If the bid's $2500 he'll pay out his max. $2500 for a total charitable contribution of $5000 which in a 30% tax bracket would be worth $1500 as a tax deduction, giving him an out of pocket cost of $1000.
If the bid went as high as $6000, then the contribution would be $8500 - worth *over* $2500 as a deduction, and he'd actually be ahead!
Anyway, just pointing this out for fun. The charity wins whatever the amount, so it's definitely a cool thing to do.
I saw a TV program the other day where they showed a "pickled" Tasmanian tiger cub that was collected before they went extinct (unless, in fact, they're not!). I'm assuming there must be some pretty good DNA there...
Not as impressive as cloning a Mammoth, perhaps, but they were pretty neat looking animals, and bringing *anything* back from the dead would be pretty amazing really!
Does anyone have details about the regulations or state of affairs concerning the discovery of archeological finds on private lands in other countries?
I believe the way it is in England is that anything that is deemed to have been buried deliberately (say a pot of roman coins) is deemed "Treasure Trove", which means that the state/government can choose to take it from you if it's thought to be historically significant, but they do have to compensate you at some sort of fair (market?) rate.
There are so few T-Rex specimens around that I think the real shame would be if it wasn't made accessible to researchers. As far as being on public display, most museums have a large percentage of fossil casts (reproductions) on display anyway, not original fossils.
Huh? Sure neural nets can have loops, and that is precisely where they do gain state.
Minksy may have been an AI pioneer, but what has he done lately other than ride his own tattered coat-tails? I don't know where I'd even begin to critisize "The Society of Mind" - it doesn't even begin to address the hard problems of AI, and competely ignores the absolutely fundamental problems of perception and representation.
Minsky may pay lip service to connectionism and synthetic approaches, but he comes across to me as a died-in-the-wool symbolic AI adherent, who's work in that field has simply been eclipsed by others usch as Allen Newell and Doug Lenat.
Minsky wants to come across as the "wise old man" of AI, but his essays are no more than tired and masturbatorily self-indulgent fluff pieces.
The problem with any calculation of this sort is that we don't know how the brain works, so it's impossible to know how to measure it's processing power. What if the basic architecturasl unit is the cortical minicolum rather than individual neuron, and what if the basic cortical "computational" mechanism is some kind of darwianian spreading of replicating attractor patterns (as has been suggested)...
You could do a logic level or gate level simulation of a chip and get the same results, but one would unnecessarily use up WAY more compute power because you were simulating way below the level of what's actually going on at a macroscopic level.
I wouldn't even claim that we're necessarily overestimating the computational equivalent - I simply think we don't know enough about how the brain works to know what factors we should be considering when trying to determine it's computational equivalent (if indeed such a concept makes any sense, which it probably doesn't!).
What about AI pioneer Marvin Minsky's arguing that Perceptrons (as artifical neurons were then called) were a useless avenue of research, as among other fundamental limitations they could never compute an XOR function!
Too bad Minsky never considered that more than one neuron might be connected together in ways he hadn't considered.
Yeah, Penrose sure had to dig deep to try to concoct an argument to back up his beliefs. Too bad that his arguments are based on his own horseshit theories of how the mind works, and ignore the known facts.
Hint: Next time you want to learn about how the mind works, or what it's capable of, try reading a book by a top neurologist rather than a top mathematician.
Penrose is talking from wishfull thinking: his argument boils down to "computers can't do the same stuff as us because, well it just stands to reason".
Yep. Either that, or he actively doesn't want to believe it.
... is whether we can determine whether John Katz brain will ever stop churing out these worthless articles.
Computability was discussed to death years ago in Roger Penrose's "The Emporer's new mind".
IMO until we know in far greater detail how the brain works, then claims as to whether the brain achieves non-computable things are useless. Penrose's whole argument was based on quantum level computations taking place in the nanotubes of the glia, rather than at a neural net or higher level. Hardly a mainstream view.
Never mind "fumbling the future", what about fumbling the present?! Just curious if you have any views on Xerox's earnings slump.. What is being done to turn things around, and do you have any faith in it? What's the consensus?
I had the idea for a *recordable* greeting card based on a specific analog recording chip that made it cheap enough to implement. Sadly a "friend", without my knowledge, savaged a musical card to build a prototype, and showed it to Hallmark without them signing any NDAs.... Not too long after this Hallmark started selling this exact design, and had also secured an exclusive use agreement with the chip manufacturer so that no-one else could use the chip in card application. Needless to say, neither of us got a penny.
But you're right, the greeting card industry does appear to be interested in new ideas!:-(
That's why the networks are scared shitless about TiVo and ReplayTV - they're losing control. If the guys at TiVo are smart, they'd start selling advertising themselves - they could guarantee that you're going to watch it (or at least that it will appear on the "channel" you're watching). What'd be a decent trade off would be if they added their own advertising, perhaps skipped network advertising when recording, and dropped the subscription fee.
While the R&D cost could easily be $1M, the value of the actual unit itself is hardly more than a few thousand - the cost of a small PCB run or wire-wrap prototype. I would moderate this article as "Bullshit". Oh, I forgot, we can't moderate articles..:-(
From the Executive Summary on the Linux Capital Group web site:
VCs can make tremendous profits. For example Sequoia Capital invested in Red Hat at $3, before their IPO, and now that Red Hat has hit $300, Sequoia would multiply its investment 100 times by selling at that price. In contrast, the typical investor was first able to buy Red Hat stock at $43, and would still make a handsome profit but nothing near that of the VC. So you can see that the conventional paradigm of venture capital is structured so that only those who have a lot to invest can play the game. Linux Capital Group will give this opportunity to everyone who can afford a share.
Q: Would this be a share before or after you go public?
After the post IPO success of RedHat, and now VA Linux's record breaking IPO, it seems pretty apparent that Wall Street is more than willing to pay up front for Linux gains they anticipate down the road. If LPG expects to achive a 100-to-1 return on capital, then it seems reasonable (in the current market, at least) that any LPG IPO would open way up, therefore denying any open market investors that ground floor VC type rate of return.
If you truly want to allow others in on the financial success of Linux, then the only real way to do it would be to accept pre-IPO investments on a much broader scale (i.e. from the open source/Linux community). How exactly you would qualify such people, and avoid the Wall Street sharks is a tricky problem, although perhaps limiting investments to (say) $1000 would probably go a long way towards that.
There's a book "At home in the universe" by Stuart Kauffman which explains how the emergence of life (at least as far as the self replicating soup precursors to RNA/DNA) is actually pretty much inevitable rather than a fluke.
Market cap. is short for market capitalization, and is exactly that - it's the value of the company as given by the share price (market). It's simply the total number of shares outstanding times the stock price. When the market is sane, there are rules of thumb that relate share price to "real world" things like sales or earnings growth (e.g. P/E = annual earnings growth rate for a fairly valued growth stock, with a P/E premium for fast growth rates), but the bottom line is that share price (and hence market cap.) is whatever people are willing to pay.
So in the case of VA Linux, 39.7M shares (4.4M being offered at the IPO - both figures from the prospectus) times $30 would give them a market cap. of $1.19B. Of course it's really going to be quite a bit higher!
E*TRADE's latest confirms the $30 pricing, and says customers who've placed conditional offers have until 11:15am EST to cancel if they want to (after which presumably they run their allocation)... Sounds like it may start trading around midday.
Re:repricing is good - to a certain degree
on
VA Reprices Again
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· Score: 2
Yes, but remember that it's not just the cash they raise at the IPO, but the value of the stock in the months following also matters to them, since they presumably will use it for aquisitions.
If the stock rises significantly after the IPO, then investors will feel pretty secure and will likely tolerate the large price swings that are likely to happen. If, OTOH, they get greedy and try to squeeze all the juice out of the IPO, then investors may well bail out, particularly as many are probably in it just to stag the IPO (and stay in iff it's rising).
This whole Linux stocks craze is somewhat of a self perpetuating myth. If LNUX gets a good launch and rises significantly after the IPO, then it will likely gain mind share as a Linux stock and continue to do well. OTOH, if the IPO doesn't do so well, then it's possible investors may reconsider or take a harder look, and decide that it's really a Dell, not a RedHat.
While I'm sure the IPO will be a success, given what appears to be insane demand, I just wanted to make the point that it's not in their best interest to "market price" the issue - they need to leave something on the table for the IPO to be a success, which is equally important.
We live on a world that is fully explored - there's not a square meter of land on the surface that hasn't been mapped, prodded, and trodden.
Close enough to true, perhaps, but consider that 2/3 of the planet is ocean and we've really only begun poking around at the surface in the few decades since Cousteau invented the aqualung. Given that no-one has ever seen a live giant squid (a rather large animal), I'd have to assume that there's all sorts of interesting critters down there for us to discover. Hell, they even keep discovering large new mammels on land every decade or so!
Manned space exploration is really a gimick. I'd rather see larger scale and more ambitous robotic exploration of mars.... and if NASA is building decent robotic systems, how about also having a few robotic subs roaming and exploring the oceans!
For me the only real purpose of manned expeditions would be working towards permanently manned habitats leading towards colonies. The best step in this direction would be to first learn how to do it on earth! How about a large scale Biosphere project populated with a dozen or so people... better than MTV's Real World!
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If the bid's $2500 he'll pay out his max. $2500 for a total charitable contribution of $5000 which in a 30% tax bracket would be worth $1500 as a tax deduction, giving him an out of pocket cost of $1000.
If the bid went as high as $6000, then the contribution would be $8500 - worth *over* $2500 as a deduction, and he'd actually be ahead!
Anyway, just pointing this out for fun. The charity wins whatever the amount, so it's definitely a cool thing to do.
I saw a TV program the other day where they showed a "pickled" Tasmanian tiger cub that was collected before they went extinct (unless, in fact, they're not!). I'm assuming there must be some pretty good DNA there...
Not as impressive as cloning a Mammoth, perhaps, but they were pretty neat looking animals, and bringing *anything* back from the dead would be pretty amazing really!
I think it's Nathan Myhrvold who's the dino nut.
Gotta say if I was Gates, I'd be snapping this up for my entrance lobbby (like Jurassic park).
Does anyone have details about the regulations or state of affairs concerning the discovery of archeological finds on private lands in other countries?
I believe the way it is in England is that anything that is deemed to have been buried deliberately (say a pot of roman coins) is deemed "Treasure Trove", which means that the state/government can choose to take it from you if it's thought to be historically significant, but they do have to compensate you at some sort of fair (market?) rate.
There are so few T-Rex specimens around that I think the real shame would be if it wasn't made accessible to researchers. As far as being on public display, most museums have a large percentage of fossil casts (reproductions) on display anyway, not original fossils.
Huh? Sure neural nets can have loops, and that is precisely where they do gain state.
Minksy may have been an AI pioneer, but what has he done lately other than ride his own tattered coat-tails? I don't know where I'd even begin to critisize "The Society of Mind" - it doesn't even begin to address the hard problems of AI, and competely ignores the absolutely fundamental problems of perception and representation.
Minsky may pay lip service to connectionism and synthetic approaches, but he comes across to me as a died-in-the-wool symbolic AI adherent, who's work in that field has simply been eclipsed by others usch as Allen Newell and Doug Lenat.
Minsky wants to come across as the "wise old man" of AI, but his essays are no more than tired and masturbatorily self-indulgent fluff pieces.
The problem with any calculation of this sort is that we don't know how the brain works, so it's impossible to know how to measure it's processing power. What if the basic architecturasl unit is the cortical minicolum rather than individual neuron, and what if the basic cortical "computational" mechanism is some kind of darwianian spreading of replicating attractor patterns (as has been suggested)...
You could do a logic level or gate level simulation of a chip and get the same results, but one would unnecessarily use up WAY more compute power because you were simulating way below the level of what's actually going on at a macroscopic level.
I wouldn't even claim that we're necessarily overestimating the computational equivalent - I simply think we don't know enough about how the brain works to know what factors we should be considering when trying to determine it's computational equivalent (if indeed such a concept makes any sense, which it probably doesn't!).
What about AI pioneer Marvin Minsky's arguing that Perceptrons (as artifical neurons were then called) were a useless avenue of research, as among other fundamental limitations they could never compute an XOR function!
Too bad Minsky never considered that more than one neuron might be connected together in ways he hadn't considered.
What foresight! What a freakin' genius!
Yeah, Penrose sure had to dig deep to try to concoct an argument to back up his beliefs. Too bad that his arguments are based on his own horseshit theories of how the mind works, and ignore the known facts.
Hint: Next time you want to learn about how the mind works, or what it's capable of, try reading a book by a top neurologist rather than a top mathematician.
Penrose is talking from wishfull thinking: his argument boils down to "computers can't do the same stuff as us because, well it just stands to reason".
Yep. Either that, or he actively doesn't want to believe it.
... is whether we can determine whether John Katz brain will ever stop churing out these worthless articles.
Computability was discussed to death years ago in Roger Penrose's "The Emporer's new mind".
IMO until we know in far greater detail how the brain works, then claims as to whether the brain achieves non-computable things are useless. Penrose's whole argument was based on quantum level computations taking place in the nanotubes of the glia, rather than at a neural net or higher level. Hardly a mainstream view.
Thanks! The stock certainly looks very tempting at the current price!
Never mind "fumbling the future", what about fumbling the present?! Just curious if you have any views on Xerox's earnings slump.. What is being done to turn things around, and do you have any faith in it? What's the consensus?
I'd rather kill an old ceral box (recycling) than look like I dont know how to use the bathroom right.
Damn straight! Hell, I'd kill a spotted owl and dry my hands on that before I'd use an electric hand drier - they suck!!!
The old guy who had a heart attack while masturbrating in the restroom of a convenience store with a borrowed porn mag.
Yeah, but he still managed to have sex after he died, so those could be some winning genes!
I had the idea for a *recordable* greeting card based on a specific analog recording chip that made it cheap enough to implement. Sadly a "friend", without my knowledge, savaged a musical card to build a prototype, and showed it to Hallmark without them signing any NDAs.... Not too long after this Hallmark started selling this exact design, and had also secured an exclusive use agreement with the chip manufacturer so that no-one else could use the chip in card application. Needless to say, neither of us got a penny.
:-(
But you're right, the greeting card industry does appear to be interested in new ideas!
That's why the networks are scared shitless about TiVo and ReplayTV - they're losing control. If the guys at TiVo are smart, they'd start selling advertising themselves - they could guarantee that you're going to watch it (or at least that it will appear on the "channel" you're watching). What'd be a decent trade off would be if they added their own advertising, perhaps skipped network advertising when recording, and dropped the subscription fee.
While the R&D cost could easily be $1M, the value of the actual unit itself is hardly more than a few thousand - the cost of a small PCB run or wire-wrap prototype. I would moderate this article as "Bullshit". Oh, I forgot, we can't moderate articles.. :-(
From the Executive Summary on the Linux Capital Group web site:
VCs can make tremendous profits. For example Sequoia Capital invested in Red Hat at $3, before their IPO, and now that Red Hat has hit $300, Sequoia would
multiply its investment 100 times by selling at that price. In contrast, the typical investor was first able to buy Red Hat stock at $43, and would still make a handsome
profit but nothing near that of the VC. So you can see that the conventional paradigm of venture capital is structured so that only those who have a lot to invest can
play the game. Linux Capital Group will give this opportunity to everyone who can afford a share.
Q: Would this be a share before or after you go public?
After the post IPO success of RedHat, and now VA Linux's record breaking IPO, it seems pretty apparent that Wall Street is more than willing to pay up front for Linux gains they anticipate down the road. If LPG expects to achive a 100-to-1 return on capital, then it seems reasonable (in the current market, at least) that any LPG IPO would open way up, therefore denying any open market investors that ground floor VC type rate of return.
If you truly want to allow others in on the financial success of Linux, then the only real way to do it would be to accept pre-IPO investments on a much broader scale (i.e. from the open source/Linux community). How exactly you would qualify such people, and avoid the Wall Street sharks is a tricky problem, although perhaps limiting investments to (say) $1000 would probably go a long way towards that.
I'd give this one a "Flamebait", and the original press release a "Troll-ing for research dollars".
:-(
DNA is DNA, whether you build it from scratch or cut-and-paste using genetic engineering. We're creating life, let's call the pope. Yeah, right!
Wish I got my LNUX today!
There's a book "At home in the universe" by Stuart Kauffman which explains how the emergence of life (at least as far as the self replicating soup precursors to RNA/DNA) is actually pretty much inevitable rather than a fluke.
Market cap. is short for market capitalization, and is exactly that - it's the value of the company as given by the share price (market). It's simply the total number of shares outstanding times the stock price. When the market is sane, there are rules of thumb that relate share price to "real world" things like sales or earnings growth (e.g. P/E = annual earnings growth rate for a fairly valued growth stock, with a P/E premium for fast growth rates), but the bottom line is that share price (and hence market cap.) is whatever people are willing to pay.
So in the case of VA Linux, 39.7M shares (4.4M being offered at the IPO - both figures from the prospectus) times $30 would give them a market cap. of $1.19B. Of course it's really going to be quite a bit higher!
E*TRADE's latest confirms the $30 pricing, and says customers who've placed conditional offers have until 11:15am EST to cancel if they want to (after which presumably they run their allocation)... Sounds like it may start trading around midday.
Yes, but remember that it's not just the cash they raise at the IPO, but the value of the stock in the months following also matters to them, since they presumably will use it for aquisitions.
If the stock rises significantly after the IPO, then investors will feel pretty secure and will likely tolerate the large price swings that are likely to happen. If, OTOH, they get greedy and try to squeeze all the juice out of the IPO, then investors may well bail out, particularly as many are probably in it just to stag the IPO (and stay in iff it's rising).
This whole Linux stocks craze is somewhat of a self perpetuating myth. If LNUX gets a good launch and rises significantly after the IPO, then it will likely gain mind share as a Linux stock and continue to do well. OTOH, if the IPO doesn't do so well, then it's possible investors may reconsider or take a harder look, and decide that it's really a Dell, not a RedHat.
While I'm sure the IPO will be a success, given what appears to be insane demand, I just wanted to make the point that it's not in their best interest to "market price" the issue - they need to leave something on the table for the IPO to be a success, which is equally important.
We live on a world that is fully explored - there's not a square meter of land on the surface that hasn't been mapped, prodded, and trodden.
Close enough to true, perhaps, but consider that 2/3 of the planet is ocean and we've really only begun poking around at the surface in the few decades since Cousteau invented the aqualung. Given that no-one has ever seen a live giant squid (a rather large animal), I'd have to assume that there's all sorts of interesting critters down there for us to discover. Hell, they even keep discovering large new mammels on land every decade or so!
Manned space exploration is really a gimick. I'd rather see larger scale and more ambitous robotic exploration of mars.... and if NASA is building decent robotic systems, how about also having a few robotic subs roaming and exploring the oceans!
For me the only real purpose of manned expeditions would be working towards permanently manned habitats leading towards colonies. The best step in this direction would be to first learn how to do it on earth! How about a large scale Biosphere project populated with a dozen or so people... better than MTV's Real World!