It's the same as trying to predict any system with non-linear chaotic dynamics (e.g. the weather)... it's fundamentally impossible to do on anything other than a very short timescale, and even then only if you're in a fairly smooth region of the solution space. Note how short term weather forcasts are generally good, but occasionally something comes out of the blue all the same, such as the storm that hit england a few years ago and did so much damage to Kew gardens etc.
I assume that one might be able to predict social or marital dynamics with a similar degree of success in the relatively short term, but fundamentally it's impossible to do accurately.
Actually the Russians did fly their Shuttle clone, the Buran, once (it orbitted the earth in an unmanned mission). The Russians have also had considerable success with other unmanned missions, from the current ISS supply ships to the Lunakhod series (unmanned full size lunar rovers), as well as unmanned lunar rock retrieval... all done on a budget that is/was a fraction of what the US spends.
No doubt the US space program is in some ways more technically advanced, but I don't think it's right to dismiss the Russians as being in any way uncapable. I think the problems of their space program have been more financial than lack of expertise.
You seem to forget that the US doesn't even have a reliable way of getting men into orbit right now, let alone anything more ambitious.
The only thing from stopping the ISS from dropping out of orbit is Russian robot supply craft that are also nudging it higher, and the only way US astronauts will get to/from the ISS before the Shuttle design is fixed (without risking their lives) is via Russian spacecraft.
It seems there's at least three reasons they want to rush the shuttle back before fixing it:
- it's too embarassing to have it and the ISS unused - the chinese are about to put guys in orbit - the europeans are about to robotically orbit the moon
Personally I'd prefer to see cooler, cheaper robotic NASA missions - more ambitious robotic mars exploration & robotic exploration of other planets/moons where the possibility of human exploration will probably never exist in my lifetime
We just found a little chunk (the hippocampus) that is essential to storing memories and happens to get whacked often enough by stroke and such. Then we did an all-possible-input-combos test on this chunk (using rat brains, apparently), recorded the outputs, and burned the whole thing into a look-up table in a chip, and (this is the cool part) connected the chip to a real brain, bypassing a broken hippocampus chunk.
So what's the betting that the first human to get one of these implanted will end up with a rat's memory - only remembering things of importance to a rat!:-)
I'm still using the same Casio LCD alarm clock I bought back in college in 1979. Still going strong despite me whaling on the huge OFF button every morning.
Actually, Pachinko is MASSIVE in Japan. I was in Tokyo a while back, and there are galleries of Pachinko machines all over the place - packed with people. It looks like rows and rows of people playing slots in a casino (but packed together more tightly). I think you can win credits (maybe money?), but anyways for whatever reason the Japs are nuts over it!
Actually a human sprinter can hit 25 mph. 12 mph is more like the speed of the joggers that are already on the sidewalk. Segways are still better suited to bicycle lanes though, or more open spaces like parks and campuses.
It's hard to see who's going to use them though - what do you do with it at your destination? Lug 65lb up the stairs? Chain $4000 to the railing? If you put fat tires on them they would be good for a lazy golfer I guess.
Actually that search is now showing the Memorex MVD-2028 DVD player as supporting DivX as well as almost everything everything else, for as little as $60!
As I understand it HT can indeed speed up pure integer code (or more generally code that's competing for a single CPU resource). HT will allow another thread to exceute if the current one is waiting on anything from pipeline results to memory access. I believe that modern CPU/memory speed disaparity was one of the driving forces behind it - if one thread gets a cache miss then another may be able to continue executing rather than having to sit idle waiting for main memory.
To say that Google "did a better job" has to be the understatement of the century! It was the first (and as far as I know or care the only) search engine to actually work in the sense of finding what you are looking for as opposed to zillions of irrelevant pages that merely mention what you are looking for.
Google is a search engine - the rest are merely indeces.
If you can power it up and the power supply doesn't explode, then your electrolytics are fine! I havn't got that far yet.
Apparently electrolytics chemically deteriorate over time if they are not used, and the result can be that they will rapidly heat up and explode if you just apply normal voltage. The solution to this is to gradually apply DC voltage up to rated voltage across them thru a larger resistor, which "reforms" or undoes the chemical migration. I havn't done it yet.
The old Sun type 4 keyboards have the same foam pads as the SOL keyboard. I'm restoring a couple of SOLs myself, and picked up 4 of these keyboards for a grand total of $1 + shipping on eBay!
Have you dared turn the thing on yet? Are you reforming the PSU electolytics?
Mutations are essentially random, and "try" to take DNA in all possible directions. What dictates the directions evolution actually does take therefore isn't these unpredictable (other than being mostly random) mutations, but rather the selection pressures that weeds them out.
For example, right now the larget selection pressure on cattle is exerted by their predator man (domestic cattle vastly outnumber wild cattle), and the most successful strategy for cattle DNA production in the face of co-evolution with man - odd as it seems - is to make them tastier and meatier to that we breed more of them. The selection pressure on cattle therefore predicts fat tasty cows, regardless of the DNA mutations (natural or man engineered) that take them there.
Judging by the last 5 million, I'd expect animals in 5 million years time to look like pretty minor variations on what they do now. Perhaps the most startling change to us will be not so much on appearance but behaviour as some of the other great apes perhaps follow in our footsteps and develop greater intelligence for greater flexibility in the face of habitat destruction (assuming we don't just make them extinct, which of course is much more likely - probably within a few hundred years or less).
Of course the answer to the question depends on whether we're just talking about wetware evolution, or life in general. Never mind 5 million years, or even a thousand, we should soon see artifical species as a result of robotics/AI, and in 5 million years time these may even have become the dominant type of life outside of critters like plants, bacteria and insects and fish.
Well perhaps I owe you an apology for unfair accusation as it does sound as if you had a specialized position that you genuinely had difficulty filling. However, from my experience that is far from the common case - the scenario I outlined where an easy-to-fill position is filled with a cheaper H1-B rather than an available American is much more the norm.
Additionally, H1-B's may be here legitimately because of initial circumstances, but if the job market worsens (such that more qualified Americans are looking for work) and an H1-B is laid off or wants to switch jobs then the legal fees are a non-issue. In a bad market (such as now), an H1-B looking to stay in the country will certainly accept a salary at a saving to the hiring company more than the lawyer fee.
Companies claims not to abuse the H1-B program would be much more plausible if they didn't continue to lobby congress for H1-B quota increses even during times of massive tech worker unemployment.
H1-B hiring and overseas outsourcing don't just deprive Americans of jobs, but screw the entire economy as cash is just siphoned off it and sent overseas (either directly or via paychecks sent back home).
Anyway, apologies if I accused you unfairly, but it was more of a general rant against typical practice!
Look at the tech job market, and the experience of everyone here on slashdot... H1-B's are only meant to be hired in cases where you are unable to find a qualified American candidate. But we all know how it really works - you decide you want to hire an H1-B for whatever reason, then the lawyer handling the visa application will make sure that the legally required job advertizement (for the position for which you've already illegally selected the candidate) is placed in some obscure place where it has no exposure, and worded such that only the desired applicant fits.
While there may be plently of unemployed tech workers now, as well as last year when your hired these H1-B's, that are unqualified (the johnny come lately.com boom $70K/yr html coders), I do not believe for a second that you couldn't have found qualified Americans (as the law requires you try to) in place of those H1-B's. Recent news letters I've had from head hunters rather than offering jobs as they did a number of years ago are now offering 10% referral fees if you can find them a position to place one of their mass of qualified candidates into.
What steps did you take (as law requires) to try to find American candidates before taking the H1-B's? Did you consider candiates willing to relocate (many nowadays will do, even at own cost)?
It's people like you, one at a time, that are ruining the tech market for Americans.
Companies hire H1-B people because they are cheap, not because they are good.
Why do you think companies lobby the government for H1-B quota increases while millions of highly qualified Americans are unemployed and would love those jobs?
An American employee needs an American wage commesurate the cost of living here. Someone coming from a country like India where salaries are so low in comparison isn't viewing their H1-B employment in the same way - to them it's an investment in the future when they'll attain a green card and then be able to get a normal salary.
American companies realize they have H1-B employees by the balls, which is why they can get away with paying them 50% of the going rate, and why they want them even when unemployment is bad, as it is now.
Slashdot Mirror
That might have the effect of putting more money on it, but that doesn't mean there'll be a quick cure unless it's there to be easily found.
... he put money into it ... where's the cure? How much money does it take?!
Michal Milken got prostate cancer
It's the same as trying to predict any system with non-linear chaotic dynamics (e.g. the weather) ... it's fundamentally impossible to do on anything other than a very short timescale, and even then only if you're in a fairly smooth region of the solution space. Note how short term weather forcasts are generally good, but occasionally something comes out of the blue all the same, such as the storm that hit england a few years ago and did so much damage to Kew gardens etc.
I assume that one might be able to predict social or marital dynamics with a similar degree of success in the relatively short term, but fundamentally it's impossible to do accurately.
Actually the Russians did fly their Shuttle clone, the Buran, once (it orbitted the earth in an unmanned mission). The Russians have also had considerable success with other unmanned missions, from the current ISS supply ships to the Lunakhod series (unmanned full size lunar rovers), as well as unmanned lunar rock retrieval... all done on a budget that is/was a fraction of what the US spends.
No doubt the US space program is in some ways more technically advanced, but I don't think it's right to dismiss the Russians as being in any way uncapable. I think the problems of their space program have been more financial than lack of expertise.
You seem to forget that the US doesn't even have a reliable way of getting men into orbit right now, let alone anything more ambitious.
The only thing from stopping the ISS from dropping out of orbit is Russian robot supply craft that are also nudging it higher, and the only way US astronauts will get to/from the ISS before the Shuttle design is fixed (without risking their lives) is via Russian spacecraft.
It seems there's at least three reasons they want to rush the shuttle back before fixing it:
- it's too embarassing to have it and the ISS unused
- the chinese are about to put guys in orbit
- the europeans are about to robotically orbit the moon
Personally I'd prefer to see cooler, cheaper robotic NASA missions - more ambitious robotic mars exploration & robotic exploration of other planets/moons where the possibility of human exploration will probably never exist in my lifetime
We just found a little chunk (the hippocampus) that is essential to storing memories and happens to get whacked often enough by stroke and such. Then we did an all-possible-input-combos test on this chunk (using rat brains, apparently), recorded the outputs, and burned the whole thing into a look-up table in a chip, and (this is the cool part) connected the chip to a real brain, bypassing a broken hippocampus chunk.
:-)
So what's the betting that the first human to get one of these implanted will end up with a rat's memory - only remembering things of importance to a rat!
Yep - Casio stuff seems to live forever!
I'm still using the same Casio LCD alarm clock I bought back in college in 1979. Still going strong despite me whaling on the huge OFF button every morning.
What's "survivor bias"?
Actually, Pachinko is MASSIVE in Japan. I was in Tokyo a while back, and there are galleries of Pachinko machines all over the place - packed with people. It looks like rows and rows of people playing slots in a casino (but packed together more tightly). I think you can win credits (maybe money?), but anyways for whatever reason the Japs are nuts over it!
In fact I use it all the time.
I work on a distributed Solaris based system (major test platform for a MAJOR telco) that uses CORBA for:
- Internal inter-process communications, transparently calling other procesess whether on the same host or not
- Interfacing with underlying test systems running on other platforms (some of which are nice enough to use standards based access via CORBA)
- Providing access to our system from clients running on a range of systems (incl. Sun, Windows) in both C++ and Java
CORBA is great if you use it for what it's meant for!
You do realize he was talking about the functional language LISP?!
A computer language certainly has at least the power of XML or schemams!
Still, that's a butt-load of functionality for $119!
Gotta say I'm tempted to get one, other than knowing that this stuff just keeps getting better and cheaper!
Actually a human sprinter can hit 25 mph. 12 mph is more like the speed of the joggers that are already on the sidewalk. Segways are still better suited to bicycle lanes though, or more open spaces like parks and campuses.
It's hard to see who's going to use them though - what do you do with it at your destination? Lug 65lb up the stairs? Chain $4000 to the railing? If you put fat tires on them they would be good for a lazy golfer I guess.
Actually that search is now showing the Memorex MVD-2028 DVD player as supporting DivX as well as almost everything everything else, for as little as $60!
Memorex MVD-2028
I don't believe that's correct.
As I understand it HT can indeed speed up pure integer code (or more generally code that's competing for a single CPU resource). HT will allow another thread to exceute if the current one is waiting on anything from pipeline results to memory access. I believe that modern CPU/memory speed disaparity was one of the driving forces behind it - if one thread gets a cache miss then another may be able to continue executing rather than having to sit idle waiting for main memory.
To say that Google "did a better job" has to be the understatement of the century! It was the first (and as far as I know or care the only) search engine to actually work in the sense of finding what you are looking for as opposed to zillions of irrelevant pages that merely mention what you are looking for.
Google is a search engine - the rest are merely indeces.
If you can power it up and the power supply doesn't explode, then your electrolytics are fine! I havn't got that far yet.
Apparently electrolytics chemically deteriorate over time if they are not used, and the result can be that they will rapidly heat up and explode if you just apply normal voltage. The solution to this is to gradually apply DC voltage up to rated voltage across them thru a larger resistor, which "reforms" or undoes the chemical migration. I havn't done it yet.
The old Sun type 4 keyboards have the same foam pads as the SOL keyboard. I'm restoring a couple of SOLs myself, and picked up 4 of these keyboards for a grand total of $1 + shipping on eBay!
Have you dared turn the thing on yet? Are you reforming the PSU electolytics?
Mutations are essentially random, and "try" to take DNA in all possible directions. What dictates the directions evolution actually does take therefore isn't these unpredictable (other than being mostly random) mutations, but rather the selection pressures that weeds them out.
For example, right now the larget selection pressure on cattle is exerted by their predator man (domestic cattle vastly outnumber wild cattle), and the most successful strategy for cattle DNA production in the face of co-evolution with man - odd as it seems - is to make them tastier and meatier to that we breed more of them. The selection pressure on cattle therefore predicts fat tasty cows, regardless of the DNA mutations (natural or man engineered) that take them there.
Judging by the last 5 million, I'd expect animals in 5 million years time to look like pretty minor variations on what they do now. Perhaps the most startling change to us will be not so much on appearance but behaviour as some of the other great apes perhaps follow in our footsteps and develop greater intelligence for greater flexibility in the face of habitat destruction (assuming we don't just make them extinct, which of course is much more likely - probably within a few hundred years or less).
Of course the answer to the question depends on whether we're just talking about wetware evolution, or life in general. Never mind 5 million years, or even a thousand, we should soon see artifical species as a result of robotics/AI, and in 5 million years time these may even have become the dominant type of life outside of critters like plants, bacteria and insects and fish.
Well perhaps I owe you an apology for unfair accusation as it does sound as if you had a specialized position that you genuinely had difficulty filling. However, from my experience that is far from the common case - the scenario I outlined where an easy-to-fill position is filled with a cheaper H1-B rather than an available American is much more the norm.
Additionally, H1-B's may be here legitimately because of initial circumstances, but if the job market worsens (such that more qualified Americans are looking for work) and an H1-B is laid off or wants to switch jobs then the legal fees are a non-issue. In a bad market (such as now), an H1-B looking to stay in the country will certainly accept a salary at a saving to the hiring company more than the lawyer fee.
Companies claims not to abuse the H1-B program would be much more plausible if they didn't continue to lobby congress for H1-B quota increses even during times of massive tech worker unemployment.
H1-B hiring and overseas outsourcing don't just deprive Americans of jobs, but screw the entire economy as cash is just siphoned off it and sent overseas (either directly or via paychecks sent back home).
Anyway, apologies if I accused you unfairly, but it was more of a general rant against typical practice!
Look at the tech job market, and the experience of everyone here on slashdot... H1-B's are only meant to be hired in cases where you are unable to find a qualified American candidate. But we all know how it really works - you decide you want to hire an H1-B for whatever reason, then the lawyer handling the visa application will make sure that the legally required job advertizement (for the position for which you've already illegally selected the candidate) is placed in some obscure place where it has no exposure, and worded such that only the desired applicant fits.
.com boom $70K/yr html coders), I do not believe for a second that you couldn't have found qualified Americans (as the law requires you try to) in place of those H1-B's. Recent news letters I've had from head hunters rather than offering jobs as they did a number of years ago are now offering 10% referral fees if you can find them a position to place one of their mass of qualified candidates into.
While there may be plently of unemployed tech workers now, as well as last year when your hired these H1-B's, that are unqualified (the johnny come lately
What steps did you take (as law requires) to try to find American candidates before taking the H1-B's? Did you consider candiates willing to relocate (many nowadays will do, even at own cost)?
It's people like you, one at a time, that are ruining the tech market for Americans.
Companies hire H1-B people because they are cheap, not because they are good.
Why do you think companies lobby the government for H1-B quota increases while millions of highly qualified Americans are unemployed and would love those jobs?
An American employee needs an American wage commesurate the cost of living here. Someone coming from a country like India where salaries are so low in comparison isn't viewing their H1-B employment in the same way - to them it's an investment in the future when they'll attain a green card and then be able to get a normal salary.
American companies realize they have H1-B employees by the balls, which is why they can get away with paying them 50% of the going rate, and why they want them even when unemployment is bad, as it is now.
Dinsdale...
Yep!
Don't give up -- there are easy solutions to thick walls.
;-)
Yeah - ethernet cable running thru the conduit!