Wake me up when we finally have fusion in Livermore, CA.
Wasn't the primary goal of the NIF to simulate the conditions in fission explosions for "stockpile stewardship" purposes? If so, it's not likely to ever do much toward sustainable power-generation fusion that isn't a direct byproduct of building better bombs.
I note that I believe a lot of the PR out there regarding thorium is produced by a company that presently owns a huge percentage of the mining rights to thorium deposits in the US. Which is fine by me.:)
Well, that certainly allays my fears that the thorium hype might be manufactured largely by a narrowly-focused special interest group with no wider scientific credibility, yessiree!
What I hope comes about after this is an open standard for microblogging.
I would like to see a standard for microblogging of arbitrarily sized/structured data that plays well with pervasive caching peer to peer systems like radio mesh routing. It seems like we have such a very common need for publish/subscribe networking that we really ought to be standardising this concept at a level a lot lower than 'send an HTTP request to this commercial website'.
The worst was the first few awkward years where everyone on TV or radio pronounced the "http://" as "h-t-t-p colon slash slash" every time they read a URL out loud. I do not miss those days.
How else do you pronounce http:/// so it doesn't sound like you have a bad case of the hiccups?
I mean, other than just omitting it, but then good luck when you have to read out an rtsp:// or ftp:// url.
To give Microsoft their due, Encarta was a pretty good product when it was launched, in the CD-ROM era. I never saw Comptons, Britannica took forever to go digital and was really expensive, and Wikipedia came along much later.
Yeah! Everybody knows there's no such thing as cheating in business.
Silly rabbit! Ethics is for kids!
Of course there's ethics, and the ethical thing to do is to improve your offering to give the customers what they want. And since the search market is all aggregating third-party data to start with, I don't see why it should be 'wrong' to aggregate another aggregator's data. Don't we want an open Internet? How does calling meta-search 'cheating' make any more sense than calling pinging someone elses router 'theft'? Heck, in the before-time, there used to be entire search engines whose business model was *just* meta-search - anyone remember Dogpile?
Now, depending on your competitor to give you honest responses to your mechanical queries, that might be a weakness...
Home, home on Legrange Where the space debris always collects We possess, so it seems, two of Man's greatest dreams Solar power and zero-g se......curity network countermeasures - this is Slashdot, after all.
1. Create a secret identity as a dashing masked superhero 2. Assume cover identity as a bored rich playboy 4. Marry Catherine Zeta-Jones 5. Snog Catherine Zeta-Jones 6.... 7......... 8................ 9.... Wait, was I supposed to be saving the world or something? Ah, never mind.
There are only two reasons the computers could have said those mortgages were a sure thing. One: The humans fed the computers bogus data; Two: the computers were bugged and giving bogus answers from correct data.
Or three, the data were strictly correct as far as they went, the computers were functioning perfectly, but the formulae for making predictions from those data, while beautiful and elegant, were inapplicable to reality - and so perfect computers running perfect algorithms on perfect data gave perfect - but nonsensical - results.
The big problem with any kind of financial prediction is that you're always generalising based on the past. But as they say, "past performance is no guarantee of future results". No matter how much data you gather or how you crunch it, the past only tells you what mathematical relations held under market conditions which might not be the case today. If you're falling off a cliff, fifteen Nobel Prizes worth of economic analysis may well tell you that you're going to continue accelerating in a graceful curve forever. But it won't tell you what happens when you hit the ground, because the concept of "ground" is a black swan outside the dataset.
If the question being asked is hwo to out-innovate the entire world - ie, how to win a zero-sum contest - then it seems like we've already lost touch with reality. If the global economic game requires any one party to 'out-' another, then it's set up by design to force all except one of those parties, be they nations or individuals, to lose.
What's wrong with good old innovation, production and self-sufficiency for and by the people, and not anyone trying to force anyone else into loserdom?
Moon.... fuck it, its got no atmosphere to contaminate, no see to poison.
I am thinking too much on this now, CASE CLOSED!
Even better, put your experimental teleportation research facilities on a moon of Mars! That would make sure definitely for certain that nothing could ever go wrong.
And then came the Lego food riots, the Lego Revolution, the Lego Five Year Plans, the Great Lego Patriotic War... From Lego With Love... the fall of the Lego Wall... the rise of the Legoligarchs...
Avatar could be as well a huge success because of who made it... I don't know, did the guy had some well-received movies earlier?
He has some problem with tying up all his subplots, though. I never did understand why the Alien Queen needed to use an iceberg to assassinate Sarah Connor's great-grandfather, or why the Weyland-Yutani android in the LAPD never revealed his true identity at the time.
Slashdot Mirror
Wake me up when we finally have fusion in Livermore, CA.
Wasn't the primary goal of the NIF to simulate the conditions in fission explosions for "stockpile stewardship" purposes? If so, it's not likely to ever do much toward sustainable power-generation fusion that isn't a direct byproduct of building better bombs.
The vast majority of modern environmentalists just want less chemical waste and incidents of cancer.
But cancer means PROGRESS!!! Why are you against PROGRESS?
Next those dumb greenies will be saying we shouldn't fill our cities with smokestacks until the air gets so chunky you can eat it on toast.
I guess the american and french revolutions in the late 18th century never happened then
Yes, and look what happened to the French Revolution without Twitter.
We now face a Molten Salt Nuclear Reactor gap
I for one am not volunteering to try to jump it.
I note that I believe a lot of the PR out there regarding thorium is produced by a company that presently owns a huge percentage of the mining rights to thorium deposits in the US. Which is fine by me. :)
Well, that certainly allays my fears that the thorium hype might be manufactured largely by a narrowly-focused special interest group with no wider scientific credibility, yessiree!
What I hope comes about after this is an open standard for microblogging.
I would like to see a standard for microblogging of arbitrarily sized/structured data that plays well with pervasive caching peer to peer systems like radio mesh routing. It seems like we have such a very common need for publish/subscribe networking that we really ought to be standardising this concept at a level a lot lower than 'send an HTTP request to this commercial website'.
The worst was the first few awkward years where everyone on TV or radio pronounced the "http://" as "h-t-t-p colon slash slash" every time they read a URL out loud. I do not miss those days.
How else do you pronounce http:/// so it doesn't sound like you have a bad case of the hiccups?
I mean, other than just omitting it, but then good luck when you have to read out an rtsp:// or ftp:// url.
Back in 1983, I was at "jbn@Ford-wdl1.ARPA...
John Nagle
Ford Aerospace and Communications Corp
*blinks*
As in this John Nagle?
Er.. hello!
To give Microsoft their due, Encarta was a pretty good product when it was launched, in the CD-ROM era. I never saw Comptons, Britannica took forever to go digital and was really expensive, and Wikipedia came along much later.
Yeah! Everybody knows there's no such thing as cheating in business.
Silly rabbit! Ethics is for kids!
Of course there's ethics, and the ethical thing to do is to improve your offering to give the customers what they want. And since the search market is all aggregating third-party data to start with, I don't see why it should be 'wrong' to aggregate another aggregator's data. Don't we want an open Internet? How does calling meta-search 'cheating' make any more sense than calling pinging someone elses router 'theft'? Heck, in the before-time, there used to be entire search engines whose business model was *just* meta-search - anyone remember Dogpile?
Now, depending on your competitor to give you honest responses to your mechanical queries, that might be a weakness...
Aspiring to be different is basically trying to identify as not-something, which is just asinine.
Except for those darn non-Aristotelians who insist on being both hip and unhip simultaneously.
Home, home on Legrange ...curity network countermeasures - this is Slashdot, after all.
Where the space debris always collects
We possess, so it seems, two of Man's greatest dreams
Solar power and zero-g se...
They have solved both, the latter by the use of a multi-GPU computer. Impressive.
Most impressive - but you are not a Holodeck yet!
The brainchild of MIT could be a powerful allly if it is turned to the Commercial Side.
It will turn, my master - or die.
Cat...in the tube? O_o
Sure, how else do you brush your teeth without Inst-O-Kitteh Paste?
Zorro's Guide to Swashbucking Superheroics:
1. Create a secret identity as a dashing masked superhero ... ........ ................
2. Assume cover identity as a bored rich playboy
4. Marry Catherine Zeta-Jones
5. Snog Catherine Zeta-Jones
6.
7.
8
9.... Wait, was I supposed to be saving the world or something? Ah, never mind.
There are only two reasons the computers could have said those mortgages were a sure thing. One: The humans fed the computers bogus data; Two: the computers were bugged and giving bogus answers from correct data.
Or three, the data were strictly correct as far as they went, the computers were functioning perfectly, but the formulae for making predictions from those data, while beautiful and elegant, were inapplicable to reality - and so perfect computers running perfect algorithms on perfect data gave perfect - but nonsensical - results.
The big problem with any kind of financial prediction is that you're always generalising based on the past. But as they say, "past performance is no guarantee of future results". No matter how much data you gather or how you crunch it, the past only tells you what mathematical relations held under market conditions which might not be the case today. If you're falling off a cliff, fifteen Nobel Prizes worth of economic analysis may well tell you that you're going to continue accelerating in a graceful curve forever. But it won't tell you what happens when you hit the ground, because the concept of "ground" is a black swan outside the dataset.
They seek him here, they seek him there
Those Yankees seek him everywhere
Is he in Sweden? Or Brisbane?
That dashed elusive Julian.
How can we out innovate
If the question being asked is hwo to out-innovate the entire world - ie, how to win a zero-sum contest - then it seems like we've already lost touch with reality. If the global economic game requires any one party to 'out-' another, then it's set up by design to force all except one of those parties, be they nations or individuals, to lose.
What's wrong with good old innovation, production and self-sufficiency for and by the people, and not anyone trying to force anyone else into loserdom?
People whine bitch and moan... Computers don't, most of them anyways...
I take it you've never tried to compile a Linux system from source and looked at the gcc warning logs?
"... Nuclear weapons are ironic..."
Great, now all the hipsters will want one.
Moon.... fuck it, its got no atmosphere to contaminate, no see to poison.
I am thinking too much on this now, CASE CLOSED!
Even better, put your experimental teleportation research facilities on a moon of Mars! That would make sure definitely for certain that nothing could ever go wrong.
the 24 palladium quasi-crystals oscillation nodes.
Anyone? It's the key to pentalobular Arc reactor containment, for anyone with a giant pile of mil-scrap.
Tony Stark, is that you?
And then came the Lego food riots, the Lego Revolution, the Lego Five Year Plans, the Great Lego Patriotic War... From Lego With Love... the fall of the Lego Wall... the rise of the Legoligarchs...
"I, uh, Built things. Out of little bricks. Every day."
"Ah, so a Shuttle thermal tile engineer, then? Welcome to the team."
Avatar could be as well a huge success because of who made it ... I don't know, did the guy had some well-received movies earlier?
He has some problem with tying up all his subplots, though. I never did understand why the Alien Queen needed to use an iceberg to assassinate Sarah Connor's great-grandfather, or why the Weyland-Yutani android in the LAPD never revealed his true identity at the time.