Re:We tried to get HP to do this...
on
Idea Stock Exchange
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· Score: 2, Informative
It was during the transition to Carly but it never got high enough up to be directly attributable to the executive suite.
Indeed, executive decision support systems like this are precisely what the executive suite needs and it tends to be the layers just below them that are the most resistant so it's a catch-22. The executives typically have the mentality of the stock analysts and their immediate underlings are all-too-aware that upon this weakness their jobs depend.
The person to pay attention to here is Russ George.
He's the principle behind the business and is also behind another business with similarly profound potential: Planktos, which purports to be pursuing the use of iron fertilization to sequester carbon via oceanic autotrophism. I hope he's not a con-artist or kook but the odds are not high he is for real. This will require some serious due diligence for those venture capitalists who are frustrated with the poor returns now poisoning software systems.
Well, of course, if the engine isn't scalable to any great degree then the approach talked about by Walker would have to, during development in order to keep costs down, decouple vehicle from engine development.
Suppose we translate these figures, almost incomprehensible by modern standards (three hundred launch vehicles expended in the development program!) into quasi-modern terms. Consider an orbital launch vehicle two-stage, say, clean and green thanks to LH2/LOX propulsion in all stages. Engines: J2 or RL10s or follow-on uprated versions (we'll have plenty of opportunity to develop them and phase them in). A simple two stage cylindrical stack like Titan II, with GPS or ground-commanded navigation. Payload interface is a big ring with bolt-holes and a standard fairing with plenty of volume inside.
The habits of the development program carry over to production/operation. The only way you can afford 300 launch vehicles is to make them small and if those are the basis of your development for orbital craft then you have to make sure the entire process, for manufacture to launch operation is scalable.
One of the things that John Carmack does correctly is lots of small flights with the possibility to scale upon success. John Walker wrote a paper about this approach (restricted to expendables) called "A Rocket a Day Keeps the High Costs Away". It's good advice. It's too bad more people (to be fair, such as John Walker himself) don't take it to heart.
What's going on is actually warfare. Zombie money is being killed. Unfortunately, there is a lot of zombie money being created all the time because of the way the tax system subsidizes property rights. So the zombie money can kill a lot of people before it finally dies, and if the death rate of the zombie money isn't higher than the rate the government creates it, it can keep killing the people for a very very long time.
Well, actually things could get interesting if you just made Rand's capitalism self-consistent by admitting that there is no moral responsibility to protect the property rights of others. At that point things very quickly stop favoring mere possession of wealth and start favoring creation thereof.
everyone agrees that real-life school violence is a serious issue which lacks easy answers.
Its easy enough: Just make school administrators liable for damages resulting from school bullying including psychological damage.
Science Daily reports that: "In addition to triggering a depression-like social withdrawal syndrome, repeated defeat by dominant animals leaves a mouse with an enduring "molecular scar" in its brain that could help to explain why depression is so difficult to cure".
We live in a technological civilization. That means we are engineering our environment. When we take animals out of their wild and throw them into cages without regard for their natures we are not being humane. We are no more humane when we do the same to humans.
25 years ago E. O. Wilson, in "On Human Nature" described the reasons to believe that 50 generations could be enough to cause substantial adaptation to moderate selective pressures. For his trouble Wilson was attacked as a "fascist" by fellow "scientists" at Harvard: Lewontin and Gould and an entire genre of popular "science" books and articles were spawned by the mid-Atlantic press.
It turns out they were wrong to do this but really the posturing about 19th century beliefs being based on little more than base prejudice isn't much better than Lewontin and Gould. The Boasian anthropologists were just as politically motivated as their counterparts of the late 19th and early 20th century. The Boasians were more successful in putting forward their agenda not because their arguments were more sound but because they, like Lewontin and Gould, had better public relations.
Men of Darwin's era weren't as stupid as we wish they were and we wish they were stupid because if they weren't then we would have to face how much damage has been done to scientific progress in the fields of human culture in the name of fighting racism and prejudice.
The real question is how can we get beyond this nonsense and come to consilience between various fields of human knowledge of humanity so we can make human societies more sustainable and humane?
As I said to some white nationalists when David Irving was arrested:
Let's not get the cart before the horse.
Freedom of speech is not a fundamental human right.
Indeed, freedom of association is the sole fundamental human right.
Freedom of speech can be constructed from freedom of association by the mutually consenting association between people who believe in freedom of speech and therefore practice it within the societies they form.
There is a war to be fought but it is not over freedom of speech--rather it is over the opposition to freedom of likeminded people to form societies with territorial allocation to them within which they are able to live their beliefs without interference or parasitism from others.
I tried reading the article looking for the relevance of mere numbers in changing the optimal size of a disruptive team. I also tried looking up "instrumentalism". Making sense isn't real high on the list of priorities here is it?
For the enhancement of scientific knowlege and the required development
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by the Eligible Parties to acquire this information must be obtained
from other Eligible Parties.
The National Academy of Sciences shall identify areas of scientific
interest in which the quality of research results are quantifiable --
primarily in terms of information content. Examples of these
kinds of research results are: DNA sequencing (human genome project),
digital imaging of various phenomena (astronomical, planetary,
terrestrial ozone-layer monitoring), quantitative behavior of systems
in microgravity, quantitative mineral assay of various sites
(terrestrial and nonterrestrial), etc.
A dollar amount, to be established in conjunction with Congress, shall
be associated with each informative item and with varying degrees
of accuracy of the information. That dollar amount will then be
appropriated to The Trust to be paid out only in the event that
an Eligible Party has delivered new information on the associated item of
interest to a designated recipient. When a measurement has already
been made, payout will be limited to information value corresponding
to the increased confidence level of the measurement (e.g. additional
significant bits or fractions thereof). In areas where an information
flow is required (periodic sampling) the value of various sampling
frequencies at the various degrees of accuracy (significant bits) will
be included in the valuation of the measurement. Duplicate information
flows will share the cash flow evenly. For superior information flows,
the incremental increase in accuracy will enjoy less diluted access to
funding flows allocated to those incremental increases in accuracy.
Income on The Trust will be used to adjust The Trust for inflation.
Additional income from The Trust may be used to fund items within
The Trust. In the event that an item is measured by a Party which
is not an Eligible Party, and that information is available to the
designated recipient -- the corresponding funding will be redistributed
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So Edison wants to rise from the grave and defeat his nemisis, Tesla, eh? Now all Tesla has to do is rise up and strike back with his wireless power transmission system at GHz frequencies. Not only would this eliminate the per system power supplies but also the wiring and the master clock!
I'm pretty sure I'm just joking about that idea...
People who look to asteroid mining of metals for terrestrial use miss two fundamental factors:
Ore grade just isn't that good compared to what you find on earth. Extracting platinum from a solid block of nickel amalgam is really energy intensive, and the other "stony" asteroids have not gone through the hydrothermal concentration of metals of the terrestrial deposits.
The time it takes for a piece of capital equipment to return any materials to earth from an asteroid is enormous compared to the delivery of lunar mass to earth orbit. Since any mass in earth orbit is worth hundreds of dollars a pound and the time is so short for delivery, it makes a lot more sense to use lunar material in earth orbit than it does to use asteroidal material on the earth's surface.
The C-Prize doesn't care how you go about maximizing the compression ratio so traditional compression methods would very quickly find themselves outmodded.
Re-ordering the corpus prior to compression is fine so long as it is reversible. That means the ordering information must cost less than the gain in compression by reordering.
A classic example is the bzip algorithm. Beautiful.
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))
Compression program and decompression program are made open source.
Explanation
For an idea of why the C-Prize can solve the AI problem, if it is solvable, see Matthew Mahoney's comment on it:
Matt Mahoney
Jun 17, 7:18 pm show options
Newsgroups: comp.compression
From: "Matt Mahoney"
Date: 17 Jun 2005 20:18:59 -0700
Local: Fri, Jun 17 2005 7:18 pm
Subject: Re: The C-Prize
Hutter's AIXI, http://www.idsia.ch/~marcus/ai/paixi.htm makes another
argument for the connection between compression and AI that is more
general than the Turing test. He proves that the optimal behavior of
an agent (an interactive system that receives a reward signal from an
unknown environment) is to guess that the environement is most likely
computed by the shortest possible program that is consistent with the
behavior observed so far. In other words, the most likely outcome for
any experiment is the one with the simplest explanation, where
"simplest" means the smallest program that could model what you
currently know about the universe.
He gives a formal proof, but it basically says that the only possible
distribution of the infinite set of programs (or strings) with nonzero
probability is one which favors shorter programs over longer ones.
Given any string of length n with probability p > 0, there are an
infinite set of strings longer than n, but only a finite number of
these can have probability higher than p.
-- Matt Mahoney
Matt Mahoney is the author of Text Compression as a Test for Artificial Intelligence which states:
It is shown that optimal text compression is a harder problem thanartificial intelligence as defined by Turing's (1950) imitation game; thus compression ratio on a standard benchmark corpuscould be used as an objective and quantitative alternative test for AI (Mahoney, 1999).
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, executive decision support systems like this are precisely what the executive suite needs and it tends to be the layers just below them that are the most resistant so it's a catch-22. The executives typically have the mentality of the stock analysts and their immediate underlings are all-too-aware that upon this weakness their jobs depend.
I'm not kidding.
He's the principle behind the business and is also behind another business with similarly profound potential: Planktos, which purports to be pursuing the use of iron fertilization to sequester carbon via oceanic autotrophism. I hope he's not a con-artist or kook but the odds are not high he is for real. This will require some serious due diligence for those venture capitalists who are frustrated with the poor returns now poisoning software systems.
Well, of course, if the engine isn't scalable to any great degree then the approach talked about by Walker would have to, during development in order to keep costs down, decouple vehicle from engine development.
The habits of the development program carry over to production/operation. The only way you can afford 300 launch vehicles is to make them small and if those are the basis of your development for orbital craft then you have to make sure the entire process, for manufacture to launch operation is scalable.
What's going on is actually warfare. Zombie money is being killed. Unfortunately, there is a lot of zombie money being created all the time because of the way the tax system subsidizes property rights. So the zombie money can kill a lot of people before it finally dies, and if the death rate of the zombie money isn't higher than the rate the government creates it, it can keep killing the people for a very very long time.
Well, actually things could get interesting if you just made Rand's capitalism self-consistent by admitting that there is no moral responsibility to protect the property rights of others. At that point things very quickly stop favoring mere possession of wealth and start favoring creation thereof.
Its easy enough: Just make school administrators liable for damages resulting from school bullying including psychological damage.
Science Daily reports that: "In addition to triggering a depression-like social withdrawal syndrome, repeated defeat by dominant animals leaves a mouse with an enduring "molecular scar" in its brain that could help to explain why depression is so difficult to cure".
We live in a technological civilization. That means we are engineering our environment. When we take animals out of their wild and throw them into cages without regard for their natures we are not being humane. We are no more humane when we do the same to humans.
It turns out they were wrong to do this but really the posturing about 19th century beliefs being based on little more than base prejudice isn't much better than Lewontin and Gould. The Boasian anthropologists were just as politically motivated as their counterparts of the late 19th and early 20th century. The Boasians were more successful in putting forward their agenda not because their arguments were more sound but because they, like Lewontin and Gould, had better public relations.
Men of Darwin's era weren't as stupid as we wish they were and we wish they were stupid because if they weren't then we would have to face how much damage has been done to scientific progress in the fields of human culture in the name of fighting racism and prejudice.
The real question is how can we get beyond this nonsense and come to consilience between various fields of human knowledge of humanity so we can make human societies more sustainable and humane?
Let's not get the cart before the horse.
Freedom of speech is not a fundamental human right.
Indeed, freedom of association is the sole fundamental human right.
Freedom of speech can be constructed from freedom of association by the mutually consenting association between people who believe in freedom of speech and therefore practice it within the societies they form.
There is a war to be fought but it is not over freedom of speech--rather it is over the opposition to freedom of likeminded people to form societies with territorial allocation to them within which they are able to live their beliefs without interference or parasitism from others.
I tried reading the article looking for the relevance of mere numbers in changing the optimal size of a disruptive team. I also tried looking up "instrumentalism". Making sense isn't real high on the list of priorities here is it?
If they'd just remove the cap on foreign worker visas like Gates tells them to do they wouldn't have these problems with uppity geeks trying to destroy civilization by demanding enough money to attract a decent mate, reliably pay a mortgate and have a couple of kids they can afford to send to college.
Integrated south facing algae solar bioreactor, feeding algae grazing fish like tilapia in a huge aquarium and using the water as heat/cool storage.
They're a bunch of racists just like the Japanese with their aging population being cared for increasingly by robots rather than low-paid immigrants.
The National Academy of Sciences shall identify areas of scientific interest in which the quality of research results are quantifiable -- primarily in terms of information content. Examples of these kinds of research results are: DNA sequencing (human genome project), digital imaging of various phenomena (astronomical, planetary, terrestrial ozone-layer monitoring), quantitative behavior of systems in microgravity, quantitative mineral assay of various sites (terrestrial and nonterrestrial), etc.
A dollar amount, to be established in conjunction with Congress, shall be associated with each informative item and with varying degrees of accuracy of the information. That dollar amount will then be appropriated to The Trust to be paid out only in the event that an Eligible Party has delivered new information on the associated item of interest to a designated recipient. When a measurement has already been made, payout will be limited to information value corresponding to the increased confidence level of the measurement (e.g. additional significant bits or fractions thereof). In areas where an information flow is required (periodic sampling) the value of various sampling frequencies at the various degrees of accuracy (significant bits) will be included in the valuation of the measurement. Duplicate information flows will share the cash flow evenly. For superior information flows, the incremental increase in accuracy will enjoy less diluted access to funding flows allocated to those incremental increases in accuracy.
Income on The Trust will be used to adjust The Trust for inflation. Additional income from The Trust may be used to fund items within The Trust. In the event that an item is measured by a Party which is not an Eligible Party, and that information is available to the designated recipient -- the corresponding funding will be redistributed within The Trust. After-inflation losses will be redistributed within The Trust, deactivating items which are not currently being pursued by any Eligible Party.
I'm pretty sure I'm just joking about that idea...
Who decides who gets the revenue from the tax, and how do they decide it?
How anyone can conceive of this sort of law being "representative" of the people's will is beyond me.
Looks like it may be time for jury nullification.
Re-ordering the corpus prior to compression is fine so long as it is reversible. That means the ordering information must cost less than the gain in compression by reordering.
A classic example is the bzip algorithm. Beautiful.
They could fund a prize competition such as the following:
Let anyone submit an open source program that produces, with no inputs, one of the major natural language corpora as output.
S = size of uncompressed corpus
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed corpus
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))
Compression program and decompression program are made open source.
Explanation For an idea of why the C-Prize can solve the AI problem, if it is solvable, see Matthew Mahoney's comment on it:
Matt Mahoney is the author of Text Compression as a Test for Artificial Intelligence which states: (Mahoney is also a competitor who has some winnings from The Calgary Corpus Compression ChallengeWhat TIBET does is provide Smalltalk-like semantics in the current browser via a relatively sophisticated JavaScript runtime.