This is really a revival of a program that Clinton zeroed out the funding for in 1992. Supposedly, (I had friends working on it) Al detested the thought of anything nuclear.
Because of two factors. First, the satellites that provide good pictures are overhead for only a few minutes at a time. (Geosationary ones can only see things a meter across or more and can be fooled easily.) Second, WMD's can be made so small nowdays that they could be hidden in your average sedan. If I wanted to hide from all satelitte monitoring (or UN monitoring) enough smallpox biotoxin to wipe out the population of Earth, I'd need about twenty Peugots with dedicated boots. Think they could still be hiding in Iraq? Check the local freeway.
The Finnish Air Force also purchased several dozen (about 60) outmoded Brewster Buffalo fighter aircraft and defeated the Soviet Air Forces in battles for their own airspace. The Buffalo was the front line US fighter at the start of the Pacific war and was massacered by the Zero. It was the primary defense fighter for Midway. I have great respect for the Finnish military and the elan with which they fought.
Minsky is right; what's new to come out of actual AI research in the last 30 years?
I agree. I studied AI in linguistics for several years. Although modern translation systems have gotten a lot better at keeping lists and matching, they remain no better at grammatical structuring than before Chomsky got into the field.
Christianity is of course an amalgmam of pre-existing religous/ cultural beliefs and a new tradition. The point is, it had one pretty good leader and he had a bunch of followers who weren't to shabby either. Discredit?, far from it. Exhibit failings? absolutely. That's a huge difference. It still will be those who choose to believe, will believe. Those who refuse to believe, won't.
This is just a few congressmen trying to CYA. Sixty million sounds like a lot of money to you and me, but to a government employee, its just a drop in the bucket.
While absolute certainty of punishment would drive down random murder rates, it would not eliminate murder. A majority of women murdered are murdered by someone they know, normally a male.
The compositional change in the atmosphere (mostly how much CO2 is present) could theoretically be balanced by changes in the cloud balance (% of clouds to land area.) This would affect the albedo. I have seen research on this presenting solid evidence that the amount of cloudage has increased in the last few decades (the range of good global data.)
Actually, I believe the biggest effect of global warming (at least a few degrees) is the rise in sea level due to ice cap melting, not single area warming or cooling.
Most of the plundered texts wind up in private or semi-private collections. At the Oriental Institute, there was a major effort to convince people who held them to permit photographing and documentation. Since this normally involved an evaluation and a translation by an expert and had no strings attached, these plundered texts at least remained available to scholarly analysis.
This is the cheapest, simplest form of probe there is. It rides a fundamental law of quantum mechanics that reflected photons transmit more force than absorbed ones. Unfortunately, it will take quite awhile to go anywhere significant.
Unlikely. IBM made bad decisions in the PC market and yet kept thinking they could compete. And yet, because of their strengths, they thought they could make fabulous amounts of money there which they did for awhile. Data storage does not have the same appeal to IBM's marketing department and so is unlikely to lure the company back. Besides, they teamed up with a major player in the market and Hitachi probably has a restrictive agreement with them.
TextArc would certainly be a useful tool for analysis of undeciphered languages and texts. Ventris certainly could have used this for Linear B. The only big limitations would be requiring a suitable sized text and having a consistent meaning to that text. As in, the Rosetta stone probably was not a long enough text to analyse this way.
This is certainly a very interesting tool for summarization and analysis. Viewing it thru an NLP perspective, it converts a text into a purely visual representation. It would be interesting to examine writing from different communication channel dominant authors and check for the pattern differences. It would also be helpful for checking consistency of translations.
Certain species of whales may be among the most intelligent species on the planet. For one thing, they aren't responsible for global warming but are perfectly placed to take advantage of it. Second, they exist nearly perfectly at the top of their respective food chains, as in nothing eats them (apart from the occasional Japanese that is.) Third, they spend a good portion of their time goofing around (as in they don't have to put in hours a day in an office cube.)
Because of the need to rush construction, the ready availablitity of concrete (as opposed to scarce metal) and the 'who cares about fuel mileage' attitude, Liberty ships during WWII were sometimes produced in concrete. These were trans-Atlantic freight haulers, deemed perfect for moving armoured vehicles. Of course, if struck by enemy fire, they gave a quick refresher on the phrase 'sinks like a stone'.
Is the set of 17 amino acids in use on Earth-based life a privledged set? As in, are there any possible substitutes? Or could the set reasonably be expanded or contracted? I'm presuming size, composition, polarity and electronegativity are all limitations.
Until the space program started requesting ever smaller computers, there was virtually zero drive to downsize them. Although the thought and even practice of placing computer memory on chips existed before the Mercury program, nobody would have invested the money that allows VLSI (and hence the 'modern' computer industry.) Thus my job, your job and probably nearly everyone on Slashdot can thank space exploration.
The tricky part of this mapping is that any images recorded represent only a single snapshot of events. 15 billion year old quasars may be long gone by now, but we can't tell. We have very recent images of close stars, somewhat recent images of most of our galaxy and ancient images of most distant galaxies. Any map produced is really just a reflection of this snapshot of images from the past.
The article doesn't mention anything about taking genetic samples but it would not be a bad idea to store DNA samples of all living things. Of course, this would give a good way to do the taxonomy as well, since the diversion of the DNA can be traced backward.
Slashdot Mirror
This is really a revival of a program that Clinton zeroed out the funding for in 1992. Supposedly, (I had friends working on it) Al detested the thought of anything nuclear.
Because of two factors. First, the satellites that provide good pictures are overhead for only a few minutes at a time. (Geosationary ones can only see things a meter across or more and can be fooled easily.) Second, WMD's can be made so small nowdays that they could be hidden in your average sedan. If I wanted to hide from all satelitte monitoring (or UN monitoring) enough smallpox biotoxin to wipe out the population of Earth, I'd need about twenty Peugots with dedicated boots. Think they could still be hiding in Iraq? Check the local freeway.
The Finnish Air Force also purchased several dozen (about 60) outmoded Brewster Buffalo fighter aircraft and defeated the Soviet Air Forces in battles for their own airspace. The Buffalo was the front line US fighter at the start of the Pacific war and was massacered by the Zero. It was the primary defense fighter for Midway. I have great respect for the Finnish military and the elan with which they fought.
Minsky is right; what's new to come out of actual AI research in the last 30 years?
I agree. I studied AI in linguistics for several years. Although modern translation systems have gotten a lot better at keeping lists and matching, they remain no better at grammatical structuring than before Chomsky got into the field.
Christianity is of course an amalgmam of pre-existing religous/ cultural beliefs and a new tradition. The point is, it had one pretty good leader and he had a bunch of followers who weren't to shabby either. Discredit?, far from it. Exhibit failings? absolutely. That's a huge difference. It still will be those who choose to believe, will believe. Those who refuse to believe, won't.
Bravo.
I didn't think the readership of slashdor would be familiar with the speeches of Barry Goldwater however.
This is just a few congressmen trying to CYA. Sixty million sounds like a lot of money to you and me, but to a government employee, its just a drop in the bucket.
where saying "First." really does mean something.
There are no internet censors in the People's Republic of China.
While absolute certainty of punishment would drive down random murder rates, it would not eliminate murder. A majority of women murdered are murdered by someone they know, normally a male.
The compositional change in the atmosphere (mostly how much CO2 is present) could theoretically be balanced by changes in the cloud balance (% of clouds to land area.) This would affect the albedo. I have seen research on this presenting solid evidence that the amount of cloudage has increased in the last few decades (the range of good global data.)
Actually, I believe the biggest effect of global warming (at least a few degrees) is the rise in sea level due to ice cap melting, not single area warming or cooling.
Most of the plundered texts wind up in private or semi-private collections. At the Oriental Institute, there was a major effort to convince people who held them to permit photographing and documentation. Since this normally involved an evaluation and a translation by an expert and had no strings attached, these plundered texts at least remained available to scholarly analysis.
This is the cheapest, simplest form of probe there is. It rides a fundamental law of quantum mechanics that reflected photons transmit more force than absorbed ones. Unfortunately, it will take quite awhile to go anywhere significant.
Unlikely. IBM made bad decisions in the PC market and yet kept thinking they could compete. And yet, because of their strengths, they thought they could make fabulous amounts of money there which they did for awhile. Data storage does not have the same appeal to IBM's marketing department and so is unlikely to lure the company back. Besides, they teamed up with a major player in the market and Hitachi probably has a restrictive agreement with them.
TextArc would certainly be a useful tool for analysis of undeciphered languages and texts. Ventris certainly could have used this for Linear B. The only big limitations would be requiring a suitable sized text and having a consistent meaning to that text. As in, the Rosetta stone probably was not a long enough text to analyse this way.
This is certainly a very interesting tool for summarization and analysis. Viewing it thru an NLP perspective, it converts a text into a purely visual representation. It would be interesting to examine writing from different communication channel dominant authors and check for the pattern differences. It would also be helpful for checking consistency of translations.
Certain species of whales may be among the most intelligent species on the planet. For one thing, they aren't responsible for global warming but are perfectly placed to take advantage of it. Second, they exist nearly perfectly at the top of their respective food chains, as in nothing eats them (apart from the occasional Japanese that is.) Third, they spend a good portion of their time goofing around (as in they don't have to put in hours a day in an office cube.)
Because of the need to rush construction, the ready availablitity of concrete (as opposed to scarce metal) and the 'who cares about fuel mileage' attitude, Liberty ships during WWII were sometimes produced in concrete. These were trans-Atlantic freight haulers, deemed perfect for moving armoured vehicles. Of course, if struck by enemy fire, they gave a quick refresher on the phrase 'sinks like a stone'.
Is the set of 17 amino acids in use on Earth-based life a privledged set? As in, are there any possible substitutes? Or could the set reasonably be expanded or contracted? I'm presuming size, composition, polarity and electronegativity are all limitations.
Until the space program started requesting ever smaller computers, there was virtually zero drive to downsize them. Although the thought and even practice of placing computer memory on chips existed before the Mercury program, nobody would have invested the money that allows VLSI (and hence the 'modern' computer industry.) Thus my job, your job and probably nearly everyone on Slashdot can thank space exploration.
All your poles belong to us now.
The tricky part of this mapping is that any images recorded represent only a single snapshot of events. 15 billion year old quasars may be long gone by now, but we can't tell. We have very recent images of close stars, somewhat recent images of most of our galaxy and ancient images of most distant galaxies. Any map produced is really just a reflection of this snapshot of images from the past.
The article doesn't mention anything about taking genetic samples but it would not be a bad idea to store DNA samples of all living things. Of course, this would give a good way to do the taxonomy as well, since the diversion of the DNA can be traced backward.
. . . the size that Noah's Ark should have been with 10 million pairs of creatures onboard.
when this same technology is applied to
a) crop dusting
b) organic farming
(And no, the two are not mutually exclusive!!)