rhino42

I have anecdotal evidence to back up these claims: my mother is in internal medicine and my father is a surgeon. both have practiced defensive medicine and my father has complained about how common an occurrence it is on a regular basis.

Many tests, drugs and treatments have been applied in the name of defensive medicine.

There's a team at UC-Berkeley which is working on compiling C++ to a combination of CPU/GPU/FPGA code right now, which might change things. I think you need a special architecture to take full advantage of it though.

The other issue will be the I/O bottleneck. A practical application would need to have on-chip memory to buffer data (not mentioned here, I think). Even so, the applications will be severely limited by having data with enough processing needs.

I spend most of my time working on FPGAs, and I would imagine that in the end, a practical implementation of this chip would involve a good deal of similar work. Data would have to be piped from one core to adjacent cores, to keep the inter-chip bandwidth tractable. This could result in portions on the edges left unused because the data can't get there.

In summary, the applications for such a chip are limited, and will require a different skillset from what we usually ascribe to a programmer, but in those constraints these chips could be incredibly high-performance.

EDIT: I haven't played with log-scale arithmetic yet, but I think that adds / subs will be much more computationally complex--probably more so than multiplies in the current linear-scale numbers. Just a thought.

Haha, I guess I wasn't clear enough there; my bad.

In my defense, I was not saying "since we achieved all these awesome things, we'll surely eventually avoid the heat death of the universe". Instead, I was claiming that right now, we're probably still to ignorant to know that with confidence. Perhaps we will find a way to escape into a different universe.

Thanks for the reminder (and good username!)

Now that I think about it, even this viewpoint is invalid. Perhaps we simply have an insufficient understanding of the universe. In 5000 years, they might ridicule the people of their past (us) for ever thinking that the end of the universe is inevitable. Just because we can't conceive a workaround yet does not mean that there isn't one.

"travelling faster than 40 miles an hour is impossible" "communicate with someone on the other side of the world instantly? Impossible!" "fly to the moon?" "end death?"

I'm sure that if we sat down, we could come up with thirty things that we have daily today, but were 'impossible' a hundred years ago.

I frankly don't understand why you were downvoted. I agree with this opinion...

Consider selection bias: You'll only hear about the people who won. Those who bought a ticket and lost say nothing, because everyone knows that the chances of winning a lottery are dismal to say the least. So you only hear about winners!

This.

IMHO, humanity's goal for the next hundred years is to enhance our energy and medical technologies as quickly as possible. (space takes a distant third).

We are essentially in a race against time: if we are too slow, we will deplete our resources and wipe ourselves out.

There are lots and lots of things that are worth a single human's life (or tens, hundreds of lives). Research is one of them. For instance, if we could magically trade a random 100 lives for knowing if there is extraterrestrial life, I believe that it's a worthy trade. That's just one example.

No offense, but you seem to be raging a bit there.

Naturally, you have many interests. We all do. Google is trying to get the best picture of what those interests are, arguably so that they can give better than chance (or whatever they had before this). As usual, I would suspect that having more information trumps having less, so I argue that SPYW is improvement.

Sorry if this post seems impolite...

But at the moment those ads ate only email-relevant when served to your email- that's my understanding

But a intermediate stance, such as "you should use more than just mass media to learn your issues: consider these five websites" could be an effective message (if people actually browsed those websites / got informed)

You'd have to be pretty killer to pull that off, however. I know for a fact that out of college Microsoft picks up engineers from MIT for 84k, and NASA gets new greats (not necessarily from MIT) for 76k. (disclaimer- I am not from MIT, but these ate both very reliable sources)

Actually it's even more helpful than that: the lightest color indicates a less than one percent chance of entering the one percent, which means that that job does "worse than chance at achieving "one percent status".

The data in this graph is flawed.

I only see one major box categorized as "engineer", and it says that 1/4 of all engineers are architecture or surveying. Try 1/20, perhaps. 1/4 is way too large. The only engineering majors that large are EECS and Mechanical, I bet.

Haha, guess I didn't account for selection bias. I just asked a risk aversion question to a group of people who are considering startups (and thus very risk-tolerant). Go figure!

Eh, it depends. Would you rather have an 80 percent chance to make 75k per year, or a 10 percent chance to make 1 million per year? That's what I thought.

Engineering and software development are fields where you can consistently make very respectable wages. Risk aversion is a factor, after all...

Actually, I really looked the colors, it adds another dimension to the data: "given that you have X job, what is the chance that you would become filthy rich". I was actually frustrated with the graph until I noticed the meaning of the colors (viewing on a cell phone didn't help)

Cell towers can detect the receive power of any given cell phone on their network. If you just hacked your cell phone to use high transmit strength, they would know and could kick you off their network.

I can imagine that you could rig your cell phone (or another device) to transmit at high power to jam the connection, but the FCC would have something to say about it. If you're caught, I'd expect civil and criminal reprisals...

While this sounds like a good idea on the surface, it won't work.

Pretty much all cellular communications nowadays uses CDMA of one flavor or another. An important property of CDMA is that any signal that I send to the tower actually causes more noise for the other users in the network. This id called being interference limited. For this reason, there is a ton of effort going into power control, so that reach user sends just enough power to reach the tower but not more. Your cell phone COULD boost it's transmit power to reach the tower, but it would ruin everyone else's connection.

My initial reaction was "wow, good point; there's no way that the government would ever make the airlines buy completely new barcode scanners everywhere, for the simple purpose of improving security checkpoint effectiveness".

But then again, they threw down millions per unit for those back-scatter machines, so all bets are off.....

This is a classic case of the "prisoner's dilemma". By supporting the bill, you may increase your profit (but probably not by 10x). However, you interfere with legitimate businesses, and thus cause a net loss to society.

The threat is that some day, the other companies will support a law which is beneficial to them (and bad for you). Systemically, it is best for us to cooperate to achieve a group maximum

In this case, I disagree. Posting to that location lets us easily see the comments made on that posting (instead of just the replies to the comment being linked to)

This. My brother goes to MIT and he is precisely life-sized. He just works very hard. Let me also comment that the difference on starting salary at MIT is not so different from that of top five schools. Coming from one of those schools and knowing the students there, I believe that your degree of success is more strongly linked to your work effort and the experiences you seek, compared to the school you went to.

I initially interpreted that as "and other news aggregates like HN out there?" Oh, my silly brain...

But seriously, are there any other awesome news aggregates that I should be aware of?

I would imagine only if you were fluent in it. I bet these cabbies have to lice And breathe this information. You need not just a pile of facts, but the bigger picture: it has to be instinctive.

I am not am expert.

Correction: automation possess a threat to those who do not work principally with their mind. Knowledge workers won't be in danger of marginalization in the near future

Debatable. They clearly have enough calories, but you need more than just that to live and be healthy. I would strongly argue that omega-3's and vitamin D3 are essential nutrients that a substantial portion of the population are deficient in.

I believe that we are presently seeing the results of a system which has (by and large) begun to fail on that massive scale. The main cause of this present recession have been IMHO due to the replacement of human labor with technology. Those jobs aren't coming back, and the only way for those people to get employed again is for someone to gain applicable skills--such as technology.

I was being VERY optimistic. The system I just described would be roughly modelling the free market system, which education is not. Wholesale governmental support of the present system will make it much more "resilient" than it should be.

The good news is that the internet works in our favor--we already have alternative tools which mitigate the lack of good schools. I'm talking about Khan Academy and MIT OpenCourseWare, of course.

The problem is that the "free market" approach works better when it is immediately apparent the quality of the product. The results of teaching high school aren't really apparent for 3-4 years (at the fastest). This makes it hard for a newcomer to be effective against the competition

But you have to remember that the battery producers aren't especially interested in the safety of the battery (beyond a certain level)-- they care about price, capacity and re-usability.