I'd agree with all of those who've already pointed out that paper quantities are useless as a measure of academic productivity. There is indeed a lot of very low-quality research coming out of the developing world (there's plenty of low-quality research done in the developed world, too, mind you), but not everything done in China or India is rubbish.
There's also a very silly assumption underlying this - that research is some kind of nerd Olympics and all that matters is the US wins. More research ultimately means faster scientific and technological progress, and we all benefit.
It appears that Ken Cuccinelli is a partisan hack who's using his position as Attorney-General primarily to advance right-wing interests, and thus further his own political ambitions.
It seems to me that the reason why Microsoft won the desktop OS wars was that PCs were much cheaper than Macs.
The reason for that was that Microsoft had a huge armada of competing PC suppliers trying to figure out how to build DOS/Windows compatible hardware more cheaply; they went through a succession of business models doing so. Apple, by contrast had unique hardware built at a small scale in high-cost factories.
These days, Apple hardware (including the iphone and ipad) is basically the same as everyone else's, and it's made in the same contract manufacturers as everyone else. So they're no longer suffering a substantial cost disadvantage.
Hence, there's no reason to put up with a cheaper but inferior platform.
If your entire business model is based on cheaper but inferior platforms - and while I'll argue the toss on the desktop today, the iPhone OS and Android clearly crap all over Windows Mobile - you're going to be in trouble if you lose your cost advantage.
If Microsoft wants to expand into new consumer markets, it's going to have to change tack, stop being so focused on leveraging the Windows desktop onto those market, and build the best damn user experience it can for those markets.
As usual, the answer is "it depends", with lots of assumptions you can argue about in the absence of actual data.
A biggie is where the grid electricity comes from.
Another is how long the batteries will last, and how long an electric car will last. There have been studies claiming that a Hummer has lower life cycle emissions than an electric car, but they assume an absurdly long lifetime for Hummer and an absurdly short lifetime (and no recycling) for the EV.
Google "life cycle emissions BEV" or something like it and you'll have many hours of reading material on the matter.
Weapons like the BrahMos are primarily aimed at ships. Yes, you could also use it as a precision-guided land attack cruise missile, but Pakistan's navy is small and almost irrelevant for conflict with India.
This weapon - and, indeed, much of India's military development - is about maintaining military competitiveness with China, and to some extent the ability to discourage the US from interfering if India conducts military operations in areas it regards as its sphere of influence.
The US Navy is apparently upgrading its cruise missile defences on its ships, replacing the Phalanx gun-based system with a missile-based version, because of missiles like the BrahMos.
This device uses a two-stroke engine as its powerplant. Two-stroke engines are notoriously unreliable. You will get engine failures on these every couple of hundred hours of flying time, and most likely it'll occur when the engine is under load in initial takeoff or landing.
Let's assume that the engine stops at 50 feet.
If the engine dies, this thing will, pretty much instantly, drop like a rock. Assuming a little bit of aerodynamic drag, it would take around 1.8 seconds and terminal velocity would be around 35 mph. In other words, you would splatter yourself over the tarmac like jelly. Ballistic recovery chutes work faster than conventional chutes, but it's still going to take virtually all of those 1.8 seconds even to deploy the chute, let alone achieve significant retardation. The only solution would be something like emergency rockets to lift the pack (and user) to sufficient altitude to deploy the recovery chute safely.
Would you fly something that will need you to use the last-ditch "ejector seat" system every couple of hundred flying hours?
The World Rally Championship is the highest level of competition in that sport. So winning rounds of it, and coming second in the championship, indicates that you're pretty bloody good.
I'd hazard a guess that such results rank her in the top 30 rally drivers, all-time.
In the long term, iceteroids in the outer solar system seem to be a reasonable source of replacement hydrogen and oxygen for a terraformed Mars.
The nice thing about them is that, assuming you have nuclear rockets of sufficient size and durability, an asteroid made of ice is essentially made of reaction mass.
Other places you could get hydrogen (or water - strip out the oxygen if you don't want it) include the gas giants themselves or some of their satellites. The inner Jovian moons are unlikely to have significant human habitation because of high radiation levels, but an automated ice-mining operation on Europa, say, isn't out of the realms of possibility.
Assuming we don't get a large black monolith sending us warnings not to land there, of course:)
Yes, all of this is well out of the realms of current engineering capabilities. But there doesn't seem to any fundamental reason why it's impossible.
As a very rough, correct-within-a-factor-of-two estimate, let's assume that the average server results in two tonnes of CO2 being emitted to keep it running. So that's 45,000 tonnes of CO2 a year saved, if the OP's estimate of the difference in speed is correct (which I doubt, but anyway).
However, if Facebook implements in C++, it's reasonable to assume that they will need to hire more developers, and more expensive developers, than if they use PHP.
I don't have accurate numbers, but I'll pull them out of my arse here for the purposes of illustration. Let's say that rather than 500 PHP earning $60,000 a year, Facebook instead employed 750 C++ developers earning $80,000 a year. That's 50 million bucks a year in extra expenses.
Carbon credits on the EU ETS are currently going for around 20 USD. So if you want to prevent the emission of a tonne of CO2, you can go to the EU climate exchange, hand over the equivalent of 20 USD in Euros, and simply rip the permit and not use it.
So let's say that Facebook spends 10% of the difference in programmer costs - 5 million dollars - on ripping up EU emissions permits. They prevent 250000 tonnes of carbon emissions. That's more than five times as much emission reduction as achieved by substituting PHP for C++, and Facebook still has $45 million in the bank.
Heck, we could replace "buy carbon credits" with much higher-cost abatement options like "buy Priuses for company cars" and still come out in front.
Road pricing is horseshit because if having to drive on a congested road isn't sufficient deterrent to stop you doing it, then taxation isn't going to achieve it.
I agree that mass vehicle tracking raises very serious privacy concerns, but road pricing does reduce traffic. You might be interested in the Transport For London annual report, which indicates that traffic in the city is about 20% lower than it otherwise would be.
The trouble with your proposal to just track "key" roads is that it encourages traffic to do rat-runs along secondary roads. I experienced this personally when tolling was brought in on a freeway near my house; the alternative routes were suddenly jam-packed with traffic, particularly at off-peak times when they were previously quiet.
The ridiculously rich support a not insubstantial group of brokers of second-hand yachts, planes, luxury cars, real estate, art, and so on. These businesses generally have flashy offices, high-paid staff, and collect a fair amount of commission for helping facilitate the transfer of said assets from those on the way down to those on the way up.
The business skills of the very rich are often overrated, but most of them are smart enough to figure out that cutting out the middlemen saves both the seller and buyer money. This lets them do it without the embarrassment of parading their failures to us plebs.
Day trading is pretty much like gambling at the casino.
Over the course of time in which a day trader trades, the gyrations of the overall market, and individual stocks, is essentially noise, and overwhelms the long-term historical trend of stocks to go up in value (and, frankly, you need to have decades-long horizons to be sure that that trend will overwhelm the noise).
And every time you make a trade, your broker takes a trading commission.
You're left with a negative-expectation gambling game.
I know, I know, you've got a brilliant strategy which means you'll outperform the market, transforming the game into a positive-expectation one. Might I suggest that a) you might have just gotten lucky, and b) sooner or later enough traders will figure out your winning strategy, copy it, and you're back to square one.
As for the device, it's crap. Galvanic skin response is ancient technology, and, as others have noted, short-term traders are always stressed, so they'll be setting off the meter, oh, 95% of their "working" day.
If you're into day trading, get a job at a merchant bank or a brokerage firm. At least that way you get to gamble with other people's money, not your own. You'll still underperform the market (it's the dirty little secret of managed investment funds, they almost always do), but it's not your problem any more.
Last year, the newly-elected Australian government held something called the "2020 summit". The idea was to bring together 1000 of Australia's "best and brightest" - think academics, businesspeople, a smattering of celebrities including Hugh Jackman and Cate Blanchett (for the arts subtrack) to discuss ideas for Australia;s future. After two days of discussion, they came up with a list of suggestions.
Unfortunately, the government didn't like most of them. Some of them were genuinely bad, but a lot the government didn't like because they would have required bullet-biting.. But to show that the whole exercise is worthwhile, the government has seized on the easy, cheap, uncontroversial tidbits and is promoting them heavily. Like this bionic eye.
While it won't be of much interest to Slashdot, another one likely to get publicized over the next little while is the proposal to build a research center to record the environmental expertise of the various Aboriginal peoples of Australia. Not that it's a bad idea, but it's the kind of thing that a government can do with pocket change.
Try this on for size. Average insolation is roughly 250 watts per square metre of the Earth's surface, ignoring clouds and according to Wikipedia (accurate enough for the purposes of this calculation). That's 250 megawatts per square kilometer. The surface of the earth is around 510 million square kilometres. That gives a total insolation of roughly 127,500 terawatts.
Continuous electricity production averages out at about 2 terawatts, based on figures from the CIA world factbook.
As you can clearly see, tiny changes to the fraction of solar insolation retained as heat is going to make a lot more difference than a relatively tiny amount of extra energy beamed in.
I once did some slightly more precise calculations (still very rough, as I'm not a climate scientist), and the effect is going to be undetectable at a global scale, though is probably noticeable in densely populated regions (though, again, the effect of land use change on albedo is going to make a much bigger difference).
Even if we got our entire energy needs from this, the effect on the Earth's energy balance will be negligible compared to the effect of the additional heat trapped by our release of greenhouse gases.
laptops and desktops, sure, but I'd be a bit hesitant about doing this on application servers until I was absolutely sure it wasn't going to cause a nasty performance hit.
Furthermore, make sure you've got a very, very good backup strategy first.
SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket is supposed to have engine-out redundancy "at any stage of flight". The Saturn V rockets apparently also lost engines and completed missions.
However, that doesn't help if the engine fails in a more spectacular way than just spluttering to a halt...
Unfortunately, Obama is not Matt Santos, and (to the best of my knowledge) hasn't learned to fly anything bigger than a paper plane.
While the flight control system, sweet avionics and whatnot probably make the F-22 a relatively easy fighter to fly, the key word is "relative". Even if Obama was theoretically capable of piloting such an aircraft safely, I think he's got more important things to do than learn to play fighter jock;)
Bush senior and junior were both fighter jocks, and Junior probably could have learned to fly the F-22 (perhaps with all that spare time he spent at Crawford). How did that work out for your country?:)
I suppose it depends where your talents lie, and where you want to end up.
That said, if you want to be a better programmer, doing some C systems programming is almost certainly a good idea.
Until you know C - and perhaps try a teeny little bit of assembler - you've not really got any idea what's going on under the hood in higher-level languages.
And, while you're at it, have a crack at implementing some of the classic data structures and algorithms. Have a crack at implementing a red-black tree, or, if you're feeling very ambitious, some very basic 3D rendering stuff (even 2D can be hard enough...).
In practice, you won't have to do this out in industry, but you will come across the occasional difficult problem, and the same skills will be very handy when that difficult problem arrives.
While the form of the bailout might well have been less than ideal, no bailout at all would have been a colossal fucking global disaster.
In case you hadn't been paying attention, banks - even the solvent ones - had essentially stopped lending to each other, and to companies, because they didn't have confidence that the debt would be repaid.
Even the most soundly managed companies usually depend on access to debt to manage their cash flows, including payrolls. One tool they use for that is called commercial paper. A couple of weeks ago, buyers for that essentially disappeared, leaving the Fed to have to step into the market. If that market had stayed frozen, millions of Americans' paychecks wouldn't have arrived. Hello 1930s all over again.
Might I suggest that it is you who needs to get a better grip on reality, however unpleasant it might be.
Slashdot Mirror
Delay line memory.
Completely different form of energy, of course.
I'd agree with all of those who've already pointed out that paper quantities are useless as a measure of academic productivity. There is indeed a lot of very low-quality research coming out of the developing world (there's plenty of low-quality research done in the developed world, too, mind you), but not everything done in China or India is rubbish.
There's also a very silly assumption underlying this - that research is some kind of nerd Olympics and all that matters is the US wins. More research ultimately means faster scientific and technological progress, and we all benefit.
Perhaps it's just lack of experience with anything faster, but, honestly, no.
But then, my ping time to Slashdot is 265 ms. That may explain part of the reason why my browser wait times are dominated by the network.
I use Firefox and IE regularly, have played with Chrome, and occasionally use Safari on the Macs at work.
I honestly can't notice any difference between any of them in rendering speed.
99.99% of the time, web browsing performance is network-limited anyway.
Surely standards support and browser stability are more important features, at least on platforms with more grunt than an iphone?
It appears that Ken Cuccinelli is a partisan hack who's using his position as Attorney-General primarily to advance right-wing interests, and thus further his own political ambitions.
Last week he was going after abortion clinics.
This week it's Michael Mann.
It seems to me that the reason why Microsoft won the desktop OS wars was that PCs were much cheaper than Macs.
The reason for that was that Microsoft had a huge armada of competing PC suppliers trying to figure out how to build DOS/Windows compatible hardware more cheaply; they went through a succession of business models doing so. Apple, by contrast had unique hardware built at a small scale in high-cost factories.
These days, Apple hardware (including the iphone and ipad) is basically the same as everyone else's, and it's made in the same contract manufacturers as everyone else. So they're no longer suffering a substantial cost disadvantage.
Hence, there's no reason to put up with a cheaper but inferior platform.
If your entire business model is based on cheaper but inferior platforms - and while I'll argue the toss on the desktop today, the iPhone OS and Android clearly crap all over Windows Mobile - you're going to be in trouble if you lose your cost advantage.
If Microsoft wants to expand into new consumer markets, it's going to have to change tack, stop being so focused on leveraging the Windows desktop onto those market, and build the best damn user experience it can for those markets.
As usual, the answer is "it depends", with lots of assumptions you can argue about in the absence of actual data.
A biggie is where the grid electricity comes from.
Another is how long the batteries will last, and how long an electric car will last. There have been studies claiming that a Hummer has lower life cycle emissions than an electric car, but they assume an absurdly long lifetime for Hummer and an absurdly short lifetime (and no recycling) for the EV.
Google "life cycle emissions BEV" or something like it and you'll have many hours of reading material on the matter.
Doctors don't participate in executions, except to certify the death.
Weapons like the BrahMos are primarily aimed at ships. Yes, you could also use it as a precision-guided land attack cruise missile, but Pakistan's navy is small and almost irrelevant for conflict with India.
This weapon - and, indeed, much of India's military development - is about maintaining military competitiveness with China, and to some extent the ability to discourage the US from interfering if India conducts military operations in areas it regards as its sphere of influence.
The US Navy is apparently upgrading its cruise missile defences on its ships, replacing the Phalanx gun-based system with a missile-based version, because of missiles like the BrahMos.
This device uses a two-stroke engine as its powerplant. Two-stroke engines are notoriously unreliable. You will get engine failures on these every couple of hundred hours of flying time, and most likely it'll occur when the engine is under load in initial takeoff or landing.
Let's assume that the engine stops at 50 feet.
If the engine dies, this thing will, pretty much instantly, drop like a rock. Assuming a little bit of aerodynamic drag, it would take around 1.8 seconds and terminal velocity would be around 35 mph. In other words, you would splatter yourself over the tarmac like jelly. Ballistic recovery chutes work faster than conventional chutes, but it's still going to take virtually all of those 1.8 seconds even to deploy the chute, let alone achieve significant retardation. The only solution would be something like emergency rockets to lift the pack (and user) to sufficient altitude to deploy the recovery chute safely.
Would you fly something that will need you to use the last-ditch "ejector seat" system every couple of hundred flying hours?
The World Rally Championship is the highest level of competition in that sport. So winning rounds of it, and coming second in the championship, indicates that you're pretty bloody good.
I'd hazard a guess that such results rank her in the top 30 rally drivers, all-time.
In the long term, iceteroids in the outer solar system seem to be a reasonable source of replacement hydrogen and oxygen for a terraformed Mars.
The nice thing about them is that, assuming you have nuclear rockets of sufficient size and durability, an asteroid made of ice is essentially made of reaction mass.
Other places you could get hydrogen (or water - strip out the oxygen if you don't want it) include the gas giants themselves or some of their satellites. The inner Jovian moons are unlikely to have significant human habitation because of high radiation levels, but an automated ice-mining operation on Europa, say, isn't out of the realms of possibility.
Assuming we don't get a large black monolith sending us warnings not to land there, of course :)
Yes, all of this is well out of the realms of current engineering capabilities. But there doesn't seem to any fundamental reason why it's impossible.
Clearly, it's time for economics 101 again - opportunity cost.
As a very rough, correct-within-a-factor-of-two estimate, let's assume that the average server results in two tonnes of CO2 being emitted to keep it running. So that's 45,000 tonnes of CO2 a year saved, if the OP's estimate of the difference in speed is correct (which I doubt, but anyway).
However, if Facebook implements in C++, it's reasonable to assume that they will need to hire more developers, and more expensive developers, than if they use PHP.
I don't have accurate numbers, but I'll pull them out of my arse here for the purposes of illustration. Let's say that rather than 500 PHP earning $60,000 a year, Facebook instead employed 750 C++ developers earning $80,000 a year. That's 50 million bucks a year in extra expenses.
Carbon credits on the EU ETS are currently going for around 20 USD. So if you want to prevent the emission of a tonne of CO2, you can go to the EU climate exchange, hand over the equivalent of 20 USD in Euros, and simply rip the permit and not use it.
So let's say that Facebook spends 10% of the difference in programmer costs - 5 million dollars - on ripping up EU emissions permits. They prevent 250000 tonnes of carbon emissions. That's more than five times as much emission reduction as achieved by substituting PHP for C++, and Facebook still has $45 million in the bank.
Heck, we could replace "buy carbon credits" with much higher-cost abatement options like "buy Priuses for company cars" and still come out in front.
Here endeth the lesson.
I agree that mass vehicle tracking raises very serious privacy concerns, but road pricing does reduce traffic. You might be interested in the Transport For London annual report, which indicates that traffic in the city is about 20% lower than it otherwise would be.
The trouble with your proposal to just track "key" roads is that it encourages traffic to do rat-runs along secondary roads. I experienced this personally when tolling was brought in on a freeway near my house; the alternative routes were suddenly jam-packed with traffic, particularly at off-peak times when they were previously quiet.
The ridiculously rich support a not insubstantial group of brokers of second-hand yachts, planes, luxury cars, real estate, art, and so on. These businesses generally have flashy offices, high-paid staff, and collect a fair amount of commission for helping facilitate the transfer of said assets from those on the way down to those on the way up.
The business skills of the very rich are often overrated, but most of them are smart enough to figure out that cutting out the middlemen saves both the seller and buyer money. This lets them do it without the embarrassment of parading their failures to us plebs.
Day trading is pretty much like gambling at the casino.
Over the course of time in which a day trader trades, the gyrations of the overall market, and individual stocks, is essentially noise, and overwhelms the long-term historical trend of stocks to go up in value (and, frankly, you need to have decades-long horizons to be sure that that trend will overwhelm the noise).
And every time you make a trade, your broker takes a trading commission.
You're left with a negative-expectation gambling game.
I know, I know, you've got a brilliant strategy which means you'll outperform the market, transforming the game into a positive-expectation one. Might I suggest that a) you might have just gotten lucky, and b) sooner or later enough traders will figure out your winning strategy, copy it, and you're back to square one.
As for the device, it's crap. Galvanic skin response is ancient technology, and, as others have noted, short-term traders are always stressed, so they'll be setting off the meter, oh, 95% of their "working" day.
If you're into day trading, get a job at a merchant bank or a brokerage firm. At least that way you get to gamble with other people's money, not your own. You'll still underperform the market (it's the dirty little secret of managed investment funds, they almost always do), but it's not your problem any more.
This proposal has a bit of a backstory to it.
Last year, the newly-elected Australian government held something called the "2020 summit". The idea was to bring together 1000 of Australia's "best and brightest" - think academics, businesspeople, a smattering of celebrities including Hugh Jackman and Cate Blanchett (for the arts subtrack) to discuss ideas for Australia;s future. After two days of discussion, they came up with a list of suggestions.
Unfortunately, the government didn't like most of them. Some of them were genuinely bad, but a lot the government didn't like because they would have required bullet-biting.. But to show that the whole exercise is worthwhile, the government has seized on the easy, cheap, uncontroversial tidbits and is promoting them heavily. Like this bionic eye.
While it won't be of much interest to Slashdot, another one likely to get publicized over the next little while is the proposal to build a research center to record the environmental expertise of the various Aboriginal peoples of Australia. Not that it's a bad idea, but it's the kind of thing that a government can do with pocket change.
That should be the case. It's my observation that much of the time libertarians wish the problem away by downplaying the impacts of pollution.
Continuous electricity production averages out at about 2 terawatts, based on figures from the CIA world factbook.
As you can clearly see, tiny changes to the fraction of solar insolation retained as heat is going to make a lot more difference than a relatively tiny amount of extra energy beamed in.
I once did some slightly more precise calculations (still very rough, as I'm not a climate scientist), and the effect is going to be undetectable at a global scale, though is probably noticeable in densely populated regions (though, again, the effect of land use change on albedo is going to make a much bigger difference).
Even if we got our entire energy needs from this, the effect on the Earth's energy balance will be negligible compared to the effect of the additional heat trapped by our release of greenhouse gases.
laptops and desktops, sure, but I'd be a bit hesitant about doing this on application servers until I was absolutely sure it wasn't going to cause a nasty performance hit. Furthermore, make sure you've got a very, very good backup strategy first.
SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket is supposed to have engine-out redundancy "at any stage of flight". The Saturn V rockets apparently also lost engines and completed missions. However, that doesn't help if the engine fails in a more spectacular way than just spluttering to a halt...
While the flight control system, sweet avionics and whatnot probably make the F-22 a relatively easy fighter to fly, the key word is "relative". Even if Obama was theoretically capable of piloting such an aircraft safely, I think he's got more important things to do than learn to play fighter jock ;)
Bush senior and junior were both fighter jocks, and Junior probably could have learned to fly the F-22 (perhaps with all that spare time he spent at Crawford). How did that work out for your country? :)
That said, if you want to be a better programmer, doing some C systems programming is almost certainly a good idea.
Until you know C - and perhaps try a teeny little bit of assembler - you've not really got any idea what's going on under the hood in higher-level languages.
And, while you're at it, have a crack at implementing some of the classic data structures and algorithms. Have a crack at implementing a red-black tree, or, if you're feeling very ambitious, some very basic 3D rendering stuff (even 2D can be hard enough...).
In practice, you won't have to do this out in industry, but you will come across the occasional difficult problem, and the same skills will be very handy when that difficult problem arrives.
In case you hadn't been paying attention, banks - even the solvent ones - had essentially stopped lending to each other, and to companies, because they didn't have confidence that the debt would be repaid.
Even the most soundly managed companies usually depend on access to debt to manage their cash flows, including payrolls. One tool they use for that is called commercial paper. A couple of weeks ago, buyers for that essentially disappeared, leaving the Fed to have to step into the market. If that market had stayed frozen, millions of Americans' paychecks wouldn't have arrived. Hello 1930s all over again.
Might I suggest that it is you who needs to get a better grip on reality, however unpleasant it might be.