They have a over a billion people and their economy is slated to pass ours this decade. They're out-spending and out-developing us in science, education, space exploration, national infrastructure, environmentally friendly energy and resources, and telecommunications. The only way we're going to compete is to regain and maintain our technological edge. This would require giving up a corporate state that is busily figuring how to sell off the next generation to the highest bidder. If there's any good news, its that China has even more greedy bastards than the U.S. and they may implode in an orgy of economic cannibalism even before we do.
It would be fun to build a small radar array with a synthetic aperture antenna so you could tell the difference from let's say a Cessna 152 flying by and a drone. The next step would be to use the spacial information to aim a small high performance maser to fry the electronics on said drone (of course, only if it was invading your privacy.) It would be entertaining for the drones' owners to find in post mortem that their sky spy was a crispy critter.
Yeah, because the Chinese have bases in countries all over the world... Oh, wait that's us. No, it's the Chinese who are spending themselves into oblivion on weapons of war... Oh, wait, that's us again. We spend more on our military than the next 13 nations combined (but we can't afford to educate our children... bright.) I dunno, perhaps if we moved from offense to defense, these things wouldn't be issues?
That's because if we actually made too big a stink, we'd have to deal with the dirty deeds we did in the first place to prompt such a response and the last thing we really want to do is to begin airing our dirty laundry. Grumbling under our breath about what a bunch of douches the Chinese are is about as far as we can go without having to scrape large amounts of egg off of our collective faces.
Latest research says brain aging is most commonly a function habitual use of pre-existing neural pathways to the exclusion of growing new ones. This is what "Couch Potato Syndrome" does. Most of the aging programmers I know, are always looking at new tech. They have a burning curiosity about the universe in general and about how to keep a razors edge honed on their chosen craft. Most of these people have shockingly large libraries. Many read a slug of journals. Many game. Many have wildly eclectic and diverse personal lives. None of these things tends to result in the mummification of the human brain attributed to the normal processes associated with the average citizens aging.
Its completely arguable that our chosen lifestyles are the perfect means by which to ensure healthy and productive brain function into extreme old age. Add to that the growing use of nootropics and other brain enhancing technologies by mind workers and I can easily imagine mentally agile and productive engineers in their 80s and 90s. There was a study on human productivity that talks about two markedly different trajectories in math and physics. One group shoots to prominence in their 20s making world changing discoveries and solving insanely hard problems then slowly fading over time as they never reach that singular height again. Call them shooting stars. The other group, start off slower, but keep rising, in fact they continue to slowly but surely ascend their entire lives and by the end of their careers have achieved remarkable productivity right up until the end. Call these folks comets.
By the nature of our work, I suspect most software engineers are comets, or they find other lines of work that inspire them after 20 years. You either love intellectual puzzled or your don't. There is no good evidence or logic pointing to older engineers being less in any significant way. In fact the evidence is to the contrary.
Again, the greatest value of math is not the math itself, but the ability to abstract, extract metastructures and isolate higher order patterns from what might otherwise be just chaos or noise. Agreed some, fields are more math intensive that others. Whereas studying primates in the wild (what few are left) mostly needs only the math to get your time and GPS values properly recorded, I would be a little more concerned for the folks a the Large Hadron Collider armed only with algebra. The same goes for most other hard sciences and specializations of the softer sciences.
There are other forces at work besides gravity. The star has a solar wind. If you have countless small intelligent devices poised out at the place where gravity and the solar wind cancel, and these devices are dynamically connected through a variety of energies and forces including EMR including lasers and possibly masers further back, and the collective gravitational force they all exert on one another, It would seem to me a nonsolid shell of computational matter could effectively envelope a star, absorb most of it's energy and use some of that energy to maintain it's relative position around that star. It is an interesting questions.
Watching Slashotters talking about women is like watching pygmies talking about slam dunking. It's so dang entertaining! Oh, Don't stop! I got popcorn.
I was just reading about a Southeast Asian coffee made from coffee berries passed through the digestive tract of an Asian palm civet. It's called Kopi Luwak. Recently to make more, people have begun breeding and penning large numbers of civets and force feeding them coffee berries to increase the yield. They are endangering the wild population.
I'm wondering if common people won't envy that cat in a few years.
There is a whole roving band of hominid primates lumbering around out there, and if you put a gun to their collective heads and asked them to distinguish expedience and moral rectitude, you'd just have to shoot, because they haven't a friggin' clue. Strangely enough, these people end up lawyers and judges and political representatives and the heads of companies and banks. I don't know why that is, except maybe people with a conscience seem to get bogged down properly disposing of the dead bodies and using them like cord wood just doesn't seem to pop into the heads of more decent folks.
I could point fingers at the likes of Justice Scalia (now there are a couple divergent words that are uncomfortably close), or the 45 professional politicians who last night blocked legislation their constituency agrees with at the level of 90%. The Pew Report said the only issues with higher agreement in the U.S. are Abraham Lincoln and Jesus Christ. Mother Teresa only scored an 83%. I'm not even saying we should have blanket legislation preventing the sale of guns to criminals and the mentally ill, I'm kind of hoping that wouldn't need a tally of hands. So many brilliant and magnificent people in Boston, running into harms way to save others, to help others. Watching people CYAing their way through life shouldn't be offensive. Its so common. It just seems such a waste of breathing, in the face of what people are capable of. LinkedIn, shame on you. You want to be very careful. You shave enough corners, and what you end up with is lumpy, round and brown, and we all know what to do with stuff like that.
Actually, I've been thinking that a Dyson Sphere might look for all the world(s) like a brown dwarf star. Such a sphere would be unlikely to be a solid object, but clouds of gravitationally and electromagnetically bound computational devices collecting solar energy then passing it back as waste heat, each successive layer lengthening the wavelength of the energy that came form the star and turning the difference into useful computational work. What spills out the last layer is tepid by any reasonable measure, and would probably live in the microwave or radio region, creating the appearance of a warm body... a brown dwarf. Problem is that brown dwarves are the small fuzzy mutts of the universe and trying to distinguish a Dyson Sphere from one would be a serious challenge at a couple hundred light years.
Of course from the civilization looking to go undetected, the more you look like an uninteresting brown dwarf the better. Worth considering.
As I watch all the disparate technologies competing for the emergence of a new kind of sentience, what do you see as the probable winner, inorganic (current digital technologies) or organic (biotech - synthetic biology.) As we have begun to tinker with our own genome, how long do you think it will be before we break out of the strict barriers of our special limitations?
What do you see as our greatest threat and conversely our greatest hope?
Inside of this question, there's a poorly defined question space, and it's dancing around something like "Do you see the technology and the thinking that gave us technology as the source or our current woes?, the solution to our current woes?, both? and what should we be paying attention to that we aren't paying attention to inside of the charging juggernaut that our technology has become.
Gradual erosion? Hell, thermonuclear incineration is more like it. It took 200 years to make a social form that was the envy of the planet. It took 30 years to turn it into a corporate toilet. In the last ten, its looking like an SR-70 in a full powered dive. I'm just waiting to see Chuck Yeagers smiling face commenting "Nice Auger Job Rooky."
I find myself at an impasse. I can vote for the party that makes the right promises then doesn't keep them, or the party that makes all the wrong promises and does keep them. This leaves me vacillating between futile hope and grotesque masochism. Where are the guys that make the RIGHT promises and keep them? Where are they hiding those guys? Oh! Right. I forgot. You can't buy the right guys. Therefore you can't sell them to the public.
Are you kidding... 80% of the superpac money that shaped the last 2 years of this nation's political elections came from fewer than 200 people. The top 400 richest people hold half the nation's wealth and the top 10.000 hold over 95% of that nations wealth. You think for a second if these people lock up the future of medical technology as well as all the other IP, that they won't lock humanity out cold. If you can't see checkmate in 4 moves, you should get your eyes checked. The race is nearly owned lock, stock, and barrel by greedy, power mad, self serving plutocrats. We take back what is rightfully ours, or there is nothing left to take back.
The future hangs in the balance. We must have the right to become what we may become. Without full access to out genome that will never happen. There is literally no significant portion of the genome that isn't owned by someone. Company's have made ridiculous patent claims on tiny sequences that show hundred or even thousands of times in the genome giving them ownership of wildly unrelated genetic codes in different genes. Researcher in agricultural genomes have laid claim to cow, pig, horse and chicken DNA. Many of those mammal genes also occur in human beings and so these companies have claims on huge swaths of human genome because of the prior ownership of Bovine or Porcine DNA. Its about to become a complete cluster fuck if we don't slap these genetic privateers down right this very moment. We will all pay nothing less than ransom for a future of darkness that can't be painted bleakly enough. Do not let this crime against humanity continue.
Big Pharma and gene patents are doing to the human genome what corporate IP is doing everywhere else, turning the human genome into another economic turf war and locking up innovation and literally costing people's lives. ATTENTION this is not a theoretical conversation. See this deeply disheartening video. If you are not deeply disgusted after seeing that video you should see your health professional to determine if perhaps you are not in fact human. Corporations exist for profit. If it profits them the you or your loved ones die.. you die. Giving them the ability to block life saving medical research, health giving new advances and treatments, holding humanity hostage by laying claim to the genes the make humanity possible, is tantamount to holding the future of everything from aging to curing cancer under the thumbs of people whose only interest is to own the world. This is more than ludicrous. It's positively insane. There are things that are simply too important to allow corporations to control. This is one of those things.
Actually what Mosanto has done is wiped out hundreds of small farms by predatory lawsuits which serves large agrobusiness (their primary customers) just fine. So big players are using GM to push small farms out of existence.
Slashdot Mirror
These folks are completely safe... head open... nothing there but echoes!
To declare "I'm with STUPID ->" The official Louisiana State T-Shirt! In fact they're only a couple idiot acts away from the "I R Stupid" T-Shirt.
They have a over a billion people and their economy is slated to pass ours this decade. They're out-spending and out-developing us in science, education, space exploration, national infrastructure, environmentally friendly energy and resources, and telecommunications. The only way we're going to compete is to regain and maintain our technological edge. This would require giving up a corporate state that is busily figuring how to sell off the next generation to the highest bidder. If there's any good news, its that China has even more greedy bastards than the U.S. and they may implode in an orgy of economic cannibalism even before we do.
It would be fun to build a small radar array with a synthetic aperture antenna so you could tell the difference from let's say a Cessna 152 flying by and a drone. The next step would be to use the spacial information to aim a small high performance maser to fry the electronics on said drone (of course, only if it was invading your privacy.) It would be entertaining for the drones' owners to find in post mortem that their sky spy was a crispy critter.
Yeah, because the Chinese have bases in countries all over the world... Oh, wait that's us. No, it's the Chinese who are spending themselves into oblivion on weapons of war... Oh, wait, that's us again. We spend more on our military than the next 13 nations combined (but we can't afford to educate our children... bright.) I dunno, perhaps if we moved from offense to defense, these things wouldn't be issues?
Just a thought.
That's because if we actually made too big a stink, we'd have to deal with the dirty deeds we did in the first place to prompt such a response and the last thing we really want to do is to begin airing our dirty laundry. Grumbling under our breath about what a bunch of douches the Chinese are is about as far as we can go without having to scrape large amounts of egg off of our collective faces.
Latest research says brain aging is most commonly a function habitual use of pre-existing neural pathways to the exclusion of growing new ones. This is what "Couch Potato Syndrome" does. Most of the aging programmers I know, are always looking at new tech. They have a burning curiosity about the universe in general and about how to keep a razors edge honed on their chosen craft. Most of these people have shockingly large libraries. Many read a slug of journals. Many game. Many have wildly eclectic and diverse personal lives. None of these things tends to result in the mummification of the human brain attributed to the normal processes associated with the average citizens aging.
Its completely arguable that our chosen lifestyles are the perfect means by which to ensure healthy and productive brain function into extreme old age. Add to that the growing use of nootropics and other brain enhancing technologies by mind workers and I can easily imagine mentally agile and productive engineers in their 80s and 90s. There was a study on human productivity that talks about two markedly different trajectories in math and physics. One group shoots to prominence in their 20s making world changing discoveries and solving insanely hard problems then slowly fading over time as they never reach that singular height again. Call them shooting stars. The other group, start off slower, but keep rising, in fact they continue to slowly but surely ascend their entire lives and by the end of their careers have achieved remarkable productivity right up until the end. Call these folks comets.
By the nature of our work, I suspect most software engineers are comets, or they find other lines of work that inspire them after 20 years. You either love intellectual puzzled or your don't. There is no good evidence or logic pointing to older engineers being less in any significant way. In fact the evidence is to the contrary.
Again, the greatest value of math is not the math itself, but the ability to abstract, extract metastructures and isolate higher order patterns from what might otherwise be just chaos or noise. Agreed some, fields are more math intensive that others. Whereas studying primates in the wild (what few are left) mostly needs only the math to get your time and GPS values properly recorded, I would be a little more concerned for the folks a the Large Hadron Collider armed only with algebra. The same goes for most other hard sciences and specializations of the softer sciences.
There are other forces at work besides gravity. The star has a solar wind. If you have countless small intelligent devices poised out at the place where gravity and the solar wind cancel, and these devices are dynamically connected through a variety of energies and forces including EMR including lasers and possibly masers further back, and the collective gravitational force they all exert on one another, It would seem to me a nonsolid shell of computational matter could effectively envelope a star, absorb most of it's energy and use some of that energy to maintain it's relative position around that star. It is an interesting questions.
Watching Slashotters talking about women is like watching pygmies talking about slam dunking. It's so dang entertaining! Oh, Don't stop! I got popcorn.
I was just reading about a Southeast Asian coffee made from coffee berries passed through the digestive tract of an Asian palm civet. It's called Kopi Luwak. Recently to make more, people have begun breeding and penning large numbers of civets and force feeding them coffee berries to increase the yield. They are endangering the wild population.
I'm wondering if common people won't envy that cat in a few years.
There is a whole roving band of hominid primates lumbering around out there, and if you put a gun to their collective heads and asked them to distinguish expedience and moral rectitude, you'd just have to shoot, because they haven't a friggin' clue. Strangely enough, these people end up lawyers and judges and political representatives and the heads of companies and banks. I don't know why that is, except maybe people with a conscience seem to get bogged down properly disposing of the dead bodies and using them like cord wood just doesn't seem to pop into the heads of more decent folks.
I could point fingers at the likes of Justice Scalia (now there are a couple divergent words that are uncomfortably close), or the 45 professional politicians who last night blocked legislation their constituency agrees with at the level of 90%. The Pew Report said the only issues with higher agreement in the U.S. are Abraham Lincoln and Jesus Christ. Mother Teresa only scored an 83%. I'm not even saying we should have blanket legislation preventing the sale of guns to criminals and the mentally ill, I'm kind of hoping that wouldn't need a tally of hands. So many brilliant and magnificent people in Boston, running into harms way to save others, to help others. Watching people CYAing their way through life shouldn't be offensive. Its so common. It just seems such a waste of breathing, in the face of what people are capable of. LinkedIn, shame on you. You want to be very careful. You shave enough corners, and what you end up with is lumpy, round and brown, and we all know what to do with stuff like that.
The heart wants what the heart wants -- Woody Allen
And they leave your Higgs Bosons smelling minty fresh!
Actually, I've been thinking that a Dyson Sphere might look for all the world(s) like a brown dwarf star. Such a sphere would be unlikely to be a solid object, but clouds of gravitationally and electromagnetically bound computational devices collecting solar energy then passing it back as waste heat, each successive layer lengthening the wavelength of the energy that came form the star and turning the difference into useful computational work. What spills out the last layer is tepid by any reasonable measure, and would probably live in the microwave or radio region, creating the appearance of a warm body... a brown dwarf. Problem is that brown dwarves are the small fuzzy mutts of the universe and trying to distinguish a Dyson Sphere from one would be a serious challenge at a couple hundred light years.
Of course from the civilization looking to go undetected, the more you look like an uninteresting brown dwarf the better. Worth considering.
As I watch all the disparate technologies competing for the emergence of a new kind of sentience, what do you see as the probable winner, inorganic (current digital technologies) or organic (biotech - synthetic biology.) As we have begun to tinker with our own genome, how long do you think it will be before we break out of the strict barriers of our special limitations?
What do you see as our greatest threat and conversely our greatest hope?
Inside of this question, there's a poorly defined question space, and it's dancing around something like "Do you see the technology and the thinking that gave us technology as the source or our current woes?, the solution to our current woes?, both? and what should we be paying attention to that we aren't paying attention to inside of the charging juggernaut that our technology has become.
The ability perform many numeric manipulations at the same time... There, fixed that for you. Continue...
Gradual erosion? Hell, thermonuclear incineration is more like it. It took 200 years to make a social form that was the envy of the planet. It took 30 years to turn it into a corporate toilet. In the last ten, its looking like an SR-70 in a full powered dive. I'm just waiting to see Chuck Yeagers smiling face commenting "Nice Auger Job Rooky."
I find myself at an impasse. I can vote for the party that makes the right promises then doesn't keep them, or the party that makes all the wrong promises and does keep them. This leaves me vacillating between futile hope and grotesque masochism. Where are the guys that make the RIGHT promises and keep them? Where are they hiding those guys? Oh! Right. I forgot. You can't buy the right guys. Therefore you can't sell them to the public.
Are you kidding... 80% of the superpac money that shaped the last 2 years of this nation's political elections came from fewer than 200 people. The top 400 richest people hold half the nation's wealth and the top 10.000 hold over 95% of that nations wealth. You think for a second if these people lock up the future of medical technology as well as all the other IP, that they won't lock humanity out cold. If you can't see checkmate in 4 moves, you should get your eyes checked. The race is nearly owned lock, stock, and barrel by greedy, power mad, self serving plutocrats. We take back what is rightfully ours, or there is nothing left to take back.
The future hangs in the balance. We must have the right to become what we may become. Without full access to out genome that will never happen. There is literally no significant portion of the genome that isn't owned by someone. Company's have made ridiculous patent claims on tiny sequences that show hundred or even thousands of times in the genome giving them ownership of wildly unrelated genetic codes in different genes. Researcher in agricultural genomes have laid claim to cow, pig, horse and chicken DNA. Many of those mammal genes also occur in human beings and so these companies have claims on huge swaths of human genome because of the prior ownership of Bovine or Porcine DNA. Its about to become a complete cluster fuck if we don't slap these genetic privateers down right this very moment. We will all pay nothing less than ransom for a future of darkness that can't be painted bleakly enough. Do not let this crime against humanity continue.
Big Pharma and gene patents are doing to the human genome what corporate IP is doing everywhere else, turning the human genome into another economic turf war and locking up innovation and literally costing people's lives. ATTENTION this is not a theoretical conversation. See this deeply disheartening video. If you are not deeply disgusted after seeing that video you should see your health professional to determine if perhaps you are not in fact human. Corporations exist for profit. If it profits them the you or your loved ones die.. you die. Giving them the ability to block life saving medical research, health giving new advances and treatments, holding humanity hostage by laying claim to the genes the make humanity possible, is tantamount to holding the future of everything from aging to curing cancer under the thumbs of people whose only interest is to own the world. This is more than ludicrous. It's positively insane. There are things that are simply too important to allow corporations to control. This is one of those things.
Actually what Mosanto has done is wiped out hundreds of small farms by predatory lawsuits which serves large agrobusiness (their primary customers) just fine. So big players are using GM to push small farms out of existence.
He tried but he couldn't be heard over the people yelling and singing the Pince Song... I think they were partying!
No I ordered the Crab and Lobster Bisque with an extra helping of high energy neutrons!