This is disappointing given that Russian strength is in mathematics due to the same phenomenon that drove their launch vehicles to exceptional performance:
A lag in micro electronics development.
Basically, Russians had to be more intelligent with their algorithms than the West due to their inferior hardware. This puts them in a position to be superior software architects who should not be taking their lead from the West -- not even from Finland as much as I respect Linux.
Why are people so interested in mimicing humans? Isn't intelligence far more interesting than human-ness?
I understand people's fear of machine intelligence exceeding that of humans, but it is actually more dangerous to have machines merely mimicing human-ness than to have machines that are intelligent enough to actually understand what we say better than another human could.
That means more than merely having some mockery of mirror neurons for "empathy". It means genuine understanding: The ability to model.
The reason this is central to our relationship to our machines should be obvious: Friendly AI really boils down to the problem of effectively communicating our value systems to the AIs.
That's why natural language comprehension is the first step to friendly AI.
Oh, yeah, that's the ticket! Didn't you get the satire in that article? Let me spell it out for your: It is bigoted to hypothesize that immigration might have negative effects. Now, some may argue that since I predicted the ecological correlation between immigration from India and autism rates that this vindicates me from charges of prejudice. However, we all know those individuals who would so-argue are bigots, hence their argument is invalid and the original hypothesis simply bigotry regardless of the truth of the matter!
Only a BIGOT could have failed to get the joke! Are you such a bigot?
So, Tim, how is that H-1b theory of yours working out? You know, the one you promoted around March of 2000 where you said something to the effect that there are 5 jobs created for every H-1b visa.
Guess there just weren't enough H-1b visas issued, huh?
It is becoming their lingua franca partly because data mining has entered a golden age, whether being used to set ad prices, find new drugs more quickly or fine-tune financial models.
The "smart set" needs a such a high level lingua franca to express infinite precision financial models of no accuracy whatsoever!
civil space program (including human, robotic, commercial, and personal spaceflight)
WRONG
The appropriate division isn't military vs "civilian" but private vs public.
It's none of the government's business whether private individuals decide it is profitable, or just plain fun, to have a private space program or not.
The government's only real interest is in minimizing the negative externalities of such private activities -- exactly as with any other private activity.
That they're posing the question the way they are is terrible.
CHAPTER 141--COMMERCIAL SPACE OPPORTUNITIES AND TRANSPORTATION SERVICES
SUBCHAPTER II--FEDERAL ACQUISITION OF SPACE TRANSPORTATION SERVICES
Sec. 14731. Requirement to procure commercial space
transportation services
(a) In general
Except as otherwise provided in this section, the Federal Government
shall acquire space transportation services from United States
commercial providers whenever such services are required in the course
of its activities. To the maximum extent practicable, the Federal
Government shall plan missions to accommodate the space transportation
services capabilities of United States commercial providers.
Fertilising the sea with iron filings
This idea arises from the fact that the limiting factor in the multiplication of phytoplankton â" tiny marine plants â" is the lack of iron salts in the sea. When scientists add iron to "dead" areas of the sea, the result is a phytoplankton bloom which absorbs CO2. The hope is that carbon taken up by the microscopic plants will sink to deep layers of the ocean, and be taken out of circulation. Experiments support the idea, but blooms may be eaten by animals so carbon returns to the atmosphere as CO2.
Iron fertilization is such an obviously good thing to test out it never ceases to amaze me how much traction stupid arguments against gradually expanded iron fertilization experiments get.
On the one hand you have folks who object to such expanded experiments by saying "We don't know what global iron fertilization will do to the environment!" Well, I know this will come as a shock to some of these so-called "scientists" but that's precisely why you run EXPERIMENTS.
On the other hand, you have folks who are "worried" that some of the carbon might end up creating a food chain out in the middle of huge ocean desert areas because.... well... who needs all those fish? And, by the way, what are we going to do about all the natural fisheries that are being depleted by overfishing?
In Plato's account Atlantis was a naval power lying "in front of the Pillars of Hercules" that conquered many parts of Western Europe and Africa 9,000 years before the time of Solon, or approximately 9600 BC. After a failed attempt to invade Athens, Atlantis sank into the ocean "in a single day and night of misfortune".
That's 11,600 years ago for Atlantis's destruction but TFA says it was 12,900 years ago which is 1,300 years off you idiot!!!
Oh, I can hear the loons whine now: "But but but 10% is a pretty good margin of error for a third hand report from an Egyptian priest that long ago!"
PuhlEEEAZE go back to your Illuminatus Trilogy and leave the theorizing to the Proper Authorities!
Unless there is some study showing a good correlation between marketing savvy and technical savvy of which I am not aware, then even assuming you are right, there should still be a market segment for rationality at the upper end of the bell curve.
True, and I presume that by "lower earth orbit" you don't mean "low earth orbit", but that geostationary orbit is lower than lunar orbit. What you say is particularly true of geostationary orbit, where solar collection is more continuous.
Please review my statements about private launch services and the difference in policy with the prohabition of NASA from competing in communications satellites. Apollo was simply the wrong paradigm -- it was technosocialist. If there is one thing that socialism fails at miserably it is investement risk management of pioneering technologies.
The need for WPA style programs isn't sufficient to discipline government bureaucracies the way they were with the Manhattan and the Apollo program. There has to be a genuine threat of the political leaders holding office being humiliated in a way that they can't make excuses for. That doesn't mean they inherited a horrible economic situation and can't make it work -- that is "excusable".
Interestingly it was Gerard O'Neill who argued in the 1970's for solar power satellites constructed from lunar material and, as part of that argument predicted the industrialization of China would lead to increased CO2 emissions from coal burning that would mandate radical restructuring of global energy technology. It may be too late now to pursue nonterrestrial material SPS since the baby boomer generation, raised and educated to pioneer space from childhood, was denied that opportunity by --- well that is the question of the millennium if not the epoch isn't it? There are almost as many answers to that question as there are religions.
there was an obvious direction in place subsequent to the space race (remember the Apollo program?) that would have been followed through to space industrialization had the launch service industry enjoyed the same protection from government competition that the satellite industry enjoyed:
* (c) Private enterprise; access; competition
In order to facilitate this development and to provide for the widest possible participation by private enterprise, United States participation in the global system shall be in the form of a private corporation, subject to appropriate governmental regulation. It is the intent of Congress that all authorized users shall have nondiscriminatory access to the system; that maximum competition be maintained in the provision of equipment and services utilized by the system; that the corporation created under this chapter be so organized and operated as to maintain and strengthen competition in the provision of communications services to the public; and that the activities of the corporation created under this chapter and of the persons or companies participating in the ownership of the corporation shall be consistent with the Federal antitrust laws.
It wasn't until 1990, when a coalition of grassroots groups across the country lobbied hard for 3 years, that similar legislation got passed for launch services.
The fact that Malthusian paradigm didn't follow the Club of Rome model doesn't change the reality of the Malthusian paradigm given a fundamentally limited biosphere undergoing its largest extinction event in 60 million years. The Club of Rome merely added academic fashion to the urgency of the Malthusian situation still facing the biosphere. The 1970s was the right time to start the drive for space industrialization based on a private launch service industry. It didn't happen, the pioneering culture that founded the US is being replaced by government policy with less pioneering cultures and now we're all facing some increasingly obvious difficulties -- not just pioneer American stock -- and not just humans.
The cost of getting silicon into space from the lunar surface would be orders of magnitude less than launching from earth due not only to the much shallower gravity well but also due to the absence of atmosphere.
No beanstalk needed.
At worst a Dyneema Rotovator would be needed but probably not even that.
First, the bulk of the materials are manufactured in space from lunar raw material transported to orbital facilities so you don't need to land those facilities on the lunar surface, and you don't have to worry about g-loading the raw materials you are sending to the orbital facilities.
Second, you don't manufacture everything in space -- only bulky materials like solar cells, reflectors, structural members and perhaps klystrons. Only residual materials (raw and manufactured) are of terrestrial origin.
Third, the facility you do put on the lunar surface is there primarily to transport raw mater
I wasn't aware that/. was a racist website. Better call the SPLC about CmdrTaco.
Or did you mean to say it should be obvious to me that the First Amendment doesn't prohibit private discrimination on the basis of political speech but that the Fourteenth Amendment does prohibit private discrimination on the basis of race unless it is discrimination against "whites" in "affirmative action"?
Yeah, I'd admit, I just haven't been programmed by the Ministry of Love.
It's true that for permanent on-site work my compensation requirements are much higher, so my advertised $8/hour for remote temporary consulting is apples to the $50/hour permanent salary annualized to $99k given in TFA. But I think it trades fairly when you consider that employers don't want to commit to fixed recurring costs in the present economic climate, and the vast majority of programming work can be done remote.
How many hundreds of thousands of jobs have been lost in Silicon Valley alone recently?
The crisis has gutted demand for hardware as well, but things are changing so fast, yesterday's calculations are very likely very wrong. Tomorrow, hyperinflation could hit the US making hardware go through the roof due to the exchange rate.
You know, an awful lot of things changed during the 20th century that might have affected an individual's ability to produce breakthroughs.
Here's my theory:
Until people are allowed to exclusively migrate to territory with others who share their theories of what makes human ecologies work for them, the social sciences are going to continue to swim about in the same pool of stagnant ideas without making any progress -- so we'll never know what causes what in human societies.
It's this obnoxious idea that controlled experimentation trumps argumentation and that people should consent to being treated -- an idea at the foundation of science and its ethics -- that is an Idea from Hell to all theocrats whether they're Catholic, Islamic or Politically Correct Bureaucrats who define "separatism" as the moral equivalent of demon possession.
You beat me to it. Forth is very good pedagogy as an introduction to computation. If Forth weren't available, I'd almost suggest assembler simply because you get a real feel for what a computer is actually doing when you tell it to do something. Almost because there is no good interactive assembler shell to let you easily do I/O to my knowledge -- something you'd need to avoid overwhelming the student.
You also get an appreciation for how much work the other languages do for you.
You're measuring things in the wrong dimensions. The correct dimension is reproduction. If you want to talk about downwardly-mobile shrinking native population and industrial base being replaced by third world labor as "reproduction" because the overall population is growing, then you're obviously going to have to have this talk about "subsistence" with someone else.
If the correction is as simple as that, then it should be done: Workforce - houseparents = unemployed. However, I think even the category of "houseparents" is significantly over-blown in a manner similar to the way "self-employed" is over-blown by the reality of under-employment.
"Housewives"? Are you seriously suggesting that "housewives" make up a significant demographic group outside the 1950s or TV series fantasy? It has been a long time since only one income could reliably support middle class subsistence. Certainly there are plenty of people who aren't going to be working, but that is more a product of malinvestment than the few people who realistically have a choice to not work.
Monkeying with the key metrics -- like "unemployment" (ignoring those no longer actively seeking work) and "cost of living" under continual "revision" for political purposes since at least 1983 (when "cost of living" replaced house prices with "imputed rent") -- has left us without the information we need to realistically address economic policy.
It's sort of like a junkie being asked diagnostic questions like "Where does it hurt?" by a doctor who is prescribing him opiates.
Slashdot Mirror
This is disappointing given that Russian strength is in mathematics due to the same phenomenon that drove their launch vehicles to exceptional performance:
A lag in micro electronics development.
Basically, Russians had to be more intelligent with their algorithms than the West due to their inferior hardware. This puts them in a position to be superior software architects who should not be taking their lead from the West -- not even from Finland as much as I respect Linux.
See Universal Intelligence: A Definition of Machine Intelligence.
I understand people's fear of machine intelligence exceeding that of humans, but it is actually more dangerous to have machines merely mimicing human-ness than to have machines that are intelligent enough to actually understand what we say better than another human could.
That means more than merely having some mockery of mirror neurons for "empathy". It means genuine understanding: The ability to model.
The reason this is central to our relationship to our machines should be obvious: Friendly AI really boils down to the problem of effectively communicating our value systems to the AIs.
That's why natural language comprehension is the first step to friendly AI.
HENCE:
http://www.laboratoryofthestates.com/idltsb.html
Oh, no, that was about immigration degrading bond ratings...
How about this?
http://www.laboratoryofthestates.com/imbamcoa.html
Oh, yeah, that's the ticket! Didn't you get the satire in that article? Let me spell it out for your: It is bigoted to hypothesize that immigration might have negative effects. Now, some may argue that since I predicted the ecological correlation between immigration from India and autism rates that this vindicates me from charges of prejudice. However, we all know those individuals who would so-argue are bigots, hence their argument is invalid and the original hypothesis simply bigotry regardless of the truth of the matter!
Only a BIGOT could have failed to get the joke! Are you such a bigot?
Perish the thought! That might be racist!
Guess there just weren't enough H-1b visas issued, huh?
You're dating yourself.
The "smart set" needs a such a high level lingua franca to express infinite precision financial models of no accuracy whatsoever!
WRONG
The appropriate division isn't military vs "civilian" but private vs public.
It's none of the government's business whether private individuals decide it is profitable, or just plain fun, to have a private space program or not.
The government's only real interest is in minimizing the negative externalities of such private activities -- exactly as with any other private activity.
That they're posing the question the way they are is terrible.
CHAPTER 141--COMMERCIAL SPACE OPPORTUNITIES AND TRANSPORTATION SERVICES
SUBCHAPTER II--FEDERAL ACQUISITION OF SPACE TRANSPORTATION SERVICES
Sec. 14731. Requirement to procure commercial space transportation services
(a) In general
Except as otherwise provided in this section, the Federal Government shall acquire space transportation services from United States commercial providers whenever such services are required in the course of its activities. To the maximum extent practicable, the Federal Government shall plan missions to accommodate the space transportation services capabilities of United States commercial providers.
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=105_cong_public_laws&docid=f:publ303.105.pdf
Iron fertilization is such an obviously good thing to test out it never ceases to amaze me how much traction stupid arguments against gradually expanded iron fertilization experiments get.
On the one hand you have folks who object to such expanded experiments by saying "We don't know what global iron fertilization will do to the environment!" Well, I know this will come as a shock to some of these so-called "scientists" but that's precisely why you run EXPERIMENTS.
On the other hand, you have folks who are "worried" that some of the carbon might end up creating a food chain out in the middle of huge ocean desert areas because.... well... who needs all those fish? And, by the way, what are we going to do about all the natural fisheries that are being depleted by overfishing?
That's 11,600 years ago for Atlantis's destruction but TFA says it was 12,900 years ago which is 1,300 years off you idiot!!!
Oh, I can hear the loons whine now: "But but but 10% is a pretty good margin of error for a third hand report from an Egyptian priest that long ago!"
PuhlEEEAZE go back to your Illuminatus Trilogy and leave the theorizing to the Proper Authorities!
Unless there is some study showing a good correlation between marketing savvy and technical savvy of which I am not aware, then even assuming you are right, there should still be a market segment for rationality at the upper end of the bell curve.
True, and I presume that by "lower earth orbit" you don't mean "low earth orbit", but that geostationary orbit is lower than lunar orbit. What you say is particularly true of geostationary orbit, where solar collection is more continuous.
The need for WPA style programs isn't sufficient to discipline government bureaucracies the way they were with the Manhattan and the Apollo program. There has to be a genuine threat of the political leaders holding office being humiliated in a way that they can't make excuses for. That doesn't mean they inherited a horrible economic situation and can't make it work -- that is "excusable".
there was an obvious direction in place subsequent to the space race (remember the Apollo program?) that would have been followed through to space industrialization had the launch service industry enjoyed the same protection from government competition that the satellite industry enjoyed:
http://www.presageinc.com/contents/experience/satellitereform/contents/briefingbook/technology/1962act.pdf
It wasn't until 1990, when a coalition of grassroots groups across the country lobbied hard for 3 years, that similar legislation got passed for launch services.
http://www.geocities.com/jim_bowery/testimny.htm
The fact that Malthusian paradigm didn't follow the Club of Rome model doesn't change the reality of the Malthusian paradigm given a fundamentally limited biosphere undergoing its largest extinction event in 60 million years. The Club of Rome merely added academic fashion to the urgency of the Malthusian situation still facing the biosphere. The 1970s was the right time to start the drive for space industrialization based on a private launch service industry. It didn't happen, the pioneering culture that founded the US is being replaced by government policy with less pioneering cultures and now we're all facing some increasingly obvious difficulties -- not just pioneer American stock -- and not just humans.
The cost of getting silicon into space from the lunar surface would be orders of magnitude less than launching from earth due not only to the much shallower gravity well but also due to the absence of atmosphere.
No beanstalk needed.
At worst a Dyneema Rotovator would be needed but probably not even that.
First, the bulk of the materials are manufactured in space from lunar raw material transported to orbital facilities so you don't need to land those facilities on the lunar surface, and you don't have to worry about g-loading the raw materials you are sending to the orbital facilities.
Second, you don't manufacture everything in space -- only bulky materials like solar cells, reflectors, structural members and perhaps klystrons. Only residual materials (raw and manufactured) are of terrestrial origin.
Third, the facility you do put on the lunar surface is there primarily to transport raw mater
Or did you mean to say it should be obvious to me that the First Amendment doesn't prohibit private discrimination on the basis of political speech but that the Fourteenth Amendment does prohibit private discrimination on the basis of race unless it is discrimination against "whites" in "affirmative action"?
Yeah, I'd admit, I just haven't been programmed by the Ministry of Love.
It's true that for permanent on-site work my compensation requirements are much higher, so my advertised $8/hour for remote temporary consulting is apples to the $50/hour permanent salary annualized to $99k given in TFA. But I think it trades fairly when you consider that employers don't want to commit to fixed recurring costs in the present economic climate, and the vast majority of programming work can be done remote.
TFA says the average programmer with my experience level should be getting a salary of around $50/hour but you'll see I've recenetly advertised myself at $8/hour.
How many hundreds of thousands of jobs have been lost in Silicon Valley alone recently?
The crisis has gutted demand for hardware as well, but things are changing so fast, yesterday's calculations are very likely very wrong. Tomorrow, hyperinflation could hit the US making hardware go through the roof due to the exchange rate.
Here's my theory:
Until people are allowed to exclusively migrate to territory with others who share their theories of what makes human ecologies work for them, the social sciences are going to continue to swim about in the same pool of stagnant ideas without making any progress -- so we'll never know what causes what in human societies.
It's this obnoxious idea that controlled experimentation trumps argumentation and that people should consent to being treated -- an idea at the foundation of science and its ethics -- that is an Idea from Hell to all theocrats whether they're Catholic, Islamic or Politically Correct Bureaucrats who define "separatism" as the moral equivalent of demon possession.
You beat me to it. Forth is very good pedagogy as an introduction to computation. If Forth weren't available, I'd almost suggest assembler simply because you get a real feel for what a computer is actually doing when you tell it to do something. Almost because there is no good interactive assembler shell to let you easily do I/O to my knowledge -- something you'd need to avoid overwhelming the student. You also get an appreciation for how much work the other languages do for you.
You're measuring things in the wrong dimensions. The correct dimension is reproduction. If you want to talk about downwardly-mobile shrinking native population and industrial base being replaced by third world labor as "reproduction" because the overall population is growing, then you're obviously going to have to have this talk about "subsistence" with someone else.
If the correction is as simple as that, then it should be done: Workforce - houseparents = unemployed. However, I think even the category of "houseparents" is significantly over-blown in a manner similar to the way "self-employed" is over-blown by the reality of under-employment.
"Housewives"? Are you seriously suggesting that "housewives" make up a significant demographic group outside the 1950s or TV series fantasy? It has been a long time since only one income could reliably support middle class subsistence. Certainly there are plenty of people who aren't going to be working, but that is more a product of malinvestment than the few people who realistically have a choice to not work.
It's sort of like a junkie being asked diagnostic questions like "Where does it hurt?" by a doctor who is prescribing him opiates.