Neither Einstein nor Hitler were orders of magnitudes greater intelligence than the average human- Albert was smart, but nowhere near the potential of AI. Neither Einstein nor Hitler could process data from all around the world from millions of inputs at the same time.
Einstein and Hitler were both mortal and had a finite life span.
However, even though both Einstein and Hitler were singular humans with limited capabilities and lifespans that could not begin to have the potential impact of something like AI, there is a "meta" version of both personas that was somewhat inspired mythically by the actual humans, that continues to live and influence people today. This meta-Einstein and meta-Hitler are un-embodied ideas which are no longer constrained by mortal limits and you might argue are actually more powerful today than they were in when their namesakes were alive because there are millions more people supporting the mystique behind them and often even operating on behalf of these meta-beings (aka, the idea of the person not to be confused with that person's actual ideas).
These meta-beings (anthropormophizing a set of ideas to be represented by a popular figure) can even be extrapolated from an entity who may or may not of even actually existed in real life (e.g., meta-Jesus or perhaps AI).
To borrow some contemporary lingo, once created, key to the power of this meta-being (which is really an un-embodied idea even though it might be "named" after someone that inspired it) is dependent on if it "goes viral" or not. Unfortunately, "going-viral" is almost an autonomic reflex of our societal-organism over which we have little conscious control. The analogy of a "virus" is pretty good since the idea is not a real organism (or person), it depends on the societal-organism's infrastructure for reproduction and propagation. Once the "virus" takes over part of the infrastructure, the influence if as large (or even larger due to multiplicative effects) as the infrastructure it overruns.
The immunity response to "bad-viruses" of our societal-organism, is not unlike a real-organism's immunity response. If it can remember an idea is bad, the societal-organism is better at containing it before it gets out of hand. If the idea has mutated a bit, or the response would create some complicated inconsistencies (e.g, good for some parts of the organism, bad for some parts), the immunity has a hard time mounting any defense and the virus is more likely to get a permanent foothold or even take over.
Nobody knows if AI is a "good-virus" or a "bad-virus" with respect to our societal-organism, but I'll go out on a limb and say it's probably good for some, bad for others which mean the if it ever goes viral, it will be very hard for our society "immunity" to stop it. Let's hope it's a good idea... Our society's immune system has yet to kill meta-Hitler probably because some of the ideas represented by meta-Hitler are potentially good for more than a small part of the societal organism.
The big deal is about big transactions. This most likely isn't going to be used in the consumer credit card / debit card market, but more likely in the large purchase department. Buying a car/house? Waiting a few minutes vs hours/days for credit reports to return. Transferring millions/billions of dollars between accounts, who's auditing it? Blockchains significantly reduce the amount of work in this department while essentially eliminating fraud, since the dollars can be tracked from transaction to transaction.
Actually, this technology is targeted a contractual transactions in the financial realm (think bank cash claims, credit default-swaps, derivative securities that rely on precise timing, etc.). As far as I can tell, there no concept of proof-of-work or mining, but it's purely a distributed financial ledger concept for banks to use. The block chain concept and the chain history being held simultaneously held by multiple partner institutions simply makes the ledger un-eraseable (any corrections need to be recorded by future transactions, not erased). Unlike bit-coin, there isn't intended to be a single global ledger of all transactions everywhere, but a ledger per domain.
Well, unlike Mars, there is no reason to set up a permanent colony in Antarctica.
Oh, wait... maybe a permanent settlement on Mars is pointless as well?:) Apart from the whole "backup location for humanity, in case Earth gets creamed by an asteroid no one saw coming" thing. That has some far-fetched merit of sorts. However, due to the extremely hostile environment there, chances are that a Martian colony has a much higher probability of failing than civilisation on Earth in the first place, at least for centuries to come. So even in the most optimistic scenarios, it will be the thought that counts w/r to Martian settlement.
FWIW, Early European settlements in North America not only had a high probability of failure, they did fail, prolifically.
Here are a few well known examples... 1526 San Miguel de Gualdape (Georgia) - failed due to food shortages, disease, native attacks 1527 Jungle Prada (Florida) - abandoned after native attacks 1541 Cap-Rouge (Quebec City) - failed due to harsh winter, scurvy, native attacks 1562 Charlesfort (South Carolina) - abandoned due to fire destroyed supplies 1565 St Augustine (Florida) - survived! 1566 Fort San Juan (North Carolina) - failed, burned by natives 1570 Ajacan Jesuit Mission (Virginia) - all killed by native attack 1585 Roanoke (Virginia) - abandoned for some unknown reason ("lost colony of Roanoke") 1599 Tadoussac (Quebec) - failed due to harsh winter, scurvy 1607 Popham (Maine) - failed due to harsh winter, fire destroyed supplies 1607 Jamestown (Virginia) - survived!
I expect a few spectacular failures in the early attempts to colonize Mars. In a way, these new-world colonies were about as isolated as Mars (difficulties in financing voyages meant that colonies could be unsupplied and on their own for 2-3 years at a time). Although there won't be any natives attacking on Mars (or *are* there natives?), the things that undermined many colonies were disease, fires, and the environment which will be all real problems in any Martian colony.
Really. Criminal conviction, huh? Programmer in prison? Are you even listening to yourself?
Write a divide by zero error and have your ass cheeks divided in federal prison. Infinite Loop errors requires infinite butt pounding.
This is Europe. EU prisons are not at all like US federal prison.
Then again, wasn't it Italy that in 2009 tried and convicted some Earthquake scientists on manslaughter charges (although their conviction was ultimately overturned, they did spend time in jail) for downplaying the chance of an earthquake. All of this was after a *different* scientist was accused with being an alarmist for predicting the same earthquake a month earlier by analyzing radon gas emissions. If you are a scientists in Europe, damned if you do, damned if you don't
Which leads to the question: does NASA not share its magic recipes with the ESA?
You have to look back at the history of the ExoMars program to answer that.
Originally, NASA was a partner and was going to supply a sky-crane decent module and Atlas rockets for payload launch to the program.
Then 2012 budget cuts forced NASA to withdraw from the program. Undaunted, the ESA then brought on Russia as a partner to supply those critical elements of the program and of course the USA and Russia are on such good terms about exchanging technology...
I worked on MGS, and can tell you that to be successful with most missions, you have to have a much higher level of quality compared to normal.
Oddly, if ESA, Russia, CHina, etc wanted to really test this, they would send a duplicate around the moon and then land it on earth.
That would test just about every subsystems in similar ways.
Since you worked on MGS, you probably know people at Nasa that would tell you that landing on earth is totally different than landing on mars (mainly because of the atmospheric density).
Actually, what they're doing is the definition of liberal progressivism, also known as "regressive liberalism". I had to look it up because I wanted to know why I, a traditional liberal (free as in speech), was getting lumped in with all the "check your privilege" types. And while I agree that it appears anti-democratic for one company to severe ties with another due to ideological differences, both parties are exercising their freedom of choice. Believe it or not, it's actually logically consistent. It's just one more casualty of this toxic election.
That's simply because being a partisan is not a federally protected class... Actually, it's kind of weird that being a partisan isn't federally protected after that whole McCarthyism thing, but I guess that whole thing is a distant memory...
To further this argument, calling out political supporters is basically McCarthyism revisited. I'm not sure the "left" wants to revisit that era.
On the other hand, maybe this behavior is a natural reaction of narcissistic people holding the upper hand (aka the instinct to "bully"). The instinct of the bully is to attempt to undermine any support for the person being bullied by calling out and shaming/shunning anyone that shows any support for the target. By maintaining a culture of fear, the bully is able to project their power and further their agenda.
It may be natural, but we can be better than that. We *should* be better than that.
People are scared of random things. I drive a diesel car (in the US) and can't count how many times people have showed grave concerns about my ability to find fuel.
~700 miles (1100 km) per tank I think I should manage to find a station that carries diesel.
I think concerns are driver dependent. I used to know someone who would only fill up $10 cash at every fill up and seem to revel in getting near empty. Basically he was Kramer on Seinfeld's "The Dealership" episode. If he had a diesel car, I'm sure there would be grave concerns about his ability to find fuel...
It's not "Asgard", it's "Ásgarðr" (if you want to modernize the spelling, at least do so as "Ásgarður" - or if you want only English letters, at least get the pronunciation right with something like "Ausgarther"). That's an eth, not a d; an á, not an a; and it's not nominative if you drop the ending. And it's already a place name, it doesn't need a suffix to make it one - let alone a suffix taken from an entirely different linguistic branch. That's like naming a place "Beijing-ia" or "Tamil Nadu-ia"
Get over it. In English, there are lots of appropriated proper nouns that are "mispronounced" in common usage that aren't likely to change. There have recently been a few exceptions that have reverted after centuries of use like: Beijing -> Peking, Mumbai -> Bombay, Kolkata -> Calcutta, but there are of course others like Hong Kong that haven't (and aren't likely) revert to a more phonetic spelling.
FWIW, in Chinese it's quite a bit worse. Many place names pseudo-phonentic transliteration and country names often with a forced "Guó" (meaning country) at the end (e.g., Mei-Guó for America, Ying-Guó for England and Dé-Guó for Germany). Then again, like many languages, there are some so-called exo-nyms too like (Jn-Shn aka, gold-mountain, aka California).
Although English gets a bad rap for appropriation of words, in German, this is an "interess-ieren" phenomena of lots of exo-nyms with Germanic roots.
What's really confusing is when Italians call Munich -> Monaco (di Baviera)...
Maybe because it really wasn't our fight in the first place. Europe had been fighting amongst itself for 1000 years until it knocked everything flat and left itself ripe for Communist takeover. Along came the "Yank" Marshall Plan to help rebuild and "Yanks" paying for defense and for the first time there is sustained peace and prosperity.
Maybe you don't think it was our fight, but Germany thought the USA was fair game and Germany tried to form an alliance with Mexico to take us out prior to WW1 (fortunately Mexico ratted them out).
As for the Communist takeover of Europe being a result of war, how do you explain how it took root in central/south America? Central/south America wasn't knocked flat in any wars that I am aware of? The rise of communism was probably inevitable in the world and after it got a foothold, spread by economic influence.
The Marshall Plan was basically a way to create a powerful "EU" to counter Soviet Union's influence to prevent a Communist takeover of Europe. The Marshall plan (and later iterations) served to simultaneous muscle out the Soviet Union's economic influence and the "EU" style economic arraignment required by the aid plan made it harder for the USSR to fragment and pick-off a country reducing the USSR's economic leverage and therefore political influence. In some ways it wasn't defense, in the cold war, creating the framework for the EU was really offence. Sadly, it's all starting to fade again (e.g., Brexit)
Perhaps he's looking for his very own Kennedy moon moment without having to do anything to follow up on it.
Perhaps when this happens it will fool some of the low-information populist that Obama was the president that led us to mars like Kennedy was the president that lead us to the moon (no doubt that this sound-bite will be picked up by some sci-fi flick). Apparently Obama knows how to get the accolades (e/g. Nobel Peace Prize), better than most presidents (and real people), so I don't underestimate him on this strategy...
Going to mars is a one way ticket, just to say "I did it first" and have some monument built back here on earth to you.
You go there for science. You go there for discovery. You go there to lead to colonization and making mankind a multi-body species.
You don't go just to plant the flag. The red on the flag would clash with Mars's orange.
The UN flag won't (if it is up to BO or HC, it probably won't be the US flag), but then again having a flag that shows a projection of the earth's land masses planted on mars might not be the best "progressive" legacy image either...
On the other hand the brain damage that occurs from cosmic radiation might just be enough to get this to happen...
This might be true, but I doubt anyone could have saved Yahoo. I think the best thing would have been a temporary surge in the stock price so some investors might get rich, but nothing more. And this is what happened.
The sad thing is that Yahoo search still sucks compared to Google search. This, at least, I expected Marissa Mayer to fixed. Regardless, I think Yahoo would have failed anyway.
FYI: Since 2009, Yahoo search has been powered by Bing (MSFT)... Bing/Yahoo is pretty good now for non-obscure stuff (for obscure tech stuff Google is still way better), but I'm guessing in your mind, the only thing to "fix" it compared to Google search is for Yahoo to roll back the clock to 2004 when Yahoo search was actually powered by Google.
If you were forced to choose, smog (ozone/acid-rain) generally isn't as bad for your lungs as particulate matter (combustion ash which contains all sorts of industrial chemicals). Assuming this works as advertised as all...
Smog is not ozone Smog is the dirty air hovering over cities which also contains ozone
Actually, most regulatory agencies consider smog to be the result of sunlight+NOx+VOCs creating ozone or NOx and/or SOx +H2O making acid rain, so in a since ozone is Smog. These ionic-breeze-on-steriods towers will of course create some ozone (because some of the O2 in the air will get ionized and generate some affinity to create O3 in addition to some more indirect paths with N2 and CO2).
Much of the high dust/dirt particulate part of the air (aka dirty air), isn't generally considered smog except perhaps for the super-fine particulates (less than 100nm). Particulate matter levels PM-10 and PM-2.5 (less-than 10um and 2.5um, which is what gives much of the "dirty-color" to the smog) are just called particulate matter, not technically smog, although such particulate matter are generally more hazardous to your health than smog....
For a presidential debate that lasts only a few hours, I imagine the big 3 would gladly roll in a 4G-LTE COWs that can handle a few hundred journalists gratis. No service provider wants to get the reputation with journalists that they are unreliable for a big story like this. That would be death by a thousand small cuts of ink (and you never want to make enemies with someone who buys ink by the barrel)...
For 5K joe-averages at generic-medium sized entertainment venue, well, one COW won't do it anyhow, and it probably isn't worth cost in petrol...
Okay if big data the new coal, we should stop using it now because although it is currently cheap and plentiful with apparently many applications, we know eventually it lead us to the collapse of civilization.
Maintaining access to big-data will eventually cause political conflicts and maybe even wars, and continuing unrestrained usage of big data will eventually cause inconvenient problems in our daily lives that will make our world unliveable and our society unsustainable. The money exploited by the early adopters in the big-data industrial complex will dominate the political landscape and prevent us from doing anything about constraining this monster until it is too late.
If you could have put a cap on companies like the Peabody coal company back in the early days, you wouldn't ever hear statements like this today from coal company analysts...
“We have never seen leases of more than a billion tonnes and we are starting to see that under the Obama Administration.”
If the Obama administration's department of Interior can be bought-and-sold by a coal company with annual revenues of only $5B, what hope do governments have against big-data companies with annual revenues of $74B?
Any other analogies to coal people would like to say about big-data?
I already read the link a few hours before it was posted. There was zero details on the algorithm and no link to the actual research that I could see.
Well, in case you are interested, after checking around, it appears that this "algorithm" was a minor result of Mr. Helfgott's work to prove the ternary Goldbach conjecture (every odd integer n greater than 5 is the sum of three primes). Here's the preprint of the paper, I should warn you that it appears to be a very theoretical paper, one targetted at the Goldbach conjecture (not practical prime sieving), so there is not a fully fleshed out algorithm that you can translate into a computer program. I haven't gone through the paper in detail, but it appears to rely heavily on technique from a Messr. Ramare.
We start by adapting ideas from Ramare’s version of the large sieve for primes to estimate l2 norms over parts of the circle. We are left with the task of giving an explicit bound on the factor in Ramare’s work. As a side effect, this finally gives a fully explicit large sieve for primes that is asymptotically optimal, meaning a sieve that does not have a spurious factor of exp(gamma) in front; this was an arguably important gap in the literature.
I cannot find a definitive paper about this technique, but is appears to be related to this earlier paper. Mr. Helfgott apparently just tightening the bounds which theoretically should create a better sieve algorithm. My impression is that I think it will take some concerted effort to create a computer algorithm out of this algorithm.
Transportation is a different story, however, since one can't have hydroelectric damns on a train...
Did you know that electric trains don't need to carry their own power source? True story!
Because of cost of infrastructure, electric trains are really only viable in urban areas. You aren't going to electrify a rail between two cities and expect it to be cost effective... Passenger rail has a different set of economics, so when you do see electrified rail between cities, it's generally passenger only.
Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc would get into the parallel networks, but it would be through the countries' gateways/filters. This implications of this are not good for the people in nations controlled by thugs.
China is the modern day case study for a for a parallel internetwork-domain system (via the great firewall).
The ".com" and other country specific versions of Google, Facebook and Twitter are all blocked by this firewall. There is self-censored Google.cn and Facebook.cn, but Twitter hasn't decided to get into the parallel network game yet (and get in bed with the censorship)...
The result is not really theoretical, you can look at the current situation and draw your own conclusions
Of course this is just a scaled up version of what is done in corporations already. If you are surfing the internet from work you likely are on a parallel internet that has domains censored today. The real issues are simply the scale of censoring and the laws and forum for arbitration of conflicting interests (e.g., is my-company.biz.com and my-company.biz a conflict? how about awatch.com and awatch.apple.com?)
Slashdot Mirror
A rocket wouldn't work very well in a vacuum or thin CO2 atmosphere if it didn't have fuel and oxidizer on board.
FYI A rocket engine by definition has fuel and oxidizer on board. A jet engine is the one that doesn't have the oxidizer on board.
Neither Einstein nor Hitler were orders of magnitudes greater intelligence than the average human- Albert was smart, but nowhere near the potential of AI.
Neither Einstein nor Hitler could process data from all around the world from millions of inputs at the same time.
Einstein and Hitler were both mortal and had a finite life span.
However, even though both Einstein and Hitler were singular humans with limited capabilities and lifespans that could not begin to have the potential impact of something like AI, there is a "meta" version of both personas that was somewhat inspired mythically by the actual humans, that continues to live and influence people today. This meta-Einstein and meta-Hitler are un-embodied ideas which are no longer constrained by mortal limits and you might argue are actually more powerful today than they were in when their namesakes were alive because there are millions more people supporting the mystique behind them and often even operating on behalf of these meta-beings (aka, the idea of the person not to be confused with that person's actual ideas).
These meta-beings (anthropormophizing a set of ideas to be represented by a popular figure) can even be extrapolated from an entity who may or may not of even actually existed in real life (e.g., meta-Jesus or perhaps AI).
To borrow some contemporary lingo, once created, key to the power of this meta-being (which is really an un-embodied idea even though it might be "named" after someone that inspired it) is dependent on if it "goes viral" or not. Unfortunately, "going-viral" is almost an autonomic reflex of our societal-organism over which we have little conscious control. The analogy of a "virus" is pretty good since the idea is not a real organism (or person), it depends on the societal-organism's infrastructure for reproduction and propagation. Once the "virus" takes over part of the infrastructure, the influence if as large (or even larger due to multiplicative effects) as the infrastructure it overruns.
The immunity response to "bad-viruses" of our societal-organism, is not unlike a real-organism's immunity response. If it can remember an idea is bad, the societal-organism is better at containing it before it gets out of hand. If the idea has mutated a bit, or the response would create some complicated inconsistencies (e.g, good for some parts of the organism, bad for some parts), the immunity has a hard time mounting any defense and the virus is more likely to get a permanent foothold or even take over.
Nobody knows if AI is a "good-virus" or a "bad-virus" with respect to our societal-organism, but I'll go out on a limb and say it's probably good for some, bad for others which mean the if it ever goes viral, it will be very hard for our society "immunity" to stop it. Let's hope it's a good idea... Our society's immune system has yet to kill meta-Hitler probably because some of the ideas represented by meta-Hitler are potentially good for more than a small part of the societal organism.
The big deal is about big transactions. This most likely isn't going to be used in the consumer credit card / debit card market, but more likely in the large purchase department. Buying a car/house? Waiting a few minutes vs hours/days for credit reports to return. Transferring millions/billions of dollars between accounts, who's auditing it? Blockchains significantly reduce the amount of work in this department while essentially eliminating fraud, since the dollars can be tracked from transaction to transaction.
Actually, this technology is targeted a contractual transactions in the financial realm (think bank cash claims, credit default-swaps, derivative securities that rely on precise timing, etc.). As far as I can tell, there no concept of proof-of-work or mining, but it's purely a distributed financial ledger concept for banks to use. The block chain concept and the chain history being held simultaneously held by multiple partner institutions simply makes the ledger un-eraseable (any corrections need to be recorded by future transactions, not erased). Unlike bit-coin, there isn't intended to be a single global ledger of all transactions everywhere, but a ledger per domain.
Well, unlike Mars, there is no reason to set up a permanent colony in Antarctica.
Oh, wait... maybe a permanent settlement on Mars is pointless as well? :) Apart from the whole "backup location for humanity, in case Earth gets creamed by an asteroid no one saw coming" thing. That has some far-fetched merit of sorts. However, due to the extremely hostile environment there, chances are that a Martian colony has a much higher probability of failing than civilisation on Earth in the first place, at least for centuries to come. So even in the most optimistic scenarios, it will be the thought that counts w/r to Martian settlement.
FWIW, Early European settlements in North America not only had a high probability of failure, they did fail, prolifically.
Here are a few well known examples...
1526 San Miguel de Gualdape (Georgia) - failed due to food shortages, disease, native attacks
1527 Jungle Prada (Florida) - abandoned after native attacks
1541 Cap-Rouge (Quebec City) - failed due to harsh winter, scurvy, native attacks
1562 Charlesfort (South Carolina) - abandoned due to fire destroyed supplies
1565 St Augustine (Florida) - survived!
1566 Fort San Juan (North Carolina) - failed, burned by natives
1570 Ajacan Jesuit Mission (Virginia) - all killed by native attack
1585 Roanoke (Virginia) - abandoned for some unknown reason ("lost colony of Roanoke")
1599 Tadoussac (Quebec) - failed due to harsh winter, scurvy
1607 Popham (Maine) - failed due to harsh winter, fire destroyed supplies
1607 Jamestown (Virginia) - survived!
I expect a few spectacular failures in the early attempts to colonize Mars. In a way, these new-world colonies were about as isolated as Mars (difficulties in financing voyages meant that colonies could be unsupplied and on their own for 2-3 years at a time). Although there won't be any natives attacking on Mars (or *are* there natives?), the things that undermined many colonies were disease, fires, and the environment which will be all real problems in any Martian colony.
Really. Criminal conviction, huh? Programmer in prison? Are you even listening to yourself?
Write a divide by zero error and have your ass cheeks divided in federal prison.
Infinite Loop errors requires infinite butt pounding.
This is Europe. EU prisons are not at all like US federal prison.
Then again, wasn't it Italy that in 2009 tried and convicted some Earthquake scientists on manslaughter charges (although their conviction was ultimately overturned, they did spend time in jail) for downplaying the chance of an earthquake. All of this was after a *different* scientist was accused with being an alarmist for predicting the same earthquake a month earlier by analyzing radon gas emissions. If you are a scientists in Europe, damned if you do, damned if you don't
Which leads to the question: does NASA not share its magic recipes with the ESA?
You have to look back at the history of the ExoMars program to answer that.
Originally, NASA was a partner and was going to supply a sky-crane decent module and Atlas rockets for payload launch to the program.
Then 2012 budget cuts forced NASA to withdraw from the program. Undaunted, the ESA then brought on Russia as a partner to supply those critical elements of the program and of course the USA and Russia are on such good terms about exchanging technology...
I hope that clarifies the situation...
everybody that has worked on mars missions.
I worked on MGS, and can tell you that to be successful with most missions, you have to have a much higher level of quality compared to normal.
Oddly, if ESA, Russia, CHina, etc wanted to really test this, they would send a duplicate around the moon and then land it on earth.
That would test just about every subsystems in similar ways.
Since you worked on MGS, you probably know people at Nasa that would tell you that landing on earth is totally different than landing on mars (mainly because of the atmospheric density).
Actually, what they're doing is the definition of liberal progressivism, also known as "regressive liberalism". I had to look it up because I wanted to know why I, a traditional liberal (free as in speech), was getting lumped in with all the "check your privilege" types. And while I agree that it appears anti-democratic for one company to severe ties with another due to ideological differences, both parties are exercising their freedom of choice. Believe it or not, it's actually logically consistent. It's just one more casualty of this toxic election.
That's simply because being a partisan is not a federally protected class... Actually, it's kind of weird that being a partisan isn't federally protected after that whole McCarthyism thing, but I guess that whole thing is a distant memory...
To further this argument, calling out political supporters is basically McCarthyism revisited. I'm not sure the "left" wants to revisit that era.
On the other hand, maybe this behavior is a natural reaction of narcissistic people holding the upper hand (aka the instinct to "bully"). The instinct of the bully is to attempt to undermine any support for the person being bullied by calling out and shaming/shunning anyone that shows any support for the target. By maintaining a culture of fear, the bully is able to project their power and further their agenda.
It may be natural, but we can be better than that. We *should* be better than that.
People are scared of random things. I drive a diesel car (in the US) and can't count how many times people have showed grave concerns about my ability to find fuel.
~700 miles (1100 km) per tank I think I should manage to find a station that carries diesel.
I think concerns are driver dependent. I used to know someone who would only fill up $10 cash at every fill up and seem to revel in getting near empty. Basically he was Kramer on Seinfeld's "The Dealership" episode. If he had a diesel car, I'm sure there would be grave concerns about his ability to find fuel...
It's not "Asgard", it's "Ásgarðr" (if you want to modernize the spelling, at least do so as "Ásgarður" - or if you want only English letters, at least get the pronunciation right with something like "Ausgarther"). That's an eth, not a d; an á, not an a; and it's not nominative if you drop the ending. And it's already a place name, it doesn't need a suffix to make it one - let alone a suffix taken from an entirely different linguistic branch. That's like naming a place "Beijing-ia" or "Tamil Nadu-ia"
Get over it. In English, there are lots of appropriated proper nouns that are "mispronounced" in common usage that aren't likely to change. There have recently been a few exceptions that have reverted after centuries of use like: Beijing -> Peking, Mumbai -> Bombay, Kolkata -> Calcutta, but there are of course others like Hong Kong that haven't (and aren't likely) revert to a more phonetic spelling.
FWIW, in Chinese it's quite a bit worse. Many place names pseudo-phonentic transliteration and country names often with a forced "Guó" (meaning country) at the end (e.g., Mei-Guó for America, Ying-Guó for England and Dé-Guó for Germany). Then again, like many languages, there are some so-called exo-nyms too like (Jn-Shn aka, gold-mountain, aka California).
Although English gets a bad rap for appropriation of words, in German, this is an "interess-ieren" phenomena of lots of exo-nyms with Germanic roots.
What's really confusing is when Italians call Munich -> Monaco (di Baviera)...
Maybe because it really wasn't our fight in the first place. Europe had been fighting amongst itself for 1000 years until it knocked everything flat and left itself ripe for Communist takeover. Along came the "Yank" Marshall Plan to help rebuild and "Yanks" paying for defense and for the first time there is sustained peace and prosperity.
Maybe you don't think it was our fight, but Germany thought the USA was fair game and Germany tried to form an alliance with Mexico to take us out prior to WW1 (fortunately Mexico ratted them out).
As for the Communist takeover of Europe being a result of war, how do you explain how it took root in central/south America? Central/south America wasn't knocked flat in any wars that I am aware of? The rise of communism was probably inevitable in the world and after it got a foothold, spread by economic influence.
The Marshall Plan was basically a way to create a powerful "EU" to counter Soviet Union's influence to prevent a Communist takeover of Europe. The Marshall plan (and later iterations) served to simultaneous muscle out the Soviet Union's economic influence and the "EU" style economic arraignment required by the aid plan made it harder for the USSR to fragment and pick-off a country reducing the USSR's economic leverage and therefore political influence. In some ways it wasn't defense, in the cold war, creating the framework for the EU was really offence. Sadly, it's all starting to fade again (e.g., Brexit)
Perhaps he's looking for his very own Kennedy moon moment without having to do anything to follow up on it.
Perhaps when this happens it will fool some of the low-information populist that Obama was the president that led us to mars like Kennedy was the president that lead us to the moon (no doubt that this sound-bite will be picked up by some sci-fi flick). Apparently Obama knows how to get the accolades (e/g. Nobel Peace Prize), better than most presidents (and real people), so I don't underestimate him on this strategy...
Going to mars is a one way ticket, just to say "I did it first" and have some monument built back here on earth to you.
You go there for science. You go there for discovery. You go there to lead to colonization and making mankind a multi-body species.
You don't go just to plant the flag. The red on the flag would clash with Mars's orange.
The UN flag won't (if it is up to BO or HC, it probably won't be the US flag), but then again having a flag that shows a projection of the earth's land masses planted on mars might not be the best "progressive" legacy image either...
On the other hand the brain damage that occurs from cosmic radiation might just be enough to get this to happen...
This might be true, but I doubt anyone could have saved Yahoo. I think the best thing would have been a temporary surge in the stock price so some investors might get rich, but nothing more. And this is what happened.
The sad thing is that Yahoo search still sucks compared to Google search. This, at least, I expected Marissa Mayer to fixed. Regardless, I think Yahoo would have failed anyway.
FYI: Since 2009, Yahoo search has been powered by Bing (MSFT)...
Bing/Yahoo is pretty good now for non-obscure stuff (for obscure tech stuff Google is still way better), but I'm guessing in your mind, the only thing to "fix" it compared to Google search is for Yahoo to roll back the clock to 2004 when Yahoo search was actually powered by Google.
Or...
C.) Apple pulled it, but it wasn't at all related to if a good reason existed or not...
Perhaps you underestimate the probability of these types of occurrences in any automated (or simply large bureaucratic) system.;^)
If you were forced to choose, smog (ozone/acid-rain) generally isn't as bad for your lungs as particulate matter (combustion ash which contains all sorts of industrial chemicals). Assuming this works as advertised as all...
Of course "clean" air would be better...
Smog is not ozone
Smog is the dirty air hovering over cities which also contains ozone
Actually, most regulatory agencies consider smog to be the result of sunlight+NOx+VOCs creating ozone or NOx and/or SOx +H2O making acid rain, so in a since ozone is Smog. These ionic-breeze-on-steriods towers will of course create some ozone (because some of the O2 in the air will get ionized and generate some affinity to create O3 in addition to some more indirect paths with N2 and CO2).
Much of the high dust/dirt particulate part of the air (aka dirty air), isn't generally considered smog except perhaps for the super-fine particulates (less than 100nm).
Particulate matter levels PM-10 and PM-2.5 (less-than 10um and 2.5um, which is what gives much of the "dirty-color" to the smog) are just called particulate matter, not technically smog, although such particulate matter are generally more hazardous to your health than smog....
Here you go singing/dancing AI...
For a presidential debate that lasts only a few hours, I imagine the big 3 would gladly roll in a 4G-LTE COWs that can handle a few hundred journalists gratis. No service provider wants to get the reputation with journalists that they are unreliable for a big story like this. That would be death by a thousand small cuts of ink (and you never want to make enemies with someone who buys ink by the barrel)...
For 5K joe-averages at generic-medium sized entertainment venue, well, one COW won't do it anyhow, and it probably isn't worth cost in petrol...
Okay if big data the new coal, we should stop using it now because although it is currently cheap and plentiful with apparently many applications, we know eventually it lead us to the collapse of civilization.
Maintaining access to big-data will eventually cause political conflicts and maybe even wars, and continuing unrestrained usage of big data will eventually cause inconvenient problems in our daily lives that will make our world unliveable and our society unsustainable. The money exploited by the early adopters in the big-data industrial complex will dominate the political landscape and prevent us from doing anything about constraining this monster until it is too late.
If you could have put a cap on companies like the Peabody coal company back in the early days, you wouldn't ever hear statements like this today from coal company analysts...
“We have never seen leases of more than a billion tonnes and we are starting to see that under the Obama Administration.”
If the Obama administration's department of Interior can be bought-and-sold by a coal company with annual revenues of only $5B, what hope do governments have against big-data companies with annual revenues of $74B?
Any other analogies to coal people would like to say about big-data?
I already read the link a few hours before it was posted. There was zero details on the algorithm and no link to the actual research that I could see.
Well, in case you are interested, after checking around, it appears that this "algorithm" was a minor result of Mr. Helfgott's work to prove the ternary Goldbach conjecture (every odd integer n greater than 5 is the sum of three primes). Here's the preprint of the paper, I should warn you that it appears to be a very theoretical paper, one targetted at the Goldbach conjecture (not practical prime sieving), so there is not a fully fleshed out algorithm that you can translate into a computer program. I haven't gone through the paper in detail, but it appears to rely heavily on technique from a Messr. Ramare.
We start by adapting ideas from Ramare’s version of the large sieve for primes to estimate l2 norms over parts of the circle. We are left with the task
of giving an explicit bound on the factor in Ramare’s work. As a side effect, this finally gives a fully explicit large sieve for primes that is asymptotically optimal, meaning a sieve that does not have a spurious factor of exp(gamma) in front; this was an arguably important gap in the literature.
I cannot find a definitive paper about this technique, but is appears to be related to this earlier paper. Mr. Helfgott apparently just tightening the bounds which theoretically should create a better sieve algorithm. My impression is that I think it will take some concerted effort to create a computer algorithm out of this algorithm.
However, your mileage may vary...
Did you know that electric trains don't need to carry their own power source? True story!
Because of cost of infrastructure, electric trains are really only viable in urban areas. You aren't going to electrify a rail between two cities and expect it to be cost effective... Passenger rail has a different set of economics, so when you do see electrified rail between cities, it's generally passenger only.
Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc would get into the parallel networks, but it would be through the countries' gateways/filters. This implications of this are not good for the people in nations controlled by thugs.
China is the modern day case study for a for a parallel internetwork-domain system (via the great firewall).
The ".com" and other country specific versions of Google, Facebook and Twitter are all blocked by this firewall. There is self-censored Google.cn and Facebook.cn, but Twitter hasn't decided to get into the parallel network game yet (and get in bed with the censorship)...
The result is not really theoretical, you can look at the current situation and draw your own conclusions
Of course this is just a scaled up version of what is done in corporations already. If you are surfing the internet from work you likely are on a parallel internet that has domains censored today. The real issues are simply the scale of censoring and the laws and forum for arbitration of conflicting interests (e.g., is my-company.biz.com and my-company.biz a conflict? how about awatch.com and awatch.apple.com?)
This is about decorum and not ideology.
Ahhh, "decorum", another "go-to" excuse for censoring things that might be controversial or make someone feel bad, ashamed, or uneasy.
There's a place for decorum and then there are times it must be ignored in favor of the truth.
Except when it has trigger words/images, violates my safe zone, or contributes to an atmosphere of microaggressions...
Oh wait, wrong thread... ;^)