And I'm sure I'm not the only one to have said this by now, but adding a very accurate progress bar is a lot of f'ing work, with all the multi-threading and actual decisions on where 1% progress actually is when you're running through code. Should we use just the use of the line of code divided by the total lines? What do you do if the progress bar can actually slow down the processing in the first place? Would the user rather wait longer and see a progress bar or just get it over with? Programming is an art form in many ways. There is no formula to this stuff.
While I think your post was awesome and Tesla was way ahead of his time, I have to say that it's also entirely possible that we have obtained all the low hanging fruit after an explosion of knowledge following WW2. The answers we are now searching for like fusion, the origin of mass, artificial intelligence, and nano-biology, are extremely complicated and/or very expensive. We might have just gone through a Precambrian-like burst of knowledge to be followed by a rebuilding phase. Human's are smart, but this stuff is hard.
I'm glad they can increase Hawking's speech rate by an order of magnitude, but that's a lot of work to accommodate people like Hawking: those with ALS that live more than 10 years. I think only 1% of ALS patients live past 10 years. Hawking has lived 50+ years with ALS, which makes him an incredibly rare case.
The reason people say that alternative energy sources couldn't support base load is because it would cost an insane amount of money to remake our power grid enough to meet the demand. Look at the examples you gave. A 1 megawatt geothermal plant costs up to $5 million ($5,000/kw). An average coal power plant generates 667 megawatts. A geothermal plant that size could cost up to $3.3 billion dollars!! I couldn't even find an example of molten salt reactors. I think that wave energy could be promising, but it hasn't been explored much yet and people who don't live close to an ocean wouldn't see a single watt of it.
We have a wind farm within 30 miles, which is supplemental power, and a gas fired plant within 10 miles that is also supplemental. "Base load" comes from a coal plant some 200 miles away. When I am talking "local," I mean more local than that. Anyway, local gas and wind is already the direction I am talking about. The next step is to get more generators in homes and businesses. We could replace the coal fired plant with something more friendly to the environment since we would not require the output it provides.
That's exactly what I'm talking about. Until we invent some way to supply over 50% of maximum energy generation (i.e. base load) with inexpensive fuel, like coal, everything you're talking about is a pipe dream. You are talking some fantasy world where we have billions, probably trillions of dollars to spend building out and maintaining a brand new decentralized power grid.
$15k solar panels is a moot point since I am talking about a speculative economy in which such things become commodities because of their pervasiveness.
That seems like a lot of words to describe the economy that we DO have, one that responds to incentives. How could you possible incentivize spending a ton of money just to get the same thing we have now? You sound like a guy I once talked to that truly believed that the Star Trek universe, one where a monetized economy no longer exists and people do things just because it's altruistic, could actually exist.
Until we find a solution for base load energy like fusion or invent god-like batteries or power lines made of superconductors that cost $100 per mile, everything else is a pipe dream.
Or change the economic infrastructure to a more sensible one where areas of production and consumption are as close to coterminous as possible. That is to say, supplement with local sources and rely less on centralized mega-sources. If most people had access to ubiquitous local wind and solar generators, base load would be supplemented everywhere. It might then be possible to utilize a "new-wave" source on a larger scale for the base load that isn't so much of a base load anymore.
So you're saying you don't mind lowing power on windless days or when the sun goes down? and you don't mind having giant wind turbines in your yard or paying $15k for solar panels on your roof?
Mega-sources? You mean 'power plants'? This isn't organic farming for christ's sake. Power plants ARE local sources. You probably have one within 30 miles of where you live. I guarantee that your power is more local than the food you eat.
Solar and wind and every other new-wave energy source is just a way to supplement base load. If you know anything about electricity generation, you should know that the world depends on base load energy: energy generated from reliable sources that accounts for like 70% of all energy usage, i.e. coal, gas and nuclear. Until we find a solution for base load energy like fusion or invent god-like batteries or power lines made of superconductors that cost $100 per mile, everything else is a pipe dream.
Everyone had been thinking it, but when international standards had to be changed to accommodate the weight gain, Kilo decided to cut out the daily Big Gulps
and the idea is genius. This could never happen without some company pioneering the idea in the private industry. Even if you had the drones flying over major highways, people would get freaked out at flying packages without some kind of massive marketing campaign.
Yes, I completely agree with this post. You aren't allowed to have done drugs in the past 7 years, but that's when people do their drugs if they're just out of college. The lie detector test for the TS/SCI is a big turnoff to a lot of geeks. Relax the rules a bit and get more smart people.
The real problem is that security-related government jobs require security clearances and lie detector tests that exclude a large portion of geeks, in my opinion. They want to make sure you haven't done a bunch of drugs in the past 7 years, but for most smart geeks, that's the time they usually did their drugs. They need to relax the rules on some drugs if they want more talent.
The post seems to say there is more to intelligence than abstract reasoning. How else do you differentiate Man and beast other than the ability for abstraction (aside from the ability to communicate it, I guess). Every other aspect of the human mind is exhibited in other animals, but we are the only ones able to understand our world as a set of abstract concepts. Abstraction is vital in our ability to teach our offspring, to create new tools, to find new strategies. Behaviors that take evolution millenia to develop can be conceptualized and executed in mere seconds by a capable human.
How do you go through an ordeal like that and then spend your time writing that much about it? You can never get the time back you spent rambling about some bug fixes.
You are making that number up because the studies show that medication is the only effective treatment for ADHD. Cognitive and Behavioral Therapy has been shown to have virtually no effect when compared to drugs. Furthermore, there is virtually no additional alleviation of symptoms when medication is combined with CBT. You can dream all you want, but you're just wrong.
Is it ethical to take away stimulant medication from a person who has been thriving due to their ADHD being successfully managed? How does a doctor adhere to the Hippocratic Oath of "Do no harm" and deny the patient access to a medication that has changed their life?
I disagree entirely with your statement. You are making generalizations about a topic you obviously don't know anything about. While there are certainly people who fit your description, there are many who do not.
I've been taking Adderall for a long time, and there are definitely side effects even if you don't abuse it. Also, you are using illegal drugs if you don't have a prescription.
In high school, I had my own web development company and was an accomplished, award-winning saxophone player but I struggled getting the grades I should have been able to get for a reason that I couldn't understand. I was diagnosed with ADHD in 10th grade and set upon a journey involving virtually every drug recommended for the disorder. I settled upon Adderall and have been taking it ever since. Reading through the comments on this page, I find it amusing that everyone seems to have such a black and white opinion on the subject. I, on the other hand, really don't know what to think.
Studies show that nothing is more effective at treating ADHD than stimulants and cognitive therapy does virtually nothing without drugs. Furthermore, people who control their ADHD with medication are FAR more likely to avoid substance abuse than if they leave their condition untreated. I'm sure everyone knows a really smart kid in high school who smoked their life away on weed and never made anything of themselves. I know that I personally would have probably gone this route, as I was already heading in that direction. Finally, stimulants like Adderall haven't been shown to have any real long term health consequences and (contrary to popular belief) are not particularly addictive if taken as directed.
Anyone who has been to college in the past decade can tell you that Adderall can certainly help you cram for tests. Does that mean it gives them an advantage? I really don't think so. I've crammed for a lot of tests, and unless you're a business or mass communication major, you are not going to get an A by cramming. Try cramming a month's worth of organic chemistry in one night with some Adderall. You'll probably pass, but you definitely aren't getting an A. People get A's on tests by keeping up with the work. Not to mention the horrific day you have after cramming all night on speed. The biggest advantage I saw with Adderall was playing Quake 3, and even then there were people a lot better than me that used nothing but Mountain Dew.
I guess what I'm saying is that I think that people are overestimating the power of stimulants. Their biggest advantage is that you can stay up later, but if you don't take the drug regularly, you will also not be able to get to sleep. You'll also not eat enough and will probably have issues with sexual dysfunction. If that sounds like an unfair advantage to you, I don't know what to tell you.
I recently re-read a lot of Heinlein books, including the Moon is a Harsh Mistress and found that I now see his writing for what it is. He is misogynistic, preachy, and focuses on polygamy and nudity obsessively and at length in several of his books. Even Stranger in a Strange Land turned absolutely retarded at about the halfway mark.
As an older computer engineer, I would bet that your schooling is obsolete and that you haven't been keeping up on current information theory. I found The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick utterly fascinating. It is long-winded at times, but it changed the way I perceive the world and changed how I approach programming and developing systems. We are on the cusp of a revolution in computer science/information theory towards semantic systems and this book gives a great glimpse into current philosophy and theory.
Slashdot Mirror
And I'm sure I'm not the only one to have said this by now, but adding a very accurate progress bar is a lot of f'ing work, with all the multi-threading and actual decisions on where 1% progress actually is when you're running through code. Should we use just the use of the line of code divided by the total lines? What do you do if the progress bar can actually slow down the processing in the first place? Would the user rather wait longer and see a progress bar or just get it over with? Programming is an art form in many ways. There is no formula to this stuff.
While I think your post was awesome and Tesla was way ahead of his time, I have to say that it's also entirely possible that we have obtained all the low hanging fruit after an explosion of knowledge following WW2. The answers we are now searching for like fusion, the origin of mass, artificial intelligence, and nano-biology, are extremely complicated and/or very expensive. We might have just gone through a Precambrian-like burst of knowledge to be followed by a rebuilding phase. Human's are smart, but this stuff is hard.
We are still waiting for our hoverboard
I'm glad they can increase Hawking's speech rate by an order of magnitude, but that's a lot of work to accommodate people like Hawking: those with ALS that live more than 10 years. I think only 1% of ALS patients live past 10 years. Hawking has lived 50+ years with ALS, which makes him an incredibly rare case.
My libertarian side wants to agree with you but my pragmatic side keeps kicking it in the balls.
The reason people say that alternative energy sources couldn't support base load is because it would cost an insane amount of money to remake our power grid enough to meet the demand. Look at the examples you gave. A 1 megawatt geothermal plant costs up to $5 million ($5,000/kw). An average coal power plant generates 667 megawatts. A geothermal plant that size could cost up to $3.3 billion dollars!! I couldn't even find an example of molten salt reactors. I think that wave energy could be promising, but it hasn't been explored much yet and people who don't live close to an ocean wouldn't see a single watt of it.
We have a wind farm within 30 miles, which is supplemental power, and a gas fired plant within 10 miles that is also supplemental. "Base load" comes from a coal plant some 200 miles away. When I am talking "local," I mean more local than that. Anyway, local gas and wind is already the direction I am talking about. The next step is to get more generators in homes and businesses. We could replace the coal fired plant with something more friendly to the environment since we would not require the output it provides.
That's exactly what I'm talking about. Until we invent some way to supply over 50% of maximum energy generation (i.e. base load) with inexpensive fuel, like coal, everything you're talking about is a pipe dream. You are talking some fantasy world where we have billions, probably trillions of dollars to spend building out and maintaining a brand new decentralized power grid.
$15k solar panels is a moot point since I am talking about a speculative economy in which such things become commodities because of their pervasiveness.
That seems like a lot of words to describe the economy that we DO have, one that responds to incentives. How could you possible incentivize spending a ton of money just to get the same thing we have now? You sound like a guy I once talked to that truly believed that the Star Trek universe, one where a monetized economy no longer exists and people do things just because it's altruistic, could actually exist.
Until we find a solution for base load energy like fusion or invent god-like batteries or power lines made of superconductors that cost $100 per mile, everything else is a pipe dream.
Or change the economic infrastructure to a more sensible one where areas of production and consumption are as close to coterminous as possible. That is to say, supplement with local sources and rely less on centralized mega-sources. If most people had access to ubiquitous local wind and solar generators, base load would be supplemented everywhere. It might then be possible to utilize a "new-wave" source on a larger scale for the base load that isn't so much of a base load anymore.
So you're saying you don't mind lowing power on windless days or when the sun goes down? and you don't mind having giant wind turbines in your yard or paying $15k for solar panels on your roof? Mega-sources? You mean 'power plants'? This isn't organic farming for christ's sake. Power plants ARE local sources. You probably have one within 30 miles of where you live. I guarantee that your power is more local than the food you eat.
Solar and wind and every other new-wave energy source is just a way to supplement base load. If you know anything about electricity generation, you should know that the world depends on base load energy: energy generated from reliable sources that accounts for like 70% of all energy usage, i.e. coal, gas and nuclear. Until we find a solution for base load energy like fusion or invent god-like batteries or power lines made of superconductors that cost $100 per mile, everything else is a pipe dream.
If it seems too good to be true... then its probably food made into fuel. Or at least I think that's what they say.
Everyone had been thinking it, but when international standards had to be changed to accommodate the weight gain, Kilo decided to cut out the daily Big Gulps
and the idea is genius. This could never happen without some company pioneering the idea in the private industry. Even if you had the drones flying over major highways, people would get freaked out at flying packages without some kind of massive marketing campaign.
What the hell are CDs? and why would you rip them?
Yes, I completely agree with this post. You aren't allowed to have done drugs in the past 7 years, but that's when people do their drugs if they're just out of college. The lie detector test for the TS/SCI is a big turnoff to a lot of geeks. Relax the rules a bit and get more smart people.
The real problem is that security-related government jobs require security clearances and lie detector tests that exclude a large portion of geeks, in my opinion. They want to make sure you haven't done a bunch of drugs in the past 7 years, but for most smart geeks, that's the time they usually did their drugs. They need to relax the rules on some drugs if they want more talent.
The post seems to say there is more to intelligence than abstract reasoning. How else do you differentiate Man and beast other than the ability for abstraction (aside from the ability to communicate it, I guess). Every other aspect of the human mind is exhibited in other animals, but we are the only ones able to understand our world as a set of abstract concepts. Abstraction is vital in our ability to teach our offspring, to create new tools, to find new strategies. Behaviors that take evolution millenia to develop can be conceptualized and executed in mere seconds by a capable human.
How do you go through an ordeal like that and then spend your time writing that much about it? You can never get the time back you spent rambling about some bug fixes.
You are making that number up because the studies show that medication is the only effective treatment for ADHD. Cognitive and Behavioral Therapy has been shown to have virtually no effect when compared to drugs. Furthermore, there is virtually no additional alleviation of symptoms when medication is combined with CBT. You can dream all you want, but you're just wrong.
Is it ethical to take away stimulant medication from a person who has been thriving due to their ADHD being successfully managed? How does a doctor adhere to the Hippocratic Oath of "Do no harm" and deny the patient access to a medication that has changed their life?
I disagree entirely with your statement. You are making generalizations about a topic you obviously don't know anything about. While there are certainly people who fit your description, there are many who do not.
I've been taking Adderall for a long time, and there are definitely side effects even if you don't abuse it. Also, you are using illegal drugs if you don't have a prescription.
Me take adderall long time. I not soulless ghoul
In high school, I had my own web development company and was an accomplished, award-winning saxophone player but I struggled getting the grades I should have been able to get for a reason that I couldn't understand. I was diagnosed with ADHD in 10th grade and set upon a journey involving virtually every drug recommended for the disorder. I settled upon Adderall and have been taking it ever since. Reading through the comments on this page, I find it amusing that everyone seems to have such a black and white opinion on the subject. I, on the other hand, really don't know what to think.
Studies show that nothing is more effective at treating ADHD than stimulants and cognitive therapy does virtually nothing without drugs. Furthermore, people who control their ADHD with medication are FAR more likely to avoid substance abuse than if they leave their condition untreated. I'm sure everyone knows a really smart kid in high school who smoked their life away on weed and never made anything of themselves. I know that I personally would have probably gone this route, as I was already heading in that direction. Finally, stimulants like Adderall haven't been shown to have any real long term health consequences and (contrary to popular belief) are not particularly addictive if taken as directed.
Anyone who has been to college in the past decade can tell you that Adderall can certainly help you cram for tests. Does that mean it gives them an advantage? I really don't think so. I've crammed for a lot of tests, and unless you're a business or mass communication major, you are not going to get an A by cramming. Try cramming a month's worth of organic chemistry in one night with some Adderall. You'll probably pass, but you definitely aren't getting an A. People get A's on tests by keeping up with the work. Not to mention the horrific day you have after cramming all night on speed. The biggest advantage I saw with Adderall was playing Quake 3, and even then there were people a lot better than me that used nothing but Mountain Dew.
I guess what I'm saying is that I think that people are overestimating the power of stimulants. Their biggest advantage is that you can stay up later, but if you don't take the drug regularly, you will also not be able to get to sleep. You'll also not eat enough and will probably have issues with sexual dysfunction. If that sounds like an unfair advantage to you, I don't know what to tell you.
I recently re-read a lot of Heinlein books, including the Moon is a Harsh Mistress and found that I now see his writing for what it is. He is misogynistic, preachy, and focuses on polygamy and nudity obsessively and at length in several of his books. Even Stranger in a Strange Land turned absolutely retarded at about the halfway mark.
As an older computer engineer, I would bet that your schooling is obsolete and that you haven't been keeping up on current information theory. I found The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick utterly fascinating. It is long-winded at times, but it changed the way I perceive the world and changed how I approach programming and developing systems. We are on the cusp of a revolution in computer science/information theory towards semantic systems and this book gives a great glimpse into current philosophy and theory.