According to Jodie Fostor in the movie Contact, it states that when faced with numerous different possible explanations for a mysterious phenomenon, the simplest one is likely the most plausible one. It is a Scientific premise. This is not the same as the Engineering principle that a simpler design is better than a complicated one.
BTW, the simpler design of the Kalashnikov AK-47 rifle was what enabled the Vietcong to prevail over American soldiers equipped with the Stone M-16, which was more advanced.
uh, perhaps because the sheer total number of ALL POSSIBLE MOVES that are possible in a game of chess is indeed a number that is a close cousin of the google-plex and to store that much information using hard drives/memory with today's latest information-to-storage-area density would require an amount of material that would rival the amount of matter present in the known universe??
- Hollywood will come out with a new blockbuster movie loosely based on '2001: A Space Odessey'. HAL 9000 will be instead HAN 9000, a supercomputer that speaks Mandarin, plays Chinese chess, and of course, runs on Red Flag Linux. It'll control a bunch of Mechanotronics that do zero-gravity Kung-Fu with a Taikonaut played by Jet Li.
- Finally Tom Clancy will have a new 'Evil Empire' to replace the former USSR with in his books.
China did try very hard to get into the International Space Station Project, which is largely controlled by U.S., Russia, and the European Space Agency. But they bascially got the cold shoulder. So now China is basically saying: 'Screw you then. We'll do it on our own.'
If anyone is critical of the huge amount of nationalistic pride motivating their space enterprise, remember that there was such pride also behind the European nations's race to be first to reach the North Pole, South Pole, Mt Everest at the turn of the century during the 'Golden Age of Exploration'.
To understand why the Chinese space effort is ominous, you need to read no further than the article, "China Detains Health Official for Publicizing AIDS Coverup". Within the same month that the Chinese express fascist pride at their ability to challenge democracies like the USA in space technology, the Chinese arrested and imprisoned a person who revealed an AIDS coverup.
You mean, sort of how like the Bush Administration leaked the identity of a covert CIA agent when her husband revealed a coverup about the war in Iraq??
i wasn't being redundant when i mentioned schizophrenia and bizarre behavior at the same time when describing John Nash. He was bizarre even when he was 'alright' (for reference, please read 'A Brief History of Economic Genius' by Paul Strathern). i wasn't trying to bash schizophrenics if that's what you thought.
as far as sexual orientation, homosexuality was a PROSECUTABLE OFFENSE, during the time Nash did his important work, which was the 1950's. wouldn't something like that be a factor in determining whether someone would get hired as a faculty member or an analyst within the defense department?
if the schizophrenic, homosexual, and sometimes just downright bizarre John Nash (forget what you saw in the overly romanticized movie 'A Beautiful Mind'), could maintain a presence in academia and eventually win the Nobel Prize for Economics, then it is likely that Sir Issac Newton could have held a position as a tenured professor.
although it must be asked: through what lens are we looking at when we say Sir Issac Newton was eccentric? sure he wrote stuff that may seem wierd today, like treatises that speculated on the geological location of Hell. but one must keep in mind that during his time, most scientists were actually "natural philosophers", who investigated matters of philosophy and religion, as well as pure science.
Newton did make most of his equipment himself, such as grinding his own lenses for Studies in Opticks. I doubt that he would be able to go that today.
at my lab, we administer cisco routers using a console connection to a pc via hyperterminal. what you see in the screen is a scrolling-text, command prompt environment. sometimes, the keyboard gets bumped around and the scroll-lock button gets accidently pressed.
my co-worker, in all the years that he's been working here, never seems to learn this.
i'd be sitting at my desk, trying to do more important stuff (like reading/.), when i'd hear him yell out:
"there's something wrong with this router! come check it out..."
I can imagine al_Qaeda right now, reading this paper written by Mr Carlson, saying to themselves: "Shit! We can buy stuff like that on eBay? Why didn't we think of that?"
After months of observing the news and media, I have discovered a new Law (modeled after Moore's Law).
This new Law states that the number of new and frighteningly creative ways in which terrorists can attack us grows exponentially which each instance of someone breathlessly pointing out a previously unimagined hole in our security infrastructure via public broadcast media and the web.
The winners of the Physics prize are all old men, the youngest being 65 and the oldest 87. They did their groundbreaking research during the Cold War environment, when governments invested heavily in basic science research.
One wonders if the same caliber of science research is being conducted today that are worthy of future Nobels. Physics research was dealt a heavy blow when Congress decided to kill the Superconducting Supercollider Project in 1990, which still remains, unfinished and abandoned, in Texas, as a kind of a modern-day Stonehenge. Many of the famous institutions, such as Bell Labs, are a shell of their former selves. Private industry labs, such as those of IBM, which used to support basic science research without qualms, are now hesitant to fund research that does not bear any immediate commercial benefits. The federal goverment does not have any well-stated policy for insuring the scientific leadership of the nation. The young people of today do not aspire to become scientists or engineers, having been brain-damaged by an MTV culture. The current state of research itself has become ridiculous. Whereas, in the past, people were interested in lasers, superconductors, and fusion, now, serious science has been reduced to the level of how to bake a better cookie from the oven.
I believe that there are other reasons why the govts of China, Japan, and Korea decided form a Linux pact that go beyond simply saving money in the bureaucrasies or having an alternative to Microsoft. If those were the only reasons, then there is no need for such an international tripartite techno-alliance.
Ever since Sony started marketing transistor radios back in the 60s, Asian manufacturers have dominated the electronics industries. This is not news to anyone. However, despite this, they always had to pay hefty royalty fees for certain key technologies developed by American or European firms that were protected by intellectual property laws (let's leave China out for now, since they are only in the initial stages of the development path that Korea and Japan embarked upon decades ago). Examples of such technologies include dolby noise filtering techniques during the days of cassette tape players and the semiconductor chips that implement the CDMA protocol developed by Qualcomm that go into every cell phone made by Samsung. Licensing fees for Microsoft software is only another example. Korea and Japan have traditionally been export-oriented economies and a big percentage of those exports is claimed by hi-tech products. Therefore, promoting the use of locally developed components or technologies has always been a issue of high importance, both politically and business-wise.
This is not the first time Asian govts have intervened to guide private industry. In the 80s, the Japanese undertook a national VLSI project to develop their semiconductor industry when it was realized that electronics were destined to be more digital instead of analog. The Koreans implemented their own massive push into semiconductors on the heels of the Japanese in the 90s. I believe that something similar is happening now with Linux.
Why Linux?
Many devices that are designed today are essentially specialized computers. By that I mean, the architecture basically resembles that which is present in a regular PC, ie volatile memory, non-volatile storage, CPU, and optional interfaces all linked together by a system bus on a mainboard. A Cisco router is nothing more than a specialized computer whose architecture has been optimized and adapted for the purpose of routing IP packets. Same for cell phones and mp3 players. But any device that utilizes a CPU must also have an operating system. That's where Linux comes in.
The design trend is leaning more and more towards embedded systems utilizing some form of Linux as a de-facto standard platform. Therefore Linux has an important role to play, even beyond desktops and servers. The open-source nature of Linux is appealing, esp to the Asians, because it helps mitigate the issue of having to pay royalties to foreign companies. By agreeing to cooperate in Linux and open-source, the three Asian nations are in a sense declaring independence from being constantly beholden to proprietary foreign technologies and perhaps even positioning themselves to seize leadership in setting technical standards in a key area which they think is crucial by leveraging the power of a huge combined marketplace that will include China.
Slashdot Mirror
i get most of my stuff from reading periodicals while sipping chai at Borders. and websites like the Linux Documentation Project.
http://www.tldp.org
I hereby declare, on behalf of my great, great, GREAT ancester Og,
a retro-active patent on THE WHEEL. Pay up folks.
what makes you think She will play chess with you?
BTW, the simpler design of the Kalashnikov AK-47 rifle was what enabled the Vietcong to prevail over American soldiers equipped with the Stone M-16, which was more advanced.
SOOOooo, what you're saying is that before we can even begin to build that game tree, we'd have to become a Type IV civilization first?
TYPE I civilization: has learned to harness the energy of a planet.
TYPE II: has learned to harness the energy of a star.
TYPE III: ditto of an entire galaxy, ie. the Star Trek Federation.
TYPE IV: ditto of an entire universe, and has started exploring other universes.
uh, perhaps because the sheer total number of ALL POSSIBLE MOVES that are possible in a game of chess is indeed a number that is a close cousin of the google-plex and to store that much information using hard drives/memory with today's latest information-to-storage-area density would require an amount of material that would rival the amount of matter present in the known universe??
yup.
whatever happens, the winners are the got-dang lawyers.
- Hollywood will come out with a new blockbuster movie loosely based on '2001: A Space Odessey'. HAL 9000 will be instead HAN 9000, a supercomputer that speaks Mandarin, plays Chinese chess, and of course, runs on Red Flag Linux. It'll control a bunch of Mechanotronics that do zero-gravity Kung-Fu with a Taikonaut played by Jet Li.
- Finally Tom Clancy will have a new 'Evil Empire' to replace the former USSR with in his books.
China did try very hard to get into the International Space Station Project, which is largely controlled by U.S., Russia, and the European Space Agency. But they bascially got the cold shoulder. So now China is basically saying: 'Screw you then. We'll do it on our own.'
If anyone is critical of the huge amount of nationalistic pride motivating their space enterprise, remember that there was such pride also behind the European nations's race to be first to reach the North Pole, South Pole, Mt Everest at the turn of the century during the 'Golden Age of Exploration'.
You mean, sort of how like the Bush Administration leaked the identity of a covert CIA agent when her husband revealed a coverup about the war in Iraq??
i wasn't being redundant when i mentioned schizophrenia and bizarre behavior at the same time when describing John Nash. He was bizarre even when he was 'alright' (for reference, please read 'A Brief History of Economic Genius' by Paul Strathern). i wasn't trying to bash schizophrenics if that's what you thought.
as far as sexual orientation, homosexuality was a PROSECUTABLE OFFENSE, during the time Nash did his important work, which was the 1950's. wouldn't something like that be a factor in determining whether someone would get hired as a faculty member or an analyst within the defense department?
if the schizophrenic, homosexual, and sometimes just downright bizarre John Nash (forget what you saw in the overly romanticized movie 'A Beautiful Mind'), could maintain a presence in academia and eventually win the Nobel Prize for Economics, then it is likely that Sir Issac Newton could have held a position as a tenured professor.
although it must be asked: through what lens are we looking at when we say Sir Issac Newton was eccentric? sure he wrote stuff that may seem wierd today, like treatises that speculated on the geological location of Hell. but one must keep in mind that during his time, most scientists were actually "natural philosophers", who investigated matters of philosophy and religion, as well as pure science.
Newton did make most of his equipment himself, such as grinding his own lenses for Studies in Opticks. I doubt that he would be able to go that today.
at my lab, we administer cisco routers using a console connection to a pc via hyperterminal. what you see in the screen is a scrolling-text, command prompt environment. sometimes, the keyboard gets bumped around and the scroll-lock button gets accidently pressed.
/.), when i'd hear him yell out:
my co-worker, in all the years that he's been working here, never seems to learn this.
i'd be sitting at my desk, trying to do more important stuff (like reading
"there's something wrong with this router! come check it out..."
me: "is the scroll-lock on?"
few seconds later...
"oh."
I can imagine al_Qaeda right now, reading this paper written by Mr Carlson, saying to themselves: "Shit! We can buy stuff like that on eBay? Why didn't we think of that?"
After months of observing the news and media, I have discovered a new Law (modeled after Moore's Law).
This new Law states that the number of new and frighteningly creative ways in which terrorists can attack us grows exponentially which each instance of someone breathlessly pointing out a previously unimagined hole in our security infrastructure via public broadcast media and the web.
The winners of the Physics prize are all old men, the youngest being 65 and the oldest 87. They did their groundbreaking research during the Cold War environment, when governments invested heavily in basic science research. One wonders if the same caliber of science research is being conducted today that are worthy of future Nobels. Physics research was dealt a heavy blow when Congress decided to kill the Superconducting Supercollider Project in 1990, which still remains, unfinished and abandoned, in Texas, as a kind of a modern-day Stonehenge. Many of the famous institutions, such as Bell Labs, are a shell of their former selves. Private industry labs, such as those of IBM, which used to support basic science research without qualms, are now hesitant to fund research that does not bear any immediate commercial benefits. The federal goverment does not have any well-stated policy for insuring the scientific leadership of the nation. The young people of today do not aspire to become scientists or engineers, having been brain-damaged by an MTV culture. The current state of research itself has become ridiculous. Whereas, in the past, people were interested in lasers, superconductors, and fusion, now, serious science has been reduced to the level of how to bake a better cookie from the oven.
I believe that there are other reasons why the govts of China, Japan, and Korea decided form a Linux pact that go beyond simply saving money in the bureaucrasies or having an alternative to Microsoft. If those were the only reasons, then there is no need for such an international tripartite techno-alliance.
Ever since Sony started marketing transistor radios back in the 60s, Asian manufacturers have dominated the electronics industries. This is not news to anyone. However, despite this, they always had to pay hefty royalty fees for certain key technologies developed by American or European firms that were protected by intellectual property laws (let's leave China out for now, since they are only in the initial stages of the development path that Korea and Japan embarked upon decades ago). Examples of such technologies include dolby noise filtering techniques during the days of cassette tape players and the semiconductor chips that implement the CDMA protocol developed by Qualcomm that go into every cell phone made by Samsung. Licensing fees for Microsoft software is only another example. Korea and Japan have traditionally been export-oriented economies and a big percentage of those exports is claimed by hi-tech products. Therefore, promoting the use of locally developed components or technologies has always been a issue of high importance, both politically and business-wise.
This is not the first time Asian govts have intervened to guide private industry. In the 80s, the Japanese undertook a national VLSI project to develop their semiconductor industry when it was realized that electronics were destined to be more digital instead of analog. The Koreans implemented their own massive push into semiconductors on the heels of the Japanese in the 90s. I believe that something similar is happening now with Linux.
Why Linux?
Many devices that are designed today are essentially specialized computers. By that I mean, the architecture basically resembles that which is present in a regular PC, ie volatile memory, non-volatile storage, CPU, and optional interfaces all linked together by a system bus on a mainboard. A Cisco router is nothing more than a specialized computer whose architecture has been optimized and adapted for the purpose of routing IP packets. Same for cell phones and mp3 players. But any device that utilizes a CPU must also have an operating system. That's where Linux comes in.
The design trend is leaning more and more towards embedded systems utilizing some form of Linux as a de-facto standard platform. Therefore Linux has an important role to play, even beyond desktops and servers. The open-source nature of Linux is appealing, esp to the Asians, because it helps mitigate the issue of having to pay royalties to foreign companies. By agreeing to cooperate in Linux and open-source, the three Asian nations are in a sense declaring independence from being constantly beholden to proprietary foreign technologies and perhaps even positioning themselves to seize leadership in setting technical standards in a key area which they think is crucial by leveraging the power of a huge combined marketplace that will include China.