Ray - I respect your work, especially to the extent that I'm planning on 2030 being a heck of a lot of fun (I'll only be in my fifties, chronologically, and I've cleaned up my health considerably thanks to you)! Yet, given the clockwork-like march of progress, I have to ask if you ever wonder if you're needed. Is this just a ton of fun for you to work at Google on this, or do you feel you're going to be making important contributions that wouldn't have been made otherwise (or later)? Or does the motion of this great societal machine already understand that men like you will inevitably be doing things like this? I guess what I'm asking is your take on the feedback mechanisms of the emergent nature of the Singularity as a feature of our society and perhaps why our society ends up here (or if there was ever another possible outcome once the first simian picked up a rock).
What do you recommend be done with these billions of people in the coming decades?
Blech. The question assumes that anybody can make an informed decision about what to tell billions of people to do.
Personally, I'm looking forward to ten billion people who have all the food, energy, materials, and information they desire, and can't even begin to imagine the beautiful things that will come of it (other than a gradual reduction of that ten billion over time). The music we'll hear, the stories we'll read, the advances in science and engineering that I'll see some day, and the amazing amazings I can't even guess at!
We're nerds. We don't buy solutions, we create them.
Absolutely true for nerds. But some of us are geeks. We'll buy stuff if it's the best solution given the requirements (sometimes with extreme prejudice).
Did you see the part where their revenue stream is water mined from the asteroid and sold to the satellite operators, who pay > $10K/k for propellant to orbit now?
Ah, neat. If you only see a dozen odd apps, click on 'What's New' and change that to 'All'. It wasn't clearly obvious to me (brand new JB install) that this was a menu widget.
I seriously doubt even a solid gold asteroid would justify the costs to go into space, mine it, and return said gold to earth
Nobody is talking about returning products to Earth - the whole problem is that it's too expensive to get stuff off of Earth. DSI is currently pursuing the model of 1) recovering water from asteroids and using that to refuel satellites that are already in orbit (revenue stream) and 2) mining nickel from asteroids to use in an 3D printer in space to build space infrastructure.
And since we don't even have the technology to move an asteroid yet (just some "Well it's possible" bullshit speculation)
We understand Newtonian physics, and we have ion engines deployed in space on deep space probes and on satellites for station keeping. There's 15 years of on-mission experience with these things.
If we need to move an asteroid quite a distance over a long period of time, that will be done with a gravitational mass that is held in the desired orbit with ion engines and gravity between the two bodies drags the asteroid towards that mass. The expense will be in doing the first one, as we'd probably have to lift something very heavy off the Earth to bootstrap that process. But once the first asteroid is in Earth orbit for mining operations (you'd want to attach new ion engines from Earth in the near term) then the process can be done much more cheaply.
For small objects near to us we could just attach ion engines directly. NASA has already landed a craft on an asteroid, so the rest is just a matter of working out the system to fire the right engine at the right time. This doesn't scale very well, but for first efforts it might be worthwhile. Heck, if it were very very close and in a very similar orbit, we could even use chemical rockets.
We do have the technology - certainly not much experience or engineering best practices yet - but that's why it's a nascent industry, not an established one. Just because it hasn't been done yet, it doesn't follow that we can't do it yet.
MIT is not publicly funded according to what I've read
Isn't most of MIT's total operating budget supported by federal research grants? Back when Kerry/Gore/O'Leary lead the effort to kill the Integral Fast Reactor, it was said that Kerry's motivation was to protect the hot fusion money coming into MIT (tens of millions per year).
WebM completely failed to gain any traction whatsoever against h.264, so why should it do any better against h.265?
Well, if WebM were as good as h.265, then we'd be a in a place where no hardware supports either standard and new hardware could support both standards. Right now, h.264 has hardware support and WebM doesn't, putting it at a large disadvantage.
They are typically fabricated in large sheets, then the sheets are tested for dead pixels, and then the standard display sizes are cut out from between the dead pixels, and the individual units are retested.
To be fair, though, a 30" display meant to be read at 20' can have a few dead pixels and that won't matter.
I wouldn't think twice about having the clerk go, "there's a surcharge for credit", to which I'd respond, "OK, thanks anyway." and leave.
Cash and debit card users would be delighted to have credit card users take their business elsewhere. We're tired of paying for your air miles and GM credit.
That and some PoS systems have six or seven screens to go through. I do think it works well at McDonald's (swipe it and forget it, on DSL), but that's not universal by any means.
"If you think debit is faster than cash, you may have a very small base of experience and be prone to overgeneralizing."
These screens only show how many people are on the phones and how many customers are waiting.
I did tech support for a call center 20 years ago and they had the same information on a display. They used an LCD matrix display. Even today, that seems like it would use less power, have a better viewing angle, and be more visible for folks at a distance, not to mention less expensive to acquire.
So the private owner will get money for 'protecting' the trees, as well as money for cutting them down and selling them. Win/win!
Right, they're his property so he can do with the trees as he pleases, within the bounds of the land grant. Clearcutting the forest wipes out his asset so he doesn't do that. If somebody else tries to poach his trees, he defends them. Again, this model has been proven to work for elephant conservation.
Seriously, who is supplying the money that is to motivate the private owner to protect the trees, and can they afford to keep doing that indefinitely, even as the amount of money the owner could get from logging them rises?
The elephant model consists of a stipend plus the proceeds of controlled elephant culling. Some people are upset that any elephants are culled (I'd prefer none as well) but the rate of elephant culling is dramatically lower in areas where property rights have been assigned to them.
"just put it in a torrent and you'll always be able to get a copy of it".
I think this comes from Linus's observation that real men don't back up, they upload their work to an FTP server.
The trick is offering something that anybody else would want. I've had a torrent client waiting a month for somebody to seed a torrent that other people would actually want.
Steve's idea was to sell something for $40 that the customer could build themselves for $20, a 100% markup. The idea the folks behind Raspberry Pi have is to order parts in a quantity of scale that allows them to build and sell you something you could not hope to put together yourself for that price. That is not the same thing at all.
Only if you discount the value of labor to approximately $0.
I was just having this discussion with a client who is tight on funds. They need a temperature sensor for the server room, and commercial options with SNMP and e-mail capability start at $199 and can easily hit $499 (other recommendations welcome!). He correctly identified that it "shouldn't be that expensive" and I offered that an Arduino solution could be purchased for $50 in parts, but then he thought about having to learn Arduino and assembling the parts and finding and loading the proper sketches, or hiring me to do it, then $199 seemed like a good deal.
Of course, if you love to build stuff, then you're not in the market for the $40 computer anyway!
Rule #1 of investigating a compromised system is you don't use the tools on the compromised system.
Security is a process. Running a scanner on a compromised system has no guarantee of finding out that the system is compromised. But 98% of the time it will work just fine - these systems are usually compromised by script kiddie tools that don't spend a great deal of effort to find the rootkit scanners.
I suppose it would be better if somebody came up with a well-developed package for cross-scanning systems over shared storage (does it already exist?) but that's also only going to reduce your 98% to 98.5%. I suppose all you need to really do is to validate the integrity of the host system's scanner (or rpm or dpkg, etc.) but then again the remote system access method could also be compromised (today it's TLA stuff to compromise e.g. nfsd such that it will only return the wrong (but valid) md5sum and sha1sum and [randomhashsum] for only the scanners you might check for) but it's not likely.
Taking down every system on a frequent schedule for an offline scan would be a good idea but then again the BIOS could be compromised and you start to run into the collision of business needs and absolute security.
And it's a healthy sign that some random guy can say, "look Special Relativity seems to be broken," and nobody starts screaming about golden idols or anything, but rather four smart guys kindly consider what he has to say and show him where he went wrong. Everybody learns something, egos remain intact, and nobody starts swinging guns. Science FTW.
Which is why property ownership is the only way the stated goals can actually be achieved. Allow a private owner to own n acres of rain forest, have him hire security to protect the resource, and then the economics becomes that of whether the bribe is worth losing the contract. The security company can be measured with success metrics, which the constable never will be. It's working for the elephants in Africa.
Slashdot Mirror
Ray - I respect your work, especially to the extent that I'm planning on 2030 being a heck of a lot of fun (I'll only be in my fifties, chronologically, and I've cleaned up my health considerably thanks to you)! Yet, given the clockwork-like march of progress, I have to ask if you ever wonder if you're needed. Is this just a ton of fun for you to work at Google on this, or do you feel you're going to be making important contributions that wouldn't have been made otherwise (or later)? Or does the motion of this great societal machine already understand that men like you will inevitably be doing things like this? I guess what I'm asking is your take on the feedback mechanisms of the emergent nature of the Singularity as a feature of our society and perhaps why our society ends up here (or if there was ever another possible outcome once the first simian picked up a rock).
What do you recommend be done with these billions of people in the coming decades?
Blech. The question assumes that anybody can make an informed decision about what to tell billions of people to do.
Personally, I'm looking forward to ten billion people who have all the food, energy, materials, and information they desire, and can't even begin to imagine the beautiful things that will come of it (other than a gradual reduction of that ten billion over time). The music we'll hear, the stories we'll read, the advances in science and engineering that I'll see some day, and the amazing amazings I can't even guess at!
We're nerds. We don't buy solutions, we create them.
Absolutely true for nerds. But some of us are geeks. We'll buy stuff if it's the best solution given the requirements (sometimes with extreme prejudice).
Did you see the part where their revenue stream is water mined from the asteroid and sold to the satellite operators, who pay > $10K/k for propellant to orbit now?
Ah, neat. If you only see a dozen odd apps, click on 'What's New' and change that to 'All'. It wasn't clearly obvious to me (brand new JB install) that this was a menu widget.
I seriously doubt even a solid gold asteroid would justify the costs to go into space, mine it, and return said gold to earth
Nobody is talking about returning products to Earth - the whole problem is that it's too expensive to get stuff off of Earth. DSI is currently pursuing the model of 1) recovering water from asteroids and using that to refuel satellites that are already in orbit (revenue stream) and 2) mining nickel from asteroids to use in an 3D printer in space to build space infrastructure.
And since we don't even have the technology to move an asteroid yet (just some "Well it's possible" bullshit speculation)
We understand Newtonian physics, and we have ion engines deployed in space on deep space probes and on satellites for station keeping. There's 15 years of on-mission experience with these things.
If we need to move an asteroid quite a distance over a long period of time, that will be done with a gravitational mass that is held in the desired orbit with ion engines and gravity between the two bodies drags the asteroid towards that mass. The expense will be in doing the first one, as we'd probably have to lift something very heavy off the Earth to bootstrap that process. But once the first asteroid is in Earth orbit for mining operations (you'd want to attach new ion engines from Earth in the near term) then the process can be done much more cheaply.
For small objects near to us we could just attach ion engines directly. NASA has already landed a craft on an asteroid, so the rest is just a matter of working out the system to fire the right engine at the right time. This doesn't scale very well, but for first efforts it might be worthwhile. Heck, if it were very very close and in a very similar orbit, we could even use chemical rockets.
We do have the technology - certainly not much experience or engineering best practices yet - but that's why it's a nascent industry, not an established one. Just because it hasn't been done yet, it doesn't follow that we can't do it yet.
MIT is not publicly funded according to what I've read
Isn't most of MIT's total operating budget supported by federal research grants? Back when Kerry/Gore/O'Leary lead the effort to kill the Integral Fast Reactor, it was said that Kerry's motivation was to protect the hot fusion money coming into MIT (tens of millions per year).
WebM completely failed to gain any traction whatsoever against h.264, so why should it do any better against h.265?
Well, if WebM were as good as h.265, then we'd be a in a place where no hardware supports either standard and new hardware could support both standards. Right now, h.264 has hardware support and WebM doesn't, putting it at a large disadvantage.
They are typically fabricated in large sheets, then the sheets are tested for dead pixels, and then the standard display sizes are cut out from between the dead pixels, and the individual units are retested.
To be fair, though, a 30" display meant to be read at 20' can have a few dead pixels and that won't matter.
I wouldn't think twice about having the clerk go, "there's a surcharge for credit", to which I'd respond, "OK, thanks anyway." and leave.
Cash and debit card users would be delighted to have credit card users take their business elsewhere. We're tired of paying for your air miles and GM credit.
So it's not that you hate the surcharge. It's that you hate being informed about it.
Which is why this is a great move forward. More information = better informed consumers = more efficient market.
That and some PoS systems have six or seven screens to go through. I do think it works well at McDonald's (swipe it and forget it, on DSL), but that's not universal by any means.
"If you think debit is faster than cash, you may have a very small base of experience and be prone to overgeneralizing."
These screens only show how many people are on the phones and how many customers are waiting.
I did tech support for a call center 20 years ago and they had the same information on a display. They used an LCD matrix display. Even today, that seems like it would use less power, have a better viewing angle, and be more visible for folks at a distance, not to mention less expensive to acquire.
"Keep your mouth shut and never rat on your friends."
So the private owner will get money for 'protecting' the trees, as well as money for cutting them down and selling them. Win/win!
Right, they're his property so he can do with the trees as he pleases, within the bounds of the land grant. Clearcutting the forest wipes out his asset so he doesn't do that. If somebody else tries to poach his trees, he defends them. Again, this model has been proven to work for elephant conservation.
Seriously, who is supplying the money that is to motivate the private owner to protect the trees, and can they afford to keep doing that indefinitely, even as the amount of money the owner could get from logging them rises?
The elephant model consists of a stipend plus the proceeds of controlled elephant culling. Some people are upset that any elephants are culled (I'd prefer none as well) but the rate of elephant culling is dramatically lower in areas where property rights have been assigned to them.
Does it translate ARM code to x86 for apps that come with compiled libraries?
"just put it in a torrent and you'll always be able to get a copy of it".
I think this comes from Linus's observation that real men don't back up, they upload their work to an FTP server.
The trick is offering something that anybody else would want. I've had a torrent client waiting a month for somebody to seed a torrent that other people would actually want.
Steve's idea was to sell something for $40 that the customer could build themselves for $20, a 100% markup. The idea the folks behind Raspberry Pi have is to order parts in a quantity of scale that allows them to build and sell you something you could not hope to put together yourself for that price. That is not the same thing at all.
Only if you discount the value of labor to approximately $0.
I was just having this discussion with a client who is tight on funds. They need a temperature sensor for the server room, and commercial options with SNMP and e-mail capability start at $199 and can easily hit $499 (other recommendations welcome!). He correctly identified that it "shouldn't be that expensive" and I offered that an Arduino solution could be purchased for $50 in parts, but then he thought about having to learn Arduino and assembling the parts and finding and loading the proper sketches, or hiring me to do it, then $199 seemed like a good deal.
Of course, if you love to build stuff, then you're not in the market for the $40 computer anyway!
Rule #1 of investigating a compromised system is you don't use the tools on the compromised system.
Security is a process. Running a scanner on a compromised system has no guarantee of finding out that the system is compromised. But 98% of the time it will work just fine - these systems are usually compromised by script kiddie tools that don't spend a great deal of effort to find the rootkit scanners.
I suppose it would be better if somebody came up with a well-developed package for cross-scanning systems over shared storage (does it already exist?) but that's also only going to reduce your 98% to 98.5%. I suppose all you need to really do is to validate the integrity of the host system's scanner (or rpm or dpkg, etc.) but then again the remote system access method could also be compromised (today it's TLA stuff to compromise e.g. nfsd such that it will only return the wrong (but valid) md5sum and sha1sum and [randomhashsum] for only the scanners you might check for) but it's not likely.
Taking down every system on a frequent schedule for an offline scan would be a good idea but then again the BIOS could be compromised and you start to run into the collision of business needs and absolute security.
Not everybody here is a depressed curmudgeon.
And it's a healthy sign that some random guy can say, "look Special Relativity seems to be broken," and nobody starts screaming about golden idols or anything, but rather four smart guys kindly consider what he has to say and show him where he went wrong. Everybody learns something, egos remain intact, and nobody starts swinging guns. Science FTW.
...and gets his hundred bucks to ignore it.
Which is why property ownership is the only way the stated goals can actually be achieved. Allow a private owner to own n acres of rain forest, have him hire security to protect the resource, and then the economics becomes that of whether the bribe is worth losing the contract. The security company can be measured with success metrics, which the constable never will be. It's working for the elephants in Africa.
There are two kinds of Star Wars fans, those who were adults when EPIV came out, and those who saw it as kids.
Age is not the relevant difference.
Truth. Just like "The Clone Wars" animated series will have to tide us over until there's a fourth Star Wars movie.
What was the designer smoking?
There was no designer, it's the Anheuser-Busch brewery in Van Nuys.
ok, they taped on some 'radioactive' signs where the AB logo were...
(not to disagree with the rest of your righteous rant)