You know, usually about this time on a thread about companies overpromising and underdelivering, we would have already had a good joke or three about Duke Nukem Forever. Sigh.
What does adrenaline have to do with heads of state?
Okay, imagine someone going up to you and yelling the following, REALLY LOUD: "The economy is falling apart!!! Everyone thinks you're a Muslim born in Kenya!!! We're spending billions in Afghanistan propping up a failed state and getting U.S. servicemen killed!!! Nobody can find jobs!!! Wikileaks just released our diplomatic cables! Still no jobs! We found Osama Bin Laden but he's in Pakistan so either you tell them and he may get away or you don't and basically invade Pakistan! Jobs, jobs, jobs! Our strategic alliance with Egypt is threatened by a democratic uprising so choose one!!! The European economy is in crisis! There's a revolution in Yemen! Republicans are risking a default! Now Libya is revolting! Still no jobs! Time to run for re-election so you can get FOUR MORE YEARS of this!!!!"
Imagine that every day, see if you don't feel a bit stressed out.
This is how science moves forward. You make a mistake, you think about it, you engineer a solution and then see how badly it blows up. Granted that is over simplified, but without mistakes, missteps, and anomalies we don't move technology forward. Many of the problems we face as a society will not be solved by buying a solution from the local supermarket, they will be solved by a crazy person who believes that the future can be better and has the resources to "waste" working the bugs out of his crazy vision.
This isn't blue-sky, pure research-for-the-sake-of-research, making the world a happy fuzzy place kinda stuff. The Falcon is part of a program called Prompt Global Strike, which is designed to allow the U.S. to strike with conventional weapons, anywhere in the world, within 1-2 hours, like an ICBM without the nuke.
It would allow the U.S. to take out high-value targets, like terrorist leaders, leaders of rogue states, nuclear facilities and nuclear weapons, without using the nuclear option. Since you wouldn't have to move any forces into the area, you could do it without warning, and at 13000 mph it would be basically impossible to shoot down. So if by "better future" we mean "being able to blow up stuff at the time and place of our choosing", yes, this is a better future. Would it be useful? Well, the problem with Osama bin Laden wasn't that we didn't have the ability to put a bomb on his head, it was that we couldn't find him. Similarly, Qaddafi would probably be dead if NATO knew where to find him, and the U.S. tried to bomb Saddam at the outset of the war but couldn't get good intelligence about where he was. It would probably be more useful against targets that you can't move around- Iran's nuclear facilities, for instance.
and despite the rosy pictures implied in leftist and progressive propaganda if we simply take the money from the bankers, we all know that their promises of wealth, brotherhood and justice for all will turn into the wars, concentration and slaughter camps they turned into last time.
This sort of behavior is exactly why the debt has been downgraded. It's f***ing knuckle-dragging, drooling, inbred idiots like you who are the reason we can't arrive at any sort of a rational compromise. One side talks about the idea that people who can afford to pay more perhaps should shoulder a somewhat higher proportion of the tax burden, which is a fairly mainstream political idea and one that has guided tax policy in the United States for generations. Suddenly, the lunatic right pulls a Godwin and start running around wildly accusing the moderate left of being Stalin-era genocidal maniacs wanting to send us all off to the collective farm. In the 1940s and 1950s, the top income tax rate was as high as 90%, and it remained extremely high as late as 1970. America survived and thrived, and nobody was sent off to the gulag. No one on the left has proposed anything even remotely approaching these tax rates- just a return to Clinton-era tax rates, which are still low by historical standards.
Last time Texas tired of a governor you guys shipped him off to the White House. We still owe you bastards for that one... if you so much as even think about trying that stunt with Perry, we're going to have to give you jerks back to Mexico.
I found it suspicious that Celigia forgot for years that he owned a majority of Facebook. The other thing that is suspicious is the contract calls for Zuckerberg to surrender ownership of Facebook if he was late. Normally penalties are assessed in monetary values because Celigia is sacrificing hard cash for ownership of a company not related to his business nor guaranteed to bring in future money. It is also not clear whether Celigia knew about the existence of Facebook as it was much smaller back.
It's hard to believe that Zuckerberg acted in the way that Ceglia claimed. It's not a question of character- Zuckerberg's dealings with the Winklevoss twins suggest he's a tough businessman, maybe even a ruthless one- it's one of competency. Whatever you think of the guy as a person, he managed to start a company in his dorm room and turn it into an internet giant valued at tens of billions of dollars, one that even Google has struggled to compete with. So whatever else he may or may not be, Zuckerberg's clearly not an idiot when it comes to business. And you'd have to be a complete idiot to sell half interest in your taco stand for a thousand dollars, let alone half your internet startup, unless you thought the company had zero chance of succeeding. A few years later, Zuckberberg's deal with Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal, was $500,000 for just over 10% of the company. Admittedly it was a lot further along, but still, Zuckerberg clearly wasn't in a hurry to surrender ownership of his company.
The summary doesn't say if accuracy goes up with more tweets, and if you RTFA it actually doesn't say either, but it turns out the article itself is just a summary of *another* article http://www.fastcompany.com/1769217/there-are-no-secrets-from-twitter. That article mentions that reading all tweets brings accuracy up from 65.9% to 75.8%. Not bad... although not exactly amazing, either. Some of it's sort of dead obvious. Possessives like "My hubby" "my bf" "my yogurt" and "my yoga" are correlated with being female and stuff like "my wife" "my gf" "my jeep" and "my beer" are correlated with being male. And if that's a lot of the algorithm is going off of, the whole premise of outing someone pretending to be female is sort of silly in that case... obviously if you're a dude pretending to be a girl, you're going to tweet stuff like "OMG I love my bf" not "My gf can't tell me not to drive my jeep while drinking my beer, dude."
One thing the summary gets wrong: the original article, at NPR, does not say that these are "Chinese hackers". The article only says that the attack "originated in China". The reason you can't actually pin this on the Chinese is that there are are actually two countries that conduct offensive cyberwarfare operations out of China. One being China, obviously. The other is North Korea. Believe it or not, North Korea is thought to have one of the most advanced offensive cyberwarfare capabilities out there (apparently when North Korea puts its mind to something, like hacking or making nuclear bombs and ballistic missiles, they're actually not that bad at it, which makes you wonder why there still isn't enough rice to go around). Given the effectiveness with which China manages to police its internet, however, it's damn hard to believe that the North Koreans aren't operating without their approval, or even active assistance.
What you have stated above is the philosophy of the coward (perhaps an anonymous one like yourself?) and the slave - yielding to evil without resistance and considering it a virtue.
A world that is blind is still better than a world where only the wrongdoers keep their eyes, after all.
As a wise man has said, All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
We've already seen the arrest of Rebekah Brooks, one of the top executives in Murdoch's media empire, and Neil Wallis, former editor of the News of the World. In fact, ten people have already been arrested in connection with the case, and two high-ranking members of Scotland Yard have stepped down. In this case, the legal system appears to have been working just fine before Anonymous stepped in.
So in this case, it's sort of like running up to someone who's just been put in handcuffs by the cops, smacking them upside the head with a two-by-four, and then claiming you're a crime fighting vigilante.
Uh, no. The primary rifle used by militias in Africa is going to be the Kalashnikov because it's cheap, rugged, any idiot can use it, and it's light enough for a child to carry. Which is useful, of course, if you want to arm children. As you might guess from the name, the Kalashnikov is a Russian assault rifle that was sold off in vast quantities by Warsaw Pact countries after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Plants and fungi make an amazing variety of drugs. Fungi have given us penicillin, LSD, psilocybin, and of course, alcohol. Plants have provided us with caffeine, cocaine, heroin, cannabis, nicotine, and mescaline. So if you take half a dozen different folk remedies and throw them into a tea, there's a reasonable chance that one of them is a drug. Hell, most of the tea that you buy does contain a mild drug in the form of the caffeine. Some of them contain stronger stuff. I've seen tea at the store that contains Saint John's Wort, which is a drug, pure and simple- you actually need a prescription to get the stuff in Europe. Saint John's Wort is an antidepressant that's manufactured by flowers instead of by the pharmaceutical companies, and it's been shown to work at least as well as Prozac in clinical studies; the major difference is that it has fewer side effects than man-made antidepressants.
As far as the poster's tea, if it improved his memory, there's a chance it's the Rhodiola. I've heard it's effective and there are a handful of clinical studies that have found that it works to improve depression and anxiety.
Which isn't to say you should run out and get this stuff. It may be herbal, organic, and natural, but these are still drugs. Don't assume the stuff is harmless because it's natural, any more than you should assume it's ineffective because it's natural. Drugs are drugs no matter where they come from.
Murdering goat herders from 50000 feet by remote control is the most extreme form of cowardice I have ever seen or heard of.
Engaging the Taliban with robots is not a fair fight. It's not honorable. But the point of combat isn't a fair fight, it's not to gain honor, it's to win. And winning means making the fight as unfair as possible- fighting him on your terms, not his, using tactics and terrain where you can use your strengths and your equipment to your advantage. So instead of engaging the Taliban on foot, you engage him in such a way that he can't hit you back. That means engaging masses of Taliban with AK-47 assault rifles with A-10s tankbusters armed with 30 mm gatling guns designed to take out Soviet armor. Chasing down footsoldiers with Apache gunships. Obliterating Taliban headquarters with GPS guided artillery rockets which allow you to put 200 pounds of high explosive within a meter of where you're aiming, from 25 miles away. Or having some guy in Nevada shoot at a truck carrying Taliban leaders with a Reaper drone.
Fighting unfairly is nothing new. That's why armies try to take the high ground, and have better weapons and armor than their enemies, and to attack with superior numbers, and better discipline. Because it makes the fight unfair. Fighting unfairly is how the Battle of Agincourt was won. The English used a weapon- the longbow- that allowed them to take out the French knights before the French could get them. It was unfair, it was dishonorable, and it delivered the French a crushing defeat. And fighting unfairly and dishonorably is also how the Taliban fight. The Taliban have trouble beating the U.S. in a firefight so they have increasingly used improvised explosive devices that allow them to attack U.S. troops without exposing themselves. They pretend they're civilians so the U.S. doesn't know who to hit. They hide in the middle of civilians so that it's impossible to attack them without hitting civilians. They use suicide bombers. Is it fair? Is that honorable? Of course not. But their goal is to win, not to be honorable, or to fight fair.
There are limits to what's acceptable. Killing civilians deliberately, or with reckless disregard, is one of these, and sometimes the U.S. military has done this. And whether the U.S. really should be in Afghanistan at this point is debatable. But fighting unfairly is the whole point and it's naive to argue otherwise.
Hm, so what enemies would the Navy be facing that would be able to rapidly adapt to the laser, requiring the ability to quickly alter the frequency of their weapon's beam? Dear god... that must be it. They're preparing for a Borg invasion.
Also there are two types of debate - the academic debate where people knowledgable in the field evaluate arguments and the sort of debate that two politicians have on TV.
Philosophy and rhetoric, as the Greeks would have argued. There's rational discourse appealing to facts and sound logic, and irrational discourse appealing to emotions and logic, sound and otherwise. An amazing example of this is the recent John Stewart appearance on the O'Reilly Factor (really, it happened and the universe did not explode). O'Reilly blusters, argues, pontificates loudly, professes outrage, sets up straw men; Stewart calmly cites precedents and takes apart O'Reily's arguments piece by piece. It's hard to really say who won, they're playing such different games. Rhetorically O'Reilly is sort of like a Canadian brutally clubbing a helpless baby harp seal, but logically Stewart is like King Arthur, taking apart the Black Knight piece by piece.
As for these social scientists, I don't know if I buy their explanation for why rationality evolved but I would agree with these guys about one thing: humans aren't evolved to assess problems rationally. The stuff they teach us in school about the Scientific Method, how we gather evidence, formulate hypotheses and then test them... it's bullshit. The process works; it's amazingly powerful. But in practice that's the opposite of how humans typically arrive at the answer. Humans start with an answer they've arrived at through some quasi-rational means and then collect facts and generate rational arguments to support the answer they've already decided on. Even scientists, most of them, don't really think according to the scientific method, most of the time. I mean, these social scientists, did they actually conduct any science; did they actually test an hypothesis? From the Times article doesn't sound like these "scientists" made any testable predictions or gathered any data, they just started with a thesis ("human rationality evolved to win arguments") and then marshalled evidence and arguments in favor of it. They're debating, not discovering. If that's not an argument against rationality, I don't know what is.
In that case, though, Wikileaks alone has proven it will protect its sources.
Really? Woodward and Bernstein and the Washington Post kept silent about the identity of Deep Throat for over 30 years. Judith Miller went to jail for three months rather than reveal who leaked Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA agent to her. It seems like the conventional media do a pretty good job of keeping their sources confidential, if only because nobody would leak information to them otherwise.
Here's a thought exercise. Pick a country at random. Stand on a corner in that random country, and start saying "The government of [insert country here] is illegitimate! The bureaucrats are corrupt! [insert head of country name here] is a tyrant! We should get rid of the people in power and replace them! We should negotiate for peace in [insert name of area where the country is fighting an insurgency/war/uprising/political separatist movement]" Gather some other people, start distributing flyers, start recruiting members to a group, create a website, post online via FaceBook and Youtube, so on, and soforth. How far ya gonna get?
If you're in a western democracy- the United States, Great Britain, Denmark, Japan, Australia etc., you're probably not going to have too much trouble as long as you don't start mentioning violence. It's possible that if you're being a nuisance you'll be asked to leave, and maybe if you're in the States you'll get stuck in one of those Free Speech Zones if you start becoming a little too effective. But you'll be more or less free to do what you want, and when you sleep in your bed, you're not going to worry about anyone pounding on the door in the middle of the night.
And that's the difference between these countries and a lot of other places. Would you try this stunt in Beijing? How long before you ended up in prison? Would you feel comfortable doing this in Moscow and speaking out against Putin and the thugs from the former KGB? And if you really want to live dangerously, try doing this in Iran, where they'll lock you up and torture you. Try doing this in Syria or Lybia. You'll be visited by the state security apparatus, you'll enter custody, and that may be the last anyone sees of you. That's what happens to dissidents in these countries.
The U.S. and other western democracies are far from perfect but to say that they're the moral equivalent of the repressive governments these programs are designed to fight is ridiculous. That doesn't mean we should be complacent and it doesn't mean we should tolerate abuses of power by our governments when they happen, and they do happen. But on the other hand, maybe we should be rightfully proud when the government once in a great while, actually does something right. And in this case, we have the U.S. government hiring hackers and nerds to fight repressive regimes with the free flow of information via the internet... I can't really think of anything more amazing than that. That's exactly the kind of thing I want my government to be doing.
You should see how they inflicted the emotional pain!
"Yes, miss, we understand. Yes, he has been a loving, honest, and decent boyfriend. He has treated you with respect, and he has been there for you in some difficult times, like when your dog died. He brought you chocolates and flowers on Valentine's day and he even cooked you dinner. He tolerates your mother and your father thinks he's a stand-up guy. But you see, you still have to dump him. You have to dump him for science."
I think that the 20 Under 20 program is probably a really good idea... if you're Peter Thiel. I imagine his thought process went something like this: "Man, investing in Zuckerberg and Facebook was the smartest thing I ever did. Half a million dollars turned into two. billion. f***ing. dollars. How in the hell can I possibly do that again?" It's a long-shot gamble that paid off huge. 4000 times his original investment, or 400,000% return. That's one of the best investments in history. Imagine giving a friend 250 dollars for his company and becoming a millionaire. How can you replicate that success?
The answer is to recruit as many wannabe Zuckerbergs as you possibly can, throw money and some guidance at them, and if any of them show promise, you're in a position to invest heavily in them and get in on the next FaceBook or Google from day 1. It's a long-shot bet, sure. But long-shot bets are worth taking, if the potential payoff is large enough and the amount you wager is low enough. Imagine a lottery where it costs 1$ to play, and the odds of success are 1%, but the payoff is 4000:1. What would you do? You'd buy as many tickets as you can. Spending a modest (by Thiel's standards) $2 million dollars for a 1% chance of making another $2 billion dollars is a damn clever investment. The downside is fixed (2 million) and not enough to hurt, but the potential upside is virtually unlimited.
If you're one of the people applying for Thiel's grants, however, the risk:benefit calculus works out a bit differently. Thiel is hedging his bets, he's got 24 grantees, if he runs the program for four years he would have almost 100 startups. He only has to have one modest success to break even, and if every single company is an abject failure, he hasn't really lost much. Heck, the whole thing is a foundation, so I assume it's even tax-deductible. He has a reasonable shot of winning and can hardly lose. The grantee is in a very different situation. I'm totally pulling numbers out of my ass, but I would guess that 90% of these companies will fail to ever break even, 10% will make some profit, and 1% will be real successes. So you're trading 2 years of your life, and 2 years of college, for a fairly modest sum of money and an extremely remote chance of starting a major company. It's kind of like dropping out of college and a conventional career path to run off to L.A. and become a rock star or an actor. Sure, you could win huge, but odds are you won't. On the other hand, the real-world experience gained in starting and running a company, and the mentorship, are arguably more useful than what you'll learn in college and would probably be attractive to a lot of companies, especially if you could show that you did manage to produce and learn something in those two years.
And hell, maybe one of them will even invent the Next Big Thing.
And of course, this kind of gambling is probably stupid at the individual level but it's vital at a societal level. If everyone took the conventional path then we'd have a nation of actuaries, doctors, bankers, management consultants, and lawyers, and no movie directors, rock stars, artists, novelists, or visionary CEOs. If nobody took these kinds of risks, you wouldn't have companies like Google, FaceBook, Apple, and Microsoft. You wouldn't have the Beatles, Tom Hanks, or Harry Potter, either. For most people, you'd be a fool to take Thiel's wager, you'll be safer and happier staying on the safe path. But for a small percentage, it's a hell of an opportunity and an experience, and encouraging this type of risk-taking could produce a lot of benefits for the whole of society, for all the doctors and lawyers and bankers and management consultants and actuaries. Overall, I think that Thiel is probably right, that a lot of our best and brightest are being encouraged to play it too safe, that we're probably squandering a lot of talent pushing really smart kids into safe career paths in management consulting, investment banking, and medicine. And at the same time, I hope he's encouraging these kids to have some backup plans.
You have some very romantic, and very wrong, ideas about how capable and cheap robots are.
Let's talk figures then. Bush's Mars mission was projected to cost $40-$80 billion dollars, which is probably a huge underestimate considering that the International Space Station cost about that much and a space station is a far, far simpler problem. The total cost for putting Spirit and Opportunity on Mars was $800 million. In other words, for the price of a brief manned mission you could put 100-200 rovers on Mars that could then stay there for years. Robots are orders of magnitude cheaper, and while they move slowly, they can operate for years. For the same amount of money, robotic probes could survey more of the planet for a longer time, and ultimately do more science. And as far as romanticism goes, human spaceflight is decades away, and it's unclear when it's going to happen. It's science fiction. That's romantic. Opportunity has been operating on Mars since 2004. It's proven technology, it's been in use for years, and it's only getting better. That's the realistic approach.
Further, most mission-killers are minor failures. A failed motor, a sand trap, an exhausted RTG, dead batteries or a blocked solar panel. A human could fix any of these.
First off, there's a very simple way to deal with this problem: redundancy. Robots are cheap and expendable, so just send two (or more) of them. One of them gets caught in the sand, the other keeps going, and the mission is saved. That's what NASA did here; Spirit got stuck in the sand but Opportunity is still working. Second, as robots get more sophisticated, it will become possible to have robots that can assist and repair the remaining robots. If the robots need repairmen, why do the repairmen have to be actual men? We already use ROVs to do repairs on undersea oil rigs, there's no reason we can't build robots that are capable of repairing other robots.
Good communications, regardless of whether it is from robots or humans, has always been the deciding factor between a success story and a disaster. The 9 mins, 30 secs delay to get from Mars to Earth and then the same in reverse means real-time assisntance is impossible. Having human assistants in orbit or on the ground reduces the delay to practically nothing. Those 19 minutes saved have the potential to salvage a mission.
That argument doesn't hold water either. If you really have a situation where lightning-fast reflexes are needed, the answer is simple: turn the task over to a machine. Machines can react faster than humans. We already have robot aircraft like the Predator that can take off, fly, and land without human intervention, we have robotically driven cars like the ones from the DARPA Grand Challenge that can drive themselves across uneven terrain. It's not that hard to build a rover that can take care of itself for 10 minutes at a stretch. Where humans are still needed is strategic decision making, but the moment-to-moment stuff can be turned over to the machines and machines are only going to become more autonomous, not less.
Then there's the experiments themselves. A rover can't replace a damaged experiment module or upgrade a module with something more advanced later on. Humans can do that FOR a rover at much less cost and in far less time than building a new rover from scratch.
No, they can't. Do the math. The entire Spirit/Opportunity mission cost about a billion dollars to launch, or $500 million per rover. Bush's Mars mission was projected to cost $40 billion to $80 billion. In other words, it would cost about 100 times as much to send someone to repair a rover as to send a new one. It is far, far cheaper and faster to build another robot than to send humans. And even for an extremely sophisticated, expensive piece of equipment like the Hubble that can't easily be replaced, we could repair it with another machine.
You're starting with the assumptions that humans are really necessary, so you're trying to invent things for them to do. But the reality is that most of these problems with automation can be solved with more automation.
I recall reading in Steven Squyres' book about how one of the rovers spent an entire week backing and filling so it could photograph a rock from all sides - something a human being could have done in minutes.
That may be true, but so what? Perhaps the human performs well on Mars, but it would take 10-20 years and 100 billion dollars for us to develop the technology to get the person there. Who would you rather hire: a contractor who takes a week to do a job, charges 100 dollars, and starts today, or a contractor who takes a day to finish, but charges 100,000 dollars, and won't be ready to start for ten years?
They know EXACTLY where it is so when we finally get to Mars we can go get it.
The final launch of the Endeavour marks the beginning of the end for an era in exploration. And it's sad to see it ending. But the end of the Spirit rover marks something very, very different. And that's the end of the beginning.
What we're seeing is a major technological transition. A new kind of hardware has emerged that's fundamentally superior to the old technology. It's analogous to stone being replaced by bronze. It's like clipper ships being replaced by steam, or battleships being replaced by carriers. It's like the typewriter being supplanted by the PC. And it's thrilling and deeply disturbing at the same time, because this time around, the hardware upgrade is personal. Very, very personal. Because the outmoded hardware that's being replaced is us.
The era of manned exploration of the cosmos is coming to an end, and the era of unmanned exploration is beginning in a serious way. Neil Armstrong is the old face of space exploration; Spirit is the new face. We'll get to Mars eventually but when we do it will be thoroughly mapped and analyzed and studied by robots. It won't fundamentally be exploration, it will be more like tourism. People talk about the shortcomings of robotic exploration, and how humans are more adaptible and versatile. Maybe that's true, if you ignore the incredible logistic hurdles required to support fragile flesh-and-bone hardware on a hostile planet. And maybe it's true that human hands are still better than metal manipulators... but only for now. The reality is that by the time we overcome the technological hurdles required to put humans on Mars, the technology of robots will have advanced. And they'll be able to move, to work, to do science, and to explore far more effectively in those environments than we will ever be able to do.
There's a visceral dislike to this, I know. It's hard to let go of the old idea of exploration, of putting human feet on an unexplored world. But I don't think we're really losing as much as some people fear. It may be unmanned exploration, but it is still human exploration. It's still humans envisioning the rockets, engineering the robots, writing up the software, somehow pulling off this amazing feat of exploration, and wondering at the results. At least, it is for now.
We haven't had a terrorist attack in this country since the law came into effect. I'm not saying correlation is causation, but I think claims that the law hasn't prevented at least one American death pretty dubious.
One could rephrase that argument a bit and say, "we haven't had a single terrorist attack since Apple released the iPhone, since the Chinese river dolphin went extinct, since Twitter was started, or since barefoot running became the next fitness fad. I think claims that these things haven't prevented at least one American death are pretty dubious." Logically, how is crediting the absence of terrorist attacks to the Patriot Act any different? Where's the evidence that these programs are any more effective at preventing terrorism than, say, slaughtering freshwater dolphins?
What would be evidence of the programs' effectiveness is pointing to a case where a credible threat- that is, a well-organized terrorist cell, with a practical plan and the expertise and materials to carry it out- was detected first by the domestic surveillance program. I'm sure the program's defenders would argue that it's all top-secret hush-hush stuff and that's why they can't point to any examples. But it seems to me that if the program actually worked, it would be a good idea to put the evidence out there, so that (a) the Americans would know that the program worked and would support it, and (b) the terrorists would know that the program worked, and would be deterred. Where's the evidence that all this domestic spying has actually prevented anything?
That's a really good idea... I don't think people would be willing to fly on an airplane without a pilot, but cargo is entirely different (if not rationally so, at least in the human mind). I could see having cargo aircraft that are remotely piloted at takeoff and landing, but computer-piloted for most of their trip; not just for remote airstrips but for all kinds of situations. Commercial cargo and also military- have a robotic cargo plane or helicopter to airlift your equipment into combat zones, for instance.
But another thing occurs to me. Why not make all aircraft 'pilot optional', if only as a backup system? Being able to switch over your aircraft to computer-controlled or remotely-piloted could be useful if something went wrong, for instance if the computer was able to detect if the human pilot lost consciousness, it could kick in and take control of the aircraft. And the copilot is in part there as a backup for the pilot, people might not be willing to go as far as replacing the pilot, but would they be willing to see the copilot replaced by a computer?
Slashdot Mirror
You know, usually about this time on a thread about companies overpromising and underdelivering, we would have already had a good joke or three about Duke Nukem Forever. Sigh.
Okay, imagine someone going up to you and yelling the following, REALLY LOUD: "The economy is falling apart!!! Everyone thinks you're a Muslim born in Kenya!!! We're spending billions in Afghanistan propping up a failed state and getting U.S. servicemen killed!!! Nobody can find jobs!!! Wikileaks just released our diplomatic cables! Still no jobs! We found Osama Bin Laden but he's in Pakistan so either you tell them and he may get away or you don't and basically invade Pakistan! Jobs, jobs, jobs! Our strategic alliance with Egypt is threatened by a democratic uprising so choose one!!! The European economy is in crisis! There's a revolution in Yemen! Republicans are risking a default! Now Libya is revolting! Still no jobs! Time to run for re-election so you can get FOUR MORE YEARS of this!!!!"
Imagine that every day, see if you don't feel a bit stressed out.
This is how science moves forward. You make a mistake, you think about it, you engineer a solution and then see how badly it blows up. Granted that is over simplified, but without mistakes, missteps, and anomalies we don't move technology forward. Many of the problems we face as a society will not be solved by buying a solution from the local supermarket, they will be solved by a crazy person who believes that the future can be better and has the resources to "waste" working the bugs out of his crazy vision.
This isn't blue-sky, pure research-for-the-sake-of-research, making the world a happy fuzzy place kinda stuff. The Falcon is part of a program called Prompt Global Strike, which is designed to allow the U.S. to strike with conventional weapons, anywhere in the world, within 1-2 hours, like an ICBM without the nuke.
It would allow the U.S. to take out high-value targets, like terrorist leaders, leaders of rogue states, nuclear facilities and nuclear weapons, without using the nuclear option. Since you wouldn't have to move any forces into the area, you could do it without warning, and at 13000 mph it would be basically impossible to shoot down. So if by "better future" we mean "being able to blow up stuff at the time and place of our choosing", yes, this is a better future. Would it be useful? Well, the problem with Osama bin Laden wasn't that we didn't have the ability to put a bomb on his head, it was that we couldn't find him. Similarly, Qaddafi would probably be dead if NATO knew where to find him, and the U.S. tried to bomb Saddam at the outset of the war but couldn't get good intelligence about where he was. It would probably be more useful against targets that you can't move around- Iran's nuclear facilities, for instance.
This sort of behavior is exactly why the debt has been downgraded. It's f***ing knuckle-dragging, drooling, inbred idiots like you who are the reason we can't arrive at any sort of a rational compromise. One side talks about the idea that people who can afford to pay more perhaps should shoulder a somewhat higher proportion of the tax burden, which is a fairly mainstream political idea and one that has guided tax policy in the United States for generations. Suddenly, the lunatic right pulls a Godwin and start running around wildly accusing the moderate left of being Stalin-era genocidal maniacs wanting to send us all off to the collective farm. In the 1940s and 1950s, the top income tax rate was as high as 90%, and it remained extremely high as late as 1970. America survived and thrived, and nobody was sent off to the gulag. No one on the left has proposed anything even remotely approaching these tax rates- just a return to Clinton-era tax rates, which are still low by historical standards.
Last time Texas tired of a governor you guys shipped him off to the White House. We still owe you bastards for that one... if you so much as even think about trying that stunt with Perry, we're going to have to give you jerks back to Mexico.
I found it suspicious that Celigia forgot for years that he owned a majority of Facebook. The other thing that is suspicious is the contract calls for Zuckerberg to surrender ownership of Facebook if he was late. Normally penalties are assessed in monetary values because Celigia is sacrificing hard cash for ownership of a company not related to his business nor guaranteed to bring in future money. It is also not clear whether Celigia knew about the existence of Facebook as it was much smaller back.
It's hard to believe that Zuckerberg acted in the way that Ceglia claimed. It's not a question of character- Zuckerberg's dealings with the Winklevoss twins suggest he's a tough businessman, maybe even a ruthless one- it's one of competency. Whatever you think of the guy as a person, he managed to start a company in his dorm room and turn it into an internet giant valued at tens of billions of dollars, one that even Google has struggled to compete with. So whatever else he may or may not be, Zuckerberg's clearly not an idiot when it comes to business. And you'd have to be a complete idiot to sell half interest in your taco stand for a thousand dollars, let alone half your internet startup, unless you thought the company had zero chance of succeeding. A few years later, Zuckberberg's deal with Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal, was $500,000 for just over 10% of the company. Admittedly it was a lot further along, but still, Zuckerberg clearly wasn't in a hurry to surrender ownership of his company.
The summary doesn't say if accuracy goes up with more tweets, and if you RTFA it actually doesn't say either, but it turns out the article itself is just a summary of *another* article http://www.fastcompany.com/1769217/there-are-no-secrets-from-twitter. That article mentions that reading all tweets brings accuracy up from 65.9% to 75.8%. Not bad... although not exactly amazing, either. Some of it's sort of dead obvious. Possessives like "My hubby" "my bf" "my yogurt" and "my yoga" are correlated with being female and stuff like "my wife" "my gf" "my jeep" and "my beer" are correlated with being male. And if that's a lot of the algorithm is going off of, the whole premise of outing someone pretending to be female is sort of silly in that case... obviously if you're a dude pretending to be a girl, you're going to tweet stuff like "OMG I love my bf" not "My gf can't tell me not to drive my jeep while drinking my beer, dude."
One thing the summary gets wrong: the original article, at NPR, does not say that these are "Chinese hackers". The article only says that the attack "originated in China". The reason you can't actually pin this on the Chinese is that there are are actually two countries that conduct offensive cyberwarfare operations out of China. One being China, obviously. The other is North Korea. Believe it or not, North Korea is thought to have one of the most advanced offensive cyberwarfare capabilities out there (apparently when North Korea puts its mind to something, like hacking or making nuclear bombs and ballistic missiles, they're actually not that bad at it, which makes you wonder why there still isn't enough rice to go around). Given the effectiveness with which China manages to police its internet, however, it's damn hard to believe that the North Koreans aren't operating without their approval, or even active assistance.
We've already seen the arrest of Rebekah Brooks, one of the top executives in Murdoch's media empire, and Neil Wallis, former editor of the News of the World. In fact, ten people have already been arrested in connection with the case, and two high-ranking members of Scotland Yard have stepped down. In this case, the legal system appears to have been working just fine before Anonymous stepped in.
So in this case, it's sort of like running up to someone who's just been put in handcuffs by the cops, smacking them upside the head with a two-by-four, and then claiming you're a crime fighting vigilante.
Uh, no. The primary rifle used by militias in Africa is going to be the Kalashnikov because it's cheap, rugged, any idiot can use it, and it's light enough for a child to carry. Which is useful, of course, if you want to arm children. As you might guess from the name, the Kalashnikov is a Russian assault rifle that was sold off in vast quantities by Warsaw Pact countries after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
As far as the poster's tea, if it improved his memory, there's a chance it's the Rhodiola. I've heard it's effective and there are a handful of clinical studies that have found that it works to improve depression and anxiety.
Which isn't to say you should run out and get this stuff. It may be herbal, organic, and natural, but these are still drugs. Don't assume the stuff is harmless because it's natural, any more than you should assume it's ineffective because it's natural. Drugs are drugs no matter where they come from.
Murdering goat herders from 50000 feet by remote control is the most extreme form of cowardice I have ever seen or heard of.
Engaging the Taliban with robots is not a fair fight. It's not honorable. But the point of combat isn't a fair fight, it's not to gain honor, it's to win. And winning means making the fight as unfair as possible- fighting him on your terms, not his, using tactics and terrain where you can use your strengths and your equipment to your advantage. So instead of engaging the Taliban on foot, you engage him in such a way that he can't hit you back. That means engaging masses of Taliban with AK-47 assault rifles with A-10s tankbusters armed with 30 mm gatling guns designed to take out Soviet armor. Chasing down footsoldiers with Apache gunships. Obliterating Taliban headquarters with GPS guided artillery rockets which allow you to put 200 pounds of high explosive within a meter of where you're aiming, from 25 miles away. Or having some guy in Nevada shoot at a truck carrying Taliban leaders with a Reaper drone.
Fighting unfairly is nothing new. That's why armies try to take the high ground, and have better weapons and armor than their enemies, and to attack with superior numbers, and better discipline. Because it makes the fight unfair. Fighting unfairly is how the Battle of Agincourt was won. The English used a weapon- the longbow- that allowed them to take out the French knights before the French could get them. It was unfair, it was dishonorable, and it delivered the French a crushing defeat. And fighting unfairly and dishonorably is also how the Taliban fight. The Taliban have trouble beating the U.S. in a firefight so they have increasingly used improvised explosive devices that allow them to attack U.S. troops without exposing themselves. They pretend they're civilians so the U.S. doesn't know who to hit. They hide in the middle of civilians so that it's impossible to attack them without hitting civilians. They use suicide bombers. Is it fair? Is that honorable? Of course not. But their goal is to win, not to be honorable, or to fight fair.
There are limits to what's acceptable. Killing civilians deliberately, or with reckless disregard, is one of these, and sometimes the U.S. military has done this. And whether the U.S. really should be in Afghanistan at this point is debatable. But fighting unfairly is the whole point and it's naive to argue otherwise.
Hm, so what enemies would the Navy be facing that would be able to rapidly adapt to the laser, requiring the ability to quickly alter the frequency of their weapon's beam? Dear god... that must be it. They're preparing for a Borg invasion.
Philosophy and rhetoric, as the Greeks would have argued. There's rational discourse appealing to facts and sound logic, and irrational discourse appealing to emotions and logic, sound and otherwise. An amazing example of this is the recent John Stewart appearance on the O'Reilly Factor (really, it happened and the universe did not explode). O'Reilly blusters, argues, pontificates loudly, professes outrage, sets up straw men; Stewart calmly cites precedents and takes apart O'Reily's arguments piece by piece. It's hard to really say who won, they're playing such different games. Rhetorically O'Reilly is sort of like a Canadian brutally clubbing a helpless baby harp seal, but logically Stewart is like King Arthur, taking apart the Black Knight piece by piece.
As for these social scientists, I don't know if I buy their explanation for why rationality evolved but I would agree with these guys about one thing: humans aren't evolved to assess problems rationally. The stuff they teach us in school about the Scientific Method, how we gather evidence, formulate hypotheses and then test them... it's bullshit. The process works; it's amazingly powerful. But in practice that's the opposite of how humans typically arrive at the answer. Humans start with an answer they've arrived at through some quasi-rational means and then collect facts and generate rational arguments to support the answer they've already decided on. Even scientists, most of them, don't really think according to the scientific method, most of the time. I mean, these social scientists, did they actually conduct any science; did they actually test an hypothesis? From the Times article doesn't sound like these "scientists" made any testable predictions or gathered any data, they just started with a thesis ("human rationality evolved to win arguments") and then marshalled evidence and arguments in favor of it. They're debating, not discovering. If that's not an argument against rationality, I don't know what is.
Really? Woodward and Bernstein and the Washington Post kept silent about the identity of Deep Throat for over 30 years. Judith Miller went to jail for three months rather than reveal who leaked Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA agent to her. It seems like the conventional media do a pretty good job of keeping their sources confidential, if only because nobody would leak information to them otherwise.
If you're in a western democracy- the United States, Great Britain, Denmark, Japan, Australia etc., you're probably not going to have too much trouble as long as you don't start mentioning violence. It's possible that if you're being a nuisance you'll be asked to leave, and maybe if you're in the States you'll get stuck in one of those Free Speech Zones if you start becoming a little too effective. But you'll be more or less free to do what you want, and when you sleep in your bed, you're not going to worry about anyone pounding on the door in the middle of the night.
And that's the difference between these countries and a lot of other places. Would you try this stunt in Beijing? How long before you ended up in prison? Would you feel comfortable doing this in Moscow and speaking out against Putin and the thugs from the former KGB? And if you really want to live dangerously, try doing this in Iran, where they'll lock you up and torture you. Try doing this in Syria or Lybia. You'll be visited by the state security apparatus, you'll enter custody, and that may be the last anyone sees of you. That's what happens to dissidents in these countries.
The U.S. and other western democracies are far from perfect but to say that they're the moral equivalent of the repressive governments these programs are designed to fight is ridiculous. That doesn't mean we should be complacent and it doesn't mean we should tolerate abuses of power by our governments when they happen, and they do happen. But on the other hand, maybe we should be rightfully proud when the government once in a great while, actually does something right. And in this case, we have the U.S. government hiring hackers and nerds to fight repressive regimes with the free flow of information via the internet... I can't really think of anything more amazing than that. That's exactly the kind of thing I want my government to be doing.
"Yes, miss, we understand. Yes, he has been a loving, honest, and decent boyfriend. He has treated you with respect, and he has been there for you in some difficult times, like when your dog died. He brought you chocolates and flowers on Valentine's day and he even cooked you dinner. He tolerates your mother and your father thinks he's a stand-up guy. But you see, you still have to dump him. You have to dump him for science."
The answer is to recruit as many wannabe Zuckerbergs as you possibly can, throw money and some guidance at them, and if any of them show promise, you're in a position to invest heavily in them and get in on the next FaceBook or Google from day 1. It's a long-shot bet, sure. But long-shot bets are worth taking, if the potential payoff is large enough and the amount you wager is low enough. Imagine a lottery where it costs 1$ to play, and the odds of success are 1%, but the payoff is 4000:1. What would you do? You'd buy as many tickets as you can. Spending a modest (by Thiel's standards) $2 million dollars for a 1% chance of making another $2 billion dollars is a damn clever investment. The downside is fixed (2 million) and not enough to hurt, but the potential upside is virtually unlimited.
If you're one of the people applying for Thiel's grants, however, the risk:benefit calculus works out a bit differently. Thiel is hedging his bets, he's got 24 grantees, if he runs the program for four years he would have almost 100 startups. He only has to have one modest success to break even, and if every single company is an abject failure, he hasn't really lost much. Heck, the whole thing is a foundation, so I assume it's even tax-deductible. He has a reasonable shot of winning and can hardly lose. The grantee is in a very different situation. I'm totally pulling numbers out of my ass, but I would guess that 90% of these companies will fail to ever break even, 10% will make some profit, and 1% will be real successes. So you're trading 2 years of your life, and 2 years of college, for a fairly modest sum of money and an extremely remote chance of starting a major company. It's kind of like dropping out of college and a conventional career path to run off to L.A. and become a rock star or an actor. Sure, you could win huge, but odds are you won't. On the other hand, the real-world experience gained in starting and running a company, and the mentorship, are arguably more useful than what you'll learn in college and would probably be attractive to a lot of companies, especially if you could show that you did manage to produce and learn something in those two years. And hell, maybe one of them will even invent the Next Big Thing.
And of course, this kind of gambling is probably stupid at the individual level but it's vital at a societal level. If everyone took the conventional path then we'd have a nation of actuaries, doctors, bankers, management consultants, and lawyers, and no movie directors, rock stars, artists, novelists, or visionary CEOs. If nobody took these kinds of risks, you wouldn't have companies like Google, FaceBook, Apple, and Microsoft. You wouldn't have the Beatles, Tom Hanks, or Harry Potter, either. For most people, you'd be a fool to take Thiel's wager, you'll be safer and happier staying on the safe path. But for a small percentage, it's a hell of an opportunity and an experience, and encouraging this type of risk-taking could produce a lot of benefits for the whole of society, for all the doctors and lawyers and bankers and management consultants and actuaries. Overall, I think that Thiel is probably right, that a lot of our best and brightest are being encouraged to play it too safe, that we're probably squandering a lot of talent pushing really smart kids into safe career paths in management consulting, investment banking, and medicine. And at the same time, I hope he's encouraging these kids to have some backup plans.
Let's talk figures then. Bush's Mars mission was projected to cost $40-$80 billion dollars, which is probably a huge underestimate considering that the International Space Station cost about that much and a space station is a far, far simpler problem. The total cost for putting Spirit and Opportunity on Mars was $800 million. In other words, for the price of a brief manned mission you could put 100-200 rovers on Mars that could then stay there for years. Robots are orders of magnitude cheaper, and while they move slowly, they can operate for years. For the same amount of money, robotic probes could survey more of the planet for a longer time, and ultimately do more science. And as far as romanticism goes, human spaceflight is decades away, and it's unclear when it's going to happen. It's science fiction. That's romantic. Opportunity has been operating on Mars since 2004. It's proven technology, it's been in use for years, and it's only getting better. That's the realistic approach.
First off, there's a very simple way to deal with this problem: redundancy. Robots are cheap and expendable, so just send two (or more) of them. One of them gets caught in the sand, the other keeps going, and the mission is saved. That's what NASA did here; Spirit got stuck in the sand but Opportunity is still working. Second, as robots get more sophisticated, it will become possible to have robots that can assist and repair the remaining robots. If the robots need repairmen, why do the repairmen have to be actual men? We already use ROVs to do repairs on undersea oil rigs, there's no reason we can't build robots that are capable of repairing other robots.
Good communications, regardless of whether it is from robots or humans, has always been the deciding factor between a success story and a disaster. The 9 mins, 30 secs delay to get from Mars to Earth and then the same in reverse means real-time assisntance is impossible. Having human assistants in orbit or on the ground reduces the delay to practically nothing. Those 19 minutes saved have the potential to salvage a mission.
That argument doesn't hold water either. If you really have a situation where lightning-fast reflexes are needed, the answer is simple: turn the task over to a machine. Machines can react faster than humans. We already have robot aircraft like the Predator that can take off, fly, and land without human intervention, we have robotically driven cars like the ones from the DARPA Grand Challenge that can drive themselves across uneven terrain. It's not that hard to build a rover that can take care of itself for 10 minutes at a stretch. Where humans are still needed is strategic decision making, but the moment-to-moment stuff can be turned over to the machines and machines are only going to become more autonomous, not less.
Then there's the experiments themselves. A rover can't replace a damaged experiment module or upgrade a module with something more advanced later on. Humans can do that FOR a rover at much less cost and in far less time than building a new rover from scratch.
No, they can't. Do the math. The entire Spirit/Opportunity mission cost about a billion dollars to launch, or $500 million per rover. Bush's Mars mission was projected to cost $40 billion to $80 billion. In other words, it would cost about 100 times as much to send someone to repair a rover as to send a new one. It is far, far cheaper and faster to build another robot than to send humans. And even for an extremely sophisticated, expensive piece of equipment like the Hubble that can't easily be replaced, we could repair it with another machine.
You're starting with the assumptions that humans are really necessary, so you're trying to invent things for them to do. But the reality is that most of these problems with automation can be solved with more automation.
That may be true, but so what? Perhaps the human performs well on Mars, but it would take 10-20 years and 100 billion dollars for us to develop the technology to get the person there. Who would you rather hire: a contractor who takes a week to do a job, charges 100 dollars, and starts today, or a contractor who takes a day to finish, but charges 100,000 dollars, and won't be ready to start for ten years?
The final launch of the Endeavour marks the beginning of the end for an era in exploration. And it's sad to see it ending. But the end of the Spirit rover marks something very, very different. And that's the end of the beginning.
What we're seeing is a major technological transition. A new kind of hardware has emerged that's fundamentally superior to the old technology. It's analogous to stone being replaced by bronze. It's like clipper ships being replaced by steam, or battleships being replaced by carriers. It's like the typewriter being supplanted by the PC. And it's thrilling and deeply disturbing at the same time, because this time around, the hardware upgrade is personal. Very, very personal. Because the outmoded hardware that's being replaced is us.
The era of manned exploration of the cosmos is coming to an end, and the era of unmanned exploration is beginning in a serious way. Neil Armstrong is the old face of space exploration; Spirit is the new face. We'll get to Mars eventually but when we do it will be thoroughly mapped and analyzed and studied by robots. It won't fundamentally be exploration, it will be more like tourism. People talk about the shortcomings of robotic exploration, and how humans are more adaptible and versatile. Maybe that's true, if you ignore the incredible logistic hurdles required to support fragile flesh-and-bone hardware on a hostile planet. And maybe it's true that human hands are still better than metal manipulators... but only for now. The reality is that by the time we overcome the technological hurdles required to put humans on Mars, the technology of robots will have advanced. And they'll be able to move, to work, to do science, and to explore far more effectively in those environments than we will ever be able to do.
There's a visceral dislike to this, I know. It's hard to let go of the old idea of exploration, of putting human feet on an unexplored world. But I don't think we're really losing as much as some people fear. It may be unmanned exploration, but it is still human exploration. It's still humans envisioning the rockets, engineering the robots, writing up the software, somehow pulling off this amazing feat of exploration, and wondering at the results. At least, it is for now.
One could rephrase that argument a bit and say, "we haven't had a single terrorist attack since Apple released the iPhone, since the Chinese river dolphin went extinct, since Twitter was started, or since barefoot running became the next fitness fad. I think claims that these things haven't prevented at least one American death are pretty dubious." Logically, how is crediting the absence of terrorist attacks to the Patriot Act any different? Where's the evidence that these programs are any more effective at preventing terrorism than, say, slaughtering freshwater dolphins?
What would be evidence of the programs' effectiveness is pointing to a case where a credible threat- that is, a well-organized terrorist cell, with a practical plan and the expertise and materials to carry it out- was detected first by the domestic surveillance program. I'm sure the program's defenders would argue that it's all top-secret hush-hush stuff and that's why they can't point to any examples. But it seems to me that if the program actually worked, it would be a good idea to put the evidence out there, so that (a) the Americans would know that the program worked and would support it, and (b) the terrorists would know that the program worked, and would be deterred. Where's the evidence that all this domestic spying has actually prevented anything?
But another thing occurs to me. Why not make all aircraft 'pilot optional', if only as a backup system? Being able to switch over your aircraft to computer-controlled or remotely-piloted could be useful if something went wrong, for instance if the computer was able to detect if the human pilot lost consciousness, it could kick in and take control of the aircraft. And the copilot is in part there as a backup for the pilot, people might not be willing to go as far as replacing the pilot, but would they be willing to see the copilot replaced by a computer?
Personally I thought their original plan was better. They were going to take unemployed people and subject them to high doses of gamma rays.