That global warming is occurring is based on empirical data I'll grant; but how is the human cause based on empirical data? In order to make an empirical assertion about a cause you would need a control group, which is pretty much impossible with a sample size of one.
We think that the cause his human activity because its the simplest explanation for such a rapid rise in temperatures, that's not the same as saying we have direct experimental evidence that says the same thing.
No, but some no trivial amount of code is running the x-ray machine at the dentist, processing my credit card, managing my fuel injection, saving my thesis paper, and timing stoplights throughout my city.
We trust our lives and livelihoods to shitty code every day and the plain fact of the matter is that shitty code usually works. As programmers we like to think of ourselves as artists; creating a master piece of perfectly engineered code. In reality, all projects face budget and time constraints, most projects have legacy code which is hard to maintain, and most teams have at least one guy who just doesn't get it.
If the code works, and you can show empirically that the code works, that is proven beyond a reasonable doubt it my opinion. Not beyond any doubt, but that isn't the standard that our justice system is based upon.
I'd be more interested in their test plan and test results than their source code if I were trying to convince a computer illiterate judge of something. Find a missing test case or an uncovered corner condition and you might have a decent case, code that doesn't pass static analysis and is ugly... well that pretty much defines 99% of the code out there.
I've noticed some inconsistencies on my companies finance.google page. It seems to be giving two different values for gains and losses for the day, the one on the graph is correct but the one at the heading is not. It also lists our company as one of the related companies, something that it has never done before.
I've got to wonder just what the hell happened here. Major and unusual issues across nearly all of Google's services? This isn't going to be good for Google's brand image.
It isn't so much that High Fructose Corn Syrup is bad for you, its just that HFCS is cheap and plentiful. Do you realize there are stores where it is cheaper to buy a bottle of soda than it is to buy a bottle of water? Or how about the fact that nearly every juice in the aisle at your grocery store has HFCS as one of its primary ingredients?
Even parents that think they are doing well by buying juice are giving their kids just as many calories as they would if they gave them soda, sometimes even more because the parents think that since its juice it must be ok. I used to work in a grocery store and the only people I ever saw come through the line with 100% juice were people with WIC checks.
People don't know how to eat healthy anymore and its too late to educate them. The only way they'll learn is to hit them in the only place they pay attention to, their pocket books. I'm not sure that a tax is the best way to do it, and I know that it isn't the right (right as in ethical) way to do it, but it might just be the only way to make the average person take notice.
Also, at the L2 point, all three major heat sources (Sun, Earth, and Moon) are in the same direction. This allows them to have a single heat shield to block radiation from those sources, reducing the cooling needs. When you're trying to keep something at 1.5K, even the light shining off the moon can make a pretty big difference in how much it takes to maintain that temperature.
The reason that it's legal to 'patent genes' is that is very, very, very (did I mention very?) expensive to discover which gene(s) control an aspect of a plant or animal.
Right now that is true enough, but what happens in 20 years when the price to do the same research is 1/1000th of what it is now? Look at the cost to sequence the human genome today versus ten years ago for example. I wish laws had an expiration date, that would force them to be re-reviewed every 5 or 10 years, but as things stand now companies will still be able to patent genes when it costs pennies to the dollar what it costs now to discover them.
Wasn't there an article a while back about an exoplanet discovered that was so dense the astronomers couldn't even begin to speculate what it was made out of? This would seem to be an interesting candidate for an answer.
Really, stop and think about just how dense this stuff is. Fill a soda can with it and the can would weigh in at 35000 lbs! Even if all you did was burn it or use it in a fuel cell, the volume to energy ratio of this substance is amazing.
Sounds good in theory maybe but its a very dangerous idea. Your rights would then be limited by the amount of grief an officer is willing to go through in order to catch you in some illegal act. Imagine you're a cop tracking down a serial killer and you think there's evidence inside someone's house, wouldn't you be willing to risk punishment to prevent the guy killing again?
All the sudden the rule would be 'you need a warrant and probably cause OR be willing to risk punishment' which is not quite the same thing. Throwing out the conviction is the only punishment that will work to deter abuses, because it is the only punishment that takes away the reward for illegal searches. Otherwise there will always be times when the reward (catching the bad guy) is greater than the punishment (the end of your career), especially when you'll be a hero to the public for your 'brave sacrifice'.
Both the book and the review are wildly biased, though obviously in opposite directions. I think it's safe to say that the truth lies somewhere in the wide area between the two. For what its worth, I'd guess the truth is in the area of "Politicians legitimately trying to do what they think is right but screwing it up badly by not realizing the unintended consequences of their actions".
Until Joe brings home the computer and tries to install Bejeweled 2 (or pretty much anything else he bought) on it, only to find out that it doesn't work. Now Dell/HP/Acer gets an angry tech support call, a returned machine, and a lost customer. Now, it's all well and good to say 'Use Wine' or 'Theres a free equivalent' but that doesn't help Joe if he doesn't know where to get these things or how to use them.
I've never understood why Linux fans always push for every mom and pop to use Linux when if they thought about it that situation can only ever end in tears the first time mom or pop try to install a new program or hardware. Good luck explaining to the average user how to find software to run on Linux, they're much too used to the model of going to the store and picking up what you want to buy. And no matter what you say about the 'average' user, you can't just hope that all they want to do is read email and the news; even my Grandpa has a collection of games that he likes to play.
The Wall Street Journal isn't your typical newspaper, it's very nearly a technical journal that is required reading for people of a certain profession. The Journal doesn't report the same news that every other paper does, and it doesn't just rely on AP and Reuters feeds to do the work for them, it actually offers things that are nearly unique in the news industry. That, and only that, is why they can get away with a pay wall.
No, his argument is that lots of cool stuff happened in the past, and the cool stuff is happening more and more rapidly as time goes on. Basically, each major 'cool thing' that happens increases the amount of processing power being used to solve the next problem and create the next cool thing.
Agriculture led to a massive population increase that in turn led to more human beings working to solve problems. Iron tools reduced the time it took to do tasks and freed up more time for other pursuits. The printing press led to the education of vast numbers of people who would otherwise have remained ignorant. Computers aid research in ways that no one could have imagined 70 years ago.
If you grant that progress is happing at an accellerating rate, there comes a time in the future where things change dramatically in very short periods of time. If you chose to call that point "OMG ponnies!!!!!" so be it.
Look at it this way, when I read the newspaper (or rather, the news website) and see words like "as a result of the accident, the child will be blind for the rest of his life". The first thing that pops into my head is that he won't be blind for the rest of his life, he'll be blind until we find a way to give him his sight back.
If the kid lost his retina, we can already fix that to some extent with a transplant. If the kid had his optic nerve destroyed, that might be a couple years for us to fix, maybe even a decade. If the kid the part of his brain the processes images, maybe it'll take 40 years, but I have no doubt we'll eventually be able to do it.
Now, how are any of our diseases any different? If you can't imagine an implantable artificial heart being available within 20 years, you have very little faith in our progress. Sure, the other organs are going to be trickier, but can you really think of a valid reason that each and every one of them (except the brain) can't be replaced by an artificial version assuming the technology is advanced enough? Alzheimer's (and mental senescence in general) is about the only thing that might not be fixable from a strictly mechanical point of view and we're even getting closer to understanding those issues.
So tell me, logically, why it's impossible. I'll grant that it probably won't happen any time soon. I'll maybe even grant that society won't let it happen since immortality would cause pretty drastic changes to our culture and our planet. But I won't grant that it is technologically impossible.
Kurzweil's predictions aren't just based on modern trends but historical shifts as well. In fact, I thought one of the big pieces he shows is a graph of 'paradigm shifting events' against time. These would be technologies that changed everything at the time; things like agriculture, the printing press, nuclear power, the transistor, etc.
The point isn't the gradual improvement of transistor technology that make the singularaty interesting, it's that transistors will be old news in 20 years; replaced by some new technology that we can't even speculate about right now. It's about the shifts, not the gradual evolution.
Then we, as individuals, started chemically castrating ourselves because we saw the writing on the wall. And the rich and the powerful encouraged us, because single people make better wage slaves.
I was at least thinking about what you said up until this point. The idea that an unmarried man or woman without children makes a better wage slave than a parent is just ridiculous. When I was single, if I fucked up my life that was my own fault and caused me and only me pain. Now that I have a spouse and we're thinking about kids, screwing up my life hurts a lot of other people. Some of us take that responsibility very seriously, to the point of sticking with a dead end job that we hate because it puts food on the table and pays the mortgage (not that I hate my job, far from it, but even if I did I wouldn't be risking it unless I had a fallback ready to go).
Yep, you can pretty much say that the financial crises was caused by just about anyone, and you'd probably be right to some extant or another. Homeowners, loan officers, big banks, small banks, the FHA, AIG and companies like them, investors, the media, the non-journalistic media, republicans, democrats, and government regulators just to name a few and I'm sure you can come up with more if you try.
There's plenty of blame to go around, anyone who claims one group is responsible is pushing an agenda or very short sighted.
I guess I've never understood that argument. Camera phones aren't about replacing your camera, they're about having a camera with you 99% of the time. I don't know how many times something has happened that I wanted a picture of and didn't have a real camera handy. The camera phone pictures aren't the best, but they often do the job of capturing the moment well enough for me.
Obviously, if I'm going somewhere or doing something that I expect to be interesting I bring my real camera along for the ride. The camera on my phone and my real camera fulfill two very different purposes and I'm happy to have them both.
The Pirate Party is hardly a 'fake' political party. It has a well developed platform including protecting privacy (on and off the internet), copyright reform, and patent reform. In the 2006 elections in Sweden it recieved 34,918 less than 9 months after it was founded, making it the 10th largest (out of 40) political party in the election.
By the time you can have that, you'll be able to get 10G bps over a wired connection, what's more you'll probably need (or at least want) it as applications eat up more and more bandwidth.
Look at it as the equivilant non-cyble technology. In this case, it would be like handing out encrypted radios to all the people in the target country. I don't know that that would constitute an attack, but it sure would piss off the powers that be.
Limiting funding for embryonic stem cells did slow research into adult stem cells. Specifically, it slowed research into just what is and isn't possible to treat with stem cells. Adult stem cells don't function exactly as embryonic stem cells do, generally embryonic stem cells are capable of becoming any tissue in the body where as adult stem cells are limited to a subset of them.
For every tissue, it is probably possible to produce an adult stem cell that will be capable of becoming that tissue but it costs time, money, and equipment to create it. That same time and effort could have gone directly to working on and testing the treatment. So, yes you are correct that adult stem cells can probably be used to cure the same diseases embryonic stem cells can. But you are also wrong if you insist that the lack of embryonic stem cell funding didn't slow that research down, leading to thousands of untimely deaths.
That's not a judgement on the ethics of the situation, I'm just trying to lay out the facts as I see them.
How about just get rid of PDFs in general? I mean, how many times have you opened up a page and said to yourself "Sweet, it's a PDF, now I can...". I can't even think of a good example of something you can do with a PDF that you can't do with a properly designed web page or an RTF document.
I suppose there must be a place for them, but it seems to me they're mostly used by people too lazy to create a page with the information they want to display, and instead just put a link to the PDF they sent to their printer, often from a years out of date brochure or flier.
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That global warming is occurring is based on empirical data I'll grant; but how is the human cause based on empirical data? In order to make an empirical assertion about a cause you would need a control group, which is pretty much impossible with a sample size of one.
We think that the cause his human activity because its the simplest explanation for such a rapid rise in temperatures, that's not the same as saying we have direct experimental evidence that says the same thing.
No, but some no trivial amount of code is running the x-ray machine at the dentist, processing my credit card, managing my fuel injection, saving my thesis paper, and timing stoplights throughout my city.
We trust our lives and livelihoods to shitty code every day and the plain fact of the matter is that shitty code usually works. As programmers we like to think of ourselves as artists; creating a master piece of perfectly engineered code. In reality, all projects face budget and time constraints, most projects have legacy code which is hard to maintain, and most teams have at least one guy who just doesn't get it.
If the code works, and you can show empirically that the code works, that is proven beyond a reasonable doubt it my opinion. Not beyond any doubt, but that isn't the standard that our justice system is based upon.
I'd be more interested in their test plan and test results than their source code if I were trying to convince a computer illiterate judge of something. Find a missing test case or an uncovered corner condition and you might have a decent case, code that doesn't pass static analysis and is ugly... well that pretty much defines 99% of the code out there.
I've noticed some inconsistencies on my companies finance.google page. It seems to be giving two different values for gains and losses for the day, the one on the graph is correct but the one at the heading is not. It also lists our company as one of the related companies, something that it has never done before.
I've got to wonder just what the hell happened here. Major and unusual issues across nearly all of Google's services? This isn't going to be good for Google's brand image.
It isn't so much that High Fructose Corn Syrup is bad for you, its just that HFCS is cheap and plentiful. Do you realize there are stores where it is cheaper to buy a bottle of soda than it is to buy a bottle of water? Or how about the fact that nearly every juice in the aisle at your grocery store has HFCS as one of its primary ingredients?
Even parents that think they are doing well by buying juice are giving their kids just as many calories as they would if they gave them soda, sometimes even more because the parents think that since its juice it must be ok. I used to work in a grocery store and the only people I ever saw come through the line with 100% juice were people with WIC checks.
People don't know how to eat healthy anymore and its too late to educate them. The only way they'll learn is to hit them in the only place they pay attention to, their pocket books. I'm not sure that a tax is the best way to do it, and I know that it isn't the right (right as in ethical) way to do it, but it might just be the only way to make the average person take notice.
Also, at the L2 point, all three major heat sources (Sun, Earth, and Moon) are in the same direction. This allows them to have a single heat shield to block radiation from those sources, reducing the cooling needs. When you're trying to keep something at 1.5K, even the light shining off the moon can make a pretty big difference in how much it takes to maintain that temperature.
Makes me want to go type jokes into the search bar and see if Google laughs.
The reason that it's legal to 'patent genes' is that is very, very, very (did I mention very?) expensive to discover which gene(s) control an aspect of a plant or animal.
Right now that is true enough, but what happens in 20 years when the price to do the same research is 1/1000th of what it is now? Look at the cost to sequence the human genome today versus ten years ago for example. I wish laws had an expiration date, that would force them to be re-reviewed every 5 or 10 years, but as things stand now companies will still be able to patent genes when it costs pennies to the dollar what it costs now to discover them.
Wasn't there an article a while back about an exoplanet discovered that was so dense the astronomers couldn't even begin to speculate what it was made out of? This would seem to be an interesting candidate for an answer.
Really, stop and think about just how dense this stuff is. Fill a soda can with it and the can would weigh in at 35000 lbs! Even if all you did was burn it or use it in a fuel cell, the volume to energy ratio of this substance is amazing.
Sounds good in theory maybe but its a very dangerous idea. Your rights would then be limited by the amount of grief an officer is willing to go through in order to catch you in some illegal act. Imagine you're a cop tracking down a serial killer and you think there's evidence inside someone's house, wouldn't you be willing to risk punishment to prevent the guy killing again?
All the sudden the rule would be 'you need a warrant and probably cause OR be willing to risk punishment' which is not quite the same thing. Throwing out the conviction is the only punishment that will work to deter abuses, because it is the only punishment that takes away the reward for illegal searches. Otherwise there will always be times when the reward (catching the bad guy) is greater than the punishment (the end of your career), especially when you'll be a hero to the public for your 'brave sacrifice'.
Both the book and the review are wildly biased, though obviously in opposite directions. I think it's safe to say that the truth lies somewhere in the wide area between the two. For what its worth, I'd guess the truth is in the area of "Politicians legitimately trying to do what they think is right but screwing it up badly by not realizing the unintended consequences of their actions".
Until Joe brings home the computer and tries to install Bejeweled 2 (or pretty much anything else he bought) on it, only to find out that it doesn't work. Now Dell/HP/Acer gets an angry tech support call, a returned machine, and a lost customer. Now, it's all well and good to say 'Use Wine' or 'Theres a free equivalent' but that doesn't help Joe if he doesn't know where to get these things or how to use them.
I've never understood why Linux fans always push for every mom and pop to use Linux when if they thought about it that situation can only ever end in tears the first time mom or pop try to install a new program or hardware. Good luck explaining to the average user how to find software to run on Linux, they're much too used to the model of going to the store and picking up what you want to buy. And no matter what you say about the 'average' user, you can't just hope that all they want to do is read email and the news; even my Grandpa has a collection of games that he likes to play.
The Wall Street Journal isn't your typical newspaper, it's very nearly a technical journal that is required reading for people of a certain profession. The Journal doesn't report the same news that every other paper does, and it doesn't just rely on AP and Reuters feeds to do the work for them, it actually offers things that are nearly unique in the news industry. That, and only that, is why they can get away with a pay wall.
No, his argument is that lots of cool stuff happened in the past, and the cool stuff is happening more and more rapidly as time goes on. Basically, each major 'cool thing' that happens increases the amount of processing power being used to solve the next problem and create the next cool thing.
Agriculture led to a massive population increase that in turn led to more human beings working to solve problems. Iron tools reduced the time it took to do tasks and freed up more time for other pursuits. The printing press led to the education of vast numbers of people who would otherwise have remained ignorant. Computers aid research in ways that no one could have imagined 70 years ago.
If you grant that progress is happing at an accellerating rate, there comes a time in the future where things change dramatically in very short periods of time. If you chose to call that point "OMG ponnies!!!!!" so be it.
Look at it this way, when I read the newspaper (or rather, the news website) and see words like "as a result of the accident, the child will be blind for the rest of his life". The first thing that pops into my head is that he won't be blind for the rest of his life, he'll be blind until we find a way to give him his sight back.
If the kid lost his retina, we can already fix that to some extent with a transplant. If the kid had his optic nerve destroyed, that might be a couple years for us to fix, maybe even a decade. If the kid the part of his brain the processes images, maybe it'll take 40 years, but I have no doubt we'll eventually be able to do it.
Now, how are any of our diseases any different? If you can't imagine an implantable artificial heart being available within 20 years, you have very little faith in our progress. Sure, the other organs are going to be trickier, but can you really think of a valid reason that each and every one of them (except the brain) can't be replaced by an artificial version assuming the technology is advanced enough? Alzheimer's (and mental senescence in general) is about the only thing that might not be fixable from a strictly mechanical point of view and we're even getting closer to understanding those issues.
So tell me, logically, why it's impossible. I'll grant that it probably won't happen any time soon. I'll maybe even grant that society won't let it happen since immortality would cause pretty drastic changes to our culture and our planet. But I won't grant that it is technologically impossible.
Kurzweil's predictions aren't just based on modern trends but historical shifts as well. In fact, I thought one of the big pieces he shows is a graph of 'paradigm shifting events' against time. These would be technologies that changed everything at the time; things like agriculture, the printing press, nuclear power, the transistor, etc.
The point isn't the gradual improvement of transistor technology that make the singularaty interesting, it's that transistors will be old news in 20 years; replaced by some new technology that we can't even speculate about right now. It's about the shifts, not the gradual evolution.
Then we, as individuals, started chemically castrating ourselves because we saw the writing on the wall. And the rich and the powerful encouraged us, because single people make better wage slaves.
I was at least thinking about what you said up until this point. The idea that an unmarried man or woman without children makes a better wage slave than a parent is just ridiculous. When I was single, if I fucked up my life that was my own fault and caused me and only me pain. Now that I have a spouse and we're thinking about kids, screwing up my life hurts a lot of other people. Some of us take that responsibility very seriously, to the point of sticking with a dead end job that we hate because it puts food on the table and pays the mortgage (not that I hate my job, far from it, but even if I did I wouldn't be risking it unless I had a fallback ready to go).
Yep, you can pretty much say that the financial crises was caused by just about anyone, and you'd probably be right to some extant or another. Homeowners, loan officers, big banks, small banks, the FHA, AIG and companies like them, investors, the media, the non-journalistic media, republicans, democrats, and government regulators just to name a few and I'm sure you can come up with more if you try.
There's plenty of blame to go around, anyone who claims one group is responsible is pushing an agenda or very short sighted.
I guess I've never understood that argument. Camera phones aren't about replacing your camera, they're about having a camera with you 99% of the time. I don't know how many times something has happened that I wanted a picture of and didn't have a real camera handy. The camera phone pictures aren't the best, but they often do the job of capturing the moment well enough for me.
Obviously, if I'm going somewhere or doing something that I expect to be interesting I bring my real camera along for the ride. The camera on my phone and my real camera fulfill two very different purposes and I'm happy to have them both.
The Pirate Party is hardly a 'fake' political party. It has a well developed platform including protecting privacy (on and off the internet), copyright reform, and patent reform. In the 2006 elections in Sweden it recieved 34,918 less than 9 months after it was founded, making it the 10th largest (out of 40) political party in the election.
By the time you can have that, you'll be able to get 10G bps over a wired connection, what's more you'll probably need (or at least want) it as applications eat up more and more bandwidth.
Look at it as the equivilant non-cyble technology. In this case, it would be like handing out encrypted radios to all the people in the target country. I don't know that that would constitute an attack, but it sure would piss off the powers that be.
I hearby submit Bear Flu or maybe Ursine Flu as the new name. Number one threat to America... BEARS!
Limiting funding for embryonic stem cells did slow research into adult stem cells. Specifically, it slowed research into just what is and isn't possible to treat with stem cells. Adult stem cells don't function exactly as embryonic stem cells do, generally embryonic stem cells are capable of becoming any tissue in the body where as adult stem cells are limited to a subset of them.
For every tissue, it is probably possible to produce an adult stem cell that will be capable of becoming that tissue but it costs time, money, and equipment to create it. That same time and effort could have gone directly to working on and testing the treatment. So, yes you are correct that adult stem cells can probably be used to cure the same diseases embryonic stem cells can. But you are also wrong if you insist that the lack of embryonic stem cell funding didn't slow that research down, leading to thousands of untimely deaths.
That's not a judgement on the ethics of the situation, I'm just trying to lay out the facts as I see them.
How about just get rid of PDFs in general? I mean, how many times have you opened up a page and said to yourself "Sweet, it's a PDF, now I can...". I can't even think of a good example of something you can do with a PDF that you can't do with a properly designed web page or an RTF document.
I suppose there must be a place for them, but it seems to me they're mostly used by people too lazy to create a page with the information they want to display, and instead just put a link to the PDF they sent to their printer, often from a years out of date brochure or flier.