The substance is decentralized storage and transfer of wealth.
No currency stores wealth. Wealth and currency are different things. Wealth has some value in itself - it generates income or some other value over time.
There are many things you can exchange currency for: wealth is one of them (and not a very popular choice is seems).
Owning a business is a risk, but not all risk-taking is gambling. Driving to work is a life safety risk. Owning a house is a financial risk. Lots of stuff you need to do in life are risks, but not gambling.
Yeh right, bubbles that stay, got it. Can I buy a Windows phone in Second Life with my Bitcoins?
You do realize Second Life is still around, still under active development, right? Even if BTC is worth $100 a year from now, people will still be using it as "remote cash".
Yes, trivially so because it has VB.NET. The interesting question is what's the minimum set of primitives, such as not using variables (or maybe a small number of "registers"). I don't think you could do arbitrary control flow without any VB bits, however, as Excel really wants to calculate cells in a fixed order, and has limits to the exceptions it will make to that, so you can't do loops in any obvious way.
practicality means that an individual simply does not have the capacity to master all scientific fields, trust is therefore necessary.
I disagree. You shouldn't hold any strong opinion on any subject unless you can follow the reasoning on both sides. This is a much lower bar that being able to do original work in a field.
There's this odd unwillingness, especially among intellectuals, to say "I don't know enough to have a firm opinion here". Heavens for fend we not know enough! So instead a religious belief in "the science" has arisen, and that's harmful in many ways.
And, no, I don't have to trust any accreditation process, I hold little faith in such things, as any institution can become corrupt, and most are mildly so. I can, however, reasonably expect an expert in a field to also know how to explain things to an educated layman. If both sides can present compelling arguments, the expert has some work to do. (A great example of this was the talk.origins web site, where convincing-sounding arguments from creationists were debunked at length, without treating the doubter like a fool.)
the Excel implementation is restricted to first-order functions acting on atomic data types organized in a fixed-layout grid
Not true: you can certainly do fixed sized arrays, variable-sized lists, and structs using worksheets - heck, a table is exactly an array of structs. It's just the primitives are more primitive than most programming environments.
The reason Excel won the "spreadsheet wars" in the early days was because it's good at making lists, and making lists is like 90% of what people use spreadsheets for. MS realized this very early on, and really made it a nice UI for... list keeping. The other companies didn't, and died. So, whatever you may think of human nature, it's human nature to use spreadsheets to keep lists.
These guys are likely doing very elaborate stuff, so more like 2 weeks. (There's an entire ecosystem of Excel programmers, with no formal training, doing stuff like re-inventing quicksort.)
All the BI stuff dies a horrible death if you have to deal with any decent amount of records like a million +.
Only if you're doing everything with a single DB server, which is why "data warehousing" is a thing. I've worked at a place that had quite a bit more than a million records in its BI system (a million records is nothing these days), and the finance guys seemed to do OK. We used Redshift, since no one had time to admin a bunch of DB servers or figure out if Haddop could work, but Adobe is a big enough software shop to do there own thing if they don't want to use AWS.
Meh, if he gets the altitude he wanted, he's as right as anyone - rockets don't work by accident. This is his second launch, so I'm betting on his survival.
The math used by engineers may sometimes be the result of science, though often it's not. Both fields refine their equations through iterative testing, but science is more than just that, and engineering is actually useful.
"AIs that figure out how to distract them" on Facebook and on Google ads, not in general. It's only worthwhile to manipulate Facebook's algorithms because it's not the open web. And as for ads: of course ads deceitfully manipulate you; I mean, really, is any adult unclear on that? But ads are trivial to block.
Nobody forces you on the 1 percent controlled sites such as Facebook, Google or Twitter.
This. The problem isn't "the Web", the problem is "social media and AdSense". Heck, the specific problem TBL seems to be on about is confined to ads on the web (people still see those?).
Obviously you don't have a free and open Web if by "Web" you mean "Facebook". If you go to one corp's site, you get controlled by that corp - that's on you, not "the Web".
Seems like all the high-end sports cars these days are going dual-clutch anyhow. The days of non-budget stick-shift sports cars may be numbered, except perhaps the inevitable retro wave.
Ah, I see you got modded to +5 for saying "scientists are smart". Truly brilliant insight, that.
Only by luck? I think that dismisses the training, creativity, and perseverance of scientists. Luck is helpful, but science would not progress unless a prepared mind can spot when it occurs. I think patience is more important.
A better system wouldn't require so much training, creativity, perseverance, prepared minds, patience, and luck.
Right now an important data point that can't be explained produces a vast array of hypotheses (sometimes a whole "ecosystem" or subfield devoted to such speculation, as is often the case in cosmology), all but one of which are discarded when new data eventually comes. Sure, that works, but a more efficient system certainly seems possible.
publication of bogus results can be a problem (more in some fields than others) but the self-correcting nature of the scientific method exposes and corrects the mistakes eventually.
"consider themselves non-religious" sounds like Atheist. 2/3s of America are "cultural Christians". They'll respond "Christian" on any survey, because they learned that's the right answer, but very few go to church weekly for more than social reasons. (Heck, in a lot of communities, your choices for a dating scene are bars or church, sadly enough.) It's the difference between supporting your local football team, and playing football.
When the project scope is based on false assumptions, and can't possibly fly because of the problems you see (or have seen for years, and that's why the project has historically not been worth doing), when do you raise objections? Before or after your manager commits you to crunch time on that impossible schedule?
At (most likely) the same employer, I was nearly fired for disagreeing with my boss in the first place. "Bring me solutions, not problems." (Did he realize that's a line that only the villains say in movies?) Then nearly fired because things failed in more-or-less the way I expected. But then, that guy would yell at me for disagreeing with him, then yell at me for not raising concerns early enough.
Yeah, "disagree and commit" looks great on paper, but assholes gonna asshole.
The scientific method will become outdated only when another method is discovered that does a better job of capturing our knowledge of the natural world in a useful way. I'm not holding my breath for that to happen.
While there is surely a better approach than the scientific method, as it seems to converge on a better answer only by luck, I'm not holding my breath either.
There is a more practical problem that needs to be fixed, though: since no one is focused on trying to replicate or disprove ordinary results form other teams, there are fields where more than half of published results are wrong (sometimes just falsified to keep up a quota, as in biochem). That's not a problem with the scientific method, but it's a real problem in modern science.
I'll no doubt regret agreeing with Spun on anything, but he's right.
Science, and for that matter logic has been condemned as an instrument of the patriarchy for around 30 years now. It's a core tenet of Post-Modernism that logic itself is a tool of oppression to be discarded, and Post-Modernism devoured academic feminism decades ago. I read peer-reviewed papers (in philosophy) to this effect in the early 90s, and it's only become more mainstream in academia.
Slashdot Mirror
The substance is decentralized storage and transfer of wealth.
No currency stores wealth. Wealth and currency are different things. Wealth has some value in itself - it generates income or some other value over time.
There are many things you can exchange currency for: wealth is one of them (and not a very popular choice is seems).
Owning a business is a risk, but not all risk-taking is gambling. Driving to work is a life safety risk. Owning a house is a financial risk. Lots of stuff you need to do in life are risks, but not gambling.
Yeh right, bubbles that stay, got it. Can I buy a Windows phone in Second Life with my Bitcoins?
You do realize Second Life is still around, still under active development, right? Even if BTC is worth $100 a year from now, people will still be using it as "remote cash".
Well, you can correct that situation if you know it's going on. It's when that guy quits or something that you're in trouble.
What would be really cool is a Lisp interpreter
80s nostalgia night?
Is Excel Turing complete?
Yes, trivially so because it has VB.NET. The interesting question is what's the minimum set of primitives, such as not using variables (or maybe a small number of "registers"). I don't think you could do arbitrary control flow without any VB bits, however, as Excel really wants to calculate cells in a fixed order, and has limits to the exceptions it will make to that, so you can't do loops in any obvious way.
practicality means that an individual simply does not have the capacity to master all scientific fields, trust is therefore necessary.
I disagree. You shouldn't hold any strong opinion on any subject unless you can follow the reasoning on both sides. This is a much lower bar that being able to do original work in a field.
There's this odd unwillingness, especially among intellectuals, to say "I don't know enough to have a firm opinion here". Heavens for fend we not know enough! So instead a religious belief in "the science" has arisen, and that's harmful in many ways.
And, no, I don't have to trust any accreditation process, I hold little faith in such things, as any institution can become corrupt, and most are mildly so. I can, however, reasonably expect an expert in a field to also know how to explain things to an educated layman. If both sides can present compelling arguments, the expert has some work to do. (A great example of this was the talk.origins web site, where convincing-sounding arguments from creationists were debunked at length, without treating the doubter like a fool.)
the Excel implementation is restricted to first-order functions acting on atomic data types organized in a fixed-layout grid
Not true: you can certainly do fixed sized arrays, variable-sized lists, and structs using worksheets - heck, a table is exactly an array of structs. It's just the primitives are more primitive than most programming environments.
The reason Excel won the "spreadsheet wars" in the early days was because it's good at making lists, and making lists is like 90% of what people use spreadsheets for. MS realized this very early on, and really made it a nice UI for ... list keeping. The other companies didn't, and died. So, whatever you may think of human nature, it's human nature to use spreadsheets to keep lists.
"Job Security by Force" is always a management failure - you need to fix that situation before it goes horribly wrong.
Write an Excel macro. Elapsed time: 5 minutes.
These guys are likely doing very elaborate stuff, so more like 2 weeks. (There's an entire ecosystem of Excel programmers, with no formal training, doing stuff like re-inventing quicksort.)
All the BI stuff dies a horrible death if you have to deal with any decent amount of records like a million +.
Only if you're doing everything with a single DB server, which is why "data warehousing" is a thing. I've worked at a place that had quite a bit more than a million records in its BI system (a million records is nothing these days), and the finance guys seemed to do OK. We used Redshift, since no one had time to admin a bunch of DB servers or figure out if Haddop could work, but Adobe is a big enough software shop to do there own thing if they don't want to use AWS.
GPS
Not a bad argument, but you don't know where that signal is coming from.
The laser we routinely bounce of the mirror we put ON THE MOON
Have you done that? No? So you're just taking someone's word for it.
Photos
Did you take them? No? So you're just taking someone's word they're real.
The International Space Station
Have you been there? No? So you're just taking someone's word for it.
These are bad arguments: they're all "no, really, trust what they're telling you". The opposite of science, really.
This is a good argument: get on a boat, go out some distance on a very clear day, watch the shore gradually sink below the horizon.
Meh, if he gets the altitude he wanted, he's as right as anyone - rockets don't work by accident. This is his second launch, so I'm betting on his survival.
Science doesn't care if you believe in it.
This seems a quite inaccurate statement as far engineering is basically applied science.
Sure, in the sense that everything humans do is basically applied biology.
The math used by engineers IS science.
No, that's just not what "science" means.
The math used by engineers may sometimes be the result of science, though often it's not. Both fields refine their equations through iterative testing, but science is more than just that, and engineering is actually useful.
"AIs that figure out how to distract them" on Facebook and on Google ads, not in general. It's only worthwhile to manipulate Facebook's algorithms because it's not the open web. And as for ads: of course ads deceitfully manipulate you; I mean, really, is any adult unclear on that? But ads are trivial to block.
Nobody forces you on the 1 percent controlled sites such as Facebook, Google or Twitter.
This. The problem isn't "the Web", the problem is "social media and AdSense". Heck, the specific problem TBL seems to be on about is confined to ads on the web (people still see those?).
Obviously you don't have a free and open Web if by "Web" you mean "Facebook". If you go to one corp's site, you get controlled by that corp - that's on you, not "the Web".
Seems like all the high-end sports cars these days are going dual-clutch anyhow. The days of non-budget stick-shift sports cars may be numbered, except perhaps the inevitable retro wave.
Ah, I see you got modded to +5 for saying "scientists are smart". Truly brilliant insight, that.
Only by luck? I think that dismisses the training, creativity, and perseverance of scientists. Luck is helpful, but science would not progress unless a prepared mind can spot when it occurs. I think patience is more important.
A better system wouldn't require so much training, creativity, perseverance, prepared minds, patience, and luck.
Right now an important data point that can't be explained produces a vast array of hypotheses (sometimes a whole "ecosystem" or subfield devoted to such speculation, as is often the case in cosmology), all but one of which are discarded when new data eventually comes. Sure, that works, but a more efficient system certainly seems possible.
publication of bogus results can be a problem (more in some fields than others) but the self-correcting nature of the scientific method exposes and corrects the mistakes eventually.
Eventually is a long time.
"consider themselves non-religious" sounds like Atheist. 2/3s of America are "cultural Christians". They'll respond "Christian" on any survey, because they learned that's the right answer, but very few go to church weekly for more than social reasons. (Heck, in a lot of communities, your choices for a dating scene are bars or church, sadly enough.) It's the difference between supporting your local football team, and playing football.
When the project scope is based on false assumptions, and can't possibly fly because of the problems you see (or have seen for years, and that's why the project has historically not been worth doing), when do you raise objections? Before or after your manager commits you to crunch time on that impossible schedule?
This would only be true if Edison had duped billions of dollars from the public via tax subsidies and billions more from investors.
You might want to read more about Edison.
Anyone can look smart when they are given unlimited access to money that isn't theirs.
And yet others didn't. Funny old world.
At (most likely) the same employer, I was nearly fired for disagreeing with my boss in the first place. "Bring me solutions, not problems." (Did he realize that's a line that only the villains say in movies?) Then nearly fired because things failed in more-or-less the way I expected. But then, that guy would yell at me for disagreeing with him, then yell at me for not raising concerns early enough.
Yeah, "disagree and commit" looks great on paper, but assholes gonna asshole.
The scientific method will become outdated only when another method is discovered that does a better job of capturing our knowledge of the natural world in a useful way. I'm not holding my breath for that to happen.
While there is surely a better approach than the scientific method, as it seems to converge on a better answer only by luck, I'm not holding my breath either.
There is a more practical problem that needs to be fixed, though: since no one is focused on trying to replicate or disprove ordinary results form other teams, there are fields where more than half of published results are wrong (sometimes just falsified to keep up a quota, as in biochem). That's not a problem with the scientific method, but it's a real problem in modern science.
I'll no doubt regret agreeing with Spun on anything, but he's right.
Science, and for that matter logic has been condemned as an instrument of the patriarchy for around 30 years now. It's a core tenet of Post-Modernism that logic itself is a tool of oppression to be discarded, and Post-Modernism devoured academic feminism decades ago. I read peer-reviewed papers (in philosophy) to this effect in the early 90s, and it's only become more mainstream in academia.