To me, the surprising thing is that doctors routinely dismiss chronic pain as imaginary, and far too many pdocs are more interested in a fast buck (some to pay off the horrible expenses of getting qualified) and a quick DSM-IV diagnosis rather than actual clinical analysis. (These days, 9 Tesla MRIs can track individual neurons firing. Combine that with data from fMRI and PET scans, and maybe add some radioactive tracers to standard medicines, and you could build up all the information you could possibly need.)
Both of these brilliant minds were lost to society. Both could probably have been saved with better, earlier, more intelligent treatment. That's one disturbing thing to come of this. The other is that there are probably other, equally brilliant minds, that are being sucked down into oblivion. That society doesn't seem to mind this - THAT is the surprising thing to me.
...it's less about the specific solution and more about the fact that commercial efforts to exploit high-altitude and space flight are edging past NASA in their research into alternative technologies -- and far more yet about the fact that NASA's top research at the moment is a blended-wing body aircraft that they'd already got just about as far with in 2000 when they cancelled it. Yes, BWB and waveriders are tough, but NASA is a self-imposed decade behind where they damn well should be. A decade in which everyone else was not sitting still. A decade in which Australia got their scramjet working first, a vital prelude to this kind of work. I doubt the Australians were doing nothing after the USA got their scramjet tests in, and I sincerely doubt those are the sole two nations who posess the technology. (Reverse-engineering and traditional industrial espionage alone must have given other industrialized nations enough data to build their own.)
NASA is just too damn stodgy and too conservative to stay ahead. Yes, you want things safe, but they're not even doing that very well. Fuel tank readings faulty for several missions before they bother to hold things back and fault-trace?! Results are what get the citizenry interested, and interested citizens are what it takes to get Congessional funding. You don't get results without moving ahead. It's not that much different from Formula 1 - the cars are horribly expensive to design, build and race, but those who keep winning can keep paying for it. Teams that rely on past glory - such as Lotus - die. Glory has no cash value, which is why even spectacularly successful missions aren't worth much more than any other successful mission. Only successful progress is redeemable at the local store.
3a. Learn to speak Klingon really really fast.
3b. Hope HAL doesn't have the Klingon i18n package installed.
Or...
3a. XOR the output from HAL's camera with the output from the output from a chip manufacturing security camera. The AI porn'll distract HAL for long enough.
MapReduce is a clustered database system, which implies you have a cluster, which shuld be very good for games. Alternatively, if you wanted a VERY large game of Empire or NetPanzer, a distributed world would actually be quite helpful.
I am a little surprised by the parallelization methods, though. Informix developed some parallel database methods some time back, which is partly why IBM bought them. I'm sure that the cutting-edge parallel database techniques that exist today have advanced beyond herustics and hack-and-slash work division.
The whooshing sound you heard was the set logic joke flying overhead.
Even so, though, unions only have a bad rep in America. Interestingly, America is also the country with the greatest number of stress-related illnesses in the western world (more than twice as many heart attacks from stress as in England), and that is tied to their self-destructive yet amazingly narcistic "work ethic" which simultaneously creates unbearable stresses on the human frame whilst producing only minimal extra productivity. Trade unions were founded as a form of cooperative, providing heath benefits, life insurance, education and training, back in the days of King James II. Remind me, when precisely did Americans provide these to their workforce? Oh, you mean 50% of them still don't have them? How quaint.
Unions as a political, rather than a socialist, entity is partly because many in America also hate all forms of socialism. This explains why the rest of the world regards them as anti-social. So much time and effort has gone into linking socialism with communism, communism with Communism, and Communism with Stalinism (even though none of those are even remotely connected) that all you have left is a bunch of paranoid spoiled rich kids and a bunch of equally paranoid serfs. This is a violently unstable system which must either correct itself or risk the fate of other violently unstable civilizations. Oh, the US won't vanish overnight, no matter what. Even the Roman Empire survived in some form or other for a millenium after it imploded. There will likely be an identifiable United States of America in 3000 AD for that reason alone. The question is, will it a stagnating copy of how it is now, or something that has learned from its mistakes and corrected them?
This might be part of why other organizations are looking more at combination liquid/solid engines, in addition to the greater control provided. For many decades now, organizations - NASA included - have worked on replacing the first stage rocket completely with a turbine-assisted ramjet. TAR engines are much more efficient than rockets, the main difficulties are in building one large enough, building large enough bypasses for the engine to work efficiently at high speeds, and at the same time building a turbine large enough for the engine to work well stationary.
When stationary, the air must have a net velocity in excess of 400 mph for the engine to retain efficiency - which a turbine can easily do if there are no other complications. Eventually, the turbine gets in the way, hence the need for a really good bypass system. White Knight avoided the need for TAR by having the first stage as an actual aircraft, but a conventional aircraft isn't going to be capable of carrying the weight needed for true orbital flight, let alone interplanetary flight. Affordable space flight is probably going to require TAR engines.
(Other alternative launch-assist methods include using linear accelerators - basically strap the rocket onto something akin to a bullet train and then get the train up to the critical speed, or using a very powerful gas cannon to fire the rocket into the air at the critical speed. The first would likely end up more expensive to operate than a TAR, the latter would require a very sophisticated multi-charge arrangement if it is to avoid killing everyone onboard, but might end up being another viable method.)
One thing I think can be said for certain - by 2020, no sane engineer will be designing launch vehicles for space that use a rocket first stage. I'll give it a 40/60 chance that by 2020 commercial space flight will have surpassed NASA in terms of cost-per-unit-mass-launched, and 20/80 that hobbyist space flight will have done likewise. If NASA persists in long-outmoded next-gen launch vehicles, then somewhere in the 2030-2050 timeline, NASA will be redundant. Government-run organizations make sense for bleeding-edge work because that is generally too expensive for everyone else. However, once everyone passes said Government agency's technology, it has no value or merit. To have value for money, NASA should be working on systems that will become bleeding-edge in 2020, not what were bleeding-edge in 1920. R&D is the expensive work, everything else is meccano tech.
There are those who would argue that this is an open invitation by Google for scientists to try and DDoS their systems, and those who would argue it might not be a bad thing if they succeed. Personally, I disagree with the last part, but DO think that this could lead to Google developing vastly superior search technology. They can search gigantic data sets, sure, but the percentage of false hits is way too high. When you move into scientific data and multi-dimensional non-simply-connected non-linear search spaces, you need far better search algorithms than currently exist. AMS work on 10-20 MeV particle accelerators requires operators to largely guess the regions of interest, and atomic mass spectrometry is used in just about every field of science. It's incredibly well-understood and exact in comparison to many techniques you're likely to see used where help and compute cycles would likely be interesting to scientists.
I don't doubt Google's good intentions (or their desire to improve on their search technology by honing it on such gigantic, complex data sets) but I have severe doubts they have the knowledge or the skills to produce a search and analysis system of this level of complexity even in specific fields, hence their problems producing a high positive hit rate merely for web pages. Producing a generalized pattern finder that will work on any problem...
You see, if it dies more than 32767 times, you get an overflow, the sign bit flips and it becomes alive again. This is the problem with using fixed-length integers. If computers were using variable-length precision, you wouldn't get this problem.
Sodium salt, potassium salt or lithium salt? You're right, that's what the wikipedia page says, but the analogous sized animals used to compare the rodents with modern life (a grizzly bear versus a bull) would seem to be far closer than the x5 - x20 difference that the given masses of the rodents would imply, hence my confusion. Either one (or both) analogies is way off, or the relative masses were far closer together.
I guess the other point of confusion is that Amblyrhiza Inundata was credited for being large because it was on an island and mammals (generally) are believed to get larger in island environments. South America is no island, so either the theory of islands is incorrect OR South America had some truly weird characteristics, making it viable for a rodent to grow large anyway. However, I've seen nothing to suggest South America had anything particularly abnormal about it. The biodiversity, predetation, etc, seem to have been fairly typical, which would in turn seem to make it a Really Bad Place for oversized mammalian life. Obviously, the giant rodents lived there, and where facts contradict theory, one should never change the facts to suit the theory, only the theory to suit the facts. But which theory is the theory that's wrong?
Not necessarily. There are many kinds of Downtime. Downtime is the name of a Doctor Who spinoff, which would therefore be watched. Reading Slashdot during downtime, however, makes no sense, as this is clearly educational material for advancing one's knowledge of the field.
According to various lists of giant fauna, the largest land-based mammal weighed upwards of 20 tonnes. The largest mammal that has ever lived is, of course, the Blue Whale, which is the descendant of a relative of the modern hippo. The cetaceans are unusual in that they are aquatic life descended from land life. The manatees are also descended from land life (they are relatives of the giraffe). I don't know of other examples. The contest for the largest rodent seems fierce, with competition from at least one other continent and the (at the time) giant island of Anguila, with rodents estimated as comparable in size to a grizzly bear. There may well be larger examples, as it seems clear the largest known (extinct) rodent is below the maximum size mammalian life supports.
None of the movies I'd be interested in are provided by Netflix. None of the television shows, either. Sure, I'm only one person out of, oh, seven billion or so on the planet, but it would seem to indicate that Netflix have scope for improving their range. Given the power of data mining techniques and the ability for an Internet-based system to get direct feedback, one would have thought that they would have ways and means of predicting what would be good to add to their service, but given that my interests are not quite that bizarre, I can only assume that no such intelligence has been added.
Even the hardest of criminals was not born that way. Many probably descended into such a life through circumstances beyond their control. This does not justify their actions, by any means, but it seems far more rational to pity those who could not reasonably have avoided their deaths than to pity those whose deaths were entirely self-inflicted and well within the capacity of those involved to have avoided.
No, you've probably not heard a lot of hurrahs for punch cards, but you've probably heard that CDs and DVDs have a shelf-life of 5 years due to UV damage, chemical decomposition, easily-scratched surfaces, etc, whereas high-end mag tape is usually good for a decade or two, and core can be good for a century or so. If you want archival-quality media, the optical formats don't hold a candle to formats designed with archiving in mind.
(So why doesn't anyone use them? Because archival formats suck for anything other than archiving. There are trade-offs for having extreme durability and stability - usually they're slow and they're bulky. It's much the same reason people don't usually use rock as a medium for writing these days. Sure, it's good for 10,000 years - a good hundred times better than archival ink and paper - but it's just not practical for temporary storage or quick retrieval. Now, if you were wanting to create a gigantic genealogical database, there's nothing better. And I'm sure that if there was fundamental knowledge that was at extremely high risk, people would be looking at damn-near permanent storage formats for that as well.)
Garage developers are an essential step to producing inventors. Inventors are an essential step to producing genuinely new ideas and new products. (Generally, "innovation" - as opposed to invention - seems to involve stepwise improvements at best, more often just slightly better eye candy and a thicker manual.) The same mindset that produces inventors also produces "deep science" (radically new work, as opposed to filling in the gaps) and other important original work. Originality is the key element, here, because it is both rare and potent. A lot can come from original work. As originality declines, the return on invested effort declines, but the return will always decline faster.
My gripes with Gentoo are the same as my gripes with every distro that uses some form of package manager. There are too many corner cases (same package, different permutation of mutually exclusive options) that are not adequately handled, there are too many specific compiler/linker flags which must (or must not) be used with specific packages only, there are too many ways of crashing the package managers out there beyond recovery, there are too many namespace collisions from independent packages, and packages aren't being maintained in sync resulting in post-install dependency violations.
Some of these problems can be fixed in any distribution - if enough time and care is put in. Some can only be fixed in source-based distros like Gentoo. Some can't be fixed at all without the use of herustics and a lot of compute time. The only way I can think of to produce a totally generic solution is to use software that already exists for calculating optimal settings and for profiling packages, and produce as comprehensive a table as possible of what permutations work for what systems.
Ditto for SimEarth. The knowledge that went into SimLife and SimEarth was limited by the machines available and the knowledge that existed. The machines are more powerful today and knowledge is much more extensive, opening up far more possibilities. It's not as if these games produce significant revenue any more and I seriously doubt either have any meaningful Intellectual Property as far as current-generation sims are concerned.
There is another side to all of this, though. By releasing "dead" product lines under Linux - preferably Open Sourced - gaming companies can start to build up the Linux gaming market at nominal cost to themselves. The code already exists, all it would take is a quick once-over audit to clean out anything that might remain super-secret or was licensed from outside. A Linux gaming market has an unknown value at the moment, because so little exists for it. But through such experiments, it would be possible for companies to get a better feel for just how much money there is to be made via Linux. It would also be possible to build up some measure of customer loyalty prior to there being any sizable investment.
What would such companies stand to lose by doing this? Financially, not a whole lot. The investment required to do an once-over audit is probably a couple of hundred dollars at most - and that is if it is done in-house.
The problem lies not with the number of distributions but with what the different distributions offer. Needs, and therefore "ideal" solutions, tend to be specialized. General-purpose distributions have to be generalized. This means that general-purpose distributions will meet most of most needs, but can never really be ideal for any of them.
Gentoo's approach of configuring and compiling at point of install should - in theory - solve this problem. You can adjust what gets compiled with what options and can therefore tailor the solution exactly to what you need. This is great for some of the more complicated packages, where there are many optional components, some of which may be mutually exclusive. This is also great when you have packages that - if you compile in everything - the package become unwieldy and sluggish.
In practice, the maze of options and the staggering number of potential compiler flags for tuning things -- it's simply too complicated for the majority of users and even for a very large number of software engineers. A better solution, in my opinion, is to have users describe a basic distribution and the platform on which it is to run, and then have a central cluster use herustics to grind out a way to achieve it.
Personally, I'd do this by compiling a mini distro locally that used a very standard package manager and didn't invalidate assumptions by mainstream distributions also using that package manager. Then the user could use existing repositories to add the stuff that's not critical to them but they still want. Alternatively, the cluster could spit out all of the necessary scripts, databases and configuration files for a Gentoo-style distro to build that perfect foundation.
However, ultimately, I do believe this to be the area virtually all distros get it wrong. The foundation components are the most critical, but they are also the least reusable. Correct that and you correct 99% of the (few) problems people have with Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
Both of these brilliant minds were lost to society. Both could probably have been saved with better, earlier, more intelligent treatment. That's one disturbing thing to come of this. The other is that there are probably other, equally brilliant minds, that are being sucked down into oblivion. That society doesn't seem to mind this - THAT is the surprising thing to me.
NASA is just too damn stodgy and too conservative to stay ahead. Yes, you want things safe, but they're not even doing that very well. Fuel tank readings faulty for several missions before they bother to hold things back and fault-trace?! Results are what get the citizenry interested, and interested citizens are what it takes to get Congessional funding. You don't get results without moving ahead. It's not that much different from Formula 1 - the cars are horribly expensive to design, build and race, but those who keep winning can keep paying for it. Teams that rely on past glory - such as Lotus - die. Glory has no cash value, which is why even spectacularly successful missions aren't worth much more than any other successful mission. Only successful progress is redeemable at the local store.
3b. Hope HAL doesn't have the Klingon i18n package installed.
Or...
3a. XOR the output from HAL's camera with the output from the output from a chip manufacturing security camera. The AI porn'll distract HAL for long enough.
I am a little surprised by the parallelization methods, though. Informix developed some parallel database methods some time back, which is partly why IBM bought them. I'm sure that the cutting-edge parallel database techniques that exist today have advanced beyond herustics and hack-and-slash work division.
Even so, though, unions only have a bad rep in America. Interestingly, America is also the country with the greatest number of stress-related illnesses in the western world (more than twice as many heart attacks from stress as in England), and that is tied to their self-destructive yet amazingly narcistic "work ethic" which simultaneously creates unbearable stresses on the human frame whilst producing only minimal extra productivity. Trade unions were founded as a form of cooperative, providing heath benefits, life insurance, education and training, back in the days of King James II. Remind me, when precisely did Americans provide these to their workforce? Oh, you mean 50% of them still don't have them? How quaint.
Unions as a political, rather than a socialist, entity is partly because many in America also hate all forms of socialism. This explains why the rest of the world regards them as anti-social. So much time and effort has gone into linking socialism with communism, communism with Communism, and Communism with Stalinism (even though none of those are even remotely connected) that all you have left is a bunch of paranoid spoiled rich kids and a bunch of equally paranoid serfs. This is a violently unstable system which must either correct itself or risk the fate of other violently unstable civilizations. Oh, the US won't vanish overnight, no matter what. Even the Roman Empire survived in some form or other for a millenium after it imploded. There will likely be an identifiable United States of America in 3000 AD for that reason alone. The question is, will it a stagnating copy of how it is now, or something that has learned from its mistakes and corrected them?
It also means you can subtract differences. Creationist scientists won't like it, as it's possible to have alternative views.
When stationary, the air must have a net velocity in excess of 400 mph for the engine to retain efficiency - which a turbine can easily do if there are no other complications. Eventually, the turbine gets in the way, hence the need for a really good bypass system. White Knight avoided the need for TAR by having the first stage as an actual aircraft, but a conventional aircraft isn't going to be capable of carrying the weight needed for true orbital flight, let alone interplanetary flight. Affordable space flight is probably going to require TAR engines.
(Other alternative launch-assist methods include using linear accelerators - basically strap the rocket onto something akin to a bullet train and then get the train up to the critical speed, or using a very powerful gas cannon to fire the rocket into the air at the critical speed. The first would likely end up more expensive to operate than a TAR, the latter would require a very sophisticated multi-charge arrangement if it is to avoid killing everyone onboard, but might end up being another viable method.)
One thing I think can be said for certain - by 2020, no sane engineer will be designing launch vehicles for space that use a rocket first stage. I'll give it a 40/60 chance that by 2020 commercial space flight will have surpassed NASA in terms of cost-per-unit-mass-launched, and 20/80 that hobbyist space flight will have done likewise. If NASA persists in long-outmoded next-gen launch vehicles, then somewhere in the 2030-2050 timeline, NASA will be redundant. Government-run organizations make sense for bleeding-edge work because that is generally too expensive for everyone else. However, once everyone passes said Government agency's technology, it has no value or merit. To have value for money, NASA should be working on systems that will become bleeding-edge in 2020, not what were bleeding-edge in 1920. R&D is the expensive work, everything else is meccano tech.
I don't doubt Google's good intentions (or their desire to improve on their search technology by honing it on such gigantic, complex data sets) but I have severe doubts they have the knowledge or the skills to produce a search and analysis system of this level of complexity even in specific fields, hence their problems producing a high positive hit rate merely for web pages. Producing a generalized pattern finder that will work on any problem...
Because you can then replicate the really good ones. I would have thought that obvious.
You see, if it dies more than 32767 times, you get an overflow, the sign bit flips and it becomes alive again. This is the problem with using fixed-length integers. If computers were using variable-length precision, you wouldn't get this problem.
I guess the other point of confusion is that Amblyrhiza Inundata was credited for being large because it was on an island and mammals (generally) are believed to get larger in island environments. South America is no island, so either the theory of islands is incorrect OR South America had some truly weird characteristics, making it viable for a rodent to grow large anyway. However, I've seen nothing to suggest South America had anything particularly abnormal about it. The biodiversity, predetation, etc, seem to have been fairly typical, which would in turn seem to make it a Really Bad Place for oversized mammalian life. Obviously, the giant rodents lived there, and where facts contradict theory, one should never change the facts to suit the theory, only the theory to suit the facts. But which theory is the theory that's wrong?
Not necessarily. There are many kinds of Downtime. Downtime is the name of a Doctor Who spinoff, which would therefore be watched. Reading Slashdot during downtime, however, makes no sense, as this is clearly educational material for advancing one's knowledge of the field.
According to various lists of giant fauna, the largest land-based mammal weighed upwards of 20 tonnes. The largest mammal that has ever lived is, of course, the Blue Whale, which is the descendant of a relative of the modern hippo. The cetaceans are unusual in that they are aquatic life descended from land life. The manatees are also descended from land life (they are relatives of the giraffe). I don't know of other examples. The contest for the largest rodent seems fierce, with competition from at least one other continent and the (at the time) giant island of Anguila, with rodents estimated as comparable in size to a grizzly bear. There may well be larger examples, as it seems clear the largest known (extinct) rodent is below the maximum size mammalian life supports.
...theo other giant rats, such as Amblyrhiza Inundata from Anguila?
None of the movies I'd be interested in are provided by Netflix. None of the television shows, either. Sure, I'm only one person out of, oh, seven billion or so on the planet, but it would seem to indicate that Netflix have scope for improving their range. Given the power of data mining techniques and the ability for an Internet-based system to get direct feedback, one would have thought that they would have ways and means of predicting what would be good to add to their service, but given that my interests are not quite that bizarre, I can only assume that no such intelligence has been added.
Even the hardest of criminals was not born that way. Many probably descended into such a life through circumstances beyond their control. This does not justify their actions, by any means, but it seems far more rational to pity those who could not reasonably have avoided their deaths than to pity those whose deaths were entirely self-inflicted and well within the capacity of those involved to have avoided.
Wasn't it was the working title of a Fox made-for-tv movie?
(So why doesn't anyone use them? Because archival formats suck for anything other than archiving. There are trade-offs for having extreme durability and stability - usually they're slow and they're bulky. It's much the same reason people don't usually use rock as a medium for writing these days. Sure, it's good for 10,000 years - a good hundred times better than archival ink and paper - but it's just not practical for temporary storage or quick retrieval. Now, if you were wanting to create a gigantic genealogical database, there's nothing better. And I'm sure that if there was fundamental knowledge that was at extremely high risk, people would be looking at damn-near permanent storage formats for that as well.)
Garage developers are an essential step to producing inventors. Inventors are an essential step to producing genuinely new ideas and new products. (Generally, "innovation" - as opposed to invention - seems to involve stepwise improvements at best, more often just slightly better eye candy and a thicker manual.) The same mindset that produces inventors also produces "deep science" (radically new work, as opposed to filling in the gaps) and other important original work. Originality is the key element, here, because it is both rare and potent. A lot can come from original work. As originality declines, the return on invested effort declines, but the return will always decline faster.
Some of these problems can be fixed in any distribution - if enough time and care is put in. Some can only be fixed in source-based distros like Gentoo. Some can't be fixed at all without the use of herustics and a lot of compute time. The only way I can think of to produce a totally generic solution is to use software that already exists for calculating optimal settings and for profiling packages, and produce as comprehensive a table as possible of what permutations work for what systems.
You can have fractional problems on a Pentium I.
There is another side to all of this, though. By releasing "dead" product lines under Linux - preferably Open Sourced - gaming companies can start to build up the Linux gaming market at nominal cost to themselves. The code already exists, all it would take is a quick once-over audit to clean out anything that might remain super-secret or was licensed from outside. A Linux gaming market has an unknown value at the moment, because so little exists for it. But through such experiments, it would be possible for companies to get a better feel for just how much money there is to be made via Linux. It would also be possible to build up some measure of customer loyalty prior to there being any sizable investment.
What would such companies stand to lose by doing this? Financially, not a whole lot. The investment required to do an once-over audit is probably a couple of hundred dollars at most - and that is if it is done in-house.
Now to see if NeWS is ever Open Sourced. That's one of the few major interfaces from the time that hasn't been.
Gentoo's approach of configuring and compiling at point of install should - in theory - solve this problem. You can adjust what gets compiled with what options and can therefore tailor the solution exactly to what you need. This is great for some of the more complicated packages, where there are many optional components, some of which may be mutually exclusive. This is also great when you have packages that - if you compile in everything - the package become unwieldy and sluggish.
In practice, the maze of options and the staggering number of potential compiler flags for tuning things -- it's simply too complicated for the majority of users and even for a very large number of software engineers. A better solution, in my opinion, is to have users describe a basic distribution and the platform on which it is to run, and then have a central cluster use herustics to grind out a way to achieve it.
Personally, I'd do this by compiling a mini distro locally that used a very standard package manager and didn't invalidate assumptions by mainstream distributions also using that package manager. Then the user could use existing repositories to add the stuff that's not critical to them but they still want. Alternatively, the cluster could spit out all of the necessary scripts, databases and configuration files for a Gentoo-style distro to build that perfect foundation.
However, ultimately, I do believe this to be the area virtually all distros get it wrong. The foundation components are the most critical, but they are also the least reusable. Correct that and you correct 99% of the (few) problems people have with Linux.
The emerge of the upgraded management package failed? Did you remember to set the right USE flags?