I'LL BET IT SPEEDS UP RENDERING OF ALL CAPS BY QUITE A BIT.
.
.
.
[adding some lower case text to get past slashdot's all-caps filter.
i appreciate encouraging people not to use all-caps all the time, which can be
annoying. but in this case that is the whole point.]
I'd got through all that training and go up and risk my life for free.
Would you do it if it were 100% certain that you would be immediately killed
without accomplishing anything? I doubt it.
And if you would, then you are so insane that you are worthless
as an astronaut.
So it's a trade-off. How much must risk be reduced to make it
possible to hire top quality astronauts? The claim of TFA is
that less can be spent reducing risk.
There is already serious risk involved. So my gut feeling
is that you can't reduce it much.
But if NASA hasn't already done so, I agree that it would
be worth spending some money to get a science-based
estimate of how much risk is really tolerable.
Invest a higher proportion of the budget in two things:
More accurate risk assessment
Evaluating the quality of candidates, in terms of expected performance in all scenarios, when factoring in the effect of allowing candidates who tolerate higher risk
With more information, you might be able to reach equilibrium at lower total cost.
I'm skeptical about whether this would actually result in any significant cost reduction.
But it's worth a try, I suppose.
As OP (here on/., not the author of the article), I'd like to re-raise here in the comments a point in my original post
that got edited out:
There are many who disagree with the thesis of TFA.
It is interesting to note that they are trying to make their point -
where else? -
in the comments on the article,
in comments here on./,
and elsewhere in the blogosphere.
...Instead of taking you where you want to go, or what is the best place for what you want to do, he will take you where he will get commissions from anything you spend... For me, Google is largely the same. That is how they make money.
No, I don't think the people at Google are that stupid.
They make their advertising money by being the biggest in search,
and the only way they'll stay the biggest is by continuing to give the best results.
It really doesn't make sense for them to squander their advantage for
the few extra pennies they might get by skewing. And they know that very well.
Google's business model is built on the assumption that the days of traditional
Big Media are numbered. The way people get information is changed forever.
Now you make money by being better at gathering information and making
it available, not by "owning" information and selling it.
But Big Media is not dead yet, and they are fighting back. They are using
what's left of their hold on the public's attention to attack Google,
and the concept of a free Internet in general,
in every way they can.
The amount of blatantly distorted anti-Google
articles in traditional news media and on their web sites lately is astounding.
Don't get me wrong. The old slogan of "do no evil" is impossible to
sustain for a for-profit company as big as Google has become.
They'll do whatever they can to be the *only* ones who can present
information as well as they do.
They'll push the bounds of privacy, as long as it doesn't risk
causing their basic business model to be clamped down.
But don't be fooled by Big Media into thinking that
they'll be stupid and destroy their own business model.
The interesting part is behind a link buried deep inside this post. It's the
dynamic
semantic publishing engine, which was originally used on their
World Cup 2010
site.
The Microsoft specification/method doesn't require to cooperation of publishers and doesn't rely on the behaving properly - unlike the methods implemented in Firefox and Chrome do, which therefore are practically useless against ill-behaving advertisers who do not honor the user's wishes regarding privacy.
It doesn't really matter. Either way, in the best case they'll spend a huge amount of man hours
on developing a standard, everyone will adopt it, and no one will use it. Because
you won't get the functionality you need on any significant site when Do-Not-Track
is enabled.
Interesting. I was under the impression that this is common sense. Maybe I should have spoken it out aloud in order to get all the praise.;)
Of course, this has been well known for at least 30 years, and it has
been the foundation of all reading methods for about that long.
Everyone studying for a degree in education learns about
it in their first-year reading methods course, and everyone studying
special education spends months or even years studying
the fine details.
But don't forget - this is a press release. It is written by marketing
writers, not by scientists or educators.
If you read these marketing blurbs very carefully, sometimes
you can get lucky and find a scrap of actual information somewhere.
And in fact, buried in the middle, we can find some quotes
of the scientists, from which we infer the actual purpose
of the research. They're trying to get a better understanding
of the neurological mechanisms behind these well-known
phenomena.
My, my, what a surprise, considering that the researchers are neurologists.
You: hi
Rosette: I'm a little busy at the moment. Could you wait a bit?
You: sure
Rosette: I'm a little busy at the moment. Could you wait a bit?
Rosette: I'm a little busy at the moment. Could you wait a bit?
You: ok, ok. you don't have to keep saying that.
Rosette: I'm a little busy at the moment. Could you wait a bit?
Re:haskell for the masses? sure, but only...
on
OCaml For the Masses
·
· Score: 1
Haskell is beautiful for researchers only... Haskell groupies should start writting real-life applications
This is just not true.
Haskell use is growing quickly at my company. I am working on a large
enterprise system for the aerospace industry, in Haskell. Others in my
company have produced other kinds of applications, such as web apps,
in Haskell that have been very successful. Management has been
very happy about the effect of introducing Haskell-based technologies
to our tool chest.
We are hearing of more and more companies, start-up and enterprise, that are
using Haskell successfully.
the Haskell Industrial Group has never been above 3 or 4 members, while the Caml Consortium has 12 members, and is increasing every year.
The company that runs the IHG,
Well-Typed,
is too busy writing real-life applications to be able to spend
their time recruiting members. I'd say 12 members in the
CC isn't very many either; it's certainly not representative
of the success OCaml and related languages have been
enjoying during the past few years.
Yes,
Better Place
is already deploying swapping stations in a few areas.
They have signed contracts for various stages of deployment on
a much larger scale.
From what I understand, UARS was intentionally decommissioned and was instructed to perform a burn to (eventually) bring it down.
Yes. When it was decommissioned several years ago, it used its last bit of fuel
to bring it to a lower orbit so that it would come sooner.
Don't we have more deliberate and controlled ways to de-orbit satellites?
Yes. Nowadays, that is part of the mission planning for satellites. (Well, at least for NASA satellites...)
Or is it just too complicated and expensive to add that kind of functionality considering the extreme odds of actually hitting anything valuable?
That was the thinking in days when UARS was launched.
Nowadays, even that tiny risk is considered important enough to justify controlled de-orbiting.
Mainly for PR reasons, I think.
In addition, we now realize that leaving dead satellites hanging around in a low orbit
for a few years runs the additional risk of it colliding with something and causing
an explosion of space junk.
It's not the fax machine that dies hard, it's the universe of paper documents that dies hard.
There is no modern hardware or software technology that comes close to the usability of paper.
Paper is used for a myriad of applications in everyday life,
The interface is so intuitive and effortless that any person of any age in any country in the world can use it without training.
Countless new applications are being invented daily; the people inventing them almost never even notice that they've done something new.
As amazing as some of the latest technology may seem, so far none of it comes to close to
paper, which has been around for thousands of years. Perhaps the closest is fax,
which builds on the success of paper. Its interface is more complex and less intuitive than
paper. But it's far more usable than most modern technology, and it adds many more useful
applications for paper itself.
Until some other technology approaches paper in usability and universal adoption, the fax is here to stay.
Although the authors do use the word "text" in the abstract, that is not what this study is about.
They are not reading any characters or glyphs from the brain.
They built a map of the way some relationships between concepts are represented in the brain.
Then they were able to observe the activation of those brain structures and get some
information about what the person was thinking.
That is very cool, but it doesn't really have much to do with text.
They did use both text and pictures as stimuli. I think the authors are emphasizing
"text" in order to make it clear that they believe they are finding high-level
semantic concepts in the brain, not just visual images.
Once again, USB starts out way behind the game. Last time it still overtook Firewire and buried it.
But I have a feeling that this time, with Apple in a completely different market position,
it's not going to be so simple to catch up with Thunderbolt.
...but I'm surprised that Google seems to be in 'bet the company' litigation over this... $100million bucks for billions in return seems like a small price to pay.
You're right. Patent litigation almost always ends up with some kind of royalties settlement.
When it goes to court, usually it just means the defendant believes that the patent owner is demanding much more
than the patent is worth. As weaknesses of the patent claim become exposed during trial, some of the
monetary risk gets transferred from the defendant onto the claimant. As soon as one of the parties feels that
the risk is not worth it anymore, they take the current settlement offer.
In this case, we all know Sun's strategy at the time of trying to get Java out there and make it as ubiquitous
as possible. It's much more than just this blog post - Sun was going to a lot of trouble to make people
feel that they don't have to worry about these kinds of patent claims. I'm sure we don't yet know all
the details of what went on behind the scenes between Google and Sun at the time when the Android concept
was born.
I'm also not sure what other tricks Google has up their sleeve. But if they can successfully convey some of the feeling
of that atmosphere to the court, it will certainly help their result.
maybe its just me, but I had to read that headline about 4x to understand it.
Yeah, sorry about that. Slashdot now has a very tight limit on the number of characters in a title, so it's tough to get in the point of the post. You've really got to pack it in.
We need to come up with a good compressed format for Slashdot titles.
You're right. The AP article looks like it's wrong.
I was amazed by that little item they let slip in the middle of the article.
It was the whole reason I posted this story - but it turns out to be
just confusion of a clueless reporter. Ah, well. Sorry.
The company's web site is a small self-consciously slick flash site. It contains only a few short press releases about this
and several other technologies, each with similarly outlandish world-changing claims and supposedly already built and working.
Slashdot Mirror
...as demonstrated by Mark Twain's famous quote that I paraphrased to use as the title of this blog post.
Sorry, that's a damned lie.
Mark Twain attributed the quote to Disraeli, not to himself. But even that attribution is now considered inaccurate, as described by The University of York Department of Mathematics and on this Wikipedia page.
.
.
.
[adding some lower case text to get past slashdot's all-caps filter. i appreciate encouraging people not to use all-caps all the time, which can be annoying. but in this case that is the whole point.]
I'd got through all that training and go up and risk my life for free.
Would you do it if it were 100% certain that you would be immediately killed without accomplishing anything? I doubt it. And if you would, then you are so insane that you are worthless as an astronaut.
So it's a trade-off. How much must risk be reduced to make it possible to hire top quality astronauts? The claim of TFA is that less can be spent reducing risk.
There is already serious risk involved. So my gut feeling is that you can't reduce it much. But if NASA hasn't already done so, I agree that it would be worth spending some money to get a science-based estimate of how much risk is really tolerable.
Invest a higher proportion of the budget in two things:
With more information, you might be able to reach equilibrium at lower total cost.
I'm skeptical about whether this would actually result in any significant cost reduction. But it's worth a try, I suppose.
As OP (here on /., not the author of the article), I'd like to re-raise here in the comments a point in my original post
that got edited out:
There are many who disagree with the thesis of TFA. It is interesting to note that they are trying to make their point - where else? - in the comments on the article, in comments here on ./,
and elsewhere in the blogosphere.
...Instead of taking you where you want to go, or what is the best place for what you want to do, he will take you where he will get commissions from anything you spend... For me, Google is largely the same. That is how they make money.
No, I don't think the people at Google are that stupid. They make their advertising money by being the biggest in search, and the only way they'll stay the biggest is by continuing to give the best results. It really doesn't make sense for them to squander their advantage for the few extra pennies they might get by skewing. And they know that very well.
Google's business model is built on the assumption that the days of traditional Big Media are numbered. The way people get information is changed forever. Now you make money by being better at gathering information and making it available, not by "owning" information and selling it.
But Big Media is not dead yet, and they are fighting back. They are using what's left of their hold on the public's attention to attack Google, and the concept of a free Internet in general, in every way they can. The amount of blatantly distorted anti-Google articles in traditional news media and on their web sites lately is astounding.
Don't get me wrong. The old slogan of "do no evil" is impossible to sustain for a for-profit company as big as Google has become. They'll do whatever they can to be the *only* ones who can present information as well as they do. They'll push the bounds of privacy, as long as it doesn't risk causing their basic business model to be clamped down.
But don't be fooled by Big Media into thinking that they'll be stupid and destroy their own business model.
...and in the darkness bind them?
Only if you remembered to number the cards.
The interesting part is behind a link buried deep inside this post. It's the dynamic semantic publishing engine, which was originally used on their World Cup 2010 site.
with an initial investment of £21m
Yeah, right.
The Microsoft specification/method doesn't require to cooperation of publishers and doesn't rely on the behaving properly - unlike the methods implemented in Firefox and Chrome do, which therefore are practically useless against ill-behaving advertisers who do not honor the user's wishes regarding privacy.
It doesn't really matter. Either way, in the best case they'll spend a huge amount of man hours on developing a standard, everyone will adopt it, and no one will use it. Because you won't get the functionality you need on any significant site when Do-Not-Track is enabled.
Interesting. I was under the impression that this is common sense. Maybe I should have spoken it out aloud in order to get all the praise. ;)
Of course, this has been well known for at least 30 years, and it has been the foundation of all reading methods for about that long. Everyone studying for a degree in education learns about it in their first-year reading methods course, and everyone studying special education spends months or even years studying the fine details.
But don't forget - this is a press release. It is written by marketing writers, not by scientists or educators.
If you read these marketing blurbs very carefully, sometimes you can get lucky and find a scrap of actual information somewhere. And in fact, buried in the middle, we can find some quotes of the scientists, from which we infer the actual purpose of the research. They're trying to get a better understanding of the neurological mechanisms behind these well-known phenomena.
My, my, what a surprise, considering that the researchers are neurologists.
Due to an engine problem, the mission failed. Too bad.
You: hi
Rosette: I'm a little busy at the moment. Could you wait a bit?
You: sure
Rosette: I'm a little busy at the moment. Could you wait a bit?
Rosette: I'm a little busy at the moment. Could you wait a bit?
You: ok, ok. you don't have to keep saying that.
Rosette: I'm a little busy at the moment. Could you wait a bit?
Haskell is beautiful for researchers only... Haskell groupies should start writting real-life applications
This is just not true.
Haskell use is growing quickly at my company. I am working on a large enterprise system for the aerospace industry, in Haskell. Others in my company have produced other kinds of applications, such as web apps, in Haskell that have been very successful. Management has been very happy about the effect of introducing Haskell-based technologies to our tool chest.
We are hearing of more and more companies, start-up and enterprise, that are using Haskell successfully.
the Haskell Industrial Group has never been above 3 or 4 members, while the Caml Consortium has 12 members, and is increasing every year.
The company that runs the IHG, Well-Typed, is too busy writing real-life applications to be able to spend their time recruiting members. I'd say 12 members in the CC isn't very many either; it's certainly not representative of the success OCaml and related languages have been enjoying during the past few years.
You could always just swap them out.
Yes, Better Place is already deploying swapping stations in a few areas. They have signed contracts for various stages of deployment on a much larger scale.
From what I understand, UARS was intentionally decommissioned and was instructed to perform a burn to (eventually) bring it down.
Yes. When it was decommissioned several years ago, it used its last bit of fuel to bring it to a lower orbit so that it would come sooner.
Don't we have more deliberate and controlled ways to de-orbit satellites?
Yes. Nowadays, that is part of the mission planning for satellites. (Well, at least for NASA satellites...)
Or is it just too complicated and expensive to add that kind of functionality considering the extreme odds of actually hitting anything valuable?
That was the thinking in days when UARS was launched.
Nowadays, even that tiny risk is considered important enough to justify controlled de-orbiting. Mainly for PR reasons, I think.
In addition, we now realize that leaving dead satellites hanging around in a low orbit for a few years runs the additional risk of it colliding with something and causing an explosion of space junk.
It's not the fax machine that dies hard, it's the universe of paper documents that dies hard.
There is no modern hardware or software technology that comes close to the usability of paper.
Paper is used for a myriad of applications in everyday life, The interface is so intuitive and effortless that any person of any age in any country in the world can use it without training. Countless new applications are being invented daily; the people inventing them almost never even notice that they've done something new.
As amazing as some of the latest technology may seem, so far none of it comes to close to paper, which has been around for thousands of years. Perhaps the closest is fax, which builds on the success of paper. Its interface is more complex and less intuitive than paper. But it's far more usable than most modern technology, and it adds many more useful applications for paper itself.
Until some other technology approaches paper in usability and universal adoption, the fax is here to stay.
Although the authors do use the word "text" in the abstract, that is not what this study is about. They are not reading any characters or glyphs from the brain.
They built a map of the way some relationships between concepts are represented in the brain. Then they were able to observe the activation of those brain structures and get some information about what the person was thinking.
That is very cool, but it doesn't really have much to do with text.
They did use both text and pictures as stimuli. I think the authors are emphasizing "text" in order to make it clear that they believe they are finding high-level semantic concepts in the brain, not just visual images.
Once again, USB starts out way behind the game. Last time it still overtook Firewire and buried it. But I have a feeling that this time, with Apple in a completely different market position, it's not going to be so simple to catch up with Thunderbolt.
...but I'm surprised that Google seems to be in 'bet the company' litigation over this... $100million bucks for billions in return seems like a small price to pay.
You're right. Patent litigation almost always ends up with some kind of royalties settlement.
When it goes to court, usually it just means the defendant believes that the patent owner is demanding much more than the patent is worth. As weaknesses of the patent claim become exposed during trial, some of the monetary risk gets transferred from the defendant onto the claimant. As soon as one of the parties feels that the risk is not worth it anymore, they take the current settlement offer.
In this case, we all know Sun's strategy at the time of trying to get Java out there and make it as ubiquitous as possible. It's much more than just this blog post - Sun was going to a lot of trouble to make people feel that they don't have to worry about these kinds of patent claims. I'm sure we don't yet know all the details of what went on behind the scenes between Google and Sun at the time when the Android concept was born.
I'm also not sure what other tricks Google has up their sleeve. But if they can successfully convey some of the feeling of that atmosphere to the court, it will certainly help their result.
Use British Headlinese. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3148
Indeed, that's what I used. And there's a precedent: This article reports that the following headline actually appeared in a newspaper:
TEACHER STRIKES IDLE KIDS
maybe its just me, but I had to read that headline about 4x to understand it.
Yeah, sorry about that. Slashdot now has a very tight limit on the number of characters in a title, so it's tough to get in the point of the post. You've really got to pack it in.
We need to come up with a good compressed format for Slashdot titles.
It's Agency, not Administration
Thanks.
But actually, it's Administration: The National Nuclear Security Administration. It turns out that the author of this AP story was a little confused.
You're right. The AP article looks like it's wrong.
I was amazed by that little item they let slip in the middle of the article. It was the whole reason I posted this story - but it turns out to be just confusion of a clueless reporter. Ah, well. Sorry.
This shows the value of issuing press releases.
The company's web site is a small self-consciously slick flash site. It contains only a few short press releases about this and several other technologies, each with similarly outlandish world-changing claims and supposedly already built and working.
According to Google Maps, the corporate address on the web site points to what appears to be a private home in a fancy neighborhood in Linz.