What? I always do this with Firefox. I have it set to open new windows instead of new tabs, and my window manager is what sorts out the "tabbing" - that's what it's for. Also, when I middle-click a link it opens a new window. I have absolutely no interest in Firefox or any other application taking over this window management task, and to me, that's exactly what the tab bar does. Luckily, it's easy to disable all tab use in Firefox.
One comment on tfa raised an obvious question: Why deploy an advanced and experimental stealth aircraft in Kandahar against an enemy that doesn't have radar (nor any capability to threaten aircraft)? One clue may be that the closest international border to Kandahar is Pakistan's, and Pakistan certainly does have radar. The next question, about why this story was leaked complete with a picture, might have a related answer: The message is "Fuck you, Pakistan; we'll talk as though we're your friends, but we own your airspace and can see every hair on your bare asses, so don't try anything."
We went through this higher in the thread. That is a completely asshole thing to do, something for which you really should be ashamed if you try to do.
I agree in principle, but in practice things tend to be less elegant. I expect to see an increase of private trackers, because their hosts will not be the huge, tempting targets that Mininova and TPB were. This means that we'll all join exclusive, secret societies online and share files that way. It's not more egalitarian, etc., but it's probably more sustainable and seems more like a bunch of overlapping communities, which is sort of nice.
Was it always like this in science? I'm honestly curious. Somehow I picture the earlier decades somewhat differently - where scientists were respected, and treated and paid respectfully. Being asked to toil for 80 hours a week is not what I consider respectful work conditions, and I'm very sorry to hear of it.
The article stated explicitly that the problem isn't competition from overseas, but rather the decisions of US-born science students to not remain in science. But maybe the reason why US-born science students are making this choice is that the labor pool they face if they stay in science is seriously tilted by vigorous competition from foreign-born scientists. In other words, companies that hire scientists have learned that they can treat them like shit and still keep all the positions filled. Smart students see this and say "fuck that, I don't love science enough to put myself through that." In fact, this seems to be like the best explanation of the data. If we really do produce enough scientists domestically (contrary to the constant lamentations of US companies who are always angling to remove H1B caps), maybe we can after all afford to shrink our visa program.
My university makes a lot of money charging ridiculous tuition to foreign-born students and thanks to that money they can offer many more scholarships to US-born students. The foreign students are, in effect, subsidizing the American higher education system. That's one reason why we have so many. If you look at how much money flows from developing countries into the US in exchange for us educating their young adults, I bet it would be in the billions. Our education is one of the few products we have left that the world still respects, wants and buys.
If the average Chinese person really does say "I've got a good life going" (which I would dispute, but anyway), then I don't think we need to fret so much about how their government needs to be changed.
I wasn't wondering why someone would start a space restaurant or want to explore. I think I'm the sort of nerd that would want a humaned space program which is independent of Starfleet. I mean, consider, there's nothing in the star trek mythos that keeps you from going to space without joining the space navy. Sure, only Starfleet goes out to the dangerous frontiers, but what proportion of Starfleet do this? A tiny one. And a tiny proportion of that proportion really get to enjoy it, because the rest are mopping the deck or something.
You can bet that I wouldn't be posting on Slashdot if the only way I could do it is to enlist in a military organization which orders me to. That's just not what Slashdot is about. If I put in volunteer time, it would be to help engineer a space program that rivals Starfleet but with more of a focus on habitation and less of a stick up its ass.
It was my impression that people take shitty jobs (or any job in some cases) because they have to in order to get by. There is nobody like that in the Star Trek fiction. Right?
Well, the reason why it's hard to write a screenplay about this is that it's hard to write roles for smart people in general, especially by Hollywood screenwriters. Tell me, when was the last time a character that was supposed to be smart talk like a genuinely smart person in a movie? (Seriously, reply with tips; I'll watch all the movies that have a chance at succeeding in this, I promise.) I work at a university and I've met genuine geniuses, and you can tell when you talk to them how smart they are. Hollywood pretends that geniuses talk like Hollywood genius-stereotypes, whose "great (onscreen) epiphanies" are ideas that ordinary geeks watching the movie had thought of fifteen minutes before. I honestly don't want to see Hollywood handling supra-intelligent people, because they'll butcher it so horribly. So I say that this sort of story is better left unfilmed.
I should also add that I think you're exactly right about not only transporter technology, but basically the utopian end of material need on which Star Trek is premised. In a society like that, are people really going to be enlisting for the space navy, to spend a career wiping the asses of their "commanding officers" and drinking synthohol in the lamest bar in the galaxy? If so, those people would be nothing like you and me.
Agreed. The reason why we don't have it already is that we've tended to build power stations fairly close to where the power is consumed. This is not so hard with plants that burn fossil fuels and nuclear. All that is about to change, because not many people want to live in the desert where we have the best wind and solar conditions. Once we really start with that stuff on a massive scale, that power will probably end up being used a thousand miles from where it is generated. Europe is looking at building a DC power corridor from the Sahara desert... Which is good. This is exactly the sort of stuff we need to think about if we're serious about upgrading the primary method by which we generate electricity.
I actually tried to RTFA and the best clue I found about what this "high temperature superconductor" is was a picture with them showing a liquid nitrogen cooling system. If these superconductors are operating at liquid nitrogen temperatures, I would assume that they have to be of the Type 2 ceramics, almost certainly some sort of copper oxides. However, inside of the nitrogen-cooled envelope was something with many more unlabeled layers, one of which could have been a liquid helium system. (Whenever you use liquid helium, it's wise to surround it with a vacuum and then to surround that with a pipe cooled by liquid nitrogen, so that the helium doesn't absorb much radiated heat from the pipe.)
Does someone have more concrete information on what material they will use?
We're kind of not getting closer though. This sounds like a very expensive material, and though it's a "breakthrough," it's really not that much better than the copper oxides we had in 1986. Since then we've tried every trick in the book, and while it's not quite fair to say that we've hit a wall, we've hit something like a foam block, so every step forward is tinier and takes more time and effort. This is a tiny step forward compared to the heady days of the 80's, when we thought that room temperature superconductors might be around the corner based on Tc trends up to then. I suspect they're not physically possible. Let's hope I'm wrong.
Since the cable can be 100 feet (30+ m), I'd put my computer in the basement, put even bigger fans on it and overclock it a bit more. Then I'd run a cable to my living room TV and bedrooms, so that the whole house can simultaneously use a single computer from many different local monitors/keyboards. It's pretty damn elegant and efficient if you ask me. Since you only need one computer for the house, it's worth it to make it awesome: Multiple CPU sockets, multiple GPUs - this is stuff that has entered the mainstream already. I know there has been work done on making use of non-matching GPU's (article). Now if they could design CPUs to also be on their own little daugterboards like graphics cards are, and huge motherboards with a dozen open slots... then we could just keep adding stuff to our system, and only throw out the weakest stuff once our slots are filled. Motherboards "do" less and less each generation, because more and more is being merged onto the CPU die. Once motherboards become little more than chip-connecting wires, this monstrous fantasy will be complete. I know a lego computer like this would be insanely fast but huge and ugly, which is exactly why it must be in the basement. And since it will be in the basement and producing heat, somebody should design it so that it heats my water!
You can't just point to things that didn't work out and blame those on the government, and point to things that did work and say they happened in spite of the government. Again, for a fair comparison, try to project the 20th century history of Russia if the revolution never happened. I'm pretty sure that's a world where Russia would have stood no chance against Hitler - not without the massive Communist forced industrialization that the czar had no intention of undertaking. I'm not saying that Hitler would have won WW2, because it probably would have ended once the nukes started falling on Berlin, Paris, Prague, Athens and every other "German" city. In that world, Russia would have been a sort of Saudi Arabia of the North: A place where you take oil, pay off the czar and admire the ballet.
Capitalist modernization of Japan from 1870 to 1914? I think if you look in detail at what happened in those years in Japan, it will remind you a great deal of Stalin and not at all of England and the US. To call Japan's planned economy (at that time) "capitalist" borders on absurdity.
There were much more capitalist countries and colonies in that time, like all of Latin America. All that capitalism surely made them into a superpower, right? Seriously, get outa here with your bad jokes.
I wonder what actually happens to a German person if they ever catch a glimpse of a swastika. I assume it's something terrible, if their government goes to such great lengths to protect them from setting eyes on the symbol, even in fictional game. Does it flip some sort of switch that makes them slobbering monsters? I wonder... Somebody should try flashing swastikas at Germans and recording their horrendous transformations for science.
Hey, if I could just plug a second card into my system that didn't have to match the first one, I'd be at newegg right after hitting "submit". If this gets big it will definitely sell more hardware because it will lead to more frequent upgrading and just more GPU buying. AMD and NVidia would be crazy to kill this goose.
I think it goes too far to say that collectivization doesn't work. Czarist Russia was a fairly minor and backward power, the first European power to lose a war to non-Europeans (Japan). Fast forward to only fifty years later, when they singlehandedly destroyed 85% of Hitler's ground troops and were a legitimate global superpower: You can't call that a governing system that doesn't work. No country industrialized and modernized as fast as did the Soviet Union under Stalin. If you told someone in 1900 that the first man in space will be Russian, they would have had every reason to laugh! I agree that a Stalinist system could never hold together long-term, but I don't like it when people forget how much progress the Russians made in the Lenin-Stalin years. This is exactly why Stalin was Saddam Hussein's role model. It's not crazy. He 1. secularized his backwards people, 2. invested brutally in engineering, science and education and 3. force-marched his backward country to the point where they had some of the best scientists and weapons in the world. Of course it's completely immoral to do it in Stalin's brutal manner, but please don't forget that it worked.
At one time I thought I'd leave my academic job and actually gather people to do this as a startup, but I'm too risk-averse. Still, the idea is sound and I hope someone steals it.
The idea is this: Release high-quality digital teaching modules under an open license, and pay for top talent to have them made. This teaching software would include video lectures integrated with an interactive "textbook" which is more than a simple reading. The textbook would include manipulable simulation applets to illustrate whatever concept is being discussed, say, the flow of electrons through the p/n junction of a transistor or the effect on supply-demand curves of the change in the velocity of money. The idea is to simulate, occasionally in a video-game-like setting, something like a lab component of a university course. In many ways, this would be "not as good" as an actual lab, but in some ways it would be even more fun. Since you can fire a BFG in a game but not in real life, I would like to let students operate simulated equipment like x-ray lasers, particle accelerators, space probe thrusters, etc. An AI, which would start off primitive and improve in later versions, would simulate as many elements as possible of how the world reacts to the student's input.
The video lectures would be designed by a prestigious group of the field's experts, and delivered by one or several of these. They would allow students many opportunities to interrupt and seek more detail on the concept discussed, either in text, audio or even a secondary "tutor" lecture. Video answers to frequently asked questions would be available in the release of the software, and many more would be seamlessly available, linked through online wikis. There would be a wiki and forum for each "chapter" of each textbook, where students can get help from each other and kind experts. The latter would not be paid, but certainly the programmers, designers, authors and lecturers would be. Where would the money for this come from?
First, we academics to do lots of stuff for free. I don't get a cent when I publish years of research in a journal article. We don't get paid for reviewing journal articles, even if the journal is for-profit. It's an honor to just contribute, and it's our employers (universities) that indirectly compensate us for these unpaid professional activities, through tenure, raises, etc. I can imagine that being selected as, say, one of the top experts to design a module on ancient philosophy would be considered a substantial career achievement. So much excellent work from academics can be gotten cheaply. Consider, for example, MIT's open courseware. Online help, in almost-real time could also be plausibly provided pro bono.
Still, many aspects of excellent digital teaching modules would cost real money. Since it's essential that this expensive content would be distributed freely and globally, any company that did this would have to be giving away their crown jewels. At first, I thought that grants from governments, universities and philanthropists might cover these costs, and they would still play a role, but the real business model would be based around testing. The idea is actually pretty simple. With a university's worth of free, outstanding educational material being available universally and for free, many students who work their way through a course might be interested in receiving a certification that they indeed know that material. This would be done much like the GRE - in a supervised classroom somewhere not far from their location, with ID verification and other cheating-prevention measures. The GRE costs about a hundred bucks to take, and this pays for all the associated costs. A certification one of the courses I imagine would cost more. I'm not sure what is the right price point. It would be less than the cost of a similar course in a junior college. Still, we might be in the range of $300+. Why would someone pay so much to take prove the know physical anthropology and inorganic chemistry? Actually, there are many re
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Wow, that's such a perfect post!
What? I always do this with Firefox. I have it set to open new windows instead of new tabs, and my window manager is what sorts out the "tabbing" - that's what it's for. Also, when I middle-click a link it opens a new window. I have absolutely no interest in Firefox or any other application taking over this window management task, and to me, that's exactly what the tab bar does. Luckily, it's easy to disable all tab use in Firefox.
One comment on tfa raised an obvious question: Why deploy an advanced and experimental stealth aircraft in Kandahar against an enemy that doesn't have radar (nor any capability to threaten aircraft)? One clue may be that the closest international border to Kandahar is Pakistan's, and Pakistan certainly does have radar. The next question, about why this story was leaked complete with a picture, might have a related answer: The message is "Fuck you, Pakistan; we'll talk as though we're your friends, but we own your airspace and can see every hair on your bare asses, so don't try anything."
We went through this higher in the thread. That is a completely asshole thing to do, something for which you really should be ashamed if you try to do.
I agree in principle, but in practice things tend to be less elegant. I expect to see an increase of private trackers, because their hosts will not be the huge, tempting targets that Mininova and TPB were. This means that we'll all join exclusive, secret societies online and share files that way. It's not more egalitarian, etc., but it's probably more sustainable and seems more like a bunch of overlapping communities, which is sort of nice.
A very insightful comment! I think that would be awesome!
Was it always like this in science? I'm honestly curious. Somehow I picture the earlier decades somewhat differently - where scientists were respected, and treated and paid respectfully. Being asked to toil for 80 hours a week is not what I consider respectful work conditions, and I'm very sorry to hear of it.
The article stated explicitly that the problem isn't competition from overseas, but rather the decisions of US-born science students to not remain in science. But maybe the reason why US-born science students are making this choice is that the labor pool they face if they stay in science is seriously tilted by vigorous competition from foreign-born scientists. In other words, companies that hire scientists have learned that they can treat them like shit and still keep all the positions filled. Smart students see this and say "fuck that, I don't love science enough to put myself through that." In fact, this seems to be like the best explanation of the data. If we really do produce enough scientists domestically (contrary to the constant lamentations of US companies who are always angling to remove H1B caps), maybe we can after all afford to shrink our visa program.
My university makes a lot of money charging ridiculous tuition to foreign-born students and thanks to that money they can offer many more scholarships to US-born students. The foreign students are, in effect, subsidizing the American higher education system. That's one reason why we have so many. If you look at how much money flows from developing countries into the US in exchange for us educating their young adults, I bet it would be in the billions. Our education is one of the few products we have left that the world still respects, wants and buys.
If the average Chinese person really does say "I've got a good life going" (which I would dispute, but anyway), then I don't think we need to fret so much about how their government needs to be changed.
Meh. I mean, it's not awful, but not what I'm talking about.
Actually yes, and I agree, that was some smart writing. So are some other detective stories, including several by Doyle.
You can bet that I wouldn't be posting on Slashdot if the only way I could do it is to enlist in a military organization which orders me to. That's just not what Slashdot is about. If I put in volunteer time, it would be to help engineer a space program that rivals Starfleet but with more of a focus on habitation and less of a stick up its ass.
It was my impression that people take shitty jobs (or any job in some cases) because they have to in order to get by. There is nobody like that in the Star Trek fiction. Right?
Well, the reason why it's hard to write a screenplay about this is that it's hard to write roles for smart people in general, especially by Hollywood screenwriters. Tell me, when was the last time a character that was supposed to be smart talk like a genuinely smart person in a movie? (Seriously, reply with tips; I'll watch all the movies that have a chance at succeeding in this, I promise.) I work at a university and I've met genuine geniuses, and you can tell when you talk to them how smart they are. Hollywood pretends that geniuses talk like Hollywood genius-stereotypes, whose "great (onscreen) epiphanies" are ideas that ordinary geeks watching the movie had thought of fifteen minutes before. I honestly don't want to see Hollywood handling supra-intelligent people, because they'll butcher it so horribly. So I say that this sort of story is better left unfilmed.
I should also add that I think you're exactly right about not only transporter technology, but basically the utopian end of material need on which Star Trek is premised. In a society like that, are people really going to be enlisting for the space navy, to spend a career wiping the asses of their "commanding officers" and drinking synthohol in the lamest bar in the galaxy? If so, those people would be nothing like you and me.
Agreed. The reason why we don't have it already is that we've tended to build power stations fairly close to where the power is consumed. This is not so hard with plants that burn fossil fuels and nuclear. All that is about to change, because not many people want to live in the desert where we have the best wind and solar conditions. Once we really start with that stuff on a massive scale, that power will probably end up being used a thousand miles from where it is generated. Europe is looking at building a DC power corridor from the Sahara desert... Which is good. This is exactly the sort of stuff we need to think about if we're serious about upgrading the primary method by which we generate electricity.
Does someone have more concrete information on what material they will use?
We're kind of not getting closer though. This sounds like a very expensive material, and though it's a "breakthrough," it's really not that much better than the copper oxides we had in 1986. Since then we've tried every trick in the book, and while it's not quite fair to say that we've hit a wall, we've hit something like a foam block, so every step forward is tinier and takes more time and effort. This is a tiny step forward compared to the heady days of the 80's, when we thought that room temperature superconductors might be around the corner based on Tc trends up to then. I suspect they're not physically possible. Let's hope I'm wrong.
I expect that many readers have their computers in the basement, but that's usually because they also live there.
Since the cable can be 100 feet (30+ m), I'd put my computer in the basement, put even bigger fans on it and overclock it a bit more. Then I'd run a cable to my living room TV and bedrooms, so that the whole house can simultaneously use a single computer from many different local monitors/keyboards. It's pretty damn elegant and efficient if you ask me. Since you only need one computer for the house, it's worth it to make it awesome: Multiple CPU sockets, multiple GPUs - this is stuff that has entered the mainstream already. I know there has been work done on making use of non-matching GPU's (article). Now if they could design CPUs to also be on their own little daugterboards like graphics cards are, and huge motherboards with a dozen open slots... then we could just keep adding stuff to our system, and only throw out the weakest stuff once our slots are filled. Motherboards "do" less and less each generation, because more and more is being merged onto the CPU die. Once motherboards become little more than chip-connecting wires, this monstrous fantasy will be complete. I know a lego computer like this would be insanely fast but huge and ugly, which is exactly why it must be in the basement. And since it will be in the basement and producing heat, somebody should design it so that it heats my water!
You can't just point to things that didn't work out and blame those on the government, and point to things that did work and say they happened in spite of the government. Again, for a fair comparison, try to project the 20th century history of Russia if the revolution never happened. I'm pretty sure that's a world where Russia would have stood no chance against Hitler - not without the massive Communist forced industrialization that the czar had no intention of undertaking. I'm not saying that Hitler would have won WW2, because it probably would have ended once the nukes started falling on Berlin, Paris, Prague, Athens and every other "German" city. In that world, Russia would have been a sort of Saudi Arabia of the North: A place where you take oil, pay off the czar and admire the ballet.
Capitalist modernization of Japan from 1870 to 1914? I think if you look in detail at what happened in those years in Japan, it will remind you a great deal of Stalin and not at all of England and the US. To call Japan's planned economy (at that time) "capitalist" borders on absurdity.
There were much more capitalist countries and colonies in that time, like all of Latin America. All that capitalism surely made them into a superpower, right? Seriously, get outa here with your bad jokes.
I wonder what actually happens to a German person if they ever catch a glimpse of a swastika. I assume it's something terrible, if their government goes to such great lengths to protect them from setting eyes on the symbol, even in fictional game. Does it flip some sort of switch that makes them slobbering monsters? I wonder... Somebody should try flashing swastikas at Germans and recording their horrendous transformations for science.
Hey, if I could just plug a second card into my system that didn't have to match the first one, I'd be at newegg right after hitting "submit". If this gets big it will definitely sell more hardware because it will lead to more frequent upgrading and just more GPU buying. AMD and NVidia would be crazy to kill this goose.
I think it goes too far to say that collectivization doesn't work. Czarist Russia was a fairly minor and backward power, the first European power to lose a war to non-Europeans (Japan). Fast forward to only fifty years later, when they singlehandedly destroyed 85% of Hitler's ground troops and were a legitimate global superpower: You can't call that a governing system that doesn't work. No country industrialized and modernized as fast as did the Soviet Union under Stalin. If you told someone in 1900 that the first man in space will be Russian, they would have had every reason to laugh! I agree that a Stalinist system could never hold together long-term, but I don't like it when people forget how much progress the Russians made in the Lenin-Stalin years. This is exactly why Stalin was Saddam Hussein's role model. It's not crazy. He 1. secularized his backwards people, 2. invested brutally in engineering, science and education and 3. force-marched his backward country to the point where they had some of the best scientists and weapons in the world. Of course it's completely immoral to do it in Stalin's brutal manner, but please don't forget that it worked.
At one time I thought I'd leave my academic job and actually gather people to do this as a startup, but I'm too risk-averse. Still, the idea is sound and I hope someone steals it.
The idea is this: Release high-quality digital teaching modules under an open license, and pay for top talent to have them made. This teaching software would include video lectures integrated with an interactive "textbook" which is more than a simple reading. The textbook would include manipulable simulation applets to illustrate whatever concept is being discussed, say, the flow of electrons through the p/n junction of a transistor or the effect on supply-demand curves of the change in the velocity of money. The idea is to simulate, occasionally in a video-game-like setting, something like a lab component of a university course. In many ways, this would be "not as good" as an actual lab, but in some ways it would be even more fun. Since you can fire a BFG in a game but not in real life, I would like to let students operate simulated equipment like x-ray lasers, particle accelerators, space probe thrusters, etc. An AI, which would start off primitive and improve in later versions, would simulate as many elements as possible of how the world reacts to the student's input.
The video lectures would be designed by a prestigious group of the field's experts, and delivered by one or several of these. They would allow students many opportunities to interrupt and seek more detail on the concept discussed, either in text, audio or even a secondary "tutor" lecture. Video answers to frequently asked questions would be available in the release of the software, and many more would be seamlessly available, linked through online wikis. There would be a wiki and forum for each "chapter" of each textbook, where students can get help from each other and kind experts. The latter would not be paid, but certainly the programmers, designers, authors and lecturers would be. Where would the money for this come from?
First, we academics to do lots of stuff for free. I don't get a cent when I publish years of research in a journal article. We don't get paid for reviewing journal articles, even if the journal is for-profit. It's an honor to just contribute, and it's our employers (universities) that indirectly compensate us for these unpaid professional activities, through tenure, raises, etc. I can imagine that being selected as, say, one of the top experts to design a module on ancient philosophy would be considered a substantial career achievement. So much excellent work from academics can be gotten cheaply. Consider, for example, MIT's open courseware. Online help, in almost-real time could also be plausibly provided pro bono.
Still, many aspects of excellent digital teaching modules would cost real money. Since it's essential that this expensive content would be distributed freely and globally, any company that did this would have to be giving away their crown jewels. At first, I thought that grants from governments, universities and philanthropists might cover these costs, and they would still play a role, but the real business model would be based around testing. The idea is actually pretty simple. With a university's worth of free, outstanding educational material being available universally and for free, many students who work their way through a course might be interested in receiving a certification that they indeed know that material. This would be done much like the GRE - in a supervised classroom somewhere not far from their location, with ID verification and other cheating-prevention measures. The GRE costs about a hundred bucks to take, and this pays for all the associated costs. A certification one of the courses I imagine would cost more. I'm not sure what is the right price point. It would be less than the cost of a similar course in a junior college. Still, we might be in the range of $300+. Why would someone pay so much to take prove the know physical anthropology and inorganic chemistry? Actually, there are many re