I found Mims' statement that he has "built thousands of circuits, none of which were made by randomly wiring together components" very telling. If he were to wire billions of circuits by randomly wiring together components, then he might end up with a few that were useful.
That experiment was also done. Doing it in hardware turned out to give a lot of unexpected side effects, such as not being able to remove a "dead" circuit, as it's effect on capacitance and cross talk having a real effect after all.
So in order to address this they instead tried simulation of passive analogue filters (obvious fitness function and you can control which building blocks that "nature" gets to play with) and matched against the patent data base. It turns out that you indeed end up with a lot of different filters that work very well, but can be difficult to analyze, being messy evolved creatures. And also that you find the ones that made it into the patent data base.
So, even that particular version of "we do it by design so therefore nature must have" is a bust. We've done it both ways, and both ways demonstrably work. This was hot stuff in academia in the nineties so it's not exactly brand new...
A lot of the US gets heavy seasonal snow & ice which I don't think is nearly as prevalent in the UK. Also the thought line is probably that having above ground ones are far more noticeable, in fact in some areas where they get real heavy snow they attach brightly colored metal poles to the hydrants in case they are covered by snow.
Like I said below. We have the same design in Sweden as well, and it's no problem here. If the street is clear enough of snow that the fire engine can get to the site, then it's clear enough that the fire hydrant is accessible. (And they are marked with a "flag" on a pole that shows direction and distance).
In fact when it comes to heavy snow and emergency clearing, putting the fire hydrant on the side of the street would be a liability, as that's where the snow ends up when you run the plow. Especially if there isn't a side walk, then that area would likely never be cleared as long as there's snow for the plows. That fire hydrant would thaw out in spring along with the rest of the muck.
Snow. The design you talk about works well if there is no snow on the ground.
Well, thing is we have the same kind of fire hydrant in Sweden as well. So the snow argument doesn't "hold water"... They're not difficult to find since being in the street there's not much snow on top of it (we clear our streets, if the fire engine can get there, then the fire hydrant can be used) and there's a sign on a post marking the direction and distance to the fire hydrant.
It bugs me though that I haven't ever gotten the "why are manhole covers round" when interviewing in the US. My first answer would be, "They're not. Fire hydrants are rectangular for instance. Next question please...":-)
Sexist! A keyboard should be equally good for beating anyone to death, regardless of their race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation.
Nope, men are on average much harder to beat to death than women. A wimpy keyboard may be sturdy enough to still beat a woman to death with, but a good keyboard is sturdy enough to beat a man to death with.
But your right that while gender does play a role, ethnicity or sexual orientation doesn't. Well usually at least. Some races of people are smaller and lighter on average, so let's exclude those. Don't come bragging that your keyboard held up to beating a pygmy to death!
If you actually wanted to know the reasons, rather than flame and rant from ignorance of the topic, you're perfectly capable of doing some research on the subject, and gathering facts and figures, or finding resources from others who have done so before you.
I know the reasons. Living in Europe and having worked several years in the telecoms industry. (And son, if you think that was a flame, you weren't around when the internet was young...)
I was just interested in what you thought the reasons were, since your explanation for why it might be cheaper in Romania (which BTH aren't exactly watertight) doesn't even begin to explain why the rest of Europe (barring a few dark corners) have so much better connectivity, at drastically lower cost than the US. That is to say, the part of Europe where cost and regulations are much higher and stricter than in the US.
Sure, I might have come of as a bit snarky right off the bat, but I am really interested in what your arguments are, or rather, your reasons for thinking the way you do about this issue.
That's been studied at length. And the solution is "simple", i.e. easy to state but harder to accomplish.
Terrorist organisations (from a military standpoint) rely exclusively on the civilian society for support. It's their logistics, intelligence, funding, base of operations etc. etc. So, what you need to do it distance the organisation from its support for long enough that it starves and dies. This can be done the "nice" way, like the British in Burma, whereby they armed the local population and worked with education and propaganda to isolate the communist guerilla. But you don't have to be nice as demonstrated in Kenya with the Mau Mau where strategic villages (aka "concentration camps") effectively isolated the guerilla from their support. The organisation that ultimately won was the same in name only, and it was mostly political pressure from abroad on the government that made them abandon their largely successful approach.
The other thing you have to remember is that to win takes stamina (something the US has always lacked abroad). The guerilla only have to not lose to win. As long as they exist and can perform operations they're in business. The other side on the other hand has to actually win, i.e. defeat the guerilla in detail, so that they virtually cease to exist, in order to claim victory.
Given this, there's little to support a campaign of drone strikes. It's very difficult to see what such a campaign would ultimately achieve other than as a small part of a larger strategy.
There was an article in Parameters, Scholarly quarterly journal of the US Army War College a few years back on this very topic. So it's not exactly new knowledge. If you leaf through that they often have papers on irregular warfare (not surprisingly). It's available for free online.
My math skills may be rusty, but I vaguely recall that a such a continuous function necessarily has a global maximum.
Well, not really. Matematically it may have several equal maxima, so it doesn't have to have a global maxima.
But that's mathematically. In this case there will probably be one global maxima (more or less). We probably won't see wild swings up and down that aren't part of a general trend of increase or decline. Several "trend" tops are unlikely.
The car is either autonomous, or it isn't. If it isn't autonomous, I'll drive it myself and be in control the whole time.
Let's try it on an airliner: "Either the airliner is autnomous, or it isn't. If it isn't autonomous I'll drive it myself and be in control the whole time."
Doesn't really work out. The pilot-in-command is always responsible for the safe operation of the aircraft, even when the aircraft is "flying itself". Now of course there are limits to this responsibility, if an engine falls off due to shoddy maintenance that's usually not considered a pilot error. But complex computer malfunctions are more often than not blamed on the pilot (too much so to my mind, but that's another question).
I foresee that we'll see the same development with "autonomous" cars (i.e. cars with advanced auto pilots). They'll do better on average than a human, but when the malfunction you (the "driver in command") will be left to pick up the pieces, if there are any pieces left to be picked up. As with piloting, you're average workload will decrease substantially, but when things to wrong, you now have a much more complex situation to deal with, and no time to do it. The maximum requirements on your performance actually increased even though the average decreased. If the NTSB can still say "pilot error" 99% of the time, then it'll be "driver error" 99% of the time with autonomous cars.
And like with aircraft you'll like it, since the average is long and dreary and malfunctions will be so few and far between that you can functionally ignore them.
"Sleeping in the back seat" will be just as much frowned upon as it would be in an airliner. Leaning back and having a cup of coffee would be about as far as you could stretch it.
So make one. Or is your argument that a) there might (big "might") be differences between regulatory structure and cost between Romania and the US that would make internet infrastructure in Romania cheaper to build, b) when observing that the rest of regulated high cost Europe also has much better and cheaper access to same, that "I'm right about Romania and I don't know about the rest"?
That's not an argument at all. Not even about the Romanian situation. Especially about the Romanian situation.
So what is your argument about the Swedish situation then? As you agree the supposed argument about the Romanian situation doesn't work to explain the differences between the US and most European countries when it comes to differences in internet adoption/cost/speed/caps etc.
But of course the same is true about Sweden, and almost all European countries.
For example: I have 100Mbps/100Mbps + cable tv (basic) + phone (calls extra) for $50 (and that's just because your exchange rate sucks right now). No caps, of course, there are no caps on fixed line internet, and servers etc. are OK (no outgoing SMTP, that's the only limitation).
So you want to try that argument about standards and cheap labour again?
No, I'll use the argument that man-power and regulatory compliance costs a lot more in 1st world countries, and there are lots of other stable and profitable places to invest money.
What? Are you seriously suggesting that we have less regulation and cheaper labour in my native Sweden than in the US of A?
That's a new one... And that's as far as I can tell the only merit that argument has.
As far as I can tell, there has never been a sustained system that has been cryogenically chilled in such an extreme environment (eg high neutron flux, >1000C temps).
It's not that they can't create a plug, it's that they have no idea how to do it reliably 24/7/365 x 30years.
I was under the impression that the "plug" (called "freeze valves") concept worked really well in the MSRE, with sources even claiming this was the normal mode of shutdown over the weekends. Cut the power to the cooling fan and the reactor would drain the salt into the storage tanks quite undramatically. (See e.g.: http://nucleargreen.blogspot.s...).
Now of course in this design you didn't need cryogenic cooling, since salt freezes at a rather high temperature. So I'm wondering what the scoop is? Are proposed new designs operating in a region where simple "blow on a pipe" that worked so well at the MSRE not possible anymore?
In peaceful suburbs with low justifiable homicide rates, state action is the dominating outcome to murder; execution becomes a looming, subconscious threat.
There's scant evidence that this is in fact true. Murder in these settings are almost all crimes of passion. There's no "subconcious" threat to evaluate.
Which brings us to the heart of the matter. We tend to not commit crimes due to an internalised moral compass given to us both by birth and upbringing. We tend to stay on the straight and narrow because that's the right thing to do, not because we consciously or otherwise perform a running cost-benefit analysis. (In fact, society wouldn't nearly work if that were true.) We as a species don't want to kill members of our own species, and will go to some lengths to avoid that.
There's indeed strong evidence to this as studied in the field of killology, i.e. the study of how to make men kill each other. It turns out that training a killer is a surprisingly difficult thing to do. Quoting a marine corps sergeant "One man in eighty is a natural killer. The rest we have to teach!" (Which I note corresponds nicely with the prevalence rates of psychopathy.) And it's illustrative to learn how this process is carried out. Not with moral guidance on the "rightness of killing" (which would be wholly superfluous under your model, people would just subconsciously evaluate that it's no "OK" to kill, and be done with it), but instead by instilling the automatic somatic reflex to take certain action that will result in the likely death of your opponent.
Also lots of QA people can code - automated testing is mostly coding - and lots of developers can't test at all.
If my experience is anything to go by, then the QA people on average code about as well as the developers can test. Which is to say, everything from "decent," to "not at all," depending on how good the organisation was overall.
It may be cliche, but how secure a language is depends on who is using it.
Well, this might be one of those times where "correlation is not causation" is appropriate. What I mean by this is that while the skill of the user certainly matters, so does the quality of the tool. "It's a poor workman who blames his tools" is a warning against poor workmen, not a carte blanche for shitty tools.
So of course, a tool can both help you and hinder you doing what you need to. It's no accident that you see top sportsmen obsessing over their equipment. Or why people don't clamour for manual gear boxes without synchronisation rings any more.
Now, when it comes to programming languages these interactions are very poorly understood. We don't know what makes a certain language (or features) work well for certain programmers in what situations. That said, we've amassed quite a body of evidence to suggest that some things work better than others. Functional programming languages with proper type systems for example seems to make large classes of errors just go away, by making them both obvious and impossible (since the type system wouldn't allow them). They also seem to increase productivity by a factor of four to ten, and increase system performance too boot. (Even though they're "slower" than C in micro benchmarks. Basically the same argument against C from the assembly crowd in the eighties, which we all know fell out in favour of that "slow, bloated, high-level mess" that is C...
Granted, much of this is still in the research state, and security among other things isn't important enough to make people change their ways (at least not yet), but there is a lot more interesting done, and still left to do, to just say that the tool/language etc. side of the equation doesn't matter. It clearly does.
I'm wondering if they got results without a choke, or at full choke. This might be statistically significant.
No, they actually correct for the "non random" spread of pellets in the paper using importance sampling. Which is a neat trick and really the takeaway from this paper. I.e. that you can make Monte Carlo methods work, even if you don't have a flat/uniform probability distribution.
Sure there are problems, many and obvious. It's showing its age, no doubt about it.
However, there's a reason that it won, as the stuff that came out of industry (esp. telecom) was and is so much worse that it would make your eyes bleed. Why? Well, because any reasonable solution would make the telephone company less powerful and it would make it more difficult to charge for ever little operation. Hence circuit switched everywhere, all the smarts in the center of the network, and please make that as centralised as possible.
The mistakes made in TCP (in hindsight) were at least honest. We didn't know any better then. The "mistakes" made in telecoms were made for a completely different reason. They were made from a position of power that was going to make damn sure that it didn't lose that power and technology and society be damned.
Remember, that if it weren't for TCP/IP you could have had all the X.25 or ISDN you would have been willing to pay for. Which wouldn't have been a lot... It's no accident that the pricing structure came first, and the protocols as a consequence of that, in the telecom protocols, with pricing not even part of the TCP/IP suite.
Well sure. That's an "abuse" of the system. But I bet most of these are at least honestly not working. And being passive beats being actively malicious every time.
That said. I've met plenty of people in industry that spent their days just carrying around a binder. Hell, I've been one of those guys, at least partially and at least some of the time. So again, it's not a unique to academia.
To summarize. If you haven't been in industry. Don't for a second think the grass is even a shade greener. If it looks that way to you, it's only because marketing got to it before the brown and wilting became too obvious.:-)
Well, I dunno. I think it's more a question of the size of the organisation in that case. As more people are interested, and larger entities (whether corporate or academic) things will move slower, and slower and slower. And the larger the more "useless" political types, middle managers etc. will be attracted. Like flies... Case in point, remember Usenet before the year "September never ended"? Same effect.
In any case. My main point was that academia is after all at least mostly honest. The corporate players are often openly or covertly malicious. Like Stallman put it (paraphrase), it's not a question of how much faster you can run than your competitors, rather, how much you can slow them down, by tripping them up or shooting at them. And if that makes you stand still, that doesn't matter.
You can hate on corporate types for various thing, but anyone who acts like academics know how to get anything done has never worked in academia. I work at a university and fuck me do we spend ages spinning our wheels, having meeting after endless meeting, discussing shit to death, and finally doing things 10 years after they needed to be done.
Well having done both big corporate telecoms standardisation and academia, I know which place I rather work in... (And I ultimately put my money where my mouth is. Or rather, didn't put my money as it were, salary not being an academic strong suit).
Sure, the local bike shedding can be tiresome, but our actual work, i.e. research, is cut throat and a model of efficiency and sanity. (Don't laugh. Cry if you have to, but don't laugh). There's very little politics in that side of the "business" and if you think there is, don't ever, for the love of all you hold holy, get involved in the corporate world. That's not just moving to the bad side of town, that's leaving civilisation altogether.
We used to hold the IETF, current warts and all, as the highest standard to follow (pun intended), but also saw where we were headed with the increased pressure, as TCP/IP became important to the political types and not just a nerd affair for sensible, reasonable people any more. You know, the kind of people that can listen to argument, grudgingly realise that another suggestion has technical merit and go along with that, instead of pushing their hidden agenda at all cost, and above all else.
When you've seen how the big boys make their sausage, you'd be as surprised as we were that your phone and mobile internet works at all. It's nothing short of an all out heroic struggle by the engineers in the trenches that makes it so. The rest of the system tries with all its might to prevent that from happening.
It is not my job to be a brood mare. And I don't want my role in society to be marginalized because my primary role is being a brood mare. (Also, even without modern technology, we can probably keep infant mortality down far below historical norms just with modern knowledge - even low tech sterile conditions do a lot.) Having control over when to have children broadly gives women control of their lives.
That of course depends on the actual scenario, but what you consider your job to be will probably be a luxury that society can ill afford. After the dust has settled, we'll be in a situation where we'll be fighting tooth and nail to avoid complete population collapse. We'll need scores of young people to work us out of that hole, and if you're of child bearing age, you'll bear those children. It's after all a unique skill that very few people can be put to do. (I'd for example be pretty crap at it, as I fall for the simplest and most obvious of reasons, I'm a guy.)
That's not to say that you'll be forced at gun (or club) point, but rather that society will bring down quite a bit of weight on you to "make the right decision". So for example, expect contraception to be made illegal rather than made unavailable, and anybody that interferes with a pregnancy to hang from the nearest tree. (Of course, it'd be the smart thing to do anyway, as we'll spend quite a bit of resources on the pregnant and mothers of young, so "Why would she want to do that anyway?")
After a generation or two (if we make it that far) that'll be the norm, standard, and "the way it always was", like Rob Slade puts it; "Don't go out dear, it's not good for the baby." will very rapidly morph into "Don't go out". And remember this is a good thing. It's what we want to happen, because the alternative is much, much worse.
Now, again, to say exactly how things will play out is difficult, because it depends on the scenario. If the scenario is nuclear Armageddon many bright people spent careers thinking about the consequences, and some of this information is now in the open (see e.g. Rob Slades short introduction: "Nuclear warfare 101-103" http://www.giantbomb.com/fallo... , esp. 103 deals with the aftermath. Another good book about the possible aftermath of an EMP strike is "One Second after." It is based on the US Govt. EMP commission report (and has a wikipedia page). It deals mainly with the immediate aftermath, so it doesn't really reach the "we need you to have kids"-part, but is still a somewhat realistic assessment of what society could be like. (It for example contains a long scene where refugees are triaged according to useful skill. If you're not a doctor or electrical power engineer, take a hike.)
But again. The takeaway is that what you consider your job to be will probably come so low down on the list of things to consider that it won't even make the first chapter. And that in a time when people will be far pressed to make it to the end of the first page.
But don't let that discourage you. My assigned role in such a scenario is realistically to die as quietly, and quickly as possible, so as to not use any resources best spent on the deserving. Preferably without putting any undue stress on them, mental or otherwise. I think a heroic but ultimately futile act to save the needing is my preferred way to go, but even that isn't my call. You get at least to have kids (with great loss of control of your life, but hey, nobody is going to be "in control" of much of anything), I don't get a life at all... (And if you're past the age where child bearing/rearing is a realistic occupation for you, I'll even let you lead me in the charge unto the breech. How's that for an offer you'd probably do best not to refuse?
So on a more upbeat note, lets agree that civilisation is a good thing and make our damnedest to try and preserve it, rather than go stocking up on soap just yet.
Try as I might, that kid just would not believe that he could do meaningful stuff. It's not that he didn't want to be code monkey like me, or didn't want to have a higher paying job. He just didn't think it was going to happen. I couldn't get him to try. That sort of resistance is weird, and I'm not sure I have a solid grasp of it's root cause. But if I had to call it something, I'd say it's the culture of the poor.
The usual suspect is learned helplessness. Or "you can run but you'll just die tired." If you've died tired time and time again, haven't seen anyone that hasn't, and everybody tells you by word and deed, to just die already, because what's the point of dying tired, what are you supposed to think? Or do for that matter?
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I found Mims' statement that he has "built thousands of circuits, none of which were made by randomly wiring together components" very telling. If he were to wire billions of circuits by randomly wiring together components, then he might end up with a few that were useful.
That experiment was also done. Doing it in hardware turned out to give a lot of unexpected side effects, such as not being able to remove a "dead" circuit, as it's effect on capacitance and cross talk having a real effect after all.
So in order to address this they instead tried simulation of passive analogue filters (obvious fitness function and you can control which building blocks that "nature" gets to play with) and matched against the patent data base. It turns out that you indeed end up with a lot of different filters that work very well, but can be difficult to analyze, being messy evolved creatures. And also that you find the ones that made it into the patent data base.
So, even that particular version of "we do it by design so therefore nature must have" is a bust. We've done it both ways, and both ways demonstrably work. This was hot stuff in academia in the nineties so it's not exactly brand new...
A lot of the US gets heavy seasonal snow & ice which I don't think is nearly as prevalent in the UK. Also the thought line is probably that having above ground ones are far more noticeable, in fact in some areas where they get real heavy snow they attach brightly colored metal poles to the hydrants in case they are covered by snow.
Like I said below. We have the same design in Sweden as well, and it's no problem here. If the street is clear enough of snow that the fire engine can get to the site, then it's clear enough that the fire hydrant is accessible. (And they are marked with a "flag" on a pole that shows direction and distance).
In fact when it comes to heavy snow and emergency clearing, putting the fire hydrant on the side of the street would be a liability, as that's where the snow ends up when you run the plow. Especially if there isn't a side walk, then that area would likely never be cleared as long as there's snow for the plows. That fire hydrant would thaw out in spring along with the rest of the muck.
Snow. The design you talk about works well if there is no snow on the ground.
Well, thing is we have the same kind of fire hydrant in Sweden as well. So the snow argument doesn't "hold water"... They're not difficult to find since being in the street there's not much snow on top of it (we clear our streets, if the fire engine can get there, then the fire hydrant can be used) and there's a sign on a post marking the direction and distance to the fire hydrant.
It bugs me though that I haven't ever gotten the "why are manhole covers round" when interviewing in the US. My first answer would be, "They're not. Fire hydrants are rectangular for instance. Next question please..." :-)
Sexist! A keyboard should be equally good for beating anyone to death, regardless of their race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation.
Nope, men are on average much harder to beat to death than women. A wimpy keyboard may be sturdy enough to still beat a woman to death with, but a good keyboard is sturdy enough to beat a man to death with.
But your right that while gender does play a role, ethnicity or sexual orientation doesn't. Well usually at least. Some races of people are smaller and lighter on average, so let's exclude those. Don't come bragging that your keyboard held up to beating a pygmy to death!
If you actually wanted to know the reasons, rather than flame and rant from ignorance of the topic, you're perfectly capable of doing some research on the subject, and gathering facts and figures, or finding resources from others who have done so before you.
I know the reasons. Living in Europe and having worked several years in the telecoms industry. (And son, if you think that was a flame, you weren't around when the internet was young...)
I was just interested in what you thought the reasons were, since your explanation for why it might be cheaper in Romania (which BTH aren't exactly watertight) doesn't even begin to explain why the rest of Europe (barring a few dark corners) have so much better connectivity, at drastically lower cost than the US. That is to say, the part of Europe where cost and regulations are much higher and stricter than in the US.
Sure, I might have come of as a bit snarky right off the bat, but I am really interested in what your arguments are, or rather, your reasons for thinking the way you do about this issue.
So, how do we go after these guys then?
That's been studied at length. And the solution is "simple", i.e. easy to state but harder to accomplish.
Terrorist organisations (from a military standpoint) rely exclusively on the civilian society for support. It's their logistics, intelligence, funding, base of operations etc. etc. So, what you need to do it distance the organisation from its support for long enough that it starves and dies. This can be done the "nice" way, like the British in Burma, whereby they armed the local population and worked with education and propaganda to isolate the communist guerilla. But you don't have to be nice as demonstrated in Kenya with the Mau Mau where strategic villages (aka "concentration camps") effectively isolated the guerilla from their support. The organisation that ultimately won was the same in name only, and it was mostly political pressure from abroad on the government that made them abandon their largely successful approach.
The other thing you have to remember is that to win takes stamina (something the US has always lacked abroad). The guerilla only have to not lose to win. As long as they exist and can perform operations they're in business. The other side on the other hand has to actually win, i.e. defeat the guerilla in detail, so that they virtually cease to exist, in order to claim victory.
Given this, there's little to support a campaign of drone strikes. It's very difficult to see what such a campaign would ultimately achieve other than as a small part of a larger strategy.
There was an article in Parameters, Scholarly quarterly journal of the US Army War College a few years back on this very topic. So it's not exactly new knowledge. If you leaf through that they often have papers on irregular warfare (not surprisingly). It's available for free online.
My math skills may be rusty, but I vaguely recall that a such a continuous function necessarily has a global maximum.
Well, not really. Matematically it may have several equal maxima, so it doesn't have to have a global maxima.
But that's mathematically. In this case there will probably be one global maxima (more or less). We probably won't see wild swings up and down that aren't part of a general trend of increase or decline. Several "trend" tops are unlikely.
The car is either autonomous, or it isn't. If it isn't autonomous, I'll drive it myself and be in control the whole time.
Let's try it on an airliner: "Either the airliner is autnomous, or it isn't. If it isn't autonomous I'll drive it myself and be in control the whole time."
Doesn't really work out. The pilot-in-command is always responsible for the safe operation of the aircraft, even when the aircraft is "flying itself". Now of course there are limits to this responsibility, if an engine falls off due to shoddy maintenance that's usually not considered a pilot error. But complex computer malfunctions are more often than not blamed on the pilot (too much so to my mind, but that's another question).
I foresee that we'll see the same development with "autonomous" cars (i.e. cars with advanced auto pilots). They'll do better on average than a human, but when the malfunction you (the "driver in command") will be left to pick up the pieces, if there are any pieces left to be picked up. As with piloting, you're average workload will decrease substantially, but when things to wrong, you now have a much more complex situation to deal with, and no time to do it. The maximum requirements on your performance actually increased even though the average decreased. If the NTSB can still say "pilot error" 99% of the time, then it'll be "driver error" 99% of the time with autonomous cars.
And like with aircraft you'll like it, since the average is long and dreary and malfunctions will be so few and far between that you can functionally ignore them.
"Sleeping in the back seat" will be just as much frowned upon as it would be in an airliner. Leaning back and having a cup of coffee would be about as far as you could stretch it.
So make one. Or is your argument that a) there might (big "might") be differences between regulatory structure and cost between Romania and the US that would make internet infrastructure in Romania cheaper to build, b) when observing that the rest of regulated high cost Europe also has much better and cheaper access to same, that "I'm right about Romania and I don't know about the rest"?
That's not an argument at all. Not even about the Romanian situation. Especially about the Romanian situation.
So what is your argument about the Swedish situation then? As you agree the supposed argument about the Romanian situation doesn't work to explain the differences between the US and most European countries when it comes to differences in internet adoption/cost/speed/caps etc.
No, that's something I've also only heard about as a cautionary US tale. If that's happening in Europe as well, I'd also like to know.
But of course the same is true about Sweden, and almost all European countries.
For example: I have 100Mbps/100Mbps + cable tv (basic) + phone (calls extra) for $50 (and that's just because your exchange rate sucks right now). No caps, of course, there are no caps on fixed line internet, and servers etc. are OK (no outgoing SMTP, that's the only limitation).
So you want to try that argument about standards and cheap labour again?
No, I'll use the argument that man-power and regulatory compliance costs a lot more in 1st world countries, and there are lots of other stable and profitable places to invest money.
What? Are you seriously suggesting that we have less regulation and cheaper labour in my native Sweden than in the US of A?
That's a new one... And that's as far as I can tell the only merit that argument has.
As far as I can tell, there has never been a sustained system that has been cryogenically chilled in such an extreme environment (eg high neutron flux, >1000C temps).
It's not that they can't create a plug, it's that they have no idea how to do it reliably 24/7/365 x 30years.
I was under the impression that the "plug" (called "freeze valves") concept worked really well in the MSRE, with sources even claiming this was the normal mode of shutdown over the weekends. Cut the power to the cooling fan and the reactor would drain the salt into the storage tanks quite undramatically. (See e.g.: http://nucleargreen.blogspot.s...).
Now of course in this design you didn't need cryogenic cooling, since salt freezes at a rather high temperature. So I'm wondering what the scoop is? Are proposed new designs operating in a region where simple "blow on a pipe" that worked so well at the MSRE not possible anymore?
In peaceful suburbs with low justifiable homicide rates, state action is the dominating outcome to murder; execution becomes a looming, subconscious threat.
There's scant evidence that this is in fact true. Murder in these settings are almost all crimes of passion. There's no "subconcious" threat to evaluate.
Which brings us to the heart of the matter. We tend to not commit crimes due to an internalised moral compass given to us both by birth and upbringing. We tend to stay on the straight and narrow because that's the right thing to do, not because we consciously or otherwise perform a running cost-benefit analysis. (In fact, society wouldn't nearly work if that were true.) We as a species don't want to kill members of our own species, and will go to some lengths to avoid that.
There's indeed strong evidence to this as studied in the field of killology, i.e. the study of how to make men kill each other. It turns out that training a killer is a surprisingly difficult thing to do. Quoting a marine corps sergeant "One man in eighty is a natural killer. The rest we have to teach!" (Which I note corresponds nicely with the prevalence rates of psychopathy.) And it's illustrative to learn how this process is carried out. Not with moral guidance on the "rightness of killing" (which would be wholly superfluous under your model, people would just subconsciously evaluate that it's no "OK" to kill, and be done with it), but instead by instilling the automatic somatic reflex to take certain action that will result in the likely death of your opponent.
Also lots of QA people can code - automated testing is mostly coding - and lots of developers can't test at all.
If my experience is anything to go by, then the QA people on average code about as well as the developers can test. Which is to say, everything from "decent," to "not at all," depending on how good the organisation was overall.
It may be cliche, but how secure a language is depends on who is using it.
Well, this might be one of those times where "correlation is not causation" is appropriate. What I mean by this is that while the skill of the user certainly matters, so does the quality of the tool. "It's a poor workman who blames his tools" is a warning against poor workmen, not a carte blanche for shitty tools.
So of course, a tool can both help you and hinder you doing what you need to. It's no accident that you see top sportsmen obsessing over their equipment. Or why people don't clamour for manual gear boxes without synchronisation rings any more.
Now, when it comes to programming languages these interactions are very poorly understood. We don't know what makes a certain language (or features) work well for certain programmers in what situations. That said, we've amassed quite a body of evidence to suggest that some things work better than others. Functional programming languages with proper type systems for example seems to make large classes of errors just go away, by making them both obvious and impossible (since the type system wouldn't allow them). They also seem to increase productivity by a factor of four to ten, and increase system performance too boot. (Even though they're "slower" than C in micro benchmarks. Basically the same argument against C from the assembly crowd in the eighties, which we all know fell out in favour of that "slow, bloated, high-level mess" that is C...
Granted, much of this is still in the research state, and security among other things isn't important enough to make people change their ways (at least not yet), but there is a lot more interesting done, and still left to do, to just say that the tool/language etc. side of the equation doesn't matter. It clearly does.
You forgot the bit about only certain countries having any factories left at the end of WWII...
Yes, just see what a horrible place Germany turned into... Losing all those factories really hurt them in the long run.
P.S. Their recovery was also paid for by the US taxpayers, and it seems they got a fairly good deal on that too.
I'm wondering if they got results without a choke, or at full choke. This might be statistically significant.
No, they actually correct for the "non random" spread of pellets in the paper using importance sampling. Which is a neat trick and really the takeaway from this paper. I.e. that you can make Monte Carlo methods work, even if you don't have a flat/uniform probability distribution.
TCP is not reasonable.
Sure there are problems, many and obvious. It's showing its age, no doubt about it.
However, there's a reason that it won, as the stuff that came out of industry (esp. telecom) was and is so much worse that it would make your eyes bleed. Why? Well, because any reasonable solution would make the telephone company less powerful and it would make it more difficult to charge for ever little operation. Hence circuit switched everywhere, all the smarts in the center of the network, and please make that as centralised as possible.
The mistakes made in TCP (in hindsight) were at least honest. We didn't know any better then. The "mistakes" made in telecoms were made for a completely different reason. They were made from a position of power that was going to make damn sure that it didn't lose that power and technology and society be damned.
Remember, that if it weren't for TCP/IP you could have had all the X.25 or ISDN you would have been willing to pay for. Which wouldn't have been a lot... It's no accident that the pricing structure came first, and the protocols as a consequence of that, in the telecom protocols, with pricing not even part of the TCP/IP suite.
Be very careful what you wish for... :-)
Well sure. That's an "abuse" of the system. But I bet most of these are at least honestly not working. And being passive beats being actively malicious every time.
That said. I've met plenty of people in industry that spent their days just carrying around a binder. Hell, I've been one of those guys, at least partially and at least some of the time. So again, it's not a unique to academia.
To summarize. If you haven't been in industry. Don't for a second think the grass is even a shade greener. If it looks that way to you, it's only because marketing got to it before the brown and wilting became too obvious. :-)
Well, I dunno. I think it's more a question of the size of the organisation in that case. As more people are interested, and larger entities (whether corporate or academic) things will move slower, and slower and slower. And the larger the more "useless" political types, middle managers etc. will be attracted. Like flies... Case in point, remember Usenet before the year "September never ended"? Same effect.
In any case. My main point was that academia is after all at least mostly honest. The corporate players are often openly or covertly malicious. Like Stallman put it (paraphrase), it's not a question of how much faster you can run than your competitors, rather, how much you can slow them down, by tripping them up or shooting at them. And if that makes you stand still, that doesn't matter.
You can hate on corporate types for various thing, but anyone who acts like academics know how to get anything done has never worked in academia. I work at a university and fuck me do we spend ages spinning our wheels, having meeting after endless meeting, discussing shit to death, and finally doing things 10 years after they needed to be done.
Well having done both big corporate telecoms standardisation and academia, I know which place I rather work in... (And I ultimately put my money where my mouth is. Or rather, didn't put my money as it were, salary not being an academic strong suit).
Sure, the local bike shedding can be tiresome, but our actual work, i.e. research, is cut throat and a model of efficiency and sanity. (Don't laugh. Cry if you have to, but don't laugh). There's very little politics in that side of the "business" and if you think there is, don't ever, for the love of all you hold holy, get involved in the corporate world. That's not just moving to the bad side of town, that's leaving civilisation altogether.
We used to hold the IETF, current warts and all, as the highest standard to follow (pun intended), but also saw where we were headed with the increased pressure, as TCP/IP became important to the political types and not just a nerd affair for sensible, reasonable people any more. You know, the kind of people that can listen to argument, grudgingly realise that another suggestion has technical merit and go along with that, instead of pushing their hidden agenda at all cost, and above all else.
When you've seen how the big boys make their sausage, you'd be as surprised as we were that your phone and mobile internet works at all. It's nothing short of an all out heroic struggle by the engineers in the trenches that makes it so. The rest of the system tries with all its might to prevent that from happening.
It is not my job to be a brood mare. And I don't want my role in society to be marginalized because my primary role is being a brood mare. (Also, even without modern technology, we can probably keep infant mortality down far below historical norms just with modern knowledge - even low tech sterile conditions do a lot.) Having control over when to have children broadly gives women control of their lives.
That of course depends on the actual scenario, but what you consider your job to be will probably be a luxury that society can ill afford. After the dust has settled, we'll be in a situation where we'll be fighting tooth and nail to avoid complete population collapse. We'll need scores of young people to work us out of that hole, and if you're of child bearing age, you'll bear those children. It's after all a unique skill that very few people can be put to do. (I'd for example be pretty crap at it, as I fall for the simplest and most obvious of reasons, I'm a guy.)
That's not to say that you'll be forced at gun (or club) point, but rather that society will bring down quite a bit of weight on you to "make the right decision". So for example, expect contraception to be made illegal rather than made unavailable, and anybody that interferes with a pregnancy to hang from the nearest tree. (Of course, it'd be the smart thing to do anyway, as we'll spend quite a bit of resources on the pregnant and mothers of young, so "Why would she want to do that anyway?")
After a generation or two (if we make it that far) that'll be the norm, standard, and "the way it always was", like Rob Slade puts it; "Don't go out dear, it's not good for the baby." will very rapidly morph into "Don't go out". And remember this is a good thing. It's what we want to happen, because the alternative is much, much worse.
Now, again, to say exactly how things will play out is difficult, because it depends on the scenario. If the scenario is nuclear Armageddon many bright people spent careers thinking about the consequences, and some of this information is now in the open (see e.g. Rob Slades short introduction: "Nuclear warfare 101-103" http://www.giantbomb.com/fallo... , esp. 103 deals with the aftermath. Another good book about the possible aftermath of an EMP strike is "One Second after." It is based on the US Govt. EMP commission report (and has a wikipedia page). It deals mainly with the immediate aftermath, so it doesn't really reach the "we need you to have kids"-part, but is still a somewhat realistic assessment of what society could be like. (It for example contains a long scene where refugees are triaged according to useful skill. If you're not a doctor or electrical power engineer, take a hike.)
But again. The takeaway is that what you consider your job to be will probably come so low down on the list of things to consider that it won't even make the first chapter. And that in a time when people will be far pressed to make it to the end of the first page.
But don't let that discourage you. My assigned role in such a scenario is realistically to die as quietly, and quickly as possible, so as to not use any resources best spent on the deserving. Preferably without putting any undue stress on them, mental or otherwise. I think a heroic but ultimately futile act to save the needing is my preferred way to go, but even that isn't my call. You get at least to have kids (with great loss of control of your life, but hey, nobody is going to be "in control" of much of anything), I don't get a life at all... (And if you're past the age where child bearing/rearing is a realistic occupation for you, I'll even let you lead me in the charge unto the breech. How's that for an offer you'd probably do best not to refuse?
So on a more upbeat note, lets agree that civilisation is a good thing and make our damnedest to try and preserve it, rather than go stocking up on soap just yet.
Try as I might, that kid just would not believe that he could do meaningful stuff. It's not that he didn't want to be code monkey like me, or didn't want to have a higher paying job. He just didn't think it was going to happen. I couldn't get him to try. That sort of resistance is weird, and I'm not sure I have a solid grasp of it's root cause. But if I had to call it something, I'd say it's the culture of the poor.
The usual suspect is learned helplessness. Or "you can run but you'll just die tired." If you've died tired time and time again, haven't seen anyone that hasn't, and everybody tells you by word and deed, to just die already, because what's the point of dying tired, what are you supposed to think? Or do for that matter?