Sorry, but if you don't understand a simple assembler, say Z-80 or simpler, even MIX will do, you don't really understand programming. You should almost NEVER use this, you understand, but it's a basic underpinning necessary to understand code. You should also understand C, even if you never use it. (I hate it, personally. I consider it too dangerous for production work because of the way it encourages unrestricted use of pointers.) You *do* need to understand it, to understand how assembler morphs into useful languages. (I don't *think* you need to go any lower than assembler, but it wouldn't hurt to do a couple of actual hex code programs for a simple machine [which can be virtual as well as not].)
If all you learn is Java, C#, Python, Ruby, Javascript, and the rest of that ilk, then you don't really understand programming. For most applications, that's the level of language you should USE, but you can't use them to ground your understanding of what you are doing.
Actually, if the price is right, it *is* meant for a project I'm working on. I don't need it this year, so it may actually be a possibility. "Not this August... but the year after that, or the year after that..." (Well that's just free association. I left out the context of application, because it didn't apply.)
Damn. In that case it's not impressive at all. That kind of thing has been done in the lab for, I think, a decade now. So it's basically just a minor avance in packaging (piled on top of a decade of advances in packaging).
Remember, this is a prototype. 5 years ago cell phones were rather clumsy, too, and they'd been on the market for years. Expect the final (i.e., final before they start selling them) version to have a hidden controller, possibly in a belt or shirt-pocket.
But you're believing the story. It might be true. I'm not sure I want to be any more definite than that. Without knowing the person, I don't know whether it is plausible or not. I don't know whether the "girlfriend" actually was such, and I don't know if someone was out to get him.
A few years ago I would have accepted this story without much question. These days there are so many proven lies told as official stories, that I don't even believe when they say something plausible. I think you've got to learn to live with uncertainty. There are too many practicing liars to trust much of anything you can't check yourself. (Fortunately, it's fairly safe to ignore most news stories.)
The thing is, I'm NOT ideologically opposed to GE crops, though my wife is. I am, however, opposed to monopoly crops, for the same reason I'm opposed to monopoly software. So I use FOSS tools, because it's harder to take them away from me. Sometimes they aren't quite as good, but I've had several bad experiences with becoming dependent on a proprietary package just to have the vendor decide that they want to change, say, the file format, and being totally unable to do anything about it. FOSS tools don't do that to you, even though they are just as subject to manipulation. (Can you say Gnome3? But Gnome3 couldn't stop me from taking my data and moving to KDE4 or xfce. [I'm still debating which, but while I'm debating I've already moved away from Gnome. Some people moved to Mate, another option that would not exist.])
Now use your understanding of the software community to understand what the privitization and monopolization of the sources of food is threatening, and understand that food is a lot more basic a need than software. So the monopolies have greater leverage.
And that's why I support organic food, etc. I've got nothing against GE foods, except that they tend to be proprietary. And that means that when monopoly is achieved, the prices can be raised arbitrarily high.
There's reasonable evidence that the prevalence of obesity is related to the liberal use of high-fructose corn syrup on prepared foods. And a part of the reason for that use of corn is GM corn. More of the reason, of course, is government subsidies, Of course the government subsidies are totally unrelated to lobbying from Monsanto, the vendor of the GM corn seeds. And the only legal vendor of those seeds.
Yeah, I'd have a lot less problem with GM foods, if they weren't leading to monopolization of the food provision chain by one or a very few companies.
Larry Niven, among others. Jack Williamson. I think a few others. I can't remember any that were set in the near future, though. Not before it started happening.
You need to stabilize that count though. This can probably be done by throwing away, say, 2/3 of the time intervals, counting the other third as true if one or more decays are detectes. (Or, perhaps, set it at 3 or more. You need to adjust things by experiment until you get 50% hits.) Then you accumulate random numbers for a few weeks.
You used to be able to do this kind of thing with an overdriven mic amp in a *really* quiet room, but I don't know if that still works. That would let you accumulate random numbers faster, but I think cosmics let you accumulate them at 1 or 2 bits / second. (You don't want to overload the giger tube, because then it goes quiet.)
OTOH, I've *NO* modern experience with this. At the time I was interested all the equipment used tubes. Transistors are a LOT quieter.
Unless I misunderstand the system, the "trusted" authority doesn't have access to (or knowledge of) the self-generated certificate. But, of course, the ISP does.
That would actually be a plausible explanation, if the outraged noises coming from our allies are just a put-up job. But when a German Prime Minister publicly compares a US govt. agency to the STASI, I don't think I believe that it's an act.
Presumably they're looking to improve the design of the hardware, and possibly the software, sufficiently to allow a smaller computer to do the job. If they wanted to do it in acres, they could probably do it right now...of course more than half the hardware would need to be dedicated to error correction. And fortunately the answer is easy to check for correctness, so the answer isn't more like 3/4 of the hardware would need to be devoted to error correction.
OTOH, we KNOW they've ordered a DWAVE quantum computer. Perhaps this is just the price of that. Since I doubt that they would be satisfied with that, they're bound to have a research group looking to improve it. Which would mean that *that* budget is still not known.
Interesting. In common with most people, I've moved to the right as I got older, and saw the errors of left wing proposals. This, however, has not blinded me to the errors of right wing proposals.
FWIW, I consider BOTH the Republicans AND the Democrats to posture in favor of the right wing. And I also consider them both to be liars, merely after increasing centralization of power. In ways that nobody would accept if they understood what was happening.
FWIW, I do support national healthcare. I don't accept that the insurance companies should be able to take a cut. That rather defeats half the reason that I support it. But if I could opt out of the govt. collecting centralized information on it's citizens, I would readily accept that this meant they couldn't provide free health care. As it is, what I figure is that we might as well get *some* benefit from them collecting information on us. But to pay the insurance companies also is pure lunacy. Especially letting them decide what should be covered. They are the reason we pay more for poorer service than any other even approximately equivalently developed country. (Besides, why should the insurance companies be given access to the information the govt. collects on us.)
The problem with government is that you really can't successfully get rid of it. So since you have a genuine monopoly, you might as well have it do the things that are best done by a national monopoly. And that includes health care. I'm not at all certain, however, that it includes highways. Or many other things it has expanded its way into. It certainly shouldn't include education. That should be a state perogative. It's not clear what rights should devolve on the states. One thing to consider is that states are more able to defend their rights against the feds than are individual citizens. So if the right is held by the state, it's less likely to be infringed by the feds. (N.B.: I'm not talking about what the constitution says. It has been so long disregarded, that it would need serious repair before it could be used in current society. The govt. just ignored the ammendment process, and did whatever it felt like to handle a current problem. Sometimes, however, it was a problem that really needed to be handled. So an ammendment was needed, but was not added, because the govt. was able to get away with just doing what it felt like.)
Nobody is willing to do anything serious about greenhouse gas emissions...well, maybe Germany. The US drop is solely due to fracking, and that was an economic decision, not an environmental one. (On environmental grounds it may be worse, but nobody is tracking methane leaks very well, so they can pretend that they're doing better. Maybe they are, but it's quite dubious, as they are assuming an unrealistically low level of leaks.)
Currently only two groups are seriously reducing greenhouse gas emissions: Those who are using nukes, and those who are using solar. (Wind is relatively minor.) And each of those alternatives has serious unsolved problems. (Either cycling generation or waste disposal.)
I'll accept that for the 1960's, but not for the 1950's. During the 1950's the US just about ignored space. That's why we were so surprised when the 1950's ended with Sputnik. (The Russians hadn't been keeping it secret...they'd just been ignored.) For the 1950's you need to find some other mechanism.
P.S.: Spending for political spectaculars doesn't do that much to advance Science and Engineering, even when they are the purported beneficiaries. I think Kennedy actually had a vision of developing space, but Johnson was interested in politics and pork. So that's mainly what we ended up with. (OTOH, it's questionable whether we would have survived much longer with Kennedy. He tended to walk too close to the edge of nuclear war.)
It's a decent answer, but I'm not really sure that a planet is the right answer. Asteroids have a lot going for them if you can beat the "closed ecosystem" problem, and if you can't, then you can't live on Mars. (Granted, Mars is probably a slightly easier version of the problem, but that's not sure.) Asteroids let you distribute the risk, and don't impose much penalty when you want to ship stuff home. (Well, around half as much of a acceleration penalty, but you can apply it slowly, which makes things like ion rockets and solar sails practical. They'll never get you off a planet, but they can let you land cargo on one without reaction mass.)
There's a lot of good in things like SpaceX, but don't be deceived. Corporations also have failure modes, and some of them are pretty bad. One that often happens with technical companies is, the first generation of management are technical visionaries, the second generation are competent engineers, the thrid generation are bookkeepers. There usually isn't a fourth generation. (OTOH, note that this is just a "usually". IBM is a good counterexample. But then HP is an excellent example.)
There *is* a dialect of English that's easy for foreigners to learn. It's a development of Pidgin (i.e., business) English. To most US people it would be a foreign language. OTOH, a decade ago it was reported to be the fastest growing dialect of English, accounting for most of it's growth worldwide. (Was the report correct? Is it still? I don't know...and I'm not asserting either.)
I think you need to reread the reports on what we did. Granted, we didn't create the problem the Chinese did, but what we did wasn't anything spectacular, more a PR response. (Judging by how you remembered it, it seems to have worked.)
I don't know about in this decade, but a few decades ago there were people in the US living essentially on a non-cash economy. I'll grant that they held possession of their own property...but I can't say they owned it, as I don't believe they ever paid taxes, so they probably couldn't hold a deed. I think they must have got by on, maybe, $500/year. They probably weren't on the census roles. They used someone else's mailbox when they needed to mail (I don't know if they ever did). They lived on garden and chickens. Many of them had a goat for milk. But they didn't consider themselves poor the way people in a city on welfare do.
I suspect that such people have now been forced off "their" land, but I don't know it. The land wasn't that good. It was too hilly to be good for mechanized farming. So maybe nobody wants it yet. Soon, though, they'll be forced out and into real poverty...where they're dependent on strangers for survival and a place to sleep.
Being poor isn't not having money, it's not being able to dependably get food and a place to sleep. If you don't need money, then lacking it doesn't make you poor.
Getting there first isn't the task. Getting there survibably is the task. (Fortunately, I believe that Musk understands this...I'm not sure he understands just how much of a problem a recycling closed environment is.)
No, the US space program is not well. It's been severly ill, and has suffered extensive memory and capabilites loss. SpaceX, etc. are trying to re-invent many techniques that were previously solved problems. They may come up with better solutions, but if they do it will because they HAD to. And they may also come up with inferior solutions, because the basic knowledge has been lost. (OTOH, much has changed in the interim, and materials science is now more advanced, so one can hope that the new answers will be better.)
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but if you don't understand a simple assembler, say Z-80 or simpler, even MIX will do, you don't really understand programming. You should almost NEVER use this, you understand, but it's a basic underpinning necessary to understand code. You should also understand C, even if you never use it. (I hate it, personally. I consider it too dangerous for production work because of the way it encourages unrestricted use of pointers.) You *do* need to understand it, to understand how assembler morphs into useful languages. (I don't *think* you need to go any lower than assembler, but it wouldn't hurt to do a couple of actual hex code programs for a simple machine [which can be virtual as well as not].)
If all you learn is Java, C#, Python, Ruby, Javascript, and the rest of that ilk, then you don't really understand programming. For most applications, that's the level of language you should USE, but you can't use them to ground your understanding of what you are doing.
I'm guessing that they see the main market as being GM, Toyota, and Ford. I'm not saying they aren't eager for all the other uses, of course.
Actually, if the price is right, it *is* meant for a project I'm working on. I don't need it this year, so it may actually be a possibility. ... but the year after that, or the year after that..."
"Not this August
(Well that's just free association. I left out the context of application, because it didn't apply.)
Damn. In that case it's not impressive at all. That kind of thing has been done in the lab for, I think, a decade now. So it's basically just a minor avance in packaging (piled on top of a decade of advances in packaging).
Well, not prickly pear...but that's because I don't like it. The others I do buy. Also other things like rye seed (for cooking), etc.
Organic farmers are allowed to replant the seeds they harvest. They may not choose to, be they are allowed to. To me this makes a big difference.
Remember, this is a prototype. 5 years ago cell phones were rather clumsy, too, and they'd been on the market for years. Expect the final (i.e., final before they start selling them) version to have a hidden controller, possibly in a belt or shirt-pocket.
But you're believing the story. It might be true. I'm not sure I want to be any more definite than that. Without knowing the person, I don't know whether it is plausible or not. I don't know whether the "girlfriend" actually was such, and I don't know if someone was out to get him.
A few years ago I would have accepted this story without much question. These days there are so many proven lies told as official stories, that I don't even believe when they say something plausible. I think you've got to learn to live with uncertainty. There are too many practicing liars to trust much of anything you can't check yourself. (Fortunately, it's fairly safe to ignore most news stories.)
The thing is, I'm NOT ideologically opposed to GE crops, though my wife is. I am, however, opposed to monopoly crops, for the same reason I'm opposed to monopoly software. So I use FOSS tools, because it's harder to take them away from me. Sometimes they aren't quite as good, but I've had several bad experiences with becoming dependent on a proprietary package just to have the vendor decide that they want to change, say, the file format, and being totally unable to do anything about it. FOSS tools don't do that to you, even though they are just as subject to manipulation. (Can you say Gnome3? But Gnome3 couldn't stop me from taking my data and moving to KDE4 or xfce. [I'm still debating which, but while I'm debating I've already moved away from Gnome. Some people moved to Mate, another option that would not exist.])
Now use your understanding of the software community to understand what the privitization and monopolization of the sources of food is threatening, and understand that food is a lot more basic a need than software. So the monopolies have greater leverage.
And that's why I support organic food, etc. I've got nothing against GE foods, except that they tend to be proprietary. And that means that when monopoly is achieved, the prices can be raised arbitrarily high.
There's reasonable evidence that the prevalence of obesity is related to the liberal use of high-fructose corn syrup on prepared foods. And a part of the reason for that use of corn is GM corn. More of the reason, of course, is government subsidies, Of course the government subsidies are totally unrelated to lobbying from Monsanto, the vendor of the GM corn seeds. And the only legal vendor of those seeds.
Yeah, I'd have a lot less problem with GM foods, if they weren't leading to monopolization of the food provision chain by one or a very few companies.
Larry Niven, among others. Jack Williamson. I think a few others. I can't remember any that were set in the near future, though. Not before it started happening.
You need to stabilize that count though. This can probably be done by throwing away, say, 2/3 of the time intervals, counting the other third as true if one or more decays are detectes. (Or, perhaps, set it at 3 or more. You need to adjust things by experiment until you get 50% hits.) Then you accumulate random numbers for a few weeks.
You used to be able to do this kind of thing with an overdriven mic amp in a *really* quiet room, but I don't know if that still works. That would let you accumulate random numbers faster, but I think cosmics let you accumulate them at 1 or 2 bits / second. (You don't want to overload the giger tube, because then it goes quiet.)
OTOH, I've *NO* modern experience with this. At the time I was interested all the equipment used tubes. Transistors are a LOT quieter.
Unless I misunderstand the system, the "trusted" authority doesn't have access to (or knowledge of) the self-generated certificate. But, of course, the ISP does.
With the advantage that we aren't as likely to end up with a sterilized planet.
That would actually be a plausible explanation, if the outraged noises coming from our allies are just a put-up job. But when a German Prime Minister publicly compares a US govt. agency to the STASI, I don't think I believe that it's an act.
Presumably they're looking to improve the design of the hardware, and possibly the software, sufficiently to allow a smaller computer to do the job. If they wanted to do it in acres, they could probably do it right now...of course more than half the hardware would need to be dedicated to error correction. And fortunately the answer is easy to check for correctness, so the answer isn't more like 3/4 of the hardware would need to be devoted to error correction.
OTOH, we KNOW they've ordered a DWAVE quantum computer. Perhaps this is just the price of that. Since I doubt that they would be satisfied with that, they're bound to have a research group looking to improve it. Which would mean that *that* budget is still not known.
Interesting. In common with most people, I've moved to the right as I got older, and saw the errors of left wing proposals. This, however, has not blinded me to the errors of right wing proposals.
FWIW, I consider BOTH the Republicans AND the Democrats to posture in favor of the right wing. And I also consider them both to be liars, merely after increasing centralization of power. In ways that nobody would accept if they understood what was happening.
FWIW, I do support national healthcare. I don't accept that the insurance companies should be able to take a cut. That rather defeats half the reason that I support it. But if I could opt out of the govt. collecting centralized information on it's citizens, I would readily accept that this meant they couldn't provide free health care. As it is, what I figure is that we might as well get *some* benefit from them collecting information on us. But to pay the insurance companies also is pure lunacy. Especially letting them decide what should be covered. They are the reason we pay more for poorer service than any other even approximately equivalently developed country. (Besides, why should the insurance companies be given access to the information the govt. collects on us.)
The problem with government is that you really can't successfully get rid of it. So since you have a genuine monopoly, you might as well have it do the things that are best done by a national monopoly. And that includes health care. I'm not at all certain, however, that it includes highways. Or many other things it has expanded its way into. It certainly shouldn't include education. That should be a state perogative. It's not clear what rights should devolve on the states. One thing to consider is that states are more able to defend their rights against the feds than are individual citizens. So if the right is held by the state, it's less likely to be infringed by the feds.
(N.B.: I'm not talking about what the constitution says. It has been so long disregarded, that it would need serious repair before it could be used in current society. The govt. just ignored the ammendment process, and did whatever it felt like to handle a current problem. Sometimes, however, it was a problem that really needed to be handled. So an ammendment was needed, but was not added, because the govt. was able to get away with just doing what it felt like.)
Nobody is willing to do anything serious about greenhouse gas emissions...well, maybe Germany. The US drop is solely due to fracking, and that was an economic decision, not an environmental one. (On environmental grounds it may be worse, but nobody is tracking methane leaks very well, so they can pretend that they're doing better. Maybe they are, but it's quite dubious, as they are assuming an unrealistically low level of leaks.)
Currently only two groups are seriously reducing greenhouse gas emissions: Those who are using nukes, and those who are using solar. (Wind is relatively minor.) And each of those alternatives has serious unsolved problems. (Either cycling generation or waste disposal.)
I'll accept that for the 1960's, but not for the 1950's. During the 1950's the US just about ignored space. That's why we were so surprised when the 1950's ended with Sputnik. (The Russians hadn't been keeping it secret...they'd just been ignored.) For the 1950's you need to find some other mechanism.
P.S.: Spending for political spectaculars doesn't do that much to advance Science and Engineering, even when they are the purported beneficiaries. I think Kennedy actually had a vision of developing space, but Johnson was interested in politics and pork. So that's mainly what we ended up with. (OTOH, it's questionable whether we would have survived much longer with Kennedy. He tended to walk too close to the edge of nuclear war.)
It's a decent answer, but I'm not really sure that a planet is the right answer. Asteroids have a lot going for them if you can beat the "closed ecosystem" problem, and if you can't, then you can't live on Mars. (Granted, Mars is probably a slightly easier version of the problem, but that's not sure.) Asteroids let you distribute the risk, and don't impose much penalty when you want to ship stuff home. (Well, around half as much of a acceleration penalty, but you can apply it slowly, which makes things like ion rockets and solar sails practical. They'll never get you off a planet, but they can let you land cargo on one without reaction mass.)
There's a lot of good in things like SpaceX, but don't be deceived. Corporations also have failure modes, and some of them are pretty bad. One that often happens with technical companies is, the first generation of management are technical visionaries, the second generation are competent engineers, the thrid generation are bookkeepers. There usually isn't a fourth generation. (OTOH, note that this is just a "usually". IBM is a good counterexample. But then HP is an excellent example.)
There *is* a dialect of English that's easy for foreigners to learn. It's a development of Pidgin (i.e., business) English. To most US people it would be a foreign language. OTOH, a decade ago it was reported to be the fastest growing dialect of English, accounting for most of it's growth worldwide. (Was the report correct? Is it still? I don't know...and I'm not asserting either.)
I think you need to reread the reports on what we did. Granted, we didn't create the problem the Chinese did, but what we did wasn't anything spectacular, more a PR response. (Judging by how you remembered it, it seems to have worked.)
I don't know about in this decade, but a few decades ago there were people in the US living essentially on a non-cash economy. I'll grant that they held possession of their own property...but I can't say they owned it, as I don't believe they ever paid taxes, so they probably couldn't hold a deed. I think they must have got by on, maybe, $500/year. They probably weren't on the census roles. They used someone else's mailbox when they needed to mail (I don't know if they ever did). They lived on garden and chickens. Many of them had a goat for milk. But they didn't consider themselves poor the way people in a city on welfare do.
I suspect that such people have now been forced off "their" land, but I don't know it. The land wasn't that good. It was too hilly to be good for mechanized farming. So maybe nobody wants it yet. Soon, though, they'll be forced out and into real poverty...where they're dependent on strangers for survival and a place to sleep.
Being poor isn't not having money, it's not being able to dependably get food and a place to sleep. If you don't need money, then lacking it doesn't make you poor.
Getting there first isn't the task. Getting there survibably is the task. (Fortunately, I believe that Musk understands this...I'm not sure he understands just how much of a problem a recycling closed environment is.)
No, the US space program is not well. It's been severly ill, and has suffered extensive memory and capabilites loss. SpaceX, etc. are trying to re-invent many techniques that were previously solved problems. They may come up with better solutions, but if they do it will because they HAD to. And they may also come up with inferior solutions, because the basic knowledge has been lost. (OTOH, much has changed in the interim, and materials science is now more advanced, so one can hope that the new answers will be better.)