The first to prove that such a wing has minimum wave drag was R.T. Jones (1951). More recently, inviscid CFD calculations proved that the best performances are obtained with a wing of aspect-ratio 10:1 with a cruise CL=0.068. The best yaw angle would be 68 degrees, and the wing would have the flying operation shown in Fig. 1 below.
Have you been watching what's happening in the preliminary votes for candidates for the upcoming election? Everyone who has a tight race is either harping on immigration or they are losing.
Do you see anything wrong with the government not financing prizes for fair contests when it is financing cost-plus technology development contracts for decades on end for a permanent bureaucracy dedicated to not producing a solution to the fusion or orbital launch cost problem lest they lose their stream of funding?
Fair contests like this really separate the performers from the bullshitters. Its why you basically have to drag the government kicking and screaming to fund fair contests like this by embarrassing the hell out of them with stuff like the X-Prize.
The winning entry beat the first runner up by a whopping 72%.
The only "big name" university represented in the 22 entrants (all listed in the results) is UC Berkeley and they were seventh place.
The only university outside of North America came in 18th place, and IIT, the darling of mainstream media like CBS "60 Minutes" didn't even compete (not that Caltech, MIT or CMU are any better for not having entered). Even so, congratulations to Dehli College of Engineering for competing.
The winning high school team from Evansville, Indiana, had the second best mileage out of all contenders including the universities.
It's pretty "funny" that people turn to guys like George Carlin for advice on public hygine. Its a pretty big leap of faith to take a comedian at his word about their immune systems. Are you going to be able to sue George Carlin for advising you to swim in a cesspool if you do and you pick up hepatitis C? Well the joke's on you, immuno-stud.
It isn't so "funny" if public policy get set on this sort of thing and people are involuntarily exposed to environments to which their immune systems aren't adapted.
One of the big problems is that technology doesn't just insulate us from natural pathogens -- it also exposes us to pathogens we wouldn't naturally be exposed to, and the more ecologies get mixed through transportation and environmental controls, as well as public policies promoting them, up the more that applies.
Diversity is strength. Australia is an inbred backwater of an ecosystem that needs to be enriched so it looks like the world. Predators who are foolish enough to eat poisonous frogs from more evolutionarily advanced ecosystems are doomed and we should celebrate their demise as the relentless march of evolution progresses ever onward to a glorious day when that heavenly brown-green-grey goo eats everything.
If I were in Ray Ozzie's shoes I would apply something like the C-Prize to the entirety of MS's source code base. From the resulting compressed code, I'd reduce the OS CD to those components required to create a web-delivered application platform using whatever language won the C-Prize competition, and create a legacy port of the code to an ECMAScript Client/SOA architecture like TIBET(tm) that can run with a solid JavaScript engine. The idea is to go "Live", ie: web-delivered, with a fundamentally new base (whatever engine won the C-Prize) but with some support for the legacy environments (ECMAScript).
Microsoft has at least 2 really big problems deriving from the same fundamental reality: Everyone needs their OS to interoperate with the bulk of the information industry.
The first problem is ethical and really goes beyond the scope of my professional opinions to my public opinions about the support of property rights. Suffice to say, I have no trouble with someone who goes after a natural monopoly position and succeeds. I have a problem with someone who then refuses to use that position of success to fix the bug in the society that made them inordinately rich and their technology inordinately influential.
The second problem is technical, which is what my argument here is really all about.
Basically Microsoft's code bloat problem derives from its monopoly position. This may seem like a truism since all of the software "profession" suffers from code bloat, but only Microsoft can take this to monopolistic proportions -- proportions that make Ma Bell's monopolistic complexities of yore look Spartan.
So Microsoft has this problem and it has many programmers (contributing to the code-bloat problem). It also has mountains of cash.
So how can Microsoft bust its own monopoly position turning its many programmers and mountains of cash into succinct code?
Monetary Incentives for the Programmers, ala the C-Prize:
S = size of uncompressed code-base
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed code-base
R = S/P (the compression ratio).
Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X
Fund contains: $Z at noon GMT on day of new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))
What happens very rapidly is the programmers first apply their skills to maximally refactoring the code. What falls out is a series of legacy API layers written atop a tight core.
They'd have to spend more money on code testing to verify the compressed code-bases of the competing teams actually worked to spec but the results should be quite gratifying.
The next stage of the research is to work out how to make the glass stable at room temperature and pressure.
Reminds me of the cartoon of the scientist at the blackboard with a series of equations on one side and concluding equation on the other with "And then a miracle happens." in between.
average US developer has fallen in KLOC productivity since 1999, when they produced about 9000 lines a year. So Windows isn't alone in this.
Anyone who uses "lines of code" as a metric of software productivity is already demanding that bad code be produced.
Earlier in the piece he writes about complexity thus:
Windows code is too complicated. It's not the components themselves, it's their interdependencies.
This demonstrates he doesn't really understand complexity. The most rigorous definition of complexity is Kolmogorov Complexity, which is simply the minimum size program required to meet specification. Note this is a single metric: number of bits in the program. It doesn't say anything about "interdependencies" and indeed it can't say anything negative about interdependencies because the way you minimize the size of the program is through reuse of code.
The basic way to drive space settlement is land taxation (probably with a subsistence exemption for homesteaders) ala Henry George who, not coincidentally, was the most widely read political economist during the expansion of carrying capacity through cultuvlation of the American west.
Milton Friedman endorsed this form of taxation as the least distorting. The reason is that it is a tax on economic rent, which is to say, the portion of profit that is unnecessary for bringing a particular asset into its current use.
What happens when you start taxing economic rent instead of economic activity is that marginal assets are brought into production -- the most marginal of assets being at the frontier.
Here's how I tried to explain to my congressional representative why it is better to outsource than to raise the H-1b cap:
When you outsource, you don't import a bunch of guys who engage in ethnic nepotism to import other Indians for the huge increases in dowery ($50k frequently) they can enjoy from a green card, as well as minting MBAs and lawyers from the corporate education benefits. That way, when the company finally goes tits up, the way Sun did, you haven't left a mafia in the USA.
I designed and deployed the first metro area mesh network in the US using Locustworld's MeshAP software. It wasn't and isn't big (small tourist town) and it required a lot of babysitting for the first year, but its a pretty mature technology now and the price is right (the software is free unless you start getting into the WISP stuff they sell).
Visiting Frankfurt on a connecting flight recently I went to the airport's MacDonalds in desperation to get some flight-layover sustanence. I was one of the only two white males out of about 50 customers and 15 employees. On a return flight I went to a restaurant outside passport control and at the next table were 3 couples each of which had a blonde women, two of which were with black men and a third was with a man who would have made the grade for a Nazi-propaganda cartoon for "semitic blood".
I suspect if people from 1920 had seen that they would have allied with Hitler.
The tragedy is that there has been nearly a half century of computer science -- much of it involving relational systems such as RDBMS -- and only one real attempt to go back and revive relation arithmetic as a formal basis for computer systems. Imagine the mathematical rigor, simplicity and elegance of arithmetic applied to such complicated systems as RDBMSs and you get an idea of where something fundamental like this could go -- not in the far future but quite soon.
The book Plague Time : How Stealth Infections Cause Cancer, Heart Disease, and Other Deadly Ailments
by Paul W. Ewald outlines a number of interesting strategies for dealing more effectively with the battle against antibiotic resistance. Basically, if you insist on having a world where international transporters (jets, ships, cars, busses, etc) act like mosquitoes to facilitate human-to-human transmission of disease, you have to resort to some other public health measures so that viruses and bacteria (and parasites) are least capable of winning the evolutionary arms race.
Among these measures is to target virulence rather than the pathogen itself. The reason is that a species of pathogen can have varying virulence and you want the last virulent to win the competition for the ecological niche (human body). Ewald gives an example of a particular protein used by a bacteria to convert human lung tissue to useful food -- a protein that costs the bacteria about 5% of its budget but has huge returns. Vaccinating against this protein can let the more benign variants beat out the virulent variants for the lungs of humans, and give the human immune system the kick it needs to construct antibodies to suppress further infection.
A big part of the reason they can live better here than they can back home is the fact that their employers externalize the social service costs of their immigrant employees. If there were a market for visas rather than a commie waiting list you'd find out just how much the government is subsidizing immigration.
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It's rather difficult to control the flow of drugs across the border when you aren't controlling the flow of people across the border.
Have you been watching what's happening in the preliminary votes for candidates for the upcoming election? Everyone who has a tight race is either harping on immigration or they are losing.
Confiscate the assets of the businesses illegally lowering wages via violation of the law.
What ranking do you use for this statement?
Do you see anything wrong with the government not financing prizes for fair contests when it is financing cost-plus technology development contracts for decades on end for a permanent bureaucracy dedicated to not producing a solution to the fusion or orbital launch cost problem lest they lose their stream of funding?
When you look at the race results a few things stand out:
It isn't so "funny" if public policy get set on this sort of thing and people are involuntarily exposed to environments to which their immune systems aren't adapted.
One of the big problems is that technology doesn't just insulate us from natural pathogens -- it also exposes us to pathogens we wouldn't naturally be exposed to, and the more ecologies get mixed through transportation and environmental controls, as well as public policies promoting them, up the more that applies.
Diversity is strength. Australia is an inbred backwater of an ecosystem that needs to be enriched so it looks like the world. Predators who are foolish enough to eat poisonous frogs from more evolutionarily advanced ecosystems are doomed and we should celebrate their demise as the relentless march of evolution progresses ever onward to a glorious day when that heavenly brown-green-grey goo eats everything.
Microsoft has at least 2 really big problems deriving from the same fundamental reality: Everyone needs their OS to interoperate with the bulk of the information industry.
The first problem is ethical and really goes beyond the scope of my professional opinions to my public opinions about the support of property rights. Suffice to say, I have no trouble with someone who goes after a natural monopoly position and succeeds. I have a problem with someone who then refuses to use that position of success to fix the bug in the society that made them inordinately rich and their technology inordinately influential.
The second problem is technical, which is what my argument here is really all about.
Basically Microsoft's code bloat problem derives from its monopoly position. This may seem like a truism since all of the software "profession" suffers from code bloat, but only Microsoft can take this to monopolistic proportions -- proportions that make Ma Bell's monopolistic complexities of yore look Spartan.
So Microsoft has this problem and it has many programmers (contributing to the code-bloat problem). It also has mountains of cash.
So how can Microsoft bust its own monopoly position turning its many programmers and mountains of cash into succinct code?
Monetary Incentives for the Programmers, ala the C-Prize:
S = size of uncompressed code-base
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed code-base
R = S/P (the compression ratio).
Award monies in a manner similar to the M-Prize:
Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X
Fund contains: $Z at noon GMT on day of new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))
What happens very rapidly is the programmers first apply their skills to maximally refactoring the code. What falls out is a series of legacy API layers written atop a tight core.
They'd have to spend more money on code testing to verify the compressed code-bases of the competing teams actually worked to spec but the results should be quite gratifying.
Reminds me of the cartoon of the scientist at the blackboard with a series of equations on one side and concluding equation on the other with "And then a miracle happens." in between.
Anyone who uses "lines of code" as a metric of software productivity is already demanding that bad code be produced.
Earlier in the piece he writes about complexity thus:
This demonstrates he doesn't really understand complexity. The most rigorous definition of complexity is Kolmogorov Complexity, which is simply the minimum size program required to meet specification. Note this is a single metric: number of bits in the program. It doesn't say anything about "interdependencies" and indeed it can't say anything negative about interdependencies because the way you minimize the size of the program is through reuse of code.
It would only be news in that timeline if it was the last mention of it in this timeline.
Milton Friedman endorsed this form of taxation as the least distorting. The reason is that it is a tax on economic rent, which is to say, the portion of profit that is unnecessary for bringing a particular asset into its current use.
What happens when you start taxing economic rent instead of economic activity is that marginal assets are brought into production -- the most marginal of assets being at the frontier.
When you outsource, you don't import a bunch of guys who engage in ethnic nepotism to import other Indians for the huge increases in dowery ($50k frequently) they can enjoy from a green card, as well as minting MBAs and lawyers from the corporate education benefits. That way, when the company finally goes tits up, the way Sun did, you haven't left a mafia in the USA.
Why is it that with each passing Shuttle disaster, I look forward more to the resumption Shuttle launches?
I designed and deployed the first metro area mesh network in the US using Locustworld's MeshAP software. It wasn't and isn't big (small tourist town) and it required a lot of babysitting for the first year, but its a pretty mature technology now and the price is right (the software is free unless you start getting into the WISP stuff they sell).
Visiting Frankfurt on a connecting flight recently I went to the airport's MacDonalds in desperation to get some flight-layover sustanence. I was one of the only two white males out of about 50 customers and 15 employees. On a return flight I went to a restaurant outside passport control and at the next table were 3 couples each of which had a blonde women, two of which were with black men and a third was with a man who would have made the grade for a Nazi-propaganda cartoon for "semitic blood". I suspect if people from 1920 had seen that they would have allied with Hitler.
It turns out that a medieval philosopher named William of Ockham may have provide the route to artificial intelligence in his famous Ockham's Razor. As it turns out, this has now been shown to be central to very definition of abstract intelligence and could provide the basis of a prize award like the X-Prize that could solve the AI problem far more effectively than the Turing Competition.
The tragedy is that there has been nearly a half century of computer science -- much of it involving relational systems such as RDBMS -- and only one real attempt to go back and revive relation arithmetic as a formal basis for computer systems. Imagine the mathematical rigor, simplicity and elegance of arithmetic applied to such complicated systems as RDBMSs and you get an idea of where something fundamental like this could go -- not in the far future but quite soon.
Among these measures is to target virulence rather than the pathogen itself. The reason is that a species of pathogen can have varying virulence and you want the last virulent to win the competition for the ecological niche (human body). Ewald gives an example of a particular protein used by a bacteria to convert human lung tissue to useful food -- a protein that costs the bacteria about 5% of its budget but has huge returns. Vaccinating against this protein can let the more benign variants beat out the virulent variants for the lungs of humans, and give the human immune system the kick it needs to construct antibodies to suppress further infection.
A big part of the reason they can live better here than they can back home is the fact that their employers externalize the social service costs of their immigrant employees. If there were a market for visas rather than a commie waiting list you'd find out just how much the government is subsidizing immigration.
We can import an H-1b to take over ownership of Taco's stock, right?
Why not just build hospitals in Mexico and save all thse people the trouble of crossing the border illegally to go to the emergency rooms for free?
Scott McNealy's Java didn't do as much damage as Bill Gates's DOS so in that respect we may praise his holy name.