A cryptocurrency could go up a lot again if one becomes commonly used.
Right now, a very small percentage of the population holds any cryptocurrency, and a tiny percentage of worldwide financial transactions are conducted in cryptocurrency.
If this changed - if one became popular for financial transactions, where a lot of the population carried some device that could complete cryptocurrency transactions as easily as a credit card, and many or most businesses accepted cryptocurrency, than whatever currency wins that "common usage" battle still has a long way up. The price is just supply and demand, and large numbers of people acquiring some currency to use as currency = demand and would drive up the price further.
I don't know when or if that would happen, but it's conceivable that a cryptocurrency could, at some point, become very easy to use and offer some advantage(s) over other currencies such that it was widely adopted for use as a general currency, which would cause at least one more run up in price for any currency that does that.
You should ALWAYS be able to stop safely when the person in front of you stops fast.
You obviously haven't driven in really big cities - New York, DC, LA, Chicago...
I completely agree with you that that's how everyone should drive. That's how I drive whenever I'm anywhere where it's possible to do so (moderate sized cities, small towns, rural areas, roads without multiple lanes).
But in the really big cities, if you leave a safe gap such that you could stop in time if there were an accident in front of you, then another car changes lanes to get in that gap. Slow down to make another gap, another car instantly fills it to where you're tailgating them. Keep doing that, and you slow down and down to where you're going an unsafe speed and everyone is swerving around you like a stopped car - and as they swerve around you, they're still cutting over in front of you so fast that you're overdriving your stopping distance. The only speed at which you're not overdriving your stopping distance is under about 10 MPH, which is both illegal on most major arteries and insanely unsafe.
The only thing to do if you have to drive in these places is leaves the biggest gap you can that will usually stop another car from darting in front of you, which still means you are not guaranteed safe stopping distance. Or just don't drive there. There is no way to drive there and avoid tailgating, because someone else will change lanes to make it so you're tailgating regardless of your speed. There is no way to drive safely.
I think it's bursting now.
As an honors graduate of a top 10-university, I feel confident in saying: most college graduates would acquire skills more useful to employers spending 4 years working than 4 years in college. Plus they financial difference for the prospective students of spending 4 years making money rather than 4 years hemorrhaging money is enormous.
Aside from certain professional fields that truly require a lot of very specific knowledge it takes years to learn (doctors, lawyers, scientists, etc), schooling is a signaling function, not an actual value-add proposition.
Bran Caplan's Take on Education
But it's value as a signaling function falls apart when supply outstrips demand for a significant category of degree recipients - which is middle-quality school liberal arts majors now, and that's pulling back the veil on the myth of education adding employer-relevant value to students.
If the occupants have reasonable assessments, then the only way for the offers to have any effect on the occupants is for the evil actors to offer everybody twice the market value of their house. And it's easy to buy up whole neighborhoods right now by offering everybody twice the value of their house.
Right now, the evil actors don't want to actually cough up as much money as people want in exchange for moving. They try to buy up homes by offering 10% above market value. When the people refuse, they just bribe government to use eminent domain to kick the people out and let them buy the land at below market value.
If my proposal could somehow help change the evil company's strategy to instead offer everybody 200% of the value of their house, that would be great. But unfortunately, I think the evil people would still rather use eminent domain than actually pay the money. Houses are expensive - it's cheaper to bribe government than pay what it takes to make people move voluntarily.
If it was a real offer to buy, then the "ludicrous tax bill" is just what you should have paid already, that you've been dodging by lying about the value of your property.
That's right. This kind of rule, in effect, would force everyone to grossly overstate the value of everything and pay ludicrous taxes to avoid unnecessary risk of a sudden forced move.
However, there may still be a better way to handle this that preserves the idea. For example, if someone makes an offer to buy at twice your valuation or more, you must either sell, or change your valuation to the new offer and pay a few years of back taxes at the new valuation. This would make forced moves always avoidable, but would still provide a reality check between claimed value and market value. In this case, if the real value of a building is $1B and Apple's claiming $200, someone would surely make an offer at $700M or so and then Apple would have to either sell or change the evaluation to $700M and pay several years of back taxes at the $700M price.
That's right. My wife is a scientist, she has a PhD in pharmacology.
Talking to her through her undergrad, PhD, and Postdoc, I identified what I believe are three separate problems in science that each exacerbate the others and collectively are having a devastating effect on the field:
1. Publish or perish.
2. Nobody reports negative results
3. Most scientists who are below the level of Principle Investigator for a lab are being assigned their projects.
So it used to be, back when my parents got their doctorates, that a new scientist joined a lab, proposed their own research, conducted the research, wrote a thesis, and then defended it before committee. If the committee was decent, it didn't matter if the results were positive or negative. They grilled the candidate on how they generated their hypothesis, why the implications would be important whether positive or negative, how they set up the experiments and conducted them, how they analyzed and presented the results - basically, the candidate had to prove they knew everything it takes to operate effectively as a scientist.
Maybe if the research was exceptional, the thesis advisor would also be recommended that it be submitted to a journal, but most of the theses just went to the institution's library. The point was to prove the candidate understood and could perform science as an academic exercise, not to contribute usefully to the field.
Today that is completely different. Most PhD candidates are assigned a project by the PI of the lab they join. So right off the bat, you aren't differentiating people by the quality of their ideas, which is probably the most important trait for a scientist. Instead, the quality of the idea assigned to them is likely to have a huge impact on how their career goes. It's like randomly handing out career potential without regard for ability. And there is no point in a committee grilling them about the formation of the hypothesis or what positive or negative results would contribute to understanding, because they never came up with the hypothesis in the first place.
Then they have to have one or more papers accepted by peer reviewed journals to get their PhD. The papers are their thesis, and as long as they were accepted for publication, defending them is perfunctory now. Their acceptance is the only real test to get the PhD.
Which means nobody is trying to make sure the candidate actually understands and can perform science; supposedly the papers evidence that, but we all know that isn't really true now; the peer reviewers do not attempt to replicate the study or dig in deep enough to see if any of it is actually high quality work.
Not being able to publish negative results means that if you are assigned a project that ends up indistinguishable from the null hypothesis, you can waste years of your life based on a luck-of-the-draw assignment, with no regard to your ability. Or... you can fudge the data.
"Fudging the data" here doesn't even necessarily imply anything overtly malicious. Talking to people in the lab who'd discuss how experiment after experiment had failed to show the desired effect, and what experiment they were planning next to try to demonstrate it, my standard comment was "we need to pass a 95% confidence test, so we'd better plan about 20 experiments to prove it."
A possible 4th thing to list here is that the system now takes so long to get through, from undergrad to PhD to a Post Doc or two or three, that by the time anybody gets to be a PI and actually start pursuing their own research ideas, they're past the age past scientists were when they achieved approximately every major breakthrough in the history of science.
This "news story" reads like one of the Dilbert comics where someone with no understanding of the meaning of the words mashes a bunch of buzzwords together.
"They're betting biology will be the next great computing platform, DNA will be the code that runs it, and Crispr will be the programming language."
None of these companies are looking at biology as a computing platform.
While they aren't trying to use biology to perform computation, there are a number of ways computers are good parallels for biology. But even then, they get that wrong. DNA is a storage medium - it's like a hard drive, not software code. The DNA stores the software code. Genes are like code. CRISPR is nothing remotely like a programming language - it's like the combination of firmware and physical write mechanisms in a drive that allow the drive to actually go write values to the right places.
I agree the shifts are a disaster. We're not really saving energy anymore with DST, and it's killing people, causing depression and economic losses, etc.
But... I'm near the eastern end of EST. Near the summer solstice, with DST in effect, it's light out from about 4:30 AM to 9 pm. Honestly, I'd be better off if there were a 2-hr DST shift - I don't get up before 5:30 AM, 5:30 to 10 pm would be much better, which is what they get at the western end of EST and what I grew up with.
WIthout DST, we're looking at it being light out from 3:30 AM to 8 PM. To me, a 3:30 AM sunrise with the modern fixed work/school/daycare schedule is just inhumane. And what a waste having all that daylight waaay before time to get up, and then get dark at 8 PM.
OK, so getting rid of DST makes summer suck. So we could just do DST all year like Florida wants to?
Well, Russia tried permanent DST, and depression and morning traffic accidents is winter went up. Near the western edge of EST, winter solstice sunrise is already 8:20 AM. Permanent DST would make the sun come up at 9:20 AM - about two and a half hours after most people get up for work/school. That is depressing. I remember waiting for the school bus on frozen, dark snowy days well before civil twilight even began, but with permanent DST, we'd be talking about getting to school and classes starting way before civil twilight.
So people get depressed and have accidents now for a week on either side of the time change... but if we get rid of it, I'm not sure we aren't just trading it for another set of problems - insomnia in summer, less summer sports and exercise, and trading two weeks of depression and accidents in the spring/fall for three months of depression and accidents in winter.
A single world time zone doesn't help with any of this. It's not like everyone will just run a nocturnal schedule in the part of the earth that gets midnight at what's now noon and vice/versa. If you have to call someone around the world, the question would just shift in semantics from "what time is it there" to "what time do people get up there?" And having a single time zone with no DST doesn't help with it being light too early in summer or too late in winter. Companies, schools, etc could be free to shift the time on their own, but for anyone with complicated schedules, having different organizations make different decisions about whether to shift or not just makes everything worse.
Although Hilary is one of the least popular presidential candidates ever, she has vicious defenders even among those who don't like her, given the alternative.
This [disclaimer, they're selling t-shirts here] sums up how I feel about it.
I've gotten a chance to try out a few friends' work-issued Blackberrys in the smartphone era, and I've got to say, a convenient way to destroy the thing entirely sounds like the most useful feature RIM has added in a long time.
We lost probably $30k in lost sales, and employees unable to do their jobs yesterday. Liquid web is going to lose a ton of customers over this. I don't know if it was their "fault," or if it was the top tier providers in their area they contract with. But as I understand it, if we had been with anyone really big who had us colocated in facilities way far away from each other, this would have been extremely unlikely.
Or you can just learn how to expose film properly before you ever set foot in a darkroom, and then spend your time in the darkroom learning about dodging and burning, cropping, using multicontrast papers and filters, ferrotyping tins, different developers, etc. to get the look you want, in which case you get feedback within minutes and can keep printing until you get what you want.
It's true it's not the fastest way to check framing, exposure, depth of field, focus, etc. Although it can also force people to put more thought into those things, since the stakes are higher.
You can find current articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, etc stating medical items as facts that are 10, 20, 30 years or more behind the current state of research at the time.
You still see newspapers running articles saying that post-menopausal hormone supplements reduce the risk of heart-attack in women (they increase it), that plastic cutting boards have lower risk of harboring dangerous bacteria than wood (it's higher), that low-fat diets help with weight loss (they make it harder to lose weight than higher fat diets), that all fat is unhealthy (it's not), that foods like rice cakes and baked potatoes and simple pastas are great diet foods (they're terrible, they have high glycemic response, you'd be better off eating a candy bar as far as weight loss is concerned), I could go on and on. The article you reference is simply written by someone who doesn't keep up on the current state of the research.
"Current state" meaning around 2008.
I don't have time to recount all the science, but here's one link to a 2009 meta-study.
I'm not exaggerating at all. I'm not claiming my views are so well established that they're in the 8th-grade health textbook, that will probably take 100 years, but the science behind this in peer-reviewed research journals is well established. Expect at least 10 years for the media to pick up on it, if we're lucky.
One of the biggest problems with vitamin supplements is that neither the takers nor the manufacturers (nor doctors prescribing supplements) pay any attention to absorption pathways. They also tend to ignore variants, which is a problem with a broader category of nutrients than just vitamins. There is a pretty decent scientific basis for the idea that good levels of vitamins are healthy, but supplements are usually taken in ways that are likely to make things worse rather than better through crowding out other essential vitamins and minerals that get absorbed through the same pathway.
Take zinc. It was found that zinc can denature viruses, so a viral sore throat can have its symptoms somewhat alleviated by zinc lozenges. But zinc is absorbed through the same pathway as copper, and the sort of large doses of zinc that people are taking for cold remedies is probably crowding out reasonable levels of copper absorption. And guess what copper's critical for? White blood cells and your immune system, the functions that can really do something about colds. Usually there's some bit of news, that the media gets wrong, then the general public gets even more wrong, and what the average consumer does in respect to a new scientific development ends up being completely counter-productive. Thus the news that zinc can denature viruses on contact turned into people taking zinc supplement pills with ads on the side of the bottle about taking them for colds. But pillsâ"as opposed to lozengesâ"do not result in significant concentrations of zinc where the virus is, and then they end up weakening the immune system by crowding out copper absorption.
Vitamin E is another excellent example. "Vitamin E" is 8 different vitamins that serve very different roles in the body. But they are absorbed through the same pathway and are highly subject to crowding-out. Basically, due to a terminology problem that the 8 distinct vitamins got lumped together as "Vitamin E," people who take vitamin E supplements end up deficient in 7 essential vitamins, unless they're taking reasonable doses of multitocopherol supplements, which isn't what much of anybody takes.
This tendancy to lump things together has lead to another super popular modern marketing disaster, Omega-3 fatty acids. Omega-3 is not a type of fatty acid, it's a class of fatty acids encompassing many different molecules. It turns out that only the fish-derived versions demonstrate any of the health benefits, but basically every food in the grocery store touting "Omega 3" all over the label is using plant sources, where they might as well be adding a gram of canola oil or corn oil for all the health benefits you'll be getting. Everything touting the helath benefits of flax seeds have no scientific basis, the the science is quite clear that the Omega 3 fatty acids in flax do not exhibit any of the hormone-like beneficial properties such as reducing inflammation that the fish Omega 3 fatty acids have.
I strongly suspect that in the long-term it will turn out that taking appropriate supplements is a very good idea for health, but right now, the science hasn't explored the area thoroughly enough to make solid recommendations given the complexity of the subject, and what little we do know has very little effect on what manufactures make and advertise and what consumers actually take. Which probably leads to the negative outcomes.
If you want to try to figure out, based on what we know, what the best guesses might be about what supplements to actually take, try reading up on the work of Bruce Ames and Andrew Weil. They don't have easy answers, but Bruce Ames did brilliant research, and Andrew Weil makes practical best-guess recommendations based upon the current state of the science.
How long might it take us to become a threat? Interstellar space-faring aliens may have civilizations millions or billions of years old. They may have seen annoying upstart civilizations seem as harmless as one gnat to all the world's militaries, but then leave them alone for just a few tens or hundreds of thousand years, and all of a sudden they're some kind of annoyance. How often do they happen through this part of space? The universe is a big place. Monitoring may be resource intensive and error prone. They might just consider it good practice, in discovering new life, especially with some modicum of intelligence, to stamp it out as they find it to reduce risk to their way of life.
I'm surprised I don't see anyone here questioning this 5 zettabyte number.
The biggest drives currently manufactured are 4 terabyte 3.5" drives. 5 zetabytes would require 1.25 billion of those drives. A great price on a 4TB drive right now is $190. I doubt there's enough margin in them to make this possible, but let's just say that based on the insane quantity they get them for $150 each. That's $187 billion for the drives alone, nothing for the computers and racks and air conditioning and all. The NSA's budget is estimated at 8 billion a year. $187 billion is 23 times their yearly budget. It would be about 3% of total federal spending for a year... just for the drives. Total facility costs would certainly run many times that... it would probably cost more than an entire year's military spending to build a 5 zettabyte data center.
Also, you can fit about 500 terabytes in a server cabinet. That means 10 million server cabinets. A server cabinet is about 15 cubic feet of volume. So just the cabinets alone would run 150 million cubic feet. And that's just storage, not even including computers. And it's not like you can pack them in solid, of course. If you can make a datacenter with one third of its total volume being server racks, that would be amazing. The largest building in the world is only 472 million cubic feet, this would have to equal or surpass it.
Also, the entire world wide market for hard drives is only a little over 30 billion a year... this one project would consume over 6 times as much value in hard drives as every other use in the world combined for the year.
Unless the NSA has developed their own mass storage technology that no one else knows about and is radically superior to anything commercially available, I'm guessing someone's exaggerating or got their numbers wrong.
I'd say about a quarter of the kids I knew in school drew pictures of guns or tanks or other violent things.
Adam Lanza was also an honer student. While about 25% of kids draw weapons, only about 10% of kids are honor students. For higher specificity on their correlational targeting, they should arrest honor students.
Five years ago your comment would have made a lot of sense to me, but now you're talking about how everyone's gone X86 during the first massive movement away from X86 the industry's seen... smartphones and tablets are all computers that run on ARM processors, they're cleaning X86's clock in the only rapidly expanding market. And ARM's next core design is aimed at servers.
For the first time, Windows compatibility is mattering less and less as many users only use the web and web apps on their computers - opening the door to competing processors for the first time since the late 80's. At the same time, PC's continue to represent a smaller and smaller share of new CPU's, which are migrating to data centers, smartphones, and pads, which are even less dependent on X86 compatibility.
For the first time, the computational penalty of X86 instruction set translation for RISC cores may not outweigh the compatibility benefit for a significant portion of users. Increasingly, customers don't care about compatibility with existing X86 codebases. Like ARM, anyone with a new processor with compelling performance per watt might actually be able to sell the thing, without everyone assuming it's worthless if it won't run Windows.
Also, I wouldn't quite characterize POWER as a strictly legacy product, since IBM introduced the latest iteration, the power 7+, in August 2012, and is currently selling 15 different systems using Power7 processors. Not to mention the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Wii, and not-even-out-yet Wii U that are all POWER based systems.
That's a common theory, but Apple's P/E is 15.6. For context:
Microsoft: 15.4
IBM: 14.5
GE: 18.2
Walmart: 15.2
Toyota: 17.87
Do most of the biggest companies in the world also hold most of their value in the expectation of further rapid growth?
Apple makes unreal amounts of money. Their profitability increased so fast, it outpaced their stock value despite its growth. Early this year Marc Andreessen made the investment news pointing out that Apple's profits had so far outpaced their stock price that they had the P/E of a steel company that was about to go out of business.
Compared to other companies, their stock price is pretty much what one would expect it to be for a company that investors expect to stagnate right where it is.
You nailed it in pointing out that the current TLD system is already a "point of stupidity."
The point of having different TLD's would be to allow otherwise identical URL's to be usefully differentiated by a TLD. In practice, this is very rarely the case. Most domain owners do not want otherwise identical domains at other TLD's, so they feel they need to register their domain at a bunch of TLD's and forward them. The nearly ubiquitous need to do this among major websites demonstrates that the whole idea is flawed. Most of the public only knows about ".com" and basically think that means "on the internet." Only a few geeks are even aware of what the TLD system was intended to accomplish.
The best answer to the TLD problem is to abandon it - grandfather it out. Stop adding new ones. They should do this by making the final period a non-special signifier in addresses. Anyone can pick anything they want and put any number of periods in their address they want. Every current address would still be unique and valid. But you can register new addresses with no TLD, just use whatever non-owned string makes the most sense for you. If you like TLD's and actually think they're useful, nothing's stopping you from registering new sites with a period followed by the three letters of any current TLD or any new one you want to make up. The process of handing out new addresses with no TLD fairly - you know, like "http://www.google," or "http://sex" would be a bit messy, but grandfathering out official TLD's would be the best system for the future internet.
This will never happen though, because there's too much money in selling new imaginary property with every new TLD they roll out. The majority of that money is not coming from people looking to take advantage of a new useful identifier, but from people looking to defend their identifier from others in the new domain - revealing the whole problem with the TLD sytem.
They may have any amount of legitimate expertise to contribute. Even if it's just on the business/managerial side of things and not the software/encryption side, not that that's necessarily the case.
But you know one big thing they contribute just by being there? This company will be accused of being anti-American, of "helping the terrorists win." There's nothing that will help inoculate them against that as much as having a couple of combat veterans as founders.
And to those who will say the presence of veterans means you can't trust this organization because they will provide a backdoor for the feds, the people in our armed forces hold a range of political opinions, they are not all clones. And there are a lot of them who agree with a libertarian or traditional conservative view of highly restricted government power and lots of freedom. A lot of people in the military are there to fight for our freedom, and that includes opposing the Orwellian encroachments of our own government.
There's another option here. Think, what if you were a bomber who wanted to maximize the terror you could cause? How about get a good voice scrambler and an anonymous email account and then call and email in bomb threats through several layers of proxies, TOR, etc. They evacuate buildings, cause fear, lots of inconvenience. Keep sending the threats, just keep doing it over and over, more frequently, relentlessly, until they end up with no choice but to ignore you, after incalculable time and expense on the fake threats. Maybe for fear of liability for NOT evacuating for threats, they will go to extremes, but just keep sending them until they're disrupting half the class schedule if they have to... make them cancel major sporting events, whatever it takes to make your threats impossible NOT to ignore. THEN, once they're ignoring you, you actually blow some people up exactly when and where you called in a threat.
Then start up with the threats again, and now what do they do?
The idea that a real bomber won't call in the threat to maximize impact isn't valid, because this scenario involves calling in the threat, and maximizes fear over a random non-reported explosion.
For very few actual bombs, you will cause much more fear and inconvenience this way.
Slashdot Mirror
A cryptocurrency could go up a lot again if one becomes commonly used.
Right now, a very small percentage of the population holds any cryptocurrency, and a tiny percentage of worldwide financial transactions are conducted in cryptocurrency.
If this changed - if one became popular for financial transactions, where a lot of the population carried some device that could complete cryptocurrency transactions as easily as a credit card, and many or most businesses accepted cryptocurrency, than whatever currency wins that "common usage" battle still has a long way up. The price is just supply and demand, and large numbers of people acquiring some currency to use as currency = demand and would drive up the price further.
I don't know when or if that would happen, but it's conceivable that a cryptocurrency could, at some point, become very easy to use and offer some advantage(s) over other currencies such that it was widely adopted for use as a general currency, which would cause at least one more run up in price for any currency that does that.
You should ALWAYS be able to stop safely when the person in front of you stops fast.
You obviously haven't driven in really big cities - New York, DC, LA, Chicago...
I completely agree with you that that's how everyone should drive. That's how I drive whenever I'm anywhere where it's possible to do so (moderate sized cities, small towns, rural areas, roads without multiple lanes).
But in the really big cities, if you leave a safe gap such that you could stop in time if there were an accident in front of you, then another car changes lanes to get in that gap. Slow down to make another gap, another car instantly fills it to where you're tailgating them. Keep doing that, and you slow down and down to where you're going an unsafe speed and everyone is swerving around you like a stopped car - and as they swerve around you, they're still cutting over in front of you so fast that you're overdriving your stopping distance. The only speed at which you're not overdriving your stopping distance is under about 10 MPH, which is both illegal on most major arteries and insanely unsafe.
The only thing to do if you have to drive in these places is leaves the biggest gap you can that will usually stop another car from darting in front of you, which still means you are not guaranteed safe stopping distance. Or just don't drive there. There is no way to drive there and avoid tailgating, because someone else will change lanes to make it so you're tailgating regardless of your speed. There is no way to drive safely.
I think it's bursting now. As an honors graduate of a top 10-university, I feel confident in saying: most college graduates would acquire skills more useful to employers spending 4 years working than 4 years in college. Plus they financial difference for the prospective students of spending 4 years making money rather than 4 years hemorrhaging money is enormous. Aside from certain professional fields that truly require a lot of very specific knowledge it takes years to learn (doctors, lawyers, scientists, etc), schooling is a signaling function, not an actual value-add proposition. Bran Caplan's Take on Education But it's value as a signaling function falls apart when supply outstrips demand for a significant category of degree recipients - which is middle-quality school liberal arts majors now, and that's pulling back the veil on the myth of education adding employer-relevant value to students.
Right now, the evil actors don't want to actually cough up as much money as people want in exchange for moving. They try to buy up homes by offering 10% above market value. When the people refuse, they just bribe government to use eminent domain to kick the people out and let them buy the land at below market value.
If my proposal could somehow help change the evil company's strategy to instead offer everybody 200% of the value of their house, that would be great. But unfortunately, I think the evil people would still rather use eminent domain than actually pay the money. Houses are expensive - it's cheaper to bribe government than pay what it takes to make people move voluntarily.
If it was a real offer to buy, then the "ludicrous tax bill" is just what you should have paid already, that you've been dodging by lying about the value of your property.
That's right. This kind of rule, in effect, would force everyone to grossly overstate the value of everything and pay ludicrous taxes to avoid unnecessary risk of a sudden forced move. However, there may still be a better way to handle this that preserves the idea. For example, if someone makes an offer to buy at twice your valuation or more, you must either sell, or change your valuation to the new offer and pay a few years of back taxes at the new valuation. This would make forced moves always avoidable, but would still provide a reality check between claimed value and market value. In this case, if the real value of a building is $1B and Apple's claiming $200, someone would surely make an offer at $700M or so and then Apple would have to either sell or change the evaluation to $700M and pay several years of back taxes at the $700M price.
Talking to her through her undergrad, PhD, and Postdoc, I identified what I believe are three separate problems in science that each exacerbate the others and collectively are having a devastating effect on the field:
1. Publish or perish.
2. Nobody reports negative results
3. Most scientists who are below the level of Principle Investigator for a lab are being assigned their projects.
So it used to be, back when my parents got their doctorates, that a new scientist joined a lab, proposed their own research, conducted the research, wrote a thesis, and then defended it before committee. If the committee was decent, it didn't matter if the results were positive or negative. They grilled the candidate on how they generated their hypothesis, why the implications would be important whether positive or negative, how they set up the experiments and conducted them, how they analyzed and presented the results - basically, the candidate had to prove they knew everything it takes to operate effectively as a scientist.
Maybe if the research was exceptional, the thesis advisor would also be recommended that it be submitted to a journal, but most of the theses just went to the institution's library. The point was to prove the candidate understood and could perform science as an academic exercise, not to contribute usefully to the field. Today that is completely different. Most PhD candidates are assigned a project by the PI of the lab they join. So right off the bat, you aren't differentiating people by the quality of their ideas, which is probably the most important trait for a scientist. Instead, the quality of the idea assigned to them is likely to have a huge impact on how their career goes. It's like randomly handing out career potential without regard for ability. And there is no point in a committee grilling them about the formation of the hypothesis or what positive or negative results would contribute to understanding, because they never came up with the hypothesis in the first place.
Hence got your bad project."
Then they have to have one or more papers accepted by peer reviewed journals to get their PhD. The papers are their thesis, and as long as they were accepted for publication, defending them is perfunctory now. Their acceptance is the only real test to get the PhD.
Which means nobody is trying to make sure the candidate actually understands and can perform science; supposedly the papers evidence that, but we all know that isn't really true now; the peer reviewers do not attempt to replicate the study or dig in deep enough to see if any of it is actually high quality work.
Not being able to publish negative results means that if you are assigned a project that ends up indistinguishable from the null hypothesis, you can waste years of your life based on a luck-of-the-draw assignment, with no regard to your ability. Or... you can fudge the data.
"Fudging the data" here doesn't even necessarily imply anything overtly malicious. Talking to people in the lab who'd discuss how experiment after experiment had failed to show the desired effect, and what experiment they were planning next to try to demonstrate it, my standard comment was "we need to pass a 95% confidence test, so we'd better plan about 20 experiments to prove it."
A possible 4th thing to list here is that the system now takes so long to get through, from undergrad to PhD to a Post Doc or two or three, that by the time anybody gets to be a PI and actually start pursuing their own research ideas, they're past the age past scientists were when they achieved approximately every major breakthrough in the history of science.
This "news story" reads like one of the Dilbert comics where someone with no understanding of the meaning of the words mashes a bunch of buzzwords together.
"They're betting biology will be the next great computing platform, DNA will be the code that runs it, and Crispr will be the programming language."
None of these companies are looking at biology as a computing platform.
While they aren't trying to use biology to perform computation, there are a number of ways computers are good parallels for biology. But even then, they get that wrong. DNA is a storage medium - it's like a hard drive, not software code. The DNA stores the software code. Genes are like code. CRISPR is nothing remotely like a programming language - it's like the combination of firmware and physical write mechanisms in a drive that allow the drive to actually go write values to the right places.
But... I'm near the eastern end of EST. Near the summer solstice, with DST in effect, it's light out from about 4:30 AM to 9 pm. Honestly, I'd be better off if there were a 2-hr DST shift - I don't get up before 5:30 AM, 5:30 to 10 pm would be much better, which is what they get at the western end of EST and what I grew up with.
WIthout DST, we're looking at it being light out from 3:30 AM to 8 PM. To me, a 3:30 AM sunrise with the modern fixed work/school/daycare schedule is just inhumane. And what a waste having all that daylight waaay before time to get up, and then get dark at 8 PM.
OK, so getting rid of DST makes summer suck. So we could just do DST all year like Florida wants to?
Well, Russia tried permanent DST, and depression and morning traffic accidents is winter went up. Near the western edge of EST, winter solstice sunrise is already 8:20 AM. Permanent DST would make the sun come up at 9:20 AM - about two and a half hours after most people get up for work/school. That is depressing. I remember waiting for the school bus on frozen, dark snowy days well before civil twilight even began, but with permanent DST, we'd be talking about getting to school and classes starting way before civil twilight. So people get depressed and have accidents now for a week on either side of the time change... but if we get rid of it, I'm not sure we aren't just trading it for another set of problems - insomnia in summer, less summer sports and exercise, and trading two weeks of depression and accidents in the spring/fall for three months of depression and accidents in winter.
A single world time zone doesn't help with any of this. It's not like everyone will just run a nocturnal schedule in the part of the earth that gets midnight at what's now noon and vice/versa. If you have to call someone around the world, the question would just shift in semantics from "what time is it there" to "what time do people get up there?" And having a single time zone with no DST doesn't help with it being light too early in summer or too late in winter. Companies, schools, etc could be free to shift the time on their own, but for anyone with complicated schedules, having different organizations make different decisions about whether to shift or not just makes everything worse.
This [disclaimer, they're selling t-shirts here] sums up how I feel about it.
I've gotten a chance to try out a few friends' work-issued Blackberrys in the smartphone era, and I've got to say, a convenient way to destroy the thing entirely sounds like the most useful feature RIM has added in a long time.
We lost probably $30k in lost sales, and employees unable to do their jobs yesterday. Liquid web is going to lose a ton of customers over this. I don't know if it was their "fault," or if it was the top tier providers in their area they contract with. But as I understand it, if we had been with anyone really big who had us colocated in facilities way far away from each other, this would have been extremely unlikely.
Or you can just learn how to expose film properly before you ever set foot in a darkroom, and then spend your time in the darkroom learning about dodging and burning, cropping, using multicontrast papers and filters, ferrotyping tins, different developers, etc. to get the look you want, in which case you get feedback within minutes and can keep printing until you get what you want.
It's true it's not the fastest way to check framing, exposure, depth of field, focus, etc. Although it can also force people to put more thought into those things, since the stakes are higher.
You can find current articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, etc stating medical items as facts that are 10, 20, 30 years or more behind the current state of research at the time.
You still see newspapers running articles saying that post-menopausal hormone supplements reduce the risk of heart-attack in women (they increase it), that plastic cutting boards have lower risk of harboring dangerous bacteria than wood (it's higher), that low-fat diets help with weight loss (they make it harder to lose weight than higher fat diets), that all fat is unhealthy (it's not), that foods like rice cakes and baked potatoes and simple pastas are great diet foods (they're terrible, they have high glycemic response, you'd be better off eating a candy bar as far as weight loss is concerned), I could go on and on. The article you reference is simply written by someone who doesn't keep up on the current state of the research.
"Current state" meaning around 2008.
I don't have time to recount all the science, but here's one link to a 2009 meta-study.
I'm not exaggerating at all. I'm not claiming my views are so well established that they're in the 8th-grade health textbook, that will probably take 100 years, but the science behind this in peer-reviewed research journals is well established. Expect at least 10 years for the media to pick up on it, if we're lucky.
One of the biggest problems with vitamin supplements is that neither the takers nor the manufacturers (nor doctors prescribing supplements) pay any attention to absorption pathways. They also tend to ignore variants, which is a problem with a broader category of nutrients than just vitamins. There is a pretty decent scientific basis for the idea that good levels of vitamins are healthy, but supplements are usually taken in ways that are likely to make things worse rather than better through crowding out other essential vitamins and minerals that get absorbed through the same pathway.
Take zinc. It was found that zinc can denature viruses, so a viral sore throat can have its symptoms somewhat alleviated by zinc lozenges. But zinc is absorbed through the same pathway as copper, and the sort of large doses of zinc that people are taking for cold remedies is probably crowding out reasonable levels of copper absorption. And guess what copper's critical for? White blood cells and your immune system, the functions that can really do something about colds. Usually there's some bit of news, that the media gets wrong, then the general public gets even more wrong, and what the average consumer does in respect to a new scientific development ends up being completely counter-productive. Thus the news that zinc can denature viruses on contact turned into people taking zinc supplement pills with ads on the side of the bottle about taking them for colds. But pillsâ"as opposed to lozengesâ"do not result in significant concentrations of zinc where the virus is, and then they end up weakening the immune system by crowding out copper absorption.
Vitamin E is another excellent example. "Vitamin E" is 8 different vitamins that serve very different roles in the body. But they are absorbed through the same pathway and are highly subject to crowding-out. Basically, due to a terminology problem that the 8 distinct vitamins got lumped together as "Vitamin E," people who take vitamin E supplements end up deficient in 7 essential vitamins, unless they're taking reasonable doses of multitocopherol supplements, which isn't what much of anybody takes.
This tendancy to lump things together has lead to another super popular modern marketing disaster, Omega-3 fatty acids. Omega-3 is not a type of fatty acid, it's a class of fatty acids encompassing many different molecules. It turns out that only the fish-derived versions demonstrate any of the health benefits, but basically every food in the grocery store touting "Omega 3" all over the label is using plant sources, where they might as well be adding a gram of canola oil or corn oil for all the health benefits you'll be getting. Everything touting the helath benefits of flax seeds have no scientific basis, the the science is quite clear that the Omega 3 fatty acids in flax do not exhibit any of the hormone-like beneficial properties such as reducing inflammation that the fish Omega 3 fatty acids have.
I strongly suspect that in the long-term it will turn out that taking appropriate supplements is a very good idea for health, but right now, the science hasn't explored the area thoroughly enough to make solid recommendations given the complexity of the subject, and what little we do know has very little effect on what manufactures make and advertise and what consumers actually take. Which probably leads to the negative outcomes.
If you want to try to figure out, based on what we know, what the best guesses might be about what supplements to actually take, try reading up on the work of Bruce Ames and Andrew Weil. They don't have easy answers, but Bruce Ames did brilliant research, and Andrew Weil makes practical best-guess recommendations based upon the current state of the science.
How long might it take us to become a threat? Interstellar space-faring aliens may have civilizations millions or billions of years old. They may have seen annoying upstart civilizations seem as harmless as one gnat to all the world's militaries, but then leave them alone for just a few tens or hundreds of thousand years, and all of a sudden they're some kind of annoyance. How often do they happen through this part of space? The universe is a big place. Monitoring may be resource intensive and error prone. They might just consider it good practice, in discovering new life, especially with some modicum of intelligence, to stamp it out as they find it to reduce risk to their way of life.
I'm surprised I don't see anyone here questioning this 5 zettabyte number. The biggest drives currently manufactured are 4 terabyte 3.5" drives. 5 zetabytes would require 1.25 billion of those drives. A great price on a 4TB drive right now is $190. I doubt there's enough margin in them to make this possible, but let's just say that based on the insane quantity they get them for $150 each. That's $187 billion for the drives alone, nothing for the computers and racks and air conditioning and all. The NSA's budget is estimated at 8 billion a year. $187 billion is 23 times their yearly budget. It would be about 3% of total federal spending for a year... just for the drives. Total facility costs would certainly run many times that... it would probably cost more than an entire year's military spending to build a 5 zettabyte data center.
Also, you can fit about 500 terabytes in a server cabinet. That means 10 million server cabinets. A server cabinet is about 15 cubic feet of volume. So just the cabinets alone would run 150 million cubic feet. And that's just storage, not even including computers. And it's not like you can pack them in solid, of course. If you can make a datacenter with one third of its total volume being server racks, that would be amazing. The largest building in the world is only 472 million cubic feet, this would have to equal or surpass it.
Also, the entire world wide market for hard drives is only a little over 30 billion a year... this one project would consume over 6 times as much value in hard drives as every other use in the world combined for the year.
Unless the NSA has developed their own mass storage technology that no one else knows about and is radically superior to anything commercially available, I'm guessing someone's exaggerating or got their numbers wrong.
Exactly.
I'd say about a quarter of the kids I knew in school drew pictures of guns or tanks or other violent things.
Adam Lanza was also an honer student. While about 25% of kids draw weapons, only about 10% of kids are honor students. For higher specificity on their correlational targeting, they should arrest honor students.
Five years ago your comment would have made a lot of sense to me, but now you're talking about how everyone's gone X86 during the first massive movement away from X86 the industry's seen... smartphones and tablets are all computers that run on ARM processors, they're cleaning X86's clock in the only rapidly expanding market. And ARM's next core design is aimed at servers.
For the first time, Windows compatibility is mattering less and less as many users only use the web and web apps on their computers - opening the door to competing processors for the first time since the late 80's. At the same time, PC's continue to represent a smaller and smaller share of new CPU's, which are migrating to data centers, smartphones, and pads, which are even less dependent on X86 compatibility.
For the first time, the computational penalty of X86 instruction set translation for RISC cores may not outweigh the compatibility benefit for a significant portion of users. Increasingly, customers don't care about compatibility with existing X86 codebases. Like ARM, anyone with a new processor with compelling performance per watt might actually be able to sell the thing, without everyone assuming it's worthless if it won't run Windows.
Also, I wouldn't quite characterize POWER as a strictly legacy product, since IBM introduced the latest iteration, the power 7+, in August 2012, and is currently selling 15 different systems using Power7 processors. Not to mention the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Wii, and not-even-out-yet Wii U that are all POWER based systems.
That's a common theory, but Apple's P/E is 15.6. For context:
Microsoft: 15.4
IBM: 14.5
GE: 18.2
Walmart: 15.2
Toyota: 17.87
Do most of the biggest companies in the world also hold most of their value in the expectation of further rapid growth?
Apple makes unreal amounts of money. Their profitability increased so fast, it outpaced their stock value despite its growth. Early this year Marc Andreessen made the investment news pointing out that Apple's profits had so far outpaced their stock price that they had the P/E of a steel company that was about to go out of business.
Compared to other companies, their stock price is pretty much what one would expect it to be for a company that investors expect to stagnate right where it is.
You nailed it in pointing out that the current TLD system is already a "point of stupidity." The point of having different TLD's would be to allow otherwise identical URL's to be usefully differentiated by a TLD. In practice, this is very rarely the case. Most domain owners do not want otherwise identical domains at other TLD's, so they feel they need to register their domain at a bunch of TLD's and forward them. The nearly ubiquitous need to do this among major websites demonstrates that the whole idea is flawed. Most of the public only knows about ".com" and basically think that means "on the internet." Only a few geeks are even aware of what the TLD system was intended to accomplish.
The best answer to the TLD problem is to abandon it - grandfather it out. Stop adding new ones. They should do this by making the final period a non-special signifier in addresses. Anyone can pick anything they want and put any number of periods in their address they want. Every current address would still be unique and valid. But you can register new addresses with no TLD, just use whatever non-owned string makes the most sense for you. If you like TLD's and actually think they're useful, nothing's stopping you from registering new sites with a period followed by the three letters of any current TLD or any new one you want to make up. The process of handing out new addresses with no TLD fairly - you know, like "http://www.google," or "http://sex" would be a bit messy, but grandfathering out official TLD's would be the best system for the future internet.
This will never happen though, because there's too much money in selling new imaginary property with every new TLD they roll out. The majority of that money is not coming from people looking to take advantage of a new useful identifier, but from people looking to defend their identifier from others in the new domain - revealing the whole problem with the TLD sytem.
There are usually several cases of Bubonic Plague in the US every year.
It is treatable with antibiotics.
They may have any amount of legitimate expertise to contribute. Even if it's just on the business/managerial side of things and not the software/encryption side, not that that's necessarily the case.
But you know one big thing they contribute just by being there? This company will be accused of being anti-American, of "helping the terrorists win." There's nothing that will help inoculate them against that as much as having a couple of combat veterans as founders.
And to those who will say the presence of veterans means you can't trust this organization because they will provide a backdoor for the feds, the people in our armed forces hold a range of political opinions, they are not all clones. And there are a lot of them who agree with a libertarian or traditional conservative view of highly restricted government power and lots of freedom. A lot of people in the military are there to fight for our freedom, and that includes opposing the Orwellian encroachments of our own government.
There's another option here. Think, what if you were a bomber who wanted to maximize the terror you could cause? How about get a good voice scrambler and an anonymous email account and then call and email in bomb threats through several layers of proxies, TOR, etc. They evacuate buildings, cause fear, lots of inconvenience. Keep sending the threats, just keep doing it over and over, more frequently, relentlessly, until they end up with no choice but to ignore you, after incalculable time and expense on the fake threats. Maybe for fear of liability for NOT evacuating for threats, they will go to extremes, but just keep sending them until they're disrupting half the class schedule if they have to... make them cancel major sporting events, whatever it takes to make your threats impossible NOT to ignore. THEN, once they're ignoring you, you actually blow some people up exactly when and where you called in a threat.
Then start up with the threats again, and now what do they do?
The idea that a real bomber won't call in the threat to maximize impact isn't valid, because this scenario involves calling in the threat, and maximizes fear over a random non-reported explosion.
For very few actual bombs, you will cause much more fear and inconvenience this way.
That makes 3 of you.