In the 1900s, the horse and cart had been the cornerstone of land transport for four thousand years - a pretty good record, I'm sure you'll agree. My neighbour across the street, who's now in his late eighties, was apprenticed to a wheelwright. Do you know how many days he worked as a wheelwright after completing his apprenticeship? Precisely none. It was an obsolete skill in the 1920s. Is that what you want for your children?
You still haven't explained why using a keyboard (e.g. touch typing) is going to made obsolescent by "voice recognition and speech to text" - your words. It has a lot of hurdles to overcome, probably insurmountable. Homonyms, punctuation, eavesdropping, corrections, cognitive load on the brain while speaking as opposed to typing. With the latter, you aren't going to find a solution, no matter how much you would like to. In the absence of a compelling argument that touch typing will be obsolete, my kids will be learning that. It also gives them more options, kind of like teaching them to drive stick as opposed to automatic, or linux rather than windows.
How many people, as a proportion of the total workforce, now use vim as an essentially tool of their trade? How many will do so in 20 years time? If you can demonstrate that it's more than, say, 70%, then it may be worth teaching children in schools the special skills needed.
I'm not making the case that everyone do it, but my own kids - certainly. I want them to be familiar with lots of time-saving, powerful tools, and get them to grow up using them as second nature. Reverse polish notation calculation, vim, databases (and spreadsheets), touch typing. I want them to hit the ground running. As far as the school system, they have to cater to the majority. Touch typing at least, for a large swatch of people is a very useful skill.
As far as in 20 years time... vi was created in 1976 (33 years ago), and if keyboards are still around then you'd have to come up with a better text editor. Again, there has been plenty of opportunity to create a more powerful text editor. I don't see anything that matches vim. Given the low barriers to entry to creating a better text editor, I think it's a good bet that there will only be evolutionary as opposed to revolutionary improvement on Bill Joy's creation.
There was a mechanical tabulating machine on many, many desks forty years ago. Thirty years from now, the only place you'll see a Querty keyboard is in a museum - and your grandchildren won't even understand what it was used for. Technology changes - all the time. In this industry you ought to know this.
Qwerty has been around since the 1870s. Touch typing has been relevant for 140 years and counting. That's a pretty good record, especially as the primary input device for what might be called the cornerstone of modern technology. Every nerd looking around for a better mousetrap to build has had the keyboard in front of them, daring them to make something better. Dictation software has been trying to supplant it for about 20 years or more. And failing. For most of the reasons written here: http://slashdot.org/articles/06/01/25/0616247.shtml
I'm going to make sure my kids can touch type, and there is a good chance they will do 90+wpm like their dad. This will enable them to procr^H^H^H^H^Hget work done far faster than other kids (not to mention speeding up the feedback loops involved in keyboard related learning, making learning computers less frustrating, etc.), especially the kids of those who are trusting in the invisible hand to build a better keyboard. They'll be learning faster in the interim anyway, getting as much learning in before they inevitably discover the opposite sex.
So why do you think voice recognition and speech to text will supplant the keyboard as the primary means of inputting text (and controlling text editors etc. like vim)? If you can make a good case, I'll read attentively.
I think you are bang on the money - with the exception of the Obama Marxist thing. As far as I can tell, it is in the interest of the US government to keep MS a US owned monopoly for two reasons. 1) It brings in income (and taxes) for the US, income that could be heading elsewhere. 2) It can insert backdoors in the product if it wants to. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY 3) It prevents another country from building a popular competitor with their own backdoor. If someone has to succeed, open source (global by its very nature; can insert your own staff; can fork; can point out problems with source) would be preferable.
Exactly. I'm surprised that his son is whining like this though, it won't do any good.
Here's what you do if you are in the situation of a buggy whip manufacturer in the days before Henry Ford: you use your inside knowledge of what is happening to sell out (if not all, a significant chunk) when $INEXORABLE_THREAT is on your horizon and not on the horizon of the investing public. This way, you will get a price higher than is justified by the value of the future income stream from your business. Someone else will wind up holding the bag. You will pay some CGT but it will probably still work out better than the alternative - if it doesn't, don't sell. You will probably need a good cover story, because when an owner/manager sells, people are always curious.
Then you learn another business, using a small part of your capital to do so in order not to make mistakes on a grand scale and wipe out all of your capital. Or you just learn how to invest. I remember reading an article some time in 1997-2000 about Bill Gates starting to divest from Microsoft and hiring someone to do his investing for him. It immediately struck my curiosity - almost the only time a person sells stock in their business, especially when they have all their day to day needs covered anyway by a trifling sum of externally invested capital, is because they think it is overvalued. I googled and I think I even found the exact article - it came from 1999. My thoughts at the time were - why would he sell? And why appoint someone to divest? I thought Microsoft was going great. But if you read the Halloween memos of 1998, Gates obviously had a good reason to have a bet each way and the timing is very interesting.
What you don't do is don't hold on at any cost (like the Murdochs). You don't whine "Oh, my poor profit margins are shrinking!" like the elder Murdoch. Living in denial is never a great place to be in any competitive situation. If you catch something early you can nip it in the bud while you are in a better position.
What really surprises me is that the son is coming out with statements like this. I would expect Rupert to cling to the past - he has had a long and meteoric rise to power. His whole working life people have been kissing his ass and telling him how great he is. He was past retirement age already when the internet was threatening. James is young enough to have a more realistic perspective.
So yea, don't think of it as a "more is better" situation. The sweet spot of intelligence in society is probably in the 130's...Too much above that and alienation starts kicking in.
Good point. Someone in the 130s can relatively easily relate to the average person. The higher up you go, the more Greek you talk without even realizing it. Most people can't even describe someone as talking like an encyclopedia because "dictionary" is about the only big, difficult book they know. It's difficult because there is a human desire to communicate, but your interests are not shared, at least, not on a level where there is an exchange.
My brain is always searching out for the exceptions, the places to have your cake and eat it too. The counterintuitive. The hidden advantages in life that no one else knows. Unfortunately, the more you do of what is not customary, the more you stick out. To get people to copy your strange ways of doing things, you have to first achieve great wealth, or at least, the status symbols. Then they will blindly ape your mistakes too.
For the long-term survival of the human species, I suspect that the average person needs to be smarter, if only to see the perilous long-term ramifications of doing easy but long-term stupid things.
You have higher cognitive ability, you realize how the world runs, you get depressed. Not the other way 'round.
Maybe that's part of the reason for the push to medicate - dumb, happy people tend not to revolt. Especially if they have food on the table and blather on the telescreen. (Slashdot works well too.)
As a former libertarian, I have to agree with you - everything you've said here and the last paragraph of your original post (I just don't know what the economics of asteroid mining etc. are). I've lived an additional decade beyond college, I've seen how companies operate, how lazy people are. Many companies reflexively won't do things that are environmentally conscionable even if it works out better for them financially in the long term.
Companies are entities that are legal fictions composed of real people. There are companies on the way up where everything works the way it is supposed to. There are companies on the way down, run by the senile, or the CEO only concerned about his pay check, and staffed by lazy people whose most important qualifications are ass kissing. There are probably even companies composed of environmentally responsible people (as opposed to lip-service environmentalists). But there are only so many environmentally responsible people out there, and perhaps having them in one company just serves to take those people from other companies where they would do just as much good.
Individually, humanity operates like bats shitting guano in our own cave, not concerned about the looming day when that guano reaches the roof. Without top-down ordering "at the point of a gun" by "jack-booted thugs" to use libertarian parlance, the right thing long term won't get done. So that's the way it's got to be.
That's not to say that behavior of humans can't be shifted using market methods when appropriate. For example, probably the simplest method of getting a lot of resource conservation happening would be to shift the income tax to various resources (e.g. oil, water, etc.) so that the government is still paid for, and it justly hits hardest at the most wasteful people. And practically, a lot of government work is just contracted out to private industry anyway.
Any idea how we can tell the great minds from the mediocre idiots?
Several rules of thumb. If this person can't spell or their grammar is poor, I figure that the odds of them being a "great mind" are poor. Language is a system that requires some intelligence to master. And English as a second language should not be a barrier, there are thousands of grad students from all over the world churning out papers that are "good enough" as far as this is concerned. This will weed out most of the mediocre thinkers right away.
Logical fallacies - if I see some I stop reading. Someone with basic scientific training should not be making these. This eliminates more. http://www.tektonics.org/guest/fallacies.html
Gobbledygook - is the terminology of whatever scientific domain used correctly? If not, discard. If someone is too stupid to make it through high school physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics etc, odds are very remote that they will come up with something ground breaking.
Perpetual motion machine - ignore.
"For the secret to... send money..." -ignore.
If they get that far, then as another poster said, does the theory match known empirical data? Is there actually a theory at all? Does it make new predictions that are testable? If so, then we might have something of worth. However, we have probably eliminated 99% of the random idiots out there with the first few tests. I'd be surprised if there are many false positives. A great mind will have good enough language skills, know what logical fallacies are and not rely on them, use proper scientific terminology, not propose perpetual motion machines, and not be selling snake oil.
In addition, if a great mind wants to be taken seriously he will bend over backwards to make it as easy as possible to get to the crux of the idea and pass all of the above hurdles. He will look at how his argument appears to a third party and attempt to be as transparent as possible. He will assume complete lack of trust in himself and thus buttress his argument with empirical data from trusted third parties so that his argument does not rest on assertion.
The mediocre minds Einstein was referring to are not the rank and file mediocre minds the tests above will eliminate. It is the moderately intelligent and educated mediocre minds in positions of power who are not brave or smart enough to change the status quo and/or have a vested interest in said status quo. Because there is always a power structure associated with the existing status quo, and those people want to maintain their positions, these "mediocre minds" will always put up a fight.
Perl was obviously created while under the influence.
Maybe not of drugs, but it seems obvious to me that a Roguelike addiction must have been a major influence. Rogue (1980), Hack (1983) and Moria (1983) all pre-dated Perl (1987).
When I read Mostly Harmless I found it riveting. I immediately re-read it and tried to understand what I had just read - like one would after watching Memento, Twelve Monkeys, The Usual Suspects, or LA Confidential. It has been 16 years now, so I can't remember if I could make sense of it or not. At least I didn't hate it in the same way I hate a David Lynch film that deliberately sets out to be completely nonsensical rather than just difficult to understand.
It wasn't like the other 4 books, or the Dirk Gently novels for that matter. But I don't think it was bad to the point of recommending someone avoid it, like I'd recommend a Metallica fan avoid St. Anger.
Pornographic images and video have the largest percentage (although it may not necessarily exceed 50%) of Internet bandwidth.
If it's only 50%, what's the rest of the internet used for? Porn would have to be the most bandwidth intensive activity per time spent of anything on the internet (except folding perhaps). Files on the order of 1GB get downloaded to be looked at for probably half an hour. Maybe several hours for someone's absolute favorites. The majority will be looked at for a couple minutes and never looked at again. I wouldn't be surprised if family photos/video gets more viewing time spent per MB than porn.
Multiplayer games, MMORPGs, forums such as this one, news, random research/surfing, youtube, messaging, those are the addictions.
it takes more than a willingness to parrot the neocon party line and faking creativity by self-consciously avoiding caps and punctuation to get a film funded, even if it is a lowly team america-esque propaganda film. you need talent and connections. if it were that easy half of freerepublic would have made a movie by now
There is a cognitive cost (in quality of ideas expressed) corresponding to crappy transcription systems. If you're not getting your basic homonyms correct, you're not respecting your code points, which doesn't speak well to intellectual focus. In all cases, intelligence can transcend any limitation of the given media, if the person wishes to work hard enough, but let's be honest here: most people are so damn lazy most of the time that poor spelling becomes a valid signifier that the person didn't work hard enough to be worth a first scan, much less a second pass for deep comprehension.
You are dead on the money. The more passes, the better my writing gets. (It's a bit like what separates an engineer from a smart kid - the engineer does enough passes over his work that he eliminates the mistakes himself.)
I've found one of the best ways to improve my writing (besides indulging in lots of it, obviously) is to make use something like the mod system in a forum (a system of feedback) and karma whore. Then raise the bar. Aim for a +5 (or equivalent) with every post. Mark my words, the quality of your writing will improve. And as you say, it's all to do with the number of passes and the effort involved. Instead of regurgitation of thought on a page, each sentence builds a paragraph and each paragraph builds your larger point. Often complete rewrites are necessary. You will do research to double-check your thinking. Sometimes you will scrap a post because it does not cut the mustard or you find out you were wrong.
But strangely enough, once you try this people will start thinking that you are somehow smarter than before when you really have exactly the same intelligence as before, the only difference is in what you are letting the world see.
Looking at the amount of destruction I just don't understand how it's possible.
The power station converts gravitational potential energy to electrical energy at the rate of 6400 Megawatts. I have no idea how many transformers are involved, but in terms of the total, that's 6.4Giga Watts, or Joules/second. To put that in perspective, 1 tonne of TNT is 4.184 Giga Joules. If there is only one transformer for the dam and this transformer shorts, every second there is up to an equivalent energy of 1.5 tonnes of TNT being converted to heat in a very small space as opposed to providing useful power all over the electrical grid. If there are any ordnance experts here, I'm sure they can clue you in to what 1.5 tonnes of TNT will do. Actually, a bit of googling yields that there are 4 weights of general purpose bombs the US military uses. The largest is Mk84, at 908kg. The others are 113kg, 227 and 454kg.
To compound matters, what will happen is that the oil will turn into gas, but there is a metal shell that will prevent the oil from boiling over. The longer this metal shell is able to withstand the pressure, the bigger the explosion. Just multiply the 1.5 tonnes/second figure by the number of seconds the explosion is contained to get an idea of how powerful the explosion might be. If some of this oil can ignite, add more energy into the equation. However, it does not even have to ignite in order for there be damage equivalent to a bomb going off.
There are some things in life that can't be estimated. As someone I knew who worked in aerospace (engineer turned manager) told me - "You can't schedule a breakthrough".
I don't think he ever said that imagination was not necessary - his point was that it was necessary, just not sufficient. He specifically stated that you needed to be competent/talented or the books won't help at all. But if you are imaginative, it is necessary to be able to get your code polished to whatever point is useful - e.g. to work in all situations that will arise, to be easily maintainable by other people if other people will need to maintain it, etc. I think for these sorts of things you need exposure to the work of other people, even if it is just reading other people's code (not books, per se) to see what is elegantly written and what is ugly so you can learn by example. Even man pages were written by other humans.
"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources." -Einstein
It also helps that those schools are free, too - so long as you qualify. End result is that the brighter kids, regardless of background, are segregated from the rest, and receive education matching their abilities - and, as I mentioned earlier, there's a strong emphasis on math, physics, and other hard sciences. This definitely helps shape the mind for programming.
Absolutely. That's a common thread with geniuses who achieve a lot in life - not only are they born with the intellectual horsepower but they also happen to receive enough tutelage to achieve their potential. e.g. Euler, tutored by Bernoulli, Mozart and Beethoven, tutored by competent fathers. I imagine that the web is both a blessing and a curse - it's very easy to find extra tutelage/learning in virtually every discipline. But now we have computer games and forums to draw in those with the brains and attention span necessary to succeed in those disciplines.
Slashdot Mirror
You have to remember that Microsoft (and perhaps none more enthusiastically so than their legal team) pride themselves on innovation.
You still haven't explained why using a keyboard (e.g. touch typing) is going to made obsolescent by "voice recognition and speech to text" - your words. It has a lot of hurdles to overcome, probably insurmountable. Homonyms, punctuation, eavesdropping, corrections, cognitive load on the brain while speaking as opposed to typing. With the latter, you aren't going to find a solution, no matter how much you would like to. In the absence of a compelling argument that touch typing will be obsolete, my kids will be learning that. It also gives them more options, kind of like teaching them to drive stick as opposed to automatic, or linux rather than windows.
I'm not making the case that everyone do it, but my own kids - certainly. I want them to be familiar with lots of time-saving, powerful tools, and get them to grow up using them as second nature. Reverse polish notation calculation, vim, databases (and spreadsheets), touch typing. I want them to hit the ground running. As far as the school system, they have to cater to the majority. Touch typing at least, for a large swatch of people is a very useful skill.
As far as in 20 years time... vi was created in 1976 (33 years ago), and if keyboards are still around then you'd have to come up with a better text editor. Again, there has been plenty of opportunity to create a more powerful text editor. I don't see anything that matches vim. Given the low barriers to entry to creating a better text editor, I think it's a good bet that there will only be evolutionary as opposed to revolutionary improvement on Bill Joy's creation.
Qwerty has been around since the 1870s. Touch typing has been relevant for 140 years and counting. That's a pretty good record, especially as the primary input device for what might be called the cornerstone of modern technology. Every nerd looking around for a better mousetrap to build has had the keyboard in front of them, daring them to make something better. Dictation software has been trying to supplant it for about 20 years or more. And failing. For most of the reasons written here: http://slashdot.org/articles/06/01/25/0616247.shtml
I'm going to make sure my kids can touch type, and there is a good chance they will do 90+wpm like their dad. This will enable them to procr^H^H^H^H^Hget work done far faster than other kids (not to mention speeding up the feedback loops involved in keyboard related learning, making learning computers less frustrating, etc.), especially the kids of those who are trusting in the invisible hand to build a better keyboard. They'll be learning faster in the interim anyway, getting as much learning in before they inevitably discover the opposite sex.
So why do you think voice recognition and speech to text will supplant the keyboard as the primary means of inputting text (and controlling text editors etc. like vim)? If you can make a good case, I'll read attentively.
I think you are bang on the money - with the exception of the Obama Marxist thing. As far as I can tell, it is in the interest of the US government to keep MS a US owned monopoly for two reasons.
1) It brings in income (and taxes) for the US, income that could be heading elsewhere.
2) It can insert backdoors in the product if it wants to. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY
3) It prevents another country from building a popular competitor with their own backdoor. If someone has to succeed, open source (global by its very nature; can insert your own staff; can fork; can point out problems with source) would be preferable.
By contrast, a MMOG has elements of both Mman and Dog. They are, allegedly, their own best friend.
Exactly - I thought the whole joy of wielding a massive monopole was to embrace... and extend.
And you just know that the exact moment you reach the point of no return, Murphy's Law dictates that someone will discover a cheap, effective cure.
Exactly. I'm surprised that his son is whining like this though, it won't do any good.
Here's what you do if you are in the situation of a buggy whip manufacturer in the days before Henry Ford: you use your inside knowledge of what is happening to sell out (if not all, a significant chunk) when $INEXORABLE_THREAT is on your horizon and not on the horizon of the investing public. This way, you will get a price higher than is justified by the value of the future income stream from your business. Someone else will wind up holding the bag. You will pay some CGT but it will probably still work out better than the alternative - if it doesn't, don't sell. You will probably need a good cover story, because when an owner/manager sells, people are always curious.
Then you learn another business, using a small part of your capital to do so in order not to make mistakes on a grand scale and wipe out all of your capital. Or you just learn how to invest. I remember reading an article some time in 1997-2000 about Bill Gates starting to divest from Microsoft and hiring someone to do his investing for him. It immediately struck my curiosity - almost the only time a person sells stock in their business, especially when they have all their day to day needs covered anyway by a trifling sum of externally invested capital, is because they think it is overvalued. I googled and I think I even found the exact article - it came from 1999. My thoughts at the time were - why would he sell? And why appoint someone to divest? I thought Microsoft was going great. But if you read the Halloween memos of 1998, Gates obviously had a good reason to have a bet each way and the timing is very interesting.
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1999/03/15/256491/index.htm
What you don't do is don't hold on at any cost (like the Murdochs). You don't whine "Oh, my poor profit margins are shrinking!" like the elder Murdoch. Living in denial is never a great place to be in any competitive situation. If you catch something early you can nip it in the bud while you are in a better position.
What really surprises me is that the son is coming out with statements like this. I would expect Rupert to cling to the past - he has had a long and meteoric rise to power. His whole working life people have been kissing his ass and telling him how great he is. He was past retirement age already when the internet was threatening. James is young enough to have a more realistic perspective.
Good point. Someone in the 130s can relatively easily relate to the average person. The higher up you go, the more Greek you talk without even realizing it. Most people can't even describe someone as talking like an encyclopedia because "dictionary" is about the only big, difficult book they know. It's difficult because there is a human desire to communicate, but your interests are not shared, at least, not on a level where there is an exchange.
My brain is always searching out for the exceptions, the places to have your cake and eat it too. The counterintuitive. The hidden advantages in life that no one else knows. Unfortunately, the more you do of what is not customary, the more you stick out. To get people to copy your strange ways of doing things, you have to first achieve great wealth, or at least, the status symbols. Then they will blindly ape your mistakes too.
For the long-term survival of the human species, I suspect that the average person needs to be smarter, if only to see the perilous long-term ramifications of doing easy but long-term stupid things.
Blades, high places, poison, rope... where there was a will I'm sure there was a way.
Maybe that's part of the reason for the push to medicate - dumb, happy people tend not to revolt. Especially if they have food on the table and blather on the telescreen. (Slashdot works well too.)
As a former libertarian, I have to agree with you - everything you've said here and the last paragraph of your original post (I just don't know what the economics of asteroid mining etc. are). I've lived an additional decade beyond college, I've seen how companies operate, how lazy people are. Many companies reflexively won't do things that are environmentally conscionable even if it works out better for them financially in the long term.
Companies are entities that are legal fictions composed of real people. There are companies on the way up where everything works the way it is supposed to. There are companies on the way down, run by the senile, or the CEO only concerned about his pay check, and staffed by lazy people whose most important qualifications are ass kissing. There are probably even companies composed of environmentally responsible people (as opposed to lip-service environmentalists). But there are only so many environmentally responsible people out there, and perhaps having them in one company just serves to take those people from other companies where they would do just as much good.
Individually, humanity operates like bats shitting guano in our own cave, not concerned about the looming day when that guano reaches the roof. Without top-down ordering "at the point of a gun" by "jack-booted thugs" to use libertarian parlance, the right thing long term won't get done. So that's the way it's got to be.
That's not to say that behavior of humans can't be shifted using market methods when appropriate. For example, probably the simplest method of getting a lot of resource conservation happening would be to shift the income tax to various resources (e.g. oil, water, etc.) so that the government is still paid for, and it justly hits hardest at the most wasteful people. And practically, a lot of government work is just contracted out to private industry anyway.
Several rules of thumb. If this person can't spell or their grammar is poor, I figure that the odds of them being a "great mind" are poor. Language is a system that requires some intelligence to master. And English as a second language should not be a barrier, there are thousands of grad students from all over the world churning out papers that are "good enough" as far as this is concerned. This will weed out most of the mediocre thinkers right away.
... send money..." -ignore.
Logical fallacies - if I see some I stop reading. Someone with basic scientific training should not be making these. This eliminates more. http://www.tektonics.org/guest/fallacies.html
Gobbledygook - is the terminology of whatever scientific domain used correctly? If not, discard. If someone is too stupid to make it through high school physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics etc, odds are very remote that they will come up with something ground breaking.
Perpetual motion machine - ignore.
"For the secret to
If they get that far, then as another poster said, does the theory match known empirical data? Is there actually a theory at all? Does it make new predictions that are testable? If so, then we might have something of worth. However, we have probably eliminated 99% of the random idiots out there with the first few tests. I'd be surprised if there are many false positives. A great mind will have good enough language skills, know what logical fallacies are and not rely on them, use proper scientific terminology, not propose perpetual motion machines, and not be selling snake oil.
In addition, if a great mind wants to be taken seriously he will bend over backwards to make it as easy as possible to get to the crux of the idea and pass all of the above hurdles. He will look at how his argument appears to a third party and attempt to be as transparent as possible. He will assume complete lack of trust in himself and thus buttress his argument with empirical data from trusted third parties so that his argument does not rest on assertion.
The mediocre minds Einstein was referring to are not the rank and file mediocre minds the tests above will eliminate. It is the moderately intelligent and educated mediocre minds in positions of power who are not brave or smart enough to change the status quo and/or have a vested interest in said status quo. Because there is always a power structure associated with the existing status quo, and those people want to maintain their positions, these "mediocre minds" will always put up a fight.
Maybe not of drugs, but it seems obvious to me that a Roguelike addiction must have been a major influence. Rogue (1980), Hack (1983) and Moria (1983) all pre-dated Perl (1987).
Classic.
When I read Mostly Harmless I found it riveting. I immediately re-read it and tried to understand what I had just read - like one would after watching Memento, Twelve Monkeys, The Usual Suspects, or LA Confidential. It has been 16 years now, so I can't remember if I could make sense of it or not. At least I didn't hate it in the same way I hate a David Lynch film that deliberately sets out to be completely nonsensical rather than just difficult to understand.
It wasn't like the other 4 books, or the Dirk Gently novels for that matter. But I don't think it was bad to the point of recommending someone avoid it, like I'd recommend a Metallica fan avoid St. Anger.
If it's only 50%, what's the rest of the internet used for? Porn would have to be the most bandwidth intensive activity per time spent of anything on the internet (except folding perhaps). Files on the order of 1GB get downloaded to be looked at for probably half an hour. Maybe several hours for someone's absolute favorites. The majority will be looked at for a couple minutes and never looked at again. I wouldn't be surprised if family photos/video gets more viewing time spent per MB than porn.
Multiplayer games, MMORPGs, forums such as this one, news, random research/surfing, youtube, messaging, those are the addictions.
it takes more than a willingness to parrot the neocon party line and faking creativity by self-consciously avoiding caps and punctuation to get a film funded, even if it is a lowly team america-esque propaganda film. you need talent and connections. if it were that easy half of freerepublic would have made a movie by now
Good point. I also don't think they use TNT anymore, it's RDX? The energy density is likely to be different.
You are dead on the money. The more passes, the better my writing gets. (It's a bit like what separates an engineer from a smart kid - the engineer does enough passes over his work that he eliminates the mistakes himself.)
I've found one of the best ways to improve my writing (besides indulging in lots of it, obviously) is to make use something like the mod system in a forum (a system of feedback) and karma whore. Then raise the bar. Aim for a +5 (or equivalent) with every post. Mark my words, the quality of your writing will improve. And as you say, it's all to do with the number of passes and the effort involved. Instead of regurgitation of thought on a page, each sentence builds a paragraph and each paragraph builds your larger point. Often complete rewrites are necessary. You will do research to double-check your thinking. Sometimes you will scrap a post because it does not cut the mustard or you find out you were wrong.
But strangely enough, once you try this people will start thinking that you are somehow smarter than before when you really have exactly the same intelligence as before, the only difference is in what you are letting the world see.
The power station converts gravitational potential energy to electrical energy at the rate of 6400 Megawatts. I have no idea how many transformers are involved, but in terms of the total, that's 6.4Giga Watts, or Joules/second. To put that in perspective, 1 tonne of TNT is 4.184 Giga Joules. If there is only one transformer for the dam and this transformer shorts, every second there is up to an equivalent energy of 1.5 tonnes of TNT being converted to heat in a very small space as opposed to providing useful power all over the electrical grid. If there are any ordnance experts here, I'm sure they can clue you in to what 1.5 tonnes of TNT will do. Actually, a bit of googling yields that there are 4 weights of general purpose bombs the US military uses. The largest is Mk84, at 908kg. The others are 113kg, 227 and 454kg.
To compound matters, what will happen is that the oil will turn into gas, but there is a metal shell that will prevent the oil from boiling over. The longer this metal shell is able to withstand the pressure, the bigger the explosion. Just multiply the 1.5 tonnes/second figure by the number of seconds the explosion is contained to get an idea of how powerful the explosion might be. If some of this oil can ignite, add more energy into the equation. However, it does not even have to ignite in order for there be damage equivalent to a bomb going off.
There are some things in life that can't be estimated. As someone I knew who worked in aerospace (engineer turned manager) told me - "You can't schedule a breakthrough".
I don't think he ever said that imagination was not necessary - his point was that it was necessary, just not sufficient. He specifically stated that you needed to be competent/talented or the books won't help at all. But if you are imaginative, it is necessary to be able to get your code polished to whatever point is useful - e.g. to work in all situations that will arise, to be easily maintainable by other people if other people will need to maintain it, etc. I think for these sorts of things you need exposure to the work of other people, even if it is just reading other people's code (not books, per se) to see what is elegantly written and what is ugly so you can learn by example. Even man pages were written by other humans.
"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources." -Einstein
Absolutely. That's a common thread with geniuses who achieve a lot in life - not only are they born with the intellectual horsepower but they also happen to receive enough tutelage to achieve their potential. e.g. Euler, tutored by Bernoulli, Mozart and Beethoven, tutored by competent fathers. I imagine that the web is both a blessing and a curse - it's very easy to find extra tutelage/learning in virtually every discipline. But now we have computer games and forums to draw in those with the brains and attention span necessary to succeed in those disciplines.
I got a laugh out of it, but does the converse really work? E.g. elsewhere, do "you program the state"?