Restore the honor and decency and respect for the citizens that the government of the USA once had. The way I see it, that's what this whole deal is really about.
I don't believe that the difference is in the morality of the US government, it is in the rise of competing sources of information to the official, centralized channels (ironically the seeds of which were sewn with the creation of ARPANET). Martin Luther would have been just some crank if he had been born a century earlier (before the printing press).
For one thing, they left reflectors on the moon that can bounce back laser signals.
Because placing a reflector on the moon absolutely requires a human as opposed to a robot. You damn your case with faint proof.
Actually proving a manned moon landing is difficult. It's a lot like trying to prove/disprove the existence of god. Most people feel they have to make a decision on the matter, even if there is a chance that they end up being wrong. The difference is that it's fairly popular these days to take the skeptical side of the god debate. But the truth is really orthogonal to how popular a side of a debate is at a point in time.
Every Mixed Martial Arts club (usually offering some mix of BJJ, MT, boxing, wrestling, judo) I have seen offers classes or open mats at least 6 days per week. This guy has minimum 2-3 days per week. That's all he needs. He just has to make a rule that every day he has off, he goes to his club, aiming for 3 days per week min.
If you pick something with some live sparring (e.g. any component sport of MMA as opposed to Traditional Martial Arts (TMA)), you will get in shape, guaranteed. If both people sparring are wanting to win (which is natural), there is no choice but for the level of energy output to be high enough to provide good exercise (and it will be at 100% at the beginning). Another way to gauge this is to look at the members of the club. Are there few fat slobs in among the belts higher than the first? If there aren't many (of course, some will have come back after taking an extended hiatus), that's a good sign. I'm not as familiar with the various TMA other than karate, but if it has more than a 10-20% max slob/stud ratio, it may not be intense enough.
Choose something where you are not going to be whacked in the head (e.g. if you do any boxing or MT, no head contact) so that you don't end up feeling the brain damage in 10-15 years. You make your living from your brain and damaging it is not an option. Or just do something grappling based - BJJ, Judo, wrestling (freestyle, greco, folkstyle, college). If you want to save money and live in North America, you could probably just train wrestling at your local high school.
I find that of those people who stick to BJJ, many/most of them are intelligent people. A lot of college graduates, people in IT, academics, etc. You almost have to have a good memory to learn all the different moves required to play the game and recall those moves as required, and their counters. Becoming somewhat competent takes hundreds of hours, excellent requires thousands. But the upside of this is that you will probably never get bored. BJJ is a very cerebral activity, which those in IT can appreciate. It's continuous problem solving. If you can get addicted to RTS games, chess or anything like that, you can get addicted to BJJ (pitting strength against weakness, recognizing openings, tricking the opponent, recognizing when to give 100% output and when to conserve energy).
It also offers something for the RPG gamer - the endless progress, gaining new abilities. Instead of monsters of varying strength, you have people in class who you can gauge your abilities against. As long as you are intelligent about how you measure your progress (e.g. time to get submitted versus someone better, a submission against someone of equal talent, or maybe minimum energy output required to submit someone of lesser ability), you can see progress and it will motivate you. Even learning new moves and pulling them off is a form of advancement, kind of like getting proficiencies in an RPG.
Of course, it will suck in the beginning. You will wonder why on earth you ever started. You will feel like the biggest fish out of water. But give it 3 months, if you last that long you will probably get hooked. The bonus is that you get yourself addicted to an exercise where you aren't counting the clock until it finishes.
I want terabyte USB thumb drives, not yet another mechanical storage device.
That day may come sooner than I'd thought. It looks like they even have 256Gb thumb drives now, last time I checked the largest was only 32Gb (which is now the sweet spot in $/GB). I'd still like to have all the data I own on 1 disk with another disk or two as backup. If mechanical gets me there sooner so be it. Currently mechanical is 1/20 of the cost of USB flash, comparing lowest $/GB media. 10Tb HDDs should be here in 2013, according to Hitachi.
But I can certainly understand the cool factor in terabyte thumb drives, especially with USB3 making an appearance. To be honest, my mind boggles at how far computing has come since the days of the C64 era. And there still will be a need for different storage media out to at least 5 years - USB flash for transporting data quickly on your person, SSD for anything requiring quick seeks, HDD for storing all your data at home. Hopefully there will also be something flash based to supersede tapes for archival purposes too.
And, they are doing a "soft migration" in which relevant open source applications are being installed on Windows to gear up the user base for the switch. Just pulling the rug out from under all the users quickly is stupid and will generate nothing but backlash.
From the article - this is a little more about the actual process:
To iron out the system's teething troubles, the project team first conducted pilot migrations in three departments that volunteered for the purpose. Before migrating a department, Matthias Braun and his colleagues in the migration support team take a close look at the particular situation in that section, and work out a solution with the local system administrators.
The LiMux migration itself begins only when the ground is thus prepared. Again, each department can choose which migration path it wants: either moving all services to the new operating system in one bold stroke, or a so-called soft migration in several stages.
During such a soft migration, the administrators first deploy OpenOffice, Firefox and Thunderbird on computers still running a version of Windows. In a second step, they switch to the new operating system. In order to minimise the impact of any problems that may occur, the first systems to be migrated are those that are not frequently used for contact with other sections of the city's administration, and do not have to exchange documents between different office program suites.
Until the end of 2008, each of the city's departments will have a "LiMux germ cell". These are groups of 30-50 workstations that will be migrated to the LiMux client. Even in departments that are sceptical towards the migration, this helps the IT staff to become familiar with the software. This approach also allows the LiMux project team to learn about the specific technical requirements of each department, and address them before the full-scale roll-out of the software.
Color me impressed. They've attempted to head virtually ever issue off at the pass. Migrating to Openoffice, Firefox and Thunderbird on XP was exactly what I did before migrating to Linux, and it's the only time I ever succeeded for more than say, a week or two. I think it's been nearly two years now for me since I began my own "soft migration" and no signs of going back. Another thing that impresses me is their "Linux Germ Cell" idea - get the IT departments up to speed slowly before rolling it out en-masse. Other people here have criticized the "only 10% rolled out" stat, but the last thing you want to do is roll out a mass linux migration without even understanding what the main bugs are or how to solve them, and you can guarantee that there will be a huge learning curve.
One thing I wonder about though - anyone with the ability to block something will do so if they perceive that their income stream is likely to be lessened somehow, either now or in the future. I hope this was anticipated. I can think of at least two solutions: make sure that these individuals are first identified and then either making sure they end up getting paid as much or more after the switch as they used to (and this is communicated to them earnestly)... or, they get purged right away, before they can block anything.
What, like Bubble Bobble? Last Ninja? International Karate or International Karate Plus? F14 Tomcat wasn't too bad I thought. I think the most accurate in physics was probably "Thrust", albeit only in two dimensions.
He should have gotten the Linux liver. He'd be operated on for free by an enthusiastic student doctor. After his body starts going into shock from rejecting the transplant, he gets on the forums and PMs the doctor. He is briefly told that his new organ is a "fork of the porcine liver" and that dampening the auto-immune response of the body is a feature that is not even at alpha stage yet but assuredly, quite high in the queue. If he wants to develop the feature himself, he's welcome to, in fact, he can easily obtain a similar liver to study for free. If that is too hard, he could always recompile his DNA so that it won't conflict with his new liver, but hey, he better have a spare body in case his system hangs during reboot. Until then, he could do what most people do and take a concoction of drugs to work around that bug, unfortunately, he has to learn to live with being housebound and crawling around on his hands and knees.
After becoming irate, he is told to STFW and RTFM. At 8:00am, bleary eyed from searching endless forums he calls up work and tells them he's sick and won't be coming in until he's better. 6 months later, he takes a shower, ready to head back to work after finally fixing his problem himself.
He gazes up at the enormous face of the penguin. Eighteen years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark feathers. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two
gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Linux.
When I hear "need", but don't hear a "for what" part soon after, I get suspicious. Was the term "energy needs" a rhetorical device introduced by governments or energy suppliers to distract from the fact that we can live on varying amounts of energy consumption.
Exactly. Especially seeing as how most of our so-called "energy needs" can be eliminated using existing technology. Using 3 tonnes of vehicle with the drag coefficient of a barn door to transport one person to the grocery store is not a need. Heating your non-insulated house so that you can walk around in shorts and a t-shirt in winter is not a need.
Ray Bradbury is 88 years old. Odds are high enough that he has dementia that a demented point of view is about as likely as an intelligent point of view. Just because he was intelligent enough to write Fahrenheit 451 at age 33 does not mean that his brain is going to be able to keep making new memories/adapting to new concepts at age 88.
"About 13% of Americans over the age of 65 have Alzheimer's and half of those over age 85 will develop Alzheimer's -- or a closely related dementia."
Which makes me think people are a LOT stupider than they used to be; because the option is never presented as a viable solution anymore.
Not more stupid, just more effective means of control (press, TV, education system) coupled with an acceptable standard of living that prevents people from revolting. The option is not presented because it is not in the interest of the presenters.
If you have the skills to not pay for music or movies, you have the skills to not pay for games. Yet game sales are increasing and music sales are diminishing.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that games of today have orders of magnitude more budget than they did 10 or 20 years ago, hardware to match, etc, and it makes a huge difference. Combine the increase in immersion with a good story and you are golden. The other thing is that entertainment companies are also competing for your entertainment time budget. If you are playing Evercrack 24/7, you don't have much time to listen to music. And even if you did, Pink Floyd/Nirvana/Tool/Metallica/Beethoven/$GENRE_DEFINING_BAND still sounds as good coming from the discount rack as it did when it was created. OTOH you can't really compare Pong with say, Bioshock.
A engineer is a better diagnostician but the best diagnosticians aren't necessarily engineers. Look at what demo coders on old 8-bits do...
Thanks for your comment. You are right. Problem diagnosis and reverse engineering are subtly different skills to design. Especially design out of whole cloth with not much in the way of prior art, versus design by taking the best features from existing designs and combining them, perhaps with some small component that is new.
I guess looking back on it, I think that some people are born with the ability to intuitively see examples of systems and quickly grok how they work or are supposed to work, and apply them in new and inventive ways. They can then think of how to make the design better, use the design in a novel way or wring the last ounce of performance out of the design (e.g. the 8 bit demo coder), or see where there the design has a fault that needs fixing. I guess this is the domain of the "hacker" (original connotation). Someone with the hacker mindset tends to get a kick out of hearing people say that you can't do something, then thinking a bit, then saying "Well... technically, you can do that, you just have to do x, y and z...", to which the person who said it couldn't be done will either wryly smile and give kudos to the hacker (usually if they are a hacker themselves) or if they aren't, they say that you aren't supposed to do it like that, that it could be dangerous, that the operating manual didn't specify that function, etc. etc.
To relate it back to medicine, for expert diagnosis you need someone experienced at troubleshooting in general, and specifically in the domain of the problem (unless they have time to develop the experience on their own). For medical "design" per se, I can't see any other way to do it than have the hacker mindset. The human body is an existing and intricate system, even if it formed as a product of its environment through natural selection. All fixes are hacks. All hacks require understanding how the system works, and hacking on bits or tweaking it somehow. Whoever created laser eye surgery, artificial hearts, knees, designing drugs etc, was performing a hack.
Let me explain. I had the grades to do medicine. So did 3 other people from my graduating class. Two of them were what I would call natural engineers - you could see this from the way they solved problems and understood them. One wasn't. Regardless of who took medicine, I would be skeptical of taking a difficult to diagnose problem to the man who wasn't, simply because he wasn't great at grokking problems or how the underlying systems worked in order to solve the problem. He was the sort of guy who would shy away from changing the oil in his car. He got his grades through cramming more than anyone else. Of course, he would be able to diagnose average problems, like most GPs.
Of the other two people, both were natural engineers, great problem solvers. One did engineering, the other did medicine. The one who is now a surgeon would have been a great engineer. As it was he coded various applications in his spare time, learning different programming languages, taking CS courses with me, etc. He got an HP48GX and taught me why it was good, both the RPN and the applications you could download. I copied him and got one myself. I would trust him to diagnose virtually anything if he was motivated to do so.
90+ hours of internship? A whole two weeks huh? Try a typical four years of residency with 60-80 hour work weeks. The last year of medical school is often called an internship, but really the definition more fits residency. So instead of the 90 hours you think, it is more like 18,000 hours.
Sorry for the confusion, I meant to type 90+ hours per week. That's what my highschool friend who is now a surgeon seems to have worked.
Also, any doctor worth his license
Unfortunately not all doctors are worth their license.
This is not at all surprising to me, although most people would look at me funny for saying so.
If you are: 1. Smart (she is in AP science class) 2. Motivated (you are if you have an illness - it sucks; this is powerful and sustaining motivation) 3. Can spend as many hours of your spare time as it takes. This could be 10-1000+ hours. 4. Are willing to experiment. 5. Live in the internet age...
You can often diagnose and solve your own problems.
The key is to realize that: 1. The info is out there on the internet... somewhere. Probably on a forum, newsgroup post, whatever. (Chances are very high that someone has the exact same problem as you, and has written about it. You just have to figure out what combination of words are on that page and not on others.) 2. Although the signal to noise ratio is not great, if you are smart enough you will eventually learn to filter the noise and retain signal. 3. You may go down a wrong path, but since you are doing a type of extensive depth first search (but since you give up on non-promising leads by using your intelligence, you will eventually hit all the breadth), the search will start to approximate exhaustive. 4. In combination with 3, because you are experimenting, you learn when to curtail one of your search lines and try another. 5. Because you are smart, you will learn when one of your search lines fails but yields a clue to success, and because you are persistent you will get closer to a solution.
Thus, an exhaustive search will very often find the answer. The key enabler of all this, the "intelligence multiplier", is the internet.
Contrast this with a typical expert, such as a doctor. A doctor has 20 minutes to diagnose your problem, and has to remember something he studied for maybe half a day twenty years ago (if at all), in combination with the limited number of patients he has has both seen and successfully diagnosed in his life (compared to the vast collective experience of the internet). He can bill another N clients $$$ for another 20 minutes, or he can research your problem in his spare time. Guess what he usually does? He didn't make it through 90+ hours of internships etc. for the fun of it or to "help people" (maybe 1 in 100). He has student loans to pay off, a current model BMW, a trophy wife or girlfriend, a house in the best suburb, expensive wines to drink, classmates to impress at the reunion, and he has to start at age 30 or so.
And if you get a second opinion from someone who DOES diagnose your problem, does he get the feedback? Does he see your medical records from your new doctor? Usually not.
Another thing to realize with doctors is that many (of course, not all) of the people who go into medicine are not natural problem solvers. They are reasonably smart people who have good memories, good English skills, can cram well, and want the lifestyle that goes with being a doctor. A natural engineer by contrast, is better at diagnosis - figuring out what is wrong and fixing it. But often a good engineer will want to do engineering and not medicine. Note that I'm not saying that great doctors aren't out there. They are. But even the best doctors don't have expertise in all areas.
The odds of surviving a crash are pretty bad for small cars in general, no doubt about it. The key is not to get in a crash in the first place. I've found that in life, there are usually there are ways to stack the odds in your favor. If you are smart you can often have your cake and eat it too.
There are some basic things you can do to minimize your risk if you choose a small car. For example, choose a white or silver car for visibility. Don't drive excessively fast. Give yourself plenty of time to come to a stop. Give yourself more margin for error in general and when driving in difficult conditions. Avoid driving unless you really have to. Avoid driving at night, in the wet and typical holiday periods if you can avoid it. Especially avoid Friday and Saturday night when hooligans are on the roads. Don't follow too close in the wet. Double check around you when you change lanes. In fact, when you drive a small car a bit of paranoia is healthy. There are plenty of idiots on the road. Expect it and drive accordingly.
I've got an AMD Athlon X2 4850e. The time before that I lasted 6 years. So far I'm having a hard time seeing the value proposition in replacing the 4850e in the foreseeable future. There is still nothing better that I can see is the best combination of performance, low power consumption and price.
In fact, it would make more sense to calculate a cost per year to own rather than the outright purchase cost, since this is what it really costs a person. Probably most people on slashdot have their computer on half the time, idling most of the time. A simple $1/year/Watt*0.5 (the 0.5 is for the time on) and straightline depreciation down to say, zero after 4 years, would be a good way to calculate it. So if the CPU is $100, the power usage is 45W at idle (or whatever it is supposed to be, I can't remember and can't be bothered googling properly), then the cost per year is $100/4 + $45 * 0.5 = $25 + $11.25 = $36.25/year. Power is 1/3 the cost, even with a power frugal CPU. For a lot of other CPUs this percentage is only going to increase, until you get to the very high end where the purchase price is so large that it dwarfs the power consumption.
There will be one blindingly obvious upgrade I will make within 4 years, and that will be an SSD.
Here's to the new Reformation - long live Unix!
on
Unix Turns 40
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You have the analogy backwards. Corporations such as Microsoft are the church. Their modus operandi is to constrain their users into a narrow view of thinking while extracting as much in the way of resources as possible. Linux allows escape from that, much to the chagrin of Microsoft.
If they ever came up with a perfect "algorithm" and let it rest, then the SEOs would reverse engineer it, make their useless pages beat every useful page, and then the perfect algorithm would be shit.
Maybe the answer is to have several algorithms and change them at random intervals? Kind of like HIV?
If the whole supposed male power structure is responsible for holding a supposed equal or greater number of female mathematical geniuses down, then it should be relatively easy to show with actual examples in a country such as the United States in the last 50 or so years, where these barriers are no longer in place. Or you could accept the more rational explanation, that the higher variance in IQ in the male means that you have more genius males and more dullard males. Of course, you will have a few genius females. There are going to be exceptions, and humanity is better off for their contribution.
Then you will get into subjective issues as to who is the greater mathematician and how do you judge this. Of course, you can look at similar intellectual endeavours (e.g. Chess) that are absolutely objective and have no barriers to entry for females. At extreme levels of skill, chess is dominated by males, as is the upper echelons of all cognitive endeavours that I can think of.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't believe that the difference is in the morality of the US government, it is in the rise of competing sources of information to the official, centralized channels (ironically the seeds of which were sewn with the creation of ARPANET). Martin Luther would have been just some crank if he had been born a century earlier (before the printing press).
Because placing a reflector on the moon absolutely requires a human as opposed to a robot. You damn your case with faint proof.
Actually proving a manned moon landing is difficult. It's a lot like trying to prove/disprove the existence of god. Most people feel they have to make a decision on the matter, even if there is a chance that they end up being wrong. The difference is that it's fairly popular these days to take the skeptical side of the god debate. But the truth is really orthogonal to how popular a side of a debate is at a point in time.
Every Mixed Martial Arts club (usually offering some mix of BJJ, MT, boxing, wrestling, judo) I have seen offers classes or open mats at least 6 days per week. This guy has minimum 2-3 days per week. That's all he needs. He just has to make a rule that every day he has off, he goes to his club, aiming for 3 days per week min.
If you pick something with some live sparring (e.g. any component sport of MMA as opposed to Traditional Martial Arts (TMA)), you will get in shape, guaranteed. If both people sparring are wanting to win (which is natural), there is no choice but for the level of energy output to be high enough to provide good exercise (and it will be at 100% at the beginning). Another way to gauge this is to look at the members of the club. Are there few fat slobs in among the belts higher than the first? If there aren't many (of course, some will have come back after taking an extended hiatus), that's a good sign. I'm not as familiar with the various TMA other than karate, but if it has more than a 10-20% max slob/stud ratio, it may not be intense enough.
Choose something where you are not going to be whacked in the head (e.g. if you do any boxing or MT, no head contact) so that you don't end up feeling the brain damage in 10-15 years. You make your living from your brain and damaging it is not an option. Or just do something grappling based - BJJ, Judo, wrestling (freestyle, greco, folkstyle, college). If you want to save money and live in North America, you could probably just train wrestling at your local high school.
I find that of those people who stick to BJJ, many/most of them are intelligent people. A lot of college graduates, people in IT, academics, etc. You almost have to have a good memory to learn all the different moves required to play the game and recall those moves as required, and their counters. Becoming somewhat competent takes hundreds of hours, excellent requires thousands. But the upside of this is that you will probably never get bored. BJJ is a very cerebral activity, which those in IT can appreciate. It's continuous problem solving. If you can get addicted to RTS games, chess or anything like that, you can get addicted to BJJ (pitting strength against weakness, recognizing openings, tricking the opponent, recognizing when to give 100% output and when to conserve energy).
It also offers something for the RPG gamer - the endless progress, gaining new abilities. Instead of monsters of varying strength, you have people in class who you can gauge your abilities against. As long as you are intelligent about how you measure your progress (e.g. time to get submitted versus someone better, a submission against someone of equal talent, or maybe minimum energy output required to submit someone of lesser ability), you can see progress and it will motivate you. Even learning new moves and pulling them off is a form of advancement, kind of like getting proficiencies in an RPG.
Of course, it will suck in the beginning. You will wonder why on earth you ever started. You will feel like the biggest fish out of water. But give it 3 months, if you last that long you will probably get hooked. The bonus is that you get yourself addicted to an exercise where you aren't counting the clock until it finishes.
What makes you think it can?
That day may come sooner than I'd thought. It looks like they even have 256Gb thumb drives now, last time I checked the largest was only 32Gb (which is now the sweet spot in $/GB). I'd still like to have all the data I own on 1 disk with another disk or two as backup. If mechanical gets me there sooner so be it. Currently mechanical is 1/20 of the cost of USB flash, comparing lowest $/GB media. 10Tb HDDs should be here in 2013, according to Hitachi.
But I can certainly understand the cool factor in terabyte thumb drives, especially with USB3 making an appearance. To be honest, my mind boggles at how far computing has come since the days of the C64 era. And there still will be a need for different storage media out to at least 5 years - USB flash for transporting data quickly on your person, SSD for anything requiring quick seeks, HDD for storing all your data at home. Hopefully there will also be something flash based to supersede tapes for archival purposes too.
From the article - this is a little more about the actual process:
Color me impressed. They've attempted to head virtually ever issue off at the pass. Migrating to Openoffice, Firefox and Thunderbird on XP was exactly what I did before migrating to Linux, and it's the only time I ever succeeded for more than say, a week or two. I think it's been nearly two years now for me since I began my own "soft migration" and no signs of going back. Another thing that impresses me is their "Linux Germ Cell" idea - get the IT departments up to speed slowly before rolling it out en-masse. Other people here have criticized the "only 10% rolled out" stat, but the last thing you want to do is roll out a mass linux migration without even understanding what the main bugs are or how to solve them, and you can guarantee that there will be a huge learning curve.
One thing I wonder about though - anyone with the ability to block something will do so if they perceive that their income stream is likely to be lessened somehow, either now or in the future. I hope this was anticipated. I can think of at least two solutions: make sure that these individuals are first identified and then either making sure they end up getting paid as much or more after the switch as they used to (and this is communicated to them earnestly)... or, they get purged right away, before they can block anything.
What, like Bubble Bobble? Last Ninja? International Karate or International Karate Plus? F14 Tomcat wasn't too bad I thought. I think the most accurate in physics was probably "Thrust", albeit only in two dimensions.
Some say the end is near.
Some say we'll see armageddon soon.
I certainly hope we will.
I sure could use a vacation from this
Bullshit three ring circus sideshow of
Freaks...
He should have gotten the Linux liver. He'd be operated on for free by an enthusiastic student doctor. After his body starts going into shock from rejecting the transplant, he gets on the forums and PMs the doctor. He is briefly told that his new organ is a "fork of the porcine liver" and that dampening the auto-immune response of the body is a feature that is not even at alpha stage yet but assuredly, quite high in the queue. If he wants to develop the feature himself, he's welcome to, in fact, he can easily obtain a similar liver to study for free. If that is too hard, he could always recompile his DNA so that it won't conflict with his new liver, but hey, he better have a spare body in case his system hangs during reboot. Until then, he could do what most people do and take a concoction of drugs to work around that bug, unfortunately, he has to learn to live with being housebound and crawling around on his hands and knees.
After becoming irate, he is told to STFW and RTFM. At 8:00am, bleary eyed from searching endless forums he calls up work and tells them he's sick and won't be coming in until he's better. 6 months later, he takes a shower, ready to head back to work after finally fixing his problem himself.
He gazes up at the enormous face of the penguin. Eighteen years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark feathers. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Linux.
...6 months ago, Jobs offered Woz $3150 if he'd sell him his liver. Looks like Jobs finally got sick of waiting for Woz to "think about it".
Exactly. Especially seeing as how most of our so-called "energy needs" can be eliminated using existing technology. Using 3 tonnes of vehicle with the drag coefficient of a barn door to transport one person to the grocery store is not a need. Heating your non-insulated house so that you can walk around in shorts and a t-shirt in winter is not a need.
Ray Bradbury is 88 years old. Odds are high enough that he has dementia that a demented point of view is about as likely as an intelligent point of view. Just because he was intelligent enough to write Fahrenheit 451 at age 33 does not mean that his brain is going to be able to keep making new memories/adapting to new concepts at age 88.
"About 13% of Americans over the age of 65 have Alzheimer's and half of those over age 85 will develop Alzheimer's -- or a closely related dementia."
http://www.isnare.com/?aid=282530&ca=Aging
Not more stupid, just more effective means of control (press, TV, education system) coupled with an acceptable standard of living that prevents people from revolting. The option is not presented because it is not in the interest of the presenters.
This is clearly a case of cloud-to-cloud lightning.
If you have the skills to not pay for music or movies, you have the skills to not pay for games. Yet game sales are increasing and music sales are diminishing.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that games of today have orders of magnitude more budget than they did 10 or 20 years ago, hardware to match, etc, and it makes a huge difference. Combine the increase in immersion with a good story and you are golden. The other thing is that entertainment companies are also competing for your entertainment time budget. If you are playing Evercrack 24/7, you don't have much time to listen to music. And even if you did, Pink Floyd/Nirvana/Tool/Metallica/Beethoven/$GENRE_DEFINING_BAND still sounds as good coming from the discount rack as it did when it was created. OTOH you can't really compare Pong with say, Bioshock.
Almost always someone has asked the question. Occasionally the answers are thin on the ground.
Thanks for your comment. You are right. Problem diagnosis and reverse engineering are subtly different skills to design. Especially design out of whole cloth with not much in the way of prior art, versus design by taking the best features from existing designs and combining them, perhaps with some small component that is new.
I guess looking back on it, I think that some people are born with the ability to intuitively see examples of systems and quickly grok how they work or are supposed to work, and apply them in new and inventive ways. They can then think of how to make the design better, use the design in a novel way or wring the last ounce of performance out of the design (e.g. the 8 bit demo coder), or see where there the design has a fault that needs fixing. I guess this is the domain of the "hacker" (original connotation). Someone with the hacker mindset tends to get a kick out of hearing people say that you can't do something, then thinking a bit, then saying "Well... technically, you can do that, you just have to do x, y and z...", to which the person who said it couldn't be done will either wryly smile and give kudos to the hacker (usually if they are a hacker themselves) or if they aren't, they say that you aren't supposed to do it like that, that it could be dangerous, that the operating manual didn't specify that function, etc. etc.
To relate it back to medicine, for expert diagnosis you need someone experienced at troubleshooting in general, and specifically in the domain of the problem (unless they have time to develop the experience on their own). For medical "design" per se, I can't see any other way to do it than have the hacker mindset. The human body is an existing and intricate system, even if it formed as a product of its environment through natural selection. All fixes are hacks. All hacks require understanding how the system works, and hacking on bits or tweaking it somehow. Whoever created laser eye surgery, artificial hearts, knees, designing drugs etc, was performing a hack.
Let me explain. I had the grades to do medicine. So did 3 other people from my graduating class. Two of them were what I would call natural engineers - you could see this from the way they solved problems and understood them. One wasn't. Regardless of who took medicine, I would be skeptical of taking a difficult to diagnose problem to the man who wasn't, simply because he wasn't great at grokking problems or how the underlying systems worked in order to solve the problem. He was the sort of guy who would shy away from changing the oil in his car. He got his grades through cramming more than anyone else. Of course, he would be able to diagnose average problems, like most GPs.
Of the other two people, both were natural engineers, great problem solvers. One did engineering, the other did medicine. The one who is now a surgeon would have been a great engineer. As it was he coded various applications in his spare time, learning different programming languages, taking CS courses with me, etc. He got an HP48GX and taught me why it was good, both the RPN and the applications you could download. I copied him and got one myself. I would trust him to diagnose virtually anything if he was motivated to do so.
Sorry for the confusion, I meant to type 90+ hours per week. That's what my highschool friend who is now a surgeon seems to have worked.
Unfortunately not all doctors are worth their license.
This is not at all surprising to me, although most people would look at me funny for saying so.
If you are:
1. Smart (she is in AP science class)
2. Motivated (you are if you have an illness - it sucks; this is powerful and sustaining motivation)
3. Can spend as many hours of your spare time as it takes. This could be 10-1000+ hours.
4. Are willing to experiment.
5. Live in the internet age...
You can often diagnose and solve your own problems.
The key is to realize that:
1. The info is out there on the internet... somewhere. Probably on a forum, newsgroup post, whatever. (Chances are very high that someone has the exact same problem as you, and has written about it. You just have to figure out what combination of words are on that page and not on others.)
2. Although the signal to noise ratio is not great, if you are smart enough you will eventually learn to filter the noise and retain signal.
3. You may go down a wrong path, but since you are doing a type of extensive depth first search (but since you give up on non-promising leads by using your intelligence, you will eventually hit all the breadth), the search will start to approximate exhaustive.
4. In combination with 3, because you are experimenting, you learn when to curtail one of your search lines and try another.
5. Because you are smart, you will learn when one of your search lines fails but yields a clue to success, and because you are persistent you will get closer to a solution.
Thus, an exhaustive search will very often find the answer. The key enabler of all this, the "intelligence multiplier", is the internet.
Contrast this with a typical expert, such as a doctor. A doctor has 20 minutes to diagnose your problem, and has to remember something he studied for maybe half a day twenty years ago (if at all), in combination with the limited number of patients he has has both seen and successfully diagnosed in his life (compared to the vast collective experience of the internet). He can bill another N clients $$$ for another 20 minutes, or he can research your problem in his spare time. Guess what he usually does? He didn't make it through 90+ hours of internships etc. for the fun of it or to "help people" (maybe 1 in 100). He has student loans to pay off, a current model BMW, a trophy wife or girlfriend, a house in the best suburb, expensive wines to drink, classmates to impress at the reunion, and he has to start at age 30 or so.
And if you get a second opinion from someone who DOES diagnose your problem, does he get the feedback? Does he see your medical records from your new doctor? Usually not.
Another thing to realize with doctors is that many (of course, not all) of the people who go into medicine are not natural problem solvers. They are reasonably smart people who have good memories, good English skills, can cram well, and want the lifestyle that goes with being a doctor. A natural engineer by contrast, is better at diagnosis - figuring out what is wrong and fixing it. But often a good engineer will want to do engineering and not medicine. Note that I'm not saying that great doctors aren't out there. They are. But even the best doctors don't have expertise in all areas.
The odds of surviving a crash are pretty bad for small cars in general, no doubt about it. The key is not to get in a crash in the first place. I've found that in life, there are usually there are ways to stack the odds in your favor. If you are smart you can often have your cake and eat it too.
There are some basic things you can do to minimize your risk if you choose a small car. For example, choose a white or silver car for visibility. Don't drive excessively fast. Give yourself plenty of time to come to a stop. Give yourself more margin for error in general and when driving in difficult conditions. Avoid driving unless you really have to. Avoid driving at night, in the wet and typical holiday periods if you can avoid it. Especially avoid Friday and Saturday night when hooligans are on the roads. Don't follow too close in the wet. Double check around you when you change lanes. In fact, when you drive a small car a bit of paranoia is healthy. There are plenty of idiots on the road. Expect it and drive accordingly.
I've got an AMD Athlon X2 4850e. The time before that I lasted 6 years. So far I'm having a hard time seeing the value proposition in replacing the 4850e in the foreseeable future. There is still nothing better that I can see is the best combination of performance, low power consumption and price.
In fact, it would make more sense to calculate a cost per year to own rather than the outright purchase cost, since this is what it really costs a person. Probably most people on slashdot have their computer on half the time, idling most of the time. A simple $1/year/Watt*0.5 (the 0.5 is for the time on) and straightline depreciation down to say, zero after 4 years, would be a good way to calculate it. So if the CPU is $100, the power usage is 45W at idle (or whatever it is supposed to be, I can't remember and can't be bothered googling properly), then the cost per year is $100/4 + $45 * 0.5 = $25 + $11.25 = $36.25/year. Power is 1/3 the cost, even with a power frugal CPU. For a lot of other CPUs this percentage is only going to increase, until you get to the very high end where the purchase price is so large that it dwarfs the power consumption.
There will be one blindingly obvious upgrade I will make within 4 years, and that will be an SSD.
You have the analogy backwards. Corporations such as Microsoft are the church. Their modus operandi is to constrain their users into a narrow view of thinking while extracting as much in the way of resources as possible. Linux allows escape from that, much to the chagrin of Microsoft.
Maybe the answer is to have several algorithms and change them at random intervals? Kind of like HIV?
If the whole supposed male power structure is responsible for holding a supposed equal or greater number of female mathematical geniuses down, then it should be relatively easy to show with actual examples in a country such as the United States in the last 50 or so years, where these barriers are no longer in place. Or you could accept the more rational explanation, that the higher variance in IQ in the male means that you have more genius males and more dullard males. Of course, you will have a few genius females. There are going to be exceptions, and humanity is better off for their contribution.
Then you will get into subjective issues as to who is the greater mathematician and how do you judge this. Of course, you can look at similar intellectual endeavours (e.g. Chess) that are absolutely objective and have no barriers to entry for females. At extreme levels of skill, chess is dominated by males, as is the upper echelons of all cognitive endeavours that I can think of.