So far, government imposed "solutions" such as carbon credits, shuttering nukes, and subsidy schemes, have accomplished little, or been counter-productive.
Exactly. Because they're for show, not real solutions.
Because any party having the honesty to remove the direct and indirect subsidies for fossil fuels and adding a surcharge for the externalized costs (just include the adverse effects on health and agriculture) would be voted out instantly and never see the light of day again.
actually that's totally untrue. Much of the efficiency improvements were driven by collaborative approach between government and business
The efficiency improvements in our vehicle fleet have been directly due to government demanding them, and have slacked off as soon as the government mandates relaxed.
This will only happen by appropriately regulating businesses.
So far the big reductions, such as the switch from coal to gas, LED lights, variable speed DC motors, more efficient HVAC, better insulation, have all been driven by the market, not "government regulation". So far, government imposed "solutions" such as carbon credits, shuttering nukes, and subsidy schemes, have accomplished little, or been counter-productive.
Abraham Lincoln was a big proponent of government backing high-speed rail, and that turned out pretty well for the country.
Actually, the average Chinese guy is far wealthier today than he was before economic liberalization. It's come at a cost to the environment in China, to be sure, but that's sort of the natural progression developing countries go through. There used to be rivers in the US that would actually burn, and even as late as the mid '60s when you got up to go to work in Pittsburgh there would be a layer of coal dust on your car.
The older Chinese people still remember when the government ran everything. That's when 30 million of them starved to death.
China still contains a billion subsistence farmers lurking underneath that thriving industrial revolution.
This will only happen by appropriately regulating businesses.
If anybody actually wanted to live in a state where success and failure were decided by the government, who your friends were in government we could have just not fought the cold war.
Here's a little hint for the past 25 years "appropriate government" regulation has done nothing but increase.
The result smaller middle class, wage stagnation, greater concentration of wealth, and greater income inequality.
Good job
Nice try at obfuscation. Of course, we know that smaller middle class, wage stagnation, greater concentration of wealth, and greater income inequality have been on the increase SINCE YOUR BIRTH!!!! Don't try to palm responsibility off on "appropriate government" regulation. We know it's you.
Who is actually making the software, and why does it make since to divorce design from the people executing it? This is the dumbest idea since Agile was invented.
And changing programming from an 18th century style craft industry to an assembly line. Look at how computers were manufactured in the 70s and 80s vs today for an example more recent. You break off all the really hard stuff to a few top guys and the rest is done by folks earning minimum wage who don't really understand what they're doing but know if they do certain steps they get certain results. If labor wasn't so cheap this wouldn't work ( too many specific tasks) but at less than a buck an hour in many countries it becomes possible. Of course, it mean being a programmer creases to be middle class work, but I think that's the point.
Sure. In the 60s or 70s any kid with a couple of years of high school electronics or the equivalent (who actually learned the material) could pick up a tube manual or transistor manual and dig through the various components and their specs to find something that suited his thinking and translate the operating parameters to design a reasonable amplifier around it, then drop over to radio shack and come home with a bag of components and solder it together.
now, some sophisticated engineer designs an amplified IC which a kid with almost zilch electronics knowhow can go pick up from somewhere (sometimes radio shack) and read the schematic on the back or in the package or whatever and buy the tiny handful of components that it takes to make a better amplifier than the component variety (usually).
or, just buy the entire amplifier circuit board with everything mounted on it and hook it up to input, output, and power supply. maybe put it in a box.
we've been waiting for software to go that route for a long time. commercial forces push it into that direction, if at all possible.
We have several cheap battery technologies. Molten salt (big vat of hot liquid, heated by incoming power to charge, steam engine taking off heat to provide electricity), and hydroelectric (big reservoir up high in the mountains, recharge by pumping water into it, water turned generators to draw power off).
Big Pharma, in its chase for the ever mighty dollar, has made medical science into a farce of what it should be by now. Don't get me wrong, there's been a lot of progress made...but a lot of the information coming out from the companies backing the publishing of irreproducible results is leaving a large shadow over that progress; it's beginning to give me the perception that we're coming upon a plateau in our rate of advancement. It's also not easing my cynicism any.
Medical research excluding big pharma has been fuzzy since day 1. Part of it's built in; there are various types of experiments you just can't ethically do on people, so you hope to heck that what you discovered on mice holds for the big bipeds. It's even ethically shaky to do various things on primates; or even dogs.
So you get some guy who operates on people's spines to fix their slipped discs and publishes his successful results, and it seems logical, so we keep doing that for 50 years because it would be unethical to refuse a treatment believed to be beneficial; and finally somebody does the epidemiological study that compares the outcomes with those of people who for one reason or another did not get operated on, and publishes "Uh, guys.... look at this....."
The popular press doesn't help, of course. "Medical research was telling us that lowering sodium is good for us, now it's telling us that it's bad for us, you can't trust it" Not really. What it's telling us now is that reducing it below a level which is, by current standards, already pretty low is bad; but above that level, more sodium does indeed still raise the mortality risk. It's the press that's reversing its oversimplified messages. See also "In the 70s all the scientists warned us of the coming ice age" No, but a few popular magazines did.
I'm dismayed that in CS that the academic community is putting so much emphasis on replication and not enough on robust reproducibility.
From my experience, the academic community puts no emphasis on either. I think it would be neat to study a paper and attempt to reproduce the results, but that doesn't get me a journal paper in today's academic landscape.
I had to modify some vast quantity of badly written code once, and found that the source was missing a semicolon. When I fixed the semicolon issue, it wouldn't compile. Never did figure it out.
Puh leeze. I would not be surprised to find that you couldn't reproduce 50% of the published papers in "hard sciences" couldn't be replicated either. Do the words "cold fusion" ring a bell?
Depends what you call hard sciences though. Note that several of the irreproductible examples given are brain scans etc. which is definitely on the harder side of the softer sciences.
The numeric keypad tends to be pretty highly valued by typists that are 10key proficient and type a lot of numbers. It's actually more common than you probably believe. I and many others prefer to buy laptops/keyboards with the 10 key numeric in place.
Absolutely. when i'm doing a lot of entry into excel it's numeric keyboard time. getting numbers from the number row is obviously klunky.
That's just not true!
The IBM PC-AT keyboard, circa 1984, has control as a large key above shift and to the left of the 'A' key, in its proper place. Alt is below shift. There are no right-hand alt or control keys and caps-lock is off on the right side below shift where the right control key is now. There was a large gap between the spaceback and caps-lock, since there was no right alt or windows key.
The PC-XT keyboard, circa 1981, had the same layout of control-shift-alt in the proper order on the left. The caps-lock key was on the far upper-right corner, above the numeric keypad.
It wasn't until the 101 key model M that IBM messed up and placed the caps lock key in the incorrect location above shift and next to 'A'.
Is there really no one else here who remebers typing away on the original PC keyboard, with the control key in the proper location, the giant plus key, break on the scroll lock key and printscreen on the dedicated '*' key?
And the freeware you would install to swap the AT keys back to where they had been.
I wish it still behaved as shift-lock: affecting all characters, not just letters. When I use caps lock, it's almost always because I'm typing an environment variable or #defined constant. And that means I'm going to be typing lots of _ characters. If caps lock behaved like shift lock, I wouldn't have to press shift for every one of them.
absofrigginglutely. the underscore is the enemy of capslock.
I confess that's why i try to avoid them, and i avoid camelcase too so all my variables and file names looklikethisbuticanreadthemok.
The Capslock key inherited the position occupied by the Shift-Lock key. Some keyboards still mark it as shift-lock. In the old mechanical typewriters, the shift lock actually moved the entire framework holding the rack of all the levers that held the letters. It required considerable force to push.
...and you could tell from the look and feel of the shift key that it was down. And using the shift key automatically unlocked the shift lock (on many keyboards at least).
If you really want to have that key, it probably ought to go back to that: some kind of mechanical lock on the shift key. Perhaps a smallish button actually physically on one corner of the left shift key.
Some keyboards are nice enough to have a status light in the middle of the capslock key. others try to make do with a status light up in the top right corner, along with numlock and scroll lock. and there are the various softwares that put indicators on the screen. but having it in the key is 1000% better.
and one of the windows options is to have the shift key release capslock, which is good.
also good the windows accessibility options which have the ability to make the lock keys go boop when you set them on and boopboop when you off them.
being microsoft, however, the two options don't work together, so now my keyboard goes boop when i hit capslock, but when i hit shift and it unlocks it just stays quiet.
I always remap caps lock to left ctrl, the way it used to be on rather old keyboards. So much more convenient than having to reach down to the left-ctrl key.
The qwerty keyboard uses the little fingers way too much to begin with, for some reason pc keyboard designers seem determined to make it worse.
We once had a plant manager who enforced a strict professional attire for all. He got everyone in the company to wear shirt and tie even when they had to wear safety overalls over the top.
That all changed one day when he was visiting the workshop and got his tie stuck on a piece of rotating equipment (drill press as the story went). After nearly losing his head in the literal sense the dress code was relaxed leaving everyone scratching their heads wondering why a chemical plant with no customer facing positions had a dress code to begin with.
tangentially, that nice tie your doctor wears when he comes in to your hospital room to examine you; saturated with infectious organisms.
Slashdot Mirror
So far, government imposed "solutions" such as carbon credits, shuttering nukes, and subsidy schemes, have accomplished little, or been counter-productive.
Exactly. Because they're for show, not real solutions.
Because any party having the honesty to remove the direct and indirect subsidies for fossil fuels and adding a surcharge for the externalized costs (just include the adverse effects on health and agriculture) would be voted out instantly and never see the light of day again.
actually that's totally untrue. Much of the efficiency improvements were driven by collaborative approach between government and business
The efficiency improvements in our vehicle fleet have been directly due to government demanding them, and have slacked off as soon as the government mandates relaxed.
This will only happen by appropriately regulating businesses.
So far the big reductions, such as the switch from coal to gas, LED lights, variable speed DC motors, more efficient HVAC, better insulation, have all been driven by the market, not "government regulation". So far, government imposed "solutions" such as carbon credits, shuttering nukes, and subsidy schemes, have accomplished little, or been counter-productive.
Abraham Lincoln was a big proponent of government backing high-speed rail, and that turned out pretty well for the country.
Actually, the average Chinese guy is far wealthier today than he was before economic liberalization. It's come at a cost to the environment in China, to be sure, but that's sort of the natural progression developing countries go through. There used to be rivers in the US that would actually burn, and even as late as the mid '60s when you got up to go to work in Pittsburgh there would be a layer of coal dust on your car.
The older Chinese people still remember when the government ran everything. That's when 30 million of them starved to death.
China still contains a billion subsistence farmers lurking underneath that thriving industrial revolution.
This will only happen by appropriately regulating businesses.
If anybody actually wanted to live in a state where success and failure were decided by the government, who your friends were in government we could have just not fought the cold war.
Here's a little hint for the past 25 years "appropriate government" regulation has done nothing but increase.
The result smaller middle class, wage stagnation, greater concentration of wealth, and greater income inequality.
Good job
Nice try at obfuscation. Of course, we know that smaller middle class, wage stagnation, greater concentration of wealth, and greater income inequality have been on the increase SINCE YOUR BIRTH!!!! Don't try to palm responsibility off on "appropriate government" regulation. We know it's you.
Who is actually making the software, and why does it make since to divorce design from the people executing it? This is the dumbest idea since Agile was invented.
chinese prisoners and indonesian children.
And changing programming from an 18th century style craft industry to an assembly line. Look at how computers were manufactured in the 70s and 80s vs today for an example more recent. You break off all the really hard stuff to a few top guys and the rest is done by folks earning minimum wage who don't really understand what they're doing but know if they do certain steps they get certain results. If labor wasn't so cheap this wouldn't work ( too many specific tasks) but at less than a buck an hour in many countries it becomes possible. Of course, it mean being a programmer creases to be middle class work, but I think that's the point.
Sure. In the 60s or 70s any kid with a couple of years of high school electronics or the equivalent (who actually learned the material) could pick up a tube manual or transistor manual and dig through the various components and their specs to find something that suited his thinking and translate the operating parameters to design a reasonable amplifier around it, then drop over to radio shack and come home with a bag of components and solder it together. now, some sophisticated engineer designs an amplified IC which a kid with almost zilch electronics knowhow can go pick up from somewhere (sometimes radio shack) and read the schematic on the back or in the package or whatever and buy the tiny handful of components that it takes to make a better amplifier than the component variety (usually). or, just buy the entire amplifier circuit board with everything mounted on it and hook it up to input, output, and power supply. maybe put it in a box. we've been waiting for software to go that route for a long time. commercial forces push it into that direction, if at all possible.
Who is actually making the software
The coding is not done by programmers, but by peers. It says so right in the summary. Duh.
I should hope so. Experience has taught me that those who don't pee can't code well at all.
We have several cheap battery technologies. Molten salt (big vat of hot liquid, heated by incoming power to charge, steam engine taking off heat to provide electricity), and hydroelectric (big reservoir up high in the mountains, recharge by pumping water into it, water turned generators to draw power off).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
If anyone finds me in the Ashley Madison database, I just want to emphasize that I was under the impression that it was a fine furniture retailer.
Big Pharma, in its chase for the ever mighty dollar, has made medical science into a farce of what it should be by now. Don't get me wrong, there's been a lot of progress made...but a lot of the information coming out from the companies backing the publishing of irreproducible results is leaving a large shadow over that progress; it's beginning to give me the perception that we're coming upon a plateau in our rate of advancement. It's also not easing my cynicism any.
Medical research excluding big pharma has been fuzzy since day 1. Part of it's built in; there are various types of experiments you just can't ethically do on people, so you hope to heck that what you discovered on mice holds for the big bipeds. It's even ethically shaky to do various things on primates; or even dogs. So you get some guy who operates on people's spines to fix their slipped discs and publishes his successful results, and it seems logical, so we keep doing that for 50 years because it would be unethical to refuse a treatment believed to be beneficial; and finally somebody does the epidemiological study that compares the outcomes with those of people who for one reason or another did not get operated on, and publishes "Uh, guys.... look at this....."
The popular press doesn't help, of course. "Medical research was telling us that lowering sodium is good for us, now it's telling us that it's bad for us, you can't trust it" Not really. What it's telling us now is that reducing it below a level which is, by current standards, already pretty low is bad; but above that level, more sodium does indeed still raise the mortality risk. It's the press that's reversing its oversimplified messages.
See also "In the 70s all the scientists warned us of the coming ice age" No, but a few popular magazines did.
I'm dismayed that in CS that the academic community is putting so much emphasis on replication and not enough on robust reproducibility.
From my experience, the academic community puts no emphasis on either. I think it would be neat to study a paper and attempt to reproduce the results, but that doesn't get me a journal paper in today's academic landscape.
I can't get my goto statements to be harmful.
I had to modify some vast quantity of badly written code once, and found that the source was missing a semicolon. When I fixed the semicolon issue, it wouldn't compile. Never did figure it out.
In spite of the gut feeling of the submitter, it's not much better in at least computer science: http://reproducibility.cs.ariz...
Well duh. Everybody knows that when you turn the machine off and on again, everything comes out different.
Puh leeze. I would not be surprised to find that you couldn't reproduce 50% of the published papers in "hard sciences" couldn't be replicated either. Do the words "cold fusion" ring a bell? Depends what you call hard sciences though. Note that several of the irreproductible examples given are brain scans etc. which is definitely on the harder side of the softer sciences.
The numeric keypad tends to be pretty highly valued by typists that are 10key proficient and type a lot of numbers. It's actually more common than you probably believe. I and many others prefer to buy laptops/keyboards with the 10 key numeric in place.
Absolutely. when i'm doing a lot of entry into excel it's numeric keyboard time. getting numbers from the number row is obviously klunky.
That's just not true! The IBM PC-AT keyboard, circa 1984, has control as a large key above shift and to the left of the 'A' key, in its proper place. Alt is below shift. There are no right-hand alt or control keys and caps-lock is off on the right side below shift where the right control key is now. There was a large gap between the spaceback and caps-lock, since there was no right alt or windows key. The PC-XT keyboard, circa 1981, had the same layout of control-shift-alt in the proper order on the left. The caps-lock key was on the far upper-right corner, above the numeric keypad. It wasn't until the 101 key model M that IBM messed up and placed the caps lock key in the incorrect location above shift and next to 'A'. Is there really no one else here who remebers typing away on the original PC keyboard, with the control key in the proper location, the giant plus key, break on the scroll lock key and printscreen on the dedicated '*' key?
And the freeware you would install to swap the AT keys back to where they had been.
I wish it still behaved as shift-lock: affecting all characters, not just letters. When I use caps lock, it's almost always because I'm typing an environment variable or #defined constant. And that means I'm going to be typing lots of _ characters. If caps lock behaved like shift lock, I wouldn't have to press shift for every one of them.
absofrigginglutely. the underscore is the enemy of capslock.
I confess that's why i try to avoid them, and i avoid camelcase too so all my variables and file names looklikethisbuticanreadthemok.
The Capslock key inherited the position occupied by the Shift-Lock key. Some keyboards still mark it as shift-lock. In the old mechanical typewriters, the shift lock actually moved the entire framework holding the rack of all the levers that held the letters. It required considerable force to push.
...and you could tell from the look and feel of the shift key that it was down. And using the shift key automatically unlocked the shift lock (on many keyboards at least).
If you really want to have that key, it probably ought to go back to that: some kind of mechanical lock on the shift key. Perhaps a smallish button actually physically on one corner of the left shift key.
Some keyboards are nice enough to have a status light in the middle of the capslock key. others try to make do with a status light up in the top right corner, along with numlock and scroll lock. and there are the various softwares that put indicators on the screen. but having it in the key is 1000% better. and one of the windows options is to have the shift key release capslock, which is good. also good the windows accessibility options which have the ability to make the lock keys go boop when you set them on and boopboop when you off them. being microsoft, however, the two options don't work together, so now my keyboard goes boop when i hit capslock, but when i hit shift and it unlocks it just stays quiet.
Just curious, what OS are you using? On both Windows and Linux, it's a pretty handy key.
when you're in a case-sensitive OS, it's a help alright.
that was supposed to be the capslock, not the microsoft key. the microsoft key does things in linux??
Just curious, what OS are you using? On both Windows and Linux, it's a pretty handy key.
when you're in a case-sensitive OS, it's a help alright.
I always remap caps lock to left ctrl, the way it used to be on rather old keyboards. So much more convenient than having to reach down to the left-ctrl key.
The qwerty keyboard uses the little fingers way too much to begin with, for some reason pc keyboard designers seem determined to make it worse.
yeah i guess the right mouse key wouldn't be popular with mac users but might be different among ibmers.
goofy = left foot forward
the silver surfer can do it.
We once had a plant manager who enforced a strict professional attire for all. He got everyone in the company to wear shirt and tie even when they had to wear safety overalls over the top.
That all changed one day when he was visiting the workshop and got his tie stuck on a piece of rotating equipment (drill press as the story went). After nearly losing his head in the literal sense the dress code was relaxed leaving everyone scratching their heads wondering why a chemical plant with no customer facing positions had a dress code to begin with.
tangentially, that nice tie your doctor wears when he comes in to your hospital room to examine you; saturated with infectious organisms.