Recent Russian Nobel prize winners in physics: Andre Geim, 2010 Konstantin Novoselov, 2010 Alexei A. Abrikosov, 2003 Vitaly Ginzburg, 2003 Zhores Ivanovich Alferov, 2000
Because living in benign environments like the top of Mt. Everest and Antarctica is easy compared to a harsh environment like space. Consider it a warm-up exercise.
This is truly a shame. Back during the Cold War the question was often posed, is Russia the most backward advanced country in the world, or the most advanced backward country in the world. However, despite being cursed with horrid systems of government and an inability to make washing machines, anybody who knew anything admired their accomplishments in science and math. Now Putty Poot wants to kill that? He's a traitor.
Do you really think Google hasn't thought of this? I have no doubt that the algorithm makes use of all available options and without a doubt does so much faster and more efficiently than any human ever could.
Right, because Google solves all problems and never has bugs. If God were to recreate the heavens and the earth tomorrow, he'd probably consult Google first.
machines are entirely built from the ground up to serve a very specific purpose. That's why we have them - they're better than what a human could do
Which explains why even the most sophisticated aircraft autopilots, when they encounter a situation they can't handle (e.g. unable to understand the situation the sensors are indicating), kick out and let a human handle it.
There are plenty of operations for which a JVM is actually faster than a C process... and Hotspot runtime optimization has access to a lot more information about how code is actually being used than static compile time optimization - the difference that makes can be remarkable.
Very interesting, and oft cited as a defense of Java's speed. Now show me the benchmarks.
there are a great many applications out there for which converting to C++ (for example) would not give any kind of performance boost (and may even be slower)
With virtualization becoming pervasive I wondered how long it would be until people started looking at the bits of an OS that were rendered legacy because they were required for running on "bare metal".
Try Wikipedia, amongst many other places. The term "shadow banking" has been around for years, is at least well enough defined to make it a worthwhile topic of discussion, and most definitely was not invented by the authors.
In general the SBS only matters because tax payers are committed to bailing banks out if they lose too much money there.
It's not just that. Many of the players in the SBS aren't banks. The SBS matters because it's unstable, and if there is a run on it, then it causes as much havoc as other bank runs cause (whether or not the banks get bailed out).
Depository banking is always potentially unstable, due to the "borrow short, lend long" model and fractional reserves. This can be mitigated by regulation that enforces capital and reserve requirements, and limits the risk of loans. As poorly enforced as those things were/are for traditional banks, the shadow banking system had no such requirements. It was a house of cards on a windy day.
What worries me is that, in the US, excess labor seems to have been a consistent (and increasing) trend for the last 40 years now.
Because of economic and political choices, not because of technology. Consider that in the Great Depression, there was something like 25% unemployment. In the 1950's there was far lower unemployment, despite greatly improved technology and far higher productivity. People worried that unemployment would increase because of the technology that was being introduced in the 1950's, like NC machine tools (replacing human machine tool operators, just as robots replace human assemblers), yet unemployment was very low in the 1960's, and wages increased.
And everyone who is capable of getting an advanced degree will do so and we'll have a glut and subsequent huge amount of unemployed people with said degrees.
In fact we already have that, even with the vaunted STEM degrees that useful idiots are always saying we have a shortage of.
What needs to change is NOT automation but our economic system
Hear, hear! I don't know what "ism" we'll attach to a changed system, but any system that makes people worse off economically because it increases productivity is obviously and seriously flawed.
...films depicting chaos and societal breakdown aren't that far off, aye?
Yes they are. Look at what happened in the US during the 1918-1919 flu pandemic. It wasn't all pretty, but it certainly wasn't Zombie Apocalypse 17-1/2.
I guess all the Preppers will have the last laugh as they eat their freeze dried food in their bunkers, with gun in lap, waiting for vaccine to become available.
They'll also make walking without a tracking device attached to you a federal crime.
Can't be too careful citizen! Gone are the easy days of fighting the British empire, or Nazi Germany and the Japanese empire simultaneously, or dealing with enough nuclear warheads to wipe out the planet aimed at us and deliverable within an hour. Nowadays we face a real danger to our existence with people trying to put bombs in their underwear.
Nah, that's Einstein. He got lucky once and stole Olinto De Pretto's formula, but after that? Feynman was working all the time.
De Pretto figured out (or perhaps made a lucky guess) based on his understanding of the lumineferous aether. Einstein derived it from his special theory of relativity. Einstein presented E=mc^2 in a followup letter to his paper "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" (i.e. it's an interesting derivation, not an essential part of the theory). There was also the photoelectric effect and general relativity. Of the three, special relativity is arguably his least impressive work (Lorentz, et al, were also working towards it).
Security of nuclear weapons and components isn't something to play at.
Which is why those operating that facility should be shamed. Certainly dismissal is in order, and perhaps there is reason for charges. When an 82 year old nun infiltrates a nuclear weapons facility, you know there's a security problem. They should probably thank Sister Megan and her two whipper snapper accomplices for pointing out such a serious lack of security.
This whole thing would be incredibly comical if it wasn't for the fact that Sister Megan and here two "accomplices" are facing sentences of up to 35 years. The government has made itself a laughing stock and an object of ridicule. By defending their actions in any way, you've done the same to yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
Recent Russian Nobel prize winners in physics:
Andre Geim, 2010
Konstantin Novoselov, 2010
Alexei A. Abrikosov, 2003
Vitaly Ginzburg, 2003
Zhores Ivanovich Alferov, 2000
About 99.99999999999999999% of all the resources in the universe are above our heads.
So let's send some robots to get them.
The only benefit Earth has is that we don't need to build our own eco-system to survive here.
Minor detail. Our eco-system only took a few billion years to reach this point, and I'm sure we could do it much faster.
The downside is that any number of things could completely trash that eco-system, then we all die.
The most likely thing to trash it is us. If that happens, then to hell with the human race.
Because living in benign environments like the top of Mt. Everest and Antarctica is easy compared to a harsh environment like space. Consider it a warm-up exercise.
This is truly a shame. Back during the Cold War the question was often posed, is Russia the most backward advanced country in the world, or the most advanced backward country in the world. However, despite being cursed with horrid systems of government and an inability to make washing machines, anybody who knew anything admired their accomplishments in science and math. Now Putty Poot wants to kill that? He's a traitor.
Oops, I was thinking of Hans's wife.
I remember when SuSE was one of the only distros, perhaps the only one, which used reiserfs as the default filesystem.
Big mistake - it almost killed SuSE.
Do you really think Google hasn't thought of this? I have no doubt that the algorithm makes use of all available options and without a doubt does so much faster and more efficiently than any human ever could.
Right, because Google solves all problems and never has bugs. If God were to recreate the heavens and the earth tomorrow, he'd probably consult Google first.
machines are entirely built from the ground up to serve a very specific purpose. That's why we have them - they're better than what a human could do
Which explains why even the most sophisticated aircraft autopilots, when they encounter a situation they can't handle (e.g. unable to understand the situation the sensors are indicating), kick out and let a human handle it.
Regards
Linus
Linus actually stating a firm opinion? How unusual.
There are plenty of operations for which a JVM is actually faster than a C process ... and Hotspot runtime optimization has access to a lot more information about how code is actually being used than static compile time optimization - the difference that makes can be remarkable.
Very interesting, and oft cited as a defense of Java's speed. Now show me the benchmarks.
there are a great many applications out there for which converting to C++ (for example) would not give any kind of performance boost (and may even be slower)
Actual experiments and measurements?
Why jump through all these hoops to boost Java performance?
Because Sun's marketing department was better than AT&T's marketing department.
With virtualization becoming pervasive I wondered how long it would be until people started looking at the bits of an OS that were rendered legacy because they were required for running on "bare metal".
About 41 years ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VM/CMS
It sounds like money laundering to me.
Nah, laundered money is still money. It's much worse when they deal in fake money.
Derivitives are based around insurance, so yes if absolutely everything went ...
A very unlikely occurrence, which explains why there was no global financial crisis.
What the hell is Shadow Banking?
Try Wikipedia, amongst many other places. The term "shadow banking" has been around for years, is at least well enough defined to make it a worthwhile topic of discussion, and most definitely was not invented by the authors.
In general the SBS only matters because tax payers are committed to bailing banks out if they lose too much money there.
It's not just that. Many of the players in the SBS aren't banks. The SBS matters because it's unstable, and if there is a run on it, then it causes as much havoc as other bank runs cause (whether or not the banks get bailed out).
Depository banking is always potentially unstable, due to the "borrow short, lend long" model and fractional reserves. This can be mitigated by regulation that enforces capital and reserve requirements, and limits the risk of loans. As poorly enforced as those things were/are for traditional banks, the shadow banking system had no such requirements. It was a house of cards on a windy day.
That statement does not apply to Americans. Just stop paying your property taxes and you'll find out what I mean.
Americans? How many places in the world don't have property taxes?
What worries me is that, in the US, excess labor seems to have been a consistent (and increasing) trend for the last 40 years now.
Because of economic and political choices, not because of technology. Consider that in the Great Depression, there was something like 25% unemployment. In the 1950's there was far lower unemployment, despite greatly improved technology and far higher productivity. People worried that unemployment would increase because of the technology that was being introduced in the 1950's, like NC machine tools (replacing human machine tool operators, just as robots replace human assemblers), yet unemployment was very low in the 1960's, and wages increased.
And everyone who is capable of getting an advanced degree will do so and we'll have a glut and subsequent huge amount of unemployed people with said degrees.
In fact we already have that, even with the vaunted STEM degrees that useful idiots are always saying we have a shortage of.
What needs to change is NOT automation but our economic system
Hear, hear! I don't know what "ism" we'll attach to a changed system, but any system that makes people worse off economically because it increases productivity is obviously and seriously flawed.
Why would bowel movements be expensive?
Labor costs - they're one of the few things robots can't do.
I pose ... I would guess ...
History is a better guide than guesswork.
...films depicting chaos and societal breakdown aren't that far off, aye?
Yes they are. Look at what happened in the US during the 1918-1919 flu pandemic. It wasn't all pretty, but it certainly wasn't Zombie Apocalypse 17-1/2.
I guess all the Preppers will have the last laugh as they eat their freeze dried food in their bunkers, with gun in lap, waiting for vaccine to become available.
I believe Mr. Poe already addressed that issue: The Masque of the Red Death .
They'll also make walking without a tracking device attached to you a federal crime.
Can't be too careful citizen! Gone are the easy days of fighting the British empire, or Nazi Germany and the Japanese empire simultaneously, or dealing with enough nuclear warheads to wipe out the planet aimed at us and deliverable within an hour. Nowadays we face a real danger to our existence with people trying to put bombs in their underwear.
Nah, that's Einstein. He got lucky once and stole Olinto De Pretto's formula, but after that? Feynman was working all the time.
De Pretto figured out (or perhaps made a lucky guess) based on his understanding of the lumineferous aether. Einstein derived it from his special theory of relativity. Einstein presented E=mc^2 in a followup letter to his paper "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" (i.e. it's an interesting derivation, not an essential part of the theory). There was also the photoelectric effect and general relativity. Of the three, special relativity is arguably his least impressive work (Lorentz, et al, were also working towards it).
Security of nuclear weapons and components isn't something to play at.
Which is why those operating that facility should be shamed. Certainly dismissal is in order, and perhaps there is reason for charges. When an 82 year old nun infiltrates a nuclear weapons facility, you know there's a security problem. They should probably thank Sister Megan and her two whipper snapper accomplices for pointing out such a serious lack of security.
This whole thing would be incredibly comical if it wasn't for the fact that Sister Megan and here two "accomplices" are facing sentences of up to 35 years. The government has made itself a laughing stock and an object of ridicule. By defending their actions in any way, you've done the same to yourself.