I am a software test engineer in Austin, Texas. I am experienced in JUnit, XMLUnit, CPPUnit, and Borland's SilkTest, in addition to being experienced in shell scripting. My main interests are the application of theory to business problems, and therefore I have always enjoyed playing with concepts like genetic algorithms, when I don't happen to be working with systems which implement them on a day to day basis. My (largely political) blog is: http://blogkinnetic.blogspot.com. See bio there as well. :-)
EOM
I am not an economist, but I think this is a lesson in the area of risk/reward. Sure, as a tourist I might have qualms about taking a ride in an unlicensed sub. However as a human being who loves knowledge, I would be intrigued by the chance to see a 14-foot shark close-up. The risk involved is offset by the chance for knowledge. Evolution hard-wires self-preservation into us. But perhaps it also hard-wires a certain risk-tolerance for the sake of a greater good. Put it another way: it is better for the gene to lose a few gene-carriers along the way to aquiring a big new advantage, than to not lose those handful of gene-carriers but also not aquire the big new advantage. So businesses like this that understand the hard-wired tolerance we have for risk when others don't understand that, have a competitive advantage - they can get to work while their competitors are still worrying about paper work. In a word, the selfish gene should be proud of this guy! :-)
It should be someone who is largely retired, like a Cinnenatus kind of person, so, for example, not Steve Balmer. He is awesome as ceo of microsoft, and the world would be poorer for it, were he to go elsewhere, in my opinion. This job is not even that technical - just trying to increase access to broadband, and advising on "green tech" issues. More a job for a marketing type than a super-technical type.
Well written article to be sure. However let me say what a lot of folks here I bet are thinking but don't want to actually post: they would give their left-you-know-what for a 300K over three years offer from Microsoft!! I darn sure would, and I am not afraid to admit that! :-)
Great article. The notion of "short-term self" vs. "long-term self", the self which wants to blow the pay cheque on booze, and the self which wants to save some of it for a rainy day, explains much internal conflict. My complaint though is it presents the "multiple selves" idea as in some way different from Freud's "superego. vs. ego. vs. id" model. I do not believe these are contradictory. The "short-term self" can be part of the id, I would think. The "long-term self" can be manifestations of the ego or the super-ego, it seems. The Freudian model is simpler, and still valid. However in some cases, the "multiple selves" model can be used to enhance the Freudian model. To me, just as a layman's opinion, it seems the Freudian model might be like Newtonian gravity - works in most situations, except in "corner cases" like the orbit of Mercury, where we need general relativity. Similarly, the Freudian "id/ego/superego" model of personality should still work in most cases, but there might be "corner cases" where a more complex "multiple selves" model might come in handy. By the way Robert Louis Stevenson in 'Jeckyl and Hyde' comes to this same model himself. Dr. Henry Jeckyl at last realizes that in each man there are many men, not just two.
Hey by the way, that was a quote from "Office Space". It was meant tongue-in-cheek. Personally, I think lay-offs suck, and if you have a good business plan (focus on being cash-flow positive) than you lessen your chances of needing lay-offs. I have seen the "hire too many people in good times", "lay them all off in bad times" approach with no regard to wanting to be cash-flow positive. That is certainly not how I would want to do business!
Like anything else, depends on how the test code was written to begin with! :-) SilkTest supports class inheritance, so if you have a good set of core classes, then, when application functionality changes, you can just change your inherited class implementations which makes it easier than having to re-invent the wheel every time.
Not sure that works. Remember, a neuron is a relatively simple mechanism. It is just that a bunch of them together make one "smart" or whatever. So alcohol's wanton destruction of neurons is only destructive I would think, because there are not "stronger" vs. "weaker" neurons. They are all pretty much the same, simple mechanisms. The more the better, and so killing some of them off just can't be good, I don't think. I am not a doctor but I do know neurons are fairly simple. They fire if a "threshold" of electric potential is exceeded, else they don't. They are simple, stupid, binary mechanisms. But put lots of them together and you eventually get Einstein. So killing neurons can only be bad I think.
My first thought beyond "wow, what total bull" is that there is a serious philosophical battle that needs to be waged, or vacuities like "the dignity of wheat" will persist. Basically we need to get down to things broadly termed qualia - feelings, emotions, "subject experience" like color and so on. Daniel Dennett is a good place to start."Qualia" is a product of the computation power of the brain. So wheat does not have a nervous system, ergo has no computational power, ergo has no "qualia", subjective experience, the feeling of pain and so on. Once we establish all subject experience, all qualia, as a phenomenon of computation then cockamamie like the "dignity of all living things" will go away. Which, by the way, a "living thing" is roughly when you get down to it a molecule that can copy itself, so crystals are "living" too. Shall we now have a discussion on tax payer money about how much pain a crystal feels when we cut it?
They need to associate themselves with the Disco movement of the late 70's. That is the general idea. Yuppie "groups" going to trendy places like Studio 54, and meeting up with other "groups". Perhaps letting trendy (upscale) nightclubs to advertise or interface on their portal would be a good idea. Like let a "group" book a room at a club listed on the site. I support the disco movement in principle, or more precisely, I support its revival. But a fuzzy definition like "group dating" doesn't really get me on the love train.
In terms of the fact that capitalism goes in "rise and fall" cycles, yes, this much seems clear. In terms of the idea that the public ownership of wealth is inevitable, hardly.
As Thatcher wisely said, "There is no such thing as society."
So capitalism I think continues. Just a few folks will blow their brains out along the way. Survival of the fittest, what can I say. Don't blame Darwin or the capitalists. It is just the laws of nature. As Elton John sings, "Who makes the call and who gets to choose/who gets to win and who gets to lose/it's like rolling dice in the belly of the blues/and the blues never fade away."
Dawkins rules. "The Selfish Gene" I think is one of the books which has had the most influence on me. That, and perhaps, "A brief history of time". I also am interested in genetic algorithms, a sort of "interface" between computer science and biology. In addition, the link to biology is further enhanced by viruses and spiders, and in more ways than just their names. :-)
Senator Obama has it on the money here I think. Going back to the depression, what was it that really got things moving and finally led to the prosperity of the 1950's? Well, WWII, which stimulated production. The best, perhaps the only, "way out" of a depression is new enterprise. We don't need a war for that of course. We just need new products, new idea, new technologies, which create new jobs and importantly "moves money" again. The problem is money is "frozen", being "hoarded" by scared banks and investors. So giving a tax incentive to entrepreneurs can stimulate the economy by getting start-ups a hand-up, which gets investment money moving, which creates jobs, etc. Socializing banks will not lead to prosperity in the long-run. Free-enterprise will.
These are fun ideas. Of course, temporal paradoxes are a red herring I think. If one takes the Everett-Wheeler many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics seriously, there is no problem. If I go back in time and impregnate my own mother, this happens in an E-W parallel world, causing no paradox with respect to the world wherefrom I originated. The only "rule" I think is that whatever I do travelling back in time along parallel worlds is I musn't increase entropy "back in time" to the extent that the "net increase in entropy" across all worlds is negative. However, since time travel probably is an infrequent occurance, the entropic effect is likely negligible, so, basically there ends up being no way I can harm the laws of physics, etc. thru my time traveling. So in brief, to one and all I say, happy time travelling!! :-)
Cool stuff. I love statistics and probabilities. I don't think "post-human" is going to be a dominant category. It may appear but somehow not sure how stable it would be. I think it would be more a "transition" form, much as archeaopterx was a "transition" between dinosaurs and birds.So, post-singularity one could have "half-man/half-machine" things running about no doubt. But there would be no point keeping DNA-based life around. The meme would have finally beaten the gene. I would say within a 100 or 200 hundred thousand years of the singularity hominids will be extinct, but "life-forms" in the form of replicating worms controlled by "minds" running on millions of machines at once, would be prevalent. These could perhaps survive until the heat death of the cosmos, or close to it, who knows. The key question I am not sure about is how long the "post-human transition form" would last. Maybe 10^4 - 10^6 years or so. Hard to narrow it down further tho.
Thank you for your candor. With views like that, it works out better for pellet-hording "rats"/"chipmunks" like myself since once you exit stage left via the whiskey/suicide route, that means there will be more "pellets" for us "rats" by way of your no longer using up the social security benefits! :-)
Diversify and hedge. Name of the game. People I work with have seen their 401K's eviscerated. Mine is more or less OK, because it is "heavily weighted" into money markets, which are safer than equity markets. The "rule of thumb" for people in their 20's and 30's is to have 70% of the 401K in equity markets. I didn't follow that, and instead reduced my position in equities and increased my position in money markets, when it came to my own 401K. Now I am more or less OK while my collegues are scrambling to sell.
That is a great insight. An idea is not just some "eureka!" moment. It is a synthesis of little ideas into an implementable concept. Case in point: genetic algorithms. These are based upon Darwin's principle of natural selection, which itself, the memeticist Susan Blackmore has called "the best idea anybody ever had". But sucessful implementation of the idea of natural selection by way of genetic algorithms means finding a real world business application for the principles involved, no easy task. Finding the right business niche for a mathematical idea is half the game.
*The Fountainhead</> says it best regarding great ideas:
"Thousands of years ago, the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burned at the stake he had taught his brothers to light. He was considered an evildoer who had dealt with a demon mankind dreaded. But thereafter men had fire to keep them warm, to cook their food, to light their caves. He had left them a gift they had not conceived and he had lifted darkness off the earth."
"Lifting darkness from the earth" - that is what entrepreneurship is all about really I think.
Stallman is a commie crackpot and everybody knows it. No respectable business person of note takes him seriously.
You can't have Falstaff, and have him thin.
Meaning, you can't have superior computing power like the "cloud" provides and expect to retain total transparency/privacy. Something has to give. I think it is inevitable in the long run that business will decide that the help to their bottom line that the cheap resources of the "cloud" provides offsets any theoretical leftist concern about transparency, privacy, etc.
Asking everyone to do their own computing is like going back to an agrarian culture where everyone grows their own food. Seem to recall Pol-Pot tried that, and I don't think history looks upon him too favorably. 'Nuff said.
Interesting. It is a little unclear to me from this article the nature of the discrepancy between the predicted strength of the gravitomagnetic field from general relativity and what the researchers claim to be observing. Whence the increase in strength in the gravitomagnetic field from predictions? Is it an effect from quantum theory? Maybe the article just doesn't go into detail enough, but seems to me either there needs to be a satisfactory explanation for this discrepancy, or, what they are observing is not the gravitomagnetic field.
Are you scraping wikipedia as a "top priority" node set in your search algorithm? Actually not a bad idea. I typed "Alyssa Milano" in there, since I am a HUGE 'Charmed' fan - anyway - that returned me a wiki article, as well as images, and facebook links, basically everything I really would need to know if I were writing a paper on her, including publicity images and so forth, all right there in one result page.Maybe it is just me, but I thought the colour scheme was kind of fun - different anyway - something for a change - I can definitely see people using this at least as a supplement to google! Good work! :-)
My own view is that acquiring "geek skills" in one's teens and early twenties, increases one's earning potential. From this, all else follows. I freely admit, personally, I didn't have much of a social life in terms of high school or even so much thereafter. I did however get my finger in the pie of the bubble after graduating high school in '99, and that I think has given me more insights in terms of things people do positive and negative in a start-up environment. These insights I think can only help going forward, and so if, even today, I probably do not consider myself a complete "socialite", that simply isn't as important in the long run as earning potential, based on exposure to start-up environments. And needless to say, in terms of "getting laid", to be blunt about it, earning potential is an aphrodisiac. In my experience, the beautiful can be bought! :-)
I'm not buying. As Howard Roarke, the protagonist in 'The Fountainhead' says, "The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing."
We don't need more altruism or nobless-oblige. We need more innovation. Google, who all but started the cloud computing model, is a leader in innovation. They should stick with what they are good at, technological innovation, and not have some kind of save the world guilt trip. The world benefits most by a Google that is focused on the one thing they are great at: search and a cloud computing dev environment.
Don't save us, google. Just keep up the good work. That way, by benefiting from your technology, we can save ourselves. :-)
If this individual elected to pursue his PhD work instead of carrying on with google, then he hasn't a right to complain that he is not getting the "recognition" he feels he deserved.