Perhaps the fact that so many scientists appear to be left-leaning in the political spectrum might indicate that the conservative stance is unreasonable?
It's like when governments complain about their coverage in the media. The media may have an anti-government stance. Or they might simply just be correct.
There are a number of ways of treating sentences like "this sentence is false" logically without throwing one's hands in the air and saying it is meaningless.
It's a well formed sentence in English grammar; it certainly seems to have a meaning -- that is, that the sentence is in some way not true. The problem lies in that it appears self contradictory.
What's needed is some sane way of dealing with things which are inconsistent. Paraconsistent logic is one such way, and if you ask me, a pretty strong case is made for it. Such a logical underpinning for mathematics would also mean that the potential for inconsistency in maths that can not be avoided (thanks, Goedel!) need not spell disaster.
I thought the key issue with CO2 was that it did not have the same opacity to radiation at all frequencies. The basic scenario being as follows.
A range of solar radiation hits the Earth, a chunk of which is passed unimpeded by the CO2 in the atmosphere. This radiation hits the ground, water, whatever, gets bounced around a bit, absorbed and re-emitted preferentially at frequencies at which CO2 is more opaque. Thus CO2 in the atmosphere has a greater effect on decreasing the energy radiated part of the equation and less on the energy absorbed part.
If this picture is correct, a greater CO2 percentage in the atmosphere, other things being more or less equal, would lead to a higher steady state mean temperature.
PS: I'd wager most serious climatologists don't get a kick (or kickbacks) from scaring the population with the spectre of global warming. In fact, if you're looking for kickbacks, you're much more likely to find them on the other side of the fence. There is a real fear, backed by observed facts and admittedly primitive models, that the effect of mankind's activities on the environment will yield severe changes in climate in the not so distant future. Given how painful such changes would be, this ostritch approach towards the issue seems incredibly stupid.
You know, localized versions of Windows already are tied to a single language.
I couldn't believe it when I found out, but it's true. You can't take your English language version and give it a German locale for German OS messages. Nor can you take your Japanese version and get English messages. As far as I can tell, instead of maintaining a locale and message database, they maintain a separate version for each supported language.
That's just plain nuts. Unless of course internally at Microsoft it is just a big locale message database, and they include only those messages for a particular locale so as to maintain artificial price discrimination. But why would Microsoft want to do that, hmm?
One advantage of case-sensitivity of variable names and the like is that it allows ad hoc separations of name spaces.
For example, it is a common practice in C to use ALLCAPS for macro definitions and alllowercase for variable and function names. If adhered to strictly, it means that there won't be any collisions between variable and macro names.
It can be convenient in maths heavy code too, where the use of long variable names quickly makes the code hard to read due to excessive line lengths. Being able to use short upper case names for 'big' objects (eg matrices or operators) and short lower case names for 'small' objects such as scalars matches mathematical convention and keeps equations short and readable. Case sensitivity means that there won't be any accidental collisions between the two sets of objects.
It's certainly not necessary, but it can make life a lot easier. If you don't expect your language to ignore case, then you're unlikely to make case-based errors as a programmer. Especially if you're coming from a mathematical background where 'A' and 'a' rarely refer to the same thing.
Your body readily replaces the Calcium you're currently using with Strontium. There, the beta emitter is a good way to get Leukemia. It's also carried in the milk of mammals that eat anything contaminated by it.
Just like many other toxic substances that we deal with daily, don't eat it. Because it is solely a beta-emitter, it can be safely contained with a minimum of effort.
Both have nice and nasty decay products that produce Gamma Radiation.
Unless everything I've read is wrong, Strontium-90 decays to Yttrium-90, emitting only beta particles. Yttrium-90 decays to stable Zirconium-90, again emitting only beta radiation (of higher energy than Sr-90's). I think you're wrong on this one.
Of course energetic beta particles can generate
bremsstrahlung radiation when they hit something, but neither Strontium-90 or its decay products emit anything other than beta radiation themselves.
If he can already code, then probably he's best off with a language/platform reference that isn't too dry, and lots of example code that other have written so he can get a feel for how people put programs together.
Let me pull out my walking stick and reminisce about the Old Days (programmers with a longer history are of course free to run over me in their wheel chairs.) BASIC on something like the VIC20, Apple II or C64 was a great learning environment: immediate feedback from the language and well documented guides to the Operating System were readily available. Hacking in 6502 assembly was also pretty straightforward. In this sort of environment, where there were also many available printed books containing code for games that you could type in, learning how to code your own games in BASIC or assembly was almost inevitable.
So my suggestion is to try and recreate a similar environment in today's world!
Oh, another point: start small. Before jumping into some huge ambitious project that will never get finished, encourage him to start with warm-ups. eg: for basic game structure and AI write a naughts and crosses program. Start with a dumb version that uses text, and gradually embellish it to use graphics and make it a learning AI. Then perhaps try something like a real-time lunar-lander variant, to get the hang of non-turn based game structure. To get familiar with graphics and sound, encourage him to try writing graphics demos (start small, with a spinning cube or somesuch) or a simple music composition program. The latter would also help to learn about more complicated user interfaces.
Sun hardware and software used to be rock solid, but their low-end range is now cheap and nasty. Of course it isn't cheap in the important, financial sense.
I used to admin a mixed network with many low-end Sun machines (nothing faster than an Ultra 1), and have spent time subbing for an admin in a network with their higher end equipment. This was roughly the time that the Sun Ultra 5 and Ultra 10 were released.
The Ultra 5, even then, was a disgrace. Unstable, terrible performance compared with x86 hardware at the time, and insanely expensive.
Sun's fabled support generally came down to: 'we don't support what you are trying to do', or 'it might be fixed in the next OS release'. (I believe eventually Sun did get around to fixing the problems Solaris had on this platform.)
Unless you're paying a premium for their best support level, Sun's support just isn't that hot. Or wasn't back in the late 90s anyhow.
These days, for anything with 4 or fewer processors, it's hard to imagine any purchase from Sun being cost effective unless you are somehow tied to the platform. I'm certainly a convert to Linux (or *BSD) on good quality x86 hardware as the best solution in a very wide range of applications. Given Sun's past glory, it's a little sad.
The Sparcstation 2 has to have been one of the best workstations ever made.
Unencumbered, high quality digital music. With an explicit 'we choose not to treat customers like slime' policy. This is the sort of service I've been waiting for.
iTunes didn't cut it on either point, but it was moot anyway since I'm forbidden from buying from them in the first place due to geography.
Newer compression schemes may be superior to mp3, but as far as accessibility is concerned, mp3 is hard to beat. Nearly anything will play it with absolutely no hassles, including (most importantly for me) your average linux distribution and the iPod. The only thing that would make this perfect would be if there were an option for downloading the music in a lossless format, so one can recode to one's prefered compression scheme.
Now the only question is, is there anything there that I want to listen to?
Well, that is a bit of a strawman argument. I never claimed that the appeal is proportional to the degree of violence. On the contrary I was making the claim that even very nasty stuff, which one might think would not sell at all, does sell. More accurate would be the statement: publishers believe it will sell, and it would be surprising if they were consistently wrong in matters like this.
A lot of perfectly good games use violent action, it's just not extreme. Nearly every RTS is based about combat. First person shooters are naturally going to involve shooting. Even most computer RPGs have a large combat element. This doesn't make them evil or bad, I'm just noting that violence is quite common.
The argument that publishers won't support titles they won't think will sell, still stands.
Two other points: that there are crap very violent games doesn't seem to be particularly pertinent, unless one is arguing that more violence = more sales. The argument instead is that violence, even extreme violence, has appeal. But even if correlation were the argument, one would have to compare extremely violent crap games against generic crap games with similar marketing budgets, and we all know that there are tragically a very large number of crap games.
Secondly, a game doesn't have to be a best seller to be successful. If Manhunt gives a decent return on investment, then it ought to be counted as a financial success.
The Child's Play charity run organised by Penny Arcade is simply amazing.
But the column cited at its inception doesn't really seem to be demonizing video game players, but a class of very violent video games themselves. The column certainly uses language that while not outright stating it, does imply that ultra-violent video games lead children into becoming sociopathic serial killers, and this was unfortunate rhetoric clearly used to increase the impact of the piece. But there are certainly (at least) two valid points being made there.
Firstly, and most simply, age-restriction ratings on video games are having little actual effect. Either they are not being observed by retailers, or they are circumvented very easily in all the traditional ways. How they could be made more effective, or even if they should, is another question.
Secondly, and more contentiously, there are indeed some few video games which are incredibly violent in a spectacularly brutal and callous way. Interaction does make for better learning than passive exposure, and it's intuitively the case that a steady diet of this material at young ages is probably having some malign effect on the more marginally sane in the population. This leads to the question: why do game companies and publishers produce such games?
Video games can certainly be regarded as a form of creative art. And they're fun, too (or ought to be.) But they're also really expensive to produce these days, at least for any major title. I don't think any large publisher is going to pick up a title unless they feel it has a good chance of being a good seller. And so in turn, it must be that violence sells, even really nasty stuff.
In film, the extreme end of the spectrum is certainly available, but it's not trivially easy to access for minors. Especially for films which are refused cinema release. The creators of such films are almost certainly not doing it for profit motive, because no exposure means few sales. As such, the movie classification systems of (say) major Western countries generally work as a comprimise. They rarely achieve outright censorship, but do for the most part keep the most violent films away from people deemed too young to view them. It also removes the profit motive from exploiting violence as mere titilation.
So maybe stronger classification and enforcement is the answer after all, if it can be placed on par with film classification?
I don't have any concrete information on this at all, but would comparing NASA funding with defence spending be useful as a first estimate?
Both seem to have similar requirements as regards research and specialised engineering. Both historically have a reputation for a lot of bureaucractic overhead and paying inflated prices for equipment. Indeed, I believe they use many of the same subcontractors.
So, making the possibly unjustified assumption that the relation of spending to jobs created is linear, and using the above justifiation for assuming that this ratio is about the same for NASA as for defense spending on the whole, one could guesstimate the jobs created per new budget assigned to achieve these Big Space Projects.
But, nobody knows for sure what would have happened without the Bomb. The only thing we know for sure is that it brought about a swift end to the war.
We don't know that. In fact, by quotes from military people who ought to know at the time, it was felt that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did little to hasten the end of the war.
Many of these comments though were apparently not available to the public at large until relatively recently (1979 or some such). If interested in reading more, there's a site I came across recently and have linked to in other comments in this thread: http://www.doug-long.com/
I am no historian, and am certainly not familiar enough with the details of WWII to argue your points directly. But perhaps you would be willing to see what others have said in counter-argument?
The positions taken by Doug Long in an article Hiroshima: Was It Necessary? (there is also a summary), and the arguments given by Gar Alperovit on a mailing list, also collected on Doug Long's site, seem to have the weight of evidence behind them. Their case seems very plausible.
This site came up with a quick google search; I was unaware of it when I posted the earlier comment.
Some certainly claim there is such evidence, such as the collection of quotes at this site. In particular have a look at the section under Ellis Zacharias, Deputy Director of the Office of Naval Intelligence.
Quoting one segment here,
On July 25th, the U.S. intercepted a secret transmission from Japan's Foreign Minister (Togo) to their Ambassador to Moscow (Sato), who was trying to set up a meeting with the Soviets to negotiate an end to the war. The message referred to the Zacharias broadcast and stated:
"...special attention should be paid to the fact that at this time the United States referred to the Atlantic Charter. As for Japan, it is impossible to accept unconditional surrender under any circumstances, but we should like to communicate to the other party through appropriate channels that we have no objection to a peace based on the Atlantic Charter."
U.S. Dept. of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: Conference of Berlin (Potsdam) 1945, vol. 2, pg. 1260-1261.
I understand your outrage... but I think you misread my sentence or misunderstood the context.
As regards the targetting of civilians of the opposing countries, the actions are comparable. The bombing of Rotterdam by Germany explicitly set out to crush the Dutch, killing approximately 30000. This is and was deplorable. But later attacks by the US and Allied forces were no better in this regard.
Outside this aspect, certainly there were actions of mindboggling awfulness and callousness performed by the Nazis and Japan, that were in no way matched by their foes in WWII. I'm not claiming that America was no better than the Nazi regime (though it certainly was no saint, either.)
I know one shouldn't believe uncritically what one reads in the papers, but in a recent piece discussing the display of the "Enola Gay" the topic of the necessity of the use of the bombs was brought up.
According to the article, there is evidence showing that at the time the bombs were dropped, Japan was communicating with Russia with the aim of having Russia act as an intermediary in negotiating a peace in the US. Further, the USA knew of this.
At that point in time, Japan was in a very poor position, running low on resources and having its cities severely bombed conventionally. Again, according to the article, provided that the terms of a peace would allow them to keep the Emperor, Japan was all too willing to surrender.
The choice wasn't between using atomic bombs or a land invasion. Given this situation, a land invasion, along with the concommitant loss of life, would have been simply unnecessary.
Note also: even if there had been a land invasion, the lives lost would have been chiefly confined to those in the armed forces of the two nations (note also that this figure as estimated today would have been similar to or less than the 160000 casualties of the Hiroshima bombing.) Dropping an atomic bomb on a city of course kills mainly civilians. Whether this is significant or not depends on your attitudes towards war.
PS: For comparison, the firebombing of Tokyo is said to have killed about 80000 to 100000 people. The firebombing of Dresden, between 25000 and 150000. With such attrocities it demonstrates that the actions of the victors in WWII were in the end no better than that of their foes, as regards the deliberate targetting of civilian populations. I guess you can always point a finger at the Germany and say 'they started it'...:(
Email is P2P. It's possibly the canonical peer-to-peer system on the 'net. The only non P2P part comes from DNS address look up.
To send you email, I look up the corresponding MX record and connect to your host directly and attempt to deliver.
Of course in the real world, home Windows machines typically do not run their own mail servers, and rely on some other server (their ISP?) to handle mail for them. But there's nothing stopping users from handling their own mail if they have decent network connectivity and working name service.
Here is another example of how widespread NAT and dynamic IPs cause problems that we have to struggle to work around. This is the problem, not any lack of P2P-ness of email!
Statistics is used in Science. Statistics is not the same as Science.
People say that Mathematics is the Queen of the Sciences. This has to be a mischaracterization: maths is a key tool in science, and developments in science can inspire new fields of research within mathematics, but they are fundamentally different things.
To be honest, Engineering is not Science either. (Not to denigrate either.)
I'd love to see an FFT implementation (maybe it's not so hard... will have to download and play with it.)
A lot of scientific code is constrained by how fast you can do an FFT, perhaps of arbitrary size. And a fast graphics card is a lot cheaper than a high-end processor.
For embarassingly parallel vector problems, this is just the sort of thing for cheap, powerful clusters based around a cheap PC and a fast GPU.
I think you may have fallen for a little propaganda yourself...
Microsoft has developed all of their code to be cross-platform for
years
Not true I'm afraid. Windows NT 3.5 and 4.0 (and maybe 3.1 too?) were available for Alpha, MIPS and PowerPC. But other than these versions of the OS, and some associated server software (such as IIS and SQL server) everything was Intel only. In particular, the Microsoft Office software was only ever supported under emulation for Alpha.
and upwardly bit-scalable
Not really sure what you mean here, but at the time there existed non-Intel versions of Microsoft software, they presented a 32-bit environment, even on 64-bit platforms such as Alpha and MIPS. Given the win32 API, it actually seems like a serious problem extending it to 64-bits in a compatible way, given the frequent and intentional confusion between 32-bit int values and pointers.
demoing 64-bit editions of Windows for
years
Working in the computing industry for many years now, I have to start with a low opinion of demos, having written too many myself. If Windows were written with portability in mind, why is it that the Itanium version of Windows Server 2003 lacks so many features of its 32-bit brethren?
That there was a brief period of partial cross-platform support in Microsoft's recent history is more to do with from where they got the basis for Windows NT in the first place (ie Digital) than anything else. And word-size agnosticism has never been their strong point - one would have thought they would have learnt from 16-bit Windows 3.1, but no...
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps the fact that so many scientists appear to be left-leaning in the political spectrum might indicate that the conservative stance is unreasonable?
It's like when governments complain about their coverage in the media. The media may have an anti-government stance. Or they might simply just be correct.
There are a number of ways of treating sentences like "this sentence is false" logically without throwing one's hands in the air and saying it is meaningless.
It's a well formed sentence in English grammar; it certainly seems to have a meaning -- that is, that the sentence is in some way not true. The problem lies in that it appears self contradictory.
What's needed is some sane way of dealing with things which are inconsistent. Paraconsistent logic is one such way, and if you ask me, a pretty strong case is made for it. Such a logical underpinning for mathematics would also mean that the potential for inconsistency in maths that can not be avoided (thanks, Goedel!) need not spell disaster.
Read up on it -- it's cool.
I thought the key issue with CO2 was that it did not have the same opacity to radiation at all frequencies. The basic scenario being as follows.
A range of solar radiation hits the Earth, a chunk of which is passed unimpeded by the CO2 in the atmosphere. This radiation hits the ground, water, whatever, gets bounced around a bit, absorbed and re-emitted preferentially at frequencies at which CO2 is more opaque. Thus CO2 in the atmosphere has a greater effect on decreasing the energy radiated part of the equation and less on the energy absorbed part.
If this picture is correct, a greater CO2 percentage in the atmosphere, other things being more or less equal, would lead to a higher steady state mean temperature.
PS: I'd wager most serious climatologists don't get a kick (or kickbacks) from scaring the population with the spectre of global warming. In fact, if you're looking for kickbacks, you're much more likely to find them on the other side of the fence. There is a real fear, backed by observed facts and admittedly primitive models, that the effect of mankind's activities on the environment will yield severe changes in climate in the not so distant future. Given how painful such changes would be, this ostritch approach towards the issue seems incredibly stupid.
It doesn't have to be just one or the other you know.
You know, localized versions of Windows already are tied to a single language.
I couldn't believe it when I found out, but it's true. You can't take your English language version and give it a German locale for German OS messages. Nor can you take your Japanese version and get English messages. As far as I can tell, instead of maintaining a locale and message database, they maintain a separate version for each supported language.
That's just plain nuts. Unless of course internally at Microsoft it is just a big locale message database, and they include only those messages for a particular locale so as to maintain artificial price discrimination. But why would Microsoft want to do that, hmm?
There's always Star Lego. Which is simply a classic.
One advantage of case-sensitivity of variable names and the like is that it allows ad hoc separations of name spaces.
For example, it is a common practice in C to use ALLCAPS for macro definitions and alllowercase for variable and function names. If adhered to strictly, it means that there won't be any collisions between variable and macro names.
It can be convenient in maths heavy code too, where the use of long variable names quickly makes the code hard to read due to excessive line lengths. Being able to use short upper case names for 'big' objects (eg matrices or operators) and short lower case names for 'small' objects such as scalars matches mathematical convention and keeps equations short and readable. Case sensitivity means that there won't be any accidental collisions between the two sets of objects.
It's certainly not necessary, but it can make life a lot easier. If you don't expect your language to ignore case, then you're unlikely to make case-based errors as a programmer. Especially if you're coming from a mathematical background where 'A' and 'a' rarely refer to the same thing.
Of course energetic beta particles can generate bremsstrahlung radiation when they hit something, but neither Strontium-90 or its decay products emit anything other than beta radiation themselves.
I guess it depends on his attention span.
If he can already code, then probably he's best off with a language/platform reference that isn't too dry, and lots of example code that other have written so he can get a feel for how people put programs together.
Let me pull out my walking stick and reminisce about the Old Days (programmers with a longer history are of course free to run over me in their wheel chairs.) BASIC on something like the VIC20, Apple II or C64 was a great learning environment: immediate feedback from the language and well documented guides to the Operating System were readily available. Hacking in 6502 assembly was also pretty straightforward. In this sort of environment, where there were also many available printed books containing code for games that you could type in, learning how to code your own games in BASIC or assembly was almost inevitable.
So my suggestion is to try and recreate a similar environment in today's world!
Oh, another point: start small. Before jumping into some huge ambitious project that will never get finished, encourage him to start with warm-ups. eg: for basic game structure and AI write a naughts and crosses program. Start with a dumb version that uses text, and gradually embellish it to use graphics and make it a learning AI. Then perhaps try something like a real-time lunar-lander variant, to get the hang of non-turn based game structure. To get familiar with graphics and sound, encourage him to try writing graphics demos (start small, with a spinning cube or somesuch) or a simple music composition program. The latter would also help to learn about more complicated user interfaces.
Sun hardware and software used to be rock solid, but their low-end range is now cheap and nasty. Of course it isn't cheap in the important, financial sense.
I used to admin a mixed network with many low-end Sun machines (nothing faster than an Ultra 1), and have spent time subbing for an admin in a network with their higher end equipment. This was roughly the time that the Sun Ultra 5 and Ultra 10 were released.
The Ultra 5, even then, was a disgrace.
Unstable, terrible performance compared with x86 hardware at the time, and insanely expensive.
Sun's fabled support generally came down to: 'we don't support what you are trying to do', or 'it might be fixed in the next OS release'. (I believe eventually Sun did get around to fixing the problems Solaris had on this platform.)
Unless you're paying a premium for their best support level, Sun's support just isn't that hot. Or wasn't back in the late 90s anyhow.
These days, for anything with 4 or fewer processors, it's hard to imagine any purchase from Sun being cost effective unless you are somehow tied to the platform. I'm certainly a convert to Linux (or *BSD) on good quality x86 hardware as the best solution in a very wide range of applications. Given Sun's past glory, it's a little sad.
The Sparcstation 2 has to have been one of the best workstations ever made.
Unencumbered, high quality digital music. With an explicit 'we choose not to treat customers like slime' policy. This is the sort of service I've been waiting for.
iTunes didn't cut it on either point, but it was moot anyway since I'm forbidden from buying from them in the first place due to geography.
Newer compression schemes may be superior to mp3, but as far as accessibility is concerned, mp3 is hard to beat. Nearly anything will play it with absolutely no hassles, including (most importantly for me) your average linux distribution and the iPod. The only thing that would make this perfect would be if there were an option for downloading the music in a lossless format, so one can recode to one's prefered compression scheme.
Now the only question is, is there anything there that I want to listen to?
Well, that is a bit of a strawman argument. I never claimed that the appeal is proportional to the degree of violence. On the contrary I was making the claim that even very nasty stuff, which one might think would not sell at all, does sell. More accurate would be the statement: publishers believe it will sell, and it would be surprising if they were consistently wrong in matters like this.
A lot of perfectly good games use violent action, it's just not extreme. Nearly every RTS is based about combat. First person shooters are naturally going to involve shooting. Even most computer RPGs have a large combat element. This doesn't make them evil or bad, I'm just noting that violence is quite common.
The argument that publishers won't support titles they won't think will sell, still stands.
Two other points: that there are crap very violent games doesn't seem to be particularly pertinent, unless one is arguing that more violence = more sales. The argument instead is that violence, even extreme violence, has appeal. But even if correlation were the argument, one would have to compare extremely violent crap games against generic crap games with similar marketing budgets, and we all know that there are tragically a very large number of crap games.
Secondly, a game doesn't have to be a best seller to be successful. If Manhunt gives a decent return on investment, then it ought to be counted as a financial success.
The Child's Play charity run organised by Penny Arcade is simply amazing.
But the column cited at its inception doesn't really seem to be demonizing video game players, but a class of very violent video games themselves. The column certainly uses language that while not outright stating it, does imply that ultra-violent video games lead children into becoming sociopathic serial killers, and this was unfortunate rhetoric clearly used to increase the impact of the piece. But there are certainly (at least) two valid points being made there.
Firstly, and most simply, age-restriction ratings on video games are having little actual effect. Either they are not being observed by retailers, or they are circumvented very easily in all the traditional ways. How they could be made more effective, or even if they should, is another question.
Secondly, and more contentiously, there are indeed some few video games which are incredibly violent in a spectacularly brutal and callous way. Interaction does make for better learning than passive exposure, and it's intuitively the case that a steady diet of this material at young ages is probably having some malign effect on the more marginally sane in the population. This leads to the question: why do game companies and publishers produce such games?
Video games can certainly be regarded as a form of creative art. And they're fun, too (or ought to be.) But they're also really expensive to produce these days, at least for any major title. I don't think any large publisher is going to pick up a title unless they feel it has a good chance of being a good seller. And so in turn, it must be that violence sells, even really nasty stuff.
In film, the extreme end of the spectrum is certainly available, but it's not trivially easy to access for minors. Especially for films which are refused cinema release. The creators of such films are almost certainly not doing it for profit motive, because no exposure means few sales. As such, the movie classification systems of (say) major Western countries generally work as a comprimise. They rarely achieve outright censorship, but do for the most part keep the most violent films away from people deemed too young to view them. It also removes the profit motive from exploiting violence as mere titilation.
So maybe stronger classification and enforcement is the answer after all, if it can be placed on par with film classification?
I don't have any concrete information on this at all, but would comparing NASA funding with defence spending be useful as a first estimate?
Both seem to have similar requirements as regards research and specialised engineering. Both historically have a reputation for a lot of bureaucractic overhead and paying inflated prices for equipment. Indeed, I believe they use many of the same subcontractors.
So, making the possibly unjustified assumption that the relation of spending to jobs created is linear, and using the above justifiation for assuming that this ratio is about the same for NASA as for defense spending on the whole, one could guesstimate the jobs created per new budget assigned to achieve these Big Space Projects.
We don't know that. In fact, by quotes from military people who ought to know at the time, it was felt that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did little to hasten the end of the war.
Many of these comments though were apparently not available to the public at large until relatively recently (1979 or some such). If interested in reading more, there's a site I came across recently and have linked to in other comments in this thread: http://www.doug-long.com/
I am no historian, and am certainly not familiar enough with the details of WWII to argue your points directly. But perhaps you would be willing to see what others have said in counter-argument?
The positions taken by Doug Long in an article Hiroshima: Was It Necessary? (there is also a summary), and the arguments given by Gar Alperovit on a mailing list, also collected on Doug Long's site, seem to have the weight of evidence behind them. Their case seems very plausible.
This site came up with a quick google search; I was unaware of it when I posted the earlier comment.
Some certainly claim there is such evidence, such as the collection of quotes at this site. In particular have a look at the section under Ellis Zacharias, Deputy Director of the Office of Naval Intelligence.
Quoting one segment here,
I understand your outrage ... but I think you misread my sentence or misunderstood the context.
As regards the targetting of civilians of the opposing countries, the actions are comparable. The bombing of Rotterdam by Germany explicitly set out to crush the Dutch, killing approximately 30000. This is and was deplorable. But later attacks by the US and Allied forces were no better in this regard.
Outside this aspect, certainly there were actions of mindboggling awfulness and callousness performed by the Nazis and Japan, that were in no way matched by their foes in WWII. I'm not claiming that America was no better than the Nazi regime (though it certainly was no saint, either.)
I know one shouldn't believe uncritically what one reads in the papers, but in a recent piece discussing the display of the "Enola Gay" the topic of the necessity of the use of the bombs was brought up.
... :(
According to the article, there is evidence showing that at the time the bombs were dropped, Japan was communicating with Russia with the aim of having Russia act as an intermediary in negotiating a peace in the US. Further, the USA knew of this.
At that point in time, Japan was in a very poor position, running low on resources and having its cities severely bombed conventionally. Again, according to the article, provided that the terms of a peace would allow them to keep the Emperor, Japan was all too willing to surrender.
The choice wasn't between using atomic bombs or a land invasion. Given this situation, a land invasion, along with the concommitant loss of life, would have been simply unnecessary.
Note also: even if there had been a land invasion, the lives lost would have been chiefly confined to those in the armed forces of the two nations (note also that this figure as estimated today would have been similar to or less than the 160000 casualties of the Hiroshima bombing.) Dropping an atomic bomb on a city of course kills mainly civilians. Whether this is significant or not depends on your attitudes towards war.
PS: For comparison, the firebombing of Tokyo is said to have killed about 80000 to 100000 people. The firebombing of Dresden, between 25000 and 150000. With such attrocities it demonstrates that the actions of the victors in WWII were in the end no better than that of their foes, as regards the deliberate targetting of civilian populations. I guess you can always point a finger at the Germany and say 'they started it'
Email is P2P. It's possibly the canonical peer-to-peer system on the 'net. The only non P2P part comes from DNS address look up.
To send you email, I look up the corresponding MX record and connect to your host directly and attempt to deliver.
Of course in the real world, home Windows machines typically do not run their own mail servers, and rely on some other server (their ISP?) to handle mail for them. But there's nothing stopping users from handling their own mail if they have decent network connectivity and working name service.
Here is another example of how widespread NAT and dynamic IPs cause problems that we have to struggle to work around. This is the problem, not any lack of P2P-ness of email!
Statistics is used in Science.
Statistics is not the same as Science.
People say that Mathematics is the Queen of the Sciences. This has to be a mischaracterization: maths is a key tool in science, and developments in science can inspire new fields of research within mathematics, but they are fundamentally different things.
To be honest, Engineering is not Science either. (Not to denigrate either.)
I'd love to see an FFT implementation (maybe it's not so hard ... will have to download and play with it.)
A lot of scientific code is constrained by how fast you can do an FFT, perhaps of arbitrary size. And a fast graphics card is a lot cheaper than a high-end processor.
For embarassingly parallel vector problems, this is just the sort of thing for cheap, powerful clusters based around a cheap PC and a fast GPU.
I think you may have fallen for a little propaganda yourself ...
Not true I'm afraid. Windows NT 3.5 and 4.0 (and maybe 3.1 too?) were available for Alpha, MIPS and PowerPC. But other than these versions of the OS, and some associated server software (such as IIS and SQL server) everything was Intel only. In particular, the Microsoft Office software was only ever supported under emulation for Alpha. Not really sure what you mean here, but at the time there existed non-Intel versions of Microsoft software, they presented a 32-bit environment, even on 64-bit platforms such as Alpha and MIPS. Given the win32 API, it actually seems like a serious problem extending it to 64-bits in a compatible way, given the frequent and intentional confusion between 32-bit int values and pointers. Working in the computing industry for many years now, I have to start with a low opinion of demos, having written too many myself. If Windows were written with portability in mind, why is it that the Itanium version of Windows Server 2003 lacks so many features of its 32-bit brethren?That there was a brief period of partial cross-platform support in Microsoft's recent history is more to do with from where they got the basis for Windows NT in the first place (ie Digital) than anything else. And word-size agnosticism has never been their strong point - one would have thought they would have learnt from 16-bit Windows 3.1, but no ...
I think you are right.
Righteous indignation makes for very bad/highly inappropriate spelling.
That said, you have to watch out for those cows. They're just biding their time. What do you think they spend all their time ruminating on?
I mean 128 kilobits per second; how one is supposed to figure out what I mean when I use the wrong abbreviation is um, a different issue ...
I'll just go and get a new brain now.