I'd agree with this completely, except for the fact that hiring managers suck at picking techies. And the 'questions' that get asked, if they're not technical, are pretty much irrelevant.
Technical competency is pretty much inverse to "team fit" as defined by a non-technical hiring manager. Introverted, awkward, geeky, bookish, maladjusted males are your prime territory here. These are not people who will shine at an interview where they have to be social or ask questions of a non-extremely-technical nature.
and someone willing to do assigned tasks without argument is a waste of space when the assigned tasks are incorrect. You *need* geeks who will stand up for themselves in this area.
If you get to the blame allocation phase of your project, and I really hope you don't, then that's when certificates come into their own.
You can come up with the most perfect slashdot-based system of determining LAMP competency, but when push comes to shove, what a manager wants to see is commercial certificates.
I know and you know that they don't mean shit, anyone can pass them. But they're official bits of paper which means they're *quantifiable* and *indisputable* which makes them gold.
So the question you should be asking is not 'how do I tell if they're competent'...but 'do I value competence when I could be fired if they fail the project?'
Having had to design and implement an application form processing system that deals with the general public, and had millions of applications, then you do have to deal with those edge cases. You can't just say to someone 'no you can't have a card because you've got a stupid name'. You do get Chinese people living in your (English-speaking) country wanting to apply in their own name.
You get idiotic things like people applying with a name of (insert vulgar word here), who then go to the press and complain that you sent them a card with (same vulgar word) on it. The press joyfully print the story and suddenly you're implementing a blacklist on your data and cursing the good people of Scunthorpe.
You get people who name their kids with the same name as themselves, so they have multiple people of the same name at one address.
You get people who marry and have the same first name. Sam, Tony, Robin, for example, are all gender-neutral, and in our culture a wife takes her husband's name. Given enough random pairings eventually a Sam will marry a Sam. And that's without considering same-sex marriages.
Names are not identifiers in any meaningful sense. The combination of name, date of birth, gender, and zip code/postcode/area code is about the best you can get, but even then it's trivial to think of examples that will break this (I bet there's some joker couple out there who named their identical twins with identical names).
(and here we go with the 'trollbait' mods...skeptic opinion always gets modded trollbait)
Cap and Trade provides an enormous market for banks to make fortunes in. It's another commodity market, only on a commodity that isn't actually related to any actual industry or production measure (and so is infinitely capable of being manipulated by "market makers"). It's the commodites equivalent of a financial derivates market; futures trading in something that has no actual objective value in the future.
Cap and Trade is not going to have anything to do with atmospheric CO2, and even less to do with Global Warming. It's a scam, pure and simple.
For example: how, exactly, are they going to measure a multinational company's CO2 emissions to any kind of accurate degree? And if they do solve that thorny question (which I haven't seen any workable solution for), how are they going to stop multinational companies from playing this game, given that the company can move its CO2-producing operations to another country, sell it's Carbon Credits and continue polluting the same atmosphere with the same emissions, only more profit?
The problem is that this doesn't work for software, but does work (well, works the way the industry wants it to work) for other industries, especially drugs and manufacturing.
After all, patent law was developed and refined into something that works well for those industries over many many years.
The problem is that in manufacturing you have to have a working prototype, and in the drugs industry you have to patent a specific compound, but in software you can patent an idea or broad concept without a prototype.
IMHO if they just required a working prototype for software inventions like they do for hardware inventions then a lot of the trolling would vanish.
Agree......what happens when a generation of Americans brought up to believe that:
1. their nation was chosen by God to lead the world, and
2. guns are good, everyone should have at least one
grow up in a world where the American economy is losing ground and will be incapable of supporting their place on top of the hill, let alone shining the beacon?
My money's on a lot of those guns getting used on other Americans.
Britain managed to shed its empire and come down off 'the hill' with remarkably little bloodshed (a mass of African conflicts and the ongoing India v Pakistan problem notwithstanding), mostly because America picked up the baton as Britain let it go...who's going to pick up the baton this time?
The earth's magnetic field protects us from charged particle radiation, not from electromagnetic waves (which are 99.9999% the cause of solar heating). Thus, your entire theory was just shot down in 1 sentence.
The greenhouse effect is indisputable; earth would be at least 20C colder without it. The drastic increase in carbon dioxide (a major greenhouse gas) over the past 150 years is indisputable. You could possibly dispute mans effect on the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but my guess is that it has been studied and verified already (I am not a climatologist). Thus, if man has an effect on the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, man has an effect on the greenhouse effect, which has a major effect on the global average temperature.
2 points here: 1. Carbon's effect on the greenhouse effect isn't linear, and tails off pretty sharply at around the level we're at, which is also around the level that the biosphere maintains naturally (probably not a coincidence). The Global Warming effect from increased CO2 is supposed to come from positive(runaway) feedback effects triggered by the CO2, not the increased level of CO2 itself. So far, none of those feedbacks have been observed. 2. The amount of CO2 that human activity causes/generates is pretty insignificant compared to the amount of carbon washing around the planet in the biosphere.
If we could stop wasting our time trying to convince all the people incapable of logical thought, maybe we could use our ability to control the global average temperature to our advantage.
We don't have the ability to control the temperature. So far our only proposed method of controlling the atmosphere is by taxing it via cap-and-trade. This tax is why we're only hearing about carbon now instead of 'greenhouse gases' and why suddenly big business is green...there's a LOT of money to be made here.
Actually the one with better people skills is the one you want.
Maths is great for some coding problems, I'm not saying it isn't, but you rarely bump into a commercial coding problem that requires any degree of serious maths. I've been commercial coding for nearly 20 years, and I've hit a maths problem 3 times (and the last two were solved by a half-day of Googling).
But you will bump into a people problem in commercial coding. Every. Single. Day. Knowing how to cope with those is massively more important (and Google can't help you with them).
But the article wasn't really talking about this. The article was talking about becoming a Great Programmer. To become a Great Programmer, don't spend your days coding CRUD websites. You're never going to build/discover something amazing while doing commercial coding.
When I get involved in these arguments, I like to point out that in fact the vast majority of child abuse in this country has been carried out by members of the clergy, particularly the Catholic church, and that statistically the most effective way of reducing child abuse in this country would be to close all church-run orphanages and missions.
This would eliminate something like 99% of all child abuse, and wouldn't affect the everyday lives of anyone else. While implementing the Conroy Filter will create a burden on the rest of the country but will not stop a single child being abused.
Needless to say, this doesn't go over particularly well
Actually, the polls that have been performed so far seem to indicate that the 'clean feed' idea behind the legislation goes over very well with the average Aussie voter, and they're not getting the 'geek rage' message that it won't work and will slow down the internet.
There needs to be a whole load of education to the masses to get across the reality of what they're proposing, and how it can be used in future to censor anything the pollies don't want the public to know about, before there's any real chance of this not going through.
And don't depend on Mr Abbott and friends to stop it. The Churches are all for it, in fact there's a strong indication that the Clean Feed is a deliberate play to the right-wing church lobby groups.
Our only hope is the Greens (and the Sex party and Pirate party*) who are the only 'major' political party who have definitely come out against this.
(* who should definitely join forces to form the Sexy Pirate party)
Academic prestive and paid research poistions are the motivation.
The CRU gets massive respect and lots of funding because it's 'leading the charge' against AGW.
If AGW is disproved they lose a lot of funding.
Same goes for *every* climatologist out there. 'Peer-reviewed' becomes a joke because maintaining AGW becomes more important than accurately assessing the paper.
Showing that the system was rigged and that some valid papers were rejected is enough. Even showing that a single valid paper was rejected is enough, because it's not supposed to be possible.
A conspiracy has been exposed, and that's enough to start questioning the conspirators and treating the evidence skeptically.
While we were unable to review the Switzerland logs, mostly due to our failure to coordinate between volunteers’ time to run the scripts, Switzerland assisted us in finding some interesting conclusions. We left a server to seed a.torrent file of a public domain video; our volunteers downloaded and uploaded the file again and again, looking for potential interference by the ISP or RST packets. We were unable to produce any substantial results or conclusions regarding traffic, mostly due to Switzerland’s interface.
So they didn't get anything from Switzerland...
The Glasnost tests appeared to be more rigorously done, but 8 samples is a very low population, and there appeared to be no control.
Plus the out-of-context:
However, after a massive number of attempts, we found out that another user is seeding our torrent, from the IP address 212.235.15.36 and not from the libTorrent Client we used (screenshot, screenshot ). We found a mention of such IP address in an Israeli Hardware forum describing it as one of Netvision’s caching servers (HWZone, 2009).
And no attempt to ascertain and eliminate alternative causes for the results.
Redacting just the properly secret bits would give you too much of an idea about what is secret, and that would allow you to make educated guesses about what the secret bits maybe are.
Redacting the secrtet bits plus a random selection of paragraphs prevents you from guessing the secret bits.
The state of Gelder, in a move to combat terrorism, has banned shoes.
A spokesman for the government said 'We know from two recent terrorist attacks that the terrorists used shoes to transport themselves between attack targets. Consequently we are removing this method of transport from the terrorist's arsenal'.
In a separate statement, ministers said they were considering the effectiveness of a ban on long trousers used by terrorists to conceal their knees.
Sorry to contradict, but I'm a strong Darwinist and a medium Climate Sceptic (or maybe Skeptic).
I see the same dogmatic adherence to arguments from authority in both the Creationist and Green movements, and it repels me utterly.
I am suspicious of the Green Agenda (and openly opposed to the Creationist Agenda)...I have had too many conversations with devout Greens who insist that the only way to save the planet is to ditch Capitalism and go back to a pre-industrial 'golden age'. Even for non-devout, the usual response of 'we've got to start changing our ways' doesn't actually contain any useful actions, just a vague 'recycle more' meme. No-one seems to understand that to cut greenhouse gases by 20% (not just Carbon ffs...that's only one of several greenhouse gases!) we have to cut our society's output by 20%. That means we all get 20% poorer or 20% of us die. The Great Recession saw GDP's drop by 2-5% and there's already huge suffering. How much suffering for a 20% drop?
I have no doubt that the climate is changing. The entire planet is constantly changing, that's clear. The insanity of politicians picking a temperature and saying 'no further than this' is crass stupidity, a modern equivalent of the old King Cnut story of commanding the tide to stop. And it's utterly pointless: if the climate does cross their line, then they're impotent to do anything about it. If the climate doesn't cross their line, then we'll never know if that was because we did things, or because we didn't...too many causes affect the climate for us to be able to unravel them and attribute blame/credit.
And meanwhile the population rises and rises. If the assembled Nations of the World had said '6 billion and no more' and start sterilising their populations, then that's climate action I can believe in. All the rest is just bullshit politics.
Digital storage makes perfect copies but uses media that don't survive well (mostly because of the incredible data densities used). Making redundant copies is trivial, and replenishing those copies regularly (and completely accurately) is also trivial...so the best way of storing a digital file is on a series of different digital media, each replaced every few years with fresh copies. Every few months is better.
The fact we haven't got a commercial solution to do this yet is a different problem;)
Utter tripe. Paper is subject to a vast array of environmental hazards and will degrade quickly and messily if subject to any of them.
The usual response to this is that books have survive thousands of years intact...but no they haven't. They're heavily degraded, and the vast majority of them didn't survive (do the maths on monastical book production and surviving examples). The ones that have survived have been patched and repaired and maintained, often poorly, and have only survived because generations of people spent a lot of care on them. As a long-term data storage solution, paper sucks.
Using a data matrix you'd need to trade off resolution size and storage space. Assuming 1 bit takes up 1 square mm (reasonable to resist degradation from ink seepage over the first hundred years, after which it would probably be unreadable), then an A4 page (allowing for margins) can hold around 56kb (7KB) with no error correction or compression. That's 146 pages per Meg, or 150,000 pages per gig. A standard ream of paper is 500 pages which would contain 7MB of data if you use both sides of each page. Assuming your graphic file is 1GB in size, that's 142 reams of paper. Assuming 1Kg per ream (depends on the density of the paper, so arbitrary amount used), that's the weight of two average human beings (or a slashdot reader + laptop). Not really portable, so it'd need to be stored somewhere.
The storage would need to be environmentally controlled and sterile. The paper is vulnerable to moisture, fungal or bacterial colonisation, insect attack, fire, sunlight, and will degrade naturally with time anyway (rate depending on the paper used).
I carry a pocket USB stick around with me that has 8 Gb on it...in paper storage that's 1,100 reams of paper, or just over a metric tonne. Point made.
And the awesome response from the article, which I completely agree with...
Myth #7: A Ph.D. means something.
Reality: The only thing a Ph.D. means is that you're not a moron, and you're willing to put up with the bullshit it takes to slog your way through a Ph.D. program somewhere. Empirically, having a Ph.D. is negatively correlated with business success. This is because the reward structure in academia is almost the exact opposite of what it is in business. In academia, what your peers think matters. In business, it's what your customers think that matters, and your customers are (almost certainly) not your peers.
[UPDATE: this is not to say that getting a Ph.D. is useless. You can learn a lot of useful stuff by getting a Ph.D. But it's the knowledge and experience that you gain by going through the process that is potentially valuable (for business endeavors), not the degree itself.]
Regarding the original poster...the most important component of any startup is not the technology but the business plan. You fail to mention if you've even got a business plan, which tends to suggest you don't. So stop, go back to work, find a business angel or someone who knows how to run a business, and then convince them to give your idea a try.
so Scientology is a dangerous cult, but Catholicism is not?
Catholics, in the name of their religion, have killed and tortured thousands, if not millions, of innocent people. The Catholic church was found to have systematically raped and abused thousands of innocent children assigned to its care in Ireland within the last 30 years. The Catholic Church *still* preaches the evils of contraception to the developing world, when every agency and involved party says that this is directly contributing to the developing world's poverty and suffering. And that's just the first three that come to mind.
Scientology is a mere beginner at being a dangerous cult, though I'll agree it's showing promise.
And how come religions deserve special protection, but other forms of association don't? How come the Australian government doesn't have a special law banning people from saying nasty things about us WoW players?
still too narrow for my tastes... trees don't 'move' (and lichens definitely don't) yet they're definitely alive
and before you say 'but they're unlikely to be intelligent' I suggest you read the original article;) The ability to do 'intelligent' stuff is demonstrated in the videos to not require cells/neurons/gates/etc
All plant and animal life on this planet evolved from a single cell. We all share a common ancestor that out-reproduced every other form of life on the planet (except some other single-cell organisms, possibly) it goes without saying that our ancestor was very suitable to our planet. What we don't know is who the other contenders were and what life would look like if they'd won (presumably because the planet's conditions favoured different forms).
Thinking crystals that shunt heat around to liquify and solidify bits of themselves and use crystallisation waveforms to think isn't that unlikely...
Slashdot Mirror
I'd agree with this completely, except for the fact that hiring managers suck at picking techies. And the 'questions' that get asked, if they're not technical, are pretty much irrelevant.
Technical competency is pretty much inverse to "team fit" as defined by a non-technical hiring manager. Introverted, awkward, geeky, bookish, maladjusted males are your prime territory here. These are not people who will shine at an interview where they have to be social or ask questions of a non-extremely-technical nature.
and someone willing to do assigned tasks without argument is a waste of space when the assigned tasks are incorrect. You *need* geeks who will stand up for themselves in this area.
If you get to the blame allocation phase of your project, and I really hope you don't, then that's when certificates come into their own.
You can come up with the most perfect slashdot-based system of determining LAMP competency, but when push comes to shove, what a manager wants to see is commercial certificates.
I know and you know that they don't mean shit, anyone can pass them. But they're official bits of paper which means they're *quantifiable* and *indisputable* which makes them gold.
So the question you should be asking is not 'how do I tell if they're competent'...but 'do I value competence when I could be fired if they fail the project?'
No-one got fired for buying IBM...plus ca change.
Having had to design and implement an application form processing system that deals with the general public, and had millions of applications, then you do have to deal with those edge cases. You can't just say to someone 'no you can't have a card because you've got a stupid name'. You do get Chinese people living in your (English-speaking) country wanting to apply in their own name.
You get idiotic things like people applying with a name of (insert vulgar word here), who then go to the press and complain that you sent them a card with (same vulgar word) on it. The press joyfully print the story and suddenly you're implementing a blacklist on your data and cursing the good people of Scunthorpe.
You get people who name their kids with the same name as themselves, so they have multiple people of the same name at one address.
You get people who marry and have the same first name. Sam, Tony, Robin, for example, are all gender-neutral, and in our culture a wife takes her husband's name. Given enough random pairings eventually a Sam will marry a Sam. And that's without considering same-sex marriages.
Names are not identifiers in any meaningful sense. The combination of name, date of birth, gender, and zip code/postcode/area code is about the best you can get, but even then it's trivial to think of examples that will break this (I bet there's some joker couple out there who named their identical twins with identical names).
none
Cap and Trade isn't designed to work like that.
(and here we go with the 'trollbait' mods...skeptic opinion always gets modded trollbait)
Cap and Trade provides an enormous market for banks to make fortunes in. It's another commodity market, only on a commodity that isn't actually related to any actual industry or production measure (and so is infinitely capable of being manipulated by "market makers").
It's the commodites equivalent of a financial derivates market; futures trading in something that has no actual objective value in the future.
Cap and Trade is not going to have anything to do with atmospheric CO2, and even less to do with Global Warming. It's a scam, pure and simple.
For example: how, exactly, are they going to measure a multinational company's CO2 emissions to any kind of accurate degree?
And if they do solve that thorny question (which I haven't seen any workable solution for), how are they going to stop multinational companies from playing this game, given that the company can move its CO2-producing operations to another country, sell it's Carbon Credits and continue polluting the same atmosphere with the same emissions, only more profit?
The problem is that this doesn't work for software, but does work (well, works the way the industry wants it to work) for other industries, especially drugs and manufacturing.
After all, patent law was developed and refined into something that works well for those industries over many many years.
The problem is that in manufacturing you have to have a working prototype, and in the drugs industry you have to patent a specific compound, but in software you can patent an idea or broad concept without a prototype.
IMHO if they just required a working prototype for software inventions like they do for hardware inventions then a lot of the trolling would vanish.
Agree... ...what happens when a generation of Americans brought up to believe that:
1. their nation was chosen by God to lead the world, and
2. guns are good, everyone should have at least one
grow up in a world where the American economy is losing ground and will be incapable of supporting their place on top of the hill, let alone shining the beacon?
My money's on a lot of those guns getting used on other Americans.
Britain managed to shed its empire and come down off 'the hill' with remarkably little bloodshed (a mass of African conflicts and the ongoing India v Pakistan problem notwithstanding), mostly because America picked up the baton as Britain let it go...who's going to pick up the baton this time?
The earth's magnetic field protects us from charged particle radiation, not from electromagnetic waves (which are 99.9999% the cause of solar heating). Thus, your entire theory was just shot down in 1 sentence.
The greenhouse effect is indisputable; earth would be at least 20C colder without it. The drastic increase in carbon dioxide (a major greenhouse gas) over the past 150 years is indisputable. You could possibly dispute mans effect on the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but my guess is that it has been studied and verified already (I am not a climatologist). Thus, if man has an effect on the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, man has an effect on the greenhouse effect, which has a major effect on the global average temperature.
2 points here:
1. Carbon's effect on the greenhouse effect isn't linear, and tails off pretty sharply at around the level we're at, which is also around the level that the biosphere maintains naturally (probably not a coincidence). The Global Warming effect from increased CO2 is supposed to come from positive(runaway) feedback effects triggered by the CO2, not the increased level of CO2 itself. So far, none of those feedbacks have been observed.
2. The amount of CO2 that human activity causes/generates is pretty insignificant compared to the amount of carbon washing around the planet in the biosphere.
If we could stop wasting our time trying to convince all the people incapable of logical thought, maybe we could use our ability to control the global average temperature to our advantage.
We don't have the ability to control the temperature. So far our only proposed method of controlling the atmosphere is by taxing it via cap-and-trade. This tax is why we're only hearing about carbon now instead of 'greenhouse gases' and why suddenly big business is green...there's a LOT of money to be made here.
Actually the one with better people skills is the one you want.
Maths is great for some coding problems, I'm not saying it isn't, but you rarely bump into a commercial coding problem that requires any degree of serious maths. I've been commercial coding for nearly 20 years, and I've hit a maths problem 3 times (and the last two were solved by a half-day of Googling).
But you will bump into a people problem in commercial coding. Every. Single. Day. Knowing how to cope with those is massively more important (and Google can't help you with them).
But the article wasn't really talking about this. The article was talking about becoming a Great Programmer.
To become a Great Programmer, don't spend your days coding CRUD websites. You're never going to build/discover something amazing while doing commercial coding.
When I get involved in these arguments, I like to point out that in fact the vast majority of child abuse in this country has been carried out by members of the clergy, particularly the Catholic church, and that statistically the most effective way of reducing child abuse in this country would be to close all church-run orphanages and missions.
This would eliminate something like 99% of all child abuse, and wouldn't affect the everyday lives of anyone else. While implementing the Conroy Filter will create a burden on the rest of the country but will not stop a single child being abused.
Needless to say, this doesn't go over particularly well
Actually, the polls that have been performed so far seem to indicate that the 'clean feed' idea behind the legislation goes over very well with the average Aussie voter, and they're not getting the 'geek rage' message that it won't work and will slow down the internet.
There needs to be a whole load of education to the masses to get across the reality of what they're proposing, and how it can be used in future to censor anything the pollies don't want the public to know about, before there's any real chance of this not going through.
And don't depend on Mr Abbott and friends to stop it. The Churches are all for it, in fact there's a strong indication that the Clean Feed is a deliberate play to the right-wing church lobby groups.
Our only hope is the Greens (and the Sex party and Pirate party*) who are the only 'major' political party who have definitely come out against this.
(* who should definitely join forces to form the Sexy Pirate party)
Well, they finally did it.
They found a way to tax the air we breathe.
I'm a climate skeptic though...so no Green for me.
I'm voting Pirate if we can stand anyone up for it :)
http://pirateparty.org.au/
Academic prestive and paid research poistions are the motivation.
The CRU gets massive respect and lots of funding because it's 'leading the charge' against AGW.
If AGW is disproved they lose a lot of funding.
Same goes for *every* climatologist out there. 'Peer-reviewed' becomes a joke because maintaining AGW becomes more important than accurately assessing the paper.
No wonder there's 'consensus'...
"inaccurate" is obviously translated into CRU-speak as "not confirming AGW".
No, you don't actually.
Showing that the system was rigged and that some valid papers were rejected is enough. Even showing that a single valid paper was rejected is enough, because it's not supposed to be possible.
A conspiracy has been exposed, and that's enough to start questioning the conspirators and treating the evidence skeptically.
/agree
I read the paper with increasing incredulousness.
While we were unable to review the Switzerland logs, mostly due to our failure to coordinate between volunteers’ time to run the scripts, Switzerland assisted us in finding some interesting conclusions. We left a server to seed a .torrent file of a public domain video; our volunteers downloaded and uploaded the file again and again, looking for potential interference by the ISP or RST packets. We were unable to produce any substantial results or conclusions regarding traffic, mostly due to Switzerland’s interface.
So they didn't get anything from Switzerland...
The Glasnost tests appeared to be more rigorously done, but 8 samples is a very low population, and there appeared to be no control.
Plus the out-of-context:
However, after a massive number of attempts, we found out that another user is seeding our torrent, from the IP address 212.235.15.36 and not from the libTorrent Client we used (screenshot, screenshot ). We found a mention of such IP address in an Israeli Hardware forum describing it as one of Netvision’s caching servers (HWZone, 2009).
And no attempt to ascertain and eliminate alternative causes for the results.
Oh, and the spelling mistakes.
Like Kickasso said...this is worthless.
It's so you don't know what you don't know.
Redacting just the properly secret bits would give you too much of an idea about what is secret, and that would allow you to make educated guesses about what the secret bits maybe are.
Redacting the secrtet bits plus a random selection of paragraphs prevents you from guessing the secret bits.
But I'm just guessing here ;)
The state of Gelder, in a move to combat terrorism, has banned shoes.
A spokesman for the government said 'We know from two recent terrorist attacks that the terrorists used shoes to transport themselves between attack targets. Consequently we are removing this method of transport from the terrorist's arsenal'.
In a separate statement, ministers said they were considering the effectiveness of a ban on long trousers used by terrorists to conceal their knees.
Sorry to contradict, but I'm a strong Darwinist and a medium Climate Sceptic (or maybe Skeptic).
I see the same dogmatic adherence to arguments from authority in both the Creationist and Green movements, and it repels me utterly.
I am suspicious of the Green Agenda (and openly opposed to the Creationist Agenda)...I have had too many conversations with devout Greens who insist that the only way to save the planet is to ditch Capitalism and go back to a pre-industrial 'golden age'. Even for non-devout, the usual response of 'we've got to start changing our ways' doesn't actually contain any useful actions, just a vague 'recycle more' meme. No-one seems to understand that to cut greenhouse gases by 20% (not just Carbon ffs...that's only one of several greenhouse gases!) we have to cut our society's output by 20%. That means we all get 20% poorer or 20% of us die. The Great Recession saw GDP's drop by 2-5% and there's already huge suffering. How much suffering for a 20% drop?
I have no doubt that the climate is changing. The entire planet is constantly changing, that's clear. The insanity of politicians picking a temperature and saying 'no further than this' is crass stupidity, a modern equivalent of the old King Cnut story of commanding the tide to stop. And it's utterly pointless: if the climate does cross their line, then they're impotent to do anything about it. If the climate doesn't cross their line, then we'll never know if that was because we did things, or because we didn't...too many causes affect the climate for us to be able to unravel them and attribute blame/credit.
And meanwhile the population rises and rises. If the assembled Nations of the World had said '6 billion and no more' and start sterilising their populations, then that's climate action I can believe in. All the rest is just bullshit politics.
yep, it gets me thinking that women like to be paid to code
Agree.
Digital storage makes perfect copies but uses media that don't survive well (mostly because of the incredible data densities used).
Making redundant copies is trivial, and replenishing those copies regularly (and completely accurately) is also trivial...so the best way of storing a digital file is on a series of different digital media, each replaced every few years with fresh copies. Every few months is better.
The fact we haven't got a commercial solution to do this yet is a different problem ;)
only solution guaranteed to last centuries ?
*** PAPER AND INK ***
Utter tripe. Paper is subject to a vast array of environmental hazards and will degrade quickly and messily if subject to any of them.
The usual response to this is that books have survive thousands of years intact...but no they haven't. They're heavily degraded, and the vast majority of them didn't survive (do the maths on monastical book production and surviving examples). The ones that have survived have been patched and repaired and maintained, often poorly, and have only survived because generations of people spent a lot of care on them. As a long-term data storage solution, paper sucks.
Using a data matrix you'd need to trade off resolution size and storage space. Assuming 1 bit takes up 1 square mm (reasonable to resist degradation from ink seepage over the first hundred years, after which it would probably be unreadable), then an A4 page (allowing for margins) can hold around 56kb (7KB) with no error correction or compression. That's 146 pages per Meg, or 150,000 pages per gig. A standard ream of paper is 500 pages which would contain 7MB of data if you use both sides of each page.
Assuming your graphic file is 1GB in size, that's 142 reams of paper. Assuming 1Kg per ream (depends on the density of the paper, so arbitrary amount used), that's the weight of two average human beings (or a slashdot reader + laptop). Not really portable, so it'd need to be stored somewhere.
The storage would need to be environmentally controlled and sterile. The paper is vulnerable to moisture, fungal or bacterial colonisation, insect attack, fire, sunlight, and will degrade naturally with time anyway (rate depending on the paper used).
I carry a pocket USB stick around with me that has 8 Gb on it...in paper storage that's 1,100 reams of paper, or just over a metric tonne. Point made.
Lol. A Ph.D DOES mean something. Get real.
And the awesome response from the article, which I completely agree with...
Myth #7: A Ph.D. means something.
Reality: The only thing a Ph.D. means is that you're not a moron, and you're willing to put up with the bullshit it takes to slog your way through a Ph.D. program somewhere. Empirically, having a Ph.D. is negatively correlated with business success. This is because the reward structure in academia is almost the exact opposite of what it is in business. In academia, what your peers think matters. In business, it's what your customers think that matters, and your customers are (almost certainly) not your peers.
[UPDATE: this is not to say that getting a Ph.D. is useless. You can learn a lot of useful stuff by getting a Ph.D. But it's the knowledge and experience that you gain by going through the process that is potentially valuable (for business endeavors), not the degree itself.]
Regarding the original poster...the most important component of any startup is not the technology but the business plan. You fail to mention if you've even got a business plan, which tends to suggest you don't. So stop, go back to work, find a business angel or someone who knows how to run a business, and then convince them to give your idea a try.
Scientology is a dangerous cult
so Scientology is a dangerous cult, but Catholicism is not?
Catholics, in the name of their religion, have killed and tortured thousands, if not millions, of innocent people.
The Catholic church was found to have systematically raped and abused thousands of innocent children assigned to its care in Ireland within the last 30 years.
The Catholic Church *still* preaches the evils of contraception to the developing world, when every agency and involved party says that this is directly contributing to the developing world's poverty and suffering.
And that's just the first three that come to mind.
Scientology is a mere beginner at being a dangerous cult, though I'll agree it's showing promise.
And how come religions deserve special protection, but other forms of association don't? How come the Australian government doesn't have a special law banning people from saying nasty things about us WoW players?
Life = living = movement
Solid things can't really move...
still too narrow for my tastes...
trees don't 'move' (and lichens definitely don't) yet they're definitely alive
and before you say 'but they're unlikely to be intelligent' I suggest you read the original article ;) The ability to do 'intelligent' stuff is demonstrated in the videos to not require cells/neurons/gates/etc
All plant and animal life on this planet evolved from a single cell. We all share a common ancestor that out-reproduced every other form of life on the planet (except some other single-cell organisms, possibly) it goes without saying that our ancestor was very suitable to our planet. What we don't know is who the other contenders were and what life would look like if they'd won (presumably because the planet's conditions favoured different forms).
Thinking crystals that shunt heat around to liquify and solidify bits of themselves and use crystallisation waveforms to think isn't that unlikely...