Adolf Hitler's public speeches are, just that, public. I'd imagine that there's been quite a few academic publications recording and discussing his speeches. There's absolutely nothing classified about them.
And while I'm certainly no fan of Dubya, drawing parallels between him and Hitler is just stupid.
It'd be like trying to attack the citizens of rural Montana. It's just too diffuse a target to be of interest, unless you mount a biological attack with some kind of (probably genetically engineered) disease or pest. If terrorists have the sophistication to pull such an attack off, we've all got bigger problems - for instance, where are we going to get, um, food, for which we are entirely dependent on vegetable crops?
Worry about real threats, not super-terrorists hiding under the mattress.
As I understood it, OTEC plants just used the temperature differential to alternately boil and condense a volatile fluid in a heat exchanger. This system uses the ammonia released by the seawater as it is heated to power a turbine.
This American study seems to suggest that a) abductions by strangers are rare, and b) teenagers are much more likely to be abducted than younger children.
Not easily. You either send them a problem that is already solved (pointless, because you won't get any useful work done) or you send them a problem that is unsolved... in which case, you have no way of telling if they are sending the right solution or a spoofed one.
There are lots of problems that are easy to check an answer to, but not easy to solve. In fact, problems that appear to be of this type are one of the most famous open questions in computer science. One easy to understand example is the "Travelling Salesman Problem". You've got a bunch of cities with roads of known lengths between them, and a sales rep who has to visit every one. The question is then "can the salesman travel between them on a route of distance less than x?" If somebody gives you a route, it's very easy to add up the distances to find out its length. However, we don't know of an easy way to *find* that route. There are a bunch of problems like this classed as NP-Complete. They have a very interesting property in that they are all equivalent - if you have a method to solve one efficiently, (in principle) you can use that method to solve them all! Most computer scientists think it highly unlikely that an easy way exists
An even easier example is "this number is a product of two prime numbers. What are they?" Given a solution it's easy to verify its correctness, but finding the solution is very difficult (though, in a theoretical sense, not as difficult as the TSP. The factoring problem is not known to be NP-complete).
By nature, turbochargers, blowers, and the like all _increase_ fuel efficiency precisely _because_ they get their additional power out of a more effective burn.
Not necessarily. What a turbocharger does is pump more fuel/air mixture into the combustion changer. It's entirely plausible that the combusition is less efficient than a naturally aspirated vehicle. Not to mention the energy required to run the pump (though a naturally aspirated engine of similar power would have larger moving masses, more contact areas and thus more friction, and so on).
IIRC, in practice a well-designed turbocharged engine can be made more efficient than a non-turbo one. For one thing, you're not lumbered with the need to spin a big engine at light throttle.
It's actually a very old idea. Several cities had very large systems of this type in the 19th century, mainly because of the huge volume of telegraph messages being sent. They were made obsolete by the invention of the teleprinter.
Most of that "support" is through a combination of bribery and threats.
Australia and America, for instance, have just sat down to start negotiating a free trade deal. In the past, the US has been in no hurry whatsoever to do such a deal (mainly because any deal will involve reducing protection for their agricultural industries). Now, all of a sudden, it's all systems go. Maybe that's a coincidence. I doubt it.
Whether you like it or not (I certainly don't) a majority of Americans seem to think executing teenagers and the mentally ill in a revenge kick is just fine and dandy, and don't understand just how much Shrub has managed to piss the rest of the world off in an incredibly short space of time.
Ask him about copyright. What does he think the philosophical basis for copyright protection is - in the context of the de facto perpetual copyright regime developing in the US. Are the present copyright conditions and term lengths serving those purposes? Wouldn't a shorter term serve just as well?
I know that this was meant in jest, but I'd have to say that the whole "kissing Kirsten Dunst" thing would have to be overrated.
Kirsten Dunst is really attractive, on film, and is probably pretty cute in the flesh as well. Movie sets, however, are most certainly not sexy places. You've got hot, bright lights blasting at you, a whopping great camera in your face, all manner of crew staring at you, both your partners happen to be visiting the set that day, it's getting late, it's the twentieth run-through of the same damn scene, the director's getting on everybody's nerves. Not to mention that for all we know, Ms. Dunst is just as likely to be a bitchy egomaniac or a complete dimwit as a pleasant person to be around.
I'd also imagine that Tobey McGuire has no shortage of gorgeous, intelligent, and interesting women who'd like to spend quality time with him anyway, so the relative drool factor for him is almost certainly lower than for the rest of us:/
However, if they're still scratching around to cast somebody, I'm happy to take some leave and give it a try:)
I own an SLR, which I load with 800ISO (and occasionally try 1600ISO) for low-light shooting. My housemate has a 3 MP digital. His photos always come out much better under those conditions.
Of course, he can't fit a 400mm telephoto lens to his camera:)
I have a bike computer on my bicycle, and it's not hard to exceed 23 mph downhill (28 mph isn't unusual). Standard bike brakes haul you up quite acceptably.
Sheesh, in the Tour De France the *average* speed of the winner is over 23 mph, and those bike use standard block brakes (well, standard design. They're probably carved from the baby teeth of yetis or something similarly expensive). I hate to think what those guys do downhill...
I recently wrote an article a story at Kuro5hin about the moped I ride.
As far as this thing goes, I wonder what the effect of having a considerably heavier, and powered, front wheel has on the handling and ride of a bicycle. Having the extra weight at the back (yes, I realise that this is going to be much lighter than the motor on my machine, but there's still a fair bit of extra weight in that wheel) seems like a better idea to me. Additionally, that range is no better than an electric bike. A few hundred millilitres of extra fuel seems like a good idea. Yes, it wouldn't be hard to carry an extra bottle of fuel, but who wants to be refilling the thing in the middle of the street?
Electric-assisted bicycles don't quite have the range to be practical yet, IMHO, but if somebody can put together a lithium-ion one, or even better, a fuel cell one, they should wipe gas-powered models off the market in fairly short order.
The key benefit of 64-bit architectures is that you can address much more than 4 gigabytes of memory without having to deal with funky segmentation tricks. As servers are running hard up against this barrier, and desktops are not that far off it, *that* is why the impetus for 64-bit processors is happening now.
Because the machine code *has* to change in the process, you can take the opportunity to redesign your instruction set to make it possible to design faster chips that use it. In AMD's case, they've added some registers and presumably cleaned up the sillier bits of the x86 instruction set. Intel has taken a different tack - they basically decided to wipe the slate clean and start again. As it turns out, they haven't really been able to make their clean-sheet design work very well yet.
Going to 64-bit code has its costs, also. Code density (the amount of machine code needed to do a task) goes down, so your memory system doesn't work as well. If a crucial bit of your program that fitted in the instruction cache in 32-bit mode doesn't in 64-bit mode, the 64-bit code would run considerably more slowly.
Speed is not the real issue here. The ability to work with large RAM sizes is.
Build in some of those microsensor things we keep hearing so much about, and degrade the signal out of the artificial hippocampus when the sensors detect ${MIND_ALTERING_SUBSTANCE}
The actual "tool" is the sound app. The operating system , in this case, is more like the workbench the tool is used on.
As far as audio apps are concerned, it should not be hard to make the Linux "workbench" good enough for the tools to work at their best. I would expect the 2.6 kernel, with its interactive scheduling improvements, to be quite close to the mark for these purposes.
Nobody's yet demonstrated material strong enough to build the space elevator as they propose. There's been a lot of developments in this area recently, but until they can demonstrate a non-microscopic quantity of the stuff with the desired strength it's all just (very fun) speculation.
If they *can*, however, demonstrate some of that material and can produce it for a realistic cost, the space elevator becomes a no-briner.
The writer is correct in saying that the relevance of race tech to road cars has virtually disappeared, but he misses the other big problems with contemporary open-wheel motorsport: the idea that motor racing can serve as a simultaneous test of a) which team/company can construct the fastest automobile, and b) which driver can extract the most from their vehicle through skill and bravery is no longer the case. Additionally that ground effect aerodynamics and carbon fibre brakes make overtaking very, very difficult in open-wheel circuit racing and turns the races into processions (this isn't the case in speedway, but that has its own problems). The proposal to shift the Indy 500 to fuel cells will only tackle the first of the four problems I have mentioned.
My solution is as follows: Divide the circuit racing calendar in two - have a series where the best drivers race each other in identical vehicles. These could either be something like Formula Ford, or better still let them race karts and hold the series in sports stadiums. Imagine that - Schumacher, Montoya, the best Indy drivers, maybe even guests from series like NASCAR or bike racers like Valentino Rossi, all competing in a small arena where you could actually watch the entire race live!
Then, you could have the tech series where fuel cell racers, with every electronic doodad under the sun legal, compete and manufacturers could show their skills in a field that might actually be vaguely relevant to the average motorist one day.
What if, say, the biochemistry department needs to use a program that has no equivalent on Linux (or MacOS, for that matter), and won't run under WINE? At the very least, you'd need to negotiate a clause that allows exceptions where no feasible alternative exists.
Much and all as I'd encourage universities to switch to open source solutions and dump expensive Microsoft ones as quickly and as much as possible, I suspect that there are areas where that just can't happen...yet.
Hardware random number generators are known technology, and incorporating this into an artificially intelligent systems would be trivial - provided we knew how to build an artificially intelligent system (in the Turing-test passing sense). Which we don't.
One standard reply to the "it's only a simulation" criticism of AI is simply to ask the criticiser to prove that their own intelligence isn't "simulated".
And if oil gets expensive enough we can extract it from both of those. In fact, it might well be possible to make high-quality diesel from coal (and use the waste heat from the process for a power station) at an economic cost right now. The state government here is considering just this process for a new base load generator at the moment.
However, I must point out that the economic adjustment of which you speak may not be so painless as you imply. Ask the former residents of Easter Island what happens when you run out of an important resource (in their case, lumber):)
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AFAIK, that's a GSM-only thing. My CDMA phone certainly doesn't have a SIM.
And while I'm certainly no fan of Dubya, drawing parallels between him and Hitler is just stupid.
Is this the best the trolls can do these days? C'mon! Show some pride in your work!
Worry about real threats, not super-terrorists hiding under the mattress.
Or is this how all OTEC plants work??
This American study seems to suggest that a) abductions by strangers are rare, and b) teenagers are much more likely to be abducted than younger children.
You should factor in the extra running costs of a CRT into your equation. LCD's don't have to be the same price to be cost competitive.
There are lots of problems that are easy to check an answer to, but not easy to solve. In fact, problems that appear to be of this type are one of the most famous open questions in computer science. One easy to understand example is the "Travelling Salesman Problem". You've got a bunch of cities with roads of known lengths between them, and a sales rep who has to visit every one. The question is then "can the salesman travel between them on a route of distance less than x?" If somebody gives you a route, it's very easy to add up the distances to find out its length. However, we don't know of an easy way to *find* that route. There are a bunch of problems like this classed as NP-Complete. They have a very interesting property in that they are all equivalent - if you have a method to solve one efficiently, (in principle) you can use that method to solve them all! Most computer scientists think it highly unlikely that an easy way exists
An even easier example is "this number is a product of two prime numbers. What are they?" Given a solution it's easy to verify its correctness, but finding the solution is very difficult (though, in a theoretical sense, not as difficult as the TSP. The factoring problem is not known to be NP-complete).
Not necessarily. What a turbocharger does is pump more fuel/air mixture into the combustion changer. It's entirely plausible that the combusition is less efficient than a naturally aspirated vehicle. Not to mention the energy required to run the pump (though a naturally aspirated engine of similar power would have larger moving masses, more contact areas and thus more friction, and so on).
IIRC, in practice a well-designed turbocharged engine can be made more efficient than a non-turbo one. For one thing, you're not lumbered with the need to spin a big engine at light throttle.
It's actually a very old idea. Several cities had very large systems of this type in the 19th century, mainly because of the huge volume of telegraph messages being sent. They were made obsolete by the invention of the teleprinter.
Australia and America, for instance, have just sat down to start negotiating a free trade deal. In the past, the US has been in no hurry whatsoever to do such a deal (mainly because any deal will involve reducing protection for their agricultural industries). Now, all of a sudden, it's all systems go. Maybe that's a coincidence. I doubt it.
Whether you like it or not (I certainly don't) a majority of Americans seem to think executing teenagers and the mentally ill in a revenge kick is just fine and dandy, and don't understand just how much Shrub has managed to piss the rest of the world off in an incredibly short space of time.
Ask him about copyright. What does he think the philosophical basis for copyright protection is - in the context of the de facto perpetual copyright regime developing in the US. Are the present copyright conditions and term lengths serving those purposes? Wouldn't a shorter term serve just as well?
Kirsten Dunst is really attractive, on film, and is probably pretty cute in the flesh as well. Movie sets, however, are most certainly not sexy places. You've got hot, bright lights blasting at you, a whopping great camera in your face, all manner of crew staring at you, both your partners happen to be visiting the set that day, it's getting late, it's the twentieth run-through of the same damn scene, the director's getting on everybody's nerves. Not to mention that for all we know, Ms. Dunst is just as likely to be a bitchy egomaniac or a complete dimwit as a pleasant person to be around.
I'd also imagine that Tobey McGuire has no shortage of gorgeous, intelligent, and interesting women who'd like to spend quality time with him anyway, so the relative drool factor for him is almost certainly lower than for the rest of us :/
However, if they're still scratching around to cast somebody, I'm happy to take some leave and give it a try :)
Of course, he can't fit a 400mm telephoto lens to his camera :)
Sheesh, in the Tour De France the *average* speed of the winner is over 23 mph, and those bike use standard block brakes (well, standard design. They're probably carved from the baby teeth of yetis or something similarly expensive). I hate to think what those guys do downhill...
As far as this thing goes, I wonder what the effect of having a considerably heavier, and powered, front wheel has on the handling and ride of a bicycle. Having the extra weight at the back (yes, I realise that this is going to be much lighter than the motor on my machine, but there's still a fair bit of extra weight in that wheel) seems like a better idea to me. Additionally, that range is no better than an electric bike. A few hundred millilitres of extra fuel seems like a good idea. Yes, it wouldn't be hard to carry an extra bottle of fuel, but who wants to be refilling the thing in the middle of the street?
Electric-assisted bicycles don't quite have the range to be practical yet, IMHO, but if somebody can put together a lithium-ion one, or even better, a fuel cell one, they should wipe gas-powered models off the market in fairly short order.
Because the machine code *has* to change in the process, you can take the opportunity to redesign your instruction set to make it possible to design faster chips that use it. In AMD's case, they've added some registers and presumably cleaned up the sillier bits of the x86 instruction set. Intel has taken a different tack - they basically decided to wipe the slate clean and start again. As it turns out, they haven't really been able to make their clean-sheet design work very well yet.
Going to 64-bit code has its costs, also. Code density (the amount of machine code needed to do a task) goes down, so your memory system doesn't work as well. If a crucial bit of your program that fitted in the instruction cache in 32-bit mode doesn't in 64-bit mode, the 64-bit code would run considerably more slowly.
Speed is not the real issue here. The ability to work with large RAM sizes is.
Build in some of those microsensor things we keep hearing so much about, and degrade the signal out of the artificial hippocampus when the sensors detect ${MIND_ALTERING_SUBSTANCE}
As far as audio apps are concerned, it should not be hard to make the Linux "workbench" good enough for the tools to work at their best. I would expect the 2.6 kernel, with its interactive scheduling improvements, to be quite close to the mark for these purposes.
If they *can*, however, demonstrate some of that material and can produce it for a realistic cost, the space elevator becomes a no-briner.
My solution is as follows: Divide the circuit racing calendar in two - have a series where the best drivers race each other in identical vehicles. These could either be something like Formula Ford, or better still let them race karts and hold the series in sports stadiums. Imagine that - Schumacher, Montoya, the best Indy drivers, maybe even guests from series like NASCAR or bike racers like Valentino Rossi, all competing in a small arena where you could actually watch the entire race live!
Then, you could have the tech series where fuel cell racers, with every electronic doodad under the sun legal, compete and manufacturers could show their skills in a field that might actually be vaguely relevant to the average motorist one day.
Much and all as I'd encourage universities to switch to open source solutions and dump expensive Microsoft ones as quickly and as much as possible, I suspect that there are areas where that just can't happen...yet.
One standard reply to the "it's only a simulation" criticism of AI is simply to ask the criticiser to prove that their own intelligence isn't "simulated".
However, I must point out that the economic adjustment of which you speak may not be so painless as you imply. Ask the former residents of Easter Island what happens when you run out of an important resource (in their case, lumber) :)