The problem is that politics could directly get in the way of this bet and of the science. Climate scientists are arguing (rightly or wrongly) that absent any change in policy the earth will warm some amount. But China, the US, the EU and India could all tomorrow wake up and change policies, and they might already have changed polices from when the predictions were made, which changes significantly the outcome.
Even if you try and bake in new policies to the models, you run into the problem of predicting compliance. I don't think any climate scientist included a housing bubble and bank collapse, or a tunsian protest in their climate predictions, but all of those things have significantly effected the outcome.
The Simon-Ehrlich Wager, as mentioned in the post is a good example of a lot of factors that have nothing to do with the core topic changing the outcome considerably. Oil prices, reagenomics, computerization all significantly altered metric of the bet.
Climate change says dumping more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than it can absorb is probably bad, and will lead to increased temperatures. But there's a natural reactive cycle to that (plant growth factors basically) and there's a political effect as that lot come on board. And then there's all the other random crap that happens in the world. In all of the last 3 centuries there have been major transformative wars in the second decade (admittedly the 1700's I'm thinking the war of spanish succession, and the ascendance of russia which were partly first decade, and the napoleonic wars extended a long time), another of those could radically reshape the geopolitical landscape and basically throw every climate model out the window. That doesn't mean we shouldn't take action, but if governments actually do something about climate change, the climate scientist would (probably) lose the bet.
I'm on a 175 GB 50Mb plan in london ontario. It's sort of 100 bucks a month (with rogers if you bundle home phone, cell phone cable etc. you get a discount). It's absurdly overpriced but the service pretty much lives up to as advertised.
But with just two people both PhD students we move a lot of data, probably 85% of which is related to our studies, we regularly run into the caps.
They do have packages ranging from 25 gigs (good for my mom) up to 175, but even 175 is too low for a lot of us.
The problem really is multimedia content, games are especially bad, but movies aren't great either. Games (and I'm looking at you steam) aren't good about telling you how big they are up front, or accurately reporting how big they will be, or not randomly completely re downloading themselves as a patch. As we've moved our TV watching from the TV to the computer, and game playing much more into online distribution bandwidth limits are becoming more and more problematic. And that's just two of us. I think if we had teenage kids we'd need a business type plan at home.
bikes really are in use all over the world all the time
Where I am they sure as hell aren't. Riding a bike in winter is a path to getting yourself killed, or worse.
I certainly grant there could be more bike traffic (when there isn't you know, ice), but then you've got the car, and you've got to go 20km. 15 minute drive, or hour long bike? Oh and while biking you have to share the road with cars, and if even one of them ever hits you by accident, you're in for a very bad day.
Bikes work in china and india because of the crushing mass of people. You can't fit cars, and bikes can't go fast, if a car does hit you, it was probably going slower than you are. You can't live 20km from your job because you'd never get to it if you did. That's an urban (and personal) planning issue more than a technology issue.
that's a bit far reaching. Using US dollars is gambling that the value won't tank overnight. In fact, holding money in anything (even gold) is gambling that whatever that thing is won't suddenly depreciate in value through no action of yours.
The management of a company are ultimately investors, they can either reinvest profits into new products and grow the company, or pay out to shareholders if they figure they can't do better than the shareholders with that money. The 'worth' of a company depends on how much it honestly discloses, revenue, profits,total assets, vs costs and liabilities, and then what you expect it to be worth when you want to sell it. Lets return to the US dollar analogy. If you get paid in dollars, you are hoping that the buying power of those dollars will be unchanged when you go to spend it. But a government that lies about its financial situation (Greece), or screw it up badly (US, UK, Ireland, Italy, Spain) can significantly (and sometimes relatively rapid) change the value of their currencies, in 12 months the EURO declined about 9% vs the dollar. The pound is down I think 91% since 1971, and more than that since pre WW2 (in the case of the pound there are even a handful of days where the government decided to revalue to pound overnight).
Apple is just a company with some revenue. Whether it's worth 300 billion dollars or not is up to potential investors to decide, but it has a revenue of 65 billion dollars or so and profits of ~14 billion, but that 14 billion reinvested in the company should provide more than what 14 billion dollars would provide if paid out as a dividend and invested by shareholders. You can read their public filings as much as anyone else. If you think they're lying, or the risk of them lying (or pulling a BP and getting themselves on the hook for 40 billion dollars) exceeds their ability to pay, then you probably don't want to buy.
So, as with any company, whether they pay a dividend or not. Do you think that if when you would want to sell shares, will it pay out (dividends + value of the sold shares) more than you could get else where, or less? Apple does shiny well, it's popular with lots of important people, and they're a market leader in several areas. I don't personally think they're worth 300 billion dollars, but i don't think gold is worth 1400 bucks an ounce either, but that's irrelevant, they're both worth something. The bernie madoff frauds of the world are supposed to 1, get caught, and 2 have their assets siezed (which impressively looks like ~50% of the money is going to be recovered so far).
Stock guys have to be good at figuring out where the market is going to move, regardless of so called 'fundamentals'. Is apple really worth 200 billion dollars? That's irrelevant, what matters is if people think it's going to be worth 200 or 300 billion, and moving your money accordingly based on when you're willing to sell. If you want to invest for the next 30 years, then apple by itself isn't a good plan anyway, hence you should you know... diversify.
Well that's the advantage of online dating in general. Have a monacle fetish? Tired of your friends setting you up on dates with people who don't have monacles because you haven't told them about this. No problem, online dating will help. You can be brutally honest about what you want, and don't want. The downside I can see with online dating is that there's a difference between wanting a fantasy (wanting a woman who looks like angelina jolie), and wanting something you learned from experience (someone who is both willing, and financially able to go on at least 2 weeks of overseas vacations a year). I think the younger generation, teenagers, early 20 somethings, who don't yet know or fully appreciate what they do, or don't want are going to be handed a lot of tools to find a fantasy. For all of it's faults what eharmony purports offer is an attempt at least, to understand what you seriously want in a partner and not just what would fulfil your immediate daydreams. Whether it succeeds or not I have no idea, having never tried the service.
I suppose in the parlance of computer science it's requirements specification. Online is a great way to do pattern match and some sort of combinatorial optimization to 'rank' different pairs of people, but you need to have accurate input in the first place on just what people want and are. There might be a neat machine learning problem there where you could take a dataset of people and then as it pairs them up ask them how the date went in a number of ways and then build a set of relations between some sets of have - want properties.
Well there's also a point where you can only spend so much time in a day travelling before you move to reduce travelling. I think on an individual basis that may vary a lot, but there's probably a plateau'd statistical average (maybe 2 hours? not sure). Since speed limits haven't increased dramatically (and as congestion increases traffic speed overall goes down), the distance travelled will eventually peak, until you alleviate congestion or otherwise increase the speed of travel. That would be for sort of day to day work. Then you get into vacation time and so on, and again, you only get so much vacation time (which hasn't magically increased in the last few decades), so you pretty much cap your driving vs flying distance. You can only drive so far before it becomes preferably to fly, even if you make flying unpalatable (longer security check ins etc..) you only increase the driving > flying radius so much. If you have to go from New York to London (either the london where I live in ontario or the good london in the UK), and extra hour or 2 at the airport doesn't make it better to try and drive. New York to washington D.C. maybe though. So your total distance travelled in a year (via car) is going to be the sum of normal everyday driving + vacation driving. Even if you want to count total distance travelled, well, again, airplanes are mostly capped towards the speed of sound, so unless you get more time to travel, you aren't going to go much farther until we see more regular super sonic air travel.
I suspect G.M. figured this peak travel thing out when they designed the Volt. They figure ~80% of all driving is done in 1 day, and less than 100km or whatever the exact numbers are. That pretty much tells you the cap. We've been at 100% of the north american population that wants a car has one for about a decade, so the only growth there is population growth, unless we can start to increase the average speed of road travel (which, beyond reducing congestion seems unlikely), we're not going to change the max distance any time soon.
Naturally smaller, and more dense countries could travel less, (something like 20% of japans population is in the greater tokyo area, which overall is about 3.5% of the total are of the country, or so wikipedia tells me).
-50 is very rare in anywhere inhabited. In the last 30 years the coldest I've been in the Windsor - Fredericton corridor (Toronto, montreal, quebec city etc.) was about -40 with windchill, and that was back in I think 2003/2004, typically we don't see much below -30.
Granted, if you car dies any time it happens to be -40 around here it could be a fairly serious problem.
Obviously that's in a celsius not that other unit of measure that died a few decades ago.
probably true that a few thousand would suffice for current cryto systems. But you're then into a trivial cat and mouse game. If it's easy to factor a 4 bit product of primes with a quantum computer, use 16 or 32. If it's easy to build a quantum computer to factor 256 bit RSA with a few thousand gates, well use 1024. If building a crypto system scales more easily than the quantum computer does, well, you're still ahead.
The problem of qubits though is more subtle than just the record being a 7 or 8 qubit system. Without millions in grant money the most complex transistor system you could build in a uni lab would be, frankly, pretty pathetic compared to what can be fabbed by intel. If you want a large scale quantum computer you probably are going to need large scale R&D and manufacturing. That sort of investment wasn't made in quantum computing 4 or 5 years ago, and I haven't touched the topic since so I don't know what's happened since. I suspect that the semiconductor guys are watching the research to try and figure out just how complex and expensive it's going to be to build a system that can factor something more complex than 652133 (719x907). 5 years ago when I was looking into it the big question was which quantum system was most viable, excited electronic, or nuclear states, if so which ones and so on. That's a few steps away from being able to build a scalable system, but it isn't necessarily a huge breakthrough to go from being able to build 100 qubit system(of some time) in a lab to a billion qubit system at intel, though it might be. Depends on a lot of factors.
Quantum computing is probabilistic, it has a chance to converge on the right answer, and it gets there in the fairly specific case of using a quantum version of a fourier transform to factor large primes. If you base your crypto method on something not vulnerable to to a quantum fourier transform, or if, with your decryption method you absolutely must get the right answer, you can end up back at brute force.
Quantum cryptography is really not related to quantum computing all that much. They both rely on entanglement, but trying to extract some quantum state of two entangled things (nuclear or electron states most likely) isn't really a computational problem that computing, quantum or otherwise exists to solve. There are lots of practical challenges to quantum cryptography, the short version of which is that a single thing in a specific quantum state is hard to pin down, but lots of stuff (polarized light, atoms in excited states etc.) all happen with a distribution of states. If you were to communicate inside a device this limitation isn't really a problem, but if you need to send data from New York to LA it's very hard to send a single photon or atom (at least for the moment), and if you're sending a million photons, in some collection of quantum states it's somewhat harder to guarantee security. I'm being a bit handwavy here, but a few years ago I did a simple demo quantum crypto project with polarized light, for a couple of hundred dollars in hardware borrowed from an optics lab for an afternoon it worked pretty well. Over the length of a table. Scaling up to fibre optics that move any meaningful distance isn't impossible, but if done wrong you end up rapidly defeating your own crypto system.
For those who don't know, a quantum computer can factor products of primes in polynomial time, with a certain probability of success, but right now because you can't build quantum computer which more than a few qubits you are limited to trivial problems. If you could build a multi-million qubit system you could, with a certain probability of success, factor large products primes such as those used in cryptography in polynomial time.
I'm not sure that's fair. Assange is important, but he just founded wikileaks, he didn't populate it with content. The editor in chief, the founder etc. of the new york times don't really deserve enormous personal accolades for the pentagon papers. Wikileaks is valuable because it facilitates what journalists should be doing, but the vast majority of what it releases is of no value (by volume), but I'm not sure it's quite fair to make him person of the year. PFC manning, assuming he actually leaked the material maybe. But Julian Assange and Mark Zuckerberg both don't deserve the accolade for the same reason, they just made a website that other people can upload stuff to. 3 or 4 years from now, someone else could come along with a better way to upload stuff and either of them could be forgotten in a heartbeat.
Since time does award person of the year to more than just one person, I think a better answer might have been to give it to Wikileaks supporters (use editorial staff to come up with a better name) rather than just Assange, or to Wikileaks as a whole. For showing us that most of what happens in diplomatic meetings is mind numbingly boring and best left unrepeated, but the bad stuff can be very very bad.
ya I remember 15 or so years ago (maybe a bit more than that) when employees all had both computers AND archives of paper and books everywhere. They had more cubicle space, and less elbow room. Today they have less cubicle space, and more elbow room. Document management systems, laptops, google, and desks that are actually designed for computers and not just whatever table they could find that was the right height make a big difference.
I used to be a ninja computer installer. We'd go in to a company between 4:30 and 5:30 pm, talk to their manager to see if there were any last minute changes. And then replace all the computers in an area overnight. Offices and their contents have changed a lot. People used to have their own paper archives of stuff, that's all gone. Technical people especially would have fairly large personal collections of books, again, mostly gone. People have books but it's less reference material and more specifically topical. People don't have their own printers anymore, and they usually don't have their own legacy machines in their cubicle (which used to happen a lot in some places like GE but not others). I don't really know how long the 'legacy' systems stuck around for or didn't, since by definition we didn't take those away, but a lot of people had 2 or 3 full desktop systems which you don't see much outside of places that are in the computing business directly. The other thing is concepts of what separable work is seem to be in flux. It's less of a you sit in that cubicle and drone away and more of a come in, meet with people discuss things etc. then go to your cubicle and do something. I'm not sure that's a better for productivity, but when I'm actually doing work now it seems like there's less of a show up and sit in your cube for 8 hours.
ya. Get it your way on some other platform, and consumers will make the choice if your product is worth being on a particular platform for, if it works out Apple will be forced into an agreement at the risk of losing subscribers to android/WP7. I'm not sure magazines are a killer app for slates, but they might be. I don't own one, and I don't read non technical magazines, so I'm not sure I can comment on how valuable this proposition is to the device sellers.
ya, I'm surprised at the lack of a dual core. Not that hummingbird is bad, but apparently the Orion is based on ARM9 and is about 5x faster (using both cores fully of course). I'm not up on the software side of android since I'm stuck with an iPhone and blackberry until august.
There is in infinite supply of ideas 'if only we could implement it' and programmers are as good a source as anyone for generic ideas. Being able to convert an idea to an implementation is a skill, it's part of what programmers should learn in software engineering. But programmers (or any sort of engineer for that matter), is a specialist in technology, not in some field that has some deficiency that can be solved by the application of some as yet undeveloped technology. It's important to filter out people who have ideas that are equally well developed and understood by programmers, from those who require something only a programmer can deliver, but they themselves couldn't have the skill for. Medicine is a good example, where they know they want something (training tools, better imaging etc.), in that case the programmer cannot possibly develop or specify the requirements in a vacuum. But if you have an idea for the next great game that you just need a programmer for, I've got 23 students in my game engines course all of whom have great ideas for AAA games, and if you can't implement, you're not really adding any value they don't already have.
Of course being able to implement may mean you're important enough, or rich enough, to pay programmers to do your bidding. At some point most people give up on your own ideas and implement someone else's, no matter how stupid, because they'll pay you for 40 hours a week, when trying to fund your own idea will take 80 hours a week and money you don't have. I like food more than I like the satisfaction of knowing i've produced the worlds greatest iPhone game that no one will buy because there are 50 000 other really great iPhone games that are almost as good.
I would then argue that programming is many orders of magnitude more important than the vast majority of good ideas, which is why programmers are paid more than the creative types usually. There are of course exceptionally good ideas, and a handful of people who, in spite of lacking technical skill have been able to see them to fruition, but most of the great idea guys earned their cred from being technical people in the first place.
Really, if you think about the great idea guys of the computing age, Steve and Steve at apple, Gates at MS, Page and Brinn at google, Ellison at oracle, torvalds on linux, they all started as technical people being able to implement solutions, not necessarily solutions to the problems they ended up working on at their more famous companies, but they wouldn't have been able to get there if they hadn't been able to implement in the first place.
I don't know about the programmers you work with, but all the university educated programmers (CS/Software eng people) are all both idea people and technical people, and they guide development of a product far more than a business guy does (unless you are trying to solve purely business driven problems). The college/tradeshool programmer types are assembly line workers of programming, but they are also only ever entrusted with the minimum of difficult work anyway, and they don't view programming as poetry, or an end product, they view it as a (crappy) job that pays the bills.
she's too small for the PRC. They're going for carriers easily twice this size. I would have expected india to consider purchasing the ship (as they have in the past) but frankly, the invincible class is small, old and not the sort of thing of interest to the future naval powers. Spain has modernish carriers about the size of invincible, and those would be much easier to buy designs for. Though PRC doesn't need to learn to build carrier systems on this size when they have much bigger russian carriers already, and india is in basically the same situation.
The other thing is this isn't exactly a sale to the highest bidder. Basically the MOD is looking for the best value for the money they can get, and will assess from there. She might be broken up for scrap, if someone can throw together a good deal she'll end up a museum ship (though that would be presumably hard), or any number of other schemes.
then you would have to let them bundle in an AV product and let all of the 3rd party security vendor's go out of business. One could even argue windows is not so much inherently defective, after all, they have a security alert telling you to have an AV, firewall and account control, and if you don't patch, well, the car company doesn't drive to your house to do repairs, you have to take the vehicle in for service when you get a note, MS sends you a note about a free patch, it's up to you to install it. Your car (to continue to analogy) might not come with winter tyres (or even tyres at all), but they sure expect you to have them when you operate the vehicle, and operating the vehicle without tyres well, sorta works, but it's not really a defect that the car doesn't work properly without them.
I think the broader issue is what to do about security and the generally bad behaviour of computers on a network. Like it or not the ISP's have become the connection between users and anything they can do harm to, so it may be that it falls to them, to in some way compel users to fix their stuff, and provide services to do so. It's that or we need licence repair shops where you can get your computer a 'repair' (security check, something along those lines) with a certificate saying it was safe as of this time. Which seems like a monumentally unnecessary challenge when your ISP probably knows if you have a virus, and can usually walk you through fixing it.
Except that the unit cost is probably if it's made in south korea. Put that in the US and you're looking at double the price. And while they are similar in purpose, they are very different actual weapons. The daewoo is a 5.56 mm rifle with a grenade launcher. The XM25 is well, just a grenade launcher. And then you get into the whole computerization part.
And clearly the RoK sees a weapon like this as useful against the DPRK, but without an actual shooting war that's educated guesswork at best.
Afghanistan and Iraq are, tactically, very different. In afghanistan you're regularly seeing engagement ranges (sniping basically) of ~2Km, Iraq that happens, but you're mostly seeing more 300m engagement range. The relatively close quarters stuff is happening in afghanistan too though. 800m seems like a good number, it's probably not all that hard to make one that does 800m or 300m effectively, but to do much more than that gets dicey, and it's about on par with the trusty ole m16. It's almost certainly designed for far more than just Iraq and Afghanistan too. How much use it would have in North korea is anyone's guess, but there are a lot of potential hot spots in the world, and weapon designers are trying to be prepared for all of them.
I would think you're right, a weapon like this is a one a squad or 1 a platoon, not one per soldier. But a typical soldier only carries about 300 rounds, you're not exactly spraying ammo like crazy with 300 rounds, and if they're specialized rounds, on a specialist, well, you don't need as many of them. Literally it's the same sort of thing as smart bombs, the munition itself costs more (sometimes a LOT more) but if you actually hit what you're shooting at it makes up for it.
Last I checked the unit replacement cost on the m16 is about $600, I'm not an american, nor do I own an m16 but my understanding is the civilian version is several thousands of dollars, but the AR15 (the semi auto only version) is only about 500 bucks, so I would say they're actually in the 500-600 dollar range. I'm not sure it's entirely fair to compare that to a XM25 though, they're new, which makes them expensive, and 35k isn't really a lot of money if it gets you out of fights faster (or more to the point keeps your guys from getting killed more).
The point is that it's out of the development/prototype phase and now into actual deployment. It's not new, it's just new to the field. I don't know specifically about the XM25 but a lot of places experimenting with new weapons have been concerned about the mass, and desert (i.e. heat and sand) performance, which delayed them somewhat.
IMO part of the problem is that they positioned the protest wrong. People don't want to screw up time with family to make a protest. If you cause a fuss you may never get where you're going. If they'd set the protest for sunday it would be a protest coming back. And you could always tell your boss you got caught up in the protest, true or not. Going out do you really want to explain to your relatives that you were busy protesting?
The other thing is people travelling with kids might not want to protest at all. Mostly because the kids will protest the delay, and no one wants to deal with that.
Which carries with it fairly deep complications. Most of the Nobel physics prizes are relatively deep into their career when they do the work and may have supervised several students (both undergrad and grad), and collaborated on these projects with many scientists for years. How do you portion out credit to to all the involved people then?
I would contrast this with earlier nobel prizes where the winners were rewarded for work typically done early in their careers. If you've been a tenured faculty for 4 or 5 years, that means you've been around for potentially 9, 10 years, you've done a lot in there.
How about just letting MS put security essentials onto your computer as part of regular windows updates? You could even set it up to remove fake antivirus products automatically. And if it accidentally breaks a legitimate one, at least you have MSE on there, which may (or may not) be as good as whatever it removed but it's better than millions of people with fake AV's.
Or how about a walled garden security store in windows? If you want access you have to be approved for the national app store by the government (not MS), but then your software has to be both legitimate, and actually show up, you get the benefit of exposure and the consumer gets the benefit of legitimacy and working updates. The EU basically showed us how to do this with web browsers, security software is just as important, and if you do it pre-emptively you can avoid anti trust issues. To some degree this goes to the whole idea of security certificates, since you shouldn't be able to install an AV without a valid security certificate, assuming they can keep said certificates clean.
For all of the many (many) things wrong with microsoft, good security rules should acknowledge they happen to be in the majority right now, and we have to deal with the problems on their platform in the most consumer friendly and secure way possible. If that means that some boutique AV vendors get screwed, that's still preferable to the constant parade of broken norton installs and fake av programs out there.
Personally I have both avast and MSE. Avast messes with Opera a bit, but otherwise I'm quite happy with it. But MSE seems a bit better at catching stuff it doesn't.
127 to -40 is a problem. Actually it's a pretty serious problem. Well 127 on the high side is probably manageable, depending on where exactly the processor is in the engine, most inhabited places only rarely get to 50-60C, and then if you leave the vehicle out in the sun it's only 80 or 90. But about 7 years ago we had a cold snap that hit basically the great lakes, and the St. Lawrence area and it was consistently below -40 for more than two weeks, and that's in an area with ~25 or 30 million people (and by extension 25 or 30 million cars since it's north america). And that sort of thing isn't all that uncommon in a lot of canada or the US. So that's not even accounting for anywhere else in the world. I'm sure parts can exceed tolerance for a while, but I'd hate find out the 12 CPU's in my car all need to be replaced because I left it out overnight in -45 C weather.
That was the great weakness of the ribbon in the new office. Yes, once you learn it it's much more productive. But people are generally too scared of their computer to want to learn the new stuff to benefit from it. And it's a fight that IT support staff aren't ever going to win. Ever. If engineering comes down or management says, hey look at al this cool new/easier stuff we can do with it people might comply. In my experience it's best from management. When someone who everyone knows is a mindless suite with an MBA shows how they can do something that actually looks good, well, everyone else figures it can't be that bad.
People's expectations from home matter too, and how much they can fix on their own. If I don't know where something is, but the guy in the cubicle next to me does I can usually save IT some time teaching me. If on the other hand you use linux, which virtually no one knows, and figuring out even basic things REQUIRES an IT guy, because no one who does any of the actual work has linux at home, well, you're adding considerably to your support costs. Then you get into problems where things don't work, either on your end or for the customer. If you didn't pay for it, they have no obligation or desire to support you. If you paid 5000 bucks a seat for a piece of software you should have in your contract who you contact about things not working and they can go all the way up and down the chain to find people who can fix it, including devs. If you have a problem with something open source, pay someone to be an in house developer or pay for.. wait wasn't the point to not have to pay someone?
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The problem is that politics could directly get in the way of this bet and of the science. Climate scientists are arguing (rightly or wrongly) that absent any change in policy the earth will warm some amount. But China, the US, the EU and India could all tomorrow wake up and change policies, and they might already have changed polices from when the predictions were made, which changes significantly the outcome.
Even if you try and bake in new policies to the models, you run into the problem of predicting compliance. I don't think any climate scientist included a housing bubble and bank collapse, or a tunsian protest in their climate predictions, but all of those things have significantly effected the outcome.
The Simon-Ehrlich Wager, as mentioned in the post is a good example of a lot of factors that have nothing to do with the core topic changing the outcome considerably. Oil prices, reagenomics, computerization all significantly altered metric of the bet.
Climate change says dumping more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than it can absorb is probably bad, and will lead to increased temperatures. But there's a natural reactive cycle to that (plant growth factors basically) and there's a political effect as that lot come on board. And then there's all the other random crap that happens in the world. In all of the last 3 centuries there have been major transformative wars in the second decade (admittedly the 1700's I'm thinking the war of spanish succession, and the ascendance of russia which were partly first decade, and the napoleonic wars extended a long time), another of those could radically reshape the geopolitical landscape and basically throw every climate model out the window. That doesn't mean we shouldn't take action, but if governments actually do something about climate change, the climate scientist would (probably) lose the bet.
I'm on a 175 GB 50Mb plan in london ontario. It's sort of 100 bucks a month (with rogers if you bundle home phone, cell phone cable etc. you get a discount). It's absurdly overpriced but the service pretty much lives up to as advertised.
But with just two people both PhD students we move a lot of data, probably 85% of which is related to our studies, we regularly run into the caps.
They do have packages ranging from 25 gigs (good for my mom) up to 175, but even 175 is too low for a lot of us.
The problem really is multimedia content, games are especially bad, but movies aren't great either. Games (and I'm looking at you steam) aren't good about telling you how big they are up front, or accurately reporting how big they will be, or not randomly completely re downloading themselves as a patch. As we've moved our TV watching from the TV to the computer, and game playing much more into online distribution bandwidth limits are becoming more and more problematic. And that's just two of us. I think if we had teenage kids we'd need a business type plan at home.
bikes really are in use all over the world all the time
Where I am they sure as hell aren't. Riding a bike in winter is a path to getting yourself killed, or worse.
I certainly grant there could be more bike traffic (when there isn't you know, ice), but then you've got the car, and you've got to go 20km. 15 minute drive, or hour long bike? Oh and while biking you have to share the road with cars, and if even one of them ever hits you by accident, you're in for a very bad day.
Bikes work in china and india because of the crushing mass of people. You can't fit cars, and bikes can't go fast, if a car does hit you, it was probably going slower than you are. You can't live 20km from your job because you'd never get to it if you did. That's an urban (and personal) planning issue more than a technology issue.
that's a bit far reaching. Using US dollars is gambling that the value won't tank overnight. In fact, holding money in anything (even gold) is gambling that whatever that thing is won't suddenly depreciate in value through no action of yours.
The management of a company are ultimately investors, they can either reinvest profits into new products and grow the company, or pay out to shareholders if they figure they can't do better than the shareholders with that money. The 'worth' of a company depends on how much it honestly discloses, revenue, profits,total assets, vs costs and liabilities, and then what you expect it to be worth when you want to sell it. Lets return to the US dollar analogy. If you get paid in dollars, you are hoping that the buying power of those dollars will be unchanged when you go to spend it. But a government that lies about its financial situation (Greece), or screw it up badly (US, UK, Ireland, Italy, Spain) can significantly (and sometimes relatively rapid) change the value of their currencies, in 12 months the EURO declined about 9% vs the dollar. The pound is down I think 91% since 1971, and more than that since pre WW2 (in the case of the pound there are even a handful of days where the government decided to revalue to pound overnight).
Apple is just a company with some revenue. Whether it's worth 300 billion dollars or not is up to potential investors to decide, but it has a revenue of 65 billion dollars or so and profits of ~14 billion, but that 14 billion reinvested in the company should provide more than what 14 billion dollars would provide if paid out as a dividend and invested by shareholders. You can read their public filings as much as anyone else. If you think they're lying, or the risk of them lying (or pulling a BP and getting themselves on the hook for 40 billion dollars) exceeds their ability to pay, then you probably don't want to buy.
So, as with any company, whether they pay a dividend or not. Do you think that if when you would want to sell shares, will it pay out (dividends + value of the sold shares) more than you could get else where, or less? Apple does shiny well, it's popular with lots of important people, and they're a market leader in several areas. I don't personally think they're worth 300 billion dollars, but i don't think gold is worth 1400 bucks an ounce either, but that's irrelevant, they're both worth something. The bernie madoff frauds of the world are supposed to 1, get caught, and 2 have their assets siezed (which impressively looks like ~50% of the money is going to be recovered so far).
Stock guys have to be good at figuring out where the market is going to move, regardless of so called 'fundamentals'. Is apple really worth 200 billion dollars? That's irrelevant, what matters is if people think it's going to be worth 200 or 300 billion, and moving your money accordingly based on when you're willing to sell. If you want to invest for the next 30 years, then apple by itself isn't a good plan anyway, hence you should you know... diversify.
Well that's the advantage of online dating in general. Have a monacle fetish? Tired of your friends setting you up on dates with people who don't have monacles because you haven't told them about this. No problem, online dating will help. You can be brutally honest about what you want, and don't want. The downside I can see with online dating is that there's a difference between wanting a fantasy (wanting a woman who looks like angelina jolie), and wanting something you learned from experience (someone who is both willing, and financially able to go on at least 2 weeks of overseas vacations a year). I think the younger generation, teenagers, early 20 somethings, who don't yet know or fully appreciate what they do, or don't want are going to be handed a lot of tools to find a fantasy. For all of it's faults what eharmony purports offer is an attempt at least, to understand what you seriously want in a partner and not just what would fulfil your immediate daydreams. Whether it succeeds or not I have no idea, having never tried the service.
I suppose in the parlance of computer science it's requirements specification. Online is a great way to do pattern match and some sort of combinatorial optimization to 'rank' different pairs of people, but you need to have accurate input in the first place on just what people want and are. There might be a neat machine learning problem there where you could take a dataset of people and then as it pairs them up ask them how the date went in a number of ways and then build a set of relations between some sets of have - want properties.
Well there's also a point where you can only spend so much time in a day travelling before you move to reduce travelling. I think on an individual basis that may vary a lot, but there's probably a plateau'd statistical average (maybe 2 hours? not sure). Since speed limits haven't increased dramatically (and as congestion increases traffic speed overall goes down), the distance travelled will eventually peak, until you alleviate congestion or otherwise increase the speed of travel. That would be for sort of day to day work. Then you get into vacation time and so on, and again, you only get so much vacation time (which hasn't magically increased in the last few decades), so you pretty much cap your driving vs flying distance. You can only drive so far before it becomes preferably to fly, even if you make flying unpalatable (longer security check ins etc..) you only increase the driving > flying radius so much. If you have to go from New York to London (either the london where I live in ontario or the good london in the UK), and extra hour or 2 at the airport doesn't make it better to try and drive. New York to washington D.C. maybe though. So your total distance travelled in a year (via car) is going to be the sum of normal everyday driving + vacation driving. Even if you want to count total distance travelled, well, again, airplanes are mostly capped towards the speed of sound, so unless you get more time to travel, you aren't going to go much farther until we see more regular super sonic air travel.
I suspect G.M. figured this peak travel thing out when they designed the Volt. They figure ~80% of all driving is done in 1 day, and less than 100km or whatever the exact numbers are. That pretty much tells you the cap. We've been at 100% of the north american population that wants a car has one for about a decade, so the only growth there is population growth, unless we can start to increase the average speed of road travel (which, beyond reducing congestion seems unlikely), we're not going to change the max distance any time soon.
Naturally smaller, and more dense countries could travel less, (something like 20% of japans population is in the greater tokyo area, which overall is about 3.5% of the total are of the country, or so wikipedia tells me).
-50 is very rare in anywhere inhabited. In the last 30 years the coldest I've been in the Windsor - Fredericton corridor (Toronto, montreal, quebec city etc.) was about -40 with windchill, and that was back in I think 2003/2004, typically we don't see much below -30.
Granted, if you car dies any time it happens to be -40 around here it could be a fairly serious problem.
Obviously that's in a celsius not that other unit of measure that died a few decades ago.
probably true that a few thousand would suffice for current cryto systems. But you're then into a trivial cat and mouse game. If it's easy to factor a 4 bit product of primes with a quantum computer, use 16 or 32. If it's easy to build a quantum computer to factor 256 bit RSA with a few thousand gates, well use 1024. If building a crypto system scales more easily than the quantum computer does, well, you're still ahead.
The problem of qubits though is more subtle than just the record being a 7 or 8 qubit system. Without millions in grant money the most complex transistor system you could build in a uni lab would be, frankly, pretty pathetic compared to what can be fabbed by intel. If you want a large scale quantum computer you probably are going to need large scale R&D and manufacturing. That sort of investment wasn't made in quantum computing 4 or 5 years ago, and I haven't touched the topic since so I don't know what's happened since. I suspect that the semiconductor guys are watching the research to try and figure out just how complex and expensive it's going to be to build a system that can factor something more complex than 652133 (719x907). 5 years ago when I was looking into it the big question was which quantum system was most viable, excited electronic, or nuclear states, if so which ones and so on. That's a few steps away from being able to build a scalable system, but it isn't necessarily a huge breakthrough to go from being able to build 100 qubit system(of some time) in a lab to a billion qubit system at intel, though it might be. Depends on a lot of factors.
Quantum computing is probabilistic, it has a chance to converge on the right answer, and it gets there in the fairly specific case of using a quantum version of a fourier transform to factor large primes. If you base your crypto method on something not vulnerable to to a quantum fourier transform, or if, with your decryption method you absolutely must get the right answer, you can end up back at brute force.
Quantum cryptography is really not related to quantum computing all that much. They both rely on entanglement, but trying to extract some quantum state of two entangled things (nuclear or electron states most likely) isn't really a computational problem that computing, quantum or otherwise exists to solve. There are lots of practical challenges to quantum cryptography, the short version of which is that a single thing in a specific quantum state is hard to pin down, but lots of stuff (polarized light, atoms in excited states etc.) all happen with a distribution of states. If you were to communicate inside a device this limitation isn't really a problem, but if you need to send data from New York to LA it's very hard to send a single photon or atom (at least for the moment), and if you're sending a million photons, in some collection of quantum states it's somewhat harder to guarantee security. I'm being a bit handwavy here, but a few years ago I did a simple demo quantum crypto project with polarized light, for a couple of hundred dollars in hardware borrowed from an optics lab for an afternoon it worked pretty well. Over the length of a table. Scaling up to fibre optics that move any meaningful distance isn't impossible, but if done wrong you end up rapidly defeating your own crypto system.
For those who don't know, a quantum computer can factor products of primes in polynomial time, with a certain probability of success, but right now because you can't build quantum computer which more than a few qubits you are limited to trivial problems. If you could build a multi-million qubit system you could, with a certain probability of success, factor large products primes such as those used in cryptography in polynomial time.
I'm not sure that's fair. Assange is important, but he just founded wikileaks, he didn't populate it with content. The editor in chief, the founder etc. of the new york times don't really deserve enormous personal accolades for the pentagon papers. Wikileaks is valuable because it facilitates what journalists should be doing, but the vast majority of what it releases is of no value (by volume), but I'm not sure it's quite fair to make him person of the year. PFC manning, assuming he actually leaked the material maybe. But Julian Assange and Mark Zuckerberg both don't deserve the accolade for the same reason, they just made a website that other people can upload stuff to. 3 or 4 years from now, someone else could come along with a better way to upload stuff and either of them could be forgotten in a heartbeat.
Since time does award person of the year to more than just one person, I think a better answer might have been to give it to Wikileaks supporters (use editorial staff to come up with a better name) rather than just Assange, or to Wikileaks as a whole. For showing us that most of what happens in diplomatic meetings is mind numbingly boring and best left unrepeated, but the bad stuff can be very very bad.
ya I remember 15 or so years ago (maybe a bit more than that) when employees all had both computers AND archives of paper and books everywhere. They had more cubicle space, and less elbow room. Today they have less cubicle space, and more elbow room. Document management systems, laptops, google, and desks that are actually designed for computers and not just whatever table they could find that was the right height make a big difference.
I used to be a ninja computer installer. We'd go in to a company between 4:30 and 5:30 pm, talk to their manager to see if there were any last minute changes. And then replace all the computers in an area overnight. Offices and their contents have changed a lot. People used to have their own paper archives of stuff, that's all gone. Technical people especially would have fairly large personal collections of books, again, mostly gone. People have books but it's less reference material and more specifically topical. People don't have their own printers anymore, and they usually don't have their own legacy machines in their cubicle (which used to happen a lot in some places like GE but not others). I don't really know how long the 'legacy' systems stuck around for or didn't, since by definition we didn't take those away, but a lot of people had 2 or 3 full desktop systems which you don't see much outside of places that are in the computing business directly. The other thing is concepts of what separable work is seem to be in flux. It's less of a you sit in that cubicle and drone away and more of a come in, meet with people discuss things etc. then go to your cubicle and do something. I'm not sure that's a better for productivity, but when I'm actually doing work now it seems like there's less of a show up and sit in your cube for 8 hours.
ya. Get it your way on some other platform, and consumers will make the choice if your product is worth being on a particular platform for, if it works out Apple will be forced into an agreement at the risk of losing subscribers to android/WP7. I'm not sure magazines are a killer app for slates, but they might be. I don't own one, and I don't read non technical magazines, so I'm not sure I can comment on how valuable this proposition is to the device sellers.
ya, I'm surprised at the lack of a dual core. Not that hummingbird is bad, but apparently the Orion is based on ARM9 and is about 5x faster (using both cores fully of course). I'm not up on the software side of android since I'm stuck with an iPhone and blackberry until august.
There is in infinite supply of ideas 'if only we could implement it' and programmers are as good a source as anyone for generic ideas. Being able to convert an idea to an implementation is a skill, it's part of what programmers should learn in software engineering. But programmers (or any sort of engineer for that matter), is a specialist in technology, not in some field that has some deficiency that can be solved by the application of some as yet undeveloped technology. It's important to filter out people who have ideas that are equally well developed and understood by programmers, from those who require something only a programmer can deliver, but they themselves couldn't have the skill for. Medicine is a good example, where they know they want something (training tools, better imaging etc.), in that case the programmer cannot possibly develop or specify the requirements in a vacuum. But if you have an idea for the next great game that you just need a programmer for, I've got 23 students in my game engines course all of whom have great ideas for AAA games, and if you can't implement, you're not really adding any value they don't already have.
Of course being able to implement may mean you're important enough, or rich enough, to pay programmers to do your bidding. At some point most people give up on your own ideas and implement someone else's, no matter how stupid, because they'll pay you for 40 hours a week, when trying to fund your own idea will take 80 hours a week and money you don't have. I like food more than I like the satisfaction of knowing i've produced the worlds greatest iPhone game that no one will buy because there are 50 000 other really great iPhone games that are almost as good.
I would then argue that programming is many orders of magnitude more important than the vast majority of good ideas, which is why programmers are paid more than the creative types usually. There are of course exceptionally good ideas, and a handful of people who, in spite of lacking technical skill have been able to see them to fruition, but most of the great idea guys earned their cred from being technical people in the first place.
Really, if you think about the great idea guys of the computing age, Steve and Steve at apple, Gates at MS, Page and Brinn at google, Ellison at oracle, torvalds on linux, they all started as technical people being able to implement solutions, not necessarily solutions to the problems they ended up working on at their more famous companies, but they wouldn't have been able to get there if they hadn't been able to implement in the first place.
I don't know about the programmers you work with, but all the university educated programmers (CS/Software eng people) are all both idea people and technical people, and they guide development of a product far more than a business guy does (unless you are trying to solve purely business driven problems). The college/tradeshool programmer types are assembly line workers of programming, but they are also only ever entrusted with the minimum of difficult work anyway, and they don't view programming as poetry, or an end product, they view it as a (crappy) job that pays the bills.
she's too small for the PRC. They're going for carriers easily twice this size. I would have expected india to consider purchasing the ship (as they have in the past) but frankly, the invincible class is small, old and not the sort of thing of interest to the future naval powers. Spain has modernish carriers about the size of invincible, and those would be much easier to buy designs for. Though PRC doesn't need to learn to build carrier systems on this size when they have much bigger russian carriers already, and india is in basically the same situation.
The other thing is this isn't exactly a sale to the highest bidder. Basically the MOD is looking for the best value for the money they can get, and will assess from there. She might be broken up for scrap, if someone can throw together a good deal she'll end up a museum ship (though that would be presumably hard), or any number of other schemes.
then you would have to let them bundle in an AV product and let all of the 3rd party security vendor's go out of business. One could even argue windows is not so much inherently defective, after all, they have a security alert telling you to have an AV, firewall and account control, and if you don't patch, well, the car company doesn't drive to your house to do repairs, you have to take the vehicle in for service when you get a note, MS sends you a note about a free patch, it's up to you to install it. Your car (to continue to analogy) might not come with winter tyres (or even tyres at all), but they sure expect you to have them when you operate the vehicle, and operating the vehicle without tyres well, sorta works, but it's not really a defect that the car doesn't work properly without them.
I think the broader issue is what to do about security and the generally bad behaviour of computers on a network. Like it or not the ISP's have become the connection between users and anything they can do harm to, so it may be that it falls to them, to in some way compel users to fix their stuff, and provide services to do so. It's that or we need licence repair shops where you can get your computer a 'repair' (security check, something along those lines) with a certificate saying it was safe as of this time. Which seems like a monumentally unnecessary challenge when your ISP probably knows if you have a virus, and can usually walk you through fixing it.
Except that the unit cost is probably if it's made in south korea. Put that in the US and you're looking at double the price. And while they are similar in purpose, they are very different actual weapons. The daewoo is a 5.56 mm rifle with a grenade launcher. The XM25 is well, just a grenade launcher. And then you get into the whole computerization part.
And clearly the RoK sees a weapon like this as useful against the DPRK, but without an actual shooting war that's educated guesswork at best.
Afghanistan and Iraq are, tactically, very different. In afghanistan you're regularly seeing engagement ranges (sniping basically) of ~2Km, Iraq that happens, but you're mostly seeing more 300m engagement range. The relatively close quarters stuff is happening in afghanistan too though. 800m seems like a good number, it's probably not all that hard to make one that does 800m or 300m effectively, but to do much more than that gets dicey, and it's about on par with the trusty ole m16. It's almost certainly designed for far more than just Iraq and Afghanistan too. How much use it would have in North korea is anyone's guess, but there are a lot of potential hot spots in the world, and weapon designers are trying to be prepared for all of them.
I would think you're right, a weapon like this is a one a squad or 1 a platoon, not one per soldier. But a typical soldier only carries about 300 rounds, you're not exactly spraying ammo like crazy with 300 rounds, and if they're specialized rounds, on a specialist, well, you don't need as many of them. Literally it's the same sort of thing as smart bombs, the munition itself costs more (sometimes a LOT more) but if you actually hit what you're shooting at it makes up for it.
Last I checked the unit replacement cost on the m16 is about $600, I'm not an american, nor do I own an m16 but my understanding is the civilian version is several thousands of dollars, but the AR15 (the semi auto only version) is only about 500 bucks, so I would say they're actually in the 500-600 dollar range. I'm not sure it's entirely fair to compare that to a XM25 though, they're new, which makes them expensive, and 35k isn't really a lot of money if it gets you out of fights faster (or more to the point keeps your guys from getting killed more).
The point is that it's out of the development/prototype phase and now into actual deployment. It's not new, it's just new to the field. I don't know specifically about the XM25 but a lot of places experimenting with new weapons have been concerned about the mass, and desert (i.e. heat and sand) performance, which delayed them somewhat.
IMO part of the problem is that they positioned the protest wrong. People don't want to screw up time with family to make a protest. If you cause a fuss you may never get where you're going. If they'd set the protest for sunday it would be a protest coming back. And you could always tell your boss you got caught up in the protest, true or not. Going out do you really want to explain to your relatives that you were busy protesting?
The other thing is people travelling with kids might not want to protest at all. Mostly because the kids will protest the delay, and no one wants to deal with that.
or an individual research group.
Which carries with it fairly deep complications. Most of the Nobel physics prizes are relatively deep into their career when they do the work and may have supervised several students (both undergrad and grad), and collaborated on these projects with many scientists for years. How do you portion out credit to to all the involved people then?
I would contrast this with earlier nobel prizes where the winners were rewarded for work typically done early in their careers. If you've been a tenured faculty for 4 or 5 years, that means you've been around for potentially 9, 10 years, you've done a lot in there.
How about just letting MS put security essentials onto your computer as part of regular windows updates? You could even set it up to remove fake antivirus products automatically. And if it accidentally breaks a legitimate one, at least you have MSE on there, which may (or may not) be as good as whatever it removed but it's better than millions of people with fake AV's.
Or how about a walled garden security store in windows? If you want access you have to be approved for the national app store by the government (not MS), but then your software has to be both legitimate, and actually show up, you get the benefit of exposure and the consumer gets the benefit of legitimacy and working updates. The EU basically showed us how to do this with web browsers, security software is just as important, and if you do it pre-emptively you can avoid anti trust issues. To some degree this goes to the whole idea of security certificates, since you shouldn't be able to install an AV without a valid security certificate, assuming they can keep said certificates clean.
For all of the many (many) things wrong with microsoft, good security rules should acknowledge they happen to be in the majority right now, and we have to deal with the problems on their platform in the most consumer friendly and secure way possible. If that means that some boutique AV vendors get screwed, that's still preferable to the constant parade of broken norton installs and fake av programs out there.
Personally I have both avast and MSE. Avast messes with Opera a bit, but otherwise I'm quite happy with it. But MSE seems a bit better at catching stuff it doesn't.
127 to -40 is a problem. Actually it's a pretty serious problem. Well 127 on the high side is probably manageable, depending on where exactly the processor is in the engine, most inhabited places only rarely get to 50-60C, and then if you leave the vehicle out in the sun it's only 80 or 90. But about 7 years ago we had a cold snap that hit basically the great lakes, and the St. Lawrence area and it was consistently below -40 for more than two weeks, and that's in an area with ~25 or 30 million people (and by extension 25 or 30 million cars since it's north america). And that sort of thing isn't all that uncommon in a lot of canada or the US. So that's not even accounting for anywhere else in the world. I'm sure parts can exceed tolerance for a while, but I'd hate find out the 12 CPU's in my car all need to be replaced because I left it out overnight in -45 C weather.
unless of course, you're stuck with the ribbon in future, like it or not. And the sooner you learn, and adapt the better.
That was the great weakness of the ribbon in the new office. Yes, once you learn it it's much more productive. But people are generally too scared of their computer to want to learn the new stuff to benefit from it. And it's a fight that IT support staff aren't ever going to win. Ever. If engineering comes down or management says, hey look at al this cool new/easier stuff we can do with it people might comply. In my experience it's best from management. When someone who everyone knows is a mindless suite with an MBA shows how they can do something that actually looks good, well, everyone else figures it can't be that bad.
People's expectations from home matter too, and how much they can fix on their own. If I don't know where something is, but the guy in the cubicle next to me does I can usually save IT some time teaching me. If on the other hand you use linux, which virtually no one knows, and figuring out even basic things REQUIRES an IT guy, because no one who does any of the actual work has linux at home, well, you're adding considerably to your support costs. Then you get into problems where things don't work, either on your end or for the customer. If you didn't pay for it, they have no obligation or desire to support you. If you paid 5000 bucks a seat for a piece of software you should have in your contract who you contact about things not working and they can go all the way up and down the chain to find people who can fix it, including devs. If you have a problem with something open source, pay someone to be an in house developer or pay for.. wait wasn't the point to not have to pay someone?