You are far off the mark dude. In fact I don't know any professional physicist whose criticism of string theory is motivated by such childish considerations. Personally, I've been following string theory since the early 80s and I was initially very enthusiastic about it.
By the late 80s, however there were already more patches than one usually sees in such theories, and by the late 90s things were looking rather bad. The last 15 years have done nothing to reverse that assessment.
I didn't say it was false. However a theory that can produce no predictions is useless and needs to be scrapped. People working on it need to be repositioned to more useful pursuits within theoretical physics.
Buying a right-of-way into a "road system"? ESR libertarian utopia has no such thing.
Once you have "an ecosystem of roads" as you suggest which is maintained by road fees and requires public access so you can get to all places you want to go, you have just reimplemented government owned public infrastructure under a different name. This is what typically happens when people get a chance to implement their simplistic libertarian philosophies: it either devolves into a lord of the flies scenario (Somalia, Sealand) or governmental structures quickly reappear.
For one thing, string theory will probably need to be scrapped.
This much has been obvious for quite a while. Too much time has gone by without string theory being able to produce a falsifiable statement and now that finally we have one for SUSY, it failed.
It's been around for about 35 years in its current form and even its best proponent, the distinguished Juan Maldacena, thinks it is still 20 to 30 years before it can be tested experimentally.
p.s. you can count Richard Feynman among the superstring skeptics.
So have you become a total crackpot since September 11th, or was it something that was always sorta brewing under the surface.
It was always brewing under the surface.
He is a blind follower of extreme libertarian ideas. For example, a long time ago in a personal discussion I showed him how under the specific libertarian rules he was suggesting I could buy all the land around a person's house and starve them to death since they couldn't leave. He didn't bat an eye. He kept insisting that "free market rules" wouldn't allow this, as if by magic, rather than rethinking his simplistic position.
Frankly ESR is an embarrassment to the open source movement.
Not in terms of bank regulations. The Great Recession was caused, for the most part, by lax regulations on the banking and mortgage industries across the world.
What they needed to do was fix the problems with Windows 8 and lower the prices substantially to remain competitive.
Instead they release the useless Win 8.1 and an ad-ridden crippled "free" version of Win 8.1.
This is the signature of every truly fscked company out there. The steps needed are rather straightforward and obvious yet time and time again said companies find a way not to take them. For example it was obvious since the mid 80s that Detroit needed to produce better quality cars to avoid bankruptcy, yet a poisonous combination of management, company culture and unions prevented them from taking the obvious step.
Even today they are not yet fully committed to quality cars in the way Toyota or Honda are.
cry for more government, more regulation and more fascism.
Measured amounts of government regulation is what separates us from Lord of the Flies scenarios. There is simply no basis in fact to equate reasonable bank regulation meant to prevent outright fraud with fascism.
Here's a free hint: more electric cars being sold will only put more demand on battery manufacturers, and I don't have to explain how supply and demand works.
No need to explain. We get it: larger demand will lead to economies of scale and mass production so prices will drop massively, like they've done for solar cells.
Remember when AOL was bought by Time Warner because they were panicked that they would be left behind in the Web 1.0 future?
Erh, seemingly you don't. It was AOL who bought Time Warner, not the other way around:
In 2000, AOL purchased Time Warner for US$164 billion.[49] The deal, announced on January 10, 2000[50] and officially filed on February 11, 2000 [wikipedia]
You seem to contradict yourself there, since you give an example of how Germany overreacted.
How should Indonesia ever be able to protect as much as 1% of their current coast against sea level rising?
The same way as Thailand has, where Bangkok has subsided over the last fifty years.
The coastline of the Netherlands compared to the UK is a joke,
You don't need to defend every inch of coast in the UK and much less in the USA, whereas the Netherlands has to defend every bit, so in the end is a wash. Plus the UK and USA have vast larger economies to support sea wall defenses.
As to the Dutch expertise all it means is that when it comes the time to defend Jakarta they will be hiring Dutch companies.
Most nations in the pacific will be wiped out in the next 30 years,
This is positively false, which proves my point. AGW is real but there are plenty of chicken littles on the side of the truth.
An event can be both true and overhyped, e.g. Y2K, the speed of propagation of AIDS, peak oil, overpopulation.
All of those are real concerns that need to be addressed but also have a legion of "oh my god we are all going to die" supporters.
For example, the raise in the level of the oceans will likely not be catastrophic. Many places are subsiding or already below water and they sort of manage (see Netherlands). At the same time, the fact that this particular aspect of AGW is overhyped does not mean that other changes will not be dire e.g. possible desertification of current bread baskets.
there was no one event of discovery...just Catholic Church bullshit
This has nothing to do with Catholicism. You can equally read about Cook's "discovery" of Hawaii, and last time I checked he was Anglican at the service of an Anglican country.
Discovery of America, it's all about European etnocentrism: it didn't exist until we knew about it.
People who keep pointing that Leif Eriksson got there first are usually only driven by the fact that they don't find Columbus white enough, because if one is to be that pedantic about who got to America first, it is clearly someone from Asia/Polynesia somewhere between 10-30K years ago.
Often when the probability of an event gets close to 1-in-100 people just say "impossible", i.e. they round down to zero.
They also forget that one can increase the chances of the event happening by repeating the trial. E.g. funding a 1-in-100 chances of blow-out-success company sounds like a risky bet, but if you fund 100 such companies, it is a rather safe bet. Hence VCs.
This is a counter-intuitive situation in which increasing the occurrences of the risky behaviour makes the whole situation safer. (Contrast this with Russian roulette in which increased trials is definitely a bad thing).
Stack ranking also works if you aim for a 1% trim rate instead of a 10% rate. In a 100 workers it is not hard to find a bad hire or a previously good now demotivated worker, and the average folk need not fear. Of course one should be able to let underperformers go without any target rate, but in practice many people find it really hard to fire someone unless told they have to.
I can see why people might prefer Windows 7 to Windows 8, but most of the time people are speaking from ignorance, never having used Windows 8 (or having used it only with a mouse). It's a different beast entirely with a touch screen.
Windows 8 sucks for reasons much beyond the metro interface. Here's an example: no matter what your personal settings about half of the windows updates will override them and randomly change your logon background page and the presence of the logon page itself.
Here's another one, when you open a picture with the new built in photo app, none of the obvious commands advances you to the next picture in the file folder.
Another one, once you set icon sizes to your own preference, every time you restart they may revert back to the original size, and then back to small size, with no apparent pattern for its change of heart.
In other words, a decisive amount of circumstantial evidence is already pointing us toward humans as at least a part of the cause of the second die-off. The burden of proof is on those who want to claim humans had nothing to do with it. But all they are claiming here is, "lack of evidence" (and only in a small area too, there's plenty of that evidence elsewhere), but that does not help them.
Exactly. I've been studying science for long enough to know that there are times when it gives rather surprising novel explanations to phenomena we thought we had explained away. So while it would be a surprise to learn that it wasn't humans, as a scientist I'm prepared to be blown out of the water any time.
However, this is not the first study trying to argue that "humans didn't do it" and none of them have the weight of evidence nor the "aha!" explanatory power of conventional-wisdom turning discoveries. To make matters worse, said studies too often seem to be punctuated with some sort of "noble savage" morality play, suggesting that only modern western humans are capable of environmental destruction.
In all likelihood humans ran into a system of weakened prey species (ice age anyone?) that might or might not have survived if we hadn't shown up, and we delivered the coup de grace by hunting them down.
People misunderstand what "security through obscurity" means.
Actually chalk that one on RSA who pushed the security through obscurity meme really hard in the late 90s
Most (all?) encryption relies on security through obscurity at some level.
Of course, starting with your private key, which you should keep secret, continuing with which of your servers holds the motherload, which port you should contact, what exact version of crypto you are using (among the many considered reliable), etc. Each one of these is yet another hurdle on the way of a potential codebreaker attack.
It appears you are arguing I oppose all social programs.
Huh? I was talking about the republican party, not you.
you appear to defend the Democrats by complaining that the GOP
Huh^2. I'm simply pointing out why people don't vote republican in spite of obvious failings of the democratic party in Detroit. This justifies why people voting Democrat, it doesn't justify democratic policies in Detroit.
You also seem to demand that they take specific actions which would require large amounts of public money and probably infringements on property rights,
Right, like they have never done anything like that (defense spending, cough, subsidies to oil industry, subsidies to agricultural conglomerates).
Reality is that todays GOP only remembers the deficit and fiscal probity when it comes to helping people in need. But when it comes to giving massive tax breaks to the wealthy all those financial considerations go out the window and they open the deficit taps.
Yet simpletons fall for the deficit rhetoric in spite of the actual voting record of the GOP in congress and White House.
but the offer of free handouts is a tough one to campaign against.
Yes, it is rather surprising how enticing food is when you are unemployed at home with kids, no work and no prospect of employment. Funny that.
The GOP could come with proposals such as retraining and plans to move people out of economically depressed areas which are unlikely to recover, or they could sit in a posh country club and rally against the 43% moochers.
If you do so, just don't come and act surprised then that we don't vote for your invective and vindictive party.
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You are far off the mark dude. In fact I don't know any professional physicist whose criticism of string theory is motivated by such childish considerations. Personally, I've been following string theory since the early 80s and I was initially very enthusiastic about it.
By the late 80s, however there were already more patches than one usually sees in such theories, and by the late 90s things were looking rather bad. The last 15 years have done nothing to reverse that assessment.
I didn't say it was false. However a theory that can produce no predictions is useless and needs to be scrapped. People working on it need to be repositioned to more useful pursuits within theoretical physics.
Buying a right-of-way into a "road system"? ESR libertarian utopia has no such thing.
Once you have "an ecosystem of roads" as you suggest which is maintained by road fees and requires public access so you can get to all places you want to go, you have just reimplemented government owned public infrastructure under a different name. This is what typically happens when people get a chance to implement their simplistic libertarian philosophies: it either devolves into a lord of the flies scenario (Somalia, Sealand) or governmental structures quickly reappear.
For one thing, string theory will probably need to be scrapped.
This much has been obvious for quite a while. Too much time has gone by without string theory being able to produce a falsifiable statement and now that finally we have one for SUSY, it failed.
It's been around for about 35 years in its current form and even its best proponent, the distinguished Juan Maldacena, thinks it is still 20 to 30 years before it can be tested experimentally.
p.s. you can count Richard Feynman among the superstring skeptics.
So have you become a total crackpot since September 11th, or was it something that was always sorta brewing under the surface.
It was always brewing under the surface.
He is a blind follower of extreme libertarian ideas. For example, a long time ago in a personal discussion I showed him how under the specific libertarian rules he was suggesting I could buy all the land around a person's house and starve them to death since they couldn't leave. He didn't bat an eye. He kept insisting that "free market rules" wouldn't allow this, as if by magic, rather than rethinking his simplistic position.
Frankly ESR is an embarrassment to the open source movement.
Not in terms of bank regulations. The Great Recession was caused, for the most part, by lax regulations on the banking and mortgage industries across the world.
What they needed to do was fix the problems with Windows 8 and lower the prices substantially to remain competitive.
Instead they release the useless Win 8.1 and an ad-ridden crippled "free" version of Win 8.1.
This is the signature of every truly fscked company out there. The steps needed are rather straightforward and obvious yet time and time again said companies find a way not to take them. For example it was obvious since the mid 80s that Detroit needed to produce better quality cars to avoid bankruptcy, yet a poisonous combination of management, company culture and unions prevented them from taking the obvious step.
Even today they are not yet fully committed to quality cars in the way Toyota or Honda are.
Perhaps that is the case in your limited circle. The rest of us has kept some perspective and can spot outright BS such as this from a mile away.
cry for more government, more regulation and more fascism.
Measured amounts of government regulation is what separates us from Lord of the Flies scenarios. There is simply no basis in fact to equate reasonable bank regulation meant to prevent outright fraud with fascism.
Here's a free hint: more electric cars being sold will only put more demand on battery manufacturers, and I don't have to explain how supply and demand works.
No need to explain. We get it: larger demand will lead to economies of scale and mass production so prices will drop massively, like they've done for solar cells.
Thanks for reminding us of that.
Remember when AOL was bought by Time Warner because they were panicked that they would be left behind in the Web 1.0 future?
Erh, seemingly you don't. It was AOL who bought Time Warner, not the other way around:
In 2000, AOL purchased Time Warner for US$164 billion.[49] The deal, announced on January 10, 2000[50] and officially filed on February 11, 2000 [wikipedia]
Y2K certainly was not 'overhyped'.
You seem to contradict yourself there, since you give an example of how Germany overreacted.
How should Indonesia ever be able to protect as much as 1% of their current coast against sea level rising?
The same way as Thailand has, where Bangkok has subsided over the last fifty years.
The coastline of the Netherlands compared to the UK is a joke,
You don't need to defend every inch of coast in the UK and much less in the USA, whereas the Netherlands has to defend every bit, so in the end is a wash. Plus the UK and USA have vast larger economies to support sea wall defenses.
As to the Dutch expertise all it means is that when it comes the time to defend Jakarta they will be hiring Dutch companies.
Most nations in the pacific will be wiped out in the next 30 years,
This is positively false, which proves my point. AGW is real but there are plenty of chicken littles on the side of the truth.
An event can be both true and overhyped, e.g. Y2K, the speed of propagation of AIDS, peak oil, overpopulation.
All of those are real concerns that need to be addressed but also have a legion of "oh my god we are all going to die" supporters.
For example, the raise in the level of the oceans will likely not be catastrophic. Many places are subsiding or already below water and they sort of manage (see Netherlands). At the same time, the fact that this particular aspect of AGW is overhyped does not mean that other changes will not be dire e.g. possible desertification of current bread baskets.
there was no one event of discovery...just Catholic Church bullshit
This has nothing to do with Catholicism. You can equally read about Cook's "discovery" of Hawaii, and last time I checked he was Anglican at the service of an Anglican country.
Discovery of America, it's all about European etnocentrism: it didn't exist until we knew about it.
People who keep pointing that Leif Eriksson got there first are usually only driven by the fact that they don't find Columbus white enough, because if one is to be that pedantic about who got to America first, it is clearly someone from Asia/Polynesia somewhere between 10-30K years ago.
Often when the probability of an event gets close to 1-in-100 people just say "impossible", i.e. they round down to zero.
They also forget that one can increase the chances of the event happening by repeating the trial. E.g. funding a 1-in-100 chances of blow-out-success company sounds like a risky bet, but if you fund 100 such companies, it is a rather safe bet. Hence VCs.
This is a counter-intuitive situation in which increasing the occurrences of the risky behaviour makes the whole situation safer. (Contrast this with Russian roulette in which increased trials is definitely a bad thing).
Stack ranking also works if you aim for a 1% trim rate instead of a 10% rate. In a 100 workers it is not hard to find a bad hire or a previously good now demotivated worker, and the average folk need not fear. Of course one should be able to let underperformers go without any target rate, but in practice many people find it really hard to fire someone unless told they have to.
The burden of proof is not on those making the claim. It falls on those making the non-occam razor claim.
Group of hunters shows up, prey group disappears. Conclusion, hunters killed prey until substantial evidence to the contrary is gained.
That's never happened to me, not even once.
Ok, I believe you. So? All it means is that Win 8 fails erratically.
Also, I never use the bulit-in photo viewer.
So your argument in favor of Win 8 is that if you purchase enough software and replace enough of it it can be made not to suck. That's an endorsement.
I can see why people might prefer Windows 7 to Windows 8, but most of the time people are speaking from ignorance, never having used Windows 8 (or having used it only with a mouse). It's a different beast entirely with a touch screen.
Windows 8 sucks for reasons much beyond the metro interface. Here's an example: no matter what your personal settings about half of the windows updates will override them and randomly change your logon background page and the presence of the logon page itself.
Here's another one, when you open a picture with the new built in photo app, none of the obvious commands advances you to the next picture in the file folder.
Another one, once you set icon sizes to your own preference, every time you restart they may revert back to the original size, and then back to small size, with no apparent pattern for its change of heart.
I can go on and on. The whole thing is a kludge.
In other words, a decisive amount of circumstantial evidence is already pointing us toward humans as at least a part of the cause of the second die-off. The burden of proof is on those who want to claim humans had nothing to do with it. But all they are claiming here is, "lack of evidence" (and only in a small area too, there's plenty of that evidence elsewhere), but that does not help them.
Exactly. I've been studying science for long enough to know that there are times when it gives rather surprising novel explanations to phenomena we thought we had explained away. So while it would be a surprise to learn that it wasn't humans, as a scientist I'm prepared to be blown out of the water any time.
However, this is not the first study trying to argue that "humans didn't do it" and none of them have the weight of evidence nor the "aha!" explanatory power of conventional-wisdom turning discoveries. To make matters worse, said studies too often seem to be punctuated with some sort of "noble savage" morality play, suggesting that only modern western humans are capable of environmental destruction.
In all likelihood humans ran into a system of weakened prey species (ice age anyone?) that might or might not have survived if we hadn't shown up, and we delivered the coup de grace by hunting them down.
People misunderstand what "security through obscurity" means.
Actually chalk that one on RSA who pushed the security through obscurity meme really hard in the late 90s
Most (all?) encryption relies on security through obscurity at some level.
Of course, starting with your private key, which you should keep secret, continuing with which of your servers holds the motherload, which port you should contact, what exact version of crypto you are using (among the many considered reliable), etc. Each one of these is yet another hurdle on the way of a potential codebreaker attack.
It appears you are arguing I oppose all social programs.
Huh? I was talking about the republican party, not you.
you appear to defend the Democrats by complaining that the GOP
Huh^2. I'm simply pointing out why people don't vote republican in spite of obvious failings of the democratic party in Detroit. This justifies why people voting Democrat, it doesn't justify democratic policies in Detroit.
You also seem to demand that they take specific actions which would require large amounts of public money and probably infringements on property rights,
Right, like they have never done anything like that (defense spending, cough, subsidies to oil industry, subsidies to agricultural conglomerates).
Reality is that todays GOP only remembers the deficit and fiscal probity when it comes to helping people in need. But when it comes to giving massive tax breaks to the wealthy all those financial considerations go out the window and they open the deficit taps.
Yet simpletons fall for the deficit rhetoric in spite of the actual voting record of the GOP in congress and White House.
but the offer of free handouts is a tough one to campaign against.
Yes, it is rather surprising how enticing food is when you are unemployed at home with kids, no work and no prospect of employment. Funny that.
The GOP could come with proposals such as retraining and plans to move people out of economically depressed areas which are unlikely to recover, or they could sit in a posh country club and rally against the 43% moochers.
If you do so, just don't come and act surprised then that we don't vote for your invective and vindictive party.
I programmed in those in the mid-80s so I can tell you that they are more than just concept pieces.
The company I worked for back then owned five of them. So I can tell you without a doubt that it was nor just a concept piece.