We've got the world's most capable military by a very large margin, more than half our citizens own guns and know how to use them (to quote the Japanease Admiral, a rifle behind every blade of grass), etc. etc. etc....
Only an egghead from a country that started to disarm it's subjects almost a century ago (the Bolshevik revolution terrified the U.K. ruling class) could suggest such lunacy.
I know it's true for me; after I commit a lecture to paper (with a fountain pen, mostly for low friction with the paper) I only have to go back to my notes for a few items. This doesn't seem to be true for things that I type (granted, I didn't formally learn to touch type although I of course do nowadays).
You ignore how ICBMs are political weapons in a way that "cheap-ass panel vans" aren't. There's a big difference in the posture of a nation that can deliver a nuke over one or more of your cities in 30 minutes and one that might, if they were so inclined, smuggle in one or more in some period of weeks or months.
Thank you for a reasoned and fact filled reply; I'll keep my eyes out for this development---gaah, but there's just too much to follow, and medicine is twice removed from my science field of chemistry and then there's all that tasty CS....
However, with the politicization of science becoming a red hot topic (e.g. see the recent two "mistakes" the IPCC has admitted to (GlacierGate and frequency of disasters)) this has to be followed.
No, because it's very clear that politics hasn't strangled this line of research and nonetheless it hasn't lived up its proponents' claims (the reasonable one, I'm not talking about Edwards' ravings), because they were lying about where the field was.
There have been 10s of adult stem cell research therapies proven and 0 embryonic. If there was just even one the story would be different.
China's demographic problems are starting to hit now, much earlier in the game than Japan, due to the forced One Child Per Family problem. For the aging, it's called e.g. the 4-2-1 problem, 4 grandparents have 2 parent have 1 child, who all of the parents realize is going to have to provide for all of them. So they save like mad instead of consume at levels that would build up their domestic market, a critical part of Japan's success.
And the 2020 problem is going to be 10s of millions of men who can't find wives, not thousands. 22 million if I recall, but I'm not sure if that matches the 2020 date, but it will be soon.
Finally, there's the big problem that this model is likely to work less well for China because of scale (10 times Japan's population) and Japan not having the countries it exported to be what in what looks to be a long term Great Recession (or worse). Probably the worse period for Japan that way was the 1970s, and what they did then (e.g. export early small not so high quality cars) worked well, enough that they were going like gangbusters in the 1980s, when they were predicted to take over the world. As we know, that ended in tears. I suspect it'll be a lot more messy in the much less cohesive PRC.
I have a wild guess that if you forbid basic research in one area you won't get practical results in it.
Then it's a good thing we didn't? Only ban was on Federal funding on creating (or using) new embryonic stem cell lines. Federally funded research could use the 22 existing at the time of the "ban", and other funding (including the 1-2? billion in the California program) wasn't restricted.
And all the research shows that we aren't anywhere near the applied level... but it's being promoted as applied (see other thread I previously referenced), and see the other reply in this thread for why that's a bad idea.
Would have helped if you'd read the other thread I linked to....
Anyway, you have 22 fingers on your hand? I'm impressed.
But the basic point (see other thread here) is that embryonic stem cell research is being prompted as applied not basic research. This is a bad idea, if for no other reason than that the promoters are getting caught in their lies (e.g. the California government org set up to administer their program). This along with other currently more well known lies like AGW will make it harder for all scientists to get funding in the future. Very short term thinking, yes?
(I support basic research, just not lying about it.)
No, I'm saying people have tried, they've failed, we understand why, and that promoting it as applied research ("... people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again") is fraudulent. And that claiming our scruples in avoiding research to a very small extent---there never was a total ban, only a ban on using Federal money to create new embryonic stem cell lines, as I remember---is holding us back is just not true in any way I know of.
In this field as so many others, politics is the death of real science.
Ah, so have the Chinese come up with any therapies based on embryonic stem cells? If so, we'd know, since they would be the first and it would be banner headlines around the world.... (See my other comment on this for more detail.)
If anyone could cite a single therapy to come from embryonic stem cell research your comment might have some force.
Unfortunately, solving that is equivalent to figuring out cancer (and that's essentially what you get when you put embryonic (undifferentiated) stem cells in animals); this is basic research pretending to be applied. Look at e.g. the recent equivocations of the California state organization that's administering their effort.
The mileage-adjusted accident death rate of automobiles has dropped significantly with the added safety features.
That's what I meant to say: the accident rate has stayed very roughly the same but the injuries and the severity of the injuries to the occupants are down.
conserving energy doesn't reduce energy use, but spurs economic growth and more energy use
This fits with an observation by insurance companies (or at least mine, USAA) that building safer cars results in people continuing to drive them to their preferred safety margin. We still end up with about as many crashes (but injuries are less).
I'm using Debian stable right now as the solution for my particular requirements (development desktop that's a good Xen Dom0), but I'd much rather be using a BSD (the first machine I bare metaled was BSD 2.x onto a PDP-11/44 in 1981 (sic)) or Solaris (it took me most of a decade, but I eventually got over their switch to AT&T:-).
The big problems with FreeBSD when I made my decision were no Dom0 support and an immature ZFS, and the problem I've always had with Solaris is solid mass storage device driver support, at least for vaguely affordable controllers that don't require a PCI-X bus. E.g. when I last checked nVidia SATA chipset support was iffy (which was odd since a classic workstation they shipped had a rebadged Tyan motherboard with a nVidia chipset; I've got two of those Tyans in prodution and they're rock solid... with Windows XP:-( hey, I'm not willing to put my parents on Linux or whatever quite yet )).
This may have improved since then, but be sure to check for problems in the field.
True enough, and it is best to remember the difference between cover and concealment... but perhaps it's best (in this sort of thing) to be somewhere no one is shooting at. If you must shoot, then fire only once---very hard to tell where a supersonic bullet comes from due to the sonic boom it makes---and then "scoot".
Ignoring for the moment that I generally grab what I might want from the net in the future as I find it (too many sites go "poof"), the only context in which "they" would turn off the Internet would be one of dire civil war (e.g. worse than what recently happened in Iran).
I doubt I'd actually be in a foxhole (that sort of implies you're fighting by the other side's rules), but I wouldn't take it laying down, nor would a lot of people like me.
jd, you make a good point. Just researching and collecting a set of best practices and such and probably adding some automation could get them a long ways.
Did I miss some way where it would be easy to hard wire a fiber connection to a boat when it wasn't near land?
Heh, no, I was just thinking, a supercarrier is often compared to a small city, it's got the population and a lot of technical expertise. You could imagine one having a couple of Google/Sun type shipping containers stuffed full of computers tucked away in different corners (not likely a problem with powering them!)... except for that minor detail that they're going to have a seriously constrained link when out of port.
Just thinking off the top of my head, this would be an interesting challenge for caching and pre-fetching, the latter to use otherwise wasted bits when the link isn't so busy.
This makes a lot of sense, the military has unique requirements of all sorts, from security to e.g. their inability to hook up an aircraft carrier to fiber (except while at dock) to their need to carry both operational and personal traffic (the latter to keep their people in touch with home) over necessarily constrained links.
There's lots of non-military uses for wireless or satellite links. If you need to carry both operational and personal traffic, you establish multiple links and keep the networks separated.
But won't there generally be in a lot of circumstances just one physical (radio/satellite) link to "back home"? So those multiple links must still go over one pipe and very possibly one with high latency. I'm sure there's useful stuff than can be done here to make that sort of thing work better, and that might help the civilian users of satellite broadband as well.
The military's requirement for security is most certainly not unique, either.
They're rather unique in the consequences of security failures, at least when combined with their often ad hoc situation with links, e.g. in forward bases, and in a lack of network specialists that far forward.
There's also the social links back home, where civilians send forward based troops all sorts of useful stuff including satellite stations. Most of the rest of the national security community has it a lot easier.
This makes a lot of sense, the military has unique requirements of all sorts, from security to e.g. their inability to hook up an aircraft carrier to fiber (except while at dock) to their need to carry both operational and personal traffic (the latter to keep their people in touch with home) over necessarily constrained links.
I like the bit about "self configuration capabilities to... reduce the need for trained network personnel and lower overall life cycle costs for network management". While the current state of the art keeps us well employed, things could be easier. Heck, the more the systems I maintain for my parent self-configure, the happier I am.
A single data center apparently without even a geographically distinct failover site is about as far as I can imagine from being a "cloud". Old fashioned best practices in the form of having two or more sites each capable of handling the entire load would have prevented this particular mess, let alone classic cloud approaches like that of the Google File System (GFS) which keeps at least three copies of a file's contents.
(Granted, if you're storing vital stuff in GFS or Amazon S3 you still have a logical single point of failure (e.g. a mistaken delete command) and therefore you aren't freed from the duty of doing your own backups, but that's a separate issue.)
Or we could just say that trusting Microsoft for anything is relatively unwise compared to other "higher tier" companies. Or that if you're depending on a service provider that's massively laying off staff you need to take action before something seriously ugly happens, because it likely will.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it's that Brian Reid.
There's no email client involved in this purchase (as far as I know).
Fastmail, which I've been using since last August, is an good email service with a good web front end.
We've got the world's most capable military by a very large margin, more than half our citizens own guns and know how to use them (to quote the Japanease Admiral, a rifle behind every blade of grass), etc. etc. etc....
Only an egghead from a country that started to disarm it's subjects almost a century ago (the Bolshevik revolution terrified the U.K. ruling class) could suggest such lunacy.
I know it's true for me; after I commit a lecture to paper (with a fountain pen, mostly for low friction with the paper) I only have to go back to my notes for a few items. This doesn't seem to be true for things that I type (granted, I didn't formally learn to touch type although I of course do nowadays).
You ignore how ICBMs are political weapons in a way that "cheap-ass panel vans" aren't. There's a big difference in the posture of a nation that can deliver a nuke over one or more of your cities in 30 minutes and one that might, if they were so inclined, smuggle in one or more in some period of weeks or months.
And another (they've been tasked to do that, reducing support for troops in the field, monitoring of nuclear proliferation, etc.)
Thank you for a reasoned and fact filled reply; I'll keep my eyes out for this development---gaah, but there's just too much to follow, and medicine is twice removed from my science field of chemistry and then there's all that tasty CS....
However, with the politicization of science becoming a red hot topic (e.g. see the recent two "mistakes" the IPCC has admitted to (GlacierGate and frequency of disasters)) this has to be followed.
No, because it's very clear that politics hasn't strangled this line of research and nonetheless it hasn't lived up its proponents' claims (the reasonable one, I'm not talking about Edwards' ravings), because they were lying about where the field was.
There have been 10s of adult stem cell research therapies proven and 0 embryonic. If there was just even one the story would be different.
A few notes on your excellent analysis:
China's demographic problems are starting to hit now, much earlier in the game than Japan, due to the forced One Child Per Family problem. For the aging, it's called e.g. the 4-2-1 problem, 4 grandparents have 2 parent have 1 child, who all of the parents realize is going to have to provide for all of them. So they save like mad instead of consume at levels that would build up their domestic market, a critical part of Japan's success.
And the 2020 problem is going to be 10s of millions of men who can't find wives, not thousands. 22 million if I recall, but I'm not sure if that matches the 2020 date, but it will be soon.
Finally, there's the big problem that this model is likely to work less well for China because of scale (10 times Japan's population) and Japan not having the countries it exported to be what in what looks to be a long term Great Recession (or worse). Probably the worse period for Japan that way was the 1970s, and what they did then (e.g. export early small not so high quality cars) worked well, enough that they were going like gangbusters in the 1980s, when they were predicted to take over the world. As we know, that ended in tears. I suspect it'll be a lot more messy in the much less cohesive PRC.
Then it's a good thing we didn't? Only ban was on Federal funding on creating (or using) new embryonic stem cell lines. Federally funded research could use the 22 existing at the time of the "ban", and other funding (including the 1-2? billion in the California program) wasn't restricted.
And all the research shows that we aren't anywhere near the applied level ... but it's being promoted as applied (see other thread I previously referenced), and see the other reply in this thread for why that's a bad idea.
Would have helped if you'd read the other thread I linked to....
Anyway, you have 22 fingers on your hand? I'm impressed.
But the basic point (see other thread here) is that embryonic stem cell research is being prompted as applied not basic research. This is a bad idea, if for no other reason than that the promoters are getting caught in their lies (e.g. the California government org set up to administer their program). This along with other currently more well known lies like AGW will make it harder for all scientists to get funding in the future. Very short term thinking, yes?
(I support basic research, just not lying about it.)
No, I'm saying people have tried, they've failed, we understand why, and that promoting it as applied research ("... people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again") is fraudulent. And that claiming our scruples in avoiding research to a very small extent---there never was a total ban, only a ban on using Federal money to create new embryonic stem cell lines, as I remember---is holding us back is just not true in any way I know of.
In this field as so many others, politics is the death of real science.
Ah, so have the Chinese come up with any therapies based on embryonic stem cells? If so, we'd know, since they would be the first and it would be banner headlines around the world.... (See my other comment on this for more detail.)
If anyone could cite a single therapy to come from embryonic stem cell research your comment might have some force.
Unfortunately, solving that is equivalent to figuring out cancer (and that's essentially what you get when you put embryonic (undifferentiated) stem cells in animals); this is basic research pretending to be applied. Look at e.g. the recent equivocations of the California state organization that's administering their effort.
Check out the history of this in Tennessee and Massachusetts. (The fact that you're unaware of it will tell you something straight off.)
That's what I meant to say: the accident rate has stayed very roughly the same but the injuries and the severity of the injuries to the occupants are down.
This fits with an observation by insurance companies (or at least mine, USAA) that building safer cars results in people continuing to drive them to their preferred safety margin. We still end up with about as many crashes (but injuries are less).
I'm using Debian stable right now as the solution for my particular requirements (development desktop that's a good Xen Dom0), but I'd much rather be using a BSD (the first machine I bare metaled was BSD 2.x onto a PDP-11/44 in 1981 (sic)) or Solaris (it took me most of a decade, but I eventually got over their switch to AT&T :-).
The big problems with FreeBSD when I made my decision were no Dom0 support and an immature ZFS, and the problem I've always had with Solaris is solid mass storage device driver support, at least for vaguely affordable controllers that don't require a PCI-X bus. E.g. when I last checked nVidia SATA chipset support was iffy (which was odd since a classic workstation they shipped had a rebadged Tyan motherboard with a nVidia chipset; I've got two of those Tyans in prodution and they're rock solid ... with Windows XP :-( hey, I'm not willing to put my parents on Linux or whatever quite yet )).
This may have improved since then, but be sure to check for problems in the field.
True enough, and it is best to remember the difference between cover and concealment ... but perhaps it's best (in this sort of thing) to be somewhere no one is shooting at. If you must shoot, then fire only once---very hard to tell where a supersonic bullet comes from due to the sonic boom it makes---and then "scoot".
Ignoring for the moment that I generally grab what I might want from the net in the future as I find it (too many sites go "poof"), the only context in which "they" would turn off the Internet would be one of dire civil war (e.g. worse than what recently happened in Iran).
I doubt I'd actually be in a foxhole (that sort of implies you're fighting by the other side's rules), but I wouldn't take it laying down, nor would a lot of people like me.
jd, you make a good point. Just researching and collecting a set of best practices and such and probably adding some automation could get them a long ways.
Heh, no, I was just thinking, a supercarrier is often compared to a small city, it's got the population and a lot of technical expertise. You could imagine one having a couple of Google/Sun type shipping containers stuffed full of computers tucked away in different corners (not likely a problem with powering them!) ... except for that minor detail that they're going to have a seriously constrained link when out of port.
Just thinking off the top of my head, this would be an interesting challenge for caching and pre-fetching, the latter to use otherwise wasted bits when the link isn't so busy.
But won't there generally be in a lot of circumstances just one physical (radio/satellite) link to "back home"? So those multiple links must still go over one pipe and very possibly one with high latency. I'm sure there's useful stuff than can be done here to make that sort of thing work better, and that might help the civilian users of satellite broadband as well.
They're rather unique in the consequences of security failures, at least when combined with their often ad hoc situation with links, e.g. in forward bases, and in a lack of network specialists that far forward.
There's also the social links back home, where civilians send forward based troops all sorts of useful stuff including satellite stations. Most of the rest of the national security community has it a lot easier.
This makes a lot of sense, the military has unique requirements of all sorts, from security to e.g. their inability to hook up an aircraft carrier to fiber (except while at dock) to their need to carry both operational and personal traffic (the latter to keep their people in touch with home) over necessarily constrained links.
I like the bit about "self configuration capabilities to ... reduce the need for trained network personnel and lower overall life cycle costs for network management". While the current state of the art keeps us well employed, things could be easier. Heck, the more the systems I maintain for my parent self-configure, the happier I am.
A single data center apparently without even a geographically distinct failover site is about as far as I can imagine from being a "cloud". Old fashioned best practices in the form of having two or more sites each capable of handling the entire load would have prevented this particular mess, let alone classic cloud approaches like that of the Google File System (GFS) which keeps at least three copies of a file's contents.
(Granted, if you're storing vital stuff in GFS or Amazon S3 you still have a logical single point of failure (e.g. a mistaken delete command) and therefore you aren't freed from the duty of doing your own backups, but that's a separate issue.)
Or we could just say that trusting Microsoft for anything is relatively unwise compared to other "higher tier" companies. Or that if you're depending on a service provider that's massively laying off staff you need to take action before something seriously ugly happens, because it likely will.