country could have saved money by flying to the US, a country with one of the highest health care costs in the world. Do we have some kind of free hip replacement surgery for foreigners program that I'm not aware of? I seriously doubt that if the government refuses to pay for a procedure in a "socialist" country that no place would do it if you came to them with cash.
It must be nice to be so totally secure in one's socioeconomic position in society that one can declare with absolutely certainty that one should never be asked to pay for anyone else's misfortune, and to be completely content with the fact that if the situation were reversed no assistance would be available for oneself. You libertarians must lead some pretty fucking charmed lives.
The new Battlestar Galactica is just Dallas in space.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1104233&cid=26606043 You have stolen my intellectual property! However I will happily license all further Funny moderated comments involving Nvidia, spheres, and chessboards to you for say, US $10 million.
The US currently consumes 20.8 million barrels of oil per day - the majority of which goes to automotive fuel. I don't know if anyone has run the numbers, but it would be a neat intellectual exercise to calculate, based on the energy density of an average acre of fully grown hemp or switchgrass and factoring in the energy requirements of harvesting, exactly how many cubic kilometers of fully grown plants one would have to harvest and convert per day to get the energy density of 20.8 million barrels of petroleum. I'm betting it's a pretty staggering figure.
Nothing is fully renewable that is suitable for realistically providing power for the typical modern life.
You're absolutely correct - the only way that modern life has come to be is to redress the net energy balance that fossil fuels have given us. Once fossil fuels cease to exist, technological civilization ceases to exist. That people believe that it would be possible to sustain a 6 billion person human population at our current level of energy consumption for high tech devices, hundreds of millions of cars, airplanes, etc. on the power of solar collectors, the wind, tides, and geothermal energy hardly passes a sanity check. That the end of technological civilization was an inevitability troubled me for a long time until I realized that technological "progress", while giving me great pleasure to take part in, is essentially pointless. There's really nothing to "progress" towards. If the laws of thermodynamics dictate that humanity is destined to spend the majority of its time on this planet at a pre-industial level, then so what?
Even if you manage to find sources of fossil fuels buried deep in the crust or under the oceans, eventually the energy cost of extracting those sources will equal the amount of energy recovered, at which point the source is useless. There could be a trillion barrels of oil locked in some reservoir under the ocean, but if the energy cost of extracting one barrel of that oil becomes equal to the potential energy stored in one barrel of oil that resource is forever worthless; it will be worthless whatever the price of oil is. The minute advanced extraction technologies enter the equation one starts running up against the one-to-one dilemma very quickly. With petroleum the low hanging fruit is all that's worth picking.
So, ever make fun of any Jews besides Jesus? Or do you just like blaspheming down the path of least resistance?
Did you know the Space Shuttle is comprised of 2.5 million parts making it the most complex machine ever built? Of these parts, steel valves are considered critical and of the highest order to resolve before launch.
Though the Shuttle has a huge amount of redundancy, there are an amazing number of parts which are "must work' devices, i.e. failure of the part would almost certainly lead to catastrophic loss of the vehicle. The main engine flow control valves are of course one of these, but there are many others which are not so obvious, such as the payload bay latching mechanism. If this doesn't work, you're stuck in orbit with an open payload bay and cannot re-enter. The explosive bolts that secure the payload are also must-work devices, if they fail due to vibration on launch you might have the payload come loose inside the bay during ascent - a very bad thing to happen. Also, they must not fail to work when releasing the payload, or the payload might become lodged half in and half out of the Shuttle, preventing re-entry.
The commandment "Thou Shalt Not Kill" in the Old Testament was in no way intended to be a universally applicable law - it applied only in an intratribal way to the ancient Israelites, the same as all the other commandments. It certainly did not apply to the way the Israelites interacted with other groups, and in no way applied to God. The only reason there's any contradiction in that material is if one is determined to interpret it from a New Testament perspective post-Christ where the Ten Commandments (with modifications) were extrapolated by Christians to hold universally. There's nothing wrong with that, but trying to examine the Old Testament from the perspective of more recent theology is certainly going to cause problems. For the original writers of the Torah no such contradictions existed.
Unless you design something like a 1920x1200 FPS that sends complete video data to the client (as opposed to having the client render anything on its own)
I find your ideas intriguing and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Ultima Online makes so much more sense now.
Those who preach "diversity" and "tolerance" the loudest are those who benefit the most from their targets taking the advice to heart. Globalism and multicultural ideals are simply ideological weapons used to undercut people's innate tribal identities and instincts for the benefit of some other group who have no intention of playing by the same rules - an evolutionary strategy which pays rich rewards to those who can effectively implement it.
The anti-nuclear lobby has nowhere near the kind of clout that you seem to attribute to it. I can think of only 1 reactor project off the top of my head in the United States that was canceled due to environmentalist pressure (the Shoreham plant on Long Island).
It's often claimed that Three Mile Island was the catalyst that caused the eco lobby to sink nuclear power projects in the United States. What's not often mentioned is that power companies and their investors took a hard look at nuclear power after 3 Mile Island. Even if not a single person is injured in a reactor cock-up and any radioactive emissions are completely contaiend, you suddenly have a massive cleanup project on your hands that will be enormously expensive to complete. It was not lost on power companies and their shareholders that an American nuclear plant, with what was assumed to be the highest safety standards and top quality operators, could be turned from a $2 billion asset to a $1 billion liability in the space of half an hour.
The majority of nuclear plants that have been canceled over the past 20 years have been canceled not because of environmentalist pressure, but simply because the ROI wasn't there. It has also not helped that the economic policies of the U.S. have tried to keep fuel prices artificially low for the better part of three decades; indeed one of the great dangers of the current economic situation is that fuel prices are ridiculously low and the impetus that may have existed to begin seriously working on alternative sources as the prices were driven up over the past years is being lost. Once the world's economic engines begin to come out of their torpor (however long it may take) the U.S. may find itself in a position where the result of energy companies consistently only caring about short-term profits will leave us in a state where the massively inflated prices of last summer will seem like a bargain.
Drummers.... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6OQNI8HAN8
Personally, I see TFA as nothing more than CYA. The few scientists left publicly espousing the "anthropogenic global warming" myth are realizing that the scientific community of the world has moved on as the evidence against that theory has piled up.
Science has found that AGW is BS, and that man simply cannot do anything to affect the global climate in any meaningful way.
What science? Which scientists are these? What credentials do they have? What research projects have they been involved in? Come on man, you must have been here long enough to realize that you can't just say "Science believes ____" on a controversial topic and expect it to be the grounds for any kind of convincing argument.
We do all kinds of things today considered impossible in earlier times. The one I think about the most is the scientist who proved heavier than air flight was impossible, or maybe the patent clerk who quit from the US Patent office over a century ago because Everything Had Been Invented already.
Unfortunately, the argument from history is a logical fallacy. Simply because someone at some point believed that something was impossible and turned out to be incorrect does not mean that one should draw the conclusion that all scientific problems are just a matter of will, and that science can overcome any problem that presents itself if enough hard work is put in. This is not being a Luddite (who got bad rap to begin with, as they were not opposed to "technology" in general, only a certain application), but a healthy skepticism which itself embodies the principles of the scientific method and could prevent one making fatal errors in judgement.
When we're[1] set free to invent things, we can do extraordinary things. I view events of the last 3 or 4 decades as more of a problem of declining freedom than anything else.
No argument with you here. If anything the last 3 or 4 decades have been a period where illusory freedom has been slowly substituted for real freedom to the point where people often can't tell the difference. Sure, you're free to choose between Coke and Pepsi, Honda or GM, voting red or blue, what kind of porn you want to watch, or what type of rebellious tattoo you want to get, but if the false dichotomies you're offered end up not satisfying your spirit you're pretty much out of luck.
The 50s and 60s were an exciting time of exponential technological progress.
And that's most likely the heart of the problem - exponential functions go asymptotic pretty quickly. The low hanging fruit gets picked first.
Not to mention that there will be no time for fossil fuel reserves the size of which powered humanity's Industrial Revolution to re-accumulate. Unless a new intelligent species is able to make the jump directly from Iron Age technology to photovoltaic or nuclear power, they will be SOL on ever developing a technological civilization.
I worked for a music technology retailer for a few years recently, and the Band-In-A-Box software is still a huge seller. It was easily in the top 5 of our most sold product while I was there.