What incentive is there to learn advanced theory when it is so hard to find a business that wants to hire someone to use the theory? Businesses shy from the risks of exotic ideas. Many businesses don't have the stomach to be the first ones to use a new technology or achieve a new goal.
A solution seems to be to teach students experience with advanced industrial ideas at an early age. This is of course quite difficult without a good background in science, math, sociology, language, commerce, etc. etc. but otherwise students lack any motivation.
The world needs thinkers. Machines exist to do all kinds of mundane repetitive crap. Thinking is fairly difficult though - in high school I welcomed challenging problems but looking back I can see how poor the teaching of hardcore thinking really was. The teachers did have their hands full teaching the cirriculum, which was complex enough that most students struggled with it, and to give them credit, most of them graduated by doing their work and actually learning.
I can't escape feeling that the world will be so much harsher in the near future. This will be a time when average people will have to solve challenging and somewhat unique problems in order to earn their living.
The mechanisms and procedures that produce the goods all around us are maturing. Fewer and fewer people are required to produce the same volume of things. Competing brands are converging in terms of quality and satisfaction. People are being squeezed out of the factories by automation.
There are still a lot of problems left to be solved with intelligence though. It's just that the education system doesn't have the backbone to really shove thinking down the throats of young students. Of course, it also means shoving real thinking down the throats of teachers. That could be the real problem - can public school teachers be taught to think and teach thinking? They know about good thinking. They've seen powerful concepts and methods. They know about the history of human progress, all the triumphs and mistakes. But given a difficult goal with no prior solution most teachers can't show you how to go through the steps to get an answer.
Population Reduction Done Well
on
A New Ice Age?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
We could reduce our population by undertaking a massive space program and colonizing the galaxy. It's about time people started to go to other stars.
A good start would be building space stations and bases on the moon and on Mars. Even a program of robot explorers would start the momentum.
One great bottleneck of robots is control - we still have very primitive self-driving cars. In outer space we would need a large array of robots to be able to operate for a long time. The Mars rovers work by themselves, but this limits their lifespan. However if they worked in groups they could maintain each other for a longer time. Periodically we can send supplies and more robots to boost the abilities of the robot farm.
It would be abnormal if you see a light go green and then back to red in about 10-15 sec. If this happens for 20 lights on the whole way people get a little crazy
People obey traffic signals because otherwise they get hit by a truck
Where I live, most people obey the speed limit because insurance rates have gone nuts. There's so little speeding that hardly anyone is stopped for anything.
Can a capacitor power supply run a computer? P4s consume a lot of power so R wouldn't be that big - the output voltage of the capacitor could fall rapidly.
BTW aren't capacitors used in power supplies to offset fluctuations in source voltage as the load changes?
What does this prove? Well suppose that you need many people to act in unison at a specific time to achieve a great end - like stopping an asteroid or preventing an epidemic.
This is a benchmark or demonstration of how well we can do this.
I think the supercomputer experiment was kind of weakly planned. They already ran tests showing that 60 1-GHz computers run at 46.8 GFlops. They need 60000 at least to go 46.8 TFlops, which would wallop the Earth Simulator. I doubt most people would be bringing their 3.06 GHz Xeons running 3.384 GFlops. Also, the Earth Simulator uses a massively huge building while the flashmob is in a gym. A gym may be enough sizewise, if the computers were stacked floor to ceiling...
Outsourcing overseas has been under the microscope for years now. We seem to be going over and over the same question - is it right?
That question is not worth debating. If suddenly the domestic supply of programmers multiplied by a factor of 10000 perhaps due to the availability of a powerful machine that lets anyone write computer programs, what then?? Right now the supply has multiplied, not domestically but virtually so.
Cars put horses out of the transportation business. No one is erecting hitching posts on main street. We would be completely screwed if we couldn't stop teaching people how to ride horses but not to drive cars.
Industry and the education system have the onus of teaching people what to do with the latest technology.
One of the great difficulties is the consumer profile. I don't think I own that many things, but when I look at what I do have, I have a lot of different types of things - computer, shampoo, printer, bicycle, car, toothbrush, books, fan, newspapers, milk, pens, tables, clothes, etc. I have enough commonplace things to live, and I suppose most people wouldn't have a much greater variety of items.
A suite of products that is really missing is the kind of product that helps people live. Wouldn't it be great to have a box that you could just plug in to the electrical and plumbing, turn it on and ready-to-eat food comes out. That would put a nice touch on the set of consumer items that everyone could use.
Because they don't contribute their hard-earned money back into our* economy.
In a way I agree.
Explanation - companies are just cutting costs for doing work that has become so simple minded that even monkeys pounding keyboards connected to idiot proofed software might just come up with the desired end result at the end of the day. In other words, businesses are not hiring domestically because there is not enough desire for solving difficult problems.
There are supercomputer class computers on the desks of receptionists doing nothing. Twenty years ago when people had to spend millions for such a machine they dreamed of what they could do on it. Now businesses have the potential in hand to achieve something but how many businesses are even hiring one person to do research and development in applying a computer? Are the career sections of newspapers showing ads for computer science PhDs?
On the one hand people worry about the falling US dollar and how it hurts the world economy. On the other hand companies are not investing in research.
Companies that don't invest will find themselves under competition. Mergers and attrition will reduce that competition but we all will end up paying more as surviving companies take more control of the market.
The world is full of mass produced goods that are improved year after year. However, the culture does not encourage personal initiative. There are so many people sitting on their fat asses watching TV. How many of them consider for more than 10 seconds to get involved with some problem?
Here are some problems that everyone hears about: asteroid impact, peak oil, global warming, disease, famine, water shortage. So many people understand these problems but they are constantly being told that they can't do anything about it or that some committee is taking care of things.
You don't need to know someone else's password. A filesharing program can hide the work of entering passwords - users just act as though they are reading public shared messages.
That's fine by me - it's all in the name of communicating. Not at all abusive of storage, bandwidth, etc.
Essentially Google would be giving everyone 1Gb of Internet space to do as they please. That helps many people put their own info on the Internet rather than using an ISP's limited storage.
In the end, Google could end up hosting a huge piece of all Internet content. There's power in that strategy.
Be close to where you want to go - i.e., live in the right neighborhood, encourage other people to move/start businesses close by, change/schedule jobs, find a hotel/campsite. This is one of the benefits of suburbs. Some people claim to commute 200 km. That can't last forever.
Avoid congested places. Find places that satisfy your desires without the congestion.
Traffic delays are so wasteful. People should join a club where they submit their route or begin-end points. Then others in the club would know where and when others are going someplace and avoid doing the same thing or adjust their timing or even travel together.
The Internet can improve the average life of everyone by aiding technological progress. In the long run people everywhere will gain access to the basic necessities of life and have economic opportunities for improving their own lives.
An important thing is to communicate about abusive leaders, problems, and solutions.
People all over the world feel more unified with instant communications, but it is still hard to express in words what is happening. Bandwidth and recording limitations permit some grainy videos to be seen. We're just overwhelmed by the number of issues. It's like arriving at the scene of a fire. 99% of the time there are legions of firemen already there and you don't want to interfere. Similarly, people who are reporting about problems in detail on the Internet are on top of the situation and the rest of the world waits mostly to see if the people handing the situation are doing a good job. The sentiments of the commissioner of the National Hockey League - he doesn't take sides in the Stanley Cup finals; he just wants good refereeing.
the Internet has not been as great a vessel for democratic progress as some hoped
The existence of the Internet is a sign of democracy. In countries where tyrants really clamp down there is hardly any Internet.
Since when did we ever expect the people of the world to unite against any tyrant based on urgings of people posting on the Internet?
The Internet has helped people realize their own goals. Very few people have the goal of pointing fingers at tyrants though. The news may speak of atrocities but offers little hope of someone stepping in and doing something about them.
Of course the jobs are doable by dumbasses. There's nothing else left for them to do. They're specifically designed to be doable. Anyone who is smart will hire dumbasses to keep the profits up.
Take the lawnmower for instance. Absolutely idiot proofed. In fact, a few years from now completely automated. That's the whole problem.
There are tech people so lacking in anything better to do that they are forced to earn a living inventing machines to do dumbass jobs. So like it or not, members of joe public are going to have to get off their fat little asses and find something hard to do. So far the large majority have been too cowardly to do this.
I've been talking to a large number of business owners about whether they are interested in developing automation. They aren't - why? It's not just because they would become massively over capacity to serve their current customers. Of course they would be expanding to get new customers if they increase capacity.
They're scared to take the risk. They think that having built a somewhat stabilized cash flow it's time to wait for the competition to blink - see who will survive.
Baby boomers are reaching retirement age. They want their diseases cured so anyone who wants to find something to do...
Still the same old problem - not enough to back up a 400 Gb drive, and how reliable are these new DVDs for long term storage??
Tbe new DVD may offer more capacity for redundancy though - you can write multiple copies of a large folder to the same disk with a lot of space left over so any degradation is unlikely to blow away all your data at once.
Slashdot Mirror
What incentive is there to learn advanced theory when it is so hard to find a business that wants to hire someone to use the theory? Businesses shy from the risks of exotic ideas. Many businesses don't have the stomach to be the first ones to use a new technology or achieve a new goal.
A solution seems to be to teach students experience with advanced industrial ideas at an early age. This is of course quite difficult without a good background in science, math, sociology, language, commerce, etc. etc. but otherwise students lack any motivation.
The world needs thinkers. Machines exist to do all kinds of mundane repetitive crap. Thinking is fairly difficult though - in high school I welcomed challenging problems but looking back I can see how poor the teaching of hardcore thinking really was. The teachers did have their hands full teaching the cirriculum, which was complex enough that most students struggled with it, and to give them credit, most of them graduated by doing their work and actually learning.
I can't escape feeling that the world will be so much harsher in the near future. This will be a time when average people will have to solve challenging and somewhat unique problems in order to earn their living.
The mechanisms and procedures that produce the goods all around us are maturing. Fewer and fewer people are required to produce the same volume of things. Competing brands are converging in terms of quality and satisfaction. People are being squeezed out of the factories by automation.
There are still a lot of problems left to be solved with intelligence though. It's just that the education system doesn't have the backbone to really shove thinking down the throats of young students. Of course, it also means shoving real thinking down the throats of teachers. That could be the real problem - can public school teachers be taught to think and teach thinking? They know about good thinking. They've seen powerful concepts and methods. They know about the history of human progress, all the triumphs and mistakes. But given a difficult goal with no prior solution most teachers can't show you how to go through the steps to get an answer.
We could reduce our population by undertaking a massive space program and colonizing the galaxy. It's about time people started to go to other stars.
A good start would be building space stations and bases on the moon and on Mars. Even a program of robot explorers would start the momentum.
One great bottleneck of robots is control - we still have very primitive self-driving cars. In outer space we would need a large array of robots to be able to operate for a long time. The Mars rovers work by themselves, but this limits their lifespan. However if they worked in groups they could maintain each other for a longer time. Periodically we can send supplies and more robots to boost the abilities of the robot farm.
You represent a new customer base for Microsoft: a Windows environment based on Linux.
I predict a collision regardless of any light.
It would be abnormal if you see a light go green and then back to red in about 10-15 sec. If this happens for 20 lights on the whole way people get a little crazy
People obey traffic signals because otherwise they get hit by a truck
Where I live, most people obey the speed limit because insurance rates have gone nuts. There's so little speeding that hardly anyone is stopped for anything.
Even if you can't go that fast, just spin out hard enough to go through sideways. You'll see a green light.
To be fully effective add a railway crossing barrier.
Capacitors???????
Quite the controlled discharge
v = C q(t) = - R dq/dt for a resistive load
q = - R/C dq/dt = ( V0 / C ) e^(-tR/C)
V across the load = v - Cq = v - V0 e^(-tR/C)
P = V^2 / R
Can a capacitor power supply run a computer? P4s consume a lot of power so R wouldn't be that big - the output voltage of the capacitor could fall rapidly.
BTW aren't capacitors used in power supplies to offset fluctuations in source voltage as the load changes?
I need a replacement vehicle
What does this prove? Well suppose that you need many people to act in unison at a specific time to achieve a great end - like stopping an asteroid or preventing an epidemic.
This is a benchmark or demonstration of how well we can do this.
I think the supercomputer experiment was kind of weakly planned. They already ran tests showing that 60 1-GHz computers run at 46.8 GFlops. They need 60000 at least to go 46.8 TFlops, which would wallop the Earth Simulator. I doubt most people would be bringing their 3.06 GHz Xeons running 3.384 GFlops. Also, the Earth Simulator uses a massively huge building while the flashmob is in a gym. A gym may be enough sizewise, if the computers were stacked floor to ceiling...
Do you think the CEOs in India are working for $2/hr?
Outsourcing overseas has been under the microscope for years now. We seem to be going over and over the same question - is it right?
That question is not worth debating. If suddenly the domestic supply of programmers multiplied by a factor of 10000 perhaps due to the availability of a powerful machine that lets anyone write computer programs, what then?? Right now the supply has multiplied, not domestically but virtually so.
Cars put horses out of the transportation business. No one is erecting hitching posts on main street. We would be completely screwed if we couldn't stop teaching people how to ride horses but not to drive cars.
Industry and the education system have the onus of teaching people what to do with the latest technology.
One of the great difficulties is the consumer profile. I don't think I own that many things, but when I look at what I do have, I have a lot of different types of things - computer, shampoo, printer, bicycle, car, toothbrush, books, fan, newspapers, milk, pens, tables, clothes, etc. I have enough commonplace things to live, and I suppose most people wouldn't have a much greater variety of items.
A suite of products that is really missing is the kind of product that helps people live. Wouldn't it be great to have a box that you could just plug in to the electrical and plumbing, turn it on and ready-to-eat food comes out. That would put a nice touch on the set of consumer items that everyone could use.
Because they don't contribute their hard-earned money back into our* economy.
In a way I agree.
Explanation - companies are just cutting costs for doing work that has become so simple minded that even monkeys pounding keyboards connected to idiot proofed software might just come up with the desired end result at the end of the day. In other words, businesses are not hiring domestically because there is not enough desire for solving difficult problems.
There are supercomputer class computers on the desks of receptionists doing nothing. Twenty years ago when people had to spend millions for such a machine they dreamed of what they could do on it. Now businesses have the potential in hand to achieve something but how many businesses are even hiring one person to do research and development in applying a computer?
Are the career sections of newspapers showing ads for computer science PhDs?
On the one hand people worry about the falling US dollar and how it hurts the world economy. On the other hand companies are not investing in research.
Companies that don't invest will find themselves under competition. Mergers and attrition will reduce that competition but we all will end up paying more as surviving companies take more control of the market.
The world is full of mass produced goods that are improved year after year. However, the culture does not encourage personal initiative. There are so many people sitting on their fat asses watching TV. How many of them consider for more than 10 seconds to get involved with some problem?
Here are some problems that everyone hears about: asteroid impact, peak oil, global warming, disease, famine, water shortage. So many people understand these problems but they are constantly being told that they can't do anything about it or that some committee is taking care of things.
You don't need to know someone else's password. A filesharing program can hide the work of entering passwords - users just act as though they are reading public shared messages.
That's fine by me - it's all in the name of communicating. Not at all abusive of storage, bandwidth, etc.
Essentially Google would be giving everyone 1Gb of Internet space to do as they please. That helps many people put their own info on the Internet rather than using an ISP's limited storage.
In the end, Google could end up hosting a huge piece of all Internet content. There's power in that strategy.
One can draw one's own conclusions.
10 years is a pretty long time when you finally come to throw the switch and it doesn't work.
This is the way things have been with predictions of artificial intelligence.
If promising results could be targeted within the next 1 - 2 years, we would have a better idea whether we'll get to cost-effective fusion.
More solutions
Be close to where you want to go - i.e., live in the right neighborhood, encourage other people to move/start businesses close by, change/schedule jobs, find a hotel/campsite. This is one of the benefits of suburbs. Some people claim to commute 200 km. That can't last forever.
Avoid congested places. Find places that satisfy your desires without the congestion.
Traffic delays are so wasteful. People should join a club where they submit their route or begin-end points. Then others in the club would know where and when others are going someplace and avoid doing the same thing or adjust their timing or even travel together.
The Internet can improve the average life of everyone by aiding technological progress. In the long run people everywhere will gain access to the basic necessities of life and have economic opportunities for improving their own lives.
An important thing is to communicate about abusive leaders, problems, and solutions.
People all over the world feel more unified with instant communications, but it is still hard to express in words what is happening. Bandwidth and recording limitations permit some grainy videos to be seen. We're just overwhelmed by the number of issues. It's like arriving at the scene of a fire. 99% of the time there are legions of firemen already there and you don't want to interfere. Similarly, people who are reporting about problems in detail on the Internet are on top of the situation and the rest of the world waits mostly to see if the people handing the situation are doing a good job. The sentiments of the commissioner of the National Hockey League - he doesn't take sides in the Stanley Cup finals; he just wants good refereeing.
the Internet has not been as great a vessel for democratic progress as some hoped
The existence of the Internet is a sign of democracy. In countries where tyrants really clamp down there is hardly any Internet.
Since when did we ever expect the people of the world to unite against any tyrant based on urgings of people posting on the Internet?
The Internet has helped people realize their own goals. Very few people have the goal of pointing fingers at tyrants though. The news may speak of atrocities but offers little hope of someone stepping in and doing something about them.
Tomatoes are planets.
Cube agriculture?
Of course the jobs are doable by dumbasses. There's nothing else left for them to do. They're specifically designed to be doable. Anyone who is smart will hire dumbasses to keep the profits up.
...
Take the lawnmower for instance. Absolutely idiot proofed. In fact, a few years from now completely automated. That's the whole problem.
There are tech people so lacking in anything better to do that they are forced to earn a living inventing machines to do dumbass jobs. So like it or not, members of joe public are going to have to get off their fat little asses and find something hard to do. So far the large majority have been too cowardly to do this.
I've been talking to a large number of business owners about whether they are interested in developing automation. They aren't - why? It's not just because they would become massively over capacity to serve their current customers. Of course they would be expanding to get new customers if they increase capacity.
They're scared to take the risk. They think that having built a somewhat stabilized cash flow it's time to wait for the competition to blink - see who will survive.
Baby boomers are reaching retirement age. They want their diseases cured so anyone who wants to find something to do
A few years later some students will be able to go to the moon for a few million, if Virginia Tech Terascale Cluster is any harbinger.
Still the same old problem - not enough to back up a 400 Gb drive, and how reliable are these new DVDs for long term storage??
Tbe new DVD may offer more capacity for redundancy though - you can write multiple copies of a large folder to the same disk with a lot of space left over so any degradation is unlikely to blow away all your data at once.