If you're going to plug Alienware from experience, do that. If you're going to talk about high end machines that don't have vendor customizations (or in many cases, modern video cards), how is that topical?
Well, it's topical in the sense that GP's experience was that consumer-grade Dell products were crappier. Basically, GGP was saying "Buy from Dell!" GP replied, "Well, you could buy from Dell, but in my experience the only machines worth having were X." As you rightly point out, product X is not the main focus of the current thread... which effectively means that GP's experience is that Dell isn't a good option to answer the OP's question, contra GGP's experience.
You can agree or disagree with him, but he was basically providing his experience of the nuances of which Dell computers are good vs. bad (with the ones which would be most relevant here falling into the "bad" category).
(Personally, I think his advice may be slightly outdated, as Dell has had its ups and downs in the past few years in terms of quality. But most of the post was definitely on topic.)
For all his "geek" status, Bill Gates (with his foundation) failed elementary statistics. He succumbed to the law of small numbers and idiotically pushed for smaller schools for a long period spending a lot of time, money and energy convincing policy makers that the small schools will make students better. ...
If a lot of money is spent by non-accountable idiot organizations , it is not only not good for society but actively harmful.
While this did happen, what's your alternative? We could "do nothing," and simply live with the current system, where things don't get better.
Or, I suppose we could depend on an "accountable" organization. Like what? Government is the most common answer.
Yes, government is "accountable" to voters in a way that a private foundation is not. On the other hand, this "accountability" has very specific effects that can also be problematic, such as:
- Government is often conservative from a policy perspective by nature, since major change risks alienating voters who have voted for you in the past. Government is thus often slower to adopt changes.
- Government certainly also screws up in ways just like your Gates Foundation example. I think this is pretty well known.
- "But," you say, "government is accountable." Yes, but what does that actually mean? What it means is that politicians will do their best to get re-elected. As already mentioned, this tends to work against effective change. It also tends to work against correcting bad change.
Imagine if the federal government in the U.S. had tried what the Gates Foundation did here. Within a few years, there would be a couple states that got special contracts to manufacture special stuff for these "small schools." Then the senators and representatives from those states would now be invested in this scheme (since the program brought "jobs" to their state, and voters care disproportionately about their jobs, whether the policy is effective or not). So, whether it worked or not -- they would fight to block legislation to dismantle it. Depending on how powerful they are and what committees they are on, it could take decades before a program like this would be dismantled.
That's what your "accountability" by voters gets you.
Now, the next possible answer I expect is for you to say, "Well, that's the problem with BIG government. You do things at the federal level, and you get massive bureaucracy. If you instead emphasized LOCAL government, people would have to be in touch with specific effects on the community."
And that's true to an extent. But the problem with insular small governments is that they often don't have the resources to implement big changes (even if they are needed)... and frankly many of them tend to end up corrupt and dysfunctional as well. Many people have this idealistic vision of local government as the place where "real" governing happens, and only if we gave back most power to small governments, everything would be fixed.
The problem is that this argument is based on the same statistical flaw you brought up in your post. It's true that many small governments tend to be more responsive and less dysfunctional than the federal government, but that's mostly selection bias. It's very easy for a small local government to be taken over by wackos too, and this happens in a lot of places.
I'm NOT saying I have better answers or that we shouldn't be concerned about lack of accountability in the Gates Foundation. On the other hand, I think charitable organizations do add something to the mix of new ideas, and sometimes what they do can take the lead for governments. I'm NOT convinced by your argument that they necessarily do more harm to society than good.
I don't think it's the anonymity that brings out the worst in people, but the separation of comment and audience.
THIS. My standard example is to observe how people behave in cars when stuck in traffic, compared to how they would behave if just walking down the street. Even that little bit of separation causes all sorts of madness and "road rage" that generally doesn't happen when people are in contact directly.
Would you randomly start screaming at someone if they were walking a little too slow in front of you? Most people wouldn't. But a lot more people will lay on their horn and hold it for five seconds or more (not a polite short "tap" on the horn to get someone's attention) and/or roll down the window and start ranting, gesturing wildly, etc.
If you were instead walking behind someone on the sidewalk, you'd likely ask politely to get around someone. Or, if you instead were just grumbling behind them, they'd likely hear it and move out of the way or say "Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't know you needed to get by..." or whatever. Communication can happen, because you see the person's face and demeanor -- maybe they're elderly or lost or whatever.
But when you're separated in two cars, communication is less likely. Rage develops because you get stuck "in your own head" ranting and working yourself up, rather than communicating and sorting out the issue with another person directly.
This kind of build-up of emotions and loss of civility happens exactly the same way with the disconnect on the internet. The automatic assumption many people have is that others are idiots, jerks, shills, etc., because frustration builds up -- particularly if written communication fails in successive posts... just like the guy holding down the carhorn and making obscene gestures which he might never do to someone's face.
That way both rights can be upheld and everyone should be happy. That's exactly what has happened in this case so I'm shedding no tears for anyone. The system is working, I see no reason for anyone to be complaining.
Except the ones who are "complaining" (in your terms) are ALSO exercising their free speech rights. Sure, a company should not be compelled to broadcast speech, but on the other hand they presumably want to attract customers. If they refuse to broadcast speech in a way that customers find unfair, the customers may not come. If enough people complain about such policies in public forums, the companies might be convinced that broadcasting the speech is in their interest. THAT is ALSO the "system working," by allowing complainers to exercise THEIR free speech rights, even if you don't agree with their perspective.
Should I walk to the east and board an Elven ship to Valinor, for my time has passed?
Uh, the undying lands lie to the WEST. Cirdan waits for the elves on the Western shore so they can sail west! Unless you want to go hang out with the blue wizards, I don't know why you're heading east.
As a techie I find it absolutely amazing that there is a taxi company that didn't accept credit cards.
First off, many (most?) black cabs in London DO accept credit cards. TFS and TFA are unclear -- but the difference is NOT that you couldn't get a black cab that accepted credit cards before. It's just now ALL black cabs will be required to accept them.
Second, do you travel much?
Even in the past year, I've been asked in at least two major cities (in the U.S. and in Europe, not London) whether I needed a cab that accepts credit cards when I ordered one. Five years ago, it was still very common to be asked that question when you ordered a cab. While many cabs accepted them, you simply couldn't depend on it -- and (if my experience is indicative) you still can't depend on it in some places, even major cities.
I agree the Uber angle doesn't warrant being mentioned here, but the article has merrit even without that.
Credit cards have been accepted in cabs for many years, but it hasn't been consistent. Now London is forcing all drivers to accept them. While this is of very mild interest to tech people I suppose, it's hardly major news. It's kinda like if a city required all licensed restaurants to accept credit cards instead of being a "cash only" business or location. Would that be of significant tech interest??
(Actually, if any city tried to do THAT, I'd imagine the discussion here would be the opposite and it'd end up in "Your Rights Online" -- "How DARE they force us into a cashless economy! Today it's forcing businesses to accept credit, tomorrow it's no cash allowed! My right to anonymous transactions must be upheld!!!")
unless we change the law of gravity [to something enormously more complex - c.f. epicycles]... No dark matter is the epicyclic solution.
I completely agree with your post. However, I really wish people would stop using the "epicycle" as something to denote ridiculous complexity.
The reduction of epicycles is NOT what drove the Scientific Revolution. Some facts:
- Medieval astronomers did NOT add "epicycles on epicycles." Owen Gingerich, one of the foremost historians of science and perhaps the world's greatest expert on Copernicus has spent nearly 50 years trying to stamp out this myth, which seems (according to him) to have originated with some ignorant writings in the early 1800s which had no clue how the earlier astronomical systems worked. If people actually understand how the system works and how the tables medieval astronomers used were constructed, everyone would easily comprehend why it wouldn't have been basically impossible (in a practical computational sense) for medieval astronomers to add "epicycles on epicycles," even if they wanted to.
- Even if medieval astronomers wanted to do this, they simply didn't make the required number of observations necessary to construct such a system. And even if they did the observations, their models of the sky weren't accurate enough to do the sorts of measurements necessary to see planetary position error. (The only way they could tell planetary position was in reference to the fixed stars, but those experienced precession over the centuries and Ptolemy's model of precession was screwed up and had inaccurate medieval corrections thrown in... that didn't exactly work well.) Bottom line: even if they wanted to measure planets with greater accuracy to construct such a system, they couldn't.
- The main reason why anyone got interested in these problems in the 1500s is because there were a few observations where Mars was REALLY out of whack (like 5-6 degrees) with the original Ptolemaic predictions. which happened at conjunctions. Copernicus was driven toward his system after one of these "Martian disasters." Tycho Brahe did observations of the same periodic problem in 1593, which probably led him to tell Kepler to work on the Mars problem.
- Copernicus did NOT eliminate epicycles. In fact, as he tried to make his system more accurate, he actually ended up introducing MORE epicycles than the standard Ptolemaic model.
- Kepler's greatest move toward greater accuracy was achieved by use of old Ptolemaic idea of equants to offset the earth's position around the sun correctly, which produced a MAJOR improvement in predictions, even still using the old epicycle model. The need for epicycles was finally abolished with Kepler's adoption of elliptical orbits, but this correction was much smaller, perhaps only about 1/10th of the improvement in accuracy compared to Kepler's previous advances still assuming the equant/deferent/epicycle models.
TL;DR: Epicycles were good "science" that more than adequately fit the data for ancient and medieval astronomers. Nobody was putting MORE epicycles in to make corrections to the old model, except arguably Copernicus himself. Nobody thought of replacing the old Ptolemaic model until people started doing enough observations to notice a real problem, and after that solutions were proposed almost immediately. And the improvement Kepler made by finally getting rid of epicycles was REALLY small (comparatively), especially seen in contrast to the corrections introduced by adopting heliocentrism and displacing the earth's orbit (both of which were still done in the old geometric system which required epicycles).
So, the modern practice of using "epicycles" as derogatory parlance for a bad, overly complex model doesn't make much sense.
But don't listen to me. You can listen to Owen Gingerich himself describe what he calls
Given that things like cut and paste are totally different key strokes between Windows and Mac, worrying about key placement seems kinda pointless.
Huh? In most Mac apps, the shortcuts are Command-X and Command-V. On most Windows apps, the shortcuts are CTRL-X and CTRL-V.
Your pinky just needs to move one key over. It's annoying as heck. I use a Mac at work (because that's what they give me), but I need a Linux virtual machine to get certain work done. It's a pain in the neck because on the same freakin' keyboard, I need to put my pinky in two difference places depending on what workspace I'm on. About 50% of the time I get it wrong and have some random other thing pop up that I didn't want. (And yes, I could go and try to change default keyboard shortcuts, but some of those are application-specific, and it's a pain.)
Back in the mid 90's I really appreciated the external analogue volume control on my Thinkpad. One quick swipe before booting up to turn the sound off ensured no embarrassingly loud chime when Windows XP started.
I agree with you that analog volume control is a good thing.
But I'm very confused:
(1) If you were "embarrassed" by the Windows XP chime, why not disable it (or disable system sounds completely)?? That's one of the first 3 things I do when installing an operating system -- I don't need my computer to beep at me just to say, "Hello, I've booted your OS!" Obviously you disliked it enough to find it "embarrassing"; why have it at all?
(2) Even so, I also still can't figure out how you were even booting Windows XP "back in the mid 90s." It didn't exist yet.
You did not look very hard - that article is talking about something very different, kids 3 to 11. Babies and toddlers need a lot more attention than older kids.
Not only that. The article implies that extra time with kids is mostly detrimental when parents are stressed during that time. Extrapolating to infants, where Moms of newborns tend to be really stressed, it seems like having an extra hand (like a father) around would significantly reduce maternal stress, which the quoted study implies would be a good thing.
3 movies for such a short story was what killed it. I mean did it have to take 1 whole movie just reach the damn mountain?
Agreed. Before I even saw the first movie, I said, "I'd rather have a 9-movie series doing The Lord of the Rings rather than 3 long movies about The Hobbit." There just wasn't enough material and enough stories to fill the time.
Anthony Lane, after alluding to Wagner's seemingly never-ending "Ring Cycle" of operas, in his review of the first Hobbit movie in The New Yorker probably summed it up best, concluding:
As Bilbo says, nearing the end of the book, "Roads go ever ever on." Tell me about it.
So which one of those goes to the article that the summary is about? It's the second! That's so counter-intuitive! Seriously! Why do I have to click through your links to figure out what you're linking to?
Use a browser on a real computer. Hover over link. Discover that second link is the one with a URL which matches the opening of the first sentence. Click second link.
It's only the people trying to use phones/tablets/etc. who are screwed... both by their non-discoverable OS and by Slashdot and its clickbaiting.
Okay, but iOS i still easier to use compared to Android, which is why I steer my parents and any other people who are likely to want computer support toward iOS devices whenever it makes sense.
My mom was more productive on her iPad after a week of using it than she was with her Galaxy S2 after 3 years.
And I can tell you stories about how my parents have continuously screwed up everything they have done with their iPad for the past 5 years. So what? -- older people are going to have trouble with lots of these interfaces, because there's nothing there to explain anything.
What's wrong with having TEXT buttons or menus (even as an OPTION) on a large iPad screen? You don't have the excuse of "It's a phone; there's no room." There is room. And then I could tell them to go to menu X, select clearly labeled word Y and then choose option Z. Instead, I have to spend 5 minutes every time saying, "Swipe up from the bottom... no, you accidentally swiped the wrong way... no, you must have hit the wrong thing, go back... ah, you finally swiped up, now hit that blue button with the funny trapezoid on the front of the rounded rectangle... it disappeared? Oh you took too long, swipe up again... [repeat actions of the past 2 minutes]... what? you don't know what a trapezoid is? We had this discussion the last five times you did this... what airplane? why are you talking about an airplane -- you're in airplane mode again, how did you do that?... let's turn that off and start from the beginning..."
It is good to see others who have also noticed that Apple may have lost its way regarding user-centric design.
TFA misses the point. Apple hasn't "lost its way" -- most of the design changes are clearly on purpose. It follows the classic cult paradigm of keeping esoteric knowledge for the "in-crowd."
I admire Apple, and I use many of its products, so don't dismiss me as a "hater." Hear me out. First, Apple made inroads into certain cultural groups and convinced them that "Mac" was superior to clunky Windows. Then those cultural trendsetters came to be "believers" in all things Apple. A few really good products (e.g., the early iPod designs) helped cement this.
Next step: make your interfaces LESS discoverable, and more dependent on "in-crowd knowledge." This reinforces the cult mindset, creating even more of a feeling that Mac/Apple product users are "in the know" -- knowledge about how to use things is passed between people directly by demonstration, rather than discoverable on your own or with a manual. (No manuals shipped with products anymore either, so unless you specifically go online and try to download one, you're forced to network with other Mac/iPod/iPhone/iPad/etc. users to figure out how to do anything.)
This is the creation of a sort of what cultural historians and sociologists sometimes call an "Imaginary Community" of like-minded folks. You divide up the world into "Mac users" and everyone else.
But non-discoverable interfaces also have the side effect of creating patentable UI structures (like icon sets, or special gesture interfaces), which other non-Apple companies will have to license, if they hope to be compatible with Mac users' expectations. That's the logic likely behind all of the big companies pushing obscure graphical icons ("What the heck does that weird trapezoid with a swirly do?") -- the MS Office Ribbon, Gmail getting rid of text on buttons, and Apple are all trying to win at the same game: they want users to get "locked in" and used to their particular interface, which is only understandable with practice, deliberately NOT discoverable. Discoverable interfaces allow people to switch companies/software/products -- the big tech companies want you to be so stuck with their product that you won't even know how to use another's product.
That's the reason behind TFA's main complaint -- UI design is no longer about ease of use. It is only about that when a company wants to become established. After that, these companies want to force customers to stay, which means creating custom "parts" which are not interchangeable with anyone else's. In the old days, those parts were literal physical things; now they are stuff like icon sets and specific learned (and hopefully patentable!) non-discoverable gestures and UI tricks.
IBM lost the war back in the 80s when it tried to be an open standard for everyone, which just led other companies to pull ahead after all of IBM's hard work in setting the standard. All tech companies learned that lesson.
So, TFA completely misses the point. As TFA notes, Apple products strive to be beautiful -- that's part of the "wow" factor that makes you want to join the cult. Then you join and learn all the esoteric gestures (used to be secret handshakes, now it's how you swipe with three fingers and click or whatever), which you pass along to your fellow cult members. You also learn to decode the secret symbols of the cult by clicking on weird ambiguous pictures rather than self-explanatory words.
Apple knows exactly what it's doing. Too bad the author of TFA hasn't figured it out.
I, for one, wholeheartedly welcome our Robotic Plant Overlords.
I don't. At least there will be warning. Just watch out for these plants demanding blood. They are known to prey on unsuspecting awkward antisocial guys and make them extravagant promises, so this is particularly relevant to the Slashdot crowd.
I quote an ancient warning song of the bards passed down for generations:
They may offer you fortune and fame,
Love and money and instant acclaim,
But whatever they offer you:
Don't feed the plants!
They may offer you lots of cheap thrills,
Fancy condos in Beverly Hills,
But whatever they offer you:
Don't feed the plants!
I have even heard tell of an old-fashioned morality play which shows the consequences of ignoring this advice.
Academics themselves are not blameless for allowing this situation to arise.
True, and some academics have taken it upon themselves to found new independent open-access journals and such. We just had a story here about it a couple weeks ago.
The problem is for junior academics, or those still looking to obtain a better job, you don't really have much choice in the matter assuming you want to keep your grants and labs and get tenure. In most fields, there are "high impact" journals, and grant review boards and tenure review committees look for those journals. Publishing in some new-fangled journal with no history or reputation will just lead those doing job reviews to scratch their heads... not to mention that your work is less likely to be cited if it's read by nobody because people in your field don't even know about this new journal.
I agree with you that academics should take a more active role in dismantling this system. But the reality is that the academics who depend on journals aren't really in a place to break out of the system without potentially jeopardizing their careers, while those academics who are already senior enough and/or famous enough to not have to worry about that also have better things to do with their time... like actually doing important research.
Publishing nowadays is sort of a "necessary evil" in science. The reality is that academics mostly know others in their subdisciplines and can share work directly and instantly via email or whatever, making journals less important than they were years ago for actual progress of science.
If anything, I'd also blame the gradual shift in higher education toward scoring job performance based on publication numbers and "impact" scores, which is partly coming through administration (demanding a sort of standard metric to evaluate whom to hire and to tenure). I've seen many situations where beloved professors who are great teachers, great assets to the university community (in terms of service, collegiality, etc.), great mentors who have probably mentored more students to publish reams of stuff, etc. be kicked out the door because they didn't publish enough or in high-enough profile publications. Three of the smartest people I know in one field were denied tenure, sometimes at multiple universities, for this reason.
So until there's a systematic change, it's hard for individual academics to stand up and refuse to participate in this publication game or to radically alter it on their own.
What's your fondest memory of Bill Gates Blue Screen-of-death that could?
The Olympic one is excellent, though I'd also have to go for the classic demo of Windows 98 which actually had Bill Gates standing right there when it happened.
Bill: "... That must be why we're not shipping Windows 98 yet..."
Absolutely, Bill. Absolutely.
Unfortunately... you did ship that (though 98 wasn't that bad). But then Windows ME. And then Vista. And then Windows 8. You keep doing it.
Sorry to self-reply, but I should clarify that I believe most if not all Western countries have officially adopted the Gregorian calendar. But a number of countries with strong presence of Orthodox Christians have official churches which have instead adopted the Revised Julian. There have been some politicians in these countries which have claimed the official calendar is not Gregorian...
Obviously it's probably unlikely that anyone is going to care about this stuff 800 years from now. It's still an amusing bit of weird calendar discrepancies.
Every year divisible by 4 is a leap year, except for those divisible by 100, except those divisible by 400. How much software will consider the year 2100 a leap year because the algorithm was dumbed down to every four years?
Actually, that rule is only true of the Gregorian calendar. Many countries have never officially adopted the Gregorian calendar, but rather use the Revised Julian Calendar, whose rules say that you only have leap years in centennial years when the year number/100 MOD 9 comes out to 2 or 6.
(This was done because the Revised Julian algorithm produces a much more accurate approximation to the true year than the Gregorian calendar.)
The Revised Julian Calendar and the Gregorian Calendar line up in their rules for now, but they will diverge in the year 2800. It seems unlikely that our political structures will survive until then with their different official calendars, but it does raise the question...
Have you coded in preparation for the Y2.8k problem?
(Actually, now that I say it, it sounds like some weird calendar problem in old modems....)
If we don't bother with leap seconds, then the distance that the sun will be off from being directly overhead at the equinox is about the same as it is now from being a couple of hundred miles away from the meridian. A simpler solution to the problem would be to, every couple of thousand years, have a one-hour reset.
Actually, the problem is worse than that (and shows the futility of the leap second system), because the earth is of course slowing down.
So, while we now have to add a leap second every few years or whatever, eventually that will become every year, then two every year, and then the current system will break, because right now we're only allowed two leap seconds per year by the current standard.
At best, adding up to two leap seconds per year will be able to keep up with the slowing earth for about another 200 years. If we added no leap seconds for the next 200 years, however, we'd only be off by maybe 5 minutes or so.
So, the current system simply can't work for very long anyway. It's going to break well before we'd have gotten anywhere close to a need for a "one-hour reset."
Good. 8 more years of time working correctly. The fundamental issue is that the Earth just doesn't care what our atomic clocks measure. If programmers want an exact time system without leap seconds, use TAI, that's what it's for. Most people in the world don't care if it's hard to code leap seconds. Instead, most people go outside occasionally, and they expect that 'noon' means approximately 'sun at highest point'. We can switch to some system other than leap seconds, but if we expect 'noon' to have its conventional meaning, then we need to agree on a system that does that.
Except that system is NOT UTC. The system where "noon" means "sun at highest point" is called UT1. UTC is the "smoothed out" version of UT1 that allows an error up to a second.
Other than astronomers, nobody really cares about UT1. Nobody really cares about the 1-second error in UTC either when it comes to "noon." Heck, most countries shift where the sun is at noon twice each year to observe "daylight savings."
The question is whether there is any practical benefit to keeping UTC within 1 second of UT1. People who really need UT1 already use it. People who don't generally don't care about that sort of precision for when the sun hits its zenith.
SO -- what would happen if we just got rid of leap seconds for the moment and allowed UTC to drift for a while? We'd likely accumulate a few minutes of error over the next several centuries. Maybe when we get 10 minutes off, somebody might actually care that the sun isn't lining up, but that wouldn't happen for hundreds of years.
And, you might say -- "BUT, BUT... we can't let that happen, because what about our systems in the year 2500 which will be running legacy code and will suddenly need to insert leap MINUTES! DISASTER!"
No -- there would be disaster anyway. Because the earth is gradually slowing down, we'll begin to need more and more leap seconds as the centuries go by. By the time we get to the point that the collective error in UTC is enough for the average person to care where "noon" is, we'll already be to the point when two leap seconds per year probably won't be enough to keep us "on track," so we'll have to redesign the "leap second" system anyway as it's currently implemented.
Thus, there's absolutely no good reason for leap seconds (at least in the current system). If you really care where the sun is, use UT1. If not, by the time the collective error builds up enough for anyone to care, it will be time to overhaul the time system anyway.
Meanwhile, in another anecdote, a history professor I know was on a review committee for a junior high-level history textbook used in Texas (among other states, I believe); they did fully review the textbook, only to have a significant portion of their suggested corrections ignored.
Are you talking about an academic review (usually made up of university faculty, often done before publication while revision is still going on) or a political "Board of Education" -- or state committee or whatever -- review (usually involving random people elected or appointed to decide textbooks, including non-academics, often when they are near their final form)?
State committees don't often submit many "corrections," as much as "requests" to include more material aligned to official state curriculum guidelines (or sometimes more material about the history or industry of that state or whatever).
TFA here is actually about this difference. The Texas Board of Education (political committee) was proposing setting up its own academic review panel (bunch of professors), which obviously publishers don't want -- they already find it a pain to deal with the academic reviewers they ask themselves.
Also, I don't believe he was lavished much in the way of free dinners, vacations, etc. (maybe they save that for the physicists).
Academic reviewers rarely get much in the way of perks. They're the annoying bunch who hold up publication because they find errors and such.
The people who get the perks are the ones who actually have the political power to ADOPT the textbook, which will bring in money to publishers. And the perks will vary depending on the market -- if you can guarantee the publisher to sell a few thousand copies, you might be able to squeeze out a free lunch. If you're adopting for a big state like Texas and can sell millions of copies, you might be wined and dined and who knows what else....
If you look up the study, the exact quote is âoenonconsensual penetration or sexual touching involving physical force or incapacitation,â.
The summary is brain-dead, but in a way that *understates* the problem, compared to the actual quote (which doesn't contain the word "rape").
Two things:
(1) You'll notice that the section of the summary which mentions "touching" is actually a very close paraphrase of the NYT article which is linked there. So the NYT is actually what's "brain-dead," and TFS just continued the "brain-dead" trend of not looking at the source.
(2) I'm sure this will be ignored by most people here, but can I just offer a plea to moderators to think about posts a bit before modding them "+1 Insightful" or "+1 Informative"?
The particular issue is with the common type of Slashdot post which shows up frequently around just about any study -- "Well, gee, a proper study of X would have to consider [obvious factor Y]." The default policy here seems to be to assume that all researchers running studies are absolute morons and would never consider whatever obvious flaw I came up with after 2 seconds of thought and posted on Slashdot. Or, as in this case, we assume that the researchers have some sort of agenda and ignored obvious data flaws or whatever.
Guess what, mods? 90% of these posts are WRONG. Most studies do have some subtle flaws, but researchers generally make an attempt to address many of the obvious ones.
The problem is that summaries are generally too short to contain all the details, so you'd actually have to RTFA to see that the researchers actually did take into account "obvious factor Y." Sometimes TFS is also misleading or poorly worded in such a way, which contributes to the problem. This is an editorial problem, but complaining about the editors here is fruitless, so I'll appeal to those with moderation points:
If you see a post that seems "too good to be true" in claiming to have found some obvious flaw that completely invalidates a study, either take a minute and look at the study and check it, or just ignore the post. Don't just mod it as "Insightful" or "informative" because you wish it were true, or you'd like to think everyone else in the world is an idiot (or, in this case, a manipulative idiot).
I'm tired of seeing obviously stupid posts rise to "+5 Informative" within an hour of a story going up (two such posts in a row here). I'll excuse the people posting such crap, because there's always a lot of crap posts here. But moderation should be taken at least a little more seriously.
By the way, as a further set of datapoints, I'd have a look at this NOAA report with a list of months with greatest deviations from the previous global average.
You'll note that 8 of the top 10 of them occurred in the past 5 years. And this report is from September, so once October is included, it will likely be 9/10 of the most significant upward deviations occurred in the past few years.
One October data point is not the news. The issue is that data point taken in context of the larger and well-established trend.
Meanwhile, individual weather patterns continue to be dismissed as "just weather" when they are mild or abnormally cold, but sung from the rooftops as evidence of AGW when they are usually chaotic or hot.
I agree with you to some extent that an individual data point shouldn't be trumpeted as being evidence of anything for a long-term trend. But I would note that this is NOT what TFS says. It says (1) October is the hottest October in the past 135 years (that's based on 135 data points, not one), and (2) there have been many such record-breaking months recently.
That's not an individual data point. That's a bunch of data seen in a 135-year context. You can argue that 135 years is still a short time window for climate, but still, it's more than a random single data point.
This very report cites October as the hottest October on record as evidence of global warming. Will it therefore be evidence AGAINST global warming if this December is the coldest December on record? Or will the same people who cited this report as AGW evidence suddenly dismiss that as "just a minor weather pattern, not related to climate."?
If December is the coldest December on record globally, it would certainly be MAJOR news. Those who dismiss accounts as "weather" usually are talking about... well, the WEATHER.
For example, there were all sorts of headlines this year in February in the U.S., with claims about it being one of the coldest or even THE coldest on record, particularly on the east coast of the U.S. That's true.
But, if you look at global average temperatures in February 2015, I believe it was near the HOTTEST on record. Someone will certainly come out to correct me, but I'm reasonably sure it's been about 30 years since we've had a month where GLOBAL temperature even below average, let alone setting a record for "coldest." So if something like you say happens, it will be VERY unusual indeed.
The globe is a complex system. If you introduce more energy into the system, it will do all sorts of things. Some areas will get hotter. Others will get colder. Some will get wetter. Some will get dryer.
What you can't do is look at some random anecdotal weather pattern -- even if extends for a month or more across one side of a continent -- and claim that we should take that as evidence that GLOBAL temperatures aren't going up.
Seriously. There IS a difference between "weather" and global average temperature. One hot month in October is NOT news. Saying it is the hottest month on record in a series of years that have "hottest months on record" does seem to point to a broader trend. If you can't tell the difference between that and the fact that you had a lot of snow last winter, I don't know what to say.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're going to plug Alienware from experience, do that. If you're going to talk about high end machines that don't have vendor customizations (or in many cases, modern video cards), how is that topical?
Well, it's topical in the sense that GP's experience was that consumer-grade Dell products were crappier. Basically, GGP was saying "Buy from Dell!" GP replied, "Well, you could buy from Dell, but in my experience the only machines worth having were X." As you rightly point out, product X is not the main focus of the current thread... which effectively means that GP's experience is that Dell isn't a good option to answer the OP's question, contra GGP's experience.
You can agree or disagree with him, but he was basically providing his experience of the nuances of which Dell computers are good vs. bad (with the ones which would be most relevant here falling into the "bad" category).
(Personally, I think his advice may be slightly outdated, as Dell has had its ups and downs in the past few years in terms of quality. But most of the post was definitely on topic.)
For all his "geek" status, Bill Gates (with his foundation) failed elementary statistics. He succumbed to the law of small numbers and idiotically pushed for smaller schools for a long period spending a lot of time, money and energy convincing policy makers that the small schools will make students better.
...
If a lot of money is spent by non-accountable idiot organizations , it is not only not good for society but actively harmful.
While this did happen, what's your alternative? We could "do nothing," and simply live with the current system, where things don't get better.
Or, I suppose we could depend on an "accountable" organization. Like what? Government is the most common answer.
Yes, government is "accountable" to voters in a way that a private foundation is not. On the other hand, this "accountability" has very specific effects that can also be problematic, such as:
- Government is often conservative from a policy perspective by nature, since major change risks alienating voters who have voted for you in the past. Government is thus often slower to adopt changes.
- Government certainly also screws up in ways just like your Gates Foundation example. I think this is pretty well known.
- "But," you say, "government is accountable." Yes, but what does that actually mean? What it means is that politicians will do their best to get re-elected. As already mentioned, this tends to work against effective change. It also tends to work against correcting bad change.
Imagine if the federal government in the U.S. had tried what the Gates Foundation did here. Within a few years, there would be a couple states that got special contracts to manufacture special stuff for these "small schools." Then the senators and representatives from those states would now be invested in this scheme (since the program brought "jobs" to their state, and voters care disproportionately about their jobs, whether the policy is effective or not). So, whether it worked or not -- they would fight to block legislation to dismantle it. Depending on how powerful they are and what committees they are on, it could take decades before a program like this would be dismantled.
That's what your "accountability" by voters gets you.
Now, the next possible answer I expect is for you to say, "Well, that's the problem with BIG government. You do things at the federal level, and you get massive bureaucracy. If you instead emphasized LOCAL government, people would have to be in touch with specific effects on the community."
And that's true to an extent. But the problem with insular small governments is that they often don't have the resources to implement big changes (even if they are needed)... and frankly many of them tend to end up corrupt and dysfunctional as well. Many people have this idealistic vision of local government as the place where "real" governing happens, and only if we gave back most power to small governments, everything would be fixed.
The problem is that this argument is based on the same statistical flaw you brought up in your post. It's true that many small governments tend to be more responsive and less dysfunctional than the federal government, but that's mostly selection bias. It's very easy for a small local government to be taken over by wackos too, and this happens in a lot of places.
I'm NOT saying I have better answers or that we shouldn't be concerned about lack of accountability in the Gates Foundation. On the other hand, I think charitable organizations do add something to the mix of new ideas, and sometimes what they do can take the lead for governments. I'm NOT convinced by your argument that they necessarily do more harm to society than good.
I don't think it's the anonymity that brings out the worst in people, but the separation of comment and audience.
THIS. My standard example is to observe how people behave in cars when stuck in traffic, compared to how they would behave if just walking down the street. Even that little bit of separation causes all sorts of madness and "road rage" that generally doesn't happen when people are in contact directly.
Would you randomly start screaming at someone if they were walking a little too slow in front of you? Most people wouldn't. But a lot more people will lay on their horn and hold it for five seconds or more (not a polite short "tap" on the horn to get someone's attention) and/or roll down the window and start ranting, gesturing wildly, etc.
If you were instead walking behind someone on the sidewalk, you'd likely ask politely to get around someone. Or, if you instead were just grumbling behind them, they'd likely hear it and move out of the way or say "Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't know you needed to get by..." or whatever. Communication can happen, because you see the person's face and demeanor -- maybe they're elderly or lost or whatever.
But when you're separated in two cars, communication is less likely. Rage develops because you get stuck "in your own head" ranting and working yourself up, rather than communicating and sorting out the issue with another person directly.
This kind of build-up of emotions and loss of civility happens exactly the same way with the disconnect on the internet. The automatic assumption many people have is that others are idiots, jerks, shills, etc., because frustration builds up -- particularly if written communication fails in successive posts... just like the guy holding down the carhorn and making obscene gestures which he might never do to someone's face.
That way both rights can be upheld and everyone should be happy. That's exactly what has happened in this case so I'm shedding no tears for anyone. The system is working, I see no reason for anyone to be complaining.
Except the ones who are "complaining" (in your terms) are ALSO exercising their free speech rights. Sure, a company should not be compelled to broadcast speech, but on the other hand they presumably want to attract customers. If they refuse to broadcast speech in a way that customers find unfair, the customers may not come. If enough people complain about such policies in public forums, the companies might be convinced that broadcasting the speech is in their interest. THAT is ALSO the "system working," by allowing complainers to exercise THEIR free speech rights, even if you don't agree with their perspective.
Should I walk to the east and board an Elven ship to Valinor, for my time has passed?
Uh, the undying lands lie to the WEST. Cirdan waits for the elves on the Western shore so they can sail west! Unless you want to go hang out with the blue wizards, I don't know why you're heading east.
As a techie I find it absolutely amazing that there is a taxi company that didn't accept credit cards.
First off, many (most?) black cabs in London DO accept credit cards. TFS and TFA are unclear -- but the difference is NOT that you couldn't get a black cab that accepted credit cards before. It's just now ALL black cabs will be required to accept them.
Second, do you travel much?
Even in the past year, I've been asked in at least two major cities (in the U.S. and in Europe, not London) whether I needed a cab that accepts credit cards when I ordered one. Five years ago, it was still very common to be asked that question when you ordered a cab. While many cabs accepted them, you simply couldn't depend on it -- and (if my experience is indicative) you still can't depend on it in some places, even major cities.
I agree the Uber angle doesn't warrant being mentioned here, but the article has merrit even without that.
Credit cards have been accepted in cabs for many years, but it hasn't been consistent. Now London is forcing all drivers to accept them. While this is of very mild interest to tech people I suppose, it's hardly major news. It's kinda like if a city required all licensed restaurants to accept credit cards instead of being a "cash only" business or location. Would that be of significant tech interest??
(Actually, if any city tried to do THAT, I'd imagine the discussion here would be the opposite and it'd end up in "Your Rights Online" -- "How DARE they force us into a cashless economy! Today it's forcing businesses to accept credit, tomorrow it's no cash allowed! My right to anonymous transactions must be upheld!!!")
unless we change the law of gravity [to something enormously more complex - c.f. epicycles]... No dark matter is the epicyclic solution.
I completely agree with your post. However, I really wish people would stop using the "epicycle" as something to denote ridiculous complexity.
The reduction of epicycles is NOT what drove the Scientific Revolution. Some facts:
- Medieval astronomers did NOT add "epicycles on epicycles." Owen Gingerich, one of the foremost historians of science and perhaps the world's greatest expert on Copernicus has spent nearly 50 years trying to stamp out this myth, which seems (according to him) to have originated with some ignorant writings in the early 1800s which had no clue how the earlier astronomical systems worked. If people actually understand how the system works and how the tables medieval astronomers used were constructed, everyone would easily comprehend why it wouldn't have been basically impossible (in a practical computational sense) for medieval astronomers to add "epicycles on epicycles," even if they wanted to.
- Even if medieval astronomers wanted to do this, they simply didn't make the required number of observations necessary to construct such a system. And even if they did the observations, their models of the sky weren't accurate enough to do the sorts of measurements necessary to see planetary position error. (The only way they could tell planetary position was in reference to the fixed stars, but those experienced precession over the centuries and Ptolemy's model of precession was screwed up and had inaccurate medieval corrections thrown in... that didn't exactly work well.) Bottom line: even if they wanted to measure planets with greater accuracy to construct such a system, they couldn't.
- The main reason why anyone got interested in these problems in the 1500s is because there were a few observations where Mars was REALLY out of whack (like 5-6 degrees) with the original Ptolemaic predictions. which happened at conjunctions. Copernicus was driven toward his system after one of these "Martian disasters." Tycho Brahe did observations of the same periodic problem in 1593, which probably led him to tell Kepler to work on the Mars problem.
- Copernicus did NOT eliminate epicycles. In fact, as he tried to make his system more accurate, he actually ended up introducing MORE epicycles than the standard Ptolemaic model.
- Kepler's greatest move toward greater accuracy was achieved by use of old Ptolemaic idea of equants to offset the earth's position around the sun correctly, which produced a MAJOR improvement in predictions, even still using the old epicycle model. The need for epicycles was finally abolished with Kepler's adoption of elliptical orbits, but this correction was much smaller, perhaps only about 1/10th of the improvement in accuracy compared to Kepler's previous advances still assuming the equant/deferent/epicycle models.
TL;DR: Epicycles were good "science" that more than adequately fit the data for ancient and medieval astronomers. Nobody was putting MORE epicycles in to make corrections to the old model, except arguably Copernicus himself. Nobody thought of replacing the old Ptolemaic model until people started doing enough observations to notice a real problem, and after that solutions were proposed almost immediately. And the improvement Kepler made by finally getting rid of epicycles was REALLY small (comparatively), especially seen in contrast to the corrections introduced by adopting heliocentrism and displacing the earth's orbit (both of which were still done in the old geometric system which required epicycles).
So, the modern practice of using "epicycles" as derogatory parlance for a bad, overly complex model doesn't make much sense.
But don't listen to me. You can listen to Owen Gingerich himself describe what he calls
Given that things like cut and paste are totally different key strokes between Windows and Mac, worrying about key placement seems kinda pointless.
Huh? In most Mac apps, the shortcuts are Command-X and Command-V. On most Windows apps, the shortcuts are CTRL-X and CTRL-V.
Your pinky just needs to move one key over. It's annoying as heck. I use a Mac at work (because that's what they give me), but I need a Linux virtual machine to get certain work done. It's a pain in the neck because on the same freakin' keyboard, I need to put my pinky in two difference places depending on what workspace I'm on. About 50% of the time I get it wrong and have some random other thing pop up that I didn't want. (And yes, I could go and try to change default keyboard shortcuts, but some of those are application-specific, and it's a pain.)
Back in the mid 90's I really appreciated the external analogue volume control on my Thinkpad. One quick swipe before booting up to turn the sound off ensured no embarrassingly loud chime when Windows XP started.
I agree with you that analog volume control is a good thing.
But I'm very confused:
(1) If you were "embarrassed" by the Windows XP chime, why not disable it (or disable system sounds completely)?? That's one of the first 3 things I do when installing an operating system -- I don't need my computer to beep at me just to say, "Hello, I've booted your OS!" Obviously you disliked it enough to find it "embarrassing"; why have it at all?
(2) Even so, I also still can't figure out how you were even booting Windows XP "back in the mid 90s." It didn't exist yet.
You did not look very hard - that article is talking about something very different, kids 3 to 11. Babies and toddlers need a lot more attention than older kids.
Not only that. The article implies that extra time with kids is mostly detrimental when parents are stressed during that time. Extrapolating to infants, where Moms of newborns tend to be really stressed, it seems like having an extra hand (like a father) around would significantly reduce maternal stress, which the quoted study implies would be a good thing.
3 movies for such a short story was what killed it. I mean did it have to take 1 whole movie just reach the damn mountain?
Agreed. Before I even saw the first movie, I said, "I'd rather have a 9-movie series doing The Lord of the Rings rather than 3 long movies about The Hobbit." There just wasn't enough material and enough stories to fill the time.
Anthony Lane, after alluding to Wagner's seemingly never-ending "Ring Cycle" of operas, in his review of the first Hobbit movie in The New Yorker probably summed it up best, concluding:
As Bilbo says, nearing the end of the book, "Roads go ever ever on." Tell me about it.
So which one of those goes to the article that the summary is about? It's the second! That's so counter-intuitive! Seriously! Why do I have to click through your links to figure out what you're linking to?
Use a browser on a real computer. Hover over link. Discover that second link is the one with a URL which matches the opening of the first sentence. Click second link.
It's only the people trying to use phones/tablets/etc. who are screwed... both by their non-discoverable OS and by Slashdot and its clickbaiting.
Okay, but iOS i still easier to use compared to Android, which is why I steer my parents and any other people who are likely to want computer support toward iOS devices whenever it makes sense.
My mom was more productive on her iPad after a week of using it than she was with her Galaxy S2 after 3 years.
And I can tell you stories about how my parents have continuously screwed up everything they have done with their iPad for the past 5 years. So what? -- older people are going to have trouble with lots of these interfaces, because there's nothing there to explain anything. What's wrong with having TEXT buttons or menus (even as an OPTION) on a large iPad screen? You don't have the excuse of "It's a phone; there's no room." There is room. And then I could tell them to go to menu X, select clearly labeled word Y and then choose option Z. Instead, I have to spend 5 minutes every time saying, "Swipe up from the bottom... no, you accidentally swiped the wrong way... no, you must have hit the wrong thing, go back... ah, you finally swiped up, now hit that blue button with the funny trapezoid on the front of the rounded rectangle... it disappeared? Oh you took too long, swipe up again... [repeat actions of the past 2 minutes]... what? you don't know what a trapezoid is? We had this discussion the last five times you did this... what airplane? why are you talking about an airplane -- you're in airplane mode again, how did you do that?... let's turn that off and start from the beginning..."
It is good to see others who have also noticed that Apple may have lost its way regarding user-centric design.
TFA misses the point. Apple hasn't "lost its way" -- most of the design changes are clearly on purpose. It follows the classic cult paradigm of keeping esoteric knowledge for the "in-crowd."
I admire Apple, and I use many of its products, so don't dismiss me as a "hater." Hear me out. First, Apple made inroads into certain cultural groups and convinced them that "Mac" was superior to clunky Windows. Then those cultural trendsetters came to be "believers" in all things Apple. A few really good products (e.g., the early iPod designs) helped cement this.
Next step: make your interfaces LESS discoverable, and more dependent on "in-crowd knowledge." This reinforces the cult mindset, creating even more of a feeling that Mac/Apple product users are "in the know" -- knowledge about how to use things is passed between people directly by demonstration, rather than discoverable on your own or with a manual. (No manuals shipped with products anymore either, so unless you specifically go online and try to download one, you're forced to network with other Mac/iPod/iPhone/iPad/etc. users to figure out how to do anything.)
This is the creation of a sort of what cultural historians and sociologists sometimes call an "Imaginary Community" of like-minded folks. You divide up the world into "Mac users" and everyone else.
But non-discoverable interfaces also have the side effect of creating patentable UI structures (like icon sets, or special gesture interfaces), which other non-Apple companies will have to license, if they hope to be compatible with Mac users' expectations. That's the logic likely behind all of the big companies pushing obscure graphical icons ("What the heck does that weird trapezoid with a swirly do?") -- the MS Office Ribbon, Gmail getting rid of text on buttons, and Apple are all trying to win at the same game: they want users to get "locked in" and used to their particular interface, which is only understandable with practice, deliberately NOT discoverable. Discoverable interfaces allow people to switch companies/software/products -- the big tech companies want you to be so stuck with their product that you won't even know how to use another's product.
That's the reason behind TFA's main complaint -- UI design is no longer about ease of use. It is only about that when a company wants to become established. After that, these companies want to force customers to stay, which means creating custom "parts" which are not interchangeable with anyone else's. In the old days, those parts were literal physical things; now they are stuff like icon sets and specific learned (and hopefully patentable!) non-discoverable gestures and UI tricks.
IBM lost the war back in the 80s when it tried to be an open standard for everyone, which just led other companies to pull ahead after all of IBM's hard work in setting the standard. All tech companies learned that lesson.
So, TFA completely misses the point. As TFA notes, Apple products strive to be beautiful -- that's part of the "wow" factor that makes you want to join the cult. Then you join and learn all the esoteric gestures (used to be secret handshakes, now it's how you swipe with three fingers and click or whatever), which you pass along to your fellow cult members. You also learn to decode the secret symbols of the cult by clicking on weird ambiguous pictures rather than self-explanatory words.
Apple knows exactly what it's doing. Too bad the author of TFA hasn't figured it out.
I, for one, wholeheartedly welcome our Robotic Plant Overlords.
I don't. At least there will be warning. Just watch out for these plants demanding blood. They are known to prey on unsuspecting awkward antisocial guys and make them extravagant promises, so this is particularly relevant to the Slashdot crowd.
I quote an ancient warning song of the bards passed down for generations:
They may offer you fortune and fame,
Love and money and instant acclaim,
But whatever they offer you:
Don't feed the plants!
They may offer you lots of cheap thrills,
Fancy condos in Beverly Hills,
But whatever they offer you:
Don't feed the plants!
I have even heard tell of an old-fashioned morality play which shows the consequences of ignoring this advice.
Academics themselves are not blameless for allowing this situation to arise.
True, and some academics have taken it upon themselves to found new independent open-access journals and such. We just had a story here about it a couple weeks ago.
The problem is for junior academics, or those still looking to obtain a better job, you don't really have much choice in the matter assuming you want to keep your grants and labs and get tenure. In most fields, there are "high impact" journals, and grant review boards and tenure review committees look for those journals. Publishing in some new-fangled journal with no history or reputation will just lead those doing job reviews to scratch their heads... not to mention that your work is less likely to be cited if it's read by nobody because people in your field don't even know about this new journal.
I agree with you that academics should take a more active role in dismantling this system. But the reality is that the academics who depend on journals aren't really in a place to break out of the system without potentially jeopardizing their careers, while those academics who are already senior enough and/or famous enough to not have to worry about that also have better things to do with their time... like actually doing important research.
Publishing nowadays is sort of a "necessary evil" in science. The reality is that academics mostly know others in their subdisciplines and can share work directly and instantly via email or whatever, making journals less important than they were years ago for actual progress of science.
If anything, I'd also blame the gradual shift in higher education toward scoring job performance based on publication numbers and "impact" scores, which is partly coming through administration (demanding a sort of standard metric to evaluate whom to hire and to tenure). I've seen many situations where beloved professors who are great teachers, great assets to the university community (in terms of service, collegiality, etc.), great mentors who have probably mentored more students to publish reams of stuff, etc. be kicked out the door because they didn't publish enough or in high-enough profile publications. Three of the smartest people I know in one field were denied tenure, sometimes at multiple universities, for this reason.
So until there's a systematic change, it's hard for individual academics to stand up and refuse to participate in this publication game or to radically alter it on their own.
What's your fondest memory of Bill Gates Blue Screen-of-death that could?
The Olympic one is excellent, though I'd also have to go for the classic demo of Windows 98 which actually had Bill Gates standing right there when it happened.
Bill: "... That must be why we're not shipping Windows 98 yet..."
Absolutely, Bill. Absolutely.
Unfortunately... you did ship that (though 98 wasn't that bad). But then Windows ME. And then Vista. And then Windows 8. You keep doing it.
Sorry to self-reply, but I should clarify that I believe most if not all Western countries have officially adopted the Gregorian calendar. But a number of countries with strong presence of Orthodox Christians have official churches which have instead adopted the Revised Julian. There have been some politicians in these countries which have claimed the official calendar is not Gregorian...
Obviously it's probably unlikely that anyone is going to care about this stuff 800 years from now. It's still an amusing bit of weird calendar discrepancies.
Every year divisible by 4 is a leap year, except for those divisible by 100, except those divisible by 400. How much software will consider the year 2100 a leap year because the algorithm was dumbed down to every four years?
Actually, that rule is only true of the Gregorian calendar. Many countries have never officially adopted the Gregorian calendar, but rather use the Revised Julian Calendar, whose rules say that you only have leap years in centennial years when the year number/100 MOD 9 comes out to 2 or 6.
(This was done because the Revised Julian algorithm produces a much more accurate approximation to the true year than the Gregorian calendar.)
The Revised Julian Calendar and the Gregorian Calendar line up in their rules for now, but they will diverge in the year 2800. It seems unlikely that our political structures will survive until then with their different official calendars, but it does raise the question...
Have you coded in preparation for the Y2.8k problem?
(Actually, now that I say it, it sounds like some weird calendar problem in old modems....)
If we don't bother with leap seconds, then the distance that the sun will be off from being directly overhead at the equinox is about the same as it is now from being a couple of hundred miles away from the meridian. A simpler solution to the problem would be to, every couple of thousand years, have a one-hour reset.
Actually, the problem is worse than that (and shows the futility of the leap second system), because the earth is of course slowing down.
So, while we now have to add a leap second every few years or whatever, eventually that will become every year, then two every year, and then the current system will break, because right now we're only allowed two leap seconds per year by the current standard.
At best, adding up to two leap seconds per year will be able to keep up with the slowing earth for about another 200 years. If we added no leap seconds for the next 200 years, however, we'd only be off by maybe 5 minutes or so.
So, the current system simply can't work for very long anyway. It's going to break well before we'd have gotten anywhere close to a need for a "one-hour reset."
Good. 8 more years of time working correctly. The fundamental issue is that the Earth just doesn't care what our atomic clocks measure. If programmers want an exact time system without leap seconds, use TAI, that's what it's for. Most people in the world don't care if it's hard to code leap seconds. Instead, most people go outside occasionally, and they expect that 'noon' means approximately 'sun at highest point'. We can switch to some system other than leap seconds, but if we expect 'noon' to have its conventional meaning, then we need to agree on a system that does that.
Except that system is NOT UTC. The system where "noon" means "sun at highest point" is called UT1. UTC is the "smoothed out" version of UT1 that allows an error up to a second.
Other than astronomers, nobody really cares about UT1. Nobody really cares about the 1-second error in UTC either when it comes to "noon." Heck, most countries shift where the sun is at noon twice each year to observe "daylight savings."
The question is whether there is any practical benefit to keeping UTC within 1 second of UT1. People who really need UT1 already use it. People who don't generally don't care about that sort of precision for when the sun hits its zenith.
SO -- what would happen if we just got rid of leap seconds for the moment and allowed UTC to drift for a while? We'd likely accumulate a few minutes of error over the next several centuries. Maybe when we get 10 minutes off, somebody might actually care that the sun isn't lining up, but that wouldn't happen for hundreds of years.
And, you might say -- "BUT, BUT... we can't let that happen, because what about our systems in the year 2500 which will be running legacy code and will suddenly need to insert leap MINUTES! DISASTER!"
No -- there would be disaster anyway. Because the earth is gradually slowing down, we'll begin to need more and more leap seconds as the centuries go by. By the time we get to the point that the collective error in UTC is enough for the average person to care where "noon" is, we'll already be to the point when two leap seconds per year probably won't be enough to keep us "on track," so we'll have to redesign the "leap second" system anyway as it's currently implemented.
Thus, there's absolutely no good reason for leap seconds (at least in the current system). If you really care where the sun is, use UT1. If not, by the time the collective error builds up enough for anyone to care, it will be time to overhaul the time system anyway.
Meanwhile, in another anecdote, a history professor I know was on a review committee for a junior high-level history textbook used in Texas (among other states, I believe); they did fully review the textbook, only to have a significant portion of their suggested corrections ignored.
Are you talking about an academic review (usually made up of university faculty, often done before publication while revision is still going on) or a political "Board of Education" -- or state committee or whatever -- review (usually involving random people elected or appointed to decide textbooks, including non-academics, often when they are near their final form)?
State committees don't often submit many "corrections," as much as "requests" to include more material aligned to official state curriculum guidelines (or sometimes more material about the history or industry of that state or whatever).
TFA here is actually about this difference. The Texas Board of Education (political committee) was proposing setting up its own academic review panel (bunch of professors), which obviously publishers don't want -- they already find it a pain to deal with the academic reviewers they ask themselves.
Also, I don't believe he was lavished much in the way of free dinners, vacations, etc. (maybe they save that for the physicists).
Academic reviewers rarely get much in the way of perks. They're the annoying bunch who hold up publication because they find errors and such.
The people who get the perks are the ones who actually have the political power to ADOPT the textbook, which will bring in money to publishers. And the perks will vary depending on the market -- if you can guarantee the publisher to sell a few thousand copies, you might be able to squeeze out a free lunch. If you're adopting for a big state like Texas and can sell millions of copies, you might be wined and dined and who knows what else....
If you look up the study, the exact quote is âoenonconsensual penetration or sexual touching involving physical force or incapacitation,â.
The summary is brain-dead, but in a way that *understates* the problem, compared to the actual quote (which doesn't contain the word "rape").
Two things:
(1) You'll notice that the section of the summary which mentions "touching" is actually a very close paraphrase of the NYT article which is linked there. So the NYT is actually what's "brain-dead," and TFS just continued the "brain-dead" trend of not looking at the source.
(2) I'm sure this will be ignored by most people here, but can I just offer a plea to moderators to think about posts a bit before modding them "+1 Insightful" or "+1 Informative"?
The particular issue is with the common type of Slashdot post which shows up frequently around just about any study -- "Well, gee, a proper study of X would have to consider [obvious factor Y]." The default policy here seems to be to assume that all researchers running studies are absolute morons and would never consider whatever obvious flaw I came up with after 2 seconds of thought and posted on Slashdot. Or, as in this case, we assume that the researchers have some sort of agenda and ignored obvious data flaws or whatever.
Guess what, mods? 90% of these posts are WRONG. Most studies do have some subtle flaws, but researchers generally make an attempt to address many of the obvious ones.
The problem is that summaries are generally too short to contain all the details, so you'd actually have to RTFA to see that the researchers actually did take into account "obvious factor Y." Sometimes TFS is also misleading or poorly worded in such a way, which contributes to the problem. This is an editorial problem, but complaining about the editors here is fruitless, so I'll appeal to those with moderation points:
If you see a post that seems "too good to be true" in claiming to have found some obvious flaw that completely invalidates a study, either take a minute and look at the study and check it, or just ignore the post. Don't just mod it as "Insightful" or "informative" because you wish it were true, or you'd like to think everyone else in the world is an idiot (or, in this case, a manipulative idiot).
I'm tired of seeing obviously stupid posts rise to "+5 Informative" within an hour of a story going up (two such posts in a row here). I'll excuse the people posting such crap, because there's always a lot of crap posts here. But moderation should be taken at least a little more seriously.
By the way, as a further set of datapoints, I'd have a look at this NOAA report with a list of months with greatest deviations from the previous global average.
You'll note that 8 of the top 10 of them occurred in the past 5 years. And this report is from September, so once October is included, it will likely be 9/10 of the most significant upward deviations occurred in the past few years.
One October data point is not the news. The issue is that data point taken in context of the larger and well-established trend.
Meanwhile, individual weather patterns continue to be dismissed as "just weather" when they are mild or abnormally cold, but sung from the rooftops as evidence of AGW when they are usually chaotic or hot.
I agree with you to some extent that an individual data point shouldn't be trumpeted as being evidence of anything for a long-term trend. But I would note that this is NOT what TFS says. It says (1) October is the hottest October in the past 135 years (that's based on 135 data points, not one), and (2) there have been many such record-breaking months recently.
That's not an individual data point. That's a bunch of data seen in a 135-year context. You can argue that 135 years is still a short time window for climate, but still, it's more than a random single data point.
This very report cites October as the hottest October on record as evidence of global warming. Will it therefore be evidence AGAINST global warming if this December is the coldest December on record? Or will the same people who cited this report as AGW evidence suddenly dismiss that as "just a minor weather pattern, not related to climate."?
If December is the coldest December on record globally, it would certainly be MAJOR news. Those who dismiss accounts as "weather" usually are talking about... well, the WEATHER.
For example, there were all sorts of headlines this year in February in the U.S., with claims about it being one of the coldest or even THE coldest on record, particularly on the east coast of the U.S. That's true.
But, if you look at global average temperatures in February 2015, I believe it was near the HOTTEST on record. Someone will certainly come out to correct me, but I'm reasonably sure it's been about 30 years since we've had a month where GLOBAL temperature even below average, let alone setting a record for "coldest." So if something like you say happens, it will be VERY unusual indeed.
The globe is a complex system. If you introduce more energy into the system, it will do all sorts of things. Some areas will get hotter. Others will get colder. Some will get wetter. Some will get dryer.
What you can't do is look at some random anecdotal weather pattern -- even if extends for a month or more across one side of a continent -- and claim that we should take that as evidence that GLOBAL temperatures aren't going up.
Seriously. There IS a difference between "weather" and global average temperature. One hot month in October is NOT news. Saying it is the hottest month on record in a series of years that have "hottest months on record" does seem to point to a broader trend. If you can't tell the difference between that and the fact that you had a lot of snow last winter, I don't know what to say.