When genetic testing becomes less expensive, I expect prior to every transplant, a DNA sample of the transplant tissue is tested against a federal data bank of consenting donors, which should also contain cause of death information, etc.
This isn't hard to police once genetic sequencing becomes cheap. Only the agreed donors need to be registered.
There are some potential privacy issues (for the living) in maintaining a genetic registry for the deceased. Nevertheless, I have trouble believing it won't happen in some form or another.
My advice would be to learn formal verification techniques.
Over my career, I wouldn't say that languages as such have been a major influence. Developing language-independent formal coding strategies has proven far more important. I've benefited from the writings of Dijkstra (immeasurably), Stroustrup, Iverson, Backus, Knuth, Plaugher, Stepanov, Brooks, Bertrand Meyer (with reservations), and not a lot else. I haven't learned anything profound from Wall, but thanks for all the Onions.
Machine code gave me a good underlying model of the machine. Essential for many debugging situations, esp. back in the day when compilers would often generate faulty code.
APL taught me the value and power of carefully reasoned primitives, the power *and* risk of concision.
C taught me how easy it is to write a loop that's impossible to validate mentally (and then I taught myself how *not* to write such code).
C++ taught me most of what I know about software engineering: programming in the large. C++ manages to be simultaneously better and worse than almost any other language one cares to name. There is a deep truth there that hardly anybody in the industry wishes to accept.
SNOBOL and PL/1 taught me that kitchen sinks are best used for washing dishes.
Perl taught me that it isn't at all difficult to write a complex regular expression that's harder to read than any APL program I ever wrote. I once had to program in APL on a teletype that lacked the APL character set, so every APL symbol was mapped to its ASCII counterpart based on key location. Reading APL code on this teletype was comparable to reading a particularly hairy Perl regex.
PHP taught me that useful code can be written in a language with no coherent center whatsoever.
LISP taught me that the human brain is not a stack machine. I grew up with Mechano. I don't understand the Lego people while all those identical bricks, and I don't understand the LISP people with all those identical cricks.
COBOL taught me separation of concerns: code should be code, comments should be comments.
Python taught me nothing at all. To me Python is just the metric version of PHP, which spares you the headache of guessing which functions calls are in Imperial or American units (roughly as arbitrary as whether a Wikipedia page uses British or American spellings). To be honest, I learned more from playing around with ChipWits many years ago. But I find Python enjoyable for some reason as much as I've used it.
Pascal taught me that the evolution of a complex program occurs along more than a single dimension. I never enjoyed a single minute of Pascal programming.
By far, I learned the most simply from reading Dijkstra (set aside an hour per page) and practicing the art of coding an algorithm in such a way that by the time you are done, your code couldn't possibly be wrong in any profound way, because you have captured the undiluted purity of essence.
Plaugher helped to convince me that computers are *especially* fast at doing nothing. Whenever possible, when a precondition is not met, I just let the code continue, mostly doing nothing (if every statement is coded not to execute in the absence of its precondition, this is an automatic consequence). When the routine completes, I check state variables to see whether the desired actions were accomplished.
I hate exceptions and have never conclusively demonstrated to myself why exceptions are necessary. I suppose to permit integration with code that *doesn't* rigorously guard every statement. I feel confident about my C++ code until the moment I enable exceptions in the compiler. Then I think to myself: this program could potentially fail in 1000 different ways depending on which exception paths are taken. It took the wizards of STL *years* to make the STL fully exception safe. That troubles me. A lot. More than all the other complaints about C++ piled to the moon and back.
I happened to have a Fedora system, so I stuck with FF 1.5.x right up until the first day of FF 3b1. I do a lot of work in MediaWiki environments, often pounding away the whole day in FF. Somehow, I rarely manage to have less than 50 tabs open, occasionally as many as 200, in four to eight windows scattered over four desktops.
Memory usage under 1.5.x was unbelievably bad. After a week of heavy use, it would routinely plateau in the 1-1.5 GB range, at which point it would become intolerably slow and force me to restart.
I've downloaded every FF 3 beta the day of first release, and pounded on them all.
3b1 crapped out after just over 2 weeks of heavy use. 3b2 was noticeably better, but not perfect. I wasn't thrilled with 3b3. Page transitions to previously open tabs became more sluggish, back/forward browsing was slower, and they really messed up window to window tab move (didn't take the tab history along for the ride, causing me to lose some major unsaved edits while discovering this unpleasant fact, which happily is now fixed in 3b4).
3b4 has been tremendously solid over the relatively short period since its release. Virtual 540MB, resident 330MB. That's spectacularly low by the standards of previous releases for the intensity of my use. Back/forward page transitions on aged tabs remains slower than for 3b1, but not annoyingly so. Overall, it just feels solid now.
I'm having trouble comprehending that *anyone* once said Firefox had no serious memory leaks. Say what? Firefox 1.5 was the Ginny Sacramoni of web browsers. I'm happy to confirm that Firefox has successfully excised the 90-pound mole from its waddling derriere.
Canadians enjoy a particularly severe strain of dating schizophrenia. I have discovered a good solution to the 2/4/6 problem. Avoid doing transactions on any day less than the current month and during any month less than the current year.
Of course, in 2012 I'll have to compress my yearly shopping between December 12 and December 31. Hopefully nobody else figures this out, so the stores won't be too crowded.
The nuclear cat is out of the bag, and as long as the US has a single nuke, they have no place to lecture others about non-proliferation.
This is dangerous reasoning.
Reasoning? LMAO! Hey buddy, pass me that copy there of Sun Tsu's "The Art of Unilateral Disarmament".
Seriously, how does a person make it into their adult years spouting this kind of sentiment?
The cat is out of the bag. Polarizing, fatalistic, and brinkmanship rolled into a pithy pronouncement of life's harsh realities for the benefit of a gaggle of children crying over spilled milk. Yes, daddy, you know best.
What exactly does that expression mean, anyway? There are dozens of performance parameters on the construction and maintenance of a nuclear stockpile, a base of knowledge where the Americans retain many profound advantages, obtained at staggering costs. I'd be surprised if "the bag" doesn't have a hundred cats, each with a billion dollar pedigree.
One could equally argue that three-headed human fetuses are also "out of the bag" concerning recent advanced in genomics. No point trying to stop the proliferation of human embryo experimentation. It's "out of the bag, dude."
as long as the US has a single nuke
Sounds best in the voice of the bratty kid who has been water bombing the girls from a second story school window when the rest of his balloons are confiscated. "But Bobby still has balloons! You didn't take his balloons away!" Yeah, we're hoping Bobby doesn't prove to be quite as stupid in the choices he makes, but if it comes to that, he'll soon suffer the same fate.
The aspect of human nature that I've become most interested in lately is how the taunts and provocations of the grade-two school yard continue to echo in the corridors of power and public opinion in adult society.
It's amazing to me the level of discourse from the creationists that holds sway in many quarters. Few people go "haha, that's what I used to think and how I used to behave back when I was nine years old". The more one invokes school yard tauntings, the more implicitly powerful it seems to become. We somehow grow out of the "baby under the cabbage leaf", but don't grow out of equally infantile schoolyard rhetoric.
Why not? "Cat out of the bag" in a discussion of international nuclear non-proliferation is about as useful as "babies come from storks" in a discussion of global population growth.
In practical terms, I don't think the Americans can walk away from their existing nuclear stockpile any easier than a twenty-five year old woman can tell her ten year old daughter "You know what, I've realized it was a mistake to get pregnant out of wedlock at age 15. Please step into the vaporizer booth so I can clean the slate."
It would hardly be hypocrisy for such a woman to say "I made a choice that put me on this path through life and I've managed to live with it, but it's not easy, and I think the world would soon go to hell in a hand-basket if everyone went down the same path I've followed, with much help from everyone around who made better life choices."
I've often heard the statement made that no one should become president who hasn't suffered a major life setback. It's never been established that the best leadership comes from the untarnished.
Unfortunately, the Americans made a catastrophic blunder in positioning themselves as a sober steward of a dangerous and difficult responsibility: they started a major war over a false cause, and then lied about the fact that it matters.
The message seems to have been lost among the majority of the American electorate that democracy is a responsibility and a burden, not an entitlement. I take the perspective that America's consumerist culture is responsible for undermining what was once America's great political achievement.
It is possible that being bombarded with 10,000 ad impressions per year from the age where our wrinkly little thumb f
Their "this is Google" halo could be dented in short order rolling out something like this obnoxiously. I don't see Google wanting to explore that risk in the short term. More likely, this is a rainy day patent, if a revenue downturn in their existing business threatens their core competitiveness.
Another move is that they might deploy something like this, but on a very small scale, enough to recover their Youtube bandwidth costs and not actually lose money on this service.
It would be cool if some pharmaceutical compound was discovered to have the side effect of making a person impervious to commercial brainwashing, such that exposure to advertising had zero influence on future purchasing decisions. Botox against herd behaviour. Would western civilization survive?
Skinner completely missed the boat. The interesting academic paper was the emergence of a market to receive pleasure in response for subjecting yourself to a unit of behavioral conditioning to serve the interests of your corporate overlords, er, the people who sell you Coke and sneakers and a Dodge Ram so you can fit into society and manage to get laid and retain your alpha-male fantasy long into middle age.
If only Skinner had had McLuhan as his research advisor.
The pretty pictures just show that the volume of code is going up, which doesn't tell us anything about the value (economic or practical) of what's being written, nor what the future trends for that value are likely to be. Neither is the GDP a particularly good measure of economic progress, since the figure is quite happy to add a mess to the cost of cleaning up the mess and then tell you that you are quite wealthy.
LOC has the same problem: it will add lines of code creating a bug to lines of code working around the bug.
The purchase of an SUV adds to the GDP more than a less expensive vehicle. The SUV adds yet more to the GDP when it burns more gas to travel the same distance. If that SUV rolls over on the highway two years after purchase and causes one of the occupants to collect $1m in heath benefits through insurance, the GDP rockets upward yet again. GDP has an extremely dim relationship to the *value* of the activity it measures. What you can infer is that the society is wealthy enough that people (some people) actually *have* million dollar health insurance packages, and there is a medical establishment capable of delivering that service.
But the same is true of LOC: you can successfully infer from a project having 1m LOC that the project probably has more than a single core contributor.
In fact, prior to the sub-prime collapse, American economic health metrics were an orgy of double counting. Five to ten years from now the press will be writing stories about how the market has *returned* to the level of 2006, having conveniently forgotten that the numbers from 2006 were fictitious to the point of fraudulence.
If you are taking one figure more seriously than the other, just because one is denominated in dollars (and hence more "real"), you aren't thinking clearly.
Goolsbee remarks late 2006:
The one true dark spot on the US picture is our totally unsustainable fiscal position.
First, you should disregard the official numbers because of the accounting. Some time ago the government got tired of people seeing how much they were actually promising to spend so they switched to cash accounting. Nothing counts as a cost until it is actually spent. So the social security system is bringing in tons of money which it was supposed to use for your retirement. But they don't have to actually start spending money on your retirement for a few years sooooo, they can count the cash coming in as revenue and not count the what they will owe as expenditure. They are almost literally charging money to a credit card and calling it income.
Now if you take the total value of what we are on the hook to pay and the amount that we will raise in taxes, do I really need to tell you that they don't add up? Boy do they not add up. The latest numbers indicate that the net present value over the next 75 years is almost $70 trillion. According to some budget experts, by the standard of a business, the nation is bankrupt. But hey, it's only money.
In fact, Alan Turing thought it would be solved within a few years. Turing was far from being that dim, though I suspect he would have been shocked that the first chess program to beat a world champion contained no planning or deductive reasoning module.
OTOH, his code breaking work gave him an unsurpassed understanding of entropy. If you had asked Turing to estimate the knowledge base of a typical adult human (sensory, experiential, intellectual) he would have picked a large number. Did he think that all that necessary information content was going to be stored in a mercury delay line? Hardly.
More likely he felt the art would advance fairly quickly to the point where it fooled some of the people some of the time, despite a paltry real-world information base.
Ask yourself this: At what point did he himself think *he* could be fooled by a such a program? "A few years"? Roger Penrose figures his magnificent brain won't be duplicated without the discovery of new laws of physics. Whatever Turing's answer might have been, it would have been more sensible than Roger Penrose, and less outrageous than "a few years", unless he was meaning "few" relative to the historical norms of Kings College, founded in 1441.
The great bounty of the Turing test will be the determination of areas of (purported) human proficiency where the challenge proves particularly easy: just about any field of discourse that activates the human greed, status, denial, narcotic, or sexual gratification cognitive reflex arcs (aka the whole of Rush Limbaugh's repertoire).
Here's a test even the smartest human can't pass: distinguish the average call-in to a radio talk show from a meet-puppet simulacrum with little more than an oozing cupcake of space fungus inside the bony eyeball prominence. Perhaps I exaggerate, if not much.
Consider a 300lb couch potato whose primary physical activity is participating in a rousing re-run of "Dukes of Hazard". It's fairly obvious from the outside that this person has not made a substantial investment in maximizing his physical gifts. Many people out there treat their minds just as badly. Some of these circuits take work (calories, discipline, and emotional investment) to fully activate.
When you hear stories of middle aged professionals being taken for 50,000 British pounds by Nigerian advance-fee fraud, it becomes apparent how far one can get through life with little activation of ones higher faculties.
The first conclusion from research progressing toward Turing-esque objectives will be that we do in fact have these higher faculties that *are* extremely difficult to simulate.
The second conclusion that will soon follow is how rarely we employ these faculties going about our everyday business: grinding out a living, getting laid, reaffirming our rung in the social hierarchy, promoting our moral agendas.
Speaking of holodecks, I can't wait to see Spitzer Jr put forward the defense in 2060 "You mean I paid for expensive hookers in *real* life? I thought I was immersed in my favorite program on Holodeck 9. I would never have behaved that way in real life, if I had known it was for real at the time."
I look forward over the next thirty years to our insightful pundits of political culture (real or electronic) debating on late night TV, in three words sound bites, the proposition: what's the difference, if there is one, between paying $5000 for two hours in Holodeck 9 rather than enjoying two hours as Client 9 for the same subjective experience?
I can see it already: electronically simulated female companionship, with an official simulation age of 21 (to comply with federal guidelines), behaving suggestively within the simulation to be not quite so old as all that, yet purporting in dialog to be as old as federal law requires.
The new Turing test: how old is your holodeck hooker, really? Whatever you do, if you've downloaded that Sharapova extension from Russia, don't give her the bank account number to your tax haven in Liechtenstein, no matter what. Sometimes human brain no workee too good.
secondly, who really cares? Most of it is cached google pages and pron anyway... That's why/.ers care. But actually, no. We're very close already to being able to generate pron on demand without involving any principle photography. You won't even need to say what you want, that will be ascertained on the fly by neuro-cranial-bio-feedback.
After enough of the male population has been brain mapped, it will probably turn out like spam: there's only so many unique permutations, as long as the scene is dressed up a little differently from time to time to maintain the novelty factor.
Pron seems to be a lot like Big Bertha, where each mortar round was larger than the last, to accommodate progressive barrel enlargement. Eventually the images become extremely shocking to get any response at all.
The future of compression is not to send the picture itself, but the reduced specification for an image that produces the same effect on the human visual system. We're already doing this with psycho-acoustic encoding.
Once we have a sufficiently sophisticated model of human sensory perception, mental and emotional responses (which will run to TBs I'm sure), we can run a competition for the best feature movie encoded in under 4KB. Mostly it would describe desired emotional responses and cognitive states, the actual images would be back-generated to achieve this effect as determined by the human perceptual model.
Then it took less than a century for the bottom to fall off _that_ market, and nowadays the only countries which still have an agriculture are those who subsidize it. This is a most curious argument, not that you are the first to make it. The statement seems to imply that if Canada, say, ceased to hand out agricultural subsidies and thereby terminated our agricultural industry, we'd be able to import the food cheaper than we were previously growing it ourselves, and further benefit by eliminating loss-making (subsidized) agricultural exports. Does that make any sense? Or the asymptote: that the world would be economically better off if the world ceased food production altogether?
I was just reading a piece on economics which termed 1000BC to 1800AD "The Flintstones" and 1800AD to the present "The Jetsons". It's only been a relatively short time period where the economy has grown (hence *changed* in material respects) so rapidly that 50-year investment cycles are hard to fathom.
Yes, it turns out that some forms of economic activity are hard to justify as we charge toward the looming technological singularity.
something which _might_ make you the big bucks in 50 years, will get Wall Street screaming for blood Isn't that interesting? We have the attention span of an ADHD mayfly for raising capital, but we're happy to sit on our liabilities for hundreds of thousands of years.
At some scale, common abstractions break down, such as your broad-brush of "subsidy" to the whole of global food production above. Some human endeavors are larger than the greed-loop in a Wall Street tycoon, who is, after all, merely engaged in a culturally shaped manifestation of his underlying biological drives.
The solution, obviously, is genetic engineering. One must first genetically alter the human population with biological drives compatible with 50-plus year investment cycles. In 50 to 100 years, a suitably modified humanity would support any length of transgalactic investment cycle you might wish to contemplate.
If you started with some Wikipedian root stock (barely qualifying as human as it stands), you could even set things up so that people compete for the opportunity to deliver your goods for free. Just be sure to suppress the "crow" complex, or they'll bring you back a cargo container filled with shiny lumps of carbon.
Re:but this goes for any stream of information
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The Geometry of Music
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· Score: 1
Since this paper is the first ever on musical theory to be published in Science, which is a highly prestigious peer-reviewed journal, we can assume that the paper is saying something interesting within its field. I wouldn't reason that broadly from prestige, but then I score the utility of Wikipedia higher than most, and the utility of peer-review lower than most.
The difference in my view comes down to a different perception of what "utility" encompasses: I don't concede special prominence to the narrow utility of career advancement. No doubt I'll soon be called to testify in front of the "House Committee on Un-American Activities".
Listen to any background conversation at your local hot-tub or donut shop. Would the average opinion overheard be damaged or improved by a quick visit to the Wikipedia on the subject discussed? Wikipedia can locate Iraq on a map. Most Americans can't.
The American view seems to be if you're not getting paid to do so, why bother? Don't waste your time. The information you need is found in the authoritative literature of your profession. This system produces strong economic results, which goes a long ways toward paying for the rather bad political results corresponding to a blinkered electorate.
I'm just saying that how a person frames "utility" amounts to a value statement and that prestige and peer-review are relative to purpose. You don't need to study anthropology very long before you get a good look at cultural credence effects (eminently peer-reviewed) meanwhile overturned.
From the perspective of algorithmic complexity, a scientist ought to be compelled to believe *all* hypotheses that haven't yet been falsified (with an exponential weighting function diminishing likelihood as a function of expression length). But science tends to have a rather severe constructive bias, which is culturally enforced.
Read the Summers debate, these voices are the same people performing auspicious peer-review behind the ivory curtain. Is your confidence shaken? Mine was. Probably not so much by this link, but by the rest of what I read at the time. Note that on the surface they aren't even managing to debate the same point, but the undercurrent concerns career advancement.
One thing you can count upon, no future Harvard president will be caught dead discussing this research in a public forum.
So, what one can infer from the prestige of the journal Science is that if this result is a sophisticated math bamboozle, it's at the most sophisticated end of the bamboozle spectrum. I'll give them that much.
I don't actually suspect this is a bamboozle. I wouldn't be at all surprised that a more compact expression of chordal music is possible in a higher dimensional space. I have trouble believing Bach could do what he did if his mind was manipulating the same representation as the rest of us. The extent to which Bach intuited this higher representation, if it in fact exists, would be hard to establish.
The metaphor I would use is self-organized quasi-periodic tiling. Bach seemed to sense the local rules which governed whether the pattern could be sustained and extended (mellifluously), though he might not have had a conscious grasp on Penrose tiling itself, or whatever its analog might be in contrapunctal composition.
We're trained from childhood to think that ads are no big deal by exposure to 10,000 ad impressions per year. In the world of greed, is all that money being spent on something that doesn't work? You seem to think it's a good thing if we *don't* notice the ads, or *don't think* we do, or are affected by them.
I don't see why the cost structure would grow such that it can't continue at close to current funding levels. As fast as Wikipedia has grown, so has the performance/price of the server infrastructure.
We'd be risking a major cultural change in what the Wikipedia represents over a rather paltry sum of money. I don't get it.
Far more of a threat to Wikipedia than shortage of cash is a negative cultural spiral among the editors who frequent there. Some would suggest this has already happened / is already happening. I haven't decided yet.
That said, I wouldn't be entirely opposed to advertising on pages concerning popular culture. Despite my inclusionist stance, I tend to regard the fancruft as more of a burden than an asset, even if I do use it to brush up on the plot or characters of the Sopranos.
If the money began to gush in from fancruft pages, how long would the resolve last to confine ads to fancruft? The debate would be never-ending. Eventually, it would go one way or the other just to shut people up.
Fortunately, I don't think this is likely to happen anytime soon. Jimmy is already working to monetize the fancruft over at Wikia. He'd be undercutting his own venture. I've heard the move to SF was to enable more effective fund-raising, as there is a lot of money floating around the valley.
In America, there does seem to be a general mistrust of any institution that hasn't yet sold out to the prevailing material culture. I suppose it is an effective way to rationalize the depressing society we live within by declaring that "resistance is futile". I mean by that resistance to the almighty buck. Why would anyone wish to resist? Money, after all, is next to godliness, as we all know. You've poured a trillion dollars of godliness into Iraq and look where it's got you.
I've long wanted to convert my firewall systems to something Via based, partly for their low power consumption, partly for the Padlock crypto engine. It's only recently that Via boards have hit price points appropriate to their performance levels. The premium associated with a specialty board always canceled out the lower cost of the chips it contained.
The existing via is much like a 1.5GHz 486 with a handful of special purpose accelerators. The upcoming Isaiah (one source suggests availability June 2008) should finally kick via up into the 1.5GHz PIII range, at which point, for many purposes, performance is no longer a limiting factor. The rumour is that this new Via offers twice the performance/watt in a drop-in, pin-compatible package.
At long last, these low-end carcasses are becoming quite the interesting niche.
Re:My heterogeneous experience with Cell processor
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Panic in Multicore Land
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· Score: 5, Interesting
So if this is what heterogeneous-cores programming means, I'd probably prefer the homogeneous version.
Your points are valid as things stand, but isn't it a bit premature to make this judgment? Cell was a fairly radical design departure. If IBM continues to refine Cell, and as more experience is gained, the challenge will likely diminish.
For one thing, IBM will likely add double precision floating point support. But note that SIMD in general poses problems in the traditional handling of floating point exceptions, so it still won't be quite the same as double precision on the PPU.
The local-memory SPE design alleviates a lot of pressure on the memory coherence front. Enforcing coherence in silicon generates a lot of heat, and heat determines your ultimate performance envelop.
For decades, programmers have been fortunate in making our own lives simpler by foisting tough problems onto the silicon. It wasn't a problem until the hardware ran into the thermal wall. No more free lunch. Someone has to pay on one side or the other. IBM recognized this new reality when they designed Cell.
The reason why x86 never died the thousand deaths predicted by the RISC camp is that heat never much mattered. Not enough registers? Just add OOO. Generates a bit more heat to track all the instructions in flight, but no real loss in performance. Bizarre instruction encoding? Just add big complicated decoders and pre-decoding caches. Generates more heat, but again performance can be maintained.
Probably with a software architecture combining the hairy parts of the Postgres query execution planner with the recent improvements in the FreeBSD affinity-centric ULE scheduler, you could make the nastier aspects of SPE coordination disappear. It might help if the SPUs had 512KB instead of 256KB to alleviate code pressure on data space.
I think the big problem is the culture of software development. Most code functions the same way most programmers begin their careers: just dive into the code, specify requirements later. What I mean here is that programs don't typically announce the structure of the full computation ahead of time. Usually the code goes to the CPU "do this, now do that, now do this again, etc." I imagine the modern graphics pipelines spell out longer sequences of operations ahead of time, by necessity, but I've never looked into this.
Database programmers wanting good performance from SQL *are* forced to spell things out more fully in advance of firing off the computation. It doesn't go nearly far enough. Instead of figuring out the best SQL statement, the programmer should send a list of *all* logically equivalent queries and just let the database execute the one it finds least troublesome. Problem: sometimes the database engine doesn't know that you have written the query to do things the hard way to avoid hitting a contentious resource that would greatly impact the performance limiting path.
These are all problems in the area of making OSes and applications more introspective, so that resource scheduling can be better automated behind the scenes, by all those extra cores with nothing better to do.
Instead, we make the architecture homogeneous, so that resource planning makes no real difference, and we can thereby sidestep the introspection problem altogether.
I've always wondered why no-one has ever designed a file system where all the unused space is used to duplicate other disk sectors/blocks, to create the option of vastly faster seek plans. Probably because it would take a full-time SPU to constantly recompute the seek plan as old requests are completed and new requests enter the queue. Plus if two supposedly identical copies managed to diverge, it would be a nightmare to debug, because the copy you get back would non-deterministic. Hybrid MRAM/Flash/spindle storage systems could get very interesting.
I guess I've been looking forward to the end of artificial scaling for a long time (clock freq. as the
We don't need a "Linux ready" logo, which in any case excludes other worthy open source alternatives.
What we need is an EPA badge "Premature Landfill Protected" which means that the hardware manufacturer has released full interface specifications (without requiring NDA) so that the hardware can continue to be supported over the long term regardless of any silly OS fashion changes that might take place in the meantime.
Anyone care to guess how many inkjet printers and scanners went to an early grave in response to Microsoft driver issues on the 3.1/95/98/NT/2000/XP/Vista/Windows 7 treadmill?
Yeah, sure the new printer/scanner is better. The old one was full of lead. Where is all that lead and tantalum now?
I think the government should offer industry one of two choices: either achieve a very high recycling target for the device (e.g. all the toxics and 80% of the rest, without shipping anything to China), *or* make the interface specifications public to encourage a longer use lifetime.
I call it the 'oppressed underdog' narrative, and it would be great except for the fact that it's usually wrong. With his keen eye for misleading narrative devices, you'd think he would have spotted the old canard "undefined denominator". Just how wide does one need to cast this net to obtain "usually"? Every crackpot later recruited by scientology? Every anti-establishment survivalist publishing in "Bullets and Butter"? Every #1 cure-for-everything they-won't-tell-you-about dietary infomercialist? Cast the net only into the fish ponds I was likely to believe in the first place, would the rhetoric still be "usually"? Nice little bit of evasive "dial a denominator" there. The rest of the paper continues to demonstrate his point from the basis step 1/1 (one out of one). Did you miss his induction step? It was that word "usually" in the lede paragraph.
This raises a question: being gay has obvious evolutionary fitness consequences - without modern medicine, you have to have heterosexual sex to have offspring. This has never been obvious, though many people seem to wish it were. To begin with, for any population is it far from obvious how to define "optimal fertility". Less that the carrying capacity of their niche in the ecosystem? Less than the historic carrying capacity? Less than the projected carrying capacity? If homosexuality could be shown to lead to sustained population fertility below the "optimal" fertility rate for that population (if such a definition is even possible) you would also have to show that the basis for homosexual behaviour did not confer on the population any form of immunity to black swan events, under any hypothetical future condition.
We've all seen this definition of "obvious" play out with road ragers on busy highways. From the road rage perspective isn't it "obvious" that if I cut past that car ahead of me, I'll get there just a little bit sooner? Why is it I can still many of the cars that dangerously cut me off ten miles later, still struggling to gain every foot with the valiant effectiveness of trench combatants in WWI? When you actually study traffic flow on a highway, what you discover is that this kind of aggressively self-serving behaviour produces standing waves which reduce the net capacity of the highway as a whole. But still, somehow, it seems obvious to many that this driving strategy constitutes a good way to gain personal advantage.
Third, he's using *Darwin* here in an anecdote about over-reaching scientific orthodoxy undermined. Unbelievable. No, don't use Freud, Chomsky, Pauling, Schottky, or the Leaky family as an example of a scientist possibly prone to overreaching. No, use Darwin, Marie Curie, or Michael Farrady.
I missed your point concerning what is laudable about the Deletionists. Is is laudable in the same way that pretending not to know your "hick" younger sister is laudable if it preserves your social standing within your own age group?
In the fall of 2006, groups of editors went around getting rid of articles on webcomic artists--some of the most original and articulate people on the Net. They would tag an article as nonnotable and then crowd in to vote it down. One openly called it the "web-comic articles purge of 2006." A victim, Trev-Mun, author of a comic called Ragnarok Wisdom, wrote: "I got the impression that they enjoyed this kind of thing as a kid enjoys kicking down others' sand castles." Another artist, Howard Tayler, said: "'Notability purges' are being executed throughout Wikipedia by empire-building, wannabe tin-pot dictators masquerading as humble editors." Rob Balder, author of a webcomic called PartiallyClips, likened the organized deleters to book burners, and he said: "Your words are polite, yeah, but your actions are obscene. Every word in every valid article you've destroyed should be converted to profanity and screamed in your face."
As the deletions and ill-will spread in 2007--deletions not just of webcomics but of companies, urban places, Web sites, lists, people, categories, and ideas--all deemed to be trivial, "NN" (nonnotable), "stubby," undersourced, or otherwise unencyclopedic--Andrew Lih, one of the most thoughtful observers of Wikipedia's history, told a Canadian reporter: "The preference now is for excising, deleting, restricting information rather than letting it sit there and grow."...
Apologies to Mr Baker about quoting slightly more than my personal standard concerning fair use, but it couldn't be more pertinent to the discussion at hand.
The core problem with deletionism is deletion itself. There is a certain totalitarian satisfaction available in the deletion of something one doesn't like. Furthermore, it's a complete failure to approach the situation from a systems theory perspective: the only viable long-term test of quality is to allow the stub to sit there and see what comes of it (if any accepted topic once existed at the same preliminary state within the spectrum of "doubtful", "outside chance", or "maybe never").
Worse, once a potentially viable stub is deleted, editors show up to make additions, and find history erased. Resurrect the article from scratch, it will likely be deleted again (with the added prejudice of the previous deletion(s)).
On the other side of the coin, there are many articles at Wikipedia below the standard that Google should be indexing. Perhaps there are only a million English articles at Wikipedia worth inclusion in the Google index.
Deletion is hugely problematic as an enforcement mechanism in a society built around consensus and incremental improvement.
The problem with having a large quarantine area of content not yet ready for prime time is that no one wishes to invest in vandal patrol over a vast wasteland where only 10% of the content is likely to graduate to core. Make it such that the only way for an IP-based user to arrive at these pages is type to the full name of the page in the Wikipedia search bar. Users who log in can set a preference so that links from core to non-core are functional. IP-based users would be regarded as full users during an article edit (the search box that precedes article creation and edit previews).
I've been contemplating whether the genius of Wikipedia consists of inverting the normal social order. In most human social structures, the peons are fenced off into sandboxes of the trivial, while the only the eminences and power-users can "submit" to
What evidence do you have that the previous approach WORKED? Seems like a circular definition to me, where "works" is defined as an absence of viable alternatives.
I grew up with a 14th edition Britannica from the mid-sixties in the house. The junior version was worthless. I gave up on that when I was nine. I used the big edition a lot, but half the articles I looked up had a giant stick up their butt: scholarship as a functional impediment to information flow. A lousy way to sate a fleeting curiosity. What's the population of Iraq? Oh, bother, I've already got the I volume open to a different page. I was an impatient child. No bookmarks for me. Maybe I'd rather solve another polynomial.
I've never been thrilled with honesty or quality of information web 1.0 or its dark-age antecedent.
I had such great information available to me. Paul Ehrlich's 1968 "The Population Bomb". Ah, yes, the experts of yesteryear. No bias here, we're responsible scientists. Erich von Däniken's 1968 "Chariots of the Gods?" "The Guinness Book of World Records", various editions. "Your Erroneous Zones" 1976 Wayne Dyer. "Roots: The Saga of an American Family" 1976 Alex Haley. "In and Out of the Garbage Pail" 1981 Frederick S. Perls
This is the typical crap people had on their bookshelves prior to the invention of the PC. And the worst of it was, so far as I could tell as a child, none of the adults around me could much tell the difference. If you had taken a vote at my local church, I suspect "Chariots of the Gods?" would have been voted the most credible, or maybe the "Guinness Book of World Records".
By the standards of what the average person finds credible, the Wikipedia leaves little to be desired. I just read a nice line associated with the age of the universe thread:
The age of the Universe is 13.73 billion years, plus or minus 120 million years. Some people might say it doesn't look a day over 6000 years. They're wrong." Most people have tree sap for brains. But nevertheless, they "demand" information pure as the driven snow, piled high to the sky. Because these are serious cash-hording Minnesotans, they demand "bankability":
The revival comes amid mounting demand for a more reliable, bankable Web. Vague "mounting demand" from where, exactly? You couldn't write such meaningless drivel in the Wikipedia without having it removed, and rather briskly if the article has any importance. One man's "mounting demand" is another man's elitist grumbling.
The homage to reliability continues to drivel vaguely:
"People are beginning to recognize that the world is too dangerous a place for faulty information," says Charlotte Beal, a consumer strategist for the Minneapolis-based research firm Iconoculture. Beal adds that choice fatigue and fear of bad advice are creating a "perfect storm of demand for expert information." That's as bad as any article I've edited at Wikipedia. "Perfect storm"? How about "the mother of all vacuous cliches"? Taking a more literalist view, I would depict the situation leading up to the current Iraq war as the "perfect storm of demand for expert information." Turns out, experts can be beaten. Squeeze long enough, eventually they'll say what the government most wishes to hear.
There were also a lot of people back in the 1970s who were having trouble accepting that tobacco smoke is harmful to human health. You can't really blame them: there were more white coats lined up on the side of the argument that "health effects from tobacco remain unproven".
What golden era of WORKS are you referring to, exactly?
The only reliable information I can recall from my childhood were the books written by Kurt Vonnegut or Mark Twain. Since Kurt has passed on, I'll pass along a hint in his spirit for how to best approach the Wikipedia: if you plucked a piece of gum from the underside of your desk, would you put it in your mouth? Read the Wikipedia accordingly. You'll be fine.
This document shows that American fleet-average fuel economy peaked in 1987 and has declined about ten percent since, despite improvements in fuel consumption technology.
Seriously, with a correct oil price, America should presently have a 24 MPG fleet-average, a 10% improvement over two decades, not something hovering around 20 MPG after a 10% decline.
The difference would offset the 20% of the fuel supply we are now frantically replacing with ethanol, without having to actually make any ethanol.
I think the answer was pretty simple: allow the price of oil to slowly creep upward until the fleet-average fuel economy was tracking a 1 MPG/decade improvement curve. At some price, people will think twice about buying that SUV they don't really need. In my mind, that price would have been a good price, as it would have corresponded with sensible consumption choices.
The whole thing could have been rather slow, steady, and painless, but no, apparently catastrophism is the American way.
Long ago I had a friend who was enrolled in the unusual double major of pure and applied math. As a result of this, he ended up taking more or less the same course in differential equations twice, once on the pure side, once on the applied side.
One of the two professors was rather lazy, so at some point during the course he ended up being given the same assignment he had already completed the first time around: twenty pages of dense pencil-work for which he had received a grade of 95% We're talking a major math school that often beats MIT/Harvard at the Putnam. This was not a trivial accomplishment.
One night, I want to go out for beers or something, but he tells me "I can't". I go "Why not?" "I have to copy out my twenty page diffy-Q assignement." I go "What do you mean, you have to copy out your own assignment?" He tells me the situation. I suggest "Why don't you just cross off the professor from the first time around and put the name of the new professor there, you already got 95% and it was your own work".
Obviously, he wanted to go for beers, because he took my foolish advice. His prof (a woman, let's call her Dolores) gave him a ZERO for his efforts. A ZERO for handing his own work (again), when she herself was too lazy to come up with her own assignment. He had to protest, and got his grade back, but it involved a lot of stress. Dolores seemed like a normal enough person in real life, if a bit stressed most of the time.
These days, if you write up your assignment using one of the math software packages, you could simply reprint your own work, and the prof. would have nothing to complain about. Dolores must have thought it was an insult to her authority, that he wouldn't have been so glib with a male professor. Or something. It actually beats me she was thinking at all. It's not like he had 70% the first time and clear scope for improvement, either. His first pass had two points deducted for what amounted to transcription errors, the kinds of small mistakes any person with a brain worth having will make in the middle of twenty pages of dense pencil-work.
This ban on "collaboration" in completing homework assignments has never been real. Students actually learn better when they share the process. I find the best situation is where the assignment is too difficult for any one person independently, and students are forced to group together and learn from each other.
"The Paper Chase" is effectively a documentary on this schooling approach. At the end of the day, though, you need to write up the answers in your own words or you'll be screwed on exam day, whatever credit you got on the assignments in the meantime.
It does sound like this site crossed the line more than most approaches to shared learning. But I wouldn't be too quick to side with the institution either, as universities can often be remarkably dumb institutions.
Some people say this prepares you for real life. There's the problem. It prepares you to *accept* the crap that goes on far too easily, so instead of having fewer PHBs we end up with more. I miss the days when universities existed to aim high.
Give one example of an embargo working. You can't - they only end up hurting innocent people and isolating countries so change is slower.
Yes, because the proof of an embargo working is when the country next door to the country whose economy you've trashed becomes much more approachable in diplomatic circles. There is plenty of evidence circulated about this in the public blogs all diplomats involved in these discussions maintain concerning their recent activities, but Google seems to rank these sites at the bottom of their search rankings, so they are extremely hard to find.
But why am I explaining this in my own words? The basic concept goes back to infinity and beyond.
Sun Tzu replied: "You may." Ho Lu asked: "May the test be applied to women?" The answer was again in the affirmative, so arrangements were made to bring 180 ladies out of the Palace. Sun Tzu divided them into two companies, and placed one of the King's favorite concubines at the head of each. He then bade them all take spears in their hands, and addressed them thus: "I presume you know the difference between front and back, right hand and left hand?" The girls replied: Yes. Sun Tzu went on: "When I say "Eyes front," you must look straight ahead. When I say "Left turn," you must face towards your left hand. When I say "Right turn," you must face towards your right hand. When I say "About turn," you must face right round towards your back." Again the girls assented. The words of command having been thus explained, he set up the halberds and battle-axes in order to begin the drill. Then, to the sound of drums, he gave the order "Right turn." But the girls only burst out laughing. Sun Tzu said: "If words of command are not clear and distinct, if orders are not thoroughly understood, then the general is to blame." So he started drilling them again, and this time gave the order "Left turn," whereupon the girls once more burst into fits of laughter. Sun Tzu: "If words of command are not clear and distinct, if orders are not thoroughly understood, the general is to blame. But if his orders ARE clear, and the soldiers nevertheless disobey, then it is the fault of their officers." So saying, he ordered the leaders of the two companies to be beheaded. Now the king of Wu was watching the scene from the top of a raised pavilion; and when he saw that his favorite concubines were about to be executed, he was greatly alarmed and hurriedly sent down the following message: "We are now quite satisfied as to our general's ability to handle troops. If We are bereft of these two concubines, our meat and drink will lose their savor. It is our wish that they shall not be beheaded." Sun Tzu replied: "Having once received His Majesty's commission to be the general of his forces, there are certain commands of His Majesty which, acting in that capacity, I am unable to accept." Accordingly, he had the two leaders beheaded, and straightway installed the pair next in order as leaders in their place. When this had been done, the drum was sounded for the drill once more; and the girls went through all the evolutions, turning to the right or to the left, marching ahead or wheeling back, kneeling or standing, with perfect accuracy and precision, not venturing to utter a sound. Then Sun Tzu sent a messenger to the King saying: "Your soldiers, Sire, are now properly drilled and disciplined, and ready for your majesty's inspection. They can be put to any use that their sovereign may desire; bid them go through fire and water, and they will not disobey."
Show me one example of a beheaded concubine who becomes more disciplined. You can't. Thanks for playing. And yes, the whole program is rather brutal on the unsuspecting.
The hype was far greater than the language could deliver and the fanboi's made it worse as they cannot face the limitations of the language. Almost every serious book begins with a preface where the author praises his/her primary sources and then concedes "all the errors are my own".
Yet when random, excitable, anonymous forum-crawlers hype a software concept or language, if the hype doesn't come true, it's now the fault of the software. Isn't that an implicit form of collectivism? The entire Ruby community is smeared by hype generated from no particular quarter?
I've always had a soft spot for Perl 6. The engines of hype briefly chuffed into action, but then... nothing... as the Perl 6 initiative safely retreated into their hype-impervious cocoon of "maybe never". They must positively revel in their obscurity.
AI as a discipline has been forever tainted by some excitable fellows at MIT in the 1950s who fed the press what the press wanted to hear in the era of grandiosity leading into the space program.
No, actually, I simplified that. The whole discipline of AI has been forever tainted because millions of people *who ought to know better* refuse to forget what a couple of excitable guys once told the media back in the 1950s. The technological sophistication of the average journalist in the 1960s: "you mean like the Jetsons?" or "you mean like HAL?" In actual fact, improvements in computer chess was incremental and mostly linear. The correct answer in 1960 was "check back in about 40 years when the computers are a billion times faster and the software has become 100-fold more sophisticated". What actually happened: the journalist looked at the guy wearing dark-framed glasses, with a slipstick in his pocket protector, and said to himself "that's as close to sex as that guy will ever get, now who can I interview I can actually quote?" Our collective memory for accurate predictions: the 10ms time slice it takes our brain to write-off a social loser.
Hype itself is a short-term problem. The credence given to that hype (actually, the credence given to the obvious and unsurprising fact that the hype was hopelessly stupid) continues to cloud matters for decades afterward.
With hype, it's even worse: someone with no credibility whatsoever in the first place (a pimply "fanboi" in an excitable moment) once made unrealistic claims about the future greatness of a new and unproven programming language (these predictions always work out), but my god, let's not ever forget this incident, as it must necessarily continue to shape and constrain the debate forever after.
Ruby has managed to survive the hype. Even more impressive, Ruby has managed to survive the people who won't forget the original hype and its excesses (but are strangely reluctant to name the parties responsible).
It's quite the impressive feat for a language to thrive under such a burden. I don't know a whole lot about Ruby, but given those facts, deep down it must be pretty good.
One sheet *per machine* per day. Does the FA say they have only one machine?
Most software startups have a lot less than one sheet per day to show for themselves during the pilot phase, unless you're counting bug reports, incomplete features, or functionality postponements.
If you offer blood to a vampire, it soon returns stronger and in greater numbers. The plague and pestilence will not end until you drive a stake through its heart. If that costs $100m up front, it's money well invested.
IBM could have settled for less than they have spent... That's an elementary error in game theory, the failure to distinguish a single instance game from an iterated game.
It's also an elementary error in management theory: failure to distinguish a narrow effect from broad and recurring effects.
It's a also an elementary error in basic manhood: sticking up for yourself at the first opportunity instead of handing over your lunch money to escape a minor torment and becoming the class whipping boy as a result.
Re:It is all about the platform.
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Is AMD Dead Yet?
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I had the KT133A as well. It was a disaster until I flashed my mobo. That said, the chip it replaced, the KT133 had a stellar reputation. I foolishly thought the A represented merely an increased FSB, rather than serious functional differences.
After finally obtaining a good BIOS (major annoyance), my KT133A worked fine... until the Taiwanese capacitors leaked.
Slashdot Mirror
When genetic testing becomes less expensive, I expect prior to every transplant, a DNA sample of the transplant tissue is tested against a federal data bank of consenting donors, which should also contain cause of death information, etc.
This isn't hard to police once genetic sequencing becomes cheap. Only the agreed donors need to be registered.
There are some potential privacy issues (for the living) in maintaining a genetic registry for the deceased. Nevertheless, I have trouble believing it won't happen in some form or another.
My advice would be to learn formal verification techniques.
Over my career, I wouldn't say that languages as such have been a major influence. Developing language-independent formal coding strategies has proven far more important. I've benefited from the writings of Dijkstra (immeasurably), Stroustrup, Iverson, Backus, Knuth, Plaugher, Stepanov, Brooks, Bertrand Meyer (with reservations), and not a lot else. I haven't learned anything profound from Wall, but thanks for all the Onions.
Machine code gave me a good underlying model of the machine. Essential for many debugging situations, esp. back in the day when compilers would often generate faulty code.
APL taught me the value and power of carefully reasoned primitives, the power *and* risk of concision.
C taught me how easy it is to write a loop that's impossible to validate mentally (and then I taught myself how *not* to write such code).
C++ taught me most of what I know about software engineering: programming in the large. C++ manages to be simultaneously better and worse than almost any other language one cares to name. There is a deep truth there that hardly anybody in the industry wishes to accept.
SNOBOL and PL/1 taught me that kitchen sinks are best used for washing dishes.
Perl taught me that it isn't at all difficult to write a complex regular expression that's harder to read than any APL program I ever wrote. I once had to program in APL on a teletype that lacked the APL character set, so every APL symbol was mapped to its ASCII counterpart based on key location. Reading APL code on this teletype was comparable to reading a particularly hairy Perl regex.
PHP taught me that useful code can be written in a language with no coherent center whatsoever.
LISP taught me that the human brain is not a stack machine. I grew up with Mechano. I don't understand the Lego people while all those identical bricks, and I don't understand the LISP people with all those identical cricks.
COBOL taught me separation of concerns: code should be code, comments should be comments.
Python taught me nothing at all. To me Python is just the metric version of PHP, which spares you the headache of guessing which functions calls are in Imperial or American units (roughly as arbitrary as whether a Wikipedia page uses British or American spellings). To be honest, I learned more from playing around with ChipWits many years ago. But I find Python enjoyable for some reason as much as I've used it.
Pascal taught me that the evolution of a complex program occurs along more than a single dimension. I never enjoyed a single minute of Pascal programming.
By far, I learned the most simply from reading Dijkstra (set aside an hour per page) and practicing the art of coding an algorithm in such a way that by the time you are done, your code couldn't possibly be wrong in any profound way, because you have captured the undiluted purity of essence.
Plaugher helped to convince me that computers are *especially* fast at doing nothing. Whenever possible, when a precondition is not met, I just let the code continue, mostly doing nothing (if every statement is coded not to execute in the absence of its precondition, this is an automatic consequence). When the routine completes, I check state variables to see whether the desired actions were accomplished.
I hate exceptions and have never conclusively demonstrated to myself why exceptions are necessary. I suppose to permit integration with code that *doesn't* rigorously guard every statement. I feel confident about my C++ code until the moment I enable exceptions in the compiler. Then I think to myself: this program could potentially fail in 1000 different ways depending on which exception paths are taken. It took the wizards of STL *years* to make the STL fully exception safe. That troubles me. A lot. More than all the other complaints about C++ piled to the moon and back.
Knuth was wrong about premature opt
I happened to have a Fedora system, so I stuck with FF 1.5.x right up until the first day of FF 3b1. I do a lot of work in MediaWiki environments, often pounding away the whole day in FF. Somehow, I rarely manage to have less than 50 tabs open, occasionally as many as 200, in four to eight windows scattered over four desktops.
Memory usage under 1.5.x was unbelievably bad. After a week of heavy use, it would routinely plateau in the 1-1.5 GB range, at which point it would become intolerably slow and force me to restart.
I've downloaded every FF 3 beta the day of first release, and pounded on them all.
3b1 crapped out after just over 2 weeks of heavy use. 3b2 was noticeably better, but not perfect. I wasn't thrilled with 3b3. Page transitions to previously open tabs became more sluggish, back/forward browsing was slower, and they really messed up window to window tab move (didn't take the tab history along for the ride, causing me to lose some major unsaved edits while discovering this unpleasant fact, which happily is now fixed in 3b4).
3b4 has been tremendously solid over the relatively short period since its release. Virtual 540MB, resident 330MB. That's spectacularly low by the standards of previous releases for the intensity of my use. Back/forward page transitions on aged tabs remains slower than for 3b1, but not annoyingly so. Overall, it just feels solid now.
I'm having trouble comprehending that *anyone* once said Firefox had no serious memory leaks. Say what? Firefox 1.5 was the Ginny Sacramoni of web browsers. I'm happy to confirm that Firefox has successfully excised the 90-pound mole from its waddling derriere.
Canadians enjoy a particularly severe strain of dating schizophrenia. I have discovered a good solution to the 2/4/6 problem. Avoid doing transactions on any day less than the current month and during any month less than the current year.
Of course, in 2012 I'll have to compress my yearly shopping between December 12 and December 31. Hopefully nobody else figures this out, so the stores won't be too crowded.
The nuclear cat is out of the bag, and as long as the US has a single nuke, they have no place to lecture others about non-proliferation.
This is dangerous reasoning.
Reasoning? LMAO! Hey buddy, pass me that copy there of Sun Tsu's "The Art of Unilateral Disarmament".
Seriously, how does a person make it into their adult years spouting this kind of sentiment?
The cat is out of the bag. Polarizing, fatalistic, and brinkmanship rolled into a pithy pronouncement of life's harsh realities for the benefit of a gaggle of children crying over spilled milk. Yes, daddy, you know best.
What exactly does that expression mean, anyway? There are dozens of performance parameters on the construction and maintenance of a nuclear stockpile, a base of knowledge where the Americans retain many profound advantages, obtained at staggering costs. I'd be surprised if "the bag" doesn't have a hundred cats, each with a billion dollar pedigree.
One could equally argue that three-headed human fetuses are also "out of the bag" concerning recent advanced in genomics. No point trying to stop the proliferation of human embryo experimentation. It's "out of the bag, dude."
as long as the US has a single nuke
Sounds best in the voice of the bratty kid who has been water bombing the girls from a second story school window when the rest of his balloons are confiscated. "But Bobby still has balloons! You didn't take his balloons away!" Yeah, we're hoping Bobby doesn't prove to be quite as stupid in the choices he makes, but if it comes to that, he'll soon suffer the same fate.
The aspect of human nature that I've become most interested in lately is how the taunts and provocations of the grade-two school yard continue to echo in the corridors of power and public opinion in adult society.
It's amazing to me the level of discourse from the creationists that holds sway in many quarters. Few people go "haha, that's what I used to think and how I used to behave back when I was nine years old". The more one invokes school yard tauntings, the more implicitly powerful it seems to become. We somehow grow out of the "baby under the cabbage leaf", but don't grow out of equally infantile schoolyard rhetoric.
Why not? "Cat out of the bag" in a discussion of international nuclear non-proliferation is about as useful as "babies come from storks" in a discussion of global population growth.
In practical terms, I don't think the Americans can walk away from their existing nuclear stockpile any easier than a twenty-five year old woman can tell her ten year old daughter "You know what, I've realized it was a mistake to get pregnant out of wedlock at age 15. Please step into the vaporizer booth so I can clean the slate."
It would hardly be hypocrisy for such a woman to say "I made a choice that put me on this path through life and I've managed to live with it, but it's not easy, and I think the world would soon go to hell in a hand-basket if everyone went down the same path I've followed, with much help from everyone around who made better life choices."
I've often heard the statement made that no one should become president who hasn't suffered a major life setback. It's never been established that the best leadership comes from the untarnished.
Unfortunately, the Americans made a catastrophic blunder in positioning themselves as a sober steward of a dangerous and difficult responsibility: they started a major war over a false cause, and then lied about the fact that it matters.
The message seems to have been lost among the majority of the American electorate that democracy is a responsibility and a burden, not an entitlement. I take the perspective that America's consumerist culture is responsible for undermining what was once America's great political achievement.
It is possible that being bombarded with 10,000 ad impressions per year from the age where our wrinkly little thumb f
Their "this is Google" halo could be dented in short order rolling out something like this obnoxiously. I don't see Google wanting to explore that risk in the short term. More likely, this is a rainy day patent, if a revenue downturn in their existing business threatens their core competitiveness.
Another move is that they might deploy something like this, but on a very small scale, enough to recover their Youtube bandwidth costs and not actually lose money on this service.
It would be cool if some pharmaceutical compound was discovered to have the side effect of making a person impervious to commercial brainwashing, such that exposure to advertising had zero influence on future purchasing decisions. Botox against herd behaviour. Would western civilization survive?
Skinner completely missed the boat. The interesting academic paper was the emergence of a market to receive pleasure in response for subjecting yourself to a unit of behavioral conditioning to serve the interests of your corporate overlords, er, the people who sell you Coke and sneakers and a Dodge Ram so you can fit into society and manage to get laid and retain your alpha-male fantasy long into middle age.
If only Skinner had had McLuhan as his research advisor.
LOC has the same problem: it will add lines of code creating a bug to lines of code working around the bug.
The purchase of an SUV adds to the GDP more than a less expensive vehicle. The SUV adds yet more to the GDP when it burns more gas to travel the same distance. If that SUV rolls over on the highway two years after purchase and causes one of the occupants to collect $1m in heath benefits through insurance, the GDP rockets upward yet again. GDP has an extremely dim relationship to the *value* of the activity it measures. What you can infer is that the society is wealthy enough that people (some people) actually *have* million dollar health insurance packages, and there is a medical establishment capable of delivering that service.
But the same is true of LOC: you can successfully infer from a project having 1m LOC that the project probably has more than a single core contributor.
In fact, prior to the sub-prime collapse, American economic health metrics were an orgy of double counting. Five to ten years from now the press will be writing stories about how the market has *returned* to the level of 2006, having conveniently forgotten that the numbers from 2006 were fictitious to the point of fraudulence.
If you are taking one figure more seriously than the other, just because one is denominated in dollars (and hence more "real"), you aren't thinking clearly.
Goolsbee remarks late 2006: The one true dark spot on the US picture is our totally unsustainable fiscal position.
First, you should disregard the official numbers because of the accounting. Some time ago the government got tired of people seeing how much they were actually promising to spend so they switched to cash accounting. Nothing counts as a cost until it is actually spent. So the social security system is bringing in tons of money which it was supposed to use for your retirement. But they don't have to actually start spending money on your retirement for a few years sooooo, they can count the cash coming in as revenue and not count the what they will owe as expenditure. They are almost literally charging money to a credit card and calling it income.
Now if you take the total value of what we are on the hook to pay and the amount that we will raise in taxes, do I really need to tell you that they don't add up? Boy do they not add up. The latest numbers indicate that the net present value over the next 75 years is almost $70 trillion. According to some budget experts, by the standard of a business, the nation is bankrupt. But hey, it's only money.
OTOH, his code breaking work gave him an unsurpassed understanding of entropy. If you had asked Turing to estimate the knowledge base of a typical adult human (sensory, experiential, intellectual) he would have picked a large number. Did he think that all that necessary information content was going to be stored in a mercury delay line? Hardly.
More likely he felt the art would advance fairly quickly to the point where it fooled some of the people some of the time, despite a paltry real-world information base.
Ask yourself this: At what point did he himself think *he* could be fooled by a such a program? "A few years"? Roger Penrose figures his magnificent brain won't be duplicated without the discovery of new laws of physics. Whatever Turing's answer might have been, it would have been more sensible than Roger Penrose, and less outrageous than "a few years", unless he was meaning "few" relative to the historical norms of Kings College, founded in 1441.
The great bounty of the Turing test will be the determination of areas of (purported) human proficiency where the challenge proves particularly easy: just about any field of discourse that activates the human greed, status, denial, narcotic, or sexual gratification cognitive reflex arcs (aka the whole of Rush Limbaugh's repertoire).
Here's a test even the smartest human can't pass: distinguish the average call-in to a radio talk show from a meet-puppet simulacrum with little more than an oozing cupcake of space fungus inside the bony eyeball prominence. Perhaps I exaggerate, if not much.
Consider a 300lb couch potato whose primary physical activity is participating in a rousing re-run of "Dukes of Hazard". It's fairly obvious from the outside that this person has not made a substantial investment in maximizing his physical gifts. Many people out there treat their minds just as badly. Some of these circuits take work (calories, discipline, and emotional investment) to fully activate.
When you hear stories of middle aged professionals being taken for 50,000 British pounds by Nigerian advance-fee fraud, it becomes apparent how far one can get through life with little activation of ones higher faculties.
The first conclusion from research progressing toward Turing-esque objectives will be that we do in fact have these higher faculties that *are* extremely difficult to simulate.
The second conclusion that will soon follow is how rarely we employ these faculties going about our everyday business: grinding out a living, getting laid, reaffirming our rung in the social hierarchy, promoting our moral agendas.
Speaking of holodecks, I can't wait to see Spitzer Jr put forward the defense in 2060 "You mean I paid for expensive hookers in *real* life? I thought I was immersed in my favorite program on Holodeck 9. I would never have behaved that way in real life, if I had known it was for real at the time."
I look forward over the next thirty years to our insightful pundits of political culture (real or electronic) debating on late night TV, in three words sound bites, the proposition: what's the difference, if there is one, between paying $5000 for two hours in Holodeck 9 rather than enjoying two hours as Client 9 for the same subjective experience?
I can see it already: electronically simulated female companionship, with an official simulation age of 21 (to comply with federal guidelines), behaving suggestively within the simulation to be not quite so old as all that, yet purporting in dialog to be as old as federal law requires.
The new Turing test: how old is your holodeck hooker, really? Whatever you do, if you've downloaded that Sharapova extension from Russia, don't give her the bank account number to your tax haven in Liechtenstein, no matter what. Sometimes human brain no workee too good.
After enough of the male population has been brain mapped, it will probably turn out like spam: there's only so many unique permutations, as long as the scene is dressed up a little differently from time to time to maintain the novelty factor.
Pron seems to be a lot like Big Bertha, where each mortar round was larger than the last, to accommodate progressive barrel enlargement. Eventually the images become extremely shocking to get any response at all.
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/03/mri_vision
The future of compression is not to send the picture itself, but the reduced specification for an image that produces the same effect on the human visual system. We're already doing this with psycho-acoustic encoding.
Once we have a sufficiently sophisticated model of human sensory perception, mental and emotional responses (which will run to TBs I'm sure), we can run a competition for the best feature movie encoded in under 4KB. Mostly it would describe desired emotional responses and cognitive states, the actual images would be back-generated to achieve this effect as determined by the human perceptual model.
I was just reading a piece on economics which termed 1000BC to 1800AD "The Flintstones" and 1800AD to the present "The Jetsons". It's only been a relatively short time period where the economy has grown (hence *changed* in material respects) so rapidly that 50-year investment cycles are hard to fathom.
Yes, it turns out that some forms of economic activity are hard to justify as we charge toward the looming technological singularity. something which _might_ make you the big bucks in 50 years, will get Wall Street screaming for blood Isn't that interesting? We have the attention span of an ADHD mayfly for raising capital, but we're happy to sit on our liabilities for hundreds of thousands of years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_mountain
At some scale, common abstractions break down, such as your broad-brush of "subsidy" to the whole of global food production above. Some human endeavors are larger than the greed-loop in a Wall Street tycoon, who is, after all, merely engaged in a culturally shaped manifestation of his underlying biological drives.
The solution, obviously, is genetic engineering. One must first genetically alter the human population with biological drives compatible with 50-plus year investment cycles. In 50 to 100 years, a suitably modified humanity would support any length of transgalactic investment cycle you might wish to contemplate.
If you started with some Wikipedian root stock (barely qualifying as human as it stands), you could even set things up so that people compete for the opportunity to deliver your goods for free. Just be sure to suppress the "crow" complex, or they'll bring you back a cargo container filled with shiny lumps of carbon.
The difference in my view comes down to a different perception of what "utility" encompasses: I don't concede special prominence to the narrow utility of career advancement. No doubt I'll soon be called to testify in front of the "House Committee on Un-American Activities".
Listen to any background conversation at your local hot-tub or donut shop. Would the average opinion overheard be damaged or improved by a quick visit to the Wikipedia on the subject discussed? Wikipedia can locate Iraq on a map. Most Americans can't.
The American view seems to be if you're not getting paid to do so, why bother? Don't waste your time. The information you need is found in the authoritative literature of your profession. This system produces strong economic results, which goes a long ways toward paying for the rather bad political results corresponding to a blinkered electorate.
I'm just saying that how a person frames "utility" amounts to a value statement and that prestige and peer-review are relative to purpose. You don't need to study anthropology very long before you get a good look at cultural credence effects (eminently peer-reviewed) meanwhile overturned.
From the perspective of algorithmic complexity, a scientist ought to be compelled to believe *all* hypotheses that haven't yet been falsified (with an exponential weighting function diminishing likelihood as a function of expression length). But science tends to have a rather severe constructive bias, which is culturally enforced.
Read the Summers debate, these voices are the same people performing auspicious peer-review behind the ivory curtain. Is your confidence shaken? Mine was. Probably not so much by this link, but by the rest of what I read at the time. Note that on the surface they aren't even managing to debate the same point, but the undercurrent concerns career advancement.
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.html
Or this one, which amused me earlier this evening: Tall people earn more because they're smarter. But hey, if you don't like it, I'm sure it was peer-reviewed.
One thing you can count upon, no future Harvard president will be caught dead discussing this research in a public forum.
So, what one can infer from the prestige of the journal Science is that if this result is a sophisticated math bamboozle, it's at the most sophisticated end of the bamboozle spectrum. I'll give them that much.
I don't actually suspect this is a bamboozle. I wouldn't be at all surprised that a more compact expression of chordal music is possible in a higher dimensional space. I have trouble believing Bach could do what he did if his mind was manipulating the same representation as the rest of us. The extent to which Bach intuited this higher representation, if it in fact exists, would be hard to establish.
The metaphor I would use is self-organized quasi-periodic tiling. Bach seemed to sense the local rules which governed whether the pattern could be sustained and extended (mellifluously), though he might not have had a conscious grasp on Penrose tiling itself, or whatever its analog might be in contrapunctal composition.
We're trained from childhood to think that ads are no big deal by exposure to 10,000 ad impressions per year. In the world of greed, is all that money being spent on something that doesn't work? You seem to think it's a good thing if we *don't* notice the ads, or *don't think* we do, or are affected by them.
I don't see why the cost structure would grow such that it can't continue at close to current funding levels. As fast as Wikipedia has grown, so has the performance/price of the server infrastructure.
We'd be risking a major cultural change in what the Wikipedia represents over a rather paltry sum of money. I don't get it.
Far more of a threat to Wikipedia than shortage of cash is a negative cultural spiral among the editors who frequent there. Some would suggest this has already happened / is already happening. I haven't decided yet.
That said, I wouldn't be entirely opposed to advertising on pages concerning popular culture. Despite my inclusionist stance, I tend to regard the fancruft as more of a burden than an asset, even if I do use it to brush up on the plot or characters of the Sopranos.
If the money began to gush in from fancruft pages, how long would the resolve last to confine ads to fancruft? The debate would be never-ending. Eventually, it would go one way or the other just to shut people up.
Fortunately, I don't think this is likely to happen anytime soon. Jimmy is already working to monetize the fancruft over at Wikia. He'd be undercutting his own venture. I've heard the move to SF was to enable more effective fund-raising, as there is a lot of money floating around the valley.
In America, there does seem to be a general mistrust of any institution that hasn't yet sold out to the prevailing material culture. I suppose it is an effective way to rationalize the depressing society we live within by declaring that "resistance is futile". I mean by that resistance to the almighty buck. Why would anyone wish to resist? Money, after all, is next to godliness, as we all know. You've poured a trillion dollars of godliness into Iraq and look where it's got you.
I've long wanted to convert my firewall systems to something Via based, partly for their low power consumption, partly for the Padlock crypto engine. It's only recently that Via boards have hit price points appropriate to their performance levels. The premium associated with a specialty board always canceled out the lower cost of the chips it contained.
The existing via is much like a 1.5GHz 486 with a handful of special purpose accelerators. The upcoming Isaiah (one source suggests availability June 2008) should finally kick via up into the 1.5GHz PIII range, at which point, for many purposes, performance is no longer a limiting factor. The rumour is that this new Via offers twice the performance/watt in a drop-in, pin-compatible package.
At long last, these low-end carcasses are becoming quite the interesting niche.
So if this is what heterogeneous-cores programming means, I'd probably prefer the homogeneous version.
Your points are valid as things stand, but isn't it a bit premature to make this judgment? Cell was a fairly radical design departure. If IBM continues to refine Cell, and as more experience is gained, the challenge will likely diminish.
For one thing, IBM will likely add double precision floating point support. But note that SIMD in general poses problems in the traditional handling of floating point exceptions, so it still won't be quite the same as double precision on the PPU.
The local-memory SPE design alleviates a lot of pressure on the memory coherence front. Enforcing coherence in silicon generates a lot of heat, and heat determines your ultimate performance envelop.
For decades, programmers have been fortunate in making our own lives simpler by foisting tough problems onto the silicon. It wasn't a problem until the hardware ran into the thermal wall. No more free lunch. Someone has to pay on one side or the other. IBM recognized this new reality when they designed Cell.
The reason why x86 never died the thousand deaths predicted by the RISC camp is that heat never much mattered. Not enough registers? Just add OOO. Generates a bit more heat to track all the instructions in flight, but no real loss in performance. Bizarre instruction encoding? Just add big complicated decoders and pre-decoding caches. Generates more heat, but again performance can be maintained.
Probably with a software architecture combining the hairy parts of the Postgres query execution planner with the recent improvements in the FreeBSD affinity-centric ULE scheduler, you could make the nastier aspects of SPE coordination disappear. It might help if the SPUs had 512KB instead of 256KB to alleviate code pressure on data space.
I think the big problem is the culture of software development. Most code functions the same way most programmers begin their careers: just dive into the code, specify requirements later. What I mean here is that programs don't typically announce the structure of the full computation ahead of time. Usually the code goes to the CPU "do this, now do that, now do this again, etc." I imagine the modern graphics pipelines spell out longer sequences of operations ahead of time, by necessity, but I've never looked into this.
Database programmers wanting good performance from SQL *are* forced to spell things out more fully in advance of firing off the computation. It doesn't go nearly far enough. Instead of figuring out the best SQL statement, the programmer should send a list of *all* logically equivalent queries and just let the database execute the one it finds least troublesome. Problem: sometimes the database engine doesn't know that you have written the query to do things the hard way to avoid hitting a contentious resource that would greatly impact the performance limiting path.
These are all problems in the area of making OSes and applications more introspective, so that resource scheduling can be better automated behind the scenes, by all those extra cores with nothing better to do.
Instead, we make the architecture homogeneous, so that resource planning makes no real difference, and we can thereby sidestep the introspection problem altogether.
I've always wondered why no-one has ever designed a file system where all the unused space is used to duplicate other disk sectors/blocks, to create the option of vastly faster seek plans. Probably because it would take a full-time SPU to constantly recompute the seek plan as old requests are completed and new requests enter the queue. Plus if two supposedly identical copies managed to diverge, it would be a nightmare to debug, because the copy you get back would non-deterministic. Hybrid MRAM/Flash/spindle storage systems could get very interesting.
I guess I've been looking forward to the end of artificial scaling for a long time (clock freq. as the
We don't need a "Linux ready" logo, which in any case excludes other worthy open source alternatives.
What we need is an EPA badge "Premature Landfill Protected" which means that the hardware manufacturer has released full interface specifications (without requiring NDA) so that the hardware can continue to be supported over the long term regardless of any silly OS fashion changes that might take place in the meantime.
Anyone care to guess how many inkjet printers and scanners went to an early grave in response to Microsoft driver issues on the 3.1/95/98/NT/2000/XP/Vista/Windows 7 treadmill?
Yeah, sure the new printer/scanner is better. The old one was full of lead. Where is all that lead and tantalum now?
I think the government should offer industry one of two choices: either achieve a very high recycling target for the device (e.g. all the toxics and 80% of the rest, without shipping anything to China), *or* make the interface specifications public to encourage a longer use lifetime.
We've all seen this definition of "obvious" play out with road ragers on busy highways. From the road rage perspective isn't it "obvious" that if I cut past that car ahead of me, I'll get there just a little bit sooner? Why is it I can still many of the cars that dangerously cut me off ten miles later, still struggling to gain every foot with the valiant effectiveness of trench combatants in WWI? When you actually study traffic flow on a highway, what you discover is that this kind of aggressively self-serving behaviour produces standing waves which reduce the net capacity of the highway as a whole. But still, somehow, it seems obvious to many that this driving strategy constitutes a good way to gain personal advantage.
Third, he's using *Darwin* here in an anecdote about over-reaching scientific orthodoxy undermined. Unbelievable. No, don't use Freud, Chomsky, Pauling, Schottky, or the Leaky family as an example of a scientist possibly prone to overreaching. No, use Darwin, Marie Curie, or Michael Farrady.
While the Economist article is not bad, The Charms of Wikipedia, a recent article by Nicholson Baker, of "Vox" fame, is the better of the two.
In the fall of 2006, groups of editors went around getting rid of articles on webcomic artists--some of the most original and articulate people on the Net. They would tag an article as nonnotable and then crowd in to vote it down. One openly called it the "web-comic articles purge of 2006." A victim, Trev-Mun, author of a comic called Ragnarok Wisdom, wrote: "I got the impression that they enjoyed this kind of thing as a kid enjoys kicking down others' sand castles." Another artist, Howard Tayler, said: "'Notability purges' are being executed throughout Wikipedia by empire-building, wannabe tin-pot dictators masquerading as humble editors." Rob Balder, author of a webcomic called PartiallyClips, likened the organized deleters to book burners, and he said: "Your words are polite, yeah, but your actions are obscene. Every word in every valid article you've destroyed should be converted to profanity and screamed in your face."
...
As the deletions and ill-will spread in 2007--deletions not just of webcomics but of companies, urban places, Web sites, lists, people, categories, and ideas--all deemed to be trivial, "NN" (nonnotable), "stubby," undersourced, or otherwise unencyclopedic--Andrew Lih, one of the most thoughtful observers of Wikipedia's history, told a Canadian reporter: "The preference now is for excising, deleting, restricting information rather than letting it sit there and grow."
Apologies to Mr Baker about quoting slightly more than my personal standard concerning fair use, but it couldn't be more pertinent to the discussion at hand.
The core problem with deletionism is deletion itself. There is a certain totalitarian satisfaction available in the deletion of something one doesn't like. Furthermore, it's a complete failure to approach the situation from a systems theory perspective: the only viable long-term test of quality is to allow the stub to sit there and see what comes of it (if any accepted topic once existed at the same preliminary state within the spectrum of "doubtful", "outside chance", or "maybe never").
Worse, once a potentially viable stub is deleted, editors show up to make additions, and find history erased. Resurrect the article from scratch, it will likely be deleted again (with the added prejudice of the previous deletion(s)).
On the other side of the coin, there are many articles at Wikipedia below the standard that Google should be indexing. Perhaps there are only a million English articles at Wikipedia worth inclusion in the Google index.
Deletion is hugely problematic as an enforcement mechanism in a society built around consensus and incremental improvement.
The problem with having a large quarantine area of content not yet ready for prime time is that no one wishes to invest in vandal patrol over a vast wasteland where only 10% of the content is likely to graduate to core. Make it such that the only way for an IP-based user to arrive at these pages is type to the full name of the page in the Wikipedia search bar. Users who log in can set a preference so that links from core to non-core are functional. IP-based users would be regarded as full users during an article edit (the search box that precedes article creation and edit previews).
I've been contemplating whether the genius of Wikipedia consists of inverting the normal social order. In most human social structures, the peons are fenced off into sandboxes of the trivial, while the only the eminences and power-users can "submit" to
I grew up with a 14th edition Britannica from the mid-sixties in the house. The junior version was worthless. I gave up on that when I was nine. I used the big edition a lot, but half the articles I looked up had a giant stick up their butt: scholarship as a functional impediment to information flow. A lousy way to sate a fleeting curiosity. What's the population of Iraq? Oh, bother, I've already got the I volume open to a different page. I was an impatient child. No bookmarks for me. Maybe I'd rather solve another polynomial.
I've never been thrilled with honesty or quality of information web 1.0 or its dark-age antecedent.
I had such great information available to me. Paul Ehrlich's 1968 "The Population Bomb". Ah, yes, the experts of yesteryear. No bias here, we're responsible scientists. Erich von Däniken's 1968 "Chariots of the Gods?" "The Guinness Book of World Records", various editions. "Your Erroneous Zones" 1976 Wayne Dyer. "Roots: The Saga of an American Family" 1976 Alex Haley. "In and Out of the Garbage Pail" 1981 Frederick S. Perls
This is the typical crap people had on their bookshelves prior to the invention of the PC. And the worst of it was, so far as I could tell as a child, none of the adults around me could much tell the difference. If you had taken a vote at my local church, I suspect "Chariots of the Gods?" would have been voted the most credible, or maybe the "Guinness Book of World Records".
By the standards of what the average person finds credible, the Wikipedia leaves little to be desired. I just read a nice line associated with the age of the universe thread: The age of the Universe is 13.73 billion years, plus or minus 120 million years. Some people might say it doesn't look a day over 6000 years. They're wrong." Most people have tree sap for brains. But nevertheless, they "demand" information pure as the driven snow, piled high to the sky. Because these are serious cash-hording Minnesotans, they demand "bankability": The revival comes amid mounting demand for a more reliable, bankable Web. Vague "mounting demand" from where, exactly? You couldn't write such meaningless drivel in the Wikipedia without having it removed, and rather briskly if the article has any importance. One man's "mounting demand" is another man's elitist grumbling.
The homage to reliability continues to drivel vaguely: "People are beginning to recognize that the world is too dangerous a place for faulty information," says Charlotte Beal, a consumer strategist for the Minneapolis-based research firm Iconoculture. Beal adds that choice fatigue and fear of bad advice are creating a "perfect storm of demand for expert information." That's as bad as any article I've edited at Wikipedia. "Perfect storm"? How about "the mother of all vacuous cliches"? Taking a more literalist view, I would depict the situation leading up to the current Iraq war as the "perfect storm of demand for expert information." Turns out, experts can be beaten. Squeeze long enough, eventually they'll say what the government most wishes to hear.
There were also a lot of people back in the 1970s who were having trouble accepting that tobacco smoke is harmful to human health. You can't really blame them: there were more white coats lined up on the side of the argument that "health effects from tobacco remain unproven".
What golden era of WORKS are you referring to, exactly?
The only reliable information I can recall from my childhood were the books written by Kurt Vonnegut or Mark Twain. Since Kurt has passed on, I'll pass along a hint in his spirit for how to best approach the Wikipedia: if you plucked a piece of gum from the underside of your desk, would you put it in your mouth? Read the Wikipedia accordingly. You'll be fine.
The consumption of oil has grown by "leaps and bounds" because oil was severely underpriced.
http://www.sierraclub.org/globalwarming/cleancars/cafe/briefing_book.pdf
This document shows that American fleet-average fuel economy peaked in 1987 and has declined about ten percent since, despite improvements in fuel consumption technology.
Seriously, with a correct oil price, America should presently have a 24 MPG fleet-average, a 10% improvement over two decades, not something hovering around 20 MPG after a 10% decline.
The difference would offset the 20% of the fuel supply we are now frantically replacing with ethanol, without having to actually make any ethanol.
I think the answer was pretty simple: allow the price of oil to slowly creep upward until the fleet-average fuel economy was tracking a 1 MPG/decade improvement curve. At some price, people will think twice about buying that SUV they don't really need. In my mind, that price would have been a good price, as it would have corresponded with sensible consumption choices.
The whole thing could have been rather slow, steady, and painless, but no, apparently catastrophism is the American way.
Long ago I had a friend who was enrolled in the unusual double major of pure and applied math. As a result of this, he ended up taking more or less the same course in differential equations twice, once on the pure side, once on the applied side.
One of the two professors was rather lazy, so at some point during the course he ended up being given the same assignment he had already completed the first time around: twenty pages of dense pencil-work for which he had received a grade of 95% We're talking a major math school that often beats MIT/Harvard at the Putnam. This was not a trivial accomplishment.
One night, I want to go out for beers or something, but he tells me "I can't". I go "Why not?" "I have to copy out my twenty page diffy-Q assignement." I go "What do you mean, you have to copy out your own assignment?" He tells me the situation. I suggest "Why don't you just cross off the professor from the first time around and put the name of the new professor there, you already got 95% and it was your own work".
Obviously, he wanted to go for beers, because he took my foolish advice. His prof (a woman, let's call her Dolores) gave him a ZERO for his efforts. A ZERO for handing his own work (again), when she herself was too lazy to come up with her own assignment. He had to protest, and got his grade back, but it involved a lot of stress. Dolores seemed like a normal enough person in real life, if a bit stressed most of the time.
These days, if you write up your assignment using one of the math software packages, you could simply reprint your own work, and the prof. would have nothing to complain about. Dolores must have thought it was an insult to her authority, that he wouldn't have been so glib with a male professor. Or something. It actually beats me she was thinking at all. It's not like he had 70% the first time and clear scope for improvement, either. His first pass had two points deducted for what amounted to transcription errors, the kinds of small mistakes any person with a brain worth having will make in the middle of twenty pages of dense pencil-work.
This ban on "collaboration" in completing homework assignments has never been real. Students actually learn better when they share the process. I find the best situation is where the assignment is too difficult for any one person independently, and students are forced to group together and learn from each other.
"The Paper Chase" is effectively a documentary on this schooling approach. At the end of the day, though, you need to write up the answers in your own words or you'll be screwed on exam day, whatever credit you got on the assignments in the meantime.
It does sound like this site crossed the line more than most approaches to shared learning. But I wouldn't be too quick to side with the institution either, as universities can often be remarkably dumb institutions.
Some people say this prepares you for real life. There's the problem. It prepares you to *accept* the crap that goes on far too easily, so instead of having fewer PHBs we end up with more. I miss the days when universities existed to aim high.
Yes, because the proof of an embargo working is when the country next door to the country whose economy you've trashed becomes much more approachable in diplomatic circles. There is plenty of evidence circulated about this in the public blogs all diplomats involved in these discussions maintain concerning their recent activities, but Google seems to rank these sites at the bottom of their search rankings, so they are extremely hard to find.
But why am I explaining this in my own words? The basic concept goes back to infinity and beyond.
Show me one example of a beheaded concubine who becomes more disciplined. You can't. Thanks for playing. And yes, the whole program is rather brutal on the unsuspecting.
Yet when random, excitable, anonymous forum-crawlers hype a software concept or language, if the hype doesn't come true, it's now the fault of the software. Isn't that an implicit form of collectivism? The entire Ruby community is smeared by hype generated from no particular quarter?
I've always had a soft spot for Perl 6. The engines of hype briefly chuffed into action, but then
AI as a discipline has been forever tainted by some excitable fellows at MIT in the 1950s who fed the press what the press wanted to hear in the era of grandiosity leading into the space program.
No, actually, I simplified that. The whole discipline of AI has been forever tainted because millions of people *who ought to know better* refuse to forget what a couple of excitable guys once told the media back in the 1950s. The technological sophistication of the average journalist in the 1960s: "you mean like the Jetsons?" or "you mean like HAL?" In actual fact, improvements in computer chess was incremental and mostly linear. The correct answer in 1960 was "check back in about 40 years when the computers are a billion times faster and the software has become 100-fold more sophisticated". What actually happened: the journalist looked at the guy wearing dark-framed glasses, with a slipstick in his pocket protector, and said to himself "that's as close to sex as that guy will ever get, now who can I interview I can actually quote?" Our collective memory for accurate predictions: the 10ms time slice it takes our brain to write-off a social loser.
Hype itself is a short-term problem. The credence given to that hype (actually, the credence given to the obvious and unsurprising fact that the hype was hopelessly stupid) continues to cloud matters for decades afterward.
http://xkcd.com/386/
With hype, it's even worse: someone with no credibility whatsoever in the first place (a pimply "fanboi" in an excitable moment) once made unrealistic claims about the future greatness of a new and unproven programming language (these predictions always work out), but my god, let's not ever forget this incident, as it must necessarily continue to shape and constrain the debate forever after.
Ruby has managed to survive the hype. Even more impressive, Ruby has managed to survive the people who won't forget the original hype and its excesses (but are strangely reluctant to name the parties responsible).
It's quite the impressive feat for a language to thrive under such a burden. I don't know a whole lot about Ruby, but given those facts, deep down it must be pretty good.
One sheet *per machine* per day. Does the FA say they have only one machine?
Most software startups have a lot less than one sheet per day to show for themselves during the pilot phase, unless you're counting bug reports, incomplete features, or functionality postponements.
It's also an elementary error in management theory: failure to distinguish a narrow effect from broad and recurring effects.
It's a also an elementary error in basic manhood: sticking up for yourself at the first opportunity instead of handing over your lunch money to escape a minor torment and becoming the class whipping boy as a result.
I had the KT133A as well. It was a disaster until I flashed my mobo. That said, the chip it replaced, the KT133 had a stellar reputation. I foolishly thought the A represented merely an increased FSB, rather than serious functional differences.
... until the Taiwanese capacitors leaked.
After finally obtaining a good BIOS (major annoyance), my KT133A worked fine