which is where I think we'll always fail at communicating with another species. So much of our communication is non-verbal and based on shared experiences of being human that I doubt we can ever get that across to another species.
Human-dog or human-horse communication is about as good as it can get, I think. If the dog could talk, a lot of what it would say would be meaningless to us because we're not dogs.
Anyway, that's besides the point. The simplest thing to do would in this case would be to ban any paid work (for a "cooling off" period) for any entity you had government authority over. This hiatus helps undue influence cool off, and hinders possible abuses of authority (Commissioner: "I am looking into your merger plans. By the way, does your firm hire lobbyists... I'm thinking of a career shift in a few months". Company: "Uh, yes - you'll have to wait 2 years though". Commissioner:"Okkkay").
Doesn't work because the position becomes available for the spouse or children.
Commissioner: "I am looking into your merger plans. By the way does your firm hire lobbyists? I have a daughter who is interested in a career in lobbying..." Company: "As it happens, yes we do and we have a position available for someone with your daughter's qualifications, and a salary of around..." Commissioner: "I think she mentioned she was looking for a base salary of $250K" Company: "I was just going to say $250K" Commissioner: "Excellent, let's take a look at those merger plans then..."
Traditionally this was considered socially unacceptable and anyone being this openly corrupt would be forced to resign from public life because of it.
These days the only way we can deal with it is to formalise it and make it a known factor in politics, with a set of rules about how it operates. We should probably start selling the positions that we now elect as well, since it would make it simpler for everyone.
Reserve price of $1Million for a seat on congress, renewable annually, bids are open...
I've been where you are now, and I've been the other side of it.
The problem is that IT have a bunch of standards that they have to obey. Those standards are there for good reasons, and ultimately stop the company infrastructure from degenerating into a mess.
What you've (and the OP has) done have circumvent all those standards and create a mess. I know it works now, and it 'gets the job done'. But in 3-5 years you'll leave, and it'll stop working, and your VP's will ask/demand/scream at IT to come fix them, and some poor bastard will have to unpick all your work and migrate it to a stable state on stable platforms that actually allow it to work properly. That effort is going to cost a lot more than the 2 years and half a million dollars that it would take to do it properly from the start.
Basically, what your VP's have asked you to do will take 2 years and half a million dollars to do, at the cheapest. They either pay that now, or pay much more later fixing the mess you've just created.
You think you're doing good and helping the company make money. Trust me, you're not. Stop now and go back to the VP's and tell them IT stopped you from fulfilling their request and they need to go through IT to get it done.
Remember the Maker's Triangle: Quick, Cheap, Good...Pick 2. Ultimately, someone has to take your Quick & Cheap and make it Good, and that will be Slow and Expensive.
erm...no...the driest parts of the globe are deserts (by definition). Antarctica is a desert, and it's not warm. The warmest parts of the globe are the bits around the equator, obviously. They're also the wettest and most abundantly fertile and biodiverse.
"Global Warming" will apparently cause the world to become warmer, wetter and with higher concentrations of CO2. All of which encourage plant growth (this is what they do in greenhouses, after all). If we wanted to engineer a world that could support a larger population, then a good first step would be to make it warmer, wetter and with much higher CO2 levels.
I think his point was that the actual jet is actually being built somewhere else. There could be 1000 US service companies in the chain, each adding a little bit of value to the end product, but the end product is now being built in China, whereas it used to be built in Detroit.
Your product is a phsical change, but other than that a process that makes something more useful to me is worth extra cost and the form of that value does not make either job less important.
Service companies add value as you say, but you can't build a ship from service guarantees. You actually need someone to produce the threaded rod at some point, guaranteed or not. That doesn't happen in the US much any more.
Did anyone else pick up on the bizarre doom-mongering going on in TFA?
To quote:
We lose a few (relatively speaking) containers a year. These containers are a product of a new technology. Aquatic species use these containers to live in, and might spread to new areas where they would affect the ecology ALL NEW TECHNOLOGIES ARE DANGEROUS AND WE MUST BE SCARED OF THEM!
I understand that in order to get any MSM attention these days there must be an overwhelming imperative involving the destruction of all we hold sacred, but this is stretching a point surely?
This is where I get a bit wtff? about the whole thing.
OK, first off...living will give you cancer. Live enough, and you will get cancer. Radiation in the quantities being released from the Japanese reactors WILL NOT GIVE YOU CANCER. Scientific fact, get over it.
People die on the roads in massive, horrific numbers and yet this causes no comment and people are not afraid to cross the road. How come all the hysteria about radiation?
People have NOT died or suffered in any meaningful numbers from any application of nuclear power technology, at all, ever. And if you discount Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which after all were acts of war *designed* to kill large numbers of people, then the same goes for all nuclear technology. It's incredibly, unbelievably safe, way safer than any other known form of energy production. Chernobyl had a minor effect on the local population, way less than other industrial disasters of a similar scale (Bhopal, for instance).
As many sensible and sane people have said before, the events in Japan have been a massive vindication of nuclear safety. A disaster of way beyond "worst-possible-can't-happen-in-our-lifetime" magnitude happened and NO-ONE DIED or even got seriously injured (one bloke broke his foot I understand).
And yet, the press and everyone else is all hysterical about the radiation. WTF?
I'm with Iain M Banks on this one. (to paraphrase:) Robots provide the how, humans provide the why.
We're not far off having distributed manufacturing able to make shit for us for very low cost (almost free). But there's no way our current economic model can survive that. Given the amount of hassle we're dealing with because we can make copies of songs for free, what are we going to have to cope with when we can make copies of cars for free?
Yeah but no. There are limits on market sizes, mainly because demand is limited by money supply. I might 'want' 100 fridges, but I'm not going to pay for more than 1 fridge every 10 years because I've got other things to spend my money on. This means the market for fridges = population of country / 10 units per year. If you're supplying close to that then you can't grow by selling more fridges*
But companies aren't required to make stuff. Companies are legally required to maximise profit to shareholders. So when you start getting close to your maximum market share and you can't improve profits by selling more stuff, you can only improve profits by reducing costs (which you're legally required to do if you're a public company). Which is where the US manufacturing industry went over the last 20 years. You can pay people less, or reduce the number of people you need to make the same number of fridges, or move your manufacturing to another country where costs are less. All of which are great for your shareholders but really really bad for your employees (and you should remember that your employees are your market, ultimately).
This is where the industrial revolution gets us. It's great in one respect, because the people in developing countries get to spend a generation working in factories like we did and go through their industrial revolution to get to the good post-industrial stuff. But the developed countries need to work out how to stop all the money concentrating into a tiny number of incredibly rich people, because we might as well be back in feudalism if we let that carry on.
*you could diversify into making other things, but sooner or later someone's going to split you from that diversified operation and you'll be back to just making fridges. And you can't diversify infinitely, you hit the market limits eventually. So for this thought experiment we're pretending that diversification has nothing to do with it.
Not that I'm even trying to defend this bill or Young-Earth Creationism, but surely having a massively wide range of opinions in any scientific discipline is good and very healthy? You never know, there may be some bizarre enigma in paleontology that stumps everyone but is solved by someone who looks at the problem from a young-earth creationist viewpoint.
Science is, after all, about facts not consensus. Your opinions or beliefs do not matter to science, only the evidence matters.
Spent 2 hours downloading the demo, then spent 20 minutes playing the demo, as 2 different "characters" (same person, same plot, same voice, just different abilities). That's a chunk of bandwidth cap I'm never getting back:(
I even tried just doing nothing for one of the fights. Sure enough, we win anyway. This isn't a game, it's a series of cutscenes tied together with a series of pointless 'fights'. Might as well be watching some crap TV fantasy show for all the contribution I made.
I'll go back to Minecraft, thanks, where I'm an active participant in the entertainment not a passive viewer.
So no, contrary to your majestic disbelief, dark matter is a Real Hypothesis (tm), investigated by Real Scientists (tm), doing Real Science (tm).
So was the Luminiferous Aether. That didn't stop it from being "wrong" in the end.
Real Science (tm) as done by real Scientists (tm) produces as many wrong answers as right answers. This is a good thing and what differentiates it from Religion (tm).
The difference between Dark Matter and Luminiferous Aether is they made something out of nothing. What's going on here is we have "something". We have gravity. This gravity is measurable and is out there, but we cannot find the matter associated with it.
Not quite true. We have more observable gravity than our current understanding of gravity predicts, yes, but that doesn't necessarily mean there's an invisible gravity-pony out there causing all the 'extra' gravity.
The aether was created to solve the problem that light behaves as a wave, but waves must propagate through something. Once we had a better understanding of photons we could dispense with the aether.
The same holds true for our understanding of gravity. At the moment we are proposing that the universe is full of invisible gravity-ponies because 'something must be out there causing all this gravity'. We may come to a better understanding of gravity that allows us to dispense with the ponies.
Don't forget, after all, that we are also currently proposing that there are invisible inter-galactic gravity-ponies pushing the galaxies apart too.
If Dark Matter attracts itself through gravity (which it must do to form Dark Galaxies), but is incapable of holding a charge (or, presumably, interacting with the Strong or Weak nuclear), then how does it repel itself enough to stay separate? Surely it should just collapse almost instantly into Dark Black Holes?
yeah, I've tried this technology you speak of. I have a library of around 400-500 books, and every time I move (about once a year on average) I pack them all into boxes, give myself chronic back pain moving them into the new place, and work out where the hell I've got space in the new place to put them. Currently they're lining the hallway in large piles. I can see a point where they become a safety hazard.
Also, in Australia there's a bunch of protectionist laws (protecting publishing house profits, obviously) that mean the average book new is $25+ and second-hand is $10+. I like the idea of being able to download from the tubes at reasonable prices.
I figure it's like Steam vs Boxed CD's...and Steam won that fight hands down.
However, I'm not sold on the idea. I figure an e-reader is worth a try at this point. If it doesn't, I've still got the books .
Or things like the Bullet Cluster prove that we don't understand gravity nearly as well as we think we do.
Put simply: two things interact, but don't conform to our expectations of how they should interact. Therefore: 1. Our expectations must be wrong. or 2. There must be something we're not seeing about the interaction.
Dark Matter is basically saying "2, because our expectations seem to pan out for other interactions"
But then...Dark Energy...
Put simply: two things interact at very long distances, but don't conform to our expectations of how they should interact. Therefore: 1. Our expectations must be wrong. or 2. There must be something we're not seeing about the interaction.
So, non-intuitively, we say "2 again, despite the thing we're not seeing being completely different/opposite to the thing we didn't see with Dark Matter"
Of course, redoing the assumptions about gravity at galactic scales will be hard, and there won't be any megabuck research grants and facilities to do it, so I don't really blame people for not wanting to go down that path...
you forget, any warming from CO2 must be human-caused otherwise there's no point and it might as well be random climate change for no reason (tsk tsk)
No human causation = no need to panic, and therefore no need to dismantle capitalism and usher in the golden age of enviro-socialism (google Common Purpose for details)
('wowser' is a uniquely Aussie term for a strong supporter of interventionist government policy).
Any discussion of online privacy/retention/etc tends to be one-sided, from my experience so far, largely because wowsers seem to be almost universally technology-illiterate. If the government proposed to keep a photocopy of every letter you ever received or sent, there'd be a howling outcry (well actually probably not, since the only people that send letters any more are government agencies and utility companies, but you get the picture).
In discussions on the Conroy Filter, any explanations about how it won't work tends to fall on deaf ears, or gets the standard Conroy response of 'so you propose we do nothing then?', and the assumption is that the internet is full of vile perverts who should be castrated. The point being that the debate is not on technical feasibility, or even benefits, but on perceived moral stance.
With any opposition to government surveillance, the standard response of 'if you've done nothing wrong you've got nothing to hide' should be ringing across the ether...except it appears that no-one who knows enough to comment on this issue is ignorant enough to declare that (well, not as many as you'd expect).
So it seems there's a Digital Divide right there...if the debate is pitched in terms of details and technical specifics, it only attracts knowledgeable commentary, and that tends to be broadly anti-censorship and pro-privacy. If the debate is pitched in simple terms, it attracts wowsers.
Which would suggest that wowsers tend to be older, since young people are more familiar with technology? Or is it education?
Having actually smelted iron from iron ore in a living history re-enactment, I call bullshit on this entire thing (well, ok, given the metal disks, the root battery might work).
You need a *serious* air feed to the base of the smelter to get the temperatures high enough to melt the ore. A single bag bellows feeding into the top of a simple depression in the ground with almost no fuel stock just won't do it. We had two bag bellows constantly manned pumping into the base of a big stack of charcoal and only just got the temperatures high enough. Oh, and put that kind of heat anywhere near a clay crucible that hasn't completely dried out (at least a day or so of drying using a small fire) and the whole thing will go bang in your face as the residual water in the clay turns to steam and explosively releases.
And once you've got your iron from the base of the smelt, you can't just bang it with a rock to get it to a usable disk. It comes out of the smelter as a rough mass of iron flakes (called a 'bloom'). You need to very carefully forgeweld it into a whole. Hitting it with a hammer causes the bloom to fall apart immediately into an unusable mess of rust flakes. I know, I made this mistake and we had to start again.
I can't speak for smelting copper. I believe the process is similar but easier because of lower temperatures.
And charcoal doesn't come for free. There's a whole involved process for making charcoal, requiring *lots* of wood (and preferably hardwood which burns hotter but is much harder to cut down). It takes about 4 days (plus wood-chopping time, which you just can't do with just a single stone hand-axe and one person) to make charcoal from scratch, and it's a very tricky process requiring a lot of practice.
There's a reason we spent thousands of years in the bronze age before we started using iron. It's not because we didn't know about iron ores.
I tend to agree...this debate isn't really about GUI vs CLI, it's more a desire for a third type of tool altogether.
CLI's are good for all the reasons everyone's been saying they're good (mainly scripting, which incidentally helps with documentation and auditing) GUI's are good when you need to do a completely new task in a limited time without messing it up (no time for man pages, just do it!) or when you're unfamiliar with the system.
If we could produce a fully-scriptable interface that provided a complete and exhaustive list of all the possible options, with their acceptable parameter values, and a 'warning! are you sure you want to do this?' mechanism, then we'd be getting to what people really need.
I don't assume that the scientists have not checked out the Caption Obvious answers. I assume they don't talk about them because they don't get paid to talk about them because they're obvious.
I see the situation like this:
Mr Climate Scientist studies sea levels. He (for he is a male climate scientist) wants to continue studying sea levels. However, in order for him to do that, someone must pay him to study sea levels. In order for someone to pay him to study sea levels, someone else with money must be interested enough in sea levels to pay him. He finds that sea levels go up and down a lot all over the world for lots of different reasons. But saying that in a paper will not be interesting. So he writes a paper about how the sea levels are going up and lots of people are going to drown. He gets two friends who are also interested in continuing to be paid to study the climate to peer-review his paper, and a journal that's interested in being read by people with money who could be scared of rising sea levels publishes it.
I think there's a problem with peer-reviewed science.
Slashdot Mirror
what warming? there's been no warming for a decade now...
which is where I think we'll always fail at communicating with another species. So much of our communication is non-verbal and based on shared experiences of being human that I doubt we can ever get that across to another species.
Human-dog or human-horse communication is about as good as it can get, I think. If the dog could talk, a lot of what it would say would be meaningless to us because we're not dogs.
Anyway, that's besides the point. The simplest thing to do would in this case would be to ban any paid work (for a "cooling off" period) for any entity you had government authority over. This hiatus helps undue influence cool off, and hinders possible abuses of authority (Commissioner: "I am looking into your merger plans. By the way, does your firm hire lobbyists ... I'm thinking of a career shift in a few months". Company: "Uh, yes - you'll have to wait 2 years though". Commissioner:"Okkkay").
Doesn't work because the position becomes available for the spouse or children.
Commissioner: "I am looking into your merger plans. By the way does your firm hire lobbyists? I have a daughter who is interested in a career in lobbying..."
Company: "As it happens, yes we do and we have a position available for someone with your daughter's qualifications, and a salary of around..."
Commissioner: "I think she mentioned she was looking for a base salary of $250K"
Company: "I was just going to say $250K"
Commissioner: "Excellent, let's take a look at those merger plans then..."
Traditionally this was considered socially unacceptable and anyone being this openly corrupt would be forced to resign from public life because of it.
These days the only way we can deal with it is to formalise it and make it a known factor in politics, with a set of rules about how it operates. We should probably start selling the positions that we now elect as well, since it would make it simpler for everyone.
Reserve price of $1Million for a seat on congress, renewable annually, bids are open...
I've been where you are now, and I've been the other side of it.
The problem is that IT have a bunch of standards that they have to obey. Those standards are there for good reasons, and ultimately stop the company infrastructure from degenerating into a mess.
What you've (and the OP has) done have circumvent all those standards and create a mess. I know it works now, and it 'gets the job done'. But in 3-5 years you'll leave, and it'll stop working, and your VP's will ask/demand/scream at IT to come fix them, and some poor bastard will have to unpick all your work and migrate it to a stable state on stable platforms that actually allow it to work properly. That effort is going to cost a lot more than the 2 years and half a million dollars that it would take to do it properly from the start.
Basically, what your VP's have asked you to do will take 2 years and half a million dollars to do, at the cheapest. They either pay that now, or pay much more later fixing the mess you've just created.
You think you're doing good and helping the company make money. Trust me, you're not. Stop now and go back to the VP's and tell them IT stopped you from fulfilling their request and they need to go through IT to get it done.
Remember the Maker's Triangle: Quick, Cheap, Good...Pick 2. Ultimately, someone has to take your Quick & Cheap and make it Good, and that will be Slow and Expensive.
erm...no...the driest parts of the globe are deserts (by definition). Antarctica is a desert, and it's not warm.
The warmest parts of the globe are the bits around the equator, obviously. They're also the wettest and most abundantly fertile and biodiverse.
"Global Warming" will apparently cause the world to become warmer, wetter and with higher concentrations of CO2. All of which encourage plant growth (this is what they do in greenhouses, after all).
If we wanted to engineer a world that could support a larger population, then a good first step would be to make it warmer, wetter and with much higher CO2 levels.
I think his point was that the actual jet is actually being built somewhere else. There could be 1000 US service companies in the chain, each adding a little bit of value to the end product, but the end product is now being built in China, whereas it used to be built in Detroit.
Your product is a phsical change, but other than that a process that makes something more useful to me is worth extra cost and the form of that value does not make either job less important.
Service companies add value as you say, but you can't build a ship from service guarantees. You actually need someone to produce the threaded rod at some point, guaranteed or not. That doesn't happen in the US much any more.
nope, still pronouncing 'vessel' in my head as 'wessel'. Damn them and their multicultural crew.
Did anyone else pick up on the bizarre doom-mongering going on in TFA?
To quote:
We lose a few (relatively speaking) containers a year.
These containers are a product of a new technology.
Aquatic species use these containers to live in, and might spread to new areas where they would affect the ecology
ALL NEW TECHNOLOGIES ARE DANGEROUS AND WE MUST BE SCARED OF THEM!
I understand that in order to get any MSM attention these days there must be an overwhelming imperative involving the destruction of all we hold sacred, but this is stretching a point surely?
This is where I get a bit wtff? about the whole thing.
OK, first off...living will give you cancer. Live enough, and you will get cancer. Radiation in the quantities being released from the Japanese reactors WILL NOT GIVE YOU CANCER. Scientific fact, get over it.
People die on the roads in massive, horrific numbers and yet this causes no comment and people are not afraid to cross the road. How come all the hysteria about radiation?
People have NOT died or suffered in any meaningful numbers from any application of nuclear power technology, at all, ever. And if you discount Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which after all were acts of war *designed* to kill large numbers of people, then the same goes for all nuclear technology. It's incredibly, unbelievably safe, way safer than any other known form of energy production. Chernobyl had a minor effect on the local population, way less than other industrial disasters of a similar scale (Bhopal, for instance).
As many sensible and sane people have said before, the events in Japan have been a massive vindication of nuclear safety. A disaster of way beyond "worst-possible-can't-happen-in-our-lifetime" magnitude happened and NO-ONE DIED or even got seriously injured (one bloke broke his foot I understand).
And yet, the press and everyone else is all hysterical about the radiation. WTF?
agree, it is beautiful. I consider myself lucky to be alive at a time when we're making such things as this :)
I'm with Iain M Banks on this one. (to paraphrase:) Robots provide the how, humans provide the why.
We're not far off having distributed manufacturing able to make shit for us for very low cost (almost free). But there's no way our current economic model can survive that. Given the amount of hassle we're dealing with because we can make copies of songs for free, what are we going to have to cope with when we can make copies of cars for free?
Yeah but no. There are limits on market sizes, mainly because demand is limited by money supply. I might 'want' 100 fridges, but I'm not going to pay for more than 1 fridge every 10 years because I've got other things to spend my money on. This means the market for fridges = population of country / 10 units per year. If you're supplying close to that then you can't grow by selling more fridges*
But companies aren't required to make stuff. Companies are legally required to maximise profit to shareholders. So when you start getting close to your maximum market share and you can't improve profits by selling more stuff, you can only improve profits by reducing costs (which you're legally required to do if you're a public company). Which is where the US manufacturing industry went over the last 20 years. You can pay people less, or reduce the number of people you need to make the same number of fridges, or move your manufacturing to another country where costs are less. All of which are great for your shareholders but really really bad for your employees (and you should remember that your employees are your market, ultimately).
This is where the industrial revolution gets us. It's great in one respect, because the people in developing countries get to spend a generation working in factories like we did and go through their industrial revolution to get to the good post-industrial stuff. But the developed countries need to work out how to stop all the money concentrating into a tiny number of incredibly rich people, because we might as well be back in feudalism if we let that carry on.
*you could diversify into making other things, but sooner or later someone's going to split you from that diversified operation and you'll be back to just making fridges. And you can't diversify infinitely, you hit the market limits eventually. So for this thought experiment we're pretending that diversification has nothing to do with it.
Not that I'm even trying to defend this bill or Young-Earth Creationism, but surely having a massively wide range of opinions in any scientific discipline is good and very healthy?
You never know, there may be some bizarre enigma in paleontology that stumps everyone but is solved by someone who looks at the problem from a young-earth creationist viewpoint.
Science is, after all, about facts not consensus. Your opinions or beliefs do not matter to science, only the evidence matters.
Spent 2 hours downloading the demo, then spent 20 minutes playing the demo, as 2 different "characters" (same person, same plot, same voice, just different abilities). That's a chunk of bandwidth cap I'm never getting back :(
I even tried just doing nothing for one of the fights. Sure enough, we win anyway. This isn't a game, it's a series of cutscenes tied together with a series of pointless 'fights'. Might as well be watching some crap TV fantasy show for all the contribution I made.
I'll go back to Minecraft, thanks, where I'm an active participant in the entertainment not a passive viewer.
So no, contrary to your majestic disbelief, dark matter is a Real Hypothesis (tm), investigated by Real Scientists (tm), doing Real Science (tm).
So was the Luminiferous Aether. That didn't stop it from being "wrong" in the end.
Real Science (tm) as done by real Scientists (tm) produces as many wrong answers as right answers. This is a good thing and what differentiates it from Religion (tm).
The difference between Dark Matter and Luminiferous Aether is they made something out of nothing. What's going on here is we have "something". We have gravity. This gravity is measurable and is out there, but we cannot find the matter associated with it.
Not quite true. We have more observable gravity than our current understanding of gravity predicts, yes, but that doesn't necessarily mean there's an invisible gravity-pony out there causing all the 'extra' gravity.
The aether was created to solve the problem that light behaves as a wave, but waves must propagate through something. Once we had a better understanding of photons we could dispense with the aether.
The same holds true for our understanding of gravity. At the moment we are proposing that the universe is full of invisible gravity-ponies because 'something must be out there causing all this gravity'. We may come to a better understanding of gravity that allows us to dispense with the ponies.
Don't forget, after all, that we are also currently proposing that there are invisible inter-galactic gravity-ponies pushing the galaxies apart too.
That's a really good point actually.
If Dark Matter attracts itself through gravity (which it must do to form Dark Galaxies), but is incapable of holding a charge (or, presumably, interacting with the Strong or Weak nuclear), then how does it repel itself enough to stay separate? Surely it should just collapse almost instantly into Dark Black Holes?
Or are there Dark Black Holes out there?
yeah, I've tried this technology you speak of. I have a library of around 400-500 books, and every time I move (about once a year on average) I pack them all into boxes, give myself chronic back pain moving them into the new place, and work out where the hell I've got space in the new place to put them. Currently they're lining the hallway in large piles. I can see a point where they become a safety hazard.
Also, in Australia there's a bunch of protectionist laws (protecting publishing house profits, obviously) that mean the average book new is $25+ and second-hand is $10+. I like the idea of being able to download from the tubes at reasonable prices.
I figure it's like Steam vs Boxed CD's...and Steam won that fight hands down.
However, I'm not sold on the idea. I figure an e-reader is worth a try at this point. If it doesn't, I've still got the books .
Thanks for all the tips :)
I was literally just looking at buying a Kindle for myself for Xmas...and then read this...
I really really don't like the idea of Amazon being able to reach in to my library and burn my books.
So what's the open alternative?
Or things like the Bullet Cluster prove that we don't understand gravity nearly as well as we think we do.
Put simply: two things interact, but don't conform to our expectations of how they should interact. Therefore:
1. Our expectations must be wrong.
or
2. There must be something we're not seeing about the interaction.
Dark Matter is basically saying "2, because our expectations seem to pan out for other interactions"
But then...Dark Energy...
Put simply: two things interact at very long distances, but don't conform to our expectations of how they should interact. Therefore:
1. Our expectations must be wrong.
or
2. There must be something we're not seeing about the interaction.
So, non-intuitively, we say "2 again, despite the thing we're not seeing being completely different/opposite to the thing we didn't see with Dark Matter"
Of course, redoing the assumptions about gravity at galactic scales will be hard, and there won't be any megabuck research grants and facilities to do it, so I don't really blame people for not wanting to go down that path...
you forget, any warming from CO2 must be human-caused otherwise there's no point and it might as well be random climate change for no reason (tsk tsk)
No human causation = no need to panic, and therefore no need to dismantle capitalism and usher in the golden age of enviro-socialism (google Common Purpose for details)
('wowser' is a uniquely Aussie term for a strong supporter of interventionist government policy).
Any discussion of online privacy/retention/etc tends to be one-sided, from my experience so far, largely because wowsers seem to be almost universally technology-illiterate. If the government proposed to keep a photocopy of every letter you ever received or sent, there'd be a howling outcry (well actually probably not, since the only people that send letters any more are government agencies and utility companies, but you get the picture).
In discussions on the Conroy Filter, any explanations about how it won't work tends to fall on deaf ears, or gets the standard Conroy response of 'so you propose we do nothing then?', and the assumption is that the internet is full of vile perverts who should be castrated. The point being that the debate is not on technical feasibility, or even benefits, but on perceived moral stance.
With any opposition to government surveillance, the standard response of 'if you've done nothing wrong you've got nothing to hide' should be ringing across the ether...except it appears that no-one who knows enough to comment on this issue is ignorant enough to declare that (well, not as many as you'd expect).
So it seems there's a Digital Divide right there...if the debate is pitched in terms of details and technical specifics, it only attracts knowledgeable commentary, and that tends to be broadly anti-censorship and pro-privacy. If the debate is pitched in simple terms, it attracts wowsers.
Which would suggest that wowsers tend to be older, since young people are more familiar with technology? Or is it education?
Having actually smelted iron from iron ore in a living history re-enactment, I call bullshit on this entire thing (well, ok, given the metal disks, the root battery might work).
You need a *serious* air feed to the base of the smelter to get the temperatures high enough to melt the ore. A single bag bellows feeding into the top of a simple depression in the ground with almost no fuel stock just won't do it. We had two bag bellows constantly manned pumping into the base of a big stack of charcoal and only just got the temperatures high enough.
Oh, and put that kind of heat anywhere near a clay crucible that hasn't completely dried out (at least a day or so of drying using a small fire) and the whole thing will go bang in your face as the residual water in the clay turns to steam and explosively releases.
And once you've got your iron from the base of the smelt, you can't just bang it with a rock to get it to a usable disk. It comes out of the smelter as a rough mass of iron flakes (called a 'bloom'). You need to very carefully forgeweld it into a whole. Hitting it with a hammer causes the bloom to fall apart immediately into an unusable mess of rust flakes. I know, I made this mistake and we had to start again.
I can't speak for smelting copper. I believe the process is similar but easier because of lower temperatures.
And charcoal doesn't come for free. There's a whole involved process for making charcoal, requiring *lots* of wood (and preferably hardwood which burns hotter but is much harder to cut down). It takes about 4 days (plus wood-chopping time, which you just can't do with just a single stone hand-axe and one person) to make charcoal from scratch, and it's a very tricky process requiring a lot of practice.
There's a reason we spent thousands of years in the bronze age before we started using iron. It's not because we didn't know about iron ores.
Well I read it :)
I tend to agree...this debate isn't really about GUI vs CLI, it's more a desire for a third type of tool altogether.
CLI's are good for all the reasons everyone's been saying they're good (mainly scripting, which incidentally helps with documentation and auditing)
GUI's are good when you need to do a completely new task in a limited time without messing it up (no time for man pages, just do it!) or when you're unfamiliar with the system.
If we could produce a fully-scriptable interface that provided a complete and exhaustive list of all the possible options, with their acceptable parameter values, and a 'warning! are you sure you want to do this?' mechanism, then we'd be getting to what people really need.
I don't assume that the scientists have not checked out the Caption Obvious answers. I assume they don't talk about them because they don't get paid to talk about them because they're obvious.
I see the situation like this:
Mr Climate Scientist studies sea levels. He (for he is a male climate scientist) wants to continue studying sea levels. However, in order for him to do that, someone must pay him to study sea levels. In order for someone to pay him to study sea levels, someone else with money must be interested enough in sea levels to pay him.
He finds that sea levels go up and down a lot all over the world for lots of different reasons. But saying that in a paper will not be interesting. So he writes a paper about how the sea levels are going up and lots of people are going to drown. He gets two friends who are also interested in continuing to be paid to study the climate to peer-review his paper, and a journal that's interested in being read by people with money who could be scared of rising sea levels publishes it.
I think there's a problem with peer-reviewed science.