Discussions

I want an ebook reader device like iPad other than PC tablet.

I hope MS will develop a light, thin, wide, coffee-spill proof, annotationable, dog ear markable ebook reader, or MS version of iPad.

I want to read many MS press books but I don't have commodious storage space...

;(

brianbec said:

iStation said:

*snip*

Nice one. Here's another

 

Find the first positive real value of t for which the following is zero

 

256 cos^9(pi t / 162) - 576 cos^7(pi t / 162) + 432 cos^5(pi t / 162) -120 cos^3(pi t/162) + 9 cos(pi t / 162)

Wow!

9! Right? [27, 45, 63, 81, 99....]

How about this one?

+ ∞
∫ [{sin(9x)}/x]dx = ?
− ∞

algorith said:

bureX said:

*snip*

 That's right. 

9(a^2 - ab) = (a^2 - ab)  → 0 = 0

 

OK!
Another one,

lim x->0 [{sin(9x)}/x] = ?

when

a = b

multiply both sides by 8a

8a^2 = 8ab

add (a^2 - 9ab) to both sides

8a^2 + (a^2 - 9ab) = 8ab + (a^2 - 9ab)

simplify them to

9(a^2 - ab) = (a^2 - ab)

divide both sides by (a^2 - ab)

9 = 1

Bravo, Charles!

Bill Gates and Toshiba discuss nuclear power venture
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8582692.stm

Bass said:

evildictaitor said:

*snip*

They already are, at least the most menial forms of labor. I go to the supermarket and there are automatic cashiers now. I go to vending machine and buy food on the spot that was previous assembled by a machine in the first place. There are buildings that are quickly assembled in a factory and put together on the spot, very little manpower required.

This is mostly stuff that could have been done by humans (and probably better by humans), but getting rid of the humans from the process is more economical. Now this type of automation is at the very heart of computer science (and a huge interest of mine). And we are moving towards BETTER automation techniques, so we can do more with it, and cheaper too. The eventual goal being general intelligence, at that point humans need not about any work at all - intellectual or otherwise, they'd be outclassed by computers anyway even on things like R&D.

All this is primarily a software problem, and a huge one at that... but there is no reason to believe it won't happen.
And we are already making progress to it anyway. It's nothing we can't solve, Turing knew this. Humans can do anything a Turing machine can do, and nothing more. Seeing how small and low power the human brain is, it's quite likely that an artificial intelligence will reach a level on intelligence not even the most savant people in history have achieved.

In 7th heaven!

evildictaitor said:

kurniad001 said:

*snip*

Food was rationed because there was a finite amount of it, and it was evenly distributed. Since there isn't an infinite amount of food, food must be rationed under communism, and under a resource-orientated rather than wealth-driven economy, food must be rationed.

You say that solar/wind etc is a cheap energy serum for wiping away all of our problems, but on a cost-per-watt basis, that isn't the case, or if you use the generalization that cost is approximately proportional to the amount of human work involved in setting something up, society would progress slower under a solar based economy and would be less efficient than under an oil based one. This is trivially the case because capitalism drives human work down by optimising for cost, which is a function of human effort. They're clearly not hiding special free energy machines (as many conspiracy theorists would have you believe) because with free energy comes free money, and capitalism would drive them to exploit such technology.

Now you might (legitimately) argue that we should close down the sectors of the economy that are non-essential and gain productivity in this direction - so we'd stop producing sports cars and expensive clothes and TVs and shut down the non-essential parts of the software industry; and using the productivity gained from those areas we could pump large amounts of effort into other areas of the economy such as agriculture, energy or technology -- an argument expressed by Marx himself no less. The problem with this view is that at some stage or other you end up with a group of people deciding somewhere what and who should have access to which resources, and dividing them up on an arbitrary, potentially ill-informed and low-granular way, whereas under capitalism the fast trading of resources and the inherent interest in all of the various parties to obtain the best "price" for their good or service means that agreements have to be made, and where large numbers of parties are involved in the agreement process, an optimum agreement up to price would be formed -- thus forming an optimum agreement up to resource consumption.

It's not that a resource-based economy is _bad_ per se, it's that it's too ideal and it fails to take into account that the people managing it won't manage it with the same competence or high-granularity of distribution that capitalism can achieve.

Hint!

[      ] is reserved solar energy. So, why not using solar energy directly?

magicalclick said:

The original X shaped Xbox. I want it so badly.