Why do all these slashdot hyped hacker projects have to be so half assed.
Obviously, if these projects weren't at least a little bit insane, they'd attract real investment that would hire professional and competent staff.
I think we all have a soft spot for cranks, especially cranks that are almost believable when viewed from a certain angle (and not to closely). They perform an important service to society, even if their ideas nearly always fail.
I think of the culture of ideas as being like an elastic band. One end is anchored in the great mass of the mundane, unimaginative, mediocre minds who perform all the useful but completely unoriginal work. On the other end of elastic are the people who in exchange for appearing occasionally incapable of tying their own shoes, sometimes come close to inventing an ingenious shoe tying machine. Most of their minds are are mediocre too, but they're not unimaginative, they are too imaginative. They aren't unoriginal, they nurse an irrational disdain for proven solutions.
If I had a choice of ends, I'd stand with the crackpots who keep the elastic band of creativity stretched taut across the entire range of possibility, rather than the mass of dead weight on the other end. I'd stand with the crackpots even though the cost is nearly certain failure and humiliation. There are a million Charlie Browns for every Joe DiMaggio. There has to be. If there weren't, then there wouldn't be any Joe DiMaggio either.
the one thing which doctors seem to stress over and over is that exercise has the strongest experimental correlation to maintaining mental performance: better than any kind of dietary supplement, drug, meditation or computerized mental training. It also happens that as one gets older, one has less energy, more aches and pains, and above all more time commitments. All this means you get less exercise. So you have to ask yourself, suppose I set aside 90 minutes a day for exercise, everything like showering and changing included. How much of a mental improvement would there have to be in order for that to be a net gain?
Chances are, not much.
Now for the personal testimonial. I am middle aged, and I did notice an increased difficulty with keeping track of what I was doing. Other than getting a good night's sleep, exercise is the one thing that makes a difference. The effect is subjectively subtle but enormous objectively. I feel a bit better when I get my exercise, but I perform enormously better, at least measured by looking back at my day and actually getting things accomplished that I set out to do.
This makes a great deal of sense. The body wasn't meant to sit around doing nothing but being stressed out all day. We know that it plays hell with the circulatory system, but I'll bet the brain takes a beating too. It's an extremely sensitive instrument that evolved to direct hours of daily movement. It shouldn't be pickled in stress hormones all day long as blood sugar levels shoot wildly up and down.
Seriously. Set aside an hour and half; it doesn't have to be at the gym, it could be a five mile walk. Do it for a month and see if all the mental deterioration you're seeing doesn't go away.
The problem isn't domestic spying. It's unaccountable domestic spying. The government has a legitimate reasons for eavesdropping on some conversations. However, the problem with the program is that the executive branch has structured the program so it answers to nobody for what it does. There is no way to limit the government's use of its eavesdropping capabilities, and given the behavior of the administration in situations we know about, we can probably assume it hasn't stuck to its legitimate limits. Going warrantless removes important safeguards against this sort of thing. The administration has removed the warrant requirement without putting any mechanism of accountability in place.
In this case it's no the access per se that is the issue. Presumably people have access to records to do things like deal with billing disputes. However, that doesn't give people the right to use their access for their own purposes. That's exactly what we want to prevent. Here we have a good example of how accountability works: you can't stop somebody from doing something wrong, but you can catch them at it.
Everybody who's worked with large databases with people in them probably has come across "interesting" records from time to time. I treat those records like they burn my eyes to look at them, and this situation shows why. Imagine if McCain had won in the kind of situation that happened in 2000, and then this came out. Given concerns about telecom compliance with dubious legal requests from the administration, this incident over all the other problems with the election could have been the straw that split the country in two.
Well, granted that there are certain rocket sciency aspects to video encoding, I don't see how embedding a stream object and controls is something that cannot be accomodated in standard html, along with references to things like codecs. After all, a flash program is just an embedded object; all you need is the URL of the object and a URI for the codec.
Same goes for the huge javascript grid (although I have my doubts of its usefulness). Possibly, some kind of more efficient encoding of huge DOM objects might be worth considering if the table is built server side; othwerise, there is not reason that javascript could not build such a thing as fast as flash; the difference is that javascript implementations weren't optimized for that sort of thing. Certainly with JIT compilation and more efficient over the wire encodings I don't see the need for any of these proprietary systems. The effort expended in the market by content providers to deal with proprietary format wars could easily pay for making the necessary optimizations.
Well, I doubt you dream the entire time you're asleep.
In any case, the definition you provide does not preclude that immaterial piece consisting of self-consciousness. In any case, that's not my point: my point is that self-consciousness is a reasonable stand-in for "soul" for any ethical discussion based on refutable observations.
should be free. It'd take a large, complex function out of running a transit system, and simplify travel. I wonder what percentage of a fare dollar goes to managing the fare collection?
Of course, outfits like the AAA don't like the idea of transit riders getting, er, a free ride. But you don't pay to drive on a freeway, and that's pretty expensive to keep up. You don't pay the cost of the pollution you emit either. A big city like London ought to do everything it can to reduce the impact of cars: the traffic, pollution, parking problems and so forth.
I'm not saying this is a solution for smaller cities , but for huge cities, especially old huge cities like London or New York, cars just aren't a reasonable solution to moving people around; the density of the cities makes them impractical. You could try to keep them out, of course, with high bridge tolls, but I think it makes much more sense to make public transit really, really easy to use: no fare zones, no fare cards, no toll collectors, nothing.
Actually, Microsoft has an interesting idea here, to integrate a high performance computer installation with Windows client software such as Excel. Of course, there's no reason at all the back end supercomputer has to be running Windows, other than the fact that Microsoft will sell you the complete software stack, presumably through system integrators.
Frankly, I don't see why you'd want to do that, but obviously this is out of the box thinking. Maybe they see some application area for this, such as financial services, that is untapped, although if that's the case their timing is not fortuitous...
Fair enough. But a great deal of Mac OSX is "stripped out" of the iPhone too.
What I'm saying is that the fact that Mac OSX (in a sense) runs on smart phones and Vista does not says nothing about whether Vista is "bloated". You have to have a consistent definition of what "sameness" means between platforms. If stripping unneeded or unworkable pieces from Vista would make it "not Vista", than the same benchmark has to be applied to the iPhone OS and its relationship to Mac OSX.
The fact that there is no mobile OS that shares core OS code with Vista has nothing to do with Vista's bloatedness, and everything to do with the fact they already have a perfectly functional core OS for small devices.
Personally, I think Vista's problems come from a loss of focus at Microsoft. They have too many products and too many competing interests.
Soul doesn't exactly mean consciousness in common parlance.
If you could demonstrate that, I'd be impressed.
Keeping in mind, of course, that we are not self-conscious when we sleep, or are in a coma, I'd say it's very hard to separate the concept most people have of "souls" from the capacity for self-consciousness.
Of course, some people think trees and rocks have souls too; naturally these are counterexamples, but they aren't common.
Perhaps in the universe where 4GB+ means more than 4GB of RAM?
At least, I'd expect Vista to be faster than 32 bit XP with PAE for systems with memory in the 8GB range; I'm not sure how 64 bit XP, or Windows Server stack up. 64 bit Vista is available in more editions certainly than 64 bit XP, and 64 bit XP has its own driver problems. Situations where working sets are greater than 4GB are fairly rarified yet, and "out of the box" benchmarking is not all that informative about those.
Still, it is quite possible that in certain circumstances, 64 bit Vista is a reasonable choice and, indeed, faster than XP 64.
Well, to be fair, you don't get anything like the full OSX on the iPhone.
Windows XP Embedded runs on 32MB each of RAM and ROM, which is certainly smartphone territory. I don't think there's any reason that, stripped of all its bells and whistles, that the kernel and core operating system from Vista could not run on a modern smartphone. The base iPhone model is a fairly hefty chunk of computing power, after all, with 128MB of DRAM, 4GB of flash, and a 667 Mhz ARM processor. That certainly would be enough to run a version of Vista stripped down for smartphone use.
Of course, none of this matters that much since we don't have binary OR source compatibility between the desktop and mobile OS offerings from either MS or Apple. What matters is how easily developers move between a desktop OS and its mobile counterpart, in the case of Vista that would be the various Windows CE flavored operating systems. I think Microsoft suffers by comparison here because (a) it has a more complicated product line and (b) because developing for Apple platforms is easier to begin with, setting the bar lower for developers switching focus to mobile apps.
Every human has one soul, for a given value of "soul".
Of course, there's lots of other concepts we have that we treat as important but defy quantification: justice, love, duty, fairness. What social scientists do when dealing with these unavoidable concepts is adopt an "operational definition". An "operational definition" doesn't claim to capture every nuance of a concept's essence, instead it is a measurable or observable thing which stands in for the other concept within the context of an experiment. Within that context, it should fulfill all the functions we attribute to that thing.
In this situation, Kurzweil is defining "soul" to be "consciousness". This is an operational definition, because consciousness can be tested for, at least in a crude way. This definition can "operate", if you will, within the context of any theory of ethics in which human rights arise from self-awareness. In those theories, "person" is in effect defined as a self-conscious entity. Self consciousness plays precisely the same role in those theories as "soul" in theories where personhood arises from the soul.
A self-conscious machine would have the functional equivalent of a "soul" for purposes of any discussion of ethics where we accept that any self-conscious entity has a right to determine its own destiny. However, I suspect other things might well qualify as possessing "souls" under this definition, such as communities and nations. Perhaps the definition of "soul" must stipulate that a soul is irreducible; it is not a "soul" by virtue of any component of it possesses "soul-ness". I don't know, I never considered that before. This would disbar communities from technical "personhood", although not necessarily from rights which arise from self-awareness per se.
Reminds me of my dear departed bolshie Uncle Ivan. Ivan wasn't really a communist, although he was a socialist by inclination. The reason could never be a communist was that more than anything else, he was a cynic.
"Kid," Ivan used to say, "nobody believes in socialism. Nobody believes in capitalism either. It's socialism for me, capitalism for you."
Wherever he is, he's been reading the newspapers the last couple of months and laughing his ass off.
The answer is obvious: order windmills made in China. In fact, if we don't buy them but only lease them at a price China chooses to name at any point in the future, we don't have to change any of our economic assumptions.
In point of fact, I understand that China is going into windpower in a big way; I was listening to a story on the radio the other day on how an aircraft subcontractor was having problems getting bearings for a very large machine he had because China was absorbing the world's supply of enormous bearings for their wind power program.
The summary says nothing mathematical about efficiency (other than we can presume it is somewhat higher). It says "increase their power output by... as much as 100 percent". I take this to mean the new design puts out twice the power of the conventional design under special conditions. Since this is supposedly in the speed band where wind turbines are said to be particularly inefficient, this hardly requires that we violate the laws of thermodynamics.
On the other hand the slashdot title, I suspect, is wrong. Even where a conventional generator would be operating at 0% (not putting out any energy), I have considerable doubt that the new design operates anywhere near 50% efficiency, even though expressed as a percent the power increase is infinite.
As has always been the case and the #1 reason Microsoft products suck in general, marketing makes the product technology decisions.
That's like the theory that the world rides on the back of a giant turtle; it doesn't explain what the turtle is standing on. You've just moved the locus of incompetence from engineering to marketing. A competent marketing department would know the limits of its capabilities, and would probably have a pretty good seat of the pants understanding of engineering if that was essential to their job.
One thing I've learned in twenty five years in this business: the urge to do stupid things can be almost irresistible when it gets you an immediate reward. Ship the product broken and get management off your back; promise the moon and sort out the details later; send a customer away happy by doing something that makes ten customers walk away quietly.
Perhaps one of the reason that business executives should have ethical training is that its practice in thinking about doing the right thing when the wrong thing "seems like the right thing at the time." The more I hear about this story, the more it sounds like management that makes impulsive, undisciplined choices.
The real problem, the thing that makes China scary and has people talking about treason and execution in this case is this: deep down we're afraid we've lost our technology balls.
It's been 36 years since America has been to the Moon. An entire generation has been born since then, and have even had their own children. I remember watching Neil Armstrong take that first step on the Moon, an event that to my children that is like my parents talking about Pearl Harbor is to me. Space, to them, is a place where movies are set. The Space Shuttle program was a disappointment, and the Mars initiative is a transparent boondoggle with no significant program milestones on the calendar.
In my lifetime, I have watched the leveraged buyout of the American culture of invention. When I was a kid, America was a country that made things. Of the course of my adulthood, it became something remarkable when a thing was actually made here. Then we were a country that invented things that were made elsewhere, and that is still true, but for how long? The idea of free trade is that countries do what "they do best"; it's a good idea in theory, but in practice our role in the world economy has become to spend the accumulated gains of generations, to send investment overseas.
The idea that we can somehow protect our preeminence in the world by hoarding our past accomplishments is pathetic. Oh, I won't deny that this kind of thing doesn't help China somewhat, otherwise why would they do it? But if you could wave a magic wand and make all these sort things go away, it wouldn't make much difference at all.
China is pursuing technological and economic development, whereas we have become complacent. We have been acting in the last two decades as if national preeminence is not simply a legacy but a birthright.
So we get all worked up about cases like this, because it gives us an excuse for our own lack of initiative and vision. We have elected leaders who pandered to our laziness and anti-intellectualism, and mocked the thoughtful as out of touch, the visionary as insane. We have embraced hypocrisy, insisting the poor should shoulder their economic responsibilities, which is fine by me, but all the while demanding middle class prerogatives as our entitlement. I remember watching a movie in which people were singing that things were so wonderful in America because it is "God's Country", and cringing at the idea that some poor bastard in the third world was watching his children starve because God doesn't like him as much as he likes us. That kind of thinking is more in style today than ever.
Oh, I won't be surprised if lots of people want to hang this guy. That's what passes these days for "feel good" politics.
Right question: who in their right mind would want to steal music dumbed down to music industry specifications?
Hank Williams Sr., Bill Monroe, Roy Acuff, the Carters, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins -- the list goes on of worthwhile country musicians. The industry isn't run by creative people, it does its best to strangle of the life out of any kind of music it touches.
Re:Both franchise shared the same fate.
on
New Star Trek Trailer
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Well, Star Wars had the problem that Lucas didn't have that much to say, and by the time he got around the to the prequels he had plenty of money to say it with.
Star Trek was simple overexposure. They didn't have enough good writing to cover two simultaneous series and the bled the well dry.
If you accept anti-gravity, artificial gravity, FTL travel, telekinesis, clairvoyance, and especially force fields, then accepting that the plasma can be confined to some predefined shape isn't all that hard.
By the way, notice that the article mentions the Volsunga Saga, and Lord of the Rings in the same sentence.
Tolkien deliberately evoked the saga, in the scene where Bilbo gives Frodo Sting. Bilbo doesn't hand Sting to Frodo. Instead Bilbo casually drives Sting into a wooden post to demonstrate its virtues. This subtly echos the incident in the saga in which Odin leaves the sword in the tree, from which Sigmund alone is destined to draw it. Bilbo's way of giving Sting to Frodo turns the gift of Sting into a kind of ceremony in which the responsibility for the heroic quest is passed to the next generation.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do all these slashdot hyped hacker projects have to be so half assed.
Obviously, if these projects weren't at least a little bit insane, they'd attract real investment that would hire professional and competent staff.
I think we all have a soft spot for cranks, especially cranks that are almost believable when viewed from a certain angle (and not to closely). They perform an important service to society, even if their ideas nearly always fail.
I think of the culture of ideas as being like an elastic band. One end is anchored in the great mass of the mundane, unimaginative, mediocre minds who perform all the useful but completely unoriginal work. On the other end of elastic are the people who in exchange for appearing occasionally incapable of tying their own shoes, sometimes come close to inventing an ingenious shoe tying machine. Most of their minds are are mediocre too, but they're not unimaginative, they are too imaginative. They aren't unoriginal, they nurse an irrational disdain for proven solutions.
If I had a choice of ends, I'd stand with the crackpots who keep the elastic band of creativity stretched taut across the entire range of possibility, rather than the mass of dead weight on the other end. I'd stand with the crackpots even though the cost is nearly certain failure and humiliation. There are a million Charlie Browns for every Joe DiMaggio. There has to be. If there weren't, then there wouldn't be any Joe DiMaggio either.
the one thing which doctors seem to stress over and over is that exercise has the strongest experimental correlation to maintaining mental performance: better than any kind of dietary supplement, drug, meditation or computerized mental training. It also happens that as one gets older, one has less energy, more aches and pains, and above all more time commitments. All this means you get less exercise. So you have to ask yourself, suppose I set aside 90 minutes a day for exercise, everything like showering and changing included. How much of a mental improvement would there have to be in order for that to be a net gain?
Chances are, not much.
Now for the personal testimonial. I am middle aged, and I did notice an increased difficulty with keeping track of what I was doing. Other than getting a good night's sleep, exercise is the one thing that makes a difference. The effect is subjectively subtle but enormous objectively. I feel a bit better when I get my exercise, but I perform enormously better, at least measured by looking back at my day and actually getting things accomplished that I set out to do.
This makes a great deal of sense. The body wasn't meant to sit around doing nothing but being stressed out all day. We know that it plays hell with the circulatory system, but I'll bet the brain takes a beating too. It's an extremely sensitive instrument that evolved to direct hours of daily movement. It shouldn't be pickled in stress hormones all day long as blood sugar levels shoot wildly up and down.
Seriously. Set aside an hour and half; it doesn't have to be at the gym, it could be a five mile walk. Do it for a month and see if all the mental deterioration you're seeing doesn't go away.
The problem isn't domestic spying. It's unaccountable domestic spying. The government has a legitimate reasons for eavesdropping on some conversations. However, the problem with the program is that the executive branch has structured the program so it answers to nobody for what it does. There is no way to limit the government's use of its eavesdropping capabilities, and given the behavior of the administration in situations we know about, we can probably assume it hasn't stuck to its legitimate limits. Going warrantless removes important safeguards against this sort of thing. The administration has removed the warrant requirement without putting any mechanism of accountability in place.
In this case it's no the access per se that is the issue. Presumably people have access to records to do things like deal with billing disputes. However, that doesn't give people the right to use their access for their own purposes. That's exactly what we want to prevent. Here we have a good example of how accountability works: you can't stop somebody from doing something wrong, but you can catch them at it.
Everybody who's worked with large databases with people in them probably has come across "interesting" records from time to time. I treat those records like they burn my eyes to look at them, and this situation shows why. Imagine if McCain had won in the kind of situation that happened in 2000, and then this came out. Given concerns about telecom compliance with dubious legal requests from the administration, this incident over all the other problems with the election could have been the straw that split the country in two.
Well, granted that there are certain rocket sciency aspects to video encoding, I don't see how embedding a stream object and controls is something that cannot be accomodated in standard html, along with references to things like codecs. After all, a flash program is just an embedded object; all you need is the URL of the object and a URI for the codec.
Same goes for the huge javascript grid (although I have my doubts of its usefulness). Possibly, some kind of more efficient encoding of huge DOM objects might be worth considering if the table is built server side; othwerise, there is not reason that javascript could not build such a thing as fast as flash; the difference is that javascript implementations weren't optimized for that sort of thing. Certainly with JIT compilation and more efficient over the wire encodings I don't see the need for any of these proprietary systems. The effort expended in the market by content providers to deal with proprietary format wars could easily pay for making the necessary optimizations.
But is it reasonable to cover both?
Well, I doubt you dream the entire time you're asleep.
In any case, the definition you provide does not preclude that immaterial piece consisting of self-consciousness. In any case, that's not my point: my point is that self-consciousness is a reasonable stand-in for "soul" for any ethical discussion based on refutable observations.
should be free. It'd take a large, complex function out of running a transit system, and simplify travel. I wonder what percentage of a fare dollar goes to managing the fare collection?
Of course, outfits like the AAA don't like the idea of transit riders getting, er, a free ride. But you don't pay to drive on a freeway, and that's pretty expensive to keep up. You don't pay the cost of the pollution you emit either. A big city like London ought to do everything it can to reduce the impact of cars: the traffic, pollution, parking problems and so forth.
I'm not saying this is a solution for smaller cities , but for huge cities, especially old huge cities like London or New York, cars just aren't a reasonable solution to moving people around; the density of the cities makes them impractical. You could try to keep them out, of course, with high bridge tolls, but I think it makes much more sense to make public transit really, really easy to use: no fare zones, no fare cards, no toll collectors, nothing.
Actually, Microsoft has an interesting idea here, to integrate a high performance computer installation with Windows client software such as Excel. Of course, there's no reason at all the back end supercomputer has to be running Windows, other than the fact that Microsoft will sell you the complete software stack, presumably through system integrators.
Frankly, I don't see why you'd want to do that, but obviously this is out of the box thinking. Maybe they see some application area for this, such as financial services, that is untapped, although if that's the case their timing is not fortuitous...
Fair enough. But a great deal of Mac OSX is "stripped out" of the iPhone too.
What I'm saying is that the fact that Mac OSX (in a sense) runs on smart phones and Vista does not says nothing about whether Vista is "bloated". You have to have a consistent definition of what "sameness" means between platforms. If stripping unneeded or unworkable pieces from Vista would make it "not Vista", than the same benchmark has to be applied to the iPhone OS and its relationship to Mac OSX.
The fact that there is no mobile OS that shares core OS code with Vista has nothing to do with Vista's bloatedness, and everything to do with the fact they already have a perfectly functional core OS for small devices.
Personally, I think Vista's problems come from a loss of focus at Microsoft. They have too many products and too many competing interests.
If you could demonstrate that, I'd be impressed.
Keeping in mind, of course, that we are not self-conscious when we sleep, or are in a coma, I'd say it's very hard to separate the concept most people have of "souls" from the capacity for self-consciousness.
Of course, some people think trees and rocks have souls too; naturally these are counterexamples, but they aren't common.
Perhaps in the universe where 4GB+ means more than 4GB of RAM?
At least, I'd expect Vista to be faster than 32 bit XP with PAE for systems with memory in the 8GB range; I'm not sure how 64 bit XP, or Windows Server stack up. 64 bit Vista is available in more editions certainly than 64 bit XP, and 64 bit XP has its own driver problems. Situations where working sets are greater than 4GB are fairly rarified yet, and "out of the box" benchmarking is not all that informative about those.
Still, it is quite possible that in certain circumstances, 64 bit Vista is a reasonable choice and, indeed, faster than XP 64.
Well, to be fair, you don't get anything like the full OSX on the iPhone.
Windows XP Embedded runs on 32MB each of RAM and ROM, which is certainly smartphone territory. I don't think there's any reason that, stripped of all its bells and whistles, that the kernel and core operating system from Vista could not run on a modern smartphone. The base iPhone model is a fairly hefty chunk of computing power, after all, with 128MB of DRAM, 4GB of flash, and a 667 Mhz ARM processor. That certainly would be enough to run a version of Vista stripped down for smartphone use.
Of course, none of this matters that much since we don't have binary OR source compatibility between the desktop and mobile OS offerings from either MS or Apple. What matters is how easily developers move between a desktop OS and its mobile counterpart, in the case of Vista that would be the various Windows CE flavored operating systems. I think Microsoft suffers by comparison here because (a) it has a more complicated product line and (b) because developing for Apple platforms is easier to begin with, setting the bar lower for developers switching focus to mobile apps.
Every human has one soul, for a given value of "soul".
Of course, there's lots of other concepts we have that we treat as important but defy quantification: justice, love, duty, fairness. What social scientists do when dealing with these unavoidable concepts is adopt an "operational definition". An "operational definition" doesn't claim to capture every nuance of a concept's essence, instead it is a measurable or observable thing which stands in for the other concept within the context of an experiment. Within that context, it should fulfill all the functions we attribute to that thing.
In this situation, Kurzweil is defining "soul" to be "consciousness". This is an operational definition, because consciousness can be tested for, at least in a crude way. This definition can "operate", if you will, within the context of any theory of ethics in which human rights arise from self-awareness. In those theories, "person" is in effect defined as a self-conscious entity. Self consciousness plays precisely the same role in those theories as "soul" in theories where personhood arises from the soul.
A self-conscious machine would have the functional equivalent of a "soul" for purposes of any discussion of ethics where we accept that any self-conscious entity has a right to determine its own destiny. However, I suspect other things might well qualify as possessing "souls" under this definition, such as communities and nations. Perhaps the definition of "soul" must stipulate that a soul is irreducible; it is not a "soul" by virtue of any component of it possesses "soul-ness". I don't know, I never considered that before. This would disbar communities from technical "personhood", although not necessarily from rights which arise from self-awareness per se.
Reminds me of my dear departed bolshie Uncle Ivan. Ivan wasn't really a communist, although he was a socialist by inclination. The reason could never be a communist was that more than anything else, he was a cynic.
"Kid," Ivan used to say, "nobody believes in socialism. Nobody believes in capitalism either. It's socialism for me, capitalism for you."
Wherever he is, he's been reading the newspapers the last couple of months and laughing his ass off.
The answer is obvious: order windmills made in China. In fact, if we don't buy them but only lease them at a price China chooses to name at any point in the future, we don't have to change any of our economic assumptions.
In point of fact, I understand that China is going into windpower in a big way; I was listening to a story on the radio the other day on how an aircraft subcontractor was having problems getting bearings for a very large machine he had because China was absorbing the world's supply of enormous bearings for their wind power program.
The summary says nothing mathematical about efficiency (other than we can presume it is somewhat higher). It says "increase their power output by ... as much as 100 percent". I take this to mean the new design puts out twice the power of the conventional design under special conditions. Since this is supposedly in the speed band where wind turbines are said to be particularly inefficient, this hardly requires that we violate the laws of thermodynamics.
On the other hand the slashdot title, I suspect, is wrong. Even where a conventional generator would be operating at 0% (not putting out any energy), I have considerable doubt that the new design operates anywhere near 50% efficiency, even though expressed as a percent the power increase is infinite.
As has always been the case and the #1 reason Microsoft products suck in general, marketing makes the product technology decisions.
That's like the theory that the world rides on the back of a giant turtle; it doesn't explain what the turtle is standing on. You've just moved the locus of incompetence from engineering to marketing. A competent marketing department would know the limits of its capabilities, and would probably have a pretty good seat of the pants understanding of engineering if that was essential to their job.
One thing I've learned in twenty five years in this business: the urge to do stupid things can be almost irresistible when it gets you an immediate reward. Ship the product broken and get management off your back; promise the moon and sort out the details later; send a customer away happy by doing something that makes ten customers walk away quietly.
Perhaps one of the reason that business executives should have ethical training is that its practice in thinking about doing the right thing when the wrong thing "seems like the right thing at the time." The more I hear about this story, the more it sounds like management that makes impulsive, undisciplined choices.
Really? Never had a piece of hardware that failed with every distro kernel upgrade I take it?
Not that I don't love Linux. I just hate it too.
If there is any system you don't hate, it is because you don't know it well enough.
The real problem, the thing that makes China scary and has people talking about treason and execution in this case is this: deep down we're afraid we've lost our technology balls.
It's been 36 years since America has been to the Moon. An entire generation has been born since then, and have even had their own children. I remember watching Neil Armstrong take that first step on the Moon, an event that to my children that is like my parents talking about Pearl Harbor is to me. Space, to them, is a place where movies are set. The Space Shuttle program was a disappointment, and the Mars initiative is a transparent boondoggle with no significant program milestones on the calendar.
In my lifetime, I have watched the leveraged buyout of the American culture of invention. When I was a kid, America was a country that made things. Of the course of my adulthood, it became something remarkable when a thing was actually made here. Then we were a country that invented things that were made elsewhere, and that is still true, but for how long? The idea of free trade is that countries do what "they do best"; it's a good idea in theory, but in practice our role in the world economy has become to spend the accumulated gains of generations, to send investment overseas.
The idea that we can somehow protect our preeminence in the world by hoarding our past accomplishments is pathetic. Oh, I won't deny that this kind of thing doesn't help China somewhat, otherwise why would they do it? But if you could wave a magic wand and make all these sort things go away, it wouldn't make much difference at all.
China is pursuing technological and economic development, whereas we have become complacent. We have been acting in the last two decades as if national preeminence is not simply a legacy but a birthright.
So we get all worked up about cases like this, because it gives us an excuse for our own lack of initiative and vision. We have elected leaders who pandered to our laziness and anti-intellectualism, and mocked the thoughtful as out of touch, the visionary as insane. We have embraced hypocrisy, insisting the poor should shoulder their economic responsibilities, which is fine by me, but all the while demanding middle class prerogatives as our entitlement. I remember watching a movie in which people were singing that things were so wonderful in America because it is "God's Country", and cringing at the idea that some poor bastard in the third world was watching his children starve because God doesn't like him as much as he likes us. That kind of thinking is more in style today than ever.
Oh, I won't be surprised if lots of people want to hang this guy. That's what passes these days for "feel good" politics.
Wrong question.
Right question: who in their right mind would want to steal music dumbed down to music industry specifications?
Hank Williams Sr., Bill Monroe, Roy Acuff, the Carters, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins -- the list goes on of worthwhile country musicians. The industry isn't run by creative people, it does its best to strangle of the life out of any kind of music it touches.
Well, Star Wars had the problem that Lucas didn't have that much to say, and by the time he got around the to the prequels he had plenty of money to say it with.
Star Trek was simple overexposure. They didn't have enough good writing to cover two simultaneous series and the bled the well dry.
If you accept anti-gravity, artificial gravity, FTL travel, telekinesis, clairvoyance, and especially force fields, then accepting that the plasma can be confined to some predefined shape isn't all that hard.
By the way, notice that the article mentions the Volsunga Saga, and Lord of the Rings in the same sentence.
Tolkien deliberately evoked the saga, in the scene where Bilbo gives Frodo Sting. Bilbo doesn't hand Sting to Frodo. Instead Bilbo casually drives Sting into a wooden post to demonstrate its virtues. This subtly echos the incident in the saga in which Odin leaves the sword in the tree, from which Sigmund alone is destined to draw it. Bilbo's way of giving Sting to Frodo turns the gift of Sting into a kind of ceremony in which the responsibility for the heroic quest is passed to the next generation.