By focusing only on $ per kW or $ per other unit, you seem to be ruling out consideration of $ per mission or $ per step, thus requiring $billions to be spent up front on technology that has only been proven in the laboratory. This is roughly as difficult as trying to kickstart a fusion reactor using nothing more than a matchbook.
Have you given any thought to demonstration missions, or realistic paths to funding that might eventually unlock enough money for the full system as you describe it? ("Government funding" not being a realistic path, given their demonstrated history with regard to projects that might actually give cheap power to the masses. This applies to any government large enough to fund this - such as US, EU, Russia, or China - though the exact means by which each one has demonstrated it wouldn't fund this, except to sabotage it and thereby waste the energy of those who might otherwise build this for real, varies by government.)
If not, why not? That's as much a part of the problem that needs solving here as the technology, and you've shown you can solve the technical side.
Sorry, but the hippocampus is write-only. More like you'd remember the movie for a few hours; if it makes it into long term memory, it's beyond the control of this device.
What you really want is something to mimic the long-term memory itself...
I wonder if those rumors I've heard, about companies that refuse to grant reporters permission to talk to their employees (except for specially trained PR flacks) unless they've signed waivers against quoting out of context (and granting significant damages if they do, thus aiming this largely at "respectable" newspapers that try to have a little foresight but who, on using that foresight, see at least a significant chance of disagreement about what's in context), are true?
I would have to seriously question the veracity of their claims - has anyone noticed that they do not have any kind of video evidence of actually launching anything?
What happens is that the sued businesses still have to invest significant $ for a long while fighting the case, which they are not guaranteed to get back and most likely will not get any profit from. Businesses exist to make a profit, not (in theory) to make interest-free loans to the legal industry.
What, and they wouldn't be willing to sell the production capacity itself? One would think they'd be glad to be rid of the plant, and whatever other parts of it they could transfer ownership of.
I thought intimidation *was* the purpose of the legal system! Or have I been reading about too many bought-and-paid-for laws lately?
The latter. Granted, some laws are passed with the intention of being used for little more than intimidation, but the original purpose of the legal system was to settle disputes, such as over who owned what.
Sounds like a problem of misapplied technology, not technology itself. When purchasing new gear, always - ALWAYS - ask yourself why. "Because it's cool" can work as an answer, if it will be sufficiently cool to everyone you expect to use what you buy, especially if you intend to be the sole user of your copy. But a corporate purchaser or a manager has a duty to think of the real needs and desires of the employees who will be using the system. If the new software will not wind up boosting productivity significantly, it's probably not worth purchasing at any price. (And if it really was boosting productivity significantly, the employees would notice their jobs get significantly easier. Since they don't, we can conclude that the software is not accomplishing this function, and therefore probably should not have been purchased.)
That said, it's really too bad that IP laws, perceived market pressures, and the still primitive (compared to what they could be with a lot more development) state of search engines make it usually more worthwhile, from a view of legal risk (first two factors) and time (third factor), to rebuild things from scratch than to improve on what others have built. (Open source being an exception for the legal risk part, though finding exactly the widget you need, if it's not an extremely popular widget, can take longer than to write it yourself even if all such widgets are clearly in the public domain once you find them.)
Or maybe the problem is with increasingly lazy (or just spending too much energy on politics and/or on gaining and guarding the fruits of their corruption) "managers" who fail to gather clear requirements that accurately represent the users' needs and desires - often including, but left unstated and untested except by the users (and then only after the system is released), that the system allow users to accomplish their tasks quickly and efficiently.
Or maybe the problem is with an increasingly lower expected mental effort from users, mirroring the decline in American education noted over the past few decades. What serious company, back in the era of Rosie the Riveter, would dare allow their senior marketing folk to spout "math is haaard" (implication: too hard to even usefully attempt the basics of) as if it were true, to say nothing of sincerely believe it? (As opposed to, say, "I'm not the sharpest at maths, but if I have to add two plus two, then by gum, I'll learn how to add two plus two".*) Add to this the increasing amount of things that computers have been expected to do since then (for instance, a 53 page manual to document what would have taken 100 devices, and thus 100 * 2 page manuals).
Or maybe this has all been said too many times before.
*...just noticed something. Some people define humanity, as opposed to the qualities possessed by all non-human living things, in part as the ability to think and learn, at least at a much higher level. (A very bright ape can slowly learn sign language. We can sing - badly, sometimes; write poems; discuss abstract theories; and even pun.) If the very act of learning is, itself, defined as something the majority of human beings no longer wish to do, does that confer on them a certain inhumanity? At what point do they dumb themselves down to mere beasts, no morally different than a wild boar that may be shot for inconveniencing a farmer?
I'm not sure if I like where that thought is headed. And yet, if one considers why animals are treated as animals while humans deserve more humane treatment, it seems to make sense....
How about ASCII Doom? The lag would be a bitch, but at least you could honestly say you had no Doom installed on the computer you were using while playing.
Sure it can. Just make a list of all members of groups a, b, and c, add z, subtract x (and y, if I read your example correctly), and create a new group d from that. Granted, group d's membership will have to be changed if a's, b's, or c's change, but you created a new group semantially in the problem statement anyway by modifying the existing groups.
As a counterpoint to that: having been a government poster boy/target, and having received punishment that by most accounts was too high for your crimes (even if you did steal credit card numbers, and even if you were a multiple repeat offender), do you have any advice for those of us who might face the same fate in the course of more noble ends (for instance, Arab Americans who had nothing to do with 9/11, held a peaceful protest against the rush to war with Iraq, and for that act have been or are about to be disappeared into indefinite secret detention)?
The particles, being massless, do not warp spacetime at all. But even photons have finite, nonzero momentum and finite, nonzero velocity, thus they can be said to have mass for some purposes. (Not all, and it's tricky to say which do and don't apply.)
As to the crack, you could be smoking it for all I know. Doesn't affect reality, just one's perception - and a very few people (mostly addicts) are actually more lucid on crack than off, or so I've heard.
There are a lot of entrenched interests in keeping the status quo, even though everyone who has done honest analysis (which is a frighteningly small number of the decision makers) knows the stats are way inaccurate.
In truth, they market to the households that Nielsen measures, because Nielsen has brainwashed so many advertisers into believing only Nielsen numbers. Reality be damned.
This has been noted by some of the answers, for instance Stuart Pimm's at http://www.edge.org/q2003/q03_pimm.html:
I have yet to see an area where science has informed any of this present administration's policies.... I think I'll give this position a pass, not so much out of spite, but because I think there are many better platforms from which to ensure that science effects good policy at the international, national, and state levels.
I did not cut you off... You were driveing way too slow.
Fine, you're both guilty. High explosive warhead, area effect burst. Problem solved.
Re:It will encourage terrorism
on
Droning On
·
· Score: 2
Bah. Any place where hacking could directly cause real, serious, physical harm, you already see enough security that only a dedicated professional could crack it. Don't come whining about how this or that script kiddie crashed your entire business: sure, it could put you in the poorhouse, which could cause you to commit suicide, but that's your problem; the hack itself won't kill you directly.
On the other hand, try hacking into a nuclear power plant. Let's start with the complete lack of external interface to its systems...
(Yes, there are coding mistakes that sometimes allow this type of thing, like the one time an errant phone call crashed an airport's misconfigured radar system. There's a difference between bugs and security holes. Bugs can kill, manned or unmanned, and they will always be there. Systems that certain parties want to use to kill lots of people usually have at least minimal safety systems.)
Yeah, the Helios project was one of the many efforts to get this up, so to speak. Frankly, given the number of attempts, I'm surprised no one's actually deployed one yet.
Re:1) light fire. 2) open gas can...
on
Droning On
·
· Score: 1
Indeed. If Gore wasn't popular enough to win far more of a majority than he did, how is that entirely, or even mostly, Nader's fault? Just several thousand more votes in Florida, or in any of a few other states, and he'd be in the White House now. So he couldn't stand a little extra competition...
If you can't study their notes then reimpliment their work on your own, highly tuned for your specific application, so that you don't have to worry about whether you could theoretically use their code...well, let's just call that another Turing Test. ^_^
I speak as one who did just that, BTW. Last page of http://justice-email.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/survey.cg i . And yes, I can think of quite a few ways to break it, just as these guys know how to break their own CAPTCHAs (at least, they do *now*). It's more spam minimization than spam stopping, relying on the fact that, at least for the next long while, practically nobody who would abuse our service for spam would put in the effort to break these CAPTCHAs (if the trivial task of coding up a script to provide fake info for the survey itself doesn't throw 'em off).
Slashdot Mirror
By focusing only on $ per kW or $ per other unit, you seem to be ruling out consideration of $ per mission or $ per step, thus requiring $billions to be spent up front on technology that has only been proven in the laboratory. This is roughly as difficult as trying to kickstart a fusion reactor using nothing more than a matchbook.
Have you given any thought to demonstration missions, or realistic paths to funding that might eventually unlock enough money for the full system as you describe it? ("Government funding" not being a realistic path, given their demonstrated history with regard to projects that might actually give cheap power to the masses. This applies to any government large enough to fund this - such as US, EU, Russia, or China - though the exact means by which each one has demonstrated it wouldn't fund this, except to sabotage it and thereby waste the energy of those who might otherwise build this for real, varies by government.)
If not, why not? That's as much a part of the problem that needs solving here as the technology, and you've shown you can solve the technical side.
There are some ideas out there as to how to structure it so it'll be profitable, at least for the first place winner.
Sorry, but the hippocampus is write-only. More like you'd remember the movie for a few hours; if it makes it into long term memory, it's beyond the control of this device.
What you really want is something to mimic the long-term memory itself...
I wonder if those rumors I've heard, about companies that refuse to grant reporters permission to talk to their employees (except for specially trained PR flacks) unless they've signed waivers against quoting out of context (and granting significant damages if they do, thus aiming this largely at "respectable" newspapers that try to have a little foresight but who, on using that foresight, see at least a significant chance of disagreement about what's in context), are true?
Sounds to me like you could've summed it up in one simple sentence:
"I find everything that actually is on the network."
Would that not be accurate (when including hardware and software and firmwire under "everything")?
I would have to seriously question the veracity of their claims - has anyone noticed that they do not have any kind of video evidence of actually launching anything?
http://www.armadilloaerospace.com
Actually, I've noticed they do have said video evidence. In spades.
What happens is that the sued businesses still have to invest significant $ for a long while fighting the case, which they are not guaranteed to get back and most likely will not get any profit from. Businesses exist to make a profit, not (in theory) to make interest-free loans to the legal industry.
What, and they wouldn't be willing to sell the production capacity itself? One would think they'd be glad to be rid of the plant, and whatever other parts of it they could transfer ownership of.
Read ERPS's site to see why they, and Carmack, aren't doing LOX and have no intention of doing so.
I thought intimidation *was* the purpose of the legal system! Or have I been reading about too many bought-and-paid-for laws lately?
The latter. Granted, some laws are passed with the intention of being used for little more than intimidation, but the original purpose of the legal system was to settle disputes, such as over who owned what.
Most of the users I work with prefer speed and stability over features.
Sounds like a problem of misapplied technology, not technology itself. When purchasing new gear, always - ALWAYS - ask yourself why. "Because it's cool" can work as an answer, if it will be sufficiently cool to everyone you expect to use what you buy, especially if you intend to be the sole user of your copy. But a corporate purchaser or a manager has a duty to think of the real needs and desires of the employees who will be using the system. If the new software will not wind up boosting productivity significantly, it's probably not worth purchasing at any price. (And if it really was boosting productivity significantly, the employees would notice their jobs get significantly easier. Since they don't, we can conclude that the software is not accomplishing this function, and therefore probably should not have been purchased.)
That said, it's really too bad that IP laws, perceived market pressures, and the still primitive (compared to what they could be with a lot more development) state of search engines make it usually more worthwhile, from a view of legal risk (first two factors) and time (third factor), to rebuild things from scratch than to improve on what others have built. (Open source being an
exception for the legal risk part, though finding exactly the widget you need, if it's not an extremely popular widget, can take longer than to write it yourself even if all such widgets are clearly in the public domain once you find them.)
Or maybe the problem is with increasingly lazy (or just spending too much energy on politics and/or on gaining and guarding the fruits of their corruption) "managers" who fail to gather clear requirements that accurately represent the users' needs and desires - often including, but left unstated and untested except by the users (and then only after the system is released), that the system allow users to accomplish their tasks quickly and efficiently.
Or maybe the problem is with an increasingly lower expected mental effort from users, mirroring the decline in American education noted over the past few decades. What serious company, back in the era of Rosie the Riveter, would dare allow their senior marketing folk to spout "math is haaard" (implication: too hard to even usefully attempt the basics of) as if it were true, to say nothing of sincerely believe it? (As opposed to, say, "I'm not the sharpest at maths, but if I have to add two plus two, then by gum, I'll learn how to add two plus two".*) Add to this the increasing amount of things that computers have been expected to do since then (for instance, a 53 page manual to document what would have taken 100 devices, and thus 100 * 2 page manuals).
Or maybe this has all been said too many times before.
*...just noticed something. Some people define humanity, as opposed to the qualities possessed by all non-human living things, in part as the ability to think and learn, at least at a much higher level. (A very bright ape can slowly learn sign language. We can sing - badly, sometimes; write poems; discuss abstract theories; and even pun.) If the very act of learning is, itself, defined as something the majority of human beings no longer wish to do, does that confer on them a certain inhumanity? At what point do they dumb themselves down to mere beasts, no morally different than a wild boar that may be shot for inconveniencing a farmer?
I'm not sure if I like where that thought is headed. And yet, if one considers why animals are treated as animals while humans deserve more humane treatment, it seems to make sense....
How about ASCII Doom? The lag would be a bitch, but at least you could honestly say you had no Doom installed on the computer you were using while playing.
Sure it can. Just make a list of all members of groups a, b, and c, add z, subtract x (and y, if I read your example correctly), and create a new group d from that. Granted, group d's membership will have to be changed if a's, b's, or c's change, but you created a new group semantially in the problem statement anyway by modifying the existing groups.
As a counterpoint to that: having been a government poster boy/target, and having received punishment that by most accounts was too high for your crimes (even if you did steal credit card numbers, and even if you were a multiple repeat offender), do you have any advice for those of us who might face the same fate in the course of more noble ends (for instance, Arab Americans who had nothing to do with 9/11, held a peaceful protest against the rush to war with Iraq, and for that act have been or are about to be disappeared into indefinite secret detention)?
So, what's the speed of light in your universe? ;)
The particles, being massless, do not warp spacetime at all. But even photons have finite, nonzero momentum and finite, nonzero velocity, thus they can be said to have mass for some purposes. (Not all, and it's tricky to say which do and don't apply.)
As to the crack, you could be smoking it for all I know. Doesn't affect reality, just one's perception - and a very few people (mostly addicts) are actually more lucid on crack than off, or so I've heard.
There are a lot of entrenched interests in keeping the status quo, even though everyone who has done honest analysis (which is a frighteningly small number of the decision makers) knows the stats are way inaccurate.
In truth, they market to the households that Nielsen measures, because Nielsen has brainwashed so many advertisers into believing only Nielsen numbers. Reality be damned.
I did not cut you off... You were driveing way too slow.
Fine, you're both guilty. High explosive warhead, area effect burst. Problem solved.
Bah. Any place where hacking could directly cause real, serious, physical harm, you already see enough security that only a dedicated professional could crack it. Don't come whining about how this or that script kiddie crashed your entire business: sure, it could put you in the poorhouse, which could cause you to commit suicide, but that's your problem; the hack itself won't kill you directly.
On the other hand, try hacking into a nuclear power plant. Let's start with the complete lack of external interface to its systems...
(Yes, there are coding mistakes that sometimes allow this type of thing, like the one time an errant phone call crashed an airport's misconfigured radar system. There's a difference between bugs and security holes. Bugs can kill, manned or unmanned, and they will always be there. Systems that certain parties want to use to kill lots of people usually have at least minimal safety systems.)
Yeah, the Helios project was one of the many efforts to get this up, so to speak. Frankly, given the number of attempts, I'm surprised no one's actually deployed one yet.
Indeed. If Gore wasn't popular enough to win far more of a majority than he did, how is that entirely, or even mostly, Nader's fault? Just several thousand more votes in Florida, or in any of a few other states, and he'd be in the White House now. So he couldn't stand a little extra competition...
If you can't study their notes then reimpliment their work on your own, highly tuned for your specific application, so that you don't have to worry about whether you could theoretically use their code...well, let's just call that another Turing Test. ^_^
g i . And yes, I can think of quite a few ways to break it, just as these guys know how to break their own CAPTCHAs (at least, they do *now*). It's more spam minimization than spam stopping, relying on the fact that, at least for the next long while, practically nobody who would abuse our service for spam would put in the effort to break these CAPTCHAs (if the trivial task of coding up a script to provide fake info for the survey itself doesn't throw 'em off).
I speak as one who did just that, BTW. Last page of http://justice-email.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/survey.c
Informative but not funny? Come on, even if it's true, no one sees the irony here?