North Korea + China once fought South Korea + US to a stand still. Today, they're one of the poorest, malnourished, and isolated countries in the world.
Meh. It would be more accurate to say that China fought the US to a standstill. The only reasons the North Korean forces had such success early on in the Korean War were (a) near-total surprise, and (b) at that point, both Koreas were about equally poor, malnourished, and isolated. Once the UN (mainly US) war machine really got rolling, North Korea itself crumbled pretty fast, and it took what was essentially a Chinese takeover of the war to push the situation to its eventual stalemate.
You really think China will be there to help them? China has had the ability to put a nuclear icbm on any point on the earth for 30 years. They won't give NK a missile, but you think they'll risk destabilizing their own country for them?
Unfortunately, I think China would make pretty much the same calculation now they did sixty years ago: they may not give a damn about North Korea as such, but they won't tolerate having the US Army camped out on the Yalu.
Well, defending a patent on something as stupid as rounded corners is probably very hard intellectual work, but it's not *productive.*
Heh. I wasn't thinking about defending patents so much as coming up with patentable material in the first place--and thinking "hey, we should round off those corners" is not hard work by any reasonable definition.
but seriously I hope that they have some kind of common sense approach over there
Don't hold your breath. The patent system worldwide is in desperate need of reform, but every change we've seen so far has been in favor of moneyed interests and against people who actually do hard intellectual work. Both of TFAs are frustratingly light on details, but honestly I'll be kind of shocked if the new system doesn't follow that trend.
Kazakhs and Cossacks aren't the same people. Not even close. I recommend you remember that if you ever find yourself in either Kazakhstan or certain parts of Russia and Ukraine.;)
Nobody has explored taking modern culture back to 1700s tech.
You might be interested in Stirling's Emberverse series. I don't necessarily agree with his conclusions about what would happen in this scenario--for one thing, I think he assumes that civilization would actually fall too far and too fast, in contrast to the overly optimistic outcome of the 1632 series--but it's a good read.
He also has to invoke something kind of mystical to make this happen. There's no realistic hard-SF scenario under which the entire world reverts to a pre-industrial technological level all at once. Far more likely is a situation in which the resources necessary to maintain the modern first-world lifestyle are gradually depleted with corresponding hoarding, and we end up in a neo-feudal world of a high-tech elite surrounded by starving peasants.
If Obama had stayed with the budget left to him by Bush, the budget deficit would have been ~$800billion smaller than it is now.
Or the economy would have continued its Bush-era death spiral, and revenues would have dropped to damn near zero. We'd might well have a smaller deficit in that case, sure--if the US had completely fallen apart, at which point "the United States government deficit" would be as relevant a concept as "the Confederate States government deficit" was in the late 1860s. If we'd managed to survive as a nation, you can be damn sure that we'd be in a lot worse financial shape than we are now.
Millions of years of selection without automotive traffic as a factor, then a hundred or so years with it. If we're still driving several thousand years from now, there might be some real shifts, particularly with small animals such as squirrels that have short generations.
Incidentally, this applies to humans too. Driving is nothing like anything we evolved to do, which is why it's so incredibly dangerous. Again, if we're still driving in the distant future--and if the activity we call "driving" hasn't been entirely automated--then maybe we'll see the evolution of Homo automobilicus, especially since car accidents have a nasty habit of killing off members of the species at or before prime breeding age.
The only place where that line about "Earth-shaking" appears, AFAICT, is in the Slashdot summary. It's not even in reporter's words in the linked story, much less in any direct quote from Grotzinger. And contrary to your previous post, the difference between "This data is gonna be one for the history books. It's looking really good" and "the analysis shows something Earth-shaking" is far more than one of semantics. It's about as serious as the difference between "mws1066 got arrested" and "mws1066 is a serial killer."
When follow-up tests confirmed that it wasn't organic compounds, they saved face by pulling this "Oh, the press just misinterpreted what he was saying" stuff.
Or maybe... the press just misinterpreted what he was saying. Because that's usually the way to bet when it comes to sensationalist science reporting. But you know, if you'd rather believe the worst about NASA scientists, go ahead. They'll keep doing good, professional work regardless of what you think.
7500 years, which is basically "modern man" in terms of evolution
We're a young species, but not quite that young. In anatomical terms, ~250,000 years seems to be about the line for "modern" as far as we can tell from fossil evidence. This looks more like a function of agriculture than anything; our hunter-gatherer ancestors may in fact have been healthier in most respects than their descendants, but they couldn't sustain anything like the population density farmers can.
I am sorry to say but it's folks like you that are responsible for the USA's [finacial] woes it finds itself in at this time.
People who say things like this, and actually believe them, aren't entirely responsible for our economic problems, but they're probably the worst offenders.
To make matters worse, your statements do not reflect an iota of sorrow for the tax paying ordinary American!
(a) Federal employees pay taxes like everyone else. Yes, their jobs are ultimately paid for by everyone's tax dollars (including their own) but it makes no difference to the person getting the paycheck.
(b) I'm sure he feels a great deal of sorrow for the people caught up in the rat race of private-sector employment, which is why he's taken the step of not being one of them any more. Your statement makes as much sense as saying to someone who's happy to have survived cancer, "Your statements do not reflect an iota of sorrow for the people whose tumors don't respond to chemotherapy!"
Those five weeks should be cut down to say two, and your salary shuld be reduced by at least 20%.
(a) Right. God forbid someone should have a reasonable vacation and benefits package instead of being expected to work himself half to death. Clearly the solution is to drag everyone down to the same miserable level.
(a) You have no idea what his salary is. Most likely, it's less than his private-sector counterparts make. That's one of the tradeoffs you make when you take a government job. Sorry if that doesn't jibe with your ideology.
I can still find folks willing to do your job under such conditions.
Ah, got it. You're one of the parasites, then. See my first line, above.
If you ask me the biggest problem with the economy and business isn't republicans or democrats, it's that people whose best years and best ideas are behind them, but they want to squeeze the last drop of blood out and make sure every last cent is off the table (even at the expense of greater profit in 2-5 years with investment).
Close, but not quite. It's people who never had any "best years and best ideas" to begin with, but who do know one thing: how to "squeeze the last drop of blood out and make sure every last cent is off the table" by preying on the people who do have the good years and good ideas. And neither group is defined by age; if there are more older people in the former group, it's only because they've had longer to learn the tricks of effective parasitism.
Poe's Law strikes again. I actually can't tell if you're serious or if you're doing a parody of the "Big Pharma wants to keep us sick" conspiracy-mongering. If the former, you should be aware that profit margins on common vaccines are razor-thin. If the latter... well played.
With the "$scientists" stuck in there, this guy clearly read "vaccine" in the title and rushed in to make his screed against Big Pharma.
That was the first thing I thought when I read the post too, but on reflection I'm going to be generous and assume he's using the Perl-type "$descriptively_named_variable" syntax which is pretty common in geek discussions.
the holy grail is to minimize human invovlement -- "unsupervised learning"
Unsupervised learning is valuable, but calling it a "holy grail" is going a little too far. Supervised, unsupervised, and semi-supervised learning are all active areas of research.
Slashdot Mirror
North Korea + China once fought South Korea + US to a stand still. Today, they're one of the poorest, malnourished, and isolated countries in the world.
Meh. It would be more accurate to say that China fought the US to a standstill. The only reasons the North Korean forces had such success early on in the Korean War were (a) near-total surprise, and (b) at that point, both Koreas were about equally poor, malnourished, and isolated. Once the UN (mainly US) war machine really got rolling, North Korea itself crumbled pretty fast, and it took what was essentially a Chinese takeover of the war to push the situation to its eventual stalemate.
You really think China will be there to help them? China has had the ability to put a nuclear icbm on any point on the earth for 30 years. They won't give NK a missile, but you think they'll risk destabilizing their own country for them?
Unfortunately, I think China would make pretty much the same calculation now they did sixty years ago: they may not give a damn about North Korea as such, but they won't tolerate having the US Army camped out on the Yalu.
Well, defending a patent on something as stupid as rounded corners is probably very hard intellectual work, but it's not *productive.*
Heh. I wasn't thinking about defending patents so much as coming up with patentable material in the first place--and thinking "hey, we should round off those corners" is not hard work by any reasonable definition.
but seriously I hope that they have some kind of common sense approach over there
Don't hold your breath. The patent system worldwide is in desperate need of reform, but every change we've seen so far has been in favor of moneyed interests and against people who actually do hard intellectual work. Both of TFAs are frustratingly light on details, but honestly I'll be kind of shocked if the new system doesn't follow that trend.
Cossak-Stan
Kazakhs and Cossacks aren't the same people. Not even close. I recommend you remember that if you ever find yourself in either Kazakhstan or certain parts of Russia and Ukraine. ;)
Nobody has explored taking modern culture back to 1700s tech.
You might be interested in Stirling's Emberverse series. I don't necessarily agree with his conclusions about what would happen in this scenario--for one thing, I think he assumes that civilization would actually fall too far and too fast, in contrast to the overly optimistic outcome of the 1632 series--but it's a good read.
He also has to invoke something kind of mystical to make this happen. There's no realistic hard-SF scenario under which the entire world reverts to a pre-industrial technological level all at once. Far more likely is a situation in which the resources necessary to maintain the modern first-world lifestyle are gradually depleted with corresponding hoarding, and we end up in a neo-feudal world of a high-tech elite surrounded by starving peasants.
If Obama had stayed with the budget left to him by Bush, the budget deficit would have been ~$800billion smaller than it is now.
Or the economy would have continued its Bush-era death spiral, and revenues would have dropped to damn near zero. We'd might well have a smaller deficit in that case, sure--if the US had completely fallen apart, at which point "the United States government deficit" would be as relevant a concept as "the Confederate States government deficit" was in the late 1860s. If we'd managed to survive as a nation, you can be damn sure that we'd be in a lot worse financial shape than we are now.
I think most people are tired of Hollywood stars, reality TV, and people famous for being famous.
If that were the case, then we'd no longer have Hollywood stars, reality TV, and people famous for being famous.
Millions of years of selection without automotive traffic as a factor, then a hundred or so years with it. If we're still driving several thousand years from now, there might be some real shifts, particularly with small animals such as squirrels that have short generations.
Incidentally, this applies to humans too. Driving is nothing like anything we evolved to do, which is why it's so incredibly dangerous. Again, if we're still driving in the distant future--and if the activity we call "driving" hasn't been entirely automated--then maybe we'll see the evolution of Homo automobilicus, especially since car accidents have a nasty habit of killing off members of the species at or before prime breeding age.
The only place where that line about "Earth-shaking" appears, AFAICT, is in the Slashdot summary. It's not even in reporter's words in the linked story, much less in any direct quote from Grotzinger. And contrary to your previous post, the difference between "This data is gonna be one for the history books. It's looking really good" and "the analysis shows something Earth-shaking" is far more than one of semantics. It's about as serious as the difference between "mws1066 got arrested" and "mws1066 is a serial killer."
When follow-up tests confirmed that it wasn't organic compounds, they saved face by pulling this "Oh, the press just misinterpreted what he was saying" stuff.
Or maybe ... the press just misinterpreted what he was saying. Because that's usually the way to bet when it comes to sensationalist science reporting. But you know, if you'd rather believe the worst about NASA scientists, go ahead. They'll keep doing good, professional work regardless of what you think.
Please point out in that story where anyone who actually works for NASA used the phrases "earth-shattering," "earth-shaking," or even "breakthrough."
If they did, they WOULD go to jail.
[shrug] Keep telling yourself whatever makes you feel better about the world, I guess.
Note that if any CEO of a company managed retirement funds like the state legislature does, he/she would be in jail.
Your planet sounds like a nice place to live.
7500 years, which is basically "modern man" in terms of evolution
We're a young species, but not quite that young. In anatomical terms, ~250,000 years seems to be about the line for "modern" as far as we can tell from fossil evidence. This looks more like a function of agriculture than anything; our hunter-gatherer ancestors may in fact have been healthier in most respects than their descendants, but they couldn't sustain anything like the population density farmers can.
Well, your post certainly provides evidence for your thesis, but further study is probably needed.
Why do that, when you can have an organized directory structure and searchable file tags? The two aren't mutually exclusive, you know.
Barcodes! You need barcodes!
And the way it's always looking for Sarah Connor.
I am sorry to say but it's folks like you that are responsible for the USA's [finacial] woes it finds itself in at this time.
People who say things like this, and actually believe them, aren't entirely responsible for our economic problems, but they're probably the worst offenders.
To make matters worse, your statements do not reflect an iota of sorrow for the tax paying ordinary American!
(a) Federal employees pay taxes like everyone else. Yes, their jobs are ultimately paid for by everyone's tax dollars (including their own) but it makes no difference to the person getting the paycheck.
(b) I'm sure he feels a great deal of sorrow for the people caught up in the rat race of private-sector employment, which is why he's taken the step of not being one of them any more. Your statement makes as much sense as saying to someone who's happy to have survived cancer, "Your statements do not reflect an iota of sorrow for the people whose tumors don't respond to chemotherapy!"
Those five weeks should be cut down to say two, and your salary shuld be reduced by at least 20%.
(a) Right. God forbid someone should have a reasonable vacation and benefits package instead of being expected to work himself half to death. Clearly the solution is to drag everyone down to the same miserable level.
(a) You have no idea what his salary is. Most likely, it's less than his private-sector counterparts make. That's one of the tradeoffs you make when you take a government job. Sorry if that doesn't jibe with your ideology.
I can still find folks willing to do your job under such conditions.
Ah, got it. You're one of the parasites, then. See my first line, above.
If you ask me the biggest problem with the economy and business isn't republicans or democrats, it's that people whose best years and best ideas are behind them, but they want to squeeze the last drop of blood out and make sure every last cent is off the table (even at the expense of greater profit in 2-5 years with investment).
Close, but not quite. It's people who never had any "best years and best ideas" to begin with, but who do know one thing: how to "squeeze the last drop of blood out and make sure every last cent is off the table" by preying on the people who do have the good years and good ideas. And neither group is defined by age; if there are more older people in the former group, it's only because they've had longer to learn the tricks of effective parasitism.
Poe's Law strikes again. I actually can't tell if you're serious or if you're doing a parody of the "Big Pharma wants to keep us sick" conspiracy-mongering. If the former, you should be aware that profit margins on common vaccines are razor-thin. If the latter ... well played.
With the "$scientists" stuck in there, this guy clearly read "vaccine" in the title and rushed in to make his screed against Big Pharma.
That was the first thing I thought when I read the post too, but on reflection I'm going to be generous and assume he's using the Perl-type "$descriptively_named_variable" syntax which is pretty common in geek discussions.
Do you have *actual* arguments comparing Bayesian to these hypothetical alternatives, or should we just take the claims on trust?
It's the "Rebel Science" guy. He's a nutcase. So no, he's not going to have any actual arguments, just a bunch of pseudoscientific babble.
the holy grail is to minimize human invovlement -- "unsupervised learning"
Unsupervised learning is valuable, but calling it a "holy grail" is going a little too far. Supervised, unsupervised, and semi-supervised learning are all active areas of research.
Having fusion reactors would be a national miracle seeing as how all current reactors and weapons are of the fission type.
Um, no.
If you'd left off the "and weapons," you'd have been right, of course.