The funding problem seems to be harder than the science itself nowadays. There's so much science and technology research we could be doing, but aren't, or at a very slow pace. The main issue is finding funding for fundamental research (for which applications haven't yet been found) and research with a very long payoff period. Historically, this is the type of research that has enabled the bulk of our rapid progress in the last couple of centuries. However, governments around the world are under pressure to cut spending, and this research is slowly but steadily being cut. I think this is a side-effect of the long period of peace we have been enjoying. Now, even the cold war has ended. It seriously looks like our progress will stagnate pretty soon.
Anyone have suggestions on how to improve the funding situation? A sadistic suggestion might be "start a world war," but modern weapons make this pretty much infeasible.
It's a good idea to make Minceraft mods that expose certain laws of physics to interaction, even if not 100% rigorous and realistic. It could become a valuable teaching tool in the future for a large variety of physics and other scientific and engineering concepts. Somehow I feel Markus Persson intended this from the beginning.
Not a bad analogy I guess... The financial industry is the one most similar to the military: secrecy, spying, cutting edge (but highly specialized) technology, wealth, political power, stretching the limits of the law. Though I don't think we can hold the technology developed directly for the financial industry in the same high regard as medicine or nuclear physics.
Others have already answered that most HFTs are just doing arbitrage and make the bit-ask spread low. However, reading some of the article, it saddens me that very talented PhDs are wasting their time playing mind games with each other. The are solving problems then they themselves are creating. I guess on the plus side we have some advancement of FPGA technology and real-time systems... Somehow this still seems like a net waste.
Carnivores, small mammals and less active animals sleep more, large herbivores sleep less. Carnivores have bigger and more active brains. Large herbivores need to constantly watch out for predators. I think there is no contradiction here.
Is it really practical to find and track these objects? There may be just too many of them. These small objects also probably have relatively unstable orbits, so would require constant observation not to lose them again.
This is the correct advice: Use whatever language is most common in your research area, so you can benefit from the most existing source code. This will almost certainly be a high-level scripting language like R, MATLAB or Python, with the ability to drop down to C, FORTRAN and CUDA for the small parts of the code that need optimization. (In my case: electrical engineering = MATLAB + C and CUDA mex files)
I'm with you about wanting more space and other science discussions. Why not post something on the topic of this story and try to get a discussion going? Try to master the art of stimulating productive Slashdot discussion (admittedly, I haven't yet, but I've seen others do it). Actively fight back against mundane, idle chit-chat.
My theory is that the US is governed by very smart (and rich) conservatives that have mastered the art of brainwashing the masses into thinking that far right policies are good for them. As a result, the majority of the general public in the US genuinely does not want socialized health care... The level of brainwashing is comparable to that in Stalin's USSR or in North Korea.
There is some truth to the conservative's preachings. The extreme economic pressure does drive people to be more productive. However, I think it achieves this productivity at the expense of happiness. Of course, some small minority benefits tremendously from this productivity...
It's not that it's unworkable, it's just an unnecessary complication. We need proportional representation of everyone in society, not a huge number of representatives. The emphasis should shift from geographic to demographic representation. Candidates should be allowed to run nationwide on platforms of representing teachers, engineers, lawyers, maybe even ethnic groups. Handing out pork to specific geographic Congressional districts needs to end. (Of course this is all pie-in-the-sky, politically impossible to achieve...)
Cutting too deep into things like infrastructure, research funding and education is not likely to produce much short-term pain. These things are long-term investments. The losses will come many years from now when the US falls from its technological leadership position, stagnates, and eventually declines. I find the short-term thinking behind cutting research and education funding extremely stupid.
2. Defense
This is a logical area to cut, but seems politically impossible.
3. Entitlements
This is another huge chunk of the budget that seems politically impossible to cut.
Given that we already cut too deep into things that really matter, like research and infrastructure, and cannot cut huge chunks of the budget, like entitlements and military, for political reasons, do you still think the solution to the budget deficit is more spending cuts? Your main argument seems to be that raising taxes would shift jobs over to other countries with lower taxes. Which countries would that be? They would have to be larger and have a better reputation than Ireland. Most other developed countries have higher taxes than the US.
Yeah, a more practical shielded spacecraft will likely be a cycler, so it would be used for both the forward and return trips. We would need to develop the technology for docking in solar orbit rather than Earth orbit, which I imagine has much less error margin.
Even though these space transportation techniques seem feasible, it is just so unlikely that we'll do any of it given the current political climate. Even a mission to a near-Earth asteroid seems unlikely. Is the argument that manned space fight is a waste of money really valid? Even if the direct return on investment is low or negative (however it's measured), maybe just the entertainment and inspiration value would be enough of a return? The moon landings were certainly very inspirational. I can't imagine spending the same amount of money on anything else and achieving the same or better effect.
The mass has been estimated in the hundreds of tons: wiki
The propellant mass required to accelerate it to a Mars transfer orbit will be pretty enormous, but maybe not impossibly large, especially if we use reusable rockets to get it into Earth orbit. I wonder if the majority of the acceleration could be done over a multi-year time frame using ion engines, and then the Mars transfer spacecraft docks with the crew capsule and puts in the rest of the delta-V using chemical engines. In any case, this shielded spacecraft will only be useful one-way. It would not be possible to slow it into a Mars orbit and then accelerate it back into an Earth-transfer orbit. So it's a one-way shielded trip to Mars. I wish we were working on something like this... It might even be possible to send the return spacecraft (unmanned) on a large looping orbit that upon intersecting Mars changes into a fast Mars-Earth transfer orbit. The crew then blasts off Mars in a small capsule and docks with the return spacecraft.
You're right on many points. There is inefficiency in the way government spends money. Private companies are more efficient when they have to compete. However, private companies are incapable of investing in high-risk science and technology that may benefit us all 50 years from now. What I'm trying to get at is that we got bogged down in trying to improve the efficiency of mundane economic activity, but at the same time are failing to invest in our long-term prosperity. This is a path to eventual stagnation and then decline.
The US economy has never been stronger or more productive. The government debt issues are mostly due to the unwillingness to raise taxes. We have plenty of room for large, ambitious, high-risk, high-payoff projects. We just have to decide to do them! We gotta hurry up already. Life is getting boring! The best and brightest minds are working on web advertising and stock trading.
There is a pragmatic reason for continuing manned space flight: It is easier to get funding for it from the general public. It could even be that most robotic NASA missions are piggybacking on the manned space program for their funding.
Having said this, is it really that bad that we spend money on manned space flight? Sure, some of it is wasted, but so is much of the money spent on defense, for example. We still get some scientific and technological benefit. The losses are a normal part of the way humans function.
Can anyone enlighten us why MIPS has been much less visible than ARM? Their business model and CPU architectures are similar nowadays. Why are people seriously trying to build servers based on the brand new and untested ARMv8 architecture, while ignoring MIPS64 (in existence since 1999)? Is is all about ARM being cheaper and the network effect?
It's not a solution to climate change and never was or will be. It's a solution to getting at least some energy infrastructure in the poor parts of the world. One thing we have to worry about is scaling this technology, since it creates an easy path deforestation (as others have pointed out). Biomass energy production should ideally use only waste biomass from agriculture and such.
Technically, there is no real problem. People should just not buy Apple products if they don't like them. This issue is probably a marketing failure on the part of other manufacturers. There should be a series of TV commercials exposing the downsides of Apple's vendor lock-in practices.
A condition for allowing "dragnet surveillance" must be that the database only retains data temporarily. Old data quickly becomes a security liability (like you said) and should be completely deleted. Of course, not violating everyone's privacy in the first place is preferable.
Why all the excitement about finding water in another star system? Sure, it seems to be the first time it was actually detected, but only after the water fell onto a white dwarf. This detection method will not work for systems that might actually harbor life.. And it's only one data point, so doesn't generate any useful statistics on the water content of other star systems. As far as answering the question "is there water in other star systems?" I don't think anyone ever thought the answer might be "no."
Has anyone tried a system where serving in the government is a civic duty just like jury duty? You get selected randomly and serve a short term, maybe a couple years, then go back to being a normal citizen. Perhaps this would be better than having factions competing for power? The power of lobbyists also needs to be checked somehow.. The goal is basically to avoid letting an organized group accumulate power, and instead spread political power as evenly as possible through the general public.
This simple idea is used in all branches of engineering. It's basically prototyping. You never build the full-blown complex system from scratch. You start with a simple prototype. If that works, you increase complexity and add features. Adding features increases cost, but if you have demonstrated feasibility, it's much easier to get the customer to pay.
If we're at the point of worrying about the LO interfering with the airplane equipment, we should also worry about the digital clocks in just about all electronic devices. Is that really what they are worried about? I was under the impression that the rule of turning off and stowing all electronic devices was to reduce the number of potential projectiles in case something doesn't go quite right during these most dangerous parts of the flight. There's also the concern that a cheap phone may not properly disable its transmitter in airplane mode.. maybe. A LO or digital clock under no circumstances constitute a threat as they are on the order of 1 mW, or less, RF power.
Slashdot Mirror
build a small tech incubator city that floats in international waters, outside of government control
Are these people planning to operate outside the law of an existing country? This seems beyond impossible. Not even worth discussing.
The Mars colony is more interesting for the technology required to to this than the society that might spring up on Mars.
The funding problem seems to be harder than the science itself nowadays. There's so much science and technology research we could be doing, but aren't, or at a very slow pace. The main issue is finding funding for fundamental research (for which applications haven't yet been found) and research with a very long payoff period. Historically, this is the type of research that has enabled the bulk of our rapid progress in the last couple of centuries. However, governments around the world are under pressure to cut spending, and this research is slowly but steadily being cut. I think this is a side-effect of the long period of peace we have been enjoying. Now, even the cold war has ended. It seriously looks like our progress will stagnate pretty soon.
Anyone have suggestions on how to improve the funding situation? A sadistic suggestion might be "start a world war," but modern weapons make this pretty much infeasible.
It's a good idea to make Minceraft mods that expose certain laws of physics to interaction, even if not 100% rigorous and realistic. It could become a valuable teaching tool in the future for a large variety of physics and other scientific and engineering concepts. Somehow I feel Markus Persson intended this from the beginning.
Not a bad analogy I guess... The financial industry is the one most similar to the military: secrecy, spying, cutting edge (but highly specialized) technology, wealth, political power, stretching the limits of the law. Though I don't think we can hold the technology developed directly for the financial industry in the same high regard as medicine or nuclear physics.
Others have already answered that most HFTs are just doing arbitrage and make the bit-ask spread low. However, reading some of the article, it saddens me that very talented PhDs are wasting their time playing mind games with each other. The are solving problems then they themselves are creating. I guess on the plus side we have some advancement of FPGA technology and real-time systems... Somehow this still seems like a net waste.
Carnivores, small mammals and less active animals sleep more, large herbivores sleep less. Carnivores have bigger and more active brains. Large herbivores need to constantly watch out for predators. I think there is no contradiction here.
Is it really practical to find and track these objects? There may be just too many of them. These small objects also probably have relatively unstable orbits, so would require constant observation not to lose them again.
This is the correct advice: Use whatever language is most common in your research area, so you can benefit from the most existing source code. This will almost certainly be a high-level scripting language like R, MATLAB or Python, with the ability to drop down to C, FORTRAN and CUDA for the small parts of the code that need optimization. (In my case: electrical engineering = MATLAB + C and CUDA mex files)
I'm with you about wanting more space and other science discussions. Why not post something on the topic of this story and try to get a discussion going? Try to master the art of stimulating productive Slashdot discussion (admittedly, I haven't yet, but I've seen others do it). Actively fight back against mundane, idle chit-chat.
My theory is that the US is governed by very smart (and rich) conservatives that have mastered the art of brainwashing the masses into thinking that far right policies are good for them. As a result, the majority of the general public in the US genuinely does not want socialized health care... The level of brainwashing is comparable to that in Stalin's USSR or in North Korea.
There is some truth to the conservative's preachings. The extreme economic pressure does drive people to be more productive. However, I think it achieves this productivity at the expense of happiness. Of course, some small minority benefits tremendously from this productivity...
It's not that it's unworkable, it's just an unnecessary complication. We need proportional representation of everyone in society, not a huge number of representatives. The emphasis should shift from geographic to demographic representation. Candidates should be allowed to run nationwide on platforms of representing teachers, engineers, lawyers, maybe even ethnic groups. Handing out pork to specific geographic Congressional districts needs to end. (Of course this is all pie-in-the-sky, politically impossible to achieve...)
1. Discretionary.
Cutting too deep into things like infrastructure, research funding and education is not likely to produce much short-term pain. These things are long-term investments. The losses will come many years from now when the US falls from its technological leadership position, stagnates, and eventually declines. I find the short-term thinking behind cutting research and education funding extremely stupid.
2. Defense
This is a logical area to cut, but seems politically impossible.
3. Entitlements
This is another huge chunk of the budget that seems politically impossible to cut.
Given that we already cut too deep into things that really matter, like research and infrastructure, and cannot cut huge chunks of the budget, like entitlements and military, for political reasons, do you still think the solution to the budget deficit is more spending cuts? Your main argument seems to be that raising taxes would shift jobs over to other countries with lower taxes. Which countries would that be? They would have to be larger and have a better reputation than Ireland. Most other developed countries have higher taxes than the US.
Yeah, a more practical shielded spacecraft will likely be a cycler, so it would be used for both the forward and return trips. We would need to develop the technology for docking in solar orbit rather than Earth orbit, which I imagine has much less error margin.
Even though these space transportation techniques seem feasible, it is just so unlikely that we'll do any of it given the current political climate. Even a mission to a near-Earth asteroid seems unlikely. Is the argument that manned space fight is a waste of money really valid? Even if the direct return on investment is low or negative (however it's measured), maybe just the entertainment and inspiration value would be enough of a return? The moon landings were certainly very inspirational. I can't imagine spending the same amount of money on anything else and achieving the same or better effect.
The mass has been estimated in the hundreds of tons: wiki
The propellant mass required to accelerate it to a Mars transfer orbit will be pretty enormous, but maybe not impossibly large, especially if we use reusable rockets to get it into Earth orbit. I wonder if the majority of the acceleration could be done over a multi-year time frame using ion engines, and then the Mars transfer spacecraft docks with the crew capsule and puts in the rest of the delta-V using chemical engines. In any case, this shielded spacecraft will only be useful one-way. It would not be possible to slow it into a Mars orbit and then accelerate it back into an Earth-transfer orbit. So it's a one-way shielded trip to Mars. I wish we were working on something like this... It might even be possible to send the return spacecraft (unmanned) on a large looping orbit that upon intersecting Mars changes into a fast Mars-Earth transfer orbit. The crew then blasts off Mars in a small capsule and docks with the return spacecraft.
You're right on many points. There is inefficiency in the way government spends money. Private companies are more efficient when they have to compete. However, private companies are incapable of investing in high-risk science and technology that may benefit us all 50 years from now. What I'm trying to get at is that we got bogged down in trying to improve the efficiency of mundane economic activity, but at the same time are failing to invest in our long-term prosperity. This is a path to eventual stagnation and then decline.
The US economy has never been stronger or more productive. The government debt issues are mostly due to the unwillingness to raise taxes. We have plenty of room for large, ambitious, high-risk, high-payoff projects. We just have to decide to do them! We gotta hurry up already. Life is getting boring! The best and brightest minds are working on web advertising and stock trading.
There is a pragmatic reason for continuing manned space flight: It is easier to get funding for it from the general public. It could even be that most robotic NASA missions are piggybacking on the manned space program for their funding.
Having said this, is it really that bad that we spend money on manned space flight? Sure, some of it is wasted, but so is much of the money spent on defense, for example. We still get some scientific and technological benefit. The losses are a normal part of the way humans function.
Can anyone enlighten us why MIPS has been much less visible than ARM? Their business model and CPU architectures are similar nowadays. Why are people seriously trying to build servers based on the brand new and untested ARMv8 architecture, while ignoring MIPS64 (in existence since 1999)? Is is all about ARM being cheaper and the network effect?
It's not a solution to climate change and never was or will be. It's a solution to getting at least some energy infrastructure in the poor parts of the world. One thing we have to worry about is scaling this technology, since it creates an easy path deforestation (as others have pointed out). Biomass energy production should ideally use only waste biomass from agriculture and such.
See the problem?
Technically, there is no real problem. People should just not buy Apple products if they don't like them. This issue is probably a marketing failure on the part of other manufacturers. There should be a series of TV commercials exposing the downsides of Apple's vendor lock-in practices.
A condition for allowing "dragnet surveillance" must be that the database only retains data temporarily. Old data quickly becomes a security liability (like you said) and should be completely deleted. Of course, not violating everyone's privacy in the first place is preferable.
Why all the excitement about finding water in another star system? Sure, it seems to be the first time it was actually detected, but only after the water fell onto a white dwarf. This detection method will not work for systems that might actually harbor life.. And it's only one data point, so doesn't generate any useful statistics on the water content of other star systems. As far as answering the question "is there water in other star systems?" I don't think anyone ever thought the answer might be "no."
Has anyone tried a system where serving in the government is a civic duty just like jury duty? You get selected randomly and serve a short term, maybe a couple years, then go back to being a normal citizen. Perhaps this would be better than having factions competing for power? The power of lobbyists also needs to be checked somehow.. The goal is basically to avoid letting an organized group accumulate power, and instead spread political power as evenly as possible through the general public.
This simple idea is used in all branches of engineering. It's basically prototyping. You never build the full-blown complex system from scratch. You start with a simple prototype. If that works, you increase complexity and add features. Adding features increases cost, but if you have demonstrated feasibility, it's much easier to get the customer to pay.
If we're at the point of worrying about the LO interfering with the airplane equipment, we should also worry about the digital clocks in just about all electronic devices. Is that really what they are worried about? I was under the impression that the rule of turning off and stowing all electronic devices was to reduce the number of potential projectiles in case something doesn't go quite right during these most dangerous parts of the flight. There's also the concern that a cheap phone may not properly disable its transmitter in airplane mode.. maybe. A LO or digital clock under no circumstances constitute a threat as they are on the order of 1 mW, or less, RF power.