I do believe, however, the US military could never suppress a large scale uprising.
I agree with you there, but I also believe that such an uprising wouldn't ever happen without some truely extraordinary circumstances. You mention the economic factor, but the history of the US (and the world) has an instance of an economic disaster and it didn't cause an armed uprising, even though conditions were better for one to be successful. During the worst of the Great Depression (about 1933), there was better than 25% unemployment. Times were horrible, but there wasn't any rebellion, even though at that time there was basically no military to speak of compared to today's military. Even after the US got involved in WWII, it really took our military better than a year to get back to fighting status.
Now, I don't doubt that we're heading toward some kind of a financial crisis for the reasons that you've covered (though I would bet that it would have more to do with OPEC switching to the Euro and the dollar losing value that way). I just don't think that it would lead to an overthrow of the government or even an reasonable attempt at one.
I have no doubt that a lot of soldiers will not hesitate to shoot Americans. At first. Then there will be people that doubt these actions. Soldiers who have family members fighting on the side of the militia. (Sound familiar?)
Yes, it does sound familiar, since the Civil War typified it. Of course, we kept shooting at each other for better than four years, which seems to go against your point, considering the Civil War ended because of military defeat, not through a feeling of empathy for family members on the other side. Enough zeal would be thrown in on both sides to make sure both were the most "patriotic" (in the modern since, which seems equivalent to "God is on our side" of the past).
But very likely the militias will come up with some new method for fighting, that the U.S. Army won't be able to cope with. Look how e-mail, IM, blogs and the sort work. You can't filter everything.
I doubt that there'd be a truly new method for fighting. What it comes down to is guerilla war, which is currently being practiced in Iraq. They're already using cell phones and the internet to organize and, no, the military over there can't track them all, etc., but that doesn't mean the military is definitely losing. Frankly, the "insurgents" are about as well equipped as any US militia would be, possibly better since I doubt that the US militia would have outside suppliers. They're making a pretty big dent in the civilian population, but not a huge amount against true military targets. I do wonder how the military over there would react to some of the bombings, etc., if they weren't a foreign force and instead it was their families getting blow apart.
This didn't stop with the last election. Bush has been having "Town Hall" meetings about social security reform using the same kind of pre-screened, "I voted for you, twice", signed-a-waiver-to-get-in audiences that he used during the run up to the election.
I sometimes wonder if Bush is clueless about what the public thinks, not because he's so unconnected or just plain stupid, but because he never sees anything indicating that there's actually an opinion other than his.
I've got you all beat. I've been a kidney transplantee for nearly 14 years.
I'm on the three drug Cyclo, Prednisone, Immuran cocktail. I'd love to see the prednisone replaced, though I'm on an absolute minimal dose, and my daily side effects are basically null, the long term side effects are nasty.
As for sickness, I get sick about as often as anytime in my life, but I stay sick a bit longer. It's not really surprising; the various viruses and bacteria don't get in from the outside any different than before the immune system was compromised.
I'm not sure if I'd choose cyclo, etc. over insulin though. As a replacement for dialysis, sure, but you can live a normal life with insulin too.
I agree with your statement in general, but I see the whole IT consultant (like described in the article header) as more like a plumber than an electrician or janitor because plumbers are more commonly called in to fix something rather than upgrade something.
It's not even necessarily about respect directly; it's about circumstances. When the pipe bursts in the basement and you need it fixed, you call in the guy with the experience and all of the necessary tools to do the job. Plumbers who do their job well are respected, but you never really want to see them because it means you've got sewage leaking somewhere. It's the same way with IT consultants who are called in when something's broken. Both plumbers and IT guys will show up and generally will stay until the problem's fixed, but those who call them really would rather they weren't there to begin with.
It's not that they aren't respected; it's that they don't want to have the problem in the first place.
Looks familiar. I noticed that Karl Sims' work wasn't in your biography. Your approach is a bit different than his, but even the 'bots generated are very similar. Check this out: Evolved Virtual Creatures.
This isn't necessarily true exactly. Evolution requires selection pressure. Now it does require populations greater than one generally, but the members of a population don't necessarily compete with each other directly. The selection pressure can easily come from the environment (which, in nature, is basically where it comes from) and the members do not have direct competition.
Think of it this way, if there's a population living in wonderful conditions (plenty of food, plenty of mating opportunities, etc.) they only have to worry about the tigers that are going to try and eat them. Their competition is with the tigers (an environmental pressure), not with their peers.
Also, in most domestic herd populations, there is no lack of resources to compete for, but the pressure is still there, since the farmer is the selector: a cow gets to breed more because she produces more milk, a bull does because he's more docile, etc. There isn't any direct competition, just selection pressure from an outside source.
Most artificial populations generally get over their small size through reuse. Yes, there's only a handful of robots, but they their "brains" get replaced with each generation. This works fine from an outside selector perspective.
Who said it had to be in a dish? Before IVF was common (about 15 years ago), I remember my bio teacher talking about sex selection using a centrifuge. Just take the lightest 10% of the sperm and use the medical equivalent of a turkey baster for insemination.
No, it's not foolproof by any means. The sperm won't be perfectly separated, but they'll be predominately Y, which is pretty good odds.
Historically, this would even out due to death.
Guys are violent risk takers that go hunt bears
with spears.
Actually, it's also because of inherent flaws in the Y-chromosome. Males are also more likely to die of things like hemophilia and other such predominently male diseases.
And actually, in modern countries with modern medicine, enough boys die by age 15 to even things out and after that, there are more females, which makes most populations have a female majority. (The US is about 0.97 males to each female overall, with about 5% more males being born. Over the course of a life, that's an 8% deficit.)
US population: 293,027,571
US Males Fit for Military: NA
US Males of Military Age: 73,597,731
China population: 1,298,847,624
China Males Fit for Military: 208,143,352
China Males of Military Age: 379,524,688
Basically, China's got enough potential soldiers to field two for every three men, women and children in the US. Also, about 12,494,201 men reach military age in China per year (same source). That's about 4% of our total population. We only could increase our military by about a sixth of that. And you have to remember that they're currently cutting their population growth; if they really needed more bodies, they would just let people have kids as they wanted.
Of course, we also spend about 6 times as much on our military as they do, which definitely should be taken into consideration.
I wouldn't exactly call it alpha channel support, but gifs support setting one color to completely transparent, which is generally sufficient for most "make sure users can see the background through it" needs.
In fact, I think it's been around since the GIF 89a spec, though it could definitely be the old remembry going...
It's a little surprising to have to be so specific for this particular book.
Actually, I'm not surprised at all. If a google just returned some random version of the Bible, what kind of message would some fundie think was being said? "Google is evil because they don't think my version of the Bible is the real one!"
When it comes to versions, there are so many different versions of the Bible that it nearly makes dictionary printings look tiny by comparison. Think of how many different translations into how many different languages there have been. Then there are all the revisions of those translations.
When you do a search for "Catcher in the Rye", you're basically limited to a single work written very recently. Just the English versions of the Bible over the last few hundred years dwarf it.
Or was it just that your 18 month old daughter's immune system killed whatever virus she was infected with? Or maybe that she just out grew the problem through lung growth?
There's a pretty good chance that your homeopaths were just there at the right time.
Oh, and I'm sure that placebo effects can work on an 18 month old. As long as they're told that something will make them feel better, a placebo effect is possible. My younger brother was absolutely sure that the pain went away when you put the bandaid over the cut. He'd scream his head off before it was put on, but stopped, like a light shut off, when it was covered. Ever heard of "I'll kiss it and make it better"? Same theory, same results.
Even if you ignore the fact that they won't be around for anywhere near a week (or a second, for that matter), they're incredibly small. Along the lines of smaller than elementary particles.
They're basically just point gravity sources with incredibly tiny event horizons. In fact, their event horizons are so minute that they really can't interact with anything unless they run right into it (this is basically why they shrink instead of growing--they can't attract, and thus consume, anything).
So if you were holding this thing in your hand, it'll be drawn toward the nearest big attractor, which would be the earth, without interacting with your hand at all. If it did manage to be stable this long, it would start a nice yo-yo motion with the center of the earth as the mid-point, most likely not interacting with the earth either, though if it did get lucky, it could slowly grow and eventually swallow the whole planet. From what I understand, it takes along the lines of years to decades for the complete consumption to take place, though something like the last 50% of the earth would be consumed in the last few seconds because of the nice exponential progression (might be only geometric).
A nice scifi novel concerning these lovely little voracious buggers is Earth by David Brin, published sometime in the late 80s or early 90s. It's possibly the last good bit of scifi he wrote that has anything to do with reality.
Might want to do some more research into hybrids before telling people that they're wrong.
Hybrid automobiles have two philosophies. One is Toyota's where each engine can run the car independently. Generally, at low speeds, the electric is used, but the gasoline engine kicks in and directly drives the vehicle at higher speeds. The engine will run a bit extra when the batteries are low to keep them charged. In other words, both can drive the car separately or together.
The second philosophy is using the electric as a acceleration enhancer. This is Honda's method. The gas engine is designed for cruising rather than acceleration, allowing the engine to be tuned better for constant speeds and small size (since it takes a lot less horsepower to maintain speed than increase speed). The electric kicks in when you need to accelerate. It also acts as a massive starter motor, so the gas engine can start instantly from stop.
In both cases, the gas engine directly drives the wheels, at least when it comes to cars. Now locomotives are different, their diesels act solely as a generator and never power the drive train directly, but that's not the case with cars.
There's a simple answer to this: Those people are expensive.
For small firms, the cost of a few dozen PCs in a render farm is far less than paying one person with those sorts of talents. This is basically true for all businesses. Machines are cheaper than people by far.
I've done small scale 3D animation. When I say small scale, I mean small: It's just me. It's just a side job I've done on occasion, so I don't have time to learn all the ins and outs of renderman. Why should I have to write up shadow maps and reflection maps when all I have to do is place light sources and put my textures on my geometries and then let the thing go? Sure, it may take 10 hours to raytrace compared to an hour on renderman, but my man-hours were a heck of a lot shorter. And since it's only me, I can just let it go overnight.
Heck, in the past, because raytracing is so parallelizable, I've actually run different parts of an image on different machines and slapped them together at the end, just for the speed-up. Of course, this was back in the days of 486s.
This is especially true in a democracy, where special interests wield huge clout. Each of those special interests knows how to spend *your* money better than you do, in ways that benefit them.
Actually, since the US is a republic (representative democracy), even if you remove the special interests, this is still true. Voters hire someone to represent them, this person is supposed to know how to spend these peoples' money, in theory, better than they do.
A true democracy would give every person the right to vote as to how their money would be spent. Of course, then everyone would have to come out and vote on everything that currently comes before their local, county, state, and national governments. I'm pretty sure the voter turn-out, even for major issues, would drop into the single digits in no time.
You're talking about Alan Turning then? When it comes right down to it, the theoretical Universal Turing Machine was the first conceptual VM and everything else has just be an implementation of that idea.
And Java itself is not especially innovative from a technology standpoint; it just combined a bunch of pre-existing features into a rather well-designed whole. Smalltalk used a virtual machine with a standard OO design. LISP before that used a virtual machine (it was completely interpreted) and was completely OO free.
I'm not even sure if there were other VM style languages before that, but I wouldn't be surprised.
Actually, Intel's 64-bit instructions are the same as AMD's. I wouldn't say that their architecture is the same. From what I've read, Intel's first forays into x86-64 have been less than stellar performers.
So what's the logical conclusion? Is war going to just end up being a big computer simulation with nobody getting hurt? Perhaps the kings should just go decide over a nice game of chess!
It'll never work as long as one of the "kings" involved isn't a very good "chess" player. And we've already got our "chess", it's international relations through negotiation and we've already seen how well that works out.
The corps lobby congress with their nice, easily-organized, centralized money (as opposed to the public's horribly-organized, decentralized money) and get corporations declared "living people."
Why are you using CE? Why not a full Windows install if it's such a hefty application?
My company is deploying to the field an application suite designed to run on Windows. There's a tablet form-factor Toughbook that handles the job more than adequately for about $4000 per unit. Since the application is GIS oriented, the built-in GPS unit on the Toughbook means that users don't have to connect to an external GPS.
As for running linux, I haven't tried it, but since it's a fairly standard laptop, you could probably do it. It would still be usable even without the touch screen since there's a keyboard too.
Actually, in the article, Kay stated that Smalltalk wasn't what it should've been and that he'd fought against it's spread in the 70s because he realized what its problems were.
His argument was that languages really haven't continued to progress. In fact, his example of Squeak almost seemed to be a stopgap measure rather than an actual progression. More like a "language done right" using the ideas of a number of existing languages.
I generally agree with him. There hasn't been any major changes in the landscape in the last 20 years. All of the languages created lately are generally just features of already existing language ideas glued together with a particular syntax (generally the syntax is borrowed as well). For example, Java is Smalltalk objects and garbage collector and Objective-C "interfaces" (as a way around the multiple inheritance problem) using a C-like syntax.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with you there, but I also believe that such an uprising wouldn't ever happen without some truely extraordinary circumstances. You mention the economic factor, but the history of the US (and the world) has an instance of an economic disaster and it didn't cause an armed uprising, even though conditions were better for one to be successful. During the worst of the Great Depression (about 1933), there was better than 25% unemployment. Times were horrible, but there wasn't any rebellion, even though at that time there was basically no military to speak of compared to today's military. Even after the US got involved in WWII, it really took our military better than a year to get back to fighting status.
Now, I don't doubt that we're heading toward some kind of a financial crisis for the reasons that you've covered (though I would bet that it would have more to do with OPEC switching to the Euro and the dollar losing value that way). I just don't think that it would lead to an overthrow of the government or even an reasonable attempt at one.
Yes, it does sound familiar, since the Civil War typified it. Of course, we kept shooting at each other for better than four years, which seems to go against your point, considering the Civil War ended because of military defeat, not through a feeling of empathy for family members on the other side. Enough zeal would be thrown in on both sides to make sure both were the most "patriotic" (in the modern since, which seems equivalent to "God is on our side" of the past).
But very likely the militias will come up with some new method for fighting, that the U.S. Army won't be able to cope with. Look how e-mail, IM, blogs and the sort work. You can't filter everything.
I doubt that there'd be a truly new method for fighting. What it comes down to is guerilla war, which is currently being practiced in Iraq. They're already using cell phones and the internet to organize and, no, the military over there can't track them all, etc., but that doesn't mean the military is definitely losing. Frankly, the "insurgents" are about as well equipped as any US militia would be, possibly better since I doubt that the US militia would have outside suppliers. They're making a pretty big dent in the civilian population, but not a huge amount against true military targets. I do wonder how the military over there would react to some of the bombings, etc., if they weren't a foreign force and instead it was their families getting blow apart.
I sometimes wonder if Bush is clueless about what the public thinks, not because he's so unconnected or just plain stupid, but because he never sees anything indicating that there's actually an opinion other than his.
I'm on the three drug Cyclo, Prednisone, Immuran cocktail. I'd love to see the prednisone replaced, though I'm on an absolute minimal dose, and my daily side effects are basically null, the long term side effects are nasty.
As for sickness, I get sick about as often as anytime in my life, but I stay sick a bit longer. It's not really surprising; the various viruses and bacteria don't get in from the outside any different than before the immune system was compromised.
I'm not sure if I'd choose cyclo, etc. over insulin though. As a replacement for dialysis, sure, but you can live a normal life with insulin too.
It's not even necessarily about respect directly; it's about circumstances. When the pipe bursts in the basement and you need it fixed, you call in the guy with the experience and all of the necessary tools to do the job. Plumbers who do their job well are respected, but you never really want to see them because it means you've got sewage leaking somewhere. It's the same way with IT consultants who are called in when something's broken. Both plumbers and IT guys will show up and generally will stay until the problem's fixed, but those who call them really would rather they weren't there to begin with.
It's not that they aren't respected; it's that they don't want to have the problem in the first place.
There's also a cool video available from here.
I remember being incredibly amazed by his work when I first saw it in 1995 or so...
This isn't necessarily true exactly. Evolution requires selection pressure. Now it does require populations greater than one generally, but the members of a population don't necessarily compete with each other directly. The selection pressure can easily come from the environment (which, in nature, is basically where it comes from) and the members do not have direct competition.
Think of it this way, if there's a population living in wonderful conditions (plenty of food, plenty of mating opportunities, etc.) they only have to worry about the tigers that are going to try and eat them. Their competition is with the tigers (an environmental pressure), not with their peers.
Also, in most domestic herd populations, there is no lack of resources to compete for, but the pressure is still there, since the farmer is the selector: a cow gets to breed more because she produces more milk, a bull does because he's more docile, etc. There isn't any direct competition, just selection pressure from an outside source.
Most artificial populations generally get over their small size through reuse. Yes, there's only a handful of robots, but they their "brains" get replaced with each generation. This works fine from an outside selector perspective.
Yeah, I'd guess the dog breeders wouldn't survive very long in the wild either.
No, it's not foolproof by any means. The sperm won't be perfectly separated, but they'll be predominately Y, which is pretty good odds.
Actually, it's also because of inherent flaws in the Y-chromosome. Males are also more likely to die of things like hemophilia and other such predominently male diseases.
And actually, in modern countries with modern medicine, enough boys die by age 15 to even things out and after that, there are more females, which makes most populations have a female majority. (The US is about 0.97 males to each female overall, with about 5% more males being born. Over the course of a life, that's an 8% deficit.)
US population: 293,027,571
US Males Fit for Military: NA
US Males of Military Age: 73,597,731
China population: 1,298,847,624
China Males Fit for Military: 208,143,352
China Males of Military Age: 379,524,688
Basically, China's got enough potential soldiers to field two for every three men, women and children in the US. Also, about 12,494,201 men reach military age in China per year (same source). That's about 4% of our total population. We only could increase our military by about a sixth of that. And you have to remember that they're currently cutting their population growth; if they really needed more bodies, they would just let people have kids as they wanted.
Of course, we also spend about 6 times as much on our military as they do, which definitely should be taken into consideration.
In fact, I think it's been around since the GIF 89a spec, though it could definitely be the old remembry going...
Actually, I'm not surprised at all. If a google just returned some random version of the Bible, what kind of message would some fundie think was being said? "Google is evil because they don't think my version of the Bible is the real one!"
When it comes to versions, there are so many different versions of the Bible that it nearly makes dictionary printings look tiny by comparison. Think of how many different translations into how many different languages there have been. Then there are all the revisions of those translations.
When you do a search for "Catcher in the Rye", you're basically limited to a single work written very recently. Just the English versions of the Bible over the last few hundred years dwarf it.
There's a pretty good chance that your homeopaths were just there at the right time.
Oh, and I'm sure that placebo effects can work on an 18 month old. As long as they're told that something will make them feel better, a placebo effect is possible. My younger brother was absolutely sure that the pain went away when you put the bandaid over the cut. He'd scream his head off before it was put on, but stopped, like a light shut off, when it was covered. Ever heard of "I'll kiss it and make it better"? Same theory, same results.
They're basically just point gravity sources with incredibly tiny event horizons. In fact, their event horizons are so minute that they really can't interact with anything unless they run right into it (this is basically why they shrink instead of growing--they can't attract, and thus consume, anything).
So if you were holding this thing in your hand, it'll be drawn toward the nearest big attractor, which would be the earth, without interacting with your hand at all. If it did manage to be stable this long, it would start a nice yo-yo motion with the center of the earth as the mid-point, most likely not interacting with the earth either, though if it did get lucky, it could slowly grow and eventually swallow the whole planet. From what I understand, it takes along the lines of years to decades for the complete consumption to take place, though something like the last 50% of the earth would be consumed in the last few seconds because of the nice exponential progression (might be only geometric).
A nice scifi novel concerning these lovely little voracious buggers is Earth by David Brin, published sometime in the late 80s or early 90s. It's possibly the last good bit of scifi he wrote that has anything to do with reality.
Hybrid automobiles have two philosophies. One is Toyota's where each engine can run the car independently. Generally, at low speeds, the electric is used, but the gasoline engine kicks in and directly drives the vehicle at higher speeds. The engine will run a bit extra when the batteries are low to keep them charged. In other words, both can drive the car separately or together.
The second philosophy is using the electric as a acceleration enhancer. This is Honda's method. The gas engine is designed for cruising rather than acceleration, allowing the engine to be tuned better for constant speeds and small size (since it takes a lot less horsepower to maintain speed than increase speed). The electric kicks in when you need to accelerate. It also acts as a massive starter motor, so the gas engine can start instantly from stop.
In both cases, the gas engine directly drives the wheels, at least when it comes to cars. Now locomotives are different, their diesels act solely as a generator and never power the drive train directly, but that's not the case with cars.
For small firms, the cost of a few dozen PCs in a render farm is far less than paying one person with those sorts of talents. This is basically true for all businesses. Machines are cheaper than people by far.
I've done small scale 3D animation. When I say small scale, I mean small: It's just me. It's just a side job I've done on occasion, so I don't have time to learn all the ins and outs of renderman. Why should I have to write up shadow maps and reflection maps when all I have to do is place light sources and put my textures on my geometries and then let the thing go? Sure, it may take 10 hours to raytrace compared to an hour on renderman, but my man-hours were a heck of a lot shorter. And since it's only me, I can just let it go overnight.
Heck, in the past, because raytracing is so parallelizable, I've actually run different parts of an image on different machines and slapped them together at the end, just for the speed-up. Of course, this was back in the days of 486s.
Actually, since the US is a republic (representative democracy), even if you remove the special interests, this is still true. Voters hire someone to represent them, this person is supposed to know how to spend these peoples' money, in theory, better than they do.
A true democracy would give every person the right to vote as to how their money would be spent. Of course, then everyone would have to come out and vote on everything that currently comes before their local, county, state, and national governments. I'm pretty sure the voter turn-out, even for major issues, would drop into the single digits in no time.
You're talking about Alan Turning then? When it comes right down to it, the theoretical Universal Turing Machine was the first conceptual VM and everything else has just be an implementation of that idea.
And Java itself is not especially innovative from a technology standpoint; it just combined a bunch of pre-existing features into a rather well-designed whole. Smalltalk used a virtual machine with a standard OO design. LISP before that used a virtual machine (it was completely interpreted) and was completely OO free.
I'm not even sure if there were other VM style languages before that, but I wouldn't be surprised.
Hands of blue...
Actually, Intel's 64-bit instructions are the same as AMD's. I wouldn't say that their architecture is the same. From what I've read, Intel's first forays into x86-64 have been less than stellar performers.
It'll never work as long as one of the "kings" involved isn't a very good "chess" player. And we've already got our "chess", it's international relations through negotiation and we've already seen how well that works out.
The corps lobby congress with their nice, easily-organized, centralized money (as opposed to the public's horribly-organized, decentralized money) and get corporations declared "living people."
Doesn't sound to difficult to me.
My company is deploying to the field an application suite designed to run on Windows. There's a tablet form-factor Toughbook that handles the job more than adequately for about $4000 per unit. Since the application is GIS oriented, the built-in GPS unit on the Toughbook means that users don't have to connect to an external GPS.
As for running linux, I haven't tried it, but since it's a fairly standard laptop, you could probably do it. It would still be usable even without the touch screen since there's a keyboard too.
His argument was that languages really haven't continued to progress. In fact, his example of Squeak almost seemed to be a stopgap measure rather than an actual progression. More like a "language done right" using the ideas of a number of existing languages.
I generally agree with him. There hasn't been any major changes in the landscape in the last 20 years. All of the languages created lately are generally just features of already existing language ideas glued together with a particular syntax (generally the syntax is borrowed as well). For example, Java is Smalltalk objects and garbage collector and Objective-C "interfaces" (as a way around the multiple inheritance problem) using a C-like syntax.