It's OK, I got this. I'll have an airspace reservation app. You can register your flight plan and reserve the space around it for the time you're passing through. Any drones illegally entering your airspace will be taken down by my own personal army of drones. Any other aircraft infringing upon your airspace reservation without an airspace reservation of their own will be taken down by my own personal army of drones. It will be secure, reliable, and uninterruptable because the reservation service will run in the cloud.
-- Now accepting applications for joining my own personal drone army.
Not just that, there are a LOT of efficiencies that airplanes can take advantage of that are just not available to ground transportation. For distances above ~400 miles, air freight can be more efficient than even a freight train for hauling just about anything with a higher value per pound than rocks and gravel.
* gas turbine engines can reach peak thermodynamic efficiencies of ~50% around 30,000 feet, where the intake air is coldest but not too thin. Any combustion engine running at surface conditions can do maybe 20 - 30% efficiency tops. * air at 30,000 feet is still thin enough to greatly reduce drag compared to ground transportation. Only the vacuum tube trains like Elon Musk's "Hyperloop" will be able to beat that... at enormous expense.
Not to mention all of the "bonus efficiencies" not related to lower ton-mile/fuel costs that you get "for free" * Time is money, and air freight also happens to be the fastest mode of transportation. It actually takes more fuel to cruise slower than the design cruise speed of Mach 0.84 or whatever. * just need an airport with a mile or two of runway at each end, no other infrastructure needs to be built between point A and point B * lots of old used passenger airplanes are refurbished for freight for relatively cheap at the end of their passenger service life * lots of excess airport capacity at night when the passengers aren't flooding them
The "distances above 400 miles" is a pretty significant caveat, of course... that's roughly the break-even point for the extra fuel you need to get your cargo airplane up to 30,000 feet so you can save enough fuel during cruise/descent.
Also, with electric batteries and brushless motors also gradually approaching 50% efficiency (when taking advantage of regenerative braking), ground transportation kinda has a shot at achieving gas-turbine-like energy efficiency... at sufficiently slow speeds to keep drag down.
Yep, that, and Disney is... special. I left Disney IT just before last October; it had already become a pretty stressful place to work. Morale was already super-low, because they had just launched the new version of their website that they'd been working on for 5 years and everyone was burned out from working *crunch* shifts through nights and weekends trying to finish developing the thing and then helping it limp along during its initial years. Coming out of development mode and going into sustainment mode, and then they burned through lots of operations budget dealing with all of the tech debt from the rush job, and then made up for it by laying off a bunch of good managers (like mine) and trying to put the squeeze on the remaining staff.
Since Disney is one of the top brands in the US, they actually take pride in how little they can pay their employees (er, "cast members") below market rates, in exchange for being associated with The Mouse. Burnout and turnover was pretty high, few people lasted more than three years (incidentally the amount of time until their pension vests). I got tired of the squeeze and took a job elsewhere for much higher pay. Also managed to snag a guy interviewing for my old job at Disney because his recruiter told him to ask me about his concerns over work/life balance.
To be fair, I did get a lot of experience working at Disney... since they don't believe in "reduce variation" they had one of almost everything in production somewhere since old sites never died but were always maintained for use by some niche customer (er, "guest" / "partner"). I'm sure my Disney friends and co-workers will turn out all right or better than they were at that puppy mill, I actually kinda feel more concerned for the H1Bs that will be tending to their fires and burning through their lives at both ends.
Sounds like Drew will fit right in with Congress, where we have senators who never sent email sitting on the technology committee. http://www.addictinginfo.org/2...
While I'm saddened that Drew has had to "clean up" Fark of its foobies and more aggressively moderate racist photoshop themes and pics, I applaud more tech geeks taking the plunge into politics. Here's hoping for a campaign that's more transparently data-driven by the people being represented than money-driven by shadow financiers.
Weird... I never worried about anything I ingest. But Sucralose / Splenda was the first thing that I ever drank that gave me an instant headache (and I almost never get headaches), and now I go out of my way to make sure that the stuff I buy doesn't have it in the ingredients list.
Huh, that's strange... what tech publications are under Conde Nast... Wired, ArsTechnica, and... ? They seem to like to review gadgets like VR headsets, and I'd think they'd find it difficult to give the appearance of doing impartial reviews if they were slinging their own thing.
Not all that many more. NPR misrepresents the situation. For as long as the US Department of Labor has kept records, men have been prevalent in computing.
Engineering has been male dominated throughout history.
The whole "men pushed women out" narrative doesn't hold water.
It may surprise you that in the days before the electronic computer, the word "computer" often referred to a human operator that performed calculations. Most of them were women. http://www.theatlantic.com/tec...
The workforce has always been pretty hostile to women, but it wasn't always that way. China and Russia have plenty of women engineers. My Soviet-raised wife always scoffs at these SJW threads because it simply wasn't a problem where she grew up. But for some reason, it's a thing that happens in Western countries. http://www.paristechreview.com...
There are probably several societal and cultural factors that have been discouraging women from tech fields, but guys being insufferable dicks is the only one I really have personally witnessed. For my part, I just find smart chicks hawt and would prefer working with more women instead of hanging out with a gaggle of dudes all day long.
The best explanation I've heard is that Affirmative Action is how to take the world you live in and turn it into the world you want to live in. A world where the politicians, doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, etc. were actually representative of the population they served.
Yes, Affirmative Action is racist / sexist, because people are racist / sexist. It's ingrained into the human psyche. It can have evolutionary advantages at a certain scale that we've long ago exceeded in civilized society. We'll have more success as a species if we start actively managing our racist / sexist tendencies, and the only way to do that is to acknowledge them and actively counteract them to achieve balance and healthy diversity in the ecosystem.
That's what Affirmative Action is. An acknowledgement that racism / sexism exists, and we need to do something about it to achieve true balance. Anyone who says they are completely neutral to racism / sexism are probably lying to themselves and will find that they do poorly in actual tests like : https://implicit.harvard.edu/i...
Yes, this. At some point in the past, women were better represented in the math and sciences. Decades ago, more women were doing technical stuff http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...
And then at some point engineering and technology became a "bro" field and pushed a lot of women out, perhaps because of insecurity with their male dominancy hierarchy or whatever, or increased competition from not so many men going off to die in wars, or whatever.
Women are very useful to have in organizations, though. It's not just an equality thing. There are tangible benefits. Teams with women have better communication. http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/aw... Product teams with women on them can develop better products that appeal to women and serve a wider customer base.
These kinds of things explain why a lot of large successful businesses are working hard to put more girls through STEM education to bring things back up from the 10 - 20% gender ratio where they are now. There aren't that many things you can do to effectively double your customer base. But appealing to women is a pretty big one. So yes, women are more highly sought-after than men in the tech industry. It's nothing to be concerned or ashamed of, it's just a real problem that exists and people are trying to address the issue.
Everyone else can stay and whine in silent desperation on your little male-dominated lonely island if you want. Evolution and the free market will take good care of you!:D
Yep, this! Buy a hard disk for a trusted friend or relative, and rsync your stuff to their server periodically.
I've also started using AWS Glacier for backups of my raw photo archives. (Only the "good" processed photos get published to Google+, where no one really sees them, and maybe cross-posted to Facebook occasionally after some public event like a wedding or something).
Anyway, to upload stuff to Glacier I use the SAGU java client, which is relatively straightforward. It's something like 10 cents per GB per month, so I currently get a bill for 42 cents per month. I can live with that.
Every year or so I tar up the previous year's photos and upload them. Then I copy the manifest to Google Drive or some other thing. I gpg encrypt the sensitive stuff. The private key is on a USB drive in the fire safe, at some point I should get around to writing down the passphrase and tossing it in there too. I joke with my wife that if I get run over by a bus, I'll scrawl the passphrase next to my body in blood. She might be contacting some of y'all to help decipher the 133+5p34k characters, though.
Yes, I got the $100 HP Stream 7 for my wife a few months ago, and I have to admit it's pretty nice. As long as you're only running a couple things at a time, it's easy to forget you're not using a "real" computer. It keeps up with most social media sites just fine, without those long pauses and freezes that I get on my old EeePC901. Even have her Steam account set up on it and it does a great job at the 2D games like Mini Metro.
The main problems are the UI, of course... click and drag is difficult to get working on the tiny touchscreen, the tiny desktop elements are tricky to hit consistently, and the onscreen keyboard feels absolutely primitive compared to the default keyboards on Android/iOS nowadays. Someday I'll bother hooking up a USB keyboard/mouse or twiddler something to it and it should be fine, though.
People complain about the 1GB of RAM constraining the multitasking, but at $100 a pop, you can afford to build up a collection of these things and fill up your desk and walls with tablets running an individual app or website on each.
My other main annoyance with it is that it will spontaneously run out of batteries every other day or so if I don't leave it plugged in. Sometimes it'll be fine for a few days on standby, and then over the course of a few more hours it'll suddenly drain itself to 0% and shutdown and refuse to turn back on again until I've plugged it in for several minutes to build up enough charge to attempt to boot. I'm sure there's a simple fix I could just Google for (err, maybe Bing), but by the time I grab another device, trying to tweak drivers or power settings on that thing is the furthest thing from my mind:P
Yep. From one perspective, the US was founded and colonized by pilgrims on the promise of the religious freedom to practice one of the most restrictive religions of the time.
On the other hand, capitalism is largely the religion of this era. Vegas might as well be one of the 7 Wonder of the Modern World, and it's essentially a huge mega-mall, the grandest temple of temples where all the little consumers go to worship regularly.
From that perspective, you want your temple to be as inclusive as possible, because what idiot would limit their customer base through discrimination? So you can see why many of the large successful corporations are pretty progressive with equality. And you can also see about how more... er... traditional organizations may fall by the wayside.
Does it ever work? Let's find examples of it working, and let that encourage more companies to engage over twitter. Because the common thread here is these are all companies that deserve criticism.
I would submit that whatever gets people talking about the company or brand or candidate is all good, whether it's positive or negative.
No one reads through all the actual buzz. They just see "instances of #hashtag is TRENDING!"
What's more, the group's Facebook page is almost guaranteed to be a honeypot for all of the trolls against it. And if they're all happily trolling away at the group's Facebook or Twitter page, then they're likely sitting back smug thinking they've made a "difference" by airing their opinions and not actually out there harassing the group's actual customers or fanbase. Just paw through at any politician's Facebook page or comments on their posts, it's an endless stream of vile drivel. Does anyone who actually likes the candidate care or bother to read any of that? No!
My first-hand experience reading through that kind of thing occurred while contracting for MS Flight. "The killers of MSFS!", the fanboys would proudly proclaim, making personal threats against the manager in charge for trying to figure out how to get one of MS's first free-to-play model games to work (and also one of the first to transition from GfW Live to Steam). Meanwhile, the people who actually bothered to play the game for what is was... a gentle, accessible reboot of GA flight sims circa 1994, really seemed to enjoy the (limited) experiences it provided managed to play online mostly unharassed by any of the crowd spouting vitriol in the public forums. So it worked out pretty well (well, except for the part where the dev team got axed for the second time because they weren't making enough money from DLC). But it could have been worse!:P
Yes, and Ghenkis Khan also had a measurable effect on the environment, as forests regrew in the wake of his conquests: http://carnegiescience.edu/new...
But really, liberals and conservatives really want the same thing... more wealth by reducing the competition for resources. One proposes using economic market forces, the other proposes reducing the competition with military forces. Either way, we win. Unless you lose. But then, you're dead, so you're part of the solution, so... yay?!
Cool! I'd like to believe that there's way more complexity stashed away in the brain than is readily apparent, perhaps in those microtubule structures.
But after seeing some of the presentations from Mark Tilden (the engineer behind some of the RoboSapiens toys and a few other DIY BEAM robotics kits) on how sophisticated behaviors can emerge from some of the dirt-simple neural networks cobbled together from a handful of transistors, sensors, and motors in a feedback loop, it's pretty clear that there's a lot about neural networks that we just don't understand.
His simplest BEAM bots would just have maybe 9 transistors hooked up to a light sensor and one or two step motors. Depending on whether you hooked up the light sensor for positive feedback or negative feedback, the thing would eventually start twitching itself towards or away from a light source. They were trying to characterize the system behavior somehow by watching the electrical signals at various points in the network, but it still kinda defied reason. The various voltages would flop around randomly at first, but eventually all of them would start oscillating regularly in a pattern that would vibrate the bot in a particular direction using its two rudimentary "appendages". They kinda attributed it to "chaos systems theory" for emergent behavior of asynchronous neural networks, since chaos was like the handwavy buzzword of the 90s that would solve all of our large intractable problems. And of course one of the fundamental characteristics of these neural networks is that they're pretty hard to program "by hand" , you pretty much can only train them and let them adapt themselves, and there's not really all that much you can discern about how they actually work by watching parts of them or prodding them with electrodes (or tweaking their weighting values) from the sidelines.
So given that and the fact that brain networks appear to always be reconfiguring themselves to become more compact and efficient with each night's sleep, I think a lot of that can account for a lot of the "complexity gap" based on neuron counts in the brain vs. estimates of how difficult it would be to program a computer to perform common tasks like vision processing, memory recall, and speech. I think a lot of behavior is encoded in various complex rhythms of neuron groups firing in chaotic feedback loops, which would also give us our sense of time, and perhaps help explain why we can't maintain consciousness indefinitely.
I'm sure quantum physics plays some part in optimizing parts of the process because biochemistry, but I doubt it does anything critical, like hiding tons of information in other "dimensions" through quantum superposition or somesuch... though it ought to be a neat way to compress data, like holographic storage. I don't see a lot of crystal-like structures in the brain, though. That said, there's gotta be something at that scale, since even single-celled organisms have some ability to react to stimuli by waving their flagella and stuff appropriately.
I don't understand the train of thought that leads to the notion that quantum computing is a prerequisite for strong AI, unless there has been some research that has shown that the human brain is a quantum computer.
There is some investigation that suggests that quantum consciousness is possible based on interactions between microtubule structures inside of neurons. But there isn't really anything to suggest that much more happens inside of the brain that can't be explained by the classical interactions between axons and dendrites of a typical neural network that can be modeled satisfactorily by a simulation.
But I agree, quantum physics, like atomic radiation in the 50s and electromagnetism at the turn of the century, is the overhyped and poorly-understood cure-all of modern day science. If someone says something relies on quantum physics, it probably means they don't know what they're talking about and just hand-waving. Unless they're talking about quantum entanglement, in which case it might be useful for a tiny set of specially-constructed quantum cryptography problems. And just stop dreaming if they mention anything about quantum teleportation, in which they're surprised that they can't exactly keep fuzzy particles in buckets without some of the fuzziness "escaping"
But anyway, yes, computers replaced secretaries in the 50s. They're going to replace truck drivers over the next few decades. http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...
Computers are not going to replace teachers anytime soon, though... the entire job of the teacher is to tell when the students aren't getting it via conventional scripted means.
Sounds pretty cool... if Amazon didn't have such a reputation for being a nerd sweatshop in the Seattle area, I'd be finishing up my private pilots' license and applying:P
Well, he's well on his way to getting to dirty-tree and a turd, then he just has to multiply by another tree and he'll have something divisible by 5 n twentee.
Eh, we've been using GoDaddy to sign our top level public wildcard SSL certs for a couple of years now. They had competitive prices for those things (~$200/yr for 2 years, which we couldn't beat anywhere else while shopping last year), and the process was fairly automated and relatively painless.
We still learned how to sign wildcard certs as our own certificate authority for lots of internal backend subdomains, though.
I've been using dyndns.org since 1999, and upgraded to the paid service about 10 years ago. $30/year gets you, like, 30 custom subdomains, and some other features that I don't use much but seem useful.
Yeah, you have a bit less flexibility with the domains you can choose, but they have a great selection that you can get creative with. And the flexibility of being able to turn on a dime and switch hosts and IPs immediately is great... you don't have to wait hours or even days for DNS changes to propagate. Lots of clients for windows, linux, and even random wifi routers make it easy to update records to point to where ever in the world you boot up, ao you can serve stuff from home or anywhere in public clouds or even from your smartphone.
Certainly worth fussing around with in addition or even instead of a "real" DNS registrar. I think they still have a free tier, and are always useful for doing quick demos for hack days and such.
Eh, I foresee Nintendo staying with their "exclusive" titles on their consoles/handhelds, and just getting into smartphones for silly tie-ins. "Install the COMPANION APP to click on the mini-game to give you VALUABLE ITEMS! Receive CONSTANT NOTIFICATIONS to your phone when your PokeDragon is LONELY and wants to be lot out to PEE". That kind of thing.
Some observations on my kids: * I never subjected them to any consoles at home (OK, well, a PS2 for GT4, but they never took interest in anything beyond a little Burnout). * They have plentiful mobile phones and tablet at home. They play some free games on them, but mostly use them for YouTube. * I built them a nice multiseat Minecraft rig, and have access to my Windows gaming machine with a half-decent Steam library.
They still went off and got their grandparents to buy them various DSi / 3DS handhelds. I don't really see them playing on them much, and when the do they always have the 3D dial turned to "flat". And I don't really notice them... until they break a power cable or the entire handheld, and then suddenly it's at the top of their wishlist again for a few months until they can gravel for and save up enough birthday money to buy a new one.
So far my favorite keyboard has been the ~$20 Dell SK-8135 . Quiet keys, modern minimalist design around a full 104 keyboard layout, but has fairly ergonomic multimedia keys that are easy to find in the dark, and a USB hub which I find convenient for minimizing wire clutter.
My aunt bought me a nice Logitech G510 keyboard, but... I don't really care for it all that much. Uh... you can change the backlight color, and there's a little mono LCD panel that you can download apps to display extra things on. There are a bunch of programmable macro buttons on the side, but I don't find them convenient to use in any of my games compared to keeping my fingers near the WASD home row with the default keyboard layouts, and maybe using an autohotkey macro where necessary. It also has a built-in USB audio headset/mic jacks, which I guess is nice for eliminating system noise from your mic if you don't already have something better. The G510 looks damn impressive, but if I really needed its features, I'd have optioned for the G13 and a normal keyboard.
Yep, this. NOAA is supposed to operate all of the earth-observing weather satellites.
My FIL works for climate.gsfc.nasa.gov , and was the PM for the NASA instruments for the recent DSCOVR satellite. My understanding is that it was full of irony... of the major instruments, NASA was responsible for the earth-facing ones - NISTAR (measuring radiation reflected from the Earth) and EPIC (Al Gore's original Earth webcam-in-space concept from back when it was called Triana), and NOAA provided the PlasMag instrument that measures --- the solar wind from the Sun. But the rest of the project makes sense... NASA integrated the payload, the Air Force paid for the launch, NASA is guiding the satellite to the L1 point, and then handing it over to NOAA for operations once it's in place. I don't see that kind of arrangement going away, since a lot of the satellite and sensor expertise lies with NASA, and NOAA is mostly a big data warehouse.
I'm actually kinda laughing on the inside, since NOAA is a MUCH larger proponent of environmentalism than NASA. Stewardship of the oceans and atmosphere is actually written into NOAA's mission, and they're also responsible for most of climate weather data collection and analysis that has been supporting the AGW narrative. NASA is much more objective... my FIL is a Russian mathematician who doesn't really give a rat's ass about the environment or smoking or littering, but if you make a mistake interpreting LIDAR radiative dissipation measurement he'll rip you a new one. A lot of his work for climate.gsfc.nasa.gov has actually been measuring all of the ways AGW has not been occurring, by gathering data to improve models of cloud and aerosol reflectivity, things that help explain how Earth maintains its energy balance and could really raise the ceiling on the projected budget for CO2 emissions.
But if the conservatives want to take responsibility for objectively looking at the Earth away from NASA and giving more responsibility to NOAA, we can all look forwards to a lot more intensive environmental studies supporting NOAA's charter to be good stewards of the oceans and skies.
Heh, back in the first dotcom boom I was working for some company that was making supercomputing clusters that were recursively scaleable. Back then you could get all the dumb, fast 8-port switches you wanted for cheap, but if you tried scaling it up with a big flat Cisco backplane for more than a few dozen nodes, you'd easily start paying more for switches than for computers. Plus if any of that infrastructure broke, you'd be out of a huge part of your cluster.
Is the Mars Society legit? They appear somewhat connected to Mars One, but seem to actually be doing a little bit more, like camping trips in the Arctic to test their... gear?
Slashdot Mirror
It's OK, I got this. I'll have an airspace reservation app. You can register your flight plan and reserve the space around it for the time you're passing through. Any drones illegally entering your airspace will be taken down by my own personal army of drones. Any other aircraft infringing upon your airspace reservation without an airspace reservation of their own will be taken down by my own personal army of drones. It will be secure, reliable, and uninterruptable because the reservation service will run in the cloud.
--
Now accepting applications for joining my own personal drone army.
Not just that, there are a LOT of efficiencies that airplanes can take advantage of that are just not available to ground transportation. For distances above ~400 miles, air freight can be more efficient than even a freight train for hauling just about anything with a higher value per pound than rocks and gravel.
* gas turbine engines can reach peak thermodynamic efficiencies of ~50% around 30,000 feet, where the intake air is coldest but not too thin. Any combustion engine running at surface conditions can do maybe 20 - 30% efficiency tops. ... at enormous expense.
* air at 30,000 feet is still thin enough to greatly reduce drag compared to ground transportation. Only the vacuum tube trains like Elon Musk's "Hyperloop" will be able to beat that
Not to mention all of the "bonus efficiencies" not related to lower ton-mile/fuel costs that you get "for free"
* Time is money, and air freight also happens to be the fastest mode of transportation. It actually takes more fuel to cruise slower than the design cruise speed of Mach 0.84 or whatever.
* just need an airport with a mile or two of runway at each end, no other infrastructure needs to be built between point A and point B
* lots of old used passenger airplanes are refurbished for freight for relatively cheap at the end of their passenger service life
* lots of excess airport capacity at night when the passengers aren't flooding them
The "distances above 400 miles" is a pretty significant caveat, of course... that's roughly the break-even point for the extra fuel you need to get your cargo airplane up to 30,000 feet so you can save enough fuel during cruise/descent.
Also, with electric batteries and brushless motors also gradually approaching 50% efficiency (when taking advantage of regenerative braking), ground transportation kinda has a shot at achieving gas-turbine-like energy efficiency... at sufficiently slow speeds to keep drag down.
I highly recommend this book:
http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/...
Yep, that, and Disney is... special. I left Disney IT just before last October; it had already become a pretty stressful place to work. Morale was already super-low, because they had just launched the new version of their website that they'd been working on for 5 years and everyone was burned out from working *crunch* shifts through nights and weekends trying to finish developing the thing and then helping it limp along during its initial years. Coming out of development mode and going into sustainment mode, and then they burned through lots of operations budget dealing with all of the tech debt from the rush job, and then made up for it by laying off a bunch of good managers (like mine) and trying to put the squeeze on the remaining staff.
Since Disney is one of the top brands in the US, they actually take pride in how little they can pay their employees (er, "cast members") below market rates, in exchange for being associated with The Mouse. Burnout and turnover was pretty high, few people lasted more than three years (incidentally the amount of time until their pension vests). I got tired of the squeeze and took a job elsewhere for much higher pay. Also managed to snag a guy interviewing for my old job at Disney because his recruiter told him to ask me about his concerns over work/life balance.
To be fair, I did get a lot of experience working at Disney... since they don't believe in "reduce variation" they had one of almost everything in production somewhere since old sites never died but were always maintained for use by some niche customer (er, "guest" / "partner"). I'm sure my Disney friends and co-workers will turn out all right or better than they were at that puppy mill, I actually kinda feel more concerned for the H1Bs that will be tending to their fires and burning through their lives at both ends.
Sounds like Drew will fit right in with Congress, where we have senators who never sent email sitting on the technology committee.
http://www.addictinginfo.org/2...
While I'm saddened that Drew has had to "clean up" Fark of its foobies and more aggressively moderate racist photoshop themes and pics, I applaud more tech geeks taking the plunge into politics. Here's hoping for a campaign that's more transparently data-driven by the people being represented than money-driven by shadow financiers.
Weird... I never worried about anything I ingest. But Sucralose / Splenda was the first thing that I ever drank that gave me an instant headache (and I almost never get headaches), and now I go out of my way to make sure that the stuff I buy doesn't have it in the ingredients list.
Huh, that's strange... what tech publications are under Conde Nast... Wired, ArsTechnica, and... ? They seem to like to review gadgets like VR headsets, and I'd think they'd find it difficult to give the appearance of doing impartial reviews if they were slinging their own thing.
Not all that many more. NPR misrepresents the situation. For as long as the US Department of Labor has kept records, men have been prevalent in computing.
Engineering has been male dominated throughout history.
The whole "men pushed women out" narrative doesn't hold water.
It may surprise you that in the days before the electronic computer, the word "computer" often referred to a human operator that performed calculations. Most of them were women.
http://www.theatlantic.com/tec...
The workforce has always been pretty hostile to women, but it wasn't always that way. China and Russia have plenty of women engineers. My Soviet-raised wife always scoffs at these SJW threads because it simply wasn't a problem where she grew up. But for some reason, it's a thing that happens in Western countries.
http://www.paristechreview.com...
There are probably several societal and cultural factors that have been discouraging women from tech fields, but guys being insufferable dicks is the only one I really have personally witnessed. For my part, I just find smart chicks hawt and would prefer working with more women instead of hanging out with a gaggle of dudes all day long.
The best explanation I've heard is that Affirmative Action is how to take the world you live in and turn it into the world you want to live in. A world where the politicians, doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, etc. were actually representative of the population they served.
Yes, Affirmative Action is racist / sexist, because people are racist / sexist. It's ingrained into the human psyche. It can have evolutionary advantages at a certain scale that we've long ago exceeded in civilized society. We'll have more success as a species if we start actively managing our racist / sexist tendencies, and the only way to do that is to acknowledge them and actively counteract them to achieve balance and healthy diversity in the ecosystem.
That's what Affirmative Action is. An acknowledgement that racism / sexism exists, and we need to do something about it to achieve true balance. Anyone who says they are completely neutral to racism / sexism are probably lying to themselves and will find that they do poorly in actual tests like : https://implicit.harvard.edu/i...
Yes, this. At some point in the past, women were better represented in the math and sciences. Decades ago, more women were doing technical stuff
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...
And then at some point engineering and technology became a "bro" field and pushed a lot of women out, perhaps because of insecurity with their male dominancy hierarchy or whatever, or increased competition from not so many men going off to die in wars, or whatever.
Women are very useful to have in organizations, though. It's not just an equality thing. There are tangible benefits. Teams with women have better communication.
http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/aw...
Product teams with women on them can develop better products that appeal to women and serve a wider customer base.
These kinds of things explain why a lot of large successful businesses are working hard to put more girls through STEM education to bring things back up from the 10 - 20% gender ratio where they are now. There aren't that many things you can do to effectively double your customer base. But appealing to women is a pretty big one. So yes, women are more highly sought-after than men in the tech industry. It's nothing to be concerned or ashamed of, it's just a real problem that exists and people are trying to address the issue.
Everyone else can stay and whine in silent desperation on your little male-dominated lonely island if you want. Evolution and the free market will take good care of you! :D
Yep, this! Buy a hard disk for a trusted friend or relative, and rsync your stuff to their server periodically.
I've also started using AWS Glacier for backups of my raw photo archives. (Only the "good" processed photos get published to Google+, where no one really sees them, and maybe cross-posted to Facebook occasionally after some public event like a wedding or something).
Anyway, to upload stuff to Glacier I use the SAGU java client, which is relatively straightforward. It's something like 10 cents per GB per month, so I currently get a bill for 42 cents per month. I can live with that.
Every year or so I tar up the previous year's photos and upload them. Then I copy the manifest to Google Drive or some other thing. I gpg encrypt the sensitive stuff. The private key is on a USB drive in the fire safe, at some point I should get around to writing down the passphrase and tossing it in there too. I joke with my wife that if I get run over by a bus, I'll scrawl the passphrase next to my body in blood. She might be contacting some of y'all to help decipher the 133+5p34k characters, though.
Yes, I got the $100 HP Stream 7 for my wife a few months ago, and I have to admit it's pretty nice. As long as you're only running a couple things at a time, it's easy to forget you're not using a "real" computer. It keeps up with most social media sites just fine, without those long pauses and freezes that I get on my old EeePC901. Even have her Steam account set up on it and it does a great job at the 2D games like Mini Metro.
The main problems are the UI, of course... click and drag is difficult to get working on the tiny touchscreen, the tiny desktop elements are tricky to hit consistently, and the onscreen keyboard feels absolutely primitive compared to the default keyboards on Android/iOS nowadays. Someday I'll bother hooking up a USB keyboard/mouse or twiddler something to it and it should be fine, though.
People complain about the 1GB of RAM constraining the multitasking, but at $100 a pop, you can afford to build up a collection of these things and fill up your desk and walls with tablets running an individual app or website on each.
My other main annoyance with it is that it will spontaneously run out of batteries every other day or so if I don't leave it plugged in. Sometimes it'll be fine for a few days on standby, and then over the course of a few more hours it'll suddenly drain itself to 0% and shutdown and refuse to turn back on again until I've plugged it in for several minutes to build up enough charge to attempt to boot. I'm sure there's a simple fix I could just Google for (err, maybe Bing), but by the time I grab another device, trying to tweak drivers or power settings on that thing is the furthest thing from my mind :P
Yep. From one perspective, the US was founded and colonized by pilgrims on the promise of the religious freedom to practice one of the most restrictive religions of the time.
On the other hand, capitalism is largely the religion of this era. Vegas might as well be one of the 7 Wonder of the Modern World, and it's essentially a huge mega-mall, the grandest temple of temples where all the little consumers go to worship regularly.
From that perspective, you want your temple to be as inclusive as possible, because what idiot would limit their customer base through discrimination? So you can see why many of the large successful corporations are pretty progressive with equality. And you can also see about how more... er... traditional organizations may fall by the wayside.
Does it ever work?
Let's find examples of it working, and let that encourage more companies to engage over twitter. Because the common thread here is these are all companies that deserve criticism.
I would submit that whatever gets people talking about the company or brand or candidate is all good, whether it's positive or negative.
No one reads through all the actual buzz. They just see "instances of #hashtag is TRENDING!"
What's more, the group's Facebook page is almost guaranteed to be a honeypot for all of the trolls against it. And if they're all happily trolling away at the group's Facebook or Twitter page, then they're likely sitting back smug thinking they've made a "difference" by airing their opinions and not actually out there harassing the group's actual customers or fanbase. Just paw through at any politician's Facebook page or comments on their posts, it's an endless stream of vile drivel. Does anyone who actually likes the candidate care or bother to read any of that? No!
My first-hand experience reading through that kind of thing occurred while contracting for MS Flight. "The killers of MSFS!", the fanboys would proudly proclaim, making personal threats against the manager in charge for trying to figure out how to get one of MS's first free-to-play model games to work (and also one of the first to transition from GfW Live to Steam). Meanwhile, the people who actually bothered to play the game for what is was... a gentle, accessible reboot of GA flight sims circa 1994, really seemed to enjoy the (limited) experiences it provided managed to play online mostly unharassed by any of the crowd spouting vitriol in the public forums. So it worked out pretty well (well, except for the part where the dev team got axed for the second time because they weren't making enough money from DLC). But it could have been worse! :P
Yes, and Ghenkis Khan also had a measurable effect on the environment, as forests regrew in the wake of his conquests:
http://carnegiescience.edu/new...
But really, liberals and conservatives really want the same thing... more wealth by reducing the competition for resources. One proposes using economic market forces, the other proposes reducing the competition with military forces. Either way, we win. Unless you lose. But then, you're dead, so you're part of the solution, so... yay?!
Cool! I'd like to believe that there's way more complexity stashed away in the brain than is readily apparent, perhaps in those microtubule structures.
But after seeing some of the presentations from Mark Tilden (the engineer behind some of the RoboSapiens toys and a few other DIY BEAM robotics kits) on how sophisticated behaviors can emerge from some of the dirt-simple neural networks cobbled together from a handful of transistors, sensors, and motors in a feedback loop, it's pretty clear that there's a lot about neural networks that we just don't understand.
His simplest BEAM bots would just have maybe 9 transistors hooked up to a light sensor and one or two step motors. Depending on whether you hooked up the light sensor for positive feedback or negative feedback, the thing would eventually start twitching itself towards or away from a light source. They were trying to characterize the system behavior somehow by watching the electrical signals at various points in the network, but it still kinda defied reason. The various voltages would flop around randomly at first, but eventually all of them would start oscillating regularly in a pattern that would vibrate the bot in a particular direction using its two rudimentary "appendages". They kinda attributed it to "chaos systems theory" for emergent behavior of asynchronous neural networks, since chaos was like the handwavy buzzword of the 90s that would solve all of our large intractable problems. And of course one of the fundamental characteristics of these neural networks is that they're pretty hard to program "by hand" , you pretty much can only train them and let them adapt themselves, and there's not really all that much you can discern about how they actually work by watching parts of them or prodding them with electrodes (or tweaking their weighting values) from the sidelines.
So given that and the fact that brain networks appear to always be reconfiguring themselves to become more compact and efficient with each night's sleep, I think a lot of that can account for a lot of the "complexity gap" based on neuron counts in the brain vs. estimates of how difficult it would be to program a computer to perform common tasks like vision processing, memory recall, and speech. I think a lot of behavior is encoded in various complex rhythms of neuron groups firing in chaotic feedback loops, which would also give us our sense of time, and perhaps help explain why we can't maintain consciousness indefinitely.
I'm sure quantum physics plays some part in optimizing parts of the process because biochemistry, but I doubt it does anything critical, like hiding tons of information in other "dimensions" through quantum superposition or somesuch... though it ought to be a neat way to compress data, like holographic storage. I don't see a lot of crystal-like structures in the brain, though. That said, there's gotta be something at that scale, since even single-celled organisms have some ability to react to stimuli by waving their flagella and stuff appropriately.
Anyway, enough handwaving for today :P
I don't understand the train of thought that leads to the notion that quantum computing is a prerequisite for strong AI, unless there has been some research that has shown that the human brain is a quantum computer.
There is some investigation that suggests that quantum consciousness is possible based on interactions between microtubule structures inside of neurons. But there isn't really anything to suggest that much more happens inside of the brain that can't be explained by the classical interactions between axons and dendrites of a typical neural network that can be modeled satisfactorily by a simulation.
But I agree, quantum physics, like atomic radiation in the 50s and electromagnetism at the turn of the century, is the overhyped and poorly-understood cure-all of modern day science. If someone says something relies on quantum physics, it probably means they don't know what they're talking about and just hand-waving. Unless they're talking about quantum entanglement, in which case it might be useful for a tiny set of specially-constructed quantum cryptography problems. And just stop dreaming if they mention anything about quantum teleportation, in which they're surprised that they can't exactly keep fuzzy particles in buckets without some of the fuzziness "escaping"
But anyway, yes, computers replaced secretaries in the 50s. They're going to replace truck drivers over the next few decades.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...
Computers are not going to replace teachers anytime soon, though... the entire job of the teacher is to tell when the students aren't getting it via conventional scripted means.
Sounds pretty cool... if Amazon didn't have such a reputation for being a nerd sweatshop in the Seattle area, I'd be finishing up my private pilots' license and applying :P
Well, he's well on his way to getting to dirty-tree and a turd, then he just has to multiply by another tree and he'll have something divisible by 5 n twentee.
Eh, we've been using GoDaddy to sign our top level public wildcard SSL certs for a couple of years now. They had competitive prices for those things (~$200/yr for 2 years, which we couldn't beat anywhere else while shopping last year), and the process was fairly automated and relatively painless.
We still learned how to sign wildcard certs as our own certificate authority for lots of internal backend subdomains, though.
I've been using dyndns.org since 1999, and upgraded to the paid service about 10 years ago. $30/year gets you, like, 30 custom subdomains, and some other features that I don't use much but seem useful.
Yeah, you have a bit less flexibility with the domains you can choose, but they have a great selection that you can get creative with. And the flexibility of being able to turn on a dime and switch hosts and IPs immediately is great... you don't have to wait hours or even days for DNS changes to propagate. Lots of clients for windows, linux, and even random wifi routers make it easy to update records to point to where ever in the world you boot up, ao you can serve stuff from home or anywhere in public clouds or even from your smartphone.
Certainly worth fussing around with in addition or even instead of a "real" DNS registrar. I think they still have a free tier, and are always useful for doing quick demos for hack days and such.
Eh, I foresee Nintendo staying with their "exclusive" titles on their consoles/handhelds, and just getting into smartphones for silly tie-ins. "Install the COMPANION APP to click on the mini-game to give you VALUABLE ITEMS! Receive CONSTANT NOTIFICATIONS to your phone when your PokeDragon is LONELY and wants to be lot out to PEE". That kind of thing.
Some observations on my kids:
* I never subjected them to any consoles at home (OK, well, a PS2 for GT4, but they never took interest in anything beyond a little Burnout).
* They have plentiful mobile phones and tablet at home. They play some free games on them, but mostly use them for YouTube.
* I built them a nice multiseat Minecraft rig, and have access to my Windows gaming machine with a half-decent Steam library.
They still went off and got their grandparents to buy them various DSi / 3DS handhelds. I don't really see them playing on them much, and when the do they always have the 3D dial turned to "flat". And I don't really notice them... until they break a power cable or the entire handheld, and then suddenly it's at the top of their wishlist again for a few months until they can gravel for and save up enough birthday money to buy a new one.
Marketing, how does it work?
So far my favorite keyboard has been the ~$20 Dell SK-8135 . Quiet keys, modern minimalist design around a full 104 keyboard layout, but has fairly ergonomic multimedia keys that are easy to find in the dark, and a USB hub which I find convenient for minimizing wire clutter.
My aunt bought me a nice Logitech G510 keyboard, but... I don't really care for it all that much. Uh... you can change the backlight color, and there's a little mono LCD panel that you can download apps to display extra things on. There are a bunch of programmable macro buttons on the side, but I don't find them convenient to use in any of my games compared to keeping my fingers near the WASD home row with the default keyboard layouts, and maybe using an autohotkey macro where necessary. It also has a built-in USB audio headset/mic jacks, which I guess is nice for eliminating system noise from your mic if you don't already have something better. The G510 looks damn impressive, but if I really needed its features, I'd have optioned for the G13 and a normal keyboard.
Yep, this. NOAA is supposed to operate all of the earth-observing weather satellites.
My FIL works for climate.gsfc.nasa.gov , and was the PM for the NASA instruments for the recent DSCOVR satellite. My understanding is that it was full of irony... of the major instruments, NASA was responsible for the earth-facing ones - NISTAR (measuring radiation reflected from the Earth) and EPIC (Al Gore's original Earth webcam-in-space concept from back when it was called Triana), and NOAA provided the PlasMag instrument that measures --- the solar wind from the Sun. But the rest of the project makes sense... NASA integrated the payload, the Air Force paid for the launch, NASA is guiding the satellite to the L1 point, and then handing it over to NOAA for operations once it's in place. I don't see that kind of arrangement going away, since a lot of the satellite and sensor expertise lies with NASA, and NOAA is mostly a big data warehouse.
I'm actually kinda laughing on the inside, since NOAA is a MUCH larger proponent of environmentalism than NASA. Stewardship of the oceans and atmosphere is actually written into NOAA's mission, and they're also responsible for most of climate weather data collection and analysis that has been supporting the AGW narrative. NASA is much more objective... my FIL is a Russian mathematician who doesn't really give a rat's ass about the environment or smoking or littering, but if you make a mistake interpreting LIDAR radiative dissipation measurement he'll rip you a new one. A lot of his work for climate.gsfc.nasa.gov has actually been measuring all of the ways AGW has not been occurring, by gathering data to improve models of cloud and aerosol reflectivity, things that help explain how Earth maintains its energy balance and could really raise the ceiling on the projected budget for CO2 emissions.
But if the conservatives want to take responsibility for objectively looking at the Earth away from NASA and giving more responsibility to NOAA, we can all look forwards to a lot more intensive environmental studies supporting NOAA's charter to be good stewards of the oceans and skies.
Heh, back in the first dotcom boom I was working for some company that was making supercomputing clusters that were recursively scaleable. Back then you could get all the dumb, fast 8-port switches you wanted for cheap, but if you tried scaling it up with a big flat Cisco backplane for more than a few dozen nodes, you'd easily start paying more for switches than for computers. Plus if any of that infrastructure broke, you'd be out of a huge part of your cluster.
Is the Mars Society legit? They appear somewhat connected to Mars One, but seem to actually be doing a little bit more, like camping trips in the Arctic to test their... gear?