The one thing that separates crackpots from "Real Scientists" is who gets grant money. Look at String Theory or Post-modernism. Prestigious journals in both endeavors where both hoaxed. Post-modernism by the infamous Sokal affair (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair) and String Theory by the Bogandov Affair (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_Affair). There are also a lot of dubious things going on in the softer sciences that are heavily politicized. Meanwhile a lot of good fundamental physics and comp-sci research goes unfunded because it doesn't qualify for a DARPA grant.
Imagine a poor inventor working on things like Tesla Motors, SpaceX or EEstore are doing. They'd probably get rejected for grants because those things are too far out of the mainstream.
I would nominate Bram Cohen as a recent example of a lone genius coming along and changing everything. The guy worked for a year at least, on the verge of being broke, and built Bittorrent which truly changed the world. It was based on his own brilliant synthesis of game theory and computer science.
I got a T-Mobile flex plan. You always pay the same amount every month. A separate flex account is provided for roaming and other charges. You refill your flex account over the phone or online as needed. If your flex account runs dry your roaming is disabled and you have to add money -- but at least there aren't any surprise bills.
I have been following "new" energy for years. Every "new" energy story is a mystery novel with the last half removed.
1. Big announcement. 2. Impressive Demo. 4. Denunciation by "mainstream science" (Second Law of Thermodynamics, etc explained again) 5. ???? 6. Never hear anything else about it ever again good or bad.
The teacher has nothing to do with the NEA getting money from Microsoft. She's just a low-level drone who's only source of information was maybe an education tech conference she went to and the mainstream media.
A better letter would have pointed out that Linux is being used in industry, in the world's largest companies, the U.S government and so forth and that children should have the skills to compete in the workforce by learning Linux. The whole free software thing should also be explained in the letter throughly, perhaps with a page or two containing a complete idiots guide to the basics of the GPL, etc. Perhaps reprinted from C-Net or some other technology media source.
They can block anyone's free speech and blame the whole thing on a mistake.
From what I've seen over the years, the incompetence defense works every single time. Officials can do something they want to do and blame it on a mistake and the public accepts it unquestioningly every single time. It's one of the most perfect propaganda techniques ever engineered.
For about the last 2 years I Have been getting continuously hit with botnet hosts every 2 minutes trying every conceivable email address@mydomain. I tried writing a rule to autoblock them with iptables but the list grew into the 10s of thousands and slowed down my machine. I put a greylist on it and now they get greylisted but they keep coming and coming and coming. There must have been more than a million greylisted email attempts over the preceding two years. Far more than the amount of legit mail I get.
What is this ridiculous focus on making sure everybody gets good grades? The point of education is not to get good grades but to learn something useful. I can't think of anything more useful in the sciences than to be able to use mathematical calculations to analyze the results of an experiment.
I have never heard of an employer asking to see a college transcript. When I have hired, I have never cared the least as to what an interviewee's grades where in college. It's the skills they have and whether they can apply them that is important.
I agree. Iphone Pandora w/3G is the cat's pajamas for music radio. Sirius seems like an utter joke now. Perhaps they could switch to being a satellite based bandwidth provider for remote areas?
Anyone know of anything like Pandora for news/comedy radio? I'd like to hear some niche podcasts, etc.
Meanwhile in the 1970s 'unsuccessful' nerds, like John Dolan, were working security in truck yards in Oakland with poor abused old dogs with their vocal cords cut out as their only companions. This is all documented in "Pleasant Hell" which should make a good companion read to a Paul Allen or Steve Wozniak biography.
After the very early enlightenment (late 1700s - early 1800s), philosophy was put to use to reconcile reason with religion and despotism (Hegel, Kant) or to explain why the two could not be reconciled (Nietzsche). Finally the quest ended in defeat and nihilism with the existentialists during the mid 20th century.
This of course has nothing to do with computer science.
There are some ignored philosophers who might tangentially be of interest to computer science like some of Von Mises's technical methodological works such as "Theory and History" but no one will teach that to you at any university.
I was watching MTV several years ago and remember hearing the words "Burger King" getting bleeped out in the "Humpty Dance" song in the verse "I once got busy in a Burger King bathroom".
So, IMHO, I think this is probably part of a general policy to not allow product placement in song lyrics.
The whole packaged securities things and off balance sheet entities, and incredibly complex securities where just for the sole purpose of bamboozling regulators and naive and trusting foreigners. They all trusted that the "really smart wall street guys" and their super trustworthy rating agencies where doing something so complicated they could never understand it but it was all well and good and they should trust them. The rating agencies didn't really know the risk of the securities they were underwriting but loved all the underwriting fees. The risk was said to be removed because it was all guaranteed by other institutions. The other institutions didn't know what their risk was but they loved the premiums and there was no regulation of the sector anyway.
All the mathematical models failed because they were incomplete -- Just like Long-Term Capital Management failed, even though it was run by nobel prize winners because they never expected bond spreads to widen. They just didn't write that into the program. Sure they had a good math model but the underlying theory was wrong and/or incomplete.
I leave you with two quotes to ponder:
"Sometimes a concept is baffling not because it is profound but because it's wrong." - Edward O. Wilson
"It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to." - The Catcher in the Rye Holden Caulfield in Chapter 21
Well if you want to go with a proprietary trading tool that runs well on Linux, the "think or swim" trading platform/brokerage has a Java Client that runs on Linux.
EclipseTrader is probably the most advanced open source trading program. It interfaces with some trading platforms and intra-day data feeds. It has several hundred technical indicators. It also is very expandable and easy to write modules for (in Java). I wrote some technical analysis modules for the back-testing system and was fairly impressed with how well it worked as it is based on the very solid OSGI/Eclipse model. I'd say it actually competes fairly well with some of the proprietary trading platforms I have used, especially if you are a Java coder and want to add modules to it to aid in implementing your particular trading style.
It's not the kind of doom where people tell you the best thing you can do about it is to buy MREs, take a gun out into the mountains, bug out and prepare to defend your MREs from hungry zombies for the next six months.
Personally, I think the best response is probably PANIC SEX!!!
Imagine! You could control a robot playing tennis remotely! Oh wait.. What if the network lags. Oh we just simulate what would actually be going on the remote tennis court on the local machine and just pause the remote player's screen until we actually hit the ball and then we can send him a message telling him how hard we hit it and in what direction.
Oh WAIT! We're talking about REALITY not a simulation. Well then.. If we lagged we missed the ball and there's no way to paper over it like we can in virtual worlds.
If you had a traditional robot playing tennis running a hard real-time operating system then everything from moving into place, winding up and swinging would all take a predictable amount of time and given a good algorithm one could play a pretty good game.
Anyway, Tennis is a relatively trivial example but things that happen in the physical world where physical forces are in play do not tolerate internet like latency very well. You cannot send xon/xoff like flow control signals to reality.
I think the U.S is stuck in a rut. Competition is a good thing to get us moving again. It certainly did during the cold war. It's also good to see that China now is starting to contribute to advancing the state of the art instead of just catching up with the west. That will benefit all of humanity.
I do my own mail forwarding for a small domain that I own. There are about 20 valid email addresses at that domain. For the last year at least I have had a botnet harassing my mail server trying every conceivable random email address at my domain. I tried blocking by ip and iptables got so huge (10000+ ips) that it just about crashed my machine. I finally implemented gray listing so my machine just tells the botnet to buzz off and doesn't store any data but it's still an on-going problem. This whole botnet thing is like some surreal science fiction movie.
From the Greenplum article mentioned in the summary:
Most or all of the PostgreSQL data access methods are left intact. The big changes to PostgreSQL lie in the areas of query optimization, planning, and execution. I.e., Greenplum has its own way of breaking up a query into pieces â" and of course of seeing that data gets shipped among nodes â" but the low-level operators for storage and access are from PostgreSQL.
Slashdot Mirror
So I guess the string theorists are all crackpots? I might even agree with you :).
The one thing that separates crackpots from "Real Scientists" is who gets grant money. Look at String Theory or Post-modernism. Prestigious journals in both endeavors where both hoaxed. Post-modernism by the infamous Sokal affair (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair) and String Theory by the Bogandov Affair (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_Affair). There are also a lot of dubious things going on in the softer sciences that are heavily politicized. Meanwhile a lot of good fundamental physics and comp-sci research goes unfunded because it doesn't qualify for a DARPA grant.
Imagine a poor inventor working on things like Tesla Motors, SpaceX or EEstore are doing. They'd probably get rejected for grants because those things are too far out of the mainstream.
I would nominate Bram Cohen as a recent example of a lone genius coming along and changing everything. The guy worked for a year at least, on the verge of being broke, and built Bittorrent which truly changed the world. It was based on his own brilliant synthesis of game theory and computer science.
I got a T-Mobile flex plan. You always pay the same amount every month. A separate flex account is provided for roaming and other charges. You refill your flex account over the phone or online as needed. If your flex account runs dry your roaming is disabled and you have to add money -- but at least there aren't any surprise bills.
I have been following "new" energy for years. Every "new" energy story is a mystery novel with the last half removed.
1. Big announcement.
2. Impressive Demo.
4. Denunciation by "mainstream science" (Second Law of Thermodynamics, etc explained again)
5. ????
6. Never hear anything else about it ever again good or bad.
The teacher has nothing to do with the NEA getting money from Microsoft. She's just a low-level drone who's only source of information was maybe an education tech conference she went to and the mainstream media.
A better letter would have pointed out that Linux is being used in industry, in the world's largest companies, the U.S government and so forth and that children should have the skills to compete in the workforce by learning Linux. The whole free software thing should also be explained in the letter throughly, perhaps with a page or two containing a complete idiots guide to the basics of the GPL, etc. Perhaps reprinted from C-Net or some other technology media source.
They can block anyone's free speech and blame the whole thing on a mistake.
From what I've seen over the years, the incompetence defense works every single time. Officials can do something they want to do and blame it on a mistake and the public accepts it unquestioningly every single time. It's one of the most perfect propaganda techniques ever engineered.
For about the last 2 years I Have been getting continuously hit with botnet hosts every 2 minutes trying every conceivable email address@mydomain. I tried writing a rule to autoblock them with iptables but the list grew into the 10s of thousands and slowed down my machine. I put a greylist on it and now they get greylisted but they keep coming and coming and coming. There must have been more than a million greylisted email attempts over the preceding two years. Far more than the amount of legit mail I get.
What is this ridiculous focus on making sure everybody gets good grades? The point of education is not to get good grades but to learn something useful. I can't think of anything more useful in the sciences than to be able to use mathematical calculations to analyze the results of an experiment.
I have never heard of an employer asking to see a college transcript. When I have hired, I have never cared the least as to what an interviewee's grades where in college. It's the skills they have and whether they can apply them that is important.
I agree. Iphone Pandora w/3G is the cat's pajamas for music radio. Sirius seems like an utter joke now. Perhaps they could switch to being a satellite based bandwidth provider for remote areas?
Anyone know of anything like Pandora for news/comedy radio? I'd like to hear some niche podcasts, etc.
Meanwhile in the 1970s 'unsuccessful' nerds, like John Dolan, were working security in truck yards in Oakland with poor abused old dogs with their vocal cords cut out as their only companions. This is all documented in "Pleasant Hell" which should make a good companion read to a Paul Allen or Steve Wozniak biography.
After the very early enlightenment (late 1700s - early 1800s), philosophy was put to use to reconcile reason with religion and despotism (Hegel, Kant) or to explain why the two could not be reconciled (Nietzsche). Finally the quest ended in defeat and nihilism with the existentialists during the mid 20th century.
This of course has nothing to do with computer science.
There are some ignored philosophers who might tangentially be of interest to computer science like some of Von Mises's technical methodological works such as "Theory and History" but no one will teach that to you at any university.
I was watching MTV several years ago and remember hearing the words "Burger King" getting bleeped out in the "Humpty Dance" song in the verse "I once got busy in a Burger King bathroom".
So, IMHO, I think this is probably part of a general policy to not allow product placement in song lyrics.
The whole packaged securities things and off balance sheet entities, and incredibly complex securities where just for the sole purpose of bamboozling regulators and naive and trusting foreigners. They all trusted that the "really smart wall street guys" and their super trustworthy rating agencies where doing something so complicated they could never understand it but it was all well and good and they should trust them. The rating agencies didn't really know the risk of the securities they were underwriting but loved all the underwriting fees. The risk was said to be removed because it was all guaranteed by other institutions. The other institutions didn't know what their risk was but they loved the premiums and there was no regulation of the sector anyway.
All the mathematical models failed because they were incomplete -- Just like Long-Term Capital Management failed, even though it was run by nobel prize winners because they never expected bond spreads to widen. They just didn't write that into the program. Sure they had a good math model but the underlying theory was wrong and/or incomplete.
I leave you with two quotes to ponder:
"Sometimes a concept is baffling not because it is profound but because it's wrong." - Edward O. Wilson
"It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to." - The Catcher in the Rye Holden Caulfield in Chapter 21
If only DNS was expanded to include service type and return port number.
For example
$ nslookup www.slashdot.org:smtp
Name: www.slashdot.org
Service: smtp
Address: 192.168.1.5:4000
Then we'd actually be able to easily use all 48 bits available.
Well if you want to go with a proprietary trading tool that runs well on Linux, the "think or swim" trading platform/brokerage has a Java Client that runs on Linux.
EclipseTrader is probably the most advanced open source trading program. It interfaces with some trading platforms and intra-day data feeds. It has several hundred technical indicators. It also is very expandable and easy to write modules for (in Java). I wrote some technical analysis modules for the back-testing system and was fairly impressed with how well it worked as it is based on the very solid OSGI/Eclipse model. I'd say it actually competes fairly well with some of the proprietary trading platforms I have used, especially if you are a Java coder and want to add modules to it to aid in implementing your particular trading style.
Unless a scientific theory can reliably predict the future it's just a narrative.
I kind of like this LHC doom.
It's not the kind of doom where people tell you the best thing you can do about it is to buy MREs, take a gun out into the mountains, bug out and prepare to defend your MREs from hungry zombies for the next six months.
Personally, I think the best response is probably PANIC SEX!!!
The iphone doesn't run flash and it costs twice as much. No one will ever buy one!
Imagine! You could control a robot playing tennis remotely! Oh wait.. What if the network lags. Oh we just simulate what would actually be going on the remote tennis court on the local machine and just pause the remote player's screen until we actually hit the ball and then we can send him a message telling him how hard we hit it and in what direction.
Oh WAIT! We're talking about REALITY not a simulation. Well then.. If we lagged we missed the ball and there's no way to paper over it like we can in virtual worlds.
If you had a traditional robot playing tennis running a hard real-time operating system then everything from moving into place, winding up and swinging would all take a predictable amount of time and given a good algorithm one could play a pretty good game.
Anyway, Tennis is a relatively trivial example but things that happen in the physical world where physical forces are in play do not tolerate internet like latency very well. You cannot send xon/xoff like flow control signals to reality.
I think the U.S is stuck in a rut. Competition is a good thing to get us moving again. It certainly did during the cold war. It's also good to see that China now is starting to contribute to advancing the state of the art instead of just catching up with the west. That will benefit all of humanity.
I do my own mail forwarding for a small domain that I own. There are about 20 valid email addresses at that domain. For the last year at least I have had a botnet harassing my mail server trying every conceivable random email address at my domain. I tried blocking by ip and iptables got so huge (10000+ ips) that it just about crashed my machine. I finally implemented gray listing so my machine just tells the botnet to buzz off and doesn't store any data but it's still an on-going problem. This whole botnet thing is like some surreal science fiction movie.
From the Greenplum article mentioned in the summary:
I think I read the same comment modded up to 5 10 times in a row now.
The comment is always a variations on: "This is fusion. No it's not a viable source of power."