Are the investors, themselves, "All In"? Do they put all their money for a fund plus their own house in one investment? Obviously not, they know that most startups fail.
Making the entrepreneur "more motivated" such that his life is nearly permanently ruined by a highly probable failure and unable to try again ever (if you are a normal person who now owes a judgement for $350,000 with no collateral and you haven't had a steady job for years and are likely to continue to be unemployed for at least a year, your life sucks and you will be divorced upon) does not not improve the odds of the outcome. More effort frequently does not translate into more success past a certain point. There is a large contribution of luck which cannot be managed or innovated around.
Do investors want to select for delusional entrepreneurs without a sense of the realities of the world?
it's possible the OP is experiencing a correct immune reaction, including emission of cytokines, but without an actual widespread infection of replicating influenza. Could "feel sick" but not be actually infected.
The actual economic issue is the consequences of balance of spending by public and private sectors which,as it allocates resources and may cause inflation, is significant---but it is not the same problem as households with a checkbook.
Bolshevik Russia defaulted, by choice, on every one of its Tsarist bonds.
"At his position Linus does not have to put with childish behavior from his staff"
a) it wasn't his staff, it was somebody from Redhat. And even if it were.... b) Linus was the only childish one getting all pantytied and emotional.
Did you read the rest of the thread? And how the other people responded?
It seems to be a complicated issue. The other people acknowledged the bug but showed it in context of some rather difficult hardware & driver issues across multiple areas.
It's just a kernel patch, nothing to be actually "angry" about. Why so emotional? And especially when it's somebody who is not an employee.
Just say, "It is our firm policy that we do not break XXX, even when any given developer wishes they could. If you wish to continue contributing, you must follow the policy. Please apply the fix ASAP and acknowledge your understanding of these conditions."
"Name these languages that offer more performance AND safety than C++"
Yes, Fortran. Fortran 2003/2008 is a very good conventional straight-forward programming language, except for I/O. It has a better memory and execution model for high-performance computing.
And of course it doesn't omit obvious things like FUCKING MULTIDIMENSIONAL ARRAYS for real, in the language, and interoperable everywhere. And they can start at 1 or 0.
And a pointer is not the same as an allocatable array/structure.
Patents have a section for the description and setting. This is quoting the description. Patents do not cover everything that's in the description.
Only Claims are what have legal force, and they always are written as long conditionals from broad to narrow. Claims can be limited by the PTO to apply to situations which are a AND b AND c AND d etc.
You have a very caustic liquid at hundreds of degrees which is infused with very large amounts of high level radioactive waste. Fission daughter products which in a regular reactor are solid and encased in zirconium steel and treated with utmost care are now free floating in something very hot, flowing and caustic. What if if there's an accident and it rains. Or a flood. The fission products are very water soluble.
Every power plant also has to be a very nasty chemical separation and reprocessing plant. Consider the contamination just in "normal" operation. And consider the people running them.
What happens if it cools off and solidifies? You've frozen radioactive waste in the pipes a multi-billion dollar plant, and you can't go in there for decades.
There aren't some failure modes of existing reactors, but there are other failure modes and problems.
It might be a good idea to have one or two, very highly regulated and operated with the utmost skill (i.e. not for profit) used to burn up actinides wastes from other reactors.
"It is no conspiracy that the bureaucrats controlling NASA do not want any real sience or progress for humanity. They just want pork for their corporations (IBM, Exxon, etc)."
This is true, if you recognize that the "bureaucrats" fitting this description are known as Congressmen.
If you're talking about people inside NASA administration, they actually do want science and progress. The institutional process is very difficult however, and there are laws and meddling which don't apply to a private corporation.
If we want to get serious about global warming, we have to make mining and burning coal a capital offense, and shut down every mine and plant with the urgency of eliminating the slave trade.
Instead, even eco-minded Germany is ramping up coal production and consumption because they started shutting down their reactors. There is a *new* 2200 MW coal burning plant in Germany. They foolishly believe that the competition is between nuclear and wind, and prefer wind (I do, but it's not remotely enough), and find that when actual joules have to be counted to keep the lights going, the coal gets burned.
Please uprate previous comment. It is not a troll. The NIF project is funded primarily by the NNSA, the part of the Department of Energy which deals with the science & engineering of nuclear weapons. The DoE does not dispute this, it just likes to de-emphasize the reality of the primacy of the weapons effort.
The design of the experiment and system matches the thermonuclear secondaries for weapons. Contrary to some people's belief, the nuclear physics is not difficult---it is the fluid mechanics and radiation transfer in extreme conditions which is the scientifically difficult part. (Radiation-driven secondaries are much much more difficult than fission primaries).
The primary purpose of the NIF is to gain experimental data to calibrate the simulation codes for nuclear weapons engineering & reliability in the absence of nuclear weapons testing.
There is a small energy related research project, but it is very very very far from practicality. There is little attention to actual engineering issues, compared to say ITER (magnetic confinement fusion) project, which is pretty heavily focused on engineering practicalities. Lasers are horribly inefficient energy transfer if you care about power breakeven but much better for making clean data for weapons code calibration. Most of the funded experimental runs will be for weapons, not energy research.
In any case, neither inertial confinement nor magnetic confinement fusion will be used as a power source with customers for at least 60-100 years.
We already know how to make nuclear reactors---and if we are not funding and churning out high-quality modular fission reactors now, it's foolish to think about fusion.
"One has to wonder why these machines don't have some form of self-destruct mechanism built in for situations where they are legitimately shot down or otherwise captured."
A sufficiently energetic self-destruct could be dangerous for the air crews which regularly have to service, launch and retrieve them. This can malfunction as well. To be safe, you need an affirmative self-destruct which works only when given a signal from the legitimate ground station and the drone is in a mission state. But losing communication is precisely the scenario when a self-destruct would be needed. A "self-destruct if I can't figure out what's up" could be quite dangerous to the legitimate users day in and day out.
And it's expense and weight that can't be devoted to payload.
Otherwise, crashing from sufficient altitude is usually sufficient.
Correct. The US officials rarely actually lie. They do misdirect when necessary. Note the response in this case:
Iran: We have a U.S. drone U.S: The *U.S. Navy* (which is known to fly drones nearby) is not missing any drones.
Well, what about CIA, NRO, or NGIA? They don't say anything.
And besides, even CIA could reply "We're not missing any of our drones." And could be entirely true. And that's because a private subcontractor owns and runs them for CIA.
Somewhat true. Why did Fujifilm survive? Because they correctly saw themselves as an industrial coatings company, and not a photography company. Kodak also had great experience in *optics* (they may have made optics for some generations of surveillance satellites, very high-tech and expensive)---optics are necessary for photography but it isn't the same area exactly.
They had great expertise in two critical industrial areas, but the managers were apparently stuck on consumer photography, and did not appreciate how inexpert they were in semiconductors and consumer electronics.
Exactly, moreover there isn't any "optimal" solution.
This is an applied science & engineering problem. People will solve it by developing self-learning algorithms but based on methods, assumptions and data which are customized to the specific installation. Actual experience doing this for many years for paying customers is important. Methods need to be robust to changing assumptions and changing uses.
I work in machine learning and applications for business (not elevators). The real metric which counts is the very low-bitrate "phone call metric" --- how often do you get phone calls from unhappy clients.
"Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement." -- Mark Twain
If "success" means "no content copied", then of course nothing will work. That's an impossible goal.
What success actually means *economically* is "increase revenues, or prevent revenue loss, more than the cost of implementation." If you make it difficult enough for somebody who has the potential means and motivation to buy to avoid buying then it could be deemed a success. A teenager with nothing to lose (and no money) might not care about being busted for torrenting copyrighted content---but a family man with a mortgage, job and credit rating might care.
Electronic tags on handbags don't prevent 100% of shoplifting, and yet they're deployed fairly widely.
This is almost certainly what is happening. It is impossible for humans to rate any significant fraction of searches/websites to be quantitatively useful for Google's search volume.
In machine learning, the name is "tags", a.k.a. ground truth for a supervised prediction/ranking model. Google gets zillions of weak, noisy, tag proxies in the sense of being able to measure when a user clicks on a link and then within a minute clicks on another link on the same search page, potentially indicating that the first link was undesirable.
These are the relatively expensive but highest quality "ground-truth" tags from which Google can calibrate the value and interpretation of the weak automatic tags and the algorithms themselves.
The final machine learning algorithms may be as simple as linear regression---performed on some rather complex features. These ground truth tags are used to calibrate and weight the importance of various features in making a final ranking.
Instead, he proposed to buy a bike using a certain amount of pure gold, and he took a little golden color piece of something out of his pocket which he imagined somehow would be "proof" of its proper chemical composition.
The people who trade gold for regular money have the ability to do something like this. The anti-fiat-currency nut didn't go to this type of person. Why not?
The bike-store owner has some good reason to suspect either a scam or mental illness. These kinds of people are not good customers.
"The majority of neural network research is about developing new and/or improved algorithms to solve problems, not to say anything about how the human brain works."
This isn't true---or the connotation of it isn't true. I don't know how to quantify "majority", but there is substantial interest in computational modeling of actual biology across all levels of biological/chemistry fidelity and attention to engineering and statistical problems.
A glance at the work in the journal _Neural Computation_ shows papers both on entirely theoretical statistical computational models and models much more closely tied to experimental neuroscience results.
Many people want to do both: derive useful methods for solving engineering problems and understand biological systems which have shown such abilities. The field is very difficult and deep.
Slashdot Mirror
Are the investors, themselves, "All In"? Do they put all their money for a fund plus their own house in one investment? Obviously not, they know that most startups fail.
Making the entrepreneur "more motivated" such that his life is nearly permanently ruined by a highly probable failure and unable to try again ever (if you are a normal person who now owes a judgement for $350,000 with no collateral and you haven't had a steady job for years and are likely to continue to be unemployed for at least a year, your life sucks and you will be divorced upon) does not not improve the odds of the outcome. More effort frequently does not translate into more success past a certain point. There is a large contribution of luck which cannot be managed or innovated around.
Do investors want to select for delusional entrepreneurs without a sense of the realities of the world?
it's possible the OP is experiencing a correct immune reaction, including emission of cytokines, but without an actual widespread infection of replicating influenza. Could "feel sick" but not be actually infected.
Exactly. The reason the Senate isn't like that is because you can't gerrymander states's borders every 10 years.
"All of us balance our own checkbook at the end of every single month, and try our best to live within our means.
Why can't America?"
Because the government is not like a household.
http://www.loansafe.org/comparing-government-to-household-is-fallacy
The actual economic issue is the consequences of balance of spending by public and private sectors which,as it allocates resources and may cause inflation, is significant---but it is not the same problem as households with a checkbook.
Bolshevik Russia defaulted, by choice, on every one of its Tsarist bonds.
"At his position Linus does not have to put with childish behavior from his staff"
a) it wasn't his staff, it was somebody from Redhat. And even if it were....
b) Linus was the only childish one getting all pantytied and emotional.
Did you read the rest of the thread? And how the other people responded?
It seems to be a complicated issue. The other people acknowledged the bug but showed it in context of some rather difficult hardware & driver issues across multiple areas.
It's just a kernel patch, nothing to be actually "angry" about. Why so emotional? And especially when it's somebody who is not an employee.
Just say, "It is our firm policy that we do not break XXX, even when any given developer wishes they could. If you wish to continue contributing, you must follow the policy. Please apply the fix ASAP and acknowledge your understanding of these conditions."
Peace will come when Stallman loves open source coders more than he hates capitalists.
"Name these languages that offer more performance AND safety than C++"
Yes, Fortran. Fortran 2003/2008 is a very good conventional straight-forward programming language, except for I/O. It has a better memory and execution model for high-performance computing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran#Fortran_2003
And it supports successful code-reuse, proven empirically over decades, even when hobbled with backward compatibility with ancient cruft/
www.netlib.org
Fourier transform routines written in the 1960's are still good. Ugly to look at, but it will compile and link and work just fine.
http://www.netlib.org/go/realtr.f
And of course it doesn't omit obvious things like FUCKING MULTIDIMENSIONAL ARRAYS for real, in the language, and interoperable everywhere. And they can start at 1 or 0.
And a pointer is not the same as an allocatable array/structure.
Patents have a section for the description and setting. This is quoting the description. Patents do not cover everything that's in the description.
Only Claims are what have legal force, and they always are written as long conditionals from broad to narrow. Claims can be limited by the PTO to apply to situations which are a AND b AND c AND d etc.
You have a very caustic liquid at hundreds of degrees which is infused with very large amounts of high level radioactive waste. Fission daughter products which in a regular reactor are solid and encased in zirconium steel and treated with utmost care are now free floating in something very hot, flowing and caustic. What if if there's an accident and it rains. Or a flood. The fission products are very water soluble.
Every power plant also has to be a very nasty chemical separation and reprocessing plant. Consider the contamination just in "normal" operation. And consider the people running them.
What happens if it cools off and solidifies? You've frozen radioactive waste in the pipes a multi-billion dollar plant, and you can't go in there for decades.
There aren't some failure modes of existing reactors, but there are other failure modes and problems.
It might be a good idea to have one or two, very highly regulated and operated with the utmost skill (i.e. not for profit) used to burn up actinides wastes from other reactors.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/World's_First_Five_Spaceplanes.PNG
This picture gives a good scale view.
The Shuttle Orbiter is much much bigger than the X37.
"It is no conspiracy that the bureaucrats controlling NASA do not want any real sience or progress for humanity. They just want pork for their corporations (IBM, Exxon, etc)."
This is true, if you recognize that the "bureaucrats" fitting this description are known as Congressmen.
If you're talking about people inside NASA administration, they actually do want science and progress. The institutional process is very difficult however, and there are laws and meddling which don't apply to a private corporation.
No, the compression beams need to be fired for every shot, which produces a finite and fairly small amount of energy.
Fission will always be easier than fusion, because neutrons are uncharged and aren't repelled by a nucleus.
If we want to get serious about global warming, we have to make mining and burning coal a capital offense, and shut down every mine and plant with the urgency of eliminating the slave trade.
Instead, even eco-minded Germany is ramping up coal production and consumption because they started shutting down their reactors. There is a *new* 2200 MW coal burning plant in Germany. They foolishly believe that the competition is between nuclear and wind, and prefer wind (I do, but it's not remotely enough), and find that when actual joules have to be counted to keep the lights going, the coal gets burned.
Please uprate previous comment. It is not a troll. The NIF project is funded primarily by the NNSA, the part of the Department of Energy which deals with the science & engineering of nuclear weapons. The DoE does not dispute this, it just likes to de-emphasize the reality of the primacy of the weapons effort.
The design of the experiment and system matches the thermonuclear secondaries for weapons. Contrary to some people's belief, the nuclear physics is not difficult---it is the fluid mechanics and radiation transfer in extreme conditions which is the scientifically difficult part. (Radiation-driven secondaries are much much more difficult than fission primaries).
The primary purpose of the NIF is to gain experimental data to calibrate the simulation codes for nuclear weapons engineering & reliability in the absence of nuclear weapons testing.
There is a small energy related research project, but it is very very very far from practicality. There is little attention to actual engineering issues, compared to say ITER (magnetic confinement fusion) project, which is pretty heavily focused on engineering practicalities. Lasers are horribly inefficient energy transfer if you care about power breakeven but much better for making clean data for weapons code calibration. Most of the funded experimental runs will be for weapons, not energy research.
In any case, neither inertial confinement nor magnetic confinement fusion will be used as a power source with customers for at least 60-100 years.
We already know how to make nuclear reactors---and if we are not funding and churning out high-quality modular fission reactors now, it's foolish to think about fusion.
Vandalism works even worse than appeasement.
"One has to wonder why these machines don't have some form of self-destruct mechanism built in for situations where they are legitimately shot down or otherwise captured."
A sufficiently energetic self-destruct could be dangerous for the air crews which regularly have to service, launch and retrieve them. This can malfunction as well. To be safe, you need an affirmative self-destruct which works only when given a signal from the legitimate ground station and the drone is in a mission state. But losing communication is precisely the scenario when a self-destruct would be needed. A "self-destruct if I can't figure out what's up" could be quite dangerous to the legitimate users day in and day out.
And it's expense and weight that can't be devoted to payload.
Otherwise, crashing from sufficient altitude is usually sufficient.
Correct. The US officials rarely actually lie. They do misdirect when necessary. Note the response in this case:
Iran: We have a U.S. drone
U.S: The *U.S. Navy* (which is known to fly drones nearby) is not missing any drones.
Well, what about CIA, NRO, or NGIA? They don't say anything.
And besides, even CIA could reply "We're not missing any of our drones." And could be entirely true. And that's because a private subcontractor owns and runs them for CIA.
Somewhat true. Why did Fujifilm survive? Because they correctly saw themselves as an industrial coatings company, and not a photography company.
Kodak also had great experience in *optics* (they may have made optics for some generations of surveillance satellites, very high-tech and expensive)---optics are necessary for photography but it isn't the same area exactly.
They had great expertise in two critical industrial areas, but the managers were apparently stuck on consumer photography, and did not appreciate how inexpert they were in semiconductors and consumer electronics.
Exactly, moreover there isn't any "optimal" solution.
This is an applied science & engineering problem. People will solve it by developing self-learning algorithms but based on methods, assumptions and data which are customized to the specific installation. Actual experience doing this for many years for paying customers is important. Methods need to be robust to changing assumptions and changing uses.
I work in machine learning and applications for business (not elevators). The real metric which counts is the very low-bitrate "phone call metric" --- how often do you get phone calls from unhappy clients.
"Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement." -- Mark Twain
If "success" means "no content copied", then of course nothing will work. That's an impossible goal.
What success actually means *economically* is "increase revenues, or prevent revenue loss, more than the cost of implementation." If you make it difficult enough for somebody who has the potential means and motivation to buy to avoid buying then it could be deemed a success. A teenager with nothing to lose (and no money) might not care about being busted for torrenting copyrighted content---but a family man with a mortgage, job and credit rating might care.
Electronic tags on handbags don't prevent 100% of shoplifting, and yet they're deployed fairly widely.
This is almost certainly what is happening. It is impossible for humans to rate any significant fraction of searches/websites to be quantitatively useful for Google's search volume.
In machine learning, the name is "tags", a.k.a. ground truth for a supervised prediction/ranking model. Google gets zillions of weak, noisy, tag proxies in the sense of being able to measure when a user clicks on a link and then within a minute clicks on another link on the same search page, potentially indicating that the first link was undesirable.
These are the relatively expensive but highest quality "ground-truth" tags from which Google can calibrate the value and interpretation of the weak automatic tags and the algorithms themselves.
The final machine learning algorithms may be as simple as linear regression---performed on some rather complex features. These ground truth tags are used to calibrate and weight the importance of various features in making a final ranking.
Instead, he proposed to buy a bike using a certain amount of pure gold, and he took a little golden color piece of something out of his pocket which he imagined somehow would be "proof" of its proper chemical composition.
The people who trade gold for regular money have the ability to do something like this. The anti-fiat-currency nut didn't go to this type of person. Why not?
The bike-store owner has some good reason to suspect either a scam or mental illness. These kinds of people are not good customers.
So, why aren't the Argentinians attempting to trade pesos for bitcoins?
"The majority of neural network research is about developing new and/or improved algorithms to solve problems, not to say anything about how the human brain works."
This isn't true---or the connotation of it isn't true. I don't know how to quantify "majority", but there is substantial interest in computational modeling of actual biology across all levels of biological/chemistry fidelity and attention to engineering and statistical problems.
A glance at the work in the journal _Neural Computation_ shows papers both on entirely theoretical statistical computational models and models much more closely tied to experimental neuroscience results.
Many people want to do both: derive useful methods for solving engineering problems and understand biological systems which have shown such abilities. The field is very difficult and deep.