In other words -- if girls don't want to study science them please, for the love of science, don't try to make them. I sincerely believe that statistically, men are better at science than women. There are enough objectively identifiable differences between the sexes to justify such a statement. (The same could be said for races, too.)
Ok, that last statement was just not cool. How can you possibly apply even a weak stereotype to a group that numbers in the billions (1/6 of the world population) in some cases? I guarantee you, there is no racial stereotype that is actually true. Even skin color is not uniform across an entire "race." It's simple statistics.
Check your math sir. 35/.13 is closer to 300 than 3000.
That was courtesy of a "metric-challenged USAian.":)
Besides, your typical gasoline engine has an average efficiency of about 20%. The best (newest) coal and gas fired power plants can hit 60% thermal efficiency. This means the actual figure is more like 10 gallons to produce your required steel, meaning it takes more energy to fill your gas tank just once. (This is all assuming your numbers are correct).
If you had a machine that allowed you to run cars off grid power (and could implement it), you would save the world. This is because fossil fuel to usable energy conversion efficiency is much higher in a power plant than in an internal combustion engine. Gas fired power plants have hit 60% efficiency while the theoretical maximum efficiency for car engines is closer to 30%. Such a machine already exists and it has nothing to do with ethanol- hydrogen fuel cells.
Your consideration of energy balance is misguided. The more important consideration is carbon balance. Fossil Fuels are the worst possible source from a carbon perspective, because 100% of the carbon contained in them is irreversibly released into the atmosphere. Ethanol is carbon neutral because all the carbon released by burning the ethanol is absorbed by next year's crop. In this respect ethanol is painfully beneficial. If we could get efficiencies as low as 1% (by using last year's ethanol crop to grow the next year's), all our problems would be solved (except maybe space utilization).
Of course ethanol is terribly inefficient in itself. A lot of the energy is invariably lost as the converting bacteria take their cut to replicate or as you harvest and sow the crops. Solar/hydrogen has the potential for the highest efficiency while being carbon neutral, provided costs fall.
I like how the first task they listed doesn't even make sense. Why use lip-to-text technology for hearing disabled people? If you're giving them computers, shouldn't you just make it speech-to-text? Just because they can't hear doesn't mean a computer can't hear for them.
It's sad but yeah, the biggest use for this will be spying.
I see no reason why we would be paying them to use maps already made freely available by them.
I bet within the next 50 years battlefield commanders will have a Command and Conquer style interface letting them observe from above and issue orders in real time across a wide area.
You people are pathetic. Like it or not, he's a successful businessman and probably has some good inspirational advice for the kids.
Remember, morality is relative. So what if you disagree with him? Do you really want to attack him on behalf of some sort of personal vendetta and ruin the experience for everyone? I think the most responsible thing to do would be to give a short, unbiased 20 minute presentation about the man's work and the issues that he has to deal with. The kids will decide for themselves.
Also, remember that this person as an individual has nothing to do with the RIAA. He just happens to be a good publicist and is being payed by his employer to advocate a certain viewpoint. He's just doing his job.
Just like scientific advancements and knowledge in general are available to anyone, anywhere, so should be open source software. It's a principles thing.
In any case, something tells me no open source UAV software will ever be capable of running a weapons platform without significant contributions. If a country can build a UAV capable of military grade recon or even able to field weapons, they won't have any problem writing the software.
Knowing all the muscles in a cat isn't pointless trivia. It's important if one wants to understand the evolutionary links between various animal species, as the evidence and basis for comparison is anatomy, in many cases. Just like math is the fundamental language of physics, the basic structure of the various organisms is fundamental to understanding the rest of biology. Even so, those students probably never learned cat anatomy per se, but were able to figure it out pretty easily from knowing the anatomy of other mammals and a little evolution theory.
That said, I agree that we aren't really losing our long term memory, we're just not using it for pointless information.
Actually it was the fact that 1) Europeans brought unstoppable diseases and 2) The natives could not unite and preferred to continue killing each other even as the whites pushed onto their land that brought about their genocide. It was mostly 1 though, with diseases like smallpox killing as much as 75% of the native population in some places in as little as 20 years- a true genocide.
Now, I don't see anyone trying to sue African nations for the existence of HIV in the rest of the world (HIV originated in Africa). So we can't really blame the Europeans for bringing diseases to the natives. So what, exactly, are we paying for? For defeating a powerful and hostile enemy. To say that the US government (and the Canadians too, by extension) took advantage of the natives in some way is revisionist history. The practice of making war for the right to posses land was common both in Europe and among all the tribes of the Americas, since before Columbus. In my opinion, the natives are lucky they were able to remain "sovereign" at all
Agreed. I'm willing to bet that a lot of the Chinese students who do well on that problem have seen it at least 10 times before. Could they get it right without ever having seen a similar problem? On the other hand, I bet there are a fair number of western math students, who would get that right based on our knowledge of the general principles of trigonometry (the same principles as the UK problem), never even having seen a "3-D" parallelogram before. I wouldn't call it 3-D because you still think in 2-D to understand and solve it.
I know from personal experience and from news that this is a problem in a lot of 3rd world countries- discipline and rote learning are emphasized, thinking and problem solving are not. These countries push their students through the system, teaching them a huge number of things sure, but they end up forgetting about critical thinking and problems solving skills that tie it all together. They have the organizational capability to "educate" everyone because they recognize the importance of said education for their economy, but they simply don't have the expertise to do it effectively. When you use rote learning you can get to any level of complexity. You could get 8th graders to solve problems using maxwell's equations if you wanted. But it doesn't mean they have an intuitive, useful grasp of the math behind it. If that were true of the Chinese students, there would be much more innovative science and technology coming out of China, considering the huge numbers of science and engineering grads they've got. Instead, they had to buy their space technology from the Russians.
I'm not worried about the supposed better quality of Chinese math students than the west's. I AM worried that UK schools are doing stupid things like discouraging students from taking math for the sake of their rankings. Talk about a competitive system gone wrong.
Intelsat has been accused of having business links with Hezbollah before This is the company we trust to run one of our most valuable strategic assets?
I've been saying this for years, they need to move the shuttle to California! A launch facility near San Diego would be well supported by the local tech economy AND the weather would be beyond perfect. No more weather delays!
So what if it's a little extra fuel. The cost of a slightly bigger rocket would be more than recovered by preventing delays like this.
I fail to see a difference. If it acts like a computer- that is, it computes- then it IS a computer. Or does a computer HAVE to have electrons running through it?
>In fact, Africa has probably received more charity than China or India and is doing much worse than those countries.
Exactly my point. If the third world countries knew what had to be done, they wouldn't be third world countries anymore. Africa is a perfect example- they get millions, even billions in "aid" and the government officials just end up buying nice cars and planes with the money. Africa doesn't need money or food, it needs serious investment in its infrastructure and education system. It needs economic development, and that is something the Africans can't provide. In South Africa, the unemployment rate is hovering around 40%. During the Great Depression, an American unemployment rate of 25% - almost half of South Africa - was a global crisis.
"In other developing countries, legions of unskilled workers have kept down labor costs. But South Africa's leaders, vowing not to let their nation become the West's sweatshop, heeded the demands of politically powerful labor unions for new protections and benefits. According to a study conducted in 2000 for the government's finance department, South Africa's wages are five times higher than Indonesia's, even though its workers are only twice as productive.
To the great detriment of its people, South Africa's leaders have been successful. South Africa is not the West's sweatshop."
Third world leaders do not know what needs to be done. The knowledge, the 2 centuries of economics research, exists in the west. A country that has never before had a thriving economy can't be expected to suddenly spawn one.
I remember reading that the cases would be large and bright orange so they can easily be spotted if stolen, and so if people see an adult with one it will be embarrassing- because he stole it from a child.
Well, I think solar power is a damn good argument to be in space. Even nuclear will eventually run down. Sure, Uranium is cheap now but if 50, 80 percent of earth's energy starts to come from fission? And Fusion is just as bad- hydrogen fusion creates helium, and that's an absolutely irreversible process. We're planning to get hydrogen from the water? So we're going to start running down our planet's water supply to create "clean" power? At the very least we'd need extra-planetary hydrogen sources to not fuck up our oceans. The way I see it, solar is the only infinite power source available to man (well, wind too by virtue of its being created by the sun's heating but it's impractical to carpet the planet with wind mills). All other power sources destroy the planet because they extract power from it. Even things like geothermal cool the mantle/core and if performed on a large enough scale would cause a serious problem. Tidal will eventually destroy the moon's orbit (even if we don't extract power). Hydroelectric has a fundamental limit- a function of the total rainfall and the number/elevation of rivers. Not to mention it rapes the surrounding land. Solar brings power in from the outside, rather than consuming from within. So good argument number 1: long term, impactless survival dictates that we MUST eventually switch to solar. Covering the land with solar cells counts as pollution, so we'd need to build them in space- in orbit and on the moon- and beam the power down.
Another damn good reason is the technology. Our century has evolved, technologically, faster than any other in the history of human existence. A big reason for this is the windfall from space exploration. Instant commmunication to any point on the planet? Sure, most of it TODAY might happen over fiber optic lines on the ocean floors, but we never would have gotten to this point without first launching communication satellites. And we never would've launched satellites unless the Soviets had gotten this wacky, pointless idea to point a rocket straight up. What about air travel- it is actually possible to reach any point on earth within 36 hours from any point, and you don't have to pay an exorbitant amount of money to do it. This is because of advances in jet engine technology, in aerodynamics, materials, navigation, logistics, computers. NASA didn't necessarily pioneer these fields but it definitely had a lot to do with them. For example, NASA was involved very early on in the development of Computational Fluid Dynamics to employ in rockets and study atmospheric re-entry. This technology has been applied to build better jet engines, better (cheaper) wings, and has brought down the price of air travel to the point where most people can afford it. And if there is going to be another revolution in air travel, it will be thanks to work that NASA is the primary researcher in- hypersonic, air breathing Ramjets. Ramjets are directly applicable to NASA's goal to reduce the cost of getting into space, but can also cut travel time to any point on the planet down to two hours (maximum air time, that is). NASA recently tested a mach 11 ramjet. And solar cells- guess who was the very first buyer of solar cells because they needed power where the sun was the only source. Guess who is a big supporter of further solar cell research because of the need to put them on satellites and space stations? The list is long: NASA has been involved in the development of communications technology, optics, energy production, materials, and on and on.
If you can't call these things "real benefits to humanity," then there is no such thing. We can't even start to imagine what sort of technologies will come from a mission to settle the moon and Mars.
And you know, I think romanticism is a damn good reason for space exploration too. Like JFK said when he was pushing for the moon: why fly solo across the Atlantic, why climb the highest mountain? Why does man do crazy, pointless things, and why does it capture
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, that last statement was just not cool. How can you possibly apply even a weak stereotype to a group that numbers in the billions (1/6 of the world population) in some cases? I guarantee you, there is no racial stereotype that is actually true. Even skin color is not uniform across an entire "race." It's simple statistics.
Heh, that should be 100 gallons to produce the steel. My mistake.
Still a lot less than 3,000. And only a few months worth of fuel stops.
Check your math sir. 35/.13 is closer to 300 than 3000.
That was courtesy of a "metric-challenged USAian." :)
Besides, your typical gasoline engine has an average efficiency of about 20%. The best (newest) coal and gas fired power plants can hit 60% thermal efficiency. This means the actual figure is more like 10 gallons to produce your required steel, meaning it takes more energy to fill your gas tank just once. (This is all assuming your numbers are correct).
But it's just what I need to cheer me up when I'm pinned down by sniper fire!
If you had a machine that allowed you to run cars off grid power (and could implement it), you would save the world. This is because fossil fuel to usable energy conversion efficiency is much higher in a power plant than in an internal combustion engine. Gas fired power plants have hit 60% efficiency while the theoretical maximum efficiency for car engines is closer to 30%. Such a machine already exists and it has nothing to do with ethanol- hydrogen fuel cells.
Your consideration of energy balance is misguided. The more important consideration is carbon balance. Fossil Fuels are the worst possible source from a carbon perspective, because 100% of the carbon contained in them is irreversibly released into the atmosphere. Ethanol is carbon neutral because all the carbon released by burning the ethanol is absorbed by next year's crop. In this respect ethanol is painfully beneficial. If we could get efficiencies as low as 1% (by using last year's ethanol crop to grow the next year's), all our problems would be solved (except maybe space utilization).
Of course ethanol is terribly inefficient in itself. A lot of the energy is invariably lost as the converting bacteria take their cut to replicate or as you harvest and sow the crops. Solar/hydrogen has the potential for the highest efficiency while being carbon neutral, provided costs fall.
I like how the first task they listed doesn't even make sense. Why use lip-to-text technology for hearing disabled people? If you're giving them computers, shouldn't you just make it speech-to-text? Just because they can't hear doesn't mean a computer can't hear for them.
It's sad but yeah, the biggest use for this will be spying.
"The EU" isn't a country, now is it? Chump.
I see no reason why we would be paying them to use maps already made freely available by them.
I bet within the next 50 years battlefield commanders will have a Command and Conquer style interface letting them observe from above and issue orders in real time across a wide area.
Well shit, I'm waiting for the array of 1,000 foot telescopes on the moon. THEN we'll be doing some serious astronomy.
You people are pathetic. Like it or not, he's a successful businessman and probably has some good inspirational advice for the kids. Remember, morality is relative. So what if you disagree with him? Do you really want to attack him on behalf of some sort of personal vendetta and ruin the experience for everyone? I think the most responsible thing to do would be to give a short, unbiased 20 minute presentation about the man's work and the issues that he has to deal with. The kids will decide for themselves. Also, remember that this person as an individual has nothing to do with the RIAA. He just happens to be a good publicist and is being payed by his employer to advocate a certain viewpoint. He's just doing his job.
Just like scientific advancements and knowledge in general are available to anyone, anywhere, so should be open source software. It's a principles thing.
In any case, something tells me no open source UAV software will ever be capable of running a weapons platform without significant contributions. If a country can build a UAV capable of military grade recon or even able to field weapons, they won't have any problem writing the software.
Knowing all the muscles in a cat isn't pointless trivia. It's important if one wants to understand the evolutionary links between various animal species, as the evidence and basis for comparison is anatomy, in many cases. Just like math is the fundamental language of physics, the basic structure of the various organisms is fundamental to understanding the rest of biology. Even so, those students probably never learned cat anatomy per se, but were able to figure it out pretty easily from knowing the anatomy of other mammals and a little evolution theory.
That said, I agree that we aren't really losing our long term memory, we're just not using it for pointless information.
Actually, posts containing goatse seem to be getting modded +5 something a lot these days.
Actually it was the fact that 1) Europeans brought unstoppable diseases and 2) The natives could not unite and preferred to continue killing each other even as the whites pushed onto their land that brought about their genocide. It was mostly 1 though, with diseases like smallpox killing as much as 75% of the native population in some places in as little as 20 years- a true genocide.
Now, I don't see anyone trying to sue African nations for the existence of HIV in the rest of the world (HIV originated in Africa). So we can't really blame the Europeans for bringing diseases to the natives. So what, exactly, are we paying for? For defeating a powerful and hostile enemy. To say that the US government (and the Canadians too, by extension) took advantage of the natives in some way is revisionist history. The practice of making war for the right to posses land was common both in Europe and among all the tribes of the Americas, since before Columbus. In my opinion, the natives are lucky they were able to remain "sovereign" at all
It's not an ordered pair, it's a fraction- like 4/4 time = 1.
The challenging part is finding an uncommonly "large" time like 16/4 (4/4 is the most common AFAIK).
Agreed. I'm willing to bet that a lot of the Chinese students who do well on that problem have seen it at least 10 times before. Could they get it right without ever having seen a similar problem? On the other hand, I bet there are a fair number of western math students, who would get that right based on our knowledge of the general principles of trigonometry (the same principles as the UK problem), never even having seen a "3-D" parallelogram before. I wouldn't call it 3-D because you still think in 2-D to understand and solve it.
I know from personal experience and from news that this is a problem in a lot of 3rd world countries- discipline and rote learning are emphasized, thinking and problem solving are not. These countries push their students through the system, teaching them a huge number of things sure, but they end up forgetting about critical thinking and problems solving skills that tie it all together. They have the organizational capability to "educate" everyone because they recognize the importance of said education for their economy, but they simply don't have the expertise to do it effectively. When you use rote learning you can get to any level of complexity. You could get 8th graders to solve problems using maxwell's equations if you wanted. But it doesn't mean they have an intuitive, useful grasp of the math behind it. If that were true of the Chinese students, there would be much more innovative science and technology coming out of China, considering the huge numbers of science and engineering grads they've got. Instead, they had to buy their space technology from the Russians.
I'm not worried about the supposed better quality of Chinese math students than the west's. I AM worried that UK schools are doing stupid things like discouraging students from taking math for the sake of their rankings. Talk about a competitive system gone wrong.
hmm... now about that open source laser lithography machine...
I've been saying this for years, they need to move the shuttle to California! A launch facility near San Diego would be well supported by the local tech economy AND the weather would be beyond perfect. No more weather delays! So what if it's a little extra fuel. The cost of a slightly bigger rocket would be more than recovered by preventing delays like this.
Wannabe explorers everywhere just shat in their pants.
I fail to see a difference. If it acts like a computer- that is, it computes- then it IS a computer. Or does a computer HAVE to have electrons running through it?
>In fact, Africa has probably received more charity than China or India and is doing much worse than those countries.
Exactly my point. If the third world countries knew what had to be done, they wouldn't be third world countries anymore. Africa is a perfect example- they get millions, even billions in "aid" and the government officials just end up buying nice cars and planes with the money. Africa doesn't need money or food, it needs serious investment in its infrastructure and education system. It needs economic development, and that is something the Africans can't provide. In South Africa, the unemployment rate is hovering around 40%. During the Great Depression, an American unemployment rate of 25% - almost half of South Africa - was a global crisis.
Lookie here
"In other developing countries, legions of unskilled workers have kept down labor costs. But South Africa's leaders, vowing not to let their nation become the West's sweatshop, heeded the demands of politically powerful labor unions for new protections and benefits. According to a study conducted in 2000 for the government's finance department, South Africa's wages are five times higher than Indonesia's, even though its workers are only twice as productive.
To the great detriment of its people, South Africa's leaders have been successful. South Africa is not the West's sweatshop."
Third world leaders do not know what needs to be done. The knowledge, the 2 centuries of economics research, exists in the west. A country that has never before had a thriving economy can't be expected to suddenly spawn one.
I remember reading that the cases would be large and bright orange so they can easily be spotted if stolen, and so if people see an adult with one it will be embarrassing- because he stole it from a child.
Yea, because third world countries know exactly what needs to be done, right?
Good arguments, huh?
Well, I think solar power is a damn good argument to be in space. Even nuclear will eventually run down. Sure, Uranium is cheap now but if 50, 80 percent of earth's energy starts to come from fission? And Fusion is just as bad- hydrogen fusion creates helium, and that's an absolutely irreversible process. We're planning to get hydrogen from the water? So we're going to start running down our planet's water supply to create "clean" power? At the very least we'd need extra-planetary hydrogen sources to not fuck up our oceans. The way I see it, solar is the only infinite power source available to man (well, wind too by virtue of its being created by the sun's heating but it's impractical to carpet the planet with wind mills). All other power sources destroy the planet because they extract power from it. Even things like geothermal cool the mantle/core and if performed on a large enough scale would cause a serious problem. Tidal will eventually destroy the moon's orbit (even if we don't extract power). Hydroelectric has a fundamental limit- a function of the total rainfall and the number/elevation of rivers. Not to mention it rapes the surrounding land. Solar brings power in from the outside, rather than consuming from within. So good argument number 1: long term, impactless survival dictates that we MUST eventually switch to solar. Covering the land with solar cells counts as pollution, so we'd need to build them in space- in orbit and on the moon- and beam the power down.
Another damn good reason is the technology. Our century has evolved, technologically, faster than any other in the history of human existence. A big reason for this is the windfall from space exploration. Instant commmunication to any point on the planet? Sure, most of it TODAY might happen over fiber optic lines on the ocean floors, but we never would have gotten to this point without first launching communication satellites. And we never would've launched satellites unless the Soviets had gotten this wacky, pointless idea to point a rocket straight up. What about air travel- it is actually possible to reach any point on earth within 36 hours from any point, and you don't have to pay an exorbitant amount of money to do it. This is because of advances in jet engine technology, in aerodynamics, materials, navigation, logistics, computers. NASA didn't necessarily pioneer these fields but it definitely had a lot to do with them. For example, NASA was involved very early on in the development of Computational Fluid Dynamics to employ in rockets and study atmospheric re-entry. This technology has been applied to build better jet engines, better (cheaper) wings, and has brought down the price of air travel to the point where most people can afford it. And if there is going to be another revolution in air travel, it will be thanks to work that NASA is the primary researcher in- hypersonic, air breathing Ramjets. Ramjets are directly applicable to NASA's goal to reduce the cost of getting into space, but can also cut travel time to any point on the planet down to two hours (maximum air time, that is). NASA recently tested a mach 11 ramjet. And solar cells- guess who was the very first buyer of solar cells because they needed power where the sun was the only source. Guess who is a big supporter of further solar cell research because of the need to put them on satellites and space stations? The list is long: NASA has been involved in the development of communications technology, optics, energy production, materials, and on and on.
If you can't call these things "real benefits to humanity," then there is no such thing. We can't even start to imagine what sort of technologies will come from a mission to settle the moon and Mars.
And you know, I think romanticism is a damn good reason for space exploration too. Like JFK said when he was pushing for the moon: why fly solo across the Atlantic, why climb the highest mountain? Why does man do crazy, pointless things, and why does it capture