I was under the impression that the radioactivity produced in the materials used for fusion would last decades, whereas that produced in materials used for fission, lasts hundreds or many thousands of years. Clearly the former situation is preferable from a waste manangement point of view to the latter. The money saved on safe storage of fission over fusion waste would dwarf that invested in the prototype fission reactor in the first place, so it's a valid economic and technological objective.
I remember reading somewhere that Einsteins wife was a Mathematician and that she was the one who actually worked the theory through but he took all of the credit (hence he was awarded the Nobel Prize but gave all of the money to her). He might not have been given his ideas by aliens. It is more likely he was given them by his wife.
More FUD. The shame of it is that most non-technical users don't have a clue what the problem is in the first place. I tried to get a couple of non-techie friends to boycott Sony over this but had trouble explaining exactly why (I gave up in the end). I think Sony know this and one of their Executives more or less admitted it quite recently. "We can do whatever we like, as long as our users don't understand whatever it is we are doing". As with some others above, I like Sony hardware but won't be buying any in the near future because of this.
Anyway I haven't bought a music CD since the RIAA started taking children to court for file sharing. I'm not completely anti-corporate, it's just that I've started to get this very nasty feeling I'm being exploited somehow whenever I hand over money to one of these companies. Market Branding is all about the "customer feel-good factor" but what these guys are doing is completely destroying their brands. I don't feel that way about buying video games and movie DVD's at the moment - (although Valve are doing their best to put me off video games with Steam and the MIAA are feeding up their lawyers for the big push).
The whole thing leaves a very bad taste in my mouth and I'm giving these people less of my money because of it. It isn't good business. It's going to break at some point I'm sure of it. I can feel the pressure building.
Thats because the larger the company becomes, the greedier the shareholders, bankers and financial consultants are. It's called the slimey pole. If you want to be successful, you eventually have to climb it.
I am permanently lost in life (how could it not strike a chord!). Throughout this movie I was waiting for something to happen. A plot would have been nice. `Bored 50 Year Old Man Tries Karaoke and is reborn' isn't a story, neither is it a philosophical statement. I became particularly irritated by the way the couple kept looking at each other in that "goofy" way every now and then. Eventually I realised the entire film was going to be like this and I felt a bit cheated.
I don't think the definition of a good film is one within which situations arise that we must relate to. I do think that the definition of a good film is one during which I am not constantly checking my watch.
I don't want this part of the thread to turn into a film review or anything, but I personally found Lost In Translation to be really quite boring and I mean "boring" in the way the Worlds Most Intelligent Potato would mean it.
I do not find a guy in Japan having a mid-life crisis letching over an intelligent young girl, cooing at each other every now and then in a nausiating way and then looking each other in the eye with a "knowing but un-said" expression remotely interesting or insightful. It wasn't insightful. I learned nothing about these characters apart from that they were empty.
I have no idea why the reviewers thought it was any good.
The point does not concern having an alternative to back up the scepticism with, the point is that current dogmas literally eat almost all available funding, leaving little behind with which to develop and test any other hypothesis.
I know you are all cynical gits but I think this is one anti-trust action that should fail. Why? Because it is intrinsically GOOD that people have anti-virus/anti-spyware bundled with their OS. I don't care too much about other anti-virus company profits. Lets face it, they have been whoring on the back of this problem for long enough. The OS should come with protection and that protection should be free (as in I don't pay over and above after I've bought the OS).
Eve Online does this. Skill training is what gives access to new or different modules, ships and activities. These are active when you are offline. Unfortunately, this "access" depends on you being able to purchase the equipment your skills have been trained to use - and this costs money - and money is what you get for grinding.
Same thing, just a slightly more complicated version.
No I agree with the previous poster - it is I think indicative of quality. He's right about the sweet spot. With an older card some games won't run quite so well (without dropping the features down) and new games maybe won't work properly at all.
I bought a 9800 about 1 year after they were released. Price-wise it hadn't moved very much at all (and is still expensive) - but through that time I've never had a "gotcha" with a game I've bought.
Absolutely. And also consider the advancing shader programming model is developing more and more into a general purpose programming language in it's own right (although you would have to jump through some hoops to get it to do anything useful that is not graphics related at present). These things are starting to look like high performance general co-processors, rather than specialist graphics cards. They cost almost as much as a PC in the first place!
I fear mr Koch will come a cropper in exactly the same way the symbolists have. They are now galvanised around "common sense" as the solution to the strong AI problem.
Your position seems to be, "I know what parts to use, I just need to put them together the right way around", whereas I am suggesting that, like the early attempts at flight ( the plane has wings, but the designer doesn't understand the mathematics of lift ), we don't understand the nature of consciousness and yet computer scientists are trying to model it!
I don't agree lordavebury ( did you take your degree at Brighton by any chance?) - how do you account for the "smoothing out" of quantum effects in superfluids and superconductors?
I have to agree with you. Dennet is something of an extremeist and having written a book called "Consciousness Explained" which doesn't actually explain consciousness, he is also something of a propagandist.
The only reason I went to University and took a degree was because I was so enthused by the concept of the nature of consciousness after reading The Emporers New Mind. I think we all have a book that affected the way we thought about the world more than any other and that one was mine.
I have also read `Godel, Escher, Bach' and I have to say that Hofstadter seems to attach almost metaphysical properties to the concept of recursion. Like Dennet, Hofstadter seeks to explain everything with a single simple concept. Not in itself a bad idea - after all, science is about reducing everything to a few basic principles.
After five years of Symbolic Logic and Neural Networks at University my gutt feeling is that Penrose and Hameroff are on the right tracks in seeking to try to draw together consciousness and quantum theory. They might not have cracked the problem, but I think they have made us aware that the currently dominant explainational paradigm of the Universal Turing Machine inside our heads does have it's limits.
Slashdot Mirror
I was under the impression that the radioactivity produced in the materials used for fusion would last decades, whereas that produced in materials used for fission, lasts hundreds or many thousands of years. Clearly the former situation is preferable from a waste manangement point of view to the latter. The money saved on safe storage of fission over fusion waste would dwarf that invested in the prototype fission reactor in the first place, so it's a valid economic and technological objective.
I remember reading somewhere that Einsteins wife was a Mathematician and that she was the one who actually worked the theory through but he took all of the credit (hence he was awarded the Nobel Prize but gave all of the money to her). He might not have been given his ideas by aliens. It is more likely he was given them by his wife.
More FUD. The shame of it is that most non-technical users don't have a clue what the problem is in the first place. I tried to get a couple of non-techie friends to boycott Sony over this but had trouble explaining exactly why (I gave up in the end). I think Sony know this and one of their Executives more or less admitted it quite recently. "We can do whatever we like, as long as our users don't understand whatever it is we are doing". As with some others above, I like Sony hardware but won't be buying any in the near future because of this. Anyway I haven't bought a music CD since the RIAA started taking children to court for file sharing. I'm not completely anti-corporate, it's just that I've started to get this very nasty feeling I'm being exploited somehow whenever I hand over money to one of these companies. Market Branding is all about the "customer feel-good factor" but what these guys are doing is completely destroying their brands. I don't feel that way about buying video games and movie DVD's at the moment - (although Valve are doing their best to put me off video games with Steam and the MIAA are feeding up their lawyers for the big push). The whole thing leaves a very bad taste in my mouth and I'm giving these people less of my money because of it. It isn't good business. It's going to break at some point I'm sure of it. I can feel the pressure building.
Thats because the larger the company becomes, the greedier the shareholders, bankers and financial consultants are. It's called the slimey pole. If you want to be successful, you eventually have to climb it.
I am permanently lost in life (how could it not strike a chord!). Throughout this movie I was waiting for something to happen. A plot would have been nice. `Bored 50 Year Old Man Tries Karaoke and is reborn' isn't a story, neither is it a philosophical statement. I became particularly irritated by the way the couple kept looking at each other in that "goofy" way every now and then. Eventually I realised the entire film was going to be like this and I felt a bit cheated. I don't think the definition of a good film is one within which situations arise that we must relate to. I do think that the definition of a good film is one during which I am not constantly checking my watch.
I don't want this part of the thread to turn into a film review or anything, but I personally found Lost In Translation to be really quite boring and I mean "boring" in the way the Worlds Most Intelligent Potato would mean it. I do not find a guy in Japan having a mid-life crisis letching over an intelligent young girl, cooing at each other every now and then in a nausiating way and then looking each other in the eye with a "knowing but un-said" expression remotely interesting or insightful. It wasn't insightful. I learned nothing about these characters apart from that they were empty. I have no idea why the reviewers thought it was any good.
The point does not concern having an alternative to back up the scepticism with, the point is that current dogmas literally eat almost all available funding, leaving little behind with which to develop and test any other hypothesis.
Ironically, they are doing this to keep themselves well stocked with coke in the first place.
I know you are all cynical gits but I think this is one anti-trust action that should fail. Why? Because it is intrinsically GOOD that people have anti-virus/anti-spyware bundled with their OS. I don't care too much about other anti-virus company profits. Lets face it, they have been whoring on the back of this problem for long enough. The OS should come with protection and that protection should be free (as in I don't pay over and above after I've bought the OS).
Geeks...am I the only person who watches BG in the hope of seeing Trishia Helfer naked?
Eve Online does this. Skill training is what gives access to new or different modules, ships and activities. These are active when you are offline. Unfortunately, this "access" depends on you being able to purchase the equipment your skills have been trained to use - and this costs money - and money is what you get for grinding. Same thing, just a slightly more complicated version.
Ahhhaaahhh! Your the guy who sold me that shuttle for 100 million?
No I agree with the previous poster - it is I think indicative of quality. He's right about the sweet spot. With an older card some games won't run quite so well (without dropping the features down) and new games maybe won't work properly at all. I bought a 9800 about 1 year after they were released. Price-wise it hadn't moved very much at all (and is still expensive) - but through that time I've never had a "gotcha" with a game I've bought.
Absolutely. And also consider the advancing shader programming model is developing more and more into a general purpose programming language in it's own right (although you would have to jump through some hoops to get it to do anything useful that is not graphics related at present). These things are starting to look like high performance general co-processors, rather than specialist graphics cards. They cost almost as much as a PC in the first place!
I fear mr Koch will come a cropper in exactly the same way the symbolists have. They are now galvanised around "common sense" as the solution to the strong AI problem. Your position seems to be, "I know what parts to use, I just need to put them together the right way around", whereas I am suggesting that, like the early attempts at flight ( the plane has wings, but the designer doesn't understand the mathematics of lift ), we don't understand the nature of consciousness and yet computer scientists are trying to model it!
I don't agree lordavebury ( did you take your degree at Brighton by any chance?) - how do you account for the "smoothing out" of quantum effects in superfluids and superconductors?
I have to agree with you. Dennet is something of an extremeist and having written a book called "Consciousness Explained" which doesn't actually explain consciousness, he is also something of a propagandist. The only reason I went to University and took a degree was because I was so enthused by the concept of the nature of consciousness after reading The Emporers New Mind. I think we all have a book that affected the way we thought about the world more than any other and that one was mine. I have also read `Godel, Escher, Bach' and I have to say that Hofstadter seems to attach almost metaphysical properties to the concept of recursion. Like Dennet, Hofstadter seeks to explain everything with a single simple concept. Not in itself a bad idea - after all, science is about reducing everything to a few basic principles. After five years of Symbolic Logic and Neural Networks at University my gutt feeling is that Penrose and Hameroff are on the right tracks in seeking to try to draw together consciousness and quantum theory. They might not have cracked the problem, but I think they have made us aware that the currently dominant explainational paradigm of the Universal Turing Machine inside our heads does have it's limits.