In the sub prime mortgage disaster AIG insured for a very low rate against the impossible (or so they thought) possibility of all these mortgage backed bonds and whatnot collapsing. So quite simply they didn't have enough in reserves to cover all the losses. The government ended up stepping in. But in that case the government can just make money out of thin air. They can't make servers out of thin air.
So assuming some company is willing to take your money to provide ready access to a failover crisis how do you know that they can handle the load, it might be like all the Titanic passengers trying to get into way too few lifeboats. Also if something like AWS ever went belly up you couldn't buy a server or find another co-location fast enough. Every other service out there would be instantly swamped even if they didn't double their prices overnight.
My sites are small enough (I don't want them to be) that I could round up enough hardware to host them locally for a while.
But this does potentially make a case for finding some slightly older hardware and doing development on it in your office. The idea would be to have enough hardware to be able to somewhat, or even entirely service you basic server needs. It might not be pretty but it would be way better than 100% down and panicked calling to every cloud host out there.
When a politician's promises something that is not even in his next term of office then he is basically saying that they aren't doing it. In 2020 (assuming their hand isn't forced before then) they will grant "extensions' and "waivers" and magical beans that will allow this practice to carry on.
This could easily be implemented in 2015 or at most 2016. Taxes change all the time and often by huge amounts so drastically changing this wildly unfair situation would be nothing out of the ordinary.
But I will make a prediction. The EU, or Britain, or the US will simply wave a wand and end this practice. Too much revenue is being lost. These companies are clearly generating vast profits domestically in many countries and somehow not paying taxes on those revenues. Not only is this not fair from a tax owed perspective but it is unfair competition to those local companies that pay those massive taxes and can't then use that money R&D, massive marketing, or simply attracting new investors to expand the company. So for any country to allow this continue is to basically throw faeces into the faces of their own industries.
Whenever I see a battery the size of a postage stamp as the prototype I get very nervous. I have read about a zillion revolutionary batteries where the scientists are holding up a fingernail sized bit and saying that all our battery needs have been met. But then the years go by and I never hear about the battery again. The only variation that I am seeing here is that one of them is holding a bottle of milk, while the other guy has a pretty geometric display of fingernail sized batteries.
Quite simply I want to see these guys replace the battery in a small electric car with a known range, battery, charge time, etc and then drive to exhaustion, recharge in 5 minutes and then drive to exhaustion a handful of times with a battery no bigger than the original. Then I want to see a machine that is doing something boringly energy predictable like boiling a tank of water until the charge runs out, recharging, and boiling the just refilled tank of water.
That way they can say, this battery the size of a popcan boiled 18 liters of water (or whatever a good popcan sized battery could boil) every 20 minutes for the last 6 months and is able still boil 17.6 liters of water. (25 minutes per cycle for ~10,000 cycles).
But some spec of a battery that is subjected to tests that are not real world enough with graphs of discharge rates and whatnot just don't electrify me. Those are great for a science journal but I want tangibles. Unless there is something screwy such as extreme altitude boiling water from room temperature takes a fairly fixed amount of energy.
When you are flying there is only one real important thing to know and that is how many rows you are from the emergency exit. Basically can you find the emergency exit with your eyes closed? (i.e. full of smoke) The instructions say take note of the emergency exits but unless you can get to them in a crash that you have survived then they might not be much good.
The remainder of the rules are pretty obvious, how to put on your seatbelt, and even the live vest rule is a stupid one to keep demonstrating because if the crash is in water and completely out of the blue then either you imitate someone else's actions or you will blindly struggle (to the emergency exit) and fling yourself out. Or the plane is losing altitude and heading for the water and you will have time to imitate everyone else putting on their life vests.
The reality is that if there is a serious plane problem that the logical measures would include (bailing out with a chute), smearing yourself in a fire retardant gel and putting on a nomex poncho, and having some sort of gas mask, oh and putting on helmets. Those sort of things would vastly increase the survival rates for plane crashes that didn't turn everyone into burnt jam.
The simple reality is that nobody is listening to the safety announcements where they play that lousy game of charades of inflating the vest by mouth and whatnot.
The main use of the stewardesses it to get everyone off the plane in a hurry if something does go wrong. Plus if the plane is going to land in water they will redo the life vest tutorial and you can be assured that everyone is going to pay attention that time.
I would think a whole other factor is that when wind turbines are new to an area the expertise in putting them up and maintaining them would be low; thus the costs would be a bit higher. But after a decade or so of experience that the local talent would be getting better and better at selecting, installing, and maintaining the turbines and associated electrical infrastructure.
This would be on top of the fact that the turbines themselves are becoming cheaper and better with their nearly continuous improvements. So for anyone making decisions on future projects these numbers would not only be getting more reliable but could end up not being optimistic enough. Whereas with more mature technologies like coal the numbers are going to simply be the numbers.
Maybe if they were grinding up the camels live (legs first) for fuel for their streetview vehicle. Or were dragging the camels behind the streetview vehicle, then they would have a point.
I see PETA about the same way I do see camels, ornery, biting, spitting, smelly, animals
I give this project a very high hoax factor but it is no longer 100% like it was the first day that I first read about it. The test I would like to see would include Penn And Teller as the debunkers as they would think way outside the box, not examining extreme physics, but looking for smoke and mirrors.
Oddly enough if Penn and Teller gave it a thumbs up while working with the appropriate physics and chemistry experts, I would say that this is probably true moreso than if any group of physicists gave it a thumbs up.
The simple reality is that this guy really needs to publish how to build your own and let the world have a crack. With this the hoax factor almost instantly goes to 100% or 0%. If it isn't a hoax I suspect that the guy is obsessed with not being ripped off. If I were him what would piss me off is if some somewhat famous physicist looked over my publication and then called the effect governing the process after himself, and the nomenclature stuck. Of course I would also be pissed off is somehow my patent was end-run somehow.
A whole other psychological thing that might be at play would be that the guy does have something but has no idea how it works; thus he might accidentally have figured out an interesting way of tapping into nearby high tension powerlines or something and will be proven to be a fool, even though he may have still developed something fairly interesting, just non-nuclear. Also if many other scientists do get their hands on it and figure out how it works he might just be called a tinkerer, idiot savant, etc as opposed to pretty much being classified along with the guy who invented fire.
I wouldn't bet on this being real, but much like the faster than light neutrinos I have my fingers crossed. Those would have been so cool!
If this thing turns out to work it will upset a whole lot of apple carts and I am not only talking about the obvious energy sector ones. But projects like ITER go to hell. Patent offices would be forced to use their brains. And then worst of all a whole lot of very smart people with very respectable degrees would have to say, "Not only was that not invented in a prestigious institution by a prestigious graduate who was funded by a prestigious grant giving organization, but we don't have a clue as to how the magic works."
But the real problem with his project is basically that after the last cold fusion debacle nobody will touch that with a 20 foot pole. Basically if you want to work on cold fusion the closest would be to try and get a grand for "Alternate forms of neutron emission for the detection of hidden explosives." To associate your reputation and name with cold fusion would be roughly equal to associating it with paranormal studies. So even if you have a pet theory that you have in a bottom drawer that perfectly meshes with what this guy is doing would you dare take the risk and back this guy?
I would be so happy if this was an ITER killer. To me the ITER project is just a massive white elephant that was designed to last entire careers of delivering nothing. All the squabbling over who builds what and where it is built just reeks of petty bureaucrats gone wild. The zillions of dollars should have gone to hoards of small scale fundamental research projects instead of one giant role of the dice.
What would make me laugh even harder would be to find out that the "leaders" of ITER were trying to squash this fusion project just so they don't get shut down.
The other thing that I would be willing to bet is that if the ITER project were shut down that physicists and engineers would pour out of the woodwork saying that they didn't previously dare criticise the project for fear of their careers being destroyed but that now they can say how much the project stunk.
Top Gear had an interesting experiment where they raced a Prius against a BMW M3. But what they did was have the Prius go all out and the M3 just paced it. Then they measured the actual gas consumed and found that the BMW had better mileage under those circumstances.
Some time ago I had a big old V8 car and I could pretty much halve my mileage simply by being only somewhat more aggressive. City driving would also send that car's mileage into a tailspin. The rated mileage was around 23/18Mpg but I would say that with gentle highway driving I could do 23 but with typical city driving it might have been below 12.
So what I would like to see for a metric would be something similar to the Top Gear scenario; basically they would drive the car around a test track at three(light, normal, and lead foot) given sets of reasonable accelerations, braking, speeds, etc and then tell us the consumption rate. Then we could compare apples to apples when buying cars.
If automation doesn't kill at least 50% by 2025 I'll have my robot eat its hat.
What hasn't happened yet is the creation of the IBM PC of robots. There have been a few cracks at it such as the PR2 but I see that as more of a Sinclair than PC. I want a whitebox robot that I can then glue bits on through a PCI type interface equivalent and make it a factory robot, a hospital robot, or an agricultural robot. For instance I was looking at a machine that was making pretzels and someone had called it a robot. I would have called it a slightly adaptable pretzel making machine.
I have two rules of thumb for what I call a robot: One is that it adapts to its environment somewhat; for instance a garbage picking up machine that looked for garbage, picked up garbage, and did other things such as bringing back a full load and dumping it would meet rule one. Rule two(the lesser rule) is that at the core of the machine can be adapted to something else. So the garbage picking up robot could have some bits switched and it could be a mowing robot or a snow removal robot. I am not saying that the actual garbage robot would be swapable, but that the factory that makes them would be at least adapting a central common core.
So a roomba very much meets rule one but is mostly failing on rule two.
And my rules also apply to software that eliminates a job. I suspect that the software that replaces a call center worker will end up being related to the software that replaces a medical doctor on diagnoses. So adapts to is limited environment, and has a common core.
But when robot designers are working with tools that meet both of my rules then the robot revolution will take off and the job losses will be astronomical. Basically any fairly repetitive job that follows a simple set of logical rules is doomed. This describes many many jobs ranging from building cleaners to medical doctors. Oddly enough some lower skilled jobs will require humans for a very long time. Car repair would be a good example. Often when a car breaks in some way things can be disrupted. So that a simple repetitive routine won't work. Things need to be pounded, pried, and even torched to even get things apart. But computers will assist with such a job by helping to diagnose. If robots are going to damage the car repair profession at all it will be by the robotic assembly of cars resulting in more reliable cars and fewer accidents by robotically driven cars.
The local (a 2nd or even 3rd rate) medical school has pushed for a BSc in Medical Science which is starting its first year the past September. The dean of the medical school told me that the HS class average was 98%. Quite simply many public schools won't grade inflate enough for a 98 average. My daughter had the highest grade 12 math average in a 1000+ HS at 97. (She didn't apply to this program) But that might not have been enough.
There are all kinds of ways that a superior student could end up with far less than a 98%. Taking advanced courses, taking lots of hard courses, entering plenty of math/science competitions, fantastic science fair projects, etc.
Basically what they are saying is that you get to go to medical school if you have OCD and aren't interested in anything else.
Some med schools also have lists of this or that activity that they like to see but then the students go through it like a checklist.
I have long thought that there should be more of a risky system where you apply for medical school and then spend 6 months doing medically related things but then the people who just don't fit in are dropped. The same with other programs such as physics, chemistry, engineering, etc.
If this turns out to be provably true then an easy solution would be to boot Russia from the swift system for a few weeks. That would basically mean that no international transactions could take place large or small. Or if they wanted to make it interesting they could restrict swift transactions to minor amounts so that the very richest would be impacted while the average Russian would feel a lesser impact.
But large food importers and whatnot would be massively impacted.
But before this can be done Europe needs to find an alternative to Russian Gas. But when Europe does then they won't tolerate Russian shenanigans for 1 second.
The key is that any retaliation needs to hit those around Putin who can change their mind about his being in power. The average Russian on the street will choose Putin over the West nearly 100% of the time.
If they were charging some people $1,000 during that time period then it would only have taken 600 customers to cover the fine. With all the smaller fish who were fried it could easily have been millions. Plus the huge inconvenience for those who went without. This fine should have been ruinous and someone should have gone to jail. Someone really senior, not just some tech dweeb who was scapegoated.
One of the rules that have long thought should be that when a corporation commits a felony there should be mandatory jail time and that it should be at the highest level that may (not certainly) have been aware of the crime. So if a UPS driver runs someone over going too fast that he may or may not go to jail but that if they can show that some executive was told that some policy would push drivers to speed, then boom it would be whatever sentence that would apply had he been speeding himself.
The average speed of a train in Canada has slowed significantly down from where they were in the 1930's. My family recently took a few trips to a location that is 2.5 hours of driving and the scheduled time for the train is a bit over 3 hours. Each time it is usually around the 4 hour mark and sometimes has exceeded 6. Plus major rail lines are being ripped up and turned into walking trails and the runs are far less frequent on the remaining ones. The areas with the removed train services have sunk into economic stagnation.
You might be thinking that we have a marvellous road system or something but, nope, our potholes have potholes (pictures available) and our most productive fishing and farming areas have a tortuous routes to get to major markets.
This is fairly typical of most of Canada with the exception of a tiny corridor running by the Ottawa area (our federal capital).
Unless it is a really violent religion that actively encourages human sacrifice as one of its lesser requirements for entry into heaven. Or it is one of these massive time wasting religions where people forego nearly every productive activity to do religious stuff; basically worse than TV is now.
Religion is something that an ET might bring. It could be in the form of creation myths, some strange gap they discovered in physics and a religion built up around it. Or they may have always had a religion that drove them to pursue physics with a fanatic's zeal resulting in space travel while not straying from their core faith.
Or even worse, they could be way ahead of us in pretty much every science yet have a fanatical religion where the two options are pretty much to pray to some god or spread out and convert other species.
Another nasty variation is that they come with some religion that has a series of logical arguments that can pretty much convince anyone who doesn't have a PhD in rhetoric. So they come along drop off their book of faith and leave.
But if they do come with any religion at all we can all be certain that it will end up with adherents on Earth. Seeing that we have Neo Nazis there is no creed too stupid for some people.
And then there is unreliable which can allow for awesome statistics, for instance they could tell the FCC that Netflix is 105% faster than Hulu but that the way it works is that Netflix has a 5% packet loss that are perfectly selected to cause the most trouble with the data stream.
Also if these paid agreements are so "reasonable" why not buy exclusivity? That is that when these companies negotiate their fast lane contracts to make it exclusive fast lane access; that is to basically pay to block the competitors out. So Hulu could buy the all the fast lane access for video subscription streaming locking out Netflix. Or google could buy up all search engine access.
Plus this would then give comcast incentive to make an ever greater divide between the two speeds and keep slowing down the slow lane. I suspect that the ever shrinking legroom in economy is increasing first/business class ticket sales.
Basically allowing any form of non-network neutrality will only make a few scumbags richer and the rest of us greatly poorer in both money and quality of services.
A fair percentage of people who travel on airplanes are assholes; plain and simple. So to give another tool for these douchbags to continue their assholery is just stupid.
A great move for the airlines would be to de-shithead their passenger lists by banning the use of mobile on the plane. I would happily travel on any airline that had a no cellphone rule for the simple reason that any remaining airlines that let people use their phones would magnetically attract the wankers away from the awesome airlines.
I suspect that there will be magically connection rates but this will just be a dickwad amplifier in that the people who use the phones will be government and large organization types on an expense account and will be ultra fartbreaths while they are talking since the calls will cost so much.
But on a more serious note allowing cellphone use on airlines will be stupendously dangerous seeing that some vigilantes will take jammers with them. While cellphones have been pretty solidly proven not to interfere with the avionics I am fairly certain that a jammer would have a substantially negative effect.
To give an example of just how much of a crap-for-brains type of person I am expecting I will give a recent restaurant experience. There was a guy in a very small restaurant who kept getting calls on his phone that he was not answering on his very very loud phone that didn't have voice mail. So basically the phone was ringing for about 50 percent of the time that I was in the restaurant. The fattened pig of a human being just sat there ignoring the phone and the horrible effect that it was having on anyone else. The owners of the restaurant were there and did nothing (as I would expect most airlines to do). What would this guy do on an airplane at 2am? Let the phone ring for 4 hours straight, or silence it? BTW the guy was not deaf.
I do have a happy ending, when my lunch friend and I went to both drop our 1 star Yelp reviews we saw two others relating to the same incident. The four 1 star reviews made up over a third of the total reviews; smashing the 4 star rating to 2 stars. Cellholes can really piss people off.
Lightning can easily give off Xrays and even Gamma rays. So would it also be possible that these people who have this blast right along their skin are also getting a solid dose of radiation.
There are huge swaths of things that I don't understand about most technologies that I use. I could not even begin to enumerate the various obscure ways that "const" can be used in C++. But I have deployed many product using C++. The same with SQL databases which I have huge amounts of data happily going into and out of. These things work as well as I could hope and my understanding of them is well sufficient for me to be happy. I suspect that if I hired a top of the line C++ or SQL expert that both my code and my databases could be vastly improved from a working well to working even better.
But with both of the above examples, not only did the products get deployed but as new functionality was required no real barriers were hit during development. But with MongoDB basic data in/data out functionality was developed and deployed. But as new functionality was required the fight with MongoDB became a huge waste of time.
And my credibility comes from the fact that the same functionality was easily deployed in other tools learned before and subsequent to MongoDB. My point being that it was time wasted on a technology that absolutely did not live up to the hype. I didn't say that my MongoDB couldn't do it(who knows) but that the potholed road to getting there was not worth driving when a smooth traffic free 8 lane highway existed going in the same direction.
So my recommendation is to use MongoDB if you want to look cool in 2012 and like to flagellate yourself.
I tried MongoDB and I even tried to like it. I do love NoSQL but what I came to realize was that MongoDB was trying to tell me how to solve my problems instead of just storing my damned data.
But the real problem with MongoDB was that nearly everything, while appearing simple, required a google search to figure out how to do it. A mark of a very well designed API is that you soon start guessing the commands and your guesses are really close or right on. But with MongoDB I found that nothing really made sense. Only after carefully crafted "debate team" arguments could any unusual aspect of MongoDB defend itself. Whereas redis is the opposite, it just works. Or even simpler systems like Memcache, that couldn't be simpler, when read the API for either of those they just made sense. There is no layer upon layer upon layer of complexity. It is data goes in, and data comes out.
In fact redis would be a good example of ease of use mixed with advanced capabilities. The basic commands are things like get, append, save, while more advanced commands are more esoteric such as PEXPIREAT which has to do with timestamp expiries. So you can happily use redis like a simple minded fool and it is wonderful. Or you can dig in deeper and only mildly shake your head at some of the command names. But with MongoDB it is just a pain in the ass from the first moment you truly have even vaguely complicated data.
But back to PostgresSQL. The JSON related features are mildly complex but appear to be solving the most common problems. Also by using PostgresSQL it solves the entire debate of relational vs NoSQL. Use PostgresSQL and you can just do both without giving it a second thought. And I for one can certainly say that I have data that demands NoSQL and I have other data that demands relational; all in the same project. But oddly enough the technique that I use is MariaDB for the relational and redis for everything else. This is ideal for me as the relational data is very simple and won't need to scale much whereas the redis stuff needs to run at rocket speeds and will be the first to scale to many machines.
But as for MongoDB, it has been deleted from all machines, development and deployment and will never be revisited regardless of this weeks propaganda.
Slashdot Mirror
In the sub prime mortgage disaster AIG insured for a very low rate against the impossible (or so they thought) possibility of all these mortgage backed bonds and whatnot collapsing. So quite simply they didn't have enough in reserves to cover all the losses. The government ended up stepping in. But in that case the government can just make money out of thin air. They can't make servers out of thin air.
So assuming some company is willing to take your money to provide ready access to a failover crisis how do you know that they can handle the load, it might be like all the Titanic passengers trying to get into way too few lifeboats. Also if something like AWS ever went belly up you couldn't buy a server or find another co-location fast enough. Every other service out there would be instantly swamped even if they didn't double their prices overnight.
My sites are small enough (I don't want them to be) that I could round up enough hardware to host them locally for a while.
But this does potentially make a case for finding some slightly older hardware and doing development on it in your office. The idea would be to have enough hardware to be able to somewhat, or even entirely service you basic server needs. It might not be pretty but it would be way better than 100% down and panicked calling to every cloud host out there.
When a politician's promises something that is not even in his next term of office then he is basically saying that they aren't doing it. In 2020 (assuming their hand isn't forced before then) they will grant "extensions' and "waivers" and magical beans that will allow this practice to carry on.
This could easily be implemented in 2015 or at most 2016. Taxes change all the time and often by huge amounts so drastically changing this wildly unfair situation would be nothing out of the ordinary.
But I will make a prediction. The EU, or Britain, or the US will simply wave a wand and end this practice. Too much revenue is being lost. These companies are clearly generating vast profits domestically in many countries and somehow not paying taxes on those revenues. Not only is this not fair from a tax owed perspective but it is unfair competition to those local companies that pay those massive taxes and can't then use that money R&D, massive marketing, or simply attracting new investors to expand the company. So for any country to allow this continue is to basically throw faeces into the faces of their own industries.
Whenever I see a battery the size of a postage stamp as the prototype I get very nervous. I have read about a zillion revolutionary batteries where the scientists are holding up a fingernail sized bit and saying that all our battery needs have been met. But then the years go by and I never hear about the battery again. The only variation that I am seeing here is that one of them is holding a bottle of milk, while the other guy has a pretty geometric display of fingernail sized batteries.
Quite simply I want to see these guys replace the battery in a small electric car with a known range, battery, charge time, etc and then drive to exhaustion, recharge in 5 minutes and then drive to exhaustion a handful of times with a battery no bigger than the original. Then I want to see a machine that is doing something boringly energy predictable like boiling a tank of water until the charge runs out, recharging, and boiling the just refilled tank of water. That way they can say, this battery the size of a popcan boiled 18 liters of water (or whatever a good popcan sized battery could boil) every 20 minutes for the last 6 months and is able still boil 17.6 liters of water. (25 minutes per cycle for ~10,000 cycles). But some spec of a battery that is subjected to tests that are not real world enough with graphs of discharge rates and whatnot just don't electrify me. Those are great for a science journal but I want tangibles. Unless there is something screwy such as extreme altitude boiling water from room temperature takes a fairly fixed amount of energy.
When you are flying there is only one real important thing to know and that is how many rows you are from the emergency exit. Basically can you find the emergency exit with your eyes closed? (i.e. full of smoke) The instructions say take note of the emergency exits but unless you can get to them in a crash that you have survived then they might not be much good.
The remainder of the rules are pretty obvious, how to put on your seatbelt, and even the live vest rule is a stupid one to keep demonstrating because if the crash is in water and completely out of the blue then either you imitate someone else's actions or you will blindly struggle (to the emergency exit) and fling yourself out. Or the plane is losing altitude and heading for the water and you will have time to imitate everyone else putting on their life vests.
The reality is that if there is a serious plane problem that the logical measures would include (bailing out with a chute), smearing yourself in a fire retardant gel and putting on a nomex poncho, and having some sort of gas mask, oh and putting on helmets. Those sort of things would vastly increase the survival rates for plane crashes that didn't turn everyone into burnt jam.
The simple reality is that nobody is listening to the safety announcements where they play that lousy game of charades of inflating the vest by mouth and whatnot.
The main use of the stewardesses it to get everyone off the plane in a hurry if something does go wrong. Plus if the plane is going to land in water they will redo the life vest tutorial and you can be assured that everyone is going to pay attention that time.
I would think a whole other factor is that when wind turbines are new to an area the expertise in putting them up and maintaining them would be low; thus the costs would be a bit higher. But after a decade or so of experience that the local talent would be getting better and better at selecting, installing, and maintaining the turbines and associated electrical infrastructure.
This would be on top of the fact that the turbines themselves are becoming cheaper and better with their nearly continuous improvements. So for anyone making decisions on future projects these numbers would not only be getting more reliable but could end up not being optimistic enough. Whereas with more mature technologies like coal the numbers are going to simply be the numbers.
Maybe if they were grinding up the camels live (legs first) for fuel for their streetview vehicle. Or were dragging the camels behind the streetview vehicle, then they would have a point.
I see PETA about the same way I do see camels, ornery, biting, spitting, smelly, animals
I give this project a very high hoax factor but it is no longer 100% like it was the first day that I first read about it. The test I would like to see would include Penn And Teller as the debunkers as they would think way outside the box, not examining extreme physics, but looking for smoke and mirrors.
Oddly enough if Penn and Teller gave it a thumbs up while working with the appropriate physics and chemistry experts, I would say that this is probably true moreso than if any group of physicists gave it a thumbs up.
The simple reality is that this guy really needs to publish how to build your own and let the world have a crack. With this the hoax factor almost instantly goes to 100% or 0%. If it isn't a hoax I suspect that the guy is obsessed with not being ripped off. If I were him what would piss me off is if some somewhat famous physicist looked over my publication and then called the effect governing the process after himself, and the nomenclature stuck. Of course I would also be pissed off is somehow my patent was end-run somehow.
A whole other psychological thing that might be at play would be that the guy does have something but has no idea how it works; thus he might accidentally have figured out an interesting way of tapping into nearby high tension powerlines or something and will be proven to be a fool, even though he may have still developed something fairly interesting, just non-nuclear. Also if many other scientists do get their hands on it and figure out how it works he might just be called a tinkerer, idiot savant, etc as opposed to pretty much being classified along with the guy who invented fire.
I wouldn't bet on this being real, but much like the faster than light neutrinos I have my fingers crossed. Those would have been so cool!
If this thing turns out to work it will upset a whole lot of apple carts and I am not only talking about the obvious energy sector ones. But projects like ITER go to hell. Patent offices would be forced to use their brains. And then worst of all a whole lot of very smart people with very respectable degrees would have to say, "Not only was that not invented in a prestigious institution by a prestigious graduate who was funded by a prestigious grant giving organization, but we don't have a clue as to how the magic works."
But the real problem with his project is basically that after the last cold fusion debacle nobody will touch that with a 20 foot pole. Basically if you want to work on cold fusion the closest would be to try and get a grand for "Alternate forms of neutron emission for the detection of hidden explosives." To associate your reputation and name with cold fusion would be roughly equal to associating it with paranormal studies. So even if you have a pet theory that you have in a bottom drawer that perfectly meshes with what this guy is doing would you dare take the risk and back this guy?
I would be so happy if this was an ITER killer. To me the ITER project is just a massive white elephant that was designed to last entire careers of delivering nothing. All the squabbling over who builds what and where it is built just reeks of petty bureaucrats gone wild. The zillions of dollars should have gone to hoards of small scale fundamental research projects instead of one giant role of the dice.
What would make me laugh even harder would be to find out that the "leaders" of ITER were trying to squash this fusion project just so they don't get shut down.
The other thing that I would be willing to bet is that if the ITER project were shut down that physicists and engineers would pour out of the woodwork saying that they didn't previously dare criticise the project for fear of their careers being destroyed but that now they can say how much the project stunk.
Top Gear had an interesting experiment where they raced a Prius against a BMW M3. But what they did was have the Prius go all out and the M3 just paced it. Then they measured the actual gas consumed and found that the BMW had better mileage under those circumstances.
Some time ago I had a big old V8 car and I could pretty much halve my mileage simply by being only somewhat more aggressive. City driving would also send that car's mileage into a tailspin. The rated mileage was around 23/18Mpg but I would say that with gentle highway driving I could do 23 but with typical city driving it might have been below 12.
So what I would like to see for a metric would be something similar to the Top Gear scenario; basically they would drive the car around a test track at three(light, normal, and lead foot) given sets of reasonable accelerations, braking, speeds, etc and then tell us the consumption rate. Then we could compare apples to apples when buying cars.
If automation doesn't kill at least 50% by 2025 I'll have my robot eat its hat.
What hasn't happened yet is the creation of the IBM PC of robots. There have been a few cracks at it such as the PR2 but I see that as more of a Sinclair than PC. I want a whitebox robot that I can then glue bits on through a PCI type interface equivalent and make it a factory robot, a hospital robot, or an agricultural robot. For instance I was looking at a machine that was making pretzels and someone had called it a robot. I would have called it a slightly adaptable pretzel making machine.
I have two rules of thumb for what I call a robot: One is that it adapts to its environment somewhat; for instance a garbage picking up machine that looked for garbage, picked up garbage, and did other things such as bringing back a full load and dumping it would meet rule one. Rule two(the lesser rule) is that at the core of the machine can be adapted to something else. So the garbage picking up robot could have some bits switched and it could be a mowing robot or a snow removal robot. I am not saying that the actual garbage robot would be swapable, but that the factory that makes them would be at least adapting a central common core.
So a roomba very much meets rule one but is mostly failing on rule two.
And my rules also apply to software that eliminates a job. I suspect that the software that replaces a call center worker will end up being related to the software that replaces a medical doctor on diagnoses. So adapts to is limited environment, and has a common core.
But when robot designers are working with tools that meet both of my rules then the robot revolution will take off and the job losses will be astronomical. Basically any fairly repetitive job that follows a simple set of logical rules is doomed. This describes many many jobs ranging from building cleaners to medical doctors. Oddly enough some lower skilled jobs will require humans for a very long time. Car repair would be a good example. Often when a car breaks in some way things can be disrupted. So that a simple repetitive routine won't work. Things need to be pounded, pried, and even torched to even get things apart. But computers will assist with such a job by helping to diagnose. If robots are going to damage the car repair profession at all it will be by the robotic assembly of cars resulting in more reliable cars and fewer accidents by robotically driven cars.
The local (a 2nd or even 3rd rate) medical school has pushed for a BSc in Medical Science which is starting its first year the past September. The dean of the medical school told me that the HS class average was 98%. Quite simply many public schools won't grade inflate enough for a 98 average. My daughter had the highest grade 12 math average in a 1000+ HS at 97. (She didn't apply to this program) But that might not have been enough.
There are all kinds of ways that a superior student could end up with far less than a 98%. Taking advanced courses, taking lots of hard courses, entering plenty of math/science competitions, fantastic science fair projects, etc.
Basically what they are saying is that you get to go to medical school if you have OCD and aren't interested in anything else.
Some med schools also have lists of this or that activity that they like to see but then the students go through it like a checklist.
I have long thought that there should be more of a risky system where you apply for medical school and then spend 6 months doing medically related things but then the people who just don't fit in are dropped. The same with other programs such as physics, chemistry, engineering, etc.
If this turns out to be provably true then an easy solution would be to boot Russia from the swift system for a few weeks. That would basically mean that no international transactions could take place large or small. Or if they wanted to make it interesting they could restrict swift transactions to minor amounts so that the very richest would be impacted while the average Russian would feel a lesser impact.
But large food importers and whatnot would be massively impacted.
But before this can be done Europe needs to find an alternative to Russian Gas. But when Europe does then they won't tolerate Russian shenanigans for 1 second.
The key is that any retaliation needs to hit those around Putin who can change their mind about his being in power. The average Russian on the street will choose Putin over the West nearly 100% of the time.
If they were charging some people $1,000 during that time period then it would only have taken 600 customers to cover the fine. With all the smaller fish who were fried it could easily have been millions. Plus the huge inconvenience for those who went without. This fine should have been ruinous and someone should have gone to jail. Someone really senior, not just some tech dweeb who was scapegoated.
One of the rules that have long thought should be that when a corporation commits a felony there should be mandatory jail time and that it should be at the highest level that may (not certainly) have been aware of the crime. So if a UPS driver runs someone over going too fast that he may or may not go to jail but that if they can show that some executive was told that some policy would push drivers to speed, then boom it would be whatever sentence that would apply had he been speeding himself.
The average speed of a train in Canada has slowed significantly down from where they were in the 1930's. My family recently took a few trips to a location that is 2.5 hours of driving and the scheduled time for the train is a bit over 3 hours. Each time it is usually around the 4 hour mark and sometimes has exceeded 6. Plus major rail lines are being ripped up and turned into walking trails and the runs are far less frequent on the remaining ones. The areas with the removed train services have sunk into economic stagnation.
You might be thinking that we have a marvellous road system or something but, nope, our potholes have potholes (pictures available) and our most productive fishing and farming areas have a tortuous routes to get to major markets.
This is fairly typical of most of Canada with the exception of a tiny corridor running by the Ottawa area (our federal capital).
Unless it is a really violent religion that actively encourages human sacrifice as one of its lesser requirements for entry into heaven. Or it is one of these massive time wasting religions where people forego nearly every productive activity to do religious stuff; basically worse than TV is now.
Religion is something that an ET might bring. It could be in the form of creation myths, some strange gap they discovered in physics and a religion built up around it. Or they may have always had a religion that drove them to pursue physics with a fanatic's zeal resulting in space travel while not straying from their core faith.
Or even worse, they could be way ahead of us in pretty much every science yet have a fanatical religion where the two options are pretty much to pray to some god or spread out and convert other species.
Another nasty variation is that they come with some religion that has a series of logical arguments that can pretty much convince anyone who doesn't have a PhD in rhetoric. So they come along drop off their book of faith and leave.
But if they do come with any religion at all we can all be certain that it will end up with adherents on Earth. Seeing that we have Neo Nazis there is no creed too stupid for some people.
I would no more call this a robot than I would call an xray machine a robotic innards examiner or a smoke detector a robot fireman's nose.
I would call it a robot if it wandered the streets of Bangkok smelling for the most Thai food and recording on a map where it found it.
Does this benefit the population at large or does this benefit corrupt officials and the large corporations that corrupted them?
And then there is unreliable which can allow for awesome statistics, for instance they could tell the FCC that Netflix is 105% faster than Hulu but that the way it works is that Netflix has a 5% packet loss that are perfectly selected to cause the most trouble with the data stream.
Also if these paid agreements are so "reasonable" why not buy exclusivity? That is that when these companies negotiate their fast lane contracts to make it exclusive fast lane access; that is to basically pay to block the competitors out. So Hulu could buy the all the fast lane access for video subscription streaming locking out Netflix. Or google could buy up all search engine access.
Plus this would then give comcast incentive to make an ever greater divide between the two speeds and keep slowing down the slow lane. I suspect that the ever shrinking legroom in economy is increasing first/business class ticket sales.
Basically allowing any form of non-network neutrality will only make a few scumbags richer and the rest of us greatly poorer in both money and quality of services.
A fair percentage of people who travel on airplanes are assholes; plain and simple. So to give another tool for these douchbags to continue their assholery is just stupid.
A great move for the airlines would be to de-shithead their passenger lists by banning the use of mobile on the plane. I would happily travel on any airline that had a no cellphone rule for the simple reason that any remaining airlines that let people use their phones would magnetically attract the wankers away from the awesome airlines.
I suspect that there will be magically connection rates but this will just be a dickwad amplifier in that the people who use the phones will be government and large organization types on an expense account and will be ultra fartbreaths while they are talking since the calls will cost so much.
But on a more serious note allowing cellphone use on airlines will be stupendously dangerous seeing that some vigilantes will take jammers with them. While cellphones have been pretty solidly proven not to interfere with the avionics I am fairly certain that a jammer would have a substantially negative effect.
To give an example of just how much of a crap-for-brains type of person I am expecting I will give a recent restaurant experience. There was a guy in a very small restaurant who kept getting calls on his phone that he was not answering on his very very loud phone that didn't have voice mail. So basically the phone was ringing for about 50 percent of the time that I was in the restaurant. The fattened pig of a human being just sat there ignoring the phone and the horrible effect that it was having on anyone else. The owners of the restaurant were there and did nothing (as I would expect most airlines to do). What would this guy do on an airplane at 2am? Let the phone ring for 4 hours straight, or silence it? BTW the guy was not deaf.
I do have a happy ending, when my lunch friend and I went to both drop our 1 star Yelp reviews we saw two others relating to the same incident. The four 1 star reviews made up over a third of the total reviews; smashing the 4 star rating to 2 stars. Cellholes can really piss people off.
Lightning can easily give off Xrays and even Gamma rays. So would it also be possible that these people who have this blast right along their skin are also getting a solid dose of radiation.
There are huge swaths of things that I don't understand about most technologies that I use. I could not even begin to enumerate the various obscure ways that "const" can be used in C++. But I have deployed many product using C++. The same with SQL databases which I have huge amounts of data happily going into and out of. These things work as well as I could hope and my understanding of them is well sufficient for me to be happy. I suspect that if I hired a top of the line C++ or SQL expert that both my code and my databases could be vastly improved from a working well to working even better.
But with both of the above examples, not only did the products get deployed but as new functionality was required no real barriers were hit during development. But with MongoDB basic data in/data out functionality was developed and deployed. But as new functionality was required the fight with MongoDB became a huge waste of time.
And my credibility comes from the fact that the same functionality was easily deployed in other tools learned before and subsequent to MongoDB. My point being that it was time wasted on a technology that absolutely did not live up to the hype. I didn't say that my MongoDB couldn't do it(who knows) but that the potholed road to getting there was not worth driving when a smooth traffic free 8 lane highway existed going in the same direction.
So my recommendation is to use MongoDB if you want to look cool in 2012 and like to flagellate yourself.
I tried MongoDB and I even tried to like it. I do love NoSQL but what I came to realize was that MongoDB was trying to tell me how to solve my problems instead of just storing my damned data.
But the real problem with MongoDB was that nearly everything, while appearing simple, required a google search to figure out how to do it. A mark of a very well designed API is that you soon start guessing the commands and your guesses are really close or right on. But with MongoDB I found that nothing really made sense. Only after carefully crafted "debate team" arguments could any unusual aspect of MongoDB defend itself. Whereas redis is the opposite, it just works. Or even simpler systems like Memcache, that couldn't be simpler, when read the API for either of those they just made sense. There is no layer upon layer upon layer of complexity. It is data goes in, and data comes out.
In fact redis would be a good example of ease of use mixed with advanced capabilities. The basic commands are things like get, append, save, while more advanced commands are more esoteric such as PEXPIREAT which has to do with timestamp expiries. So you can happily use redis like a simple minded fool and it is wonderful. Or you can dig in deeper and only mildly shake your head at some of the command names. But with MongoDB it is just a pain in the ass from the first moment you truly have even vaguely complicated data.
But back to PostgresSQL. The JSON related features are mildly complex but appear to be solving the most common problems. Also by using PostgresSQL it solves the entire debate of relational vs NoSQL. Use PostgresSQL and you can just do both without giving it a second thought. And I for one can certainly say that I have data that demands NoSQL and I have other data that demands relational; all in the same project. But oddly enough the technique that I use is MariaDB for the relational and redis for everything else. This is ideal for me as the relational data is very simple and won't need to scale much whereas the redis stuff needs to run at rocket speeds and will be the first to scale to many machines.
But as for MongoDB, it has been deleted from all machines, development and deployment and will never be revisited regardless of this weeks propaganda.