The basic problem with the singularity folks is that there is no guarantee that their notion of progress needs to converge to a limit. It might feel like it is converging now given a finite number of data points, but it could easily hop up and down and around a limit or asymptote, or at some point turn chaotic, i.e., produce a range of machines that turn the planet into a cinder long before the Sun gets around to it.
Look at what NSF, NIH, and other assorted agencies fund. All you are looking at is what is reported in the pop press which needs a headline, not, "$1.3 million grant given to Dr. I. M. Egghead for research into genetic variation in breast cancer cells".
I think there is a difference between a sponsored link and your generic web ad that one might get on site frequently visited for information and that gets updated daily like a news site. Most people probably ignore those out of necessity since they visit the site too often to waste time on the ads.
However, there have been times when I've been interested in some item, like a particular kind of pen I'm partial to, and Google will return retailers' links. Granted, these are not your typical web ad but more of a simple (paid for) link. But I have clicked on them simply because I want to buy the product.
Name one new market that MS has created? If anything, they wait until a market is mature and then doggedly go after the top dog until they run them aground.
I think the shear size of MS these days prevents it from creating any market. Any creative talent gets mired in internal politics. A thrust in one direction would mean a single entity within MS is behind it, and that entity will get backstabbed from the others.
Bullshit, have you ever lived in NYS? The current climate of screwing the populace for the benefit of the pols started under Rockefellar in the '60's and has continued ever since. The result is NYS losing businesses and population. The pols response is to increase taxes because they've decimated the tax base. The pols build in interlocking services and entitlements so when expenses outstrip revenue, they claim nothing can be cut using the same fucking argument you just gave. To cut any one service is going to look like throwing pregnant mothers out into the snow, the pols were very careful to build the system that way.
Also, if you make a lot of vague and coded predictions, and wait long enough, society will generate enough idiots who will put together an argument that some of them have come to pass.
Yeah, and an ultralight being sucked into a jet engine would have exactly what effect on a 747 during takeoff? And if that doesn't take it down, how about one for each engine with a few sticks of dynamite for that added special effect.
More accurately, Apple didn't like the roadmap that IBM and Motorola had for PPC. Moto was into embedded systems and IBM was not into desktop systems.
I don't think that Apple could really switch back though. I think some of the pickup in their sales was the fact that one could run a virtualization blob for those who want/need to run Windoze but would rather have a Mac.
Way to miss the gp's point entirely. He wasn't arguing science isn't done that way, he's arguing you will have no respect for yourself if you do science that way. And if you do science that way and still respect yourself, you have deeper issues than respect dogging you.
If you are referring to the current credit crisis, the blame goes to a lot more than a few mega-corporations. Let's assign the blame:
1. The Fed. Years of interest rates way too low made too much money available which had to go somewhere inflating somewhere's value, and it went to our next contestants...
2. The U.S. house buying public which bought houses on all interest payment loans, second and third houses, flipped houses, etc. This was enabled by our next competitors...
3. The real estate companies (and their lovely agents) and the builders...who believed everyone deserved a McMansion. This was heartily approved by our next scum suckers...
4. The local and state tax districts whose pols and legislators saw to it that zoning ordinances, lax environmental laws, etc. where there to Help Make America Strong. They were echoed by...
5. The federal Congress Critters and Administration who saw to it that a free market economy carried no responsibility for oversight since more economic activity meant more money to spend. That still wasn't enough so they deficit spent because what's a few more bucks for those policies needed to buy the next election. This enabled...
6. Your mega-corporations on Wall Street...even thought they are dwarfed by real mega-corporations but I figured you probably wouldn't know the difference...These Wall Street geniuses thought that packaging loans and thus cutting the link between value and collateral would be a great way to sucker the investors near and abroad in buying these "debt instruments"....and to make things worse...
7. Their other friends on Wall Street made more debt-instruments available all backed by the debt-instruments in 6, and this went several layers deep so that an entire domino tail was stacked up just waiting for a push. This also enabled...
8. Speculators in commodities to use this new found wealth to bid up the prices of oil, food, and other commodities.
8. The first domino fell when Joe Sixpack realized how overextended he was and couldn't afford to outlive his means and cut back...including defaults on those home loans.
You cannot "know" the sun will come up in the morning. It is contingent on a host of things, none which you can "know" either. You mean that you "believe" the sun will come up in the morning based on the perceived probabilities of things you can conceive of which have not yet happened to cause the sun to fail to come up, and the probability that something you don't know about won't happen simply because it hasn't happened yet in the last several billion years (presuming science has the age properly bracketed).
Precisely! Business School Product understands nothing about manufacturing, engineering, science...all the things that go into the stuff they manage and sell.
There is somewhat of a paradox built into modern business of a sufficient size. The engineers and scientists that created the product eschew management, marketing, and sales because it isn't fun. By default, the company gets run by the people who do enjoy management, marketing, and sales; they are the people who don't get the underlying technology leading to screwups and mismanagement.
Seems to me that about half of the articles on Groklaw are now about things other than SCO. Groklaw has already been moving into other areas, typically ones under threat from Monkey Boy and The Thugs (new hit boy band), but not always. Groklaw will be around for a long time.
"Terrorism is the great boogeyman of the twenty first century."
Let me reword that for you:
"Terrorism is the great boogeyman of the twenty first century, at least until the Islamo-Fascists acquire Pakistan's nukes or make their own chem weapons."
I think you mean engineering, not 'intelligence'. The intelligence people only specced what the capabilities were. The rest was built by some company, and the launch by NASA or U.S. Air Force. Either the engineering was faulty or the execution in building and launching.
The record companies don't have to report to the FDA for every new title/artist. It takes roughly 12 years from the time a pharma company gets an idea for a new drug until final FDA approval. And very few make it due to various problems, they must go through hundreds of tries for every one that makes it.
There is no easy answer to big pharma. Universities do not have the jack to go through FDA trials, well, not many of them anyway. Small pharma certainly doesn't have the jack. The government labs are not set up for producing drugs and they would essentially have to buy out big pharma's facilities to do that amount of work.
That said, the U.S. Admin is somehow against pushing big pharma for price discounts as other governments do. Hence, Americans get gouged. I expect that will change shortly.
Slashdot Mirror
The basic problem with the singularity folks is that there is no guarantee that their notion of progress needs to converge to a limit. It might feel like it is converging now given a finite number of data points, but it could easily hop up and down and around a limit or asymptote, or at some point turn chaotic, i.e., produce a range of machines that turn the planet into a cinder long before the Sun gets around to it.
Gerry
Hi there, I have some swamp land in Florida I think someone of your persuasion might be interested in.
Gerry
Wow, did you swallow a Microsoft Marketing Executive?
Gerry
From the letter to ISO from Brazil: "The AssociaÃão Brasileira de Normas Técnicas (ABNT), as a P member of ISO/IEC/JTC1/SC34, would like to present, to ISO/IEC/JTC1 and ISO/IEC/JTC1/SC34, this appeal for reconsideration of the ISO/IEC DIS 29500 final result."
Gerry
Look at what NSF, NIH, and other assorted agencies fund. All you are looking at is what is reported in the pop press which needs a headline, not, "$1.3 million grant given to Dr. I. M. Egghead for research into genetic variation in breast cancer cells".
Gerry
The Democrats, controlling Congress, could have restored and increased the funding anytime they pleased...they were not so disposed.
Gerry
I think there is a difference between a sponsored link and your generic web ad that one might get on site frequently visited for information and that gets updated daily like a news site. Most people probably ignore those out of necessity since they visit the site too often to waste time on the ads.
However, there have been times when I've been interested in some item, like a particular kind of pen I'm partial to, and Google will return retailers' links. Granted, these are not your typical web ad but more of a simple (paid for) link. But I have clicked on them simply because I want to buy the product.
Gerry
Name one new market that MS has created? If anything, they wait until a market is mature and then doggedly go after the top dog until they run them aground.
I think the shear size of MS these days prevents it from creating any market. Any creative talent gets mired in internal politics. A thrust in one direction would mean a single entity within MS is behind it, and that entity will get backstabbed from the others.
Gerry
Bullshit, have you ever lived in NYS? The current climate of screwing the populace for the benefit of the pols started under Rockefellar in the '60's and has continued ever since. The result is NYS losing businesses and population. The pols response is to increase taxes because they've decimated the tax base. The pols build in interlocking services and entitlements so when expenses outstrip revenue, they claim nothing can be cut using the same fucking argument you just gave. To cut any one service is going to look like throwing pregnant mothers out into the snow, the pols were very careful to build the system that way.
Gerry
Also, if you make a lot of vague and coded predictions, and wait long enough, society will generate enough idiots who will put together an argument that some of them have come to pass.
Gerry
Yeah, and an ultralight being sucked into a jet engine would have exactly what effect on a 747 during takeoff? And if that doesn't take it down, how about one for each engine with a few sticks of dynamite for that added special effect.
Gerry
More accurately, Apple didn't like the roadmap that IBM and Motorola had for PPC. Moto was into embedded systems and IBM was not into desktop systems.
I don't think that Apple could really switch back though. I think some of the pickup in their sales was the fact that one could run a virtualization blob for those who want/need to run Windoze but would rather have a Mac.
Hey, you are right. If they would only solve the problem then it would indeed be solved. Maybe you could give them a call and explain it to them.
Gerry
Way to miss the gp's point entirely. He wasn't arguing science isn't done that way, he's arguing you will have no respect for yourself if you do science that way. And if you do science that way and still respect yourself, you have deeper issues than respect dogging you.
Gerry
I think the line you are looking for is that you wouldn't trust him further than you can spit a rat (Zaphod Beeblebrox).
Gerry
Wow, you connected a patent troll to Iraq. Do parts of your brain communicate with each other or do you let them lead their own lives?
Gerry
The Fed (Federal Reserve) doesn't watch over monopolies, that's the Justice Dept. And Judge Kotar-Kelley has shown herself to be pretty clueless.
Gerry
If you are referring to the current credit crisis, the blame goes to a lot more than a few mega-corporations. Let's assign the blame:
1. The Fed. Years of interest rates way too low made too much money available which had to go somewhere inflating somewhere's value, and it went to our next contestants...
2. The U.S. house buying public which bought houses on all interest payment loans, second and third houses, flipped houses, etc. This was enabled by our next competitors...
3. The real estate companies (and their lovely agents) and the builders...who believed everyone deserved a McMansion. This was heartily approved by our next scum suckers...
4. The local and state tax districts whose pols and legislators saw to it that zoning ordinances, lax environmental laws, etc. where there to Help Make America Strong. They were echoed by...
5. The federal Congress Critters and Administration who saw to it that a free market economy carried no responsibility for oversight since more economic activity meant more money to spend. That still wasn't enough so they deficit spent because what's a few more bucks for those policies needed to buy the next election. This enabled...
6. Your mega-corporations on Wall Street...even thought they are dwarfed by real mega-corporations but I figured you probably wouldn't know the difference...These Wall Street geniuses thought that packaging loans and thus cutting the link between value and collateral would be a great way to sucker the investors near and abroad in buying these "debt instruments"....and to make things worse...
7. Their other friends on Wall Street made more debt-instruments available all backed by the debt-instruments in 6, and this went several layers deep so that an entire domino tail was stacked up just waiting for a push. This also enabled...
8. Speculators in commodities to use this new found wealth to bid up the prices of oil, food, and other commodities.
8. The first domino fell when Joe Sixpack realized how overextended he was and couldn't afford to outlive his means and cut back...including defaults on those home loans.
And this is the simplistic view.
Gerry
You cannot "know" the sun will come up in the morning. It is contingent on a host of things, none which you can "know" either. You mean that you "believe" the sun will come up in the morning based on the perceived probabilities of things you can conceive of which have not yet happened to cause the sun to fail to come up, and the probability that something you don't know about won't happen simply because it hasn't happened yet in the last several billion years (presuming science has the age properly bracketed).
Gerry
Precisely! Business School Product understands nothing about manufacturing, engineering, science...all the things that go into the stuff they manage and sell.
There is somewhat of a paradox built into modern business of a sufficient size. The engineers and scientists that created the product eschew management, marketing, and sales because it isn't fun. By default, the company gets run by the people who do enjoy management, marketing, and sales; they are the people who don't get the underlying technology leading to screwups and mismanagement.
Gerry
Oh, so you are going to reform Islam for the Muslims? Let us know how that works when you have time.
Gerry
Seems to me that about half of the articles on Groklaw are now about things other than SCO. Groklaw has already been moving into other areas, typically ones under threat from Monkey Boy and The Thugs (new hit boy band), but not always. Groklaw will be around for a long time.
Gerry
"Terrorism is the great boogeyman of the twenty first century."
Let me reword that for you:
"Terrorism is the great boogeyman of the twenty first century, at least until the Islamo-Fascists acquire Pakistan's nukes or make their own chem weapons."
Gerry
I think you mean engineering, not 'intelligence'. The intelligence people only specced what the capabilities were. The rest was built by some company, and the launch by NASA or U.S. Air Force. Either the engineering was faulty or the execution in building and launching.
Gerry
The record companies don't have to report to the FDA for every new title/artist. It takes roughly 12 years from the time a pharma company gets an idea for a new drug until final FDA approval. And very few make it due to various problems, they must go through hundreds of tries for every one that makes it.
There is no easy answer to big pharma. Universities do not have the jack to go through FDA trials, well, not many of them anyway. Small pharma certainly doesn't have the jack. The government labs are not set up for producing drugs and they would essentially have to buy out big pharma's facilities to do that amount of work.
That said, the U.S. Admin is somehow against pushing big pharma for price discounts as other governments do. Hence, Americans get gouged. I expect that will change shortly.
Gerry