I think you watch too many movies, personally. The coercion part is what makes it "organized crime", not the means and methods. There are similarities to the victims for sure, but I place the blame rather differently. For anyone that uses violence I blame them and want to put them in jail. If anybody can coerce others with lawyers I blame the lawmakers and the legal system that made this possible.
... but network effects mean that the number of connections in a heavily populated mesh grow exponentially. No, quadratically with the number of phones.
If groups with different IQs have different sex habits, and I learn about your sex habits, then by using Bayes' theorem I can also make inferences about your IQ. Obviously just statistical inferences ("he has less sex, therefore, he is more likely to be smart"), but still.
Anybody can have a supercomputer on the cheap because the definition of supercomputer changes every 3 seconds.
Although presumably the definition is revised up in terms of performance... It is not like everyone is sitting on old slow computers which suddenly become supercomputers by definition.
This is great news, but I am a little curious about the cost of these things...
The biggest barrier to solar cells right now is cost, not efficiency. This new cell is about twice as efficient as your typical single layer panel but how much more expensive is it? 50% more expensive? Twice as expensive? 10 times more expensive?
This thing has several layers and optics to separate the light... apparently in a much tighter package than similar devices in the past, but still complex and big relative to your standard single layer solar panel.
This comparison is unfair because sending a human there is many orders of magnitude more expesive than sending a robot. So the question is rather, would we learn more from a hundred different robotic missions or one manned one?
I think scientifically it is quite clear that sending humans to space gives you less bang for the buck than sedning robots. Arguably sending people can be justified on other grounds though.
But really, aside from that, is the infrastructure in Alaska and Canada and eastern Russia up there really of the sort that could take advantage of a big project like this? It's all well and good to ship cargo and electricity and such through a tunnel, but without having a way to get it to / take it away from the tunnel, I'd be skeptical of the utility.
Also, if this project really did make economic sense then there wouldn't be any need to involve the government at all. A private company could raise money for the tunnel and charge for anything being transported. I suspect that the proponents already realize that no investor in his or her right mind would be willing to put his or her own money into such a project; that is why they would like lawmakers to use the taxpayers' money instead.
Seriously, this is a technology whose time has come. No, it hasn't. The posted story is really cool, and the results are awesome. Also, the title is quite to the point: "Another step towards...".
There are quite a few steps to go. For one thing, there is a BIG difference between results in a simulated 2D world and a real 3D world. Having worked in one of the Grand Challenge teams, I can say that usually the greatest problem is often to understand the surrounding envrionment in order to make the right inferences and decisions. How do you distinguish a stone, a shadow, a curb, sensor noise, a person, an empty vehicle, a driving vehicle, a cloud of dust, etc, from a video feed and some laser distance sensors? In real time?
However, in order to stimulate economic activity and the general welfare, sometimes it's necessary for government to aid industries. This sounds reasonable, but there are some serious problems. The first problem is that the only way to get money for aid, is to take it from businesses and individuals. So how do you know that the government is not destroying more welfare than it is creating? Is the government really better than industries and individual investors to pick out good future industries? Second problem, once you establish a system for corporate hand-outs, isn't there a clear risk that the money will not end up with the companies that create the most "general welfare", but rather with the loudest screamers and the biggest campaign contributors? The case of farm subsidies will illustrate nicely:
Note that the farm subsidies, for example, were intended to help the small family farmer, during times of low demand when the corporate farm economies of scale were killing them. While no doubt this was the original intention, according to wikipedia "nearly three quarters of [farm] subsidy money goes to the top 10% of recipients.[9] Thus, the large farms, which are the most profitable because they have economies of scale, receive the most money."
Using a computer algorithm to determine sentences is ridiculous. No two cases are the same, which means that there are an incredible number of variables.
And is man or machine better at reaching consistent decisions from an incredible number of variables?
Sounds like someone doesn't live in hickville. Or belonged to a PTA anywhere. To believe that banning books is either temporally remote or over with is naive AND incorrect. These days parents seem to just are about different stuff, like 'promoting witchcraft' (Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings). And sometimes, they succeed for a time (till a suit or injunction slaps them back into shape). Same shite, different decade.
But this also makes the label "banned" pretty weak. And some of the books have only been challenged. For example, one book on the top of their list, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald was (check the link) challenged by Baptist College in Charleston, SC in 1987, and I am assuming not banned since it doesn't say it was.
If all it takes to get on the list is to be (unsuccessfully) challenged at one college in 1987 then it is not very surprising that they can make a long list.
Because, for astronomers it would be very useful to have a definition of the word "planet". If you make simulations of the early solar system or observe other stars, it is rather convenient if everybody knows what you mean when you say that there is (or isn't) a planet.
The problem is that there is no reasonable definition that results in the original nine, and no others, being planets.
Tor
I flew from Burbank to Atlanta, and the guy who sat next to me was either an Air Marshall, or one roughneck (buff/scrappy) lookin' blue collar business man, wearing blue jeans, a t-shirt, and harley-style shit-kicker boots.
There was no way that the guy could afford 1st class. He also ate his food as if it were his daily meal. Maybe the guy travels a lot, but probability leans towards the Air Marshall conclusion.
He even looked like one of the guys on the discovery channel show about Air Marshalls, it was pretty obvious.
I took photos of some clouds too, so now I'm probably on that list. *weaksauce*
I am sorry. In the US you actually cannot tell from simple clothing if someone does or does not have money. This is why if you go into a fancy store wearing jeans and an old T-shirt in the US, you will probably be treated with respect and as a potential customer. In Europe, you will probably be ignored. The employees in both stores are doing what they have been trained to do.
Surely there must be countless examples of airplane crashes due both to autopilot and human errors. To state the bloody obvious:
1) Both humans and autopilots make mistakes and cause crashes
2) As time goes on, autopilots get better. Humans don't. We should expect autopilots to take over more and more tasks from humans, and flights to get safer and safer.
(Whether Airbus is doing the right thing in this particular case I don't know - unlike so many other posters here I am no aviations expert)
I RTFA, and frankly, it sounds like confirmation of the idea that mathamatics in general is WAY ahead of the other sciences. Things that are perfectly possible in theory are out of our grasp in the real world... right now, at least.
I fail to see the problem. The authors calculate the exact distribution of refraction indeces (they would have to vary) the cloak would have to have in order to work. They leave it to someone else to make a material with these properties. This distribution of labor is extremely common in science, some are more theoretical and come up with the first ideas and others are more experimental and make it work in pracitice. The material properties will also depend on the wavelengths you want to cloak against and radio waves are probably the first ones that will happen in pracitce. Writes the reviewer (not the author) in Science: "In the near future, such cloaking devices might shield sensitive equipment from disruptive radio waves or electric and magnetic fields".
Even as a mathmatician, the fact that there's so much theory and so little actual DOING has me worried.
Have we been on different planets recently? This is the first time I hear the accusation that modern science hasn't been very productive. If you go through the scientific achievements in the last 10,20 or 100 years you will see that the progress is crazy. And a lot of it starts off as purely mathematical models.
Since the cloaking device will send all light around you to come out on your opposite side, you will not be able to see anything of the outside world while you are using it (I am not making this up, I RTFP in Science).
Sorry if this is will hinder your sinister plans.
Tor
Yes, but assuming that they try to store the information in a compact way, a good portion of this does not need to be stored for every call, since our telephone number, address, billing rates, call plan, etc tends to stay the same for months or years at the time.
And even if it would take say 10kb to store one call (and I really don't think it would) it still wouldn't change the overall conclusion of my post which is that this enterprise does not have a measurable impact on the storage industry.
Memory to store one info on one call ~ 0.1-1 kb (two telefon numbers, maybe 2 people identifiers like SSNs, duration of call).
Average calls per person per day ~ 1-10
People in the US ~ 3*10^8
Approximate memory need per day 3*10^8 kb = 300 GB.
So at current rates they need about a new hard drive per day, or maybe the order $100 per day, or $10^4 - $10^5 per year. Don't expect any earthshaking impact on the technology sector, even if they do want to store past calls as well.
Tor
Note that even with all the technology available today, unarmed combat is still taught to all our soldiers, and ninja-like skills are even taught to some of our special forces. The reason is that there is nothing more important than troops on the ground.
Unarmed combat ceased to be the most important thing in armed conflict with the invention of club and spear. By the end of medieval times warfare had come to be dominated by longbows and projectiles. Obviously unarmed combat has only diminished in importance since then. In modern combat people get killed primarily with artillery, bombs and long distance weapons (in recent wars, 80% of casualties had shrapnel wounds). In the unlikely event that you get close enough to actually see your enemy first hand you will be shooting each other with rifles and machine guns, and praying that you will get heavy fire support before they do. Some recent asymmetric conflict like Iraq are a bit different but still you will see that "insurgents" are mostly killed by heavy support weapons, and Americans mostly by remote detonated bombs. In the cases when they get closer to each other American troops tend to dominate with their superior marksmanship and training. If the insurgents can device a plan to get really close to American troops, they will set off a suicide bomb, not enter a fist fight.
Hollywood of course tends to exaggerate hand to hand combat as it is much more exciting to have the hero and the villain fight it out with their bare teeth than having either killed by a random artillery shell.
Most businesses are in the business of making profit, not of making market share.
The article implies that Dell is making a big mistake by sticking to Intel, but that need not be the case. If sticking to Intel means lower price per CPU it could mean higher profit, even if the volume and market share suffers.
Tor
I am amazed by how much fuzz anything related to sexuality is generating. For crying out loud, you are playing a game in which the basic premise, like in most other games, is to kill and plunder. There are no moral problems with this because you are Good and they are Bad. But if someone say "gay", or starts an LBGT guild - then what an outrage. No more is the game good "family" entertainment, no indeed, it needs to be cleaned up, the little ones need to be protected.
Can you believe it's 2006 and we still care about the near-high-school drop-outs who continue to question evolution?
For those of you who don't read science, I would like to add that the paper itself made no mention of ID at all. Of course, biologists are interested in evlotution of complex mechanisms for its own sake, not for the sake of convincing some young earth creationists.
However, Dr Christoph Adami, who wrote in Perspecives (basically, giving an opinion of the significance of a new finding and providing the non-specialist with a context of the paper) made the point of how fatal this finding is for the ID argument. Here we have parts that have exactly the "irreducable complexity" that ID proponents love to talk about, and now someone has managed to reconstruct their evolutionary history.
When computing power grows exponentially, you need an exponential (in the age of the machines) number of old machines to do the work of one new one. And that is even before you consider all the losses to parallelism, the big electricity bill, and all the know-how needed to put them together!
Slashdot Mirror
... but network effects mean that the number of connections in a heavily populated mesh grow exponentially. No, quadratically with the number of phones.If groups with different IQs have different sex habits, and I learn about your sex habits, then by using Bayes' theorem I can also make inferences about your IQ. Obviously just statistical inferences ("he has less sex, therefore, he is more likely to be smart"), but still.
Although presumably the definition is revised up in terms of performance... It is not like everyone is sitting on old slow computers which suddenly become supercomputers by definition.
This is great news, but I am a little curious about the cost of these things... The biggest barrier to solar cells right now is cost, not efficiency. This new cell is about twice as efficient as your typical single layer panel but how much more expensive is it? 50% more expensive? Twice as expensive? 10 times more expensive? This thing has several layers and optics to separate the light... apparently in a much tighter package than similar devices in the past, but still complex and big relative to your standard single layer solar panel.
This comparison is unfair because sending a human there is many orders of magnitude more expesive than sending a robot. So the question is rather, would we learn more from a hundred different robotic missions or one manned one? I think scientifically it is quite clear that sending humans to space gives you less bang for the buck than sedning robots. Arguably sending people can be justified on other grounds though.
Also, if this project really did make economic sense then there wouldn't be any need to involve the government at all. A private company could raise money for the tunnel and charge for anything being transported. I suspect that the proponents already realize that no investor in his or her right mind would be willing to put his or her own money into such a project; that is why they would like lawmakers to use the taxpayers' money instead.
Using a computer algorithm to determine sentences is ridiculous. No two cases are the same, which means that there are an incredible number of variables.
And is man or machine better at reaching consistent decisions from an incredible number of variables?
Sounds like someone doesn't live in hickville. Or belonged to a PTA anywhere. To believe that banning books is either temporally remote or over with is naive AND incorrect. These days parents seem to just are about different stuff, like 'promoting witchcraft' (Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings). And sometimes, they succeed for a time (till a suit or injunction slaps them back into shape). Same shite, different decade.
But this also makes the label "banned" pretty weak. And some of the books have only been challenged. For example, one book on the top of their list, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald was (check the link) challenged by Baptist College in Charleston, SC in 1987, and I am assuming not banned since it doesn't say it was.
If all it takes to get on the list is to be (unsuccessfully) challenged at one college in 1987 then it is not very surprising that they can make a long list.
Tor
does the story about a girl kept in a dungeon for eight years revolve around the kidnapper's computer. Tor
Because, for astronomers it would be very useful to have a definition of the word "planet". If you make simulations of the early solar system or observe other stars, it is rather convenient if everybody knows what you mean when you say that there is (or isn't) a planet. The problem is that there is no reasonable definition that results in the original nine, and no others, being planets. Tor
I flew from Burbank to Atlanta, and the guy who sat next to me was either an Air Marshall, or one roughneck (buff/scrappy) lookin' blue collar business man, wearing blue jeans, a t-shirt, and harley-style shit-kicker boots.
There was no way that the guy could afford 1st class. He also ate his food as if it were his daily meal. Maybe the guy travels a lot, but probability leans towards the Air Marshall conclusion.
He even looked like one of the guys on the discovery channel show about Air Marshalls, it was pretty obvious.
I took photos of some clouds too, so now I'm probably on that list. *weaksauce*
I am sorry. In the US you actually cannot tell from simple clothing if someone does or does not have money. This is why if you go into a fancy store wearing jeans and an old T-shirt in the US, you will probably be treated with respect and as a potential customer. In Europe, you will probably be ignored. The employees in both stores are doing what they have been trained to do.
Tor
The reverse argument could be made.
Surely there must be countless examples of airplane crashes due both to autopilot and human errors. To state the bloody obvious:
1) Both humans and autopilots make mistakes and cause crashes
2) As time goes on, autopilots get better. Humans don't. We should expect autopilots to take over more and more tasks from humans, and flights to get safer and safer.
(Whether Airbus is doing the right thing in this particular case I don't know - unlike so many other posters here I am no aviations expert)
Tor
I RTFA, and frankly, it sounds like confirmation of the idea that mathamatics in general is WAY ahead of the other sciences. Things that are perfectly possible in theory are out of our grasp in the real world... right now, at least.
I fail to see the problem. The authors calculate the exact distribution of refraction indeces (they would have to vary) the cloak would have to have in order to work. They leave it to someone else to make a material with these properties. This distribution of labor is extremely common in science, some are more theoretical and come up with the first ideas and others are more experimental and make it work in pracitice. The material properties will also depend on the wavelengths you want to cloak against and radio waves are probably the first ones that will happen in pracitce. Writes the reviewer (not the author) in Science: "In the near future, such cloaking devices might shield sensitive equipment from disruptive radio waves or electric and magnetic fields".
Even as a mathmatician, the fact that there's so much theory and so little actual DOING has me worried.
Have we been on different planets recently? This is the first time I hear the accusation that modern science hasn't been very productive. If you go through the scientific achievements in the last 10,20 or 100 years you will see that the progress is crazy. And a lot of it starts off as purely mathematical models.
Tor
Since the cloaking device will send all light around you to come out on your opposite side, you will not be able to see anything of the outside world while you are using it (I am not making this up, I RTFP in Science). Sorry if this is will hinder your sinister plans. Tor
Time, Duration, Source (Carrier,Number,GPS,Address,Type{Cell/POTS/VOIP}), Destination (Carrier,Number,GPS,Address,Type{Cell/POTS/VOIP}), Routing path, Billing Rate(s), Call Plan.
Yes, but assuming that they try to store the information in a compact way, a good portion of this does not need to be stored for every call, since our telephone number, address, billing rates, call plan, etc tends to stay the same for months or years at the time.
And even if it would take say 10kb to store one call (and I really don't think it would) it still wouldn't change the overall conclusion of my post which is that this enterprise does not have a measurable impact on the storage industry.
Tor
Memory to store one info on one call ~ 0.1-1 kb (two telefon numbers, maybe 2 people identifiers like SSNs, duration of call). Average calls per person per day ~ 1-10 People in the US ~ 3*10^8 Approximate memory need per day 3*10^8 kb = 300 GB. So at current rates they need about a new hard drive per day, or maybe the order $100 per day, or $10^4 - $10^5 per year. Don't expect any earthshaking impact on the technology sector, even if they do want to store past calls as well. Tor
Note that even with all the technology available today, unarmed combat is still taught to all our soldiers, and ninja-like skills are even taught to some of our special forces. The reason is that there is nothing more important than troops on the ground.
Unarmed combat ceased to be the most important thing in armed conflict with the invention of club and spear. By the end of medieval times warfare had come to be dominated by longbows and projectiles. Obviously unarmed combat has only diminished in importance since then. In modern combat people get killed primarily with artillery, bombs and long distance weapons (in recent wars, 80% of casualties had shrapnel wounds). In the unlikely event that you get close enough to actually see your enemy first hand you will be shooting each other with rifles and machine guns, and praying that you will get heavy fire support before they do. Some recent asymmetric conflict like Iraq are a bit different but still you will see that "insurgents" are mostly killed by heavy support weapons, and Americans mostly by remote detonated bombs. In the cases when they get closer to each other American troops tend to dominate with their superior marksmanship and training. If the insurgents can device a plan to get really close to American troops, they will set off a suicide bomb, not enter a fist fight.
Hollywood of course tends to exaggerate hand to hand combat as it is much more exciting to have the hero and the villain fight it out with their bare teeth than having either killed by a random artillery shell.
Tor
Most businesses are in the business of making profit, not of making market share. The article implies that Dell is making a big mistake by sticking to Intel, but that need not be the case. If sticking to Intel means lower price per CPU it could mean higher profit, even if the volume and market share suffers. Tor
I am amazed by how much fuzz anything related to sexuality is generating. For crying out loud, you are playing a game in which the basic premise, like in most other games, is to kill and plunder. There are no moral problems with this because you are Good and they are Bad. But if someone say "gay", or starts an LBGT guild - then what an outrage. No more is the game good "family" entertainment, no indeed, it needs to be cleaned up, the little ones need to be protected.
Tor
Can you believe it's 2006 and we still care about the near-high-school drop-outs who continue to question evolution?
For those of you who don't read science, I would like to add that the paper itself made no mention of ID at all. Of course, biologists are interested in evlotution of complex mechanisms for its own sake, not for the sake of convincing some young earth creationists.
However, Dr Christoph Adami, who wrote in Perspecives (basically, giving an opinion of the significance of a new finding and providing the non-specialist with a context of the paper) made the point of how fatal this finding is for the ID argument. Here we have parts that have exactly the "irreducable complexity" that ID proponents love to talk about, and now someone has managed to reconstruct their evolutionary history.
Tor
is a big problem for these kinds of projects.
When computing power grows exponentially, you need an exponential (in the age of the machines) number of old machines to do the work of one new one. And that is even before you consider all the losses to parallelism, the big electricity bill, and all the know-how needed to put them together!
But it is pretty cool.
Tor