The best example was Galileo, where the high gain antenna failed to deploy properly and new compression algorithms were uploaded to get the most out of the low gain antenna.
Actually the best example is probably Cassini, which was launched without any viable software in the orbiter at all. Because everybody knew there were going to be seven years of coasting time to Saturn and there was no point at all in spending a whole lot of effort on writing software before the launch. Software is something you can upload later.
I find it ironic that NASA would resort to this type if ploy for money. We don't have the money to keep you safe so we aren't going to! if we had more money we could protect you. But unfortunately our budget shortfalls will result in your doom and demise.
Why do you find that "ironic"? NASA does whatever congress decides. Congress decides that they don't want NASA to do any kind of science but that they should throw their budget at some kind of rewarmed Apollo program. NASA says "fine, we do what we're being paid for, you hold the purse strings, but the public expects certain things from us and they should at least be informed what services we're NOT providing because their elected officials do not deem them important enough".
If perchance some kind of earth-threatening asteroid shows up and the statements are "we could have done something about it if we had known about it ten years earlier" then YOU are going to wail how NASA has been sitting on their hands and wasting their money on all kinda of crap for all these decades.
This way, at least, the cards are on the table: "You, taxpayer, elect the congress-critters that decide that we shouldn't undertake this (and many other) kind/s of study." You choose.
In the end, NASA is in the employ of you, the people. But it gets its directions from Congress. And where the interests of Congress are in conflict (or even just may be in conflict) with the interests of the people, I'd say NASA is obligated to keep those who foot the bill informed of what those who give the commands have decided should/n't be done.
NASA, as a facility for transferring federal money to specific congressional districts, is committed to the wrong sort of social pattern. After all, its very survival requires it to support any pork-barrel scheme that benefits it... or at least, to remain mute on a subject that no one should remain mute on. And so NASA cannot seriously advocate for free-market social patterns, as would be needed to bring broadband to the masses you quietly scream your love for.
Every time I think I've seenthe dumbest thing ever said about NASA, someone proves me wrong.
NASA is an institution of the executive branch of the federal government. No different from, say, the army. Would it ever occur to complain how the army isn't clamoring for high-speed internet in rural areas? I hope not, because that is quite frankly not the army's job. "The army" is a bunch of guys that the government pays to do certain jobs for them. They have a certain small leeway in how to do the jobs, but that's it. And NASA is no different.
Any one soldier, any one officer, any one platoon, any one small or large group of members of the army may or may not have any one opinion on broadband internet and its importance in the grand scheme of things. So may any one (or any group of) NASA employees. But they all do this on their own dime, in their private time. Because their job is to do whatever the White House tells them to do within the limits of choice of operational strategies, technological engagement, scheduling, budgeting, and assumption of risk granted to them. That's it.
What went wrong? The direct cause of rolling blackouts is regulated electric prices. If it's not cost effective for utility companies to build new capacity, they won't bother.
This is the direct, diametrical opposite of truth. I.e. a lie.
Enron's ability to manipulate California's energy system into the ground was the result of California deregulating the energy industry. In any other state, the state government would have had the ability to interfere where corrupt business practices start costing human lives. But because of the mentally retarded like yourself, California didn't have that ability any more.
For thos of you out there who really didn't follow the whole Enron thing, there's a documentary out there called "Enron, the smartest guys in the room". It can be found through a number of well-seeded torrents, if nothing else.
but I have to wonder why they didn't send it up there with the ability to plane long and short treks?
Because they were originally intended to last for 90 days. There were no "long treks" planned. People assumed that maybe they'd survive a teensy bit beyond the 90 day mark and there was pretty wild celebration (for a bunch of nerds) at the 100-day mark because people thought it was really cool. Now, a thousand+ days later, these little guys are still going strong.
This kind of engineering quality is the reason why JPL is the only organization on the planet that has ever sent enything past Mars orbit. They're considerably more expensive as just farming out your hardware to Lockheed (ahem), but instead of crashing into things they actually land and work properly.
Wish I had some mod points to push this above the parent!
The one interesting thing I've read that I don't quite understand is how evolution doesn't seem to be a gradual process. Rather it comes in spurts which seems to imply that mutation isn't completely random.
A mutation either happens or it doesn't. It is by definition a stepwise process, not a gradual one.
What you find in the fossil record is not the stepwise occurance of mutations, though. It is the stepwise occurance of selective pressure. In a stable environment, the biosphere will diversify - whatever doesn't kill something will sooner or later develop and the maximum of complexity allowd bythe energy envelope of the niche will be achieved. THEN when a change in the environment occurs (some plain gets flooded or some such - yes, that includes asteroids and such) you will "suddenly" find a shift in the fossil record towards particular traits -- because those traits are the ones that allowed the survivors of the shift in selective pressure not to be selected against.
There's all kinds of hair colors out there. If something happens tomorrow that'll kill all people except those with red hair, you will find that "there was this sudden shift towards red-hairedness in the early 21st century". This will not mean that there's suddenly been a lot of mutations leading to red hair, though.
Let's look at the numbers of teen pregnancies right now, shall we? It is the other side of the equasion you are presenting, after all.
No, it is not. To the contrary.
When I was sixteen, my mother made sure that there were condoms in the house and that I knew where they were. Of course that wasn't in the US. And of course where I come from teen pregnancy is an issue that people mostly read about on the internet, not something that happens a whole lot to real people.
As long as people like you pretend that folks need to be treated like they cannot be held responsible for themselves, people will act irresponsibly. Allow them to take responsibility and they will gladly accept it -- and be much better people for it.
They just need to adapt. The world will change whether or not they agree; the only difference is whether they are dragged kicking and screaming into a new era, as the RIAA was, or whether they embrace change and try to find a new niche.
Uh -- have you been living under a rock? Britannica online was about the first (and it still the IMHO) decent online encyclopedia. It is still the point at which I start any serious dig into a topic I'm not familiar with.
Not only is Britannica adapting, if anything they're the folks who forced the whole "Encyclopedia segment" to adapt by blazing the trail onto the internet. They were online years before anybody ever thought of Wikipedia. I have no idea whether they're economically healthy - but if any online encyclopedia is, they deserve to be it.
Call Cogent up and ask how much it is for a 10GB/sec connection.
Whoa there -- either we're living in entirely different worlds or there's a real ambiguity in the term "bandwidth" here. Where I come from, BW was never measured in "per second" or any such thing. A number like "GB/s" would have been called "throughput". When we used the term "bandwidth" it meant something like the aggregate amount of data shipped in or out over the course of a month. In essence the integral over the number you're quoting.
I've never dealt with a company that put limits on the amount of data I can move around "per second" or some such -- that's home-broadband thinking. Or has the business changed so much that businesses are now running their own servers in their own buildings and are paying for the connection from there to the trunk? I don't know about Wikimedia, but most "popular websites" aren't in the business of running hardware - they're in the business of running a business.
Is this another of those fabled "paradigm shifts" of the last couple years?
No offense, but if your bandwidth is costing you tens of thousands of dollars, you're doing something wrong.
No offense, but get back to us when you leave the minor leagues and work on real corporate web sites for the Fortune 50. You're smoking crack if you think they don't spend tens of thousands per month on bandwidth.
Re-read his comment: he never claimed that they don't spend tens of thousands of dollars on bandwidth. He said they're doing something wrong when they spend tens of thousands of dollars on bandwidth.
Where and how you procure bandwidth is a business decision, and business folks aren't exactly the brightest of folks when it comes to technology. Yes, I have worked for an internet company that went through insane amounts of data and yes, they paid dearly for bandwidth and yes, they could easily have gotten the same amount for 1/10th of the price. But the business manager knew someone who swore Rackspace was the bomb and thus Rackspace it was at Rackspace's prices. Never mind that there's a rash of very cheap data centers much closer to the backbone who'll give you unmetered BW for a factor five less than what we paid.
(Of course that "friend" ran a business that relied much more on HW uptime than data throughput and for him Rackspace might have been the right choice. For us, it wasn't.)
I agree with the statement that you're doing something wrong if you're paying tens of thousands of $$ for BW a month. That's just not what it costs.
No, not facts. Propaganda lies. This has been pointed out to you before.
1.) The world appears to be getting warmer
This is a lie. You, ccarson, are a retarded lying pig. The world is getting warmer. Period. There's no "appears" about it and computer models do not figure into it. The annual extent of sea ice around Antarctica has been measured since Shackelton and Scott and the ice has been retreating for the last 100+ years. Every harbor on the planet has been keeping track of the annual high water mark since the British Empire, and it has been rising for 100+ years. There's simply no two ways about it. Global warming is an absolute certainty. It has been an absolute certainty for decades.
2.) Tying a trend to warmer temperatures based on older data from the early 1900's is suspect at best. Good, reliable, accurate scientific equipment that measures the temperature wasn't readily available until recently (late 1900's).
This retarded lie of yours has been squarely disproven before - several times. I'm naming two entirely valid and accurate temperature measurements that go back to the first decade of the 1900s right up there. They have been handed to you before, you have ignored them before. You are unable to refute anything told to you and you insist on re-re-re-re-spewing the same retarded ultra right wing propaganda lies again and again. And again.
There's a reason why holochaust deniers like yourself have no credibility. Because you have openly declared that you do not give a rat's ass about Truth or Reality.
In essence, the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere above a body of water is a function of the temperatures alone and not really related to surface area. It's called "vapor pressure". No matter how much water you draw from your local air, it'll be replaced by evaporation as long as the pertinent temperatures don't change (and as long as there is water to evaporate). This is very basic physics.
Look at it this way: you are transporting the same water from the same starting point to the same end point -- except that you're not using a pipe to do so but instead transport the water through the air in some complex evaporation-transport-condensation dance.
Not just MPL -- I am aware of four different missions that were either destroyed or drastically reduced in functionality (the last one was DART) because a contractor insisted on doing their calculations/modeling/development in imperial units and then flubbed somewhere at a translation to metric at the interface with NASA (twice Lockheed Martin, once OSC, once Boeing).
The abysmal inability of the American Industry to perform a single project in metric units is only one of the reasons why none of them has even the slightest chance of ever getting a man into orbit.
But see - if you just google it like that you get that Avenue-Q movie ("the internet is for porn"). People need to acquire the basic tech-capability of turning off google's "moderately safe search" if they want to get anywhere, and there's nowhere to turn to for them on these critical matters...
... and then what do I do on those one or two days a year when I genuinely need to send an email to the ~40000 email addresses on the registered-users list of my software who have opted-in to receive updates on new developments?
There are a lot of people who have a genuine need to send out large quantities of emails. Mailing lists for example.
Why does everyone just assume an AI will be superior to us in reasoning ability? We have zero idea how an AI will be implemented.
...uh... because that's how we're going to implement it?
Your comment sounds a little like a 17th century guy that says "how do we know that flying machines will fly better than humans?". The answer is that this is how we're going to build them or otherwise there's no point in building them in the first place. A flying machine that doesn't fly wouldn't be worth producing.
We may not know up front whether what we're trying to do is possible, but if it is, then it'll be what we're setting out to do.
If the first attempts are basically emulating a human brain it might be slow and dumb.
Is that how we built flying machines? There may have been prehistoric attempts at emulating birds, but flying really "took off" (sorry for the pun) when folks stopped trying to make "something like a bird" and started making "something that flies". Airplanes are very, very, different from birds in every conceivable respect -- and they are useful exactly because they're different from birds. If all we wanted was another bird, we could get a mommy bird and a daddy bird and let them build a nest and do the whoopy...
In the same sense, if all we wanted was another human, there's a fine, time-tested method for doing that. The whole point of making an artificial intelligence is that we'd like to do something that is NOT already abundant in nature. Something that can do things humans can not. Why else would we want to do it in the first place?
Artificial Intelligence is no where near capable of producing a hamster brain
And you imagine natural intelligence is anywhere superior?
C'mon, my camera has more personality than the freshmen around here. The reason that things like virtual (boy/girl)friends are growing in popularity is because they're actually smarter, funnier, wittier, more colorful than the meat-versions. Given that the average toaster these days is smarter than the average American, I see no reason why the toaster shouldn't have comparable rights.
So why is it that when some feature appears in MacOS it is "borrowed" from (wherever they got it), but when the same feature appears in Windows it is "stolen" from Apple?
As far as I can tell, not one of the things mentioned as allegedly ripped off MacOS x was actually originally designed or produced or introduced by Apple - they were all things that had been... well... "borrowed" from somewhere else. So if apple does it then Apple is merely listening to what the consumers want. But if Windows does it they're somehow ripping off Apple.
I've been following global warming for a long time now doing a lot research on the side for the last couple of years.
No, you haven't. You are a liar. You've been listening to ultra-rightwing propaganda lies and you're happy to parrot them blindly and unreflectedly. That's a difference.
Many have pointed out the utter absurdity of your gibberish. Here's a couple more examples:
2.) Tying a trend to warmer temperatures based on older data from the early 1900's is suspect at best. Good, reliable, accurate scientific equipment that measures the temperature wasn't readily available until recently (late 1900's)
Shackleton recorded the annual extent of sea ice around Antarctica. We've been doing this for close to 100 years now. This IS a measurement of global temperatures.
Every harbor in the world keeps a record of the annual high-water mark at least since the British Empire. Every harbor in the world has seen the ocean levels rising for at least the last 100 years. This IS a measurement of global temperatures.
Weather related damages to the US agriculture (floods, droughts, hurricanes) have been tracked since Jefferson's time. This IS a measurement of global climate.
I'm an electrical engineer and during my studies in particle physics, I learned that a particles velocity can be affected by magnetic fields.
You might want to call Joe's Diploma Emporium and ask for your money back: magnetic force (and thus acceleration) is always perpendicular to the velocity of a charge. No amount of magnetic fields can increase or decrease the speed of a charged particle (and certainly not an uncharged one).
Jupitor [...]
In all your thorough research, you've never come across the name of this planet in printed form? Even once?
Is it possible that the warmer temperatures that Earth is experiencing are caused by cyclical natural phenomena? What about glaciers in Greenland that have been shrinking for 100 years
Wait - didn't you just tell us not to believe any temperature indicators that are 100 years old?
Were those climate changes, which are no doubt more extreme than what's going on now,
You are so utterly mentally retarded that it hurts my teeth to read your drivel. NEVER in the history of the earth has anything happened that was even a tiny fraction of what we are seeing today. Not only were the ice ages NOT "more extreme", they were peanuts compared to what we see today. We have a pretty decent record of global temperatures for several hundred thousand years and there is no indication anywhere of global temperatures changing on the time-scales of decades or even centuries. Nothing like what we're seeing right now can be found anywhere in the earth's climate record.
I recommend that you refrain from posting about issues you do not have the shimmer of a clue about.
Actually, at 300MeV, I'd wager on getting a fairly decent gamma ray beam.
You lost me there -- by what process? For a z=1 particle at 300MeV/n kinetic energy, the stopping power of dry air is about ~3.1 MeV/(g/cm^2) - so that's pretty much transparent. You don't get much energy loss until you hit someone or something. (For Lung tissue I get ~3.5MeV/(g/cm^2), so taking human density to be about ~1, you'd deposit almost half the energy of the particle during penetration of a body (say 30 cm thick))
Slashdot Mirror
Actually the best example is probably Cassini, which was launched without any viable software in the orbiter at all. Because everybody knew there were going to be seven years of coasting time to Saturn and there was no point at all in spending a whole lot of effort on writing software before the launch. Software is something you can upload later.
Why do you find that "ironic"? NASA does whatever congress decides. Congress decides that they don't want NASA to do any kind of science but that they should throw their budget at some kind of rewarmed Apollo program. NASA says "fine, we do what we're being paid for, you hold the purse strings, but the public expects certain things from us and they should at least be informed what services we're NOT providing because their elected officials do not deem them important enough".
If perchance some kind of earth-threatening asteroid shows up and the statements are "we could have done something about it if we had known about it ten years earlier" then YOU are going to wail how NASA has been sitting on their hands and wasting their money on all kinda of crap for all these decades.
This way, at least, the cards are on the table: "You, taxpayer, elect the congress-critters that decide that we shouldn't undertake this (and many other) kind/s of study." You choose.
In the end, NASA is in the employ of you, the people. But it gets its directions from Congress. And where the interests of Congress are in conflict (or even just may be in conflict) with the interests of the people, I'd say NASA is obligated to keep those who foot the bill informed of what those who give the commands have decided should/n't be done.
NASA, as a facility for transferring federal money to specific congressional districts, is committed to the wrong sort of social pattern. After all, its very survival requires it to support any pork-barrel scheme that benefits it... or at least, to remain mute on a subject that no one should remain mute on. And so NASA cannot seriously advocate for free-market social patterns, as would be needed to bring broadband to the masses you quietly scream your love for.
Every time I think I've seenthe dumbest thing ever said about NASA, someone proves me wrong.
NASA is an institution of the executive branch of the federal government. No different from, say, the army. Would it ever occur to complain how the army isn't clamoring for high-speed internet in rural areas? I hope not, because that is quite frankly not the army's job. "The army" is a bunch of guys that the government pays to do certain jobs for them. They have a certain small leeway in how to do the jobs, but that's it. And NASA is no different.
Any one soldier, any one officer, any one platoon, any one small or large group of members of the army may or may not have any one opinion on broadband internet and its importance in the grand scheme of things. So may any one (or any group of) NASA employees. But they all do this on their own dime, in their private time. Because their job is to do whatever the White House tells them to do within the limits of choice of operational strategies, technological engagement, scheduling, budgeting, and assumption of risk granted to them. That's it.
This is the direct, diametrical opposite of truth. I.e. a lie.
Enron's ability to manipulate California's energy system into the ground was the result of California deregulating the energy industry. In any other state, the state government would have had the ability to interfere where corrupt business practices start costing human lives. But because of the mentally retarded like yourself, California didn't have that ability any more.
For thos of you out there who really didn't follow the whole Enron thing, there's a documentary out there called "Enron, the smartest guys in the room". It can be found through a number of well-seeded torrents, if nothing else.
Because they were originally intended to last for 90 days. There were no "long treks" planned. People assumed that maybe they'd survive a teensy bit beyond the 90 day mark and there was pretty wild celebration (for a bunch of nerds) at the 100-day mark because people thought it was really cool. Now, a thousand+ days later, these little guys are still going strong.
This kind of engineering quality is the reason why JPL is the only organization on the planet that has ever sent enything past Mars orbit. They're considerably more expensive as just farming out your hardware to Lockheed (ahem), but instead of crashing into things they actually land and work properly.
The one interesting thing I've read that I don't quite understand is how evolution doesn't seem to be a gradual process. Rather it comes in spurts which seems to imply that mutation isn't completely random.
A mutation either happens or it doesn't. It is by definition a stepwise process, not a gradual one.
What you find in the fossil record is not the stepwise occurance of mutations, though. It is the stepwise occurance of selective pressure. In a stable environment, the biosphere will diversify - whatever doesn't kill something will sooner or later develop and the maximum of complexity allowd bythe energy envelope of the niche will be achieved. THEN when a change in the environment occurs (some plain gets flooded or some such - yes, that includes asteroids and such) you will "suddenly" find a shift in the fossil record towards particular traits -- because those traits are the ones that allowed the survivors of the shift in selective pressure not to be selected against.
There's all kinds of hair colors out there. If something happens tomorrow that'll kill all people except those with red hair, you will find that "there was this sudden shift towards red-hairedness in the early 21st century". This will not mean that there's suddenly been a lot of mutations leading to red hair, though.
No, it is not. To the contrary.
When I was sixteen, my mother made sure that there were condoms in the house and that I knew where they were. Of course that wasn't in the US. And of course where I come from teen pregnancy is an issue that people mostly read about on the internet, not something that happens a whole lot to real people.
As long as people like you pretend that folks need to be treated like they cannot be held responsible for themselves, people will act irresponsibly. Allow them to take responsibility and they will gladly accept it -- and be much better people for it.
Uh -- have you been living under a rock? Britannica online was about the first (and it still the IMHO) decent online encyclopedia. It is still the point at which I start any serious dig into a topic I'm not familiar with.
Not only is Britannica adapting, if anything they're the folks who forced the whole "Encyclopedia segment" to adapt by blazing the trail onto the internet. They were online years before anybody ever thought of Wikipedia. I have no idea whether they're economically healthy - but if any online encyclopedia is, they deserve to be it.
Whoa there -- either we're living in entirely different worlds or there's a real ambiguity in the term "bandwidth" here. Where I come from, BW was never measured in "per second" or any such thing. A number like "GB/s" would have been called "throughput". When we used the term "bandwidth" it meant something like the aggregate amount of data shipped in or out over the course of a month. In essence the integral over the number you're quoting.
I've never dealt with a company that put limits on the amount of data I can move around "per second" or some such -- that's home-broadband thinking. Or has the business changed so much that businesses are now running their own servers in their own buildings and are paying for the connection from there to the trunk? I don't know about Wikimedia, but most "popular websites" aren't in the business of running hardware - they're in the business of running a business.
Is this another of those fabled "paradigm shifts" of the last couple years?
Re-read his comment: he never claimed that they don't spend tens of thousands of dollars on bandwidth. He said they're doing something wrong when they spend tens of thousands of dollars on bandwidth.
Where and how you procure bandwidth is a business decision, and business folks aren't exactly the brightest of folks when it comes to technology. Yes, I have worked for an internet company that went through insane amounts of data and yes, they paid dearly for bandwidth and yes, they could easily have gotten the same amount for 1/10th of the price. But the business manager knew someone who swore Rackspace was the bomb and thus Rackspace it was at Rackspace's prices. Never mind that there's a rash of very cheap data centers much closer to the backbone who'll give you unmetered BW for a factor five less than what we paid.
(Of course that "friend" ran a business that relied much more on HW uptime than data throughput and for him Rackspace might have been the right choice. For us, it wasn't.)
I agree with the statement that you're doing something wrong if you're paying tens of thousands of $$ for BW a month. That's just not what it costs.
Call me when you've found a way to drive truck with geothermal power.
Here are some facts about global warming.
No, not facts. Propaganda lies. This has been pointed out to you before.
1.) The world appears to be getting warmer
This is a lie. You, ccarson, are a retarded lying pig. The world is getting warmer. Period. There's no "appears" about it and computer models do not figure into it. The annual extent of sea ice around Antarctica has been measured since Shackelton and Scott and the ice has been retreating for the last 100+ years. Every harbor on the planet has been keeping track of the annual high water mark since the British Empire, and it has been rising for 100+ years. There's simply no two ways about it. Global warming is an absolute certainty. It has been an absolute certainty for decades.
2.) Tying a trend to warmer temperatures based on older data from the early 1900's is suspect at best. Good, reliable, accurate scientific equipment that measures the temperature wasn't readily available until recently (late 1900's).
This retarded lie of yours has been squarely disproven before - several times. I'm naming two entirely valid and accurate temperature measurements that go back to the first decade of the 1900s right up there. They have been handed to you before, you have ignored them before. You are unable to refute anything told to you and you insist on re-re-re-re-spewing the same retarded ultra right wing propaganda lies again and again. And again.
There's a reason why holochaust deniers like yourself have no credibility. Because you have openly declared that you do not give a rat's ass about Truth or Reality.
Google: "Clausius-Clapeyron".
In essence, the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere above a body of water is a function of the temperatures alone and not really related to surface area. It's called "vapor pressure". No matter how much water you draw from your local air, it'll be replaced by evaporation as long as the pertinent temperatures don't change (and as long as there is water to evaporate). This is very basic physics.
Look at it this way: you are transporting the same water from the same starting point to the same end point -- except that you're not using a pipe to do so but instead transport the water through the air in some complex evaporation-transport-condensation dance.
Not just MPL -- I am aware of four different missions that were either destroyed or drastically reduced in functionality (the last one was DART) because a contractor insisted on doing their calculations/modeling/development in imperial units and then flubbed somewhere at a translation to metric at the interface with NASA (twice Lockheed Martin, once OSC, once Boeing).
The abysmal inability of the American Industry to perform a single project in metric units is only one of the reasons why none of them has even the slightest chance of ever getting a man into orbit.
For what it's worth, I'd say you're visiting the right torrent sites. I'd love to know a couple where the user isn't just flooded with porn crap.
( ... for ... uh ... 'purely educational reasons', of course. Not that I'd ever download any pirated material...)
But see - if you just google it like that you get that Avenue-Q movie ("the internet is for porn"). People need to acquire the basic tech-capability of turning off google's "moderately safe search" if they want to get anywhere, and there's nowhere to turn to for them on these critical matters...
... and then what do I do on those one or two days a year when I genuinely need to send an email to the ~40000 email addresses on the registered-users list of my software who have opted-in to receive updates on new developments?
There are a lot of people who have a genuine need to send out large quantities of emails. Mailing lists for example.
Why does everyone just assume an AI will be superior to us in reasoning ability? We have zero idea how an AI will be implemented.
...uh... because that's how we're going to implement it?
Your comment sounds a little like a 17th century guy that says "how do we know that flying machines will fly better than humans?". The answer is that this is how we're going to build them or otherwise there's no point in building them in the first place. A flying machine that doesn't fly wouldn't be worth producing.
We may not know up front whether what we're trying to do is possible, but if it is, then it'll be what we're setting out to do.
If the first attempts are basically emulating a human brain it might be slow and dumb.
Is that how we built flying machines? There may have been prehistoric attempts at emulating birds, but flying really "took off" (sorry for the pun) when folks stopped trying to make "something like a bird" and started making "something that flies". Airplanes are very, very, different from birds in every conceivable respect -- and they are useful exactly because they're different from birds. If all we wanted was another bird, we could get a mommy bird and a daddy bird and let them build a nest and do the whoopy...
In the same sense, if all we wanted was another human, there's a fine, time-tested method for doing that. The whole point of making an artificial intelligence is that we'd like to do something that is NOT already abundant in nature. Something that can do things humans can not. Why else would we want to do it in the first place?
Artificial Intelligence is no where near capable of producing a hamster brain
And you imagine natural intelligence is anywhere superior?
C'mon, my camera has more personality than the freshmen around here. The reason that things like virtual (boy/girl)friends are growing in popularity is because they're actually smarter, funnier, wittier, more colorful than the meat-versions. Given that the average toaster these days is smarter than the average American, I see no reason why the toaster shouldn't have comparable rights.
What's with all the "robot" talk? Didn't you know they prefer the term "ferro-americans"?
There has never been a 900MHz P4. The lowest-clocked P4 is 1.3GHz.
So why is it that when some feature appears in MacOS it is "borrowed" from (wherever they got it), but when the same feature appears in Windows it is "stolen" from Apple?
As far as I can tell, not one of the things mentioned as allegedly ripped off MacOS x was actually originally designed or produced or introduced by Apple - they were all things that had been ... well ... "borrowed" from somewhere else. So if apple does it then Apple is merely listening to what the consumers want. But if Windows does it they're somehow ripping off Apple.
Something's amiss here somewhere...
No, you haven't. You are a liar. You've been listening to ultra-rightwing propaganda lies and you're happy to parrot them blindly and unreflectedly. That's a difference.
Many have pointed out the utter absurdity of your gibberish. Here's a couple more examples:
2.) Tying a trend to warmer temperatures based on older data from the early 1900's is suspect at best. Good, reliable, accurate scientific equipment that measures the temperature wasn't readily available until recently (late 1900's)Shackleton recorded the annual extent of sea ice around Antarctica. We've been doing this for close to 100 years now. This IS a measurement of global temperatures.
Every harbor in the world keeps a record of the annual high-water mark at least since the British Empire. Every harbor in the world has seen the ocean levels rising for at least the last 100 years. This IS a measurement of global temperatures.
Weather related damages to the US agriculture (floods, droughts, hurricanes) have been tracked since Jefferson's time. This IS a measurement of global climate.
I'm an electrical engineer and during my studies in particle physics, I learned that a particles velocity can be affected by magnetic fields.You might want to call Joe's Diploma Emporium and ask for your money back: magnetic force (and thus acceleration) is always perpendicular to the velocity of a charge. No amount of magnetic fields can increase or decrease the speed of a charged particle (and certainly not an uncharged one).
Jupitor [...]In all your thorough research, you've never come across the name of this planet in printed form? Even once?
Is it possible that the warmer temperatures that Earth is experiencing are caused by cyclical natural phenomena? What about glaciers in Greenland that have been shrinking for 100 yearsWait - didn't you just tell us not to believe any temperature indicators that are 100 years old?
Were those climate changes, which are no doubt more extreme than what's going on now,You are so utterly mentally retarded that it hurts my teeth to read your drivel. NEVER in the history of the earth has anything happened that was even a tiny fraction of what we are seeing today. Not only were the ice ages NOT "more extreme", they were peanuts compared to what we see today. We have a pretty decent record of global temperatures for several hundred thousand years and there is no indication anywhere of global temperatures changing on the time-scales of decades or even centuries. Nothing like what we're seeing right now can be found anywhere in the earth's climate record.
I recommend that you refrain from posting about issues you do not have the shimmer of a clue about.
If you have something to publish, publish in Nature or Science. If you have nothing to publish, publish in New Scientist...
Actually, at 300MeV, I'd wager on getting a fairly decent gamma ray beam.
You lost me there -- by what process? For a z=1 particle at 300MeV/n kinetic energy, the stopping power of dry air is about ~3.1 MeV/(g/cm^2) - so that's pretty much transparent. You don't get much energy loss until you hit someone or something. (For Lung tissue I get ~3.5MeV/(g/cm^2), so taking human density to be about ~1, you'd deposit almost half the energy of the particle during penetration of a body (say 30 cm thick))