...that intelligence is pathological in a species. I suggest it always leads to self-extinction. Considering that we are uniquely intelligent, perhaps there are actually genetic mechanisms checking the evolution of intelligence and we somehow got off the reservation. Anyway, once again, nature is not an idiot, and if nature, evolution, speciated, she did it early and there is most probably a very good reason for it. Taking genes and sticking them into our own genome in a sort of all-genes-are-equal bio-communism is most likely going to destroy us.
We now know why the National Security Agency has gone to Congress with a supplemental budget request of 800 Million Dollars for a power system upgrade.
If someone writes a bot that makes its own decisions and pays for its own account with its in-game winnings, does it--because it is connected to tax laws--take on the legal protections of a "person?" A corporation has such legal protections. Is it then connected to all the laws? Can it sue? Can it vote? If they tax it, it certainly would have the right to pursue a case in tax court. Must it be assigned some kind of representative of the law in a court case like a child? What a mess that would become. They better be very very careful what they do in the virtual world or they will come to regret it severely. We have already seen talk of rape cases in the virtual world. The greed of the Government may end up costing much more than it gets in tax revenue. I think that the Government should stay out of the virtual world for a long long time to come--at least until it is thoroughly thrashed out how, or even if it should be connected to the real world. I'm for a solid wall separating real from virtual. If it means not getting the last tax dollar, so be it.
Entropy wins again. Seriously, we need to teach this in schools from first grade. So much erroneous thought and perception is based on a complete blindness to this fundamental truth of the universe.
Now, we are going to do WHAT with nuclear waste?? The half-life of plutonium is what again?? I don't need engineering studies up the yinyang to know what is going to happen with THAT stuff.
Nature is NOT an idiot. Of course she doesn't carry massive amounts of "junk DNA" along on every cell devision. Apparently ego-fueled "scientists" who see nature as an idiot who has to be corrected have come around a little. Now, if we can just get them to respect nature and the evolutionary process enough not to cross every moral line there is before they find out that stem cells are not a panacea for all man's ills. Nature did NOT overlook stem cells as a repair mechanism. It is for egocentric scientists to explore WHY she doesn't use them to repair things like Parkinson's disease before they go off promising things they will never deliver. A little respect for the complex process of evolution equals common sense in science. And it will save the taxpayer billions of dollars in bogus research funding.
"A lawyer is quoted as saying that Sheehan, a high school dropout who is arguing his own case, is in for a world of hurt: 'This poor guy now faces daunting reality of having to litigate this on appeal against Gateway...By winning, he's lost."
Gateway should just slap their vicious and arrogant lawyers, tell them to STFU and just pay the guy instead of pushing this to a multi-million dollar loss in public image.
When will companies ever learn? If I were the guy, I'd contact every media outlet that needed a story...and which one doesn't?
You need an outside view to determine how the Universe started, and, last I checked, we're all inside. Great fun though. Continue. I actually heard this broadcast and enjoyed it as I've followed this for decades--since, as a kid, I bought and read a paperback titled "Frontiers of Astronomy," by Fred Hoyle, dealing with the discussion of the steady state universe model versus the big bang model. I think it was in the 60s some time. Much of science is becoming mere entertainment. Strings and branes. hahah. Good.
"Based on your logic the roads should be awash with billions of gallons on unburned gasoline."
Who says there are not billions of gallons of gasoline and oil that have been released into the environment along our roads over time? Have you ever stood on a highway overpass and seen the black smears that decorate the center of each lane? Oil, gasoline, rubber. Besides, hydrocarbons evaporate into the atmosphere. Anyway, except for the rubber, they have not been solids.
"Firstly, your estimates for the efficiency are way off. We're talking about the metabolic processes from inside your muscles, not your digestion. These are not only very efficient but the trace quantities of by-products are soluble compounds. Secondly, you are assuming that these by-products would be released."
Only problem with that is that the reaction will NOT be taking place in muscles. It will be taking place in a tank in a machine out in the wild of cold and heat and dirt and oil. And how do you accumulate 2.7 kg of waste (in my projection) per 300 miles driven without offloading it somehow? And last I read -- and I may be wrong -- enzymes are rather finicky about the requirements for their correct operation.
I think lab scientists should not be allowed to talk to the public about realities unless they are surgically attached to at least one engineer.
"The vision is for the ingredients to be mixed in the fuel tank of your car, for instance. A car with an approximately 12-gallon tank could hold 27 kilograms (kg) of starch, which is the equivalent of 4 kg of hydrogen. The range would be more than 300 miles, Zhang estimates. One kg of starch will produce the same energy output as 1.12 kg (0.38 gallons) of gasoline."
In the real world it is unlikely that this reaction will be 100% efficient, leaving only gases as a result. If it is, say, 90% efficient, then that means for every 300 miles driven, there would be 2.7 kg of waste product to handle.
assume 243 million passenger vehicles in the USA (2004, Department of Transportation)
assume 90% efficient conversion of starch to CO2 and H20 in the car's tank, leaving 2.7 kg of waste per 300 miles driven
assume 12,000 miles per year driven per "passenger vehicle"
That gives:
(243x10^6)x(2.7)x(12,000/300) = 26x10^9 kg.waste/year
26x10^9 kg. x 2.2 lbs/kg = 57 billion pounds waste/year
which equals 29 million tons of waste per year
Who sweeps that off the streets and highways of the nation?
Do we put diapers on our starch-using cars, or do we just let them crap in the street like horses of old? Gotta love those scientists thinking one dimensionally again.
A great comment and one not infected with the scientific equivalent of "irrational exuberance." I say back to science and away from manipulations for fund raising reasons.
"You can't have someone in a position of public trust lying for 28 years. It's just not acceptable."
Come on. I bet everybody at MIT has lied about something or other on their resume. She's just a threat to all of them, and the sooner she goes, the safer they'll all feel. The problem to them isn't lying, it is getting caught lying.
...we see "Emperor Credentials" has no clothes. I wonder how many brilliant men and women have been denied access to an MIT education based on the delusion that they actually can identify the excellent from paper?
I'm not talking about the economic cost of removing carbon from the air. I'm talking about doing the carbon accounting. That is to say, how much carbon do you have to produce in power plants to build and power these one million extractors, and what are the carbon costs of all the support devices and facilities?
Most likely, after a detailed energy accounting is done, this system of 1 million co2 removing machines and its associated systems will be seen to be drawing out of the atmosphere slightly less than the amount of carbon that powering it puts into the atmosphere. Come on now scientists. Stop this one dimensional thinking. Do the balancing.
I suggest this is a thermodynamics problem and no scientist right now has the overview, the outside view to see it. Not yet anyway. There is no solution short of carefully maintaining a small human population. And we will not do that of course. So, there is no solution, just an advancing problem. More humans = more order = more need for fossil fuel power to create and maintain that order = more global warming.
Intelligence in a species is pathological. I suggest there are even mechanisms in evolution, in the genetics of species on this Earth that suppress intelligence. I suggest that we perhaps evaded those mechanisms sometime in the past, maybe during the intense inbreeding around the time of the "bottleneck" in the human population on the Earth around 700,000 years ago. Intelligence has allowed us to stop evolution with regard to ourselves. We no longer evolve to fit the environment; we fit the environment to ourselves. And this is going to kill us.
P.S. Did I just read that China is going to alter the weather to insure it doesn't rain during the Olympics?
Buddy, like most people who consider themselves a success, you consider yourself the norm. You aren't the norm. I'm happy you've done well, but you really should read more of these threads and credit that most of these people are not retards.
I agree with the comments that have been made regarding H-1B visas and outsourcing. There seems to be another disturbing development keeping people from jobs though. Human resources departments seem to be over-qualifying positions -- "over-credentializing" them. More requirements have to be met for even simple jobs. More credentials are required for the most basic of tasks. And companies are willing to let positions sit unfilled for months or even years while they WAIT for the "perfect" candidate. There seems to be absolutely no wiggle room anymore. Either you just walked out of that very same job at another company yesterday or you are out of luck. This is true of even service jobs like dental assistant or customer service representative. Changing bedpans in a nursing home now requires certification to do. One experienced dental assistant (holds tools) told me she applied to a doctor's ad for a dental assistant position and he told her he required a college degree---for 10,000 dollars a year.
It is even worse at tech and engineering levels. There are no careers, only jobs. And when that job goes away, your detailed credentials are not likely to qualify you for anything else. You may as well be completely uneducated and inexperienced.
Entry level in programming now seems to go something like this: "Must know half dozen computer languages to expertise doing this and only this thing daily for 5-10 years. If you have this background, we will deign to let you in the door for an interview you will probably fail anyway."
Something sick is developing rapidly in human resources departments nationwide. I don't know if it is just an advanced case of "cover-your-ass," or what. Are they growingly more incompetent at doing the job, and falling back on more and more qualifications and credentials to make decisions for them? "Don't blame me, he had all the credentials," kind of thinking. This has even advanced to the point that computers are screening potential employees now. Insanity. In pursuit of the goal of the perfectly qualified employee, they guarantee they will have problems finding ANY qualified employees. Hiring is an art they are trying desperately to make into a science. It isn't working in my opinion.
The use of food for fuel production is a blatant immorality and illustrates the complete disregard of common sense by the US government in the face of political and industrial need. It further illustrates the reason not to allow environmental emotion to stampede us into badly thought out "solutions" to environmental problems.
Farmers have been the foundation of civilization for 10,000 years because of their production of surplus food stocks; but now they seem to have decided, with government help, that that position is no longer sufficiently important to them and like everyone in our society today, the pursuit of the very last buck is the only honorable and "smart" occupation for them too.
Let me point out that this problem actually occurred previously in the history of America. In the early years, alcohol production led to shortages of grain for bread. And during the American Civil War, The southern states had to outlaw the use of grain for alcohol production due to shortages of grain. This shows that, even in a time of war, farmers and distillers will put profit ahead of bread for the population.
Those who refuse to learn from history are condemned to repeat it." George Santayana.
And one has the RIGHT to not give one's SSN. But doing so, you don't get the services. A right that you are punished for using is no right at all. Yet this is the kind of twisted logic that the government will use with regard to the RealID too, sooner or later. It will be optional for services, but if you don't present one, you won't get services.
Slashdot Mirror
...that intelligence is pathological in a species. I suggest it always leads to self-extinction. Considering that we are uniquely intelligent, perhaps there are actually genetic mechanisms checking the evolution of intelligence and we somehow got off the reservation. Anyway, once again, nature is not an idiot, and if nature, evolution, speciated, she did it early and there is most probably a very good reason for it. Taking genes and sticking them into our own genome in a sort of all-genes-are-equal bio-communism is most likely going to destroy us.
We now know why the National Security Agency has gone to Congress with a supplemental budget request of 800 Million Dollars for a power system upgrade.
If someone writes a bot that makes its own decisions and pays for its own account with its in-game winnings, does it--because it is connected to tax laws--take on the legal protections of a "person?" A corporation has such legal protections. Is it then connected to all the laws? Can it sue? Can it vote? If they tax it, it certainly would have the right to pursue a case in tax court. Must it be assigned some kind of representative of the law in a court case like a child? What a mess that would become. They better be very very careful what they do in the virtual world or they will come to regret it severely. We have already seen talk of rape cases in the virtual world. The greed of the Government may end up costing much more than it gets in tax revenue. I think that the Government should stay out of the virtual world for a long long time to come--at least until it is thoroughly thrashed out how, or even if it should be connected to the real world. I'm for a solid wall separating real from virtual. If it means not getting the last tax dollar, so be it.
Entropy wins again. Seriously, we need to teach this in schools from first grade. So much erroneous thought and perception is based on a complete blindness to this fundamental truth of the universe.
Now, we are going to do WHAT with nuclear waste?? The half-life of plutonium is what again?? I don't need engineering studies up the yinyang to know what is going to happen with THAT stuff.
Nature is NOT an idiot. Of course she doesn't carry massive amounts of "junk DNA" along on every cell devision. Apparently ego-fueled "scientists" who see nature as an idiot who has to be corrected have come around a little. Now, if we can just get them to respect nature and the evolutionary process enough not to cross every moral line there is before they find out that stem cells are not a panacea for all man's ills. Nature did NOT overlook stem cells as a repair mechanism. It is for egocentric scientists to explore WHY she doesn't use them to repair things like Parkinson's disease before they go off promising things they will never deliver. A little respect for the complex process of evolution equals common sense in science. And it will save the taxpayer billions of dollars in bogus research funding.
Gateway should just slap their vicious and arrogant lawyers, tell them to STFU and just pay the guy instead of pushing this to a multi-million dollar loss in public image.
When will companies ever learn? If I were the guy, I'd contact every media outlet that needed a story...and which one doesn't?
I'm perfectly sober thank you "MrBoombasticfantasti." hahaha.
You need an outside view to determine how the Universe started, and, last I checked, we're all inside. Great fun though. Continue. I actually heard this broadcast and enjoyed it as I've followed this for decades--since, as a kid, I bought and read a paperback titled "Frontiers of Astronomy," by Fred Hoyle, dealing with the discussion of the steady state universe model versus the big bang model. I think it was in the 60s some time. Much of science is becoming mere entertainment. Strings and branes. hahah. Good.
Who says there are not billions of gallons of gasoline and oil that have been released into the environment along our roads over time? Have you ever stood on a highway overpass and seen the black smears that decorate the center of each lane? Oil, gasoline, rubber. Besides, hydrocarbons evaporate into the atmosphere. Anyway, except for the rubber, they have not been solids.
Only problem with that is that the reaction will NOT be taking place in muscles. It will be taking place in a tank in a machine out in the wild of cold and heat and dirt and oil. And how do you accumulate 2.7 kg of waste (in my projection) per 300 miles driven without offloading it somehow? And last I read -- and I may be wrong -- enzymes are rather finicky about the requirements for their correct operation.
I think lab scientists should not be allowed to talk to the public about realities unless they are surgically attached to at least one engineer.
In the real world it is unlikely that this reaction will be 100% efficient, leaving only gases as a result. If it is, say, 90% efficient, then that means for every 300 miles driven, there would be 2.7 kg of waste product to handle.
That gives: (243x10^6)x(2.7)x(12,000/300) = 26x10^9 kg.waste/year
26x10^9 kg. x 2.2 lbs/kg = 57 billion pounds waste/year
which equals 29 million tons of waste per year
Who sweeps that off the streets and highways of the nation?
Do we put diapers on our starch-using cars, or do we just let them crap in the street like horses of old? Gotta love those scientists thinking one dimensionally again.
A great comment and one not infected with the scientific equivalent of "irrational exuberance." I say back to science and away from manipulations for fund raising reasons.
Ever get the feeling the universe is a vast lab and all the petri dishes have been very carefully separated to preserve the integrity of the results?
"You can't have someone in a position of public trust lying for 28 years. It's just not acceptable." Come on. I bet everybody at MIT has lied about something or other on their resume. She's just a threat to all of them, and the sooner she goes, the safer they'll all feel. The problem to them isn't lying, it is getting caught lying.
...we see "Emperor Credentials" has no clothes. I wonder how many brilliant men and women have been denied access to an MIT education based on the delusion that they actually can identify the excellent from paper?
I'm not talking about the economic cost of removing carbon from the air. I'm talking about doing the carbon accounting. That is to say, how much carbon do you have to produce in power plants to build and power these one million extractors, and what are the carbon costs of all the support devices and facilities?
Nothing to say that you can understand apparently. But that's usual.
Most likely, after a detailed energy accounting is done, this system of 1 million co2 removing machines and its associated systems will be seen to be drawing out of the atmosphere slightly less than the amount of carbon that powering it puts into the atmosphere. Come on now scientists. Stop this one dimensional thinking. Do the balancing.
I suggest this is a thermodynamics problem and no scientist right now has the overview, the outside view to see it. Not yet anyway. There is no solution short of carefully maintaining a small human population. And we will not do that of course. So, there is no solution, just an advancing problem. More humans = more order = more need for fossil fuel power to create and maintain that order = more global warming.
Intelligence in a species is pathological. I suggest there are even mechanisms in evolution, in the genetics of species on this Earth that suppress intelligence. I suggest that we perhaps evaded those mechanisms sometime in the past, maybe during the intense inbreeding around the time of the "bottleneck" in the human population on the Earth around 700,000 years ago. Intelligence has allowed us to stop evolution with regard to ourselves. We no longer evolve to fit the environment; we fit the environment to ourselves. And this is going to kill us.
P.S. Did I just read that China is going to alter the weather to insure it doesn't rain during the Olympics?
Buddy, like most people who consider themselves a success, you consider yourself the norm. You aren't the norm. I'm happy you've done well, but you really should read more of these threads and credit that most of these people are not retards.
You are the face of the problem.
I agree with the comments that have been made regarding H-1B visas and outsourcing. There seems to be another disturbing development keeping people from jobs though. Human resources departments seem to be over-qualifying positions -- "over-credentializing" them. More requirements have to be met for even simple jobs. More credentials are required for the most basic of tasks. And companies are willing to let positions sit unfilled for months or even years while they WAIT for the "perfect" candidate. There seems to be absolutely no wiggle room anymore. Either you just walked out of that very same job at another company yesterday or you are out of luck. This is true of even service jobs like dental assistant or customer service representative. Changing bedpans in a nursing home now requires certification to do. One experienced dental assistant (holds tools) told me she applied to a doctor's ad for a dental assistant position and he told her he required a college degree---for 10,000 dollars a year.
It is even worse at tech and engineering levels. There are no careers, only jobs. And when that job goes away, your detailed credentials are not likely to qualify you for anything else. You may as well be completely uneducated and inexperienced.
Entry level in programming now seems to go something like this: "Must know half dozen computer languages to expertise doing this and only this thing daily for 5-10 years. If you have this background, we will deign to let you in the door for an interview you will probably fail anyway."
Something sick is developing rapidly in human resources departments nationwide. I don't know if it is just an advanced case of "cover-your-ass," or what. Are they growingly more incompetent at doing the job, and falling back on more and more qualifications and credentials to make decisions for them? "Don't blame me, he had all the credentials," kind of thinking. This has even advanced to the point that computers are screening potential employees now. Insanity. In pursuit of the goal of the perfectly qualified employee, they guarantee they will have problems finding ANY qualified employees. Hiring is an art they are trying desperately to make into a science. It isn't working in my opinion.
Absolutely correct. Here comes the propaganda which Congress will quote in its corrupt decision to allow umpteen more H-1B visas.
The use of food for fuel production is a blatant immorality and illustrates the complete disregard of common sense by the US government in the face of political and industrial need. It further illustrates the reason not to allow environmental emotion to stampede us into badly thought out "solutions" to environmental problems.
Farmers have been the foundation of civilization for 10,000 years because of their production of surplus food stocks; but now they seem to have decided, with government help, that that position is no longer sufficiently important to them and like everyone in our society today, the pursuit of the very last buck is the only honorable and "smart" occupation for them too.
Let me point out that this problem actually occurred previously in the history of America. In the early years, alcohol production led to shortages of grain for bread. And during the American Civil War, The southern states had to outlaw the use of grain for alcohol production due to shortages of grain. This shows that, even in a time of war, farmers and distillers will put profit ahead of bread for the population.
Those who refuse to learn from history are condemned to repeat it." George Santayana.And one has the RIGHT to not give one's SSN. But doing so, you don't get the services. A right that you are punished for using is no right at all. Yet this is the kind of twisted logic that the government will use with regard to the RealID too, sooner or later. It will be optional for services, but if you don't present one, you won't get services.
What a naive trusting soul you are. All government programs and systems expand. And this one will too.