The implication of "creator of Mathematica" seems to be that he's supposed to be some kind of mathematical genius.
Mathematica is a nice piece of software, but as This this letter to Salon points out, it's really just a cleaned-up reimplementation of the 30-year-old Macsyma (of which, by the way, there is a GPL'd version called Maxima available).
Sure, you're not likely to be using this stuff for a while. But don't you find this interesting anyway, both from the perspective of "what's gonna happen when conventional silicon technologies run out in a decade" (if that's indeed going to happen as it seems), and "hey, that's really cool, regardless of whether it's practical or not"?
I think we're pretty much all agreed that Lucas's efforts to screenwrite and direct the love story between Anakin and Padme didn't work. However, there seems to be an assumption that the wordiness and stiltedness was purely a screwup of an attempt to write it in contemporary style.
I don't think so. If you've ever seen any BBC costume drama (I think some of it gets shown on PBS for the Americans in the audience) such as Pride and Prejudice, the characters discuss their feelings at great length in a somewhat similar way. The difference is, of course, that Jane Austen was one of the best writers of her era. Lucas, well, isn't.
Only the "gun" uranium fission design works like that, and they are the simplest, most primitive form of nuclear weapon. None of the known nuclear powers uses these any more (the Hiroshima bomb worked like this, but not Nagasaki, and the only other use since was allegedly in South Africa's covert nuclear program because all they were interested in was a proof-of-concept). Implosion designs (the basis for later fission weapons and fusion-boosted designs) rely on multiple chunks of uranium and plutonium to be forced together by precisely-shaped bits of chemical explosive into a superdense, supercritical mass. If they don't go off in precisely the designed pattern, they don't explode.
Therefore, I'd expect the bomb to be turned into molten slag rather than explode.
IANA Nuclear Physicist, so I could be horribly wrong:)
You have to install the Gnome libraries to get gnumeric. You don't have to run sawfish, the panel, or any of the other Gnome guff if you don't want to. I believe that the equivalent is true for KOffice apps (install the libraries, but not necessarily the desktop).
Asking people not to use the functionality in the Gnome and KDE libraries is asking them to constantly reinvent the wheel, leading to code bloat and slower development.
All good points, but AFAIK bacteria living in those kind of conditions are specialised for doing so and are quite different to the ones found in other places. The odds of them accidentally hitching a ride to Mars would have to be pretty small - unless you're dipping your Mars explorer in hot springs:)
For the cost of sending a team of people to Mars, we could learn how to build a self-repairing artificial man to let anyone explore mars for years. It just doesn't make sense why there has to be a human there, when there's humans behind the controls, the experiments, and the minds learning the reliable methods to explore the universe.
Autonomous robots are still really dumb - go and watch Robocup if you don't believe me - despite 40+ years of research, and little prospect of that changing dramatically no matter how much money you throw at it. Simply moving around on Mars at walking pace is stretching things.
If you control it from Earth, you've got anything from a 10 to a 40 minute time lag.
A human in a small research lab can carry out a far wider range of examinations than any robotic research lab could do.
Robotic research can get you lots of cool stuff, but it's no substitute for being there.
I think you'd want to take some precautions, but I wouldn't be overly concerned. The conditions on the surface of Mars are pretty lethal to Earthly life forms.
Things you'd probably do would include sterilizing drilling equipment (if there's life on Mars, it could well be in subsurface acquifers, and Terran bacteria *might* conceivably survive in one) and heat any waste that's been kept in an atmosphere to kill any bugs that might be on it.
Let's think about this - if Mars has bacteria on it at all, shouldn't it have evolved at roughly the same rate as Earth's? Even at half the rate, there should be small reptiles and such on Mars by now. That is, of course, unless one (or both) of two things are true: Evolution is a farce, and there is no bacteria on Mars.
Not necessarily. Maybe conditions on Earth favoured the development of multicellular life, and they didn't on Mars. Why aren't there small reptiles in Antarctica?
The Indians and the English were both human (well, the English at least evolved into something vaguely human;) ). Yes, diseases can change from species to species, but find me one that can jump from amoeba to human without any intermediate steps - because we're more than likely more closely related to an amoeba than any potential disease host you'd find on Mars.
Yes, some precautions are justified, but I'm not losing too much sleep over the risk.
IMHO, we might get better TV if writers and actors produced a relatively few shows in a series, and after they've milked the idea for its natural life, go and do something else. That way, they have the creative freedom to go and try new ideas without having to religiously follow the conventions of a particular format.
The Simpsons was brilliant in the past, and occasionally still is. But don't you think the creative talent behind it could probably produce better things if they were freed from what is a pretty tired format?
Hmmm. The reasons why people manufacture in China are
Ready supply of cheap, compliant labor.
Lack of environmental regulation.
Decent transport links (shipping).
Network effects.
The first two are replicated in India, Russia, much of south-east Asia, Mexico, etc. etc. (though perhaps not quite as cheap and not quite as unregulated). If the supply of them dried up in China, I don't think it would take long for the shipping links and critical mass necessary to happen elsewhere.
Amongst other things, he wrote Paradroid (top-down shooter with the twist that you could either kill the bad guys, or take control of them and use them to kill others) and Uridium (classic side-scrolling shooter.
You're absolutely right WRT how you'd actually do this. However, I remain unconvinced that, when compared to terrestrial solar cells, the smaller quantities of cells required outweigh the stupendous cost of setting up lunar production facilities and supporting the lunar staff to maintain the system.
As you've pointed out, hybrid cars are more fuel-efficient than pure gasoline-powered cars. What you seem to have missed is *why* - basically, they don't waste fuel idling at traffic lights, and they turn the energy from braking back into battery charge rather than pissing it away as heat.
Any half-intelligently designed pure electric or fuel-cell electric car is going to do exactly the same thing, and therefore your in-practice efficiency is going to go up - I'd hazard a guess to the point where the energy-efficiency is about the same.
Show me even a corelation between increased speed and increased accidents. I have never seen such statistics. Accidents aren't caused by speed, they're caused by other behavior.
Have a look at this report to the Victorian government which claims the existence of studies demonstrating that lower suburban speed limits leads to lower accident rates. Subsequent to this, they dropped the limit from 60 to 50 km/h (from about 37 to 31 mph) in 2001 and they are claiming a 10% reduction
in accidents on roads where the limit has been dropped (unfortunately, I can't find a media report where this was listed, you'll have to take my word for it).
However, whether the correlation is nearly as sstrong for freeway (or two-lane rural road, for that matter) traffic I personally doubt. I also believe that governments and police forces overemphasise speed's role in causing accidents because it's easier than advocating extensive driver training and better testing (including regular retesting).
I'm certainly not going to stop speeding on the ruler-straight, zero-traffic minor roads in rural Oz:)
We are proud that among the things our customers have built are an agent to engage teens in conversations about smoking and how bad it is.
Isn't that nice? Totally irrelevant, though - and is it really ethical to have a machine pretend to be a human, no matter how worthy the cause?
And you seem to have come across LindsayBuddy, an agent built to deliver information about a 15-year old recording artist, and agent with nothing but nice things to say, and like SmarterChild, no tolerance for rude behavior.
Again, totally irrelevant, though setting up their later point.
Yes, LindsayBuddy was built to "promote" a musician.
Why the quotes? It was built to promote somebody, plain and simple.
But in the case of an interactive agent, a person chooses to interact with and engage this "promotional" property; which I believe is far less disingenuous than television programs, which insert (or should I write "impose") advertising within programming material.
Again, this artfully misses the point. Yes, the child "consents" (two can play at that game:) ) to use the LindsayBuddy, but the point is that it's not clear that children recognise that it's advertising and what that means, and that unlike television, there's not yet any controls on what marketers can do in this medium.
Would you rather your child engaged in an IM session with a stranger who found their screen name in a chat room, or with a friendly, well-mannered "bot" that plays by rules of propriety too often ignored in today's world of crass media overload, seeking audience regardless of the cost to morals and proper social behavior?
This is really our friend's tour de force. It pushes every overprotective parent's hot buttons but ignores the actual concerns raised.
This is a slimy piece of work, but presumably people don't write this crap unless it's effective. Does this kind of obfuscation actually work?
The Santa Claus fib still seems to work, at least up until about age 7 or 8 or so . . .
Grasping that an IM bot is the work of a record company trying to sell you stuff is considerably more complex, and I don't think you can really expect that sort of comprehension until somebody's a teenager (at least).
DDoS attacks involve gaining access to a lot of machines and coordinating an attack.
But if the script kiddie is just using the same rootkit to exploit a bunch of poorly-maintained boxen on cable modems, that's just persistance, not skill.
Having high-pitched, untrained female voices intermittantly scream into microphones (which seems to occur at least once at most karaoke events) isn't funny. It's just painful. Physically. Bad male singers are merely laughable.
However, a pitch bender isn't the solution I'd prefer for these people. Personally, I'm thinking tasers:)
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Mathematica is a nice piece of software, but as This this letter to Salon points out, it's really just a cleaned-up reimplementation of the 30-year-old Macsyma (of which, by the way, there is a GPL'd version called Maxima available).
Sure, you're not likely to be using this stuff for a while. But don't you find this interesting anyway, both from the perspective of "what's gonna happen when conventional silicon technologies run out in a decade" (if that's indeed going to happen as it seems), and "hey, that's really cool, regardless of whether it's practical or not"?
I don't think so. If you've ever seen any BBC costume drama (I think some of it gets shown on PBS for the Americans in the audience) such as Pride and Prejudice, the characters discuss their feelings at great length in a somewhat similar way. The difference is, of course, that Jane Austen was one of the best writers of her era. Lucas, well, isn't.
Opinions?
Insert obligatory how to distract the clone armies with sheep joke here ;-)
Only the "gun" uranium fission design works like that, and they are the simplest, most primitive form of nuclear weapon. None of the known nuclear powers uses these any more (the Hiroshima bomb worked like this, but not Nagasaki, and the only other use since was allegedly in South Africa's covert nuclear program because all they were interested in was a proof-of-concept). Implosion designs (the basis for later fission weapons and fusion-boosted designs) rely on multiple chunks of uranium and plutonium to be forced together by precisely-shaped bits of chemical explosive into a superdense, supercritical mass. If they don't go off in precisely the designed pattern, they don't explode.
Therefore, I'd expect the bomb to be turned into molten slag rather than explode.
IANA Nuclear Physicist, so I could be horribly wrong :)
Asking people not to use the functionality in the Gnome and KDE libraries is asking them to constantly reinvent the wheel, leading to code bloat and slower development.
GnuCash does.
All good points, but AFAIK bacteria living in those kind of conditions are specialised for doing so and are quite different to the ones found in other places. The odds of them accidentally hitching a ride to Mars would have to be pretty small - unless you're dipping your Mars explorer in hot springs :)
Yes, I know that was well before we were around, but there were certainly plenty of bacteria around back then.
Autonomous robots are still really dumb - go and watch Robocup if you don't believe me - despite 40+ years of research, and little prospect of that changing dramatically no matter how much money you throw at it. Simply moving around on Mars at walking pace is stretching things.
If you control it from Earth, you've got anything from a 10 to a 40 minute time lag.
A human in a small research lab can carry out a far wider range of examinations than any robotic research lab could do.
Robotic research can get you lots of cool stuff, but it's no substitute for being there.
Things you'd probably do would include sterilizing drilling equipment (if there's life on Mars, it could well be in subsurface acquifers, and Terran bacteria *might* conceivably survive in one) and heat any waste that's been kept in an atmosphere to kill any bugs that might be on it.
Not necessarily. Maybe conditions on Earth favoured the development of multicellular life, and they didn't on Mars. Why aren't there small reptiles in Antarctica?
Yes, some precautions are justified, but I'm not losing too much sleep over the risk.
The Simpsons was brilliant in the past, and occasionally still is. But don't you think the creative talent behind it could probably produce better things if they were freed from what is a pretty tired format?
The first two are replicated in India, Russia, much of south-east Asia, Mexico, etc. etc. (though perhaps not quite as cheap and not quite as unregulated). If the supply of them dried up in China, I don't think it would take long for the shipping links and critical mass necessary to happen elsewhere.
I wonder what happened to him?
You're absolutely right WRT how you'd actually do this. However, I remain unconvinced that, when compared to terrestrial solar cells, the smaller quantities of cells required outweigh the stupendous cost of setting up lunar production facilities and supporting the lunar staff to maintain the system.
Any half-intelligently designed pure electric or fuel-cell electric car is going to do exactly the same thing, and therefore your in-practice efficiency is going to go up - I'd hazard a guess to the point where the energy-efficiency is about the same.
However, whether the correlation is nearly as sstrong for freeway (or two-lane rural road, for that matter) traffic I personally doubt. I also believe that governments and police forces overemphasise speed's role in causing accidents because it's easier than advocating extensive driver training and better testing (including regular retesting).
I'm certainly not going to stop speeding on the ruler-straight, zero-traffic minor roads in rural Oz :)
Isn't that nice? Totally irrelevant, though - and is it really ethical to have a machine pretend to be a human, no matter how worthy the cause?
Again, totally irrelevant, though setting up their later point.
Why the quotes? It was built to promote somebody, plain and simple.
Again, this artfully misses the point. Yes, the child "consents" (two can play at that game :) ) to use the LindsayBuddy, but the point is that it's not clear that children recognise that it's advertising and what that means, and that unlike television, there's not yet any controls on what marketers can do in this medium.
This is really our friend's tour de force. It pushes every overprotective parent's hot buttons but ignores the actual concerns raised.
This is a slimy piece of work, but presumably people don't write this crap unless it's effective. Does this kind of obfuscation actually work?
Grasping that an IM bot is the work of a record company trying to sell you stuff is considerably more complex, and I don't think you can really expect that sort of comprehension until somebody's a teenager (at least).
with the outrageous fees they charge for institutional electronic access to their journals?
But if the script kiddie is just using the same rootkit to exploit a bunch of poorly-maintained boxen on cable modems, that's just persistance, not skill.
However, a pitch bender isn't the solution I'd prefer for these people. Personally, I'm thinking tasers :)
I apologise for my humorless countryman who couldn't figure out that you were joking. Must be an immigrant from the US :)