Born in Leeuwarden, Holland, the son of a civil engineer, Escher spent most of his childhood in Arnhem. Aspiring to be an architect, Escher enrolled in the School for Architecture and Decorative Arts in Haarlem.
I know that today, architecture schools require calculus and several basic structural engineering courses. I wonder what was covered back then.
Add M.C. Escher to the list of people who got out of architecture and into something better, like Rick White of Pink Floyd.
It's concievable that if America put price ceilings on it's medicines, the state of the entire world's medicine would be hindered
This is happening right now. Once $200 billion in Federal benefits are given US seniors, the next step will be Federal ceilings on drug prices (this is what has happened in every other country). Maine and Vermont are already looking into drug price ceilings.
What interests me is how this apparent over-capacity does not seem to match up the price of bandwidth and the apparent bandwidth management of consumer-level heavy users.
Bandwidth is getting cheaper - when you purchase by the 10's of Mbps. I've seen $100/Mbps and below in quantity.
But on a per customer basis, the costs of billing/help desk/etc. for users of under 10 Mbps may actually be more than the bandwidth cost.
And for home users, you have that nasty last mile owned by a local government granted entrenched monopoly, the costs of running new lines, or questionable wireless technologies.
That said, I see plenty of $600/month T1's around (including local loop).
As if there wasn't a fairly good chance that HDTV adoption was doomed before.
The funny thing is that Congress has not required all new television receivers to have DTV decoding capability. Of those "HDTV Televisions" being sold right now, most don't have a DTV decoder.
In the 60's when the UHF TV bands came along, Congress required television makers to include UHF receivers in most all new TVs. But there has been no parallel for DTV.
So if Congress can't even mandate DTV reception, how are they going to mandate the broadcast flag?
(BTW, I'm not saying they should mandate DTV reception, but certainly things will be very interesting at analog turn-off in 2006 without it.)
Is software based AI running on serial processors simply a matter of a drunk looking for his keys under the lamppost because that's where the light is?
I am an ex-parallel-analog-chip-AI-hardware researcher, so I can say that the entire "neuromorphic" VLSI field has yielded almost nothing in terms of direct applications, but it has taught a lot of neurobiologists basic analog electronics and signal processing that has made their job of understanding brain circuitry easier.
The biggest spinoffs of analog VLSI has been "smart pixels" that do simple image processing (a few astronomy applications there) or Carver Mead's "stacked pixels" for dense CCD arrays for digital cameras. That's about it.
But then again, neural networks of all kinds have been a general failure in terms of coming up with real-world applications.
I jumped out of analog VLSI to join one of the early Internet backbones, which was definately a lot more relevant to normal people. Moreover, digital chips sped up very quickly. A moden 2 GHz serial digital chip can simulate parallel analog chips in near real-time (the unfairness is that analog chips are only affordable in a research environment if they use older technology than moden mass-produced digitial chips, plus they are all expensive custom one-offs).
I'd also like to point to a recent Cato Institute article that explained the modern use of massive stock options for executive pay:
"Several years ago, Congress imposed a cap on the maximum tax-deductible salary for corporate managers. This caused a shift to incentive compensation, particularly stock options, which provided an excessive incentive for corporate executives to attempt to boost the stock price in the short run rather than long-run earnings."
Moreover, there has been another change in policy that may have encouraged greater fraud:
"In addition, both the federal and many state governments have restricted the ability of those who are dissatisfied with the performance of a given company to engage in a hostile tender offer to take over the company. The threat of hostile tender offers served as a discipline on corrupt and incompetent management groups."
Neither of these were done under GW Bush, but then again, he didn't seem to do much to change it either.
. From slow performance to crappy heaters to uncomfortable plastic seats to rust everywhere.
My memory of old VWs was my parents having to have four cars to make sure at least two were working at any point. The bottoms of our bug was so rusted that you could see the road below. The heaters barely worked, and I remembering wondering if my feet would freeze off in the winter. And those wonderful vent wings work fine - unless you are in a backup, and then your body would begin to stick to the vinyl seats.
An axle on a bug broke while going around a corner. The brakes on our VW bus stopped working while driving one day. CV joints went bad on a regular basis.
Today my '98 VW Golf has nearly 90K miles without a single major incident.
For full disclosure, I did receive that free high school education, and I am using that GI Bill for which I spent years in the military, you're welcome.
That's great! You are a success story that others can follow.
But E/M assembly is a godsend for those in other countries, compared to most of the other options. "Sweatshop" is an interesting concept, but you sweat a heck of a lot more working in the fields doing susistance or low value-add agriculture.
As to "sweatshops in San Jose" I will bet you that most of those recent immigrants are saving. They might not be able to get much better jobs for themselves, but they are making sure their children will be able to do better than they did.
They made a choice to move hundreds, in some cases thousands of miles for a better life. They risked a great deal. They are pro-active.
Americans want to get cheap oil, cheap third world labor, easy access to world capital, easy access to foreign markets, etc. Many other nations don't think that those are particularly good ideas
No, you are totally wrong.
Why do hundreds of countries send delegates to the WTO? They could just stay home and keep up all their trade barriers.
Most developing countries want foreign investment! Most developing countries want foreign trade (including the dropping of US barriers such as ones on textiles and agriculture)!
Oil producing countries (including OPEC nations) want reasonably priced oil, because they fear that high oil prices would lead to a move to nuclear/electric or other alternative energy by the West.
The middle east is a crisis to the US because thousand of Americans died last year. Temporary oil shocks used to be a concern, but now the threat of terrorism is much more important.
I'm sorry but isnt it thew same old story about the salvadorian maid u always tell. its getting old.
Well I know a lot of Salvadoran maids. One runs a chain of restaurants. Another works as a hotel maid, but she saved enough for her children to go to college.
A third works at home making empanadas for maid #1. She is probably the "poorest," having never learned English, but made enough to have a home theater with surround-sound and to raise her daughter. The daughter is a secretary and has married another recent Salvadoran immigrant who went to a tech school, and did DSLAM installs. He did get laid off recently, but produced local music parties in a club to make money until he could get back to doing telco work.
As Americans, we are spoiled rotten. We have no clue how rough the rest of the world is. We forget that our poorest people live better than most of the population of the world. We often fail to understand why we are part of the 1/6 of the world with a "western" standard of living and a "western" economy.
We don't even understand how we got here, the role of freedom, open markets, and property rights. We think we can simply legislate everyone out of poverty, when there is a long list of countries that tried that and failed. You can't fool the economy. The rules of economy are not well understood, but like physics, there are rules.
And we are going to have to understand how those with low IQs play into the future. I believe that most that have low IQs have other "intelligences" such as emotional intelligence. I've met people with less capability for technical thought than I have that have better business ability or better graphical thinking. Of course, we will soon be hacking our own DNA, so the long-term future might be more interesting.
What we do need is to ensure that there are market signals to encourage people to live up to their potential and allow them to maximize their productive value.
So Roadrunner has decided to block Kazaa. Any of their customers that really care about it are going to jump ship
I'm receiving broadband in my home that would have cost thousands of dollars per month not that long ago, for $40/month! I don't see why everyone is complainng (except, of course, for the reason that everyone loves to complain.) You don't get something for nothing.
Obviously home broadband has come a long way, and there will be stumbling blocks to determine how to provide desired service for reasonable prices. If you drop cable and pick up DSL, that will be a clear market signal;) That's why markets exist.
The Kazaa situation is bad - those that are power users of the service are using much more broadband than "surf/email" users. Someone has to pay for the capital investment of thousands of routers and the operating costs of sysadmins, help desk, and install people. Every broadband home takes years to recoup the investment, even for "surf/email" homes.
Moreover, Kazaa primarilly deals in the illegal exchange of copyrighted works, which is a serious liability problem for the provider (in these post Enron days, I supposed we're all concerned with corporate liability).
Until YOU elect a Congress that will make piracy legal, Kazaa is a threat to the provider.
It is not very often that people even think of "working together for the greater community" as you have put it, and this is too bad
Often people who believe in "working together for the greater community" really mean "working to put my particular centrally-planned socialist idea in place, even if it reduces 'the blessings of liberty' or 'the general welfare'."
The growth of the American economy might look great in macro terms and for large investors, but the loss of jobs hurts very much the poor working stiffs like me.
If you can't compete with an illiterate Mexican who is glad to not be working in the fields under the punishing summer sun, then perhaps you need to ask yourself why you are a "working stiff" after receiving a free high school education and the opportunity to go to college on the GI Bill?
I know a Salvadoran who lived in poverty, came to the US, worked as a maid ("low-paid sevice industry"), saved her money, and started a restaurant. Now she has a chain of three, and is doing quite well. Nor is she the only poor immigrant success story I know.
Save money - go to school, get the right skills - don't have kids until you can afford them. Very simple.
Anyone who is "hurting" should not have time to be reading Slashdot!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't their culture spend several thousands of years as the most advanced on Earth?
Yes, and for 400 years, from the mid-9th century until the sack of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1256, Arabic Islamic culture was unparalleled in its splendor and learning.
It's impossible for China to be an economic juggernaut, and yet have low wages and standards of living. Basic economic reasoning - if there's real economic growth on a per capita basis, the growth must go towards increased real wages, otherwise where does the wealth go to?
Chinese Communist Party and PLA leaders.
The southern states of the US had considerable economic growth during the 1800's. Little of it made it to the slaves.
State enterprises continue to dominate many key industries of China in what was now termed "a socialist market economy". Almost half are not profitable. Much of the growth of the Chinese economy has come from a newly freed private sector, but state domination of many industries limits this growth potential.
Urban unemployment is around 10% in China and rural unemployment is much higher. 50 to 100 million surplus rural workers are adrift between the villages and the cities, many subsisting through part-time low-paying jobs.
Moreover, the Chinese government has regularly lied about economic statistics, so it is even questionable what we really know about the Chinese economy.
I'm sure that if there is an effective political movement from communist dictatorship to truly free markets and democracy, China would be a tremendous economic powerhouse. China has a high literacy rate and a modern industrial and scientific base.
Isolationist policies like those we have seen over the last few years will likely simply make the US less and less relevant to international affairs.
I don't think the people of American now or ever have been interested in being relevant to international affairs. Nor do I think we want to be "predominant." We seem to be simply interested in getting rich, being reasonably free, and destroying the few enemies dumb enough to threaten or attack us.
I'm sure most Americans would be happy if Europe would solve the Middle East crisis or African poverty/AIDs, etc. Go for it!
PBS satellite interconnection
on
Live Via Satellite
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
In 1978, PBS became the first North American broadcaster to use satellite transmission for the primary distribution of its programming.
Before then, most broadcast networks used point-to-point connections such as AT&T's terrestrial microwave system to deliver content to sattions. Satellite was only used to acquire content for networks, not to distribute it to stations.
I just don't get why the state that has most of the Mojave Desert can't set up a decent solar energy system, at least for the bottom half of the state.
If this is such a cool idea, why don't you try it?
1) crazy enviro-nuts destroy your solar cells/ mirrors because you are "damaging the desert" 2) forget #1, you'll never make it past the environmental impact statement 3) even if you did, solar power is way too expensive to be worth the investment
But if you think I'm wrong, nothing is stopping you from raising the VC and building it yourself.
Enron's "manipulations" were simply using the exitsing rules the California state government set up. CA paid Enron to do things that hurt CA's energy supply. Check out this examination. Had a private company been handling the electrical distribution in CA, they might have wised up to the situation a bit faster.
Let's not go off the deep end though, the "manipulations" were minor - CA has a real electricity supply/transport infrastructure problem. It is spelled NIMBY/socialism. Diesel trains make a better choice than building a new generator only because you don't have to hold local hearings and do an enironmental impact statement to use them.
Government must let go of the "commanding heights" of the economy - power is #1.
our company just went with a telecom Allegience for our phone and Data one T1 split.
Interestingly enough, Allegiance just acquired (bought isn't the word) Intermedia Business Internet from Worldcom. Worldcom purchased IBI because IBI bought DIGEX (the backbone and hosting provider). IBI spun off Digex (the hosting provider), but maintained enough of an interest for WCOM to buy IBI just to have control of Digex (the hosting provider).
So the original DIGEX backbone is know with Allegiance...
Slashdot Mirror
Add M.C. Escher to the list of people who got out of architecture and into something better, like Rick White of Pink Floyd.
It's concievable that if America put price ceilings on it's medicines, the state of the entire world's medicine would be hindered
This is happening right now. Once $200 billion in Federal benefits are given US seniors, the next step will be Federal ceilings on drug prices (this is what has happened in every other country). Maine and Vermont are already looking into drug price ceilings.
check this out
Yeah, the DC meet was very cool! I even ran into people I knew, but was unaware that they were coming to the event.
Oh yeah, and my friend actually likes using vi. Does she pass the geek test?
;)
Nope, sorry, Emacs is the geekiest
Oh yeah, I'll be at the DC meetup tonight!
What interests me is how this apparent over-capacity does not seem to match up the price of bandwidth and the apparent bandwidth management of consumer-level heavy users.
Bandwidth is getting cheaper - when you purchase by the 10's of Mbps. I've seen $100/Mbps and below in quantity.
But on a per customer basis, the costs of billing/help desk/etc. for users of under 10 Mbps may actually be more than the bandwidth cost.
And for home users, you have that nasty last mile owned by a local government granted entrenched monopoly, the costs of running new lines, or questionable wireless technologies.
That said, I see plenty of $600/month T1's around (including local loop).
After all, how many people voted for any of the members of the FCC?
;)
Everyone who didn't vote Libertarian?
As if there wasn't a fairly good chance that HDTV adoption was doomed before.
The funny thing is that Congress has not required all new television receivers to have DTV decoding capability. Of those "HDTV Televisions" being sold right now, most don't have a DTV decoder.
In the 60's when the UHF TV bands came along, Congress required television makers to include UHF receivers in most all new TVs. But there has been no parallel for DTV.
So if Congress can't even mandate DTV reception, how are they going to mandate the broadcast flag?
(BTW, I'm not saying they should mandate DTV reception, but certainly things will be very interesting at analog turn-off in 2006 without it.)
Is software based AI running on serial processors simply a matter of a drunk looking for his keys under the lamppost because that's where the light is?
I am an ex-parallel-analog-chip-AI-hardware researcher, so I can say that the entire "neuromorphic" VLSI field has yielded almost nothing in terms of direct applications, but it has taught a lot of neurobiologists basic analog electronics and signal processing that has made their job of understanding brain circuitry easier.
The biggest spinoffs of analog VLSI has been "smart pixels" that do simple image processing (a few astronomy applications there) or Carver Mead's "stacked pixels" for dense CCD arrays for digital cameras. That's about it.
But then again, neural networks of all kinds have been a general failure in terms of coming up with real-world applications.
I jumped out of analog VLSI to join one of the early Internet backbones, which was definately a lot more relevant to normal people. Moreover, digital chips sped up very quickly. A moden 2 GHz serial digital chip can simulate parallel analog chips in near real-time (the unfairness is that analog chips are only affordable in a research environment if they use older technology than moden mass-produced digitial chips, plus they are all expensive custom one-offs).
. From slow performance to crappy heaters to uncomfortable plastic seats to rust everywhere.
My memory of old VWs was my parents having to have four cars to make sure at least two were working at any point. The bottoms of our bug was so rusted that you could see the road below. The heaters barely worked, and I remembering wondering if my feet would freeze off in the winter. And those wonderful vent wings work fine - unless you are in a backup, and then your body would begin to stick to the vinyl seats.
An axle on a bug broke while going around a corner. The brakes on our VW bus stopped working while driving one day. CV joints went bad on a regular basis.
Today my '98 VW Golf has nearly 90K miles without a single major incident.
For full disclosure, I did receive that free high school education, and I am using that GI Bill for which I spent years in the military, you're welcome.
That's great! You are a success story that others can follow.
But E/M assembly is a godsend for those in other countries, compared to most of the other options. "Sweatshop" is an interesting concept, but you sweat a heck of a lot more working in the fields doing susistance or low value-add agriculture.
As to "sweatshops in San Jose" I will bet you that most of those recent immigrants are saving. They might not be able to get much better jobs for themselves, but they are making sure their children will be able to do better than they did.
They made a choice to move hundreds, in some cases thousands of miles for a better life. They risked a great deal. They are pro-active.
Americans want to get cheap oil, cheap third world labor, easy access to world capital, easy access to foreign markets, etc. Many other nations don't think that those are particularly good ideas
No, you are totally wrong.
Why do hundreds of countries send delegates to the WTO? They could just stay home and keep up all their trade barriers.
Most developing countries want foreign investment! Most developing countries want foreign trade (including the dropping of US barriers such as ones on textiles and agriculture)!
Oil producing countries (including OPEC nations) want reasonably priced oil, because they fear that high oil prices would lead to a move to nuclear/electric or other alternative energy by the West.
The middle east is a crisis to the US because thousand of Americans died last year. Temporary oil shocks used to be a concern, but now the threat of terrorism is much more important.
I'm sorry but isnt it thew same old story about the salvadorian maid u always tell. its getting old.
Well I know a lot of Salvadoran maids. One runs a chain of restaurants. Another works as a hotel maid, but she saved enough for her children to go to college.
A third works at home making empanadas for maid #1. She is probably the "poorest," having never learned English, but made enough to have a home theater with surround-sound and to raise her daughter. The daughter is a secretary and has married another recent Salvadoran immigrant who went to a tech school, and did DSLAM installs. He did get laid off recently, but produced local music parties in a club to make money until he could get back to doing telco work.
As Americans, we are spoiled rotten. We have no clue how rough the rest of the world is. We forget that our poorest people live better than most of the population of the world. We often fail to understand why we are part of the 1/6 of the world with a "western" standard of living and a "western" economy.
We don't even understand how we got here, the role of freedom, open markets, and property rights. We think we can simply legislate everyone out of poverty, when there is a long list of countries that tried that and failed. You can't fool the economy. The rules of economy are not well understood, but like physics, there are rules.
And we are going to have to understand how those with low IQs play into the future. I believe that most that have low IQs have other "intelligences" such as emotional intelligence. I've met people with less capability for technical thought than I have that have better business ability or better graphical thinking. Of course, we will soon be hacking our own DNA, so the long-term future might be more interesting.
What we do need is to ensure that there are market signals to encourage people to live up to their potential and allow them to maximize their productive value.
So Roadrunner has decided to block Kazaa. Any of their customers that really care about it are going to jump ship
;) That's why markets exist.
I'm receiving broadband in my home that would have cost thousands of dollars per month not that long ago, for $40/month! I don't see why everyone is complainng (except, of course, for the reason that everyone loves to complain.) You don't get something for nothing.
Obviously home broadband has come a long way, and there will be stumbling blocks to determine how to provide desired service for reasonable prices. If you drop cable and pick up DSL, that will be a clear market signal
The Kazaa situation is bad - those that are power users of the service are using much more broadband than "surf/email" users. Someone has to pay for the capital investment of thousands of routers and the operating costs of sysadmins, help desk, and install people. Every broadband home takes years to recoup the investment, even for "surf/email" homes.
Moreover, Kazaa primarilly deals in the illegal exchange of copyrighted works, which is a serious liability problem for the provider (in these post Enron days, I supposed we're all concerned with corporate liability).
Until YOU elect a Congress that will make piracy legal, Kazaa is a threat to the provider.
It is not very often that people even think of "working together for the greater community" as you have put it, and this is too bad
Often people who believe in "working together for the greater community" really mean "working to put my particular centrally-planned socialist idea in place, even if it reduces 'the blessings of liberty' or 'the general welfare'."
The growth of the American economy might look great in macro terms and for large investors, but the loss of jobs hurts very much the poor working stiffs like me.
If you can't compete with an illiterate Mexican who is glad to not be working in the fields under the punishing summer sun, then perhaps you need to ask yourself why you are a "working stiff" after receiving a free high school education and the opportunity to go to college on the GI Bill?
I know a Salvadoran who lived in poverty, came to the US, worked as a maid ("low-paid sevice industry"), saved her money, and started a restaurant. Now she has a chain of three, and is doing quite well. Nor is she the only poor immigrant success story I know.
Save money - go to school, get the right skills - don't have kids until you can afford them. Very simple.
Anyone who is "hurting" should not have time to be reading Slashdot!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't their culture spend several thousands of years as the most advanced on Earth?
Yes, and for 400 years, from the mid-9th century until the sack of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1256, Arabic Islamic culture was unparalleled in its splendor and learning.
Easy come, easy go!
But give me a break, clean water? food? China has gotten past that stage a long time ago.
Yeah, a long time ago, like 1970? Only about 30 MILLION people starved to death in China during the 60's.
It's impossible for China to be an economic juggernaut, and yet have low wages and standards of living. Basic economic reasoning - if there's real economic growth on a per capita basis, the growth must go towards increased real wages, otherwise where does the wealth go to?
Chinese Communist Party and PLA leaders.
The southern states of the US had considerable economic growth during the 1800's. Little of it made it to the slaves.
State enterprises continue to dominate many key industries of China in what was now termed "a socialist market economy". Almost half are not profitable. Much of the growth of the Chinese economy has come from a newly freed private sector, but state domination of many industries limits this growth potential.
Urban unemployment is around 10% in China and rural unemployment is much higher. 50 to 100 million surplus rural workers are adrift between the villages and the cities, many subsisting through part-time low-paying jobs.
Moreover, the Chinese government has regularly lied about economic statistics, so it is even questionable what we really know about the Chinese economy.
I'm sure that if there is an effective political movement from communist dictatorship to truly free markets and democracy, China would be a tremendous economic powerhouse. China has a high literacy rate and a modern industrial and scientific base.
Isolationist policies like those we have seen over the last few years will likely simply make the US less and less relevant to international affairs.
I don't think the people of American now or ever have been interested in being relevant to international affairs. Nor do I think we want to be "predominant." We seem to be simply interested in getting rich, being reasonably free, and destroying the few enemies dumb enough to threaten or attack us.
I'm sure most Americans would be happy if Europe would solve the Middle East crisis or African poverty/AIDs, etc. Go for it!
In 1978, PBS became the first North American broadcaster to use satellite transmission for the primary distribution of its programming.
Before then, most broadcast networks used point-to-point connections such as AT&T's terrestrial microwave system to deliver content to sattions. Satellite was only used to acquire content for networks, not to distribute it to stations.
CHERNOBYL?
Obviously Chernobyl was a worst-case scenario of nuclear power, operated by a secretive and corrupt dictatorship.
But on the whole, would you prefer a few localized Chernobyls, or a global catastrophe brought on by CO2 emmissions?
I just don't get why the state that has most of the Mojave Desert can't set up a decent solar energy system, at least for the bottom half of the state.
If this is such a cool idea, why don't you try it?
1) crazy enviro-nuts destroy your solar cells/ mirrors because you are "damaging the desert"
2) forget #1, you'll never make it past the environmental impact statement
3) even if you did, solar power is way too expensive to be worth the investment
But if you think I'm wrong, nothing is stopping you from raising the VC and building it yourself.
Enron's "manipulations" were simply using the exitsing rules the California state government set up. CA paid Enron to do things that hurt CA's energy supply. Check out this examination. Had a private company been handling the electrical distribution in CA, they might have wised up to the situation a bit faster.
Let's not go off the deep end though, the "manipulations" were minor - CA has a real electricity supply/transport infrastructure problem. It is spelled NIMBY/socialism. Diesel trains make a better choice than building a new generator only because you don't have to hold local hearings and do an enironmental impact statement to use them.
Government must let go of the "commanding heights" of the economy - power is #1.
our company just went with a telecom Allegience for our phone and Data one T1 split.
Interestingly enough, Allegiance just acquired (bought isn't the word) Intermedia Business Internet from Worldcom. Worldcom purchased IBI because IBI bought DIGEX (the backbone and hosting provider). IBI spun off Digex (the hosting provider), but maintained enough of an interest for WCOM to buy IBI just to have control of Digex (the hosting provider).
So the original DIGEX backbone is know with Allegiance...