Since when does a conclusive study demonstrating what you already knew was true constitute "bad news"?
Bad news: perpetual motion doesn't exist. Would it be good news if it did exist? With such a toy, an enterprising galaxy could tip the universe toward heat death. Maybe a supernova is just perpetual motion gone Sorcerer's Apprentice.
If you're in a troubled relationship and you finally have a big blow out argument, and one of you storms off into the night, is that bad news, or good news? If you defined keeping the peace as good news, isn't that how you got yourself into that situation in the first place?
Life consists of nested narratives. What's good at an inner level of narrative might be a complete disaster for a containing narrative. Is the discovery of a big new oil field good news or bad news? Good for Exxon, bad for Bangladesh? Good for me, bad for my children?
The one case where I really understand good luck / bad luck was an episode of the Sopranos where Corrado says "these things come in threes". Corrado suffers from a narcissistic sampling bias, and thinks the outcome of his own cancer might complete the trinity of two other deaths. There's half a dozen deaths in every episode, but since Corrado has a deep insight into bad luck that I personally lack, he's able to frame his fear in specific terms.
Bobby's inquiry, "With all due respect Junior, what do you care about the details?" is one of my favourite lines of the whole series. That's not the sentiment of a man dumb enough to marry Tony's psychopathic sister Janice, which is where I started to lose interest in the series. "Hey, let's shack up and double our screen time." Bad news: Bobby just married Janice, and now the show sucks. Actually, I didn't regard that as bad news so much as an unpleasant insight into the law of least redemption in David Chase's fictional hell.
What does "bad news" really mean? How about "I'm about to tell you something you won't like, so please take three deep breaths before pulling out your gun and shooting me"? I think it's a hereditary conversation tick we use to give the recipient's hominid brain an extra moment to distinguish message from messenger, or to give an air-car believer a moment of hesitation before prematurely ending it all.
However, if you try to get the human to move a big machine, indirectly, you will have to contend with even more [carbon] pollution, both from cellular metabolism and extra costs to make/ship food(food is not an efficient fuel).
I thought if you first converted it into ethanol, one pint could power days and days of hard pedalling.
Did you ever know of legislation that wasn't eventually built on?
Timely. I encountered exactly the same thought yesterday from the blowhard publicly rapping Vizio's knuckles for the grave sin of suggesting that the initial regulatory guidelines are livable. I'm on an economics binge lately. Already, the slippery slope has invaded my dreams. I'm about ready to grab a bag of pitons and head on down to the Cliffs of Insanity. Apparently, it's less hard on the nerves to take the vertical ascent than to never know when your foot might strike some gull quark and furrow six inches backwards.
The interesting thing is that I took a stroll down memory lane yesterday evening with this lecture by Kirk McKusick.
He has some funny lines about Bill Joy, who could write unmaintainable code ten times as fast as any reasonable person. Krik keeps muttering about how, thirty years later, code they initially thought of as disposable hasn't much changed.
But I agree with your sentiment. The best way not to fall into the trap of maintaining software is never to release it in the first place.
About the Congo: there are four points you can find really fast on any Gapminder video: America, China, India, and The Congo. Good eye. Where all I could see was a human sinkhole stuck in the bottom left corner, you spotted an under-served market for self-help books written in Congolese.
Mr Silvia sticks the blowhard back flip, difficulty level 1.5.
Although many aspects of the proposed regulations may seem fair and not as burdensome to comply with now, there is no limit to how restrictive such regulations may become in the future.
Yes, in an open market for electricity, with an unregulated price signal, there's no limit to how high the price might rise, either. Especially in California.
As for the law of unintended consequence, the California propositional voting system is unintended consequence writ large. There was a discussion of this in an EconTalk video I listened to recently, which might have been this one.
Among other things, about an hour in, there's this remark: "Gray Davis, governor of California, gave people what they asked for but was thrown out."
Here's another one which discusses the validity of ex-ante regulation within an exchange of views on Libertarian Paternalism with Smith-Hayek in the water supply.
The cool thing about the "law of unintended consequence" is that this process never begins until someone else does something you don't like, and never for the valid reason that the other side is already trying to make the best of unintended consequence that landed on their heads. Entirely in the spirit of pulling up a lawn chair to observe, speculate, and ridicule. Nothing promotes debate like beer hats and belly paint.
He's a good relationship management tool: never tell the other person they've just made a good decision, it only encourages them to do more. Shame on Vizio for feeding the trolls.
x86 is with us because of backwards compatibility. even Intel were unable to shrug it off with Itanium and various other things.
x86 is still with us because is-gross turned out to be 20% is-gross and 80% with-gross. The 20% that actually is-gross has been a minor cross to bear, the other 80% was relegated to traps, microcode, and emulation. The most ridiculous CISC instruction from 1980 is a pimple on a bedbug in silicon area thirty years later. Moore's law: the amazing zit shrinking cream.
you almost need a different compiler for each generation of CPUs
If your compiler doesn't work well on a 486, it's badly broken. Since then, there have been two different approaches by Intel which annoy the compiler gods: the Pentium and Pentium IV which place a premium on low level instruction scheduling, and everything else, starting with the Pentium Pro and including the Core Duo, all non-deterministic data-flow architectures at heart.
The main differences in a good Pentium Pro compiler was a few hazard-aware instruction order tweaks, mostly focused on the complex/simple/simple instruction decode architecture. Hand tweaking for the Pentium Pro did not offer as much as with other architectures. It was hard to gain complete control for cycle precise scheduling, and the OOO logic did a good job of mitigating dependency chains on the fly: you neither had a large problem to solve, nor much control in solving it.
There's a rumour the trace cache is making a reappearance in Sandy Bridge, so perhaps the pendulum is swinging back to the Pentium/Pentium IV side of the fence.
A long time ago I read some long papers on TTA, around the time Intel went the wrong direction with Itanium (defining bundles as a unit of independent instructions, rather than bundles as units of dependent instructions).
What makes TTA interesting is having many buses, with as many buses utilized on each clock cycle as possible. This guy has not invented an instruction set. He has invented a microcode engine. In doing so, he's muddied the notion of processor state, so there's no abstraction for handling interrupts. The great thing on an FPGA is that you can program around the need for interrupts, if you can devote a small core to each concurrent task.
Real microcode instructions tend to have very long bit vectors, so that multiple buses can be coordinated on the same clock cycles. If you aren't trying to throw maximal resources at a single, dominant task, you can instead have many concurrent execution engines, each with a single function unit bus. This works for some applications.
My feeling about Itanium is that it should have allowed instruction clusters such as complex multiply in a single bundle.
r = ac - bd i = ad + bc
This requires four inputs from the register file, two outputs to the register file, four multiplications, and two additions. You can find many examples in TAOCP V4F1 of small instructions clusters of this nature. A single eight byte bundle will be hard pressed to encode six arbitrary registers from a 256 register set, but I would argue that you don't need to. Compilers are extremely clever at register colouring, so a clever subset of full generality would prove more than adequate. Hint: invent the compiler and prove this, before committing the design to silicon.
From a TTA perspective, such a bundle achieves six operations at the expense of just four reads and two writes to the shared register file, with some intermediate results briefly shunted on local sidings. Managing the local sidings introduces some non-determinism from the perspective of the compiler, but nowhere near the scope of OOO shunting overhead in the Pentium Pro.
I think the Itanium design fell victim to ATM logic: determinism at the expense of higher aggregate throughput in the common case. That bet rarely pays off. They tricked themselves into believing they could bet against the grain by shuffling the downside of this fictio
Don't even have to dig into the comments, and I've already landed my daily dingbat.
And pcpro.co.uk wonders whether, at 13" (33 cm) in length, the new card will even fit in most PC cases.
What does "most" have to do with it? A 500HP V12 won't fit in most passenger cars, either. But wait! You can upgrade your chassis for $60. Perhaps your power train is the bigger concern?
Was the heading on this review "Plebeian concerns on planet drool-worthy?" That must keep the transporter owls flying 24/7.
Or was the implied lament "13 inches and nowhere to put it?" For all I care, our beamish hero can rent himself a bandersnatch.
Part of the meme in these enthusiast reviews is to say the stupidest thing you can think up, to imply that the circulatory system is otherwise engaged. I'm sure Spock's subspace mailbox was crammed to the dilithosphere with "why wait se7en years when you can pon f4rr tomorrow?"
If his human side gained control, he would have become the worst drug addict in space. And stupid, too.
More fear mongering. There are nuclear powered liquid sodium cooled submarines. This isn't really challenging or new technology.
In 1988, back when anonymous cowards were not known by name, Freeman Dyson published a book confronting "Ignorant in all Dimensions", including several choice myths about the history of nuclear power. He was there when it all started, working for General Atomic in 1956.
I'll try to quote the least amount possible to make the point, which I'm dead certain Dyson would wish to hear people screaming from the roof tops. This is from a chapter titled "Quick is Beautiful" about how not to invest ten billion dollars in a program unlikely to produce a profit in less than ten years, if ever (while taking scant account of civilian safety).
What happened between 1956 and 1987 to cause such a disastrous slowdown in reaction time? Part... blamed on government... and part can be blamed on the hardening of arteries in individual heads....
Bandwagon jumping is not always bad. [Look before you leap.] In the case of the American nuclear power industry, the bandwagon was started by Admiral Rickover, who developed... a reactor to drive nuclear submarines... went into production... flying start to the industry... pressurized light water reactor... everybody except General Atomics jumped... Unfortunately, they overlooked a well known fact about submarines. There is not a lot of room to spare... most important requirement... to be compact [rather than safety]... [more power to volume] the more quickly it will melt or vaporize in case of an accident...
The other thing about submarines, which I don't see in this passage, is that being submersed in the ocean is a rather convenient massively over-specified cooling system, an advantage not enjoyed by civilian power plants.
Dyson goes on to argue small is beautiful and says that the envisioned economy of scale with 1000 MW light water reactors had proved illusory, at the time of writing. I happen to know that reactor efficiencies, for existing reactors, have increased over the past twenty years due to improved operating knowledge, so maybe that remark now needs a footnote.
The point here is this: the original market momentum in power-dense light water reactors, which are highly suitable for nuclear submarines, goes against everything that we've know since the 1950s about safe civilian reactor design.
This particular AC post deserves special moderation points for piling onto an artery hardened bandwagon that first departed 50 years ago.
The phrase tortious interference comes to mind (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference)
I was just reading about Order of Succession. Lacking a papal bull to assert otherwise, this post is the legitimate heir to the bastard son of an anonymous coward, who had a notion but failed to make an assertion. I would have liked social studies a lot more if we had done a comparative survey of succession methods (such as Tanistry) with the British Isles providing the case studies in strife and dysfunction. "For today's lesson in the optics of legitimate conception, we turn again to the British Isles."
From what I can see, tortious interference doesn't kick in until there is breach of contract. Nor am I aware of anything in law against forming market partnerships short of exploiting monopoly powers.
This whole thread, people seem not to get the point: if content is king, there's no reason why the owners of content shouldn't engage in a coordination game to protect their collective interests. It's not obvious that the search engine middle people should have gained the dominant economic hand.
The key phrase here being "if content is king". The content owners would like to think so, but the internet says otherwise: there is a heck of a lot of base load in pornography, drugs, and Asian merchandise. The government can bulk relocate the top 1000 street corner drug dealers in LA to the Chino human storage facility and it would dent the drug supply for weeks, or maybe even days or hours. There is also the long tail, user created content not yet aggregated at a major social networking site, and the content formerly known as knowledge.
Against this you have the cultural lock-in of impressionable young adults, and baby boomers who haven't yet figured out that if Elvis is still alive, he's probably fatter than Marlin Brando and creepier than Howard Hughs (who disappeared from sight for a good while himself).
There is also highly precarious tier of mass-market content manufactured against the better post-evolutionary judgement of its customer base. The macro breweries became successful, in part, because they managed to make the taste of a good beer a dim memory. Similarly, news products are continually debased, and rely more on customer momentum than choice opportunities.
It's extremely dangerous for a mass-market success story which has invested billions of dollars lulling their primary market to sleep on quality issues to introduce a choice event into the marketplace. It could be that some people discover that Google without many of the current top 1000 sites actually returns more interesting search results, as an acquired taste, given a fifteen minute taste test. Who knew?
There are more precarious market gorillas out there than people think. Cigarettes make women ugly at a younger age. Natural Coke and Pepsi make you obese. The holy trinity of corn/soy/sodium are an express train to the afterlife. Sports are the life obsession of the politically disenfranchised (for myself, hockey scores improve my minutes, while destroying my hours and days). The tripe on most news services actively sabotages attention span and issue comprehension. Duff Beer does not make you sexy. The seven never-fail sex tips of an airbrushed super model is not going to save your marriage (if the male sexual response proved too subtle to master in private study).
You can't just randomly yank the chain on these captive markets without risk of waking your customers up. There was a story here a few days ago about intelligence: many people have it, few use it. Requires effort. It's less effort to delegate to the lower brain functions, as shaped by evolutionary psychology that outlived its crown. Mmmm beer. Mmmm donuts. Mmmm bacon.
What gives the marketers an orgasm is the old joke "Whenever I feel like exercise, I lie down until the feeling passes." This is the reflex they relentle
I find it unimaginable that people would attempt to implement a technology that is not fully understood.
This is precisely why this kind of algorithm has remained undiscovered over such a long period of time that people have begun to speculate that the human brain employs a quantum magician behind the curtain. Not so. We're just slow on the uptake. (I find this amazing: against the backdrop of our intellectual failings, we manufacture glory for our miraculous cognition.)
Compositions of non-linear components tend to defy traditional explanation. We've done a pretty good job of mining the ore where our preferred mode of understanding serves us well. This campaign is presently stuck in the mud halfway between chess and Go: computers rule the chess trench, neurons rule the Go trench; there's a large no man's land in between, with the computers gaining a few hundred yards a year, though we don't yet know how far apart these trenches lie. Reminds me of the quote: "Never mistake a clear view for a short distance." -- Paul Saffo.
There seems to be a wide range of applications remaining where mother nature--unhindered by our need to shoehorn systems into our preferred mode of explanation--gets better results at less expenditure. The most interesting feature of this discovery is that it computes well within our existing computational regime. A computational factor of 10,000 means that this algorithm running on a 486 circa 1990 would not have been out of the question (see also: slow uptake; we had the hardware, no one knew how to best use it).
There's a lot we don't yet understand about non-linear systems. I'm not in the camp where I throw up my hands and go "this is so difficult, the best we can do is discover these systems through content-free genetic algorithms". There's an entire intellectual discipline yet to be established half-way between our traditional mode of analysis (understanding things before we build them) and content-free genetic algorithms.
The deep work lies at the bionic boundary: how to interface the analytic system (in chess, this is tree search) with non-linear systems (inspired by neurological models or other forms of stochastic algorithm) to get a result greater than the sum of its parts. It's extremely difficult to synthesize the opaque, so this should present some gnarly challenges.
BTW: Kurweil has been projecting great progress in reverse engineering human neurology for quite a while. He usually hauls out as his example some work by Lloyd Watts (and others, I'm sure). This paper covers a lot of ground in acoustics and vision.
The usual answer for buying commercial software with a support contract is "to have a throat to choke". If you're into the vendor for $20k, the person on the other end of the phone tends to know something. Below $5k, good luck with that. At this point I'd specify open source below that price point just to shed the delusion that having a throat to choke is worth lifting a finger. Such a crock.
There really ought to be some stronger anti-fraud provisions against this kind of tech support experience. They can just sit there and stonewall, no money down. Appalling. A few high-profile class action lawsuits against tech support fraud would be a good start. Lying is not ignorance, it's plain old fraud. The guy on the phone must be presumed to speak on behalf of the organization. Cultivated ignorance is no excuse, either.
The usual business sentiment is that lying is the best policy, until it isn't. Intel had some 'splainin to do over the Pentium FDIV bug. More recently, Nvidia proved to be a slow learner.
Nvidia will take a charge... of $150 million to $200 million to cover the expected cost of repairing and replacing the products... didn't say [which] products were affected.... products have been failing in the field at "higher than normal rates," Nvidia said.
Higher than normal... for small values of $200 million.
Let's not pretend that AMD invented this mess, or perfected the drill. The museum of culpability is standing room only: Iomega click of death, IBM Deathstar disk drives, Fujitsu disk drives, ABit leaky capacitors, IBM Mwave, an early version of the KT7A which scribbled on hard drives (until a BIOS fix), and the even more brilliant EIDE controller flaw, just to name a few off the top of my head I've personally experienced.
I never actually touched a machine with the godforsaken IBM MWave, but in my foolish youth, I agreed to do the tech support call for a dim-witted friend who stupidly purchased such a system without asking me first (did I mention he was an idiot?). I was soaking my wrists in warm water before the call ended. If no one has ever been found lying in pool of their own blood for buying IBM, it's not because they never tried.
Long ago I had a girlfriend afflicted with the bogus EIDE chip (Zeos Pantera, early Pentium era) that immediately scribbled all over the hard drive once you enabled a fast software disk cache (such as Hypercache, or any of its competitors). Immediately meant your system would melt down in less than a day for no obvious reason, once enough digital cannon balls toppled your castle. Relationship harmony dictated that I re-install the OS over and over and over again, since the cause took a full week to diagnose.
I'm well aware that it's a black art to get these complicated products right every time (excluding IBM's MWave, where the main challenge was to dream up something so brutally stupid in the first place). Personally, I don't have the stomach to sell disk drives. IBM and Fujitsu both sought ulcer relief in the aftermath of their data chomping disasters.
Normally I have a fairly high tolerance for "shit happens". What severely raises my ire is pissing on common sense. The high point of my tech support career was an HP printer driver which borked a friend's Windows 2000 machine to the point where it would only boot in safe mode.
Of course, HP provided a driver uninstall program... brilliantly engineered to require a screen resolution which safe mode doesn't offer. Imagine if GM designed a car jack too tall to stick under (wiener clause: the lift strut beside) a flat tire, because they needed more room to draw their logo. Feeling impressed?
Oil is a strange good. The wealthiest economies are those which consume the most of it. Under present conditions, each unit of oil consumed generates wealth. It's extremely hard to argue that oil is not significantly underpriced, to the greater benefit of those who monopolize its consumption.
If the price of oil doubles or triples, the western world would grouse so loudly, the internet might collapse under the collective groan, but in other respects, life would go on. We'd finally have to rationalize our consumption, a project long overdue on any number of other grounds.
I have trouble grasping Chicken Little squawking out of one beak "we're running out of oil, we're all going to freeze" while simultaneously squawking out of the other beak "we've already burned too much, we're all going to roast". Even if the GHG scenario fails to unfold with the anticipated drama, there's still the issue that we are potentially damaging ocean chemistry and wiping out global shellfish ecosystems.
My own position is that we already have more carbon at hand than we can prudently burn and release into the atmosphere, so peak oil is mostly about traders hoping to pump and dump amid a global stock panic.
My sceptic says: I'll believe the world is suffering a major food shortage when nobody grows tobacco. I'll believe the world is suffering a major energy shortage when we can no longer afford to throw a cell phone away because it's so yesterday.
Regardless, recyclers say that from their vantage point it's obvious that most phones are retired because of psychological, not technological, obsolescence. "There's some fashion driving all of this and, by its nature, fashion is not eternal," says Mark Donovan of M:Metrics, which tracks the wireless industry.
This is a dead giveaway that our society is not yet anywhere close to energy stress, as much as the masters of markets in chaos wish us to fear this.
I was thinking about power law distributions the other night, and ended up reading through some old material on Clay Shirky's blog, where I encountered the term "solidarity good": a good that primarily has value because all your peers also know about it. This is one of the factors which drives power law distributions. I mean, we all know who's the world's wealthiest self-produced amateur porn star, which is only important because we all know it.
I'm interested in another class of good which I might term "ubiquity good": something that has value primarily because you know it's pervasive and easily accessible. In software, we're trained not to succumb to the NIH factor. If you position a line of code as a scarcity good, you'll end up rewriting it every time you change jobs. In order to drive down labour cost, the powers that be have voted in favour of churn.
In our economy, most people function as wage slaves: your income is primarily determined by how many hours you have to sell. Only the ascendant sliver of the power law distribution profits from accrued capital. So you have 10% of the population controlling 90% of the wealth who are intensely invested in scarcity goods, and 90% of the population controlling 10% of the wealth who see a lot more upside in ubiquity goods. Which prevails?
Without laws to the contrary (and big government to enforce them) the answer is obvious. I wonder about this sometimes when I use Google Scholar to add a cite to a woeful Wikipedia article. I dive in, poach someone else's hard won fact/authority, jigger the wording, adjust the context, and make if free for all: a billion termites chewing away on scarcity culture, bite by bite. By comparison, the "analog gap" is a pretty small fish.
In theory, we all aspire to make the leap from the wage slave majority to the leveraged minority. The power law says most of us aren't going to make it: the number of seats at the high table seems to shrinking lately, rather than growing.
The argument boils down to one of two cases: A) we should all support scarcity culture, because we all aspire to ascend the economic ladder to the scarcity-enabled rungs of privilege, or B) we should all invest in ubiquity culture, because few of us will succeed in making the jump (as is the nature of a power law).
Power laws have a fractal structure, but scarcity doesn't seem to: for whatever reason, gated communities tend not to work; a quanta of IP tends to either be scarce or universal. Frequently the market manages to exploit aspiration over reality, but I don't see how that's going to play out in Murdoch's favour in this case. There isn't enough middle ground.
The one example of middle ground that comes to mind is stock market price data where scarcity is a function of timeliness. For the big fish, I think the goal these days is to trade on adverse information in under 4ms. The price information runs a cascade of tiers before emerging 15m later as a universal. Each tier wants to conceal the new information from the next tier down until their own trades complete, and so it goes.
Somehow Disney wants to fire the inverse-bullet-time hog-trough at this and slow the process down to the scale of human lifetimes without tipping greater society toward ubiquity goods. I can only say, good luck with that. Murdoch in the middle isn't going to fare much better.
The heart of the problem is a definition power play.
WTF are you talking about? Since the discovery of the uncertainty principle, we've known that classical determinism was crowd sourced from day one (via statistical mechanics).
Even without quantum indeterminacy, there's still algorithmic indeterminacy.
We know we might be wrong. The machines don't know that.
If this is what free will amounts to, I don't see the day coming when the computers are beating down the doors saying "I want me some of that."
OTOH, I don't see any reason why a computer can't be programmed to make addled contributions to slashdot given the magnitude of the available training corpus.
Of all things, why should a *web browser* be a memory pig?
Do you get out much? Or do you relay your slashdot posts by smoke signal to the double-agent Luddite on the other side of the ridge?
The browser has been, since nearly its invention, been viewed as a crow bar to break Microsoft's desktop monopoly. Netscape raised a small fortune in the attempt, and was scuppered after an all-guns broadside of epic proportions. Sun provided much of the powder in the form of Java, expressly designed around platform independence. This was followed by guerrilla resistance playing out amid the hedge maze of the W3C, under covering fire from the FTC. Then Google came along and industrialized the Ruhr valley at a pace and scale breathtaking to behold, with Javascript now the front line weapon of choice in commoditizing the desktop. Javascript is a dynamic, garbage collected language. It moves into town, requisitions the largest house available, then spreads its crap everywhere with the mindset of an overnight command outpost. Just in case, it brings along a global map set detailed in all the world's languages, encoded in twenty different incompatible graphics formats, RF gear that covers very nearly every spectrum that's ever been used, and some stable boys, because a few renegades still insist upon scout horses.
If your mental picture of a combat browser is more like one guy in a wet suit with a knife between his teeth licensed to kill, I'm sure it's out there, but it's certainly not Firefox.
People seem to be ignoring in this equation that this team of engineers becomes deeply familiar with the Linux kernel and likely participates in a lot of problem solving and strategic work on the side. Knowing Google, they are confronting this patch migration problem from a high level and generally thinking about *all* the problems in the Linux kernel development and maintenance space. I'm sure this mess also counts toward code review against their mission critical infrastructure and their general handling of SCM issues at all levels of software development.
Just buy more hardware: none of the above. They're already world class at scalability. Wouldn't surprise me if they had 3000 engineers making contributions counted generously toward scalability, across algorithms, services, and hardware. One percent of their engineers engaged in a high-level chess game with "grin and bear it" is entirely justified.
Interesting echo from FAQ which I read the other night. The original contains a lot of italic I'm not going to replicate.
An important fact about monotone's networking is that it deals in facts rather than operations. Networking simply informs the other party of some facts, and receives some facts from the other party. The netsync protocol determines which facts to send, based on an interactive analysis of "what is missing" on each end. No obligations, transactions, or commitments are made during networking. For all non-networking functions, monotone decides what to do by interpreting the facts it has on hand, rather than having specific conversations with other programs.
The closer one lives to the foundation, the stronger the argument for a fact-based architecture. DNS is about as foundational as one can get in internet security. Interesting, the architecture of monotone is highly cryptographic, and somewhat reminiscent of DNSSEC from the 40,000 foot view.
The people who don't see the problem with mixing fact and policy are likely the same people who don't regard it as a big problem that your credit card numbers is widely distributed in plain text: to every vendor you do business with, many of their employees, the trash collectors out back, and their governing union.
Why is it that some guy on the GPS thread complained that the police are free to criminalize driving under the age of 18 (to collect more revenue) and effectively act as their own judge, jury, and executioner (in the corrupt towns where this practice becomes established), but there is generally less complaint about VISA architecting themselves the same powers?
If the police collected a 2% slice of gasoline revenues and awarded bonus points for trips to Hawaii in any year where you keep your license clear and generally found other clever ways to rebate unpenalized drivers the 2% (with enough hidden strings attached it doesn't ultimately cost them much), would they be as loved as the VISA company? Just asking.
Turns out it depends on how you frame the question. If the question is: do you want the DNS system to become so badly abused it might as well have been designed by a bank, you might get one answer. If the question is: do you want DNS optimized so your porn streams with ten seconds less delay between clips, you probably get the other answer.
I vote for facts. That said, I will say one thing in defense of Akamai: one can construe CDN as a fact based system, if the factoids you are dealing in that "this IP address can deliver the content you want". Ideally, you already have a secure hash signature of the file you're seeking so it can't play too many games with the notion of "the file you want".
I don't see why DNS needs the facts to be so low level as "this is the same IP address everyone else gets for the same query". There could be a good reason, but Vixie's excellent article fell short of providing it.
Ideally, the CDN problem would have been solved with another layer of delegation: the content you are seeking can be obtained from a vast array of different places, here's an authoritative address for a highly overloaded server; if you're in a hurry go talk to xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx to find a location near you. Then the caching proxy can send a request with the header "I represent a client in the Pacific Northwest" rather than sending back to the client the name of the video store where client's attorney rents his own porn.
Vixie - you can't have it both ways. If these are your real feeling then I call on you to resign your position on the Advisory Board at Nominum.
Is that you, Obelix the gallstone? Fell into a vat of anonymous coward super juice as a young infant? I thought so.
He's only having it both ways if he privately supports Nominum's stupidity, while publicly declaiming his involvement.
This post is an excellent example of polarization disorder: the belief that the world will run most smoothly if everyone is neatly aligned in violent opposition.
What's the payoff for Obelix the gallstone in shifting the landscape in this direction, supposing anyone falls for his feeble derision? Personally, I've never experienced the orgasmic pleasure of seeing how far I could polarize everyone else around me. I guess the game here is to incite all the villagers to gather in the town square with pitchforks levelled, while you slip into the church to steal the artifacts.
This particular GPS might have been engineering to prevent log tampering, given its intended application.
"Might have been" tends to trigger the same kind of innumeracy as the mass of the earth's atmosphere (5 x 10^18 kg). We get a bit stupid confronting all those zeros.
Are we talking about an arithmetic "might have been" which can be expressed in two digits (0-1 in 1% increments)? Or are we talking "might have been" which can be expressed in two digits (10^-99 to 10^-epsilon)? Are we talking about less difficult than rigging an election machine, or more difficult than fleecing an ATM?
We'd all waste a lot less breath if people throwing the word "might" around would kindly confine it to a single order of magnitude: 10^-(x+0.5).. 10^-(x-0.5) for some stated value of x >= 0.5.
This concerns the value of "might" on the family's own steam.
It's a whole different matter to position might after the family engages a criminal mastermind to perform their bidding. Ordinarily, in law, the rule of thumb is "No capes!" when deciding what might have happened. They will quickly teleport you to a criminal docket if this presumption fails to hold.
Something was niggling at me while composing that last post. I must have imprinted on Bernie, our nine year old fart king impresario: he's always been my archetype of the human condition. I think I imprinted at too young an age, before our pre-pubescent stagecraft kicked into high gear.
Our frontal lobes are great accouterments, but really, in most of us they function with the consistency of a light bulb in Africa during a lightening storm. I've never once fallen for the suit and tie edition of human magnificence.
"What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god -- the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!"
Somehow I don't think he's talking about his uncle Bernie. A mite unresolved?
Funny how something niggles, decide maybe Sapolsky has something to say on the matter, and stumble over this, never having seen it before. (Fascinating for those with a bug for writing, but a tough read due to a rough, stuttering, stammering transcription.)
"The trouble is, the thing that's the core here, is Paul doesn't want to grow up and be you, and you know that and it hurts you." This is like, I almost burst into tears. It was like I was having these therapy sessions. And he was right. Paul had betrayed me because he didn't want to grow up and be like me. And I like immediately had to call up Paul and, like, relate this to him, and this was the case, that in fact he had no desire to ever be, like, this narrow. And, it immediately cleared up this one sentence. And this was like the only I've ever had the agonizing over, the editor keeping me from becoming an alcoholic by telling me the unresolved issue. So like that one time, and I've been scared of this guy ever since and never have dealt with him again.
Elsewhere in the Edge article, he comments that after the Bronx, the baboons were a welcome change.
Huh. I was once told by a roommate that I had the highest IQ of any person he'd met, but my IQ was a set of measure zero. He meant I didn't much apply my talents to tasks of any use to anyone else. So true. He also meant that physics didn't have such ridiculous things as sets of measure zero (little did he know what was coming down the pike). In my defense, I was an internet junkie, but the internet hadn't been invented yet. It consumes a lot of mental resources to become addicted to something that hasn't been invented yet. After the internet was invented, people began to perceive me as less distracted, but in truth, I suspect nothing changed.
I joke with my GF about this a lot. From time to time I heap wrath upon a post in slashdot--always in the nicest possible way. The thing is, I don't regard the targets of my scorn as imbeciles (though I mutter this loudly under my breath while I'm typing). What triggers me is the trick costume change: "I'll turn my brain off momentarily in the middle of this sentence, and woohoo, look at me come out the other side unscathed by contrary information."
Slashdot is practically a petri dish of smart people suffering from momentary mental brown-outs, willingly or not. I don't get this, it's not one of my many peccadilloes, but man, does it have popular appeal. We greatly discount this effect in public debate, much to the detriment of the outcome. I mean, if I were a white mouse studying humans, I'd never leave my keyboard, not since the day slashdot first opened its virtual doors. This can also be studied in the hot tub at my local swimming pool, but I'd soon fear for my sanity. Whatever a Jacuzzi stimulates, it ain't brain cells. Sadly, I can't handle the truth in its purest, undiluted form.
I've long opined that gambling is actually an internal money laundering operation. The spend side reasons "I'll win some/most/more than most of it back". But then, on the rare occasion when the deluded sot is momentary up on the house it's suddenly "drinks for everyone!" Ones proceeds, if they rematerialize at all, rematerialize directly into the bon vivant bucket, even if the money vested originated from the mortgage and sick kids bucket.
"I spent 90% of my money on women and drink. The rest I wasted." - George Best
Those who are less honest about this visit the casino. It's a way to pursue a certain reproductive strategy while framing it in a dingier, yet better accepted light.
Ideology is a lot like math: it doesn't matter where you hide the division by zero, once you've swapped the peanut, you can carry the result through to the end conclusion, whatever end conclusion your soul desires. It only takes the blink of a mind to go from premise A to conclusion !A through a long and highly respectable sequence of steps (bonus points: with heaps of "security theatre").
The people who argue from a deeper perspective have the habit of asking "does this still make sense?" after every step in the argument. But if that is not your agenda, you're soon conditioned not to do this. It merely interferes with arriving at your set conclusion.
I don't regard this phenomena of mentally jumping the tracks as shallow. There's many social situations where the round-trip checksum is not going to work out (that would contravene cherished consensus) unless an error is cleverly folded into one of the steps. More power to the guy in the frock with the force of will to control where that error transpires. Entire institutions have sprung up to wield that mighty staff, in every civilization of note.
These errors have tremendous cultural value (though this might be slowly waning so long as net neutrality prevails, which suggests it won't). Nor is it clear that these errors conserve mental energy. The hardest working people I've met are those who maintain an alternate reality field 24/7. These people can be pretty good at distracting you with where the marble goes. With some determi
Would you believe, that's the second biggest rootkit I've ever seen?
I guess it's kind of free'ing. I no longer stress about it and focus on more relevant issues
Pretty much where I'm at while I continue to throw good coin at my local robocall entitlement company and diligently recycle dead trees hand delivered by my local robomail entitlement crown corp. There used to be a number of disposable single blade razors that worked well for me, all since driven out of the market. Now I lease my triple-blade manhood from Warren Buffett at triple the price.
Things get rejected from the kernel all the time -- because not all things are good, useful, well coded, or solve a problem that needs solving. It's not new in any way.
There's a view the world according to father knows best. And I'm sure it's true much of the time or the project would have foundered long ago.
I'm also sure that worthwhile patches fall through the cracks, personalities matter in how the decisions are made, and the communication of the decisions made often falls far short of the ideal, wasting valuable time and energy of people who wished to make a positive contribution.
That said, Con is not my personal poster child for the unfairly rejected: he seems to understand neither software engineering nor macro economics in the large. For example, while Con's patches might improve things for the desktop user in the short term, if it comes at the cost of continued enterprise support for the people who continue to develop the kernel, the victory will be short lived; in this scenario, at the end of the day, *everyone* loses. Fair enough, one might say, at least it's equitable.
The moral of this story as I read it is that he should have chosen his battle better in the first place, such as becoming a founding developer for Haiku, who likely would have embraced his audio-glitch-free window dragging aspirations as a founding precept of digital justice. From the Linux perspective, that enterprise machine that didn't see Con's reported glitches now looks like next year's entry model (welcome to Westmere). As a software engineer, one must cast an extremely critical eye on the carrying cost of modifications designed to avert a problem where there is already a great deal of writing on the wall.
I'd say there's a good chance that same logic applies to fat binaries.
The pharma industry? Hurting? When the pharma industry hurts, pigs will fly!
I'll certainly be on the lookout next time I step outdoors. Beware what you step over, version 2 might be delivered unannounced. I've complained about the pig spotters before: there are some people out there milking the jest-coma that the next version of Windows won't fit on a 1.5 TB disk drive. They'll finally shut up... when their grandkids ask "What was Microsoft?" Maybe.
If you've been paying any attention at all, you'll realize that the drug discovery industry has arrived at the cusp of an unpleasant sea change: the old model of statistical epidemiology (and its cost structure) is failing, yet the new model, narrowly targeted drugs administered with diagnostic certainty (which I refer to etiology-based medicine) can't possibly work under the current regulatory regime.
Pricing life saving medicines (even a life with few innings left to save) is one of the most debated issues going, with voices weighing in at every conceivable price point short of "sex with your 12 year old daughter". Four years of tuition at a top school, however, lies within the realm debated. This was the subject matter on Econtalk recently, but not one of his better episodes, so I won't post the link.
The current FDA drug approval process operates at a price point one can only justify if the sales model is to add the drug to the water supply, e.g. your HDL is low, you might be at risk, you need to take Lipitor until pigs fly (aka a generic alternative materializes circa 2011).
Do drug companies fear the FDA? How would you like to be pulled over for missing a tick box on a 100 page licence application form and have your leased Ferrari immediately confiscated? Plus, you're a public company, so they grab your cell phone and Tweet this fact to everyone who has ever known you. And then you have to walk back to the office and write the incident up on your TPS form.
The small sticky labels have long been the bane of waste-conscious fruit and vegetable eaters... No more peeling those annoying labels!
Those comments incited me to discover why Marge married Homer. She must have got herself seriously tittered by Jabba the Hutt to follow Homer back to the golf castle. Somewhere in that small mind of hers "No more peeling those annoying labels!" The woman has priorities.
The beauty of this is that it could be a lot of things. If some American official someday leaks "this is why we really did this" the odds that I would discount spin can't be over 50%, which relegates this to a quasi-permanent bucket of unknowability. It's a rare thing when a lightening bolt momentarily catches the men behind the curtain with a ruse in flagrante. The Soviets had their washer microphone. The Americans had the thermohaline undersea acoustic channel (where I live, a couple of decades ago, an undersea microphone research project was shut down precipitously).
Reputedly, the Americans had a telecoms satellite with the electronics compacted to such a spectacular degree, they managed to fit a spy telescope where the Russians believed it was technologically impossible. As the story goes, this flew over open Russian nuclear missile bays until some Russian mole tipped them off, and that was the last silo with exposed cleavage it ever flew over.
Another story is that the Americans pulled off a deep undersea splice of an unencrypted fibre optic cable connecting Moscow to one of their satellite states. This cable was unencrypted because 1) the Russians didn't believe a silent optical splice was technically possible, and 2) the Russians probably didn't think an American submarine could into position to do this undetected. I think there was once a big piece in Wired about this.
The final case that comes to mind is the Siberian pipeline sabotage. This one, especially, works almost as well as propaganda as fact, but it appears to be rigorously documented. I love the image of the CIA analyst popping up over his cubicle wall going "nobody panic, we know about this" as ever other analyst in the facility fumbles to get to the red phone.
A scenario I sometimes wonder about is a conversation between no such agency and the ghost of Alan Turing that goes like this:
Dr Turing's ghost, we've got this molecular-perfect crystal of gallium arsenide the size of a dinner plate (at some staggering cost to the space program), an experimental electron beam lithography apparatus able to draw a million logic units per day (the anti-vibration table alone is staffed with a team of twenty full time Black Mesa technicians), and more liquid gas than NASA. What kind of pretty picture do you think you could draw on this thing given a few months to think about it, and a year for the etching?
The one question I've most wanted to find out is this: what was the state of the art in 1970 for one-off half billion dollar chips? Lightening rarely strikes twice, and 99 times out of a hundred you never find out.
You say that like "government" is a dial that you can turn up and down. And that all the people who want "more government," as you put it, want, is to turn the dial up.
I find that people tend to reach for the more/less dial when they nothing to contribute but ideology. Canada was rated as having the world's soundest banking system after the crash. (It's in Wikipedia; as a typical Canadian, I was surprised we even had an article there. Must have been a slow news day.) Why is it that no American ever looked across the back of the sofa and suggested, "why don't we have the same amount of regulation that worked out so well up there?"
If more works better, get more. If less works better, have less. Why is it that businesses can "right size" but government can't? Tumour in the corpus callosum? Does this make sense to anyone else?
Ideology, n. the emotional premise that optimality exists only for the values 0 and infinity.
Normally you'd expect the psychology of priming to catch this one: a linear extrapolation is worthless when medical technology continues to change as fast as it does. Diabetes continues to exist in 50 years? On the near side of the apocalypse? I highly doubt it. Excepting curvature, we can thus conclude that women are getting fatter.
Some people see this phase we're in where the genomics/proteomics researchers are discovering that nothing is as simple as we told the investors as evidence that progress in medical science has taken a coffee break. Hardly. For the last century, the foundation of modern medicine has been statistical epidemiology: trying to find a needle in a haystack with a densitometer.
The profit model for the pharmaceutical industry is to spread the benefit of a drug over the largest study population where the effect remains statistically significant. Cholesterol levels too high? Add Lipitor to the water supply. It could be that only 10% of the people who take Lipitor actually benefit. But then, if this were determined, they'd have to charge ten times as much per treatment to maintain existing revenues, and fewer uninsured would be able to pay, and we might have to let some future president actually preside.
We are right now in the heart of the transition to etiology based medicine. Among the problems are how to pay for it without using giant studies designed to implicate everyone. This isn't so different from the transition of observational taxonomy (A and B share the same egg tooth dimple) to taxonomy with a genomics turbo assist. I recall in the early 1980s, this transition was not widely welcomed among traditional taxonomists. Unreliable, they complained. Now you couldn't do taxonomy any other way, and a lot of old arguments are long gone in the rear view mirror. The new bionic taxonomy is better, stronger, faster.
We're in that deceptive interlude after pressing the ignite button on the Saturn V rocket where the flame and rumble have erupted out the bottom, while the rocket itself just kind of shivers there, apparently going nowhere.
The combined propellant flow rate of the five F-1s in the Saturn V was 3,357 US gallons (12,710 l) per second, which would empty a 30,000 US gallons (110,000 l) swimming pool in 8.9 seconds. Each F-1 engine had more thrust than all three space shuttle main engines combined.
A decade or two later, you're praying for center-engine cutoff.
Slashdot Mirror
Since when does a conclusive study demonstrating what you already knew was true constitute "bad news"?
Bad news: perpetual motion doesn't exist. Would it be good news if it did exist? With such a toy, an enterprising galaxy could tip the universe toward heat death. Maybe a supernova is just perpetual motion gone Sorcerer's Apprentice.
If you're in a troubled relationship and you finally have a big blow out argument, and one of you storms off into the night, is that bad news, or good news? If you defined keeping the peace as good news, isn't that how you got yourself into that situation in the first place?
Life consists of nested narratives. What's good at an inner level of narrative might be a complete disaster for a containing narrative. Is the discovery of a big new oil field good news or bad news? Good for Exxon, bad for Bangladesh? Good for me, bad for my children?
The one case where I really understand good luck / bad luck was an episode of the Sopranos where Corrado says "these things come in threes". Corrado suffers from a narcissistic sampling bias, and thinks the outcome of his own cancer might complete the trinity of two other deaths. There's half a dozen deaths in every episode, but since Corrado has a deep insight into bad luck that I personally lack, he's able to frame his fear in specific terms.
Bobby's inquiry, "With all due respect Junior, what do you care about the details?" is one of my favourite lines of the whole series. That's not the sentiment of a man dumb enough to marry Tony's psychopathic sister Janice, which is where I started to lose interest in the series. "Hey, let's shack up and double our screen time." Bad news: Bobby just married Janice, and now the show sucks. Actually, I didn't regard that as bad news so much as an unpleasant insight into the law of least redemption in David Chase's fictional hell.
What does "bad news" really mean? How about "I'm about to tell you something you won't like, so please take three deep breaths before pulling out your gun and shooting me"? I think it's a hereditary conversation tick we use to give the recipient's hominid brain an extra moment to distinguish message from messenger, or to give an air-car believer a moment of hesitation before prematurely ending it all.
I thought if you first converted it into ethanol, one pint could power days and days of hard pedalling.
Timely. I encountered exactly the same thought yesterday from the blowhard publicly rapping Vizio's knuckles for the grave sin of suggesting that the initial regulatory guidelines are livable. I'm on an economics binge lately. Already, the slippery slope has invaded my dreams. I'm about ready to grab a bag of pitons and head on down to the Cliffs of Insanity. Apparently, it's less hard on the nerves to take the vertical ascent than to never know when your foot might strike some gull quark and furrow six inches backwards.
The interesting thing is that I took a stroll down memory lane yesterday evening with this lecture by Kirk McKusick.
bsdtalk: bsdtalk170 - Marshall Kirk McKusick at DCBSDCon
He has some funny lines about Bill Joy, who could write unmaintainable code ten times as fast as any reasonable person. Krik keeps muttering about how, thirty years later, code they initially thought of as disposable hasn't much changed.
But I agree with your sentiment. The best way not to fall into the trap of maintaining software is never to release it in the first place.
About the Congo: there are four points you can find really fast on any Gapminder video: America, China, India, and The Congo. Good eye. Where all I could see was a human sinkhole stuck in the bottom left corner, you spotted an under-served market for self-help books written in Congolese.
Mr Silvia sticks the blowhard back flip, difficulty level 1.5.
Yes, in an open market for electricity, with an unregulated price signal, there's no limit to how high the price might rise, either. Especially in California.
As for the law of unintended consequence, the California propositional voting system is unintended consequence writ large. There was a discussion of this in an EconTalk video I listened to recently, which might have been this one.
Caplan on the Myth of the Rational Voter
Among other things, about an hour in, there's this remark: "Gray Davis, governor of California, gave people what they asked for but was thrown out."
Here's another one which discusses the validity of ex-ante regulation within an exchange of views on Libertarian Paternalism with Smith-Hayek in the water supply.
Cowen on Liberty, Art, Fetish
The cool thing about the "law of unintended consequence" is that this process never begins until someone else does something you don't like, and never for the valid reason that the other side is already trying to make the best of unintended consequence that landed on their heads. Entirely in the spirit of pulling up a lawn chair to observe, speculate, and ridicule. Nothing promotes debate like beer hats and belly paint.
He's a good relationship management tool: never tell the other person they've just made a good decision, it only encourages them to do more. Shame on Vizio for feeding the trolls.
x86 is with us because of backwards compatibility. even Intel were unable to shrug it off with Itanium and various other things.
x86 is still with us because is-gross turned out to be 20% is-gross and 80% with-gross. The 20% that actually is-gross has been a minor cross to bear, the other 80% was relegated to traps, microcode, and emulation. The most ridiculous CISC instruction from 1980 is a pimple on a bedbug in silicon area thirty years later. Moore's law: the amazing zit shrinking cream.
you almost need a different compiler for each generation of CPUs
If your compiler doesn't work well on a 486, it's badly broken. Since then, there have been two different approaches by Intel which annoy the compiler gods: the Pentium and Pentium IV which place a premium on low level instruction scheduling, and everything else, starting with the Pentium Pro and including the Core Duo, all non-deterministic data-flow architectures at heart.
The main differences in a good Pentium Pro compiler was a few hazard-aware instruction order tweaks, mostly focused on the complex/simple/simple instruction decode architecture. Hand tweaking for the Pentium Pro did not offer as much as with other architectures. It was hard to gain complete control for cycle precise scheduling, and the OOO logic did a good job of mitigating dependency chains on the fly: you neither had a large problem to solve, nor much control in solving it.
There's a rumour the trace cache is making a reappearance in Sandy Bridge, so perhaps the pendulum is swinging back to the Pentium/Pentium IV side of the fence.
A long time ago I read some long papers on TTA, around the time Intel went the wrong direction with Itanium (defining bundles as a unit of independent instructions, rather than bundles as units of dependent instructions).
What makes TTA interesting is having many buses, with as many buses utilized on each clock cycle as possible. This guy has not invented an instruction set. He has invented a microcode engine. In doing so, he's muddied the notion of processor state, so there's no abstraction for handling interrupts. The great thing on an FPGA is that you can program around the need for interrupts, if you can devote a small core to each concurrent task.
Real microcode instructions tend to have very long bit vectors, so that multiple buses can be coordinated on the same clock cycles. If you aren't trying to throw maximal resources at a single, dominant task, you can instead have many concurrent execution engines, each with a single function unit bus. This works for some applications.
My feeling about Itanium is that it should have allowed instruction clusters such as complex multiply in a single bundle.
r = ac - bd
i = ad + bc
This requires four inputs from the register file, two outputs to the register file, four multiplications, and two additions. You can find many examples in TAOCP V4F1 of small instructions clusters of this nature. A single eight byte bundle will be hard pressed to encode six arbitrary registers from a 256 register set, but I would argue that you don't need to. Compilers are extremely clever at register colouring, so a clever subset of full generality would prove more than adequate. Hint: invent the compiler and prove this, before committing the design to silicon.
From a TTA perspective, such a bundle achieves six operations at the expense of just four reads and two writes to the shared register file, with some intermediate results briefly shunted on local sidings. Managing the local sidings introduces some non-determinism from the perspective of the compiler, but nowhere near the scope of OOO shunting overhead in the Pentium Pro.
I think the Itanium design fell victim to ATM logic: determinism at the expense of higher aggregate throughput in the common case. That bet rarely pays off. They tricked themselves into believing they could bet against the grain by shuffling the downside of this fictio
Don't even have to dig into the comments, and I've already landed my daily dingbat.
What does "most" have to do with it? A 500HP V12 won't fit in most passenger cars, either. But wait! You can upgrade your chassis for $60. Perhaps your power train is the bigger concern?
Was the heading on this review "Plebeian concerns on planet drool-worthy?" That must keep the transporter owls flying 24/7.
Or was the implied lament "13 inches and nowhere to put it?" For all I care, our beamish hero can rent himself a bandersnatch.
Part of the meme in these enthusiast reviews is to say the stupidest thing you can think up, to imply that the circulatory system is otherwise engaged. I'm sure Spock's subspace mailbox was crammed to the dilithosphere with "why wait se7en years when you can pon f4rr tomorrow?"
If his human side gained control, he would have become the worst drug addict in space. And stupid, too.
More fear mongering. There are nuclear powered liquid sodium cooled submarines. This isn't really challenging or new technology.
In 1988, back when anonymous cowards were not known by name, Freeman Dyson published a book confronting "Ignorant in all Dimensions", including several choice myths about the history of nuclear power. He was there when it all started, working for General Atomic in 1956.
I'll try to quote the least amount possible to make the point, which I'm dead certain Dyson would wish to hear people screaming from the roof tops. This is from a chapter titled "Quick is Beautiful" about how not to invest ten billion dollars in a program unlikely to produce a profit in less than ten years, if ever (while taking scant account of civilian safety).
What happened between 1956 and 1987 to cause such a disastrous slowdown in reaction time? Part ... blamed on government ... and part can be blamed on the hardening of arteries in individual heads. ...
Bandwagon jumping is not always bad. [Look before you leap.] In the case of the American nuclear power industry, the bandwagon was started by Admiral Rickover, who developed ... a reactor to drive nuclear submarines ... went into production ... flying start to the industry ... pressurized light water reactor ... everybody except General Atomics jumped ... Unfortunately, they overlooked a well known fact about submarines. There is not a lot of room to spare ... most important requirement ... to be compact [rather than safety] ... [more power to volume] the more quickly it will melt or vaporize in case of an accident ...
The other thing about submarines, which I don't see in this passage, is that being submersed in the ocean is a rather convenient massively over-specified cooling system, an advantage not enjoyed by civilian power plants.
Dyson goes on to argue small is beautiful and says that the envisioned economy of scale with 1000 MW light water reactors had proved illusory, at the time of writing. I happen to know that reactor efficiencies, for existing reactors, have increased over the past twenty years due to improved operating knowledge, so maybe that remark now needs a footnote.
The point here is this: the original market momentum in power-dense light water reactors, which are highly suitable for nuclear submarines, goes against everything that we've know since the 1950s about safe civilian reactor design.
This particular AC post deserves special moderation points for piling onto an artery hardened bandwagon that first departed 50 years ago.
I was just reading about Order of Succession. Lacking a papal bull to assert otherwise, this post is the legitimate heir to the bastard son of an anonymous coward, who had a notion but failed to make an assertion. I would have liked social studies a lot more if we had done a comparative survey of succession methods (such as Tanistry) with the British Isles providing the case studies in strife and dysfunction. "For today's lesson in the optics of legitimate conception, we turn again to the British Isles."
From what I can see, tortious interference doesn't kick in until there is breach of contract. Nor am I aware of anything in law against forming market partnerships short of exploiting monopoly powers.
This whole thread, people seem not to get the point: if content is king, there's no reason why the owners of content shouldn't engage in a coordination game to protect their collective interests. It's not obvious that the search engine middle people should have gained the dominant economic hand.
The key phrase here being "if content is king". The content owners would like to think so, but the internet says otherwise: there is a heck of a lot of base load in pornography, drugs, and Asian merchandise. The government can bulk relocate the top 1000 street corner drug dealers in LA to the Chino human storage facility and it would dent the drug supply for weeks, or maybe even days or hours. There is also the long tail, user created content not yet aggregated at a major social networking site, and the content formerly known as knowledge.
Against this you have the cultural lock-in of impressionable young adults, and baby boomers who haven't yet figured out that if Elvis is still alive, he's probably fatter than Marlin Brando and creepier than Howard Hughs (who disappeared from sight for a good while himself).
There is also highly precarious tier of mass-market content manufactured against the better post-evolutionary judgement of its customer base. The macro breweries became successful, in part, because they managed to make the taste of a good beer a dim memory. Similarly, news products are continually debased, and rely more on customer momentum than choice opportunities.
It's extremely dangerous for a mass-market success story which has invested billions of dollars lulling their primary market to sleep on quality issues to introduce a choice event into the marketplace. It could be that some people discover that Google without many of the current top 1000 sites actually returns more interesting search results, as an acquired taste, given a fifteen minute taste test. Who knew?
There are more precarious market gorillas out there than people think. Cigarettes make women ugly at a younger age. Natural Coke and Pepsi make you obese. The holy trinity of corn/soy/sodium are an express train to the afterlife. Sports are the life obsession of the politically disenfranchised (for myself, hockey scores improve my minutes, while destroying my hours and days). The tripe on most news services actively sabotages attention span and issue comprehension. Duff Beer does not make you sexy. The seven never-fail sex tips of an airbrushed super model is not going to save your marriage (if the male sexual response proved too subtle to master in private study).
You can't just randomly yank the chain on these captive markets without risk of waking your customers up. There was a story here a few days ago about intelligence: many people have it, few use it. Requires effort. It's less effort to delegate to the lower brain functions, as shaped by evolutionary psychology that outlived its crown. Mmmm beer. Mmmm donuts. Mmmm bacon.
What gives the marketers an orgasm is the old joke "Whenever I feel like exercise, I lie down until the feeling passes." This is the reflex they relentle
I find it unimaginable that people would attempt to implement a technology that is not fully understood.
This is precisely why this kind of algorithm has remained undiscovered over such a long period of time that people have begun to speculate that the human brain employs a quantum magician behind the curtain. Not so. We're just slow on the uptake. (I find this amazing: against the backdrop of our intellectual failings, we manufacture glory for our miraculous cognition.)
Compositions of non-linear components tend to defy traditional explanation. We've done a pretty good job of mining the ore where our preferred mode of understanding serves us well. This campaign is presently stuck in the mud halfway between chess and Go: computers rule the chess trench, neurons rule the Go trench; there's a large no man's land in between, with the computers gaining a few hundred yards a year, though we don't yet know how far apart these trenches lie. Reminds me of the quote: "Never mistake a clear view for a short distance." -- Paul Saffo.
There seems to be a wide range of applications remaining where mother nature--unhindered by our need to shoehorn systems into our preferred mode of explanation--gets better results at less expenditure. The most interesting feature of this discovery is that it computes well within our existing computational regime. A computational factor of 10,000 means that this algorithm running on a 486 circa 1990 would not have been out of the question (see also: slow uptake; we had the hardware, no one knew how to best use it).
There's a lot we don't yet understand about non-linear systems. I'm not in the camp where I throw up my hands and go "this is so difficult, the best we can do is discover these systems through content-free genetic algorithms". There's an entire intellectual discipline yet to be established half-way between our traditional mode of analysis (understanding things before we build them) and content-free genetic algorithms.
The deep work lies at the bionic boundary: how to interface the analytic system (in chess, this is tree search) with non-linear systems (inspired by neurological models or other forms of stochastic algorithm) to get a result greater than the sum of its parts. It's extremely difficult to synthesize the opaque, so this should present some gnarly challenges.
BTW: Kurweil has been projecting great progress in reverse engineering human neurology for quite a while. He usually hauls out as his example some work by Lloyd Watts (and others, I'm sure). This paper covers a lot of ground in acoustics and vision.
Commercializing Auditory Neuroscience
The usual answer for buying commercial software with a support contract is "to have a throat to choke". If you're into the vendor for $20k, the person on the other end of the phone tends to know something. Below $5k, good luck with that. At this point I'd specify open source below that price point just to shed the delusion that having a throat to choke is worth lifting a finger. Such a crock.
There really ought to be some stronger anti-fraud provisions against this kind of tech support experience. They can just sit there and stonewall, no money down. Appalling. A few high-profile class action lawsuits against tech support fraud would be a good start. Lying is not ignorance, it's plain old fraud. The guy on the phone must be presumed to speak on behalf of the organization. Cultivated ignorance is no excuse, either.
The usual business sentiment is that lying is the best policy, until it isn't. Intel had some 'splainin to do over the Pentium FDIV bug. More recently, Nvidia proved to be a slow learner.
From Nvidia reports problem with laptop chips
Nvidia will take a charge ... of $150 million to $200 million to cover the expected cost of repairing and replacing the products ... didn't say [which] products were affected. ... products have been failing in the field at "higher than normal rates," Nvidia said.
Higher than normal ... for small values of $200 million.
Let's not pretend that AMD invented this mess, or perfected the drill. The museum of culpability is standing room only: Iomega click of death, IBM Deathstar disk drives, Fujitsu disk drives, ABit leaky capacitors, IBM Mwave, an early version of the KT7A which scribbled on hard drives (until a BIOS fix), and the even more brilliant EIDE controller flaw, just to name a few off the top of my head I've personally experienced.
I never actually touched a machine with the godforsaken IBM MWave, but in my foolish youth, I agreed to do the tech support call for a dim-witted friend who stupidly purchased such a system without asking me first (did I mention he was an idiot?). I was soaking my wrists in warm water before the call ended. If no one has ever been found lying in pool of their own blood for buying IBM, it's not because they never tried.
Long ago I had a girlfriend afflicted with the bogus EIDE chip (Zeos Pantera, early Pentium era) that immediately scribbled all over the hard drive once you enabled a fast software disk cache (such as Hypercache, or any of its competitors). Immediately meant your system would melt down in less than a day for no obvious reason, once enough digital cannon balls toppled your castle. Relationship harmony dictated that I re-install the OS over and over and over again, since the cause took a full week to diagnose.
I'm well aware that it's a black art to get these complicated products right every time (excluding IBM's MWave, where the main challenge was to dream up something so brutally stupid in the first place). Personally, I don't have the stomach to sell disk drives. IBM and Fujitsu both sought ulcer relief in the aftermath of their data chomping disasters.
Normally I have a fairly high tolerance for "shit happens". What severely raises my ire is pissing on common sense. The high point of my tech support career was an HP printer driver which borked a friend's Windows 2000 machine to the point where it would only boot in safe mode.
Of course, HP provided a driver uninstall program ... brilliantly engineered to require a screen resolution which safe mode doesn't offer. Imagine if GM designed a car jack too tall to stick under (wiener clause: the lift strut beside) a flat tire, because they needed more room to draw their logo. Feeling impressed?
I then went to the HP online support sit
Oil is a strange good. The wealthiest economies are those which consume the most of it. Under present conditions, each unit of oil consumed generates wealth. It's extremely hard to argue that oil is not significantly underpriced, to the greater benefit of those who monopolize its consumption.
If the price of oil doubles or triples, the western world would grouse so loudly, the internet might collapse under the collective groan, but in other respects, life would go on. We'd finally have to rationalize our consumption, a project long overdue on any number of other grounds.
I have trouble grasping Chicken Little squawking out of one beak "we're running out of oil, we're all going to freeze" while simultaneously squawking out of the other beak "we've already burned too much, we're all going to roast". Even if the GHG scenario fails to unfold with the anticipated drama, there's still the issue that we are potentially damaging ocean chemistry and wiping out global shellfish ecosystems.
My own position is that we already have more carbon at hand than we can prudently burn and release into the atmosphere, so peak oil is mostly about traders hoping to pump and dump amid a global stock panic.
My sceptic says: I'll believe the world is suffering a major food shortage when nobody grows tobacco. I'll believe the world is suffering a major energy shortage when we can no longer afford to throw a cell phone away because it's so yesterday.
The Afterlife of Cellphones
Regardless, recyclers say that from their vantage point it's obvious that most phones are retired because of psychological, not technological, obsolescence. "There's some fashion driving all of this and, by its nature, fashion is not eternal," says Mark Donovan of M:Metrics, which tracks the wireless industry.
This is a dead giveaway that our society is not yet anywhere close to energy stress, as much as the masters of markets in chaos wish us to fear this.
I was thinking about power law distributions the other night, and ended up reading through some old material on Clay Shirky's blog, where I encountered the term "solidarity good": a good that primarily has value because all your peers also know about it. This is one of the factors which drives power law distributions. I mean, we all know who's the world's wealthiest self-produced amateur porn star, which is only important because we all know it.
I'm interested in another class of good which I might term "ubiquity good": something that has value primarily because you know it's pervasive and easily accessible. In software, we're trained not to succumb to the NIH factor. If you position a line of code as a scarcity good, you'll end up rewriting it every time you change jobs. In order to drive down labour cost, the powers that be have voted in favour of churn.
In our economy, most people function as wage slaves: your income is primarily determined by how many hours you have to sell. Only the ascendant sliver of the power law distribution profits from accrued capital. So you have 10% of the population controlling 90% of the wealth who are intensely invested in scarcity goods, and 90% of the population controlling 10% of the wealth who see a lot more upside in ubiquity goods. Which prevails?
Without laws to the contrary (and big government to enforce them) the answer is obvious. I wonder about this sometimes when I use Google Scholar to add a cite to a woeful Wikipedia article. I dive in, poach someone else's hard won fact/authority, jigger the wording, adjust the context, and make if free for all: a billion termites chewing away on scarcity culture, bite by bite. By comparison, the "analog gap" is a pretty small fish.
In theory, we all aspire to make the leap from the wage slave majority to the leveraged minority. The power law says most of us aren't going to make it: the number of seats at the high table seems to shrinking lately, rather than growing.
The argument boils down to one of two cases: A) we should all support scarcity culture, because we all aspire to ascend the economic ladder to the scarcity-enabled rungs of privilege, or B) we should all invest in ubiquity culture, because few of us will succeed in making the jump (as is the nature of a power law).
Power laws have a fractal structure, but scarcity doesn't seem to: for whatever reason, gated communities tend not to work; a quanta of IP tends to either be scarce or universal. Frequently the market manages to exploit aspiration over reality, but I don't see how that's going to play out in Murdoch's favour in this case. There isn't enough middle ground.
The one example of middle ground that comes to mind is stock market price data where scarcity is a function of timeliness. For the big fish, I think the goal these days is to trade on adverse information in under 4ms. The price information runs a cascade of tiers before emerging 15m later as a universal. Each tier wants to conceal the new information from the next tier down until their own trades complete, and so it goes.
Somehow Disney wants to fire the inverse-bullet-time hog-trough at this and slow the process down to the scale of human lifetimes without tipping greater society toward ubiquity goods. I can only say, good luck with that. Murdoch in the middle isn't going to fare much better.
The heart of the problem is a definition power play.
WTF are you talking about? Since the discovery of the uncertainty principle, we've known that classical determinism was crowd sourced from day one (via statistical mechanics).
Even without quantum indeterminacy, there's still algorithmic indeterminacy.
Chaitin's constant
We know we might be wrong. The machines don't know that.
If this is what free will amounts to, I don't see the day coming when the computers are beating down the doors saying "I want me some of that."
OTOH, I don't see any reason why a computer can't be programmed to make addled contributions to slashdot given the magnitude of the available training corpus.
Of all things, why should a *web browser* be a memory pig?
Do you get out much? Or do you relay your slashdot posts by smoke signal to the double-agent Luddite on the other side of the ridge?
The browser has been, since nearly its invention, been viewed as a crow bar to break Microsoft's desktop monopoly. Netscape raised a small fortune in the attempt, and was scuppered after an all-guns broadside of epic proportions. Sun provided much of the powder in the form of Java, expressly designed around platform independence. This was followed by guerrilla resistance playing out amid the hedge maze of the W3C, under covering fire from the FTC. Then Google came along and industrialized the Ruhr valley at a pace and scale breathtaking to behold, with Javascript now the front line weapon of choice in commoditizing the desktop. Javascript is a dynamic, garbage collected language. It moves into town, requisitions the largest house available, then spreads its crap everywhere with the mindset of an overnight command outpost. Just in case, it brings along a global map set detailed in all the world's languages, encoded in twenty different incompatible graphics formats, RF gear that covers very nearly every spectrum that's ever been used, and some stable boys, because a few renegades still insist upon scout horses.
If your mental picture of a combat browser is more like one guy in a wet suit with a knife between his teeth licensed to kill, I'm sure it's out there, but it's certainly not Firefox.
People seem to be ignoring in this equation that this team of engineers becomes deeply familiar with the Linux kernel and likely participates in a lot of problem solving and strategic work on the side. Knowing Google, they are confronting this patch migration problem from a high level and generally thinking about *all* the problems in the Linux kernel development and maintenance space. I'm sure this mess also counts toward code review against their mission critical infrastructure and their general handling of SCM issues at all levels of software development.
Just buy more hardware: none of the above. They're already world class at scalability. Wouldn't surprise me if they had 3000 engineers making contributions counted generously toward scalability, across algorithms, services, and hardware. One percent of their engineers engaged in a high-level chess game with "grin and bear it" is entirely justified.
Interesting echo from FAQ which I read the other night. The original contains a lot of italic I'm not going to replicate.
The closer one lives to the foundation, the stronger the argument for a fact-based architecture. DNS is about as foundational as one can get in internet security. Interesting, the architecture of monotone is highly cryptographic, and somewhat reminiscent of DNSSEC from the 40,000 foot view.
The people who don't see the problem with mixing fact and policy are likely the same people who don't regard it as a big problem that your credit card numbers is widely distributed in plain text: to every vendor you do business with, many of their employees, the trash collectors out back, and their governing union.
Why is it that some guy on the GPS thread complained that the police are free to criminalize driving under the age of 18 (to collect more revenue) and effectively act as their own judge, jury, and executioner (in the corrupt towns where this practice becomes established), but there is generally less complaint about VISA architecting themselves the same powers?
If the police collected a 2% slice of gasoline revenues and awarded bonus points for trips to Hawaii in any year where you keep your license clear and generally found other clever ways to rebate unpenalized drivers the 2% (with enough hidden strings attached it doesn't ultimately cost them much), would they be as loved as the VISA company? Just asking.
Dan Ariely asks, Are we in control of our own decisions?
Turns out it depends on how you frame the question. If the question is: do you want the DNS system to become so badly abused it might as well have been designed by a bank, you might get one answer. If the question is: do you want DNS optimized so your porn streams with ten seconds less delay between clips, you probably get the other answer.
I vote for facts. That said, I will say one thing in defense of Akamai: one can construe CDN as a fact based system, if the factoids you are dealing in that "this IP address can deliver the content you want". Ideally, you already have a secure hash signature of the file you're seeking so it can't play too many games with the notion of "the file you want".
I don't see why DNS needs the facts to be so low level as "this is the same IP address everyone else gets for the same query". There could be a good reason, but Vixie's excellent article fell short of providing it.
Ideally, the CDN problem would have been solved with another layer of delegation: the content you are seeking can be obtained from a vast array of different places, here's an authoritative address for a highly overloaded server; if you're in a hurry go talk to xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx to find a location near you. Then the caching proxy can send a request with the header "I represent a client in the Pacific Northwest" rather than sending back to the client the name of the video store where client's attorney rents his own porn.
Is that you, Obelix the gallstone? Fell into a vat of anonymous coward super juice as a young infant? I thought so.
He's only having it both ways if he privately supports Nominum's stupidity, while publicly declaiming his involvement.
This post is an excellent example of polarization disorder: the belief that the world will run most smoothly if everyone is neatly aligned in violent opposition.
What's the payoff for Obelix the gallstone in shifting the landscape in this direction, supposing anyone falls for his feeble derision? Personally, I've never experienced the orgasmic pleasure of seeing how far I could polarize everyone else around me. I guess the game here is to incite all the villagers to gather in the town square with pitchforks levelled, while you slip into the church to steal the artifacts.
This particular GPS might have been engineering to prevent log tampering, given its intended application.
"Might have been" tends to trigger the same kind of innumeracy as the mass of the earth's atmosphere (5 x 10^18 kg). We get a bit stupid confronting all those zeros.
Are we talking about an arithmetic "might have been" which can be expressed in two digits (0-1 in 1% increments)? Or are we talking "might have been" which can be expressed in two digits (10^-99 to 10^-epsilon)? Are we talking about less difficult than rigging an election machine, or more difficult than fleecing an ATM?
We'd all waste a lot less breath if people throwing the word "might" around would kindly confine it to a single order of magnitude: 10^-(x+0.5) .. 10^-(x-0.5) for some stated value of x >= 0.5.
This concerns the value of "might" on the family's own steam.
It's a whole different matter to position might after the family engages a criminal mastermind to perform their bidding. Ordinarily, in law, the rule of thumb is "No capes!" when deciding what might have happened. They will quickly teleport you to a criminal docket if this presumption fails to hold.
Something was niggling at me while composing that last post. I must have imprinted on Bernie, our nine year old fart king impresario: he's always been my archetype of the human condition. I think I imprinted at too young an age, before our pre-pubescent stagecraft kicked into high gear.
Edge: A Bozo of a Baboon
Our frontal lobes are great accouterments, but really, in most of us they function with the consistency of a light bulb in Africa during a lightening storm. I've never once fallen for the suit and tie edition of human magnificence.
Somehow I don't think he's talking about his uncle Bernie. A mite unresolved?
Funny how something niggles, decide maybe Sapolsky has something to say on the matter, and stumble over this, never having seen it before. (Fascinating for those with a bug for writing, but a tough read due to a rough, stuttering, stammering transcription.)
From How I Write
Elsewhere in the Edge article, he comments that after the Bronx, the baboons were a welcome change.
Huh. I was once told by a roommate that I had the highest IQ of any person he'd met, but my IQ was a set of measure zero. He meant I didn't much apply my talents to tasks of any use to anyone else. So true. He also meant that physics didn't have such ridiculous things as sets of measure zero (little did he know what was coming down the pike). In my defense, I was an internet junkie, but the internet hadn't been invented yet. It consumes a lot of mental resources to become addicted to something that hasn't been invented yet. After the internet was invented, people began to perceive me as less distracted, but in truth, I suspect nothing changed.
Wrong on the internet
I joke with my GF about this a lot. From time to time I heap wrath upon a post in slashdot--always in the nicest possible way. The thing is, I don't regard the targets of my scorn as imbeciles (though I mutter this loudly under my breath while I'm typing). What triggers me is the trick costume change: "I'll turn my brain off momentarily in the middle of this sentence, and woohoo, look at me come out the other side unscathed by contrary information."
Slashdot is practically a petri dish of smart people suffering from momentary mental brown-outs, willingly or not. I don't get this, it's not one of my many peccadilloes, but man, does it have popular appeal. We greatly discount this effect in public debate, much to the detriment of the outcome. I mean, if I were a white mouse studying humans, I'd never leave my keyboard, not since the day slashdot first opened its virtual doors. This can also be studied in the hot tub at my local swimming pool, but I'd soon fear for my sanity. Whatever a Jacuzzi stimulates, it ain't brain cells. Sadly, I can't handle the truth in its purest, undiluted form.
I've long opined that gambling is actually an internal money laundering operation. The spend side reasons "I'll win some/most/more than most of it back". But then, on the rare occasion when the deluded sot is momentary up on the house it's suddenly "drinks for everyone!" Ones proceeds, if they rematerialize at all, rematerialize directly into the bon vivant bucket, even if the money vested originated from the mortgage and sick kids bucket.
"I spent 90% of my money on women and drink. The rest I wasted." - George Best
Those who are less honest about this visit the casino. It's a way to pursue a certain reproductive strategy while framing it in a dingier, yet better accepted light.
Ideology is a lot like math: it doesn't matter where you hide the division by zero, once you've swapped the peanut, you can carry the result through to the end conclusion, whatever end conclusion your soul desires. It only takes the blink of a mind to go from premise A to conclusion !A through a long and highly respectable sequence of steps (bonus points: with heaps of "security theatre").
The people who argue from a deeper perspective have the habit of asking "does this still make sense?" after every step in the argument. But if that is not your agenda, you're soon conditioned not to do this. It merely interferes with arriving at your set conclusion.
I don't regard this phenomena of mentally jumping the tracks as shallow. There's many social situations where the round-trip checksum is not going to work out (that would contravene cherished consensus) unless an error is cleverly folded into one of the steps. More power to the guy in the frock with the force of will to control where that error transpires. Entire institutions have sprung up to wield that mighty staff, in every civilization of note.
These errors have tremendous cultural value (though this might be slowly waning so long as net neutrality prevails, which suggests it won't). Nor is it clear that these errors conserve mental energy. The hardest working people I've met are those who maintain an alternate reality field 24/7. These people can be pretty good at distracting you with where the marble goes. With some determi
Would you believe, that's the second biggest rootkit I've ever seen?
Pretty much where I'm at while I continue to throw good coin at my local robocall entitlement company and diligently recycle dead trees hand delivered by my local robomail entitlement crown corp. There used to be a number of disposable single blade razors that worked well for me, all since driven out of the market. Now I lease my triple-blade manhood from Warren Buffett at triple the price.
Ah yes, the old "and loving it" trick.
There's a view the world according to father knows best. And I'm sure it's true much of the time or the project would have foundered long ago.
I'm also sure that worthwhile patches fall through the cracks, personalities matter in how the decisions are made, and the communication of the decisions made often falls far short of the ideal, wasting valuable time and energy of people who wished to make a positive contribution.
That said, Con is not my personal poster child for the unfairly rejected: he seems to understand neither software engineering nor macro economics in the large. For example, while Con's patches might improve things for the desktop user in the short term, if it comes at the cost of continued enterprise support for the people who continue to develop the kernel, the victory will be short lived; in this scenario, at the end of the day, *everyone* loses. Fair enough, one might say, at least it's equitable.
The moral of this story as I read it is that he should have chosen his battle better in the first place, such as becoming a founding developer for Haiku, who likely would have embraced his audio-glitch-free window dragging aspirations as a founding precept of digital justice. From the Linux perspective, that enterprise machine that didn't see Con's reported glitches now looks like next year's entry model (welcome to Westmere). As a software engineer, one must cast an extremely critical eye on the carrying cost of modifications designed to avert a problem where there is already a great deal of writing on the wall.
I'd say there's a good chance that same logic applies to fat binaries.
I'll certainly be on the lookout next time I step outdoors. Beware what you step over, version 2 might be delivered unannounced. I've complained about the pig spotters before: there are some people out there milking the jest-coma that the next version of Windows won't fit on a 1.5 TB disk drive. They'll finally shut up ... when their grandkids ask "What was Microsoft?" Maybe.
If you've been paying any attention at all, you'll realize that the drug discovery industry has arrived at the cusp of an unpleasant sea change: the old model of statistical epidemiology (and its cost structure) is failing, yet the new model, narrowly targeted drugs administered with diagnostic certainty (which I refer to etiology-based medicine) can't possibly work under the current regulatory regime.
Pricing life saving medicines (even a life with few innings left to save) is one of the most debated issues going, with voices weighing in at every conceivable price point short of "sex with your 12 year old daughter". Four years of tuition at a top school, however, lies within the realm debated. This was the subject matter on Econtalk recently, but not one of his better episodes, so I won't post the link.
The current FDA drug approval process operates at a price point one can only justify if the sales model is to add the drug to the water supply, e.g. your HDL is low, you might be at risk, you need to take Lipitor until pigs fly (aka a generic alternative materializes circa 2011).
Pfizer Wins Longer Life For Lipitor
Do drug companies fear the FDA? How would you like to be pulled over for missing a tick box on a 100 page licence application form and have your leased Ferrari immediately confiscated? Plus, you're a public company, so they grab your cell phone and Tweet this fact to everyone who has ever known you. And then you have to walk back to the office and write the incident up on your TPS form.
Those comments incited me to discover why Marge married Homer. She must have got herself seriously tittered by Jabba the Hutt to follow Homer back to the golf castle. Somewhere in that small mind of hers "No more peeling those annoying labels!" The woman has priorities.
The beauty of this is that it could be a lot of things. If some American official someday leaks "this is why we really did this" the odds that I would discount spin can't be over 50%, which relegates this to a quasi-permanent bucket of unknowability. It's a rare thing when a lightening bolt momentarily catches the men behind the curtain with a ruse in flagrante. The Soviets had their washer microphone. The Americans had the thermohaline undersea acoustic channel (where I live, a couple of decades ago, an undersea microphone research project was shut down precipitously).
Reputedly, the Americans had a telecoms satellite with the electronics compacted to such a spectacular degree, they managed to fit a spy telescope where the Russians believed it was technologically impossible. As the story goes, this flew over open Russian nuclear missile bays until some Russian mole tipped them off, and that was the last silo with exposed cleavage it ever flew over.
Another story is that the Americans pulled off a deep undersea splice of an unencrypted fibre optic cable connecting Moscow to one of their satellite states. This cable was unencrypted because 1) the Russians didn't believe a silent optical splice was technically possible, and 2) the Russians probably didn't think an American submarine could into position to do this undetected. I think there was once a big piece in Wired about this.
The final case that comes to mind is the Siberian pipeline sabotage. This one, especially, works almost as well as propaganda as fact, but it appears to be rigorously documented. I love the image of the CIA analyst popping up over his cubicle wall going "nobody panic, we know about this" as ever other analyst in the facility fumbles to get to the red phone.
A scenario I sometimes wonder about is a conversation between no such agency and the ghost of Alan Turing that goes like this:
Dr Turing's ghost, we've got this molecular-perfect crystal of gallium arsenide the size of a dinner plate (at some staggering cost to the space program), an experimental electron beam lithography apparatus able to draw a million logic units per day (the anti-vibration table alone is staffed with a team of twenty full time Black Mesa technicians), and more liquid gas than NASA. What kind of pretty picture do you think you could draw on this thing given a few months to think about it, and a year for the etching?
The one question I've most wanted to find out is this: what was the state of the art in 1970 for one-off half billion dollar chips? Lightening rarely strikes twice, and 99 times out of a hundred you never find out.
You say that like "government" is a dial that you can turn up and down. And that all the people who want "more government," as you put it, want, is to turn the dial up.
I find that people tend to reach for the more/less dial when they nothing to contribute but ideology. Canada was rated as having the world's soundest banking system after the crash. (It's in Wikipedia; as a typical Canadian, I was surprised we even had an article there. Must have been a slow news day.) Why is it that no American ever looked across the back of the sofa and suggested, "why don't we have the same amount of regulation that worked out so well up there?"
If more works better, get more. If less works better, have less. Why is it that businesses can "right size" but government can't? Tumour in the corpus callosum? Does this make sense to anyone else?
Ideology, n. the emotional premise that optimality exists only for the values 0 and infinity.
Normally you'd expect the psychology of priming to catch this one: a linear extrapolation is worthless when medical technology continues to change as fast as it does. Diabetes continues to exist in 50 years? On the near side of the apocalypse? I highly doubt it. Excepting curvature, we can thus conclude that women are getting fatter.
Some people see this phase we're in where the genomics/proteomics researchers are discovering that nothing is as simple as we told the investors as evidence that progress in medical science has taken a coffee break. Hardly. For the last century, the foundation of modern medicine has been statistical epidemiology: trying to find a needle in a haystack with a densitometer.
The profit model for the pharmaceutical industry is to spread the benefit of a drug over the largest study population where the effect remains statistically significant. Cholesterol levels too high? Add Lipitor to the water supply. It could be that only 10% of the people who take Lipitor actually benefit. But then, if this were determined, they'd have to charge ten times as much per treatment to maintain existing revenues, and fewer uninsured would be able to pay, and we might have to let some future president actually preside.
We are right now in the heart of the transition to etiology based medicine. Among the problems are how to pay for it without using giant studies designed to implicate everyone. This isn't so different from the transition of observational taxonomy (A and B share the same egg tooth dimple) to taxonomy with a genomics turbo assist. I recall in the early 1980s, this transition was not widely welcomed among traditional taxonomists. Unreliable, they complained. Now you couldn't do taxonomy any other way, and a lot of old arguments are long gone in the rear view mirror. The new bionic taxonomy is better, stronger, faster.
We're in that deceptive interlude after pressing the ignite button on the Saturn V rocket where the flame and rumble have erupted out the bottom, while the rocket itself just kind of shivers there, apparently going nowhere.
The combined propellant flow rate of the five F-1s in the Saturn V was 3,357 US gallons (12,710 l) per second, which would empty a 30,000 US gallons (110,000 l) swimming pool in 8.9 seconds. Each F-1 engine had more thrust than all three space shuttle main engines combined.
A decade or two later, you're praying for center-engine cutoff.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Apollo_8_acceleration.gif
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Genbank/genbankstats.html
Swell time to extrapolate the fate of humanity on a straight line. Besides, I have evidence to the contrary.