+1 For a Go reference. +10 for making it relevant to the topic.

This should be in the summary.

More appropriately you can inspire them up from it. After a certain point you can't teach if they aren't willing to learn, and if they are willing to learn, they'll soak it up. Creating that willingness, that desire... that's the real trick. It is, appropriately, one trick NASA has actually pulled off more often and better than any other organization I know of.

I agree with your premise, but disagree with the ad-hominem. I've seen software engineers write some shit code to (for instance, trying to do 20k iteration loops of signal processing inside an ISR and wondering why they were missing interrupts). Don't let the wrong people do the wrong job, full stop.

As an aside, control systems theory is usually taught better (or at all) in EE courses anyway, but maybe you didn't mean control theory...

BUT, GROWTH! How can you grow if your audience is only 10's of thousands? There's millions of gamers out there! We need more farmvilles, more WoWs, if you're not growing X% per month/quarter/year you are a failure! /sarc

Not really. Time dilation is not that difficult to calculate, you would know a priori how much 'ship time' to run the engines to get the appearance of 1 stationary reference year of time traveled. Yes it's relative, but who cares? As long as everyone agrees on who's reference to use as a base, everyone can come to the same results, regardless of what the local clock says.

It wouldn't be unheard of for the field metrics to be named after either whoever discovers them, or the fictional character Cochrane, if the discover has a sense of humor. :)

Ah. You are right of course it's not too much to use residential power. It is enough to be a noticeable power bill (potentially more than the cost of the SDD over the life of the computer). I got the impression from the ggp that he was referring to reasonable, not absolute max possible. 38+ Watts in a mobile device of any kind is certainly not reasonable. In a desktop that doesn't absolutely need it, seems overkill as well even if will run just fine.

It's not a big deal compared to say a space heater, or microwave, but compared to the power usage of an SDD? Not to mention any additional active cooling that needs to be done. Personally, I'd rather have that other CPU than a bunch of RAM that mostly won't be used.

Sure, but what's that got to do with Tesla's ideas? Not much in fact. Just because there is a superficial resemblance: "power transferred without wires" doesn't mean he was anywhere near reality. Anymore than the Startrek writers should get credit for being computer scientists or physicists if they happen to guess lucky. As they saying goes, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Uhm... what?
Tesla's ideas and theories for 'broadcast' power were nothing like reality.

Oh Good, for a while there we sounded confused. My point was exactly that. But you're missing a key point, bacteria did not have the ability to metabolize citrate. You're ignoring that completely new structures developed in the cell to make the process possible, apparently because you just don't like the implication. You don't get to ignore the creation of new information just because you don't like it. Especially since it seems to be the key point you're missing about evolution, that such small changes are indeed dramatic and require new information to have been synthesized out of thin air. And if they can happen once, a long slow cycle of changes can build up over time.

You continue to conflate abiogenesis (the beginning of life) with evolution (the development of life), and you seem to do it in places that only serve to help your argument. This leads to fairly deep misunderstand about the requirements and processes of evolution because everytime I point out something you try a "NO TRUE SCOTTSMAN!" fallacy. So this conversation isn't getting very far.

Last try: Your claim was 'evolutionary processes CANNOT create new information'. Or more specifically it was: 'Random bit flips + filter can't create new information'.

My response: So we have some examples here where NEW information and functions developed using so-called impossible evolutionary processes. You're reply: "But but, that's because we looked for it!" This a typical 'moving the goalposts' defense, and makes you look dishonest. Regardless of who put the filter in place or why, random bit flips + filter made completely new and previously unknown information/organization/structure. Full Stop. Don't bring up abiogenesis or any thing else on this point simply because you don't like the conclusion.

Ultimately you've already acknowledging the process CAN create information. You've also acknowledge in previous responses to others that the environment qualifies as a filter, and mutations qualify as random bit flips. My contention is that you've already acknowledged evolution and are either trolling or have such irrational resistance to the word 'evolution' that you cannot think clearly.

Well, according to your definitions (which are quite silly), here's something from your so-called 'nothing': Bacteria Evolve New Ability The information was not there one day, and there the next. You might even say a number of small minor changes built up into something more complex later.

Really? You're going to call millions of molecules a nothing/null to serve your argument?

*sigh* That's what I said. Also look up Maxwell's demon, seriously.

Why on earth would you assume we're the only possible result of evolution. If you're going to jump to conclusions, at least be reasonable and say evolution could be looking for something alive. There are one or two examples that aren't humans.

Why sure, here we found an entirely new way to use an FPGA, look here. The original paper is sourced in the reference section. The telling part is that the ultimate implementation was beyond the understanding of the experimenter. How could he be the source of the information if he didn't have it in the first place? Sure he had an idea how to test for what he was looking for but that doesn't mean he knew all the structures possible to use. In the original paper (it's not listed on the TO website unfortunately, but the paper is cited and published for reading) there were temperature sensitive effects that were not anticipated and not looked for as well, but existed in the final output.

Finally see the inset here Keane and Brown 1996 It's also a cited published paper. The Algorithm was designed to look for structures that fit criteria like stronger, flexible, etc. The result looks curiously like a biological bone structure and would probably be closer, but in 1996 computing power was tough to come by, so low number of iterations. That structure was not planned or built in. Like it or not, information CAN and DOES appear out of your theoretical "no-where", but it's not free and doesn't violate entropy.

You seem to be hung up on the creation of information/violation of entropy. Never fear, the creation of this information does cost energy, and lots of it, entropy is still preserved.