The problem is finding an area of the USA where a medium term power loss would not be business as usual, due to 3rd world infrastructure.
Hmm shutdown NYC's power, they'll collapse. Naah tried that short term back in the 00s and longer term last fall due to a mere rainstorm.
Hmm shutdown power in the south? Naah thats called a hurricane, they do that stuff couple times a year no problemo.
Hmm shutdown power in the west? Naah thats called a rolling california blackout, all part of a corrupt plan to increase prices and revenue. No problemo. Heck the crooks who run the place made more money, if anything thats encouraging them!
Hmm shutdown power in the midwest? Naah every time we get a wee windstorm or ice storm or blizzard or pretty much anything but still air, happens all the time. Oh yeah and the damn mississippi is either almost bone dry or flooding the land both causing power issues.
Is there anywhere left where power outages are unusual, maybe even dangerous?
Doesn't mean its not annoying, maybe even a little dangerous. In fact if there's even a hint that foreigners are behind it all, the biggest danger is attacking some other country. If saudi arabians fly jetliners into our skyscrapers we bomb afghanistan, so I assume if Venezuelans shut down the power in Florida for a little while we'd probably respond by bombing Iran.
They're talking about an attack on our civil rights, and they're almost certain to win, just like the bad guys won after 9/11.
Wait for the next innocent convenient disaster. Bank led by crooks and con men goes out of business? Oh you say one foreigner tried identity theft once back in '98? Well that cause and effect is obvious, we need to "temporarily" suspend the constitution until the threat is neutralized aka forever.
You can google for this quite trivially, basically your definition of gmail, clicking +1 and stuff is the much bigger "somewhat under four hundred million" number from a couple months ago whereas the number of people actually making posts to their G+ stream is the somewhat smaller "well over one hundred ish million" number also a couple months out of date.
Unless youtube has zero or negative number users, it would seem they're using the latter definition "people who actually post stuff to their G+ profile" as their definition of "active" and then adding it to somewhere around 200M youtube users to get a bit over 300 million total as claimed. If they used your definition they'd be crowing about a number closer to 600M rather than 300M.
FB/twitter for pics of dinner and smiling kids and babbling complaining and TV and sports discussion, G+ for hobbies. G+ has HUGE and active ham radio, and photography communities.
LOL maybe NK isn't China's best friend anymore, but alas China probably still is NKs best friend, despite sibling quarrel. Who else other than China would be NKs BFF? They really are kinda isolated. I think they like it like that.
This raises (for me at least) the interesting question of what causes an app to be pulled from the marketplace...
Up there for awhile, no one cares, Oprah / MSM discovers it and oh oh creepy gotta pull it (that girl radar thing for 4sq)
I wrote this myself for learning purposes, now I got a great job where "da man" says I am not allowed to directly compete with his line of work
You know how I said this was free? Well I wanna dollar now.
You can look at arbitrary files with this. Oh apple noticed that pr0n is a subset of arbitrary files. Pulled.
Don't devs have to pay money to be listed on the store? That kinda sets a hard limit, if someone wants to get out of the biz with no further liability...
You'd save a lot of battery life if you ran that on a desktop / server and VNCed into it over a VPN. I've been fooling around with that, its fun. There's nothing fundamentally new about it since roughly Y2K other than installing the tightVNC client on the tablet and maybe you use something modern-ish for the VPN like openvpn (native on android) instead of legacy stuff.
I'd rather see a discussion of getting a recent model eprom programmer running under linux under... something. Something like the mcumall usb model. I'm not interested in the 1980s willem designs which require a real old fashioned parallel printer port (I haven't had one of those in many years). I know there's a place in.de (?) selling something like a bat-something BX-32 or whatever with linux software, but shipping from.de was something like 50% of the cost of the device (serious WTF time, seeing as I'm imported stuff from.cn seeed studios for a fraction of that). Also don't bother me with claims I should just pay $15K for a commercial model, I'm looking to drop $200 or less.
So... USB pass thru... Everything I read about WINE and USB says "run, run away fast". Virtualbox only does it if you install the most recent version from the upstream rather than using packaged versions.
Not entirely surprising, its usually the charger and/or the discharge protection ckts. Ask the RC electric airplane people who have at least a decade or so experience with lithium batteries in airplanes and burning them up. I was into RC planes back when everyone used NiCad but I've kept up with recent events. The batteries themselves rarely burst into flame, they burst into flame when you connect them to something that does something very naughty well outside the limits of the datasheet.
I think this will probably, in the long run, turn into a "EE ethics and morals class" debate. So discharging 15 amps out of a 10 amp pack results in a 0.001% chance (actually pretty high) of blowing the pack up per the data sheet. However not supplying 15 amps to the engine control system during an alternator malfunction (or whatever) means the engine shuts down and 500 people have a near 100% chance of death. "just follow that datasheet" stuff could kill lots of people, then again "ignore the datasheet" could kill lots of people too. So if you must use lithium batteries (why?), then you can find a local minimum death rate which will not be zero... of course finding that might have to be done via experiment on unwilling crash victims, whole nother ethical issue. Basically, we're trading human life for slightly improved gas mileage, which certainly makes me want to fly on a carrier using airbus products instead of boeing products, which has other ethical issues, etc. Is the ethical/moral failure the managers for doing it despite advice against, the engineers fault for not committing career and economic suicide by refusing to design a lithium aircraft pack, the supplier for making batteries for an unsuitable purpose, the arabs fault for making jet fuel so expensive so we have to kill people with lightweight batteries,...
The simplest thing is a battery drop tank arrangement or a rather stout thick wall steel case, making the works heavier than using old fashioned lead acid.
Progress... why? You express it as a function of time. Why not a function of "energy controlled"? So when the EROEI of crude oil and/or coal drops below critical value then progress stops and regress begins, right?
You'll need to specify which made up numbers to use. One nice set of imaginary numbers is nationwide delivered residential averages something like 11 cents/kWh (I pay much less, some pay much more, etc) and at least some utility scale projects have come in around 12 cents/kWh.
Or if you want low conventional cost you go to a hydro dam, or if you want high conventional cost you go to Hawaii / Manhattan.
Ditto the solar, if you demand residential figures for a very small system with multiple stages of middlemen I bet you could pay as much as $10/kWh, or if you want to skip some transport and middleman costs the Chinese could probably fling them on the ground for well under the 11 cents above, plus or minus the production loss due to pollution fog.
The real question is should Superintellignece be developed first by the private sector (Google) or by the public sector (Government)? Who should get it first and why?
In our modern crony capitalist system there is no difference at all other than PR. From a PR perspective always remember "privatize the gains, socialize the losses" so if it "works" its GOOG's baby, if it fails, its.gov's baby.
Its a "new device" problem. So you get a new device and you want to re-install XYZ, but the dev discontinued it and pulled it from the marketplace. Works fine, just got pulled / sold / merged into something you don't want / whatever.
If its OS I think you can assume it'll be downloadable forever as a.apk from "somewhere" perhaps your own desktop if nowhere else. May never be updated, but who cares if it works.
then all we're going to be left with are North Korea
And who's NK's best friend? Nope soon enough we're gonna be stuck with WWII nazis as the only video game bad guys. At least the marketplace never tires of those guys. Who would ever have guessed that world peace via world trade would be such a bummer?
Yeah but I bet you still have the same problems we did... "Whoops dropped the connector end in a mud puddle" "The humvee just snagged a cable and destroyed it" and practical concerns like kinks in the cable damaging the innards. Oh and it always seems to be too short. And lightning. Holy cow how can I forget lightning. In fact pretty much all the typical outside plant problems, except we didn't have "real" outside plant telco/cable guys so we had a rough time of it. And we had it "easy" sorta.
boring lecture about primitive computer software apps.
Ah see thats the wrong way to teach it. Kind of the "high school world history" model. "OK now kids remember the number 1492 will be on your NCLB test not 1491 or 1493..."
The right way is to talk about it is the "university world history" model. Talk about large scale, sequence is more important than date memorization, cause and effect, etc.
For example you give a lecture on how processing power has fluctuated from central big computers, to distributed, to end user thick clients and back again over and over for decades. And its effect on the UI, latency, bandwidth..
A very CS algorithm history lesson would be lets just talk about sorting algos over the decades... its been a long time since bubble sort was king of the hill but you'll still see noobs trying to re-implement the wheel...
Its definitely NOT the type of thing you'd train code monkeys, but is pretty important to educate a computer scientist or "real" programmer.
I'd add UCSD Pascal. It was a Pascal "operating system" that ran on the Apple II and compiled to a "p-code" virtual machine.
Not just appleII but more or less any p-code compatible machine. Just like Java, it never lived up to its hype so if you wrote it on a A2 it was not as hard as porting assembly but not as easy as simply transferring the p-code and running.
A similar idea is the zcode that infocom adventures were written in... zork1.dat is bit for bit identical across any zcode interpreter, no matter if trs80, apple, or modern frotz.
I'd nominate "Adventure" as a prototypical text adventure.
You have not gotten the straight answer yet, but the real world economic answer is nothing changes very much, so a well educated individual knows how the newest PR news release about a "new" idea will turn out, given how the exact same idea turned out three times in 1970, five times in the 80s, and twice in the 90s. Even if the outcome is different for tech or non-tech reasons, the challenges, successes, roadblocks, etc, will be the same this time around as the last ten times.
Ah so you're saying that this new language will be a silver bullet which will eliminate programming as a profession because business people will write their own programs, you say? Hmm I wonder if thats ever been claimed before. Naah. If it were you'd have language names like "Business Oriented Language" and stuff.
I've got a totally new idea! We can project manage programming by programmer-hour because the product of programmer times hour is always a constant a given problem. You'd think someone in 1960's mainframe development would have had the same idea, but people back then were pretty stupid so I'm sure my new idea is... new.
Hey guys, I got a new one. We could assign a noob to work with an old timer and see if the noob learns anything by osmosis. This has never been tried in all of human history so I'm gonna patent it and trademark it and I'm gonna be rich and buy a private island.
To be honest its not as technical as you'd like to think... its kinda like studying ancient fashion to predict what future fashion will look like, seeing as womens fashion is kinda cyclical. So, you're saying after skirts go down, they tend to go up, and vice versa? Holy cow batman! Especially when dealing with trendy style high fashion like UI design or PR.
Just a few years before you were working there, I was using the previous gen of deployed gear, Unisys/BTOS big green machines, and all that. We found that BY FAR the biggest problem was cabling. I'd like to see wartime deployable cabling, now that would be interesting. "We" tend to baby our gear, but you can imagine what UPS/FEDEX/DHL do it it before we get it, so a durable version of the shipping package isn't all that hard to make.
Did they correct for risk aversion? Not being adverse to cheating, but being adverse to entering a field where luck / risk plays a pretty big part in success which means more motivation for cheating?
For example, lots more women in lib arts, where pretty much any result is acceptable. In the hard sciences, negative results are pretty much unacceptable, although in many ways they're just as important as positive results.
Examples:
Say you wanna prove women don't make as much money as men in field XYZ. Doesn't really matter what the result is, you get to publish, and in a publish or perish world, you win.
Say you wanna methylate some weird hydrocarbon. And you just Freaking Cannot Do it. Perhaps because its impossible. Oh well I guess you fail and become homeless and live under a bridge. Or you could bend the rules just a tiny bit just this one time....
I would stand by my lifetime observation that women are dramatically less tolerant of risk.
Eventually everyone will be doing high end jobs or be unemployed. This is not a bad thing - as long as people doing the high end jobs pay for the unemployement benefits.
Good luck, because of supply and demand the pay will be miserable, probably minimum wage. Going to be hard to collect enough taxes off 5% of the population being lifetime grad students at $8/hr to keep the 95% unemployed entertained with a middle class lifestyle.
Slashdot Mirror
How can a tweet infringe copyright? I find it inconceivable that 140 characters could ever do that.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
13,256,278,887,989,457,651,018,865,901,401,704,640
The problem is finding an area of the USA where a medium term power loss would not be business as usual, due to 3rd world infrastructure.
Hmm shutdown NYC's power, they'll collapse. Naah tried that short term back in the 00s and longer term last fall due to a mere rainstorm.
Hmm shutdown power in the south? Naah thats called a hurricane, they do that stuff couple times a year no problemo.
Hmm shutdown power in the west? Naah thats called a rolling california blackout, all part of a corrupt plan to increase prices and revenue. No problemo. Heck the crooks who run the place made more money, if anything thats encouraging them!
Hmm shutdown power in the midwest? Naah every time we get a wee windstorm or ice storm or blizzard or pretty much anything but still air, happens all the time. Oh yeah and the damn mississippi is either almost bone dry or flooding the land both causing power issues.
Is there anywhere left where power outages are unusual, maybe even dangerous?
Doesn't mean its not annoying, maybe even a little dangerous. In fact if there's even a hint that foreigners are behind it all, the biggest danger is attacking some other country. If saudi arabians fly jetliners into our skyscrapers we bomb afghanistan, so I assume if Venezuelans shut down the power in Florida for a little while we'd probably respond by bombing Iran.
They're talking about an attack on our civil rights, and they're almost certain to win, just like the bad guys won after 9/11.
Wait for the next innocent convenient disaster. Bank led by crooks and con men goes out of business? Oh you say one foreigner tried identity theft once back in '98? Well that cause and effect is obvious, we need to "temporarily" suspend the constitution until the threat is neutralized aka forever.
I wonder how they determined "active users,"
You can google for this quite trivially, basically your definition of gmail, clicking +1 and stuff is the much bigger "somewhat under four hundred million" number from a couple months ago whereas the number of people actually making posts to their G+ stream is the somewhat smaller "well over one hundred ish million" number also a couple months out of date.
Unless youtube has zero or negative number users, it would seem they're using the latter definition "people who actually post stuff to their G+ profile" as their definition of "active" and then adding it to somewhere around 200M youtube users to get a bit over 300 million total as claimed. If they used your definition they'd be crowing about a number closer to 600M rather than 300M.
Google+ actually has meaningful discussions.
FB/twitter for pics of dinner and smiling kids and babbling complaining and TV and sports discussion, G+ for hobbies.
G+ has HUGE and active ham radio, and photography communities.
LOL maybe NK isn't China's best friend anymore, but alas China probably still is NKs best friend, despite sibling quarrel.
Who else other than China would be NKs BFF? They really are kinda isolated. I think they like it like that.
This raises (for me at least) the interesting question of what causes an app to be pulled from the marketplace...
Up there for awhile, no one cares, Oprah / MSM discovers it and oh oh creepy gotta pull it (that girl radar thing for 4sq)
I wrote this myself for learning purposes, now I got a great job where "da man" says I am not allowed to directly compete with his line of work
You know how I said this was free? Well I wanna dollar now.
You can look at arbitrary files with this. Oh apple noticed that pr0n is a subset of arbitrary files. Pulled.
Don't devs have to pay money to be listed on the store? That kinda sets a hard limit, if someone wants to get out of the biz with no further liability...
There's also some net present value calcs of taking to profit today vs paying the settlements years later, but yeah.
You'd save a lot of battery life if you ran that on a desktop / server and VNCed into it over a VPN. I've been fooling around with that, its fun. There's nothing fundamentally new about it since roughly Y2K other than installing the tightVNC client on the tablet and maybe you use something modern-ish for the VPN like openvpn (native on android) instead of legacy stuff.
I'd rather see a discussion of getting a recent model eprom programmer running under linux under ... something. .de (?) selling something like a bat-something BX-32 or whatever with linux software, but shipping from .de was something like 50% of the cost of the device (serious WTF time, seeing as I'm imported stuff from .cn seeed studios for a fraction of that). Also don't bother me with claims I should just pay $15K for a commercial model, I'm looking to drop $200 or less.
Something like the mcumall usb model. I'm not interested in the 1980s willem designs which require a real old fashioned parallel printer port (I haven't had one of those in many years). I know there's a place in
So... USB pass thru... Everything I read about WINE and USB says "run, run away fast". Virtualbox only does it if you install the most recent version from the upstream rather than using packaged versions.
Not entirely surprising, its usually the charger and/or the discharge protection ckts. Ask the RC electric airplane people who have at least a decade or so experience with lithium batteries in airplanes and burning them up. I was into RC planes back when everyone used NiCad but I've kept up with recent events. The batteries themselves rarely burst into flame, they burst into flame when you connect them to something that does something very naughty well outside the limits of the datasheet.
I think this will probably, in the long run, turn into a "EE ethics and morals class" debate. So discharging 15 amps out of a 10 amp pack results in a 0.001% chance (actually pretty high) of blowing the pack up per the data sheet. However not supplying 15 amps to the engine control system during an alternator malfunction (or whatever) means the engine shuts down and 500 people have a near 100% chance of death. "just follow that datasheet" stuff could kill lots of people, then again "ignore the datasheet" could kill lots of people too. So if you must use lithium batteries (why?), then you can find a local minimum death rate which will not be zero... of course finding that might have to be done via experiment on unwilling crash victims, whole nother ethical issue. Basically, we're trading human life for slightly improved gas mileage, which certainly makes me want to fly on a carrier using airbus products instead of boeing products, which has other ethical issues, etc. Is the ethical/moral failure the managers for doing it despite advice against, the engineers fault for not committing career and economic suicide by refusing to design a lithium aircraft pack, the supplier for making batteries for an unsuitable purpose, the arabs fault for making jet fuel so expensive so we have to kill people with lightweight batteries, ...
The simplest thing is a battery drop tank arrangement or a rather stout thick wall steel case, making the works heavier than using old fashioned lead acid.
Progress... why? You express it as a function of time. Why not a function of "energy controlled"? So when the EROEI of crude oil and/or coal drops below critical value then progress stops and regress begins, right?
You'll need to specify which made up numbers to use. One nice set of imaginary numbers is nationwide delivered residential averages something like 11 cents/kWh (I pay much less, some pay much more, etc) and at least some utility scale projects have come in around 12 cents/kWh.
Or if you want low conventional cost you go to a hydro dam, or if you want high conventional cost you go to Hawaii / Manhattan.
Ditto the solar, if you demand residential figures for a very small system with multiple stages of middlemen I bet you could pay as much as $10/kWh, or if you want to skip some transport and middleman costs the Chinese could probably fling them on the ground for well under the 11 cents above, plus or minus the production loss due to pollution fog.
The real question is should Superintellignece be developed first by the private sector (Google) or by the public sector (Government)? Who should get it first and why?
In our modern crony capitalist system there is no difference at all other than PR. From a PR perspective always remember "privatize the gains, socialize the losses" so if it "works" its GOOG's baby, if it fails, its .gov's baby.
Its a "new device" problem. So you get a new device and you want to re-install XYZ, but the dev discontinued it and pulled it from the marketplace. Works fine, just got pulled / sold / merged into something you don't want / whatever.
If its OS I think you can assume it'll be downloadable forever as a .apk from "somewhere" perhaps your own desktop if nowhere else. May never be updated, but who cares if it works.
then all we're going to be left with are North Korea
And who's NK's best friend? Nope soon enough we're gonna be stuck with WWII nazis as the only video game bad guys. At least the marketplace never tires of those guys.
Who would ever have guessed that world peace via world trade would be such a bummer?
Another long format windows 8 joke...
Yeah but I bet you still have the same problems we did... "Whoops dropped the connector end in a mud puddle" "The humvee just snagged a cable and destroyed it" and practical concerns like kinks in the cable damaging the innards. Oh and it always seems to be too short. And lightning. Holy cow how can I forget lightning. In fact pretty much all the typical outside plant problems, except we didn't have "real" outside plant telco/cable guys so we had a rough time of it. And we had it "easy" sorta.
boring lecture about primitive computer software apps.
Ah see thats the wrong way to teach it. Kind of the "high school world history" model. "OK now kids remember the number 1492 will be on your NCLB test not 1491 or 1493..."
The right way is to talk about it is the "university world history" model. Talk about large scale, sequence is more important than date memorization, cause and effect, etc.
For example you give a lecture on how processing power has fluctuated from central big computers, to distributed, to end user thick clients and back again over and over for decades. And its effect on the UI, latency, bandwidth..
A very CS algorithm history lesson would be lets just talk about sorting algos over the decades... its been a long time since bubble sort was king of the hill but you'll still see noobs trying to re-implement the wheel...
Its definitely NOT the type of thing you'd train code monkeys, but is pretty important to educate a computer scientist or "real" programmer.
I'd add UCSD Pascal. It was a Pascal "operating system" that ran on the Apple II and compiled to a "p-code" virtual machine.
Not just appleII but more or less any p-code compatible machine. Just like Java, it never lived up to its hype so if you wrote it on a A2 it was not as hard as porting assembly but not as easy as simply transferring the p-code and running.
A similar idea is the zcode that infocom adventures were written in... zork1.dat is bit for bit identical across any zcode interpreter, no matter if trs80, apple, or modern frotz.
I'd nominate "Adventure" as a prototypical text adventure.
MVS/MVT with a mandatory reading of Brook's book about software development.
You have not gotten the straight answer yet, but the real world economic answer is nothing changes very much, so a well educated individual knows how the newest PR news release about a "new" idea will turn out, given how the exact same idea turned out three times in 1970, five times in the 80s, and twice in the 90s. Even if the outcome is different for tech or non-tech reasons, the challenges, successes, roadblocks, etc, will be the same this time around as the last ten times.
Ah so you're saying that this new language will be a silver bullet which will eliminate programming as a profession because business people will write their own programs, you say? Hmm I wonder if thats ever been claimed before. Naah. If it were you'd have language names like "Business Oriented Language" and stuff.
I've got a totally new idea! We can project manage programming by programmer-hour because the product of programmer times hour is always a constant a given problem. You'd think someone in 1960's mainframe development would have had the same idea, but people back then were pretty stupid so I'm sure my new idea is ... new.
Hey guys, I got a new one. We could assign a noob to work with an old timer and see if the noob learns anything by osmosis. This has never been tried in all of human history so I'm gonna patent it and trademark it and I'm gonna be rich and buy a private island.
To be honest its not as technical as you'd like to think... its kinda like studying ancient fashion to predict what future fashion will look like, seeing as womens fashion is kinda cyclical. So, you're saying after skirts go down, they tend to go up, and vice versa? Holy cow batman! Especially when dealing with trendy style high fashion like UI design or PR.
Just a few years before you were working there, I was using the previous gen of deployed gear, Unisys/BTOS big green machines, and all that. We found that BY FAR the biggest problem was cabling. I'd like to see wartime deployable cabling, now that would be interesting. "We" tend to baby our gear, but you can imagine what UPS/FEDEX/DHL do it it before we get it, so a durable version of the shipping package isn't all that hard to make.
Did they correct for risk aversion? Not being adverse to cheating, but being adverse to entering a field where luck / risk plays a pretty big part in success which means more motivation for cheating?
For example, lots more women in lib arts, where pretty much any result is acceptable. In the hard sciences, negative results are pretty much unacceptable, although in many ways they're just as important as positive results.
Examples:
Say you wanna prove women don't make as much money as men in field XYZ. Doesn't really matter what the result is, you get to publish, and in a publish or perish world, you win.
Say you wanna methylate some weird hydrocarbon. And you just Freaking Cannot Do it. Perhaps because its impossible. Oh well I guess you fail and become homeless and live under a bridge. Or you could bend the rules just a tiny bit just this one time....
I would stand by my lifetime observation that women are dramatically less tolerant of risk.
Eventually everyone will be doing high end jobs or be unemployed. This is not a bad thing - as long as people doing the high end jobs pay for the unemployement benefits.
Good luck, because of supply and demand the pay will be miserable, probably minimum wage. Going to be hard to collect enough taxes off 5% of the population being lifetime grad students at $8/hr to keep the 95% unemployed entertained with a middle class lifestyle.