| When I was in school there was constant hysteria over the ozone layer. By the year 2000 we were all supposed to be blind and dying of skin cancer because the ozone layer would be mostly gone.
It was an actual, serious problem, and still is, but is not getting worse because the planet took concerted action to fix it.
Acid rain didn't just "go away" either spontaneously, it slowed significantly because humans, back then, actually listened to scientists and were less aggressively selfish and stupid than regarding global warming.
The F-35 is primarily a ground attack aircraft (and on that measure its sensors & targeting is excellent) with reasonably good air capability. Being roughly equal to F-16 {a great dogfighter} on that criterion, plus stealth, is pretty good. With modern missiles, dogfighting is usually a mutual kill scenario. You want to avoid getting in that circumstance, and in practice, being able to get in close enough to launch bombs and missiles against an adversary's SAM sites is a much more valuable capability than the ultimate dogfighter. This isn't Battle of Britain 1941.
The central technological problem in the F-35 program was attempting to accomodate the lift-fan version (B) in the same structure as the conventional (A and C) versions. And then there's the corporate welfare.
Note the DoD was sufficiently pissed off that Northrop got the bomber and not Lockheed & Boeing (f-35 contractors), and that program seems much more tightly managed.
If the militaristic wing of GOP had had their way, which of the below would be weakened or not passed?
NAFTA GATT/WTO Treaty Gramm-Leach-Bliley (Wall St. dereg) Commodity Futures Modernization Act(more Wall St. dereg) AUMF Patriot Act (and several renewals) Military Commissions Act TARP (bank bailout) FISA Revisions Act NDAA 2012 TPP
Ideologically, none other than TARP were opposed by the hard conservatives of GOP. There would be more government centralizing and espionage authority and higher militarism, and more economic deregulation.
| Apple is not on trial here. Apple is not part of the investigation or under investigation.
Yet.
What's to stop DOJ from charging Tim Cook, and everybody down the line in the iOS group with federal crimes such as felony obstruction of justice, or even giving material support to terrorist organization, unless they comply?
Could the gov. engage in asset seizure of the iOS division in a civil action?
| The only way to judge their validity is to measure their ability to predict trends over time.
And many other behaviors, and judge the validity by examining the quality of the physics implemented in them.
There are effects which are directly a result of the underlying proposed mechanism (increased greenhouse gases), such as polar regions warming more than equatorial regions, night warming more than day, stratospheric cooling and distinguish from many other possible mechanisms.
These signatures have been observed and are consistent with mainstream scientific climatological understanding.
It's not just a matter of some particular models predicting one time series or not; it's about validating physics.
And understanding physics is the historically most successful way to predict hypothesized results of physical systems.
If corporations are people, then corporations owning corporations, or people owning corporations, must be unconstitutional under the 13th Amendment.
It is robustly clear that corporations are not people and do not possess Constitutional rights intrinsically, but only such rights and responsibilities granted by legislature.
What I find unsound is the automatic conflation of corporations with people, when they are distinctly different.
Since corporations do not have any independent cognitive power or will, but act only that of the human managers, the true underlying question is not about free speech in reality, but whether managers may use corporate finances for overtly political purposes at their discretion.
I see no reason to suppose this use of finances should not be regulated by legislation the way other uses of finance is regulated.
Regulation of corporations should be left to legislatures, as they are for all sorts of things which do not apply to human citizens. Why can a legislature compel a corporation to produce certain accounting activities and products to others but doesn't make a person give a balance sheet to others? Is there anything wrong with this? No.
Here is a quote from the decision: "The First Amendment prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for engaging in political speech, but Austin ’s antidistortion rationale would permit the Government to ban political speech because the speaker is an association with a corporate form."
This is wrong. What was attempted to be banned is the corporate form paying money from corporate accounts at the direction of corporate management to engage in political speech. It would indeed be wrong if the ban were "spokespeople for public C corporations cannot donate (their own) money or speak at political events", but it is not.
That corporate form is similarly banned from paying money from corporate accounts at the direction of corporate management to individual's people's pocketbooks when such is against the normal business operations (i.e. embezzlement) expected and interests of shareholders. Nobody has a problem with this restriction on financial freedom.
It is a linguistic shortcut (saying that 'corporations speak') as if they were aware. It is necessary to be precise about the actual activity: "financial expenditures {including labor rendered with compensation} of a corporate account at the direction of management". Managers of corporations have different responsibilities with money than natural citizens with their own money.
I would accept single-person S corporations to be functionally equivalent to natural people.
| What constitutional basics is incorrect or flawed in it?
Natural born people have rights.
Corporations are entities which are created by human laws, and given privileges and responsibilities for the purpose of aiding society and economics. There is an economic segregation and legal liability segregation created artificially.
Therefore, it is proper that legislatures may regulate a corporation's expenditure of money owned by the corporation on political issues as it regulates its expenditure of money for all sorts of other purposes and regulates its tax liability.
Scalia had a generally consistent philosophy which could predict most decisions:
Needs and rights of powerful private sector companies outweigh the needs and rights of government which outweigh the needs and rights of individual citizens.
"why the huge uncertainty over the sensitivity needed"
Because of the huge uncertainty over the strength and frequency of extraordinarily exotic astrophysical circumstances which would make gravitational waves identifiable and detectable experimentally.
It's like saying you're going to take a picture of the camouflaged panther with neutrinos. You think you know how neutrinos work, but you don't know how many of those panthers are there.
| Well, you can argue that they "ruined" math education, but they weren't "idiots." The New Math was developed in the 1960s mostly by college professors and advanced math people in reaction to the "Space Race." The idea was to introduce mathematical abstractions (set theory, formalizations of analysis, etc.) at lower levels in education, which might be beneficial to students who were heading toward engineering and science degrees.
The Soviets had a better idea. Teach standard mathematics faster to the brightest students, and kick their ass.
Personal experience: Newly entering graduate students in physics who were from Russia said that they had covered the material in the mathematical methods for physics course in secondary school before college. That means, for example, single variable calculus at age 13, multi-variable at age 14, and by the end of high school, ordinary & partial differential equations, complex and real analysis, linear algebra, Fourier/Laplace transforms, and a bit of group theory.
| This is a huge advance, even if it is only optimising multiple moderate-depth playing engines.
It isn't doing that.
They trained some strong neural networks to first predict move probabilities from 30 million expert moves and positions. That was just the start. Then they used 'reinforcement learning' where they played games against itself and propagated back the final outcome (game won/lost) all the way through the net space to improve the learning to the correct outcome (game won vs lost) vs matching expert's moves.
Then they used samples from those (huge sampling space), taking one single position from synthesized games, to train a one-step position evaluator deep network. Along the way they trained a simpler (1000 x faster) policy network to evaluate potential moves.
And then finally the actual algorithm mixed stochastic monte carlo simulations using the fast policy network (playing a subset of moves to game completion) with the trained deep value network. On a decent sized cluster with GPU acceleration.
Fixed moderate depth engines (as in chess) are a major generation behind even for conventional Go engines---there was a generational shift to the Monte Carlo deep tree searches some years ago, and the new method uses that approach partially, augmented by big deep learning networks.
It's a huge achievement, but it was also a huge amount of work.
I know nothing about Go, some stuff about machine learning, and I did download and read the full-text paper.
It doesn't quite use a "brute-force" approach, but it certainly does use significant, and intelligently designed, Monte Carlo searches which are informed by well-trained neural networks. The neural-network alone approach, without any Monte Carlo search during play, is not as strong, though it does appear to equal a state of the art conventional Go program. See Figure 4b.
And the training of the neural networks and construction of their training sets certainly did need quite a bit of 'brute force' as well as 'efficiently wielded force in large quantity'.
And will be used for "One Weird Trick to a Titanic Penis" and "Firefox has detected a CRITICAL security problem. Click on _this link_ to eliminate the malware from your system"
| Isn't it odd how as a percentage there are so few women, children and old people along with these 20 something male "refugees".
No, not at all. The men of that age are subject to conscription by any faction of torturing thugs, or summary execution on sight. And there is no employment other than the hell of a poorly paid, poorly lead, and expendable soldier.
Of course the men are going to go first rather than subject their wives and children to unexpected dangers---they will make money and then bring them over.
There is such a thing as boosted fission weapons, which do have fusion fuel---deuterium and tritium, in the core of the fission primary. This is not an "H-Bomb". The fusion fuel provides comparatively insignificant energy output from fusion and contributes almost nothing to the yield---however, it does provide an extra boost of neutrons at close to the moment of maximum criticality, therefore substantially increasing the efficiency of the fission reaction. It is a physical 'neutron gun', and in practice, a key step towards significantly smaller and lighter fission weapons suitable for a mass-constrained ballistic missile warhead.
The transition from fission weapons to true multi-stage radiation coupled thermonuclear weapons (Teller-Ulam) is indeed quite challenging scientifically, there are far more uncertainties than with the fission weapons. It's all about energy transfer, exotic thermodynamics and fluid mechanics.
There are still significant undisclosed secrets in this stage as well. The fusion section is not just Li6-D, but a combined assembly of fusion and fission fuel & tampers. A major part of yield in modern thermonuclear weapons is in fission of the secondary, and it is very incorrect to say that they are "clean weapons". A big part of yield (60-80%) is from fission and the amount of fallout is proportional to total fission events & energy.
A boosted primary core is a practical prerequisite for multi-stage H-bombs, though as it provides a cleaner and more appropriately shapable radiation pulse to drive the secondary.
I believe it to be more likely that DPRK tested a boosted fission primary and the staff told His Supercritical Eminence that it was a H-bomb. Which is true, from a certain point of view.
I have heard personally from a former colleague who is intimately involved with LANL, a high-level University researcher with ties to LANL but not a direct employee.
The current lab management contractors have various metrics for which they manage the lab employees & programs. One metric which is now completely absent? Progress, results, and success in innovative scientific research.
The UC management might have been lax in other ways---it was very hands-off and let the lab do anything it wanted as long as there was some opportunity for UC professors to also work with LANL.
But now, the fundamental purpose of much of the lab is not even recognized----and the management fee far, far higher. And previously when the UC was the prime contractor, all the money it got for management it put back in to joint research.
The national labs can do things that universities cannot---sustained research and in particular development that takes too long and would not be rewarded in a cutthroat academic environment, but the bean-counting compliance-oriented, instead of success-oriented, management philosophy is not appropriate for what is literally, as the name says, a National Laboratory.
LANL has always been the best, and I believe that some of its excellence has been because it was managed by the University of California primarily, and others were managed by private contractors.
Slashdot Mirror
And most monitors have at least a 2cm bezel of blank space in plastic around the content.
| When I was in school there was constant hysteria over the ozone layer. By the year 2000 we were all supposed to be blind and dying of skin cancer because the ozone layer would be mostly gone.
It was an actual, serious problem, and still is, but is not getting worse because the planet took concerted action to fix it.
Acid rain didn't just "go away" either spontaneously, it slowed significantly because humans, back then, actually listened to scientists and were less aggressively selfish and stupid than regarding global warming.
| There is no option to hire people below, at, or above market rate. There simply aren't enough workers with the necessary skills in this area
And, what does that mean?
| Sometimes what you need is just not available at any price.
Have you tried paying a million and all relocation costs?
Carly Fiorina never got an important job again after ruining HP.
WTF does this turd get something?
The F-35 is primarily a ground attack aircraft (and on that measure its sensors & targeting is excellent) with reasonably good air capability. Being roughly equal to F-16 {a great dogfighter} on that criterion, plus stealth, is pretty good. With modern missiles, dogfighting is usually a mutual kill scenario. You want to avoid getting in that circumstance, and in practice, being able to get in close enough to launch bombs and missiles against an adversary's SAM sites is a much more valuable capability than the ultimate dogfighter. This isn't Battle of Britain 1941.
The central technological problem in the F-35 program was attempting to accomodate the lift-fan version (B) in the same structure as the conventional (A and C) versions. And then there's the corporate welfare.
Note the DoD was sufficiently pissed off that Northrop got the bomber and not Lockheed & Boeing (f-35 contractors), and that program seems much more tightly managed.
Sure there are drones that can do all that: they're called air to air missiles, in particular the Russian K-77M missile.
If the militaristic wing of GOP had had their way, which of the below would be weakened or not passed?
NAFTA
GATT/WTO Treaty
Gramm-Leach-Bliley (Wall St. dereg)
Commodity Futures Modernization Act(more Wall St. dereg)
AUMF
Patriot Act (and several renewals)
Military Commissions Act
TARP (bank bailout)
FISA Revisions Act
NDAA 2012
TPP
Ideologically, none other than TARP were opposed by the hard conservatives of GOP. There would be more government centralizing and espionage authority and higher militarism, and more economic deregulation.
| Apple is not on trial here. Apple is not part of the investigation or under investigation.
Yet.
What's to stop DOJ from charging Tim Cook, and everybody down the line in the iOS group with federal crimes such as felony obstruction of justice, or even giving material support to terrorist organization, unless they comply?
Could the gov. engage in asset seizure of the iOS division in a civil action?
| The only way to judge their validity is to measure their ability to predict trends over time.
And many other behaviors, and judge the validity by examining the quality of the physics implemented in them.
There are effects which are directly a result of the underlying proposed mechanism (increased greenhouse gases), such as polar regions warming more than equatorial regions, night warming more than day, stratospheric cooling and distinguish from many other possible mechanisms.
These signatures have been observed and are consistent with mainstream scientific climatological understanding.
It's not just a matter of some particular models predicting one time series or not; it's about validating physics.
And understanding physics is the historically most successful way to predict hypothesized results of physical systems.
If corporations are people, then corporations owning corporations, or people owning corporations, must be unconstitutional under the 13th Amendment.
It is robustly clear that corporations are not people and do not possess Constitutional rights intrinsically, but only such rights and responsibilities granted by legislature.
What I find unsound is the automatic conflation of corporations with people, when they are distinctly different.
Since corporations do not have any independent cognitive power or will, but act only that of the human managers, the true underlying question is not about free speech in reality, but whether managers may use corporate finances for overtly political purposes at their discretion.
I see no reason to suppose this use of finances should not be regulated by legislation the way other uses of finance is regulated.
Regulation of corporations should be left to legislatures, as they are for all sorts of things which do not apply to human citizens. Why can a legislature compel a corporation to produce certain accounting activities and products to others but doesn't make a person give a balance sheet to others? Is there anything wrong with this? No.
Here is a quote from the decision: "The First Amendment prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for engaging in political speech, but Austin ’s antidistortion rationale would permit the Government to ban political speech because the speaker is an association with a corporate form."
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/08-205.ZS.html
This is wrong. What was attempted to be banned is the corporate form paying money from corporate accounts at the direction of corporate management to engage in political speech. It would indeed be wrong if the ban were "spokespeople for public C corporations cannot donate (their own) money or speak at political events", but it is not.
That corporate form is similarly banned from paying money from corporate accounts at the direction of corporate management to individual's people's pocketbooks when such is against the normal business operations (i.e. embezzlement) expected and interests of shareholders. Nobody has a problem with this restriction on financial freedom.
It is a linguistic shortcut (saying that 'corporations speak') as if they were aware. It is necessary to be precise about the actual activity: "financial expenditures {including labor rendered with compensation} of a corporate account at the direction of management". Managers of corporations have different responsibilities with money than natural citizens with their own money.
I would accept single-person S corporations to be functionally equivalent to natural people.
The Ninth Amendment tells interpreters not to be like Scalia.
| What constitutional basics is incorrect or flawed in it?
Natural born people have rights.
Corporations are entities which are created by human laws, and given privileges and responsibilities for the purpose of aiding society and economics. There is an economic segregation and legal liability segregation created artificially.
Therefore, it is proper that legislatures may regulate a corporation's expenditure of money owned by the corporation on political issues as it regulates its expenditure of money for all sorts of other purposes and regulates its tax liability.
Scalia had a generally consistent philosophy which could predict most decisions:
Needs and rights of powerful private sector companies outweigh the needs and rights of government which outweigh the needs and rights of individual citizens.
| They are both old enough to remember how utterly stupid the anti-Japanese-car kerfluffle turned out to be, shame on both.
Looked at Detroit recently?
"why the huge uncertainty over the sensitivity needed"
Because of the huge uncertainty over the strength and frequency of extraordinarily exotic astrophysical circumstances which would make gravitational waves identifiable and detectable experimentally.
It's like saying you're going to take a picture of the camouflaged panther with neutrinos. You think you know how neutrinos work, but you don't know how many of those panthers are there.
Why isn't the goal "ensure rapid travel subject to reasonable safety?"
What about removing paving?
| Well, you can argue that they "ruined" math education, but they weren't "idiots." The New Math was developed in the 1960s mostly by college professors and advanced math people in reaction to the "Space Race." The idea was to introduce mathematical abstractions (set theory, formalizations of analysis, etc.) at lower levels in education, which might be beneficial to students who were heading toward engineering and science degrees.
The Soviets had a better idea. Teach standard mathematics faster to the brightest students, and kick their ass.
Personal experience: Newly entering graduate students in physics who were from Russia said that they had covered the material in the mathematical methods for physics course in secondary school before college. That means, for example, single variable calculus at age 13, multi-variable at age 14, and by the end of high school, ordinary & partial differential equations, complex and real analysis, linear algebra, Fourier/Laplace transforms, and a bit of group theory.
| This is a huge advance, even if it is only optimising multiple moderate-depth playing engines.
It isn't doing that.
They trained some strong neural networks to first predict move probabilities from 30 million expert moves and positions. That was just the start. Then they used 'reinforcement learning' where they played games against itself and propagated back the final outcome (game won/lost) all the way through the net space to improve the learning to the correct outcome (game won vs lost) vs matching expert's moves.
Then they used samples from those (huge sampling space), taking one single position from synthesized games, to train a one-step position evaluator deep network. Along the way they trained a simpler (1000 x faster) policy network to evaluate potential moves.
And then finally the actual algorithm mixed stochastic monte carlo simulations using the fast policy network (playing a subset of moves to game completion) with the trained deep value network. On a decent sized cluster with GPU acceleration.
Fixed moderate depth engines (as in chess) are a major generation behind even for conventional Go engines---there was a generational shift to the Monte Carlo deep tree searches some years ago, and the new method uses that approach partially, augmented by big deep learning networks.
It's a huge achievement, but it was also a huge amount of work.
I know nothing about Go, some stuff about machine learning, and I did download and read the full-text paper.
I've read the paper.
It doesn't quite use a "brute-force" approach, but it certainly does use significant, and intelligently designed, Monte Carlo searches which are informed by well-trained neural networks. The neural-network alone approach, without any Monte Carlo search during play, is not as strong, though it does appear to equal a state of the art conventional Go program. See Figure 4b.
And the training of the neural networks and construction of their training sets certainly did need quite a bit of 'brute force' as well as 'efficiently wielded force in large quantity'.
And will be used for "One Weird Trick to a Titanic Penis" and "Firefox has detected a CRITICAL security problem. Click on _this link_ to eliminate the malware from your system"
| Isn't it odd how as a percentage there are so few women, children and old people along with these 20 something male "refugees".
No, not at all. The men of that age are subject to conscription by any faction of torturing thugs, or summary execution on sight. And there is no employment other than the hell of a poorly paid, poorly lead, and expendable soldier.
Of course the men are going to go first rather than subject their wives and children to unexpected dangers---they will make money and then bring them over.
Game consoles and phones are very inexpensive and last years. Rents, mortgages, medical care, and education are expensive and are ongoing expenses.
Of course you'll buy your children a $100 game off craigslist even if you can't afford $900 a month on rent.
There is such a thing as boosted fission weapons, which do have fusion fuel---deuterium and tritium, in the core of the fission primary. This is not an "H-Bomb". The fusion fuel provides comparatively insignificant energy output from fusion and contributes almost nothing to the yield---however, it does provide an extra boost of neutrons at close to the moment of maximum criticality, therefore substantially increasing the efficiency of the fission reaction. It is a physical 'neutron gun', and in practice, a key step towards significantly smaller and lighter fission weapons suitable for a mass-constrained ballistic missile warhead.
The transition from fission weapons to true multi-stage radiation coupled thermonuclear weapons (Teller-Ulam) is indeed quite challenging scientifically, there are far more uncertainties than with the fission weapons. It's all about energy transfer, exotic thermodynamics and fluid mechanics.
There are still significant undisclosed secrets in this stage as well. The fusion section is not just Li6-D, but a combined assembly of fusion and fission fuel & tampers. A major part of yield in modern thermonuclear weapons is in fission of the secondary, and it is very incorrect to say that they are "clean weapons". A big part of yield (60-80%) is from fission and the amount of fallout is proportional to total fission events & energy.
A boosted primary core is a practical prerequisite for multi-stage H-bombs, though as it provides a cleaner and more appropriately shapable radiation pulse to drive the secondary.
I believe it to be more likely that DPRK tested a boosted fission primary and the staff told His Supercritical Eminence that it was a H-bomb. Which is true, from a certain point of view.
I have heard personally from a former colleague who is intimately involved with LANL, a high-level University researcher with ties to LANL but not a direct employee.
The current lab management contractors have various metrics for which they manage the lab employees & programs. One metric which is now completely absent? Progress, results, and success in innovative scientific research.
The UC management might have been lax in other ways---it was very hands-off and let the lab do anything it wanted as long as there was some opportunity for UC professors to also work with LANL.
But now, the fundamental purpose of much of the lab is not even recognized----and the management fee far, far higher. And previously when the UC was the prime contractor, all the money it got for management it put back in to joint research.
The national labs can do things that universities cannot---sustained research and in particular development that takes too long and would not be rewarded in a cutthroat academic environment, but the bean-counting compliance-oriented, instead of success-oriented, management philosophy is not appropriate for what is literally, as the name says, a National Laboratory.
LANL has always been the best, and I believe that some of its excellence has been because it was managed by the University of California primarily, and others were managed by private contractors.