Those aren't your tax dollars. Our country spends twice what it takes in.
According to this Conservative-run Federal budget reference website the current Federal budget deficit is $483 billion on a $3504 billion dollar budget, or 13.8%. That is a far cry for "twice what it takes in". Smart to remain anonymous, you would not want to reveal your math skills to those who know you.
That notorious Marxist rag The Wall Street Journal concurs.
I was unaware that Watson had been "blacklisted". After 39 years as Chancellor of CSHL, a good long run, which is largely a public relations function - he did show himself unsuited to continue filling that role due to his 'unfiltered' public expressed opinions (which had been occurring for quite awhile, even when he was not-so-old). Still his punishment was 'promotion' to Chancellor Emeritus with a perpetual $375,000 salary, still with a free mansion to live in. Few 'blacklisted' people are treated so favorably.
He is still knocking down $30,000-$75,000 minimum fees for public appearances. Pretty good money for someone who is 'blacklisted'.
What You really seem to be saying is that he should be above criticism, and not accountable for anything he says. I disagree.
It will empower the few - to put the majority of people out of work.
Seriously - we are in the early phase of the Cybernetic Revolution - whether you call it "AI" or not - that will cannibalize jobs like the First Industrial Revolution did. If you think automation has already done that, you ain't seen nothing. Between ubiquitous, cheap computing power, an always-connected-world, and robotics whole classes of jobs that still exist are going to be automated away over the next quarter century.
And only two days later the medal is being returned to him just I suggested!
It might make "no sense" to you, oh AC, but the fix WAS in from the beginning, Watson knew the billionaire who was going to buy it.
A rapid quench would destroy any magnet, sure, but a sacrificial safe quench system could probably be designed to handle this. Think of composite flywheels that can disintegrate safely. SCES can use conventional metal sacrificial busbar to dump energy into, kinetic energy absorbing materials, a strong case, etc.
Look at just the last few years of Linux at all the guts being just ripped out rather than building on what was there, Pulse, KDE 4, Gnome 3, unity, systemd, why do you think every time it looks like Linux is gonna become mature and stable that some major subsystem gets ripped out and goes back to square 1?
You hit the nail right on the head. It seems the Great New Thing in Linux is something for which there is no evident need, and often is undesirable in many ways, yet the desktop - even with a straight default install - is glitchy and rough in ways Windows (as much as I detest it) is not. The polish just does not go where it is needed. Who wants to detail someone else's car?
a million citizens revolting against their government with hand guns and rifles isn't even going to make a dent
Don't forget the great lesson of the Soviet debacle: all governments ultimately depend on the consent of the people. When that consent is withdrawn, the government collapses.
The great lesson of Romania is that a government shouldn't count on its armed forces to violently suppress their own people.
-jcr
Quite so. And in both cases the possession of small arms was utterly irrelevant. They played no role at all in the collapse of tyranny. Why do Americans suppose that they are less capable of peaceful overthrow than Russians or Romanians?
The mass purchase of books written by right-wing commentators and politicos by right-wing organizations is well established as a form of support (aka "pay-off") is well established.
I do like the "rich fiends" bit though!
Who in their right mind would pay 4 million for *his* Nobel prize? I know pure gold doesn't really tarnish... but that thing is tarnished.
Upthread the interesting theory is offered that the fix was in, and this was a way for rich fan of Watson's unsavory remarks to kick some money his way. The buyer was anonymous of course. It would be interesting to learn if the medal is eventually loaned back to him, or to CSHL, for display only of course.
You should pay attention to this technology: http://www.technologyreview.co... It might be able to eliminate the need for a generator completely.
All this material does is passively cool through radiation. If you want your house cooled all the time, and have no other need for electricity at all, then hafnium-shingling your house may work out for you.
i'm very wrong because your father has a very affordable and very usable service available to him?
...
AC industry shill. Color me surprised.
$180/month for a 3mbs link is a monthly charge of $60 per mbps. The EU average for this service unit is $3.50. Also a 2 GB monthly cap is "very usable"?! The average home use consumes about 25 GB of bandwidth monthly, the average mobile phone user is hitting 2 GB/month right now.
So the AC Shill, paying 17 times a competitive world service rate for only 8% of what a typical American consumes in bandwidth is "very affordable and very usable". But to anyone not taking industry astro-turf cash it is a rip-off.
... the fact he's being forced into giving up his Nobel (according to the first link in the summary)...
Forced? Forced??? The link says no such thing. He is selling this Nobel Prize because he wants to use the money to take up art collecting, and making philanthropic donations. This is the choice of a very comfortable man who wants to take up the hobbies of the rich.
Note that the link says that he "he has no income outside of academia" - given his multiple high level positions in academia over the years, those pensions could stack up into mid-six figures, making him wealthy by any normal standard.
Sorry, the poor, poor Mr. Watson shtick won't wash.
The the term used in the paper is "semi-relativistic" - fast enough that relativistic effects cannot be ignored in even routine calculations about its properties. At 1/3 the speed of light the time dilation effect amounts to a 5.7% difference for example.
"Close to the speed of light" is the summary author's attempt to render "semi-relativistic" in sensible common place terminology.
One faction claims it's Apple trying to sabotage upgrades, making it so that if you buy an after-market SSD rather than paying their insane markup performance will become awful. Another faction claims it isn't deliberate sabotage, but rather a lack of interest in testing for unsupported hardware configurations...
Seems like a distinction without a difference.
...Since the laws of nature are the same everywhere, the Seed Factory concept works just as well on Earth, so our first generation design is for here. Later versions will be for more hostile environments like the oceans, deserts, ice caps, and space. Where it gets really interesting is using an expanded factory to make new starter kits. This is very similar to how biological plants reproduce. An acorn doesn't make another acorn directly. It grows into an oak tree first, then produces more acorns.
Good for you! You are proposing to build an actual von Neumann machine. Such things are obviously possible (given the evidence of living things) - but I have never seen a proposal to actual build one, or even a defensible estimate of what would be required to build Humankind's first one.
Any estimate on when we will see this is more than just an electronic document? Currently the WikiBook about this flys at such a high level that it is impossible to tell whether there really is anything here.
The nation that controls magnetism controls the universe. -- Chester Gould/Dick Tracy
