Despite my agnosticism, I'll take this one. For the same reason, we run genetic algorithms to find an optimal solution. Non optimals get weeded out, as it were. Hey, maybe Douglas Adams was on to something. I bet... Whoa! a mouse just ran over my keyboard. Maybe I shou
I've wondered a lot about this one too. Had a species evolved intelligence to the level of neanderthals or early humans, they might not leave any physical clues at all. If all we had to look at were dolphin fossils, would we know how smart they were? We could make some inferences from physical data, but we wouldn't know. From a brain perspective, what was the smartest dinosaur?
String theory? Don't look at me. As for the rest, we can observe either the effects (e.g. Big Bang, fundamental particles and atoms) or themselves directly (e.g. bacteria through a microscope, unless you think microscopes are a communist plot or something).
It's more than the race angle. Bush at least appeared to be a half bright slacker whose family connections and easy manipulability made him the RNC's candidate of choice. Obama appears to be smarter and at least slightly more self-directed. Moreover, he has access to intelligence that we do not. F'rinstance, if you knew that at least four nuclear weapons were running around loose in the world, but not their location, ownership or functioning status, would you be feeling the same way about taking out and American who wanted to help someone use them against the USA? Probably not.
When they take two parking spaces so that their expensive car doesn't get a scratch. Double parking too. When they refuse to tip the waitress AND leave a smug, self righteous remark. When they commit a violent crime with a weapon When they have committed up to 9 violent crimes without a weapon When they engage in malfeasance with investor funds in any bank or financial institution When they engage in bribery of ANY public official (federal, state and local) anywhere at any time (Both the public official and the bribee). Campaign funds should explicitly be considered bribes.
Governments involved in clandestine assassinations. Who would have thought? And of course, it only happens in other countries, to Al Qaeda and the like. Surely. Oh, and if you believe this, I have a bridge or two I can sell you....
In nature, a diverse complement of plants and animals is more resilient to disease and environmental stress than a monoculture vulnerable to a single disease, or drought. Business ecology is little different. Anything that encourages a variety of smaller corporate entities in the same business, but using different survival strategies will be more robust.
While I tend to think Stallman is a little nutso on many things, I agree with him on this one. And being an engineer is an advantage here. Engineers tend see the conceptual isomorphism across problem domains. It's the pattern that catches one's attention and leads to a similar solution. This is an easy example of that. It would probably work too. As for corporations relocating so that they don't have to break up, well, let them. Their maladaptive behavior will eventually catch up with them wherever they go, while USA banking would become as boring as it is in Canada and Sweden, if we're lucky.
We have built toy systems. Had they been economically viable, they'd be growing like topsy. They're not. A half a gigawatt is the largest extant system. Other systems are "proposed." Perhaps they will be built for specialized situations. Or not.
Regardless, the point is this. Hydrocarbons, uranium, thorium, etc. represent substances with incredibly high energy densities. They are in effect, batteries - the best we have, but they are finite and not reusable. Eventually, finite resources end. Even if we had room temperature, super-conductive wire, solar, wind, hydro all together, aren't going to cut it unless we reduce our energy use quite a bit, as in "below that which is necessary to maintain a large scale industrial civilization."
You really should review the "Cubic mile of oil" wikipedia entry. It's worth working through the numbers.
Most of our power needs as a society don't require such long-term storage. This is so wrong, it's actually impressive. Hydrocarbons and even nuclear supplies are limited. Transient energy is what we have *now* and that transience is the problem. If we could store it in significant quantities, we could even use things like solar and wind. These are trivial sources at this point because their output can't be stored.
It's interesting to wave your hand and say, "Build superconducting grids." It's got that nifty science fiction sound to it, but it's not practical at this point. With current technology, it would *take* energy to maintain and in no small quantities. Engineering expertise too. It's an incredibly high maintenance solution, until and unless room temperature superconductor becomes available at a price that's affordable. That time is not yet.
It looks like he's trying to put as good a face as possible on his tenure. The real issues such as declining energy return from the world's remaining oil, what to do about the nation's vulnerable, aging, and dangerous nuclear infrastructure, the global warming consequences of frakking natural gas and increased use of coal... He can't discuss any of this without severe political and possibly personal consequences. He's bowing out while he can, and given the magnitude of the problems, I don't blame him. He can't win. He can only escape.
Actually, even plants don't do it efficiently enough to replace the stored energy in oil, gas and coal. At least, they couldn't replace it without horrendous ecological consequences. We can't "grow, baby, grow" our way out of our energy trap any more than we can "drill, baby, drill." We either go nuclear and hope for at least adequate battery technology, or we forget about industrial scale civilization and starve and die on a massive scale come 2100 or thereabouts.
1) There are always diminishing returns on technology. The easy stuff gets discovered and developed first.
2) Invention always starts as an individual with an idea. Current employee contract law guarantees that benefits of a new invention go to corporate entities instead of the individual, thus short-circuiting the reward process for invention at the start.
3) Patent trolls can successfully shake down real inventors via litigation. Larger corporations can shrug this off. Individuals and small businesses can't.
You want invention? Purge the parasites and parasitic elements from the system (i.e. patent laws favoring corporations and patent trolls). At that point, talented individuals can start profitably inventing again.
It wouldn't hurt anyway. Seriously though. They had better either do something remarkable or have some great features. For example, I'd pay good money for a phone with a physical scrolling wheel. Ditto for sound. Or an On/Off switch that didn't make you wait for the computer to contemplate its navel would be worth something too. Sometimes you can't beat physical controls. Nobody has yet done scrolling right and you always end up clicking something you wish you hadn't. Truly painless linking to Outlook and other phones (all the other phones) would be another awesome. By painless, I mean, 100% easy and without stupid arbitrary limitations of content length of anything. Battery life that mattered would do it. If the phone lasted even three days between charges, that would matter a lot. Voice recognition that was less stupid than Siri.
There are a lot of things they could have done. They won't have done any of the ones that would help, I expect. Like Microsoft, they'll probably solve a bunch of problems that neither I nor any other customer actually had.
Oil alone accounts for 160 exajoules of the world's energy budget a year (about 30 billion barrels of oil - a year). The book referenced in this wikipedia entry ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil ) explains it in terms that are easily understandable. Google and a calculator should do the rest.
We're literally out of gas by 2100 or thereabouts (Russia might still be fracking useful quantities but nobody else will be). While there will still be coal, natural gas and oil here and there, there won't be enough that's cheap enough, or with a high enough net energy to support a large scale industrial civilization. After that, those of us that haven't starved will be using biomass, wind, solar and hydro because that, as they say, will be that. There will. however, be many fewer of us to use it. Perhaps a LOT fewer, depending on how enthusiastic we are with nuclear weapons as tools of diplomacy.
At any rate, what theory *isn't* an analogy? The map is never the territory. Theories are simply mental models with varying levels of predictive power regarding the physical world.
By the way, nobody ever thought electricity was water; they thought it was a type of liquid.
Slashdot Mirror
Despite my agnosticism, I'll take this one. For the same reason, we run genetic algorithms to find an optimal solution. Non optimals get weeded out, as it were. Hey, maybe Douglas Adams was on to something. I bet... Whoa! a mouse just ran over my keyboard. Maybe I shou
Everybody needs toilet paper?
I've wondered a lot about this one too. Had a species evolved intelligence to the level of neanderthals or early humans, they might not leave any physical clues at all. If all we had to look at were dolphin fossils, would we know how smart they were? We could make some inferences from physical data, but we wouldn't know. From a brain perspective, what was the smartest dinosaur?
String theory? Don't look at me. As for the rest, we can observe either the effects (e.g. Big Bang, fundamental particles and atoms) or themselves directly (e.g. bacteria through a microscope, unless you think microscopes are a communist plot or something).
OK. So, in a world of imperfect information and morally ambiguous decisions, you'd rather have Bush making decisions, or Obama?
It's more than the race angle. Bush at least appeared to be a half bright slacker whose family connections and easy manipulability made him the RNC's candidate of choice. Obama appears to be smarter and at least slightly more self-directed. Moreover, he has access to intelligence that we do not. F'rinstance, if you knew that at least four nuclear weapons were running around loose in the world, but not their location, ownership or functioning status, would you be feeling the same way about taking out and American who wanted to help someone use them against the USA? Probably not.
When they take two parking spaces so that their expensive car doesn't get a scratch. Double parking too.
When they refuse to tip the waitress AND leave a smug, self righteous remark.
When they commit a violent crime with a weapon
When they have committed up to 9 violent crimes without a weapon
When they engage in malfeasance with investor funds in any bank or financial institution
When they engage in bribery of ANY public official (federal, state and local) anywhere at any time (Both the public official and the bribee). Campaign funds should explicitly be considered bribes.
That'll do for a start.
Governments involved in clandestine assassinations. Who would have thought? And of course, it only happens in other countries, to Al Qaeda and the like. Surely. Oh, and if you believe this, I have a bridge or two I can sell you....
They reflect searched content as written and only show the inherent racism of content generated across the web.
In nature, a diverse complement of plants and animals is more resilient to disease and environmental stress than a monoculture vulnerable to a single disease, or drought. Business ecology is little different. Anything that encourages a variety of smaller corporate entities in the same business, but using different survival strategies will be more robust.
While I tend to think Stallman is a little nutso on many things, I agree with him on this one. And being an engineer is an advantage here. Engineers tend see the conceptual isomorphism across problem domains. It's the pattern that catches one's attention and leads to a similar solution. This is an easy example of that. It would probably work too. As for corporations relocating so that they don't have to break up, well, let them. Their maladaptive behavior will eventually catch up with them wherever they go, while USA banking would become as boring as it is in Canada and Sweden, if we're lucky.
We have built toy systems. Had they been economically viable, they'd be growing like topsy. They're not. A half a gigawatt is the largest extant system. Other systems are "proposed." Perhaps they will be built for specialized situations. Or not.
Regardless, the point is this. Hydrocarbons, uranium, thorium, etc. represent substances with incredibly high energy densities. They are in effect, batteries - the best we have, but they are finite and not reusable. Eventually, finite resources end. Even if we had room temperature, super-conductive wire, solar, wind, hydro all together, aren't going to cut it unless we reduce our energy use quite a bit, as in "below that which is necessary to maintain a large scale industrial civilization."
You really should review the "Cubic mile of oil" wikipedia entry. It's worth working through the numbers.
Most of our power needs as a society don't require such long-term storage.
This is so wrong, it's actually impressive. Hydrocarbons and even nuclear supplies are limited. Transient energy is what we have *now* and that transience is the problem. If we could store it in significant quantities, we could even use things like solar and wind. These are trivial sources at this point because their output can't be stored.
It's interesting to wave your hand and say, "Build superconducting grids." It's got that nifty science fiction sound to it, but it's not practical at this point. With current technology, it would *take* energy to maintain and in no small quantities. Engineering expertise too. It's an incredibly high maintenance solution, until and unless room temperature superconductor becomes available at a price that's affordable. That time is not yet.
Have you ever looked at the energy it takes to keep civilization as we know it running? I suggest you start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil
It looks like he's trying to put as good a face as possible on his tenure. The real issues such as declining energy return from the world's remaining oil, what to do about the nation's vulnerable, aging, and dangerous nuclear infrastructure, the global warming consequences of frakking natural gas and increased use of coal... He can't discuss any of this without severe political and possibly personal consequences. He's bowing out while he can, and given the magnitude of the problems, I don't blame him. He can't win. He can only escape.
Actually, even plants don't do it efficiently enough to replace the stored energy in oil, gas and coal. At least, they couldn't replace it without horrendous ecological consequences. We can't "grow, baby, grow" our way out of our energy trap any more than we can "drill, baby, drill." We either go nuclear and hope for at least adequate battery technology, or we forget about industrial scale civilization and starve and die on a massive scale come 2100 or thereabouts.
Cheers!
Since we've never discovered the Chinese ninjas, they must be far superior to the Japanese variety!
Seems they've been monitoring that pretty closely.
1) There are always diminishing returns on technology. The easy stuff gets discovered and developed first.
2) Invention always starts as an individual with an idea. Current employee contract law guarantees that benefits of a new invention go to corporate entities instead of the individual, thus short-circuiting the reward process for invention at the start.
3) Patent trolls can successfully shake down real inventors via litigation. Larger corporations can shrug this off. Individuals and small businesses can't.
You want invention? Purge the parasites and parasitic elements from the system (i.e. patent laws favoring corporations and patent trolls). At that point, talented individuals can start profitably inventing again.
Says you! What a pain in the ass, eh?
Say no more. Say no more...
Yeah, I know. it's just crazy talk. A computer that did what you wanted immediately. I mean, who makes those?
It wouldn't hurt anyway. Seriously though. They had better either do something remarkable or have some great features. For example, I'd pay good money for a phone with a physical scrolling wheel. Ditto for sound. Or an On/Off switch that didn't make you wait for the computer to contemplate its navel would be worth something too. Sometimes you can't beat physical controls. Nobody has yet done scrolling right and you always end up clicking something you wish you hadn't. Truly painless linking to Outlook and other phones (all the other phones) would be another awesome. By painless, I mean, 100% easy and without stupid arbitrary limitations of content length of anything. Battery life that mattered would do it. If the phone lasted even three days between charges, that would matter a lot. Voice recognition that was less stupid than Siri.
There are a lot of things they could have done. They won't have done any of the ones that would help, I expect. Like Microsoft, they'll probably solve a bunch of problems that neither I nor any other customer actually had.
This works well for land lines. The calls stop. On my cell, it hasn't been much of a problem.
Oil alone accounts for 160 exajoules of the world's energy budget a year (about 30 billion barrels of oil - a year). The book referenced in this wikipedia entry ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil ) explains it in terms that are easily understandable. Google and a calculator should do the rest.
We're literally out of gas by 2100 or thereabouts (Russia might still be fracking useful quantities but nobody else will be). While there will still be coal, natural gas and oil here and there, there won't be enough that's cheap enough, or with a high enough net energy to support a large scale industrial civilization. After that, those of us that haven't starved will be using biomass, wind, solar and hydro because that, as they say, will be that. There will. however, be many fewer of us to use it. Perhaps a LOT fewer, depending on how enthusiastic we are with nuclear weapons as tools of diplomacy.
At any rate, what theory *isn't* an analogy? The map is never the territory. Theories are simply mental models with varying levels of predictive power regarding the physical world.
By the way, nobody ever thought electricity was water; they thought it was a type of liquid.