Rubbish. 10 billion is a small fraction of the cost of the ISS, and a space elevator would be *much* more useful. If this indeed turned out to be feasible, it'd get funded in a heartbeat.
I think that was for legal games (with a game a complete sequence of moves leading to mate or a drawn position, not board states.
It might be possible to reduce that state space quite a bit with some intelligent pruning, but even so I doubt it could ever be explored with a deterministic machine.
Sorry, I was referring to the Australian dollar, which over the course of the 1980's dropped from buying 1.16 USD to around 55 cents.
As it bounced around, the name "Pacific peso" came to be used as a joke to describe its pitiful worth against the USD, the yen, and the British pound.
In practice, our economy has done pretty well, overall, over the last two decades, so it's only really an issue we worry ourselves with when we travel to those countries.
A 20 pacific peso (that's the equivalent of about 10 USD) fine. A flogging with a limp lettuce leaf, in other words.
It does achieve the goal of high turnouts though - something like 98% of those eligible vote (or at least turn up, get their names crossed off, and vote CowboyNeal).
Searching the state space of chess isn't likely to happen in the near future. I gather estimates are around 10^43, which if I've done the arithmetic correctly is around 2^140. You ain't going to be searching that for years yet.
However, it's not necessary for computers to do that to beat world champions. They're getting better all the time with heuristic searches, thanks very much.
Sure, for pro-level equipment, the costs are comparable (and once you factor in film much cheaper for digital), but you can get away with cheaper lenses and still take decent sports photos, which simply can't be done with digitals.
At least until you understand the tools relevant to your design well enough to decide for yourself.
Go away and build something (or multiple things) small, but related, using technologies and methodologies that might be useful. Learn what works for you and what doesn't. Repeat a few times, until you know what's going to work for your project.
To give an analogy, look at what John Carmack is doing at Armadillo Aerospace. When he started out, he and his team didn't know enough about rocketry to decide what technologies they were going to use in their ultimate goal (a vehicle to win the X Prize for a private space shot). What did they do? They've experimented with a variety of things on test rigs and as part of complete craft, and discovered what works and what doesn't.
You can't get a digital camera that supports interchangable lenses without shelling out $5K or so. I bought an analogue SLR that does so for about 500 USD recently.
That's a lot of film...
For my favourite application (sports photography), until cameras you can strap a decent size telephoto lens come down in price, digital won't be usable. When they do, of course, digital will become the medium of choice because with a large enough memory card you could basically shoot continuously.
Plankalkul, designed by Konrad Zuse in 1945 has got some strong claims as the first (though it didn't influence later languages as it didn't become known to the wider computing world until the 1970's).
Speaking as a researcher who has had a taste of both pure and "applied research", it seemed to me that sometimes applied research was just an excuse to get product development efforts done on the cheap with government funding, and it wasted the talents of people who were great at pure research but were bored by product development.
What's your view on this, both in terms of JPL and the broader context?
Name an activity, and the enthusiasts get gouged. Fishing, skiing, wine, cars - they all end up paying twice as much for things that are maybe 10% better.
Part of the reason is the number of stages of testing required, I believe.
You first have to do a study with a small number of people to demonstrate that the drug isn't going to make their noses grow 6" long and turn their cerebellum into an eleventh toe. Then you have to do a small study that demonstrates that the drug is effective at treating whatever it is you want to treat. Then you have to do a third, much bigger trial so that the effectiveness can be compared with existing treatments.
Throw in several years of figuring out how to make bulk quantities of whatever this drug is, testing it in animals, etc. etc., and there's obviously going to be a quite a few years of development happening.
At the moment, the government owns 51% of Telstra and needs parliamentary approval to sell the rest. It's going to struggle to get it with the present composition of the Senate.
But let's assume the rest of Telstra is sold. To obtain a controlling stake in a public company, Microsoft, as a foriegn-owned company, would have to obtain permission from a government body called the Foriegn Investment Review Board. 99.9% of the time such approval is given, but every so often the government knocks back some politically contentious ones (for instance, they knocked back Shell's attempt to buy the rest of a major gas project because it was widely argued that Shell may choose to promote other projects in Indonesia and elsewhere over the Australian one).
Given one of the major arguments advanced by the government for not splitting Telstra up into seperate companies has been that it is one of a very few Australian companies big enough to be a major player in a global market, the idea of approving a foriegn takeover of it seems unlikely.
Pretty soon they're going to just throw their arms in the air and say there's bacteria everywhere. (Isn't there, anyway?)
That is a possibility, but we don't know at this point. The only place we know there's life is Earth. We haven't found conclusive evidence of life on Mars, let alone Europa, Venus, or Pluto. This kind of study is useful, however, because it suggests new places we might consider looking for life.
To your implied question "is finding bacteria on other planets interesting" the answer has to be yes. If we did find bacteria (or something like them) on another planet, we'd either find that a) they're directly related to earthly bacteria, in which case we'd know panspermia works (at least on an interplanetary scale) and would then raise the question of whether the source was somewhere in the solar system or from elsewhere, or b) that life has developed independently more than once, indicating that if the conditions are right it is quite likely to appear. If b) were the case it would seem to raise the odds that extra-solar life (and thus possibly intelligence) is out there. Either way, the biologists, geneticists, biochemists, and so on would give several limbs for the opportunity to examine bacteria from Pluto.
True, Telstra's pricing is a ripoff, which is why it's so profitable.
The reason Telstra's share price is so low compared to the T2 float price is because at the time it floated global factors push the stock price of telcos very high. At the present time, however, the global factors are pushing all telco stocks down, despite the fact that Telstra is a profit-generating colossus. Sooner or later, provided Telstra's competitors can't win more regulatory concessions, the market is going to realise that Telstra is underpriced.
To sue Telstra, it would have to take on Telstra on its home turf (ie Australia), and Telstra is Australia's second-biggest company, very profitable, dominates the local telecommunications industry, and 51% of it is owned by the government (which the government is looking to sell so it would not be pleased by any developments that reduce the potential value of the selloff).
So, let's see, Microsoft sues Telstra. Not only does Telstra decide to go non-MS in the future, it starts promoting non-MS alternatives through its extensive ISP business (for instance designing its pages to work best with Mozilla/NS rather than IE, having their installation install NS by default, start streaming content in non-MS formats and thus preventing the usual Linux lockout, and so on), the publicity that such a trial would produce would surely encourage other businesses to look for alternatives to a company that sues its best customers.
That's not to mention what a hostile federal government could do to MS's business here if it so chose.
Whilst I'd love for Telstra to start using Linux across all their desktops, it's a pretty good second best for us Aussies even if they're only using it as a negotiating tool to beat down Microsoft's pricing.
Why? Because it's going to be millions of dollars that gets distributed back to the Australian economy either in the form of lower pricing of Telstra's products or as profits to shareholders (and as the government is still a 51% shareholder that means all of us).
The next point is that once a few more CEOs see that you can screw Microsoft in this manner, they're going to try it for themselves. At least some (and more as time goes on and Linux apps continue to improve) are going to decide that the Linux option is viable regardless of what deals MS offers, and the others will save a packet. Net result? Less money floating across the Pacific to the money vault in Redmond and more in local customers and shareholders' pockets, and a growing Linux user community who will spend money and use their buying power to get the features they want.
Now, if only Telstra could be levered out of their monopoly or quasi-monopoly positions, then we'd *really* be in good shape:)
Ironically, MSFT's condemnation of the GPL as being 'communist' might have gotten the Chinese thinking about it. For them, this condemnation must have sounded as a recommendation.
I doubt much of the Chinese leadership cares about labels like Communism any more in their actual decision making. They may occasionally mouth the platitudes, but from I read they're not even bothering with that much these days.
But I thought you wanted *cool* air going into an engine, so that when it mixes with fuel, burns, and expands, it expands more and thus you get more thrust.
I wonder, given $LARGE_AMT, whether an IMAX-quality digital camera is feasible at the moment?
The other problem, of course, would be transmitting the data back...you'd need some heavy bandwidth and the Shannon(?) theorem would also suggest you'd need a powerful transmitter...
In Australia the doctor's union (they call themselves the Australian Medical Association, but they are really just a trade union with pretensions) screams long and loud to make it hard for foriegn-trained doctors to practise here. This is kind of bad, because in rural areas there is a huge doctor shortage at the moment.
I'd imagine the New Zealand doctors' union had its head similarly up its arse.
The vision of the distant future as discussed here is:
Big screens (well duh!)
Better sound (impractical in the office environment).
attaching.wavs to email (amazing, who would have ever thought).
Attaching mpg's to email (ditto)
Videophones (what a novel idea! -NOT)
Videoconferencing (ditto).
Surely there *must* be some more new ideas floating round than that - for instance, what about better tools to manage the flood of email people now receive?
Slashdot Mirror
Rubbish. 10 billion is a small fraction of the cost of the ISS, and a space elevator would be *much* more useful. If this indeed turned out to be feasible, it'd get funded in a heartbeat.
It might be possible to reduce that state space quite a bit with some intelligent pruning, but even so I doubt it could ever be explored with a deterministic machine.
As it bounced around, the name "Pacific peso" came to be used as a joke to describe its pitiful worth against the USD, the yen, and the British pound.
In practice, our economy has done pretty well, overall, over the last two decades, so it's only really an issue we worry ourselves with when we travel to those countries.
I have a 45 of "Knights of the Black Forest" if anyone needs one .... ;)
Instant Karma to anyone who gets the reference
It does achieve the goal of high turnouts though - something like 98% of those eligible vote (or at least turn up, get their names crossed off, and vote CowboyNeal).
However, it's not necessary for computers to do that to beat world champions. They're getting better all the time with heuristic searches, thanks very much.
Sure, for pro-level equipment, the costs are comparable (and once you factor in film much cheaper for digital), but you can get away with cheaper lenses and still take decent sports photos, which simply can't be done with digitals.
Go away and build something (or multiple things) small, but related, using technologies and methodologies that might be useful. Learn what works for you and what doesn't. Repeat a few times, until you know what's going to work for your project.
To give an analogy, look at what John Carmack is doing at Armadillo Aerospace. When he started out, he and his team didn't know enough about rocketry to decide what technologies they were going to use in their ultimate goal (a vehicle to win the X Prize for a private space shot). What did they do? They've experimented with a variety of things on test rigs and as part of complete craft, and discovered what works and what doesn't.
That's a lot of film...
For my favourite application (sports photography), until cameras you can strap a decent size telephoto lens come down in price, digital won't be usable. When they do, of course, digital will become the medium of choice because with a large enough memory card you could basically shoot continuously.
Plankalkul, designed by Konrad Zuse in 1945 has got some strong claims as the first (though it didn't influence later languages as it didn't become known to the wider computing world until the 1970's).
I know it was me who asked the question, but this is an informative answer from the horse's mouth, so to speak.
What's your view on this, both in terms of JPL and the broader context?
Name an activity, and the enthusiasts get gouged. Fishing, skiing, wine, cars - they all end up paying twice as much for things that are maybe 10% better.
You first have to do a study with a small number of people to demonstrate that the drug isn't going to make their noses grow 6" long and turn their cerebellum into an eleventh toe. Then you have to do a small study that demonstrates that the drug is effective at treating whatever it is you want to treat. Then you have to do a third, much bigger trial so that the effectiveness can be compared with existing treatments.
Throw in several years of figuring out how to make bulk quantities of whatever this drug is, testing it in animals, etc. etc., and there's obviously going to be a quite a few years of development happening.
But let's assume the rest of Telstra is sold. To obtain a controlling stake in a public company, Microsoft, as a foriegn-owned company, would have to obtain permission from a government body called the Foriegn Investment Review Board. 99.9% of the time such approval is given, but every so often the government knocks back some politically contentious ones (for instance, they knocked back Shell's attempt to buy the rest of a major gas project because it was widely argued that Shell may choose to promote other projects in Indonesia and elsewhere over the Australian one).
Given one of the major arguments advanced by the government for not splitting Telstra up into seperate companies has been that it is one of a very few Australian companies big enough to be a major player in a global market, the idea of approving a foriegn takeover of it seems unlikely.
That is a possibility, but we don't know at this point. The only place we know there's life is Earth. We haven't found conclusive evidence of life on Mars, let alone Europa, Venus, or Pluto. This kind of study is useful, however, because it suggests new places we might consider looking for life.
To your implied question "is finding bacteria on other planets interesting" the answer has to be yes. If we did find bacteria (or something like them) on another planet, we'd either find that a) they're directly related to earthly bacteria, in which case we'd know panspermia works (at least on an interplanetary scale) and would then raise the question of whether the source was somewhere in the solar system or from elsewhere, or b) that life has developed independently more than once, indicating that if the conditions are right it is quite likely to appear. If b) were the case it would seem to raise the odds that extra-solar life (and thus possibly intelligence) is out there. Either way, the biologists, geneticists, biochemists, and so on would give several limbs for the opportunity to examine bacteria from Pluto.
The reason Telstra's share price is so low compared to the T2 float price is because at the time it floated global factors push the stock price of telcos very high. At the present time, however, the global factors are pushing all telco stocks down, despite the fact that Telstra is a profit-generating colossus. Sooner or later, provided Telstra's competitors can't win more regulatory concessions, the market is going to realise that Telstra is underpriced.
So, let's see, Microsoft sues Telstra. Not only does Telstra decide to go non-MS in the future, it starts promoting non-MS alternatives through its extensive ISP business (for instance designing its pages to work best with Mozilla/NS rather than IE, having their installation install NS by default, start streaming content in non-MS formats and thus preventing the usual Linux lockout, and so on), the publicity that such a trial would produce would surely encourage other businesses to look for alternatives to a company that sues its best customers.
That's not to mention what a hostile federal government could do to MS's business here if it so chose.
Why? Because it's going to be millions of dollars that gets distributed back to the Australian economy either in the form of lower pricing of Telstra's products or as profits to shareholders (and as the government is still a 51% shareholder that means all of us).
The next point is that once a few more CEOs see that you can screw Microsoft in this manner, they're going to try it for themselves. At least some (and more as time goes on and Linux apps continue to improve) are going to decide that the Linux option is viable regardless of what deals MS offers, and the others will save a packet. Net result? Less money floating across the Pacific to the money vault in Redmond and more in local customers and shareholders' pockets, and a growing Linux user community who will spend money and use their buying power to get the features they want.
Now, if only Telstra could be levered out of their monopoly or quasi-monopoly positions, then we'd *really* be in good shape :)
I doubt much of the Chinese leadership cares about labels like Communism any more in their actual decision making. They may occasionally mouth the platitudes, but from I read they're not even bothering with that much these days.
Or do I have it wrong here?
The other problem, of course, would be transmitting the data back...you'd need some heavy bandwidth and the Shannon(?) theorem would also suggest you'd need a powerful transmitter...
Something along those lines.
Maybe evolution does the trick, but I really want a text client available as well and evolution doesn't currently have that AFAIK.
I'd also like a new email protocol that requires emails to be cryptographically signed (make spam bouncing much easier, for one).
I'd imagine the New Zealand doctors' union had its head similarly up its arse.
Surely there *must* be some more new ideas floating round than that - for instance, what about better tools to manage the flood of email people now receive?