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Not to rain on this parade, but Russia figured most of these lessons out a long time ago with the Mir/Soyuz. Even now, the person who spent the longest continuous period in space did it on Mir, not the ISS. And even the US figured out a good number of these lessons with Spacelab. The ISS doesn't provide any really new experience in long term space survival, though it does provide some engineering challenges that Mir did not. And besides, neither the Mir nor ISS are close to operating indefinitely. Both needed regular resupply from Earth (the ISS, in particular). And for all the patriotic rhetoric in the US, the USSR had arguably the better and more successful space program and did it at lower cost per mission (and probably lower regard for human life). Didn't get to the moon, of course, but much more successful at space stations and getting to LEO.

5 million barrels leaked out of an estimated reservoir capacity exceeding 50 million recoverable barrels of oil. Recoverable barrels are less than the actual capacity (it's how much the oil company expects to be able to extract). And the recoverable barrel estimate is notoriously conservative. It's always less than the actual amount of oil eventually pumped out. The leak could have gone on for years without emptying the reservoir. So, yes, the well was plugged and not allowed to simply empty out.

Kurzweil is more than optimistic - he's just plain guessing. His predictions for the near term are accurate because they don't require big leaps in imagination or technology. His predictions for further out tend to be wrong or loony (many, if not most, of the predictions he made for technology achieved by 2010 back in the 90s were wrong in whole or in part).

His "theory" of technology growth is ridiculous in the face of prima facie evidence. It's true that experts historically underestimate the rate of technology advancement. It's also true they almost always underestimate the field in which explosive exponential growth takes place. In the 1950s, we were dreaming about flying cars and meals in pill form. Who actually predicted the full extent of the internet in our lives back in 1960? Or ubiquitous celluar communication? Or that we wouldn't have just 3 broadcast television stations? Technological progress is a given and the more limited of Kurzweil's predictions are correct because they typically require modest improvements in current technology - but epiphenomenalism, i.e. the singularity, is far from a given.

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Kurzweil does a fine job making the simple types of predictions (the type that led to predicting flying cars in the 50s). The problem is that, like everybody, he can't predict the "next big thing". Exponential growth in technology always relies on discovering and exploiting as yet undiscovered technologies, and Kurzweil mostly relies on existing tech. That's fine for 10 or 20 years out but gets progressively worse at predictive power past that (see his predictions for 2010 and beyond made in the 90's, as opposed to the predictions he made in the last 10 years). And, to be honest, most scientists could have (and did) made the same short-term predictions Kurzweil made. It's not a stretch to think that Moore's Law will keep chugging along for at least 5 years and that people in different fields will exploit that.

It's a dangerous idea to let a majority of voters decide things. Think about the Civil Rights Act in the US. If it had been based on direct polling of the public, it never would have passed. The whole point of a representative democracy is that the guys elected (or appointed) to the legislature should, in theory, be wise enough to occasionally act against the wishes of the majority of the public, even if this costs future elections. Doing the "right" thing isn't always doing the popular thing.

It's also the case that you don't always want a simple majority deciding issues. All you would need is a bloc of 51% of the polled members always agreeing to vote the same way. That's how political parties came about in the first place. Even though the other 49% represent almost the same number of people, their voices would be ignored in favor of a slightly larger group.

This type of "Party" might work for a few seats, but I doubt the general public of any nation is sufficiently informed (or intelligent) to decide on general legislation. It also opens the door to allowing small minorities (ethnic, religious, etc) to be completely ignored in favor of larger minorities or majorities (consider the case of Port Chester, NY). Perhaps not such a big problem in Australia but something to consider for direct democracies of all types. They only tend to work in places with very homogeneous groups of people (homogeneous ethnically, religiously, and economically).

Gotta disagree with you. College is NOT a glorified vocational school, even if some people in CS treat it as such.

Any decent college won't claim that the knowledge you gain is worth anything in 5 years. Their purpose is (and should be) teaching some fundamental principles of a particular major discipline (CS, in this case), and, more importantly, a set of attitudes and philosophies that teach you how to teach yourself. In engineering, you know your basic skill set will be obsolete in 5 years (and the Head of our EE dept. told us this before classes even began), so it's more important to get the basic mental framework in place and learn how to learn.

Even at my place of work, some talented high school students could probably be taught how to do the job about as fast and well as college graduates. The difference comes 2 or 3 years down the road. The people most able to keep up with emerging trends and extending their abilities tend to be the ones with degrees. And it tends to be the ones with PhDs or Masters that do better at it. The ones whose skill sets don't seem to expand as quickly or as much do tend to be the ones with less schooling.

Well, that makes a HUGE difference. I'd run like hell from a 400% price increase, but a 300% price increase seems fair and equitable to me.

The officer in question claimed that the other car was traveling more than 10mph above the speed limit.

I don't claim to be able to gauge speeds that accurately, but I can definitely tell if a car is going that much faster than the limit.

People got speeding tickets before radar guns, ya know.

This post misses the point of the entire debate.

Texas is such a large market for textbooks that publishers bend over backwards to produce texts catering to Texas' standards. Other, less populous states don't have the population to force publishers to make any sort of changes. They are mostly stuck with textbook standards set by big states like Texas or California. You can say "live somewhere else", but that's precisely the problem - short of states like New York, California, or Texas, you can't live anywhere else that has an effective say on textbooks. These states are the ones that, through sheer size, drag everybody else along. So, heaven forbid you decide you want to live in state with low population density where you're not surrounded by insufferable right wing nut-jobs or by liberal hippies.

Texas has some insane textbook rules, but do you actually know what you're talking about?

Texas gets back $0.98 for every $1 of tax money collected. In other words, the state is giving tax money to poorer states. It also had one of the lowest failed mortgage rates in the country. That was due to a strange case of strong regulation of the industry within the state (one of the very few cases of any sort of effective industry regulation in Texas, which doesn't stop most of the ass-clowns in the state from railing against regulation in other industries).

Both can be true, actually.

Peak oil doesn't mean we've run out or that we're nearly running out. It means we've reached the maximum yearly production. At some point, extracting additional oil becomes incredibly expensive, and our production falls off. After that point, there's still oil, but we can't extract as much as we used to. So, even if we've hit peak oil, there's decades of production left. And if we haven't hit peak oil, there's an additional buffer of several decades. But even in the most optimistic industry estimates, peak oil is happening within the next 50-70 years.

Meh. It's worthwhile for a GOOD teacher, but the conclusions are iffy, at best, and the quality of instruction by mediocre/poor math teachers may suffer if they read it. It's a lot of fluffy cloud thinking without any scientific proof or backup. Emotionally great and makes intuitive sense (how many times is intuition wrong?), but a mathematician should know better than to accept intuition as proof and that anecdotes aren't data. Music instruction isn't designed to bring EVERYBODY to a level of proficiency. So, it's an apples to oranges comparison right from the beginning. And nobody cares if you can't appreciate music or art. But an adult who can't handle basic arithmetic is at a severe functional disadvantage compared to every adult who can handle basic arithmetic. Teaching a fundamental and necessary subject will necessarily be different from teaching a subject that is elective later in life and highly subjective in terms of scoring (at least at the elementary school level).

Also, cribbing off Hofstadter for the structure of the essay and GH Hardy for the title is presumptuous at best and outright mockery at worst.

The notion that set theory should be more prominent in elementary mathematics education was one of the ideas behind "New Math" in the 60s/70s.

New Math didn't work for a few reasons. Teachers and parents weren't familiar with the concepts and had difficulty teaching students about set theory. It was also more difficult to address why and how set theory (and other New Math ideas) related to the real world. And the level of abstraction necessary for teaching the concepts was beyond several students. There were several cases of middle school children unable to handle multiplication (even if they could explain the commutative property and sort of how to work in other number bases).

Children may be able to handle the concept more easily, but they certainly won't see how it relates to the real world and will end up being unable to balance their checkbooks. Basically, going back and trying the same failed idea (but with a spiffy new name and adjusted philosophical underpinning) is probably not a good thing.

Maybe some of the rote nature of arithmetic can be reduced, but it's almost certainly necessary. Elementary school education is about developing the basis for more advanced education as well as giving the kids the basic skills necessary to function (barely) as adults. Besides, most CS profs I know were thinking in terms of educating high functioning CS majors. That's going to be very different from the real world - where most students will never need (or want) much of the formalism of set theory.

Way to Go, slashdot readers! Completely overgeneralizing a research article!

The point is that it doesn't even have to be "most" of your Facebook friends. You can infer a surprising amount of information based on a relatively small sampling of people. This is not as obvious as it sounds. The proper extension is that this type of research indicates it's possible to infer other information (like shopping, political, geographic, demographic, etc) from information reflected by your friends. If it really is that obvious, why doesn't everybody already do it effectively? It's because it's not easy and not at all obvious. Facebook and Google have some impressive algorithms for this type of thing but nothing systematic and not as quantified as anybody might think.

You'd think people would welcome fundamental research into an obviously useful area. Sheesh

And how are you proposing to set up this manufacturing plant on the moon? This requires specialized parts, raw materials, etc shipped from the Earth. It's not like we can send some "moon colonists" over and have them get going. There are certainly raw materials on the moon, but it's not like the ones we need are going to be easily accessible.

Remember that the more exotic materials we use for space exploration are not easy to get, even on earth where we have the benefit of easily available oxygen/water/labor. Setting up mining, drilling, and excavation facilities on the moon is itself a massive undertaking with dubious benefits, unless we prepare with EXTENSIVE surveys that let us know exactly where the biggest concentrations of certain materials (mostly heavy metals and the more exotic semi-conductors/rare-earth metals) are located. If they're not concentrated in a small area, setting up multiple mining facilities to feed a single central manufacturing plant will be difficult. For the forseeable future, we're not going to be mining asteroids OR the moon. We're getting raw materials from the Earth because that's going to be the most cost effective for at least the next couple generations.

Think about it this way: try mining for iron in Michigan, for alkaline earth metals in Nevada, for copper in Montana, for Uranium in Tennessee, and then shipping it all to Iowa for processing and manufacturing. Sure, we can do it, but we spent decades getting the infrastructure in a rather human-friendly environment. And it still wasn't easy or cheap to set that up. Now try it in a hostile environment, like the moon.

Even the North America colonies of the 16-18th centuries required MASSIVE aid from their respective home nations in terms of new colonists, finished goods, and constant re-supply. And that's with the benefit of having relatively friendly weather, bountiful natural resources, and free water and oxygen. The US was built of colonists. It's massive industrial base was fed by a constant influx of colonists (i.e. cheap labor). You won't have that on the moon. The economics really don't work out.

The engineering challenge of setting up any sort of significant manufacturing plant on the moon is on the same order as setting up a manufacturing plant in orbit. But with the downside of having to constantly ship things from Earth to the Moon. It's be easier to launch them from Earth to LEO. That's assuming things aren't even less friendly to human life and manufacturing on the moon than we currently know.