(quick computation shows that with approx. 500 billion square kilometers of solar panels running at 50% efficiency you could (theoretically) generate enough power to make the whole earth glow brighter than the sun)
That's a hell of a lot of solar panels though. By my calculations, the "surface area" of a shell at 30,000km radius is only 15 billion square kilometers. To put such a panel in orbit around the earth, it needs to be 200,000km altitude, and it would put the entire earth in shadow (not to mention the fact that it would cast a shadow on itself). That's not a very effective way of building it though.
I wouldn't mind seeing how you got your numbers, too (I suspect you may have made it up;)). Radius of the sun is ~695,000km. Radius of the each is ~6,300km. So the sun's radius is 110 times that of the Earth. The Sun's area is therefore ~12,000 times the Earth's, so you would need to capture 1/12000th of the Sun's energy to make the Earth "glow like the sun". The surface area of the sun is 6 * 10^12 km^2, so if you placed the panels right on the surface of the sun, you'd need 500 million km^2 to do the job (less than your calc, but the temperatures are pretty hard to work with in there). If you (ever so slightly more realistically) placed it on the same orbit around the sun as earth, then it would have a radius of 1AU (150 million km). A shell around the sun at that distance (picking up 100% of its energy), would be 282 * 10^15 km^2. To get only the energy we need at that distance, you would need 23.5 * 10^12 km^2 of 100% efficient solar panels. That's a lot.
You are speaking as if we actually know how to measure intelligence.
No, on the contrary. Those quotes that I put around my dubious uses of the word intelligence were quite intentional.
I'm refering to some hypothetical combination of genes that gives one person more potential to solve problems in their environment than another. A number of people misunderstood my "dumb people have lots of babies" to mean "Africans are dumb". That was not my intention - I am comparing people in the same environment. "Intelligent" people are the ones who given enough education, can go on to cure disease, or find better ways of using the world's resources. "Unintelligent" people are the ones who regardless of the education they are provided with, just don't have what it takes.
I'm not even refering to "trailer-trash" when I talk about "unintelligent" people. I believe that the perceived lack of intelligence among trailer-trash is a socio-economic problem. Even if they have the "intelligent" genes, they do not have the opportunities to exploit them.
I don't think it's completely insignificant, given that according to TFA, Asian and European genes started to specialise about 6600 years ago. (Did I interpret that correctly?)
I'd say it is highly likely that evolution has slowed down over the past couple of hundred years. As we learn to treat more and more genetic diseases, less pressure is placed on removing those genes. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.
Strangely, if you ask people which genes you expect to be more successful, people will normally say intelligence. But look around you. I don't mean to be a flamebaiter, but the people having lots of babies are not the "intelligent" people. Normally, people from "less intelligent" families, who are more intelligent than their peers, are seen to be "breaking the cycle". They seem to go on to have many less children than their less intelligent brethren. I'm just saying what I think appears to be the case here; I don't have any hard data to back it up.
If you follow that through, mankind is likely to get less healthy, and less intelligent.
And yet it's perfectly alright to eliminate all natural population controls of homo sapiens
What? You don't count the will to live as natural? When a pack of lions is chasing down a herd of antelope, should the antelope not run because that would be "eliminating their natural population controls"?
Perhaps you think using our intelligence for the same purpose is "unfair" or something?
Ironically, the areas with the most severe overpopulation have sub-standard medical treatment, while those with more advanced medicine struggle to naturally maintain their populations.
To suggest that medical advances lead to people starving is just silly.
But then your computer would fall over in a steaming heap as software attempted to use Intel specific instructions.
I think it's probably easier to just patch the ID test in software that uses it.
Re:Do we have evidence that Intel coerced...
on
AMD Subpoenas Skype
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I guess that's probably why they're subpoenaing them (i.e. to answer that exact question). It's very hard to see what's in this for Skype though. It's hard to claim it is a "business partnership" if it is one-way, and AMD can't get in on the action. Disclaimer: just read the username.
You also need to look at what's best for the consumer here. Partership or not, if the consumer is losing out, then it's not good.
Seems like viruses must have been a side effect of celled organisms.
I've actually wondered about this many times before (my knowlege of viruses was, and still is pretty weak [IANAB], but it doesn't stop me from pondering such things).
Viruses (generally?) need other organisms to allow them to reproduce. Is it possible that viruses are not just a contiguous family as such, but splintered sub-families; fragmented siblings of the organisms they invade? I can imagine a cell breaking down after death, and a mutation of a piece of DNA or RNA forming a virus. What better host for such a virus than the organism it was based on? I'm not sure if that is even plausible, but it's an interesting idea IMO. If my idea were correct, then viruses could have evolved from many points in the tree of life.
Also, it is believed that evolution has occured in fits and bounds in the past, right? Is it possible that these evolutionary accelerations are related to the times when viruses have become successful? I suppose that any rapid change in environment will accelerate evolution, but viruses could be one of those factors.
That's the way we tell where a sound came from on the left-right axis. We are most certainly *not* limited to that axis though.
While we certainly use visual clues for the other axes, and rotate our heads a little too, we can get a good idea of where a sound came from anyway - otherwise, the headphone examples just wouldn't work.
It makes complete sense. A sound that enters the ear directly has a very different waveform compared with a sound that first passes through the flesh of the ear (which acts as a filter), then enters directly through the canal a short time later.
Of course this is a good example of why multiple speakers is a GoodThing(tm). The human ear is pretty good at telling where a sound came from (based on echos, etc). Doing what they do in the demo above would be pretty tricky if your speakers weren't stuck to the side of your head.
No - it's not paranoia. It's slightly inaccurate, and oversimplified, but having seen a little of this kind of technology myself, it's really quite scary some of the correlations these kind of systems can find.
It's really nothing terribly new. Banks and credit agencies have been using similar technology for years (albeit simpler than what they can do now).
These systems don't really understand the concept of "logical event"; they just find correlations between pieces of data, and clusters of "data points".
To take the banking analogy, such a system would flag suspicious activity on a credit card (the system may not even know why it was suspicious). Details of that activity would then be passed onto a human, who would investigote (which would normally involve calling the card-holder to confirm they made the transactions).
Absolutely - I'm not suggesting that OSS has no part in the chain, but to suggest that law enforcement and spy agencies can just head along to SourceForge and pick up the kind of technology they are looking for is unrealistic.
Databases are an area that OSS tends to excel at, as are operating systems. I doubt all of the systems they'd be considering would be built around Oracle for Windows.
Well put. And if anyone out there wants to know more about various logical falacies, see http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies. It has excellent descriptions of all of the common fallacies, plus some not-so-obvious ones.
Offtopic, I know, but I feel the discussions here could be much more productive (with much less FUD) if people understood logic a little better.
I realise your taking a humourous dig at the (admittedly) bad choice of words there, but arbitrary aslo means: Determined by chance, whim, or impulse, and not by necessity, reason, or principle: stopped at the first motel we passed, an arbitrary choice.
"Abitrary facts" within its context could also mean "a set of facts chosen from a larger set of facts at random".
I think "seemingly unrelated facts" is what they really meant to say.
Slashdot Mirror
(quick computation shows that with approx. 500 billion square kilometers of solar panels running at 50% efficiency you could (theoretically) generate enough power to make the whole earth glow brighter than the sun)
;)). Radius of the sun is ~695,000km. Radius of the each is ~6,300km. So the sun's radius is 110 times that of the Earth. The Sun's area is therefore ~12,000 times the Earth's, so you would need to capture 1/12000th of the Sun's energy to make the Earth "glow like the sun". The surface area of the sun is 6 * 10^12 km^2, so if you placed the panels right on the surface of the sun, you'd need 500 million km^2 to do the job (less than your calc, but the temperatures are pretty hard to work with in there). If you (ever so slightly more realistically) placed it on the same orbit around the sun as earth, then it would have a radius of 1AU (150 million km). A shell around the sun at that distance (picking up 100% of its energy), would be 282 * 10^15 km^2. To get only the energy we need at that distance, you would need 23.5 * 10^12 km^2 of 100% efficient solar panels. That's a lot.
That's a hell of a lot of solar panels though. By my calculations, the "surface area" of a shell at 30,000km radius is only 15 billion square kilometers. To put such a panel in orbit around the earth, it needs to be 200,000km altitude, and it would put the entire earth in shadow (not to mention the fact that it would cast a shadow on itself). That's not a very effective way of building it though.
I wouldn't mind seeing how you got your numbers, too (I suspect you may have made it up
Informative?!? It was a joke, people! Surely /. users are smart enough to cut the coral bits off the url...
Gah.
You are speaking as if we actually know how to measure intelligence.
No, on the contrary. Those quotes that I put around my dubious uses of the word intelligence were quite intentional.
I'm refering to some hypothetical combination of genes that gives one person more potential to solve problems in their environment than another. A number of people misunderstood my "dumb people have lots of babies" to mean "Africans are dumb". That was not my intention - I am comparing people in the same environment. "Intelligent" people are the ones who given enough education, can go on to cure disease, or find better ways of using the world's resources. "Unintelligent" people are the ones who regardless of the education they are provided with, just don't have what it takes.
I'm not even refering to "trailer-trash" when I talk about "unintelligent" people. I believe that the perceived lack of intelligence among trailer-trash is a socio-economic problem. Even if they have the "intelligent" genes, they do not have the opportunities to exploit them.
I don't think it's completely insignificant, given that according to TFA, Asian and European genes started to specialise about 6600 years ago. (Did I interpret that correctly?)
I'd say it is highly likely that evolution has slowed down over the past couple of hundred years. As we learn to treat more and more genetic diseases, less pressure is placed on removing those genes. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.
Strangely, if you ask people which genes you expect to be more successful, people will normally say intelligence. But look around you. I don't mean to be a flamebaiter, but the people having lots of babies are not the "intelligent" people. Normally, people from "less intelligent" families, who are more intelligent than their peers, are seen to be "breaking the cycle". They seem to go on to have many less children than their less intelligent brethren. I'm just saying what I think appears to be the case here; I don't have any hard data to back it up.
If you follow that through, mankind is likely to get less healthy, and less intelligent.
And for those of us who can't access Coral (because of work restrictions), the story is also available here.
Woosh.
I think you must have missed the silent <sarcasm> tag on GP.
And yet it's perfectly alright to eliminate all natural population controls of homo sapiens
What? You don't count the will to live as natural? When a pack of lions is chasing down a herd of antelope, should the antelope not run because that would be "eliminating their natural population controls"?
Perhaps you think using our intelligence for the same purpose is "unfair" or something?
Ironically, the areas with the most severe overpopulation have sub-standard medical treatment, while those with more advanced medicine struggle to naturally maintain their populations.
To suggest that medical advances lead to people starving is just silly.
You can say that again!
A lot of things have to change, like our automobile usage, suburban lifestyle, and the excessive packaging of one time use products.
That's a pretty bad analogy ;)
That would be at least as bad as the KT impact that wiped out the dinosaurs.
You don't really believe that stuff do you? We all know that they were actually wiped out by the Great Flood.
(Oh c'mon - the OP was asking for a flat-earth joke; it was bound to come sooner or later)
Ooh, ooh, I know! Let's patent their DNA. That way, if any bacteria decides to multiply, we just drag them through court!
But then your computer would fall over in a steaming heap as software attempted to use Intel specific instructions.
I think it's probably easier to just patch the ID test in software that uses it.
I guess that's probably why they're subpoenaing them (i.e. to answer that exact question). It's very hard to see what's in this for Skype though. It's hard to claim it is a "business partnership" if it is one-way, and AMD can't get in on the action. Disclaimer: just read the username.
You also need to look at what's best for the consumer here. Partership or not, if the consumer is losing out, then it's not good.
omg - do the handfull of Americans out there who actually get sarcasm now understand how you all got your reputation?
This whole thread is just a classic!
Seems like viruses must have been a side effect of celled organisms.
I've actually wondered about this many times before (my knowlege of viruses was, and still is pretty weak [IANAB], but it doesn't stop me from pondering such things).
Viruses (generally?) need other organisms to allow them to reproduce. Is it possible that viruses are not just a contiguous family as such, but splintered sub-families; fragmented siblings of the organisms they invade? I can imagine a cell breaking down after death, and a mutation of a piece of DNA or RNA forming a virus. What better host for such a virus than the organism it was based on? I'm not sure if that is even plausible, but it's an interesting idea IMO. If my idea were correct, then viruses could have evolved from many points in the tree of life.
Also, it is believed that evolution has occured in fits and bounds in the past, right? Is it possible that these evolutionary accelerations are related to the times when viruses have become successful? I suppose that any rapid change in environment will accelerate evolution, but viruses could be one of those factors.
Just a thought...
That's the way we tell where a sound came from on the left-right axis. We are most certainly *not* limited to that axis though.
While we certainly use visual clues for the other axes, and rotate our heads a little too, we can get a good idea of where a sound came from anyway - otherwise, the headphone examples just wouldn't work.
It makes complete sense. A sound that enters the ear directly has a very different waveform compared with a sound that first passes through the flesh of the ear (which acts as a filter), then enters directly through the canal a short time later.
An can it perform cunnilingus on a hardwood floor?
You give them an idea and they can clone it better than anyone.
:P. /ducks
No, no. They just claim to clone it. On closer inspection, you'll see that they faked their results
Fight, fight, fight! :D
True - and there's a pretty cool demo of what you can do with two speakers (well, headphones) here: http://www.dolby.com/consumer/technology/headphone .html.
Of course this is a good example of why multiple speakers is a GoodThing(tm). The human ear is pretty good at telling where a sound came from (based on echos, etc). Doing what they do in the demo above would be pretty tricky if your speakers weren't stuck to the side of your head.
You wrote an Enigma-based copy protection system, but couldn't even be bothered reading my whole post?
No - it's not paranoia. It's slightly inaccurate, and oversimplified, but having seen a little of this kind of technology myself, it's really quite scary some of the correlations these kind of systems can find.
It's really nothing terribly new. Banks and credit agencies have been using similar technology for years (albeit simpler than what they can do now).
These systems don't really understand the concept of "logical event"; they just find correlations between pieces of data, and clusters of "data points".
To take the banking analogy, such a system would flag suspicious activity on a credit card (the system may not even know why it was suspicious). Details of that activity would then be passed onto a human, who would investigote (which would normally involve calling the card-holder to confirm they made the transactions).
Absolutely - I'm not suggesting that OSS has no part in the chain, but to suggest that law enforcement and spy agencies can just head along to SourceForge and pick up the kind of technology they are looking for is unrealistic.
Databases are an area that OSS tends to excel at, as are operating systems. I doubt all of the systems they'd be considering would be built around Oracle for Windows.
Well put. And if anyone out there wants to know more about various logical falacies, see http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies. It has excellent descriptions of all of the common fallacies, plus some not-so-obvious ones.
Offtopic, I know, but I feel the discussions here could be much more productive (with much less FUD) if people understood logic a little better.
I realise your taking a humourous dig at the (admittedly) bad choice of words there, but arbitrary aslo means:
Determined by chance, whim, or impulse, and not by necessity, reason, or principle: stopped at the first motel we passed, an arbitrary choice.
"Abitrary facts" within its context could also mean "a set of facts chosen from a larger set of facts at random".
I think "seemingly unrelated facts" is what they really meant to say.