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User: 140Mandak262Jamuna

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  1. Re:Great. Low-quality evolutionary "solutions" on Silicon Brains That Think As Fast As a Fly Can Smell · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Solutions that evolution produces (whether real or simulated) typically suck, ...

    Evolutionary solutions do not suck at all. In fact they are often brilliant and most optimized solution with lots and lots resilience. The digital camera sensors still do not have the dynamic range of mammalian eye. Robot touch sensors still don't have the dynamic range of our finger tips. We still can't mimic a geckos adaptive suction pads to create a vehicle that runs up in vertical walls. Heck, that little suction holder for my GPS keeps falling down.

    What sucks is the evolutionary process that is prodigal in its use of resources and time. On the large mammal end (elephants, gorillas, humans, whales) a typical female produces about 10 off spring (without assistance/interference from humans and modern tech). On the insect level, they produce hundreds of off spring, most of them die, a few survive for the next generation. Evolution, if we were to anthropomorphize it, would not flinch at producing 10 to 100 times more output than needed, picking 10% or 1% of the output and discarding the rest. Trees produce billions of pollen grains and their success rate, measured by how many of them end up as mature trees of the next generation is measured in parts per trillion. What if it takes 10 million generations to find the optimal solution? Well, so be it. Mother Evolution would say. What if entire species specialize too much and lose their ability to adapt for changing environment? Mother Evolution does not care, there are other species willing to fill their niche, should they go extinct.

  2. Re:Hoo boy, scientific racism again. on 20% of Neanderthal Genome Survives In Humans · · Score: 1
    Imagine what an IQ test would look like if it was designed by Kalahari Bushman Academy of Survival.

    Q: In a overcast afternoon, as you are returning back to the camp with some tubers and eggs you have gathered, you suddenly come face to face with a hyena. What would you do?

    A: Turn around and run.

    B. Throw the tubers and eggs at the hyena to scare it away.

    C. Find a bark or a stick and hold above your head to appear taller than the hyena.

    D. Charge and attack the hyena to scare it away.

    Wondering how many of the American IQ whizzes who ace spelling bees and SATs would ace that kind of a test.

  3. Re:Hoo boy, scientific racism again. on 20% of Neanderthal Genome Survives In Humans · · Score: 3, Interesting

    But IQ tests are the best measure of predicting how well one would do in IQ tests.

  4. We know what next generation robot looks like. on The Changing Face of Robotics · · Score: 1
  5. It ain't nothin. on The Changing Face of Robotics · · Score: 1

    What the hell? Two arms and multiple functions? You call that a robot? Can a 10 year old whizz kid deep into pod race subculture build it in his bedroom from kits? Can it play co-pilot to a X-wing space fighter? No? Then it ain't no robot.

  6. Re:What a bunch of baloney! Sample bias buddy. on The "Triple Package" Explains Why Some Cultural Groups Are More Successful · · Score: 1

    Because the population under study is not "Indians" it is "Indians who have emigrated to the US". What makes them more successful than other ethnic groups in the US?

    Even under this interpretation, the immigration policies are the root cause not any triple package. America shares open border with Mexico. The undocumeneted immigrants from there are drawn from bottom of the wealth/education scale. Legal immigration policy is very very pro European and they have visa allocated to these western European nations that go abegging. All those visas are for any one who want to go to usa. People who would be successful here are already successful there, so they are not uprooting their family and move. So the immigrants of these ethnicities are drawn from the lower end of economic and education scale.

    On the other hand immigrants from India/China are exclusively drawn from H1B work visa / F1 student visa transitioning to green card. They are always drawn from the top of education scale. Instead of crediting the immigration policy for letting in people who are likely to succeed, they have are trying to shoehorn a vague theory. Occam's Razor, man. Simple explanation is the visa policy not the triple package.

  7. Re:What a bunch of baloney! Sample bias buddy. on The "Triple Package" Explains Why Some Cultural Groups Are More Successful · · Score: 1

    >

    For what it's worth, I agree with them. Without the belief that you can succeed, you will not. Without the belief that you have to succeed (because otherwise bad things happen to you), there's a high chance you'll fall into the category of unrealized potential. And finally, impulse control has now repeatedly been shown to be one of, if not the primary indicator of adult success.

    I don't disagree with this statement. But why do you assume these qualities are related to their ethnicity?

  8. Re:What a bunch of baloney! Sample bias buddy. on The "Triple Package" Explains Why Some Cultural Groups Are More Successful · · Score: 1

    Add anecdotal evidence to sample bias. That school district has well performing poor Chinese. There will be other districts with well performing poor white/black/brown children in other parts of America.

  9. What a bunch of baloney! Sample bias buddy. on The "Triple Package" Explains Why Some Cultural Groups Are More Successful · · Score: 5, Insightful
    It is sample bias, and that is all it is. People with education (and/or welath), a drive to better themselves, willing to chuck everything in one land to seek fortune halfway across the world. That is the sample you are looking at in America. Not a truly representative sample of India, or Nigeria or Chinese.

    I am a very successful (by most metrics. education, job security, networth, income, family, status/respect among the peers) Indian American. Any statistics about Indian Americans suffers from terrible sample bias. Almost all the Indian immigrants to USA fall into exactly two categories. 1. Highly educated (post grad + in India from top Indian universities, IITs, IIMs, IISc, AIIMSs, NITs, RECs, etc). 2. Emigres from Gujrat business communities. Both groups would be very successful wherever they go, not because of any of this triple package.

    The Gujarati business community is world wide and they thrive in every corner of the world. A huge percentage of grocery stores, motels, retail stores and pawn shops in Africa, Caribbean and Pacific islands are owned by them, and they are making big inroads into USA, UK, Canada, New Zeland, Australia etc as their immigration polices are getting relaxed .

    The educated Indians were bottled up in India, when it was pursuing socialistic policies. A small trickle of engineers and doctors from India in 1960s became a veritable torrent during 1990s. Stated with F1 student visa, and then H1B work visas. They are all college educated.

    The achievements of Indian children in academics in the USA is not very much out place compared to the Whites, Jews, the African Americans or Chinese, if you draw a sample with same level of education/wealth from these communities.

    This triple package theory does not explain why, despite being endowed with the triple package in the dyed in wool pristine form, India and Nigeria are so corrupt and so mired in poverty.

  10. Re:mm.. Thats what happened. on How Google Broke Itself and Fixed Itself, Automatically · · Score: 1

    It was very lame anyway. Regret posting it.

  11. mm.. Thats what happened. on How Google Broke Itself and Fixed Itself, Automatically · · Score: 0

    Yesterday at around 2 or 3 pm EST we had trouble sending out email, our company uses gmail and google apps extensively. I chucked it up the usual ineptitude of our in house IT and did not even bother filing a report. I know people high up the food chain are affected and they don't file bug reports. The call the guy and go, " `FirstName(GetFullName(head_of_IT))`, would you please take of it?". They teach the correct tone and inflection to use in the word please in MBA schools. Even Duke of Someplaceorothershire asking his game warden to retrieve the pheasant he had just shot would not be so perfect in the usage of please . Well, looks like Google realized and fixed it before our IT realized that email traffic has fallen of precipitously. Good.

  12. Re:Good for them. on Microsoft Reports Record Revenue · · Score: 1

    Or perhaps you are referring to Obama's QE-Infinity where they simply print $80B per month (devaluing every $ you have in your pocket) until well-- forever?

    Imagine government printing tons of money and burying it various places and asking the private sector to dig for it and deposit whatever money they find in their bank account. You would think this is the most asinine stupid idiotic moronic thing to do, right? And you would probably thing gold is the real money and all this paper money printed by the government is not worth anymore than toilet tissue.

    But people spend enormous resources to find gold buried in the earth and promptly rebury it in various bank vaults and safes, not any different from finding money buried by the government and depositing them back in the bank accounts.

    Anyway about 50% of Americans have a net worth of zero. They don't have any money to be devalued. The next 40% have small amounts, and their net worth is basically the equity they have in their homes. That is not getting devalued by currency. It would get inflated. It is only the top 10% that have any wealth invested in stocks, bonds and cash, denominated in currency. And about half the wealth in the nation is in the hands of just 1% of the population. That money has to be recirculated somehow into the economy, otherwise the growth stagnates and the economy becomes moribund. Dont trot out the rot about job creators. The world is awash in capital. About 2 trillions in public corporations in USA alone, and another 1 trillion in private equity in USA alone. We have capital, labor, carting and rent seekers. What is missing is demand. Demand comes only when money is recirculated back into the economy. The usual choices are: tax it out of them or persuade them go on a ego-trip by donating to charity.

    When it is politically incorrect to tax it, and they are greedy enough to hoard it, we have only one way of taking it out of their hands and putting it back into the economy. Print money, devalue their holdings and put the money into circulation. That is what Obama is doing. It affects very rich people a lot, and moderately rich people like me a little. There is 80% chance it does not affect you at all, and 19% chance it affects you only moderately.

    You will never acknowledge it even if you realize it is true, but Obama is actually dragging you kicking and screaming to a better America.

  13. Good for them. on Microsoft Reports Record Revenue · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Hope they don't announce big profit now and come back a few months later with a big charge for something else. Sort of like Bush would not include war costs in regular budget and always ask for emergency appropriations for a war that had been going on for years.

  14. Re:Thought: different engine on Will Electric Cars and Solar Power Make Gasoline and Utilities Obsolete? · · Score: 1

    Yup, that is why you would never connect a road/rail vehicle wheels directly to a gas turbine. Must convert the shaft power to electricity and then apply it to the wheels. Like they do in diesel electric locomotives. Ask yourself why there are no gas-turbine-electric locomotives?

  15. Re:Sorry, but flywheel: meet tesla gadget on Will Electric Cars and Solar Power Make Gasoline and Utilities Obsolete? · · Score: 1
    Flywheels energy storage scales quadratically with RPM. Same mass, twice the rotational speed gets you four times the energy storage. Chemical batteries energy storage scales linearly with mass. More chemical for more storage. Capacitor storage scales as the area of surfaces holding charge. You can fold and pack the surfaces and probably make it scale better than linear, but it is not simple to achieve quadratic scaling. Dielectrics to sustain large potential differences over very short compactly packed distances without breaking down are difficult to use. Either they are exotic and expensive, or they have no strength (air) to keep the surfaces apart, or they are massive.

    For fixed energy storage at very large scale, it is basically solar thermal with molten salt stored in underground tanks seems most viable.

    For home use scale, using underground chambers with concrete covers for containment, flywheels would work very nicely. Already there are prototypes storing some three days worth of electricity. Mass production and deployment can get store two weeks use of electricity of a typical home in reasonable prices. No technical breakthrough needed, just breakthroughs in funding, payment, economics breakthrough needed for this. Most likely to happen in remote rural areas, data centers needing UPS, remote science outposts etc and gradually come down to home use.

    For transportation, it is difficult for me to say whether flywheels would work or not. But the industry seems to think flywheels do have a transportation application. UT Austin is working on flywheels in commuter trains, private companies use it automobiles and buses.

  16. Re:Mechanical batteries have some potential. on Will Electric Cars and Solar Power Make Gasoline and Utilities Obsolete? · · Score: 1

    Not impossible to overcome the safety issues. I hope these flywheel batteries really take off. This company is limiting the rotor speed to 45000 RPM possibly to make it safer. The energy capacity scales as the square of the rotational speed. E = 0.5 * I * (omega)^2. So doubling the RPM would quadruple the energy content. It has enormous potential.

  17. Re:Free market means exactly that ! on Network Solutions Opts Customer Into $1,850 Security Service · · Score: 1

    That makes sense. Glad to have bumped into a 34 level master.

  18. Mechanical batteries have some potential. on Will Electric Cars and Solar Power Make Gasoline and Utilities Obsolete? · · Score: 4, Informative

    Flywheels suspended in magnetic bearings spinning in vacuum have great duty cycle, fast charge/discharge times and very good efficiency. They interface beautifully with a motor/generator for charging and discharging. No chemicals or strange materials. Their main disadvantage is the angular momentum makes putting it in a car a little difficult. They can pack batteries in twin-packs with opposite spin to cancel the angular momentum. But greater danger is accidents. The containment is very poor. The heavy flywheel spinning at some 400,000 rpm delicately balanced in magnetic bearings would literally, yes literally not figuratively, explode in an accident. But for home use, you can bury it underground below some six inches of concrete. This can act as a super large capacitor to store the solar energy of night use and for cloudy days. UT Austin demonstrated a 50 Kwh storage unit.

  19. Re:Thought: different engine on Will Electric Cars and Solar Power Make Gasoline and Utilities Obsolete? · · Score: 2
    You definitely need a decent battery acting as a capacitor in the loop. Have you heard of turbo lag? Cars with turbo supercharging act with a lag when you press the pedal. And you will get the lag in both directions, i.e. you let off the gas, and the turbine will take considerable time to realize the fact and spin down!

    But small portable gas turbines are not likely to be more efficient than diesels. Case in point, small boats and ships still use diesels, not gas turbines. If gas turbines were efficient they would have adopted it long ago. Not even locomotives use gas turbines. Why? The significant improvement in efficiency of fixed gas turbines in your local utility's power plant comes by using very large and heavy heat exchangers and waste heat recovery systems. Even your utility uses steam turbines for base load and use gas turbines only for peak load. It clearly shows when it comes to efficiency gas turbines lose to diesels in portable applications and to steam turbines in fixed applications. They win only in aircraft applications because they are very light. Light enough to be airborne. I think you would see a diesel based hybrid before you see gas turbine based hybrid.

  20. Netflix model of gar car rentals needed. on Will Electric Cars and Solar Power Make Gasoline and Utilities Obsolete? · · Score: 1
    For most Americans, the automobile is the second most expensive thing they buy, next only to homes. And for such a large investment, it sits idle 95% of the time. (15000 miles average use per year, 50 mph average speed, 300 hours per year or 3.42% use time, 96.5% idle time). If a viable model emerges to let people get fractional ownership of cars it would be great. Zip cars are just the starting point. Zip car lots do not let you park your electric vehicle there and pick up a gas vehicle.

    The car rental companies should be jumping at the chance of getting a decent subscription based revenue model. Main problem with electric cars is, occasionally you need a gas car with greater range. If the car rental companies sell a subscription model [*] more people would buy electric cars. The electric car makers and dealers might give you one or two years free subscription to entice buyers. People who have decent public transport but still are forced to keep a car around also might find this subscription model appealing.

    [*] My idea of a subcription model: something like 50$ a month gets you two days and 200 miles, unused miles and days will accrue in your account, once you reach the maximum accrual subscribers pay a small annual fee to keep the account current, car rentals will provide electric car recharging stations, use a web app to schedule pick up of gas cars

  21. Re:Free market means exactly that ! on Network Solutions Opts Customer Into $1,850 Security Service · · Score: 1

    He has 34 achievments. So I am kind of surprised (s)he is not aware of domain name ownership and portability rights.

  22. Walmart tried it too. May be even google on T-Mobile Jumping Into the Check-Cashing Industry · · Score: 1
    For some reason even such big boys do not break into the strangle hold the credit card industry has on US Economy. The tales of misery emanating from them is very long.

    1. They make it so easy to steal identities. A name and a matching social security number is all they ask, extend credit and are willing to eat their financial losses of identity theft. But the people whose identities are stolen have a long and arduous task of cleaning up their credit history. They make so difficult to freeze and lock my credit report to prevent identity theft by huge lobbying effort.

    2. Merchants accepting point-of-sale pin protected ATM cards usually pay a very nominal 10 cent or 25 cents per transaction. The visa and mastercard monsters have muscled in, forced banks to tread debit cards (no risk of default to the credit cards) and credit cards (unsecured loans to card holders, significant risk of default) the same. Now merchants are forced to pay 1% to 2% of transaction as "fees".

    3. The late fees, revolving charges, usury level interest rates ... Even medieval highway robbers and usurers did not have it so good for them.

    4. The check cashing industry is also very active politically and stop any effort to clean up their act.

    At some point some one will bribe/lobby somewhere and bring such check-cashing under the purview of banking regulations and demand T-mobile to be regulated as a bank if they offer these services and kill the project.

    I just wish we could live in a democracy where our legislators look out for the interest of the common man and the future of the Republic.

  23. Re:Don't want a legitimate account on Microsoft Researchers Slash Skype Fraud By 68% · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Pretty soon people will correlate creditworthiness etc to the distribution of known friends and their credit scores.That algo will mark you as loner, possibly a loser.

  24. Re:Go after the buyers of dolphin meat. on 200 Dolphins Await Slaughter In Japan's Taiji Cove · · Score: 1

    They separating beautiful specimens for sale. Wasn't that commercial?

  25. Go after the buyers of dolphin meat. on 200 Dolphins Await Slaughter In Japan's Taiji Cove · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The Japanese consider dolphin meat to be a delicacy and serve it in their high priced restaurants. See if any of those restaurants are used to cater/host sales conferences or other such bashes of Japanese brand names. Then just publicize the info. Headlines like "Tonda Corp or Hoyota Motors hosts its sales kick off conference with dolphin meat serving restaurant" in US Market will have some salutary effect. If big name players stop supporting restaurants serving marine mammal meat the market will be greatly diminished. Hopefully.