Do you *seriously* think this is about the Taliban and showing a bit of ankle?
The "shouting fire in a crowded theater" exception to the FIRST amendment to the U.S. Constitution is a legal hole big enough to drive whatever you want through it, whether it's the local vice squad, or some agency of government, or the entire U.S. military, if it comes down to it.
The Taliban are not different in any way that matters. They want to control people, and to control people, they want to control the flow of information. Obscenity is, always has been, and always will be just an excuse. It's amazing the way the same trick works over and over and over again.
The issue is that industrial processes produce heat, and people were not so thick as not to understand that discharging heated water into a lake, river, or stream would have consequences, even if the discharge water was completely free of pollutants aside from excess heat. Engineers had to think about it because, even if you didn't care about fish and other wildlife, any body of water had a finite capacity for carrying heat away. That finite capacity had economic value. Once you start thinking about how fast you could dump heat into (say) a river, a whole bunch of environmental issues (like dead fish) comes along for the ride. The arrival of Federal law is not an indicator of the first time anyone thought about the issues.
Is everyone here a programmer? Cold is as valuable as heat. Heat has to be rejected into the environment for any industrial process and, no matter where you do it, it has negative environmental consquences. Also no matter the heat source: electronics, coal, nuclear, you name it. Data centers have no new or special issues.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankine_cycle
The industrial revolution was growing on chill-water supplied by nature long before the triode, never mind the transistor, had been invented. And all the environmental issues came up long before Al Gore was born.
We *already* have aircraft that cannot be flown nearly as reliably by a human being as it can be flown by a computer. Automatic control that is not easily duplicated manually is going to be the rule rather than the exception. You still have to design aircraft so that they can be flown manually in an emergency, but the flight envelope will be more restricted and the performance less than optimal.
I think it was five computers, and what no one ever mentions is that Thomas Watson, who made the comment, wanted the world to continue using punch cards, which were the backbone of IBM's profitability. That is to say, all you IBM'ers out there who think IBM practically invented computing, IBM's first take on the "opportunity" was to try to kill it.
Leave off the cluster as your project and demonstrate the interconnect that would make a cluster of quantum computers a sensible enterprise, and you will be remembered forever.
One consideration in my leaving the Aerospace Corporation when I did is that I wondered if anyone would notice my absence at any time other than lunch. The irony of the situation is that fining the Aerospace Corporation is a bit like the Federal Government fining itself, as no one but the Federal Government has any pecuniary interest in the Aerospace Corporation as a corporate entity--it might as well be a wholly-owned subsidiary of the US Air Force.
Although no one ever said so explicitly, I assume that the bizarre legal status of the Aerospace Corporation was to allow it to operate free from the constraints that govern civil service employees and profit-making defense contractors. Furthermore, the fact that the Aerospace Corp. was privy to so many highly-sensitive programs made it seem natural that no one knew what anyone else was doing--even it the employee was doing nothing.
Bulldozer has apparently been a disappointment. Why? One wonders.
One suspects that AMD encountered some late-in-the-game, unexpected, and very unpleasant surprises. Maybe 2 billion is closer to the number they wanted it to have. Sounds more and more like the NetBurst Story. Intel never did figure out how to add in enough transistors to make the design work well without breaking the power budget.
Robert.
Epic NASA? That's a little too harsh.
Epic reality in a nation that reduces organizations like NASA to self-parody in the desperate struggle to stay funded? That sounds about right.
The fact that you think that charging for content is a viable revenue model and that you don't understand the value of information about customers or how much it costs to get that information, and that your post was moderated as "4--Insightful" says lots a couple of things.
1. Slashdot is toast. I know, that's not really news.
2. It just confirms what a recent New Yorker article claims: people in IT wildly overestimate what they understand about their own industry. In a typical industry, respondents predicted they'd answer correctly 90% of the time and actually answered incorrectly 65% of the time or so. Respondents in IT were an outlier: they predicted 95% confidence in their answers to questions about industry knowledge and were wrong about EIGHTY percent of the time.
In order to believe that the sandbox exercises at the bomb labs serve any purpose whatsoever, you have to believe that, tomorrow, if you needed to launch a fusillade from an SSBN, you could do so with the reasonable assurance that the iffy warheads on the Trident D5's that would be launched would work to the extent that the possibility of a retaliatory response is negligible. I don't believe that any such assurance is currently available, and I don't see the situation improving in any way with the passage of time. On the contrary, there will be less and less reason to be certain of anything because the critical components will not have been tested for decades. Simply spending money writing reports isn't going to change anything.
There have been specific issues that could have been resolved by underground testing on which a great deal of money and computer time has been spent. At a MINIMUM, LLNL would no longer have an excuse for the NIF boondoggle.
Anyone who thinks that planning World War III based on model calculations is a good idea is probably already safely behind barbed wire at one of our bomb labs. Nothing short of the commencement of actual hostilities or the resumption of nuclear testing is going to resolve anything. We are stuck paying blackmail in perpetuity to a program whose success cannot be proven or disproven, short of Armageddon or a dangerous step toward it.
You, of course, understood the Tectonic shift that social media represented and could know at at exactly what level to pitch it so that people who had never used such a thing before could see right away what to do with it. That's why you have six billion dollars and Mark Zuckerberg doesn't.
As to your Labrador retriever and modern computer interfaces and the concept of abstraction, you might note that even very basic English is missing from most interfaces. At the top of my Chrome browser, there is a series of icons and no words. If you hover on the icon, you can get English words. In order to do that, your Labrador retriever would have to master a number of tasks: knowing to look at the top of the page in the first place and that that is a common feature of browsers, hovering over the task as a possible way of getting some suggestion as to what the icon might do, and some system of abstract reasoning that approximates what IQ tests measure so that your Labrador retriever doesn't have to check out each icon randomly each time (what class of tasks would be suggested by a wrench, for example).
I don't think my generation, which thought it really grooved on techie details, would even have presented the opportunity that Mr. Zuckerberg had for getting rich so fast because it wouldn't have grasped the point, a phenomenon that delayed widespread acceptance of the fax machine until it was largely irrelevant.
I don't know why I'm bothering with this. I think it's hopeless.
Arguments that technical people (or that people in general) used to be smarter or more technologically capable really should make an effort to explain away the Flynn effect.
The technological products available to the average consumer have a level of sophistication that would have been unimaginable even to Byte's earliest readers. Technological products require more in the way of abstract reasoning, and today's consumers (especially the young ones) seem equal to the task. Those who confuse remembering zillions of details (like HEX representations of opcodes) with being intelligent might not agree, but it's because they are confused, not because they are smart.
Both of the comments I referred to had been moderated, and the original moronic and offensive post still has a +3.
No, it has a +1. If you're seeing the number "3" beside it, that's because comments start off with a 1, some get an automatic bonus of 1 for karma, and the +1 that he actually got from moderation makes it a total of 3. For me it shows up as 2, since I have the karma thingy turned off. Either way, complaining that the guy got one fucking mod point is pretty dumb. It would still be dumb if his comment were a troll, and it's even more dumb when we consider that his comment is actually mildly amusing. Despite what some fascists might think, a shitty joke is not the same as trolling.
It was not a shitty joke. It was an offensive joke about good science from someone who clearly had nothing better to say. It was a troll and should have been moderated accordingly. Slashdot has been inundated by comments like that. As to what "troll" means, you can seek various sources to support various definitions. To me, a troll is an offensive, off-topic or patently silly remark intended either to get attention or to disrupt the conversation without advancing it or both.
I was using the word flame before there was an Internet to use it on.
Yah, me too. Had multiple meanings, too, including something you'd make with fuel, oxygen, and a spark, as well as being a descriptive term for the behavior of certain homosexual men. Not sure what that has to do with the usage of the word "troll" as it pertains to online communities, though.
Flame in the sense it was originally used by real hackers meant just one thing: to tell someone in scorching and unforgettable terms that he had just made a complete fool of himself by saying something technically flawed in an obvious way. You don't have a clue what hackers originally hacked. Consider yourself flamed.
Don't try to tell me what the words of hackerdom mean, because I was around when the word hacker first came into use. In order to hack, you generally had to know how to use at least a screwdriver.
Well I know how to use a screwdriver, a wrench, AND a hammer. In fact, if I remember correctly, the latter was the primary troubleshooting tool for pre-internet computers. So.... how many internets do I win?
Shows how much you actually know. A soldering iron would have been much more helpful than a wrench and a hammer, and hacking had nothing to do with computers.
I was referring to the original post, not to one of the comments that had been suppressed. Both of the comments I referred to had been moderated, and the original moronic and offensive post still has a +3.
As to whether I know what the word troll means or not:
1. I refuse to get into arguments about terminology with people who are 1e6 smarter than you are.
2. If you want a flame war, go for it. I was using the word flame before there was an Internet to use it on. Don't try to tell me what the words of hackerdom mean, because I was around when the word hacker first came into use. In order to hack, you generally had to know how to use at least a screwdriver.
The moderation has changed since I made my comment. What I am going on about is that slashdot is awash in troll posts trying to be funny and moderation that doesn't seem to mind.
Scientists should be very careful about creating misimpressions of how well a problem is understood by misuse of color graphics. In the past, you would have gotten an "artist's conception." Now we get "simulations." The difference to which the actual physics are understood or accurately represented may not be all that great. When people discover, as some must have in the case of the Gulf oil spill, that what they're been fed is useless or worse, they rightfully become skeptical of the scientific enterprise. The fact that so much cutting-edge physics is still speculative is completely lost, and we wind up with misunderstandings of what science can and cannot do. It would come as a surprise to the general public, for example, that there is much about the simulation of fluid flows that is not understood. Computational "scientists" want their computers paid for and their work funded. What happens in the pursuit of that goal is often not only not science, but antithetical to science.
Knowing something about science, unfortunately, is not enough. The problem with pretty pictures is that they are far too easy to make, and the level of detail offered by a typical fluid mechanical simulation implies something about the accuracy of the calculation that is often unsupportable in theory or in practice. What's the point of gorgeous pictures if the prediction is incorrect? We don't really know all that much about the detailed physics of hurricanes. Predictions of hurricane tracks are notoriously unreliable as have been "hurricane season" forecasts. Google "met office criticism" for a snapshot of the kind of criticism that the British office for predicting climate and weather has come under. The forecasters and the funders know *something* about science, but maybe not enough. My point here is that the engaging visual detail of fluid mechanical simulations has led to far too much uncritical acceptance of work that is often highly speculative and maybe, as a prediction, just flat out wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Ha. Ha. Ha.
Do you *seriously* think this is about the Taliban and showing a bit of ankle?
The "shouting fire in a crowded theater" exception to the FIRST amendment to the U.S. Constitution is a legal hole big enough to drive whatever you want through it, whether it's the local vice squad, or some agency of government, or the entire U.S. military, if it comes down to it.
The Taliban are not different in any way that matters. They want to control people, and to control people, they want to control the flow of information. Obscenity is, always has been, and always will be just an excuse. It's amazing the way the same trick works over and over and over again.
The issue is that industrial processes produce heat, and people were not so thick as not to understand that discharging heated water into a lake, river, or stream would have consequences, even if the discharge water was completely free of pollutants aside from excess heat. Engineers had to think about it because, even if you didn't care about fish and other wildlife, any body of water had a finite capacity for carrying heat away. That finite capacity had economic value. Once you start thinking about how fast you could dump heat into (say) a river, a whole bunch of environmental issues (like dead fish) comes along for the ride. The arrival of Federal law is not an indicator of the first time anyone thought about the issues.
Is everyone here a programmer? Cold is as valuable as heat. Heat has to be rejected into the environment for any industrial process and, no matter where you do it, it has negative environmental consquences. Also no matter the heat source: electronics, coal, nuclear, you name it. Data centers have no new or special issues.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankine_cycle
The industrial revolution was growing on chill-water supplied by nature long before the triode, never mind the transistor, had been invented. And all the environmental issues came up long before Al Gore was born.
We *already* have aircraft that cannot be flown nearly as reliably by a human being as it can be flown by a computer. Automatic control that is not easily duplicated manually is going to be the rule rather than the exception. You still have to design aircraft so that they can be flown manually in an emergency, but the flight envelope will be more restricted and the performance less than optimal.
I think it was five computers, and what no one ever mentions is that Thomas Watson, who made the comment, wanted the world to continue using punch cards, which were the backbone of IBM's profitability. That is to say, all you IBM'ers out there who think IBM practically invented computing, IBM's first take on the "opportunity" was to try to kill it.
Leave off the cluster as your project and demonstrate the interconnect that would make a cluster of quantum computers a sensible enterprise, and you will be remembered forever.
Just think what would be possible if the megalomaniacs weren't hogging all the money.
One consideration in my leaving the Aerospace Corporation when I did is that I wondered if anyone would notice my absence at any time other than lunch. The irony of the situation is that fining the Aerospace Corporation is a bit like the Federal Government fining itself, as no one but the Federal Government has any pecuniary interest in the Aerospace Corporation as a corporate entity--it might as well be a wholly-owned subsidiary of the US Air Force.
Although no one ever said so explicitly, I assume that the bizarre legal status of the Aerospace Corporation was to allow it to operate free from the constraints that govern civil service employees and profit-making defense contractors. Furthermore, the fact that the Aerospace Corp. was privy to so many highly-sensitive programs made it seem natural that no one knew what anyone else was doing--even it the employee was doing nothing.
Bulldozer has apparently been a disappointment. Why? One wonders. One suspects that AMD encountered some late-in-the-game, unexpected, and very unpleasant surprises. Maybe 2 billion is closer to the number they wanted it to have. Sounds more and more like the NetBurst Story. Intel never did figure out how to add in enough transistors to make the design work well without breaking the power budget. Robert.
Epic NASA? That's a little too harsh. Epic reality in a nation that reduces organizations like NASA to self-parody in the desperate struggle to stay funded? That sounds about right.
The fact that you think that charging for content is a viable revenue model and that you don't understand the value of information about customers or how much it costs to get that information, and that your post was moderated as "4--Insightful" says lots a couple of things.
1. Slashdot is toast. I know, that's not really news.
2. It just confirms what a recent New Yorker article claims: people in IT wildly overestimate what they understand about their own industry. In a typical industry, respondents predicted they'd answer correctly 90% of the time and actually answered incorrectly 65% of the time or so. Respondents in IT were an outlier: they predicted 95% confidence in their answers to questions about industry knowledge and were wrong about EIGHTY percent of the time.
Before you read this, read http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer MUCH bigger news.
In order to believe that the sandbox exercises at the bomb labs serve any purpose whatsoever, you have to believe that, tomorrow, if you needed to launch a fusillade from an SSBN, you could do so with the reasonable assurance that the iffy warheads on the Trident D5's that would be launched would work to the extent that the possibility of a retaliatory response is negligible. I don't believe that any such assurance is currently available, and I don't see the situation improving in any way with the passage of time. On the contrary, there will be less and less reason to be certain of anything because the critical components will not have been tested for decades. Simply spending money writing reports isn't going to change anything.
There have been specific issues that could have been resolved by underground testing on which a great deal of money and computer time has been spent. At a MINIMUM, LLNL would no longer have an excuse for the NIF boondoggle.
Anyone who thinks that planning World War III based on model calculations is a good idea is probably already safely behind barbed wire at one of our bomb labs. Nothing short of the commencement of actual hostilities or the resumption of nuclear testing is going to resolve anything. We are stuck paying blackmail in perpetuity to a program whose success cannot be proven or disproven, short of Armageddon or a dangerous step toward it.
You, of course, understood the Tectonic shift that social media represented and could know at at exactly what level to pitch it so that people who had never used such a thing before could see right away what to do with it. That's why you have six billion dollars and Mark Zuckerberg doesn't.
As to your Labrador retriever and modern computer interfaces and the concept of abstraction, you might note that even very basic English is missing from most interfaces. At the top of my Chrome browser, there is a series of icons and no words. If you hover on the icon, you can get English words. In order to do that, your Labrador retriever would have to master a number of tasks: knowing to look at the top of the page in the first place and that that is a common feature of browsers, hovering over the task as a possible way of getting some suggestion as to what the icon might do, and some system of abstract reasoning that approximates what IQ tests measure so that your Labrador retriever doesn't have to check out each icon randomly each time (what class of tasks would be suggested by a wrench, for example).
I don't think my generation, which thought it really grooved on techie details, would even have presented the opportunity that Mr. Zuckerberg had for getting rich so fast because it wouldn't have grasped the point, a phenomenon that delayed widespread acceptance of the fax machine until it was largely irrelevant.
I don't know why I'm bothering with this. I think it's hopeless.
Arguments that technical people (or that people in general) used to be smarter or more technologically capable really should make an effort to explain away the Flynn effect.
The technological products available to the average consumer have a level of sophistication that would have been unimaginable even to Byte's earliest readers. Technological products require more in the way of abstract reasoning, and today's consumers (especially the young ones) seem equal to the task. Those who confuse remembering zillions of details (like HEX representations of opcodes) with being intelligent might not agree, but it's because they are confused, not because they are smart.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be. It never was.
Both of the comments I referred to had been moderated, and the original moronic and offensive post still has a +3.
No, it has a +1. If you're seeing the number "3" beside it, that's because comments start off with a 1, some get an automatic bonus of 1 for karma, and the +1 that he actually got from moderation makes it a total of 3. For me it shows up as 2, since I have the karma thingy turned off. Either way, complaining that the guy got one fucking mod point is pretty dumb. It would still be dumb if his comment were a troll, and it's even more dumb when we consider that his comment is actually mildly amusing. Despite what some fascists might think, a shitty joke is not the same as trolling.
It was not a shitty joke. It was an offensive joke about good science from someone who clearly had nothing better to say. It was a troll and should have been moderated accordingly. Slashdot has been inundated by comments like that. As to what "troll" means, you can seek various sources to support various definitions. To me, a troll is an offensive, off-topic or patently silly remark intended either to get attention or to disrupt the conversation without advancing it or both.
I was using the word flame before there was an Internet to use it on.
Yah, me too. Had multiple meanings, too, including something you'd make with fuel, oxygen, and a spark, as well as being a descriptive term for the behavior of certain homosexual men. Not sure what that has to do with the usage of the word "troll" as it pertains to online communities, though.
Flame in the sense it was originally used by real hackers meant just one thing: to tell someone in scorching and unforgettable terms that he had just made a complete fool of himself by saying something technically flawed in an obvious way. You don't have a clue what hackers originally hacked. Consider yourself flamed.
Don't try to tell me what the words of hackerdom mean, because I was around when the word hacker first came into use. In order to hack, you generally had to know how to use at least a screwdriver.
Well I know how to use a screwdriver, a wrench, AND a hammer. In fact, if I remember correctly, the latter was the primary troubleshooting tool for pre-internet computers. So .... how many internets do I win?
Shows how much you actually know. A soldering iron would have been much more helpful than a wrench and a hammer, and hacking had nothing to do with computers.
I was referring to the original post, not to one of the comments that had been suppressed. Both of the comments I referred to had been moderated, and the original moronic and offensive post still has a +3. As to whether I know what the word troll means or not: 1. I refuse to get into arguments about terminology with people who are 1e6 smarter than you are. 2. If you want a flame war, go for it. I was using the word flame before there was an Internet to use it on. Don't try to tell me what the words of hackerdom mean, because I was around when the word hacker first came into use. In order to hack, you generally had to know how to use at least a screwdriver.
Actually, the original post still has a +3 (funny).... "Jesus quit farting in the bathtub..." What's the average age here? Eight?
The moderation has changed since I made my comment. What I am going on about is that slashdot is awash in troll posts trying to be funny and moderation that doesn't seem to mind.
Want to know why slashdot is dying? Read this post and its predecessor and note the moderation.
Scientists should be very careful about creating misimpressions of how well a problem is understood by misuse of color graphics. In the past, you would have gotten an "artist's conception." Now we get "simulations." The difference to which the actual physics are understood or accurately represented may not be all that great. When people discover, as some must have in the case of the Gulf oil spill, that what they're been fed is useless or worse, they rightfully become skeptical of the scientific enterprise. The fact that so much cutting-edge physics is still speculative is completely lost, and we wind up with misunderstandings of what science can and cannot do. It would come as a surprise to the general public, for example, that there is much about the simulation of fluid flows that is not understood. Computational "scientists" want their computers paid for and their work funded. What happens in the pursuit of that goal is often not only not science, but antithetical to science.
Knowing something about science, unfortunately, is not enough. The problem with pretty pictures is that they are far too easy to make, and the level of detail offered by a typical fluid mechanical simulation implies something about the accuracy of the calculation that is often unsupportable in theory or in practice. What's the point of gorgeous pictures if the prediction is incorrect? We don't really know all that much about the detailed physics of hurricanes. Predictions of hurricane tracks are notoriously unreliable as have been "hurricane season" forecasts. Google "met office criticism" for a snapshot of the kind of criticism that the British office for predicting climate and weather has come under. The forecasters and the funders know *something* about science, but maybe not enough. My point here is that the engaging visual detail of fluid mechanical simulations has led to far too much uncritical acceptance of work that is often highly speculative and maybe, as a prediction, just flat out wrong.