A car dealer I was talking to today had a 2012 car on his lot with a couple thousand miles on it, which he'd sold to a Romanian techie who found out a couple weeks after he bought the car that he couldn't keep whatever US visa he had, and had to go back to Romania. Bad for the US that we don't have him here designing cool stuff for us, and it was even an American car. I'm sure kicking him out made some Republican xenophobe or Democrat protectionist happy.
While I'm all in favor of more engineers, one of the biggest problems facing the US today is the cost of health care, especially as the Boomers retire (which means both that they'll be increasing demand for government-funded health care and decreasing the supply of doctors.) We've needed to prepare for this by increasing the supply of trained doctors and nurses, and that means partly increasing the capacity of American medical schools and partly making it much friendlier for foreign-trained medical people to immigrate to the US (which is partly an immigration issue and partly a medical-certification issue.) For doctors especially, it's long-term activity, with a long lead time, and part of the problem is at the state licensing level as well as partly at the Federal level.
And with engineers, we need to have them working in fields that make American life better and give us more things to trade to foreigners to make their lives better as well - building better bridges and better biomedical technology and better civilian aircraft and more efficient cars are good; building better tanks and military aircraft may require highly-trained high-tech people who get great salaries, but selling them either to the US or other countries is at best a waste of money and talent and usually is a way to make other parts of the world worse for the people who live there.
A keyboard from 20 years ago will have the keys you need, but it won't have the interface you need, because the Raspberry Pi doesn't have PS2, just USB. But that's ok - a keyboard from 5 years ago is probably USB:-) Or for about $5 you can find a USB keyboard if you don't already have one.
And when I got my first computer (ok, at work, but it was the first one that I was in charge of) it didn't have a monitor either - the console was a Decwriter.
I don't think I agree on the generational thing - I'm from the boomer generation, and got a decent amount of evolution and genetics education in high school, though over the last few decades evolution has become more and more important in biology and genetics (even if it doesn't always show up at the high school biology level.) But I'm also from the Northeast, not the South.
Also, the hippie generation were into ecology - I'm not sure if city kids get that as much, and more people are in cities these days. On the other hand, we couldn't do DNA sequencing in our kitchens or high school biology classes back then.
The Nook's strength is that it's a cheap Android tablet - the fact that it's rootable means you can install your own apps on it, which is important. If it weren't cheap, hackers would root some other cheap Android tablet, or consumers would buy some other cheap tablet that does let them install software.
The issue for the bookstore tablet vendors is that they want to be able to sell DRM'd books, but enforcing that on a non-locked tablet is difficult.
One thing that consistently seems to happen at startups is that once they have more than a dozen or so people, there's a Friday afternoon beer party, and when the company gets up to 100-200 people they hire a professional HR department, whose first move is to kill the beer party.
But also, this is the UK Microsoft, and apparently it's more socially acceptable to get ripping drunk in the UK than it is in the US.
At a previous job, we had a guy in our group who didn't drink, and was always convenient as a designated driver. There are enough techies around who aren't neurotypical or otherwise don't drink because they don't like having their heads messed with, or who don't drink because they had alcoholics in their family and don't want to go there. There are also people who don't drink because they used to be alcoholics, though I ran into that more often with sales people and cops than with techies. Also, when I got older than about 30, I found that I couldn't have a beer at lunch and still get anything done in the afternoon, and I'll seldom have a second drink these days.
On the other hand, a few years ago the department I was in had a guy who made wine, and we'd occasionally have wine-tasting after work. His belief was that if you don't have at least two different wines, it's not wine-tasting, it's just drinking:-) And I was commuting by train back then, so it worked out just fine.
Intelligent Design says that yeah, ok, something like evolution obviously did happen, but it wasn't an accident, it was a sequence of pre-planned steps by an intelligent designer Whose identity we'll pretend to be open-minded about. Genetic evidence of evolution just shows that He was reusing code and parts from animals He built first instead of magically creating them by fiat. (That doesn't mean that their motivations or methods are actually scientific, of course, but they're mainly trying to explain science in ways that leave loopholes for religion to still be true.)
That's different from hardcore evolution skeptics, who typically are literalists about the stories in Genesis or at least don't want to believe humans aren't really special. (Most of them are either Protestant Christians or else Muslims, but there are also non-Judaism-based religions whose followers don't like evolution.)
That's also different from the US right-wing political opposition to evolution. It's primarily there to keep the Protestant religious conservatives locked in to political conservatism, by pushing buttons that are easy to push, just as the Democrats use the abortion issue to keep feminists locked in to the Democratic Party and the Republicans use it to keep conservative Protestants locked in to the Republican Party and to try to steal the Catholics from the Democrats. But secondarily it's there to promote opposition to science, because the Republicans' corporate sponsors really don't want the public believing that Global Warming is a problem that needs to be solved by legislation, in ways that are bad for oil companies and agribusiness, and that means pushing the Don't Trust Science agenda every way they can. You'd expect rural conservatives to also be conservationists, especially after the Dust Bowl, and they really don't want that kind of attitude around. Drill, Baby, Drill!
One of the comments above points to an article in Scientific American which explains the issues better than the business newspaper. That article quotes biologist Susan Evans saying that anoles may be atypical and "It will be illuminating to compare it with more conservative lizards - not to mention representatives of a wider range of reptiles such as snakes, tuatara, crocodiles and turtles." Whiptails might be quite interesting, but they sound like they're definitely atypical.
He posted pretty early in the morning, so the real problem is that the coffee hadn't started working. And while I was interested in the scientific content of the articles, it really did call for some kind of reptile overlord joke.
> "that have had their genome sequenced." That's chickens and finches. If you look at the underlying scientific papers that get referenced, they're all talking about these being "non-avian species of reptile", because taxonomists currently do treat the birds as a subset of reptiles, and the point they're making is that the reptile genomes that have been sequenced so far have all been birds, and they thought it would be useful to sequence the kinds of reptiles we traditionally think of as reptiles.
How did you get to the Queen? Was it because of the line in the Scientific American article saying that anoles may be atypical and that "It will be illuminating to compare it with more conservative lizards"?
No, I actually was talking about stenography, as was CryptoJones, more or less (though we were also making fun of the people who'd used that term instead of steganography.) It's becoming a lost art, but some of the older folks here will remember those Gregg Shorthand books, and typing pools.
With Steganography, some of the interesting directions to look are how to hide stuff in various video formats, both from the standpoint of how much you can hide from programs and also how much you can hide from visual perception.
Chances are pretty good that your Quantum Computer will be running at liquid helium temperatures, maybe 4 Kelvin or so. Your general purpose CPU won't. There have been projects to run CPUs at liquid-nitrogen temperatures, and that already tends to get into mechanical difficulties; you're probably not going to be running your overclocked Xeon down at 4K.
Also, the quantum computer isn't likely to be something you're pumping a lot of data through - you're more likely to set it up, have it magically give you a probably-correct answer, and feed that answer to another computer that figures out if it's actually correct and then does something with it. For instance, if you're using the QC as an oracle to factor large numbers, you'll have it give you the result, then let your general-purpose machine multiply the factors together to find out if they give the right result, and then you'll use a general-purpose machine to rip off the bank account whose private key you just cracked.
Apple knows they're going to lose more prototypes of iPhones, iPods, or whatever other new shiny things they make over the next few years, because that just happens sometimes. Employees accidentally take the wrong devices out of buildings, go to bars, whatever. They try to keep stuff under wraps, but can't stop all the accidental leaks.
So Apple's now having their art department make fake prototype devices and leave them around in bars on purpose. They don't all have to work perfectly, the amazingly cool features can be simulations, the battery life doesn't have to be as long as they'd like, the parts can be more expensive than the real manufactured product, the cases can be entirely different shapes, the phone number in the speed-dial list is for Fake Steve Jobs, and in general you'll see stuff that's at best quirky and interesting, but won't find out anything about the real products. And if those Android folks get one, it's going to take them forever to reverse engineer the product or application because it's fake.
What do you think you'd do with a captured asteroid?
Take a few chunks and analyze them (Yes, definitely)
Take lots of photographs (Yes, definitely)
Leave it up in the sky as a monument to how cool they are? (No, not gonna happen)
Write poetry about it?* (Probably going to happen whether they mine it or not.)
Set monster movies there? (No, the Americans and Japanese will do that, though a Hong Kong action flick in 0G would be awesome!)
PROFIT!! (No, too much up-front cost...)
Colonize it? (No, too small. They might paint a red flag on it just to freak everybody out, though)
Mine it? It's only 10 meters, so maybe you wouldn't exactly call it "mining", but yeah, a nice juicy chunk of free metal in space, absolutely they'd want to find ways to use it.
Figure out how to capture the next asteroid? (Hope so!)
...
Classical Chinese poetry would be more appropriate, but on another blog I frequent it's not uncommon to rip off William Carlos Williams.
This is just to say
I have mined the asteroid that was in L4 orbit
and which you were probably saving for research
forgive me it was convenient so metallic and so nearby
And have you actually seen anybody doing stenography the last decade or two? Those people have been pretty much invisible since the Cypherpunks movement started - they were part of one of our great successes, Silent Trystero's Typing Pool...
Stenography is different from what court reporters do, though both of them are trying to capture speech in real time. It's a shorthand version of writing that a well-trained secretary could use to capture notes that she'd then type up, and Dictaphones were a technical alternative. (I don't watch Mad Men, but they probably had somebody on there doing shorthand, as well as fetching coffee and smoking cigarettes in the office.)
California's high-speed rail project didn't involve any radical engineering like building a tunnel under the Bering Straits or building railroads across frozen parts of Alaska, just a simple system upgrade from San Francisco to Los Angeles and San Diego along existing rights of way, and the price has already gone from the $30B low-ball price sold to the voters ($10B in bonds and $20B in magic money falling from the sky) to somewhere around $40-50B.
There are other differences - it's possible that this is being proposed for the purposes of actually building a railroad and shipping goods on it rather than for spending money and paying off every rich community along the way, by I'm skeptical about claims that you can build a tunnel under the Bering Straits for less than you can build a surface railroad from LA to Bakersfield, or that Russian corruption is any less than the polite Californian version.
Somewhere in my storage room I've got the founding papers from the Principality of Minerva, which a group of libertarians tried to build back in the 70s by upgrading some uninhabited coral reefs in the South Pacific. They were invaded and conquered by the King of Tonga. (I wasn't part of the project, I just acquired the papers later.) I've heard they made some really cool coins.
There have also been libertarian plans for floating cities, like Oceania, which I figured were mainly scams to get people to donate to the project rather than serious attempts to get started. For instance, there's a floating hotel that they used as an example, which some years has been a casino in the Caribbean and some years in Asia, but they were more interested in doing the plans for a gimongous project than in coming up with $25M to buy the hotel - that would have let them test their hypotheses that (a) the UN would recognize a floating city as a country and (b) they could get people to show up and find some profitable business like gambling or tax avoidance.
Those aren't punitive damages - they're legal fees, and Righthaven won't be able to afford to pay all the defendants back for the legal costs they've incurred defending themselves against these sleazes.
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A car dealer I was talking to today had a 2012 car on his lot with a couple thousand miles on it, which he'd sold to a Romanian techie who found out a couple weeks after he bought the car that he couldn't keep whatever US visa he had, and had to go back to Romania. Bad for the US that we don't have him here designing cool stuff for us, and it was even an American car. I'm sure kicking him out made some Republican xenophobe or Democrat protectionist happy.
While I'm all in favor of more engineers, one of the biggest problems facing the US today is the cost of health care, especially as the Boomers retire (which means both that they'll be increasing demand for government-funded health care and decreasing the supply of doctors.) We've needed to prepare for this by increasing the supply of trained doctors and nurses, and that means partly increasing the capacity of American medical schools and partly making it much friendlier for foreign-trained medical people to immigrate to the US (which is partly an immigration issue and partly a medical-certification issue.) For doctors especially, it's long-term activity, with a long lead time, and part of the problem is at the state licensing level as well as partly at the Federal level.
And with engineers, we need to have them working in fields that make American life better and give us more things to trade to foreigners to make their lives better as well - building better bridges and better biomedical technology and better civilian aircraft and more efficient cars are good; building better tanks and military aircraft may require highly-trained high-tech people who get great salaries, but selling them either to the US or other countries is at best a waste of money and talent and usually is a way to make other parts of the world worse for the people who live there.
A keyboard from 20 years ago will have the keys you need, but it won't have the interface you need, because the Raspberry Pi doesn't have PS2, just USB. But that's ok - a keyboard from 5 years ago is probably USB :-) Or for about $5 you can find a USB keyboard if you don't already have one.
And when I got my first computer (ok, at work, but it was the first one that I was in charge of) it didn't have a monitor either - the console was a Decwriter.
It's a computer, and it's yours, so it's a personal computer. It's for you to experiment with and play with.
I don't think I agree on the generational thing - I'm from the boomer generation, and got a decent amount of evolution and genetics education in high school, though over the last few decades evolution has become more and more important in biology and genetics (even if it doesn't always show up at the high school biology level.) But I'm also from the Northeast, not the South.
Also, the hippie generation were into ecology - I'm not sure if city kids get that as much, and more people are in cities these days. On the other hand, we couldn't do DNA sequencing in our kitchens or high school biology classes back then.
Oh, right, that's familiar. (Sorry for the America-centric viewpoint that thinks we have a monopoly on crazy people....)
The Nook's strength is that it's a cheap Android tablet - the fact that it's rootable means you can install your own apps on it, which is important. If it weren't cheap, hackers would root some other cheap Android tablet, or consumers would buy some other cheap tablet that does let them install software.
The issue for the bookstore tablet vendors is that they want to be able to sell DRM'd books, but enforcing that on a non-locked tablet is difficult.
One thing that consistently seems to happen at startups is that once they have more than a dozen or so people, there's a Friday afternoon beer party, and when the company gets up to 100-200 people they hire a professional HR department, whose first move is to kill the beer party.
But also, this is the UK Microsoft, and apparently it's more socially acceptable to get ripping drunk in the UK than it is in the US.
At a previous job, we had a guy in our group who didn't drink, and was always convenient as a designated driver. There are enough techies around who aren't neurotypical or otherwise don't drink because they don't like having their heads messed with, or who don't drink because they had alcoholics in their family and don't want to go there. There are also people who don't drink because they used to be alcoholics, though I ran into that more often with sales people and cops than with techies. Also, when I got older than about 30, I found that I couldn't have a beer at lunch and still get anything done in the afternoon, and I'll seldom have a second drink these days.
On the other hand, a few years ago the department I was in had a guy who made wine, and we'd occasionally have wine-tasting after work. His belief was that if you don't have at least two different wines, it's not wine-tasting, it's just drinking :-) And I was commuting by train back then, so it worked out just fine.
Intelligent Design says that yeah, ok, something like evolution obviously did happen, but it wasn't an accident, it was a sequence of pre-planned steps by an intelligent designer Whose identity we'll pretend to be open-minded about. Genetic evidence of evolution just shows that He was reusing code and parts from animals He built first instead of magically creating them by fiat. (That doesn't mean that their motivations or methods are actually scientific, of course, but they're mainly trying to explain science in ways that leave loopholes for religion to still be true.)
That's different from hardcore evolution skeptics, who typically are literalists about the stories in Genesis or at least don't want to believe humans aren't really special. (Most of them are either Protestant Christians or else Muslims, but there are also non-Judaism-based religions whose followers don't like evolution.)
That's also different from the US right-wing political opposition to evolution. It's primarily there to keep the Protestant religious conservatives locked in to political conservatism, by pushing buttons that are easy to push, just as the Democrats use the abortion issue to keep feminists locked in to the Democratic Party and the Republicans use it to keep conservative Protestants locked in to the Republican Party and to try to steal the Catholics from the Democrats. But secondarily it's there to promote opposition to science, because the Republicans' corporate sponsors really don't want the public believing that Global Warming is a problem that needs to be solved by legislation, in ways that are bad for oil companies and agribusiness, and that means pushing the Don't Trust Science agenda every way they can. You'd expect rural conservatives to also be conservationists, especially after the Dust Bowl, and they really don't want that kind of attitude around. Drill, Baby, Drill!
One of the comments above points to an article in Scientific American which explains the issues better than the business newspaper. That article quotes biologist Susan Evans saying that anoles may be atypical and "It will be illuminating to compare it with more conservative lizards - not to mention representatives of a wider range of reptiles such as snakes, tuatara, crocodiles and turtles." Whiptails might be quite interesting, but they sound like they're definitely atypical.
He posted pretty early in the morning, so the real problem is that the coffee hadn't started working. And while I was interested in the scientific content of the articles, it really did call for some kind of reptile overlord joke.
> "that have had their genome sequenced."
That's chickens and finches. If you look at the underlying scientific papers that get referenced, they're all talking about these being "non-avian species of reptile", because taxonomists currently do treat the birds as a subset of reptiles, and the point they're making is that the reptile genomes that have been sequenced so far have all been birds, and they thought it would be useful to sequence the kinds of reptiles we traditionally think of as reptiles.
How did you get to the Queen? Was it because of the line in the Scientific American article saying that anoles may be atypical and that "It will be illuminating to compare it with more conservative lizards"?
I'd been thinking of Newt Gingrich, myself.
No, I actually was talking about stenography, as was CryptoJones, more or less (though we were also making fun of the people who'd used that term instead of steganography.) It's becoming a lost art, but some of the older folks here will remember those Gregg Shorthand books, and typing pools.
With Steganography, some of the interesting directions to look are how to hide stuff in various video formats, both from the standpoint of how much you can hide from programs and also how much you can hide from visual perception.
Chances are pretty good that your Quantum Computer will be running at liquid helium temperatures, maybe 4 Kelvin or so. Your general purpose CPU won't. There have been projects to run CPUs at liquid-nitrogen temperatures, and that already tends to get into mechanical difficulties; you're probably not going to be running your overclocked Xeon down at 4K.
Also, the quantum computer isn't likely to be something you're pumping a lot of data through - you're more likely to set it up, have it magically give you a probably-correct answer, and feed that answer to another computer that figures out if it's actually correct and then does something with it. For instance, if you're using the QC as an oracle to factor large numbers, you'll have it give you the result, then let your general-purpose machine multiply the factors together to find out if they give the right result, and then you'll use a general-purpose machine to rip off the bank account whose private key you just cracked.
Apple knows they're going to lose more prototypes of iPhones, iPods, or whatever other new shiny things they make over the next few years, because that just happens sometimes. Employees accidentally take the wrong devices out of buildings, go to bars, whatever. They try to keep stuff under wraps, but can't stop all the accidental leaks.
So Apple's now having their art department make fake prototype devices and leave them around in bars on purpose. They don't all have to work perfectly, the amazingly cool features can be simulations, the battery life doesn't have to be as long as they'd like, the parts can be more expensive than the real manufactured product, the cases can be entirely different shapes, the phone number in the speed-dial list is for Fake Steve Jobs, and in general you'll see stuff that's at best quirky and interesting, but won't find out anything about the real products. And if those Android folks get one, it's going to take them forever to reverse engineer the product or application because it's fake.
What do you think you'd do with a captured asteroid?
...
Classical Chinese poetry would be more appropriate, but on another blog I frequent it's not uncommon to rip off William Carlos Williams.
Even though it's only a 10-meter asteroid, that's pretty much correct.
And have you actually seen anybody doing stenography the last decade or two? Those people have been pretty much invisible since the Cypherpunks movement started - they were part of one of our great successes, Silent Trystero's Typing Pool...
Stenography is different from what court reporters do, though both of them are trying to capture speech in real time. It's a shorthand version of writing that a well-trained secretary could use to capture notes that she'd then type up, and Dictaphones were a technical alternative. (I don't watch Mad Men, but they probably had somebody on there doing shorthand, as well as fetching coffee and smoking cigarettes in the office.)
Pepsi's ok, just different, and I prefer RC Cola to either one.
Diet Pepsi, on the other hand, is really nasty, even worse than Diet Coke, almost as bad as Tab was.
California's high-speed rail project didn't involve any radical engineering like building a tunnel under the Bering Straits or building railroads across frozen parts of Alaska, just a simple system upgrade from San Francisco to Los Angeles and San Diego along existing rights of way, and the price has already gone from the $30B low-ball price sold to the voters ($10B in bonds and $20B in magic money falling from the sky) to somewhere around $40-50B.
There are other differences - it's possible that this is being proposed for the purposes of actually building a railroad and shipping goods on it rather than for spending money and paying off every rich community along the way, by I'm skeptical about claims that you can build a tunnel under the Bering Straits for less than you can build a surface railroad from LA to Bakersfield, or that Russian corruption is any less than the polite Californian version.
Yes, there are pollution problems, because they're typically not run cleanly, but ships are efficient. has figures that say that "domestic waterborne" shipping uses about 50% more energy per ton*km than "Class 1 rail", but domestic waterborne shipping is going to be less efficient than international, because it uses smaller ships than the container ships that have revolutionized global commerce. A more important issue is really how far you have to haul goods using the two different methods - Vladivostok to Los Angeles is probably a lot closer by water than by rail, and certainly Shanghai to LA is closer by water.
Somewhere in my storage room I've got the founding papers from the Principality of Minerva, which a group of libertarians tried to build back in the 70s by upgrading some uninhabited coral reefs in the South Pacific. They were invaded and conquered by the King of Tonga. (I wasn't part of the project, I just acquired the papers later.) I've heard they made some really cool coins.
There have also been libertarian plans for floating cities, like Oceania, which I figured were mainly scams to get people to donate to the project rather than serious attempts to get started. For instance, there's a floating hotel that they used as an example, which some years has been a casino in the Caribbean and some years in Asia, but they were more interested in doing the plans for a gimongous project than in coming up with $25M to buy the hotel - that would have let them test their hypotheses that (a) the UN would recognize a floating city as a country and (b) they could get people to show up and find some profitable business like gambling or tax avoidance.
Those aren't punitive damages - they're legal fees, and Righthaven won't be able to afford to pay all the defendants back for the legal costs they've incurred defending themselves against these sleazes.