I know a lot of us are hoping that fuel cells will replace batteries, but how big does a fuel cell have to be to produce enough power for, say, a laptop computer? Would it be comparable in size to the batteries we have now? What about the generated heat?
Hmmm. What would happen if you filled a truck with nuclear batteries, plastic explosive, mixed well, and lit the fuse?
As for your smoke detector example, IIRC the americium is used as the smoke sensor itself, not as a power source.
I'm all for the use of nuclear technology where appropriate, but having substantial quantities of radioactive material in everybody's Game Boy doesn't strike me as appropriate.
I've seen that quoted before, but from what I've read the performance differences on integer code aren't anywhere near that great. If you're running Apache, for instance, the relative floating-point performance is neither here nor there.
Anyway, who's to say AMD don't have a demon proprietary compiler for x86-64 up their sleeve for just this purpose?
The nuclear thermal rocket is considerably better than any chemical rocket, but it's not nearly good enough to allow you to take a non-ballistic trajectory to Mars. What it *does* do is let you carry a lot less propellant, so you can carry more other stuff (like people, supplies, and equipment).
To do the weeks instead of months thing, you need something more exotic again, like an Orion (push the craft along by exploding nuclear weapons behind it), a fusion drive, or maybe a laser-powered light sail (though presumably you need a laser on Mars to slow it down again . . . ).
DVD's are *not* encoded in high definition. They may have higher effective horizontal resolution than a VHS VCR (particularly in widescreen), but they sure ain't 1920x1080.
The amount of energy required to keep a spacecraft warm and run their computers so they can keep themselves amused playing Quake XXVII, while distinctly non-trivial is much smaller than the amount of energy required to speed that big heavy starship up to some respectable fraction of the speed of light.
The real beauty of the light sail system is that you don't have to carry the fuel. If you're carrying fuel, you have to have more fuel to accelerate the heavy spacecraft, which means you need more fuel to accelerate the extra fuel . . .:)
By the time/. had UIDs, it was already pretty famous IIRC.
I want good performance for the money
on
Inside Intel
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· Score: 2
. . . and I don't care how Intel gets it.
Who cares if Intel (or anyone else) makes chip n+1 perform better than chip n through clock cycle speedups, fiddling with cache arrangements, implementing faster-than-light wiring systems on the die:-) . . . whatever. As long as it works faster and cheaper than last year's, what does it matter beyond idle curiosity?
The 28-earth-day day is going to make it bloody difficult to grow food on the Moon. Space transportation makes it rather expensive to import all your foodstuffs, particularly if they have to be launched from Earth (rather than, well, Mars).
I'm not sure whether the US still uses the F-111, but Australia does and will do so until 2020 or so. In fact, we bought a bunch of surplus ones from the States a little while ago for parts:)
No compelling evidence for this
on
Arguing A.I.
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· Score: 2
There are no generally accepted proofs, or universally accepted pieces of empirical evidence, to show that the abilities of the human brain include things that a Turing machine can't do. Penrose has tried to show it, and failed in the view of most mathematicians. Searle has also tried by a philosophical argument, but many (perhaps most) in the AI community disagree.
Of course, you may take the argument of the failure of conventional AI techniques to provide human-like intelligence yet as an argument for the notion. I don't, personally, but it's a reasonable point.
IIRC, "open source intelligence" has another meaning for real spooks - it's intelligence gleaned by reading public sources (newspapers, trade publications, scientific journals, websites etc).
From what little I've read about the area, for some sorts of intelligence-gathering this gets as much info as cloak-and-dagger stuff.
However, presumably what they're talking about here is using bazaar techniques (mailing lists, whatever) to help share and evaluate intelligence information. That's probably not a bad idea either, if you can manage the security risk.
Space infrastructure, research into long-term life support/closed-cycle ecosystems, fusion power, light sails, etc. etc, would presumably be developed to colonise the solar system (Mars, the Moon, asteroids, etc.). Given a solar-system wide economy hundreds of times bigger than our present global economy, it might be feasible one day.
As to the crew issues, you'd probably first build a frickin' huge telescope, big enough to image nearby terrestrial planets. You'd then build an unmanned probe with some snappy AI technologies to investigate promising candidates for colonisation. Then, once you've found somewhere good (it might take several lifetimes, but what's the hurry), you build your starship and the crew goes off to colonise the planet.
Would people go? Looking at our history, I don't see why you couldn't find plenty of people who would. Just imagine it, the chance to own a significant fraction of *an entire star system*:)
Arthur C. Clarke also wrote a very cool short story about this idea, in the form of a big synthesised food manufacturer testifying before Congress about the activities of a competitor selling a food line called "Ambrosia Plus" . . .
Call me naive, but why are peer reviewers accepting half-baked papers?
I suppose their attitude might be "well, given that the alternative is not hearing about this research at all we'll let it through", but, given that in most academic environments publishing papers is the key to a successful career, and that competition to get papers into prestigious journals is high, reviewers for those journals should be able to "encourage" complete publication.
I'm currently preparing my first academic paper (a simulation study of a couple of new algorithms we devised), and I know I'm being very careful to explain how our algorithms and simulation environmental worked such as to make it possible to reproduce our results. If I don't, my supervisor wouldn't let me submit it.
Say you exchange your stock certificates for some physical greenbacks. You've exchanged one collection of bits of paper for another, and, again, your "wealth" is based on the assumption that you'll be able to exchange those bits of paper for something else you want. Now, with greenbacks, that's a pretty reliable assumption, but it's not always the case with currency.
Let's go a step further and say you use your greenbacks to buy some property. Now, that property might be yours, but its worth depends entirely on what people are prepared to give you in exchange for it.
In my view, the wealth you can accumulate in the stock market is no more real or illusory than any other type of wealth. It's just *much* more volatile (and as such is risky to borrow against - margin calls and all that).
I used to run a similar program at my old school to check for cheats. I never got to see the internals, but I believe it was quite similar to the other ones described. You could manually set a threshold "similarity value" which was reported. We always manually checked any "overly similar projects" flagged by the system, and, with an appropriate similarity value, its false positive rate was damned low (probably 90% of the people it flagged were definitely cheating, and the other 10% were probably doing so). This was on ~200 lines-of-code introductory projects in C and a functional language called Haskell.
September 11 can never happen again, at least with a passenger plane. Why? Because no passenger is going to sit tight and take a hijacker's word that they'll come to no harm if they sit quietly. Unless you smuggle on a whole football team full of terrorists, you're not going to be able to kill all the passengers, even if you get a firearm on the flight.
I'd be more worried about terrorists doing things like blowing up dams, or sabotaging a bunch of power plants simultaneously . . .:(
Australia has a written constitution, but unlike the US constitution it says very little about human rights, and the limits of government legislation.
About 20 years ago, a constitutional referendum to introduce a bill of rights was put up (by the other major party, the Australian Labor Party) and soundly defeated in a referendum.
There are reasonable (in my view, not sufficiently convincing, but credible) arguments to suggest that extensive bills of rights are unnecessary and that regular laws passed by a democratically elected parliament (whose functioning *is* constitutionally protected) are a better safeguard of human rights. Amongst others, it is argued that elected politicians are likely to interpret human rights more in keeping with the electorate's views better than unelected judges, and as views on human rights evolve laws can adapt better than constitutions can.
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I know a lot of us are hoping that fuel cells will replace batteries, but how big does a fuel cell have to be to produce enough power for, say, a laptop computer? Would it be comparable in size to the batteries we have now? What about the generated heat?
As for your smoke detector example, IIRC the americium is used as the smoke sensor itself, not as a power source.
I'm all for the use of nuclear technology where appropriate, but having substantial quantities of radioactive material in everybody's Game Boy doesn't strike me as appropriate.
Looks like it's moderators on crack day today.
Anyway, who's to say AMD don't have a demon proprietary compiler for x86-64 up their sleeve for just this purpose?
To do the weeks instead of months thing, you need something more exotic again, like an Orion (push the craft along by exploding nuclear weapons behind it), a fusion drive, or maybe a laser-powered light sail (though presumably you need a laser on Mars to slow it down again . . . ).
DVD's are *not* encoded in high definition. They may have higher effective horizontal resolution than a VHS VCR (particularly in widescreen), but they sure ain't 1920x1080.
Read the scoop here.
The real beauty of the light sail system is that you don't have to carry the fuel. If you're carrying fuel, you have to have more fuel to accelerate the heavy spacecraft, which means you need more fuel to accelerate the extra fuel . . . :)
A bunch of Aussies did it first, in 1951. See the story here.
By the time /. had UIDs, it was already pretty famous IIRC.
Who cares if Intel (or anyone else) makes chip n+1 perform better than chip n through clock cycle speedups, fiddling with cache arrangements, implementing faster-than-light wiring systems on the die :-) . . . whatever. As long as it works faster and cheaper than last year's, what does it matter beyond idle curiosity?
J.S. Bach didn't have to run a marketing campaign and tour 48 countries to launch his weekly cantata either.
The 28-earth-day day is going to make it bloody difficult to grow food on the Moon. Space transportation makes it rather expensive to import all your foodstuffs, particularly if they have to be launched from Earth (rather than, well, Mars).
I'm not sure whether the US still uses the F-111, but Australia does and will do so until 2020 or so. In fact, we bought a bunch of surplus ones from the States a little while ago for parts :)
Of course, you may take the argument of the failure of conventional AI techniques to provide human-like intelligence yet as an argument for the notion. I don't, personally, but it's a reasonable point.
From what little I've read about the area, for some sorts of intelligence-gathering this gets as much info as cloak-and-dagger stuff.
However, presumably what they're talking about here is using bazaar techniques (mailing lists, whatever) to help share and evaluate intelligence information. That's probably not a bad idea either, if you can manage the security risk.
As to the crew issues, you'd probably first build a frickin' huge telescope, big enough to image nearby terrestrial planets. You'd then build an unmanned probe with some snappy AI technologies to investigate promising candidates for colonisation. Then, once you've found somewhere good (it might take several lifetimes, but what's the hurry), you build your starship and the crew goes off to colonise the planet.
Would people go? Looking at our history, I don't see why you couldn't find plenty of people who would. Just imagine it, the chance to own a significant fraction of *an entire star system* :)
Arthur C. Clarke also wrote a very cool short story about this idea, in the form of a big synthesised food manufacturer testifying before Congress about the activities of a competitor selling a food line called "Ambrosia Plus" . . .
I suppose their attitude might be "well, given that the alternative is not hearing about this research at all we'll let it through", but, given that in most academic environments publishing papers is the key to a successful career, and that competition to get papers into prestigious journals is high, reviewers for those journals should be able to "encourage" complete publication.
I'm currently preparing my first academic paper (a simulation study of a couple of new algorithms we devised), and I know I'm being very careful to explain how our algorithms and simulation environmental worked such as to make it possible to reproduce our results. If I don't, my supervisor wouldn't let me submit it.
Check out this company's products. They've already built it.
Let's go a step further and say you use your greenbacks to buy some property. Now, that property might be yours, but its worth depends entirely on what people are prepared to give you in exchange for it.
In my view, the wealth you can accumulate in the stock market is no more real or illusory than any other type of wealth. It's just *much* more volatile (and as such is risky to borrow against - margin calls and all that).
I used to run a similar program at my old school to check for cheats. I never got to see the internals, but I believe it was quite similar to the other ones described. You could manually set a threshold "similarity value" which was reported. We always manually checked any "overly similar projects" flagged by the system, and, with an appropriate similarity value, its false positive rate was damned low (probably 90% of the people it flagged were definitely cheating, and the other 10% were probably doing so). This was on ~200 lines-of-code introductory projects in C and a functional language called Haskell.
Of course, at least some Debian developers are probably bribable with free beer :)
I'd be more worried about terrorists doing things like blowing up dams, or sabotaging a bunch of power plants simultaneously . . . :(
About 20 years ago, a constitutional referendum to introduce a bill of rights was put up (by the other major party, the Australian Labor Party) and soundly defeated in a referendum.
There are reasonable (in my view, not sufficiently convincing, but credible) arguments to suggest that extensive bills of rights are unnecessary and that regular laws passed by a democratically elected parliament (whose functioning *is* constitutionally protected) are a better safeguard of human rights. Amongst others, it is argued that elected politicians are likely to interpret human rights more in keeping with the electorate's views better than unelected judges, and as views on human rights evolve laws can adapt better than constitutions can.