All of the $Billions the FedGov has invested in this effort have not produced successful commercial products. The only possible exception has been Cray Computer, which started failing after Seymour Cray left.
The FedGov's funding has, however, prevented the success of clusters based upon cheaper systems.
It is the cost of complying with the regulations of the FDA and other country's regulatory agencies.
A patent is only a mechanism for getting a return on the investment, and therefore allowing developing anything new in a capitalistic system.
Non-capitalistic systems don't work very well.
So, if you want cheap medicines and more medical development, the place to start is abolishing the FDA and all the other regulatory agencies.
These agencies cost lives: they prevent, to some extent, the use of dangerous or contaminated drugs and foods, but they do so at the cost of preventing the development of 1000s of new drugs per year and, most important, new points of view. For example, the FDA does not recognize aging as a disease, so won't evaluate any drug designed to prevent it.
When you think about how hard it is to get a control program to work for a carefully closed system (OS, hardware,...), it isn't any surprise that all gov regulatory agencies are complete failures, and their attempts result in more contrary outcomes than intended outcomes.
The FDA, for example, is probably responsible for 50% of the deaths in the US every year, maybe more around the world. There is a lot of academic research on the FDA, must be equivalent research for the other agencies.
For those of you who are SHOCKED, you haven't been thinking or paying attention:
All smoking-related deaths have to be attributed to the FDA, which has prevented development of 'smoke-sticks' which provide nicotine (adult ritalin) without tar. There are 500,000 deaths per year, and this has been going on for 50+ years.
Almost all deaths from infections, ditto, because the cost of developing drugs is so high that drug companies only do so for $1B markets. Thus, only the broad-spectrum antibiotics get developed, there are only a few of these possible, and the germs out-innovate the drug companies.
Drugs for malaria, a major killer of children throughout the third world, don't even get considered because there is no $1B market for them.
Govs around the world kill and improverish their subjects at a hell of a rate, and the US is no exception.
You guys get upset about the FCC's censorship, when this is is a very minor example.
This whole thread is filled with hind-sight discussions of whose stock was "really" worth the stock price, and who was proved to be brilliant by events, etc.
In the world-as-we-live-it, minute-by-minute, a thing is worth exactly what you can sell for at that minute.
If you guys are so GD fore-sighted, you should all be making serious fortunes in the stock market, bond market, futures markets, etc.
How many of you geniuses actually made $ from the AOL-TW merger?
"Many of the public goods we now take for granted--such as police, public libraries, and public fire departments--were historically provided either by private enterprises or by loosely-organized volunteers, neither of which have proven nearly as effectively for the common goods as their current government-run equivalents. "
Every study of public services shows them to be 25% as cost-effective as the same service provided by a private organization. This includes fire departments. At least some cities contract out fire departments as a result.
Lew
Legislation cannot make the world a better place
on
Still No Federal Spam Law
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Making laws is equivalent to programming for an open environment, or to an attempt to make a rainforest a better place. Ridiculous on the face of it.
There are technological and social ways to handle SPAM. Pressure on the ISPs that produce it, lawsuits against spammers for damages (MS/Gates is pioneering here). These use mechanisms from age-old systems of justice. Their embodiment in modern law has probably decreased their effectiveness.
Some years ago, I thought that the world would need to move to a new network paradigm: move into a cubicle/office/home, connect your PC into 8 or 16 of the fibers available, tell the computer what your goals are (profit, low-cost, high performance, or some set of trade-offs).
The networking subsystem advertises its location/address, connections==routes,...
It negotiates for name services, and chooses connections via a bidding system. Because it is a router, it can bid on requests for bandwidth.
Routing is recursive: systems that want to bid ask for bids on the remaining portion of the route.
So, not a free network, rather a capitalist system that starts by people connecting their systems through neighborhoods.
Our wonderful gov protected us all and forced IBM to sell off its services division. (Similar personal economic dynamics: leader of the anti-trust gov team became IBM's chief counsel.)
Not long after, technology changed out from under IBM, and it lost dominance, as the mainframe market became a small and slow-growing part of the overall computer market.
Microsoft will become largely irrelevant to software in the same way. OSS has proved better able to provide quality and security. Indeed, MS's anti-competitive actions are an implicit acknowledgment of this fact: they can't make their numbers without leaning on customers.
In all cases of this sort, the only enduring result is to transfer power to the gov and $ to lawyers and bureaucrats.
And, it wouldn't be that tough to figure out where: call enters a cell from another cell, there aren't many roads that allow that to happen. So they can figure the probabilities of calls being dropped on particular roads.
Alternatively, they could ask customers. Their service drives me crazy: there are spots on every one of the freeways I use where calls are ALWAYS dropped.
A serious model is initial conditions + equations.
Takes a lot of compute power, given non-linear feedback, etc.
Chaos ('butterfly effect') says you have to have initial conditions to extremely high accuracy.
We don't have that information, and we don't have the equations relating chemistry, absorption/reflection of atmosphere at different wavelengths, interaction with surface conditions (water, land, rain, surface evaporation),...
Perhaps we can learn about the models. But we won't learn anything about climate.
People I respect have been working on this using deuterium. Stainless steel cell, palladium side with the ultrasound attached to it.
Very repeatable response: clean relationships between ultrasound energy, neutrons and helium.
I have thought 'cold fusion' was real from the beginning. It is very normal for scientific breakthroughs to take a long time to reliably replicate: The early work with semi-conductors required elements from particular mines in Chile, etc.
Simple law, yes. Contract enforcement need not be a gov service.
As for the rest, you continue to assume a Newtonian clock-work universe, predictable into the infinite future.
This kind of thinking produced the FDA (just to select one of many insanities), which continues to kill far more people than it saves, both via direct effects of regultions and by the opportunity costs of lowered economic growth. We consequently have both a regulated system and one based on legal liability.
So sorry, the world isn't a Newtonian system, but a chotic system with a very close prediction horizon.
The gut-level understanding/assumptions of our entire society are completely wrong. The genius of our Constitution, no longer followed, was that it prevented gov from acting on these stupid assumptions.
Following is a series of replies both asking for links and avoiding the 'programming for an open environemnt' issue.
I read the London 'Economist' for years: they referenced them in an annual economic review.
Searching Google for "taxes regulation 'economic growth'" produces 85K results, many of which look good.
As a data point, Wanniski recently quoted a source to the effect that 1880 - 1896 had 30% wholsale price reduction and 40% (I am not positive about that number) increase in wages. This at a time of high immigration, no income tax,... We don't see growth like that any more.
I believe there are few doubters among economists about the effects of regulations and taxes on growth rates: the most regulated economies routinely have the highest unemployment and lowest growth rates and greatest poverty, although there are time- and geographic-local exceptions: Scandanavia got away with socialism for a few years, Germany for a few more,...
I have lived long enough to see many different countries hailed as the socialist model for the US to follow. All have had serious economic (and consequent social) problems, all are trying to back out of their socialism, with limited success.
The social/economic system is far beyond human comprehension in its complexity. Clearly, we cannot predict with any precision (if you can, go to Wall Street). If we can't predict, how can we prescribe via taxes and regulation?
Our goal must be the minimal set of laws that produce a stable political-economic-social system. The US Constitution came close.
There have been thousands of studies on this: taxes + regulation = total gov burden.
The higher the total gov burden, the lower the economic growth.
This is clearly predictable: Regulation and non-uniform taxes are attempts to program for an open economic/social environment, generally with no testing. Impossible/insane on the face of it: if we carefully close off our (relatively very simple) computer systems from change, follow a process religously, and test like hell, we can produce (relatively very simple) computer programs that don't crash the system too often.
Slashdot Mirror
I really thought that the Mandelbrot Set illustrated infinite detail derived from iterative equations.
Can the equation be derived from the data set?
If so, does this extrapolate to the real world?
If theoretically so, what computational power is required?
Lew
I used to read the San Jose Murky News and Dan Gillmor's column.
On any business issue, he generally comes down on the side of some idealist vision of 'fairness', and supports a gov-force solution to the problem.
In short, Gilmor is generally a socialist in his outlook.
His tech insights aren't much better, IMHO.
Lew
All of the $Billions the FedGov has invested in this effort have not produced successful commercial products. The only possible exception has been Cray Computer, which started failing after Seymour Cray left.
The FedGov's funding has, however, prevented the success of clusters based upon cheaper systems.
Lew
because it costs too much.
You must design in quality from the beginning, and develop systems with a process that guarantees the quality is not lost.
This is known to be true for everything from trivial widgets through the most complex systems that humans are capable of designing.
I suppose it is nice to have it confirmed for security flaws, but it isn't surprizing.
Lew
It is the cost of complying with the regulations of the FDA and other country's regulatory agencies.
A patent is only a mechanism for getting a return on the investment, and therefore allowing developing anything new in a capitalistic system.
Non-capitalistic systems don't work very well.
So, if you want cheap medicines and more medical development, the place to start is abolishing the FDA and all the other regulatory agencies.
These agencies cost lives: they prevent, to some extent, the use of dangerous or contaminated drugs and foods, but they do so at the cost of preventing the development of 1000s of new drugs per year and, most important, new points of view. For example, the FDA does not recognize aging as a disease, so won't evaluate any drug designed to prevent it.
Lew
When you think about how hard it is to get a control program to work for a carefully closed system (OS, hardware, ...), it isn't any surprise that all gov regulatory agencies are complete failures, and their attempts result in more contrary outcomes than intended outcomes.
The FDA, for example, is probably responsible for 50% of the deaths in the US every year, maybe more around the world. There is a lot of academic research on the FDA, must be equivalent research for the other agencies.
For those of you who are SHOCKED, you haven't been thinking or paying attention:
All smoking-related deaths have to be attributed to the FDA, which has prevented development of 'smoke-sticks' which provide nicotine (adult ritalin) without tar. There are 500,000 deaths per year, and this has been going on for 50+ years.
Almost all deaths from infections, ditto, because the cost of developing drugs is so high that drug companies only do so for $1B markets. Thus, only the broad-spectrum antibiotics get developed, there are only a few of these possible, and the germs out-innovate the drug companies.
Drugs for malaria, a major killer of children throughout the third world, don't even get considered because there is no $1B market for them.
Govs around the world kill and improverish their subjects at a hell of a rate, and the US is no exception.
You guys get upset about the FCC's censorship, when this is is a very minor example.
Lew
This whole thread is filled with hind-sight discussions of whose stock was "really" worth the stock price, and who was proved to be brilliant by events, etc.
In the world-as-we-live-it, minute-by-minute, a thing is worth exactly what you can sell for at that minute.
If you guys are so GD fore-sighted, you should all be making serious fortunes in the stock market, bond market, futures markets, etc.
How many of you geniuses actually made $ from the AOL-TW merger?
Lew
Given the assumption that it is OK to have machines punish people, we can easily conceive of more effective punishments.
I believe it would be fairly easy to implement automatic sniper rifles to punish a wide variety of traffic offenses.
Lew
It is POSSIBLE to do all this, if you want to burn dollars-converted-to-ethanol.
It surely isn't economic, even ignoring conversion costs.
Fossil fuels have hydrogen also, and can be used in fuel cells just as ethanol is in this article.
The problem is getting rid of the activated carbon.
Lew
Rather than a Ph.D., get an MS in CompSci and another in another area that you are interested in.
The intersection of these areas will have interesting opportunities, and far more of them than a single Ph.D. will open up.
"Many of the public goods we now take for granted--such as police, public libraries, and public fire departments--were historically provided either by private enterprises or by loosely-organized volunteers, neither of which have proven nearly as effectively for the common goods as their current government-run equivalents. "
Every study of public services shows them to be 25% as cost-effective as the same service provided by a private organization. This includes fire departments. At least some cities contract out fire departments as a result.
Lew
Making laws is equivalent to programming for an open environment, or to an attempt to make a rainforest a better place. Ridiculous on the face of it.
There are technological and social ways to handle SPAM. Pressure on the ISPs that produce it, lawsuits against spammers for damages (MS/Gates is pioneering here). These use mechanisms from age-old systems of justice. Their embodiment in modern law has probably decreased their effectiveness.
Lew
This is what making laws amounts to.
It is amazing that anyone expects it to work, but technical understanding isn't the strong point of legislators, I guess.
Lew
Some years ago, I thought that the world would need to move to a new network paradigm: move into a cubicle/office/home, connect your PC into 8 or 16 of the fibers available, tell the computer what your goals are (profit, low-cost, high performance, or some set of trade-offs).
...
The networking subsystem advertises its location/address, connections==routes,
It negotiates for name services, and chooses connections via a bidding system. Because it is a router, it can bid on requests for bandwidth.
Routing is recursive: systems that want to bid ask for bids on the remaining portion of the route.
So, not a free network, rather a capitalist system that starts by people connecting their systems through neighborhoods.
Wireless hubs fit well into this approach.
Lew
30 years ago, IBM appeared to be invincible.
Our wonderful gov protected us all and forced IBM to sell off its services division. (Similar personal economic dynamics: leader of the anti-trust gov team became IBM's chief counsel.)
Not long after, technology changed out from under IBM, and it lost dominance, as the mainframe market became a small and slow-growing part of the overall computer market.
Microsoft will become largely irrelevant to software in the same way. OSS has proved better able to provide quality and security. Indeed, MS's anti-competitive actions are an implicit acknowledgment of this fact: they can't make their numbers without leaning on customers.
In all cases of this sort, the only enduring result is to transfer power to the gov and $ to lawyers and bureaucrats.
Lew Glendenning
And, it wouldn't be that tough to figure out where: call enters a cell from another cell, there aren't many roads that allow that to happen. So they can figure the probabilities of calls being dropped on particular roads.
Alternatively, they could ask customers. Their service drives me crazy: there are spots on every one of the freeways I use where calls are ALWAYS dropped.
A serious model is initial conditions + equations.
Takes a lot of compute power, given non-linear feedback, etc.
Chaos ('butterfly effect') says you have to have initial conditions to extremely high accuracy.
We don't have that information, and we don't have the equations relating chemistry, absorption/reflection of atmosphere at different wavelengths, interaction with surface conditions (water, land, rain, surface evaporation),
Perhaps we can learn about the models. But we won't learn anything about climate.
Lew
Why flight crews? They don't fly the shuttle anyway: it is all automated.
"Max survivability of human cargo" is a much different issue, much easier engineering.
The idea that we can pass a law or make a regulation and improve the world is completely false, fully equivalent to believing in witches.
We all know that code can become so convoluted that it must be discarded and re-written.
Governments can become un-reformable in the same way. This proposal will merely expand gov, not reform it.
These laws merely slice another chunk of the GDP for lawyers and bureaucrats. We pay.
It was common for Germans in the 1920s to switch between the Communist and National Socialist parties.
There is a personality type that needs causes.
Lew
People I respect have been working on this using deuterium. Stainless steel cell, palladium side with the ultrasound attached to it.
Very repeatable response: clean relationships between ultrasound energy, neutrons and helium.
I have thought 'cold fusion' was real from the beginning. It is very normal for scientific breakthroughs to take a long time to reliably replicate: The early work with semi-conductors required elements from particular mines in Chile, etc.
Lew
Simple law, yes. Contract enforcement need not be a gov service.
As for the rest, you continue to assume a Newtonian clock-work universe, predictable into the infinite future.
This kind of thinking produced the FDA (just to select one of many insanities), which continues to kill far more people than it saves, both via direct effects of regultions and by the opportunity costs of lowered economic growth. We consequently have both a regulated system and one based on legal liability.
So sorry, the world isn't a Newtonian system, but a chotic system with a very close prediction horizon.
The gut-level understanding/assumptions of our entire society are completely wrong. The genius of our Constitution, no longer followed, was that it prevented gov from acting on these stupid assumptions.
Lew
Following is a series of replies both asking for links and avoiding the 'programming for an open environemnt' issue.
I read the London 'Economist' for years: they referenced them in an annual economic review.
Searching Google for "taxes regulation 'economic growth'" produces 85K results, many of which look good.
As a data point, Wanniski recently quoted a source to the effect that 1880 - 1896 had 30% wholsale price reduction and 40% (I am not positive about that number) increase in wages. This at a time of high immigration, no income tax,
I believe there are few doubters among economists about the effects of regulations and taxes on growth rates: the most regulated economies routinely have the highest unemployment and lowest growth rates and greatest poverty, although there are time- and geographic-local exceptions: Scandanavia got away with socialism for a few years, Germany for a few more,
I have lived long enough to see many different countries hailed as the socialist model for the US to follow. All have had serious economic (and consequent social) problems, all are trying to back out of their socialism, with limited success.
The social/economic system is far beyond human comprehension in its complexity. Clearly, we cannot predict with any precision (if you can, go to Wall Street). If we can't predict, how can we prescribe via taxes and regulation?
Our goal must be the minimal set of laws that produce a stable political-economic-social system. The US Constitution came close.
Lew
Right: the last ones died in a zoo, not on a farm.
There have been thousands of studies on this: taxes + regulation = total gov burden.
The higher the total gov burden, the lower the economic growth.
This is clearly predictable: Regulation and non-uniform taxes are attempts to program for an open economic/social environment, generally with no testing. Impossible/insane on the face of it: if we carefully close off our (relatively very simple) computer systems from change, follow a process religously, and test like hell, we can produce (relatively very simple) computer programs that don't crash the system too often.
Lew