While the OP got modded down by at least 2 points to -1 for having the temerity to express a view some mods didn't agree with, the PP got modded up for expressing such keen political insights as:
This is the end result. Oligarchs. Trickle Down Economics was a scam.
Mod parent back up!
The thoughtpolice got nothing on Slashdot mods. -1 for expressing your opinion? The PP is a political/economic opinion stated in a reasonable way. It is not flamebait in any conceivable way, shape, manner or form.
Bonus points for mod censorship if this post gets modded below it's original +2. It wouldn't be the first time. According to some thoughtpolice mods, not only can't people express opinions the mods don't like, you shouldn't even point that out.
I would have though US citizens, of all the places in the world, would have a historical perspective on what happens when uncaring kings run your country, and what the poor but honest citizens should do to resolve the lack of decision making power.
The problem may be that Ellison is not a king, but merely a feudal lord. There was less experience with those in colonial America.
I read a lot of the computer science and applied math literature and it's full of good work by people from Google or funded by Google.
That's great, but it's not the same as introducing products and services that use that stuff. I don't know for sure how much of Google's work makes it into real products or services, but there have been too many companies with great research work that didn't make it into production (not because it was impractical either). IIRC Microsoft research did great stuff, but what really made it into products? GM research of yore was also often like that.
Google or any other company is not going to have the next Bell Labs. That was an unusual situation because AT&T's corporate charter said X% of profits were supposed to be plowed back into R&D, and they didn't have to change that back when it was a national monopoly.
Those three companies are responsible for most of the ideas and business momentum in CONSUMER computing. Enterprise IT has been innovating at a brisk clip without contributions from those three companies, thank you very much.
Hear, hear! Some people talk about consumer items because that's all they see. Similar to your case, I'm an EE and I mostly work on black boxes that consumers never see. I like it that way. In the commercial/industrial world customers are concerned with how well something serves an actual practical purpose, and are much less concerned with the latest fad or useless geegaw.
In the early 1980's IBM, a dinosaur sued for monopoly, released the PC and changed the world.
The reason that the IBM PC was so influential was that is said "IBM" on it. Before then PC's were considered toys, but people figured if the world's largest computer company introduced one, they had to be taken seriously. There was nothing innovative about the design. It was mostly pulled off an Intel ap note.
I am fairly certain it depends on the arch/dome curvature.
Good point. I should have said that a dome can be designed so that the stresses are primarily compressive. My point was that otherwise they wouldn't have been able to build the Pantheon with unreinforced concrete. I'm always amazed at how they managed to figure out good design rules without any mathematical stress analysis. Obviously they managed, though it may have involved a few things falling down or at least having to be patched up post-construction (not that that doesn't happen nowadays). Perhaps it also had to do with only slowly evolving their design/construction techniques, rather than making big leaps.
It makes sense: if you have a very low curvature the arch/dome trends toward being a flat beam and is obviously is experiencing tension.
I thought of the same "degenerate case is flat", and there must be a point where that becomes true, but if you have a dome that's a large portion of a sphere (e.g. 180 degrees), the tensile hoop stresses occur towards the bottom, and one way of dealing that is to reduce the portion of a sphere you're using (e.g. to 140 degrees). The whole "tending towards flat" may be covered by the fact that these simple analyses apply to domes that aren't "thin", which is defined by the ratio of the thickness to the radius. IIRC thin domes are structurally called shells.
Shame it's a Saturday, otherwise we'd almost certainly have some actual structural engineers chiming in. Some interesting references:
I will say that it is a shame we don't see as many flying buttresses anymore (haha).
Why haha? Not only are those cathedrals beautiful, but they sure do last (at least if you don't bomb them). IIRC they did have a few failures while they were working things out though.
help to poor people is a drop in the bucket nowadays compared to the cumulative obesity that is government
Which demolishes your own criticism of "all heaven and earth must be put on hold and all endeavors must be taken from until every single person has food". Clearly you can feed everyone without halting all else. To what extent that "all else" should be in the government sphere is a different issue.
They live in their little world of 80-IQ Life Guidance Memes that tell them how to think, binding them as a mass behind their power-hungry leaders.
While the Great Minds of Slashdot toil in vain to halt the Supremacy of Mediocrity? Don't flatter yourself. Hans Reiser is a smart guy, but he's now getting free room and board courtesy of the State of California. Intelligence is not the same as wisdom or self control.
Plagues swept Europe from 200-700 in the cool period; the plagues disappeared from 700-1350 in the medieval warm period and then returned every generation from 1350-1700.
Interesting correlation between climate and plagues. Do you have any links on that, or did you see that in one of those "book" things that are rumored to still exist?
Christianity was part of the cause of the downfall.
Another argument against that idea is that while the Western Empire fell in the 5th century, the Eastern Empire, which was just as Christian, continued for another 1000 years.
Roman engineers were faced with difficulty designing a dome that would not collapse under its own weight (again, tensile forces and concrete are not friends)
IIRC in a dome all the stresses are compressive. It's like an arch rotated around an axis, is one way to look at it. Also, it's not essential to prestress the concrete in order for reinforcement to add tensile strength. Sorry for being pedantic, but a compulsion is a terrible thing to waste.
They taught grammar to barbarians; unfortunately English discarded most of it.
Even more unfortunately some people in the 18th century tried to impose Latin grammar on English. That's where we get nonsense like "don't end a sentence with a preposition" and absurd constructs like "he/she" instead of the neuter singular "they". Write in a dead language if you wish, but don't try to impose its absurd rules on the greatest language ever spoken: American English.
There's nothing you have said that appears anywhere in the megatons of her writings.
Megatons? Did she write much about nuclear weapons, or was she just using a very heavy bond paper?
There's nothing you have said that appears anywhere in the megatons of her writings. Is this the state of anti-Rand memes that filter about in your mental tribal community?
I can't speak for the GP, but in my mental tribal community (hint: I'm over 18) any discussion of Ayn Rand's writings gets reduced to endless jokes. Admittedly any attempt at a precise critique falls by the wayside, but there are some things you just can't help.
What a bunch of crap! Yes, you're absolutely correct: this is all (literally) ancient history.
RTFPR (read the f******* press release) and not just the headlines. This is about getting a better understanding of the important chemical and crystalline properties of Roman concrete. Of course the basics of Roman concrete have been known for a long time, but an ever more detailed understanding is useful for analyzing and predicting the properties of new concrete formulations.
Finally, microscopic studies at ALS beamline 12.3.2 identified the other minerals in the Roman samples. Integration of the results from the various beamlines revealed the minerals’ potential applications for high-performance concretes, including the encapsulation of hazardous wastes.
Lessons for the future
Environmentally friendly modern concretes already include volcanic ash or fly ash from coal-burning power plants as partial substitutes for Portland cement, with good results. These blended cements also produce C-A-S-H, but their long-term performance could not be determined until the Monteiro team analyzed Roman concrete.
Because straight concrete has good strength in compression, but very little in tension (and hence little in bending). If you use unreinforced concrete you're limited to structures where almost all the stresses are in compression, like arches and short columns.
Christianity was part of the cause of the downfall.
So sayeth some (e.g. Gibbons), but I think that's more about the agenda of the writer/historian than a dispassionate look at the facts. I'd argue the Crisis of the Third Century was the real beginning of the end (and started the path to the early middle ages) , yet it happened before Christianity became the official religion of the empire in the fourth century.
Rand's ideal world would be a true and quite unforgiving meritocracy.
Meritocracy is a wonderful ideal that I wish our society were closer to, but there is no reason for a meritocracy to be "unforgiving" as you put it. There are two separate issues. The only one that meritocracy accurately refers to is on what basis people rise to a more powerful, more prestigious and/or better paid position. The other issue, which is often falsely conflated with meritocracy, is how much of a difference there is between different people's wealth, income and power. US inequality has grown dramatically in recent decades even as, I'd argue, we've become less meritocratic.
You have to admit it's easier than doing real historical analysis, though! Technology is a complex thing, and analyzing who contributed to technological innovation requires a lot of tracing connections and contributions. You know, the kind of work historians of technology do.
How true. It amazes me how ignorant someone can be and still be called a reporter or pundit or whatever. Even the historians of technology, or at least the ones that write non-specialist books, often do a terrible job. All too often the history of technology (or science for that matter) is described as a series of isolated brilliant ideas. Utter nonsense. I'll bet most people think the Wright Brothers "invented" the airplane. Their big innovation was figuring out how to control an airplane in flight. Others had already created non-functional airplanes that had wings, propellers and motors good enough to fly.
They're the obvious outlier here, they haven't invented crap.
Very true, but what has Apple invented? A serious question. I can't think of anything, but I may easily have overlooked something (that and I'm not in the mood to be flamed by iFanBois). Apple's strength is industrial design and image.
I also agree Google really did create a better search engine, which is very useful. I wonder if AltaVista mightn't have done something similar if they hadn't been left to rot, but the bottom line is that they didn't.
However, the hype about Google's innovations since then have been overdone. They've bought some interesting companies. They've hired some big names in CS. They hire cool kids from fancy schools. It's a good place to work with multicolored geegaws in the lobby and free pan-Asian fusion cuisine (wouldn't mind that perk myself), but what great innovations have they come up with?
Every time Google does anything people go "ooh, ahh" because it came from Google. Even the driverless car thing is overhyped. They may have done some good work, but people act like they invented the very idea. IIRC it's heavily based on earlier work done for DARPA. More importantly, lots of other companies have been working on this, and developing useful things from it, for years. They're mostly car companies so people don't go "ooh, ahh, brilliant Silicon Valley innovation". They tend to take a bottom up rather than a top down approach, which may not stand out at the science fair, but parts of it actually get put into production. Google doesn't sell cars that park themselves. Production is where you really get to work out the kinks of how things do in the real world, hence this will be what actually leads to more autonomous cars in the real world. Google X is not going to suddenly going to start selling the Sergeymobile. It's akin to the progress of AI, where the old Minsky/McCarthy "lets write a bazillion lines of LISP and pass the Turing test" became a laughingstock decades ago. OTOH the AI that dare not speak its name, using a bottom up approach for things like machine vision, has been making serious progress for decades. You have to crawl before you can walk, and walk before you can run.
Apple has always been more about taking the technology available and packaging it into something easy to use and accessible.
Hear, hear!
Apple's real strength is industrial design. Their engineering is competent, but nothing terribly inventive (certainly not relative to the stature of the company). People whose only understanding of technology is going "ooh, ahh" over the latest consumer product don't seem to understand the difference. In terms of engineering and innovation the real McCoy has been the work done by others to create the latest gen fab process, OLED displays, or wireless standards and chip level implementation. Apple puts them together into nice packages. There is nothing wrong with that as a business, but the real technological innovation comes from their suppliers and other companies.
Facebook is even less of a tech company. Obviously they use computers and networks, but so do banks. Does anybody call banks tech companies because of that? Facebook is about marketing an idea, not any great technological innovation.
Slashdot Mirror
Thoughtpolice ride again!
While the OP got modded down by at least 2 points to -1 for having the temerity to express a view some mods didn't agree with, the PP got modded up for expressing such keen political insights as:
your cranial-rectumitis is flaring up again
what's your complaint, beef head?
Daddy touched you too much/ not enough?
This is the end result. Oligarchs. Trickle Down Economics was a scam.
Mod parent back up!
The thoughtpolice got nothing on Slashdot mods. -1 for expressing your opinion? The PP is a political/economic opinion stated in a reasonable way. It is not flamebait in any conceivable way, shape, manner or form.
Bonus points for mod censorship if this post gets modded below it's original +2. It wouldn't be the first time. According to some thoughtpolice mods, not only can't people express opinions the mods don't like, you shouldn't even point that out.
I would have though US citizens, of all the places in the world, would have a historical perspective on what happens when uncaring kings run your country, and what the poor but honest citizens should do to resolve the lack of decision making power.
The problem may be that Ellison is not a king, but merely a feudal lord. There was less experience with those in colonial America.
blackwhite
I read a lot of the computer science and applied math literature and it's full of good work by people from Google or funded by Google.
That's great, but it's not the same as introducing products and services that use that stuff. I don't know for sure how much of Google's work makes it into real products or services, but there have been too many companies with great research work that didn't make it into production (not because it was impractical either). IIRC Microsoft research did great stuff, but what really made it into products? GM research of yore was also often like that.
Google or any other company is not going to have the next Bell Labs. That was an unusual situation because AT&T's corporate charter said X% of profits were supposed to be plowed back into R&D, and they didn't have to change that back when it was a national monopoly.
Those three companies are responsible for most of the ideas and business momentum in CONSUMER computing. Enterprise IT has been innovating at a brisk clip without contributions from those three companies, thank you very much.
Hear, hear! Some people talk about consumer items because that's all they see. Similar to your case, I'm an EE and I mostly work on black boxes that consumers never see. I like it that way. In the commercial/industrial world customers are concerned with how well something serves an actual practical purpose, and are much less concerned with the latest fad or useless geegaw.
In the early 1980's IBM, a dinosaur sued for monopoly, released the PC and changed the world.
The reason that the IBM PC was so influential was that is said "IBM" on it. Before then PC's were considered toys, but people figured if the world's largest computer company introduced one, they had to be taken seriously. There was nothing innovative about the design. It was mostly pulled off an Intel ap note.
I am fairly certain it depends on the arch/dome curvature.
Good point. I should have said that a dome can be designed so that the stresses are primarily compressive. My point was that otherwise they wouldn't have been able to build the Pantheon with unreinforced concrete. I'm always amazed at how they managed to figure out good design rules without any mathematical stress analysis. Obviously they managed, though it may have involved a few things falling down or at least having to be patched up post-construction (not that that doesn't happen nowadays). Perhaps it also had to do with only slowly evolving their design/construction techniques, rather than making big leaps.
It makes sense: if you have a very low curvature the arch/dome trends toward being a flat beam and is obviously is experiencing tension.
I thought of the same "degenerate case is flat", and there must be a point where that becomes true, but if you have a dome that's a large portion of a sphere (e.g. 180 degrees), the tensile hoop stresses occur towards the bottom, and one way of dealing that is to reduce the portion of a sphere you're using (e.g. to 140 degrees). The whole "tending towards flat" may be covered by the fact that these simple analyses apply to domes that aren't "thin", which is defined by the ratio of the thickness to the radius. IIRC thin domes are structurally called shells.
Shame it's a Saturday, otherwise we'd almost certainly have some actual structural engineers chiming in. Some interesting references:
http://masonrydesign.blogspot.com/2012/03/thickness-of-dome-walls.html
http://site.iugaza.edu.ps/marafa/files/Spherical-dome.pdf
I will say that it is a shame we don't see as many flying buttresses anymore (haha).
Why haha? Not only are those cathedrals beautiful, but they sure do last (at least if you don't bomb them). IIRC they did have a few failures while they were working things out though.
help to poor people is a drop in the bucket nowadays compared to the cumulative obesity that is government
Which demolishes your own criticism of "all heaven and earth must be put on hold and all endeavors must be taken from until every single person has food". Clearly you can feed everyone without halting all else. To what extent that "all else" should be in the government sphere is a different issue.
They live in their little world of 80-IQ Life Guidance Memes that tell them how to think, binding them as a mass behind their power-hungry leaders.
While the Great Minds of Slashdot toil in vain to halt the Supremacy of Mediocrity? Don't flatter yourself. Hans Reiser is a smart guy, but he's now getting free room and board courtesy of the State of California. Intelligence is not the same as wisdom or self control.
Plagues swept Europe from 200-700 in the cool period; the plagues disappeared from 700-1350 in the medieval warm period and then returned every generation from 1350-1700.
Interesting correlation between climate and plagues. Do you have any links on that, or did you see that in one of those "book" things that are rumored to still exist?
Christianity was part of the cause of the downfall.
Another argument against that idea is that while the Western Empire fell in the 5th century, the Eastern Empire, which was just as Christian, continued for another 1000 years.
Didn't Vitruvius describe it in his De Architectura, written about 15 BC?
According to the terms of the Mickius Mousius copyright extension act, that means it'll soon enter the public domain.
Roman engineers were faced with difficulty designing a dome that would not collapse under its own weight (again, tensile forces and concrete are not friends)
IIRC in a dome all the stresses are compressive. It's like an arch rotated around an axis, is one way to look at it. Also, it's not essential to prestress the concrete in order for reinforcement to add tensile strength. Sorry for being pedantic, but a compulsion is a terrible thing to waste.
They taught grammar to barbarians; unfortunately English discarded most of it.
Even more unfortunately some people in the 18th century tried to impose Latin grammar on English. That's where we get nonsense like "don't end a sentence with a preposition" and absurd constructs like "he/she" instead of the neuter singular "they". Write in a dead language if you wish, but don't try to impose its absurd rules on the greatest language ever spoken: American English.
There's nothing you have said that appears anywhere in the megatons of her writings.
Megatons? Did she write much about nuclear weapons, or was she just using a very heavy bond paper?
There's nothing you have said that appears anywhere in the megatons of her writings. Is this the state of anti-Rand memes that filter about in your mental tribal community?
I can't speak for the GP, but in my mental tribal community (hint: I'm over 18) any discussion of Ayn Rand's writings gets reduced to endless jokes. Admittedly any attempt at a precise critique falls by the wayside, but there are some things you just can't help.
how much their social inferiors would suffer after a Rapture of the Rich
That's an interesting description of the French Revolution.
What a bunch of crap! Yes, you're absolutely correct: this is all (literally) ancient history.
RTFPR (read the f******* press release) and not just the headlines. This is about getting a better understanding of the important chemical and crystalline properties of Roman concrete. Of course the basics of Roman concrete have been known for a long time, but an ever more detailed understanding is useful for analyzing and predicting the properties of new concrete formulations.
Finally, microscopic studies at ALS beamline 12.3.2 identified the other minerals in the Roman samples. Integration of the results from the various beamlines revealed the minerals’ potential applications for high-performance concretes, including the encapsulation of hazardous wastes.
Lessons for the future
Environmentally friendly modern concretes already include volcanic ash or fly ash from coal-burning power plants as partial substitutes for Portland cement, with good results. These blended cements also produce C-A-S-H, but their long-term performance could not be determined until the Monteiro team analyzed Roman concrete.
Roman concrete can't be steel-reinforced
Why?
why is it necessary for concrete to be reinforced
Because straight concrete has good strength in compression, but very little in tension (and hence little in bending). If you use unreinforced concrete you're limited to structures where almost all the stresses are in compression, like arches and short columns.
Christianity was part of the cause of the downfall.
So sayeth some (e.g. Gibbons), but I think that's more about the agenda of the writer/historian than a dispassionate look at the facts. I'd argue the Crisis of the Third Century was the real beginning of the end (and started the path to the early middle ages) , yet it happened before Christianity became the official religion of the empire in the fourth century.
Rand's ideal world would be a true and quite unforgiving meritocracy.
Meritocracy is a wonderful ideal that I wish our society were closer to, but there is no reason for a meritocracy to be "unforgiving" as you put it. There are two separate issues. The only one that meritocracy accurately refers to is on what basis people rise to a more powerful, more prestigious and/or better paid position. The other issue, which is often falsely conflated with meritocracy, is how much of a difference there is between different people's wealth, income and power. US inequality has grown dramatically in recent decades even as, I'd argue, we've become less meritocratic.
You have to admit it's easier than doing real historical analysis, though! Technology is a complex thing, and analyzing who contributed to technological innovation requires a lot of tracing connections and contributions. You know, the kind of work historians of technology do.
How true. It amazes me how ignorant someone can be and still be called a reporter or pundit or whatever. Even the historians of technology, or at least the ones that write non-specialist books, often do a terrible job. All too often the history of technology (or science for that matter) is described as a series of isolated brilliant ideas. Utter nonsense. I'll bet most people think the Wright Brothers "invented" the airplane. Their big innovation was figuring out how to control an airplane in flight. Others had already created non-functional airplanes that had wings, propellers and motors good enough to fly.
Even facebook didnt invent
They're the obvious outlier here, they haven't invented crap.
Very true, but what has Apple invented? A serious question. I can't think of anything, but I may easily have overlooked something (that and I'm not in the mood to be flamed by iFanBois). Apple's strength is industrial design and image.
I also agree Google really did create a better search engine, which is very useful. I wonder if AltaVista mightn't have done something similar if they hadn't been left to rot, but the bottom line is that they didn't.
However, the hype about Google's innovations since then have been overdone. They've bought some interesting companies. They've hired some big names in CS. They hire cool kids from fancy schools. It's a good place to work with multicolored geegaws in the lobby and free pan-Asian fusion cuisine (wouldn't mind that perk myself), but what great innovations have they come up with?
Every time Google does anything people go "ooh, ahh" because it came from Google. Even the driverless car thing is overhyped. They may have done some good work, but people act like they invented the very idea. IIRC it's heavily based on earlier work done for DARPA. More importantly, lots of other companies have been working on this, and developing useful things from it, for years. They're mostly car companies so people don't go "ooh, ahh, brilliant Silicon Valley innovation". They tend to take a bottom up rather than a top down approach, which may not stand out at the science fair, but parts of it actually get put into production. Google doesn't sell cars that park themselves. Production is where you really get to work out the kinks of how things do in the real world, hence this will be what actually leads to more autonomous cars in the real world. Google X is not going to suddenly going to start selling the Sergeymobile. It's akin to the progress of AI, where the old Minsky/McCarthy "lets write a bazillion lines of LISP and pass the Turing test" became a laughingstock decades ago. OTOH the AI that dare not speak its name, using a bottom up approach for things like machine vision, has been making serious progress for decades. You have to crawl before you can walk, and walk before you can run.
In all fairness my original post overlooked Apple's chip design work. I don't know enough about it to say how innovative it is.
Apple has always been more about taking the technology available and packaging it into something easy to use and accessible.
Hear, hear!
Apple's real strength is industrial design. Their engineering is competent, but nothing terribly inventive (certainly not relative to the stature of the company). People whose only understanding of technology is going "ooh, ahh" over the latest consumer product don't seem to understand the difference. In terms of engineering and innovation the real McCoy has been the work done by others to create the latest gen fab process, OLED displays, or wireless standards and chip level implementation. Apple puts them together into nice packages. There is nothing wrong with that as a business, but the real technological innovation comes from their suppliers and other companies.
Facebook is even less of a tech company. Obviously they use computers and networks, but so do banks. Does anybody call banks tech companies because of that? Facebook is about marketing an idea, not any great technological innovation.