You are correct about the complications in making climate predictions. Regardless, I think AGW will be accepted if there is dramatic average warming in the next few hundred years, and similarly it will be rejected if there is no significant warming over the next few hundred years. I don't think the remaining decades I have to live will be enough for widespread acceptance or rejection of AGW.
Yes, I was simplifying a bit. Evolution does have predictive results. Yet there are still accepted truths that we cannot test. We cannot (yet anyway) evolve humans from primates, yet we still accept that humans evolved from primates. Not by running an experiment and reproducing the results. We base it on the limited experiments we can do and the historical evidence we have available. Biomedical research certainly tests the theory of evolution in many different ways, but these tests are quite limited when compared to mammalian evolution over millions of years. I would still say that mammalian evolution is a scientific "fact", though there is no good way to "predict" it.
Academia can be very insular. It's publish or perish and it's difficult to get published if the editors think you're part of the "tin-foil-hat gang" or being paid by Exxon. There is also a great bias against publishing negative results. Climate science is full of models that are plugged into a computer and out comes a result. These models depend on many variables, some of which are measured, some of which are estimated, and some of which are guessed. In addition the whole algorithmic process by which the "model" works is at best an approximation. Certain methods of modeling future climate result in lots of warming, some less. Right now there are large margins of error and much disagreement about exactly how "much" climate change we will experience.
Now, it certainly seems plausible that there are models out there with variables and assumptions that result in no warming, or a cooling. What is the likelihood these would get published based purely on their results? Not good. Well then what is it about a model that makes it better than others? It's ability to "predict future changes" when plugged in with past data. However, as we go back in time we quickly start losing variables in quantity and precision. 100 years of good solid data (if it's even that much) is not much when it comes to modeling how the Earth's climate changes over it's vast history.
We are at least aware of many radical changes in climate that had nothing to do with humans over the Earth's history. If we can't account for those, then we are woefully unprepared to predict future changes.
The issues are very complicated, but it's not quite correct to say that scientists are solely interested in "truth". Academia has a culture, and this culture can create biases. These biases can affect entire research programs in ways that are more nuanced than simple conspiracies.
When predicting the future, there is more of value at stake than when explaining the past. The more there is at stake, the more likely people are to be swayed by various desires than by the truth. This goes on both sides. There's no real money at stake whether evolution is correct or not. But if AGW is correct, then Exxon and others stand to lose billions. It wouldn't be fair to say that deniers of AGW are all biased and those believing it are all justified. But the whole debate is necessarily political from the start.
In any case, predicting the future rather than explaining the past gives AGW the potential to be much stronger than evolution or cosmological theories. Since it has not yet happened, it can be tested. We'll have to see if it passes the "test". I have a feeling that no one will be satisfied with the results of AGW's predictions within my lifetime.
No, that's not it. As long as the person is not working as an "agent of the state", anything they do is admissible. This came up when a hacker kept hacking into pedophiles' computers and turning them into the police. The courts ruled he was not working as an agent of the state, since the police had no control over him.
Firefox has already committed to supported theora natively. Are they going to dump that now that VP8 is open? Or are they going to support two codecs now? That would just recreate the problem an open source VP8 was meant to solve.
More problematically, patents. I doubt most people owning h264 patents want an open source competitor, and the media companies are probably more comfortable with an IP protected media format. Google has a lot of money, but patent battles could carry on for years and put the ubiquity of VP8 into doubt, much like the problems with BSD.
Well the issue is that there are many words no one will ever come across in their entire life except on a scrabble board. I immediately lost interest in scrabble as soon as I realized winning was a measure of memorizing disused words.
Really? I browse slashdot every day and have for the past 10 years and I don't recall hearing anything about "Songbird". I find it implausible that it's been widely heralded as the Linux iTunes alternative.
Unlike Solaris, Java is open. It's GPL'd. If that's not good enough, you can get JDKs from other vendors like IBM. Oracle might try to close Java development. However, it could then be forked by open source developers. An outdated FAQ seems to show some binary only pieces remaining in the JDK downloads, but I'm not sure how critical they are. And they may have been replaced by now anyway. Hopefully they are less problematic than "Open" Solaris's closed bits.
I guess it's a matter of increasing the fines down the road then. In Virginia, I can get auto insurance or pay 500 a year for not having it. It's cheaper to have auto insurance.
If the current fines aren't enough I'm sure the insurance companies will lobby for greater fines. They've had their nose deep in it since the beginning of this process--I'm sure their actuarials have done the calculations and know where they stand.
I inherited a code base of 1.5 million lines of code at the last job I was at. Thankfully I wasn't the only one responsible for it. My advice to the original poster is to add lots of logging information. Log statements should document what the code is doing at any point in time and tell you where it is doing it. If it's java you can get the stack trace from anywhere--this is very handy for logging.
MS software for such things is mostly a waste of money. You'd have to be using fairly advanced features of Office software to notice any differences between open office and MS office.
Using open source applications in their current form is really not that hard, especially for people coming from a Windows world. If an employee can't handle that, then they probably aren't clever enough to handle most office work.
I also don't buy that admins are more expensive for Linux than Windows, though I'd consider evidence to the contrary. I agree that the cost of employees eclipses all other business expenses. I just can't see that Windows ability is really any cheaper than Linux ability.
For all that, however, MS license costs are nowhere near as ridiculous as stuff like SAP, AIX, DB2, Weblogic, Websphere, and Oracle.
The backdoor in question is likely only available on Google's internal network. If it's guarded by VPN, this is fairly secure. Of course, there are many ways to hack into a company's internal network, as the Chinese hack demonstrates. But the law enforcement interface isn't uniquely problematic in this regard. Once you're into the internal network, there are all types of things you can do.
The real problem here is pen register taps, and it's application to email. The police can get as much "traffic analysis" information as they want without a warrant. This law enforcement interface was designed to allow easy access to this information, further invading our privacy through warrantless activities.
* All email header information other than the subject line, including the email addresses of the people to whom you send email, the email addresses of people that send to you, the time each email is sent or received, and the size of each email that is sent or received. * Your IP (Internet Protocol) address and the IP address of other computers on the Internet that you exchange information with, with timestamp and size information. * The communications ports and protocols used, which can be used to determine what types of communications you are sending using what types of applications.
Well all those social pressures you mention are factors that shape our interests. He never said that genders are biologically predisposed to certain occupations (though I wouldn't find it surprising if it were true). In any case, those pressures you mention have little to do with people in CS, other than perhaps reinforcing stereotypes. They are social pressures applied by people outside the field. So if there's a problem here, it's with society as a whole. And you should be asking society, "what's wrong with a man being in nursing or a woman being in CS?" I imagine most women in nursing would be glad to have more men, and most men in CS would be glad to have more women. They aren't the ones pushing these norms.
"men [are] just not that interested in being nurses, unless they're gay."
The average male is less interested in being a nurse than the average female. Unless there is something such as discrimination turning away interested male applicants, this is the only reason more women would be in nursing than men. Furthermore, the average gay male is more interested in nursing than the average straight male. Gay men are overrepresented in nursing. So yes, your little brother being married and a nurse in no way contradicts what I said.
People think I'm somehow bashing gays or stereotyping men in nursing as sissies or something. That's not true at all. I'm just pointing out that certain demographics are more drawn to certain professions. There's nothing wrong with being in a particular demographic.
Gender dominance in a particular field is more due to interest than anything else. So can we stop with the "this job is more masculine, this job is more feminine" unless your gay/lesbian crap?
Wouldn't the fact that men are more interested in X and women more interested in Y mean that X is more "masculine" and Y is more "feminine"? What do the terms "masculine" and "feminine" even mean if they can't satisfy this condition?
I didn't say that the only men to do nursing are gay, though I apologize if it came across that way. And I have all the respect in the world for nurses--it's a high stress job that requires plenty of training and long hours. I think people are drawn to nursing because they want to be helping others who are sick or injured. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this motivation. Just as there is nothing wrong with the motivations that draw certain people to IT. It's just that men tend to be more drawn to IT and women to nursing. Anecdotally, gay men are much more prevalent in nursing than they are in the general population. That is what I meant by my original assertion.
In any case, you talk about "social stigma", which is interesting, because if there's a social stigma for men being nurses, is there one for women tinkering with computers?
No, I wouldn't find that surprising at all. After all, women in computing certainly have a large selection of men to choose from (if that's their gender of preference). Of course, some will say it's quantity over quality...
Science is empirical, math is not. Scientific hypotheses are inductively tested, mathematical hypotheses are deductively proven. (And mathematical "induction" is still deductive in that the premises subsume the conclusion.)
Actually it's a bit different for coding. Most of us programmers work in a corporate environment where we expect all our emails to be read by our superiors. Code is not expected to be perfect, otherwise we would never have to worry about maintenance. Comments like, "this works but I don't know why" are common but hardly damning. They are a flag to go back and do further analysis if there's time. But we're paid to make working solutions, not generate solutions that are mathematically certain to work.
Insulting coworkers in the code is a no-no, and I've never seen it.
Slashdot Mirror
You are correct about the complications in making climate predictions. Regardless, I think AGW will be accepted if there is dramatic average warming in the next few hundred years, and similarly it will be rejected if there is no significant warming over the next few hundred years. I don't think the remaining decades I have to live will be enough for widespread acceptance or rejection of AGW.
Yes, I was simplifying a bit. Evolution does have predictive results. Yet there are still accepted truths that we cannot test. We cannot (yet anyway) evolve humans from primates, yet we still accept that humans evolved from primates. Not by running an experiment and reproducing the results. We base it on the limited experiments we can do and the historical evidence we have available. Biomedical research certainly tests the theory of evolution in many different ways, but these tests are quite limited when compared to mammalian evolution over millions of years. I would still say that mammalian evolution is a scientific "fact", though there is no good way to "predict" it.
Academia can be very insular. It's publish or perish and it's difficult to get published if the editors think you're part of the "tin-foil-hat gang" or being paid by Exxon. There is also a great bias against publishing negative results. Climate science is full of models that are plugged into a computer and out comes a result. These models depend on many variables, some of which are measured, some of which are estimated, and some of which are guessed. In addition the whole algorithmic process by which the "model" works is at best an approximation. Certain methods of modeling future climate result in lots of warming, some less. Right now there are large margins of error and much disagreement about exactly how "much" climate change we will experience.
Now, it certainly seems plausible that there are models out there with variables and assumptions that result in no warming, or a cooling. What is the likelihood these would get published based purely on their results? Not good. Well then what is it about a model that makes it better than others? It's ability to "predict future changes" when plugged in with past data. However, as we go back in time we quickly start losing variables in quantity and precision. 100 years of good solid data (if it's even that much) is not much when it comes to modeling how the Earth's climate changes over it's vast history.
We are at least aware of many radical changes in climate that had nothing to do with humans over the Earth's history. If we can't account for those, then we are woefully unprepared to predict future changes.
The issues are very complicated, but it's not quite correct to say that scientists are solely interested in "truth". Academia has a culture, and this culture can create biases. These biases can affect entire research programs in ways that are more nuanced than simple conspiracies.
When predicting the future, there is more of value at stake than when explaining the past. The more there is at stake, the more likely people are to be swayed by various desires than by the truth. This goes on both sides. There's no real money at stake whether evolution is correct or not. But if AGW is correct, then Exxon and others stand to lose billions. It wouldn't be fair to say that deniers of AGW are all biased and those believing it are all justified. But the whole debate is necessarily political from the start.
In any case, predicting the future rather than explaining the past gives AGW the potential to be much stronger than evolution or cosmological theories. Since it has not yet happened, it can be tested. We'll have to see if it passes the "test". I have a feeling that no one will be satisfied with the results of AGW's predictions within my lifetime.
Erasing his hard drive would have been perfectly fine if he did it before he realized he was the subject of an investigation.
No, that's not it. As long as the person is not working as an "agent of the state", anything they do is admissible. This came up when a hacker kept hacking into pedophiles' computers and turning them into the police. The courts ruled he was not working as an agent of the state, since the police had no control over him.
There are plenty of open source technical specs.
http://www.ietf.org/download/rfc-index.txt
Firefox has already committed to supported theora natively. Are they going to dump that now that VP8 is open? Or are they going to support two codecs now? That would just recreate the problem an open source VP8 was meant to solve.
More problematically, patents. I doubt most people owning h264 patents want an open source competitor, and the media companies are probably more comfortable with an IP protected media format. Google has a lot of money, but patent battles could carry on for years and put the ubiquity of VP8 into doubt, much like the problems with BSD.
Well the issue is that there are many words no one will ever come across in their entire life except on a scrabble board. I immediately lost interest in scrabble as soon as I realized winning was a measure of memorizing disused words.
Really? I browse slashdot every day and have for the past 10 years and I don't recall hearing anything about "Songbird". I find it implausible that it's been widely heralded as the Linux iTunes alternative.
Unlike Solaris, Java is open. It's GPL'd. If that's not good enough, you can get JDKs from other vendors like IBM. Oracle might try to close Java development. However, it could then be forked by open source developers. An outdated FAQ seems to show some binary only pieces remaining in the JDK downloads, but I'm not sure how critical they are. And they may have been replaced by now anyway. Hopefully they are less problematic than "Open" Solaris's closed bits.
I guess it's a matter of increasing the fines down the road then. In Virginia, I can get auto insurance or pay 500 a year for not having it. It's cheaper to have auto insurance.
If the current fines aren't enough I'm sure the insurance companies will lobby for greater fines. They've had their nose deep in it since the beginning of this process--I'm sure their actuarials have done the calculations and know where they stand.
I don't see any fundamental difference between native support of jpeg and native support of video codecs.
I inherited a code base of 1.5 million lines of code at the last job I was at. Thankfully I wasn't the only one responsible for it. My advice to the original poster is to add lots of logging information. Log statements should document what the code is doing at any point in time and tell you where it is doing it. If it's java you can get the stack trace from anywhere--this is very handy for logging.
MS software for such things is mostly a waste of money. You'd have to be using fairly advanced features of Office software to notice any differences between open office and MS office.
Using open source applications in their current form is really not that hard, especially for people coming from a Windows world. If an employee can't handle that, then they probably aren't clever enough to handle most office work.
I also don't buy that admins are more expensive for Linux than Windows, though I'd consider evidence to the contrary. I agree that the cost of employees eclipses all other business expenses. I just can't see that Windows ability is really any cheaper than Linux ability.
For all that, however, MS license costs are nowhere near as ridiculous as stuff like SAP, AIX, DB2, Weblogic, Websphere, and Oracle.
Just researching La Hague, looks like a non-issue. They found an increase, but it was not statistically significant.
http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0952-4746/21/3/603
The backdoor in question is likely only available on Google's internal network. If it's guarded by VPN, this is fairly secure. Of course, there are many ways to hack into a company's internal network, as the Chinese hack demonstrates. But the law enforcement interface isn't uniquely problematic in this regard. Once you're into the internal network, there are all types of things you can do.
The real problem here is pen register taps, and it's application to email. The police can get as much "traffic analysis" information as they want without a warrant. This law enforcement interface was designed to allow easy access to this information, further invading our privacy through warrantless activities.
* All email header information other than the subject line, including the email addresses of the people to whom you send email, the email addresses of people that send to you, the time each email is sent or received, and the size of each email that is sent or received.
* Your IP (Internet Protocol) address and the IP address of other computers on the Internet that you exchange information with, with timestamp and size information.
* The communications ports and protocols used, which can be used to determine what types of communications you are sending using what types of applications.
From the EFF.
Free speech for individuals is great. The problem is that corporations are not people and money is not speech.
Well all those social pressures you mention are factors that shape our interests. He never said that genders are biologically predisposed to certain occupations (though I wouldn't find it surprising if it were true). In any case, those pressures you mention have little to do with people in CS, other than perhaps reinforcing stereotypes. They are social pressures applied by people outside the field. So if there's a problem here, it's with society as a whole. And you should be asking society, "what's wrong with a man being in nursing or a woman being in CS?" I imagine most women in nursing would be glad to have more men, and most men in CS would be glad to have more women. They aren't the ones pushing these norms.
"men [are] just not that interested in being nurses, unless they're gay."
The average male is less interested in being a nurse than the average female. Unless there is something such as discrimination turning away interested male applicants, this is the only reason more women would be in nursing than men. Furthermore, the average gay male is more interested in nursing than the average straight male. Gay men are overrepresented in nursing. So yes, your little brother being married and a nurse in no way contradicts what I said.
People think I'm somehow bashing gays or stereotyping men in nursing as sissies or something. That's not true at all. I'm just pointing out that certain demographics are more drawn to certain professions. There's nothing wrong with being in a particular demographic.
Gender dominance in a particular field is more due to interest than anything else. So can we stop with the "this job is more masculine, this job is more feminine" unless your gay/lesbian crap?
Wouldn't the fact that men are more interested in X and women more interested in Y mean that X is more "masculine" and Y is more "feminine"? What do the terms "masculine" and "feminine" even mean if they can't satisfy this condition?
I didn't say that the only men to do nursing are gay, though I apologize if it came across that way. And I have all the respect in the world for nurses--it's a high stress job that requires plenty of training and long hours. I think people are drawn to nursing because they want to be helping others who are sick or injured. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this motivation. Just as there is nothing wrong with the motivations that draw certain people to IT. It's just that men tend to be more drawn to IT and women to nursing. Anecdotally, gay men are much more prevalent in nursing than they are in the general population. That is what I meant by my original assertion.
In any case, you talk about "social stigma", which is interesting, because if there's a social stigma for men being nurses, is there one for women tinkering with computers?
No, I wouldn't find that surprising at all. After all, women in computing certainly have a large selection of men to choose from (if that's their gender of preference). Of course, some will say it's quantity over quality...
No, men just not that interested in being nurses, unless they're gay.
Science is empirical, math is not. Scientific hypotheses are inductively tested, mathematical hypotheses are deductively proven. (And mathematical "induction" is still deductive in that the premises subsume the conclusion.)
Actually it's a bit different for coding. Most of us programmers work in a corporate environment where we expect all our emails to be read by our superiors. Code is not expected to be perfect, otherwise we would never have to worry about maintenance. Comments like, "this works but I don't know why" are common but hardly damning. They are a flag to go back and do further analysis if there's time. But we're paid to make working solutions, not generate solutions that are mathematically certain to work.
Insulting coworkers in the code is a no-no, and I've never seen it.