Only 2994 days until we reach the closest mission path point to Pluto! As official decorate-for-the-holidays time manager for Sears, I have a special talent for knowing when to begin reminding people of important events so I declare the countdown to Pluto to be on! We'll start laying out the plastic globes in 2010...
As I understand it, the Greenpeace fud was about how Apple was terribly bad for the environment, not that they just had room for improvement. The EPA results showed that Apple is no worse that the rest of the machines, as many of their products recieved silver and none of any company recieved higher. The fud was in Greenpeace's hyperbole, as usual.
That is to say, it's like saying Al Gore is worse for the environment than anybody else just because his home is inefficient and doesn't use solar. Because Al Gore later had the upgrades done and solar installed, does not mean he is or was worse than most other people for the environment; just that he, like apple, had (has) room for improvement.
I freely admit it was a (very) poor joke; I guess I shouldn't have relied on my sig to signal it was a joke. That or fewer people know what 'gravitas' is than I thought.
Um, if I remember correctly, changing your sig appears "retroactivly" on previous posts because the system doesn't save what it doesn't need; it just regenerates your post by mixing the text in with the basic scheme and your profile's sig whenever someone wants to look at a posting.
There exists a line. A line between everyday villainy and cartoonish supervillainy. The SoundExchange didn't just cross that line, they picked it up and moved it up with them. This is just in the realm of the unbelievable now.
What's so difficult to read? Different colors? Anyways, it basically says that some lawyers in new York are in an ongoing battle with the RIAA (via UMG) and a recent "expert" is being questioned on the grounds that they did not meet a certain standard to an expert witnesses, set forth by case precidence. It also states that Slashdot and Groklaw participated in formulating questions asked of the 'expert' as well as analysis of it's response.
What should have been a quote from a specific part of the article, is actually summarized in a way that indicates it was an end result. The actual article affords Vista the victory. But, maybe the article should have stopped at a tie, it seems Vista won because Mac OS has less standard acceptance and because Greenpeace declaired PC's to be more green than Macs.
If you like the fancy terms, here's the (only 1 page and a cover sheet) pdf the Research report or, better yet here's Modha's blog with about the same info.
For more information on the Blue Brain Project which appears to be the same, or atleast a strikingly similar project but from switzerland, click...err, that link I just placed! Here also is a good article to learn more about blue brain. It seems much more detailed than the BBC's snippit.
Groups of neurons started becoming attuned to one another until they were firing in rhythm. "It happened entirely on its own," says Markram. "Spontaneously." Insights like these are absolutly amazing. It's all such facinating research, but I can help feel a twinge of sorrow for the poor thing.
the main purpose of the artificial brain, say its creators, is to make new types of experiments possible. For example, what happens when damage is inflicted on certain types of cells whose function still isn't determined? How many cells can be switched off until the behavior of the surviving cells around them becomes erratic, or the entire circuit breaks down? The poor thing is just circuits and reactions, I know, but I feel sorry that it's literally being torn apart and rebuilt all the time. It's odd, I don't feel this way in similar experiments with real mice; I guess I have a soft spot for computers...
Who needs a multi-verse explaination when it suffices to explain a blackhole as vast swaths of time/space condensed to an ultra-hyperfine, darn-near-singular point? That's what I had always thought they were, anyways.
Who knows, maybe a black hole is just an area approaching infinity, shrinking all that comes to the area with it. Why not? And Hawking's Radiation naturally permeates all of the universe but remains unobservable as it's particles are so large that it would fit many solar systems in it's space, but shrinks down at a black hole to a (weakly) observable radiation. It's not as if something that large would be identifiable; it would be discounted to an observation of the basic state of the universe. Our universe is only our observable universe; all this multi-verse and worm-hole stuff isn't any more real science than my silly-sized particle, just imaginative speculation.
I wanna change, but I probably spend more time playing games (on XP, not going for Vista, until Direct x10 is near standard) than anything else. This article is obviously geared towards different priorities, but there are reasons (if very few for a certain one) for each OS.
I would be interested in switching to some form of Linux on my work-priority Tablet PC. Are there any flavors that support tablet-laptop hybrids atleast as well as XP tablet edition?
"If passed, today's bill would set new rates at 7.5 percent of the webcaster's revenue -- the same rate paid by satellite radio." My first question would be "what were the rates/pay scheme before this whole mess with CRB's decision was imposed?" Are we really seeing a good decision, or are we seeing an attempt to dupe people into seeing a good decision while still getting some of the increase those who convinced the CRB, wanted to see?
Looks like America ranks [PDF warning]17th out of 159 with a rating of 7.1. To clarify, that means they are ~the 17th least corrupt government as of 2005, one step ahead of France and one behind Germany.
Well, I for one am still impressed by these fancy tricks. Back in the day, the only way to do this level of incremental scaling the power of the CPU was to design a new one. Someone once said compound interest is the most powerful force in the Univers. This maybe just an Intel marketing ploy, but it does reflect the relativly powerful scaling they can do with just compounding a dual-core design with less effort than ever before.
Still, It is 20 light years away which makes any reasonable kind of controlling it impossible. It would have to be artificial intelligence surveying, which means we're not getting anything out of it beyond what we put in. But, the signal is already present, here on Earth, in the of observable phenomenons. Perhaps in less time than it would take for the probe to reach it's destination and send back it's information, we could have already developed methods of reading and interpreting these signals, much as we do today but even more precise and detailed. It might be that we could do our surveying here on Earth, with data that is only 20 light years older than when recieved it rather than..um insert-math-formula-here.
I'm all for space exploration and if a human habitable planet (or even lunar-like conditions) were found to be present, I would certainly advocate sending us there. But just for a survey, I think we can stick to LEO.
It's 41 days out of date, but The Yamal's last know position is here. But it would seem odd to post up-to-date information on the position of commercial ships for everyone to read on the internet.
My point in calling it 'speculative fiction' was not say it is impossible, but rather that it is not well supported. I saw nothing in that article that would convince me that the authors had any more of an idea what they were talking about than the people who claim it is safe. I did not set out to prove your document false (perhaps my pebble bed rant got away from my point, though.) My point was that the document was heavily skewed in favor of those that paid for its publication (Greenpeace.) I used the 100.000 km^2 as an example of that: it was deliberatly written in a way that is ment to imply a greater impact than it has. I called them fear mongers because they tell half truths, put forth speculation and hyperbole rather than objective scientific and engineering analysis to convince people. They simply didn't have convincing evidence; all I found was a lot of speculation and vague references to other works that (from what I could see) were mostly general conceptions of how the reactors worked. Feel free to look through the source more thoughrouly and show me otherwise.
The floating nuclear plant design is the same design as has been used on atomic icebreakers. It is a proven, reliable, and even simple design. All concerns of pebble bed nuclear reactors (which the floating plant is not one of) are based purely on speculative fiction. Reading your pdf, it is clear to me that any disaster they describe would require an unbelievable series of events, in which not only would the pebbles themselves have to fail, but the containment would have to fail and a separate oxygen explosion would have to occure. All of these events would have to occure within a period of time before any one of them are addressed by the technicians.
Skimming through a variety of other claims in this release paper makes it all the more clear what it is: pure and simple fear mongering. They use figures unecessarily formatted like 100.000 km^2 instead of 100 km^2 (no, it is not european, they use ',' everywhere it is appropriate.) Furthermore, their use of sources (not the author references of pg 4, but the sources on pg 45) is laughable; while adequate sources are provided in detailing the working of the reactors, very little if any is provided backing their claims of safety issues.
Greenpeace is a fear mongering organization. If these documents don't show it, their commercials do.
True, if you consider only radiating alpha particles stable, then yes Uranium is less a problem than the eventual transuranic waste product. The Nuclear reactor has a good handle on their waste. They store on site, which for the most part works fine. For the waste they do need to transport to a geologically secure burial site, such as Yucca Mt., they have highly fortified caskets (I'll leave you to read the specifications; they can be found [warning.pdf] here.) 1,300 successful transports in the last year and never a contaminating accident. Coal derived uranium, however? It spews forth into the air as a part of the ash. You are right, it is less dangerous than the transuranic waste. However, you are not breathing in the transuranic waste.
Wide spread contamination at Three Mile Island? You must be joking. The only thing deemed no longer fit for human habitation was TMI station 2. The location was secured, no contamination outside the station; hell, they still use TMI-1! Chernobyl was a disaster, no doubt about it. But you would be out of your mind to compare that generation of Russian garbage against the up and coming Gen IV. The Gen. IV series will be designed for more than just maximum reprocessing: they will be the safer than any before and will even produce hydrogen onsite from the output steam (solving one of the big problems that prevents hydrogen from being a clean fuel.) Now, if you want to talk contamination consider this: the average 1,000 MW coal-burning power plant dumps about 5.2 tons of uranium and 12.8 tons of thorium, trapped in the coal it burns, per year! Nuclear power is a high risk, but low probability venture; your alternatives (outside hydro, solar, and geo) are going to be near polar opposites: high continual yield, low risk (of a major, concentrated incident.) I'll choose nuclear over coal, oil, or natural gas anyday (I live down wind and in "range" of one, no less.) Hydro, geo, and solar are all nice, but when you need unmatched yield; it's nuclear all the way. 80% of France's energy comes from nuclear power. Have you ever heard of the French Chernobyl? Of course not, that's because there neve has been one. Nuclear power is safe, effective, and will be the power of the future.
This guy was big. His name is also associated with a ridge under the arctic ocean and a crater on the moon, as well as a gold medal prize annually given out to two outstanding scientists and apparently an additional, separate award program. His father, incidently, was a fisherman.
Slashdot Mirror
Only 2994 days until we reach the closest mission path point to Pluto! As official decorate-for-the-holidays time manager for Sears, I have a special talent for knowing when to begin reminding people of important events so I declare the countdown to Pluto to be on! We'll start laying out the plastic globes in 2010...
As I understand it, the Greenpeace fud was about how Apple was terribly bad for the environment, not that they just had room for improvement. The EPA results showed that Apple is no worse that the rest of the machines, as many of their products recieved silver and none of any company recieved higher. The fud was in Greenpeace's hyperbole, as usual.
That is to say, it's like saying Al Gore is worse for the environment than anybody else just because his home is inefficient and doesn't use solar. Because Al Gore later had the upgrades done and solar installed, does not mean he is or was worse than most other people for the environment; just that he, like apple, had (has) room for improvement.
Humorless? Ouch...
I freely admit it was a (very) poor joke; I guess I shouldn't have relied on my sig to signal it was a joke. That or fewer people know what 'gravitas' is than I thought.
Um, if I remember correctly, changing your sig appears "retroactivly" on previous posts because the system doesn't save what it doesn't need; it just regenerates your post by mixing the text in with the basic scheme and your profile's sig whenever someone wants to look at a posting.
There exists a line. A line between everyday villainy and cartoonish supervillainy. The SoundExchange didn't just cross that line, they picked it up and moved it up with them. This is just in the realm of the unbelievable now.
But then we'll go too far, we'll continue to make longer and longer nanotubes, until one day we will make a nanotube so long it will destroy us all!
What's so difficult to read? Different colors? Anyways, it basically says that some lawyers in new York are in an ongoing battle with the RIAA (via UMG) and a recent "expert" is being questioned on the grounds that they did not meet a certain standard to an expert witnesses, set forth by case precidence. It also states that Slashdot and Groklaw participated in formulating questions asked of the 'expert' as well as analysis of it's response.
What should have been a quote from a specific part of the article, is actually summarized in a way that indicates it was an end result. The actual article affords Vista the victory. But, maybe the article should have stopped at a tie, it seems Vista won because Mac OS has less standard acceptance and because Greenpeace declaired PC's to be more green than Macs.
For more information on the Blue Brain Project which appears to be the same, or atleast a strikingly similar project but from switzerland, click...err, that link I just placed! Here also is a good article to learn more about blue brain. It seems much more detailed than the BBC's snippit.
Groups of neurons started becoming attuned to one another until they were firing in rhythm. "It happened entirely on its own," says Markram. "Spontaneously." Insights like these are absolutly amazing. It's all such facinating research, but I can help feel a twinge of sorrow for the poor thing. the main purpose of the artificial brain, say its creators, is to make new types of experiments possible. For example, what happens when damage is inflicted on certain types of cells whose function still isn't determined? How many cells can be switched off until the behavior of the surviving cells around them becomes erratic, or the entire circuit breaks down? The poor thing is just circuits and reactions, I know, but I feel sorry that it's literally being torn apart and rebuilt all the time. It's odd, I don't feel this way in similar experiments with real mice; I guess I have a soft spot for computers...
Bad idea. I fear the consequences of allowing the two most dense entities in the universe to cross paths:
Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
Who needs a multi-verse explaination when it suffices to explain a blackhole as vast swaths of time/space condensed to an ultra-hyperfine, darn-near-singular point? That's what I had always thought they were, anyways.
Who knows, maybe a black hole is just an area approaching infinity, shrinking all that comes to the area with it. Why not? And Hawking's Radiation naturally permeates all of the universe but remains unobservable as it's particles are so large that it would fit many solar systems in it's space, but shrinks down at a black hole to a (weakly) observable radiation. It's not as if something that large would be identifiable; it would be discounted to an observation of the basic state of the universe. Our universe is only our observable universe; all this multi-verse and worm-hole stuff isn't any more real science than my silly-sized particle, just imaginative speculation.
iaasoc minitrue dayorder file ref /. equal crimethink, doubleplus ungood! /. misprint and unupsub iaasoc! miniluv rectify /. full doubleplus good!
I wanna change, but I probably spend more time playing games (on XP, not going for Vista, until Direct x10 is near standard) than anything else. This article is obviously geared towards different priorities, but there are reasons (if very few for a certain one) for each OS.
I would be interested in switching to some form of Linux on my work-priority Tablet PC. Are there any flavors that support tablet-laptop hybrids atleast as well as XP tablet edition?
Looks like America ranks [PDF warning]17th out of 159 with a rating of 7.1. To clarify, that means they are ~the 17th least corrupt government as of 2005, one step ahead of France and one behind Germany.
Well, I for one am still impressed by these fancy tricks. Back in the day, the only way to do this level of incremental scaling the power of the CPU was to design a new one. Someone once said compound interest is the most powerful force in the Univers. This maybe just an Intel marketing ploy, but it does reflect the relativly powerful scaling they can do with just compounding a dual-core design with less effort than ever before.
Well, I never was very good at math...
Still, It is 20 light years away which makes any reasonable kind of controlling it impossible. It would have to be artificial intelligence surveying, which means we're not getting anything out of it beyond what we put in. But, the signal is already present, here on Earth, in the of observable phenomenons. Perhaps in less time than it would take for the probe to reach it's destination and send back it's information, we could have already developed methods of reading and interpreting these signals, much as we do today but even more precise and detailed. It might be that we could do our surveying here on Earth, with data that is only 20 light years older than when recieved it rather than..um insert-math-formula-here.
I'm all for space exploration and if a human habitable planet (or even lunar-like conditions) were found to be present, I would certainly advocate sending us there. But just for a survey, I think we can stick to LEO.
Well, I guess I'll have to settle for non-verbal research...*Charges up the Probulator*
But then our probe's signal transmitter would also be 20 light years away =(
Whatever leaves our PoV, ceases to be rendered. That, or the experiment's wrong. But were's the fun in that?
It's 41 days out of date, but The Yamal's last know position is here. But it would seem odd to post up-to-date information on the position of commercial ships for everyone to read on the internet.
My point in calling it 'speculative fiction' was not say it is impossible, but rather that it is not well supported. I saw nothing in that article that would convince me that the authors had any more of an idea what they were talking about than the people who claim it is safe. I did not set out to prove your document false (perhaps my pebble bed rant got away from my point, though.) My point was that the document was heavily skewed in favor of those that paid for its publication (Greenpeace.) I used the 100.000 km^2 as an example of that: it was deliberatly written in a way that is ment to imply a greater impact than it has. I called them fear mongers because they tell half truths, put forth speculation and hyperbole rather than objective scientific and engineering analysis to convince people. They simply didn't have convincing evidence; all I found was a lot of speculation and vague references to other works that (from what I could see) were mostly general conceptions of how the reactors worked. Feel free to look through the source more thoughrouly and show me otherwise.
The floating nuclear plant design is the same design as has been used on atomic icebreakers. It is a proven, reliable, and even simple design. All concerns of pebble bed nuclear reactors (which the floating plant is not one of) are based purely on speculative fiction. Reading your pdf, it is clear to me that any disaster they describe would require an unbelievable series of events, in which not only would the pebbles themselves have to fail, but the containment would have to fail and a separate oxygen explosion would have to occure. All of these events would have to occure within a period of time before any one of them are addressed by the technicians.
Skimming through a variety of other claims in this release paper makes it all the more clear what it is: pure and simple fear mongering. They use figures unecessarily formatted like 100.000 km^2 instead of 100 km^2 (no, it is not european, they use ',' everywhere it is appropriate.) Furthermore, their use of sources (not the author references of pg 4, but the sources on pg 45) is laughable; while adequate sources are provided in detailing the working of the reactors, very little if any is provided backing their claims of safety issues.
Greenpeace is a fear mongering organization. If these documents don't show it, their commercials do.
True, if you consider only radiating alpha particles stable, then yes Uranium is less a problem than the eventual transuranic waste product. The Nuclear reactor has a good handle on their waste. They store on site, which for the most part works fine. For the waste they do need to transport to a geologically secure burial site, such as Yucca Mt., they have highly fortified caskets (I'll leave you to read the specifications; they can be found [warning .pdf] here.) 1,300 successful transports in the last year and never a contaminating accident. Coal derived uranium, however? It spews forth into the air as a part of the ash. You are right, it is less dangerous than the transuranic waste. However, you are not breathing in the transuranic waste.
Wide spread contamination at Three Mile Island? You must be joking. The only thing deemed no longer fit for human habitation was TMI station 2. The location was secured, no contamination outside the station; hell, they still use TMI-1! Chernobyl was a disaster, no doubt about it. But you would be out of your mind to compare that generation of Russian garbage against the up and coming Gen IV. The Gen. IV series will be designed for more than just maximum reprocessing: they will be the safer than any before and will even produce hydrogen onsite from the output steam (solving one of the big problems that prevents hydrogen from being a clean fuel.) Now, if you want to talk contamination consider this: the average 1,000 MW coal-burning power plant dumps about 5.2 tons of uranium and 12.8 tons of thorium, trapped in the coal it burns, per year! Nuclear power is a high risk, but low probability venture; your alternatives (outside hydro, solar, and geo) are going to be near polar opposites: high continual yield, low risk (of a major, concentrated incident.) I'll choose nuclear over coal, oil, or natural gas anyday (I live down wind and in "range" of one, no less.) Hydro, geo, and solar are all nice, but when you need unmatched yield; it's nuclear all the way. 80% of France's energy comes from nuclear power. Have you ever heard of the French Chernobyl? Of course not, that's because there neve has been one. Nuclear power is safe, effective, and will be the power of the future.
This guy was big. His name is also associated with a ridge under the arctic ocean and a crater on the moon, as well as a gold medal prize annually given out to two outstanding scientists and apparently an additional, separate award program. His father, incidently, was a fisherman.