I know perfectly well that it's not "arcane magic," any more than living organisms are. It's just a very big, very complex system doing interesting and not-always-predictable things, and well worth studying as such. If you think you have some insight into the behavior of TCP that the MIT researchers lack, by all means you should let them know, or publish it yourself.
I also know you're a jackass who will do no such thing, just keep talking shit. No further study required.
The models I build are on the cellular level. There are people working in various kinds of population and ecological modeling, but that's out of my area. I do know that, necessarily, they simplify out a lot of what the individual organisms are doing.
I'm shocked to read that anyone would be comfortable just ignoring the why of something just so we can progress beyond our understanding.
If you insist that we know why something works before we make use of it, you're discarding a large portion of engineering. We're still nowhere near a complete understanding of the laws of physics, and yet we make machines that operate quite nicely according to the laws we do know (or at least, of which we have reasonable approximations). The same goes for the relationship between medicine and basic biology, and probably for lots of other stuff as well.
If we don't understand the why then we're missing something very important that could lead to breakthroughs in many other areas. Do not let go of the curiosity that got us here to begin with.
I don't think anyone's talking about letting go of the curiosity. They're not saying, "It works, let's just accept that and move on," but rather, "It works, and we might as well make use of it while we're trying to understand it." Or, from TFA: "Remy's algorithms have more than 150 rules, and will need to be reverse-engineered to figure out how and why they work. We suspect that there is considerable benefit to being able to combine window-based congestion control with pacing where appropriate, but we'll have to trace through these things as they execute to really understand why they work."
As complex systems goes there are far worse. Go ask an engineer or a scientist.
I am a scientist--specifically, a bioinformaticist, which means I try to build mathematical and computational models of processes in living organisms, which are kind of the canonical example of complex systems. And I will cheerfully admit that the internet, taken as a whole, is at least as complex as anything I deal with.
You're right, of course, but I think it's pretty clear it was worse for the losers, as usually happens.
One large group of Americans was clearly better off after the war than they were before it. For a while, at least, until the losers started acting like they hadn't really lost, and the winners unwisely let them get away with it. A century and a half later, we're still not done sorting that out.
Are you suggesting they'd be capable of doing the same thing, against 300,000,000 (300 million) people in a country that is roughly 10 times the size of Iraq and Afghanistan combined?
No, I'm suggesting that not more than a tiny fraction of those 300 million would actually engage in armed, organized resistance against the government of the United States. And you may recall that the last time even a not-so-tiny fraction tried, it didn't end well for them.
Then they will have another town to go after because where I am from, we will take up the cause if Deer Trail goes down.
There's a story from Desert Storm about an Iraqi commander who, when asked why he surrendered his unit so quickly, said it was because of the B-52 strikes.
"But your position wasn't hit by B-52's," the puzzled interrogator said.
"No," he replied, "but I saw one that was."
It's easy to talk big about what you would do. Once you saw the results if the US government decided to go all-out on Deer Trail, you might not be quite so inclined toward chest-thumping.
1. Not all military action involves killing people. Sure, war does connotate killing; but not all militaries are at war.
A military is either at war, training for war, or a lousy military. I don't know of any fourth option.
2. I quit the US Army. They even paid for my ticket home. I did not go to jail, I was not threatened, and nobody shot me for doing so. I am not the only person who has done this.
How exactly did you do that? If you mean you just put in your time and didn't re-enlist, you have to know that's not the same thing as walking off the job.
3. I think that you just attempted to differentiate two personality types, but actually only managed to show that they're not really very different at all.
My point is that people like this are a minority in the military, and are generally despised by those who have to put up with them, whereas they absolutely dominate corporate culture.
Okay, I'll try to explain it again. My three main points:
1. Business is not war, because under normal circumstances, business does not involve killing people. Microsoft is not going to bomb Google's headquarters. Target submarines are not going to stalk ships carrying goods for Wal-Mart. Ford is not going to dispatch a battalion to move into a GM plant, kill or take prisoner all the GM employees found there, and hold the plant against attempts to take it back.
2. Corporations are not armies. The most obvious difference is that corporate employees can always walk away. Plenty of people stay with jobs they dislike for financial reasons, of course, but as a rule, in the civilian world your boss can't send you to jail--or put you up against a wall and shoot you!--if you say "to hell with this, I quit." Soldiers don't have that option, nor could armies function if they did.
3. The types of people involved are different. There are plenty of people in the military, especially officers but a fair number of NCOs as well, who are primarily concerned with climbing the career ladder. Some of them even get MBAs! And they tend to be really lousy soldiers. In peacetime, they're a constant irritation, and in wartime, they get people killed for no good reason. If Uncle Sam's training can't knock the self-absorption and amorality out of these people, where there are a lot fewer of them than there are in the typical corporate environment, it seems unlikely that some bizarre watered-down civilian version will do so, especially when they work in an environment where sociopathy is rewarded and any genuine concern for the welfare of your subordinates is regarded as weakness.
So there it is. Have I said anything above that you disagree with?
For the reasons I gave in the post I linked to, and which other posters expanded on in the thread. If you don't want to bother reading through it [shrug] that's not my problem.
Rather than repeat myself, I'll just say that I give my reasons for rejecting the idea that this will reap any of the same benefits as military basic training does here. Short version: business isn't war, and the corporate world's half-assed attempts to play soldier are doomed to failure.
Every con man trying to sell you on the latest management fad will show you "measurable metrics" (and will often use silly phrases just like that) to prove that their Latest And Greatest will make things better. Which means, of course, that last year's Latest And Greatest, and the one from the year before that, and the year before that, are all bullshit--but this Latest And Greatest is the real deal! Trust me! We've got metrics!
Whatever. As a statistician, I smell cherry-picking. And it's amazing how easily you can pick a few cherries out of a big pile of bullshit, if you're willing to dig long enough.
It's (generally) bloodless and unarmed, but the basics are all there.
No they're not. Not even close. The defining aspect of war is two (or more) large armed groups trying to kill each other. Not in the metaphorical "we're going to kill the competition" way, but in the actual piles-of-corpses, starving-refugees, survivors-crippled-for-life way. If you think that's what business looks like, it's because you have no idea what war looks like, and I envy you your ignorance.
The other basics of military life, like honor, discipline, and mutual respect? Only if you're very, very lucky. Since getting out of the service, I've worked for a couple of businesses that had these, and far more that didn't. Most other veterans will tell you the same. To be sure, there are compensations--even if I were physically up to it, I'd rather live my civilian life than be back in uniform, all in all--but in those aspects, the military world has the business world beat all to hell.
Other posters have already addressed your other points. I urge you to read what they wrote carefully.
Okay, you caught me. Guess I'll have to find some other group of running-dog lackeys to subvert to the cause of the glorious peoples' revolution of the international brotherhood of the proletariat.;)
Attempts to apply military methods to civilian business tend to fail dramatically, because:
1. Business is not war.
2. Corporations are not armies.
3. Corporate imitations of military training are almost invariably done by and for spoiled brat MBA types who love to think of themselves as macho warriors, but wouldn't last five minutes humping a pack and a rifle.
The Pendaran method, designed to force participants to rise above chaos and develop problem-solving techniques, is diametrically opposed, a sort of indictment of Six Sigma and other beloved corporate training regimes.
No, it's just yet another stupid "corporate training regime" designed to separate MBAs from their and everyone else's money. Which wouldn't be a problem, except for the "everyone else" part--companies actually spend money on this kind of crap instead of on things like, you know, salary and benefits for the people who actually do the work that keeps the company in business. And there are more and more of these parasites infecting the corporate world every year, which ought to be enough to convince the Invisible Hand cultists that maybe there's something wrong with their cherished idea that the market weeds out inefficient management... except they're all too busy congratulating themselves on buying into the latest bullshit fad to pay attention.
It's disastrous. cDNA is just a direct copy of the most important part of what's in the genomeâ"the actual transcript that gets used to make the final protein. This isn't a victory at all.
It's bad. cDNA just copies the most important part of the genome: the actual transcript used to make the protein. This is no victory.
(c)(r)(tm)(pat. pending) 2013, Daniel Dvorkin. All rights reserved. By reading this post, you grant me all rights to anything you write, say, or think, in perpetuity.
Julian Simon made a career of making 10 year bets on issues of shortage, longevity, and general health, vs. gloom-and-doomers.
That's a wild overstatement. He made two such bets, one with Paul Ehrlich over metals prices and one with David South over timber prices; he won the first bet and lost the second. This isn't "made a career" of anything, and it has all the predictive power of flipping a coin.
I used to work with a guy -- years and years ago -- that discovered that the IBM FORTRAN compiler would allow you to omit spaces. Having to read his code littered with statements like "DO10I=IBEGIN,IEND,IINCR" was a pure joy
Okay, that's just evil.
On the other hand, I've long avoided diving into Python because I cannot see why anyone would want to consider whitespace as a language element.
FWIW, I used to feel that way until I started using it. It took me about a day to get used to significant whitespace, and after that I decided it's a really nice, elegant language. Give it a shot, and you may be pleasantly surprised.
Slashdot Mirror
I know perfectly well that it's not "arcane magic," any more than living organisms are. It's just a very big, very complex system doing interesting and not-always-predictable things, and well worth studying as such. If you think you have some insight into the behavior of TCP that the MIT researchers lack, by all means you should let them know, or publish it yourself.
I also know you're a jackass who will do no such thing, just keep talking shit. No further study required.
The models I build are on the cellular level. There are people working in various kinds of population and ecological modeling, but that's out of my area. I do know that, necessarily, they simplify out a lot of what the individual organisms are doing.
I'm shocked to read that anyone would be comfortable just ignoring the why of something just so we can progress beyond our understanding.
If you insist that we know why something works before we make use of it, you're discarding a large portion of engineering. We're still nowhere near a complete understanding of the laws of physics, and yet we make machines that operate quite nicely according to the laws we do know (or at least, of which we have reasonable approximations). The same goes for the relationship between medicine and basic biology, and probably for lots of other stuff as well.
If we don't understand the why then we're missing something very important that could lead to breakthroughs in many other areas. Do not let go of the curiosity that got us here to begin with.
I don't think anyone's talking about letting go of the curiosity. They're not saying, "It works, let's just accept that and move on," but rather, "It works, and we might as well make use of it while we're trying to understand it." Or, from TFA: "Remy's algorithms have more than 150 rules, and will need to be reverse-engineered to figure out how and why they work. We suspect that there is considerable benefit to being able to combine window-based congestion control with pacing where appropriate, but we'll have to trace through these things as they execute to really understand why they work."
As complex systems goes there are far worse. Go ask an engineer or a scientist.
I am a scientist--specifically, a bioinformaticist, which means I try to build mathematical and computational models of processes in living organisms, which are kind of the canonical example of complex systems. And I will cheerfully admit that the internet, taken as a whole, is at least as complex as anything I deal with.
Like I said: chest-thumping. [shrug] I hope you're enjoying it, because it's all you're ever going to do.
You're right, of course, but I think it's pretty clear it was worse for the losers, as usually happens.
One large group of Americans was clearly better off after the war than they were before it. For a while, at least, until the losers started acting like they hadn't really lost, and the winners unwisely let them get away with it. A century and a half later, we're still not done sorting that out.
Are you suggesting they'd be capable of doing the same thing, against 300,000,000 (300 million) people in a country that is roughly 10 times the size of Iraq and Afghanistan combined?
No, I'm suggesting that not more than a tiny fraction of those 300 million would actually engage in armed, organized resistance against the government of the United States. And you may recall that the last time even a not-so-tiny fraction tried, it didn't end well for them.
Then they will have another town to go after because where I am from, we will take up the cause if Deer Trail goes down.
There's a story from Desert Storm about an Iraqi commander who, when asked why he surrendered his unit so quickly, said it was because of the B-52 strikes.
"But your position wasn't hit by B-52's," the puzzled interrogator said.
"No," he replied, "but I saw one that was."
It's easy to talk big about what you would do. Once you saw the results if the US government decided to go all-out on Deer Trail, you might not be quite so inclined toward chest-thumping.
1. Not all military action involves killing people. Sure, war does connotate killing; but not all militaries are at war.
A military is either at war, training for war, or a lousy military. I don't know of any fourth option.
2. I quit the US Army. They even paid for my ticket home. I did not go to jail, I was not threatened, and nobody shot me for doing so. I am not the only person who has done this.
How exactly did you do that? If you mean you just put in your time and didn't re-enlist, you have to know that's not the same thing as walking off the job.
3. I think that you just attempted to differentiate two personality types, but actually only managed to show that they're not really very different at all.
My point is that people like this are a minority in the military, and are generally despised by those who have to put up with them, whereas they absolutely dominate corporate culture.
Okay, I'll try to explain it again. My three main points:
1. Business is not war, because under normal circumstances, business does not involve killing people. Microsoft is not going to bomb Google's headquarters. Target submarines are not going to stalk ships carrying goods for Wal-Mart. Ford is not going to dispatch a battalion to move into a GM plant, kill or take prisoner all the GM employees found there, and hold the plant against attempts to take it back.
2. Corporations are not armies. The most obvious difference is that corporate employees can always walk away. Plenty of people stay with jobs they dislike for financial reasons, of course, but as a rule, in the civilian world your boss can't send you to jail--or put you up against a wall and shoot you!--if you say "to hell with this, I quit." Soldiers don't have that option, nor could armies function if they did.
3. The types of people involved are different. There are plenty of people in the military, especially officers but a fair number of NCOs as well, who are primarily concerned with climbing the career ladder. Some of them even get MBAs! And they tend to be really lousy soldiers. In peacetime, they're a constant irritation, and in wartime, they get people killed for no good reason. If Uncle Sam's training can't knock the self-absorption and amorality out of these people, where there are a lot fewer of them than there are in the typical corporate environment, it seems unlikely that some bizarre watered-down civilian version will do so, especially when they work in an environment where sociopathy is rewarded and any genuine concern for the welfare of your subordinates is regarded as weakness.
So there it is. Have I said anything above that you disagree with?
You should watch GATTACA
Maybe everyone should stop using a lousy movie as a guide to real-world debates about medical ethics.
For the reasons I gave in the post I linked to, and which other posters expanded on in the thread. If you don't want to bother reading through it [shrug] that's not my problem.
Rather than repeat myself, I'll just say that I give my reasons for rejecting the idea that this will reap any of the same benefits as military basic training does here. Short version: business isn't war, and the corporate world's half-assed attempts to play soldier are doomed to failure.
Every con man trying to sell you on the latest management fad will show you "measurable metrics" (and will often use silly phrases just like that) to prove that their Latest And Greatest will make things better. Which means, of course, that last year's Latest And Greatest, and the one from the year before that, and the year before that, are all bullshit--but this Latest And Greatest is the real deal! Trust me! We've got metrics!
Whatever. As a statistician, I smell cherry-picking. And it's amazing how easily you can pick a few cherries out of a big pile of bullshit, if you're willing to dig long enough.
It's (generally) bloodless and unarmed, but the basics are all there.
No they're not. Not even close. The defining aspect of war is two (or more) large armed groups trying to kill each other. Not in the metaphorical "we're going to kill the competition" way, but in the actual piles-of-corpses, starving-refugees, survivors-crippled-for-life way. If you think that's what business looks like, it's because you have no idea what war looks like, and I envy you your ignorance.
The other basics of military life, like honor, discipline, and mutual respect? Only if you're very, very lucky. Since getting out of the service, I've worked for a couple of businesses that had these, and far more that didn't. Most other veterans will tell you the same. To be sure, there are compensations--even if I were physically up to it, I'd rather live my civilian life than be back in uniform, all in all--but in those aspects, the military world has the business world beat all to hell.
Other posters have already addressed your other points. I urge you to read what they wrote carefully.
Okay, you caught me. Guess I'll have to find some other group of running-dog lackeys to subvert to the cause of the glorious peoples' revolution of the international brotherhood of the proletariat. ;)
Attempts to apply military methods to civilian business tend to fail dramatically, because:
1. Business is not war.
2. Corporations are not armies.
3. Corporate imitations of military training are almost invariably done by and for spoiled brat MBA types who love to think of themselves as macho warriors, but wouldn't last five minutes humping a pack and a rifle.
The Pendaran method, designed to force participants to rise above chaos and develop problem-solving techniques, is diametrically opposed, a sort of indictment of Six Sigma and other beloved corporate training regimes.
No, it's just yet another stupid "corporate training regime" designed to separate MBAs from their and everyone else's money. Which wouldn't be a problem, except for the "everyone else" part--companies actually spend money on this kind of crap instead of on things like, you know, salary and benefits for the people who actually do the work that keeps the company in business. And there are more and more of these parasites infecting the corporate world every year, which ought to be enough to convince the Invisible Hand cultists that maybe there's something wrong with their cherished idea that the market weeds out inefficient management ... except they're all too busy congratulating themselves on buying into the latest bullshit fad to pay attention.
Boots. Mars. Do it, NASA. This isn't rocket science.
No, unfortunately it's political science.
a classical demonstration of the tyranny of the majority
For broad enough definitions of "majority."
... and this kind of thing is what keeps me coming back to Slashdot. :)
It's disastrous. cDNA is just a direct copy of the most important part of what's in the genomeâ"the actual transcript that gets used to make the final protein. This isn't a victory at all.
It's bad. cDNA just copies the most important part of the genome: the actual transcript used to make the protein. This is no victory.
(c)(r)(tm)(pat. pending) 2013, Daniel Dvorkin. All rights reserved. By reading this post, you grant me all rights to anything you write, say, or think, in perpetuity.
Julian Simon made a career of making 10 year bets on issues of shortage, longevity, and general health, vs. gloom-and-doomers.
That's a wild overstatement. He made two such bets, one with Paul Ehrlich over metals prices and one with David South over timber prices; he won the first bet and lost the second. This isn't "made a career" of anything, and it has all the predictive power of flipping a coin.
I used to work with a guy -- years and years ago -- that discovered that the IBM FORTRAN compiler would allow you to omit spaces. Having to read his code littered with statements like "DO10I=IBEGIN,IEND,IINCR" was a pure joy
Okay, that's just evil.
On the other hand, I've long avoided diving into Python because I cannot see why anyone would want to consider whitespace as a language element.
FWIW, I used to feel that way until I started using it. It took me about a day to get used to significant whitespace, and after that I decided it's a really nice, elegant language. Give it a shot, and you may be pleasantly surprised.
In fact, the idea that you would use whitespace to denote ANYTHING is ludicrous.
Yesyou'reabsolutelyright.Weshouldjustgetridofitentirely.Itsavessomuchtimetypingwhenyoudon'thavetousethespacebaratall.