I thought it has been long established through research that even a hands free cradle talking on the phone is a dangerous distraction while driving, Can't see how this can be less of a distraction than that even if it is better than manual texting. People have enough accidents without additional distractions.
Oh please, issues like that pale in significance compared to the
important business of selling the latest consumer crap
electronics.
I forgot to mention "The Wire" (which has nothing to do with "Wired", or the television show, for that matter). It's an excellent British magazine for anyone interested in the grand old tradition of cutting-edge, avant-garde music.
Why are you pretending that you have expertise in an area you provably do not- climatology-
You need to review Dyson's bio a little more closely. He was one of the first physicists to work on global warming at all, and I would venture to say that a lot of the experimental work that's been taken place in the last 20 years has happened because of his prompting.
and making dramatic pronouncements which are directly counter to what people who DO have the requisite educational and research specialization are making?
If you'd like to know why he said what he said, you might start by reading his argument: The Question of Global Warming.
It's great that you have cultivated an impish, child-like , authority-resistant public persona, but science is not really interested in any of that.
Interestingly enough, this book did not provoke any great controversy. We all like the idea of intellectual rebels and heretics in principle, but when they go up against one of our own beliefs, then they're just incredibly arrogant for going against the authorities.
(By the way... speaking of arrogance, it takes some balls to lecture Freeman Dyson about science... but whatever.)
If you want to attack Dyson's policy recommendation on global warming, by the way, I suggest going after him on the economics. I guarantee you that he knows more about climate science than you or I do, but on a subject like the costs of imposing heavy carbon taxes he's got to defer to economists, and they've got they're own problems with objectivity.
In your article
The Question of Global Warming, you make the point that the Earth's vegetation acts as a big carbon sink, and suggest that genetically engineered plants might do an even better job -- thus becoming the first person in history to make environmentalists angry by suggesting that top soil management is important. I have a few questions about this: (1) you mention the fanciful-sounding notion of "carbon-eating trees", but aren't there technologies that already exist that might do the job? There are claims that "no till" agriculture via the dreaded "roundup ready" plants reduce greenhouse gas emissions substantially. (2) A big part of the argument against immediate reductions in CO2 emissions is economic. Do the analyses you've seen really make an effort to capture all the costs and benefits associated with a move like banning coal burning completely? The annual deaths estimated from coal pollution seem big enough to make it worth doing even before you put global warming on the table.
Yes, many publications are available on-line and in print form,
and myself I actually think they complement each other fairly
well. I read "The New York Review of Books" in print form on the
train or in the bath, and occasionaly search their on-line
archive to see what they were saying several decades ago.
It was particularly interesting to notice that they published
Noam Chomsky regularly in the sixties, and then suddenly
stopped, with his last publication in 1970. Your guess is as
good as mine why they cut him off, but I've a strong suspicion it
has to do with the Israel-Palestine issue...
I went through an Economist phase, but gave up on it during the
run-up to the Iraq war. I was getting enough stupid war
propaganda from home-grown sources, I didn't need to pay for an
import on top of that.
Since the Iraq war thing, there have been other things that
turned me off... e.g. a cover photo of a demonstration in
Indonesia-- as I remember it-- carefully selected to make it look
dramatic and violent, when the actual event was fairly peaceful.
I sometimes wonder if the Economist has ever done any market
research... the people I know who read it-- admittedly a selected
set-- are all relatively liberal types who like the fact that it
writes about places outside the US as though they really exist.
They read it in spite of the silly conservative "leaders" up
front, not because of them...
As good a place to attach my list as any, since I'm another
"Otaku USA" reader:
Otaku USA
The Nation
New York Review of Books
Science (from the AAAS)
The San Francisco Bay Guardian
The East Bay Express
Plus some common newstand buys:
Juxtapos
High Fructose
Giant Robot
N+1
Manga:
A Devil and Her Love Song
A Certain Scientific Railgun
The Black Butler
Skip Beat
One-piece
Flowers of Evil
Printed media has advantages over on-line, of course... both
durable and portable, with displays that are large,
high-resolution and low-power.
Each issue is relatively low value, so you don't need to worry
about losing them on the train, or water damage from reading in
the bath
Nor is the cell phone magically more distracting than other objects in a car.
They sure as fuck are, and you would know that already if you'd
bothered to follow any of the news about the subject. The fact
that we need research to presuade someone like yourself that
using a goddamn computer while driving a car is a bad idea is
evidence that you're in the grip of horrible denial (or an
obnoxious troll, in which case, nice job).
The california law requiring handsfree gadgets is a completely
ridiculous sop to the phone industry, that thought they'd use
their public relations crisis to sell more gadgets to people, and succeeded.
Hydrogen is everywhere and Helium is running short and getting more expensive. New hydrogen barriers are developed all the time, and Helium requires special barriers as well.
Heh. Your point is that a careful assessment of modern technical
capabilities would conclude that hydrogen-filled lifting bodies
can be built and operated relatively safely, and have technical
and economic advantages, and therefore will be used.
Now, let me introduce you to the nuclear power debate.
Perhaps this is some subtle internet humor, but if you actually follow that link, it contradicts what our ubiquitous friend Anonymous Coward says. The bit about surviving a nuclear war is discussed in a section labeled "Misconceptions of design goals".
(And as long as I'm responding to trolls, may I point out that Al Gore does indeed have a plausible claim to being the guy who created the internet.)
But Kuchroo and other researchers say that evidence so far cannot predict the effect of salt on human autoimmunity. âoeAs a physician, Iâ(TM)m very cautious,â Hafler says. âoeShould patients go on a low-salt diet? Yes,â he says, adding that âoepeople should probably already be on a low-salt dietâ for general health concerns.
Myself I would like to see physicians who are a little more cautious about making health recommendations.
There's a lot of evidence that salt has been getting a bad rap, e.g. a Scientific American article from 2010 suggests it's time to end the war on salt.
That's based on attempting to find evidence that reducing salt intake will help avoid heart disease, hypertension, etc. I expect it'll be awhile before we know if this new cellular-level research has any application on the level of human populations.
But myself I don't see why I should "already" be avoiding salt.
What are you exactly trying to say? Are you saying that the products were not functional?
What I would say is that I could typically see why someone might like Apple products, but I could also see that they were always, invariably oversold. Their ease-of-use and consistency and so on were always exaggerated, but Apple users would never point this out, and in fact appeared to be incapable of seeing it.
Are you suggesting that people did not remain satisfied enough with them to buy the next version a year or two later? A scam artist would not be able to get away with that. They typically do not have repeat customers.
Here, I fear you are sadly deluded. Once someone is conned, they have a strong interest in hiding the fact from themselves and from others. They become part of the con artists salesforce. This is how you get "cults".
While at NeXT, Jobs came to the epiphany that people wanted something that actually worked.
Well perhaps, but it took him awhile. The original NeXT didn't come with a hard drive, remember? Jobs was really pushing the removable magneto-optical drive... and reportedly when he did realize that that wasn't going to fly, he wouldn't admit he called something wrong, it was more like "They weren't ready for that yet".
(In all fairness to the magneto-optical: the Vision there was "every student could carry their universe in their backpack". I could see why Jobs would be attracted to that, around that time I would try to use some of the Macs scattered around on campus, and it seemed like every time I did I would get some weird-ass error messages about incompatible laserwriter driver versions or some such... moving *all* of the software to a removable disk would be one way to dance around that stupidity.)
Oh no doubt. C+S+D is Intuitively obvious. There's a bit of a
chicken-and-egg, of course, since the keyboard hint doesn't
appear in the Bookmarks menu pad once the command is gone,
and my muscle memory had me doing Alt B's to try to find it.
And yes, gratutious UI changes annoy the shit out of me,
particularly in a project that's decided to nag you if you don't
upgrade every month. But I am indeed capable of solving this
problem, I think the answer is iceweasel on Debian where they get
the difference between security fixes and UI changes.
That's been at the same place since Firefox 4, right-click one of your active tabs.
Yes, thanks, I did eventually find it over there, it also used to be under the Bookmarks menu tab, and it's been there for just about as long, until some bozo decided there was something Bad And Wrong about being able to access it without grabbing the mouse. (I haven't bothered to inquire about the reasons for this, I generally find that reading up on Design Philosophy is not good for my blood pressure.)
Environmentally, organic vs GM shouldn't matter much. You're talking more or less the potential usage of pesticides.
Reducing the use of pesticides is certainly a good thing, but actually there's supposed to be another advantage of some GM crops in reducing the need to till the land, which is apparently a large source of greenhouse gas emissions.
But sure, local food sources will burn less energy in transporting the stuff, which is also to the good.
Damn, you got me excited there for a moment. Built-in emacs
would make these damn TEXTAREA fields bearable...
(using emacsclient with the "It's All Text" plug-in is workable,
but a little clunky).
Yes, and actually it's one of the better arguments in favor of GM foods in general: Europe banned them, but in the US we've been eating them for many years. No health problems have been found in the US that's attributable to this. As Stewart Brand comments that's a massive experiment conducted on large populations. What more do people need before they'll calm down about this?
(In a way, it's a shame that California voters shot down that bill calling for mandatory labeling of GM foods: it might've made people suddenly realize how much of it they were eating without any problems... And once it sunk in that GM foods were better environmentally, you might find people arguing that if you can't afford Organic you should buy GM.)
"A Rails (or any other hot language/framework combo) guy pretty much has to beat off clients with a stick."
Until the fad dies down (eventually, people will get tired of re-writing Rails prototypes in something that scales...), and then you're stuck trying to decide which band-wagon to jump on next.
"... and anyone that suggests rewriting swathes of code simply to change the syntax of its representation doesn't understand the first principles of software engineering."
Ding! We have a winner. Unfortunately, you've just described nearly every programmer in existence.
My guess:
The reason we still have code written in COBOL is that management got suckered by techies playing the language-of-the-month game a couple of times, and then wised up.
(1) A Computer Science background will not get in the way of being a web developer. I think there's been a trend of late to ask CS-nerd questions in job interviews (Google's influence I think).
(2)If you want to develop web sites you should just do it. If you want someone else to hire you to do it, the simplest demo projects will beat "no experience in the field".
Slashdot Mirror
Oh please, issues like that pale in significance compared to the important business of selling the latest consumer crap electronics.
I forgot to mention "The Wire" (which has nothing to do with "Wired", or the television show, for that matter). It's an excellent British magazine for anyone interested in the grand old tradition of cutting-edge, avant-garde music.
You need to review Dyson's bio a little more closely. He was one of the first physicists to work on global warming at all, and I would venture to say that a lot of the experimental work that's been taken place in the last 20 years has happened because of his prompting.
If you'd like to know why he said what he said, you might start by reading his argument: The Question of Global Warming.
Actually, Dyson disagrees with you on this point, he's argued that there's a need for scientific heretics. Ane previously, he's had a book published on this subject: The Scientist as Rebel
Interestingly enough, this book did not provoke any great controversy. We all like the idea of intellectual rebels and heretics in principle, but when they go up against one of our own beliefs, then they're just incredibly arrogant for going against the authorities.
(By the way... speaking of arrogance, it takes some balls to lecture Freeman Dyson about science... but whatever.)
If you want to attack Dyson's policy recommendation on global warming, by the way, I suggest going after him on the economics. I guarantee you that he knows more about climate science than you or I do, but on a subject like the costs of imposing heavy carbon taxes he's got to defer to economists, and they've got they're own problems with objectivity.
In your article The Question of Global Warming, you make the point that the Earth's vegetation acts as a big carbon sink, and suggest that genetically engineered plants might do an even better job -- thus becoming the first person in history to make environmentalists angry by suggesting that top soil management is important. I have a few questions about this: (1) you mention the fanciful-sounding notion of "carbon-eating trees", but aren't there technologies that already exist that might do the job? There are claims that "no till" agriculture via the dreaded "roundup ready" plants reduce greenhouse gas emissions substantially. (2) A big part of the argument against immediate reductions in CO2 emissions is economic. Do the analyses you've seen really make an effort to capture all the costs and benefits associated with a move like banning coal burning completely? The annual deaths estimated from coal pollution seem big enough to make it worth doing even before you put global warming on the table.
Yes, many publications are available on-line and in print form, and myself I actually think they complement each other fairly well. I read "The New York Review of Books" in print form on the train or in the bath, and occasionaly search their on-line archive to see what they were saying several decades ago.
It was particularly interesting to notice that they published Noam Chomsky regularly in the sixties, and then suddenly stopped, with his last publication in 1970. Your guess is as good as mine why they cut him off, but I've a strong suspicion it has to do with the Israel-Palestine issue...
I went through an Economist phase, but gave up on it during the run-up to the Iraq war. I was getting enough stupid war propaganda from home-grown sources, I didn't need to pay for an import on top of that.
Since the Iraq war thing, there have been other things that turned me off... e.g. a cover photo of a demonstration in Indonesia-- as I remember it-- carefully selected to make it look dramatic and violent, when the actual event was fairly peaceful.
I sometimes wonder if the Economist has ever done any market research... the people I know who read it-- admittedly a selected set-- are all relatively liberal types who like the fact that it writes about places outside the US as though they really exist. They read it in spite of the silly conservative "leaders" up front, not because of them...
As good a place to attach my list as any, since I'm another "Otaku USA" reader:
Plus some common newstand buys:
Manga:
Printed media has advantages over on-line, of course... both durable and portable, with displays that are large, high-resolution and low-power. Each issue is relatively low value, so you don't need to worry about losing them on the train, or water damage from reading in the bath
They sure as fuck are, and you would know that already if you'd bothered to follow any of the news about the subject. The fact that we need research to presuade someone like yourself that using a goddamn computer while driving a car is a bad idea is evidence that you're in the grip of horrible denial (or an obnoxious troll, in which case, nice job).
The california law requiring handsfree gadgets is a completely ridiculous sop to the phone industry, that thought they'd use their public relations crisis to sell more gadgets to people, and succeeded.
Heh. Your point is that a careful assessment of modern technical capabilities would conclude that hydrogen-filled lifting bodies can be built and operated relatively safely, and have technical and economic advantages, and therefore will be used.
Now, let me introduce you to the nuclear power debate.
Perhaps this is some subtle internet humor, but if you actually follow that link, it contradicts what our ubiquitous friend Anonymous Coward says. The bit about surviving a nuclear war is discussed in a section labeled "Misconceptions of design goals".
(And as long as I'm responding to trolls, may I point out that Al Gore does indeed have a plausible claim to being the guy who created the internet.)
"...I like knowing that my $400 videocard with hardware 2D acceleration is actually accelerating my desktop, rather than being a paper-weight."
s/paper-weight/room heater/
s/rather than being a/rather than being just a/
Myself I would like to see physicians who are a little more cautious about making health recommendations.
There's a lot of evidence that salt has been getting a bad rap, e.g. a Scientific American article from 2010 suggests it's time to end the war on salt.
That's based on attempting to find evidence that reducing salt intake will help avoid heart disease, hypertension, etc. I expect it'll be awhile before we know if this new cellular-level research has any application on the level of human populations.
But myself I don't see why I should "already" be avoiding salt.
What I would say is that I could typically see why someone might like Apple products, but I could also see that they were always, invariably oversold. Their ease-of-use and consistency and so on were always exaggerated, but Apple users would never point this out, and in fact appeared to be incapable of seeing it.
Here, I fear you are sadly deluded. Once someone is conned, they have a strong interest in hiding the fact from themselves and from others. They become part of the con artists salesforce. This is how you get "cults".
Many people voted for Bush Jr. twice.
Well perhaps, but it took him awhile. The original NeXT didn't come with a hard drive, remember? Jobs was really pushing the removable magneto-optical drive... and reportedly when he did realize that that wasn't going to fly, he wouldn't admit he called something wrong, it was more like "They weren't ready for that yet".
(In all fairness to the magneto-optical: the Vision there was "every student could carry their universe in their backpack". I could see why Jobs would be attracted to that, around that time I would try to use some of the Macs scattered around on campus, and it seemed like every time I did I would get some weird-ass error messages about incompatible laserwriter driver versions or some such... moving *all* of the software to a removable disk would be one way to dance around that stupidity.)
This is a good idea, but how about we take it a step further, and prevent any tab from making noise, unless you explicitly enable it?
Remember back when there was a difference between a computer and a television set, and computers were something under your control?
Oh no doubt. C+S+D is Intuitively obvious. There's a bit of a chicken-and-egg, of course, since the keyboard hint doesn't appear in the Bookmarks menu pad once the command is gone, and my muscle memory had me doing Alt B's to try to find it.
And yes, gratutious UI changes annoy the shit out of me, particularly in a project that's decided to nag you if you don't upgrade every month. But I am indeed capable of solving this problem, I think the answer is iceweasel on Debian where they get the difference between security fixes and UI changes.
Yes, thanks, I did eventually find it over there, it also used to be under the Bookmarks menu tab, and it's been there for just about as long, until some bozo decided there was something Bad And Wrong about being able to access it without grabbing the mouse. (I haven't bothered to inquire about the reasons for this, I generally find that reading up on Design Philosophy is not good for my blood pressure.)
Reducing the use of pesticides is certainly a good thing, but actually there's supposed to be another advantage of some GM crops in reducing the need to till the land, which is apparently a large source of greenhouse gas emissions.
But sure, local food sources will burn less energy in transporting the stuff, which is also to the good.
And do you know where your "Bookmark All Tabs" has gone today?
Damn, you got me excited there for a moment. Built-in emacs would make these damn TEXTAREA fields bearable... (using emacsclient with the "It's All Text" plug-in is workable, but a little clunky).
Yes, and actually it's one of the better arguments in favor of GM foods in general: Europe banned them, but in the US we've been eating them for many years. No health problems have been found in the US that's attributable to this. As Stewart Brand comments that's a massive experiment conducted on large populations. What more do people need before they'll calm down about this?
(In a way, it's a shame that California voters shot down that bill calling for mandatory labeling of GM foods: it might've made people suddenly realize how much of it they were eating without any problems... And once it sunk in that GM foods were better environmentally, you might find people arguing that if you can't afford Organic you should buy GM.)
I suggest a medal in the shape of a robot chicken, preferably enameled with yellow.
"A Rails (or any other hot language/framework combo) guy pretty much has to beat off clients with a stick." Until the fad dies down (eventually, people will get tired of re-writing Rails prototypes in something that scales...), and then you're stuck trying to decide which band-wagon to jump on next.
" ... and anyone that suggests rewriting swathes of code simply to change the syntax of its representation doesn't understand the first principles of software engineering."
Ding! We have a winner. Unfortunately, you've just described nearly every programmer in existence.
My guess: The reason we still have code written in COBOL is that management got suckered by techies playing the language-of-the-month game a couple of times, and then wised up.
(1) A Computer Science background will not get in the way of being a web developer. I think there's been a trend of late to ask CS-nerd questions in job interviews (Google's influence I think).
(2)If you want to develop web sites you should just do it. If you want someone else to hire you to do it, the simplest demo projects will beat "no experience in the field".