Or, you know, interpret the second amendment as written and require gun owners to be part of a well regulated militia. Which would be far more restrictive than any of the restrictions currently proposed by even the more liberal folks. But just go ahead and keep believing it says something it clearly doesn't say. It's your God given right to be delusional as well.
The problem is that not everyone is on an unlimited broadband. I don't expect Microsoft to cater primarily to the millions upon millions of people who still have slow and/or metered connections, but it would be nice if they didn't go out of their way to make our life hell.
You can't just take an amazing piece of expensive kit like that and essentially throw it away! Oh wait - that's what we've been doing with the first stage of every launch forever until just now. Carry on then.
More seriously, congratulations, SpaceX, for taking such a big step forward for humankind.
No, it wasn't just simpler. The heliocentric model explained the orbits more precisely. Check out Kepler.
If we were to go by the idea that elegant explanations with no predictive power were science, then I propose a "theory" which by gravity is conveyed by magic invisible elastic bands that are attached to everything in the universe. And I'll write equations and come up with rules that will make the behavior identical to what we see observed. If you find a problem, I'll just update my equations accordingly. We could do that back-and-forth forever and I can hold on to my "theory" forever.
No, to find out if my theory has any merit, we need to show some way in which looking at the world through my theory provides a better understanding, a more precise model, and not just an appealing idea. Elegant ideas can provide useful inspiration for scientific exploration, but if they don't make any testable predictions they are just dreams, no more true or false than fairies. The foundation of science, as opposed to every other system of knowledge is it's brutal testing of ideas against reality.
String theory, as far as I've read, provides no insight into the behavior of anything, and thus we simply can't tell if it's real or not. It might as well be fairies.
Hmm. Why don't they crowdsource autonomous cars then? Just have millions of people in third-world countries paid pennies an hour deciding whether your car should speed up or slow down. If it's the best way to solve captchas, what could possibly go wrong?
Those must be some amazingly limited contexts because my success rate even getting her to play songs on my phone is bad enough that my blood pressure rises every time I even think of giving it a try. No, I don't have an accent or a speech impediment. It's just not ready for primetime yet, and certainly doesn't make up for the lack of normal UI.
Indeed. For example, I can speak aloud in public like an idiot "Play Abbey Road by The Beatles" and then Siri will play Eternal Flame by The Bangles. Then I can tell her to stop and say it again more loudly and clearly, sounding even more like an idiot, only go get Winding Road by Sheryl Crow. If by chance she recognizes it on my third, full-retard repetition, it'll be the one in five times that the song doesn't actually start playing even though she got it right, a lovely new feature since iOS 9.
The financial case probably won't be found in lost sales - purchase decisions are generally made by people who don't have to use the stuff daily. If anywhere it'll be found in support load. If your company is spending significant money on support, then you can use that as part of the case. If they've done what most companies have done and turned support into a profit center, you're basically screwed. The best you can do at that point would be to appeal to fear - the idea that an outsider could build a modern competing product and eat your company's lunch. If that's a legitimate fear and they don't buy it, then start your own company and eat their lunch.
Just to be clear UX is not "making it look better". One of the reasons UX is given such low priority by developers is because so many think that UX is just new colors or flat/glossy design. And indeed, if that's what OP is talking about, it is a waste of time for an ERP app. But it sounds like they're talking about workflow enhancements, and that can be a big win. Most people are thrilled to get workflow enhancements. It's just that 90% of the time companies bring out UI window dressing along with workflow limitations and call it a "new improved User Experience", which it is not. Then you end up with people who actually use software to get things done complaining, and people who just play with software thinking the first group is luddites because it looks so much better.
I know this seems obvious, but this is one of the things science is for: testing what seems obvious, because sometimes what seems obvious is in fact wrong. Common sense got society to maybe the 17th century, which sucked. It took the ability to question our natural understanding of the world and test it with the scientific mindset to get beyond all that.
So yes, this is what I would have guessed. But knowing it is a different thing, and we can all say that now.
Ah yes, the old "had to do it for the money" claim. If we accept that everyone is an idiot robot that will play Russian Roulette for a dollar, sure. But the fact is that a person or organization has the power to make a decision with short-term or long-term thinking in mind, or a decision with self-interest or social awareness in mind. Yet somehow we've got to the point where we'll excuse absolutely anything as being reasonable if there was money at stake. Personally, I'd prefer we hold ourselves to a slightly higher standard, but I realize I'm shouting into the wind.
I also found the article's use of "paradox" and "problem" to be a bit grating. We are observing something here we don't understand, and maybe that's anathema to a physicist who thinks we already understand everything (hint: we don't), but it's not that shocking to me.
However with the last two paragraphs of the article he clears things up a bit:
Whenever there’s a conflict between what our best theories predict [...] that’s an omen of scientific advance. That paradox is such a problem because it tells us that something about our present understanding is, in some way, incomplete. Is there a new law of physics? Is there a new application of the currently existing laws that we’ve missed? Are these quantities not fundamentally conserved after all? Is the information really encoded in the final state somehow? Will quantum gravity eventually make this all clear?
We hope to have the answer to this. But in the meantime, this paradox means we have a problem, and hence that we have more to learn. And for anyone curious about the scientific truths of the Universe, that’s an incredible thing: evidence that there’s still a whole lot more to be figured out.
Well okay then. It's not so much a paradox or a problem as a (not totally unexpected to me) indication that our physics theories do not yet account for everything going on in the universe. Taken out of the framework of "paradox" and "problem" that is exciting - maybe we'll tease some new information about how the universe works by researching this further. Now that's exciting. Just let's not get ahead of ourselves as being all-knowing quite yet.
> having a fucking LOTTERY of who gets the only cab available.
I don't get the hate for this approach. Perhaps some education is in order. When there aren't enough resources to go around, there are different ways to perform allocation. Each method has different moral implications. For example, a lottery implies equality between all people and is best used for resources that are perceived as utilitarian or necessary. Fair market pricing implies that the more money you have, the more important you are and is best used for resources that are perceived as a luxury. Of course this can be argued about all day, but it's not shocking that some people would find fair-market pricing to be inherently unfair.
What if there isn't enough food or medicine to go around? Is a lottery the best approach? Or the fair market? Or perhaps rationing? Should a person with more money be able to redirect resources to themselves, even if it is not as important to their survival as someone who has less money? Transportation can be vital to maintaining a job or caring for kids - it can also be a luxury. I can see an argument either way.
Is there a lot more to this complex topic? Sure. But there is no question that simply being black (or in this case study, being assumed black) lowers your chances of getting hired.
Since we're just talking out our asses here, I'll say there's evidence that exposure to porn at young ages increases respect for women. The "evidence" is me. I first found porn mags at age 8 or so, and lots more, including videos, by 14. I have since become an avid porn collector. Yet I am absolutely respectful of women and always have been. I am far more respectful of women than the men in some no-porn areas I've lived in other countries.
Or maybe it's largely unconnected to porn. Maybe it's about culture and upbringing. In fact, there actually _is_ evidence that porn reduces rape (the ultimate form of disrespect for women):
And even though I'd still argue against allowing younger people's free access porn, the data in that article, tracking total internet usage, certainly includes young people's access to porn.
> So what objective measurement can a cop make to tell how impaired a driver is at the moment.
How about a test of ability to drive? Instead of looking for chemicals that may or may not create a safety issue, how about we look for things like inability to focus, insufficient reaction time, etc - things that actually cause danger (though they may not be solely correlated with drugs)? There must be a way to reasonably test a driver's ability to actually drive - it's just that people would hate getting in trouble for being too tired, too distracted, or too slow. But if the goal is to improve safety, that's what it's about.
> Because they predict things up to the level of accuracy that we can currently measure, within the very limited energy and size domains we have access to. That's all there is to it.
Fixed that for you.
When you can predict particle behavior inside a black hole with planck-length precision, or you can model gravity at the galactic scale without relying on unobserved "dark matter", I might be as confident as you that our current understanding is rock solid.
And you, sir, have just turned science into religion.
The whole reason science is superior to religion is that it openly admits that it may be incorrect, and allows for itself to be corrected. It is, as you correctly outline, an iterative process that approaches truth over time. But part of that process is accepting that any truth may be overturned by new evidence. And while Einstein didn't "disprove" Newton, he did show flaws in the theory which meant that it was, in a very small way, wrong. And that's fine. Claiming it was "extended" and not "wrong" is playing semantics and makes you sound like a religious apologist.
The more comfortable we are with being wrong, and the process of refinement, the better scientists we are. The more we claim that some aspect of science is "never incorrect", the more dogmatic we are and the science suffers.
The predictions of modern physics are phenomenally accurate in many domains. But we haven't run tests in nearly enough domains to claim perfection yet. And we've no need to be defensive about it. Science is the only way to the next truth, and that's good enough for me.
You've never actually had to live in such an environment, have you?
I'm posting from behind a two meter spiked fence at the moment. Outside the fence are people living in shit conditions, suffering, and generally making the world an uglier place for me. And we still get robbed. All the money I have can't fix the side effects of living in an impoverished city. Having actually spent significant time in both situations, I've come to realize that the people who don't see the advantages of a reasonable degree of socialism are the people whose worlds have benefitted from it so thoroughly they take it for granted.
The right way to level things (in all court dealings) would be to have both parties pay into a legal fund that compensates the lawyers for both sides. One side having more money should not entitle them to more power in court. If either side wants to contribute more so that the lawyers on both sides are better, that's great - go ahead. But the practice of buying a verdict by outspending your opponent on lawyer power should not be allowed.
It's happened with arson experts too. I remember reading a horrible story of a guy convicted of burning his family to death because all the experts described these "pour patterns" in the burnt floor, signifying liquid accelerant. After he was put to death, they figured out it was just carpet glue patterns.
Between the way police feel free to shoot fleeing non-dangerous subjects these days, planting evidence in full view of other officers, lying on the stand to get convictions, and the labs and experts from every field falsifying results, I'd say our legal system is a disaster.
Slashdot Mirror
Or, you know, interpret the second amendment as written and require gun owners to be part of a well regulated militia. Which would be far more restrictive than any of the restrictions currently proposed by even the more liberal folks. But just go ahead and keep believing it says something it clearly doesn't say. It's your God given right to be delusional as well.
The problem is that not everyone is on an unlimited broadband. I don't expect Microsoft to cater primarily to the millions upon millions of people who still have slow and/or metered connections, but it would be nice if they didn't go out of their way to make our life hell.
You can't just take an amazing piece of expensive kit like that and essentially throw it away! Oh wait - that's what we've been doing with the first stage of every launch forever until just now. Carry on then.
More seriously, congratulations, SpaceX, for taking such a big step forward for humankind.
No, it wasn't just simpler. The heliocentric model explained the orbits more precisely. Check out Kepler.
If we were to go by the idea that elegant explanations with no predictive power were science, then I propose a "theory" which by gravity is conveyed by magic invisible elastic bands that are attached to everything in the universe. And I'll write equations and come up with rules that will make the behavior identical to what we see observed. If you find a problem, I'll just update my equations accordingly. We could do that back-and-forth forever and I can hold on to my "theory" forever.
No, to find out if my theory has any merit, we need to show some way in which looking at the world through my theory provides a better understanding, a more precise model, and not just an appealing idea. Elegant ideas can provide useful inspiration for scientific exploration, but if they don't make any testable predictions they are just dreams, no more true or false than fairies. The foundation of science, as opposed to every other system of knowledge is it's brutal testing of ideas against reality.
String theory, as far as I've read, provides no insight into the behavior of anything, and thus we simply can't tell if it's real or not. It might as well be fairies.
Hmm. Why don't they crowdsource autonomous cars then? Just have millions of people in third-world countries paid pennies an hour deciding whether your car should speed up or slow down. If it's the best way to solve captchas, what could possibly go wrong?
Those must be some amazingly limited contexts because my success rate even getting her to play songs on my phone is bad enough that my blood pressure rises every time I even think of giving it a try. No, I don't have an accent or a speech impediment. It's just not ready for primetime yet, and certainly doesn't make up for the lack of normal UI.
Indeed. For example, I can speak aloud in public like an idiot "Play Abbey Road by The Beatles" and then Siri will play Eternal Flame by The Bangles. Then I can tell her to stop and say it again more loudly and clearly, sounding even more like an idiot, only go get Winding Road by Sheryl Crow. If by chance she recognizes it on my third, full-retard repetition, it'll be the one in five times that the song doesn't actually start playing even though she got it right, a lovely new feature since iOS 9.
It's magical, I tell you.
Please bring sensible UI the fuck back.
The financial case probably won't be found in lost sales - purchase decisions are generally made by people who don't have to use the stuff daily. If anywhere it'll be found in support load. If your company is spending significant money on support, then you can use that as part of the case. If they've done what most companies have done and turned support into a profit center, you're basically screwed. The best you can do at that point would be to appeal to fear - the idea that an outsider could build a modern competing product and eat your company's lunch. If that's a legitimate fear and they don't buy it, then start your own company and eat their lunch.
Just to be clear UX is not "making it look better". One of the reasons UX is given such low priority by developers is because so many think that UX is just new colors or flat/glossy design. And indeed, if that's what OP is talking about, it is a waste of time for an ERP app. But it sounds like they're talking about workflow enhancements, and that can be a big win. Most people are thrilled to get workflow enhancements. It's just that 90% of the time companies bring out UI window dressing along with workflow limitations and call it a "new improved User Experience", which it is not. Then you end up with people who actually use software to get things done complaining, and people who just play with software thinking the first group is luddites because it looks so much better.
I know this seems obvious, but this is one of the things science is for: testing what seems obvious, because sometimes what seems obvious is in fact wrong. Common sense got society to maybe the 17th century, which sucked. It took the ability to question our natural understanding of the world and test it with the scientific mindset to get beyond all that.
So yes, this is what I would have guessed. But knowing it is a different thing, and we can all say that now.
Ah yes, the old "had to do it for the money" claim. If we accept that everyone is an idiot robot that will play Russian Roulette for a dollar, sure. But the fact is that a person or organization has the power to make a decision with short-term or long-term thinking in mind, or a decision with self-interest or social awareness in mind. Yet somehow we've got to the point where we'll excuse absolutely anything as being reasonable if there was money at stake. Personally, I'd prefer we hold ourselves to a slightly higher standard, but I realize I'm shouting into the wind.
I also found the article's use of "paradox" and "problem" to be a bit grating. We are observing something here we don't understand, and maybe that's anathema to a physicist who thinks we already understand everything (hint: we don't), but it's not that shocking to me.
However with the last two paragraphs of the article he clears things up a bit:
Whenever there’s a conflict between what our best theories predict [...] that’s an omen of scientific advance. That paradox is such a problem because it tells us that something about our present understanding is, in some way, incomplete. Is there a new law of physics? Is there a new application of the currently existing laws that we’ve missed? Are these quantities not fundamentally conserved after all? Is the information really encoded in the final state somehow? Will quantum gravity eventually make this all clear?
We hope to have the answer to this. But in the meantime, this paradox means we have a problem, and hence that we have more to learn. And for anyone curious about the scientific truths of the Universe, that’s an incredible thing: evidence that there’s still a whole lot more to be figured out.
Well okay then. It's not so much a paradox or a problem as a (not totally unexpected to me) indication that our physics theories do not yet account for everything going on in the universe. Taken out of the framework of "paradox" and "problem" that is exciting - maybe we'll tease some new information about how the universe works by researching this further. Now that's exciting. Just let's not get ahead of ourselves as being all-knowing quite yet.
> having a fucking LOTTERY of who gets the only cab available.
I don't get the hate for this approach. Perhaps some education is in order. When there aren't enough resources to go around, there are different ways to perform allocation. Each method has different moral implications. For example, a lottery implies equality between all people and is best used for resources that are perceived as utilitarian or necessary. Fair market pricing implies that the more money you have, the more important you are and is best used for resources that are perceived as a luxury. Of course this can be argued about all day, but it's not shocking that some people would find fair-market pricing to be inherently unfair.
What if there isn't enough food or medicine to go around? Is a lottery the best approach? Or the fair market? Or perhaps rationing? Should a person with more money be able to redirect resources to themselves, even if it is not as important to their survival as someone who has less money? Transportation can be vital to maintaining a job or caring for kids - it can also be a luxury. I can see an argument either way.
Did you really just compare the Blackbird to the Concorde? Because that's ridiculous and funny.
No need to "believe" it when you can know it:
http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873
Is there a lot more to this complex topic? Sure. But there is no question that simply being black (or in this case study, being assumed black) lowers your chances of getting hired.
Since we're just talking out our asses here, I'll say there's evidence that exposure to porn at young ages increases respect for women. The "evidence" is me. I first found porn mags at age 8 or so, and lots more, including videos, by 14. I have since become an avid porn collector. Yet I am absolutely respectful of women and always have been. I am far more respectful of women than the men in some no-porn areas I've lived in other countries.
Or maybe it's largely unconnected to porn. Maybe it's about culture and upbringing. In fact, there actually _is_ evidence that porn reduces rape (the ultimate form of disrespect for women):
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/everyday_economics/2006/10/how_the_web_prevents_rape.html
And even though I'd still argue against allowing younger people's free access porn, the data in that article, tracking total internet usage, certainly includes young people's access to porn.
> So what objective measurement can a cop make to tell how impaired a driver is at the moment.
How about a test of ability to drive? Instead of looking for chemicals that may or may not create a safety issue, how about we look for things like inability to focus, insufficient reaction time, etc - things that actually cause danger (though they may not be solely correlated with drugs)? There must be a way to reasonably test a driver's ability to actually drive - it's just that people would hate getting in trouble for being too tired, too distracted, or too slow. But if the goal is to improve safety, that's what it's about.
> You take the bullets out of the gun rather than insist everyone wear a bullet proof vest.
Whoa whoa whoa. What country do you live in?
> Because they predict things up to the level of accuracy that we can currently measure, within the very limited energy and size domains we have access to. That's all there is to it.
Fixed that for you.
When you can predict particle behavior inside a black hole with planck-length precision, or you can model gravity at the galactic scale without relying on unobserved "dark matter", I might be as confident as you that our current understanding is rock solid.
> Modern physics is never incorrect.
And you, sir, have just turned science into religion.
The whole reason science is superior to religion is that it openly admits that it may be incorrect, and allows for itself to be corrected. It is, as you correctly outline, an iterative process that approaches truth over time. But part of that process is accepting that any truth may be overturned by new evidence. And while Einstein didn't "disprove" Newton, he did show flaws in the theory which meant that it was, in a very small way, wrong. And that's fine. Claiming it was "extended" and not "wrong" is playing semantics and makes you sound like a religious apologist.
The more comfortable we are with being wrong, and the process of refinement, the better scientists we are. The more we claim that some aspect of science is "never incorrect", the more dogmatic we are and the science suffers.
The predictions of modern physics are phenomenally accurate in many domains. But we haven't run tests in nearly enough domains to claim perfection yet. And we've no need to be defensive about it. Science is the only way to the next truth, and that's good enough for me.
Do you base all your understanding of the world off of anomalous events that give no indication of what to normally expect?
You've never actually had to live in such an environment, have you?
I'm posting from behind a two meter spiked fence at the moment. Outside the fence are people living in shit conditions, suffering, and generally making the world an uglier place for me. And we still get robbed. All the money I have can't fix the side effects of living in an impoverished city. Having actually spent significant time in both situations, I've come to realize that the people who don't see the advantages of a reasonable degree of socialism are the people whose worlds have benefitted from it so thoroughly they take it for granted.
Has anyone every told you that you talk like the Borg?
The right way to level things (in all court dealings) would be to have both parties pay into a legal fund that compensates the lawyers for both sides. One side having more money should not entitle them to more power in court. If either side wants to contribute more so that the lawyers on both sides are better, that's great - go ahead. But the practice of buying a verdict by outspending your opponent on lawyer power should not be allowed.
It's happened with arson experts too. I remember reading a horrible story of a guy convicted of burning his family to death because all the experts described these "pour patterns" in the burnt floor, signifying liquid accelerant. After he was put to death, they figured out it was just carpet glue patterns.
Between the way police feel free to shoot fleeing non-dangerous subjects these days, planting evidence in full view of other officers, lying on the stand to get convictions, and the labs and experts from every field falsifying results, I'd say our legal system is a disaster.