I'm sure there's tons of people salivating at the chance to jump all over this topic and say things like "classic government inefficiency at work." But the reality is that these kinds of projects happen every day in private sector companies. You only hear about them when they make the news. I've seen many companies throw out millions in sunk costs because they couldn't get an ERP system massaged enough to fit their business processes. Often, the companies realize too late that they're getting bled dry by outsourcing "partners" and getting nothing in return, then make the hard decision to just dump everything and try again.
For a somewhat terrifying read on how private sector incompetence took out a brokerage firm, have a look at this.
In the 18th century, the sexy model of the universe was a clockwork mechanism because that was the coolest tech available at the time. Move forward three centuries and suddenly the universe is a digital computer because that is the new trendy tech. Never mind that 50 years ago Feynman showed that the universe is not efficiently computable by a Turing machine...
It is, however, worth comparing a photovoltaic conversion of solar to grid power to a heat engine conversion of solar to grid power, particularly when the latter currently holds the world record for efficiency for that particular conversion.
"The SES installation in Maricopa, Phoenix was the largest Stirling Dish power installation in the world until it was sold to United Sun Systems. Subsequently, larger parts of the installation have been moved to China as part of the huge energy demand."
I have an easier idea—why not just get rid of first posts? Most of the trouble stems from those. The rule would be simple; if a news article has zero comments on it, no one is allowed to post until it has more.
Actually, that isn't a terrible idea (yes, I get your joke). A more serious implementation would have the comments be invisible for the first hour. People can post them, but only people with moderation points can see them and moderate them. Thus the initial set of visible comments starts off pre-moderated, and presumably sorted by their score. People can game the system -- by putting in high quality replies directed only at the article (or editor/author/summary -- this *is* Slashdot), which is not a bad thing at all.
Oddly enough, this reminds me of how the first trade happens on an IPO. The trading floor opens and then you watch for 15-45 minutes while the Big Boys thrash out the open price.
"Use?" replied Reepicheep. "Use, Captain? If by use you mean filling our bellies or our purses, I confess it will be no use at all. So far as I know we did not set sail to look for things useful, but seek honor and adventure. And here is as great an adventure as I ever heard of, and here, if we turn back, no little impeachment of all our honors."
It's estimated that Homo Sapiens has been on this planet for around 200K years. This graph shows temperatures for the last 3/4 of a million years. Notice that it was warmer 110K years ago than it is now? So this isn't even "unprecedented" during our time on this planet, let alone before our ancestors climbed down from the trees.
Love the way that graph has such thick lines you can barely read it... And judging by the hysterical captions, it looks like this is a "temperature rise always causes CO2 rise" meme. Those of us in the reality-based community understand that this historical sequence has a physical cause (Milankovich cycles) and don't take it as an absolute rule that prevents CO2 emissions from causing temperature rises...
Anyway, notice that yellow chunk at the far right? That is the development of agriculture. Notice how it is much lower than the 100Kya bump you are so proud of? Now imagine if we push global temperature (or Antarctic temperature, which is what your graph actually shows) up to that level. How well do you think our food supply is going to handle that?
Oh, but we can fix these problems with technology! Sure, that is working so well in Syria, where the underlying cause of the conflict is idiotic government responses to a long term drought. If we start shifting rainfall around by heating up the planet, do you think the responses will be any better in other locations? The Pentagon is betting not.
So yeah, the planet will survive and so might the species, but civilisation may not.
Alas the NY Times seems intent on making sure nobody reads the story and has put your link behind a login page too.
Why is everyone around here too cheap to pay journalists for the work they do? If what they do is so easy, why don't you do it for free in your spare time instead of stealing their livelihood? That is how labour markets work: competition, not adolescent rationalisations of theft (of their life force, not their "bits".)
Most of the area of these glaciers is less than 13,000 years old. On the level of erosion of mountains, not significant. The glacier cover is quite new on this scale of time.
Cite? Otherwise, I have no clue why this is modded +4 Insightful...
To make another and last analogy. There was a chess game between two masters.One of them used a cigar and walking etc as means of distracting his rival. There was an uproar but I think, not nice as it was, it was allowed. I would not accept that in my private game but they played for the glory and money and the trick was allowed so we have to agree with the result (and change rules if we did not like it).
The cigar smoker was Emanuel Lasker and there was an agreement before the match that Lasker would not smoke. About 10 moves in, he pulled out a cigar and laid it on the table. His opponent called over the referee and complained that Lasker had agree not to smoke, but the ref pointed out that he had not in fact lit the cigar. To which his opponent replied "But Lasker himself has often said that the threat is more important than the execution!"
I remember reading "Life's Bottleneck" by Issac Asimov. He calculates that if life expands and uses the elements in the entire crust of the earth, the phosphorus will be exhausted first, before carbon, nitrogen, or even trace elements like iodine and selenium. Phosphorus is life's bottleneck.
But there is a big difference between fertilizing with phosphorus and nitrogen. You only need to add phosphorus once, and then only enough annually to replace what is taken out with the crop, which is usually not much. It is a permanent addition to the soil. But the nitrogen is consumed and returned to the atmosphere as the plants grow and then decay. You need to replenish it every year, either with fertilizer or legumes.
Except that phosphorous doesn't stay in the soil - it becomes runoff. See here or here.
The problem with communism seems to be that it doesn't seem to scale well beyond the tribe/monastery/commune level. Once the population gets too large to allow for effective communal decision making, communal ownership tends to become de-facto ownership by the decision makers, massively exacerbating the problem of corruption.
What about the military? That's a pretty socialistic system...
Funny thing about clouds... they increase reflectivity. As the temperatures go up more water vapour goes up into the sky to form clouds, which reflect incoming light and heat and provide a cooling effect. i.e.: it's self-regulating.
This is Richard Linzen's "Iris" hypothesis. One of the few plausible bits of actual science from the so-called climate skeptics. Unfortunately, it seems not to work and was thoroughly refuted about ten years ago.
A good example of this approach is columnar databases (C-Store, MonetDB etc.). The performance gains over traditional implementations are generally cited as 200x (which is about what I see in the one we built.) The gains are largely from simply changing the data structures:
* Columnar decomposition (i.e. big honking memory mapped C-style arrays) reduces the amount of disk IO * Columnar representation allows you to trade disk IO for lightweight decompression in the CPU * Lightweight compression techniques make it easy to operate directly on the compressed data * Columnar representations also allow you to stop building tuples every time you compute a new attribute ("late tuple assembly") * Working on data blocks that fit in L1 allows you to fit the computation in the L1 instruction cache ("block iteration")
By contrast, a system like MySQL uses an interpreter to process rows one at a time by using this traditional "accessors" approach, and it is dog slow.
How much of drawing and painting is describing our surroundings? How much of science is not that same thing at a different level? Is there any overlap?
How much is music steeped in math? What is not steeped in math? Why would you not use music to appeal to someone's mathematical curiosity?
I, for one, am happy to have a little entertainment in my education.
Why does everyone in this thread think that Art is just entertainment? Art is supposed to challenge your ways of thinking.
Read a headline from the 1890's in the Tribune when they estimated the horse poop would be 6ft deep by 1920 in the streets. Of course then came the automobile. That's the problem with all these long term prediction models. Things change in ways they never can account for.
So instead of horse poop, you have the NYC subways filling with sea water due to CO2 pollution, which is caused in part by automobiles...
This wouldn't be the first attempt at METI. Alexander Zaitsev has sent a number of messages to various stars including Gliese 581 using his 70 meter RT-70 radiotescope located in Yevpatoria, Ukraine. He is the chief advocate for METI among professional astronomers and makes his case well I think.
I respectfully disagree. He seems frightfully naïve to me.
Why does he think that no other civilisation has considered being the first to break the silence? Does he think that he is that much smarter than them? And while it may be true that asteroid avoidance is a beacon, who is to say that another mechanism may not be developed soon, especially if radio silence is considered more valuable as a means of ensuring our survival than asteroid detection? We may have spent the last 100 years shouting out our existence to the cosmos, but we are rapidly getting to the point where high-powered, omnidirectional broadcast transmissions are neither necessary nor efficient.
So silence may soon be the norm, and I for one much prefer it to his starry-eyed faith in "reason" (which means nothing if the alien values are not compatible with our continued survival). He may feel lonely, but we still have much to learn from each other and our local environment to keep us busy before we need to risk encounters with another civilization.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure there's tons of people salivating at the chance to jump all over this topic and say things like "classic government inefficiency at work." But the reality is that these kinds of projects happen every day in private sector companies. You only hear about them when they make the news. I've seen many companies throw out millions in sunk costs because they couldn't get an ERP system massaged enough to fit their business processes. Often, the companies realize too late that they're getting bled dry by outsourcing "partners" and getting nothing in return, then make the hard decision to just dump everything and try again.
For a somewhat terrifying read on how private sector incompetence took out a brokerage firm, have a look at this.
In the 18th century, the sexy model of the universe was a clockwork mechanism because that was the coolest tech available at the time. Move forward three centuries and suddenly the universe is a digital computer because that is the new trendy tech. Never mind that 50 years ago Feynman showed that the universe is not efficiently computable by a Turing machine...
I wonder how many electrodes it will take to make them vote yes on a spending bill without riders.
I think you have to find some neural tissue first...
It is, however, worth comparing a photovoltaic conversion of solar to grid power to a heat engine conversion of solar to grid power, particularly when the latter currently holds the world record for efficiency for that particular conversion.
"The SES installation in Maricopa, Phoenix was the largest Stirling Dish power installation in the world until it was sold to United Sun Systems. Subsequently, larger parts of the installation have been moved to China as part of the huge energy demand."
Well, I'm glad somebody is paying attention...
In the future, the NSA will have to be given a back door to your hair.
Thank you so much for making goatse on topic...
So you're saying it would have cost them $3.5e390 to figure out the result of 1 addition in 1 day?
Still Kurzweil ;)
FTFY...
I have an easier idea—why not just get rid of first posts? Most of the trouble stems from those. The rule would be simple; if a news article has zero comments on it, no one is allowed to post until it has more.
Actually, that isn't a terrible idea (yes, I get your joke). A more serious implementation would have the comments be invisible for the first hour. People can post them, but only people with moderation points can see them and moderate them. Thus the initial set of visible comments starts off pre-moderated, and presumably sorted by their score. People can game the system -- by putting in high quality replies directed only at the article (or editor/author/summary -- this *is* Slashdot), which is not a bad thing at all.
Oddly enough, this reminds me of how the first trade happens on an IPO. The trading floor opens and then you watch for 15-45 minutes while the Big Boys thrash out the open price.
"Use?" replied Reepicheep. "Use, Captain? If by use you mean filling our bellies or our purses, I confess it will be no use at all. So far as I know we did not set sail to look for things useful, but seek honor and adventure. And here is as great an adventure as I ever heard of, and here, if we turn back, no little impeachment of all our honors."
-- C.S.Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
The whole, "our understanding is a dim view of a more perfect geometry" thing gave me a very Neal Stephenson Anathem shiver.
That is the only book of his that I have read more than once. By far his best!
It's estimated that Homo Sapiens has been on this planet for around 200K years. This graph shows temperatures for the last 3/4 of a million years. Notice that it was warmer 110K years ago than it is now? So this isn't even "unprecedented" during our time on this planet, let alone before our ancestors climbed down from the trees.
Love the way that graph has such thick lines you can barely read it... And judging by the hysterical captions, it looks like this is a "temperature rise always causes CO2 rise" meme. Those of us in the reality-based community understand that this historical sequence has a physical cause (Milankovich cycles) and don't take it as an absolute rule that prevents CO2 emissions from causing temperature rises...
Anyway, notice that yellow chunk at the far right? That is the development of agriculture. Notice how it is much lower than the 100Kya bump you are so proud of? Now imagine if we push global temperature (or Antarctic temperature, which is what your graph actually shows) up to that level. How well do you think our food supply is going to handle that?
Oh, but we can fix these problems with technology! Sure, that is working so well in Syria, where the underlying cause of the conflict is idiotic government responses to a long term drought. If we start shifting rainfall around by heating up the planet, do you think the responses will be any better in other locations? The Pentagon is betting not.
So yeah, the planet will survive and so might the species, but civilisation may not.
Do denialists count as pests?
Alas the NY Times seems intent on making sure nobody reads the story and has put your link behind a login page too.
Why is everyone around here too cheap to pay journalists for the work they do? If what they do is so easy, why don't you do it for free in your spare time instead of stealing their livelihood? That is how labour markets work: competition, not adolescent rationalisations of theft (of their life force, not their "bits".)
Most of the area of these glaciers is less than 13,000 years old. On the level of erosion of mountains, not significant. The glacier cover is quite new on this scale of time.
Cite? Otherwise, I have no clue why this is modded +4 Insightful...
To make another and last analogy. There was a chess game between two masters.One of them used a cigar and walking etc as means of distracting his rival. There was an uproar but I think, not nice as it was, it was allowed. I would not accept that in my private game but they played for the glory and money and the trick was allowed so we have to agree with the result (and change rules if we did not like it).
The cigar smoker was Emanuel Lasker and there was an agreement before the match that Lasker would not smoke. About 10 moves in, he pulled out a cigar and laid it on the table. His opponent called over the referee and complained that Lasker had agree not to smoke, but the ref pointed out that he had not in fact lit the cigar. To which his opponent replied "But Lasker himself has often said that the threat is more important than the execution!"
I remember reading "Life's Bottleneck" by Issac Asimov. He calculates that if life expands and uses the elements in the entire crust of the earth, the phosphorus will be exhausted first, before carbon, nitrogen, or even trace elements like iodine and selenium. Phosphorus is life's bottleneck.
But there is a big difference between fertilizing with phosphorus and nitrogen. You only need to add phosphorus once, and then only enough annually to replace what is taken out with the crop, which is usually not much. It is a permanent addition to the soil. But the nitrogen is consumed and returned to the atmosphere as the plants grow and then decay. You need to replenish it every year, either with fertilizer or legumes.
Except that phosphorous doesn't stay in the soil - it becomes runoff. See here or here.
My mechanic never charges me extra hours, but damned if I don't need to have my flasher fluid changed every time I go there...
Please don't ever use the phrase "flasher fluid" around anyone who lived through the 1970s...
The climate is warming up over the entire earth.
No, it's not. We have not seen any warming for 15 years. Even the IPCC admits to this now that the evidence is overwhelming.
Cite?
And for the countercite, welcome to the escalator!
The problem with communism seems to be that it doesn't seem to scale well beyond the tribe/monastery/commune level. Once the population gets too large to allow for effective communal decision making, communal ownership tends to become de-facto ownership by the decision makers, massively exacerbating the problem of corruption.
What about the military? That's a pretty socialistic system...
Funny thing about clouds... they increase reflectivity. As the temperatures go up more water vapour goes up into the sky to form clouds, which reflect incoming light and heat and provide a cooling effect. i.e.: it's self-regulating.
This is Richard Linzen's "Iris" hypothesis. One of the few plausible bits of actual science from the so-called climate skeptics. Unfortunately, it seems not to work and was thoroughly refuted about ten years ago.
A good example of this approach is columnar databases (C-Store, MonetDB etc.). The performance gains over traditional implementations are generally cited as 200x (which is about what I see in the one we built.) The gains are largely from simply changing the data structures:
* Columnar decomposition (i.e. big honking memory mapped C-style arrays) reduces the amount of disk IO
* Columnar representation allows you to trade disk IO for lightweight decompression in the CPU
* Lightweight compression techniques make it easy to operate directly on the compressed data
* Columnar representations also allow you to stop building tuples every time you compute a new attribute ("late tuple assembly")
* Working on data blocks that fit in L1 allows you to fit the computation in the L1 instruction cache ("block iteration")
By contrast, a system like MySQL uses an interpreter to process rows one at a time by using this traditional "accessors" approach, and it is dog slow.
The cures for pandemics have never been a product of corporate research... They are always the product of government funded or subsidized research.
... and who do you think the government is funding or subsidizing? Oh! That's right, the corporate research facilities.
Not in Europe or other civilised places. In civilised countries, public health is studied by public research institutions at public universities.
Yeah. this all sounds like what we went through one week in my Functional Analysis class back in Grad School circa 1988. Anyone know what is new?
Carnival. Inspire young people.
How much of drawing and painting is describing our surroundings? How much of science is not that same thing at a different level? Is there any overlap?
How much is music steeped in math? What is not steeped in math? Why would you not use music to appeal to someone's mathematical curiosity?
I, for one, am happy to have a little entertainment in my education.
Why does everyone in this thread think that Art is just entertainment? Art is supposed to challenge your ways of thinking.
Read a headline from the 1890's in the Tribune when they estimated the horse poop would be 6ft deep by 1920 in the streets. Of course then came the automobile. That's the problem with all these long term prediction models. Things change in ways they never can account for.
So instead of horse poop, you have the NYC subways filling with sea water due to CO2 pollution, which is caused in part by automobiles...
This wouldn't be the first attempt at METI. Alexander Zaitsev has sent a number of messages to various stars including Gliese 581 using his 70 meter RT-70 radiotescope located in Yevpatoria, Ukraine. He is the chief advocate for METI among professional astronomers and makes his case well I think.
I respectfully disagree. He seems frightfully naïve to me.
Why does he think that no other civilisation has considered being the first to break the silence? Does he think that he is that much smarter than them? And while it may be true that asteroid avoidance is a beacon, who is to say that another mechanism may not be developed soon, especially if radio silence is considered more valuable as a means of ensuring our survival than asteroid detection? We may have spent the last 100 years shouting out our existence to the cosmos, but we are rapidly getting to the point where high-powered, omnidirectional broadcast transmissions are neither necessary nor efficient.
So silence may soon be the norm, and I for one much prefer it to his starry-eyed faith in "reason" (which means nothing if the alien values are not compatible with our continued survival). He may feel lonely, but we still have much to learn from each other and our local environment to keep us busy before we need to risk encounters with another civilization.