The name "theory of evolution" is just historical baggage. It's just a consequnce of DNA and "natural selection" (the fact that we're not all created equal - nature sorts out the winners), not a theory at all.
We define evolutionary "fitness" as a catch-all description of those hereditory traits that cause one individual to tend to leave more descendents than another in a given environment. In terms of animals this is mostly about things like abililty to attract mates, compete for food, fertility, disease resistance, etc. Fitness doesn't have any connotation of good or bad - it is just about number of descendents (all that matters in terms of your genetics suriving/dominating over many generations).
fact: fitter individuals leave more descendents than less fit ones fact: genetics encodes fitness fact: genetics is hereditory
consequence: each generation tends to be evolutionally fitter than the preceding one
In other words, evolution is not a theory - it is a consequence. At the time Darwin wrote "The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection" (aka the theory of evolution) it was technically fair to call it a theory since it depended on the assumed existence of an hereditory traits mechanism, but since the discovery of DNA there is nothing left but plain fact.
New species are created when two subgroups of an existing species evolve in different directions such that they can no longer interbreed (hence, by definition create a new species and are bound to diverge since due to lack of interbreeding their gene pools can no longer intermix). Speciation is just an example of evolution in action - it's simply what happens when genetic divergence takes you past the point of being able to interbreed (e.g. lion/tiger almost there, horse/donkey just diverged, man/chimp more longer diverged).
Something like a pegasus would be completely impossible under the current theory of evolution
No - the laws of physics are what prevent a flying, or even gliding, horse who's wings (surface area) are horse sized!
Functionally similar features have often evolved more that once (wings in birds, insects, bats all evolved seperately).
It's hard to imagine the circumstance in which a genetic mutation giving rise to additional limbs in a large mammal would be useful, but there's no fundamental reason why it could not happen. Of course there's a long way from a six legged horse to a flying one!
Stein does not reject Darwinism for the evolution of individual species. He rejects that it is the answer for why life exists and why the universe works that way that it does.
Just a few points:
1) If Stein doesn't reject Darwinian speciation, then what's the controversy?
2) Evolution in the presence of DNA is inevitable. Evolution pre-DNA, or of DNA, (i.e. as origin of life) is currently a theory. I'm glad that Ben Stein at least gets that, but the majority of creationists don't. Of course evolution (based on simpler hereditory mechanisms than DNA/RNA) most likely did create life, but there's no proof of it yet.
3) Given that there is NO single (or even majority opinion) theory as to the origin of the laws of the universe, Ben Stein denying that they were derived by "Darinism" is rather odd! Are they really related in his mind?!!!
a) Very few genetic mutations are actually beneficial. And even if they are beneficial, very few of these mutations actually carry over to the 3rd generation.
b) Some mutations are only beneficial if it *simultaneously* occurs with many other mutations.
c) Even if (a) and (b) occur due to the vast geological time available for these things to occur, we should still expect to find many transitional while we have actually found very few. Especially troubling is the Cambrian Explosion problem.
To quote Dawkins from the Blind Watchmaker:
"...Cambrian strata of rocks, vintage about 600 million years, are the oldest ones in which we find most of the major invertebrate groups. And we find many of them already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say, this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists."... This is not a open and shut case as you might believe. Actually, the lack of transitional fossil evidence to account for this evolution of animal species gradually has led to Gould proposing the theory of "Punctuated Equilibrium" which basically states that the changes actually occurred in large steps and not gradually.
Your objections and the "theory" of puntuated equailibrium all go together.
With hindsight the "theory" of punctuated aqulibrium is obvious. I use the scare quotes because it's no more theory than evolution itself. It's just a consequence of the rate of environmental change vs rate of genetic change.
When we talk about evolutionary "fitness" we're talking about a match between the individual (genetic phenotype) and the environment, or more specifically the degree of suitedness to survive/thrive and reproduce in the given environment.
There are two things that can change that match (i.e. change evolutionary fitness) - either the individual (genetics) can change, or the environment can change. The key is that these two things happen on very different timescales. Functionally significant genetic change occurs on the order of thousands or more of generations, but the environment can change very rapidly indeed, even within the span of an individual lifetime. Prolonged droughts, volcanic eruptions, meteor impacts, famime, disease, even climate change, all happen extrememly rapidy.
Rapid changes - almost discontinuities - in evolutionary fitness therefore are driven by the environment rather than by genetic change, and this is what drives punctuated equilibrium. One moment the accumulated genetic differences between two sub-populations of a species are of no import (they do NOT need to have been accumulatively advantageous, nevermind individually so, to have accumulated - merely not to be materially disadvantageous), the next moment the environment changes and suddenly your fortuitous resistance to a particular disease, or lesser dependence on water compared to another species becomes paramount. Almost overnight one species aquires disease resistance (and in doing so carries along the accumulated changes that happened to accompany it, and loses those that did not), and another disappears with no warning.
Within a massively changed environment the accumulated genetic changes that survived due to having been bundled together with the critical factor(s) may occasionally themselves also suddenly become of much greater importance than previously, even further amplifying the impact of the change.
Bursts of environmental change consisting of changes in predators and food supply are going to be particularly disruptive and they are going to be self-propagating (evironment change begats evolution and more enviroment change, etc) until eventually a new equalibrium is achieved.
Compared to the pace of environmental change, the cambrian "explosion" took an eternity (many millions of years), and the types of forces (in general) that will have caused it t
It's worse than that - evolution isn't just up there with things like Ohm's law and the law of gravity... it ceased being a theory/law altogether when DNA was discovered thereby making Darwin's hypothesized inheritable traits a reality.
Given the now known existence of DNA & mechanisms of genetic variation, the tautology "the fittest survive" points out that evolution HAS to occur.
variation + the fittest survive + hereditory traits => successive generations become fitter
How could they possibly NOT become fitter (evolve)?!!
Speciation is similarly unavoidable. Population genetic drift comes about by interbreeding, so lack of interbreeding will lead to diverging sub-population genetics, and there is nothing to stop this proceeding past the no-turning-back (speciation!) point of no longer being able to interbreed.
Some of the reasons why some people find it hard to accept are :
- It's personal - it clashes with their religious beliefs
- It's personal - it clashes with their egotistical belief of being special, not an animal
- Evolution of large animal species happens to slowly to observe, and most people are not familiar with other forms of evolution (e.g bacterial, or genetic design) that do happen observably quickly
- It's taught horribly in schools. When you are taught properly about population speration and genetic drift, environmental change and punctuated equilibrium, speciation as evolution past the point of inability to interbreed, it makes sense. If you instead believe evolution happens to individuals vs populations, or that all genetic changes are claimed to be incrementally beneficial (vs punctuated equilibrium, or even Lamarkian drivel like giraffe's necks getting longer because of their stretching for leaves, then you will be very confused!
The trouble with DNA is that it doesn't say that person was there - only that their DNA was. If DNA was (is?) accepted as proof of someone being at a crime scene then it would be too easy to frame someone by planting a few hairs/whatever... Couple that with some circumstantial evidence/suspicion (maybe an anonymous tip) that plant was the criminal, and there's your "scientific" "proof".
There was a recent case in the US where an attorney admitted letting an innocent man spend most of his life in prison because be wasn't willing to break the attorny-client confidentiality of his client who had admitted to the crime the other man was locked up for. With scumbags like this running the system, we should be very afraid of anything that can be remotely abused.
I'm not sure how you equate a 10% accuracy improvement of "predicted like to actual like" to an 0.1 star delta on a 5 star system. In a 5 star system surely each star is equivalent to 20% predicted like, so a 10% accuracy improvement would be 0.5 star reduction in prediction vs actual mismatch.
I think it's reasonable to expect that a 0.5 star accuracy improvement on a 5 star system would be noticeable by enough people (although not all) to make a difference - presumably resulting in better confidence in the recommendation system and an increase in the number of people who would choose a recommentation when they otherwise had nothing else they wanted. The benefit to Netflix is that if more people are consistently watching (and enjoying) movies to the max of their monthly limit, then they are less likely to drop down to a cheaper less-movies plan (or drop out entirely).
Skill is obviously imporant, but all languages are not created equal...
Some languages are better suited to certain tasks than others Some languages are more productive than others Some languages prevent certain types of bug better than others etc, etc
C++ is a great language in the hands of experts, but not all (or even many) programming teams are comprised of all experts. Given that it's better to have quality depend on process rather than people, depending on skilled (and unerring) programmers for quality is an iffy proposal. A language like Ada that forces things like rigorous module definition, type definition & usage, bounds checking, etc, should not be discounted as an aid towards less buggy code.
If they are that skilled, why don't they just produce originals themselves
They will...
This is the same process that Japan went thru. If you're old enough you'll remember when "Made in Japan" meant crap quality, and back then there were few Japanese brand names. China if building up it's tech expertise (very quickly) building knock-off versions of brands that are easy to sell. As "Made in China" stops becoming synonymous with "cheap piece of crap", then you will see more and more Chinese brands, respected for themselves, rather than knock-offs.
A better parallel would be if the cars were inadequately built or designed so that in the event they did crash into large stationary objects there was less chance of escape. The US Ford Pinto, prone to gas tank explosions for example, or maybe a hypothetical airbag with substandard seams that splits on impact.
Your intial pick has a 1/3 chance of being right, and 2/3 of being wrong.
In other words, there's a 2/3 chance the car is behind one of the other two doors, and this probability doesn't depend on whether you actually open any of the doors.
Now, when Monty opens a door he's revealing additional information! It doesn't change the 2/3 odds of one of those other two doors being the right one, but it does rather limit which one!
So, do you want to stick with your original 1/3 chance of being right, or switch and have a 2/3 chance of being right?
On a table with $100 or $500 minimum bet they are not going to pay attention to $25 bets;-)
The book the movie is based on mentions that on a (boxing) fight night at the Casino (which attracts high rollers) one of the team player was playing two spots at $6,000 per hand without attracting undue attention. The casinos have "whales" (the biggest players) who think nothing of flying in for the weekend and losing a few million at the tables.
Remember that up until they are tagged as card counters, these pro players are treated like royalty. The casinos primarily guage people by how much they bet, not how mush they win/lose, since they know that statistics will take care of the rest. The MIT team/etc where playing for a lot of money and were being comp'd hotel suites, etc... their large bets (until the casinos finally - after YEARS - figured it out) did not cause suspiscion - they were very welcome - exactly what the casinos WANTED to see from their high-rollers!
No-ones saying it's easy - if it was then the Casinos's would be losing money on the game and wouldn't offer it. OTOH the fact that everyone knows about basic strategy and counting means that it's easier for the pros to blend in since perfect play doesn't make you stand out, and there are always going to be more obvious counters than the real professionals. Team play makes it easier and quicker to make money, but bear in mind there have been and presumably still are many legendary players who did it on their own - try reading Ken Uston's "Million Dollar Blackjack" if you like this stuff!
Which is why you do it as a team - with counters who bet minimum waiting for the table to become hot, then the big players who come in when signalled and start throwing the big bucks down and playing double spots. Everyone remains consistent.
Hopefully the ticket price also includes some training time.
You'd need quite a few cycles on the vomit comet before you get the bonking-in-zero-G thing down well enough to perform under pressure in your 2 min window.
Ok, few here are old enough to be able to. But take object oriented programming. I'm fairly sure a few will remember the pre-OO days. "What is that good for?" was the most neutral question you might have heard. "Bunch o' bloated bollocks for kids that can't code cleanly" is maybe more like the average comment from an old programmer.
Sure, I'm an old timer (started out soldering together a 1MHz Z80 kit - NASCOM-1 - back in '78).
For those who were around pre-OO, it wasn't really a fundamental innovation, rather just a more convenient way of doing what we'd already been doing. e.g. If a design calls for polymorphism or a what you whippersnappers would call a class hierarchy then the OO way would be to use subclasses and virtual methods, but us old timers writing in C would just use structures with pointers to functions. Of course the ease of use of C++ is much better, and it's great to have template classes and the STL, but the concepts themselves are just things that us pre-OO old fogeys already implemented ourselves in the languages available.
Yep - the Transputer & Occam were way ahead of their time. What was so great about the combo was that they (the processor & language) designed together so that multi-processor language constructs mapped directly onto the hardwware.
In a language such as C++ inter-thread communication is implemented via constructs such as mutexs, condition variables and queues that need to be implemted in software and involve the scheduler (sleep until condition variable woken up). However, in Occam parallelism is built into the language itself and "threads" communicte by reading and writing to communication channels connected to other threads. These communication channnels are directly implemented in hardware so that if you run your Occam program on a multi Transputer network then individual threads will be mapped to seperate chips and the communications channels mapped onto the hardware inter-transputer communication channels.
You should only expect a wall time speed-up from switching to a multithreaded design if you are executing on multi-core/multi-processor hardware where there is true execution concurrency.
However, in-practice sometimes a switch to a multi-threaded design even when run time-sliced on a single processor without any true concurrency, will also result in a speed up against the expectation of a (very minor) slow down that you note. Of course this doesn't always happen, but the reason it coccasionally does happen is because multi-theading as a design tool can often lead to much cleaner and more efficient designs (and maybe also result in more cache hits between timeslices due to the smaller code per thread vs the monolithic alternative). Note that with a modern OS you've going to be getting timesliced anyway (even in a single threaded app) due to the OS itself running threads.
I used to work for Acorn Computers, Cambridge, UK in the early 80's, and one of the company founders, Chris Curry, had a similar parking technique. In the early days Acorn was located at Cambridge market square, a no-parking area. Chris Curry simply ignored the no-parking stipulation and parked directly outside of the Acorn office every day, and paid the fines. I seem to recall he wore black turtlenecks (a la Steve) also, although that may be the alzheimers kicking in.
It may not be stealthy, but it's pretty damn freaky - it'd probably scare the hell out of the enemy. If the thing was lethal - maybe heat following, then the noise could be a psychological bonus, kinda like the German "buzz bombs" scared the Brits in WWII (although in that case the fear was when the noise stopped, because that meant the bomb was dropping rather than flying over you).
If the manager doesn't have a clue whether the project he is managing is based on obsolete or dying standards, then the fact that he is questioning it doesn't carry much weight!
Developer: We're going to build the new project out of Jello and Duct tape!
Manager: Sounds great! ------------- unfit for the job
You may be right about about Mars, but 90+ years is a heck of a long time in terms of technology (look where we were 90 years ago - the Wright brothers had only just got off the ground, and trans-atlantic flight via the Hindenberg had yet to arrive!), so I wouldn't be too sure about that. Coming back would be the kicker - bringing enough fuel to get back off Mars.
I'm pretty sure there'll manned missions to the moon though - that's a couple of orders of magnitude easier, and at least there'll be chinese restaurants there by the time the US arrives!
Slashdot Mirror
The name "theory of evolution" is just historical baggage. It's just a consequnce of DNA and "natural selection" (the fact that we're not all created equal - nature sorts out the winners), not a theory at all.
We define evolutionary "fitness" as a catch-all description of those hereditory traits that cause one individual to tend to leave more descendents than another in a given environment. In terms of animals this is mostly about things like abililty to attract mates, compete for food, fertility, disease resistance, etc. Fitness doesn't have any connotation of good or bad - it is just about number of descendents (all that matters in terms of your genetics suriving/dominating over many generations).
fact: fitter individuals leave more descendents than less fit ones
fact: genetics encodes fitness
fact: genetics is hereditory
consequence: each generation tends to be evolutionally fitter than the preceding one
In other words, evolution is not a theory - it is a consequence. At the time Darwin wrote "The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection" (aka the theory of evolution) it was technically fair to call it a theory since it depended on the assumed existence of an hereditory traits mechanism, but since the discovery of DNA there is nothing left but plain fact.
New species are created when two subgroups of an existing species evolve in different directions such that they can no longer interbreed (hence, by definition create a new species and are bound to diverge since due to lack of interbreeding their gene pools can no longer intermix). Speciation is just an example of evolution in action - it's simply what happens when genetic divergence takes you past the point of being able to interbreed (e.g. lion/tiger almost there, horse/donkey just diverged, man/chimp more longer diverged).
Something like a pegasus would be completely impossible under the current theory of evolution
No - the laws of physics are what prevent a flying, or even gliding, horse who's wings (surface area) are horse sized!
Functionally similar features have often evolved more that once (wings in birds, insects, bats all evolved seperately).
It's hard to imagine the circumstance in which a genetic mutation giving rise to additional limbs in a large mammal would be useful, but there's no fundamental reason why it could not happen. Of course there's a long way from a six legged horse to a flying one!
Stein does not reject Darwinism for the evolution of individual species. He rejects that it is the answer for why life exists and why the universe works that way that it does.
Just a few points:
1) If Stein doesn't reject Darwinian speciation, then what's the controversy?
2) Evolution in the presence of DNA is inevitable. Evolution pre-DNA, or of DNA, (i.e. as origin of life) is currently a theory. I'm glad that Ben Stein at least gets that, but the majority of creationists don't. Of course evolution (based on simpler hereditory mechanisms than DNA/RNA) most likely did create life, but there's no proof of it yet.
3) Given that there is NO single (or even majority opinion) theory as to the origin of the laws of the universe, Ben Stein denying that they were derived by "Darinism" is rather odd! Are they really related in his mind?!!!
Interesting theory, but if you read the article it tells you the actual reason! ;-)
A couple of problems:
...
a) Very few genetic mutations are actually beneficial. And even if they are beneficial, very few of these mutations actually carry over to the 3rd generation.
b) Some mutations are only beneficial if it *simultaneously* occurs with many other mutations.
c) Even if (a) and (b) occur due to the vast geological time available for these things to occur, we should still expect to find many transitional while we have actually found very few. Especially troubling is the Cambrian Explosion problem.
To quote Dawkins from the Blind Watchmaker:
"...Cambrian strata of rocks, vintage about 600 million years, are the oldest ones in which we find most of the major invertebrate groups. And we find many of them already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say, this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists."
This is not a open and shut case as you might believe. Actually, the lack of transitional fossil evidence to account for this evolution of animal species gradually has led to Gould proposing the theory of "Punctuated Equilibrium" which basically states that the changes actually occurred in large steps and not gradually.
Your objections and the "theory" of puntuated equailibrium all go together.
With hindsight the "theory" of punctuated aqulibrium is obvious. I use the scare quotes because it's no more theory than evolution itself. It's just a consequence of the rate of environmental change vs rate of genetic change.
When we talk about evolutionary "fitness" we're talking about a match between the individual (genetic phenotype) and the environment, or more specifically the degree of suitedness to survive/thrive and reproduce in the given environment.
There are two things that can change that match (i.e. change evolutionary fitness) - either the individual (genetics) can change, or the environment can change. The key is that these two things happen on very different timescales. Functionally significant genetic change occurs on the order of thousands or more of generations, but the environment can change very rapidly indeed, even within the span of an individual lifetime. Prolonged droughts, volcanic eruptions, meteor impacts, famime, disease, even climate change, all happen extrememly rapidy.
Rapid changes - almost discontinuities - in evolutionary fitness therefore are driven by the environment rather than by genetic change, and this is what drives punctuated equilibrium. One moment the accumulated genetic differences between two sub-populations of a species are of no import (they do NOT need to have been accumulatively advantageous, nevermind individually so, to have accumulated - merely not to be materially disadvantageous), the next moment the environment changes and suddenly your fortuitous resistance to a particular disease, or lesser dependence on water compared to another species becomes paramount. Almost overnight one species aquires disease resistance (and in doing so carries along the accumulated changes that happened to accompany it, and loses those that did not), and another disappears with no warning.
Within a massively changed environment the accumulated genetic changes that survived due to having been bundled together with the critical factor(s) may occasionally themselves also suddenly become of much greater importance than previously, even further amplifying the impact of the change.
Bursts of environmental change consisting of changes in predators and food supply are going to be particularly disruptive and they are going to be self-propagating (evironment change begats evolution and more enviroment change, etc) until eventually a new equalibrium is achieved.
Compared to the pace of environmental change, the cambrian "explosion" took an eternity (many millions of years), and the types of forces (in general) that will have caused it t
It's worse than that - evolution isn't just up there with things like Ohm's law and the law of gravity... it ceased being a theory/law altogether when DNA was discovered thereby making Darwin's hypothesized inheritable traits a reality.
Given the now known existence of DNA & mechanisms of genetic variation, the tautology "the fittest survive" points out that evolution HAS to occur.
variation + the fittest survive + hereditory traits => successive generations become fitter
How could they possibly NOT become fitter (evolve)?!!
Speciation is similarly unavoidable. Population genetic drift comes about by interbreeding, so lack of interbreeding will lead to diverging sub-population genetics, and there is nothing to stop this proceeding past the no-turning-back (speciation!) point of no longer being able to interbreed.
Some of the reasons why some people find it hard to accept are :
- It's personal - it clashes with their religious beliefs
- It's personal - it clashes with their egotistical belief of being special, not an animal
- Evolution of large animal species happens to slowly to observe, and most people are not familiar with other forms of evolution (e.g bacterial, or genetic design) that do happen observably quickly
- It's taught horribly in schools. When you are taught properly about population speration and genetic drift, environmental change and punctuated equilibrium, speciation as evolution past the point of inability to interbreed, it makes sense. If you instead believe evolution happens to individuals vs populations, or that all genetic changes are claimed to be incrementally beneficial (vs punctuated equilibrium, or even Lamarkian drivel like giraffe's necks getting longer because of their stretching for leaves, then you will be very confused!
The trouble with DNA is that it doesn't say that person was there - only that their DNA was. If DNA was (is?) accepted as proof of someone being at a crime scene then it would be too easy to frame someone by planting a few hairs/whatever... Couple that with some circumstantial evidence/suspicion (maybe an anonymous tip) that plant was the criminal, and there's your "scientific" "proof".
There was a recent case in the US where an attorney admitted letting an innocent man spend most of his life in prison because be wasn't willing to break the attorny-client confidentiality of his client who had admitted to the crime the other man was locked up for. With scumbags like this running the system, we should be very afraid of anything that can be remotely abused.
I'm not sure how you equate a 10% accuracy improvement of "predicted like to actual like" to an 0.1 star delta on a 5 star system. In a 5 star system surely each star is equivalent to 20% predicted like, so a 10% accuracy improvement would be 0.5 star reduction in prediction vs actual mismatch.
I think it's reasonable to expect that a 0.5 star accuracy improvement on a 5 star system would be noticeable by enough people (although not all) to make a difference - presumably resulting in better confidence in the recommendation system and an increase in the number of people who would choose a recommentation when they otherwise had nothing else they wanted. The benefit to Netflix is that if more people are consistently watching (and enjoying) movies to the max of their monthly limit, then they are less likely to drop down to a cheaper less-movies plan (or drop out entirely).
Skill is obviously imporant, but all languages are not created equal...
Some languages are better suited to certain tasks than others
Some languages are more productive than others
Some languages prevent certain types of bug better than others
etc, etc
C++ is a great language in the hands of experts, but not all (or even many) programming teams are comprised of all experts. Given that it's better to have quality depend on process rather than people, depending on skilled (and unerring) programmers for quality is an iffy proposal. A language like Ada that forces things like rigorous module definition, type definition & usage, bounds checking, etc, should not be discounted as an aid towards less buggy code.
If they are that skilled, why don't they just produce originals themselves
They will...
This is the same process that Japan went thru. If you're old enough you'll remember when "Made in Japan" meant crap quality, and back then there were few Japanese brand names. China if building up it's tech expertise (very quickly) building knock-off versions of brands that are easy to sell. As "Made in China" stops becoming synonymous with "cheap piece of crap", then you will see more and more Chinese brands, respected for themselves, rather than knock-offs.
A better parallel would be if the cars were inadequately built or designed so that in the event they did crash into large stationary objects there was less chance of escape. The US Ford Pinto, prone to gas tank explosions for example, or maybe a hypothetical airbag with substandard seams that splits on impact.
Your intial pick has a 1/3 chance of being right, and 2/3 of being wrong.
In other words, there's a 2/3 chance the car is behind one of the other two doors, and this probability doesn't depend on whether you actually open any of the doors.
Now, when Monty opens a door he's revealing additional information! It doesn't change the 2/3 odds of one of those other two doors being the right one, but it does rather limit which one!
So, do you want to stick with your original 1/3 chance of being right, or switch and have a 2/3 chance of being right?
Call me cynical, but my take on it was a Google self-advertisement :-
"We built a fully functioning space shuttle over the weekend as a demo of our coolness, but NASA objected so we dismantled it. No biggie."
On a table with $100 or $500 minimum bet they are not going to pay attention to $25 bets ;-)
... their large bets (until the casinos finally - after YEARS - figured it out) did not cause suspiscion - they were very welcome - exactly what the casinos WANTED to see from their high-rollers!
The book the movie is based on mentions that on a (boxing) fight night at the Casino (which attracts high rollers) one of the team player was playing two spots at $6,000 per hand without attracting undue attention. The casinos have "whales" (the biggest players) who think nothing of flying in for the weekend and losing a few million at the tables.
Remember that up until they are tagged as card counters, these pro players are treated like royalty. The casinos primarily guage people by how much they bet, not how mush they win/lose, since they know that statistics will take care of the rest. The MIT team/etc where playing for a lot of money and were being comp'd hotel suites, etc
No-ones saying it's easy - if it was then the Casinos's would be losing money on the game and wouldn't offer it. OTOH the fact that everyone knows about basic strategy and counting means that it's easier for the pros to blend in since perfect play doesn't make you stand out, and there are always going to be more obvious counters than the real professionals. Team play makes it easier and quicker to make money, but bear in mind there have been and presumably still are many legendary players who did it on their own - try reading Ken Uston's "Million Dollar Blackjack" if you like this stuff!
Which is why you do it as a team - with counters who bet minimum waiting for the table to become hot, then the big players who come in when signalled and start throwing the big bucks down and playing double spots. Everyone remains consistent.
Hopefully the ticket price also includes some training time.
You'd need quite a few cycles on the vomit comet before you get the bonking-in-zero-G thing down well enough to perform under pressure in your 2 min window.
Sure - that'll be $200K for you, and $200K for your suitcase. Still want to go?
Ok, few here are old enough to be able to. But take object oriented programming. I'm fairly sure a few will remember the pre-OO days. "What is that good for?" was the most neutral question you might have heard. "Bunch o' bloated bollocks for kids that can't code cleanly" is maybe more like the average comment from an old programmer.
Sure, I'm an old timer (started out soldering together a 1MHz Z80 kit - NASCOM-1 - back in '78).
For those who were around pre-OO, it wasn't really a fundamental innovation, rather just a more convenient way of doing what we'd already been doing. e.g. If a design calls for polymorphism or a what you whippersnappers would call a class hierarchy then the OO way would be to use subclasses and virtual methods, but us old timers writing in C would just use structures with pointers to functions. Of course the ease of use of C++ is much better, and it's great to have template classes and the STL, but the concepts themselves are just things that us pre-OO old fogeys already implemented ourselves in the languages available.
Yep - the Transputer & Occam were way ahead of their time. What was so great about the combo was that they (the processor & language) designed together so that multi-processor language constructs mapped directly onto the hardwware.
In a language such as C++ inter-thread communication is implemented via constructs such as mutexs, condition variables and queues that need to be implemted in software and involve the scheduler (sleep until condition variable woken up). However, in Occam parallelism is built into the language itself and "threads" communicte by reading and writing to communication channels connected to other threads. These communication channnels are directly implemented in hardware so that if you run your Occam program on a multi Transputer network then individual threads will be mapped to seperate chips and the communications channels mapped onto the hardware inter-transputer communication channels.
You should only expect a wall time speed-up from switching to a multithreaded design if you are executing on multi-core/multi-processor hardware where there is true execution concurrency.
However, in-practice sometimes a switch to a multi-threaded design even when run time-sliced on a single processor without any true concurrency, will also result in a speed up against the expectation of a (very minor) slow down that you note. Of course this doesn't always happen, but the reason it coccasionally does happen is because multi-theading as a design tool can often lead to much cleaner and more efficient designs (and maybe also result in more cache hits between timeslices due to the smaller code per thread vs the monolithic alternative). Note that with a modern OS you've going to be getting timesliced anyway (even in a single threaded app) due to the OS itself running threads.
I used to work for Acorn Computers, Cambridge, UK in the early 80's, and one of the company founders, Chris Curry, had a similar parking technique. In the early days Acorn was located at Cambridge market square, a no-parking area. Chris Curry simply ignored the no-parking stipulation and parked directly outside of the Acorn office every day, and paid the fines. I seem to recall he wore black turtlenecks (a la Steve) also, although that may be the alzheimers kicking in.
It may not be stealthy, but it's pretty damn freaky - it'd probably scare the hell out of the enemy. If the thing was lethal - maybe heat following, then the noise could be a psychological bonus, kinda like the German "buzz bombs" scared the Brits in WWII (although in that case the fear was when the noise stopped, because that meant the bomb was dropping rather than flying over you).
Nah.
If the manager doesn't have a clue whether the project he is managing is based on obsolete or dying standards, then the fact that he is questioning it doesn't carry much weight!
Developer: We're going to build the new project out of Jello and Duct tape!
Manager: Sounds great! ------------- unfit for the job
You may be right about about Mars, but 90+ years is a heck of a long time in terms of technology (look where we were 90 years ago - the Wright brothers had only just got off the ground, and trans-atlantic flight via the Hindenberg had yet to arrive!), so I wouldn't be too sure about that. Coming back would be the kicker - bringing enough fuel to get back off Mars.
I'm pretty sure there'll manned missions to the moon though - that's a couple of orders of magnitude easier, and at least there'll be chinese restaurants there by the time the US arrives!