Sorry. Just a little skeptical here. I don't doubt that China does its share, but I'm guessing that it's pretty easy to make it look like an attack is coming from China even if it originates from Boise, Idaho.
You end up with unmaintainable code, late deadlines and an environment where numerous employees want to kill each other. Profit? Good luck.
It doesn't matter how talented the asshole is if he\she costs more than they're worth. I'd rather have a few mediocre developers who are nice to each other, write to spec, comment appropriately, and write code that anyone can understand and maintain.
While I'm not wild about animal testing, I recognize the necessity. Moreover, I know you can't "liberate" an animal that might survive a week in the wild, if that. Do these morons plan to give their immunosuppressed rats nice comfortable homes for the rest of their lives? From experience I can tell you that cats and dogs raised in lab environments emphatically do NOT make good pets and certainly can't care for themselves. If released, they will simply starve slowly. I'm also guessing that the people who released the animals dont' have the money to sustain them all to the end of their lives and that one way or another, most will end up in a public facility, euthanized. At taxpayer expense, of course.
World of Ptaavs, Protector, The Magic Goes Away, The Flight of the Horse (funny). They're a good read, suitable for even young teens, refer to numerous significant concepts, and oddly, the best conversations will come from picking out the flaws (e.g. Why are fossils NOT dragons that ran out of manna? How does fossil evidence disprove the main tenet of "Protector?, How do we know PSI doesn't work? What about time travel?). Hours of discussion.
Few in upper management in any corporation,in Europe or the USA, are concerned with what happens 10, or 20, or 50 years from now. It's all about the next quarter, and its bonuses.
Nuclear energy and "Green" energy isn't being put in place in China because of environmental concern, and certainly not because it's profitable (It isn't). It's because the Chinese leadership has noticed that the world running out of affordable, energy-positive hydrocarbons and is preparing for the day when they are no longer easily available.
The world looks a lot different when you look beyond just money.
Financial reform. If what the banks did in 2008 wasn't illegal, it should have been. Glass-Steagal needs to come back. The tax burden on corporations (and people) needs to increase the larger they become. Money is unelected political power. It subverts democracy and encourages oligarchy. Offshore money parking needs to be illegal as well. If you want your money in the Isle of Mann, feel free to move there.
The USA's military is 7 times larger than the next largest military. We spend 18 percent of the budget on military expenditures. I'm all for reducing "entitlements" starting with the Army, Navy and Marines.
More money should go to research in AI and energy generation. The first problem is unrecognized by the mainstream press (What a shock), but the first country that develops useful, scalable, human-like AI rules the world. Seriously. The next big problem is energy. Like it or not, significant postive net energy from oil is going away. We need a replacement.
Controversial as this is, I'd give anyone with a medical, engineering or other technical degree earned in the USA a green card and two tax free years. We need the world's smart people here, not in India.
Business markets and consumer markets are wildly different. If they decide to continue on the consumer market, they MUST do a better job of actually paying attention to basic human psychology. It's not brain surgery. A superficial familiarity with virtually any college text on human factors would have prevented the whole interface fiasco. I was taught the exact principles that would have prevented this in the 70s. Three mile island was our favorite example. The meters that provided feedback were across the room from the controls, facing away from the controls. Kind of like the properties window being at the bottom of the screen relative to what you're clicking on.
They are little more than promissary notes. Units of Debt/Value that can be traded. The "value" of either can be destroyed in a day, and restored as quickly.
It may be that "money" as an arbitrary store of value has reached it's useful limit in a technological society. As self-replicating memes go, it has certainly gone from providing symbiotic utility to becoming a pathological agent on more than one occasion.
Current society, however, is built around it. Replacing it means a new social order - probably one in which no one person can accumulate a massive surplus of goods and services. This goes against our evolutionary programming in a big way, so I'm skeptical that we'll get a rational economic/monetary system until we have better intelligences to work with (i.e. AIs).
While space travel is important for human survival in the long term, the more I think about it, the more it seems that developing a human style, scalable, artificial intelligence has for more potential to provide humans with rapid access to a much larger set of useful answers in the general domain of practical, solvable problems.
The investment should be, relatively speaking, trivial, and we already have 7 billion or so working models, so I think it's fairly certain that this can be done.
Given a choice, would you advocate more resources be allocated to space travel, or AI?
The reason the folks whose wealth is tied to old style monetary instruments are up in arms is that currencies like bitcoin are out of their control. Even metals upset them. It's harder to manipulate them than it is fiat currencies, although the last few days has shown that the world's wealthy still have a pretty good grip on those.
Money beyond the control of easily purchased governments is probably the biggest social revolution that could occur in the world at this point.
So Mr. Forbes's response is quite predictable, and will be repeated endlessly over the next few years in the corporate-owned mainstream news echo chamber.
In the end, of course, reality wins. Robust, bottom up systems prevail, just as they did when the Mayan heirarchy (and ecology) collapsed, or Rome fell, but that could be decades away, after a few more economic disasters and permanently high energy prices coupled with tight supplies.
Your customer's knowledge of your interface is a monetizable asset. Changing interfaces without a very compelling reason doesn't just inconvenience customers, it affects the bottom line.
This principal works the same for Bob's whiz-dang word processor as it does for an operating system UI. The easiest interface to use is ALWAYS the one you already know.
Bottom line? If you don't have to change it, don't.
Apple gets it. Apple has been using this fact since the Lisa hit the shelves in the 80s and continues to use it in phones, pads, etc.
The company is now run by a collection of floating board members and Ballmer. The board is made up of the clueless wealthy that view Microsoft as a shiny toy, rather than the necessary plumbing of the businesses that maintains their own wealth. Ballmer's hamfisted clumsiness and arrogance, of course, are well known.
Users? Developers? Barely afterthoughts. Large business users get some attention, but Windows 8 isn't going to be foisted off on users of MSs high end products. They actually have to get some work done.
As an end user, you're better off installing Ubuntu or Linux Mint and being done with it. Most web surfing, letter writing, spreadsheet using, end users don't need Microsoft anything. Time to move on.
You'll do with it what you now do with a smartphone, and more, but it's always on and in front of your eyes. Want a map with turn by turn directions? It's there. Want to see who's around you who's single and interested in Estonian fok dancing? They can be highlighted in glowing blue. Want to see the wiring diagram behind the wall? Access the building database and get the CAD drawings with the correct layer. Need to see the menu of the restaurant you're standing in front of? Watch it appear virtually on command. Oh, and you have a permanent heads-up cheap traffic and safety display as you're driving. Bored at a bus stop. Watch some youtube videos. Too dark? Turn on the infrared lense.
That's just off the top of my head. There will be as many applications as there are creative inviduals who can program. Any investor who can't work this out has probably already cooked their brain with alcohol and drugs, or suffers from some form of neurological impairment.
should distract the entire populace of NK thoroughly and destabilize the regime. Particularly, if we included enough Dove chocolates. Man, I love those things.
Look, we figure out the brain and we figure out how to build one in silica, thereby making it expandable and controllable. At that point, the whole domain of useful, answerable questions is open to us. *This* is the one best thing we could throw R&D money at. I would say, "throw more if it helps" but I don't know that it would.
Anyway, if we don't, the Chinese and Indians will. The country that owns this, owns the world.
Am more than willing to admit this. We may indeed enter a phase change collapse of interdependent supply chains which require cheap transportation energy. It's also possible that we will not recover from this collapse in our lifetime and that a severe die-off will result. I suspect that this is the highest probability.
Doesn't make it desirable.
Moreover, if it happens that way, the problem is moot. If, as I suspect, we slow-collapse at different rates in different regions and manage to hobble along with uranium, thorium and an ever expanding batch of renewables, it might be enough, at that point to sustain the many fewer remaining people. So, I suspect we will at least have electricity, locally at least, and the remaining folks will have more time to attack the problem and will be wonderfully motivated to do so.
Could anyone do a space program at that point? Hard to say. Hydrogen isn't hard to come by. Aluminum and other non-rusting metals won't be a problem either, for any humans on this planet, ever again. Energy will be the choke point they'll be trying to clever their way out of. Might take a thousand years, or two. Took about 1100 years for the renaissance to get going after Rome started deteriorating, and another few hundred for a tech build-up. Of course, that tech build up was entirely build on hydrocarbons (coal at first, then oil and natural gas). Difficult to predict what technologies can come from patience and energy restrictions.
Well, OK. Let's say we want to replace say, the world's oil consumption per year, which is about 160 exajoules. We *can* do it here on earth, and I suspect that we'll be eventually be shoved into about 2500 (or more) thorium nuclear plants because in about 50 years, we're fuck out of affordable net-energy positive hydrocarbons (1.3 trillion barrels of conventional crude at 30 billion barrels a year gives us a tetch over 40 years. Natural gas extends this by about 11 years ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_depletion ). Now remember that hydrocarbons are only 1/3 of the world's energy budget, so you'll have to go three times that to 480 exajoules from somewhere. That's 7500 thorium nuke plants. Tough, but doable.
As for the fantasy level of technology, the first electromagnetic tether was tested in February 25, 1996. It failed when the high voltage it generated melted the materials it was made of. I doubt that problem is insurmountable (e.g. an array of shorter EM tethers to distribute the voltage and drag would fix the problem).
light pressure and solar wind effect on your large orbital solar panel As the light panel orbits Earth away from the sun, you compensate for the solar wind with a space tether. The drag both slows down the sail and adds power to the system. You do have to extend it and retract it, which are admittedly non trivial problems.
If you want to stay in space so you can say... maintain a power generation station, and NOT haul heavy (and therefore expensive) materials up from a gravity well, like Earth then redirecting some comets and mining asteroids are your best bet.
Not sure about that. Comets have water. Asteroids have metals and who knows what else? Whether either can be made profitable and useful is another question.
Is there something wrong with putting solar panels in the desert, or using fiber optics? You have a nostalgic 1970s view of space and technology.
Yes, I also have a 1970s nostalgic view of physics, as in, land area is limited and the energy falling on it is limited and by multiplying the two, you get available power and THAT, as they say, is IT.
However, before you squeal with delight and tell me how *much* that is, please expect that you'll also need to calculate and exclude land and sea areas that are not currently supporting food crops or working ecologies, as well as areas without significant weather, or property rights problems. Oh, and do exclude land with other other instalment, theft or maintenance problems (e.g. Brooklyn, Antarctica). Oh, and don't forget those line losses for your little desert energy-topia.
If you ever want to get more solar energy than what's available on earth, it's lots of space, Mylar mirrors and microwaves.
Sorry, but there's nothing useful in either place AND they're both at the bottom of another god damned gravity well. Orbital stations for spaced based solar would at least be *useful*. Satellite based internet would be useful. Is there something wrong with useful? Why is it that when we talk about space exploration, it always descends into some dick-waving "me there first" macho-chimpanzee rant.
We know how to get into space. We know there are useful and profitable things to do there. Can we just get on with it please?
The moon is useless and if there's life on Mars, it's not going anywhere. We can wait.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry. Just a little skeptical here. I don't doubt that China does its share, but I'm guessing that it's pretty easy to make it look like an attack is coming from China even if it originates from Boise, Idaho.
You end up with unmaintainable code, late deadlines and an environment where numerous employees want to kill each other. Profit? Good luck.
It doesn't matter how talented the asshole is if he\she costs more than they're worth. I'd rather have a few mediocre developers who are nice to each other, write to spec, comment appropriately, and write code that anyone can understand and maintain.
While I'm not wild about animal testing, I recognize the necessity. Moreover, I know you can't "liberate" an animal that might survive a week in the wild, if that. Do these morons plan to give their immunosuppressed rats nice comfortable homes for the rest of their lives? From experience I can tell you that cats and dogs raised in lab environments emphatically do NOT make good pets and certainly can't care for themselves. If released, they will simply starve slowly. I'm also guessing that the people who released the animals dont' have the money to sustain them all to the end of their lives and that one way or another, most will end up in a public facility, euthanized. At taxpayer expense, of course.
World of Ptaavs, Protector, The Magic Goes Away, The Flight of the Horse (funny). They're a good read, suitable for even young teens, refer to numerous significant concepts, and oddly, the best conversations will come from picking out the flaws (e.g. Why are fossils NOT dragons that ran out of manna? How does fossil evidence disprove the main tenet of "Protector?, How do we know PSI doesn't work? What about time travel?). Hours of discussion.
Few in upper management in any corporation ,in Europe or the USA, are concerned with what happens 10, or 20, or 50 years from now. It's all about the next quarter, and its bonuses.
Nuclear energy and "Green" energy isn't being put in place in China because of environmental concern, and certainly not because it's profitable (It isn't). It's because the Chinese leadership has noticed that the world running out of affordable, energy-positive hydrocarbons and is preparing for the day when they are no longer easily available.
The world looks a lot different when you look beyond just money.
Financial reform. If what the banks did in 2008 wasn't illegal, it should have been. Glass-Steagal needs to come back. The tax burden on corporations (and people) needs to increase the larger they become. Money is unelected political power. It subverts democracy and encourages oligarchy. Offshore money parking needs to be illegal as well. If you want your money in the Isle of Mann, feel free to move there.
The USA's military is 7 times larger than the next largest military. We spend 18 percent of the budget on military expenditures. I'm all for reducing "entitlements" starting with the Army, Navy and Marines.
More money should go to research in AI and energy generation. The first problem is unrecognized by the mainstream press (What a shock), but the first country that develops useful, scalable, human-like AI rules the world. Seriously. The next big problem is energy. Like it or not, significant postive net energy from oil is going away. We need a replacement.
Controversial as this is, I'd give anyone with a medical, engineering or other technical degree earned in the USA a green card and two tax free years. We need the world's smart people here, not in India.
End rant.
Business markets and consumer markets are wildly different. If they decide to continue on the consumer market, they MUST do a better job of actually paying attention to basic human psychology. It's not brain surgery. A superficial familiarity with virtually any college text on human factors would have prevented the whole interface fiasco. I was taught the exact principles that would have prevented this in the 70s. Three mile island was our favorite example. The meters that provided feedback were across the room from the controls, facing away from the controls. Kind of like the properties window being at the bottom of the screen relative to what you're clicking on.
They are little more than promissary notes. Units of Debt/Value that can be traded. The "value" of either can be destroyed in a day, and restored as quickly.
It may be that "money" as an arbitrary store of value has reached it's useful limit in a technological society. As self-replicating memes go, it has certainly gone from providing symbiotic utility to becoming a pathological agent on more than one occasion.
Current society, however, is built around it. Replacing it means a new social order - probably one in which no one person can accumulate a massive surplus of goods and services. This goes against our evolutionary programming in a big way, so I'm skeptical that we'll get a rational economic/monetary system until we have better intelligences to work with (i.e. AIs).
While space travel is important for human survival in the long term, the more I think about it, the more it seems that developing a human style, scalable, artificial intelligence has for more potential to provide humans with rapid access to a much larger set of useful answers in the general domain of practical, solvable problems.
The investment should be, relatively speaking, trivial, and we already have 7 billion or so working models, so I think it's fairly certain that this can be done.
Given a choice, would you advocate more resources be allocated to space travel, or AI?
The reason the folks whose wealth is tied to old style monetary instruments are up in arms is that currencies like bitcoin are out of their control. Even metals upset them. It's harder to manipulate them than it is fiat currencies, although the last few days has shown that the world's wealthy still have a pretty good grip on those.
Money beyond the control of easily purchased governments is probably the biggest social revolution that could occur in the world at this point.
So Mr. Forbes's response is quite predictable, and will be repeated endlessly over the next few years in the corporate-owned mainstream news echo chamber.
In the end, of course, reality wins. Robust, bottom up systems prevail, just as they did when the Mayan heirarchy (and ecology) collapsed, or Rome fell, but that could be decades away, after a few more economic disasters and permanently high energy prices coupled with tight supplies.
Cheers!
Your customer's knowledge of your interface is a monetizable asset. Changing interfaces without a very compelling reason doesn't just inconvenience customers, it affects the bottom line.
This principal works the same for Bob's whiz-dang word processor as it does for an operating system UI. The easiest interface to use is ALWAYS the one you already know.
Bottom line? If you don't have to change it, don't.
Apple gets it. Apple has been using this fact since the Lisa hit the shelves in the 80s and continues to use it in phones, pads, etc.
The company is now run by a collection of floating board members and Ballmer. The board is made up of the clueless wealthy that view Microsoft as a shiny toy, rather than the necessary plumbing of the businesses that maintains their own wealth. Ballmer's hamfisted clumsiness and arrogance, of course, are well known.
Users? Developers? Barely afterthoughts. Large business users get some attention, but Windows 8 isn't going to be foisted off on users of MSs high end products. They actually have to get some work done.
As an end user, you're better off installing Ubuntu or Linux Mint and being done with it. Most web surfing, letter writing, spreadsheet using, end users don't need Microsoft anything. Time to move on.
You'll do with it what you now do with a smartphone, and more, but it's always on and in front of your eyes. Want a map with turn by turn directions? It's there. Want to see who's around you who's single and interested in Estonian fok dancing? They can be highlighted in glowing blue. Want to see the wiring diagram behind the wall? Access the building database and get the CAD drawings with the correct layer. Need to see the menu of the restaurant you're standing in front of? Watch it appear virtually on command. Oh, and you have a permanent heads-up cheap traffic and safety display as you're driving. Bored at a bus stop. Watch some youtube videos. Too dark? Turn on the infrared lense.
That's just off the top of my head. There will be as many applications as there are creative inviduals who can program. Any investor who can't work this out has probably already cooked their brain with alcohol and drugs, or suffers from some form of neurological impairment.
I mean, it was just looking for stuff. How could that be valuable?
should distract the entire populace of NK thoroughly and destabilize the regime. Particularly, if we included enough Dove chocolates. Man, I love those things.
Look, we figure out the brain and we figure out how to build one in silica, thereby making it expandable and controllable. At that point, the whole domain of useful, answerable questions is open to us. *This* is the one best thing we could throw R&D money at. I would say, "throw more if it helps" but I don't know that it would.
Anyway, if we don't, the Chinese and Indians will. The country that owns this, owns the world.
Like...below zero? Hey, wait a minute! I need to patent that!
Sort of. I don't believe that these are mutually exclusive scenarios. Depends on your time horizon.
Am more than willing to admit this. We may indeed enter a phase change collapse of interdependent supply chains which require cheap transportation energy. It's also possible that we will not recover from this collapse in our lifetime and that a severe die-off will result. I suspect that this is the highest probability.
Doesn't make it desirable.
Moreover, if it happens that way, the problem is moot. If, as I suspect, we slow-collapse at different rates in different regions and manage to hobble along with uranium, thorium and an ever expanding batch of renewables, it might be enough, at that point to sustain the many fewer remaining people. So, I suspect we will at least have electricity, locally at least, and the remaining folks will have more time to attack the problem and will be wonderfully motivated to do so.
Could anyone do a space program at that point? Hard to say. Hydrogen isn't hard to come by. Aluminum and other non-rusting metals won't be a problem either, for any humans on this planet, ever again. Energy will be the choke point they'll be trying to clever their way out of. Might take a thousand years, or two. Took about 1100 years for the renaissance to get going after Rome started deteriorating, and another few hundred for a tech build-up. Of course, that tech build up was entirely build on hydrocarbons (coal at first, then oil and natural gas). Difficult to predict what technologies can come from patience and energy restrictions.
Well, OK. Let's say we want to replace say, the world's oil consumption per year, which is about 160 exajoules. We *can* do it here on earth, and I suspect that we'll be eventually be shoved into about 2500 (or more) thorium nuclear plants because in about 50 years, we're fuck out of affordable net-energy positive hydrocarbons (1.3 trillion barrels of conventional crude at 30 billion barrels a year gives us a tetch over 40 years. Natural gas extends this by about 11 years ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_depletion ). Now remember that hydrocarbons are only 1/3 of the world's energy budget, so you'll have to go three times that to 480 exajoules from somewhere. That's 7500 thorium nuke plants. Tough, but doable.
As for the fantasy level of technology, the first electromagnetic tether was tested in February 25, 1996. It failed when the high voltage it generated melted the materials it was made of. I doubt that problem is insurmountable (e.g. an array of shorter EM tethers to distribute the voltage and drag would fix the problem).
FYI, I didn't have to look these numbers up. I remember them. To see what we're facing, I suggest you review the book referred to here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil.
FYI. I'm not recommending we do this yet. We have other strategies that will work, sort of, for awhile, but someday, we run out of thorium too.
light pressure and solar wind effect on your large orbital solar panel
As the light panel orbits Earth away from the sun, you compensate for the solar wind with a space tether. The drag both slows down the sail and adds power to the system. You do have to extend it and retract it, which are admittedly non trivial problems.
If you want to stay in space so you can say... maintain a power generation station, and NOT haul heavy (and therefore expensive) materials up from a gravity well, like Earth then redirecting some comets and mining asteroids are your best bet.
Not sure about that. Comets have water. Asteroids have metals and who knows what else? Whether either can be made profitable and useful is another question.
Is there something wrong with putting solar panels in the desert, or using fiber optics? You have a nostalgic 1970s view of space and technology.
Yes, I also have a 1970s nostalgic view of physics, as in, land area is limited and the energy falling on it is limited and by multiplying the two, you get available power and THAT, as they say, is IT.
However, before you squeal with delight and tell me how *much* that is, please expect that you'll also need to calculate and exclude land and sea areas that are not currently supporting food crops or working ecologies, as well as areas without significant weather, or property rights problems. Oh, and do exclude land with other other instalment, theft or maintenance problems (e.g. Brooklyn, Antarctica). Oh, and don't forget those line losses for your little desert energy-topia.
If you ever want to get more solar energy than what's available on earth, it's lots of space, Mylar mirrors and microwaves.
Sorry, but there's nothing useful in either place AND they're both at the bottom of another god damned gravity well. Orbital stations for spaced based solar would at least be *useful*. Satellite based internet would be useful. Is there something wrong with useful? Why is it that when we talk about space exploration, it always descends into some dick-waving "me there first" macho-chimpanzee rant.
We know how to get into space. We know there are useful and profitable things to do there. Can we just get on with it please?
The moon is useless and if there's life on Mars, it's not going anywhere. We can wait.