Posts by rdhood 40 posts • joined 13 Apr 2015
"The Register has to sadly support our old American neighbours. "
While that statement might make sense for any random person from the U.S., any American who is reading this article will generally be very well acquainted with different temperature and measurement systems. In fact, most of us wish the U.S. would just change so that we wouldn't have to learn every formula in two systems.
People can only accurately see a very small area in the center of their vision. everything else is fuzz. So people tend to focus their attention and best eyesite on the action If they aren't moving their heads, its because the action is staying at the center of their vision and there is no reason to move. And, as everyone else has noted, you don't necessarily want to be looking all around in order to be able to experience a movie. If this becomes something that lasts, I can see movies would have VR interactive ratings indicating the range of motion of the movie.
THIS.
If I could get 52 millionaires per year to lend me $1,000,000 for a week each, set up sequentially, then I can continually earn interest on the money like I had a million dollars!
This is the way my credit union is able to offer me a free checking account... they make interest off of my direct deposit and money in the account.
If I can hold onto 1000 contractor's salaries ($2000 per week each) for a week at a time, then I essentially can pull down the interest on $2 million a year.
"OK, everyone can call me naive and shoot me down in flames, but is there any reason why an AI CAN'T tell you why it has made a particular decision?"
In every situation, it can. BUT that does not mean you would understand it. Supposing I have some complex mathematical relationship with some changing natural phenomenon. By the time you get around to asking "but why?", the natural phenomenon that formed part of the input to the decision is gone, never to be reproduced, and the mathematical equation from which we derived the results might take you 4 years of college level mathematics to understand.
YES. AI can tell you why it made the decision. But you will not understand , nor will you be able to check, the answer.
Not in this case. Two of those reactors (in Georgia. USA) are on the site of two older reactors. There are no protests nor NIMBY problems with these reactors, or the one in SC. This is a case of bad management, pure and simple, and the thought that they could pass cost overruns to the taxpayers. Anytime a pro-business Public Service Commission (the state government entity that allows the Southern Company, a parent company to Georgia Power, to charge customers instead of investors for power system expansion) starts approving charging the public for cost overruns, it sets up feed back mechanism to milk the taxpayer for BILLIONS extra in costs. Why come in on-time and in-budget when you can take an extra few years and get an extra few billion dollars from the taxpayers of Georgia? Methinks that they got lazy going for the extra billions, and let this one get away from them.
In in Georgia (USA), we are already paying billions in cost overruns on this project... a project that was not wanted by consumers, and was not needed by the Southern Company. They (the Southern Company) jumped at the opportunity to build the first new nukes in many years in the U.S., and our own Public Service Commission gave them the green light and let them start collecting on the first billion of cost overruns. It is a fiasco that leaves Westinghouse bankrupt, leaves Toshiba in a precarious spot, and leaves Ga consumers (and not Southern Company investors) on the hook for two half built reactors.
I'll tell you why: it is like all of the "fact checkers" run by newspapers. "Our impartial fact checker gave that story/quote 4 liar-liar-pants-on-fire"
They want to be able to say "Our impartial AI said that story is fake news".
Further, is a half truth fake or real? Is it fair to say, "illegal immigration brings rich diversity to our country" without saying "but costs us $120 billion dollars a year"? Both are real/true, but one without the other is a half truth.
So each side will produce its own AI to present it's factual side of the story, and anyone who doesn't agree with their impartial AI fake news detector will be wrong.
That thing can only be considered a fish in a DNA sort of way. Methinks they got the most hobbled fish that they could find.
This. Why have we never seen the The Foundation trilogy turned into a movie? It makes so many excellent points on monetary, technological hegemony, and the whole idea of prediction of masses of people (and the inability to predict the anomalous unpredictable individual, but setting up a storage of human knowledge for the inevitable day when civilization collapses.
Or a movie like "Time enough for love". The idea that our abilities and interest span many professions and would take many lifetimes, but we are limited to ONE. We don't get to pursue so much that we would like to pursue because we are so time limited.
WAY too much good Sci Fi, and it gets ignored to rehash Dune one more time? Sci Fi got close to nailing it... they needed about twice as much time to do it right. It is definitely a 15 hour (without commercials) movie.
"Science funding, on the other hand, should be broadly spread, because you can't predict the future results. If you can predict it, then the science is done and it turns into engineering. A side effect of Science funding is, of course, a population of creative and skilled scientists and engineers that might later go into profitable careers."
In an ideal world. sure. In the real world, it's not. Gov't money is invariably tied to expectations, and money is spread according to those expectations. Much of the time, you end up getting the science that you expect, with the same projects sucking up vast sums of money because of prevailing attitudes and expectations. And scientists tend to go where the money flows, and tries to give the expected results. A scientist has to eat too, after all.
They can be picked with a tablet and an electronic connection at the door. Google it. Don't leave anything of value in your room unprotected... ever.
One of the big problems with Atlanta is that it is based on and wheel&spoke type design, and our mass transit always goes through "the hub" to get from one part of the rim to another... taking a 15 minute ride and turning it into 1.5 hours. Or, all thru traffic (of the 18 wheel variety) gets shunted onto the rim with the commuting traffic. Or all of the interstate traffic from the east coast and midwest (I85/75) headed to Florida must go through a single pathway ("the connector") .Previous attempts to create an "outer perimeter" were seen as transparent attempts to create new development corridors. All are very bad ideas that contribute to huge traffic jams that could be ameliorated with tunnels. It sounds kind of spooky and like science fiction, but if it would work....
"Kloepfer told CBS: "I learned that every 30 minutes in the United States on average a child dies or is injured by a firearm."
Which is a blatant lie that can be disproved by any number of sources by anyone in this forum in less than two minutes. It doesn't help the anti-gun agenda to just lie and make up statistics, and it doesn't help that CBS allows that lie to go unchallenged. " I heard XXXXXX" is what passes for journalism now, and the press wonders why they have a trust problem.
and speaking of electricity, who is going to man the nuclear reactors? There are several in the state where "The Walking Dead" takes place.. one near Cartersville GA, one at Ga Tech (is that one still active?), one or several at the Savannah River Plant (military), two in south GA, and two more expected to come online in the near future, and one mothballed in the Dawson Forest, in Dawson county.
"The whole of the value is based on faith in people you probably can't trust (after all they're actively seeking an unregulated money transfer/launder)"
So, if I don't want the government or my CC company knowing (literally) every single thing I purchase, then I am seeking an unregulated money transfer or money laundering? I can't simply want to keep my business private? And If I want to deal with someone that only takes bitcoin, which of these two categories do I fall into? And if I am in, say, Venezuela, and I wanted to keep ANY wealth while my country is pissing away the economy, then I am money laundering?
You have reduced bitcoin to the realm of criminals, and missed the point entirely.
That's not as crazy as it sounds. They could be making up press releases to expose who IS actually building one of these things, so they can hack them for the technology.
ALL U.S. Presidents are a time limited experiment, and we have a Constitution that prevents too much damage by one person. I look at world headlines and wonder if they realize how the U.S. actually works.
The President can't create any laws by himself, can't negotiate/pass any treaties by himself, can't renig on any treaties by himself. The President can sign (or veto) bills into law. He can applie his policies to carrying out the executive branch (example, he can choose to not enforce immigration law or marijuana drug laws), he can appoint ambassadors/judges/ dept heads (including the supreme court justices). He is commander in chief of the armed services, but he cannot declare war. He can create regulations through existing federal government.
Thus, he is not responsible for the economy (though he often gets credit , good or bad), he is not responsible for the price of gas/oil, he is not responsible for the budget (though he can veto it or propose a budget).
He CANNOT build a wall.
He CANNOT deport every illegal immigrant (he can try, but would run out of money).
He CANNOT change the tax code in any way, though he can encourage the IRS to interpret things his way.
... and so on and so forth. So forget the hyperbole. Life will go on.
"The best method is get a cat. They don't tend to crap in their own garden, and they are territorial, so generally keep other cats away..."
Not. PBS (here on the left side of the pond) aired a show of a cat population in a small Brit town. "50 felines from the Surrey village of Shamley Green were fitted with GPS collars and 'cat cams'". In viewing the episode, it was discovered that while cats do avoid each other, they end up "sharing" an area by taking shifts. In fact, they discovered that (for the people who had cat doors), other cats come into their homes while the owners are not there and eat the food and share the house!
Thus, getting a cat will not eliminate or keep other cats away, it will simply cause your property to be time shared.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2340714/The-Secret-Life-Cat-What-mischievous-moggies-gets-owners-backs.html#ixzz4OCO7plWc
Setting the speed limit on a road is arbitrary.
The requirement to obey the arbitrarily set speed limit is not.
So big Pharma can make more money and big government can lose control over it?
I could have written almost the exact same thing about Dahlonega, Ga (or 90% of the U.S.).
"John O Groats has just been enabled for fibre yet most of the communities outside the village itself still cannot get ADSL broadband let alone fibre."
North Georgia College has been enabled for fiber, yet the entire rest of the city/county still can only get ADSL at a rate of less than 6mbps.... and it costs MORE than subscribers in CA/NY/NJ who get a 25mbps-100mbps.
I'm not sure THAT is correct, either. Instantaneous spontaneous disintegration? Not likely. But then, maybe nobody would set aside time to study exploding satellites, so maybe they changed the title of the study without significantly changing the intent.
Oh, it is way worse than that. the rest:
" And if we can't lock people up, we want to call (them) out. We want to name and shame through indictments, or sanctions, or public relation campaigns – who is doing this and exactly what they're doing."
Really? Is it the place of the FBI to "send messages", to use the legal system to harass, embarrass and ruin the lives of people that they have decided that they want to lock up, but can't? That is f'n scary. That it came out of the mouth of the man who pushed to NOT indict a connected political candidate who broke rules governing classified information should scare people sh**less.
"The don't make sense if the system can take a USB card"
Actually, these make sense if you have a system dated before about 2005-2006 where the firmware/boot process does not recognize a USB drive (even if the system had usb). Most systems after that time frame had the ability to boot/install from usb.
If the thing is implanted in my chest, it needs to have secure communications at ANY distance. Limiting comms to 7ft... or even 7mm... might prevent a mass attack, but it doesn't prevent a targeted attack.
“Saying it’s more Earth-like than just its mass is speculative."
That ONE statement sums up the entire non-event non-article.
Let's be clear: they find a planet in a habitable zone and estimate its mass. THAT'S IT. To use the term "Earth-like" is hyperbole. We know know that there are HUNDREDS of minute variables that go into life on earth. If any one of them waivers by just the tiniest bit , life dies.
Call it "Earth-like" when you can claim another couple hundred of those variables that we know are necessary for life.
"Not to mention that 0.3% dimming every year doesn't at all match phases that have time scales of millions of years."
Exactly. It doesn't match ANYTHING that we know about the physics of stars or their burnout. Someone mentioned the Drake equation, and that the odds of observing a civilization in realtime would be near zero. IMHO, this is no longer true. It could be that these "star dimming" things happen all of the time, but we never before had the computer power or observational equipment to detect them in real time. Think about supernovas... it use to be weeks/months/years before someone noticed a star going supernova. Now, we sometimes detect these things WITHIN HOURS/DAYS. Drake fail.
"Not to mention, Drake's equation - the chance of observing THAT EXACT MOMENT of someone building this ridiculous structure (rather than it not being built yet, it being already built, or it already having blown to pieces long ago) is basically zero."
Maybe, but observing THIS phenomenon over 4 years, 1480 ly removed, seemed impossible just 20 years ago. IMHO, this aspect of Drake's equation (the odds of seeing something in the sky as it happens being "basically zero") is dead.
Indeed. Reading the reg article, one would think that the only folks on board are piloting the ship. In reality, ships need CONSTANT maintenance. The members of the crew that aren't piloting the ship are scrubbing, painting, lubricating, changing filters, breaking ice, yada, yada, yada. There is ALWAYS something to do.
Uh, yes it can. We can't explain gravity, but we still use it to guide small vessels all over the solar system. Understanding something works is not a prerequisite to something using it. It is true, though, that optimizing that energy output will be difficult to do when they can't even explain it in the first place.
Traffic flows like water. When it gets backed up enough in one place, it seeks alternate paths. I have a commute path that is a couple miles further, but 30 minutes faster. It is not a main artery, and is counter intuitive to most drivers. So, the herd stays on the main roads...
"Is it just me, or does this have a lot to do with E-cigarettes taking away a lot of the business of Mar*bo*ro, Be*s*n & H*dg*s, etc? Sounds like someone did some lobbying.
In fact Li-Ion aren't that dangerous if they are made correctly, "
It's just you. First, there are different kinds of lithium batteries. Go to youtube and look up
"lipo battery fire" or "lithium battery fire" . What you will see is a LOT of energy being released from some reasonably small batteries. Do you really want this happening in the hold of an airplane in which you are flying? I happen to use various lipos in radio controlled vehicles, and the recommendation is to keep them in a metal box during transport in your auto AND home. One serious crash and you dispose of them even if they look okay. Lithium batteries used in electronics is a lot safer, but they still catch fire with (sometimes) disastrous results. Example, google: "electric car burns down home"
There is ample evidence that the danger is real, and not merely lobbying scare tactics.
I think they can do it, but not for a mere million bucks. I think there is too much specialty stuff that needs to be made, too much engineering and other labor that needs to be paid, yada, yada, yada. The real competition here should, in fact, see who can create the cheapest shot to the moon with some type of working payload. $3 million? $5 million?
To be clear, I'm all for these guys having a go. at least it will show what a project can do on a limited budget. If it runs out of money....well, that's what it tells us.
So now the vegans and eco-freaks will be telling us WHICH vegetables we can eat. They will not give up their war-on-meat over lettuce and cucumbers.
Anytime a theory or prediction can be proven or dis-proven by actual observation, why argue? Respectfully disagree, and then wait! We are only looking at a few months.
"I find this quasi-religious attitude that "something is complicated so there is no need for us to do science about it" really weird."
Except that NO ONE IS SAYING THAT. What people are saying is that you don't reconstruct the economy and way of life for 7 billion people based on models that have not been properly hashed out. And when we keep finding new inputs to the climate model, it has NOT been properly hashed out.
"world leaders get ready to head to Paris for the latest pact on cutting CO2 emissions are morons. or have an agenda"
BINGO. When politicians get together to change the lives of 7 billion people based on unsettled science (and if we don't have all the inputs, as this article demonstrates, then the science is by definiton "unsettled"), then check your pocketbook and your liberty, because they are after both.
The proponents of global warming may or may not be right... the science is unsettled... but they are led by power hungry politicians who desire to enslave you in a lifestyle ... that they don't personally live.. of their choosing. Example: Al Gore. He will keep houses, jets, swimming pools while telling us to live in 200sq ft, shower once a week, and take the bus.
"Anybody with the tools necessary to cook, the patience to look for deals, and a larger budget can eat reasonably well."
That's harder than it sounds for a lot of folks who are on food stamps. Our inner cities in the U.S. are often "food deserts". The often unsavory clientèle (think about those thugs in Baltimore who just burned down their CVS drug store...) makes typical chains NOT want to locate there. So there is no "shopping around", as that would take a car and some travel. When I lived without a car in a large city, I got to know first hand this experience. It goes like this: get on bus, make 1 hour ride to grocery store, get as much as you can take back on the bus, make one hour ride back home. It's quite an eye-opening experience for someone who has always lived less than 8 minutes from a grocery store by car.
The location of grocery stores/supermarkets/farmers markets has a direct impact on what one can do with that $29 in food stamps. It's not just the amount of money, it's the availability and cost of food in your area.
I expect that the only life we will ever find are microbes in our own solar system... dormant microbes at that. Mathematicians are increasingly warning that the number of variables (upwards of 200 at this point) that must be absolutely spot on for life to exist on earth are not likely (as in "virtually impossible") to exist anywhere else. Even if there are a billions planets in the "habitable zone". The odds are so against it happening on earth that it is becoming more likely that we are simply a computer simulation in someone else's universe, or that we live in a created world.
One example of this came out a few weeks ago... that dual gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn are EXTREMELY far out and permitted relative peace-from-bombardment for the inner four planets (and still do). (see March 23 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. ) This is just one MORE variable that allowed life on earth... and there are now hundreds of variables. And all of those variables simply go to set up conditions for life... the actual development of life poses a whole new set of fantastic against-the-odds variables that must be overcome.
Its possible that microbes get passed around like the common cold in the solar system. That is not what I consider "alien life". Further, lets assume that the earth "blew up" and sent shards off into space at the highest speed of a comet.. about a million miles an hour. It would still take about a million years to get to the closest uninhabitable planet. A piece actually getting to another planet, with microbes intact, surviving reentry and seeding another planet is probably about as likely as a gamma ray burst from a far-flung star.
The more we know, the more we know that it is less and less and less likely that their is other life in the universe. Earth is an anomaly, and the mathematics involved are slowing proving that.
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