When I was CEO of a small computer security start-up we didn't have a Windows system administrator. All of the employees who wanted to run Windows had to know how to install it and manage it themselves, or they didn't get hired in the first place. My prediction is that in 10 years users that need education will be out of the high-tech workforce entirely, or will be self-training at home in order to stay competitive in the job market.
That looks like "users should be educated already" to me. And he specifically proposed deleting non-whitelisted email attachments (or providing a link to them, which does almost nothing to stop people from running attached exploit code locally--it's one extra click ona link).
The author may be right that the things he listed are dumb ideas for mission-critical ultra-secure systems. However, he seems to be advocating the five dumbest ideas for usable systems.
The price of Default Deny is loss of flexibility. If it is easy to avoid denial (e.g. automatic addition to a whitelist), it's just Default Permit by another name. If it's really hard, it will keep you from doing everything except that which you already know you want to do--in other words, nothing new, nothing clever, just the same stuff over and over. This would turn computers into the equivalent of a stereo system. They do thsoe narrowly-defined tasks that they were engineered to do, and nothing else.
People are going to occasionally want to do something new. When they do, there are certain things that they almost certainly *don't* want to do. Thus, you enumerate badness to help protect them when they want to use their computer as a flexible general-purpose device.
It's better to have systems that are secure by design. Duh. The point is, though, that even systems that are secure by design are likely to have flaws. If you look for flaws, and fix them, then you have a chance of staying ahead of other people who are looking for flaws to exploit them.
The coolness of hacking has nothing to do with security. Hacking is cool because it demonstrates our ability to manipulate our environment, to do things that are supposed to be impossible through ingenuity. In a factory of mindless corporate drones, hacking is not cool. But if you live in the real world where programs have flaws, there is even a security use for people who enjoy finding ways to use the flaws to accomplish things that the creators didn't intend.
Educating users is ridiculous--his point is that users should't be educated because they should be educated before you hire them. Okay, and how did *they* get educated? What happens if you have to hire real people who are talented but they haven't all gone to this magical security training school? His point *should* have been that there are only some things that can be taught, and that you shouldn't assume you can teach completely counterintuitive behavior. But you might be able to teach someone enough to avoid clicking on strange attachments without deleting photos in.PNG format sent to them by family (where.PNG was not a whitelisted attachment, nor was email from a random gmail account).
I don't want a secure, useless system. I want a secure, *useful* system. And that means compromises need to be made between security and usability. Reading this article gives very little clue as to how to construct a good balance.
Re:Site seems down; here's that article's text
on
Supernova 1987A Decoded
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The article starts off making sense, but then degenerates into pseudoscientific nonsense and wishful thinking based on poorly resolved images.
Stars forming along lines of electric current? Please. What would form such currents? How could they be stable for tens of millions of years? How would matter collect there? Why wouldn't all the regular, well-established theories of fusion apply? How does this explain white dwarfs? Etc. etc. etc. etc..
This shouldn't have made it to Slashdot's front page or even the science section. (Although I suppose it could be considered a public service to Slashdot their site out of existence.)
You don't have to repeat history to have repeatable results regarding history. In fact, if you repeat history, it'll come out differently, so that won't help much.
Consistency of genetic similarity across genes and consistency of fossil ages provide corroborating evidence for an evolutionary view. ID doesn't even do that much.
When you think about it, that's positively astounding. There are vastly more ways to be wrong than to be right. We've managed to get 50% right answers out of the myriad wrong answers. Pretty impressive!
It would be better still if it was more than 50%, but we can just apply the process repeatedly to push up our confidence (50%, 75%, 87.5%, etc.). A little more attention to statistics would help us raise the base rate above 50%.
Check out www.talkorigins.org. If you're unconvinced by abundant anatomical, fossil, and genetic evidence, then you probably don't care to be convinced.
talkorigins doesn't cover every point with respect to humans, last I checked, but the research has been done.
Yes, there was flexibility, because the system worked mostly consistently (with glitches like the 6-to-7 transition) regardless of power level.
The new system is much more sensitive to power level. It's inherent in the mechanics.
Since you have the book, it should be an easy exercise to make a character who can roll 24 dice on their favorite test (as compared with the stated "average" value of 6). You'll find that distance, lighting, wounds, etc., are all basically irrelevant to your performance at that point.
Without extensive play experience, it appears to me as though the system probably works well if you keep at the levels it was intended for. But you don't need play experience to see that the system obivously breaks outside that range, and that with a bit of effort you can end up outside that range during character creation.
Nearly all games break down somewhere. Depending on how you play your games, the breaking point may or may not be important to you as a gamer.
Shadowrun has been changed away from a tactical game with rules that work in a broad variety of situations into a game that works best if you don't pay much attention to rules and whose rules behave sensibly for a narrow range of characters.
Some people will love it, some will hate it, some probably will find the new version the same as the old. It's a huge change, though--as big as if SR4 used the d20 mechanic. (It doesn't, but the d20 mechanic is as different from the old mechanic as the new one is from the old mechanic.)
If you love WoD-style mechanics, SR4 is probably for you. If d20 is your thing, it's worth a look. If you're into GURPS and Rolemaster, proceed with caution. If you liked SR3 because of the flexibility of its dice system and the tactical nature of combat, you'll likely be very disappointed.
The setting and feel of the game are too subjective to review--it's still a near-future-with-magic game, and that will appeal to or turn off people depending on their preferences for game setting.
The WAP owner can make the intent to not share clear by using encryption. Otherwise, the WAP is sitting there shouting, "Hi, would you like an internet connection? Hi, would you like an internet connection? Hi, would you like an internet connection?" That seems pretty clear to me, even if it's accidental.
If someone is giving something away for free and they don't mean to be, they should (1) stop as soon as they find out and (2) complain to the hardware company whose product wasn't doing what they wanted it to do.
It is ridiculous to take legal action against people who accept a free service when it is offered to them.
There also isn't much of a reasoned response to the science that shows that (a) CO2 and temperature are correlated over the millenia timescale; (b) temperatures are unusually warm now (the past couple centuries) compared to the past millenia; (c) CO2 levels are 30% higher than they were a couple of centuries ago; (d) we have not seen such a sudden rise in CO2 for as long as we can measure it (400,000+ years); (e) humans are dumping lots of CO2 into the atmosphere. When faced with correlation, plus a perturbation of one variable and an observation of a change in the correlated variable, and much supporting evidence that I won't present here, the only reasonable conclusion is that our best guess is that the relationship is causal. In this case, human activity is increasing CO2 levels which is causing global warming.
The reasoned debate takes place regarding how fast the changes will be, how much uncertainty there is in causality and outcome, the social and economic implications of alterations to our behavior, and so on. And I see reasoned discussion of this, too, if I care to look for it. (I've read a couple good articles in the Economist, I believe.) But if you're trying to imply that the reasoned disagreement over whether there is global warming is being shouted down by a hysterical mob with no evidence, you're wrong--and close to exactly backwards, at least in the U.S..
Technical jargon is used in many fields because those terms carry a degree of precision lacking in colloquial terms and aid rather than inhibit understanding among those who are familiar with the field.
Or, in simpler language: a scientist uses lots of special words in special ways so that another scientist will know exactly what the first is trying to say.
Personally, I don't have any difficulty with jargon in my own field or in others; if there are terms I don't know, I look them up. Not understanding terms is a good indication that you need to do some background reading before you can competently understand the article. If this aggravates you a great deal, try not to do work that requires you to read articles outside your field (or at all).
"A proof would consist of accurate data, and reasoned theory. The data would be expected to be fairly questioned, and the theory fairly argued."
Right. It has been. Please see the literature (you can grab various citations from materials linked to in the thread--I won't repeat them here), unless you lack the scientific training to competently evaluate it and/or access to the appropriate journals. In that case, you're going to have to rely upon authority to some extent. I'd suggest that climate scientists are the best ones to rely upon, since they have appropriate training.
I'm not sure what your point is. There's plenty of global-warming-is-a-lie hysteria (strangely enough among people who are funded by big energy interests, and those who are their supporters), and there's a good deal of global-warming-is-guaranteed-disaster-tomorrow hysteria (typically among people who proclaim several dozen other sources of disaster tomorrow). But the hysteria does not extend to research. Some level of bias may, but the vast majority of scientists, including climate scientists, spend a huge amount of their waking time trying to figure out *what is the case*, not *how can I make my case*.
Who says you have to pretend that you're "proving" anything (in the mathematical sense)? And anyway, disproving something is proving not-something, so either you can prove things or you can't. (For the record, you can't, in the mathematical sense.)
Rejecting the null hypothesis is a method for gaining confidence that something interesting is happening. If there are other competing hypotheses, you test those too.
I suppose that your characterization of perception is true, but that doesn't mean that science is actually based upon a fallacy--rather, people are given an oversimplification of how and why it works. (It does not help that philosophers of science cannot agree on how and why it works thanks largely to historical philosophical baggage.)
As a practicing scientist, it's pretty clear to me and my colleagues how and why the scientific method works.
Hoaxes are few and far between--that they make news is actually a reflection of their rarity, not their commonality. It doesn't make news, for example, when a politician makes a misleading statement.
(Also, National Geographic is not a peer-reviewed scientific journal, so even though I am unfamiliar with the details of what happened, it's not particularly relevant what a non-scientific magazine does or does not do in the pursuit of science.)
However, there is definitely personal bias that affects how scientists interpret the results of their experiments and observations. This is why scientific studies are reviewed by peers--the peers have the experience needed to judge the study, and, hopefully, do not all share the same bias. And in any case, even when everyone is biased and data is misinterpreted, or people follow a line of inquiry for a long time that eventually turns out to be wrong (and should have been abandoned sooner, given the warning signs that were ignored), the point is that science is still self-correcting. Correction in cases where people are suppressing evidence is rapid and easy--if the data simply shows that the existing view is wrong, there are plenty of scientists who will demonstrate it and publish it. Once its in the literature, where the standard is that evidence beats opinion, it's very hard for the suppressors to maintain their position.
Suppression of evidence is different from bias, however. Almost any scientific study will reveal a bunch of things that the researchers don't understand. Their job is to try to present a hypothesis consistent with as much of the data as they can. (It's not to be consistent with all of the data because that sets too high a standard; one wouldn't be able to publish much of anything until the field was already completely solved, at which point you'd just write a textbook and stop doing research.) These biases about what is important and what is not can take a long time to overcome, when they're misguided. But it's a much less serious charge than falsification and wanton disregard of clearly contradictory evidence.
(I'm not saying the latter doesn't happen; sometimes it does. It's just fairly easily caught, so it's fairly unwise to try, if you're a scientist. Some do anyway. Wisdom is not the same thing as intelligence, apparently.)
You need deterministic processes to accurately transmit a random signal. If they are not (nearly) deterministic, you can add structure--i.e. nonrandomness--to your random signal. Having nondeterministic processes that produce pure white noise is also perfectly okay, but it is hard to find a nondeterministic process with that quality. Especially when importing data into a computer for deterministic processing there, you tend to suffer from frequency rolloff, quantization error, and so on.
GiNaC doesn't even do symbolic integration, aside from polynomials, and adding the feature is "very low" on the priority list. It's not really comparable to Maple or Mathematica. They've been banging on symbolic integration for two decades.
...but way too slowly. I have no idea how the champions can churn through 25 of these in two and a half hours--that's one every six minutes. Yikes!
(Just to demonstrate that I have finished--the diagonal sums to 12 for the first one, and to 18 in the second, no hints on the third, the first three blocks sum to the size of the fourth block for number 4, and the diagonal on the last ends with "YES". You can probably get all these answers by pretending to have finished and looking at the answer key, but I haven't bothered trying that again, so I'm not really sure.)
I get the feeling that the "find the image that..." puzzles would be a lot easier if you printed out the document and cut them up. I wonder if that's within the rules?
But our current system takes three simple sentences; one simple sentence for instruction, and two simple sentences for scoring.
Instruction to voters: Select one candidate from the choices available.
Scoring explanation: The candidate who is selected by the most voters wins. In case of a tie (flip a coin / vote in the Senate / etc.)
The reason this seems simple is because we are familiar with it. The reason approval voting seems simple is because it is a modification of it. But Condorcet is only slightly more complex, with one simple instruction, and three fairly simple sentences for scoring.
Instructions to voters: Rank the candidates in order from favorite to least favorite.
Scoring explanation: The candidate who is more highly ranked than each other candidate in a head-to-head comparison wins. If there is no clear winner, call the closest comparisons ties until one candidate wins or ties in every head-to-head comparison. If there is still a tie (flip a coin, etc.)
Here's the trick with Condorcet. The best way to get the outcome you want is to vote honestly.
This comes as a shock to people who are used to majority voting. You don't vote for who you want the most--you vote for the lesser evil of the two main candidates. If you don't use this strategy (which is much more sophisticated than Condorcet's strategy), you throw your vote away. The strategy on how to vote is something like,
"Vote for the candidate you want to win, unless there is a significant chance that the candidate will not win, in which case, identify the set of likely winners and vote for your favorite among those. If there is only one likely winner and you do not want this person to win, vote for the second most likely."
And the explanation of why that works with the scoring is more complex still (but most people have figured it out). If you don't vote according to a complex strategy like that, taking into account the behavior of other voters, you will throw your vote away. There's nothing simple about this, and it generates a two-party system in order to simplify the analysis.
So I maintain that Condorcet is actually *simpler*. It's almost impossible to strategize. Just vote for who you want, in the order of preference, and the voting method takes care of the rest.
If you want to understand how the scoring works, spend five minutes and figure it out.
Finally, we needn't introduce this all at once. With electronic voting machines, we *ought* to be able to have an advisory Condorcet vote along with the actual majority vote. After people become familiar with Condorcet, then we can decide whether we want to switch without the fear factor of a new system. Voters will be familiar with it, and we'll be able to see what impact it has on the electoral process. (I'd expect to suddenly see the Libertarian and Green parties getting 10% first-choices.)
What about not taking the word of recreational glider pilots--who tend not to fly on windier days, at least where I live--or of the company, and actually demand data from the company on wind speeds? It's their job to show that it makes sense, and maybe they haven't yet. (The report I linked to claimed to have "preliminary wind measurements", but they could easily have screwed up.)
Also, there are wind turbines in Minnesota, and more are being built. Apparently the six months of snow, ice, and freezing rain aren't enough to prevent decent power generation there.
Finally, if the company does go under, as another poster suggested, the city can sell the turbines. If you give them away for free, that shouldn't be a tax burden. You might want to insist on a contract whereby the wind turbines revert to the city in case of bankruptcy that prevents operation of the turbines, if such a contract is possible.
1. You build wind power to reduce the use of fossil fuels, not to make the grid blackout-resistant. Widespread blackouts are caused by faulty control mechanisms, not the method of power generation. Why even bring this up?
2. Having a company in financial difficulty do *anything* can be problematic. This issue is of significant concern.
3. On what do these sources base their conclusions? Studies of bird deaths due to wind turbines show pretty minimal numbers, even with the old CA turbines that were unusually dangerous for raptors. Estimates are around two birds per year per turbine (compared to somewhere around 10/year per mile of road with average traffic). Maybe you should dig up your roads and walk everywhere instead--but that's no good, you need to get places, but electricity comes for free from nowhere! Er, wait.
4. If there's really not enough wind, then building these towers is really stupid. Building wind farms where there is no wind is a good way to bankrupt one's company once again. However, are the NWS stations on ridge-tops? You can have huge differences in wind-speed based on local terrain. You make a good case against building a wind turbine on top of the National Weather Service stations. You need to provide more information, however, to show whether the 30 year records are relevant. The company's report claims that the ridge crest is a local wind corridor. Wind corridors are real, so your objection is only valid if they are wrong that it is a wind corridor, or if they are right but that even so there is insufficient wind. (Also keep in mind the difference in wind velocity as you go from ground-level to 80m above the ground.)
5. Ice is apparently a red herring. There simply isn't evidence that thrown ice is a danger, despite many installed wind farms in ice-prone areas. Besides, there are good physical reasons to think that ice would not be thrown a great distance (e.g. turbines are based on airfoils, and ice coatings don't preserve the airfoil shape, which is the whole problem with plane wings icing).
6. I have heard the new large 80m-ish Danish turbines. They're not that loud, and I don't personally find the noise that annoying. It's mostly sort of whooshing as the blades go past; the new designs have very little mechanical noise (unlike some of the old eggbeater designs in CA). It's hard to even hear them from a reasonable distance away (a few hundred meters). Why do you think that they are LOUD?
Anyway, it's nice that you're helping your dad out and all, and it's good for people to be involved in their community, but are you really arguing against it for the reasons you've given? Or is it instead because you don't like the look of giant windmills on the top of your ridge crest, and figure that if you can shoot it down you won't have to see a coal-fired power plant there instead?
People do this kind of thing all the time, often without realizing it. E.g. people where I used to live wanted to cut down all the trees for "fire protection", despite the fact that the shrub and annual grass that would have replaced the trees were a bigger fire hazard than the trees. Curiously, there was an extremely strong correlation between people who wanted to cut trees for "fire protection" and those whose views stood to improve the most, but only a weak correlation between people whose houses were near trees and the same desire.
Aesthetics are important. If that's the real reason you or your dad is fighting this, best to recognize it now so you can recognize when you're prone to believe something false because it provides an excuse for your position. Then if you still want to spread misinformation to the city council, or whatever, well, that's up to you. That happens all the time. At least you can be intellectually honest with yourself (and with readers here).
Fine, there is a right to travel. But this doesn't mean that all rights are unconditional, context-insensitive rights.
For example, a five-year-old has the physical ability to turn the ignition key in a car and press the accelerator pedal down. But this doesn't mean that they should be allowed to drive.
The key principle is that certain actions are inherently dangerous to other people. Allowing other people to engage in these actions is a direct and severe imposition on *my* right to stay alive. Of particular importance, in the case of driving, is the fact that it is not possible for a completely untrained driver to not willfully (if unintentionally) endangering me, because he or she does not have the skill to operate a dangerous device in a way that won't endanger me.
Simply by their using the vehicle, they are putting me at risk. There is no effective difference to me (as a victim) between them driving on public roads and them playing Russian roulette with me when I drive on public roads (using a gun with a sufficiently large cylinder).
So we have to balance their rights to be able to act freely with my rights to not be killed by other people's free actions. The current solution is to require training for people who use dangerous devices so that the user of the device can, with high degree of confidence, willfully avoid causing harm to others.
(Note also that it is not good enough for me for them to be punished after they kill me. I'm still dead. The rights we have in a free society should not include the right to kill one or more people, as long as we die ourselves or suffer some other punishment afterwards.)
Now, obviously, if one has a requirement but never enforces it, it doesn't protect my rights at all. So the requirement has to be enforced. I don't really care how it is enforced. The key is that there must be some mechanism to distinguish between drivers who can intend to not hurt me and, to a high degree of reliability, follow through on that intent; and those who through incompetence or inability either cannot intend to not hurt me, or lack the ability to translate intention into action.
A license is one way to accomplish this. A license that doesn't clearly identify itself as belonging to the driver isn't as useful, because this removes the ability for people to distinguish between proper drivers and threats to society. So, typically, you have to use something like a photo ID. I'd be happy with on-the-spot proficiency checks, or an IDless card with a hash value off my fingerprint that could be verified with a fingerprint scanner, or any other way to verify that the operator of the device has the capability to avoid harming others through using it.
The principle of being able to avoid harming others is also why it makes sense to outlaw drunk driving (and increase penalties for hurting people while drunk). When sufficiently drunk, you can no longer guarantee the safety of others. So by driving while sufficiently drunk, you are willfully endangering others.
So, the bottom line is: you can have a right to travel. But it doesn't follow that you have the right to travel and kill people while doing it. The right to travel is the right to travel *provided* that you possess the ability to do so without causing injury and death to others--if you do not possess that ability, their rights to stay alive trump your rights to move from A to B.
(Note that this only applies for the people operating the devices. Having IDs for being a passenger is silly, unless the passenger can, by virtue of incompetence, cause a threat to others. And it's only worth implementing checks for commonly-used devices that can hurt others. Machine shop tools can be deadly if used improperly, but they're not sprinkled all over where they can kill bystanders when untrained people use them on a daily basis. Thus, there's no point requiring an explicit license for public machine shop tool operation.)
The Sharp Actius MM10 is already a good successor to the 110CT. It's also 2 lbs, I believe its screen is brighter at its brightest, and it does well with sleep/hibernate, so it's not really instant-on, but 10-20s isn't bad.
It has two USB ports; you can get a battery that lasts 9hrs if you really need it. 802.11b is built-in, which can be really handy. Its HD is only 15GB, though.
There are no weirdnesses like two-handed mousing, and it's 10" x 8", which gives it a normal 1024x768 screen shape--personally, I find this much more usable than the weirdly shortened ones. I haven't tried installing Linux on it, but Cygwin works fine under XP.
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When I was CEO of a small computer security start-up we didn't have a Windows system administrator. All of the employees who wanted to run Windows had to know how to install it and manage it themselves, or they didn't get hired in the first place. My prediction is that in 10 years users that need education will be out of the high-tech workforce entirely, or will be self-training at home in order to stay competitive in the job market.
That looks like "users should be educated already" to me. And he specifically proposed deleting non-whitelisted email attachments (or providing a link to them, which does almost nothing to stop people from running attached exploit code locally--it's one extra click ona link).
The author may be right that the things he listed are dumb ideas for mission-critical ultra-secure systems. However, he seems to be advocating the five dumbest ideas for usable systems.
.PNG format sent to them by family (where .PNG was not a whitelisted attachment, nor was email from a random gmail account).
The price of Default Deny is loss of flexibility. If it is easy to avoid denial (e.g. automatic addition to a whitelist), it's just Default Permit by another name. If it's really hard, it will keep you from doing everything except that which you already know you want to do--in other words, nothing new, nothing clever, just the same stuff over and over. This would turn computers into the equivalent of a stereo system. They do thsoe narrowly-defined tasks that they were engineered to do, and nothing else.
People are going to occasionally want to do something new. When they do, there are certain things that they almost certainly *don't* want to do. Thus, you enumerate badness to help protect them when they want to use their computer as a flexible general-purpose device.
It's better to have systems that are secure by design. Duh. The point is, though, that even systems that are secure by design are likely to have flaws. If you look for flaws, and fix them, then you have a chance of staying ahead of other people who are looking for flaws to exploit them.
The coolness of hacking has nothing to do with security. Hacking is cool because it demonstrates our ability to manipulate our environment, to do things that are supposed to be impossible through ingenuity. In a factory of mindless corporate drones, hacking is not cool. But if you live in the real world where programs have flaws, there is even a security use for people who enjoy finding ways to use the flaws to accomplish things that the creators didn't intend.
Educating users is ridiculous--his point is that users should't be educated because they should be educated before you hire them. Okay, and how did *they* get educated? What happens if you have to hire real people who are talented but they haven't all gone to this magical security training school? His point *should* have been that there are only some things that can be taught, and that you shouldn't assume you can teach completely counterintuitive behavior. But you might be able to teach someone enough to avoid clicking on strange attachments without deleting photos in
I don't want a secure, useless system. I want a secure, *useful* system. And that means compromises need to be made between security and usability. Reading this article gives very little clue as to how to construct a good balance.
The article starts off making sense, but then degenerates into pseudoscientific nonsense and wishful thinking based on poorly resolved images.
Stars forming along lines of electric current? Please. What would form such currents? How could they be stable for tens of millions of years? How would matter collect there? Why wouldn't all the regular, well-established theories of fusion apply? How does this explain white dwarfs? Etc. etc. etc. etc..
This shouldn't have made it to Slashdot's front page or even the science section. (Although I suppose it could be considered a public service to Slashdot their site out of existence.)
You don't have to repeat history to have repeatable results regarding history. In fact, if you repeat history, it'll come out differently, so that won't help much.
Consistency of genetic similarity across genes and consistency of fossil ages provide corroborating evidence for an evolutionary view. ID doesn't even do that much.
When you think about it, that's positively astounding. There are vastly more ways to be wrong than to be right. We've managed to get 50% right answers out of the myriad wrong answers. Pretty impressive!
It would be better still if it was more than 50%, but we can just apply the process repeatedly to push up our confidence (50%, 75%, 87.5%, etc.). A little more attention to statistics would help us raise the base rate above 50%.
Check out www.talkorigins.org. If you're unconvinced by abundant anatomical, fossil, and genetic evidence, then you probably don't care to be convinced.
talkorigins doesn't cover every point with respect to humans, last I checked, but the research has been done.
Yes, there was flexibility, because the system worked mostly consistently (with glitches like the 6-to-7 transition) regardless of power level.
The new system is much more sensitive to power level. It's inherent in the mechanics.
Since you have the book, it should be an easy exercise to make a character who can roll 24 dice on their favorite test (as compared with the stated "average" value of 6). You'll find that distance, lighting, wounds, etc., are all basically irrelevant to your performance at that point.
Without extensive play experience, it appears to me as though the system probably works well if you keep at the levels it was intended for. But you don't need play experience to see that the system obivously breaks outside that range, and that with a bit of effort you can end up outside that range during character creation.
Nearly all games break down somewhere. Depending on how you play your games, the breaking point may or may not be important to you as a gamer.
Shadowrun has been changed away from a tactical game with rules that work in a broad variety of situations into a game that works best if you don't pay much attention to rules and whose rules behave sensibly for a narrow range of characters.
Some people will love it, some will hate it, some probably will find the new version the same as the old. It's a huge change, though--as big as if SR4 used the d20 mechanic. (It doesn't, but the d20 mechanic is as different from the old mechanic as the new one is from the old mechanic.)
If you love WoD-style mechanics, SR4 is probably for you. If d20 is your thing, it's worth a look. If you're into GURPS and Rolemaster, proceed with caution. If you liked SR3 because of the flexibility of its dice system and the tactical nature of combat, you'll likely be very disappointed.
The setting and feel of the game are too subjective to review--it's still a near-future-with-magic game, and that will appeal to or turn off people depending on their preferences for game setting.
Denethor actually lit himself on fire, jumped on the funeral pyre, clutching the palantir of Minas Tirith, and stayed there until he burned to death.
His death in the book was an act of determination and power (despite dubious sanity), unlike the crazy buffoonery in the movie.
I doubt greatly that Darl will exhibit such style in his exit. To compare him to Denethor is a great disservice to the last Steward of Gondor.
How do you know what the intent was?
The WAP owner can make the intent to not share clear by using encryption. Otherwise, the WAP is sitting there shouting, "Hi, would you like an internet connection? Hi, would you like an internet connection? Hi, would you like an internet connection?" That seems pretty clear to me, even if it's accidental.
If someone is giving something away for free and they don't mean to be, they should (1) stop as soon as they find out and (2) complain to the hardware company whose product wasn't doing what they wanted it to do.
It is ridiculous to take legal action against people who accept a free service when it is offered to them.
There also isn't much of a reasoned response to the science that shows that (a) CO2 and temperature are correlated over the millenia timescale; (b) temperatures are unusually warm now (the past couple centuries) compared to the past millenia; (c) CO2 levels are 30% higher than they were a couple of centuries ago; (d) we have not seen such a sudden rise in CO2 for as long as we can measure it (400,000+ years); (e) humans are dumping lots of CO2 into the atmosphere. When faced with correlation, plus a perturbation of one variable and an observation of a change in the correlated variable, and much supporting evidence that I won't present here, the only reasonable conclusion is that our best guess is that the relationship is causal. In this case, human activity is increasing CO2 levels which is causing global warming.
The reasoned debate takes place regarding how fast the changes will be, how much uncertainty there is in causality and outcome, the social and economic implications of alterations to our behavior, and so on. And I see reasoned discussion of this, too, if I care to look for it. (I've read a couple good articles in the Economist, I believe.) But if you're trying to imply that the reasoned disagreement over whether there is global warming is being shouted down by a hysterical mob with no evidence, you're wrong--and close to exactly backwards, at least in the U.S..
Technical jargon is used in many fields because those terms carry a degree of precision lacking in colloquial terms and aid rather than inhibit understanding among those who are familiar with the field.
Or, in simpler language: a scientist uses lots of special words in special ways so that another scientist will know exactly what the first is trying to say.
Personally, I don't have any difficulty with jargon in my own field or in others; if there are terms I don't know, I look them up. Not understanding terms is a good indication that you need to do some background reading before you can competently understand the article. If this aggravates you a great deal, try not to do work that requires you to read articles outside your field (or at all).
"A proof would consist of accurate data, and reasoned theory. The data would be expected to be fairly questioned, and the theory fairly argued."
Right. It has been. Please see the literature (you can grab various citations from materials linked to in the thread--I won't repeat them here), unless you lack the scientific training to competently evaluate it and/or access to the appropriate journals. In that case, you're going to have to rely upon authority to some extent. I'd suggest that climate scientists are the best ones to rely upon, since they have appropriate training.
I'm not sure what your point is. There's plenty of global-warming-is-a-lie hysteria (strangely enough among people who are funded by big energy interests, and those who are their supporters), and there's a good deal of global-warming-is-guaranteed-disaster-tomorrow hysteria (typically among people who proclaim several dozen other sources of disaster tomorrow). But the hysteria does not extend to research. Some level of bias may, but the vast majority of scientists, including climate scientists, spend a huge amount of their waking time trying to figure out *what is the case*, not *how can I make my case*.
In mathematics, important and provable truths are called theorems.
Who says you have to pretend that you're "proving" anything (in the mathematical sense)? And anyway, disproving something is proving not-something, so either you can prove things or you can't. (For the record, you can't, in the mathematical sense.)
Rejecting the null hypothesis is a method for gaining confidence that something interesting is happening. If there are other competing hypotheses, you test those too.
I suppose that your characterization of perception is true, but that doesn't mean that science is actually based upon a fallacy--rather, people are given an oversimplification of how and why it works. (It does not help that philosophers of science cannot agree on how and why it works thanks largely to historical philosophical baggage.)
As a practicing scientist, it's pretty clear to me and my colleagues how and why the scientific method works.
Hoaxes are few and far between--that they make news is actually a reflection of their rarity, not their commonality. It doesn't make news, for example, when a politician makes a misleading statement.
(Also, National Geographic is not a peer-reviewed scientific journal, so even though I am unfamiliar with the details of what happened, it's not particularly relevant what a non-scientific magazine does or does not do in the pursuit of science.)
However, there is definitely personal bias that affects how scientists interpret the results of their experiments and observations. This is why scientific studies are reviewed by peers--the peers have the experience needed to judge the study, and, hopefully, do not all share the same bias. And in any case, even when everyone is biased and data is misinterpreted, or people follow a line of inquiry for a long time that eventually turns out to be wrong (and should have been abandoned sooner, given the warning signs that were ignored), the point is that science is still self-correcting. Correction in cases where people are suppressing evidence is rapid and easy--if the data simply shows that the existing view is wrong, there are plenty of scientists who will demonstrate it and publish it. Once its in the literature, where the standard is that evidence beats opinion, it's very hard for the suppressors to maintain their position.
Suppression of evidence is different from bias, however. Almost any scientific study will reveal a bunch of things that the researchers don't understand. Their job is to try to present a hypothesis consistent with as much of the data as they can. (It's not to be consistent with all of the data because that sets too high a standard; one wouldn't be able to publish much of anything until the field was already completely solved, at which point you'd just write a textbook and stop doing research.) These biases about what is important and what is not can take a long time to overcome, when they're misguided. But it's a much less serious charge than falsification and wanton disregard of clearly contradictory evidence.
(I'm not saying the latter doesn't happen; sometimes it does. It's just fairly easily caught, so it's fairly unwise to try, if you're a scientist. Some do anyway. Wisdom is not the same thing as intelligence, apparently.)
You need deterministic processes to accurately transmit a random signal. If they are not (nearly) deterministic, you can add structure--i.e. nonrandomness--to your random signal. Having nondeterministic processes that produce pure white noise is also perfectly okay, but it is hard to find a nondeterministic process with that quality. Especially when importing data into a computer for deterministic processing there, you tend to suffer from frequency rolloff, quantization error, and so on.
GiNaC doesn't even do symbolic integration, aside from polynomials, and adding the feature is "very low" on the priority list. It's not really comparable to Maple or Mathematica. They've been banging on symbolic integration for two decades.
...but way too slowly. I have no idea how the champions can churn through 25 of these in two and a half hours--that's one every six minutes. Yikes!
(Just to demonstrate that I have finished--the diagonal sums to 12 for the first one, and to 18 in the second, no hints on the third, the first three blocks sum to the size of the fourth block for number 4, and the diagonal on the last ends with "YES". You can probably get all these answers by pretending to have finished and looking at the answer key, but I haven't bothered trying that again, so I'm not really sure.)
I get the feeling that the "find the image that..." puzzles would be a lot easier if you printed out the document and cut them up. I wonder if that's within the rules?
But our current system takes three simple sentences; one simple sentence for instruction, and two simple sentences for scoring.
Instruction to voters: Select one candidate from the choices available.
Scoring explanation: The candidate who is selected by the most voters wins. In case of a tie (flip a coin / vote in the Senate / etc.)
The reason this seems simple is because we are familiar with it. The reason approval voting seems simple is because it is a modification of it. But Condorcet is only slightly more complex, with one simple instruction, and three fairly simple sentences for scoring.
Instructions to voters: Rank the candidates in order from favorite to least favorite.
Scoring explanation: The candidate who is more highly ranked than each other candidate in a head-to-head comparison wins. If there is no clear winner, call the closest comparisons ties until one candidate wins or ties in every head-to-head comparison. If there is still a tie (flip a coin, etc.)
Here's the trick with Condorcet. The best way to get the outcome you want is to vote honestly.
This comes as a shock to people who are used to majority voting. You don't vote for who you want the most--you vote for the lesser evil of the two main candidates. If you don't use this strategy (which is much more sophisticated than Condorcet's strategy), you throw your vote away. The strategy on how to vote is something like,
"Vote for the candidate you want to win, unless there is a significant chance that the candidate will not win, in which case, identify the set of likely winners and vote for your favorite among those. If there is only one likely winner and you do not want this person to win, vote for the second most likely."
And the explanation of why that works with the scoring is more complex still (but most people have figured it out). If you don't vote according to a complex strategy like that, taking into account the behavior of other voters, you will throw your vote away. There's nothing simple about this, and it generates a two-party system in order to simplify the analysis.
So I maintain that Condorcet is actually *simpler*. It's almost impossible to strategize. Just vote for who you want, in the order of preference, and the voting method takes care of the rest.
If you want to understand how the scoring works, spend five minutes and figure it out.
Finally, we needn't introduce this all at once. With electronic voting machines, we *ought* to be able to have an advisory Condorcet vote along with the actual majority vote. After people become familiar with Condorcet, then we can decide whether we want to switch without the fear factor of a new system. Voters will be familiar with it, and we'll be able to see what impact it has on the electoral process. (I'd expect to suddenly see the Libertarian and Green parties getting 10% first-choices.)
What about not taking the word of recreational glider pilots--who tend not to fly on windier days, at least where I live--or of the company, and actually demand data from the company on wind speeds? It's their job to show that it makes sense, and maybe they haven't yet. (The report I linked to claimed to have "preliminary wind measurements", but they could easily have screwed up.)
Also, there are wind turbines in Minnesota, and more are being built. Apparently the six months of snow, ice, and freezing rain aren't enough to prevent decent power generation there.
Finally, if the company does go under, as another poster suggested, the city can sell the turbines. If you give them away for free, that shouldn't be a tax burden. You might want to insist on a contract whereby the wind turbines revert to the city in case of bankruptcy that prevents operation of the turbines, if such a contract is possible.
1. You build wind power to reduce the use of fossil fuels, not to make the grid blackout-resistant. Widespread blackouts are caused by faulty control mechanisms, not the method of power generation. Why even bring this up?
2. Having a company in financial difficulty do *anything* can be problematic. This issue is of significant concern.
3. On what do these sources base their conclusions? Studies of bird deaths due to wind turbines show pretty minimal numbers, even with the old CA turbines that were unusually dangerous for raptors. Estimates are around two birds per year per turbine (compared to somewhere around 10/year per mile of road with average traffic). Maybe you should dig up your roads and walk everywhere instead--but that's no good, you need to get places, but electricity comes for free from nowhere! Er, wait.
4. If there's really not enough wind, then building these towers is really stupid. Building wind farms where there is no wind is a good way to bankrupt one's company once again. However, are the NWS stations on ridge-tops? You can have huge differences in wind-speed based on local terrain. You make a good case against building a wind turbine on top of the National Weather Service stations. You need to provide more information, however, to show whether the 30 year records are relevant. The company's
report claims that the ridge crest is a local wind corridor. Wind corridors are real, so your objection is only valid if they are wrong that it is a wind corridor, or if they are right but that even so there is insufficient wind. (Also keep in mind the difference in wind velocity as you go from ground-level to 80m above the ground.)
5. Ice is apparently a red herring. There simply isn't evidence that thrown ice is a danger, despite many installed wind farms in ice-prone areas. Besides, there are good physical reasons to think that ice would not be thrown a great distance (e.g. turbines are based on airfoils, and ice coatings don't preserve the airfoil shape, which is the whole problem with plane wings icing).
6. I have heard the new large 80m-ish Danish turbines. They're not that loud, and I don't personally find the noise that annoying. It's mostly sort of whooshing as the blades go past; the new designs have very little mechanical noise (unlike some of the old eggbeater designs in CA). It's hard to even hear them from a reasonable distance away (a few hundred meters). Why do you think that they are LOUD?
Anyway, it's nice that you're helping your dad out and all, and it's good for people to be involved in their community, but are you really arguing against it for the reasons you've given? Or is it instead because you don't like the look of giant windmills on the top of your ridge crest, and figure that if you can shoot it down you won't have to see a coal-fired power plant there instead?
People do this kind of thing all the time, often without realizing it. E.g. people where I used to live wanted to cut down all the trees for "fire protection", despite the fact that the shrub and annual grass that would have replaced the trees were a bigger fire hazard than the trees. Curiously, there was an extremely strong correlation between people who wanted to cut trees for "fire protection" and those whose views stood to improve the most, but only a weak correlation between people whose houses were near trees and the same desire.
Aesthetics are important. If that's the real reason you or your dad is fighting this, best to recognize it now so you can recognize when you're prone to believe something false because it provides an excuse for your position. Then if you still want to spread misinformation to the city council, or whatever, well, that's up to you. That happens all the time. At least you can be intellectually honest with yourself (and with readers here).
Fine, there is a right to travel. But this doesn't mean that all rights are unconditional, context-insensitive rights.
For example, a five-year-old has the physical ability to turn the ignition key in a car and press the accelerator pedal down. But this doesn't mean that they should be allowed to drive.
The key principle is that certain actions are inherently dangerous to other people. Allowing other people to engage in these actions is a direct and severe imposition on *my* right to stay alive. Of particular importance, in the case of driving, is the fact that it is not possible for a completely untrained driver to not willfully (if unintentionally) endangering me, because he or she does not have the skill to operate a dangerous device in a way that won't endanger me.
Simply by their using the vehicle, they are putting me at risk. There is no effective difference to me (as a victim) between them driving on public roads and them playing Russian roulette with me when I drive on public roads (using a gun with a sufficiently large cylinder).
So we have to balance their rights to be able to act freely with my rights to not be killed by other people's free actions. The current solution is to require training for people who use dangerous devices so that the user of the device can, with high degree of confidence, willfully avoid causing harm to others.
(Note also that it is not good enough for me for them to be punished after they kill me. I'm still dead. The rights we have in a free society should not include the right to kill one or more people, as long as we die ourselves or suffer some other punishment afterwards.)
Now, obviously, if one has a requirement but never enforces it, it doesn't protect my rights at all. So the requirement has to be enforced. I don't really care how it is enforced. The key is that there must be some mechanism to distinguish between drivers who can intend to not hurt me and, to a high degree of reliability, follow through on that intent; and those who through incompetence or inability either cannot intend to not hurt me, or lack the ability to translate intention into action.
A license is one way to accomplish this. A license that doesn't clearly identify itself as belonging to the driver isn't as useful, because this removes the ability for people to distinguish between proper drivers and threats to society. So, typically, you have to use something like a photo ID. I'd be happy with on-the-spot proficiency checks, or an IDless card with a hash value off my fingerprint that could be verified with a fingerprint scanner, or any other way to verify that the operator of the device has the capability to avoid harming others through using it.
The principle of being able to avoid harming others is also why it makes sense to outlaw drunk driving (and increase penalties for hurting people while drunk). When sufficiently drunk, you can no longer guarantee the safety of others. So by driving while sufficiently drunk, you are willfully endangering others.
So, the bottom line is: you can have a right to travel. But it doesn't follow that you have the right to travel and kill people while doing it. The right to travel is the right to travel *provided* that you possess the ability to do so without causing injury and death to others--if you do not possess that ability, their rights to stay alive trump your rights to move from A to B.
(Note that this only applies for the people operating the devices. Having IDs for being a passenger is silly, unless the passenger can, by virtue of incompetence, cause a threat to others. And it's only worth implementing checks for commonly-used devices that can hurt others. Machine shop tools can be deadly if used improperly, but they're not sprinkled all over where they can kill bystanders when untrained people use them on a daily basis. Thus, there's no point requiring an explicit license for public machine shop tool operation.)
For a Windows machine:
(1) Patches. If I'm lucky, these complete before I've caught a virus.
(2) Mozilla. Never use IE again.
(3) PuTTY. Remote login to my unix machine.
Done!
For a Unix machine:
(1) joe
(2) LyX
(3) octave
(4) IceWM
Everything else I need is usually preinstalled.
The Sharp Actius MM10 is already a good successor to the 110CT. It's also 2 lbs, I believe its screen is brighter at its brightest, and it does well with sleep/hibernate, so it's not really instant-on, but 10-20s isn't bad.
It has two USB ports; you can get a battery that lasts 9hrs if you really need it. 802.11b is built-in, which can be really handy. Its HD is only 15GB, though.
There are no weirdnesses like two-handed mousing, and it's 10" x 8", which gives it a normal 1024x768 screen shape--personally, I find this much more usable than the weirdly shortened ones. I haven't tried installing Linux on it, but Cygwin works fine under XP.