Yeah, you called making money the wrong name, it's "socialism with Chinese characteristics"...er "Three Represents"...er, what's the current guy calling it?
I can't stand GWB, but you're right that conspiracy theories claiming that Shrub and the neocons actively conspired to help kill thousands of Americans are nuts. However, I think you are failing to distinguish between conspiracy theorists, and those who claim, with some justification, the administration was highly incompetent when it came to dealing with the threat of terrorism.
In any case, you blame the Democrats for various crazies who are regularly disowned by the mainstream party. When was the last time your guys disowned, say, Ann Coulter?
Unfortunately you guys decided the spoiled, aristocrat who's never had to work a day in his life would be a better representation of your values.
You crack me up. You picked Bush over Kerry because Kerry was a dillettante? Or are layabout sons of monarchs, er, presidents, OK for Republicans?
This is all done in the intermediate representation within the compiler. It's not programmer-visible. Most developers won't know or care. They'll only care about the fact that programs compiled with GCC 4.0 are faster than ones compiled with earlier versions of GCC.
As far as fossil fuel usage is concerned, it's possible to make *very* fuel-efficient small aircraft. The Diamond Twin Star, a twin-engine 4-place civil aircraft, got the equivalent of over 30 mpg on a non-stop trans-Atlantic crossing, at about 174mph at 11,000 feet. If they ever release a pressurised variant, it should do even better; it's capable of flying much higher (and thus more efficiently in the thinner air - the turbodiesels aren't nearly as affected by altitude as naturally-aspirated gasoline engines) but it's a tad cold (not to mention requiring supplementary oxygen) for the pilot if you go higher.
Its single-engine equivalent, the DA-40, does even better; it gets about 40 mpg at a constant 100mph at 10,000 feet. I defy you to find *any* other vehicle that can get 40mpg carrying 4 people at that speed:)
If you look at the current siting plans, they tend to be in places like 2000 kilometres west of Ecuador, or off the coast of Western Australia. Neither are particularly easy to get to, and could easily have rather large no-fly zones declared around them. Given the budget of the total project, you could even afford to purchase a naval vessel or two, and maybe a dozen VTOL examples of the Joint Strike Fighter, as a permanent garrison. Obviously, you'd also want to inspect the cargo (and passengers, when the time comes) very closely before it was let anywhere near the actual elevator, and you'd conduct security screenings for employees working on the construction and operation.
Given all that, I'd imagine that a terrorist would turn their minds to any one of an infinite number of easier, but still spectacular, available targets. How well guarded are your local dams?
Basic economics says you're wrong...
on
Space Elevator Update
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· Score: 4, Informative
The whole point of the space elevator is that, given some plausible assumptions about construction costs, it will be much cheaper and more reliable to shift stuff from orbit to GEO using an elevator than it is using rockets. Ultimately, something in the order of $3 per kilogram to GEO might be feasible, according to Bradley Edwards' calculations in his book on the subject. Nothing else comes close, except the economically impractical and politically infeasible use of gargantuan Orion drive launchers, which achieve low cost-per-kilogram figures through being preposterously big.
Aside from which, manufacturing spacecraft is perhaps one of the most industrially complex things we do. Trying to replicate that in a place more remote, and with far more environmental challenges than, say, Antarctica, would have gargantuan capital costs dwarfing the elevator. In fact, the only way you could probably get the infrastructure up there would be an elevator or something equivalently cheap.
So, can we raise the level of this discussion slightly? Does anybody have some technical papers discussing the algorithms used in this kind of program?
And for all those people blathering on about the outrage of computer marking and instead academics should be rewarding original content, this is sociology 101 we're talking about. At that level, all you're hoping for is that students can write a semi-coherent essay, and, frankly, most of them can't.
More generally, there are many components which it's very difficult to make redundant (the really heavy ones, or the ones that contain and control volatile substances). For these, you just have to ensure you've built them right.
For other things, there *is* multiple redundancy, such as the life support systems and the computers.
NASA is timid in losing those few lives because we are talking about astronauts here. There are not very many people who have the physical prowess, intelligence, and overall ability to handle extreme situations in space in this world as they do.
They're very talented people, but the fact is there's no shortage of people who would be suitable to become astronauts. I quote from a NASA page on the matter:
After that, the crucial thing to remember is that the demand for such jobs vastly
exceeds the supply. NASA's problem is not finding qualified people, but thinning the lineup down to manageable length. It is not enough to be qualified; you must avoid being *dis*qualified for any reason, many of them in principle quite irrelevant to the job.
And as for the nobility of the sacrifice, what's more noble - dying in the pursuit of knowledge for all humanity, or dying in the process of attempting to kill other people, sadly necessary as that may be on occasion?
As well as reading reasonably widely on the general history of science and technology. I did a year of postgraduate study on artifical intelligence (but ended up submitting my PhD on non-AI software engineering topic). Several of my friends, however, continue to work in AI-related fields. In the process, I read quite a lot of AI-philosophy related stuff, including making a start in Kurzweil's stuff. Before I got more than a couple of chapters into it, I came to the considered conclusion that:
He didn't know what he was talking about, for example he clearly didn't understand NP-completeness.
His argument was just a more elaborate rehash of an argument made far more eloquently in 1979 by a British guy called Christopher Evans in a pop-science book called The Mighty Micro, which also turned out to be completely wrong. At least Evans had the good excuse that he wrote the book more than 25 years ago.
So, yes, I actually do consider myself qualified to talk about such things, pal.
Subsidized and run at a loss, until recently privitized--or so I understand. I'm willing to be educated on this point.
Actually, British and Australian experience tends to suggest that privatization of mass transit is actually a bad idea, for the following reasons (amongst others):
Private companies have a nasty habit of neglecting track maintanance.
Private monopolies are worse than government monopolies, and mass transit is a natural monopoly.
Public transport is very infrastructure-intensive, and governments can actually borrow the money to build new infrastructure cheaper than private companies can. The actual work building the new system is better handled by the private sector, though.
But as to your point about subsidies, what you're failing to appreciate is that car transport is already being subsidised by a century of road-building and lack of appropriate pollution charges.
You might be interested to read some of the "conservative commentaries" on public transport here (PDF) that blow holes in some of the unstated assumptions of people opposed to public transport in the US.
Ah, but that's *precisely* the point I was trying to make. Until you've been there, you don't get it.
If you mean fountains and statuary and whatnot, I'm not sure how that's a calcuable benefit. I guess it's nice; the tourists like 'em anyway, but then they go home.
It's not just about fountains and statuary and whatnot, though that's part of it. It's about making the streets of your cities (and suburbs) a pleasant place to work and live. And the local residents like it that way. It's not exclusively a European thing by any means (Celebration, Florida is apparently an inspired example of American urban planning), but they do it habitually.
But the real point I'm trying to make is that Americans (and my own countrymen, Australians) sometimes tend to think their country has discovered the best, and indeed the only good, way to live. Foriegn travel teaches you that your way is not the only way, and that sometimes other countries do some things better than your own.
..but think it's bunk.
There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that more-than-human AI is an inevitable consequence of continued development of computer hardware. The last 50 years of faster computers haven't helped much so far. Nor am I aware of some brilliant AI technique that will be made possible by much faster conventional computers.
Technological progress generally happens in fits and starts, with radical jumps long periods of slow, gradual improvement in between. The chip industry is possibly an exception; but, frankly, I suspect if you could come up with a "utility gained" measure it would grow a lot more slowly than chip density.
Look, the United States is a large, climatically, geographically, and culturally diverse country, but you *cannot* be well-travelled if you've never left it.
For one thing, you might discover that the French and the Germans, the right's favourite punching bags at the moment, actually do have half a clue about some things, for instance how to run mass transit services that actually work well, or how to use public space in their cities. Or how to cook decent food.
Or, for another example, take China. I've only seen a little bit of China, the bit near Hong Kong. But you get a sense of just how quickly parts of China are growing when you go there.
Radio National, is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's (government radio and TV network, rough equivalent of the BBC) has the Science Show, which you can get any time as a RealAudio stream.
Capturing the stream and converting to an appropriate format for listening on your portable device is left as an exercise for the reader;)
While it may not be acceptable from a corporate point of view to have four letter words in public code, Linus has said that he doesn't care as long as it's only in comments (error messages that swear at the user are unacceptable).
That doesn't mean that you wouldn't want to scrutinize the comments carefully. Profanity might not be a big issue, but sexism, racism, or homophobia would look very bad for your company, for example. Also, you might want to remove trenchant criticism of your own (or even other companies) products.
In Japan, because of their tax laws 400cc bikes are very popular. It's just that they don't import them to the states because, as you say, they cost pretty much the same to make as a 1000cc machine.
Given the enormous suspension travel, this thing is clearly designed to be a dirtbike, or a supermotard. You can already buy electric motorcross bikes, so this is a pretty linear extension of the concept - the key enabling factor with electric dirtbikes is that shorter ranges aren't really a problem.
For dirtbike riding, rather than a help, weight is a huge impediment. It makes the bike less responsive to rider input, harder landing when you jump, and more dangerous when you fall off (which you do a lot more often on a dirtbike than a streetbike).
In any case, crosswinds are something you just have to deal with on a bike, light or heavy. I never had too much trouble on my 100kg (200-odd pound) trailbike ridden on roads, provided I paid attention. If you're not paying attention on a bike you're going to die soon enough anyway...
Maybe I was just unlucky, but when I was over there cruising round the past two summers the beer wasn't spectacular. Most of the time the local brew was a pilsener that, while having a different label on it, tasted pretty much the same from town to town (and I tried beer in a considerable number of towns). Sure, it was better than Victoria Bitter, and immeasurably better than any of the abominations the major breweries make in America (if you ever want a laugh, go to epinions.com and read the reviews of Bud), but they were all in all pretty unremarkable.
Hefeweizen or dunkelweizen, now, some of them were pretty special. Amongst the food, the schnitzels and the bread were better than anything I've had elsewhere:)
Australia is a relatively small country, with a small film, television, and theatre industry. Consequently, there's not that many professional actors. Particularly when talking about mature actors in regular work, they'd all be instantly recognisable.
I was basically on my way through to Luxembourg from Kaiserslautern, and the train doesn't go through Saarbrucken - so I can't comment on Saarbrucken itself. In general though, from an outsider's perspective it seems that Germans do tend to take pride in their cities, so an ugly German city is quite attractive by, say, American standards;)
There *is* some nice farmland and forests there, and the rivers in the general vicinity are kind of nice . Luxembourg, across the river, is nicer again:)
Look, if it was production-ready, it wouldn't be research.
While it's certainly not enough to start playing games, it's a heck of a lot closer than I thought was possible. And there's a lot of tweaking that could be done to speed the process up with present technology. An FPGA is the integrated circuit equivalent of a stack of lego. It makes it possible to build custom hardware without forking out for a custom chip; they are however much slower than such a custom-built. I expect if Nvidia decided to make their next-generation chip a raytracer they could get your 30fps. They won't do that for a while yet though - 512x512 is a long way off the resolution gamers currently play in.
But this is interesting, even though it's not practical yet, because it puts the idea on the table that, in the not too distant future, real-time raytracing might well be a possibility. From here, the big graphics-chip makers can start seriously thinking about it, and, maybe about 5 years from now the first hardware raytracers will begin to appear in 3D graphics cards.
It's really interesting to see that this comes from the University of Saarland. Saarland is a rather out of the way part of Germany, near the border with France and Luxembourg.
It's rather pretty in a European countryside kind of way - hills with wine grapes on them, big rivers with boats cruising up and down, and big vegetable gardens everywhere (Germans sure love their vegetable patches) - though I doubt it's the kind of place too many international tourists visit. Not the kind of place you'd expect cutting-edge graphics research either; but then, you find all manner of interesting research in all manner of places. Even Melbourne, Australia:)
Hi to any residents of Saarland reading this - are they holding the German round of the World Rally Championship there this year?
What I'm trying to point out that the situation described in my previous post is actually what has happened in just about every Debian release cycle (for different values of "boot floppies" and "68000 series"). The present situation *is* silly.
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Yeah, you called making money the wrong name, it's "socialism with Chinese characteristics"...er "Three Represents"...er, what's the current guy calling it?
In any case, you blame the Democrats for various crazies who are regularly disowned by the mainstream party. When was the last time your guys disowned, say, Ann Coulter?
You crack me up. You picked Bush over Kerry because Kerry was a dillettante? Or are layabout sons of monarchs, er, presidents, OK for Republicans?
This is all done in the intermediate representation within the compiler. It's not programmer-visible. Most developers won't know or care. They'll only care about the fact that programs compiled with GCC 4.0 are faster than ones compiled with earlier versions of GCC.
Its single-engine equivalent, the DA-40, does even better; it gets about 40 mpg at a constant 100mph at 10,000 feet. I defy you to find *any* other vehicle that can get 40mpg carrying 4 people at that speed :)
Given all that, I'd imagine that a terrorist would turn their minds to any one of an infinite number of easier, but still spectacular, available targets. How well guarded are your local dams?
Aside from which, manufacturing spacecraft is perhaps one of the most industrially complex things we do. Trying to replicate that in a place more remote, and with far more environmental challenges than, say, Antarctica, would have gargantuan capital costs dwarfing the elevator. In fact, the only way you could probably get the infrastructure up there would be an elevator or something equivalently cheap.
And for all those people blathering on about the outrage of computer marking and instead academics should be rewarding original content, this is sociology 101 we're talking about. At that level, all you're hoping for is that students can write a semi-coherent essay, and, frankly, most of them can't.
More generally, there are many components which it's very difficult to make redundant (the really heavy ones, or the ones that contain and control volatile substances). For these, you just have to ensure you've built them right.
For other things, there *is* multiple redundancy, such as the life support systems and the computers.
They're very talented people, but the fact is there's no shortage of people who would be suitable to become astronauts. I quote from a NASA page on the matter:
And as for the nobility of the sacrifice, what's more noble - dying in the pursuit of knowledge for all humanity, or dying in the process of attempting to kill other people, sadly necessary as that may be on occasion?
So, yes, I actually do consider myself qualified to talk about such things, pal.
Actually, British and Australian experience tends to suggest that privatization of mass transit is actually a bad idea, for the following reasons (amongst others):
But as to your point about subsidies, what you're failing to appreciate is that car transport is already being subsidised by a century of road-building and lack of appropriate pollution charges.
You might be interested to read some of the "conservative commentaries" on public transport here (PDF) that blow holes in some of the unstated assumptions of people opposed to public transport in the US.
Ah, but that's *precisely* the point I was trying to make. Until you've been there, you don't get it.
It's not just about fountains and statuary and whatnot, though that's part of it. It's about making the streets of your cities (and suburbs) a pleasant place to work and live. And the local residents like it that way. It's not exclusively a European thing by any means (Celebration, Florida is apparently an inspired example of American urban planning), but they do it habitually.
But the real point I'm trying to make is that Americans (and my own countrymen, Australians) sometimes tend to think their country has discovered the best, and indeed the only good, way to live. Foriegn travel teaches you that your way is not the only way, and that sometimes other countries do some things better than your own.
..but think it's bunk. There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that more-than-human AI is an inevitable consequence of continued development of computer hardware. The last 50 years of faster computers haven't helped much so far. Nor am I aware of some brilliant AI technique that will be made possible by much faster conventional computers. Technological progress generally happens in fits and starts, with radical jumps long periods of slow, gradual improvement in between. The chip industry is possibly an exception; but, frankly, I suspect if you could come up with a "utility gained" measure it would grow a lot more slowly than chip density.
Or, for another example, take China. I've only seen a little bit of China, the bit near Hong Kong. But you get a sense of just how quickly parts of China are growing when you go there.
People should wear more hats...
Capturing the stream and converting to an appropriate format for listening on your portable device is left as an exercise for the reader ;)
That doesn't mean that you wouldn't want to scrutinize the comments carefully. Profanity might not be a big issue, but sexism, racism, or homophobia would look very bad for your company, for example. Also, you might want to remove trenchant criticism of your own (or even other companies) products.
In Japan, because of their tax laws 400cc bikes are very popular. It's just that they don't import them to the states because, as you say, they cost pretty much the same to make as a 1000cc machine.
For dirtbike riding, rather than a help, weight is a huge impediment. It makes the bike less responsive to rider input, harder landing when you jump, and more dangerous when you fall off (which you do a lot more often on a dirtbike than a streetbike).
In any case, crosswinds are something you just have to deal with on a bike, light or heavy. I never had too much trouble on my 100kg (200-odd pound) trailbike ridden on roads, provided I paid attention. If you're not paying attention on a bike you're going to die soon enough anyway...
Hefeweizen or dunkelweizen, now, some of them were pretty special. Amongst the food, the schnitzels and the bread were better than anything I've had elsewhere :)
Australia is a relatively small country, with a small film, television, and theatre industry. Consequently, there's not that many professional actors. Particularly when talking about mature actors in regular work, they'd all be instantly recognisable.
There *is* some nice farmland and forests there, and the rivers in the general vicinity are kind of nice . Luxembourg, across the river, is nicer again :)
While it's certainly not enough to start playing games, it's a heck of a lot closer than I thought was possible. And there's a lot of tweaking that could be done to speed the process up with present technology. An FPGA is the integrated circuit equivalent of a stack of lego. It makes it possible to build custom hardware without forking out for a custom chip; they are however much slower than such a custom-built. I expect if Nvidia decided to make their next-generation chip a raytracer they could get your 30fps. They won't do that for a while yet though - 512x512 is a long way off the resolution gamers currently play in.
But this is interesting, even though it's not practical yet, because it puts the idea on the table that, in the not too distant future, real-time raytracing might well be a possibility. From here, the big graphics-chip makers can start seriously thinking about it, and, maybe about 5 years from now the first hardware raytracers will begin to appear in 3D graphics cards.
It's rather pretty in a European countryside kind of way - hills with wine grapes on them, big rivers with boats cruising up and down, and big vegetable gardens everywhere (Germans sure love their vegetable patches) - though I doubt it's the kind of place too many international tourists visit. Not the kind of place you'd expect cutting-edge graphics research either; but then, you find all manner of interesting research in all manner of places. Even Melbourne, Australia :)
Hi to any residents of Saarland reading this - are they holding the German round of the World Rally Championship there this year?
What I'm trying to point out that the situation described in my previous post is actually what has happened in just about every Debian release cycle (for different values of "boot floppies" and "68000 series"). The present situation *is* silly.