Soviet Union was not such a static phenomena as people think of it.
You reference Stalin's purges which happened between 1937 and 1954 or so.
In 80s USSR was kind of bureaucratic, "nobody cares about shit" machine, which was plodding along losing wheels and gears. People and the government simply coexisted in some weird web of rules and lies. Like "you want me to go to a demonstration for/against something? No problem - I'll need an additional day-off for that. Want me to carry a heavy banner there? - another day-off."
Sure. But the problem is: does the insurance company structure the policy in such a way that the share of liability coverage premium is fair (in probability times damage sense)?
I.e. they can shift the premium towards liability so it will constitute 80% of total policy premium. In such situation there is no reason to drop collision etc. (because it's almost free)
As result insurance co. overcharges those with minimal insurance (poor), while everybody else pays the same...
Evil...
Re:We'll Be Prepared for the Rarest of Events
on
Back to the Bunker
·
· Score: 1
That isn't rational long-term thinking, it's complacency and short-term thinking. Schemes like this are simply insurance policies.
Both things are insurance policies. And GP post's is more rational long-term than yours.
You incorrectly applied home insurance which is rational (fire happens and the home is relatively expensive). Insuring your home against alien invasion on another hand - is not.
Basically, if you need to use such bunkers on such a scale - you screwed anyway. In a lot of ways, actually.
Let me put it in other words (to avoid "what, just wait for it?" kind of reply). Probability of such an event is so low, that lots (and LOTS!) of other scenarios (with equal or higher probability of occurring) can come into play in which these bunkers are useless.
It's just basic "cave man" instinct - it's not rational.
And another thing about DNA which is different from fingerprints.
While fingerprint identifies only you, DNA on the other hand identifies ALL your blood relatives.
So government by just taking samples only from felons actually gathers "DNAprint" (as "fingerprint") information on much larger slice of the population.
Basically, you never know if they have "your" DNA or not. ... but in few years they will, one way or another...
Actually, you need to evaluate probability that your car would be stolen (where you park it) times value of the car.
Insurance company does it for you - and you're paying.
So the only reason for using Lo-Jack would be if you can deduct all the LJ fee from your insurance premium. Otherwise you paying twice and frankly, there are good reasons behind thinking that it's better not to return expensive car when stolen (e.g. you get more from insurance than from selling it).
So basically Lo-Jack is for very-very-very risk-averse people. But excessive risk-aversion is quite expensive character trait...
Ever wondered why financial markets are "risk neutral"?:-)
LOL! Shame on you - you use the same trick as creationists do: you use already rebuffed notions over and over again.
It's all over the place, even in NY times: "A Family Tree in Every Gene" By Armand Leroi:
[cut]
The dominance of the social construct theory can be traced to a 1972 article by Dr. Richard Lewontin, a Harvard geneticist, who wrote that most human genetic variation can be found within any given "race." If one looked at genes rather than faces, he claimed, the difference between an African and a European would be scarcely greater than the difference between any two Europeans. A few years later he wrote that the continued popularity of race as an idea was an "indication of the power of socioeconomically based ideology over the supposed objectivity of knowledge." Most scientists are thoughtful, liberal-minded and socially aware people. It was just what they wanted to hear.
Three decades later, it seems that Dr. Lewontin's facts were correct, and have been abundantly confirmed by ever better techniques of detecting genetic variety. His reasoning, however, was wrong. His error was an elementary one, but such was the appeal of his argument that it was only a couple of years ago that a Cambridge University statistician, A. W. F. Edwards, put his finger on it.
The error is easily illustrated. If one were asked to judge the ancestry of 100 New Yorkers, one could look at the color of their skin. That would do much to single out the Europeans, but little to distinguish the Senegalese from the Solomon Islanders. The same is true for any other feature of our bodies. The shapes of our eyes, noses and skulls; the color of our eyes and our hair; the heaviness, height and hairiness of our bodies are all, individually, poor guides to ancestry.
But this is not true when the features are taken together. Certain skin colors tend to go with certain kinds of eyes, noses, skulls and bodies. When we glance at a stranger's face we use those associations to infer what continent, or even what country, he or his ancestors came from - and we usually get it right. To put it more abstractly, human physical variation is correlated; and correlations contain information.
Genetic variants that aren't written on our faces, but that can be detected only in the genome, show similar correlations. It is these correlations that Dr. Lewontin seems to have ignored. In essence, he looked at one gene at a time and failed to see races. But if many - a few hundred - variable genes are considered simultaneously, then it is very easy to do so. Indeed, a 2002 study by scientists at the University of Southern California and Stanford showed that if a sample of people from around the world are sorted by computer into five groups on the basis of genetic similarity, the groups that emerge are native to Europe, East Asia, Africa, America and Australasia - more or less the major races of traditional anthropology.
One of the minor pleasures of this discovery is a new kind of genealogy. Today it is easy to find out where your ancestors came from - or even when they came, as with so many of us, from several different places. If you want to know what fraction of your genes are African, European or East Asian, all it takes is a mouth swab, a postage stamp and $400 - though prices will certainly fall.
It was proven already that sets of genetic differences correlate with "race".
Basically they take a swab and can tell you white or black you are with very high accuracy (actually, they can even tell you which province your ancestors came from)
And examples GP provided are most obvious ones, for others - you need to do genetic markers.
And plus, "races" are heavily correlated with "populations" so what you're saying has little sense.
"Race" is just a scale of diversity - you can go to a finer scale and tell the difference between (for example) Chinese and Japanese, or much larger and tell the difference between humans and gibbons (for example) - all supported by genetics
So because the information was available, and now reclassified it provides additional indication of value of data and thus warrants reanalysis by the interested parties (who certainly got the data archived too.)
If it can be assumed, that there is only enough business for one company in superjumbo category then airbus actually has a winning strategy - it corners superjumbo sector now and couple of years later goes after Boeing's dreamliner.
Considering that it's backed by EU's money - it seems that they can pull it off.
Ah-ha! So any scientist who accepts money is not a real scientist. Gotcha.
I do not see your logic.
What I said, is that the project needs a lot of _REAL_ science to be done in order to be marginally effective. And that _real_ scientists who do the _real_ science there not exactly care much about the bang (erm...) for the buck ratio. That's what those who ordered the system (i.e. government) who should worry.
Hmm, so all those rocket scientists and computer scientists, especially the ones with Ph.D.s, who are working on this project, they're not real scientists?
Very, very naive of you.
As long as money coming they will work on it. You need a bunch of new technologies to achieve even 1% effectiveness of a system like this. And if you're into new sensors and some data fusion stuff or missile construction or whatever - you really don't care if the entire thing works or not (as long as you're paid.)
And please don't start on "war moving the progress" flame. I'm sure there are threads on it too.
About the "march of technology": The whole point here is the amount of money and what are the real motives behind the development.
I.e. if you can develop an effective countermesure for a reasonable amount of money - good for you. If you can't even demonstrate an actually working prototype on a real test - then stop spending OUR money on deployment (WTF ?!)
The argument "better this than nothing" is flawed because "this" is not for free (certainly an understatement). And as such it should compete with other solutions to the problem. And as it been shown (boost phase etc.) it's really not up to the par (from the point of view of public safety for the money.) But it is from the point of view of corporate interests.
For less than 5% gain in performance they put a major "complication" into the core.
They will need to haul it around long after they have any use of it (compatibility).
There was a talk by one of the Intel chief designers where he told that complexity of Intel's top of the line processors has reached such levels that they have only 2-3 guys who have clear understanding of the beast and who are able to debug it. And that the large number of these small gain hacks leads to side effects in form of functional interference so that the system behave as it has it's own agenda (like those hard to explain and eliminate performance drops for few hundred cycles, etc.) He said that in terms of the overall complexity of the core it looks like it is the end of the road (i.e. major "rethinking" is in order)
The main bottleneck is CPU - RAM interface. Latent delays of several hundred cycles
just tower over these small hacks (the problem HT supposed to help with but it doesn't help much).
Basically, two much simpler cores will do much better than one which tries to pretend it's two.
Plus there is major problem with such things - software which supposed to use it.
Here's the news - software is orders of magnitude more expensive than hardware. Very few projects will go into optimizations of such level. Automatic (compiler based) will not give you much. And people will not rewrite existing code. Companies would rather spend few thousand dollars on additional hardware than hundreds of thousands on software optimizations (which is also very risky).
Just a note - generally, it's not very prudent to say that science cannot do this or that.
And in fact, I'm pretty sure that we are pretty close to start toying with some of the "things" you mentioned (surely anger, love, thought, "awe and wonder")
Just look at all the stuff we already have: drugs,
brain scanning equipment, computers to do patterns or even some augmentation, etc.
And there is certainly a lot of interest.
So, I think that religion is about to lose some more ground in that area.
And about "meaning of our existence" - I agree, "hard" science (most probably) doesn't have anything to do with that.
Slashdot Mirror
Card just appeared broken.
Turned out, I had to re-format it using camera itself, not windows, not an mp3 player.
I have no idea why, but it solved the problem. So I still have fully functional 5 year old cards (all of them).
The whole mess is very frustrating...
Soviet Union was not such a static phenomena as people think of it.
You reference Stalin's purges which happened between 1937 and 1954 or so.
In 80s USSR was kind of bureaucratic, "nobody cares about shit" machine, which was plodding along losing wheels and gears. People and the government simply coexisted in some weird web of rules and lies. Like "you want me to go to a demonstration for/against something? No problem - I'll need an additional day-off for that. Want me to carry a heavy banner there? - another day-off."
Engineer who's worth his salt supposed to know (remember) such things.
Trivial: take the first line to buffer, second line: put it into the buffer with probability=1/2, third: 1/3, fourth: 1/4 etc.
In the end you get that every line has the same chance to be in the buffer.
Basically, growing rice in the south requred manual labor (something to do with fields not supporting any form of machinery)
At that time rice was highly valuble so slavery did have solid financial basis.
I.e. they can shift the premium towards liability so it will constitute 80% of total policy premium. In such situation there is no reason to drop collision etc. (because it's almost free)
As result insurance co. overcharges those with minimal insurance (poor), while everybody else pays the same...
Evil...
Both things are insurance policies. And GP post's is more rational long-term than yours. You incorrectly applied home insurance which is rational (fire happens and the home is relatively expensive). Insuring your home against alien invasion on another hand - is not.
Basically, if you need to use such bunkers on such a scale - you screwed anyway. In a lot of ways, actually.
Let me put it in other words (to avoid "what, just wait for it?" kind of reply). Probability of such an event is so low, that lots (and LOTS!) of other scenarios (with equal or higher probability of occurring) can come into play in which these bunkers are useless.
It's just basic "cave man" instinct - it's not rational.
While fingerprint identifies only you, DNA on the other hand identifies ALL your blood relatives.
So government by just taking samples only from felons actually gathers "DNAprint" (as "fingerprint") information on much larger slice of the population.
Basically, you never know if they have "your" DNA or not.
... but in few years they will, one way or another...
Actually, you need to evaluate probability that your car would be stolen (where you park it) times value of the car.
Insurance company does it for you - and you're paying.
So the only reason for using Lo-Jack would be if you can deduct all the LJ fee from your insurance premium. Otherwise you paying twice and frankly, there are good reasons behind thinking that it's better not to return expensive car when stolen (e.g. you get more from insurance than from selling it).
So basically Lo-Jack is for very-very-very risk-averse people. But excessive risk-aversion is quite expensive character trait... :-)
Ever wondered why financial markets are "risk neutral"?
It's all over the place, even in NY times: "A Family Tree in Every Gene" By Armand Leroi:
[cut]
The dominance of the social construct theory can be traced to a 1972 article by Dr. Richard Lewontin, a Harvard geneticist, who wrote that most human genetic variation can be found within any given "race." If one looked at genes rather than faces, he claimed, the difference between an African and a European would be scarcely greater than the difference between any two Europeans. A few years later he wrote that the continued popularity of race as an idea was an "indication of the power of socioeconomically based ideology over the supposed objectivity of knowledge." Most scientists are thoughtful, liberal-minded and socially aware people. It was just what they wanted to hear.
Three decades later, it seems that Dr. Lewontin's facts were correct, and have been abundantly confirmed by ever better techniques of detecting genetic variety. His reasoning, however, was wrong. His error was an elementary one, but such was the appeal of his argument that it was only a couple of years ago that a Cambridge University statistician, A. W. F. Edwards, put his finger on it.
The error is easily illustrated. If one were asked to judge the ancestry of 100 New Yorkers, one could look at the color of their skin. That would do much to single out the Europeans, but little to distinguish the Senegalese from the Solomon Islanders. The same is true for any other feature of our bodies. The shapes of our eyes, noses and skulls; the color of our eyes and our hair; the heaviness, height and hairiness of our bodies are all, individually, poor guides to ancestry.
But this is not true when the features are taken together. Certain skin colors tend to go with certain kinds of eyes, noses, skulls and bodies. When we glance at a stranger's face we use those associations to infer what continent, or even what country, he or his ancestors came from - and we usually get it right. To put it more abstractly, human physical variation is correlated; and correlations contain information.
Genetic variants that aren't written on our faces, but that can be detected only in the genome, show similar correlations. It is these correlations that Dr. Lewontin seems to have ignored. In essence, he looked at one gene at a time and failed to see races. But if many - a few hundred - variable genes are considered simultaneously, then it is very easy to do so. Indeed, a 2002 study by scientists at the University of Southern California and Stanford showed that if a sample of people from around the world are sorted by computer into five groups on the basis of genetic similarity, the groups that emerge are native to Europe, East Asia, Africa, America and Australasia - more or less the major races of traditional anthropology.
One of the minor pleasures of this discovery is a new kind of genealogy. Today it is easy to find out where your ancestors came from - or even when they came, as with so many of us, from several different places. If you want to know what fraction of your genes are African, European or East Asian, all it takes is a mouth swab, a postage stamp and $400 - though prices will certainly fall.
[cut]
Basically they take a swab and can tell you white or black you are with very high accuracy (actually, they can even tell you which province your ancestors came from)
And examples GP provided are most obvious ones, for others - you need to do genetic markers.
And plus, "races" are heavily correlated with "populations" so what you're saying has little sense.
"Race" is just a scale of diversity - you can go to a finer scale and tell the difference between (for example) Chinese and Japanese, or much larger and tell the difference between humans and gibbons (for example) - all supported by genetics
Good book.
And I thought it was nonsence...
So because the information was available, and now reclassified it provides additional indication of value of data and thus warrants reanalysis by the interested parties (who certainly got the data archived too.)
You just register your email with a private tracker and in a few hours get your "linux distribution" as an email attachment...
Don't be naive.
Considering, that they get a lot of information using other methods, they can easily cross-match the data.
Plus, the exact technical details about that request aren't known, so it's you who's too complacent.
If it can be assumed, that there is only enough business for one company in superjumbo category then airbus actually has a winning strategy - it corners superjumbo sector now and couple of years later goes after Boeing's dreamliner.
Considering that it's backed by EU's money - it seems that they can pull it off.
I do not see your logic.
What I said, is that the project needs a lot of _REAL_ science to be done in order to be marginally effective. And that _real_ scientists who do the _real_ science there not exactly care much about the bang (erm...) for the buck ratio. That's what those who ordered the system (i.e. government) who should worry.
Very, very naive of you.
As long as money coming they will work on it. You need a bunch of new technologies to achieve even 1% effectiveness of a system like this. And if you're into new sensors and some data fusion stuff or missile construction or whatever - you really don't care if the entire thing works or not (as long as you're paid.)
And please don't start on "war moving the progress" flame. I'm sure there are threads on it too.
About the "march of technology": The whole point here is the amount of money and what are the real motives behind the development.
I.e. if you can develop an effective countermesure for a reasonable amount of money - good for you. If you can't even demonstrate an actually working prototype on a real test - then stop spending OUR money on deployment (WTF ?!)
The argument "better this than nothing" is flawed because "this" is not for free (certainly an understatement). And as such it should compete with other solutions to the problem. And as it been shown (boost phase etc.) it's really not up to the par (from the point of view of public safety for the money.) But it is from the point of view of corporate interests.
It's not "boost phase" - it's other way around.
For boost phase they want a freaking boeing 747 whith a laser thing.
Cache misses are not a "common" event
Actually it's _SO_ common that by designers own description it's a shame.
That's why HT was invented in the first place - to do something when they wait for "missed" data.
Bullshit (sorry for that)
For less than 5% gain in performance they put a major "complication" into the core.
They will need to haul it around long after they have any use of it (compatibility).
There was a talk by one of the Intel chief designers where he told that complexity of Intel's top of the line processors has reached such levels that they have only 2-3 guys who have clear understanding of the beast and who are able to debug it. And that the large number of these small gain hacks leads to side effects in form of functional interference so that the system behave as it has it's own agenda (like those hard to explain and eliminate performance drops for few hundred cycles, etc.)
He said that in terms of the overall complexity of the core it looks like it is the end of the road (i.e. major "rethinking" is in order)
The main bottleneck is CPU - RAM interface. Latent delays of several hundred cycles just tower over these small hacks (the problem HT supposed to help with but it doesn't help much).
Basically, two much simpler cores will do much better than one which tries to pretend it's two.
Plus there is major problem with such things - software which supposed to use it.
Here's the news - software is orders of magnitude more expensive than hardware.
Very few projects will go into optimizations of such level. Automatic (compiler based) will not give you much. And people will not rewrite existing code. Companies would rather spend few thousand dollars on additional hardware than hundreds of thousands on software optimizations (which is also very risky).
Actually real amount of information is much lower.
Printers tend to cheat in certain situations - they will reproduce shade more or less right but will put pixels in different places.
There some limitations on what printers can do (lasers and inks alike.)
I think google search would be "error diffusion"
Just a note - generally, it's not very prudent to say that science cannot do this or that.
And in fact, I'm pretty sure that we are pretty close to start toying with some of the "things" you mentioned (surely anger, love, thought, "awe and wonder")
Just look at all the stuff we already have: drugs, brain scanning equipment, computers to do patterns or even some augmentation, etc. And there is certainly a lot of interest.
So, I think that religion is about to lose some more ground in that area.
And about "meaning of our existence" - I agree, "hard" science (most probably) doesn't have anything to do with that.
How about grey goo scenario?
It could attack as by consuming some vital resource (oxygen for example) and reproducing fast enough.