Statement Regarding FedEx's Relationship with Amazon - <AUTHOR> http://investors.fedex.com/news-and-events/investor-news/news-release-details/2019/Statement-Regarding-FedEx-Corporations-Relationship-with-Amazoncom-Inc-/default.aspx <comment><USER3> I've never found FedEx to be as good to my door as UPS, but I lament what has happened to Amazon shipping. Where professionals used to deliver my packets, now amateurs show up in SUVs or rented box trucks. They leave the packages exposed to passers-by. They get their stupid trucks stuck in my driveway, ripping up the yard in the process. They lose packages in transit. Free one- day shipping with prime isn't worth this hassle.

<comment><USER4> I live on a private street. Amazon's "Amateur Delivery Drivers as a Service" routinely fails to find the private street, resulting in delays on packages arriving, and on numerous occasions, I have to go walk down to the end of my street to get the package from their driver.

<comment><USER5> As a counter-anecdote, Canada Post and UPS don't even try to deliver my packages to my apartment door but the Amazon guy gets it right every time.

<comment><USER3> Where do they deliver it instead?

<comment><USER5> To a post office ~2km from my home. I drive there and pick it up with my driver's license.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wouldn't be surprised if this came of amazon lowballing because they want to get (more) into Fedex's game.

The cost of shipping for Amazon isn't just the shipping cost - it's the opportunity cost of not scaling their own shipping business. I bet that's priced into their bid.

Similar goes for FedEx. If you're FexEx, you don't want more Amazon competition. You also like the scale/efficiencies from the Amazon business. So that puts their value of the deal at $$$_from_amazon + scale_efficiencies + amazon_not_in_your_game.

(I don't know what the marginal benefits of scale look like at that level - anyone know more on this?)

I could see FedEx better off taking a loss to keep the deal going. I bet either Amazon just tried to make that happen, or it's been happening for a while and there was just a change-over at Fedex.

</comment><comment><USER7> The press release isn't very clear about exactly which contract isn't being renewed. Other news sources[1] indicate that it's specifically the air delivery contract. Not exactly a surprise with events like this[2] in recent memory.

[1] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-07/fedex- say...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-07/fedex-says-it-won- t-renew-amazon-s-u-s-air-delivery-contracts) [2] [https://www.marketwatch.com/story/jeff-bezos-breaks- ground-o...](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/jeff-bezos-breaks-ground- on-15-billion-amazon-air-hub-near-cincinnati-2019-05-14)

<comment><USER8> If I was FedEx, I too would dump Amazon and let some other sucker deal with their race to the bottom demands. Having no pricing power as a vendor is a fool's errand, and Amazon will steamroll you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This title is a bit misleading.

FedEx is only dropping their Express business. As cited in the link, they note, "FedEx has made the strategic decision to not renew the FedEx Express U.S. domestic contract with Amazon.com, Inc. as we focus on serving the broader e-commerce market. This decision does not impact any existing contracts between Amazon.com and other FedEx business units or relating to international services."

<comment><USER10> That doesn't really clarify anything (for me)... What are the other business units? I've never gotten a Fedex Home Delivery pacakge from Amazon, are there other Fedex business units that ship for AWS?

<comment><USER11> "Green" FedEx is ground, which was an acquisition a long time ago. It's an all-ground service that uses trains and contract delivery carriers with FedEx livery. Slow and cheap. If you look at the door of the truck it will tell you who owns it.

The "Red" one is Fedex Express -- overnight, 2-day and 3-day service. Most people think of "Express" FedEx.

<comment><USER12> Freight is red. Express is orange.

I worked for Freight for seven years. FedEx Freight red is #FF0033 :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Of all the shippers, I've found Fedex to be the most unreliable. UPS deliveries via Amazon seem to always arrive without issue but almost every Fedex package gets lost en route or is delayed.

Always felt like Amazon should drop Fedex.

<comment><USER14> My younger brother is a professional musician, and last year he bought a boutique trombone case handmade by one guy in a cabin in Wisconsin, after over a year on the waiting list. Fedex got to his apartment building in Manhattan, realized they didn't have a code to get in, and left it on the sidewalk. My brother was waiting at home all day for this package, saw them drop it off, ran down, and it was gone when he got outside. Fedex wouldn't do anything about it, no refund, nothing. And if he had done a chargeback on the manufacturer, who wasn't really at fault, he wouldn't have been able to buy from him ever again.

So I wouldn't choose Fedex for anything valuable.

<comment><USER15> Anything that expensive or irreplaceable should have been insured by the shipper and required a signature

If you don't get what you buy, it's absolutely on the seller to make it right. It's on them to get reimbursed by the shipper for a failed delivery.

<comment><USER16> Insurance is not a panacea. It wouldn't have gotten him moved up in the waiting list to receive a replacement quicker, and the claim likely would have been denied, and they'd have expected him to go through an appeals, which would be a pain, and might not get the result he wanted. A police report will probably be required. Even if successful, when insurance claims are made they often go to the CLUE insurance report, and make many forms of insurance more expensive or harder to get. [https://www.carinsurance.com/clue- report.aspx](https://www.carinsurance.com/clue-report.aspx)

The other thing is that you're assuming there was no insurance. Maybe you're right but I doubt it, it was probably insured by Fedex and the uselessness of the insurance was included in "Fedex wouldn't do anything about it".

The "requesting a signature" part is something they often neglect to do, or do carelessly.

At any rate if the person making the trombone case can't be bothered to ship it properly, it's still Fedex's fault from the musician brother's perspective, because he knew firsthand that the driver failed to deliver the item directly to him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Delivery sucks.

Vendors can't find me because my address is half a block away from my actual unit. When they do find it, they pick one of two mail rooms, inside a random exterior door, in front of my door, or at the front desk.

The front desk is often not staffed and closes earlier than deliveries are out.

The front desk occasionally forgets to notify me a package arrived.

The delivery "lockers" sometimes don't email me.

The architecture and management of a building is very important for delivery success. It needs to be a "business address", it needs to be faithfully staffed, there needs to be delivery-only parking, and it needs to be obvious where a deliverer must go.

I have lived in places where this was done right, and several places where it was done wrong to my intense dissatisfaction.

<comment><USER18> One time I got really fed up with FedEx because when they delivered a package to me while I wasn't home, they dropped it off at the leasing office instead of taking it to the FedEx facility.

The leasing office closes at 6pm. The FedEx facility is only a few blocks away and closes at either 8 or 9. I got home at 6:30. Because of that driver's incompetence, I had to wait until the next day to get my package _and_ be late to work the next day because the leasing office doesn't open till 10am.

And this was something that was really time-sensitive, too.

This wasn't the first time they screwed up a delivery to me either. I will never do business with them again if I can help it.

<comment><USER19> Isn't there a way to register your address with general delivery directives?

<comment><USER20> Yes, you can sign up for free for FedEx Delivery Manager and set delivery instructions for your address. I don't know how effective it is though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I noticed FedEx seems very well partnered with Walmart right now: FedEx stores are now eligible pickup locations for the free store pickup option at Walmart.com.

This was pretty handy because getting in and out of busy Walmart's is a pain, and most FedEx stores are basically deserted at any given time.

Even when picking up at Walmart stores, I believe they were in FedEx packages. And this would be that two-day express shipping speed.

<comment><USER22> > getting in and out of busy Walmart's is a pain

In the 80's Walton had a hard policy of no more than three customers waiting in a line. Shopping then was a far more pleasant experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> My take: Amazon was twisting Fedex's arm on Express to limit shipping costs related to Prime. Fedex had enough.

My take: Amazon will expand their logistics operation (whether internally or via acquisition)

<comment><USER24> My take: Mackenzie Bezos buys UPS - the only other big package shipper - <USER2> wrings Amazon for a greater cut of profits

<comment><USER23> UPS is unionized, Fedex isn't. This will play a big role in any suitors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Hmm... how often does a company fire a big customer? This would seem significant and probably related to either a pricing dispute or the fact that one way or another Amazon is encroaching on FedEx's core business.

<comment><USER26> It's just FedEx is not renewing a shipping contract. Amazon could still ship using FedEx at retail/non contract rates.

<comment><USER27> Given the depth of discounts for even 1 million parcels per year, it's a safe bet the Amazon won't be paying Fedex retail rates for any non-trivial number of customer orders.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> "As previously disclosed, Amazon.com is not FedEx's largest customer."

Curious who their biggest customers are

<comment><USER29> Oddly enough, the USPS (which doesn't have their own fleet of aircraft) is the largest.

[https://about.usps.com/news/statements/022317.htm](https://about.usps.com/news/statements/022317.htm)

<comment><USER30> Interesting. That statement says FedEx is USPS' largest provider of air transportation to the USPS. But that's different from USPS being FedEx's largest customer.

<comment><USER29> I'm open to suggestions of a FedEx customer that'd have enough volume to bump all of the USPS's air mail down to second place.

<comment><USER31> Amazon?

<comment><USER29> Scroll up.

"As previously disclosed, Amazon.com is not FedEx's largest customer."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Locally I've gotten a lot more shipments delivered by Amazon delivery people.

They like to leave my packages in the driveway close-ish to the garage door rather than near the front door.

Not an ideal place....

Packages tend to be a lot more beat up too for some reason.

<comment><USER33> Amazon punishes drivers if the packages are lost or stolen so they try to hide them.

<comment><USER34> Amazon just started sending me pictures of the package on my porch as part of delivery confirmation. Not sure I love this, tbh, but if many things had been stolen I guess I's appreciate it more.

<comment><USER35> This has been useful to us because you can clearly show from the photo that Amazon delivered the device to the wrong house, and therefore a refund gets issued with no hassle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I don't think I've ever gotten a Fedex package from Amazon. It's all via CanadaPost and I assume US is USPS or UPS?

<comment><USER10> I used to get around 25% of my Amazon packages from Fedex, now most come from Amazon's own delivery service, the rest either come from the USPS or UPS (or sometimes both - UPS delivers to the postoffice and the mailman delivers to my house)

<comment><USER37> I actually like Amazon deliveries. They leave the packages at the door (in this case I'm ok with) and send a picture of said delivery, verifying that they did indeed leave it at and not in the apartment main office (which is conveniently only open while I'm at work)

<comment><USER10> As a recipient, I like them - as a pedestrian and cyclist I don't, their drivers are horrible drivers, driving too close to cyclists, cutting off pedestrians on sidewalks, etc.I assume it's because they are under a lot of time pressure to make deliveries.

UPS drivers, despite the large trucks, seem to be much safer drivers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> It's a smart business move for FedEx to be the key scale logistics infrastructure for everyone not Amazon rather than be reduced to a dumb pipe for Amazon - a scenario where they would get squeezed by the monopsony buyer over time. I bet Amazon had terms and conditions which limited FedEx's ability to go after both of these markets.

</comment><comment><USER39> Lately I have observed that UPS has given up trying to re-deliver my packages if they don't find me at home on their first try. They instead ask me to go pick them up from a UPS storage location.

I wonder if this is another sign of carriers getting fed up with Amazon.

<comment><USER40> I actually prefer this than the re-delivery attempts. Look, if something was "wrong" the first time it's probably going to stay wrong the next n times they try. I would just rather it be in a fixed location that I can pick up any time than wait another week or so until they give up.

<comment><USER39> What's the point shopping online then? You might as well go out and buy it if you have to drive.

<comment><USER22> Retail stores don't stock most of the things I buy online. Sometimes I _try_ to find something local and give up. I need a 5mm glass fuse for a shredder. All the auto parts stores only carry 6mm. Box stores don't have small fuses. Amazon got the sale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Personally, I hate FedEx with passion! They are the most unreliable, the most clueless and most difficult to work with. UPS never has an issue leaving packages by the door, whereas FedEx would always record a failed attempt to deliver. Last year I had a nightmare situation, where a case of wine was being shipped via FedEx and they "made an attempt" twice without bothering to leave a notice!!! (I suspect they weren't even at the right building). I ended up escalating it up the chain significantly to get it resolved but I swore to never ever ship anything by them.

<comment><USER42> Depends where you live. I have the complete opposite experience in San Francisco. UPS has lost packages left and right while Fedex is always on time and super reliable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Might just be a contact negotiations fail - Amazon given their options might not be too keen on paying what FedEx demands and FedEx thought it would be beneficial to disclose first and control the narrative.

<comment><USER44> Alternatively put, FedEx might not be willing to grovel for what Amazon is offering.

Many moons ago I'd worked for some folks who'd sold a business to Amazon. I'd heard it said that the only relationship you want to be in with Amazon is as a customer, anything else and they will chew you up and spit you out in the most brutal fashion.

I wouldn't be surprised to hear that Amazon was lowballing FedEx to an obscene degree, especially given that Amazon is rolling out their own delivery operations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> 'There is significant demand and opportunity for growth in e-commerce which is expected to grow from 50 million to 100 million packages a day in the U.S. by 2026.'

This expectation, if true, is mind boggling.

<comment><USER46> Yeah, that seems crazy. There are ~125 million U.S. households. We buy a ton of stuff from Amazon (not toilet paper, to be sure) and that's ~100 orders (so even fewer packages) per year. The average household is going to get an Amazon / Walmart / Costco package every single day?

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> The writing is on the wall, Amazon is going to be shipping everything themselves sooner than later. I think this just so that FedEx can focus on more profitable long term opportunities.

<comment><USER48> They already do this for a large portion of Prime deliveries in India. Don't see why they wouldn't expand it to other countries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> "Amazon.com represented less than 1.3 percent of total FedEx revenue for the 12-month period ended December 31, 2018"

<comment><USER50> I do this myself, so I wonder if when humans are trying to minimize impact when communicating bad news, we pick language intended to diminish.

Why say "LESS THAN 1.3 percent" instead of just saying something like "1.28 percent?" You're already giving decimal-level precision. Why does "less than 1.3 percent" sound better for news like this than "over 1 percent?"

<comment><USER51> For the reasons you mentioned, I assumed that to meant some decimal between 1.2 and 1.3 percent. And rounding the the tenths is more than enough. I didn't quite take that to mean anything sinister, though I'd have probably worded it something like 'just under 1.3 percent' to express that, if for the reason above.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> To this day, I don't understand why Wal-mart didn't buy UPS a decade ago.

</comment><comment><USER53> > FedEx has already built out the network and capacity to serve thousands of > retailers in the e-commerce space.

Why don't they build an e-commerce portal with third party merchants, just like Amazon?

</comment><comment><USER54> Good for Amazon. FedEx is terrible. Mini-rant:

Ordered stuff online. FedEx says the package was delivered but I don't see it. The online tracker lists the last location of the package in the city where I used to live. I assume I autofilled the wrong address or something. So I head down to my old apartment complex. They have my package. NBD, I'm able to pick it up without incident.

But then I check the shipping label on the package. It actually has my _current_ address on it. And right below that is a "Corrected Address" label, with my _old_ address. I double-check the online order. Turns out I gave them the right address. The retailer doesn't have any knowledge of my old address.

I call FedEx and ask what's up. Turns out the sender gave them my phone number (presumably so they could call me if they had issues delivering — and indeed, my phone number is listed on the "Corrected Address" label, along with an alterante phone number I did not give to the sender). The CSR confirms that FedEx disregarded the address provided and "corrected" it to the address they previously associated with name + phone number. The CSR confirms that no, this was not something I signed up for or accidentally opted into. They just "correct" addresses automatically without asking. Even if the corrected address is in a completely different city and looks nothing like the given address. Because quality.

So apparently, everytime I move, I now have to let FedEx know where or else they'll perpetually misdeliver my stuff. Lovely. And heaven forbid I try to send packages to my parent's address or some other place that's _not_ the address FedEx currently has on file for me. Because just shipping packages to the address actually on the damn label is too damn hard for them.

</comment><comment><USER55> Good !! Fedex is the only carrier that fucks up my deliveries !</comment>


First Public View Of Powerset Results - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/06/11/first-public-view-of-powerset-results/ <comment><USER2> I'm really careful about companies that hype themselves up too early.

<comment><USER3> I think these guys seem to be accumulating a lot of smart people with good track records though. It's an ambitious problem for sure but the potential reward justifies the risk. Actually I think the biggest risk is that Google probably has a team working on natural language search that could beat them to it (this is just me speculating I have no insider knowledge).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "'asterisk' died in office"</comment>


MentalHealthError: an exception occurred - <AUTHOR> http://www.kennethreitz.org/essays/mentalhealtherror-an-exception-occurred <comment><USER2> When reading this piece, it's important to keep in mind that psychiatry diagnoses symptoms, not causes.

> During my hospitalization, I was diagnosed with "Bipolar Affective Disorder > with Psychosis",

... which was caused by... ?

> Bipolar Disorder is something I've had for a while (unknowingly), _and will > have for the rest of my life._ (emphasis added)

If he hasn't had the symptoms all his life, there are causes behind the label's development. Some people get all the way through their life without becoming bipolar. Why is it that this particular human specimen developed these symptoms? The profession doesn't care, because they can sort-of medicate the symptom away.

> I now know how to manage it, with the proper blend of awareness, > _medication,_ and sleep. (emphasis added)

My girlfriend is tapering herself off her nuthouse-prescribed sedatives. If the professionals at the nuthouse had cared about causes, they would have looked deeper than their patient's superficial symptoms. Maybe they take their own kool-aid.

<comment><USER3> I can only wholeheartedly agree with this, at least in the practical sense. It's not known to me whether this is the theoretical _purpose_ of psychiatry, but by-and-large, it's definitely how it works out in practice.

<comment><USER2> > It's not known to me whether this is the theoretical purpose of psychiatry

The fringe of the mental health profession objects to treating people's symptoms as if they are the problem. The mainstream has standardized on a perverse standard of care, where they precisely "diagnose" patients with one of the meaningless labels contained in the DSM.

The author of 'The Doctor Isn't In' [1] is an older psychiatrist who is not kind to the mainstream practices of his profession. Another piece of his is 'How Psychiatry Lost Its Way' [2].

[1] [https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-doctor- isnt-...](https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-doctor-isnt-in/) [2] [https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/how- psychiatry-l...](https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/how-psychiatry- lost-its-way/)</comment></comment></comment>


Gamer sells virtual game property for over half a million dollars - <AUTHOR> http://blog.games.yahoo.com/blog/160-man-drops-record-setting-335-000-on-virtual-game-property

<comment><USER2> Previous large money transactions in Project Entropia have been shown to be PR manipulations ($100k "sale" from company to employee) or outright fabrications. There are plenty of references to these investigations out there on the net, though don't look to wikipedia, it's heavily astroturfed.

Bottom line is the game is a ponzi scheme, using fraudulent high dollar transactions to lure in lower dollar players. Some of them will flip property to even newer people for a profit, but in the vast majority of cases there just isn't any "there" there.

You can just back of the envelope figure they are full of shit - no one is paying $500k for a fucking space station made out of pixels and stored on Oracle RAC.

Need any more evidence? They are also the geniuses behind "Planet Micheal" whose tagline reads: "In the grim world of Michael Jackson, there is only war" (I swear I'm not making that up)

Oh, that employee I mentioned? "Neverdie" aka Jon Jacobs? Yeah, he's the one that just "sold" his brilliant investment for "$600k"

The one good take away from all this is how easy it is to fool the gaming blogs/press with a $20 PR newswire release. That is Project Entropia's biggest skill and they do it damn well.

[http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2006/05/project_entrop...](http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2006/05/project_entropi.html)

<comment><USER3> > no one is paying $500k for a fucking space station made out of pixels and > stored on Oracle RAC.

Since you're so well upvoted, I guess a lot of people agree with this, so I want to respond to be sure people aren't dismissing this sort of purchase without being logical about it.

I'm certainly not paying $500,000 for a virtual good like this, but this kind of statement is a bit broad and (I feel) narrow-sighted.

There are currently large online communities paying thousands a month to keep their virtual play worlds alive (e.g. larger gaming communities in Second Life). It's not hard to imagine someone acquiring virtual real estate at very high prices. Certainly I know of many investors doing it to the tune of tens of thousands. Just like landlords, those buyers are regaining their money by renting out portions of it to tenants, virtual good shopkeepers, special in- game events, etc. This is absolutely without question happening right now in many virtual settings and has been for years.

As such, virtual land can be a true investment, regardless of the number of "pixels" it contains. I'm not saying I think it's a _good_ investment, but to dismiss the market entirely as worthless is a narrow-sighted decision without understanding that there are true economic forces at work, and that business- people do their math and seem quite willing to make large payments they expect to recoup (just as with real property).

Further, some could have said the same quote about websites and look foolish today:

> no one is paying $500k for a fucking virtual magazine made out of pixels and > stored on a Wordpress server.

> no one is paying $500k for a fucking virtual name stored on a DNS server.

Virtual and digital items are going to be more and more important in our lives. They will continue to be valuable. Bet on it.

Even beyond the business implications, the comment and reaction surprises me. I don't see people reacting with the same shock about buying a $500,000 work of art, memorabilia, or antique. Clearly things can be of exceptional value based on the amount of time involved in creating it, the amount of sentimental value it holds, or the level of beauty/quality it has.

It's entirely fair to think high-priced virtual goods are a bad investment or to be skeptical of their worth, but to be severely dismissive of them is an act of ignorance and not giving them the (small?) respect they deserve simply as an economic factor in our lives and our children's lives.

<comment><USER2> I actually agree with almost everything you said. What I said was flip, to be sure, but I didn't intend for it to be forward looking at all. Obviously virtual goods can and do get bought and sold, and I have no problem believing that someday what I said could be precisely wrong in that someone would pay $500k for a fucking virtual space station made out of pixels stored on an Oracle RAC.

I was posting to shine a light on the fact that this company has pulled this kind of thing before, reporting huge dollar transactions that were either provably made up or at least had no way of verifying them. And that the person involved in this report is an employee of the company that sells these virtual goods (but they never, ever mention that). All that info came via researching the claims and not judgements about the value of virtual goods.

I was just trying to give an extra way of evaluating what I was saying. I claimed they're liars, linked to some supporting discussion of that, but it's the Internet - how do you know it's not me that's lying and them that's telling the truth? There a gut check is useful - it's pretty easy to tell that _today_ in 2010 people aren't dropping $500k on virtual real estate in a poorly funded and poorly known (compared to say second life, eve, warcraft, etc) virtual world. At least it's unlikely enough that you should demand a fair amount of proof before you believe it (and you won't be able to find any except for the pr-news-blog circle jerk)

I hope that explains what I meant better. No question that there are many people exchanging real money for virtual property in game type virtual environments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I once sunk thousands of dollars into that game. Once I bought a nice lakeside house for 500 (us) dollars and sold it for over $1100 - nothing compared to the players who spend thousands of dollars buying armor and weapons (mine was worth mere hundreds) but still quite amazing to me.

It is a pretty basic mmorpg, only got quests this year, but there's something extremely compelling about the game. Some people say the game is just gambling- I tend to agree.

There are massive amounts of money going through this game. It's both scary, and amazing to watch. And yeah, if you're a good businessman (or scam artist) there is a ton of (real) money to be made.

<comment><USER4> I just remembered- I bought the house to set up a beauty salon. My profession was a hairstylist - one of the more elite profession. I spent well over $100 on a hairstylist chair (I had to watch the auctions for weeks before one even showed up), and people would pay $2 or more to have their hair cut/styled. For the first while I did it for free- just for the cost of hair gel and supplies. Crazy enough for you?

Other 'elite' professions at the time were body modification (plastic surgery) and coloring clothes. Red was crazy expensive. Every once in a while they'd release a new color and the price would skyrocket.

Crazy times, crazy game.

<comment><USER5> If hairstylist is considered an elite profession, what are the ones who build the space stations and asteroid bases and whatnot (like what this guy sold for $600,000+)?

<comment><USER6> "Uber-Elite Professions"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Makes more sense than most real estate prices in California.

<comment><USER8> Try NYC...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wow. I believe I downloaded and installed this game on my machine in something like 2003 or 2004? My graphics chip couldn't play it at a usable frame rate, and I really couldn't figure out the gameplay (I remember people telling me to go to some ship or something? I could mine there? Or something?)

I had absolutely no idea that it was still around. I'm really happy for the creators to hear that it seems to be absolutely _flourishing_. Awesome.

</comment><comment><USER10> It looks like Second Life plus FPS game. I can see how that could be a human black hole. The biggest barrier to entry for SL is figuring out what to _do_ with yourself in-game. If you just got sucked in to fighting orcs or whatever right away, the addiction would take hold much faster.

<comment><USER11> In the beginning of the game you start grinding basically. I know I started hunting animals and sold what I got until I could get a decent gun. I then saved till I could get mining equipment. I got lucky in the middle of nowhere and hit a huge vein of gems (or something) that I sold for like 5x what I paid for the mining equipment.

I then bought armor and a better weapon and went roaming the wilderness to find one of the better cities with better markets. I could have gone with one of the 'coyotes' to help me do the crossing (some seriously big monsters along the way that I had to run like shit from) but they charged ridiculous amounts and if you had an iffy connection you could lose them and the cash you spent.

I eventually got a bit bored with the game as it's specifically designed so progression is really slow without dropping money. At least they kept skill progression to grind only or ludicrously expensive 'implants' (like in EVE).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> How long before regulation rolls into town? I'm sure there's bureaucrats out there who want a piece of this pie (beyond the normal taxes that might apply).

</comment><comment><USER13> If there were a poker game in the virtual world, would that be legal in the US? Would it depend on whether the currency was convertible to real money? If so, would there be a threshold rate of exchange at which it is legal vs. illegal?

<comment><USER14> This idea has been explored in Second Life. I do not know the answer, but there must be some literature out there that discusses the legality of the virtual casinos in SL. You might search for SL's currency (linden bucks) to find it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is there a virtual goods bubble?

</comment><comment><USER16> ...alas, we have the next real estate bubble.

</comment><comment><USER17> What happened to that woman who supposedly sold Second Life real estate (IIRC) to the tune of a million dollars? Like 4 years ago.

<comment><USER18> Are you referring to Anshe Chung? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anshe_Chung>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Apologies for adding absolutely nothing to this discussion, but...

Dude...

:0</comment>


The Unparalleled Genius of John von Neumann - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/cantors-paradise/the-unparalleled-genius-of-john-von-neumann-791bb9f42a2d <comment><USER4> "Von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my 3-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same principle when he talked to the rest of us." \- Edward Teller

See [0] for a demonstration.

I watched a documentary from the 80ies a long time ago. A mathematician (can't remember his name) who worked with von Neumann in Los Alamanos was interviewed. He described von Neumann's last weeks in the hospital - <USER2> cancer had already metastasized into his brain. The mathematician said something along this lines (I am citing from memory): "von Neumann was constantly visited by colleagues, who wanted to discuss their latest work with him. He tried to keep up, struggling, like in old times. But he couldn't. Try to imagine having one of the greatest minds maybe in the history of mankind. And then try to imagine losing this gift. I was terrible. I have never seen a man experience greater suffering."

Marina von Neumann (his daughter) later wrote this about his final weeks:

"After only a few minutes, my father made what seemed to be a very peculiar and frightening request from a man who was widely regarded as one of the greatest - if not the greatest - mathematician of the 20th century. He wanted me to give him two numbers, like 7 and 6 or 10 and 3, and ask him to tell me their sum. For as long as I can remember, I had always known that my father's major source of self-regard, what he felt to be the very essence of his being, was his incredible mental capacity. In this late stage of his illness, he must have been aware that this capacity was deteriorating rapidly, and the panic that caused was worse than any physical pain. In demanding that I test him on these elementary sums, he was seeking reassurance that at least a small fragment of this intellectual powers remained." [1]

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLbllFHBQM4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLbllFHBQM4)

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Martians-Daughter-Memoir-Marina- Whitm...](https://www.amazon.com/Martians-Daughter-Memoir-Marina- Whitman/dp/0472118420)

<comment><USER5> I've taken a medication that occasionally makes me feel stupid. For a day I might be unable to continue reading a book without re-reading each sentence a few times. I might not be able to talk to people about a complicated or technical subject without stumbling over my words. I will find it difficult to think in the abstract terms, and when I listen to others who talk about abstract values and concepts I have to continually relate it back to a concrete example otherwise I'm lost. My IQ is normally between 140-155. When I go through these brain-fog days I estimate it's at around 90.

It feels terrible. When I first experienced it, I was terrified that it would be permanent because that would keep me from doing my job and keeping up with my interests and hobbies. Now I only get this brain-fog every so often. I think it helps me communicate with people better and has helped me learn patience. I finally understand how some people might be genuinely, earnestly trying to understand what I'm trying to say or teach, but can't understand it because I'm communicating it at the right level of analysis.

If you're intellectually gifted (many programmers are), you shouldn't take that for granted. You got lucky, and if you weren't lucky enough to be intelligent, it might have been impossible to do the same kind of work you do today. Please appreciate that.

<comment><USER6> > If you're intellectually gifted (many programmers are)

Lets not jerk each other off too hard, eh? Just like everybody in life, in any trade or profession, most programmers are just average people like everybody else. They just happened to luck out and be good at a talent that pays well.

Odds are incredibly high you aren't any smarter than somebody who paints houses for a living, fills your prescription, or plays football for the NFL. We are all just people trying to make a living -- don't ever forget that.

<comment><USER7> There is a reason why a cashier works for minimum wage.

A few days ago I went to a grocery store to buy sparkling water. I got 16 small bottles and arranged them as a 4 by 4 grid before cashier, so she wouldn't need to spend time counting them and delaying the line. It took her over 10 seconds to count the bottles: apparently, she didn't recognize the pattern and counted them by groups of 3-4 bottles covering the counted ones with her hands to simplify the process. Programmers don't even need to multiply 4x4, they just see the answer. This scene hints that the cashier's analytical skills are next to none and this alone explains why she is a cashier.

Another example. There is a curious simple test to check your working memory capacity. Imagine a 3x3 grid and draw there words oil/gas/dry. Now read all the words that you see on the grid. Not all people have visual imaginations: some operate with graph-like structures and represent the grid as a set of logical statements: row1 is gas, row2 is oil, row3 is dry. This is fine as long as they do it efficiently. Most people in this task will resort to the snail analytical approach and will be thinking like: cell 2-1 is A, so cell next to the right is 2-2 belongs to word 2 which is oil and thus the second letter is I, so our current sequence is AI. Obviously it will take them ages to enumerate all the words this way. High level programmers can keep the entire grid in memory, either as an image or in symbolic form, and thus can enumerate words quickly. Why does this example matter? Programmers have to keep many objects and connections between them in memory.

If everybody had these raw cognitive skills, programmers would get the standard minimum wage. Same for accountants, lawyers, bankers.

<comment><USER8> > Imagine a 3x3 grid and draw there words oil/gas/dry. Now read all the words > that you see on the grid.

I can't do this for shit and I'm a genius.

<comment><USER9> I bet you can still enumerate them though through a different method.

<comment><USER8> Walking home that day I was obsessed with this. I guess I did okay. Found at least one five-letter word ("grail", I remember). I can't see all the letters at the same time, so I feel like I'm cheating when I do it.

On the other hand even when I think of a three letter word I don't see the letters, I just kind of know what they are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _In an answer to the question of why there is no evidence of intelligent life beyond earth despite the high probability of it existing, Szilárd responded: "They are already here among us – they just call themselves Hungarians."_ [1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_\(scientists\))

<comment><USER11> For a depressing analysis on where all the Hungarian geniuses came from and why they vanished: [https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb- consid...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered- as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/)

<comment><USER12> He mentions Curie as non-Ashkenazi, but even with her I don't know, she was born Polish with full name "Maria Salomea Skłodowska"(-Curie), her middle name "Salomea", given after her grandmother sounds to me like Jewish origin. I wonder how percentage of Nobel price winners/etc. would look like if you'd really dig deeper few generations or did genetic tests.

<comment><USER13> I have a hypothesis that almost all of the greatest intellectual achievements come from a very small number of bloodlines. I really doubt the idea that people are born and some just end up as the smartest in generations, I think theres more to the story

<comment><USER14> I am not sure that a 'bloodline' is a valid genetic concept. It depends a lot who the partner is, after all they provide 50% of the offspring's genetic material. Put another way, if you are a genius in some field, the chance of having a child with someone of equal or greater aptitude is effectively zero.

The 'more to the story' is possibly just affluence and family stability, which are also culturally embedded.

<comment><USER15> > _The 'more to the story' is possibly just affluence and family stability, > which are also culturally embedded._

At a guess I would think these are the more important factors.

Being born into an affluent family gives access to higher likelihood of more varying influences and stimuli from an early age. Children are by their nature curious creatures, so having the possibility to satisfy their curiosity in more avenues should reflect on their later ability to absorb new information in these fields (because they already have an established baseline knowledge).

Family stability probably helps to support curiosity and emotional safety. When failures are treated as positive experiences ("what did we learn from this?"), as opposed to wasted effort, you are more likely to allow yourself to seek more such experiences.

 _Of course_ there are outliers. But over generations, I would expect more innovations and brilliant minds to emerge from families who can provide and support their offspring with the environment to flourish in their fields of interest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > In 1945, von Neumann proposed a description for a computer architecture now > known as the von Neumann architecture,

Do note that he proposed a description but it wasn't his idea. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Draft_of_a_Report_on_the...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Draft_of_a_Report_on_the_EDVAC#Controversy)

> some on the EDVAC design team contended that the stored-program concept had > evolved out of meetings at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of > Electrical Engineering predating von Neumann's activity as a consultant > there, and that much of the work represented in the First Draft was no more > than a translation of the discussed concepts into the language of formal > logic in which von Neumann was fluent.

<comment><USER17> Aha — Stigler's law strikes again.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy)

<comment><USER18> I'm disappointed Stigler's law was actually coined by Stigler.

<comment><USER19> > Stigler himself named the sociologist Robert K. Merton as the discoverer of > "Stigler's law" to show that it follows its own decree, though the > phenomenon had previously been noted by others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Can anyone recommend readings on von Neumann that highlight his non- mathematical achievements? Obviously he was primarily a physicist and mathematician, but for a non-mathematician, the long list of academic publications is hard to interpret and appreciate. For example, more in the vein of these:

\- _Reportedly, von Neumann possessed an eidetic memory, and so was able to recall complete novels and pages of the phone directory on command. This enabled him to accumulate an almost encyclopedic knowledge of what ever he read, such as the history of the Peloponnesian Wars, the Trial Joan of Arc and Byzantine history (Leonard, 2010). A Princeton professor of the latter topic once stated that by the time he was in his thirties, Johnny had greater expertise in Byzantine history than he did (Blair, 1957)._

\- _...conversing in Ancient Greek at age six..._

\- _On his deathbed, he reportedly entertained his brother by reciting the first few lines of each page from Goethe's Faust, word-for-word, by heart (Blair, 1957)._

<comment><USER21> > Reportedly, von Neumann possessed an eidetic memory, and so was able to > recall complete novels and pages of the phone directory on command. This > enabled him to accumulate an almost encyclopedic knowledge of what ever he > read

If he was able to recall ~entire pages of the phone directory on command, I wonder if he could also recall (near) verbatim text of _all_ the novels he had ever read, to what degree he could do this, or to what degree he could at least comprehensively recall key points, facts, timelines.

I would think he would have spent some time speculating on how the brain stores memories, I wonder if any of his theories were ever captured in some form.

<comment><USER22> Supposedly, yes-- during his final stay in the hospital, his brother read to him from a book they'd enjoyed during their childhood, Dickens' _A Tale of Two Cities_. When his brother had to turn the page, John would continue the narration from memory while his brother found his place on the subsequent page.

Given that he could be occasionally absent minded, I suspect that it had to be something that piqued his interest, but his sense of what was interesting was extremely broad.

He did in fact speculate on the workings of the brain in _The Computer and the Brain_ , which is based on a lecture series he had planned out but did not deliver. It was more in the context of automata theory, but as someone with an interest in AI, automata, and neuroscience, it was frankly rather dank[0]. A lot of the pioneering work was, and is enjoyable in part because it's original and speculative, so you don't have to master the literature to make sense of it, you can just pick a paper and go. I'd recommend reading Pitts and McCullogh, plus also Lettvin, but others might have some equally lit[1] recommendations.

\--

0\. In the contemporary sense, _c.f._ "cool", "dope", or "excellent"; not dank like a root cellar.

1\. _vide supra_

<comment><USER23> Okay we get it, you blaze.

<comment><USER22> My word choice is more driven by exposure to the dataset that I'm working with. There's been some recent successes with autoencoders trained on virtual sensory input (i.e., video games) with surprising results, e.g., neural networks that can simulate the dynamics of these environments with surprising fidelity.

Of course, learning to _play_ video games at a high level is trivially easy, as everyone in the field now knows. The next challenge is, naturally, to make money doing this. But how? After the traditional thirty seconds of research before undertaking a major project, I determined that the only way to make money from video games is to become a popular streamer.

So now I am training an agent to generate video of it playing and reacting to an imaginary game and equally fictitious Twitch viewers, with a dataset drawn from the top Fortnite streamers. The reward function is comprised of a blend of subscribers, donations, and (logarithmically scaled) misogyny in the chat. Thus far, I've only managed to create some sort of window into hell, where the "game" consists of unceasing violence, murder after murder after murder as towers of mismatched material swell and fall in ever transforming locations on the isle while the chat endlessly subscribes, spams, and emotes in cackling glee and the superimposed webcam video features a... thing with too many eyes and hands screaming incoherently.

At first I thought it was a problem with my dataset, so I started watching some of the streams myself. This has not yielded insight into the whole "nightmare vision" output of my model, but it has expanded my vocabulary on the twin subjects of combustibles and comestibles, which I feel is a reasonable trade-off for the sanity battering associated with this whole endeavour.

<comment><USER24> What blend of lovecraft and twitch is this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I am so happy to see this article about Von Neumann on HN!!! I have been posting about him on here for years, and have read all his books, but not as many of his papers as I would like, they are really hard! I have been working for many years now on continuing his theories of weather control technology and self-replicating machines. He is my absolute personal hero and the scientist who, far above all others, I consider to be the one in whose footsteps I want to follow.

<comment><USER26> That's interesting! Have you made progress on self-replication? I think it's a very important problem. I've made some notes categorized under topics/self- replication.html in [http://canonical.org/~kragen/dercuano-20191110.tar.gz](http://canonical.org/~kragen/dercuano-20191110.tar.gz), but of course I'm no Johnny von Neumann.

<comment><USER25> Von Nueman is on the record as saying he believed computers were a sub field of self replicating machines. I believe they will be very important in the future and will have many applications.

Not really, unfortunately. I think it would be fun to build a 3d printer that can replicate itself, but have not tried building any prototypes because besides being too expensive I also havent taken my research into that far enough. I am a very ambitious person and have big plans for the future! What I have done on this subject besides reading about it is very theoretical and abstract, its more of an aspiration right now than an active research project to be completely honest.

<comment> wes-k You may want to check out [https://reprap.org/wiki/RepRap](https://reprap.org/wiki/RepRap) which is exactly this type of 3D printer. I don't think it's 100% though.

<comment><USER26> Well, RepRap has the philosophy that self-replicating systems such as hedgehogs and raspberries need some definite set of "vitamins" available prefabricated in their environment for self-replication, and RepRap chose things like threaded rod, NEMA motors, hotends, and Arduinos as their vitamins. This was extremely successful at making 3-D printers mainstream — every popular 3-D printer out there derives from RepRap designs — but not at producing an exponentially growing quantity of 3-D printers printed by 3-D printers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Von Neumann invented a novel paradigm for computing using harmonic integration of analog oscillations. The patent was granted after his death.

While there were a few prototypes in the 50s, the transistor killed it. A fully functional version of this computational architecture has never been built, to my knowledge:

[https://patents.google.com/patent/US2815488A/en](https://patents.google.com/patent/US2815488A/en)

<comment><USER28> For anyone who's interested in more detail:

This type of computer is also called a "parametron" ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parametron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parametron)). A Japanese researcher named Eiichi Goto independently invented it around the same time as von Neumann, and developed it much further than von Neumann did, so the idea is more often associated with Goto than with von Neumann.

The basic idea is that if a nonlinear harmonic oscillator is driven at twice its resonant frequency, it will oscillate stably in either of two phases. The two phases represent "0" and "1". If the driving signal is switched off and on again, the oscillator will arbitrarily "pick" a phase to stabilize on. If it's exposed to an input signal from another oscillator as it's turning on, it will always pick the same phase as the input signal. This makes it possible to copy a "0" or "1" from one oscillator to another. If the oscillator is exposed to input signals from several other oscillators, it will pick by "majority vote". Finally, a NOT-gate can be built by inverting the signal polarity. This set of primitives is sufficient to build arbitrary logic gates and flip-flops.

Goto's paper has an excellent explanation and more detail:

Goto, E. (1959). The Parametron, a Digital Computing Element Which Utilizes Parametric Oscillation. Proceedings of the IRE, 47(8), 1304–1316. doi:10.1109/jrproc.1959.287195

(PDF available at [https://sci-hub.tw/10.1109/JRPROC.1959.287195](https://sci- hub.tw/10.1109/JRPROC.1959.287195))

<comment><USER29> Thank you for this!

There's also a quantum variant:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_flux_parametron](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_flux_parametron)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Pretty good article. Can't wait to read other, less sensational articles recommended here.

One particular error in the article stood out to me: the Trinity test site is in White Sands, New Mexico, not Nevada. This was immediately noticeable because I've been to the Trinity site.

Von Neumann probes pop up in sci-fi. One of my favorite uses of them is in the Bobiverse books: [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32109569-we-are- legion?f...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32109569-we-are- legion?from_search=true&qid=rikQuF7074&rank=1)

</comment><comment><USER31> von Neumann, Oppenheimer, Bohr, Einstein, Rutherford, Turing, Teller, Szilard, Wigner, Meitner... the list goes on... -- how did that time produce so many people of colossal intellect? War certainly can't be the primary factor, given that many of them were brilliant/productive even before WWI

<comment> 0-_-0 4 on your list are Hungarian, and 3 of them went to the same high school:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasori_Gimn%C3%A1zium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasori_Gimn%C3%A1zium)

Hungary had a great education system at the time.

<comment><USER16> > Hungary had a great education system at the time.

I seriously doubt you could back this. You are generalizing from a single school. Might as well argue that socialist Hungary had a great education system because of Fazekas. Neither are true. I happen to have a maths teacher degree from a Hungarian university and we studied Hungarian education history and I learned much more about education systems later on my own (and this is not to say this university maths teacher course was a good one, quite the opposite). If you want to know what great education at the time looked like, read up on Summerhill -- it was founded in 1921 but humanistic education has been around for centuries.

<comment> 0-_-0 While having a much smaller population (10M), Hungary places 4th in worldwide medal rankings on the International Mathematics Olympiad [1] behind China (1.5B), USA (300M) and Russia (150M)

[1]: [https://www.imo- official.org/results_country.aspx?column=awa...](https://www.imo- official.org/results_country.aspx?column=awards&order=desc)

<comment><USER16> There were a few, very few special math classes that _went against the system_ which delivered results. I went to one, I should know...

<comment><USER32> If we're talking about von Neumann, or even just the math olympiad, then clearly we're not talking about how well the education system serves the 50th percentile. It's possible for a system to be awful for most, and somehow find and train the top few percent brilliantly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> You might like "Prisoner's Dilemma: John von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb" ([https://www.amazon.com/Prisoners-Dilemma-Neumann-Theory- Puzz...](https://www.amazon.com/Prisoners-Dilemma-Neumann-Theory- Puzzle/dp/038541580X))

</comment><comment><USER34> Awww, I was hoping they'd mention how Neumann was keen on launching a preemptive nuclear strike against the USSR.

<comment><USER35> _" "If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at 5 o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?"_

Hardly surprising that he was one of the influences on the character of Dr Strangelove. Was he a remarkable genius, absolutely - was he right about everything, definitely not.

<comment><USER36> Context is crucial when reading this quote now rather than the 1950s. JVN said this _before_ a nuclear war would have been 'world ending'.

Consider that several nations had avoided war as hard as possible prior to WW2. Standing by as entire countries we absorbed by a hostile power. In the end it only resulted in much greater destruction. Many people like JVN saw the same theme playing out with the iron curtain, and the destructiveness of the weapons only increasing over time.

The thought process was:

"We need to have a destructive war now to avoid having an earth shattering war later."

There had just been two world spanning wars in their lifetime. They considered a third inevitable. If it was going to happen at some point, better that it occurs before world ending arsenals were constructed.

<comment><USER35> I am aware of the context - doesn't make it any less terrifying.

Edit: I'm going to ask you the same question I asked another commenter - <USER3> you think it would have been better for the US to have attacked the Soviets as Von Neumann and others wanted?

<comment><USER36> Of course not, but only because we already know how the story ends. If they had been correct, we wouldn't be here to say that we should have listened.

Their predictions on nuclear arsenals were correct. A nuclear war in 1965 would have been vastly worse than one in 1950.

What they got wrong is that great powers would successfully avoid war over the long term. Which _at the time_ was a bet with very poor odds.

<comment><USER37> I seem to remember that von Neumann was also responsible for what later came to be known as "Mutually Assured Destruction", the idea through game theory that ensuring that both nations would be prevented from acting preemptively because the results would carry too great a cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I have always wondered how close von Neumann was to the maximum human potential. Does he sit close the outer edge of possible human potential, or can greater geniuses be created? Is there anyone alive who even comes close to Johnny?

<comment><USER39> My guess is that each relatively difficult field (fields that require substantial thought... I guess you know it when you see it) has its freaks of nature: genetic anomalies that, for at least a brief moment, seem to transcend the other participants.

In the 20th century, philosophy had Saul Kripke. Among other things, he published one of the seminal papers in the (at that time) nascent area of modal logic when he was 17. I have it on good authority from a professor friend that many - who know Kripke in a professional setting - regard him as having a sort of alien intelligence.

Not to take away from Von Neumann, but there are at least a couple people each century who have these sorts of alien cognitive skills.

Also, while there is probably some truth to them having a sort of alien intelligence, we can't disregard the contexual factors of their success. Von Neumann lived in a unique academic-historical period. A period where one could make lasting, foundational contributions to a variety of disciplines.

<comment><USER40> At the most charitable, Kripke was not generous in acknowledging influences.

[http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/Archive/whose.html](http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/Archive/whose.html)

<comment><USER39> This is interesting. I hadn't heard of this dispute.

I just read the Marcus paper from 1961 that is essential to Smith's thesis. I also read the back-and-forth rebuttals between Smith and Soames. I read the Marcus paper before reading the Smith and Soames papers.

I don't really see how Soames' primary claim is not likely true. He says:

"Marcus, along with certain other philosophers, do deserve credit for anticipating important aspects of contemporary theories of reference. However this credit in no way diminishes the seminal role of Saul Kripke."

When reading the Marcus paper, you really have to start stretching and expanding her arguments if you want to claim that she did more than anticipate 'important aspects of contemporary theories of reference'.

It should also be noted that Timothy Williamson (Oxford) has been one of the staunchest advocates for the proper appreciation of the work that Marcus produced, and yet he doesn't agree with Smith.

But really, this is all probably secondary to the issues surrounding Kripke's importance. Naming and Necessity - like most paradigm shifting works - was not a one-trick pony. Kripke expanded on his possible world semantics, introduced distinctions like metaphysical vs epistemic necessity, laid waste to any residual belief in the merits of logical positivism, came up with the first succesful (at least, most see it as succesful) argument for the existence of synthetic a priori truths, etc. Moreover, Kripke came up with at least two fairly water tight arguments against the descriptivist theory he was going against. If Marcus was the first person to introduce this new theory of reference, than the theory was stillborn. Kripke (if we take him as having taken the theory from Marcus) actually explained the ins-and-outs of the theory, provided associated puzzles, addressed counterarguments, related it to other issues in analytical philosophy, etc.

Lastly, Naming and Necessity was not the only impressive work of Kripke's. We would have to include his work on modal logic as well as his work on Wittgenstein. There are probably a number of puzzles and counterarguments that were never published that should be included as well. For example, Kripke once attended a conference on personal identity where a philospher had just presented a new argument in his talk that elicited a standing ovation from the rest of the philosophers in the room (this basically never happens at conferences). Kripke was asked to come up and comment on this new argument. He came up and provided a water tight refutation of it. Everyone in the room was taken back by this.

<comment><USER41> > He came up and provided a water tight refutation of it. Everyone in the room > was taken back by this.

His name? Albert Einstein.

Just kidding. But do you have any text of this exchange?

<comment><USER39> I don't. My philosophy of language prof in undergrad relayed it to me. She said the conference had been held in Israel. I'd start there in your search. My guess, though, is that a transcript doesn't exist. Analytical philosophy as a profession has typically been pretty piss poor for archiving conferences (whether transcripts or programs, etc.).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I've recently been engrossed by the question of how geniuses and highly intelligent people think. There's bits and pieces of information online. What I'd really like to see, though, is (a) geniuses describe their thought process and (b) a smart person voicing is interior monologue while attacking a problem.

1) Do you know of any information like this? Link?

2) Otherwise: do you think in a way that's different (better) than the average person?

<comment><USER7> I heard that Tesla could effectively "run" experiments in his mind, not just visualize them. Another pointer is that some "schools of thought" divide the art of thought into ability to visualize and ability to analyze where the latter has to be built upon the former and only when the former is perfected. My personal belief is that being a genius is about the ability to keep in mind many things at a time without losing details.

<comment><USER43> I read this about Edison.

Also he read very fast, the librarians though he did not like the books that's why he was returning all of them every next week.

Also what usually geniuses can do is process information a lot. Read and write many papers. Eg Terrence Tao. His blog is always going strong, the polymath projects, plus regular teaching, plus his own (other) research.

Alexander Grothendieck, wrote books full of brand new ideas about very abstract math. Amazing insights. Ability to work with unfamiliar cutting-edge things while keeping focus, while communicating them to others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> A question to mathematicians: what does your mind look like when you prove a theorem?

There is a comment here, saying that many hard theorems require one to build a complex branch of math and use it to prove a single statement. So I asked myself: what does it really look like to prove a theorem at such level?

I can tell what's going on in a programmer's mind. Software is very much like an imaginary mechanism and software engineers are mechanics. For example, this site is a database connected with a html page, so a programmer literally imagines a big gray building that means the database, another building that means the html page and a pipe that connects them. The database has a few tables: one for user accounts, another for posts like this, another for comments. So a programmer imagines 3 big blocks inside that building that are connected with pipes transferring data. Next to the database there is a controller device that sends and receives messages in the pipe connecting it to the users. This analogy continues to tiny things like classes, methods and variables. The entire HN forum looks like a big multi-dimensional city-like structure with numerous pipes connecting pieces together. Experienced programmers not only organize this city well, but can also predict and eliminate complexity, e.g. they know that if you put that kind of building over there, others will inevitable connect to it tens of pipes and the entire city will be a mess, where you see a pipe and have no idea what it connects to and what will happen if you cut it.

<comment><USER45> I think you are experiencing "typical mind fallacy". [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/baTWMegR42PAsH9qJ/generalizi...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/baTWMegR42PAsH9qJ/generalizing- from-one-example-realizing-it/)

I imagine there are programmers who build objects by imagining people asking them questions and thinking what the objects would answer, or all kinds of other things. People for whom Spring's Repository/Service/Controller/View are real things with personalities or flavors. I tend to think in a mix of "If I could just tell the computer what to do in English, what would I say?" (function names) and "Whose responsibility is this? Is this really their job?" (classes).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Needless to say, von Neumann's main contributions to the atomic bomb would > not be as a lieutenant in the reserve of the ordnance department, but rather > in the concept and design of the explosive lenses that were needed to > compress the plutonium core of the Fat Man weapon that was later dropped on > Nagasaki.

What are the equations that govern an atomic bomb? I don't want to say that I am asking for a friend... /s

I assume that by now the relevant equations would be well known anyway?

<comment><USER46> The equations they are referring to do not concern the nuclear aspects of an atomic bomb. They describe how to set up the geometry of conventional plastic explosives (different kinds of explosives that burn at different speeds) in just the right configuration so that the propagating shock waves interfere with each other to result in a spherical shock wave that pushes the core of the bomb (the radioactive part) towards a single fixed point at the center. If any of this is off even slightly, the forces will not be in balance and the core materials will shoot out of the weak point, rather than uniformly compress to bring the nuclear material to the critical point where the fission is self-sustaining.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Nice article. Are there any good biographies of John von Neumann that are highly recommended?

EDIT: found it at the end of the article

" For anyone interested in learning more about the life and work of John von Neumann, I especially recommend his friend Stanislaw Ulam's 1958 essay John von Neumann 1903–1957 in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 64 (3) pp 1–49 and the book John von Neumann by Norman Macrae (1992). "

<comment><USER48> Apparently there are none. Judging by the Amazon reviews of Macrae, I'd pass. I found some other discussions of the question:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/36ipik/good_biography...](https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/36ipik/good_biography_about_john_von_neumann/)

[https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-good-biography-book-about- Jo...](https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-good-biography-book-about-John-von- Neumann)

<comment><AUTHOR> I tend to agree, but Macrae isn't bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I am curious to know. Why does the Jewish community have a disproportionately large number of extremely intelligent people as evidenced by the number of Nobel laureates and other great intellectuals?

<comment><USER50> I heard it's preference for non-physical work (lawyers, doctors, bankers, artists, writers...). Also, an old Polish novel "Lalka" by Bolesław Prus says Jews have an admiration for intellect and charades is one of their favorite family past-times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> > Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to > them.

</comment><comment><USER52> Interesting anecdote from from the biography of Stanisław Ulam, a close friend of von Neumann. Von Neumann was apparently fascinated by the history of the ancient Greece which he learned by reading Thucydides and Herodotus. Once he was talking with Stan about the Siege of Melos[1] and how violent the human nature can be when driven by pride and ambition set to pursue a certain goal. That were late 30s and catastrophes like Lidice[2] and countless others on the soil which today are Poland and Belarus were soon to happen.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Melos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Melos)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidice_massacre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidice_massacre)

</comment><comment><USER53> "Johnny built, at the Institute for Advanced Study, an experimental elec- tronic calculator, popularly known as the joniac, which eventually became the pilot model for similar machines all over the country. Some of the basic prin- ciples developed in the joniac are used even today in the fastest and most modern calculators. To design the machine, Johnny and his co-workers tried to imitate some of the known operations of the live brain. This is the aspect which led him to study neurology, to seek out men in the fields of neurology and psychiatry, to attend many meetings on these subjects, and, eventu- ally, to give lectures to such groups on the possibilities of copying an extremely simplified model of the living brain for man-made machines. "

From his book - "The Computer and The Brain"

[https://ia800800.us.archive.org/4/items/TheComputerAndTheBra...](https://ia800800.us.archive.org/4/items/TheComputerAndTheBrain/The%20Computer%20and%20The%20Brain_text.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER54> Can anyone recommend readings on von Neumann that highlight his non- mathematical achievements? Obviously he was primarily a physicist and mathematician, but for a non-mathematician, the long list of academic publications is hard to interpret and appreciate. For example, more in the vein of these: \- Reportedly, von Neumann possessed an eidetic memory, and so was able to recall complete novels and pages of the phone directory on command. This enabled him to accumulate an almost encyclopedic knowledge of what ever he read, such as the history of the Peloponnesian Wars, the Trial Joan of Arc and Byzantine history (Leonard, 2010). A Princeton professor of the latter topic once stated that by the time he was in his thirties, Johnny had greater expertise in Byzantine history than he did (Blair, 1957).

\- ...conversing in Ancient Greek at age six...

\- On his deathbed, he reportedly entertained his brother by reciting the first few lines of each page from Goethe's Faust, word-for-word, by heart (Blair, 1957).

</comment><comment><USER55> That excerpt from Goedel's letter leaves out the most interesting part: he talks about what is essentially the P=NP problem!

</comment><comment><USER56> i always find it quite strange that for some reason, norbert weiner, is generally excluded from such paeans...

<comment><USER27> I think he will be popular in the future as cybernetic theory provides much a much more reliable design viewpoint than "artificial intelligence"

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> there's a lazy sensationalist style on that article that I find off-putting -- the relevant Wikipedia page is more sober and actually (or because of that) makes you more in awe of the man in question.

<comment><USER57> This article was published around his death day and is my favorite piece about him [https://qualiacomputing.com/2018/06/21/john-von- neumann/](https://qualiacomputing.com/2018/06/21/john-von-neumann/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Wouldn't einstein qualify as the most intelligent human ever lived?

<comment><USER34> A real comparison is of course impossible, but of that coterie, Kurt Gödel is a strong contender. As the original post mentions, he singlehandedly destroyed Hilbert's formalist program (which von Neumann was also working on) and von Neumann is quoted as saying he was "in a class by himself". There is the famous letter from Gödel to von Neumann which anticipates the P=NP problem by decades.

In a different era, I think Blaise Pascal is also a contender. At age 19 he invented a working mechanical calculator with a functional carry mechanism, which somehow his contemporaries failed to achieve for the next sixty years.

<comment><USER59> What is the letter? Sounds interesting.

<comment><USER34> The first part is actually quoted in the original post. The full letter is here: [https://rjlipton.wordpress.com/the-gdel- letter/](https://rjlipton.wordpress.com/the-gdel-letter/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I think moderators should mark articles behind paywalls as such, I already don't click on wapo or nytimes links but you never can tell with medium. I'm retired on a fixed income and I can't justify in my budget subscribing to these places. It makes me sad when I can't read an article that might otherwise fascinate me. One solution would be to never click on medium links, but then I'd miss the ones that are free.

<comment><USER61> Medium really botched the paywall approach and I couldn't possibly agree with you more. It is so inconsistently applied and quite honestly I can't justify spending 5 dollars a month on a "publisher" whose content is so variable. Some Medium articles are really good, others are baseless clickbait, it's hard to tell until you read the article and already sunk the time and the money.

<comment><USER60> I'm thinking of writing an extension that would go grab the first page of each link and tell me if they want me to pay. The extension would turn the link red if so. How consistently can I get this right though? I can't just go by domain name because sometimes I have free articles left, on New Yorker for example. I agree with you on Medium. I was more angry until I found out it is up to the individual authors to turn on the paywall for their article so they can get paid. 60 dollars a year for hit or miss medium content is a bit rich. They must think they are in the same league as NYT or WAPO

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> I have a feeling that modern society doesn't motivate scientistis and mathematicians enough. It's easier and better-paid to do some marketing, big data or game industry job. Tech startups are raising millions to develop remotely controlled lightbulbs or multiplier AR chess games and schools are lowering requirements for students to pass as politicians want to show the increasing number of graduates.

<comment><USER63> I think a big part of that is there are too many people inherently interested in doing science. In fact there are already a lot more grads coming out with science degrees than there are jobs, and math is even worse. Although these positions have less pay, the competition is probably more fierce than for the positions you mentioned (although I think game-dev has a similar issue).

This is a problem but it's a good one to have, we have a lot of people out their willing to make science their life's work even without these external motivators.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Hans Bethe explains in astounding articulate detail how John guided their final Atom Bomb design : [https://youtu.be/Y2jiQXI6nrE?t=33m34s](https://youtu.be/Y2jiQXI6nrE?t=33m34s)

</comment><comment><USER22> Von Neumann is something of a hero of mine, in part because of how he demonstrates (by example) that you can achieve surpassing insight by patiently applying logic and analysis to whatever problem is at hand. But also because he shows that you didn't have to be narrowly focused in your area of competence, you could pursue other interests and even excel in those, even if they aren't the things that you're known for.

He really liked history, particularly European history. There's some examples of this in his letters[0], but my favorite von Neumann story on this topic is how he managed to deduce the answer to a literary magazine's poetry trivia question when queried by his brother. They would both be teenagers at the time, and the magazine was in English, as opposed to their native martian, yet John got the solution at once.

Paraphrasing from here[1], although his brother's limited run biography/reminiscences has the story too.

The prize contest had the lines

      They know this well my baron and my men
      Gascony, England, Normandy, Poitou
      That I had never follower so low
      Whom I would leave in prison to my gain
      I say this not as a reproach to them
      But prisoner I am

John replied immediately: "Richard Coeur de Lion".

"Did you know the poem?"

"No."

"Then how did you identify the poet?"

"Very simple" he said. "Gascony, England, Normandy, and Poitou were in one feudal hand only once during the early Plantagenets, and from there it was quite easy to associate with Richard's crusades and European captivity. But of course this is a translation, since quite obviously the early Plantagenets spoke Norman-Midieval French."

His brother then goes on to state: I found out much later that the translation was that of Henry Adams, and the _Prison Song_ is only one of Richard's most perfect poems, usually referred to as gems of English literature!

\---

0\. One to his daughter springs to mind, where he expresses fatherly concern about her getting married during her undergrad-- he's worried that she's too young and this will derail her career. After that's addressed, he then moves on to talking about one of her term papers, and proceeds to suggest an insightful take on-- I believe, I haven't read the letters in a decade-- some medieval French bishop. The juxtaposition of concerned father plus European historian in a man more known for axioms and automata was jarring.

1\. "The Legacy of John Von Neumann" from the American Mathematical Society, [https://books.google.ca/books?id=XBK-r0gS0YMC&dq](https://books.google.ca/books?id=XBK-r0gS0YMC&dq) (see pg. 22-23)

</comment><comment><USER64> It must have been so much harder to be brilliant back then. Now we Just have Google for everything. Imagine what these guys could have accomplished with the computing power/tools of today.

</comment><comment><USER65> He was also the originator of the term singularity in the accelerating progress of technology sense. Interesting to see how that one pans out.

<comment><USER66> Yeah as I understand it that ain't going to happen for a thousand years, minimum ...

<comment><USER65> I'd guess quicker but time will tell.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Was his work in quantum mechanics Nobel-worthy? If so he'd be on the list of greats not to receive the prize.

</comment><comment><USER68> just one thought: everybody reading these words is reading it on a von Neumann architecture computer

</comment><comment><USER69> von Neumann was very anti-Soviet in his political views, yet he worked with (and was co-inventor on a nuclear bomb patent) with fellow nuclear weapons scientist Klaus Fuchs. Fuchs was a spy who passed von Neumann's classified work on to the Soviets. Despite his evident genius in so many areas, von Neumann apparently failed to discern the motivations of his colleague.

</comment><comment><USER70> The title contains a lovely pun.

<comment><USER70> "unparalleled" \- serial Von Neumann machine, get it? get it? nyuk nyuk

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> Was hoping for a parallel computing joke. :(

</comment><comment><USER72> Love it!

</comment><comment><USER73> tl;dr he is Turing's cooler uncle and his Wikipedia page (wow comparable to Bertrand Russell)

</comment><comment><USER74> So, kind of like Walter Pitts but born with a silver spoon in his mouth rather than being abandoned to the streets of Chicago.</comment>


Can AI Stop Shark Attacks? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/03/can-ai-stop-shark-attacks/556727/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> 2.1 deaths per year? I believe there is much more pressing matters to use AI for.

<comment><USER3> More people die from accidental swallowing of a bee each year, than shark attacks.</comment></comment>


Ten Trillion-Degree Quasar Astonishes Astronomers (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.iflscience.com/space/seven-trillion-degree-quasar-astonishes-astronomers/ <comment><USER2> Please note that this is not a temperature measurement in the sense of a thermodynamic temperature. It's not made clear in the article, but the ten trillion degrees is a "brightness temperature". This is a convention in radio astronomy where you take a measured specific intensity (power / unit area / unit solid angle / frequency) and compute the temperature a blackbody would need to have to emit the same specific intensity. When the brightness temperatures are this high, it indicates that the emission process is non- thermal (in this case, synchrotron emission from relativistic electrons).

See equation 2.32 of: [https://www.cv.nrao.edu/~sransom/web/Ch2.html](https://www.cv.nrao.edu/~sransom/web/Ch2.html)

<comment><USER3> Thank you for that, it seemed a bit implausible that they could measure such a temperature using radio astronomy since the emission peak should be in the gamma rays.

While I get it that we can't always be persnicketty about the definition of (thermodynamic) temperature I find these alternate, phenomenological temperatures often do more harm than good. It's not just that it results in misleadingly juicy press releases.

In my experience, physicists themselves forget that they are talking about what is little more than a fiction and start sticking their "temperature" into equations where it doesn't belong.

<comment><USER2> > While I get it that we can't always be persnicketty about the definition of > (thermodynamic) temperature I find these alternate, phenomenological > temperatures often do more harm than good. It's not just that it results in > misleadingly juicy press releases.

My understanding is that there's a historical reason for this convention. Many telescope observations are calibrated by comparing the sky measurements against measurements of thermal loads with known temperatures. Since the calibration sources are specified with a temperature, it's straightforward to measure the source brightness in units of a pseudo-temperature. But I agree that it's not intuitive for those familiar with it.

Another layer on this is fact that doppler broadening of emission lines from molecules means they cover a finite width. Since typical velocities in astronomy range from fractions of a km/s to hundreds of kilometers per second, line widths are typically given in km/s. Since these line widths originate due to doppler motions, a width in km/s is equivalent to a width in Hz (for a given reference frequency for the spectral line).

The combination of these two things means people often report integrated flux measurements in units of K * km / s! It seems bizarre at first, but this is equivalent to specifying it as power / unit area (again, when there's a reference frequency specified). But these units are often convenient in their own way.

<comment><USER3> Well I am not an astronomer, but the story you tell feels very similar to the how other parts of physics sometimes use weird kinds of temperatures for similar reasons.

In my field we sometimes liked to quote frequencies in Kelvins. What's and Planck-over-Boltzman between friends?

> But I agree that it's not intuitive for those familiar with it.

It's worse than that. The convention of using temperature usually arises from some such instrument-calibration where the temperature more-or-less exists, and is accurate. Then the same instrument gets used for things where temperature doesn't exist at all and sometimes doesn't even give a fair description of the energy scales. Yet people keep blithely reporting these things as temperatures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This was scraped from another website. The original dates from 2016:

[https://www.iflscience.com/space/seven-trillion-degree- quasa...](https://www.iflscience.com/space/seven-trillion-degree-quasar- astonishes-astronomers/)

<comment><USER5> Thanks. We changed the URL to that from [https://differentimpulse.com/ten- trillion-degree-quasar-asto...](https://differentimpulse.com/ten-trillion- degree-quasar-astonishes-astronomers/) and banned the latter.

<comment><USER6> Seems to be the entire purpose of that account, as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That's hotter than the Hagedorn temperature, there could be some very interesting stuff going on.

<comment><USER2> > That's hotter than the Hagedorn temperature, there could be some very > interesting stuff going on.

Unfortunately it's not made clear in the article, but the temperature they quote is not an actual temperature, but instead a way of describing the specific intensity of the radiation. In this case the emission they're measuring is non-thermal (synchrotron emission), so the "brightness temperature" of the radiation field is not the same as the thermodynamic temperature. I'd put in a top-level comment about it too: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17898224](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17898224)

<comment><USER8> However, any matter in the way of the emissions would still reach something like that temperature, right? There's got to be some dust out there that's over the hagedorn temperature.

<comment><USER2> Not likely, since the intervening material probably lets most of the radio emission through. So the radiative coupling between the synchrotron emission and that material is too weak to raise the temperature by much (if any).

> There's got to be some dust out there that's over the hagedorn temperature.

Interstellar dust grains are thought to be destroyed at temperatures of 1500-2000 K (depending on composition). And their absorption cross-section for absorbing radio waves is fairly small.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is a mission to Mars morally defensible? - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/essays/is-a-mission-to-mars-morally-defensible-given-todays-real-needs <comment><USER2> The same argument could be made about just about any human activity that isn't obviously beneficial to humanity, the environment, etc.

Is reading a discussion on HN morally defensible? You could be spending that time helping humanity somehow.

Is working at a tech start-up making mobile apps morally defensible? You could be working at a soup kitchen instead.

Is playing a video game morally defensible? You could be assisting volunteering at a shelter instead.

Is having heat in your house morally defensible? You could be turning it off to save money which you could send to help alleviate poverty, though this will require you to endure freezing temperatures in your home.

<comment><USER3> Is paying for you own cancer treatment morally defensible? You could be paying for someone else's cancer treatment.

<comment><USER2> Exactly. If you're 50 and paying for your own cancer treatment, that's morally indefensible if there's anyone younger than you who needs cancer treatment!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > _Musk wants to innovate and leave Earth, rather than to take care of it, or > fix it, and stay._

Come on. This is bullshit. Musk is also pushing environmentalism here on Earth with SolarCity and Tesla. Going to Mars and taking care of Earth are in no way mutually exclusive.

<comment><USER5> Musk is like an incarnation of Delos D. Harriman [1], if environmentalism gets him to Mars then he will be an environmentalist.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Sold_the_Moon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Sold_the_Moon)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Love that this opens with "Whitey on Mars." Total trash. Keep this garbage off of HN please.

</comment><comment><USER7> Aeon is Tumblrs less popular pseudo-scientific cousin. Trash

</comment><comment><USER8> A mission to Mars is science fiction at least until 2050 or more. We don't have the technology, we could land a 1 ton spaceship with a robot, but a space ship with enough food, water and air to let people travel for 6 months would be too heavy for current technology and crash on landing.

What is not moral is the fact that it is becoming a sort of big brother show based on no scientific assumptions.

<comment><USER9> I think we do have the technology. Just not the budget it would take to do in near future with the technology available. To make it economically feasible is going to take some time.

If US put the same kind of money into NASA they did during the Apollo days (so 4% of federal budged instead of 0.5% for a decade or two without changing the plan/goal of NASA with every administration change) a lot of stuff would be possible.

If you had an "infinite" budged you could just build a VERY big space craft in orbit and use that. But the money isn't there so it isn't happening until SpaceX or whoever lowers the launch prices further (SpaceX Falcon Heavy and/or ITS/MCT for example)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you care about humanity existing in the far future then definitely yes.</comment>


Joost Signs Advertising Deal With 31 Major Brands - <AUTHOR> http://startupmeme.com/2007/04/26/joost-signs-advertising-deal-with-31-major-brands/ <comment><USER2> Joost is an excellent concept and I'm impressed that they've been able to land some major deals before launch.

However, as the industry moves towards HD standards - are consumers going to be satisfied with the solid but still lower quality video that can be efficiently transmitted on the net?</comment>


Gaurdian News Site returning Yahoo Geocities page - DNS Hack? - <AUTHOR>

Browsing to gaurdian.co.uk or www.gaurdian.co.uk results in a 404 from GeoCities/Yahoo.  Strange.
http://twitpic.com/cz6gud
I have the gaurdian.co.ulk ip address as 22.214.171.124 http://twitpic.com/cz6gnf
Browsing directly there returns a 500 Get Method failure. http://twitpic.com/cz6grg
Anyone have any idea why this is happening?  Can anyone verify or reproduce this situation? <comment><USER2> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guardian#References_in_pop...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guardian#References_in_popular_culture)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's guardian not gaurdian.</comment>