As for the Chinese and Russians you may have a point there
If history teaches us anything, intelligence services just love to have agents within the organization that they want to monitor. This way they have automatic decryption of materials, and on top of that they get information that was never sent through the wire - such as opinions, rumors, personal observations, copies of physical materials, etc. You can't replace Max Otto von Stirlitz with a tap on Schellenberg's phone.
The GP says that military, police force or diplomats are not that likely to always have a dedicated fiber cable to Headquarters. Most communications to these folks are either wireless, or through switched (public) networks. For this quantum stuff to be usable you need to have a permanent need for high volume, high value link between stationary objects reasonably close to each other, like government buildings.
Managers have *a duty* to give a damn about things that may interfere with the job. Drug use is among top culprits, because users need money for drugs and may steal big. Some companies even give drug tests to employees (I only read about that, but never worked for any such place.) The HR book most definitely has pages about drugs.
And if cops come calling they'd have a perfectly valid probable cause, namely a freshly arrested employee that you hired. If drugs were found on him, and at his house, then why not at work? If they don't have a search warrant it's only because it would be mighty stupid for a manager to say "no" to them. They'd just call your boss and the company loses two people for the price of one. No company can say "no" to a *reasonable* request of police. Besides, they can also arrest you for obstruction of justice or things like that, never charge though, so you only get to spend a night in jail, and then explain your actions to your boss again... good luck with that.
And why in the world would you do that? Do you pay a dollar for a pseudonym, or something? For example, I use this name only on/., and if I choose to participate in discussions on other blogs I use other names.
Still it's not a guarantee of anonymity because my posts have similar writing style and similar set of mistakes. But no employer will scan that deep. Search on my real name will bring up very little.
But why do all that if you never say anything bad? Well, the problem is that even lawful, protected speech can prevent an employment. For example you are sympathetic to an animal rights group - good. Now time comes when you desperately need a job in a bio company. They google you and find that little fact. How does it affect your chances? Remember, HR is not a court of law, it's an absolute monarchy.
Does my employee smoke pot at home after hours? Unless I suspect that it is significantly affecting their performance on the job, I don't give a damn
That's because you seemingly haven't had a chance yet to be a manager. A pot user has a high chance of being arrested, since it's a crime per the current law. Your company may see cops coming and searching this guy's desk, locker and whatever, while you will be explaining to your boss why all this is not your personal fault; also you'd better have a good plan how you will ship the product on time, even though the pothead was a key designer and most of the project is still in his head.
So to summarize, it is a bad idea to hire a known criminal. Many people disagree with criminalization of the herb, but this battle should be fought in legislature, not in your office.
It is not wrong to fight death. After all, you're statement basically states that any artificial immunity, both against physical problems and against other species is wrong.
Here is a thought experiment. Imagine that starting now all deaths on Earth are permanently stopped, and all life forms remain healthy and at their peak age. What do you think the planet will look like in a week, in a month, in a year?
The nature already produces more insects and animals than their habitat can carry. The excess population must die, or else the entire population dies. To illustrate: you and your buddy are on a raft in an ocean. It will take two months to get to the shore. You have enough food for both of you to last one month. If you both remain alive you will starve one month away from the shore. If you or your buddy jumps into the water, the remaining person will have enough food to reach the safety.
My take is that unmanned probes would not have generated the science or the same quantity and variety of return samples.
I can offer you an opposite example. Martian rovers are crawling the surface for years now, looking at every rock and every feature of the landscape. They observed martian weather for two seasons, recorded and reported every detail of it. A manned expedition, OTOH, would be able to only set up a camp, visually inspect some places of interest within a circle of couple of miles, do all that inside of a month or two, and hastily depart back to Earth. No way they'd stick around for years, they'd go crazy or die from hunger or suffer accidents, etc. But robots don't have such problems, and once you designed one robot you can make a thousand of them at little incremental cost. Robots are perfect tools for meticulous, boring work 24/7; a human on Mars would be likely able to remain outside only for a few hours per day, with remaining time spent on maintenance of the camp, eating, washing, resting, sleeping, documenting, communicating...
They would never get us to the moon, or put up the ISS. Instead, they would do something like build the Shuttle.
Politicians only want power - for themselves and for the country. Back then Shuttle was a major military project (or at least it was sold as such.) If anyone told Congress that the STS will be used to fly school teachers to LEO (and kill everyone about every 50th flight) the program would have been dead. At that time manned spaceflight was seen as something that only superpowers can do, and if the USSR sends people and stations to LEO every other month you couldn't just sit on your Moon laurels. Besides, STS was presented as a "space bus", something that can fly every other week and practically for free.
Today the understanding is completely different. First of all, military does not want manned deliveries of their hardware, neither up nor down. Secondly, LEO proved to be just a place devoid of any particular usefulness except to a couple of scientists. Thirdly, having (or not) a manned spaceflight capability today will not affect USA's standing (whatever that is, considering the financial crash etc.) China and India and even NK can send rockets and people up, and who cares any more? Military might of a country is now determined by automated weapon delivery systems (ICBMs and antimissiles, for example) and, as always, by nuclear submarines. ICBMs are related to manned flight vehicles, but only in part, and that technology can be retained and improved without worrying how it affects people on board (who are not there.)
So I am not so sure that Obama - or any other president, to that matter - will not abandon spaceflight. There are very few voters on LEO; most voters keep their nose to the ground. When economy crashes and burns, when sky high taxes rob people of their wages and their homes, when nobody can afford to risk it all and open a business, when homeless people and armed gangs roam the streets, hardly anyone will question the president why he hasn't shot a hundred billion dollars of *their* money into the air for no gain to them, the voters. A single statement like "I decided to disband NASA, close all its projects down and transfer their funding into the new Emergency Assistance Fund that helps you personally" will do the job. Remaining 0.03% of population (scientists and/.) will be summarily ignored.
Excuse me, but how the heck else do you do deal with the student?
Transformation of a civilian society into a police state implies gradual transfer of power from civilian authorities to armed enforcers of the law. In this case the school should have the right to deal with troublemakers just as they deserve - dragging by the ear to detention cell if that is called for. But dragging ought to be done by teachers, not by police - not yet. We are striving to give children a realistic preview of adult life, so why this aspect of it is so much out of whack?
It's a nice utopian idea that kids will be respecting the teacher just because the teacher is older and wiser. In fact, kids are half-animals, and you will find that they borrow a lot of their instincts from wolves, for example. If a teacher looks weak he will be torn apart. And the modern doctrine makes sure that the teacher has no authority over brats. What do you think will happen then? Teachers are sitting ducks, hunted by kids, parents, lawyers and everyone else. This guarantees that only complete idiots remain teachers, everyone else runs away from education as fast as he can. In this case we have all these aspects combined - a combative brat, an idiot teacher and the atmosphere of the police state, with its "Obey my authority!" growl (because there isn't anything else left to use as a tool, as you point out.)
Let the talented and smart people be in school while the uninterested live the mediocre life they obviously are going to live anyway.
I agree with this; however the society as a whole manages to maintain two opposing beliefs at the same time:
Children are not mature enough to know what is good for them
Children are mature enough to obey whatever the preceding rule wrought.
This case is a result of such societal mental disorder. People who can't accept teaching are forced to sit in school, while people who can accept teaching (and want to) are distracted, bullied and otherwise hurt. No adult would voluntarily go to such a school where your rights disappear and you become a mere slave of the teacher, and a plaything for bullies. But the same adult happily ships their child to the school without a second thought.
During most of human history school was not a right (and not a duty) - it was a rare privilege, available only to those who are capable (and who could pay.) This stems from the same politically correct assumption that all children [and all people] are the same. But they are not. I can't paint or sing; someone else can do that and more, but will rather die than figure out what Maxwell meant with his famous equations.
Stalin's purges resulted in 3 to 6 million killed, and 20 million died in World War II. The USA lost about 500,000 in World War II, so I would say that had a major impact. USSR between 60s and 90s had a pretty good healthcare system.
Many of those ex-workers never saw a farm in their life because China steadily increased its manufacturing might over last 30 years. At best they might have a relative somewhere who will permit them to stay in exchange for a menial job at his farm, but the laid off workers themselves have no capital and no land and no skills for farming.
They could be farmers, or own fruit stands, or *gasp* manufacture products for use by Chinese consumers!
Farmer's job pays even less than the manufacturing, and it's far harder to do, and probably you need to own some land too. Not every Chinese is a land owner, and not every land owner has capital to start his agricultural business (which farming is, with all these seeds that you buy and all this grain that you sell, and all that labor that you hire to convert one into another.)
And I can't see how an unemployed, penniless Chinese laborer can suddenly convert into "manufacturing products for Chinese consumers" - even if he can get a job, the pay is far lower there because the Chinese consumers are poorer than foreign ones.
The problem of China always was that it has too many people. This reduces value of each individual person. Sweatshops only illustrate that fact. Sweatshops will disappear when employers need to compete for employees. They don't need to do that even today, and demand for manufactured goods keeps dropping every day. China has a big problem on its hands - the manufacturing contracts, and all these millions of unemployed people need to eat. They are not even competent to be farmers, they probably never saw the fields, not any more than majority of US-based workers and engineers. Chinese economy was built in recent decades on export, and now that this export is threatened China has insufficient internal market to keep the industry going.
What do you suppose the justification for these middlemen is?
The only possible explanation is that these middlemen add more value than they cost. For example, HP could order USB cords separately, keyboard plastic separately, assembled PCBs separately, and order an assembly of the keyboard themselves. But how many managers would it take in the USA to do all that, without living in the same time zone and without speaking the language and without understanding local issues? Probably it is a good deal to add another $0.75 to the price of the keyboard for the joy of having an assembled and tested keyboard, in a box, shipped to you, without worrying about all these little details.
Of course I'd be willing to pay multitudes more to get this people better working conditions.
One catch with that is that your supply of money is limited, and instead of buying 10 cheap products you will be able to afford only one. This, if happening on a large scale, will cause drop in manufacturing, and people who were making $0.41/hr are suddenly making $0/hr. We have a preview of this effect already, with this recession going on.
If you give me a choice between working a rice paddy or being effectively chained to a hard stool with guards and spies, I'd choose the former 10 times out of 10.
You seem to believe that a peasant is free to walk away from his rice paddies whenever he wants. To me it is quite obvious that 12 hours of hard labor in the sun, bent over and knee deep in water, are less pleasant than same 12 hours spent sitting on a stool in a room and pushing key caps onto switches, otherwise the workers would not be working at the keyboard shop.
How long has the ISS gone without a resupplly mission?
I think 4-6 months is possible, though it has little bearing on a trip to Mars. Clearly such a trip will require externally attached storage containers with tons of stuff - not only to get there, but also to return, and to do some useful work while there.
changes to the manifests of supply missions
Good that we know now what is likely to fail, and what spares are needed.
With regard to a dry run on LEO, that had been already done many times, that's why many cosmonauts were staying up there for 6 months - to see if they could. And now it is known what ill effects occur during this time, and whether a full year (or more) in zero gravity is a good idea. With regard to food and water, it hardly matters that new supplies were hauled up, it would be even simpler if the station has a large water tank just outside. Isolation is even less of a problem, it had been practiced on Earth since time immemorial, by hermits, and recently several studies were undertaken to extend the experiment to "normal" people on a probable interplanetary trip. Not even mentioning submarines. In brief, this is a manageable problem; lack of gravity for several years may be a far more troublesome one.
AFAIK, there have been problems with the ISS where the situation could have been far more serious had it been orbiting around the Moon, or worse Mars.
So far no crew was forced to return to Earth after an emergency, and no spacecraft had to be launched up there on emergency basis. We know now what pieces of ISS are reliable and what pieces of it are not. Why building a completely new vessel and launching it first time to the Moon or Mars will be safer? Even if certain systems on that new vessel are done in triplicate, they still can fail and crew can perish - especially because these systems haven't been tested enough.
I do not dispute that a trip to Mars will be hard from survival POV. It can be only compared to sending a group of people to North or South pole; in all these cases loss of some essential supplies like food, fuel [and air] results in painful death, and if you need help it won't be coming. Some polar explorers died. I do not expect Mars to be kinder than coldest places of this planet. The only way to prevent deaths on other planets is to never go there; but it's too much like the guaranteed recipe of avoiding death at old age (die young.)
Some Russian sources also reportedly proposed the (rather ludicrous) idea of converting the ISS into some kind of an interplanetary transport vehicle, which would serve as the 'ultimate mother ship' in manned planetary missions to the moon or even Mars.
It does sound like the submitter has some better use of ISS in mind. He should share it with the rest of the world, especially considering that the warranty on ISS expires 5 years from now, and no new scientific discoveries were reported so far. Most of the ISS's benefits are in the sphere of organizing such a project and building a few unique, new robotic arms, and gaining a better understanding how things break and how to fix them up there (mostly by replacing, which I could have told anyone even before ISS launched:-)
While I don't think the approach being discussed is a good idea, most sorting algorithms are merely concerned with = -1, 1, 0 respectively.
I was thinking about an error that a CMP command may introduce when comparing close values. The order of elements then will be wrong, and an eBay customer who bid the highest may lose the auction (for example.) This is a reasonable concern because in many implementations CMP is implemented as SUB with the result ignored but flags set, for the subsequent conditional operation to act upon.
Or impossible, if the Halting Problem is anything to go by?- or does that only apply to analysis by a Turing Machine?
No, not impossible in general case, since a simple algorithm can be defined as "c:= a+b" and all we need to do here to analyze is to check the ADD operation in the CPU, if it introduces any errors. If it does, write them down.
Some of more complex algorithms can be also analyzed; what you do there is you introduce errors into all results. Then when you use these results as inputs into other modules you use the same method, plus modules' input errors, to determine errors in their output, and so on. As you can see, this can quickly become a complex task - and we haven't started talking about loops yet. I'd say such analysis of any common algorithm (or even worse, an uncommon one) will be impractical.
Nevertheless, brain operates imprecisely, just like this proposed CPU. So maybe there is something to it... but not among algorithms that are designed for precise calculations. Things like AI, image recognition, video/audio processing can definitely trade some certainties for something else (element density and connectivity is probably most wanted in AI.)
You could use mathematical/statistical means to prove that in (from my original example) 99.9% of situations the answer returned would be within 3% of the most efficient answer. I can't say more than that because it was a hypothetical algorithm(!)
Engineering already uses partial derivatives to understand how errors of inputs affect the output. However an algorithm is far more than a single function, and complete mathematical analysis of even a small algorithm may be too difficult (or too expensive, or too lengthy.) In some algorithms errors will be canceling each other out, in other algorithms errors will be magnifying each other, with end result being completely wrong. Take many sorting algorithms, for example - they really hate to compare values more than once, and if the result of a comparison is randomly wrong, just once, then the resulting array is not sorted correctly.
From accounting POV he is right. Numbers in accounting are added in several ways, the simplest is horizontally (forming a column) and vertically (forming a row.) Sum of numbers in that column must be equal to sum of numbers in that row, or else something is wrong and you must find and fix it. There are, of course, more complex, though obvious tabulations - to pick one, the sum of all c/c expenses of your employees should match the number that you paid to the bank (and that should match the number that the bank wanted you to pay) - or else some of your employees may be getting richer than you think they ought to be. In business accounting numbers become large, and that's one of reasons why floating point is not welcome in these formulas. If you are a bank you must account for billions of monetary units, adding and removing very little in millions of transactions, and your end balance must be exact all the time. If you have an uncertainty of computation you can't even find where the error occurred, how large it is, and each time you recalculate you get a different answer...
Slashdot Mirror
As for the Chinese and Russians you may have a point there
If history teaches us anything, intelligence services just love to have agents within the organization that they want to monitor. This way they have automatic decryption of materials, and on top of that they get information that was never sent through the wire - such as opinions, rumors, personal observations, copies of physical materials, etc. You can't replace Max Otto von Stirlitz with a tap on Schellenberg's phone.
The GP says that military, police force or diplomats are not that likely to always have a dedicated fiber cable to Headquarters. Most communications to these folks are either wireless, or through switched (public) networks. For this quantum stuff to be usable you need to have a permanent need for high volume, high value link between stationary objects reasonably close to each other, like government buildings.
Managers have *a duty* to give a damn about things that may interfere with the job. Drug use is among top culprits, because users need money for drugs and may steal big. Some companies even give drug tests to employees (I only read about that, but never worked for any such place.) The HR book most definitely has pages about drugs.
And if cops come calling they'd have a perfectly valid probable cause, namely a freshly arrested employee that you hired. If drugs were found on him, and at his house, then why not at work? If they don't have a search warrant it's only because it would be mighty stupid for a manager to say "no" to them. They'd just call your boss and the company loses two people for the price of one. No company can say "no" to a *reasonable* request of police. Besides, they can also arrest you for obstruction of justice or things like that, never charge though, so you only get to spend a night in jail, and then explain your actions to your boss again... good luck with that.
And you post on slashdot under the same pseudonym
And why in the world would you do that? Do you pay a dollar for a pseudonym, or something? For example, I use this name only on /., and if I choose to participate in discussions on other blogs I use other names.
Still it's not a guarantee of anonymity because my posts have similar writing style and similar set of mistakes. But no employer will scan that deep. Search on my real name will bring up very little.
But why do all that if you never say anything bad? Well, the problem is that even lawful, protected speech can prevent an employment. For example you are sympathetic to an animal rights group - good. Now time comes when you desperately need a job in a bio company. They google you and find that little fact. How does it affect your chances? Remember, HR is not a court of law, it's an absolute monarchy.
Does my employee smoke pot at home after hours? Unless I suspect that it is significantly affecting their performance on the job, I don't give a damn
That's because you seemingly haven't had a chance yet to be a manager. A pot user has a high chance of being arrested, since it's a crime per the current law. Your company may see cops coming and searching this guy's desk, locker and whatever, while you will be explaining to your boss why all this is not your personal fault; also you'd better have a good plan how you will ship the product on time, even though the pothead was a key designer and most of the project is still in his head.
So to summarize, it is a bad idea to hire a known criminal. Many people disagree with criminalization of the herb, but this battle should be fought in legislature, not in your office.
You are no[t] electing a King or Queen and in many countries the 'president' is just a figure head
It may be so in "many countries" - however in the USA the President has powers comparable to a King or Queen, and he is elected as such.
It is not wrong to fight death. After all, you're statement basically states that any artificial immunity, both against physical problems and against other species is wrong.
Here is a thought experiment. Imagine that starting now all deaths on Earth are permanently stopped, and all life forms remain healthy and at their peak age. What do you think the planet will look like in a week, in a month, in a year?
The nature already produces more insects and animals than their habitat can carry. The excess population must die, or else the entire population dies. To illustrate: you and your buddy are on a raft in an ocean. It will take two months to get to the shore. You have enough food for both of you to last one month. If you both remain alive you will starve one month away from the shore. If you or your buddy jumps into the water, the remaining person will have enough food to reach the safety.
My take is that unmanned probes would not have generated the science or the same quantity and variety of return samples.
I can offer you an opposite example. Martian rovers are crawling the surface for years now, looking at every rock and every feature of the landscape. They observed martian weather for two seasons, recorded and reported every detail of it. A manned expedition, OTOH, would be able to only set up a camp, visually inspect some places of interest within a circle of couple of miles, do all that inside of a month or two, and hastily depart back to Earth. No way they'd stick around for years, they'd go crazy or die from hunger or suffer accidents, etc. But robots don't have such problems, and once you designed one robot you can make a thousand of them at little incremental cost. Robots are perfect tools for meticulous, boring work 24/7; a human on Mars would be likely able to remain outside only for a few hours per day, with remaining time spent on maintenance of the camp, eating, washing, resting, sleeping, documenting, communicating...
They would never get us to the moon, or put up the ISS. Instead, they would do something like build the Shuttle.
Politicians only want power - for themselves and for the country. Back then Shuttle was a major military project (or at least it was sold as such.) If anyone told Congress that the STS will be used to fly school teachers to LEO (and kill everyone about every 50th flight) the program would have been dead. At that time manned spaceflight was seen as something that only superpowers can do, and if the USSR sends people and stations to LEO every other month you couldn't just sit on your Moon laurels. Besides, STS was presented as a "space bus", something that can fly every other week and practically for free.
Today the understanding is completely different. First of all, military does not want manned deliveries of their hardware, neither up nor down. Secondly, LEO proved to be just a place devoid of any particular usefulness except to a couple of scientists. Thirdly, having (or not) a manned spaceflight capability today will not affect USA's standing (whatever that is, considering the financial crash etc.) China and India and even NK can send rockets and people up, and who cares any more? Military might of a country is now determined by automated weapon delivery systems (ICBMs and antimissiles, for example) and, as always, by nuclear submarines. ICBMs are related to manned flight vehicles, but only in part, and that technology can be retained and improved without worrying how it affects people on board (who are not there.)
So I am not so sure that Obama - or any other president, to that matter - will not abandon spaceflight. There are very few voters on LEO; most voters keep their nose to the ground. When economy crashes and burns, when sky high taxes rob people of their wages and their homes, when nobody can afford to risk it all and open a business, when homeless people and armed gangs roam the streets, hardly anyone will question the president why he hasn't shot a hundred billion dollars of *their* money into the air for no gain to them, the voters. A single statement like "I decided to disband NASA, close all its projects down and transfer their funding into the new Emergency Assistance Fund that helps you personally" will do the job. Remaining 0.03% of population (scientists and /.) will be summarily ignored.
Excuse me, but how the heck else do you do deal with the student?
Transformation of a civilian society into a police state implies gradual transfer of power from civilian authorities to armed enforcers of the law. In this case the school should have the right to deal with troublemakers just as they deserve - dragging by the ear to detention cell if that is called for. But dragging ought to be done by teachers, not by police - not yet. We are striving to give children a realistic preview of adult life, so why this aspect of it is so much out of whack?
It's a nice utopian idea that kids will be respecting the teacher just because the teacher is older and wiser. In fact, kids are half-animals, and you will find that they borrow a lot of their instincts from wolves, for example. If a teacher looks weak he will be torn apart. And the modern doctrine makes sure that the teacher has no authority over brats. What do you think will happen then? Teachers are sitting ducks, hunted by kids, parents, lawyers and everyone else. This guarantees that only complete idiots remain teachers, everyone else runs away from education as fast as he can. In this case we have all these aspects combined - a combative brat, an idiot teacher and the atmosphere of the police state, with its "Obey my authority!" growl (because there isn't anything else left to use as a tool, as you point out.)
Let the talented and smart people be in school while the uninterested live the mediocre life they obviously are going to live anyway.
I agree with this; however the society as a whole manages to maintain two opposing beliefs at the same time:
This case is a result of such societal mental disorder. People who can't accept teaching are forced to sit in school, while people who can accept teaching (and want to) are distracted, bullied and otherwise hurt. No adult would voluntarily go to such a school where your rights disappear and you become a mere slave of the teacher, and a plaything for bullies. But the same adult happily ships their child to the school without a second thought.
During most of human history school was not a right (and not a duty) - it was a rare privilege, available only to those who are capable (and who could pay.) This stems from the same politically correct assumption that all children [and all people] are the same. But they are not. I can't paint or sing; someone else can do that and more, but will rather die than figure out what Maxwell meant with his famous equations.
And in Ceasar's day and age, it was "in loco parentis"
Caesar, if we are correcting minor typos in dead languages now.
The answer to both questions is the same.
Stalin's purges resulted in 3 to 6 million killed, and 20 million died in World War II. The USA lost about 500,000 in World War II, so I would say that had a major impact. USSR between 60s and 90s had a pretty good healthcare system.
So they'd have to go back to...farming?
Many of those ex-workers never saw a farm in their life because China steadily increased its manufacturing might over last 30 years. At best they might have a relative somewhere who will permit them to stay in exchange for a menial job at his farm, but the laid off workers themselves have no capital and no land and no skills for farming.
They could be farmers, or own fruit stands, or *gasp* manufacture products for use by Chinese consumers!
Farmer's job pays even less than the manufacturing, and it's far harder to do, and probably you need to own some land too. Not every Chinese is a land owner, and not every land owner has capital to start his agricultural business (which farming is, with all these seeds that you buy and all this grain that you sell, and all that labor that you hire to convert one into another.)
And I can't see how an unemployed, penniless Chinese laborer can suddenly convert into "manufacturing products for Chinese consumers" - even if he can get a job, the pay is far lower there because the Chinese consumers are poorer than foreign ones.
The problem of China always was that it has too many people. This reduces value of each individual person. Sweatshops only illustrate that fact. Sweatshops will disappear when employers need to compete for employees. They don't need to do that even today, and demand for manufactured goods keeps dropping every day. China has a big problem on its hands - the manufacturing contracts, and all these millions of unemployed people need to eat. They are not even competent to be farmers, they probably never saw the fields, not any more than majority of US-based workers and engineers. Chinese economy was built in recent decades on export, and now that this export is threatened China has insufficient internal market to keep the industry going.
What do you suppose the justification for these middlemen is?
The only possible explanation is that these middlemen add more value than they cost. For example, HP could order USB cords separately, keyboard plastic separately, assembled PCBs separately, and order an assembly of the keyboard themselves. But how many managers would it take in the USA to do all that, without living in the same time zone and without speaking the language and without understanding local issues? Probably it is a good deal to add another $0.75 to the price of the keyboard for the joy of having an assembled and tested keyboard, in a box, shipped to you, without worrying about all these little details.
Of course I'd be willing to pay multitudes more to get this people better working conditions.
One catch with that is that your supply of money is limited, and instead of buying 10 cheap products you will be able to afford only one. This, if happening on a large scale, will cause drop in manufacturing, and people who were making $0.41/hr are suddenly making $0/hr. We have a preview of this effect already, with this recession going on.
If you give me a choice between working a rice paddy or being effectively chained to a hard stool with guards and spies, I'd choose the former 10 times out of 10.
You seem to believe that a peasant is free to walk away from his rice paddies whenever he wants. To me it is quite obvious that 12 hours of hard labor in the sun, bent over and knee deep in water, are less pleasant than same 12 hours spent sitting on a stool in a room and pushing key caps onto switches, otherwise the workers would not be working at the keyboard shop.
How long has the ISS gone without a resupplly mission?
I think 4-6 months is possible, though it has little bearing on a trip to Mars. Clearly such a trip will require externally attached storage containers with tons of stuff - not only to get there, but also to return, and to do some useful work while there.
changes to the manifests of supply missions
Good that we know now what is likely to fail, and what spares are needed.
With regard to a dry run on LEO, that had been already done many times, that's why many cosmonauts were staying up there for 6 months - to see if they could. And now it is known what ill effects occur during this time, and whether a full year (or more) in zero gravity is a good idea. With regard to food and water, it hardly matters that new supplies were hauled up, it would be even simpler if the station has a large water tank just outside. Isolation is even less of a problem, it had been practiced on Earth since time immemorial, by hermits, and recently several studies were undertaken to extend the experiment to "normal" people on a probable interplanetary trip. Not even mentioning submarines. In brief, this is a manageable problem; lack of gravity for several years may be a far more troublesome one.
AFAIK, there have been problems with the ISS where the situation could have been far more serious had it been orbiting around the Moon, or worse Mars.
So far no crew was forced to return to Earth after an emergency, and no spacecraft had to be launched up there on emergency basis. We know now what pieces of ISS are reliable and what pieces of it are not. Why building a completely new vessel and launching it first time to the Moon or Mars will be safer? Even if certain systems on that new vessel are done in triplicate, they still can fail and crew can perish - especially because these systems haven't been tested enough.
I do not dispute that a trip to Mars will be hard from survival POV. It can be only compared to sending a group of people to North or South pole; in all these cases loss of some essential supplies like food, fuel [and air] results in painful death, and if you need help it won't be coming. Some polar explorers died. I do not expect Mars to be kinder than coldest places of this planet. The only way to prevent deaths on other planets is to never go there; but it's too much like the guaranteed recipe of avoiding death at old age (die young.)
Some Russian sources also reportedly proposed the (rather ludicrous) idea of converting the ISS into some kind of an interplanetary transport vehicle, which would serve as the 'ultimate mother ship' in manned planetary missions to the moon or even Mars.
It does sound like the submitter has some better use of ISS in mind. He should share it with the rest of the world, especially considering that the warranty on ISS expires 5 years from now, and no new scientific discoveries were reported so far. Most of the ISS's benefits are in the sphere of organizing such a project and building a few unique, new robotic arms, and gaining a better understanding how things break and how to fix them up there (mostly by replacing, which I could have told anyone even before ISS launched :-)
While I don't think the approach being discussed is a good idea, most sorting algorithms are merely concerned with = -1, 1, 0 respectively.
I was thinking about an error that a CMP command may introduce when comparing close values. The order of elements then will be wrong, and an eBay customer who bid the highest may lose the auction (for example.) This is a reasonable concern because in many implementations CMP is implemented as SUB with the result ignored but flags set, for the subsequent conditional operation to act upon.
Or impossible, if the Halting Problem is anything to go by?- or does that only apply to analysis by a Turing Machine?
No, not impossible in general case, since a simple algorithm can be defined as "c := a+b" and all we need to do here to analyze is to check the ADD operation in the CPU, if it introduces any errors. If it does, write them down.
Some of more complex algorithms can be also analyzed; what you do there is you introduce errors into all results. Then when you use these results as inputs into other modules you use the same method, plus modules' input errors, to determine errors in their output, and so on. As you can see, this can quickly become a complex task - and we haven't started talking about loops yet. I'd say such analysis of any common algorithm (or even worse, an uncommon one) will be impractical.
Nevertheless, brain operates imprecisely, just like this proposed CPU. So maybe there is something to it... but not among algorithms that are designed for precise calculations. Things like AI, image recognition, video/audio processing can definitely trade some certainties for something else (element density and connectivity is probably most wanted in AI.)
You could use mathematical/statistical means to prove that in (from my original example) 99.9% of situations the answer returned would be within 3% of the most efficient answer. I can't say more than that because it was a hypothetical algorithm(!)
Engineering already uses partial derivatives to understand how errors of inputs affect the output. However an algorithm is far more than a single function, and complete mathematical analysis of even a small algorithm may be too difficult (or too expensive, or too lengthy.) In some algorithms errors will be canceling each other out, in other algorithms errors will be magnifying each other, with end result being completely wrong. Take many sorting algorithms, for example - they really hate to compare values more than once, and if the result of a comparison is randomly wrong, just once, then the resulting array is not sorted correctly.
From accounting POV he is right. Numbers in accounting are added in several ways, the simplest is horizontally (forming a column) and vertically (forming a row.) Sum of numbers in that column must be equal to sum of numbers in that row, or else something is wrong and you must find and fix it. There are, of course, more complex, though obvious tabulations - to pick one, the sum of all c/c expenses of your employees should match the number that you paid to the bank (and that should match the number that the bank wanted you to pay) - or else some of your employees may be getting richer than you think they ought to be. In business accounting numbers become large, and that's one of reasons why floating point is not welcome in these formulas. If you are a bank you must account for billions of monetary units, adding and removing very little in millions of transactions, and your end balance must be exact all the time. If you have an uncertainty of computation you can't even find where the error occurred, how large it is, and each time you recalculate you get a different answer...