You say they forgot who their customer was, forgot to have a good selection, and that caused their decline. I think you're confusing cause and effect. When the Internet gutted their margins, it was no longer profitable to have well-stocked stores, so people stopped coming... a vicious cycle. That doesn't mean they made any bad decisions; it's simply what happens to any company that is being destroyed by the competition. The same happened to Circuit City, Future Shop... and (most tellingly) nothing similar has arisen to replace them. They weren't stupid, they were simply outmoded.
And indeed, the letter's author (whose name has been redacted) laid out an interesting case for Feynman-as-secret-agent, citing his analytical mind, film-developing prowess, code breaking techniques and his well-known fascination for lock picking. The latter was a skill he regularly showed off at Los Alamos, to the chagrin of more security-minded scientists.
Probably it was one of those "more security-minded" scientists.
I say, there's a grain of truth to it. You can never be a sure a free thinker will come to the conclusions you want.
It appears that the old model was for NASA to pay contractors to develop national assets, whereas the new model is for NASA to pay contractors to develop contractor-owned assets?
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Also, I think we are bound for a cold-water-in-the-face moment of realization that the privatization of space launch means it is now divorced from nationalism/patriotism for the first time. It is no longer "we" or "us" or "our" space program. A private company can re-incorporate elsewhere to save on taxes or avoid regulations in a heartbeat. They can also provide services to the highest bidder (or more to the point, to all bidders) regardless of the payload. I am still in favor of privatization because it seems the US manned space program has finally collapsed under its own bureaucratic weight. Nevertheless people realize this is not just going to be a cost-saver.
Boeing is bigger and probably not too agile, but how can they lose after a 50 year head start? They were on the Gemeni program FFS. They make the Delta rocket. Isn't this just a matter of tweaking the terms of the their NASA contracts?
Liquid hydrogen has long been used as a rocket propellant (including the Saturn V upper stage) and environmental impact has nothing to do with it. Liquid hydrogen has triple the specific energy density of jet fuel, which is awfully handy for pushing the limits of endurance.
This is the Flynn Effect. But it is much more obvious and less controversial on a longer timescale - we are all geniuses compared to our single-celled ancestors.
As the Hubble itself shows, supporting a certain level of capability in space is not really a deterministic process. You have launch failures. You have failures on station. So, it is almost impossible to maintain, say, a 90% probability of maintaining a capability, without some overbuild.
I agree that Internet bandwidth is not and should not be the top concern, nor do I expect it to become so due to this government report. But beyond delivering textbooks, I would like to see some schools, perhaps charter schools, experiment with self-paced video instruction, supported by a teacher to monitor and answer questions. I have seen how quickly my kids master arcane interests by watching videos online. Admittedly this might be successful only in cases where the student is self-motivated. Then again, online social networking can be motivating. If you're the only kid in your class who is really interested in chemistry, and your chemistry teacher is there mainly to coach football, then it's not hard to imagine you would be better off in a self-paced virtual course, interacting with other similarly-minded students, while the football coach (who is physically present) ensures the students stay on task and handle the lab chemicals safely.
Look, there are plenty of people like yourself who assume it's all easy, if it were just turned over to good old fashioned common sense. Who can't, for the life of them, see why things are as they are. (Must be corruption).
Where is your proof of concept? Why isn't there a city in Montana where they still meet in single-room schoolhouses (taught by an old maid on a meager salary) that churns out salt-of-the-earth folks who can best whatever the foreigners have to offer?
It's because that glorified past never really existed, and certainly doesn't exist now.
As for this specific issue, it's not just about downloading digital copies of textbooks. Not by a long shot.
There is an unprecedented level of discontent with public education right now, which is resulting in an explosion of experimentation. Nobody is getting patted on the head for "sticking with what works" because there is no consensus on what that might be. Charter schools, for example, exist for no other reason than to create the "freedom to be more innovative" - and of course churn is the flipside of that.
The shift towards standardized testing, meanwhile, is meant to allow a variety of pedagogical methods, while putting them on an equal basis for evaluation. (Of course it has many issues of its own.)
As to your second rant, "back to basics" (including a shift back towards more rote memorization) is certainly among the fashionable movements now.
"The trick is finding the seed set." No, you still have to influence the seed set, which might be really hard.
Let's say this model predicts that I can end terrorism by converting 100 radical muslims to buddhism. How does that help me? (Simply sending in drones to remove these nodes from the graph, so to speak, will not have the same effect).
Second example, let's say my novel is almost guaranteed to be successful if it gets a glowing review in the New York Times. Well, how hard can that be? Usually trusted nodes are trusted for some reason - because they're reliable. That means they're hard to influence.
But he'd much rather talk about his upcoming residency in pediatric neurology, which will dominate the next five years of his professional life. He became enamored of the field while doing a rotation at LaRabida Children's Hospital in Chicago, caring for patients with cerebral palsy, shaken baby syndrome and other ailments.
"I really liked not just taking care of kids, but the way the whole team worked together - the medical team, the social workers, nutritionists, DCFS workers... the idea that you can do a lot for these patients, even if you can't cure them."
To me that does not sound like some sort of idiot savant. If anything he sounds more interested in getting a job and doing work, rather than amazing us gawkers with brilliant insights.
In any case, I think picking a single person in advance and waiting expecting them to make a great discovery or a huge fortune is a mistake. It downplays the role of luck in the process. 92% of smokers will never get lung cancer.
We remember them because what they were doing was cutting-edge at the time. Techniques and technology for search and rescue grew by leaps and bounds during WWII, which is to say, before that it sucked.
Moreover, this isn't even problematic for computers like it is for pople, because the huge steaming pile of point solutions that constitute general intelligence can be replicated in seconds (a file copy) whereas each person spends decades re-learning things others already knew (and still only gets a miniscule fraction of it).
I think your point is moot in the overall plotline, which is this: Europoeans didn't come in and take all the land. Instead, they took it over incrementally (a couple hundred years), taking away land as they grew ready to exploit it. The "legalities" meant little or nothing over the long term. Whether the Europeans negotiated favorable terms and later reneged, or "negotiated" unfavorable terms after conflict, or simply took what they wanted without negotiations, it was all more or less the same in the end.
It is a valid question to ask how individual artists are affected in specific cases, but probably no more than being concerned with how robots are now doing the jobs that assembly line workers used to do.
But that is the question of our age. We have a huge underclass emerging, of people who simply are not economically "necessary." They have made a massive shift towards low-paid servant jobs (service industry) yet still, unemployment is high.
Yes, I have to wonder if it wouldn't have been cheaper to just build another couple Hubbles as needed and throw them up there, but that's been argued to death.
Many of the Shuttle's missions in its first decade were classified, so I suppose there's some chance they might have been doing something up there that required the Shuttle's full capabilities (i.e. not just putting up a bunch of spy satellites) although I can't imagine what that would be.
We should be outraged that this poor gay kid was driven to suicide.
But we have to be a little careful there. If you make suicide an effective way to "get back" at people, you might actually promote it. An unhappy person might chose martyrdom over living.
I'm sure they know what they're doing. But I do find it interesting that this foxconn plant will employ ten times as many people as all of facebook.com (with 3500 employees). The idea that there could ever be enough "knowledge worker" jobs to replace what manufacturing used to be just doesn't hold up.
Slashdot Mirror
You say they forgot who their customer was, forgot to have a good selection, and that caused their decline. I think you're confusing cause and effect. When the Internet gutted their margins, it was no longer profitable to have well-stocked stores, so people stopped coming... a vicious cycle. That doesn't mean they made any bad decisions; it's simply what happens to any company that is being destroyed by the competition. The same happened to Circuit City, Future Shop... and (most tellingly) nothing similar has arisen to replace them. They weren't stupid, they were simply outmoded.
Probably it was one of those "more security-minded" scientists.
I say, there's a grain of truth to it. You can never be a sure a free thinker will come to the conclusions you want.
.
Also, I think we are bound for a cold-water-in-the-face moment of realization that the privatization of space launch means it is now divorced from nationalism/patriotism for the first time. It is no longer "we" or "us" or "our" space program. A private company can re-incorporate elsewhere to save on taxes or avoid regulations in a heartbeat. They can also provide services to the highest bidder (or more to the point, to all bidders) regardless of the payload. I am still in favor of privatization because it seems the US manned space program has finally collapsed under its own bureaucratic weight. Nevertheless people realize this is not just going to be a cost-saver.
I'm sure you know that. But how can we talk about Nasa not allowing things to get close to the ISS in light of it?
Boeing is bigger and probably not too agile, but how can they lose after a 50 year head start? They were on the Gemeni program FFS. They make the Delta rocket. Isn't this just a matter of tweaking the terms of the their NASA contracts?
Calling this piracy is just as dumb as calling the New York New York casino in Las Vegas piracy. And here is the home the White House is styled after.
Liquid hydrogen has long been used as a rocket propellant (including the Saturn V upper stage) and environmental impact has nothing to do with it. Liquid hydrogen has triple the specific energy density of jet fuel, which is awfully handy for pushing the limits of endurance.
This is the Flynn Effect. But it is much more obvious and less controversial on a longer timescale - we are all geniuses compared to our single-celled ancestors.
As the Hubble itself shows, supporting a certain level of capability in space is not really a deterministic process. You have launch failures. You have failures on station. So, it is almost impossible to maintain, say, a 90% probability of maintaining a capability, without some overbuild.
I agree that Internet bandwidth is not and should not be the top concern, nor do I expect it to become so due to this government report. But beyond delivering textbooks, I would like to see some schools, perhaps charter schools, experiment with self-paced video instruction, supported by a teacher to monitor and answer questions. I have seen how quickly my kids master arcane interests by watching videos online. Admittedly this might be successful only in cases where the student is self-motivated. Then again, online social networking can be motivating. If you're the only kid in your class who is really interested in chemistry, and your chemistry teacher is there mainly to coach football, then it's not hard to imagine you would be better off in a self-paced virtual course, interacting with other similarly-minded students, while the football coach (who is physically present) ensures the students stay on task and handle the lab chemicals safely.
Where is your proof of concept? Why isn't there a city in Montana where they still meet in single-room schoolhouses (taught by an old maid on a meager salary) that churns out salt-of-the-earth folks who can best whatever the foreigners have to offer?
It's because that glorified past never really existed, and certainly doesn't exist now.
As for this specific issue, it's not just about downloading digital copies of textbooks. Not by a long shot.
For self-paced learning you do.
The shift towards standardized testing, meanwhile, is meant to allow a variety of pedagogical methods, while putting them on an equal basis for evaluation. (Of course it has many issues of its own.)
As to your second rant, "back to basics" (including a shift back towards more rote memorization) is certainly among the fashionable movements now.
Let's say this model predicts that I can end terrorism by converting 100 radical muslims to buddhism. How does that help me? (Simply sending in drones to remove these nodes from the graph, so to speak, will not have the same effect).
Second example, let's say my novel is almost guaranteed to be successful if it gets a glowing review in the New York Times. Well, how hard can that be? Usually trusted nodes are trusted for some reason - because they're reliable. That means they're hard to influence.
To me that does not sound like some sort of idiot savant. If anything he sounds more interested in getting a job and doing work, rather than amazing us gawkers with brilliant insights.
In any case, I think picking a single person in advance and waiting expecting them to make a great discovery or a huge fortune is a mistake. It downplays the role of luck in the process. 92% of smokers will never get lung cancer.
We remember them because what they were doing was cutting-edge at the time. Techniques and technology for search and rescue grew by leaps and bounds during WWII, which is to say, before that it sucked.
AI isn't "discovered," it is developed.
(Or are radio telescope datasets not that big anymore in the age of Netflix?)
I think your point is moot in the overall plotline, which is this: Europoeans didn't come in and take all the land. Instead, they took it over incrementally (a couple hundred years), taking away land as they grew ready to exploit it. The "legalities" meant little or nothing over the long term. Whether the Europeans negotiated favorable terms and later reneged, or "negotiated" unfavorable terms after conflict, or simply took what they wanted without negotiations, it was all more or less the same in the end.
But that is the question of our age. We have a huge underclass emerging, of people who simply are not economically "necessary." They have made a massive shift towards low-paid servant jobs (service industry) yet still, unemployment is high.
Many of the Shuttle's missions in its first decade were classified, so I suppose there's some chance they might have been doing something up there that required the Shuttle's full capabilities (i.e. not just putting up a bunch of spy satellites) although I can't imagine what that would be.
But isn't that what enabled the Hubble, which IMHO the Shuttle's signature achievement?
But we have to be a little careful there. If you make suicide an effective way to "get back" at people, you might actually promote it. An unhappy person might chose martyrdom over living.
I'm sure they know what they're doing. But I do find it interesting that this foxconn plant will employ ten times as many people as all of facebook.com (with 3500 employees). The idea that there could ever be enough "knowledge worker" jobs to replace what manufacturing used to be just doesn't hold up.
Are snapshots on a raid 0 volume (across two disks) a workable backup strategy?