I don't find the statement history as all that mysterious, some high level wonk in the PR section said "oh we'll look into it" and some higher level wonk on the financial side said "the hell we will".
For you and I there are plenty of opportunities for ethical investment but $31B is a hell of a lot of money. I'm not sure they could invest that much money in what we'd view as completely ethical. The top 50 of the Fortune 500 is roughly the mark where companies have a valuation of greater than $50B and they're a who's who of what many would consider unethical. It's tough to invest 31B without hitting some of them or becoming too highly invested in smaller companies.
I certainly would disagree with anyone who tried to point at the Gates foundation as some evidence that Bill had become some philanthropic saint to be revered.
The phrasing above is merely for debate, like I said I have no illusions about him or the foundation. I personally view the whole Jobs vs Gates debate like I view Bud vs Coors as the better beer debate. I'd rather have a microbrew.
I don't think it's that cut and dried. I glanced at the LA Times article in question, the basic premise is the $31B foundation has made millions in investments in companies like Royal Dutch Shell, and numerous other energy and pharma companies that are, probably legitimately, viewed as contributing to some of the problems the foundation was trying to solve.
But the point of the foundation is to distribute interest made on investments so it remains solvent essentially forever. It's not clear to me how you wisely invest $31B without having some money tied up in those companies. Rather than saying the foundation is bad because it's investing in Royal Dutch Shell you could just as easily say the foundation is good (or at least neutrally not bad) because it's taking the profit RDS generates and using that to at least fix some of the problems RDS created since RDS won't do it themselves.
I have no fixed opinion of the Gates foundation either way, I do find it easier to believe it's a net benefit to society rather than a net drain. If the argument is merely that they could be better that's fine but that's a long way from: It's a big profit making scam.
I don't know, I've read the article and it's still not clear to me whether an iPhone or Android is better, who to vote for, whether I should be mad at banks and who to vote for.
Provide it as a service and charge the benefiting entities i.e the music and movie industry. Presumably it's a net win for them as they get billed X dollars and see an increase of Y revenue. If it turns out Y is less than X they'll change their mind as to the value of their content and the worth of screening.
The GP's argument regarded lifting materials out of Earth's gravity well, the replies pointed out that wouldn't be the most efficient approach.
As for your other rambling points. Using electrical current for smelting has been around for over 100+ years http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc12293/m1/58/, but even if you had to resort to some 17th century model of a big crucible and oxygen the idea that there's no oxygen in space is rather odd. Air pressure, elecromagnets and centrifuges are regularly used in smelting, manufacturing and assembly on Earth where there's that annoying extra acceleration to be dealt with. Most robotic assembly systems would work better in zero-g as there's no preferred orientation when moving parts around. Keeping something fixed in space is easy, it's only a problem when you insert humans who have an annoying physiological view of 'up'.
The only thing that we're pretty sure doesn't exist in plentiful abundance outside the Earth are people and food. Those we'd probably have to lift unless you're incredibly patient and don't personally want to go (though I predict a huge market for zero-g veal someday).
Is all of that supply chain trivial or even partially solved, of course not, is it hugely expensive, yep. But your description of the nature of the problem is pretty far off and in any event when (not if) humans build space ships to explore the solar system they won't be lifting the resources off Earth as the GP suggested.
Yeah, the enterprise is a cruddy shape. One could make a set of rings arranged as a group in a ring. During one G acceleration the small rings rotate so up is direction of travel. During coasting the larger ring rotates, during maneuvering and speeds between full thrust and coasting the individual rings re-orient or spin to create a sense of constant gravity and orientation. Transfer from one set of rings to the other is through the center into a zero-g orientation neutral pathway.
Done, http://www.planetaryresources.com/ no gravity well problem because all resources collection occurs outside the well. Just have to lift people and food and even the latter could be done in space.
Granted they may not be ready with supplies soon enough for his timescale. It's merely a question of priorities. If, as a species, we decided this was a useful expense we could do it. The money spent planet wide on military in the last decade would be more than enough.
In thinking about how I look at articles and commentary I realized I factor in comments almost as much as the article itself, particularly any inherently subjective article, for example one that discusses the social or economic impact of a scientific discovery.
The article itself is likely to have a good signal to noise but suffers from bias, the comments typically have very poor signal to noise but can often correct or at least expose the original biasing. Taken together I at least feel like I have a better sense of 'truth', particularly if the subject is likely to expose my own bias.
In other words, yeah the article makes sense initially but I'll reserve judgment till more people have posted about it on slashdot.
I agree to some extent. I look forward to the day when we can have miserable overly dramatic arguments about how best to approach the problem rather than ones over the existence of the problem.
To some extent these are the first salvos of that argument. Deciding the center is a function of impact and cost. Once we can move past debating whether the impact is effectively zero or infinite we can get on with the fun that will be whether the cost to correct is effectively zero or infinite. The initial hyperbolic arguments are the impact is nearly infinite and the cost to correct is effectively zero vs the impact is nearly zero and the cost is effectively infinite. Some day those values will converge to a manageable delta, unfortunately both cost and effect are a function of time.
The bigger problem was when some stupid ass thought uploading 'grass eating hippie' personality code into the satellites was a good idea. Now all of them only transmit observationally biased data.
Tell you what we could do. You go through the each satellite's data and point out which of it's wrong and from there I'll figure out how to change it's personality.
BTW, I'd suggest hugely technical fields require objectivity not subjectivity (your point 1).
I suspect you don't really understand the purpose of a corporation. By definition: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/corporation they're set up to be distinct. How that is achieved varies from government to government but the basic principle is the same.
First off censoring a corporation doesn't censor an individual because the individual is still perfectly free to say whatever it was the corporation was.
You seem more interested in simply taking left vs right pot shots including rather poor assumption about my view of corporations than truly grasping the issue. This is more complex than a simple of freedom of speech argument. For centuries we created a series of laws which hinged around the idea that corporations were distinct in terms of liability, financially and politically from their members. There are a lot of good reasons for this, most of which protect the corporation so they can get on with their job.
The problem here is individuals leveraging those protections with the sole purpose of using those protections, they're not a production entity they're simply an entity hiding behind a loophole. The supreme court is free to strike down all part or none of a law. They could have reached a consensus that didn't abridge any individual freedom of speech while still retaining the long held standard that corporations were not people. Now there's a can of worms and there will be a steady stream of cases challenging that interpretation in other arenas (liability for instance).
Pelosi, at a press briefing last Thursday, endorsed a movement announced by other congressional Democrats the day before to ratify an amendment to the Constitution to allow Congress to regulate political speech when it is engaged in by corporations as opposed to individuals.
If certain people hadn't stupidly decided that corporations were people with respect to political contributions and speech there wouldn't be a perception of need for such an amendment. I'll be down with corporations being treated as people with respect to speech about 4 microseconds after they're considered people with respect to felonies.
There were certainly some that were worse. SGI shipping all boxes with hosts.equiv set to '+' for a while. There was a period in the 90's when an awful lot of the big name Unices (IRIX/Solaris/HP-UX) had some huge gaping holes that shouldn't never been there (passwordless accounts like lp, broken uucp installations). There were also numerous services like rpc.mountd that were perennial favorites for zero day buffer overruns.
Granted that was a long time ago and modern BSD/Linux distros are much more secure by default and even more secure through proper installation but the argument then was it was no big deal, just fix them at install time unless you were a clueless git. For windows it's the same deal just a much larger set of gits.
Sort of true, I do find myself increasingly annoyed that the terms that are implied to be found increasingly bear no resemblance to the target page but even at its best Google required fairly exact strings. Looking for XXYYZZ234 model number is fine. Looking for more complex strings from stack traces (for bug tracking), formulas or odd context from technical papers has always been clumsy.
Not implying it does or will necessarily scale, in fact I'd be a bit surprised if you guys weren't following it but figured I'd toss it out there in case you weren't.
Interesting project, I do same thing with radio telescope data but a much smaller scale (1/10th or so) without the added complexity of transparent access to OS of the month. I assume you also have to support VAO hooks (Virtual Astronomical Observatory) or is that at a different layer than the storage portion.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't find the statement history as all that mysterious, some high level wonk in the PR section said "oh we'll look into it" and some higher level wonk on the financial side said "the hell we will".
For you and I there are plenty of opportunities for ethical investment but $31B is a hell of a lot of money. I'm not sure they could invest that much money in what we'd view as completely ethical. The top 50 of the Fortune 500 is roughly the mark where companies have a valuation of greater than $50B and they're a who's who of what many would consider unethical. It's tough to invest 31B without hitting some of them or becoming too highly invested in smaller companies.
I certainly would disagree with anyone who tried to point at the Gates foundation as some evidence that Bill had become some philanthropic saint to be revered.
The phrasing above is merely for debate, like I said I have no illusions about him or the foundation. I personally view the whole Jobs vs Gates debate like I view Bud vs Coors as the better beer debate. I'd rather have a microbrew.
I don't think it's that cut and dried. I glanced at the LA Times article in question, the basic premise is the $31B foundation has made millions in investments in companies like Royal Dutch Shell, and numerous other energy and pharma companies that are, probably legitimately, viewed as contributing to some of the problems the foundation was trying to solve.
But the point of the foundation is to distribute interest made on investments so it remains solvent essentially forever. It's not clear to me how you wisely invest $31B without having some money tied up in those companies. Rather than saying the foundation is bad because it's investing in Royal Dutch Shell you could just as easily say the foundation is good (or at least neutrally not bad) because it's taking the profit RDS generates and using that to at least fix some of the problems RDS created since RDS won't do it themselves.
I have no fixed opinion of the Gates foundation either way, I do find it easier to believe it's a net benefit to society rather than a net drain. If the argument is merely that they could be better that's fine but that's a long way from: It's a big profit making scam.
I don't know, I've read the article and it's still not clear to me whether an iPhone or Android is better, who to vote for, whether I should be mad at banks and who to vote for.
On a more serious note, I wholeheartedly agree.
Provide it as a service and charge the benefiting entities i.e the music and movie industry. Presumably it's a net win for them as they get billed X dollars and see an increase of Y revenue. If it turns out Y is less than X they'll change their mind as to the value of their content and the worth of screening.
Try bitcoins.
I think I'll off load the real work to the computer so I can get on with the more interesting bits.
Better not, you'll find a disturbing number of internet worms and find it's rotten to the core.
The GP's argument regarded lifting materials out of Earth's gravity well, the replies pointed out that wouldn't be the most efficient approach.
As for your other rambling points. Using electrical current for smelting has been around for over 100+ years http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc12293/m1/58/, but even if you had to resort to some 17th century model of a big crucible and oxygen the idea that there's no oxygen in space is rather odd. Air pressure, elecromagnets and centrifuges are regularly used in smelting, manufacturing and assembly on Earth where there's that annoying extra acceleration to be dealt with. Most robotic assembly systems would work better in zero-g as there's no preferred orientation when moving parts around. Keeping something fixed in space is easy, it's only a problem when you insert humans who have an annoying physiological view of 'up'.
The only thing that we're pretty sure doesn't exist in plentiful abundance outside the Earth are people and food. Those we'd probably have to lift unless you're incredibly patient and don't personally want to go (though I predict a huge market for zero-g veal someday).
Is all of that supply chain trivial or even partially solved, of course not, is it hugely expensive, yep. But your description of the nature of the problem is pretty far off and in any event when (not if) humans build space ships to explore the solar system they won't be lifting the resources off Earth as the GP suggested.
Yeah, the enterprise is a cruddy shape. One could make a set of rings arranged as a group in a ring. During one G acceleration the small rings rotate so up is direction of travel. During coasting the larger ring rotates, during maneuvering and speeds between full thrust and coasting the individual rings re-orient or spin to create a sense of constant gravity and orientation. Transfer from one set of rings to the other is through the center into a zero-g orientation neutral pathway.
Done, http://www.planetaryresources.com/ no gravity well problem because all resources collection occurs outside the well. Just have to lift people and food and even the latter could be done in space.
Granted they may not be ready with supplies soon enough for his timescale. It's merely a question of priorities. If, as a species, we decided this was a useful expense we could do it. The money spent planet wide on military in the last decade would be more than enough.
Since there's no +100 insightful mod option I'll just post a simple 'thank you for this post'.
That goes for your GP post as well.
In thinking about how I look at articles and commentary I realized I factor in comments almost as much as the article itself, particularly any inherently subjective article, for example one that discusses the social or economic impact of a scientific discovery.
The article itself is likely to have a good signal to noise but suffers from bias, the comments typically have very poor signal to noise but can often correct or at least expose the original biasing. Taken together I at least feel like I have a better sense of 'truth', particularly if the subject is likely to expose my own bias.
In other words, yeah the article makes sense initially but I'll reserve judgment till more people have posted about it on slashdot.
Bribes are the norm in all countries. The difference between the extremes is the extent they're formally coded into law and cost of entry.
Not new, our early extraterrestrial forebears bred Stethacanthus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Stethacanthus_BW.jpg
to support both a forward looking radar mount at the front and a laser turret on their back.
I agree to some extent. I look forward to the day when we can have miserable overly dramatic arguments about how best to approach the problem rather than ones over the existence of the problem.
To some extent these are the first salvos of that argument. Deciding the center is a function of impact and cost. Once we can move past debating whether the impact is effectively zero or infinite we can get on with the fun that will be whether the cost to correct is effectively zero or infinite. The initial hyperbolic arguments are the impact is nearly infinite and the cost to correct is effectively zero vs the impact is nearly zero and the cost is effectively infinite. Some day those values will converge to a manageable delta, unfortunately both cost and effect are a function of time.
The bigger problem was when some stupid ass thought uploading 'grass eating hippie' personality code into the satellites was a good idea. Now all of them only transmit observationally biased data.
Tell you what we could do. You go through the each satellite's data and point out which of it's wrong and from there I'll figure out how to change it's personality.
BTW, I'd suggest hugely technical fields require objectivity not subjectivity (your point 1).
C#
Not much to add other than a hearty thanks to the moderators that made this +4 informative. Made my day.
You'd have more purpose if you'd develop a Herd mentality.
1) Receive a message "Yes we do"
2) 5 years to decode and decide to send a message "Hello we heard you"
3) Receive a message "clearly not"
4) 5 years later to decode and send a message "It seems you are out there"
5) Receive a message "Stop and think"
6) Ponder 20 years and send "Do you have time travel"
7) Few weeks later "and do you think we'll invent it"
8) 700 odd years later send "why did you stop sending messages to us"
I suspect you don't really understand the purpose of a corporation. By definition: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/corporation they're set up to be distinct.
How that is achieved varies from government to government but the basic principle is the same.
First off censoring a corporation doesn't censor an individual because the individual is still perfectly free to say whatever it was the corporation was.
You seem more interested in simply taking left vs right pot shots including rather poor assumption about my view of corporations than truly grasping the issue. This is more complex than a simple of freedom of speech argument. For centuries we created a series of laws which hinged around the idea that corporations were distinct in terms of liability, financially and politically from their members. There are a lot of good reasons for this, most of which protect the corporation so they can get on with their job.
The problem here is individuals leveraging those protections with the sole purpose of using those protections, they're not a production entity they're simply an entity hiding behind a loophole. The supreme court is free to strike down all part or none of a law. They could have reached a consensus that didn't abridge any individual freedom of speech while still retaining the long held standard that corporations were not people. Now there's a can of worms and there will be a steady stream of cases challenging that interpretation in other arenas (liability for instance).
From the linked article:
Pelosi, at a press briefing last Thursday, endorsed a movement announced by other congressional Democrats the day before to ratify an amendment to the Constitution to allow Congress to regulate political speech when it is engaged in by corporations as opposed to individuals.
If certain people hadn't stupidly decided that corporations were people with respect to political contributions and speech there wouldn't be a perception of need for such an amendment. I'll be down with corporations being treated as people with respect to speech about 4 microseconds after they're considered people with respect to felonies.
There were certainly some that were worse. SGI shipping all boxes with hosts.equiv set to '+' for a while. There was a period in the 90's when an awful lot of the big name Unices (IRIX/Solaris/HP-UX) had some huge gaping holes that shouldn't never been there (passwordless accounts like lp, broken uucp installations). There were also numerous services like rpc.mountd that were perennial favorites for zero day buffer overruns.
Granted that was a long time ago and modern BSD/Linux distros are much more secure by default and even more secure through proper installation but the argument then was it was no big deal, just fix them at install time unless you were a clueless git. For windows it's the same deal just a much larger set of gits.
Sort of true, I do find myself increasingly annoyed that the terms that are implied to be found increasingly bear no resemblance to the target page but even at its best Google required fairly exact strings. Looking for XXYYZZ234 model number is fine. Looking for more complex strings from stack traces (for bug tracking), formulas or odd context from technical papers has always been clumsy.
I assume you guys are familiar with the Lustre WAN work being done for the 2.x branch. For example:
http://www.teragridforum.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=JWAN:_lustre-wan_advanced_features_testing
Not implying it does or will necessarily scale, in fact I'd be a bit surprised if you guys weren't following it but figured I'd toss it out there in case you weren't.
Interesting project, I do same thing with radio telescope data but a much smaller scale (1/10th or so) without the added complexity of transparent access to OS of the month. I assume you also have to support VAO hooks (Virtual Astronomical Observatory) or is that at a different layer than the storage portion.