The current "Internet" (all the interconnected computers on the Internet) has no sentience. There's no way moving the Internet onto a single hardware platform would cause this to spontaneously happen.
Skynet was a single mythical and very powerful AI which was given access to the Internet to prevent the spread of a computer virus. It was infected with that virus and then it proceeded to break into all the individually managed computers and take them over. From the Terminator mythology, we have no reason to think Skynet was made up from a single hardware platform as it was set in present day and we don't have a single platform that makes up the Internet.
The problem was the introduction of AI, not there being a world wide computer network. We already have a world wide computer network, it's just not made up of computers of a single platform.
He was using their words, but really, what does that mean? A whole lot of nothing. It sounds impressive I guess. It would be a shared computer as much as the Google cluster is a global-scale shared computer.
Each node card is logically just like any cluster node made from commodity hardware. It runs linux and has a bunch of CPUs. The internal architecture of a Blue Gene node a lot is different than a commodity node, but from outside, they operate the same.
And another thing, it would really be no different than the existing Internet. The existing Internet has no sentience, so neither would this implementation. It's not like the Internet could all of a sudden become self aware and take over the world.
"We're spending over a billion dollars a MILE for a light rail system that runs at grade." -- Your original assertion
The billion dollars a mile for light rail figure just cannot possibly stand, even with the most generous interpretation. This document you referenced includes costs for far more than the light rail project and no longer represents current plans anyway. Your 6.2 billion figure includes costs for segments of light rail (UW stadium to U district and U district to Northgate) that there are no actual plans to build right now. Even if we include those segments, costs and their added mileage, there's no way to push the construction + financing costs to a billion dollars a mile. Even including operating costs to 2040, there's no way it's a billion dollars a mile (given that all of Sound Transit's costs [light rail, buses, heavy rail, etc] only reach 30 billion till 2040 per your document). Like I said, all of theses figures no longer represent approved plans anyway.
Westlake to SeaTac is the only segment currently under construction. The only other segment that currently has approval is WestLake to UW stadium. On page 15 of the document you referenced you'll see the financing costs for the initial segment are 200 million dollars and the for the UW link 131 million dollars (p15). So the cost for the UW to SeaTac segment is still only about 4.2 billion including financing [2440m+200m (Westlake to SeaTac construction + financing) 1500m+131m [Westlake to UW construction + financing]).
I don't think it should be any surprise that a February 2001 estimate would be inaccurate. There have been some fairly consequential events in the world that have effected the price of everything in the US. The plan referenced in that article you linked which had a 3.6b estimate is not even the current plan. That said, the plan from the article (3.6b) is more similar to the current SeaTac to UW stadium plan (4.2b), than it is the SeaTac to Northgate plan (your 6.2b estimate). From the article, "Currently, about 21 miles are included in the $3.6 billion cost estimate (from NE 45 St. In the University of Washington area to SeaTac)...".
Your figure on the Sound Transit 2 light rail budget is way off. I don't know what other light rail system to which you'd be referring either. The segment currently under construction (Westlake to SeaTac airport) is about 16 miles long, meaning it would have to cost 16 billion dollars using your billion dollars per mile figure. The budgeted amount is only 2.44 billion dollars. The 3 mile UW extension is about 1.5 billion, largely because it's all tunnel, still short of your 1 billion dollars per mile figure though.
Washington does not have the highest gas tax, not surprisingly it's actually CA. Just search for gas taxes by state on google. Here's a direct link as well.
People don't hate Python. People hate the people who go around trolling discussion of every other programming language saying how much better Python is than the language being discussed.
Ha. I was thinking that same thing, mostly papers about the computational portion and not so much about medically relevant results. I think Folding at home is probably as much a needle in the haystack search as SETI.
The GUI is missing from the most current Linux download, it was there in 5.10.21 when I last installed it. There was definitely an oversight somewhere, either in updating the documentation or including the GUI. If you run/run_client --help it will give you the options. This is pretty standard for Linux/UNIX. This difference in friendliness of Linux/UNIX installers/programs vs other platforms (Windows/Mac) is not just a problem with BOINC. Given the small number of non-technical users running Linux on the desktop, I don't think they're probably losing a ton of CPU time.
Without SETI at home, the SETI project would have very little or no computational power available to it. Without Folding at home, Stanford, as well as cancer research at large, still has enormous computational power available to it.
Though I can find no definitive number it seems like ten of billions of dollars are being spent on cancer research every year. I don't think there's any shortage of resources being given to cancer research.
Picking a less inflammatory way to say that next time would be the way to go.
Without SETI at home, the SETI project would have very little or no computation power available to it. Without Folding at home, Stanford, as well as cancer research at large, still has enormous computational power available to it.
I work for a genomics department at a university and many people here do cancer and other disease related research. We're funded for over twenty-three million dollars a year and we have no shortage of computational power.
I only played briefly one night over Thanksgiving weekend. I think it's likely many people played little or not at all. I don't think one holiday weekend is really indicative of a pattern of poor up time.
Most downtime is scheduled and well off peak local playing hours. I think my server (first Frostwolf, currently Uldaman) has only been down outside the schedule a few times in the 2 years I've played. Granted, I only play about 10 hours a week and my characters live on a low population server. Generally Blizzard offers free character transfers for queued servers if that's the sort of trouble you're talking about.
Though I guess it would be possible, clustering an online game would probably be rather difficult, of questionable value, and significantly increase complexity. The failover time would probably cause most people to quit their session anyway. At the very least, it would be a noticeable interruption to game play and would probably cause many of the people on the failed server to end up dead. The only way to prevent that would be to stop gameplay for everyone on the cluster until the failover is complete which doesn't seem like a great option either.
Too bad Americans pay more per capita for health care than any other industrialized nation. You're already paying for all those people without health insurance. When they go into the emergency room for every health-related need and never pay rather than get preventative care, guess who ends up paying those costs. Certainly not the hospital or the publicly traded health insurance company.
You're already paying for national health care. You're also paying for advertising, lobbying, dividends, as well salaries and bonuses to management who keep profits and dividends up.
Yeah, let's completely disregard all the money Americans are pumping into the private health insurance system. I mean because if we switch to national health care, that money will just disappear!
Yes, if you completely forget the cost of maintaining that military that fights the war, then you're right. Too bad the defense budget (DOD, Homeland Security Allocations to DOD, and Veterans Adm.), even when there's not a war is about $500 billion a year. Furthermore, Medicare services the most health care intense portion of our population. Using it to generalize the overall cost of a national health care system is completely inaccurate.
There are special mobile versions of many Google apps. I routinely use both maps and Gmail on my windows mobile phone. These are perhaps the only web applications I use on my phone. They're both pretty simple and responsive. In any case, I'll be happy to trade in my Windows Mobile phone for a Google-based phone when they come out.
I don't really expect any level of ethical behavior from corporations. Corporations have two goals: increase the price of their stock and produce dividends for investors. To that end, they may accidentially or perhaps even intentionally act ethically, but it's certainly not to be expected. I do, however, expect the government to provide sufficient oversight of corporations.
I think what people are expressing is that the Congress should not expect ethical behavior from corporations when their actions have been ethically questionable and it's their job to regulate the corporations. Clearly in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, congress has allowed privacy and human rights to fall by the wayside worldwide.
Maybe we're not making 50 cent squeak toys here anymore, but we are making things like commercial aircraft, power system components, and large construction and earth moving equipment which all these developing nations will need. I heard on CNBC recently that the US still has the largest amount of exports in dollars each year, 20% vs China at 8%. We're making very complex products in the US which require very skilled labor and quality on every level and that's something we should be proud of.
Slashdot Mirror
The current "Internet" (all the interconnected computers on the Internet) has no sentience. There's no way moving the Internet onto a single hardware platform would cause this to spontaneously happen.
Skynet was a single mythical and very powerful AI which was given access to the Internet to prevent the spread of a computer virus. It was infected with that virus and then it proceeded to break into all the individually managed computers and take them over. From the Terminator mythology, we have no reason to think Skynet was made up from a single hardware platform as it was set in present day and we don't have a single platform that makes up the Internet.
The problem was the introduction of AI, not there being a world wide computer network. We already have a world wide computer network, it's just not made up of computers of a single platform.
"global-scale shared computer"
He was using their words, but really, what does that mean? A whole lot of nothing. It sounds impressive I guess. It would be a shared computer as much as the Google cluster is a global-scale shared computer.
https://asc.llnl.gov/computing_resources/bluegenel/configuration.html
Each node card is logically just like any cluster node made from commodity hardware. It runs linux and has a bunch of CPUs. The internal architecture of a Blue Gene node a lot is different than a commodity node, but from outside, they operate the same.
And another thing, it would really be no different than the existing Internet. The existing Internet has no sentience, so neither would this implementation. It's not like the Internet could all of a sudden become self aware and take over the world.
Thank you for that post, you saved me the trouble of writing my own.
... who knows? Axiom 0: people are stupid.
Given the fact that Blue Gene is a cluster by definition
"We're spending over a billion dollars a MILE for a light rail system that runs at grade." -- Your original assertion
...".
The billion dollars a mile for light rail figure just cannot possibly stand, even with the most generous interpretation. This document you referenced includes costs for far more than the light rail project and no longer represents current plans anyway. Your 6.2 billion figure includes costs for segments of light rail (UW stadium to U district and U district to Northgate) that there are no actual plans to build right now. Even if we include those segments, costs and their added mileage, there's no way to push the construction + financing costs to a billion dollars a mile. Even including operating costs to 2040, there's no way it's a billion dollars a mile (given that all of Sound Transit's costs [light rail, buses, heavy rail, etc] only reach 30 billion till 2040 per your document). Like I said, all of theses figures no longer represent approved plans anyway.
Westlake to SeaTac is the only segment currently under construction. The only other segment that currently has approval is WestLake to UW stadium. On page 15 of the document you referenced you'll see the financing costs for the initial segment are 200 million dollars and the for the UW link 131 million dollars (p15). So the cost for the UW to SeaTac segment is still only about 4.2 billion including financing [2440m+200m (Westlake to SeaTac construction + financing) 1500m+131m [Westlake to UW construction + financing]).
I don't think it should be any surprise that a February 2001 estimate would be inaccurate. There have been some fairly consequential events in the world that have effected the price of everything in the US. The plan referenced in that article you linked which had a 3.6b estimate is not even the current plan. That said, the plan from the article (3.6b) is more similar to the current SeaTac to UW stadium plan (4.2b), than it is the SeaTac to Northgate plan (your 6.2b estimate). From the article, "Currently, about 21 miles are included in the $3.6 billion cost estimate (from NE 45 St. In the University of Washington area to SeaTac)
Your figure on the Sound Transit 2 light rail budget is way off. I don't know what other light rail system to which you'd be referring either. The segment currently under construction (Westlake to SeaTac airport) is about 16 miles long, meaning it would have to cost 16 billion dollars using your billion dollars per mile figure. The budgeted amount is only 2.44 billion dollars. The 3 mile UW extension is about 1.5 billion, largely because it's all tunnel, still short of your 1 billion dollars per mile figure though.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2002181534_soundbudget16m.html
http://www.seattlechannel.org/issues/soundTransit.asp
Washington does not have the highest gas tax, not surprisingly it's actually CA. Just search for gas taxes by state on google. Here's a direct link as well.
Could this help prevent circumvention of DRM?
Rather.
Could this to help prevent circumvention of DRM?
In Seattle, WA we have Diebold voting machines which do have a paper tape, though most people don't use them still.
People don't hate Python. People hate the people who go around trolling discussion of every other programming language saying how much better Python is than the language being discussed.
Ha. I was thinking that same thing, mostly papers about the computational portion and not so much about medically relevant results. I think Folding at home is probably as much a needle in the haystack search as SETI.
The GUI is missing from the most current Linux download, it was there in 5.10.21 when I last installed it. There was definitely an oversight somewhere, either in updating the documentation or including the GUI. If you run /run_client --help it will give you the options. This is pretty standard for Linux/UNIX. This difference in friendliness of Linux/UNIX installers/programs vs other platforms (Windows/Mac) is not just a problem with BOINC. Given the small number of non-technical users running Linux on the desktop, I don't think they're probably losing a ton of CPU time.
Without SETI at home, the SETI project would have very little or no computational power available to it. Without Folding at home, Stanford, as well as cancer research at large, still has enormous computational power available to it.
Though I can find no definitive number it seems like ten of billions of dollars are being spent on cancer research every year. I don't think there's any shortage of resources being given to cancer research.
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/ReleaseNotes
Holy crap, reading the documentation helps!
Picking a less inflammatory way to say that next time would be the way to go.
Without SETI at home, the SETI project would have very little or no computation power available to it. Without Folding at home, Stanford, as well as cancer research at large, still has enormous computational power available to it.
I work for a genomics department at a university and many people here do cancer and other disease related research. We're funded for over twenty-three million dollars a year and we have no shortage of computational power.
"As poll numbers change, we will attempt to expand our selection of candidates to include any who rise into the leading ranks."
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/research/4237333.html?series=46
I only played briefly one night over Thanksgiving weekend. I think it's likely many people played little or not at all. I don't think one holiday weekend is really indicative of a pattern of poor up time.
Most downtime is scheduled and well off peak local playing hours. I think my server (first Frostwolf, currently Uldaman) has only been down outside the schedule a few times in the 2 years I've played. Granted, I only play about 10 hours a week and my characters live on a low population server. Generally Blizzard offers free character transfers for queued servers if that's the sort of trouble you're talking about.
Though I guess it would be possible, clustering an online game would probably be rather difficult, of questionable value, and significantly increase complexity. The failover time would probably cause most people to quit their session anyway. At the very least, it would be a noticeable interruption to game play and would probably cause many of the people on the failed server to end up dead. The only way to prevent that would be to stop gameplay for everyone on the cluster until the failover is complete which doesn't seem like a great option either.
Too bad Americans pay more per capita for health care than any other industrialized nation. You're already paying for all those people without health insurance. When they go into the emergency room for every health-related need and never pay rather than get preventative care, guess who ends up paying those costs. Certainly not the hospital or the publicly traded health insurance company.
You're already paying for national health care. You're also paying for advertising, lobbying, dividends, as well salaries and bonuses to management who keep profits and dividends up.
Yeah, let's completely disregard all the money Americans are pumping into the private health insurance system. I mean because if we switch to national health care, that money will just disappear!
Yes, if you completely forget the cost of maintaining that military that fights the war, then you're right. Too bad the defense budget (DOD, Homeland Security Allocations to DOD, and Veterans Adm.), even when there's not a war is about $500 billion a year. Furthermore, Medicare services the most health care intense portion of our population. Using it to generalize the overall cost of a national health care system is completely inaccurate.
There are special mobile versions of many Google apps. I routinely use both maps and Gmail on my windows mobile phone. These are perhaps the only web applications I use on my phone. They're both pretty simple and responsive. In any case, I'll be happy to trade in my Windows Mobile phone for a Google-based phone when they come out.
I don't really expect any level of ethical behavior from corporations. Corporations have two goals: increase the price of their stock and produce dividends for investors. To that end, they may accidentially or perhaps even intentionally act ethically, but it's certainly not to be expected. I do, however, expect the government to provide sufficient oversight of corporations.
I think what people are expressing is that the Congress should not expect ethical behavior from corporations when their actions have been ethically questionable and it's their job to regulate the corporations. Clearly in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, congress has allowed privacy and human rights to fall by the wayside worldwide.
Streets run parallel to each other in downtown Seattle?! Can lines be parallel when then change direction and inexplicably stop for periods?
Maybe we're not making 50 cent squeak toys here anymore, but we are making things like commercial aircraft, power system components, and large construction and earth moving equipment which all these developing nations will need. I heard on CNBC recently that the US still has the largest amount of exports in dollars each year, 20% vs China at 8%. We're making very complex products in the US which require very skilled labor and quality on every level and that's something we should be proud of.