And today we see the tendency for people with mod points to not understand sarcasm. And apparently also an inability to look at links given or even the beginning of the URL. I'd mod you up as a funny or maybe even insightful if I had mod points but I don't have any more. Sigh.
The epic fail was the initial bug. This response however is exactly what McAfee should be doing. Offering fairly spontaneously to reimburse people for their expenses incurred is good customer service and good damage control. It is also the ethical thing to do. When something is both the most ethical and most business-savvy course of action, that's a good thing. And that they are willing to do so when it essentially admits to the fact that they screwed up big time shows that they are willing to admit to their mistakes, something many people are not. When evaluating both corporations and people, look at how they respond to the serious failures and crises. McAfee has a good response.
Is this a sign of life? The calculations for how much methane should be in the atmosphere are based off what results in a chemical equilibrium. However, active metabolic entities (life) can move things very far off equilibrium. Thus, for example, Earth has a lot more oxygen in the atmosphere than would be expected from a simple set of equilibrium calculations. So, an observer could tentatively conclude that something weird, such as plant life, might be about. This imbalance between the expected and observed methane levels may be due to extraterrestrial life.
It's too bad slashdot doesn't employ anyone with journalism or editing experience, they would have caught that and come up with a more meaningful headline.
I'm more concerned about readers who fail at context recognition. Context recognition is one thing humans do very well but AI apparently do poorly. I'm concerned that you may be an evil AI. Bad jokes aside, there was exactly one reasonable interpretation of this headline. That interpretation fit exactly with what was actually happening. Just because the headline could mean other things that have very different meanings and simply wouldn't make sense in the world we live in is not a big deal.
I'm not sure what I think about the Mona Lisa comparison. On the one hand, the shuttles are amazing work of engineering even with all their flaws. On the other hand, it isn't like they were the first method of sending people into space. In that regard, the various space capsules matter more (and the Apollo ones especially so for allowing humans to first step foot on another planet). The shuttle's claim is merely that of being the first reusable method of space travel. That's important, but the shuttle isn't even fully reusable. That said, arguably the shuttle is a far more important accomplishment than the Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa is considered great art by a single human being. That's very different than space travel which has been one of the greatest achievements of humans, demonstrating what we can do when we cooperate with each other and use science. So arguably, as a symbol of human success, the shuttle is far more important than the Mona Lisa.
Some of us have multiple passwords. Some intended for secure purposes and others not so. Also, the assumption that significant others won't care about these issues is at minimum obnoxious. If you think an issue matters, you should damn well make sure the people you care about understand the issue.
Breaking up companies always bugs me when the companies has grown primarily based on outright success. This sort of amounts to punishing Google for succeeding. And I have a lot of trouble understanding how there could be a substantial anti-trust issue. They aren't bundling goods in a bad way. The ads are clearly kept separate from searches in that advertisements don't alter Google rankings and you can tell at a glance if something is an advertisement or a search result. So there's no problem here. This is in contrast to some other search engines which specifically allowed companies to pay for higher ranking in search results. The authors of the complaint claim that Google has manipulated its search results to harm potential competitors. Frankly, that sounds more like sour grapes at not having done as well as Google.
One serious problem with SETI is that even if there are other civilizations out there the timespan where they are sending out lots of radiowaves may be small. For example, humans have only had radio for about a hundred years. We sent out a lot for around 80 years but are now sending out less as we get more efficient and have other methods of communication (such as fiber optics). Moreover, many devices today use a spread spectrum approach http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spread_spectrum which looks like close to white noise. Unfortunately, we don't have many options for searching for other types of signals since almost any other signal type that we can conceive of we simply won't be able to find.
On average, PhD.s have much healthier brains than most people, even in their 90s or older. They have less incidence of dementia, alzheimers(sp?), and other forms of mental illness. Studies have shown that taking courses at community college, or learning a new language, can help sustain one's mental health in retirement.
There's a correlation v. causation issue there. It isn't clear that the PhD.s have healthier brains because they are using them more or if they have healthier brains in a way that also allows them to get PhD.s
None of those are examples of ignorance. Each of those was a best fit to the available data. A flat earth fit well if you only had very local data. The geocentric model of the solar system provided very good data for practical purposes. And phlogiston did a decent job at predicting most qualitative and effects of combustion and some quantitative effects as well. To call people ignorant for doing the best they could with data is not at all fair. If someone today is a geocentrist or a young earth creationist they probably are ignorant. We can call them ignorant because the data is available and they have not learned about it. But using the same labels for people who knew everything that was known at the time is a different category.
On the one hand, this makes a lot of sense. It shouldn't matter much how they manage to accomplish this as long as they manage to do so. On the other hand, there are problems with that approach: 1) One might want to specifically not encourage certain approaches if they had other negative results (we'd certainly feel that way about a process that improves building insulation using the flesh of newborn babies). 2) It may be difficult to measure efficiency and other metrics directly. So having specific requirements helps remove that uncertainty. This is one reason why a lot of building codes are so specific. The way the electric wiring needs to go in residential homes is standardized. Sure, you might come up with a better way of doing it. But the probability is high that something will go drastically wrong.
As I understand it this is the same thing that's happening with why bees use hexagons, minimizing surface area. Surface area minimization is the main reason that hexagons generally show up in nature, but the contexts they do are pretty rare. I'm only aware of the bubble thing, TFA's and the hexagonal crystals. They're probably are others but the point is they aren't common at all and when they do occur they occur for interesting reasons.
Spheroids, ellipses and circles arise fairly naturally from well-understood laws. Even if the laws were a bit different we'd still see them a fair bit. For example, if gravity was inverse linear planets would still organize into spheres. Orbits wouldn't be ellipses but they aren't really ellipses anyways, just ellipses to a first approximation (gravity from other planets distorts the orbits a measurable amount. This was actually used to predict the existence of Neptune based on the failure for Uranus to in as nice an ellipse). But hexagons are very rare in nature. In that sense they are a nice geometric object that we generally associate either with humans or with evolved self-organizing processes (such as bees which use hexagons because they are an efficient tiling pattern). But hexagons out of simple processes like this is just weird. In that sense this is more akin to geometrical objects like squares and octagons that you just don't see in nature. The point being made by using that term should have been clear.
Although there is a predicted island of stability (due to being nearer to a nice magic number http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_number_(physics)). However, TFA's statement about these elements lasting days or years is wildly optimistic. By most estimates it isn't likely that we will have elements which are stable for more than at most a few minutes. However, that doesn't sound sexy so everyone talks about the island of stability a lot. A lot of scifi has had fun with the idea of very stable elements in the island being not only stable but having really weird properties (allowing warp drives, wormholes and other fun stuff). However, more likely than not even if we can make these larger these elements they won't more than a few seconds. And we will only be able to make them in very tiny quantities. Of course, they certainly won't allow stargates and all that fun stuff either, but that's at least fun to dream about.
Not quite. The periodic table gives rough predictions. And yes, we understand what those should roughly be. But even given that the complexity of the interactions in the electron clouds mean we can only make rough estimates about how something would behave. For example, we barely understand why certain metals make certain types of allows and certain other metals don't. Or to use another example, many metals are superconducting at very low temperatures but we can't work out more than a very rough approximation of what temperatures those should occur at (we know the temperatures very precisely due to empirical work). For a lot of chemistry and physics we have a lot of very good theoretical models but trying to actually use them in practice becomes incredibly difficult because of the amount of computation involved.
You're quite right that direct computation of derivatives or integrals is rarely done by people nowadays (and it should really be this way in calculus classes as well, but I digress).
I disagree strongly with the point in the digression. People get a much better feel for how functions behave and what answers should look like when they've had to actually go and work them out a few times. This is important. Otherwise, when one makes a typo in your data input or the computer goes all squirrely you likely won't have enough feel for the results to notice the problem.
Sorry, and one other important detail: After Hamilton's death, Madison publicly acknowledged that he and Hamilton were primary authors. He also confirmed the then also deceased Jay's authorship and gave a complete list of who wrote which (although Hamilton's personal list had some contradictions with Madison's list).
That's not quite true. Even shortly after the Federalist Papers came out the set of authors was narrowed down quite a bit by intelligent speculation. Hamilton, John Jay and Madison were all named as possible authors (and in fact they were the three authors). After Hamilton died, documents in his possession showed that he was definitely an author and indicated that Madison was also an author. Moreover, there's a fair bit of evidence that when the essays were initially published, many people involved with the publishing and proof-reading knew who the authors were. What is more accurate is that it wasn't until much more modern work by historian Douglass Adair that we had a very good idea which were authored by which of the three. However, even that was well-established by 1970. So the comparison to AC is interesting but not so accurate.
This has nothing to do with the point made by the person you are replying to and everything to do with the fact that you don't think that it should be the business of governments to regulate popcorn prices in general. (Maybe from some fairly standard libertarian instincts?) But, if you see this as within the purview of government's regulatory duties, no matter how trivial, then the point made about multitasking stands.
That's pretty obviously a different case because an 18 year old has a much better chance fending for him/herself and can even they want to potentially consent. Underage children both have less ability to actively stop adults and cannot consent anyways. Now, the argument can be made that such restrictions shouldn't be in place until after a conviction or possibly not unless one has much stronger evidence. But the age distinction still matters.
Ok, April Fools I know but at least get the legal details right. A judge would file an opinion. A brief is what an interested party files to convince the judge of something or ask him to do something.
As Lovecraftian musicals go I prefer Shoggoth on the Roof, a Lovecraftian version of Fiddle on the Roof. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaJckcCZtBQ is the opening song (they can all be found on Youtube).
Movies (or for that matter any media) which is made by people with a specific religious or political agenda will almost inevitably suck. In this particular case, there's little to no Scientology in the film itself. But the overriding agenda of making a movie out of the founder's best (least suck?) novel still shown through. This is related to why anything of the form [religion] [normal thing] generally just means [sucky] [normal thing]. Thus, Christian rock is a subgenre of sucky rock. Christian rap? Let's not go there. Jewish rock- generally pretty sucky rock. Etc. Let's all be thankful that we don't yet have Scientology rap.
That's almost exactly what I was going to say. You've managed to make an accurate first post that actually includes a suggestion for dealing with the problems in question. Are you sure you meant to post this comment on Slashdot?
Slashdot Mirror
And today we see the tendency for people with mod points to not understand sarcasm. And apparently also an inability to look at links given or even the beginning of the URL. I'd mod you up as a funny or maybe even insightful if I had mod points but I don't have any more. Sigh.
The epic fail was the initial bug. This response however is exactly what McAfee should be doing. Offering fairly spontaneously to reimburse people for their expenses incurred is good customer service and good damage control. It is also the ethical thing to do. When something is both the most ethical and most business-savvy course of action, that's a good thing. And that they are willing to do so when it essentially admits to the fact that they screwed up big time shows that they are willing to admit to their mistakes, something many people are not. When evaluating both corporations and people, look at how they respond to the serious failures and crises. McAfee has a good response.
Is this a sign of life? The calculations for how much methane should be in the atmosphere are based off what results in a chemical equilibrium. However, active metabolic entities (life) can move things very far off equilibrium. Thus, for example, Earth has a lot more oxygen in the atmosphere than would be expected from a simple set of equilibrium calculations. So, an observer could tentatively conclude that something weird, such as plant life, might be about. This imbalance between the expected and observed methane levels may be due to extraterrestrial life.
It's too bad slashdot doesn't employ anyone with journalism or editing experience, they would have caught that and come up with a more meaningful headline.
I'm more concerned about readers who fail at context recognition. Context recognition is one thing humans do very well but AI apparently do poorly. I'm concerned that you may be an evil AI. Bad jokes aside, there was exactly one reasonable interpretation of this headline. That interpretation fit exactly with what was actually happening. Just because the headline could mean other things that have very different meanings and simply wouldn't make sense in the world we live in is not a big deal.
I'm not sure what I think about the Mona Lisa comparison. On the one hand, the shuttles are amazing work of engineering even with all their flaws. On the other hand, it isn't like they were the first method of sending people into space. In that regard, the various space capsules matter more (and the Apollo ones especially so for allowing humans to first step foot on another planet). The shuttle's claim is merely that of being the first reusable method of space travel. That's important, but the shuttle isn't even fully reusable. That said, arguably the shuttle is a far more important accomplishment than the Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa is considered great art by a single human being. That's very different than space travel which has been one of the greatest achievements of humans, demonstrating what we can do when we cooperate with each other and use science. So arguably, as a symbol of human success, the shuttle is far more important than the Mona Lisa.
Some of us have multiple passwords. Some intended for secure purposes and others not so. Also, the assumption that significant others won't care about these issues is at minimum obnoxious. If you think an issue matters, you should damn well make sure the people you care about understand the issue.
Breaking up companies always bugs me when the companies has grown primarily based on outright success. This sort of amounts to punishing Google for succeeding. And I have a lot of trouble understanding how there could be a substantial anti-trust issue. They aren't bundling goods in a bad way. The ads are clearly kept separate from searches in that advertisements don't alter Google rankings and you can tell at a glance if something is an advertisement or a search result. So there's no problem here. This is in contrast to some other search engines which specifically allowed companies to pay for higher ranking in search results. The authors of the complaint claim that Google has manipulated its search results to harm potential competitors. Frankly, that sounds more like sour grapes at not having done as well as Google.
One serious problem with SETI is that even if there are other civilizations out there the timespan where they are sending out lots of radiowaves may be small. For example, humans have only had radio for about a hundred years. We sent out a lot for around 80 years but are now sending out less as we get more efficient and have other methods of communication (such as fiber optics). Moreover, many devices today use a spread spectrum approach http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spread_spectrum which looks like close to white noise. Unfortunately, we don't have many options for searching for other types of signals since almost any other signal type that we can conceive of we simply won't be able to find.
On average, PhD.s have much healthier brains than most people, even in their 90s or older. They have less incidence of dementia, alzheimers(sp?), and other forms of mental illness. Studies have shown that taking courses at community college, or learning a new language, can help sustain one's mental health in retirement.
There's a correlation v. causation issue there. It isn't clear that the PhD.s have healthier brains because they are using them more or if they have healthier brains in a way that also allows them to get PhD.s
None of those are examples of ignorance. Each of those was a best fit to the available data. A flat earth fit well if you only had very local data. The geocentric model of the solar system provided very good data for practical purposes. And phlogiston did a decent job at predicting most qualitative and effects of combustion and some quantitative effects as well. To call people ignorant for doing the best they could with data is not at all fair. If someone today is a geocentrist or a young earth creationist they probably are ignorant. We can call them ignorant because the data is available and they have not learned about it. But using the same labels for people who knew everything that was known at the time is a different category.
On the one hand, this makes a lot of sense. It shouldn't matter much how they manage to accomplish this as long as they manage to do so. On the other hand, there are problems with that approach: 1) One might want to specifically not encourage certain approaches if they had other negative results (we'd certainly feel that way about a process that improves building insulation using the flesh of newborn babies). 2) It may be difficult to measure efficiency and other metrics directly. So having specific requirements helps remove that uncertainty. This is one reason why a lot of building codes are so specific. The way the electric wiring needs to go in residential homes is standardized. Sure, you might come up with a better way of doing it. But the probability is high that something will go drastically wrong.
We've found aliens, and they've got a warpdrive: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18775-mysterious-radio-waves-emitted-from-nearby-galaxy.html. Ok, most likely this is a previously unknown radio source that only looks like it is moving faster than the speed of light due to the angle of approach, but it is still fun to think about.
As I understand it this is the same thing that's happening with why bees use hexagons, minimizing surface area. Surface area minimization is the main reason that hexagons generally show up in nature, but the contexts they do are pretty rare. I'm only aware of the bubble thing, TFA's and the hexagonal crystals. They're probably are others but the point is they aren't common at all and when they do occur they occur for interesting reasons.
Spheroids, ellipses and circles arise fairly naturally from well-understood laws. Even if the laws were a bit different we'd still see them a fair bit. For example, if gravity was inverse linear planets would still organize into spheres. Orbits wouldn't be ellipses but they aren't really ellipses anyways, just ellipses to a first approximation (gravity from other planets distorts the orbits a measurable amount. This was actually used to predict the existence of Neptune based on the failure for Uranus to in as nice an ellipse). But hexagons are very rare in nature. In that sense they are a nice geometric object that we generally associate either with humans or with evolved self-organizing processes (such as bees which use hexagons because they are an efficient tiling pattern). But hexagons out of simple processes like this is just weird. In that sense this is more akin to geometrical objects like squares and octagons that you just don't see in nature. The point being made by using that term should have been clear.
Although there is a predicted island of stability (due to being nearer to a nice magic number http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_number_(physics)). However, TFA's statement about these elements lasting days or years is wildly optimistic. By most estimates it isn't likely that we will have elements which are stable for more than at most a few minutes. However, that doesn't sound sexy so everyone talks about the island of stability a lot. A lot of scifi has had fun with the idea of very stable elements in the island being not only stable but having really weird properties (allowing warp drives, wormholes and other fun stuff). However, more likely than not even if we can make these larger these elements they won't more than a few seconds. And we will only be able to make them in very tiny quantities. Of course, they certainly won't allow stargates and all that fun stuff either, but that's at least fun to dream about.
Not quite. The periodic table gives rough predictions. And yes, we understand what those should roughly be. But even given that the complexity of the interactions in the electron clouds mean we can only make rough estimates about how something would behave. For example, we barely understand why certain metals make certain types of allows and certain other metals don't. Or to use another example, many metals are superconducting at very low temperatures but we can't work out more than a very rough approximation of what temperatures those should occur at (we know the temperatures very precisely due to empirical work). For a lot of chemistry and physics we have a lot of very good theoretical models but trying to actually use them in practice becomes incredibly difficult because of the amount of computation involved.
You're quite right that direct computation of derivatives or integrals is rarely done by people nowadays (and it should really be this way in calculus classes as well, but I digress).
I disagree strongly with the point in the digression. People get a much better feel for how functions behave and what answers should look like when they've had to actually go and work them out a few times. This is important. Otherwise, when one makes a typo in your data input or the computer goes all squirrely you likely won't have enough feel for the results to notice the problem.
Sorry, and one other important detail: After Hamilton's death, Madison publicly acknowledged that he and Hamilton were primary authors. He also confirmed the then also deceased Jay's authorship and gave a complete list of who wrote which (although Hamilton's personal list had some contradictions with Madison's list).
That's not quite true. Even shortly after the Federalist Papers came out the set of authors was narrowed down quite a bit by intelligent speculation. Hamilton, John Jay and Madison were all named as possible authors (and in fact they were the three authors). After Hamilton died, documents in his possession showed that he was definitely an author and indicated that Madison was also an author. Moreover, there's a fair bit of evidence that when the essays were initially published, many people involved with the publishing and proof-reading knew who the authors were. What is more accurate is that it wasn't until much more modern work by historian Douglass Adair that we had a very good idea which were authored by which of the three. However, even that was well-established by 1970. So the comparison to AC is interesting but not so accurate.
This has nothing to do with the point made by the person you are replying to and everything to do with the fact that you don't think that it should be the business of governments to regulate popcorn prices in general. (Maybe from some fairly standard libertarian instincts?) But, if you see this as within the purview of government's regulatory duties, no matter how trivial, then the point made about multitasking stands.
That's pretty obviously a different case because an 18 year old has a much better chance fending for him/herself and can even they want to potentially consent. Underage children both have less ability to actively stop adults and cannot consent anyways. Now, the argument can be made that such restrictions shouldn't be in place until after a conviction or possibly not unless one has much stronger evidence. But the age distinction still matters.
Ok, April Fools I know but at least get the legal details right. A judge would file an opinion. A brief is what an interested party files to convince the judge of something or ask him to do something.
As Lovecraftian musicals go I prefer Shoggoth on the Roof, a Lovecraftian version of Fiddle on the Roof. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaJckcCZtBQ is the opening song (they can all be found on Youtube).
Movies (or for that matter any media) which is made by people with a specific religious or political agenda will almost inevitably suck. In this particular case, there's little to no Scientology in the film itself. But the overriding agenda of making a movie out of the founder's best (least suck?) novel still shown through. This is related to why anything of the form [religion] [normal thing] generally just means [sucky] [normal thing]. Thus, Christian rock is a subgenre of sucky rock. Christian rap? Let's not go there. Jewish rock- generally pretty sucky rock. Etc. Let's all be thankful that we don't yet have Scientology rap.
That's almost exactly what I was going to say. You've managed to make an accurate first post that actually includes a suggestion for dealing with the problems in question. Are you sure you meant to post this comment on Slashdot?