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Comment The problem with approaching Carnot efficiency... (Score 1) 121

... is that the process will take longer and longer time. Carnot efficiency is defined by the efficiency of a reversible heat engine operating between the given temperatures; but truly reversible processes would take infinite amount of time. Efficiency is certainly an important aim, but certainly not the solely desirable aim.

Comment 450000 permanent jobs created? (Score 2) 567

California High Speed Rail Authority officials said the train network would generate 600,000 construction-related jobs while it was being planned and built and that it would create another 450,000 permanent jobs during its operation.

450,000 new permanent jobs sounds an awful lot. Are they going to pay people to travel on the train or what?

Comment Re:From the license... (Score 1) 419

From TFA:

The 32-bit version of Menuet was released under the GPL, but the 64-bit version uses a non-open-source licence that is free for "personal and educational use". Why did you decide to licence the 64-bit version differently? Has this had any impact on encouraging people to join the effort?

Ville: With a completely new type of open source project, people seem to have strong opinions about what direction to take. Even up to a point when time is actually spent more with disputes than doing the actual coding. And when that happened, I decided to concentrate more on the original path of Menuet with the 64-bit version and with a new type of license. However, I don't have anything against open source or possibly opening up the Menuet64 source later. But with the current licence, I'd say the people are a bit more committed and willing to put more effort in to a new feature.

Comment Re:Or they're terrified (Score 1) 921

Too bad that the fine tuning argument doesn't make sense. In order to run the argument you need to assume the existence of a (probability) measure over the possible values of fundamental physical constants (to make sense of ideas such as "this interval must be extremely SMALL" / "the SMALLER the interval the less probable that it was produced by chance" etc.). But we only observe our own universe where these constants have a given value, and there is no natural measure whatsoever on the space of possible physical constants, neither probabilistic nor a priori. Since we have no empirical basis for making any claims about how this measure looks like (why not a Dirac-measure?), claims about "smallness" of intervals make no sense and the fine-tuning argument falls apart.
It always amazes me how easily people commit the fallacy of thinking that the Lebesgue measure is/should be special.

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