I wonder if people from 2050 er 2060 where did the decade go? from 50 years in the future came back in time to now and dropped their latest microchip, if it would even be useful? Sure, they have picometer circuits, but so what? We still don't know how to make them.
it's completely idiotic not to practice
closed-cycle resource management, so the sooner we promote this as a
cultural value, and learn how to orchestrate this in a cost effective
manner, the better off we'll all be
We'll all be? Hmm... Either this stuff that is being recycled is important enough to be valuable enough to be WORTH recycling, or it doesn't matter that much to those who have the money to pay the prevailing price. Recycling when it doesn't pay financially artificially lowers the price of the resulting recycled product. In a first world country EVERYONE has the ability to pay the prevailing price so the losers in a rich country are: Everyone. In a poor country, the cost of labor may be so low that it makes FINANCIAL sense to recycle. When/if the stuff not currently being recycled is worth people's time to recycle, it will be retrived from the trash (landfill) and recycled. There's your closed system.
Or it won't. Maybe the stuff will never be worth anyone's time/effort to retrieve. If something is never worthwhile to do, then it should not be done. That's what not worthwhile means. Oil sat underground for millions of years. When the dead plankton fell, nothing recycled it's carbon. It wasn't worthwhile. It was buried, and nothing was able to get down there to recycle it later until people came along and decided to drill for it. We are recycling that carbon, mining nature's landfill for it's resources. Coal is the same thing. Nothing found it worthwhile to extract the carbon that went into making coal for millions of years until now it's being recycled by people.
Being efficient is good. One would think that a closed system would be the best since there is less waste, but that's not always the case. Time value of money says you should use the cheapest resources first then as those become scarce, things like recycling become relatively more attractive. Of course this makes your resulting product more expensive and destroys some demand. The destruction of demand is why it may never be worthwhile to recycle some resources and why it may never be worthwhile to extract every last bit of raw natural resources.
You are right that ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT is not directly reflected in price. The environment, being priceless is treated as if it were worthless. ( at least worth less than your paycheck ) A forest for instance will be exploited destructively until someone can make it produce more intact. Once forest becomes rare enough, it's value for tourism could exceed it's value as lumber/palm plantation land.
At least under democracy ( which is not everywhere ) people who are not directly interested in destructive exploitation whose other economic activity is negatively impacted by the environmental destruction can vote to have that destruction prevented or at least curtailed. Then the destructive activity will move to where ability to exploit the environment destructively still exists for an affordable price. ( under democracy, this is where destructive exploitation of the environment pays enough that most will be directly or indirectly interested in it's furtherance ). As the place develops and it's environment is destroyed, opinion changes, and the destruction moves elsewhere. At some point, prices rise, (mostly environmentally worse) alternatives are used and of course some demand is destroyed.
Under systems other than democracy, likely much the same thing happens as wise generallisimos take into account profitablity and interests. Within an order of magnitude.
I agree, MONEY is the only meaningful measure of resource consumption. Even labor requires resources indirectly. Even watching tv consumes resources. Electricity, and the cost of the set, but also, you pay for the salaries of all those involved in producing it and bringing it to you and they consume resources that they would not consume had there been no audience paying. That is why piracy is the most environmentally friendly form of copyrighted material consumption.
In spending money, you take the thing you bought out of circulation. This tends to make more of those things produced. Up to the prevailing price for the item in resources will be used to bring another such item into existence.
Because everything needs some energy to operate ( you can't spend a buck to get a pat on the back and then have the person who patted your back pay you a buck so you can pat their back and so on forever without you both spending money on food ) even things that don't appear to be resource intensive involve engaging some resources. In the back patting scenario, a fraction of a cent's worth of food would have to be purchased for each pat on the back so that less than a dollar would be spent on each back pat until the entire dollar had been spent on food.
Of course food isn't the only consumable resource. There's land ( use of land for a time interval is consumable ), there's metals, there's hydrocarbons, there's energy, water, etc.
BECAUSE money is the only meaningful measure of resource consumption, doing things you wouldn't do for the money is environmentally damaging. For instance recycling is more environmentally damaging than not recycling.
Don't believe me? It's true! Your labor goes into separating your trash into different piles. This has value. Maybe it contributes to increased messiness in your house because you need bins for all the different crap. It takes time out of your day so maybe you don't have time to make supper and go out ( CONSUMING MORE RESOURCES ) maybe you even decide you need a bigger kitchen to house all the bins for paper/plastic/glass/etc. Washing cans and glass jars also increases your water bill.
Some of the crap you recycle such as aluminum cans and metal is worth something, but that would be scavenged and recycled anyway ( for money ). Most of it like much of the paper, and plastic just doesn't pay. Yet it is recycled anyway because you have subsidized it with your labor ( your town dump probably mandated it ), and because of other subsidies. Your town dump probably still pays to get rid of your paper, but because they can recycle it, the dump gets a discount on how much they must pay to get rid of your recyclables. Of course given the many hours the citizens have spent doing this nets the town coffers a tiny fraction of minimum wage for those hours, but who cares right? At least they didn't have to raise taxes to afford a real landfill.
This recycled material is valuable. The cheap availablity of recycled this and that makes resource intensive economic activity that would be uneconomic given high material prices possible further increasing environmental damage. High material prices would have slowed economic activity easing environmental burden, but recycling has lubricated the plundering of the earth with recycled crap.
And in the future when resources are drained, our children's children's children will curse us, not for using up all the resources before they were born, but for using them up so completely even being so cruel as to recycle when it was uneconomic to do so stripping the landfills they now mine for a living of the plastic and metal they survive on. They can't imagine why we would do that unless it was for some sadistic pleasure...
You can put a cup of nothing in liquid nitrogen, collect the liquid oxygen, then pour it on activated charcoal and light it with a long fuse. Supposedly it's a high explosive.
If you read Nielsen's page, he's interested in the possibility that the physical laws might be so enormously complex that they would appear random, but they are such that in the limit they appear to conform to the familiar ones we know. So I don't think this is time travel, but more like, the physical laws of the universe ALWAYS WERE such that Higgs Bosons are not created. Nothing 'reached back in time' to perturb the minds of the Congresspeople into Scuttling the Superconducting Supercollider. The laws of the universe are just such that the minds of the Congresspeople were perturbed when they had to be in order to scuttle the SSC.
Possibly different physical laws ( which have not changed ) caused the LHC to have problems.
Of course this is only what I think the argument is. I have no idea if A) I am right in my interpretation, or B) if the argument holds water. But it is interesting.
What about filling the server room with freon, and letting it boil away at 1 atm. Then recompress the freon, radiating the heat away ( the radiator can be arbitrarily hot depending on the power of the compressor providing a very hot thing and as large a temp difference as you could want ) Then use the (cool) liquid freon to top off the server room ( since some has boiled away )?
Actually I haven't thought much about it at all. For all I know liquid nitrogen is a conductor which would be like filling the server room with ice water. Then again maybe liquid nitrogen is a good insulator.
It seems to me that computers produce X BTUs of energy that must be taken out of the server room. They will produce this energy regardless of the temperature in the server room. So... with great insulation around the room, the temperature INSIDE the room should not matter much with regards to the cost of keeping it cold. I think you'd want a temperature where the fans never come on at all ideally. How about making the server room a large dewar flask and fill it with liquid nitrogen and running servers? Why should it cost any more to maintain the room at 0 degrees than it would to maintain the room at 100 degrees. I would expect quite the opposite ( with great insulation AROUND the room. )
>>If it is ever shown that 'God' is the simplest way to explain
something, I'm sure there will be waves of converts.
Would there be? I doubt it. Bayesian logic gives us the reason why.
Depending on your prior estimation (which is based on faith rather
than evidence) items of potential evidence for or against the
existence of God are more or less likely to be accepted.
In 'shown' I meant to imply the existence of sufficiently overwhelming evidence that prior estimations are unimportant. Not that this ( hypothetical ) evidence is not direct evidence of the existence of a diety, but only evidence that other explainations for observed phenomena are more complex.
Inductive reasoning never PROVES anything. Using it as a matter of habit is a moral choice if you buy the Habits = Morals idea from Nicomachean Ethics.
As one's habits/morals are involved in one's destiny, it's an important choice whether or not to strictly adhere to this habit. Of course believing in the Pizza Noid may have no effect on your life at all other than that your friends think you are weird.
I want an electronic compression detector that will severely reduce the volume of all compressed audio. I would hook that to my tv speakers so that I don't get blasted out of the room every time commercials come on.
It's a heuristic boiling down to "don't believe in something unless you have to". If it is ever shown that 'God' is the simplest way to explain something, I'm sure there will be waves of converts. But that is as unlikely as someone providing incontrovertable proof of God's nonexistence.
Another useful heuristic is: "That which will occur will resemble that which has occured". Almost everyone has a great amount of faith in this "There will be no miracles" concept. If I've dropped a rock 100 times and every time I do it, it falls to the ground, then I have faith that there is at most a very small chance that it will decide to fly up into the air the next time I drop it. Of course the rock might be made of iron, and there might be a big magnet in the sky hiding behind a cloud that will attract it, but there wasn't one there the other 100 times I threw the rock, and I don't see one now, so I'm going to assume there isn't one there now.
If the rock should fly up, I might decide to throw some other stuff and notice that it's only the iron/steel and not plastic etc that flys up into the sky. I might see what a compass does. I might get a radar device and aim it up into the cloud. I might even dare to go up there myself and look at it. At some point the big magnet in the sky would become the simplest explanation for the rock's behavior. But probably, it will have long before turned out to be a practical joke.
Weird is wonderful. It's part of what makes life fun. If you have to pay 10 million to be weird, then it will get alot more gray. This woman's stupidity and greed are one reason why the world often seems like a drudge of gray, rain, fluorescent lights and oppressive boring. Fsck her. Buy a Toyota.
And walking up to another kid, and shoving them against the lockers, telling them "After School, On the Playground, You're Dead!" should get you in at least as much trouble.
Yeah, why the heck is the EFF paying out prizes for this? It was a 'Cooperative Computing Award'.
From their site:
EFF hopes to spur the technology of cooperative networking and encourage Internet users worldwide to join together in solving scientific problems involving massive computation. EFF is uniquely situated to sponsor these awards, since part of its mission is to encourage the harmonious integration of Internet innovations into the whole of society.
Why not encourage people to cooperate solving a useful problem? I mean if you've got half a million dollars to spend on this useless crap, then I certainly won't be donating any of my money to the EFF, despite my agreeing with their larger purpose. Damn waste.
Casinos are a way to tax the poor without feeling all that bad about it as nobody forced them to p[l]ay and they 'probably' were tourists anyway. The government, citing all the social harm done by gambling claims the right to extract a percentage of the profits. Higher payouts would just make it less obvious to the players that the odds were stacked against them, and maybe even increase gambling and the casinos profit, which necessarily means increase the total amount lost by players. Casinos have to build big shiny crap to keep the morons coming so they need a substantial profit margin to make the investment attractive. The big shiny crap attracts tourists and tourist industry that in turn keeps the locals employed as dishwashers, waiters, and such, ensuring a sufficiently large patronage of serf votes to keep the whole thing politically popular.
And private citizens have the right to use computers and lasers to track the trajectories of rolling balls. Unless it is a roulette ball in a casino, then private citizens doing that are going to jail.
This is a little different. States that allow gambling also have laws to protect the house from cheaters. If I cheat you in checkers, I'm not going to jail, but if I cheat at roulette using a laser and a computer, I'm going to do time. Whose interest is more important the interest of the more 'ingenious' gamblers or the interest of the house? The answer is the house. They are allowed the aid of computers to determine who is counting cards, whereas the players are not allowed the use of computers to count cards. The interest of the house is more important because they pay more taxes, and are one of the attractions in the area. They anchor all the other crap there is in vegas which is really just a random patch of desert. If the casinos went out of business then do you think the other crap would have the roots to tap water out there? Maybe, maybe not.
I guess that was effective and served it's purpose well. They wanted it to be clear who poisoned him so the fact that it was traceable was probably a factor weighing in polonium's favor when the perpetrators were deciding how to do it. Of course they denied it - officially, but everyone knows who did it. Kind of like a mafioso who roughs up a shop owner.
But if you attempt to do something that would produce a higgs if it had worked, and you repeatedly find problems then you can look at the statistical liklihood of an accident vs the observed number of malfunctions and come to a degree of certainty about sabotage. That degree of certainty might also be the odds that milennia ago the orbit of an asteroid was perturbed in such a way that destined it to collide with earth on (*grins*) December 21 2012 just prior to the time when the dude who had been collecting data would have sat down to add up the figures. Then no more humans to publicise the fact to anyone who might be watching.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if people from 2050 er 2060 where did the decade go? from 50 years in the future came back in time to now and dropped their latest microchip, if it would even be useful? Sure, they have picometer circuits, but so what? We still don't know how to make them.
Gag me with a spoon.
We'll all be? Hmm... Either this stuff that is being recycled is important enough to be valuable enough to be WORTH recycling, or it doesn't matter that much to those who have the money to pay the prevailing price. Recycling when it doesn't pay financially artificially lowers the price of the resulting recycled product. In a first world country EVERYONE has the ability to pay the prevailing price so the losers in a rich country are: Everyone. In a poor country, the cost of labor may be so low that it makes FINANCIAL sense to recycle. When/if the stuff not currently being recycled is worth people's time to recycle, it will be retrived from the trash (landfill) and recycled. There's your closed system.
Or it won't. Maybe the stuff will never be worth anyone's time/effort to retrieve. If something is never worthwhile to do, then it should not be done. That's what not worthwhile means. Oil sat underground for millions of years. When the dead plankton fell, nothing recycled it's carbon. It wasn't worthwhile. It was buried, and nothing was able to get down there to recycle it later until people came along and decided to drill for it. We are recycling that carbon, mining nature's landfill for it's resources. Coal is the same thing. Nothing found it worthwhile to extract the carbon that went into making coal for millions of years until now it's being recycled by people.
Being efficient is good. One would think that a closed system would be the best since there is less waste, but that's not always the case. Time value of money says you should use the cheapest resources first then as those become scarce, things like recycling become relatively more attractive. Of course this makes your resulting product more expensive and destroys some demand. The destruction of demand is why it may never be worthwhile to recycle some resources and why it may never be worthwhile to extract every last bit of raw natural resources.
You are right that ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT is not directly reflected in price. The environment, being priceless is treated as if it were worthless. ( at least worth less than your paycheck ) A forest for instance will be exploited destructively until someone can make it produce more intact. Once forest becomes rare enough, it's value for tourism could exceed it's value as lumber/palm plantation land.
At least under democracy ( which is not everywhere ) people who are not directly interested in destructive exploitation whose other economic activity is negatively impacted by the environmental destruction can vote to have that destruction prevented or at least curtailed. Then the destructive activity will move to where ability to exploit the environment destructively still exists for an affordable price. ( under democracy, this is where destructive exploitation of the environment pays enough that most will be directly or indirectly interested in it's furtherance ). As the place develops and it's environment is destroyed, opinion changes, and the destruction moves elsewhere. At some point, prices rise, (mostly environmentally worse) alternatives are used and of course some demand is destroyed.
Under systems other than democracy, likely much the same thing happens as wise generallisimos take into account profitablity and interests. Within an order of magnitude.
I agree, MONEY is the only meaningful measure of resource consumption. Even labor requires resources indirectly. Even watching tv consumes resources. Electricity, and the cost of the set, but also, you pay for the salaries of all those involved in producing it and bringing it to you and they consume resources that they would not consume had there been no audience paying. That is why piracy is the most environmentally friendly form of copyrighted material consumption.
In spending money, you take the thing you bought out of circulation. This tends to make more of those things produced. Up to the prevailing price for the item in resources will be used to bring another such item into existence.
Because everything needs some energy to operate ( you can't spend a buck to get a pat on the back and then have the person who patted your back pay you a buck so you can pat their back and so on forever without you both spending money on food ) even things that don't appear to be resource intensive involve engaging some resources. In the back patting scenario, a fraction of a cent's worth of food would have to be purchased for each pat on the back so that less than a dollar would be spent on each back pat until the entire dollar had been spent on food.
Of course food isn't the only consumable resource. There's land ( use of land for a time interval is consumable ), there's metals, there's hydrocarbons, there's energy, water, etc.
BECAUSE money is the only meaningful measure of resource consumption, doing things you wouldn't do for the money is environmentally damaging. For instance recycling is more environmentally damaging than not recycling.
Don't believe me? It's true! Your labor goes into separating your trash into different piles. This has value. Maybe it contributes to increased messiness in your house because you need bins for all the different crap. It takes time out of your day so maybe you don't have time to make supper and go out ( CONSUMING MORE RESOURCES ) maybe you even decide you need a bigger kitchen to house all the bins for paper/plastic/glass/etc. Washing cans and glass jars also increases your water bill.
Some of the crap you recycle such as aluminum cans and metal is worth something, but that would be scavenged and recycled anyway ( for money ). Most of it like much of the paper, and plastic just doesn't pay. Yet it is recycled anyway because you have subsidized it with your labor ( your town dump probably mandated it ), and because of other subsidies. Your town dump probably still pays to get rid of your paper, but because they can recycle it, the dump gets a discount on how much they must pay to get rid of your recyclables. Of course given the many hours the citizens have spent doing this nets the town coffers a tiny fraction of minimum wage for those hours, but who cares right? At least they didn't have to raise taxes to afford a real landfill.
This recycled material is valuable. The cheap availablity of recycled this and that makes resource intensive economic activity that would be uneconomic given high material prices possible further increasing environmental damage. High material prices would have slowed economic activity easing environmental burden, but recycling has lubricated the plundering of the earth with recycled crap.
And in the future when resources are drained, our children's children's children will curse us, not for using up all the resources before they were born, but for using them up so completely even being so cruel as to recycle when it was uneconomic to do so stripping the landfills they now mine for a living of the plastic and metal they survive on. They can't imagine why we would do that unless it was for some sadistic pleasure...
You can put a cup of nothing in liquid nitrogen, collect the liquid oxygen, then pour it on activated charcoal and light it with a long fuse. Supposedly it's a high explosive.
If you read Nielsen's page, he's interested in the possibility that the physical laws might be so enormously complex that they would appear random, but they are such that in the limit they appear to conform to the familiar ones we know. So I don't think this is time travel, but more like, the physical laws of the universe ALWAYS WERE such that Higgs Bosons are not created. Nothing 'reached back in time' to perturb the minds of the Congresspeople into Scuttling the Superconducting Supercollider. The laws of the universe are just such that the minds of the Congresspeople were perturbed when they had to be in order to scuttle the SSC.
Possibly different physical laws ( which have not changed ) caused the LHC to have problems.
Of course this is only what I think the argument is. I have no idea if A) I am right in my interpretation, or B) if the argument holds water. But it is interesting.
This page was linked to from Holger Nielsen's web page
What about filling the server room with freon, and letting it boil away at 1 atm. Then recompress the freon, radiating the heat away ( the radiator can be arbitrarily hot depending on the power of the compressor providing a very hot thing and as large a temp difference as you could want ) Then use the (cool) liquid freon to top off the server room ( since some has boiled away )?
Actually I haven't thought much about it at all. For all I know liquid nitrogen is a conductor which would be like filling the server room with ice water. Then again maybe liquid nitrogen is a good insulator.
Hmm, I love your signature. By using it, you add every slashdot page you post to to ECHELON results, helping to negate it's effectiveness.
It seems to me that computers produce X BTUs of energy that must be taken out of the server room. They will produce this energy regardless of the temperature in the server room. So... with great insulation around the room, the temperature INSIDE the room should not matter much with regards to the cost of keeping it cold. I think you'd want a temperature where the fans never come on at all ideally. How about making the server room a large dewar flask and fill it with liquid nitrogen and running servers? Why should it cost any more to maintain the room at 0 degrees than it would to maintain the room at 100 degrees. I would expect quite the opposite ( with great insulation AROUND the room. )
Awesome! I'm getting one! Thanks!
In 'shown' I meant to imply the existence of sufficiently overwhelming evidence that prior estimations are unimportant. Not that this ( hypothetical ) evidence is not direct evidence of the existence of a diety, but only evidence that other explainations for observed phenomena are more complex.
Inductive reasoning never PROVES anything. Using it as a matter of habit is a moral choice if you buy the Habits = Morals idea from Nicomachean Ethics.
As one's habits/morals are involved in one's destiny, it's an important choice whether or not to strictly adhere to this habit. Of course believing in the Pizza Noid may have no effect on your life at all other than that your friends think you are weird.
I forgot why, but in one episode Gregory House prescribed cigarettes to a guy with intestinal issues. Not sure what the exact issue was.
I want an electronic compression detector that will severely reduce the volume of all compressed audio. I would hook that to my tv speakers so that I don't get blasted out of the room every time commercials come on.
Professor Farnsworth's Doomometer reads 86 millidooms. However that figure has been rising of late.
It's a heuristic boiling down to "don't believe in something unless you have to". If it is ever shown that 'God' is the simplest way to explain something, I'm sure there will be waves of converts. But that is as unlikely as someone providing incontrovertable proof of God's nonexistence.
Another useful heuristic is: "That which will occur will resemble that which has occured". Almost everyone has a great amount of faith in this "There will be no miracles" concept. If I've dropped a rock 100 times and every time I do it, it falls to the ground, then I have faith that there is at most a very small chance that it will decide to fly up into the air the next time I drop it. Of course the rock might be made of iron, and there might be a big magnet in the sky hiding behind a cloud that will attract it, but there wasn't one there the other 100 times I threw the rock, and I don't see one now, so I'm going to assume there isn't one there now.
If the rock should fly up, I might decide to throw some other stuff and notice that it's only the iron/steel and not plastic etc that flys up into the sky. I might see what a compass does. I might get a radar device and aim it up into the cloud. I might even dare to go up there myself and look at it. At some point the big magnet in the sky would become the simplest explanation for the rock's behavior. But probably, it will have long before turned out to be a practical joke.
Weird is wonderful. It's part of what makes life fun. If you have to pay 10 million to be weird, then it will get alot more gray. This woman's stupidity and greed are one reason why the world often seems like a drudge of gray, rain, fluorescent lights and oppressive boring. Fsck her. Buy a Toyota.
hahaha
And walking up to another kid, and shoving them against the lockers, telling them "After School, On the Playground, You're Dead!" should get you in at least as much trouble.
Yeah, why the heck is the EFF paying out prizes for this? It was a 'Cooperative Computing Award'.
From their site:
Why not encourage people to cooperate solving a useful problem? I mean if you've got half a million dollars to spend on this useless crap, then I certainly won't be donating any of my money to the EFF, despite my agreeing with their larger purpose. Damn waste.
Casinos are a way to tax the poor without feeling all that bad about it as nobody forced them to p[l]ay and they 'probably' were tourists anyway. The government, citing all the social harm done by gambling claims the right to extract a percentage of the profits. Higher payouts would just make it less obvious to the players that the odds were stacked against them, and maybe even increase gambling and the casinos profit, which necessarily means increase the total amount lost by players. Casinos have to build big shiny crap to keep the morons coming so they need a substantial profit margin to make the investment attractive. The big shiny crap attracts tourists and tourist industry that in turn keeps the locals employed as dishwashers, waiters, and such, ensuring a sufficiently large patronage of serf votes to keep the whole thing politically popular.
And private citizens have the right to use computers and lasers to track the trajectories of rolling balls. Unless it is a roulette ball in a casino, then private citizens doing that are going to jail.
This is a little different. States that allow gambling also have laws to protect the house from cheaters. If I cheat you in checkers, I'm not going to jail, but if I cheat at roulette using a laser and a computer, I'm going to do time. Whose interest is more important the interest of the more 'ingenious' gamblers or the interest of the house? The answer is the house. They are allowed the aid of computers to determine who is counting cards, whereas the players are not allowed the use of computers to count cards. The interest of the house is more important because they pay more taxes, and are one of the attractions in the area. They anchor all the other crap there is in vegas which is really just a random patch of desert. If the casinos went out of business then do you think the other crap would have the roots to tap water out there? Maybe, maybe not.
I guess that was effective and served it's purpose well. They wanted it to be clear who poisoned him so the fact that it was traceable was probably a factor weighing in polonium's favor when the perpetrators were deciding how to do it. Of course they denied it - officially, but everyone knows who did it. Kind of like a mafioso who roughs up a shop owner.
But if you attempt to do something that would produce a higgs if it had worked, and you repeatedly find problems then you can look at the statistical liklihood of an accident vs the observed number of malfunctions and come to a degree of certainty about sabotage. That degree of certainty might also be the odds that milennia ago the orbit of an asteroid was perturbed in such a way that destined it to collide with earth on (*grins*) December 21 2012 just prior to the time when the dude who had been collecting data would have sat down to add up the figures. Then no more humans to publicise the fact to anyone who might be watching.