Weather modeling and forecasts are very good, boasting >95% accuracy over the first 3-4 days, with accuracy decreasing the further ahead you go.
Not a chance. Bring some data before I will believe that accuracy rate. I don't even believe 95% is accurate for forecasting on the day of, let alone 3-4 days out, since our forecasts here in Minnesota have predicted sunny skies in the morning when I go to work, and we later get storms that drop four inches of rain. And I'm not using the "main on TV", but forecasts that are based on NOAA, which does have actual meteorologists working there. So again, bring data... I think your accuracy ratings are hugely inflated, especially for 3-4 days out.
What?
Your weather forecasts are wrong every day? And in every conceivable way (Temperature, Cloud cover, Humidity, Rainfall, Windspeed, etc.)?
No one claimed they are wrong every day, just that they aren't nearly 80% as the grandparent claimed. They seem to be wrong about 50% of the time (at least) here in Minnesota too. We are talking major, predicted sunny skies and got one of the worst storms of the summer with four inches of rain kind of wrong. And when I say wrong 50% of the time, I'm talking about major wrong. I'm not talking about "predicted 83 degrees but it ended up being 85" kind of wrong (in which case the models would approach 100% wrong). They are wrong in some more major way, such as predicted temp off five degrees or more, wind off by several mph, heavy rains when sun was predicted, snowfall either doesn't arrive or has way more inches than predicted, etc. I know that's anecdotal to you, but I'd have to see some very good data to concede that they are correct 80% of the time. My observations make me believe it's probably otherwise (although maybe other parts of the nation are more accurate and bring the average up).
However it obviously shows just how badly this country is broken. I'm not an alarmist, but it this simply isn't going to change with the current US government system. They have no REASON to change it.
The thing that's really broken is that we have government involved in this at all. Why, exactly, should only one cable company have been allowed to run wires to the houses in my area? Why shouldn't two or three of them have been allowed to do it? Why did the government mandate that there will be monopolies in cable, telephone, etc? That's ultimately the real problem: government took away my choice, so I can't vote with my wallet now. Now I have to plead to unelected FCC bureaucrats in DC to force my local monopoly provider not to throttle my service, when I could have simply voted with my wallet like I do with everything else.
It's probably too late to get to get the cable mess fixed now, but hopefully this can at least be a good cautionary tale moving forward: never, EVER let the government mandate monopolies in anything, whether it be public schools, post office letter delivery, utilities, media companies, mass transit bus service, healthcare, etc. It NEVER turns out better for the consumer, and you end up having to grovel to government employees that could not care less about you personally. Every area should be open to any company that wants to participate, and may the best one win.
A recent success story would probably be the opening of space exploration to private companies: what did NASA do in the last 30 years when it had a monopoly? What are private companies already doing in the 5-10 years they've been developing their technology? Look how far SpaceX has come with it's rocket technology. It will shortly have better, safer, more cost effective options than NASA ever did.
I still don't understand why we care about this. Water occurs naturally all over the solar system, from moons to planets to asteroids. One would assume that it's a safe bet it's common in most other systems as well, just like other basic chemicals are. And, that water will be in vapor form any time it is close enough to a star to be above 0 C, so again, one would assume that's common.
Unless we are commenting about water va-pour, as I'm pretty sure this is the first time in the universe that that's ever been mentioned.:)
According to the article, it's 40 square meters, and the Sun gives up a max of 1.3KW per square meter, which means it has a maximum of 52KW output at 100% and a clear sky. 80% would be about 41KWh per hour. If you assume 3 good hours, that's over 100KWH per day or $5 of $0.05/KWH energy. Almost $2k per year.
The economics still aren't there. A clear sky isn't enough. You won't get the sun's max in North America due to angle of the sun, especially in fall or winter. Even in summer, the angle in most parts of the country is such that you wouldn't get the max. And, in most parts of the country you also have a lot of clouds and rain (desert southwest being the exception), and you also have a fair amount of severe weather that could damage the thing. I'd be surprised if you get half of your $2k per year figure.
So figure this thing can be built for 20k. And you manage to save $1k a year. It will take 20 years to pay off, and it probably won't last that long. So it's certainly interesting and might even be applicable in select places in New Mexico or Arizona, but in places like Minnesota, it has minimal practicality from a financial perspective.
No, it's not. The question "why" in this case presuposes some kind of purpose, without any reason to believe that such a purpose exists. Just because you can phrase something in the form of a question doesn't mean that your "question" makes any sense.
It's more valid than your position, which pre-supposes that there isn't a purpose. Science can't claim there is a purpose, and it can't claim there isn't one. Therefore why is a valid question, since it is at least possible there is a purpose. Saying, with no evidence, that "Science says there is no purpose" just proves the author's point that people are abusing science.
I think that's misleading at best, because at best we can only say that it occurred, not how/why it occurred. We don't know the cause behind it. Nor are we likely to ever know for sure, because we can't experimentally test it. And I think that's the point of the article: science makes very narrow claims in this area, and clearly defines parts of the origin as untestable and unknowable to science, yet people walk around acting like science has given us every answer: truth with a capital T, as the author puts it.
" but the important thing is that you have faith, not to be shaken, no need of proof, just faith." -WHY is it important to have "have faith". Placing importance on the non-rational is the problem, not a thing to be proud of
If you a referring to Christians, I think you may misunderstand what we are having faith in. When we talk about "having faith in Jesus", we aren't saying we believe without evidence. Jesus himself didn't withhold evidence... his ministry was confirmed by a huge number of public miracles, and we have a bunch of written eyewitness accounts that testify to that fact. The men who wrote them were beheaded, sawed in half, flogged, tortured, and crucified upside down, yet still they wouldn't take back their claims that they witnessed God in the flesh, and that all these things were true. If this was a lie, some of them would have recanted, but they truly, earnestly held it forth as truth, even though they gained nothing but pain and death during their lifetimes. Not one gained political power, armies, wives, or wealth from their stand; only beatings (at best).
But even though you may know for a fact Jesus existed, you still have to trust his promises. You have to have faith that his word is true, that he will keep his word, forgive sins and give salvation. And I don't think that's 100% without evidence either, but that's more along the lines of what specifically we have to have faith about. We can be pretty certain he lived from material historical evidence, but forgiveness of sins is not something you can show materialist evidence for. You have to step beyond the materialist philosophy and take that by faith, trusting in Jesus' word.
Hopefully that's at least somewhat helpful. I know this issue often gets confused, especially in discussions like these.
The problem is even atheists still feel a need to believe in *something*. Which is silly. Planting Science as your God still means you have a God and are not an atheist.
Because people like you cannot comprehend the difference between faith and belief. You might have faith that Jesus Christ died for our sins. You might believe that also, but the important thing is that you have faith, not to be shaken, no need of proof, just faith.
I believe that there will be a sunrise tomorrow morning. I do not need faith for that belief. I have celestial mechanics to tell me that will happen, which can be proven beyond a doubt.
My belief that the sun will rise tomorrow morning, does not make it my religion.
That's a pretty odd statement to make. You don't know if there will be a sunrise tomorrow morning or not. You assume there will be, because there always has been one in the past, but you really don't know that. You claim you know it for a fact based on celestial mechanics, but that really means nothing unless you know, for a fact, everything about the universe that can ever be known.
Here's an example: We may tonight be hit by an asteroid that no one saw coming, and there may be a dust cloud that completely obscures the light of the sun for a very long time, preventing sunrises (by the way, asteroid impacts are celestial mechanics, but again, unless you know absolutely everything in the universe, including the location of every celestial body, you can't apply your celestial mechanics to every object and account for possible event). And what if it's a really large asteroid, capable of disturbing the Earth's orbit or breaking apart part of the planet? That's less likely, but not completely impossible.
And it would be very arrogant enough for us to claim we know everything about stellar mechanics. The sun could explode tonight, for perfectly natural reasons (some natural process that we don't know about), and that's the end of sunrises permanently. The sun could be destroyed at this very moment, though we won't know it for at least eight minutes.
So while you claim you know for a fact that there will be a sunrise tomorrow, your statement is based on faith as well. Even if the odds of probability are in your favor, you do not know FOR A FACT that there will be a sunrise tomorrow, because you do not have sufficient knowledge or information to make such a grandiose claim. You are taking it on faith, just like everything else. Don't let the gains of knowledge that science has provided puff up your head into thinking you know everything, or you will be guilty of abusing science in the same manner that the article was pointing out.
Or, is it possible that he does observe Black Holes, and they do exist, but the formation method is something other than what we've always assumed (eg star collapse)?
To researchers, academics, students and even everyday folk in Canada's most populous areas (Alberta, Ontario and Quebec), it really makes no difference if the material is in a dump somewhere, or if it's in obscure, out-of-the-way towns or cities like Sidney and Dartmouth. It's just about as inaccessible either way.
Inaccessible? Because they suddenly don't have the Internet in Canada, which according to the article, is how 95% of the documents in that library were being requested anyway? Seems to me they've made it accessible not just to Canada's most populous areas, but to anyone anywhere in the world.
One other note: this works as long as you have any semi-private place at work where you can put the drive. It could be a desk drawer or something else. I don't see any reason why there is a requirement that it be stored at a site you "own and control". Just put heavy AES encryption on the backups as I do, just in case the drive falls into other hands. Then your only real risk is financial loss of the disk itself. I know other people at my workplace that all do the same thing. And if you want heavier security and don't mind paying for it and taking extra time, a safe deposit box at a local bank is a good fallback, and certainly much cheaper then a colo. You'd have to have pretty deep pockets for colo space and the bandwidth to back up to and from that location, making it impractical for most people.
A colocation center? Do the initial backup locally then use something to replicate changes in the future?
Too painful and expensive. This can be made much simpler. I have two sets of backups I keep: an internal 2 TB hard drive for local backups, and a pair of 1 TB external drives for off site backups. Every Monday, I unplug the external drive at my house as I head out the door for work. At work, I put it into my locker and retrieve the other drive, which I bring home with me when I leave for the day. When I get home, I plug it into the vacant USB and power cord, and presto: it's online and ready for backup! My software (I use ShadowProtect Desktop) does a full backup of the machine every Sunday night, so Monday mornings it is always ready for the swap again. It's a very quick and painless way to have offsite backups without spending a fortune on comparatively slow Internet bandwidth.
Not only that, but it has taken an awfully long time for the price of Blu-Ray drives to really drop... maybe there was some fixing going on. I wouldn't be shocked.
The communications market is so "deregulated" that monopolism takes over, with deliberate barriers to entry placed by noncompete agreements and dirty tactics. And yet so many people think anarcho-libertarian, "laissez faire" deregulation will somehow make their lives better in every aspect.
That's not true at all. Try opening up a new cable company in your local town, or opening up a new power plant and running new wires to all the houses. Oh, that's right, you can't, because the government has decided that it would be inefficient to have more than one set of power lines, or water lines, or cable lines, or telephone lines, etc, going into a single home. So they allow one provider to service the whole town and be a government sanctioned monopoly. That's hardly "deregulation"... in fact, it's the epitome of the government regulating and controlling everything.
It's always a bad idea to compare the US to Europe or Asia. These kinds of comparisons always end up being overly simplistic. The US is a VERY decentralized nation in terms of population, and we have a far lower population density than they do. Compare Houston to Tokyo, for example... Tokyo is tightly packed and Houston is sprawling everyone. It's much easier to bring cheap, high speed broadband to a bunch of tiny, densely packed apartments than it is to bring it to every country lane. Asian and European cities are much more like LANs, and US cities are like WANs, to put it another way. If you want LAN speeds in the much less densely populated US, it is going to be very costly.
They're built by lowest bidders Serco and QSS Inc. Neither an American company.
If they had decided to hire Americans to do this job, they would have had a very large pool of qualified and skilled workers from which to choose.
I disagree. I've worked with American, Indian and Chinese developers, and you know what the number one issue is? It's not lack of qualification, it's lack of testing! Most developer HATE testing no matter which country they are from, and therefore don't do it. And you know what kind of testing they really, really, really hate? Load Testing! It is especially hated because you can't just generate large loads from your laptop... you actually have to set up dedicated load balancing agents to really simulate a large load. Setting up the load testing environment takes quite a bit more effort than most other kinds of testing, such as unit testing. So, it gets skipped all the time, and bites project after project. And I guarantee you load testing was never done on this site, and probably would have been skipped even if Americans were doing it, unless they were especially conscientious and hard working developers, which most aren't.
I'd be interested to know what line of work you do, programming wise. My experience tells me that a lot of programming that is being done is meant to be powerful and meant to be built quickly. Running quickly and with low tolerance for faults is a little less important because very few things are mission critical. While anathema to the academic, it demands a certain skill set, which is the ability to very quickly assimilate new arbitrary knowledge about libraries, software, and code, that the programmer hasn't seen before. The result is a fragile sort of knowledge that often lacks formality and granularity but is sufficient enough to accomplish a task very quickly.
There is definitely some truth to what you say. I started out as a programmer in 2007 but quit programming and went into infrastructure/systems engineering after my first programming job precisely because of what you just described. I got into computers and programming initially because I had a desire to cultivate a deep understanding of the computer and how it worked, and I discovered very quickly that modern programming is all about the latest "shiny new framework" and slapping something together as quickly as you can (the politically correct term for this is, of course, agile). That's all well and good, and there is a definite place for that because speed to market is very important in a competitive environment. And a lot of people really seem to enjoy that style of rapid development at the expense of truly understanding what is going on. But it wasn't for me.
That said, there is also truth to what the grandparent said when he posted this:
I wasn't saying a programmer should write everything from scratch every day. But if you don't know how to, you're SOL and at everybody else's mercy when something goes wrong. You're costing your company money. Because things inevitably go wrong.
Those people with the "fragile sort of knowledge" are at everyone's mercy when things go wrong. They literally have no clue where to go next or how to troubleshoot if things don't work exactly right. And in my company, it's me and others at the heart of the infrastructure devops teams who they come to when things go down, because we are the ones who actually understand how it all really works underneath the high level frameworks and scaffolding. We understand the networking, the HTTP, the authentication protocols, languages and everything else at the bottom. The best programmers, at least at this company, are the ones who did those rapid development jobs for just a few years and moved as quickly as they could into backend "Developer Center of Excellence" type teams, where their job is to support other developers, create standards, write programs designed for the infrastructure as a whole and therefore learn the deeper points of the technologies.
Conclusion: The grandparent is right when he says that the best programmers understand how things work under the hood and could write these objects from scratch if they had to. But you are right when you say that not all programmers have to be at that level in order to do something effective. Both types are essential to organization, because you have to have people fast enough to outmaneuver the competition, but also really solid people in reserve to back up the quick and dirty developers when things go wrong.
No, sorry, but this is a fractally wrong statement to make. With sufficient curiousity, you will be dedicated to learning as much as you can. The drive to learn will push you where you need to go. Intelligence merely sets the speed by which you'll arrive. Your over-emphasis on intelligence is elitism; It's suggesting that if you can't be "smart enough", you shouldn't be in science.
This is a nice thought, but patently untrue. It's like saying that anyone can be an NFL football player, and your level of physical talent and ability merely dictates the speed by which you'll arrive. But that isn't actually true. Without sufficient "speed" you'll never arrive, and it's the same in science. You may have the curiosity, but without the mental talent and aptitude you'll be forever beaten to new discoveries by all the other scientists who not only have your curiousity, but also the mental aptitude you lack.
Sure, anyone can play football and throw the ball around, but most don't have what it takes to play in the NFL. Similarly, everyone can learn the basics about the scientific method and learn to think in an empirical way, but not everyone has what it takes to be a professional scientist, or to make major scientific discoveries like Einstein did.
Yet I would argue true geniuses need the support structure the Steve Jobs/Edisons/etc can provide to realize their potential.
I think this is right on, but it extends much farther than just "true geniuses". Personally, I'm one of those highly technical people who are really good at the nitty gritty details of making technology work, but as I've learned more about myself over the years I've realized that I need to make sure I stay in the technical arena, rather than going into management or some of the purely "visionary" roles, because the high level of technical talent I have doesn't mean I have a commensurately high level of visionary talent. I've learned that a good idea for me is to seek out the visionary types in my organization and try to get myself onto their projects, because they can supply overall direction and I can provide a really good technical implementation. I'm not trying to compare myself to Woz, Einstein, Tesla, or these other geniuses, because I'm not nearly that smart, but I do think the principle extends to me an many others. There is an almost symbiotic relationship that can be had when technical people realize they need visionaries, and visionaries respect and treat the technical people well. I think it applies to much of industry, not just super geniuses and super visionaries.
Lazy voters here just complete the part of the ballot that selects the President (which is by far the highest profile election on the paper) and submit that.
I think that's a good thing. If the only thing they are following is the presidential race, then that's all they should vote on. I personally won't vote on any race I haven't thoroughly researched, as I want to leave the decision up to those who know something about it. (For the record, I do try to research every race beforehand, but if there's some judge up for election and I know nothing about their legal opinions, what grounds do I have for deciding whether they should stay or not?)
Personally, I wish more people would vote only on races they understand, rather than voting straight "R" or "D" on every race. I'm a Republican, but there are from time to time completely corrupt Republicans that should not be re-elected. Also, their are unprincipled Republicans that likewise should not be re-elected. And I know the same is true on the Democrat side... the re-election of Jesse Jackson Jr. even though the FBI said he committed felony campaign finance fraud would be a great example. If you don't know anything about it, leave it blank.
99% of the "agile" efforts I've seen used agile as an excuse to avoid whatever part of the SDLC annoyed them most.
This is totally true. And I think the main part of the SDLC they try to avoid is planning. I've both been a developer and had developers writing automation code as projects for me as an infrastructure engineer, and the most frequent abuse is zero planning. And that's the thing that makes agile seem endless to users like me. The developers keep having to rewrite everything every dang sprint because they didn't put enough planning into the architecture to make it flexible enough to meet the requirements. And speaking of requirements gathering, that consisted of getting a bunch of user stories and then diving straight into coding, rather than taking the time to get into the true details and really flesh what the users needed. Which is another agile abuse.
I'm honestly getting pretty darn sick of agile, because even with the defects in other paradigms, I think better software was developed more quickly. It's amazing what a little up front thought (which most other paradigms call for) will get you. And again, a lot of people will argue that it's not agile that is the problem, but the abuse of agile. I agree in theory that abuse of agile is the problem, but since 99% of projects seem to do agile wrong in practice, it might be time to throw the baby out with the bath water and get a new paradigm that isn't so easily misinterpreted.
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Not a chance. Bring some data before I will believe that accuracy rate. I don't even believe 95% is accurate for forecasting on the day of, let alone 3-4 days out, since our forecasts here in Minnesota have predicted sunny skies in the morning when I go to work, and we later get storms that drop four inches of rain. And I'm not using the "main on TV", but forecasts that are based on NOAA, which does have actual meteorologists working there. So again, bring data... I think your accuracy ratings are hugely inflated, especially for 3-4 days out.
No one claimed they are wrong every day, just that they aren't nearly 80% as the grandparent claimed. They seem to be wrong about 50% of the time (at least) here in Minnesota too. We are talking major, predicted sunny skies and got one of the worst storms of the summer with four inches of rain kind of wrong. And when I say wrong 50% of the time, I'm talking about major wrong. I'm not talking about "predicted 83 degrees but it ended up being 85" kind of wrong (in which case the models would approach 100% wrong). They are wrong in some more major way, such as predicted temp off five degrees or more, wind off by several mph, heavy rains when sun was predicted, snowfall either doesn't arrive or has way more inches than predicted, etc. I know that's anecdotal to you, but I'd have to see some very good data to concede that they are correct 80% of the time. My observations make me believe it's probably otherwise (although maybe other parts of the nation are more accurate and bring the average up).
However it obviously shows just how badly this country is broken. I'm not an alarmist, but it this simply isn't going to change with the current US government system. They have no REASON to change it.
The thing that's really broken is that we have government involved in this at all. Why, exactly, should only one cable company have been allowed to run wires to the houses in my area? Why shouldn't two or three of them have been allowed to do it? Why did the government mandate that there will be monopolies in cable, telephone, etc? That's ultimately the real problem: government took away my choice, so I can't vote with my wallet now. Now I have to plead to unelected FCC bureaucrats in DC to force my local monopoly provider not to throttle my service, when I could have simply voted with my wallet like I do with everything else.
It's probably too late to get to get the cable mess fixed now, but hopefully this can at least be a good cautionary tale moving forward: never, EVER let the government mandate monopolies in anything, whether it be public schools, post office letter delivery, utilities, media companies, mass transit bus service, healthcare, etc. It NEVER turns out better for the consumer, and you end up having to grovel to government employees that could not care less about you personally. Every area should be open to any company that wants to participate, and may the best one win.
A recent success story would probably be the opening of space exploration to private companies: what did NASA do in the last 30 years when it had a monopoly? What are private companies already doing in the 5-10 years they've been developing their technology? Look how far SpaceX has come with it's rocket technology. It will shortly have better, safer, more cost effective options than NASA ever did.
I still don't understand why we care about this. Water occurs naturally all over the solar system, from moons to planets to asteroids. One would assume that it's a safe bet it's common in most other systems as well, just like other basic chemicals are. And, that water will be in vapor form any time it is close enough to a star to be above 0 C, so again, one would assume that's common.
Unless we are commenting about water va-pour , as I'm pretty sure this is the first time in the universe that that's ever been mentioned. :)
According to the article, it's 40 square meters, and the Sun gives up a max of 1.3KW per square meter, which means it has a maximum of 52KW output at 100% and a clear sky. 80% would be about 41KWh per hour. If you assume 3 good hours, that's over 100KWH per day or $5 of $0.05/KWH energy. Almost $2k per year.
The economics still aren't there. A clear sky isn't enough. You won't get the sun's max in North America due to angle of the sun, especially in fall or winter. Even in summer, the angle in most parts of the country is such that you wouldn't get the max. And, in most parts of the country you also have a lot of clouds and rain (desert southwest being the exception), and you also have a fair amount of severe weather that could damage the thing. I'd be surprised if you get half of your $2k per year figure.
So figure this thing can be built for 20k. And you manage to save $1k a year. It will take 20 years to pay off, and it probably won't last that long. So it's certainly interesting and might even be applicable in select places in New Mexico or Arizona, but in places like Minnesota, it has minimal practicality from a financial perspective.
"Why?" is still a valid question;
No, it's not. The question "why" in this case presuposes some kind of purpose, without any reason to believe that such a purpose exists. Just because you can phrase something in the form of a question doesn't mean that your "question" makes any sense.
It's more valid than your position, which pre-supposes that there isn't a purpose. Science can't claim there is a purpose, and it can't claim there isn't one. Therefore why is a valid question, since it is at least possible there is a purpose. Saying, with no evidence, that "Science says there is no purpose" just proves the author's point that people are abusing science.
The big bang is how the universe was created.
I think that's misleading at best, because at best we can only say that it occurred, not how/why it occurred. We don't know the cause behind it. Nor are we likely to ever know for sure, because we can't experimentally test it. And I think that's the point of the article: science makes very narrow claims in this area, and clearly defines parts of the origin as untestable and unknowable to science, yet people walk around acting like science has given us every answer: truth with a capital T, as the author puts it.
" but the important thing is that you have faith, not to be shaken, no need of proof, just faith." -WHY is it important to have "have faith". Placing importance on the non-rational is the problem, not a thing to be proud of
If you a referring to Christians, I think you may misunderstand what we are having faith in. When we talk about "having faith in Jesus", we aren't saying we believe without evidence. Jesus himself didn't withhold evidence... his ministry was confirmed by a huge number of public miracles, and we have a bunch of written eyewitness accounts that testify to that fact. The men who wrote them were beheaded, sawed in half, flogged, tortured, and crucified upside down, yet still they wouldn't take back their claims that they witnessed God in the flesh, and that all these things were true. If this was a lie, some of them would have recanted, but they truly, earnestly held it forth as truth, even though they gained nothing but pain and death during their lifetimes. Not one gained political power, armies, wives, or wealth from their stand; only beatings (at best).
But even though you may know for a fact Jesus existed, you still have to trust his promises. You have to have faith that his word is true, that he will keep his word, forgive sins and give salvation. And I don't think that's 100% without evidence either, but that's more along the lines of what specifically we have to have faith about. We can be pretty certain he lived from material historical evidence, but forgiveness of sins is not something you can show materialist evidence for. You have to step beyond the materialist philosophy and take that by faith, trusting in Jesus' word.
Hopefully that's at least somewhat helpful. I know this issue often gets confused, especially in discussions like these.
The problem is even atheists still feel a need to believe in *something*. Which is silly. Planting Science as your God still means you have a God and are not an atheist.
Because people like you cannot comprehend the difference between faith and belief. You might have faith that Jesus Christ died for our sins. You might believe that also, but the important thing is that you have faith, not to be shaken, no need of proof, just faith.
I believe that there will be a sunrise tomorrow morning. I do not need faith for that belief. I have celestial mechanics to tell me that will happen, which can be proven beyond a doubt.
My belief that the sun will rise tomorrow morning, does not make it my religion.
That's a pretty odd statement to make. You don't know if there will be a sunrise tomorrow morning or not. You assume there will be, because there always has been one in the past, but you really don't know that. You claim you know it for a fact based on celestial mechanics, but that really means nothing unless you know, for a fact, everything about the universe that can ever be known.
Here's an example: We may tonight be hit by an asteroid that no one saw coming, and there may be a dust cloud that completely obscures the light of the sun for a very long time, preventing sunrises (by the way, asteroid impacts are celestial mechanics, but again, unless you know absolutely everything in the universe, including the location of every celestial body, you can't apply your celestial mechanics to every object and account for possible event). And what if it's a really large asteroid, capable of disturbing the Earth's orbit or breaking apart part of the planet? That's less likely, but not completely impossible.
And it would be very arrogant enough for us to claim we know everything about stellar mechanics. The sun could explode tonight, for perfectly natural reasons (some natural process that we don't know about), and that's the end of sunrises permanently. The sun could be destroyed at this very moment, though we won't know it for at least eight minutes.
So while you claim you know for a fact that there will be a sunrise tomorrow, your statement is based on faith as well. Even if the odds of probability are in your favor, you do not know FOR A FACT that there will be a sunrise tomorrow, because you do not have sufficient knowledge or information to make such a grandiose claim. You are taking it on faith, just like everything else. Don't let the gains of knowledge that science has provided puff up your head into thinking you know everything, or you will be guilty of abusing science in the same manner that the article was pointing out.
Clearly the only way to solve this issue is to send a manned expedition into the black hole to see what we find!
Or, is it possible that he does observe Black Holes, and they do exist, but the formation method is something other than what we've always assumed (eg star collapse)?
Inaccessible? Because they suddenly don't have the Internet in Canada, which according to the article, is how 95% of the documents in that library were being requested anyway? Seems to me they've made it accessible not just to Canada's most populous areas, but to anyone anywhere in the world.
One other note: this works as long as you have any semi-private place at work where you can put the drive. It could be a desk drawer or something else. I don't see any reason why there is a requirement that it be stored at a site you "own and control". Just put heavy AES encryption on the backups as I do, just in case the drive falls into other hands. Then your only real risk is financial loss of the disk itself. I know other people at my workplace that all do the same thing. And if you want heavier security and don't mind paying for it and taking extra time, a safe deposit box at a local bank is a good fallback, and certainly much cheaper then a colo. You'd have to have pretty deep pockets for colo space and the bandwidth to back up to and from that location, making it impractical for most people.
Too painful and expensive. This can be made much simpler. I have two sets of backups I keep: an internal 2 TB hard drive for local backups, and a pair of 1 TB external drives for off site backups. Every Monday, I unplug the external drive at my house as I head out the door for work. At work, I put it into my locker and retrieve the other drive, which I bring home with me when I leave for the day. When I get home, I plug it into the vacant USB and power cord, and presto: it's online and ready for backup! My software (I use ShadowProtect Desktop) does a full backup of the machine every Sunday night, so Monday mornings it is always ready for the swap again. It's a very quick and painless way to have offsite backups without spending a fortune on comparatively slow Internet bandwidth.
Not only that, but it has taken an awfully long time for the price of Blu-Ray drives to really drop... maybe there was some fixing going on. I wouldn't be shocked.
That's not true at all. Try opening up a new cable company in your local town, or opening up a new power plant and running new wires to all the houses. Oh, that's right, you can't, because the government has decided that it would be inefficient to have more than one set of power lines, or water lines, or cable lines, or telephone lines, etc, going into a single home. So they allow one provider to service the whole town and be a government sanctioned monopoly. That's hardly "deregulation"... in fact, it's the epitome of the government regulating and controlling everything.
It's always a bad idea to compare the US to Europe or Asia. These kinds of comparisons always end up being overly simplistic. The US is a VERY decentralized nation in terms of population, and we have a far lower population density than they do. Compare Houston to Tokyo, for example... Tokyo is tightly packed and Houston is sprawling everyone. It's much easier to bring cheap, high speed broadband to a bunch of tiny, densely packed apartments than it is to bring it to every country lane. Asian and European cities are much more like LANs, and US cities are like WANs, to put it another way. If you want LAN speeds in the much less densely populated US, it is going to be very costly.
I disagree. I've worked with American, Indian and Chinese developers, and you know what the number one issue is? It's not lack of qualification, it's lack of testing! Most developer HATE testing no matter which country they are from, and therefore don't do it. And you know what kind of testing they really, really, really hate? Load Testing! It is especially hated because you can't just generate large loads from your laptop... you actually have to set up dedicated load balancing agents to really simulate a large load. Setting up the load testing environment takes quite a bit more effort than most other kinds of testing, such as unit testing. So, it gets skipped all the time, and bites project after project. And I guarantee you load testing was never done on this site, and probably would have been skipped even if Americans were doing it, unless they were especially conscientious and hard working developers, which most aren't.
There is definitely some truth to what you say. I started out as a programmer in 2007 but quit programming and went into infrastructure/systems engineering after my first programming job precisely because of what you just described. I got into computers and programming initially because I had a desire to cultivate a deep understanding of the computer and how it worked, and I discovered very quickly that modern programming is all about the latest "shiny new framework" and slapping something together as quickly as you can (the politically correct term for this is, of course, agile). That's all well and good, and there is a definite place for that because speed to market is very important in a competitive environment. And a lot of people really seem to enjoy that style of rapid development at the expense of truly understanding what is going on. But it wasn't for me.
That said, there is also truth to what the grandparent said when he posted this:
Those people with the "fragile sort of knowledge" are at everyone's mercy when things go wrong. They literally have no clue where to go next or how to troubleshoot if things don't work exactly right. And in my company, it's me and others at the heart of the infrastructure devops teams who they come to when things go down, because we are the ones who actually understand how it all really works underneath the high level frameworks and scaffolding. We understand the networking, the HTTP, the authentication protocols, languages and everything else at the bottom. The best programmers, at least at this company, are the ones who did those rapid development jobs for just a few years and moved as quickly as they could into backend "Developer Center of Excellence" type teams, where their job is to support other developers, create standards, write programs designed for the infrastructure as a whole and therefore learn the deeper points of the technologies.
Conclusion: The grandparent is right when he says that the best programmers understand how things work under the hood and could write these objects from scratch if they had to. But you are right when you say that not all programmers have to be at that level in order to do something effective. Both types are essential to organization, because you have to have people fast enough to outmaneuver the competition, but also really solid people in reserve to back up the quick and dirty developers when things go wrong.
Yes, they are. They are state machines (proteins, chemical substances, and other such items keeping state) with a semi-infinite tape (ie - DNA).
This is a nice thought, but patently untrue. It's like saying that anyone can be an NFL football player, and your level of physical talent and ability merely dictates the speed by which you'll arrive. But that isn't actually true. Without sufficient "speed" you'll never arrive, and it's the same in science. You may have the curiosity, but without the mental talent and aptitude you'll be forever beaten to new discoveries by all the other scientists who not only have your curiousity, but also the mental aptitude you lack.
Sure, anyone can play football and throw the ball around, but most don't have what it takes to play in the NFL. Similarly, everyone can learn the basics about the scientific method and learn to think in an empirical way, but not everyone has what it takes to be a professional scientist, or to make major scientific discoveries like Einstein did.
I think this is right on, but it extends much farther than just "true geniuses". Personally, I'm one of those highly technical people who are really good at the nitty gritty details of making technology work, but as I've learned more about myself over the years I've realized that I need to make sure I stay in the technical arena, rather than going into management or some of the purely "visionary" roles, because the high level of technical talent I have doesn't mean I have a commensurately high level of visionary talent. I've learned that a good idea for me is to seek out the visionary types in my organization and try to get myself onto their projects, because they can supply overall direction and I can provide a really good technical implementation. I'm not trying to compare myself to Woz, Einstein, Tesla, or these other geniuses, because I'm not nearly that smart, but I do think the principle extends to me an many others. There is an almost symbiotic relationship that can be had when technical people realize they need visionaries, and visionaries respect and treat the technical people well. I think it applies to much of industry, not just super geniuses and super visionaries.
I think that's a good thing. If the only thing they are following is the presidential race, then that's all they should vote on. I personally won't vote on any race I haven't thoroughly researched, as I want to leave the decision up to those who know something about it. (For the record, I do try to research every race beforehand, but if there's some judge up for election and I know nothing about their legal opinions, what grounds do I have for deciding whether they should stay or not?)
Personally, I wish more people would vote only on races they understand, rather than voting straight "R" or "D" on every race. I'm a Republican, but there are from time to time completely corrupt Republicans that should not be re-elected. Also, their are unprincipled Republicans that likewise should not be re-elected. And I know the same is true on the Democrat side... the re-election of Jesse Jackson Jr. even though the FBI said he committed felony campaign finance fraud would be a great example. If you don't know anything about it, leave it blank.
This is totally true. And I think the main part of the SDLC they try to avoid is planning. I've both been a developer and had developers writing automation code as projects for me as an infrastructure engineer, and the most frequent abuse is zero planning. And that's the thing that makes agile seem endless to users like me. The developers keep having to rewrite everything every dang sprint because they didn't put enough planning into the architecture to make it flexible enough to meet the requirements. And speaking of requirements gathering, that consisted of getting a bunch of user stories and then diving straight into coding, rather than taking the time to get into the true details and really flesh what the users needed. Which is another agile abuse.
I'm honestly getting pretty darn sick of agile, because even with the defects in other paradigms, I think better software was developed more quickly. It's amazing what a little up front thought (which most other paradigms call for) will get you. And again, a lot of people will argue that it's not agile that is the problem, but the abuse of agile. I agree in theory that abuse of agile is the problem, but since 99% of projects seem to do agile wrong in practice, it might be time to throw the baby out with the bath water and get a new paradigm that isn't so easily misinterpreted.
Meant to say sublight speeds in the above post... Darn autocorrect.