Bill Gates has better name recognition because a) he was the richest man in the world for 10 years straight and b) he was the co-founder and CEO of the company that made the operating system that everybody and their momma used on pretty much any computer they got to use.
He's not famous because he's a philanthropist, he's a philanthropist because he's astronomically rich and famous.
I heard an anecdote about the development of the original Mac OS calculator program in the 1980s. Some kid made it all, but everytime he'd show the result to Jobs, Jobs would tell him to change something about the design. This went back and forth until the programmer made a sort of parameters editor so that Jobs himself could fine tune the design of the calculator. I kind of suck at telling anecdotes but I can't be arsed to google for it.
Wow, so instead of being a broke loner who lives in his mother's basement, it's a one-dimensional workaholic who fills his downtime with only one thing. Yeah, this is so unequivocally better.
There's already research out there involving "cloning" tissues and organs of your body. I think they can reconstruct some of what makes a bladder and transplant it on you.
But.. but.. improving humanity genetically = eugenism = nazi = evil! It's inherent, you can't even screen foetuses for genetic defects without bringing dystopian technofascism into power. If science fiction warns us against it, there must be a reason!
Yeah sure, or they could breathe lead and drink plutonium, I mean what do you know!
Or maybe possibly these guys have a better idea than you do about what seems even remotely plausible or even likely and they're taking their shot at it?
So if I got this right from TFA, they can tell there are oceans by how the amount of blue light changes? Doesn't it assume that the planet in question has large continents? I mean if the planet was pure ocean on the surface, then it'd always be a uniform display of blue. So basically what they do is detect different patches of colour, and if they find blue patches in the mix they'll assume they're oceans, am I right?
Also, using this technique of variation of light, couldn't they build a very crude longitudinal colour map of the planet? I mean, it would probably look like taking a map of Earth, squishing it to a height of 1 pixel in Photoshop and stretching it back, but they could get something like that, right?
Right, but I read somewhere just today (from some other link or maybe TFA) that solar panels only derive something like 20% of the energy into electricity and the rest remains as heat, just like when you have dark materials. So that means that "free" electricity aside, putting these dark solar panels on roof tops are no better than just have more or less dark rooftops, meaning that besides the gained electricity it still has a negative effect (or at least a lack of positive effect) on the city's atmospheric heat.
In other words, a white city with a nuclear power plant is cooler than a city covered with solar panels, which itself might actually be warmer than a regular city. So it's still really two separate fairly issues, area use aside.
True, even if it's all deterministic, our tought processes and such are so complex that it's about as relevant as the difference between pseudo-random number generators and entropy pool-based random number generators, in the end they're still indistinguishably random looking, determinism or not.
It's is SO going into an iPhone in 2 or 3 years. From that point on consider this : people use the motion sensor to stabilise the image, which will be pretty cool, and secondly, people start making a whole bunch of iPhone apps to make all sorts of "pranks".
Hard to tell what they'll come up with but you just know that kids will have a field day with that. And by day I mean decade.
The thing is, cities are all white eithers, meaning even if they're not coal-black, they still could be brighter, and increasing a city's global albedo can change a lot, which is the point of this whole thing.
I know you're taking the piss, but just for the sake of the argument, that would make the oceans very quickly dark in even shallow depths, and thus kill all sea life.
That's two very different problems you mixed together. Solar panels still absorb a lot of heat. You'd be better off painting everything white and using nuclear power plants.
By the way, couldn't that be an anti-solar energy argument, that they require vast dark heat-absorbent surfaces to be in the sun and that therefore they absorb a lot of heat from the Sun instead of bouncing it back into space as lighter surfaces would?
It's too late in the sense that stopping emitting gases right now won't stop the warming process anytime soon. However with geoengineering (such as painting white) we can counter the effects right now.
You may be right on a certain level, but that explanation fails to help us.
Indeed, it's pointless because everything is "just physics". Your computer is just physics but that won't tell you how to do what you want to do with it, and so on.
People keep devaluating things all the time by looking at them at too low a level, for example "our brains are just chemistry", "we are just a bunch of carbonated molecules", but that's irrelevant. For example, musical in digital form is just a bunch of values that describe a sound wave, which themselves are just a bunch of 0 and 1's, which themselves are just holes burnt in a layer of material, which itself is just a bunch of molecules, which themselves are just a bunch of atoms, but none of that, be it looking at the raw wave values or looking at the atoms that make up the CD will tell you anything about the difference between some Celine Dion music or some Beethoven. Because that's just looking at things at the wrong level. In the case of music for example, we process it at a much higher level than just sound waves, we analyse it, break it down, have it make connections with memories and emotions, provoke thoughts, and so on... The same goes with our meatbag bodies, or our chemical network brain, or pixelated virtual realities.
Not to mention that nothing proves our brains are purely deterministic (i.e. some quantum physics may be involved).
I'm afraid you missed my points and instead jumped to your talking points. Which is typical really, your arguing style is the same as the libertarian arguing style, which is, the world would be an unequivocally and uniformly better place if everything I don't agree with/am not part of came to disappear.
Theists, democrats, republicans, Microsoft, they all have to go. People like you think in a very manichean way, and seem utterly unable to see any redeeming qualities in what you painted dark, nor realise that you painted white isn't all that great either.
You're obsessed with seeing in religion all the bad things you can see in it, wars, abuses of power, indoctrinment, but yet are unable to see how they can benefit communities, how they can have a positive moral influence, how faith can help people accomplish things, how religious charities help, and so on.
Instead, and this is the fun part, you chose to use strawman arguments. I said religion can be beneficial to a community, you argued that you can have a community without religion. You don't prove that something isn't beneficial by arguing that it's not absolutely necessary. That's as if I said that eating meat is great for your health and you argued you can be in great shape without eating any meat. Likewise, while I'm looking at the positive aspects of religion, you attempt to counter them by showing what you think is the worst. You're not showing that there are no great aspects, you're only focusing on the negative aspects.
Which proves my point that you're unable to see any good in what you deemed bad. Which makes you an asshat.
I agree, and that's what's so annoying about hearing my fellow atheists talking about how all religion is evil, cause that's utter bullshit. The mythology may be bogus, the Catholic priests may be worse paedophiles than school teachers, religion may have played nasty roles throughout history, but the everyday reality of a community in which religion is important is actually pretty good.
Religious events are occasions for people in the community to get together, members of the lower clergy have great social functions within the community, the values and philosophies preached are mostly all great for people to follow, they have great role models to make us look up to (no one in their right mind would argue that that Jesus guy isn't a great role model, I'm pretty sure one of the reasons for the success of Christianity has to do with Jesus being the perfect role model), and they'll marry or bury you better than anyone else.
Cults are different in that they're not there to help you or make your community a better place, they're there for their own profit, and that's what makes a world of difference between Scientology and Islam, Judaism or Christianity.
Slashdot Mirror
No link, as for obvious reasons the Navy is not keen on talking about the operating frequencies of its gear
From there : "Operating frequency is 3 kHz with a peak frequency of 192 kHz."
Bill Gates has better name recognition because a) he was the richest man in the world for 10 years straight and b) he was the co-founder and CEO of the company that made the operating system that everybody and their momma used on pretty much any computer they got to use.
He's not famous because he's a philanthropist, he's a philanthropist because he's astronomically rich and famous.
I heard an anecdote about the development of the original Mac OS calculator program in the 1980s. Some kid made it all, but everytime he'd show the result to Jobs, Jobs would tell him to change something about the design. This went back and forth until the programmer made a sort of parameters editor so that Jobs himself could fine tune the design of the calculator. I kind of suck at telling anecdotes but I can't be arsed to google for it.
Wow, so instead of being a broke loner who lives in his mother's basement, it's a one-dimensional workaholic who fills his downtime with only one thing. Yeah, this is so unequivocally better.
There's already research out there involving "cloning" tissues and organs of your body. I think they can reconstruct some of what makes a bladder and transplant it on you.
Yeah, sure, because anyone just knows that we'll rush to make bizarre experiments on humans.
Here's a reality check : we're not even cloning humans and we get our wads in a bunch about stem cell research on embryos.
IIT : Sci-fi fans who take what they read a bit too seriously.
But.. but.. improving humanity genetically = eugenism = nazi = evil! It's inherent, you can't even screen foetuses for genetic defects without bringing dystopian technofascism into power. If science fiction warns us against it, there must be a reason!
Yeah sure, or they could breathe lead and drink plutonium, I mean what do you know!
Or maybe possibly these guys have a better idea than you do about what seems even remotely plausible or even likely and they're taking their shot at it?
So if I got this right from TFA, they can tell there are oceans by how the amount of blue light changes? Doesn't it assume that the planet in question has large continents? I mean if the planet was pure ocean on the surface, then it'd always be a uniform display of blue. So basically what they do is detect different patches of colour, and if they find blue patches in the mix they'll assume they're oceans, am I right?
Also, using this technique of variation of light, couldn't they build a very crude longitudinal colour map of the planet? I mean, it would probably look like taking a map of Earth, squishing it to a height of 1 pixel in Photoshop and stretching it back, but they could get something like that, right?
Right, but I read somewhere just today (from some other link or maybe TFA) that solar panels only derive something like 20% of the energy into electricity and the rest remains as heat, just like when you have dark materials. So that means that "free" electricity aside, putting these dark solar panels on roof tops are no better than just have more or less dark rooftops, meaning that besides the gained electricity it still has a negative effect (or at least a lack of positive effect) on the city's atmospheric heat.
In other words, a white city with a nuclear power plant is cooler than a city covered with solar panels, which itself might actually be warmer than a regular city. So it's still really two separate fairly issues, area use aside.
True, even if it's all deterministic, our tought processes and such are so complex that it's about as relevant as the difference between pseudo-random number generators and entropy pool-based random number generators, in the end they're still indistinguishably random looking, determinism or not.
It's is SO going into an iPhone in 2 or 3 years. From that point on consider this : people use the motion sensor to stabilise the image, which will be pretty cool, and secondly, people start making a whole bunch of iPhone apps to make all sorts of "pranks".
Hard to tell what they'll come up with but you just know that kids will have a field day with that. And by day I mean decade.
The thing is, cities are all white eithers, meaning even if they're not coal-black, they still could be brighter, and increasing a city's global albedo can change a lot, which is the point of this whole thing.
Last time I checked, solar panels were pretty damn dark. That means they won't radiate much power back into space, meaning the heat stays with us.
And then, power generation is a whole different problem (although the two may interact), and solar power is hardly the only solution.
I know you're taking the piss, but just for the sake of the argument, that would make the oceans very quickly dark in even shallow depths, and thus kill all sea life.
That's two very different problems you mixed together. Solar panels still absorb a lot of heat. You'd be better off painting everything white and using nuclear power plants.
By the way, couldn't that be an anti-solar energy argument, that they require vast dark heat-absorbent surfaces to be in the sun and that therefore they absorb a lot of heat from the Sun instead of bouncing it back into space as lighter surfaces would?
That wouldn't directly help, it'd still absorb a lot of heat, so free electricity aside, a white rooftop would still be better for cooling down.
It's too late in the sense that stopping emitting gases right now won't stop the warming process anytime soon. However with geoengineering (such as painting white) we can counter the effects right now.
Everybody grab a spray can, time to save the world!
Yes, grab a spray can! The only way we're gonna save the planet and its atmosphere is by using tons of aerosol paint!
Aerosols are good for the ozone layer, amirite?
You may be right on a certain level, but that explanation fails to help us.
Indeed, it's pointless because everything is "just physics". Your computer is just physics but that won't tell you how to do what you want to do with it, and so on.
People keep devaluating things all the time by looking at them at too low a level, for example "our brains are just chemistry", "we are just a bunch of carbonated molecules", but that's irrelevant. For example, musical in digital form is just a bunch of values that describe a sound wave, which themselves are just a bunch of 0 and 1's, which themselves are just holes burnt in a layer of material, which itself is just a bunch of molecules, which themselves are just a bunch of atoms, but none of that, be it looking at the raw wave values or looking at the atoms that make up the CD will tell you anything about the difference between some Celine Dion music or some Beethoven. Because that's just looking at things at the wrong level. In the case of music for example, we process it at a much higher level than just sound waves, we analyse it, break it down, have it make connections with memories and emotions, provoke thoughts, and so on... The same goes with our meatbag bodies, or our chemical network brain, or pixelated virtual realities.
Not to mention that nothing proves our brains are purely deterministic (i.e. some quantum physics may be involved).
Does it include (non-deterministic) quantum physics?
An unspoken rule of arguing : never make a claim that can be disproven with a mere anecdote.
In other news, I know lots of liberals who are very happy with their lives!
I'm afraid you missed my points and instead jumped to your talking points. Which is typical really, your arguing style is the same as the libertarian arguing style, which is, the world would be an unequivocally and uniformly better place if everything I don't agree with/am not part of came to disappear.
Theists, democrats, republicans, Microsoft, they all have to go. People like you think in a very manichean way, and seem utterly unable to see any redeeming qualities in what you painted dark, nor realise that you painted white isn't all that great either.
You're obsessed with seeing in religion all the bad things you can see in it, wars, abuses of power, indoctrinment, but yet are unable to see how they can benefit communities, how they can have a positive moral influence, how faith can help people accomplish things, how religious charities help, and so on.
Instead, and this is the fun part, you chose to use strawman arguments. I said religion can be beneficial to a community, you argued that you can have a community without religion. You don't prove that something isn't beneficial by arguing that it's not absolutely necessary. That's as if I said that eating meat is great for your health and you argued you can be in great shape without eating any meat. Likewise, while I'm looking at the positive aspects of religion, you attempt to counter them by showing what you think is the worst. You're not showing that there are no great aspects, you're only focusing on the negative aspects.
Which proves my point that you're unable to see any good in what you deemed bad. Which makes you an asshat.
I agree, and that's what's so annoying about hearing my fellow atheists talking about how all religion is evil, cause that's utter bullshit. The mythology may be bogus, the Catholic priests may be worse paedophiles than school teachers, religion may have played nasty roles throughout history, but the everyday reality of a community in which religion is important is actually pretty good.
Religious events are occasions for people in the community to get together, members of the lower clergy have great social functions within the community, the values and philosophies preached are mostly all great for people to follow, they have great role models to make us look up to (no one in their right mind would argue that that Jesus guy isn't a great role model, I'm pretty sure one of the reasons for the success of Christianity has to do with Jesus being the perfect role model), and they'll marry or bury you better than anyone else.
Cults are different in that they're not there to help you or make your community a better place, they're there for their own profit, and that's what makes a world of difference between Scientology and Islam, Judaism or Christianity.