But we’re scratching our heads to find the value for everyone else.
Could it be, just maybe, that they're trying to attract new customers as well as please their existing ones? It sounds like a pretty good deal to me personally, if there were a decent ISP in the area that wasn't ludicrously expensive to buy without buying cable service as well I'd be all over it.
You could argue that the public sector workers are accepting less pay in return for a more steady, in fact nearly guaranteed even in the long term, paycheck.
I also find it confusing: "[IT is] widely outsourced throughout the federal government because of the assumption that IT companies provide vastly superior skills and cost savings." Then they present their findings that contractors are paid more than public sector workers, then we get "However, the comparisons do not address any cost savings that might be achieved through the skills, processes or systems that private IT services companies might deliver."
So, if they get paid more for the same work... except it isn't the same... the government believes they bring better skills and experience to the job and therefore pays them more.
It's going to be great when they go through all the work of replicating this only to realize that some janitor moved the detector to the other side of the room so he could sweep behind it and no one noticed it.
Yes, I know neutron detectors aren't something you just scoot out of the way, it's a joke! At the same time, their distance measurement only needs to be off by 6 meters to produce the observed error. I can't imagine that wasn't on their list of things to check though.
They have mass, that automatically means that their maximum theoretical speed (according to relativity) is some number lower than c. c is the speed of light in an impossibly hard vacuum where there is no matter to interact with. That's why this result is so surprising, it is in direct contradiction to the central idea of relativity, that no massless particle can travel at or above c.
It doesn't matter how you get there, if a message can arrive at it's destination faster than a message sent at the speed of light, you break causality. It's all well and good that you trick the math into indicating your speed through space never rises above c, that doesn't change the fact that your message is getting there outside of it's own light cone.
Well, it's a bit complicated to explain, especially without being able to draw out the diagrams, but what it amounts to is if combine a faster than light signal with relativistic speeds person A can send a message to person B and receive a response back from B before they even sent the message that started the chain. If you don't mind learning how to read space-time diagrams (not really that hard) check out this page for a full explanation.
Fermilab has a similar setup which should be able to test the results. So does an experiment in Japan, T2K, but they aren't running at the moment because of the tsunami. The actual experiment shouldn't be too hard to do if you have the equipment to make a beam of neutrinos, just point them at a detector and fire away and see how long time of flight was, which means they could probably start working on it fairly soon, though it will probably take months or years to get enough data points to be statistically significant.
No kidding, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and this is one mother of an extraordinary claim. Unlike most "fast than c" research that the media distorts, it actually sounds like it would be possible to transmit information using this effect, which essentially upends either relativity or causality. But, these aren't just some cranks doing experiments in their basements, and they are appropriately guarding their choice of words to emphasis the preliminary nature of the research which is a good sign. Hopefully the experiment wasn't too expensive and difficult to perform so we can get some people started on replicated (or refuting) the results.
You might as well ask what you're going to do with an 8 core desktop PC running at 1.7 GHz when your 200 MHz P4 can already boil a cup of water. Power efficiency is about the only thing that increases even faster than performance. I'd be willing to bet you anything that this 4+1 core CPU uses less power and generates less heat than whatever processor is in your existing phone.
On the other hand, if you're expecting to have communication and communication drops out, that means something is wrong. And something being wrong on a manned vehicle is what you might call "a bad thing".
Current thinking has birds more closely related to dinosaurs than reptiles. Some go so far as to say birds would be a subclass of dinosaurs if what we think of as dinosaurs were still around to compare them against.
Your argument only works if several conditions are met:
A) They made more money than the fallout is going to cost them. It isn't cheap to close down a major business, there are lots of bills to be paid and lots of backseat accountants from both the creditors and the government making sure you don't fudge the math in your favor.
B) The people who profited DigiNotar have enough capital or credit left over to start another major corporation
C) Most doubtful of all, that they can convince people to trust them again. I don't see any of the major browser manufaturers touching the people responsible for this with a 10 foot pole. I'd be shocked if some of the fraudulent certificates weren't for websites owned by one of the big four browser developers (Google, Microsoft, Firefox, Apple). I'd think any one of those would be prime targets.
They're getting close to commodity hardware. A large 256 core server today is a run of the mill desktop in 5 years. Intel wants you to believe that GPUs have a limited lifespan, that they'll last only until real time ray tracing on the CPU can produce equivalent or better results. They could be right... but the only way to find out is going to be to wait until the hardware catches up to the point that it's economically competitive and see what the GPU makers have done in the meantime. All in all, these kind of demos cost them hardly anything at all and if they can get a couple of game developers to start seeing things their way it could pay off hugely in the future.
Acceptable or not depends on where you live and how good your ISP is. Personally, my mediocre cable internet regularly has latency in the 200s which is annoying enough trying to play online games, I can't imagine having that kind of latency for the basic I/O layer of the game. And that's not even at 12 midnight, when they decide to push out the schedule updates to every single cable box on their network simultaneously.
Depends if the rendering server is halfway across the country or halfway across the house. I remember people talking a while back (7 years or so) about using a home server to do the number crunching and moving back towards thin clients to access it. Wireless N bandwidth and latencies are pretty good, with modern technology you could probably make the idea work. Offer a suite of products that play well together: a powerful and easily upgraded server, lightweight laptops, and tablets. If you could make the price right for the clients you could have a quite expensive server with a ton of horse power while still making it a cheaper option for families that often have 4+ computers running.
$30 billion dollars for two flights includes all the R&D to build the freaking rocket, each flight does not cost $15 billion as you imply. Your math is like saying Sony spent $400 million dollars over 4 years to build the first two Cell processors, therefor they will never be able to sell a PlayStation for less than $200 Million each. To put it in perspective, Shuttle R&D was originally bid at $43 billion in today's money. The actual cost per flight was $1.5 billion dollars if you include every dollar that went to the Shuttle program.
I agree with you, people should be able to leave an memorial page open for anyone to post. I also agree with the people who say that anyone who does so is stupidly naive. Just because I think they're foolish for leaving the page open for anyone to post doesn't mean that I agree with the trolls, it just means that I'm aware that trolls exist and will be ass-hats.
If someone leaves their keys in their car and the car gets stolen, most people tend to say "What an asshole to steal someone's car, but you really shouldn't leave your keys in the ignition." The person who commits the crime is always the one who is responsible for the harm done regardless of how easy the victim makes it for them. But if you want to make your chance of being the victim lower you should take the basic steps to protect yourself.
10 years and 2 days ago, you walked through a metal detector, showed your boarding pass and got on the plane. Five years ago, you walked through a metal detector, electronics get checked for explosives, showed your boarding pass and ID and got on a plane.
Today, you go through a metal detector, an X-Ray machine, take off your shoes, get hand checked so thoroughly that sexual abuse victims have panic attacks at the thought of going through security, show an ID, boarding pass, get checked against at least 3 government DBs, get on the plane and hope that you don't have a case of diarrhea on the plane (lest they scramble F16s for your "unusually long bathroom break").
And you don't see the point that the comic is using satire to communicate?
What is unique, and questionable as to whether it will work,...
For better or worse, patents don't have to be functional to work. There's a patent out there from 1970 for a flying saucer powered by a fusion reactor with massive magnetic fields to direct the thrust. Feasible? Obviously not. Novel? Sure is.
And as for a powered landing of a booster stage on a ship, assuming they are talking about a liquid engine power the booster, they've already done short hops showing the ability to take off and land accurately. I don't see any reason why it should be impossible, and it would certainly improve the reusibility compared to having them splash down and get waterlogged after every launch.
Complexity and weight. A radioisotope thermal generator has exactly zero moving parts. It is almost literally a sphere of nuclear unstable metal, surrounded by some thermocouples. You really can't get much simpler and hardy than that.
I think the Turing test needs to be rethought. Passing as human is one thing, but it doesn't really show understanding. My suggestion is something like this: get a group of 15 humans and 15 bots, tell them they're going to be assigned two teammates and a problem to solve via chat. The problem isn't known by any participants (including the bots) before hand and the teams are set up completely randomly. Then, ask all the participants, including the bots, to identify which, if any, of their teammates they think were bots. This would require the bots to understand a new problem, provide insight into a solution (and if 3 bots happen to end up on a team, provide the actual solution itself), and have a long term memory of their interactions with the other participants and be able to determine, in retrospect, which ones acted 'strangely'.
Now granted, a test giver could come up with similarly unexpected questions to pose to the bot, but I think it's different if everyone is given the same questions, and I especially like the aspect of having the bots themselves try to call out who is and isn't a bot at the end.
SMS is more expensive than Hubble data if you pay per message to send/receive them. However, every major provider offers an unlimited option, usually for around $10 per line. Although if this were to become popular those plans wouldn't last long. Really, this system has problems everywhere except cost: bad latency, horrible bandwidth, best effort transmission, delayed and lost messages just to name a few.
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But we’re scratching our heads to find the value for everyone else.
Could it be, just maybe, that they're trying to attract new customers as well as please their existing ones? It sounds like a pretty good deal to me personally, if there were a decent ISP in the area that wasn't ludicrously expensive to buy without buying cable service as well I'd be all over it.
I know it's being pedantic but I would agree with him.
1 square kilometer is L x W = 1km^2.
1 kilometer square is 1km x 1km.
You could argue that the public sector workers are accepting less pay in return for a more steady, in fact nearly guaranteed even in the long term, paycheck.
I also find it confusing: "[IT is] widely outsourced throughout the federal government because of the assumption that IT companies provide vastly superior skills and cost savings." Then they present their findings that contractors are paid more than public sector workers, then we get "However, the comparisons do not address any cost savings that might be achieved through the skills, processes or systems that private IT services companies might deliver."
So, if they get paid more for the same work... except it isn't the same... the government believes they bring better skills and experience to the job and therefore pays them more.
It's going to be great when they go through all the work of replicating this only to realize that some janitor moved the detector to the other side of the room so he could sweep behind it and no one noticed it.
Yes, I know neutron detectors aren't something you just scoot out of the way, it's a joke! At the same time, their distance measurement only needs to be off by 6 meters to produce the observed error. I can't imagine that wasn't on their list of things to check though.
They have mass, that automatically means that their maximum theoretical speed (according to relativity) is some number lower than c. c is the speed of light in an impossibly hard vacuum where there is no matter to interact with. That's why this result is so surprising, it is in direct contradiction to the central idea of relativity, that no massless particle can travel at or above c.
It doesn't matter how you get there, if a message can arrive at it's destination faster than a message sent at the speed of light, you break causality. It's all well and good that you trick the math into indicating your speed through space never rises above c, that doesn't change the fact that your message is getting there outside of it's own light cone.
Well, it's a bit complicated to explain, especially without being able to draw out the diagrams, but what it amounts to is if combine a faster than light signal with relativistic speeds person A can send a message to person B and receive a response back from B before they even sent the message that started the chain. If you don't mind learning how to read space-time diagrams (not really that hard) check out this page for a full explanation.
Fermilab has a similar setup which should be able to test the results. So does an experiment in Japan, T2K, but they aren't running at the moment because of the tsunami. The actual experiment shouldn't be too hard to do if you have the equipment to make a beam of neutrinos, just point them at a detector and fire away and see how long time of flight was, which means they could probably start working on it fairly soon, though it will probably take months or years to get enough data points to be statistically significant.
No kidding, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and this is one mother of an extraordinary claim. Unlike most "fast than c" research that the media distorts, it actually sounds like it would be possible to transmit information using this effect, which essentially upends either relativity or causality. But, these aren't just some cranks doing experiments in their basements, and they are appropriately guarding their choice of words to emphasis the preliminary nature of the research which is a good sign. Hopefully the experiment wasn't too expensive and difficult to perform so we can get some people started on replicated (or refuting) the results.
You might as well ask what you're going to do with an 8 core desktop PC running at 1.7 GHz when your 200 MHz P4 can already boil a cup of water. Power efficiency is about the only thing that increases even faster than performance. I'd be willing to bet you anything that this 4+1 core CPU uses less power and generates less heat than whatever processor is in your existing phone.
On the other hand, if you're expecting to have communication and communication drops out, that means something is wrong. And something being wrong on a manned vehicle is what you might call "a bad thing".
Current thinking has birds more closely related to dinosaurs than reptiles. Some go so far as to say birds would be a subclass of dinosaurs if what we think of as dinosaurs were still around to compare them against.
Your argument only works if several conditions are met:
A) They made more money than the fallout is going to cost them. It isn't cheap to close down a major business, there are lots of bills to be paid and lots of backseat accountants from both the creditors and the government making sure you don't fudge the math in your favor.
B) The people who profited DigiNotar have enough capital or credit left over to start another major corporation
C) Most doubtful of all, that they can convince people to trust them again. I don't see any of the major browser manufaturers touching the people responsible for this with a 10 foot pole. I'd be shocked if some of the fraudulent certificates weren't for websites owned by one of the big four browser developers (Google, Microsoft, Firefox, Apple). I'd think any one of those would be prime targets.
They're getting close to commodity hardware. A large 256 core server today is a run of the mill desktop in 5 years. Intel wants you to believe that GPUs have a limited lifespan, that they'll last only until real time ray tracing on the CPU can produce equivalent or better results. They could be right... but the only way to find out is going to be to wait until the hardware catches up to the point that it's economically competitive and see what the GPU makers have done in the meantime. All in all, these kind of demos cost them hardly anything at all and if they can get a couple of game developers to start seeing things their way it could pay off hugely in the future.
Acceptable or not depends on where you live and how good your ISP is. Personally, my mediocre cable internet regularly has latency in the 200s which is annoying enough trying to play online games, I can't imagine having that kind of latency for the basic I/O layer of the game. And that's not even at 12 midnight, when they decide to push out the schedule updates to every single cable box on their network simultaneously.
*remote* cluster = cloud = unacceptable latencies for gaming.
The only way this concept works is if the rendering farm is running in a closet somewhere in your house.
Depends if the rendering server is halfway across the country or halfway across the house. I remember people talking a while back (7 years or so) about using a home server to do the number crunching and moving back towards thin clients to access it. Wireless N bandwidth and latencies are pretty good, with modern technology you could probably make the idea work. Offer a suite of products that play well together: a powerful and easily upgraded server, lightweight laptops, and tablets. If you could make the price right for the clients you could have a quite expensive server with a ton of horse power while still making it a cheaper option for families that often have 4+ computers running.
$30 billion dollars for two flights includes all the R&D to build the freaking rocket, each flight does not cost $15 billion as you imply. Your math is like saying Sony spent $400 million dollars over 4 years to build the first two Cell processors, therefor they will never be able to sell a PlayStation for less than $200 Million each. To put it in perspective, Shuttle R&D was originally bid at $43 billion in today's money. The actual cost per flight was $1.5 billion dollars if you include every dollar that went to the Shuttle program.
I agree with you, people should be able to leave an memorial page open for anyone to post. I also agree with the people who say that anyone who does so is stupidly naive. Just because I think they're foolish for leaving the page open for anyone to post doesn't mean that I agree with the trolls, it just means that I'm aware that trolls exist and will be ass-hats.
If someone leaves their keys in their car and the car gets stolen, most people tend to say "What an asshole to steal someone's car, but you really shouldn't leave your keys in the ignition." The person who commits the crime is always the one who is responsible for the harm done regardless of how easy the victim makes it for them. But if you want to make your chance of being the victim lower you should take the basic steps to protect yourself.
10 years and 2 days ago, you walked through a metal detector, showed your boarding pass and got on the plane. Five years ago, you walked through a metal detector, electronics get checked for explosives, showed your boarding pass and ID and got on a plane.
Today, you go through a metal detector, an X-Ray machine, take off your shoes, get hand checked so thoroughly that sexual abuse victims have panic attacks at the thought of going through security, show an ID, boarding pass, get checked against at least 3 government DBs, get on the plane and hope that you don't have a case of diarrhea on the plane (lest they scramble F16s for your "unusually long bathroom break").
And you don't see the point that the comic is using satire to communicate?
What is unique, and questionable as to whether it will work,...
For better or worse, patents don't have to be functional to work. There's a patent out there from 1970 for a flying saucer powered by a fusion reactor with massive magnetic fields to direct the thrust. Feasible? Obviously not. Novel? Sure is.
And as for a powered landing of a booster stage on a ship, assuming they are talking about a liquid engine power the booster, they've already done short hops showing the ability to take off and land accurately. I don't see any reason why it should be impossible, and it would certainly improve the reusibility compared to having them splash down and get waterlogged after every launch.
Complexity and weight. A radioisotope thermal generator has exactly zero moving parts. It is almost literally a sphere of nuclear unstable metal, surrounded by some thermocouples. You really can't get much simpler and hardy than that.
I think the Turing test needs to be rethought. Passing as human is one thing, but it doesn't really show understanding. My suggestion is something like this: get a group of 15 humans and 15 bots, tell them they're going to be assigned two teammates and a problem to solve via chat. The problem isn't known by any participants (including the bots) before hand and the teams are set up completely randomly. Then, ask all the participants, including the bots, to identify which, if any, of their teammates they think were bots. This would require the bots to understand a new problem, provide insight into a solution (and if 3 bots happen to end up on a team, provide the actual solution itself), and have a long term memory of their interactions with the other participants and be able to determine, in retrospect, which ones acted 'strangely'.
Now granted, a test giver could come up with similarly unexpected questions to pose to the bot, but I think it's different if everyone is given the same questions, and I especially like the aspect of having the bots themselves try to call out who is and isn't a bot at the end.
So... it does what Slyfire has been doing for... what? 2 years now?
SMS is more expensive than Hubble data if you pay per message to send/receive them. However, every major provider offers an unlimited option, usually for around $10 per line. Although if this were to become popular those plans wouldn't last long. Really, this system has problems everywhere except cost: bad latency, horrible bandwidth, best effort transmission, delayed and lost messages just to name a few.