Quantum effects create the properties those people are looking for. I thought at atomic scales there were undesirable quantum effects... like a significant chance that the electrons will "tunnel" out of the conductor.
Don't you think we should support string theory, the study of the big bang and number theory just a little more ? Why don't we put it to a public vote? Pure research is great and sometimes leads to more "practical" benefits, but not everyone's idea of "valuable research" is the same, and the gov't has a responsibility (not saying they live up to it) to spend tax revenue wisely. Somehow I don't think Joe Q. Public cares beans about funding more research into string theory and the big bang. Frankly, I'm not sure I do, either. And number theory? Pardon my ignorance, but what kind of research is going on in number theory?
From the article, it sounds like this only works when the graphene conductor size is a few atoms wide and "one atom thick" -- wouldn't quantum effects become a problem at that scale? Does anyone know or have an opinion whether graphene conductors could be used in a "classical" computer or only a quantum one?
good post you really added something to the world with that groundbreaking comment Ouch! I've had my point of view criticized plenty of times here, but I was unprepared for angry replies to a silly comment. For future reference, what's this about? Did I break some/. rule, or was it just not funny enough?
...I liked the puzzle-breaks and bits of dialogue in half-life, but one of my friends hated all that and "just wanted to shoot stuff". So some people would argue that "more plot" is a bad thing, anyway. I love how so many posters seem to consider "plot quality" to be something you can objectively measure. I think it is difficult to compare a static movie plot with an interactive game plot. A game has to have a fun interactive element or it might just as well BE a movie. When you watch a sword fight in a movie like "the Count of Monte Cristo" you might imagine yourself actually being there - well, a game can bring that experience to a whole new level. On the other hand, the part of that movie where the main character is studying in prison and plotting his revenge was interesting in the movie, but would be a big yawn in a game.
You are comparing a general event of genetic defects resulting from inbreeding over time with a single event of a specific individual emerging at a specific time. But that was the exact point I was trying to make. Okay, maybe the analogy wasn't so good, but my whole point was that just saying inbreeding generally produces genetic defects doesn't prove that a specific group of organisms could not have all descended from a single set of parents. You would have to have some way of proving that inbreeding always produces too many defects for a population to continue, and I do not believe that is the case. Given your criticism of my analogy (comparing a general effect to a specific occurrence), I expect you would agree with that.
yeah but unfortunately in some countries/states they only pay you 1/5 of the price they charge you for electricity instead of offsetting it from your bill.
Yeah, the utility company definitely doesn't want you going off grid or cutting into their profits too much. From what I've read, in most places "net metering" works such that you feed all your generated power to the grid and you buy all your home's power from the utility - which is what it sounds like you're describing. The downsides of that are allowing the sucky pricing scheme you describe, and the fact that if your power (from the utility) goes out, you can't power your home from your own system.
A better system would be one where your system powers your house and only the excess goes back to the grid. Then you'd actually be buying less from the grid, and you'd have backup power for your house. If you had a big battery bank, you might even be able to cover your daytime usage with your nighttime generation.
it would be more funny if it weren't so sad. Okay, given the context of this article, how far are we going to go with this kind of "there's just too many people and it's not fair" stuff? Is it "bad" if I put a solar array in my lawn because I'm "stealing" sunlight from the grass under the panels?
...It won't take TXU's "increased prices due to demand" *cough* gouging *cough* much more,... It's easy to throw around accusations of gouging (and I can't say for sure it's NOT going on), but utilities do in fact buy power from the grid to meet demand peaks. There is actually a "market" for power, and like anything else, a lot of demand will raise the price. Many states have laws restricting how much the utilities can increase the rates charged to customers, but you're going to pay for it one way or the other - either you'll pay a lot more during the hottest months, or you'll pay a little more all year round to cover the hottest months.
That is an interesting point about chance games. Obviously, a computer can't be unbeatable at games of chance, but with anything like a card game, it could figure out the BEST chance. Poker would be interesting because of the element of bluffing -- the human players would be at an advantage if the computer always bet based on the odds, however, I imagine a sophisticated enough program could "learn" the strategies of individual human opponents and still do quite well against them. I mean, it would always have a "poker face", and it's decisions wouldn't be influenced by emotion or superstition.
So in some ways a poker program might have to be a lot more sophisticated than this checkers program. The checkers program has a big database, but I'll bet there's not a whole lot of "code" required to play now that all the paths are solved.
Well, almost. I've been trying to convince my chess-playing friends that someday computers will be (literally) unbeatable at the game, but they've always been skeptical. Like TFA says, there are a finite number of positions and if the computer can store and map all non-losing paths through all of them, the game is solved.
Now interestingly, it sounds like they short cut that strategy by excluding positions reached by moves that this machine will never make and significantly reduced the number of "possible" positions that way. So I wonder if this means their program can't win from an otherwise winnable position, because that position isn't in it's database.
This can be scientifically disproven. Start with one breeding pair of the animal of your choice (say, lab rats for convenience), allow them to interbreed. See how many generations you can go before the mice get all hillbilly. That proves nothing. Just because you can't make something happen again doesn't mean it couldn't ever have happened. That's like saying YOU couldn't have been born because you can pair up any man and woman you please, and they won't give birth to an exact replica of YOU. And just because the mice are "all hillbilly" doesn't mean you couldn't get a viable population going. Maybe we're "all hillbilly" compared to the first humans. (:^B
... before you start bashing them, okay? I believe in intelligent design, but I don't see that this post has much to do with it. Those of us who believe in a literal interpretation of Genesis obviously don't believe that humans came from multiple sources, we believe all humans descended from one couple. However, even if you could conclusively prove that all humanity came from one population - that doesn't disprove evolution (which is probably why you didn't immediately get the ID crowd all posting "see! see! we were right!". In fact, I'd think that even from an evolutionists POV, the chance of a species evolving independently from multiple populations is low.
Now if someone said they'd proven that humans couldn't have evolved from one population, I might be inclined to look at their findings more closely.
5. It has IE on it. The sad truth is some sites require IE to work correctly. This is changing but having IE to fall back on does make life easy. This is a little OT, and probably "preaching to the choir", but Firefox has a nice extension called "user agent switcher" to make it easy to pretend to be IE for sites that require it. I use it at work because I like FF, but many of the intranet sites just display a "designed for IE" page if you use anything else. The funny thing is, I've had no problems using FF to view those sites when FF reports itself as IE.
What's the incentive? Yes, people bash MS, and complain about all the bugs and exploits, but I don't think it's hurting their bottom line, so they've got no reason to change.
I think it would be great and logical to have some kind of discretionary monetary reward system for reported vulnerabilities (just like you might reward someone who returned a lost wallet or something), but I'm a regular person. A high-level manager might see several problems with this:
Once you pay for the vulnerability, you've basically admitted it's there and that you didn't already know about it, and you might not want to do this.
Your testing staff might try to game the system.
You open the door to all kinds of bad publicity: people mad that their exploit didn't pay, or didn't pay as much as another, or was ignored (when it was really unfounded)
Some of this might have been addressed in TFA or even the summary (I didn't read the whole thing - sorry!). My point is just there are some negatives, and for a PHB they probably outweigh the positives (especially when measured in $)
I've always wondered if they could make a system that tracked your eye movements, because you wouldn't need very high resolution for peripheral vision. I guess that would only remove some of the rendering load, since you probably couldn't make the high res part of the screen or lens or whatever move to keep up with your eye movements.
I knew I was a PHP ubergeek when I found myself typing "mysql" automatically whenever I meant to type "myself" in e-mails (and I did it typing this sentence and had to correct it, I kid you not!). That doesn't make you a geek, you probably just need to get some sleep(8*3600).
Although some may say it's not as accurate, or reliable, it definitely has a wider breadth of knowledge and obscure articles than any other encyclopedia I've ever seen. Hey, don't get me wrong, I use wikipedia all the time, but I had to laugh when I read that line. Isn't that pretty close to saying, "The information may be wrong, but there's way more of it!"?
Now, I know why most of the illegal drugs are still illegal in the US, but why does Korea have illegal drugs? I know this is completely off topic, but I'm just curious: Why do you think illegal drugs are still illegal in the US? And why wouldn't Korea have illegal drugs?
You don't need AI to beat a capcha.
So you don't need AI, just a program that can read letters and recognize patterns? Last I checked OCR and pattern recognition were both considered AI - type problems. I'd like to see a program that can solve even a simple capcha that doesn't use a neural net or SOFM or something similar.
Slashdot Mirror
This topic sounds very interesting, but I just can't face this thread and the millions of "if Microsoft made cars" jokes that I'm sure are coming.
From the article, it sounds like this only works when the graphene conductor size is a few atoms wide and "one atom thick" -- wouldn't quantum effects become a problem at that scale? Does anyone know or have an opinion whether graphene conductors could be used in a "classical" computer or only a quantum one?
... my first thought was, "So what kind of voting machine did they use to count the votes for best voting machine? Was is the Punchscan machine?"
...I liked the puzzle-breaks and bits of dialogue in half-life, but one of my friends hated all that and "just wanted to shoot stuff". So some people would argue that "more plot" is a bad thing, anyway. I love how so many posters seem to consider "plot quality" to be something you can objectively measure. I think it is difficult to compare a static movie plot with an interactive game plot. A game has to have a fun interactive element or it might just as well BE a movie. When you watch a sword fight in a movie like "the Count of Monte Cristo" you might imagine yourself actually being there - well, a game can bring that experience to a whole new level. On the other hand, the part of that movie where the main character is studying in prison and plotting his revenge was interesting in the movie, but would be a big yawn in a game.
Yeah, the utility company definitely doesn't want you going off grid or cutting into their profits too much. From what I've read, in most places "net metering" works such that you feed all your generated power to the grid and you buy all your home's power from the utility - which is what it sounds like you're describing. The downsides of that are allowing the sucky pricing scheme you describe, and the fact that if your power (from the utility) goes out, you can't power your home from your own system.
A better system would be one where your system powers your house and only the excess goes back to the grid. Then you'd actually be buying less from the grid, and you'd have backup power for your house. If you had a big battery bank, you might even be able to cover your daytime usage with your nighttime generation.
...It won't take TXU's "increased prices due to demand" *cough* gouging *cough* much more,... It's easy to throw around accusations of gouging (and I can't say for sure it's NOT going on), but utilities do in fact buy power from the grid to meet demand peaks. There is actually a "market" for power, and like anything else, a lot of demand will raise the price. Many states have laws restricting how much the utilities can increase the rates charged to customers, but you're going to pay for it one way or the other - either you'll pay a lot more during the hottest months, or you'll pay a little more all year round to cover the hottest months.That is an interesting point about chance games. Obviously, a computer can't be unbeatable at games of chance, but with anything like a card game, it could figure out the BEST chance. Poker would be interesting because of the element of bluffing -- the human players would be at an advantage if the computer always bet based on the odds, however, I imagine a sophisticated enough program could "learn" the strategies of individual human opponents and still do quite well against them. I mean, it would always have a "poker face", and it's decisions wouldn't be influenced by emotion or superstition.
So in some ways a poker program might have to be a lot more sophisticated than this checkers program. The checkers program has a big database, but I'll bet there's not a whole lot of "code" required to play now that all the paths are solved.
Well, almost. I've been trying to convince my chess-playing friends that someday computers will be (literally) unbeatable at the game, but they've always been skeptical. Like TFA says, there are a finite number of positions and if the computer can store and map all non-losing paths through all of them, the game is solved.
Now interestingly, it sounds like they short cut that strategy by excluding positions reached by moves that this machine will never make and significantly reduced the number of "possible" positions that way. So I wonder if this means their program can't win from an otherwise winnable position, because that position isn't in it's database.
... before you start bashing them, okay? I believe in intelligent design, but I don't see that this post has much to do with it. Those of us who believe in a literal interpretation of Genesis obviously don't believe that humans came from multiple sources, we believe all humans descended from one couple. However, even if you could conclusively prove that all humanity came from one population - that doesn't disprove evolution (which is probably why you didn't immediately get the ID crowd all posting "see! see! we were right!". In fact, I'd think that even from an evolutionists POV, the chance of a species evolving independently from multiple populations is low.
Now if someone said they'd proven that humans couldn't have evolved from one population, I might be inclined to look at their findings more closely.
- Once you pay for the vulnerability, you've basically admitted it's there and that you didn't already know about it, and you might not want to do this.
- Your testing staff might try to game the system.
- You open the door to all kinds of bad publicity: people mad that their exploit didn't pay, or didn't pay as much as another, or was ignored (when it was really unfounded)
Some of this might have been addressed in TFA or even the summary (I didn't read the whole thing - sorry!). My point is just there are some negatives, and for a PHB they probably outweigh the positives (especially when measured in $)I've always wondered if they could make a system that tracked your eye movements, because you wouldn't need very high resolution for peripheral vision. I guess that would only remove some of the rendering load, since you probably couldn't make the high res part of the screen or lens or whatever move to keep up with your eye movements.
I think ATI/AMD should combine the two names and market the graphics cards under the name, "DAAMIT"
... this will be the one that finally triggers democratic reforms in Cuba!