This is demonstrably false. If taxes were too high we would be running a surplus. Since we are running the largest deficit in the history of the country clearly taxes are too low.
I was slightly disappointed with the final chapters of Smolin's book since, despite an obvious effort to the contrary, it struck me as awfully bitter and reeked of sour grapes.
Have you noticed that is really hard to raise a complaint, however valid, without having it sound like sour grapes? Tellingly the parent post criticizes the tone of Smolin's delivery without addressing the substance. Is physics in a dead end trajectory, which in particular is now reflected by the lack of increase in funding? is the system self perpetuating in its erroneous ways? Those are very valid questions and physicists would be well advised to ponder them very carefully. The future of their discipline depends on them.
If Smolin is right, physicists in large departments are in a state of group-think refusing to see faults in the current directions of research. I don't know if he is right or wrong, but he is certainly right to _ask_ the question, after thirty years of non-results from string theory, and declining funding.
You are incorrect. Coffee sites recommend 95C or higher for brewing but certainly not for serving.
Also her lawyers when they did a survey of nationwide places and what temperatures they used did not do a nationwide search
False. They compared the temperatures to many other major fast food chains and McDonalds was a good 10-20C higher than the rest.
When I first heard about this lawsuit I was very much in the "ridiculous lawsuit" camp. Then I read the court transcripts and realized she was right and McDonalds was wrong.
There was a time when Microsoft was the most admire company in geekdom, very much like Google is today. They were always agressive and had a rapidly expanding dominant position but nobody begrudged them for it. But at some point in the early 90s they switched to full-bully mode, disabling DrDos, forcing other companies to sell technology to them at cutthroat low prices, hiking the prices of their upgrades, abusing their monopoly power to remove Nestcape from the desktop and that was the beginning of the end.
Much as people complained about all other supposed defficiencies, they do not stand out as being much worse than the rest of the field. Lets face it most software out there is buggy and bloated, be it from Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, or the Mozilla foundation. If this is all they did, they wouldn't be hated just as people don't hate Apple or Adobe.
Hullo? he was cleared by the *courts*. Whatever biases the ACLU might or might not have, the courst agreed the poor bastard was innocent. Incredibly the only thought that seems to trigger in you is "those damn ACLU commies". And let me guess, you call yourself a Christian, right?
They had the "luck" that whenever their competitors shot themselves in the foot it was terminal, while microsoft would just maim itself in the process. This happened time and time again (read "In search of stupidity" or "accidental empires" or better yet, ask someone who was there while it all happened, there are many of us still around).
Microsoft didn't start the real bullying until sometime in the mid 90s, before that they were a much admired and respected company, just like Google is today.
Actually, Paterson in the end made a bit more money than that, since he retained certain residual rights. If he had asked for payment in M$ stock rather than money he would be a billionaire now.
Managers will still reward people they like and punish people they don't.
Managers like people who excel at what they do and as a consequence make the Mgr look good in front of the higher ups. They also dislike whining cry babies who get upset when a star makes more money than they do.
simply because if you work 8pm - 4am and work miracles
You have no clue what you are talking about. Managers have goals imposed from above. They parcel out the work among their underlings and keep an eye on who gets the job done and who doesn't.
Perhaps the supposed miracles you do aren't as miraculous as you think. Perhaps you wrote fantastic code but never explained to anyone else how it works, so your manager is sweating bullets and hoping you don't get run over by a bus. Maybe you were never at meetings because of your weird time schedule so you never internalized that the code is supposed to interact with external utilities.
Lastly having said that, as a manager I always implemented extreme flex time. If we have a meeting you have to be there but outside of that you work when it is more convenient for you, and I only care about results. The highest paid guy in my team routinely worked 2pm to midnight.
You are concentrating on what is wrong with the proposed solution, rather on what is right and perfecting it from there. From experience, there is nothing I can do to convince you that there is a way, short of working out all the bugs, since you are not interested in finding a solution that works. All your brain power is currently going towards pointing out the last little detail that has not yet been fully worked out.
12 guys moved a 1.5 ton block easily.
The largest stones weight over 50 tons each, the base stones weight over 10 tons. The NOVA guys pushed them a few yards, while the Giza stones come from a quarry that was several miles away.
There are various ways to use water to store energy (by pumping it up a hill/tower), but without a difference in elevation, water doesn't have any energy.
Think outside the box. Here's another way: navigate upriver to where water elevation is present, say, some water falls. Fill up elevated ship-borne tank at bottow level of water falls, then navigate downriver, empty tank at Giza location.
I'm having a hard time envisioning anything simpler that a whole bunch of guys pulling ropes and pushing levers.
I'd be willing to believe they did this, except for the fact that every time archeologists try this method it gets them nowhere, even with a team of 20 people pulling.
The Nile at Giza is an extremely lousy power source. The Nile at Giza is an extremely lousy power source.
Hint: think negative elevation. Dig a 30 feet deep hole and let water cascade into hole. But wait a minute, wouldn't the hole fill up pretty quickly, thus vanishing any said advantage? Generally yes, but not so if you can find sandy, dry soil that has very low water retention capability.
This is but one way to harness water power in the absence of natural elevation. There are others. Which one they used? I have no clue.
You think it's human nature to tend to do things sensibly?
Yes, when the things they are doing weight 3 tons and they have to move 10,000 of them. Otherwise I agree with you, if the task is not extremely challenging we tend to do whatever we are used to doing, without thinking twice about it.
Lets see... MS took an existing Operating system, repackaged it, and sold it to IBM. And thus an empire was born.
You need to review your PC history, there were a lot more twists and turns along the way. For the longest time it looked like _other_ companies were going to beat Microsoft, including Lotus, Novell, Apple, Borland and not so long ago even Netscape and Sun. Even today the biggest cash cow is Microsoft Office, not the OS.
Huh... I seem to remember seeing an article purporting that at least half of the spam-zombies perpetuating these stock pump-and-dump schemes are Win XP SP2 boxen...
Pretty amazing once you consider that XP SP2 boxen account for something like 80% of all boxes. This means that other OSes are infected at rates that are several multiples of XP.
Whatever method they used had to be a sensible method. It is human nature to device techniques that minimize effort. Whether it was poured concrete, a method involving hydraulic power which was plentiful with the pyramids being next to the longest river in the world or some here-to-fore yet unknown technology, there had to be a relatively easy way to do it. For example, in Easter Island, the latest belief is that natives built woden "railways" or "railtracks" over which the stones could slide with rather minimal effort.
Personally I've always favored a mixture of poured concrete and water powered elevators.
Correct. We went over the figures carefully and average USA households at can tolerate up to $150 barrel of oil without any major changes in habits. Its only past that that threshold where we would start to see substantial shifts in daily driving patterns, location of residence and sales-per-model type figures.
I did, and for the first n years most of them were embarrassing. They boiled down to credential checking --as the great-grand parent post did-- or nit picking, i.e. pointing minor insignificant errors in the data. Only much later did the first more cogent coutner-arguments started to appear.
I'm not going to provide links.
You can't even provide a name, so I don't expect you to be able to do anything complicated such as provide references.
Your posting is a perfect example of how *not* to attack Lomborg. It doesn't matter what your credentials are, either your facts and conclusions are right or they are not. You don't agree with Lomborg? show us when and where he rushed to conclusions (in fact, some others have).
Having read his book I think he puts forward a cogent, well researched argument that deserves a likewise response from the experts that be.
Microsoft code is no worse than the rest of the industry. FOSS fanboys used to sneer at the high-bug-rate memory-hogging IE, and guess what? when firefox came out it was (and still is) equally buggy and memory hoggy.
It was pretty much developed from scratch. The code from Spyglass was pretty useless and back then (pre-frame, pre-CSS world) developing a whole new browser wasn't that hard. Today it would take several years, as Mozilla learned.
Recently it has come to be known that the Nobel committee did have her in mind as a potential awardee, had she not died. She still would have needed to clear many hurdles, but they were aware that she was as much part of the team as Watson, Crick and Wilkins.
BS. While Microsoft did license Spyglass' code and did rip them in the process by bullying them into a pittance of a payment, Spyglass' browser was waaaaaaay crappier than Netscape or the first version of Internet Explorer.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you really think that they don't store every cookie and search pattern that everyone who uses their search engine?
You are correct. Google openly acknowledges that they store every search made together with its cookie userid.
nevermind that taxes are too high
This is demonstrably false. If taxes were too high we would be running a surplus. Since we are running the largest deficit in the history of the country clearly taxes are too low.
I was slightly disappointed with the final chapters of Smolin's book since, despite an obvious effort to the contrary, it struck me as awfully bitter and reeked of sour grapes.
Have you noticed that is really hard to raise a complaint, however valid, without having it sound like sour grapes? Tellingly the parent post criticizes the tone of Smolin's delivery without addressing the substance. Is physics in a dead end trajectory, which in particular is now reflected by the lack of increase in funding? is the system self perpetuating in its erroneous ways? Those are very valid questions and physicists would be well advised to ponder them very carefully. The future of their discipline depends on them.
If Smolin is right, physicists in large departments are in a state of group-think refusing to see faults in the current directions of research. I don't know if he is right or wrong, but he is certainly right to _ask_ the question, after thirty years of non-results from string theory, and declining funding.
You are incorrect. Coffee sites recommend 95C or higher for brewing but certainly not for serving.
Also her lawyers when they did a survey of nationwide places and what temperatures they used did not do a nationwide search
False. They compared the temperatures to many other major fast food chains and McDonalds was a good 10-20C higher than the rest.
When I first heard about this lawsuit I was very much in the "ridiculous lawsuit" camp. Then I read the court transcripts and realized she was right and McDonalds was wrong.
There was a time when Microsoft was the most admire company in geekdom, very much like Google is today. They were always agressive and had a rapidly expanding dominant position but nobody begrudged them for it. But at some point in the early 90s they switched to full-bully mode, disabling DrDos, forcing other companies to sell technology to them at cutthroat low prices, hiking the prices of their upgrades, abusing their monopoly power to remove Nestcape from the desktop and that was the beginning of the end.
Much as people complained about all other supposed defficiencies, they do not stand out as being much worse than the rest of the field. Lets face it most software out there is buggy and bloated, be it from Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, or the Mozilla foundation. If this is all they did, they wouldn't be hated just as people don't hate Apple or Adobe.
Hullo? he was cleared by the *courts*. Whatever biases the ACLU might or might not have, the courst agreed the poor bastard was innocent. Incredibly the only thought that seems to trigger in you is "those damn ACLU commies". And let me guess, you call yourself a Christian, right?
They had the "luck" that whenever their competitors shot themselves in the foot it was terminal, while microsoft would just maim itself in the process. This happened time and time again (read "In search of stupidity" or "accidental empires" or better yet, ask someone who was there while it all happened, there are many of us still around).
Microsoft didn't start the real bullying until sometime in the mid 90s, before that they were a much admired and respected company, just like Google is today.
Actually, Paterson in the end made a bit more money than that, since he retained certain residual rights. If he had asked for payment in M$ stock rather than money he would be a billionaire now.
It kind of pisses me off when Bill Gates is presented as some sort of rags-to-riches success story. He had some starting-post advantages, folks.
Would you have been able to deliver an operating system at age 21 had you mommy set up a meeting with IBM? Don't think so.
Managers will still reward people they like and punish people they don't.
Managers like people who excel at what they do and as a consequence make the Mgr look good in front of the higher ups. They also dislike whining cry babies who get upset when a star makes more money than they do.
simply because if you work 8pm - 4am and work miracles
You have no clue what you are talking about. Managers have goals imposed from above. They parcel out the work among their underlings and keep an eye on who gets the job done and who doesn't.
Perhaps the supposed miracles you do aren't as miraculous as you think. Perhaps you wrote fantastic code but never explained to anyone else how it works, so your manager is sweating bullets and hoping you don't get run over by a bus. Maybe you were never at meetings because of your weird time schedule so you never internalized that the code is supposed to interact with external utilities.
Lastly having said that, as a manager I always implemented extreme flex time. If we have a meeting you have to be there but outside of that you work when it is more convenient for you, and I only care about results. The highest paid guy in my team routinely worked 2pm to midnight.
Hundreds of miles away.
You are concentrating on what is wrong with the proposed solution, rather on what is right and perfecting it from there. From experience, there is nothing I can do to convince you that there is a way, short of working out all the bugs, since you are not interested in finding a solution that works. All your brain power is currently going towards pointing out the last little detail that has not yet been fully worked out.
12 guys moved a 1.5 ton block easily.
The largest stones weight over 50 tons each, the base stones weight over 10 tons. The NOVA guys pushed them a few yards, while the Giza stones come from a quarry that was several miles away.
There are various ways to use water to store energy (by pumping it up a hill/tower), but without a difference in elevation, water doesn't have any energy.
Think outside the box. Here's another way: navigate upriver to where water elevation is present, say, some water falls. Fill up elevated ship-borne tank at bottow level of water falls, then navigate downriver, empty tank at Giza location.
I'm having a hard time envisioning anything simpler that a whole bunch of guys pulling ropes and pushing levers.
I'd be willing to believe they did this, except for the fact that every time archeologists try this method it gets them nowhere, even with a team of 20 people pulling.
The Nile at Giza is an extremely lousy power source. The Nile at Giza is an extremely lousy power source.
Hint: think negative elevation. Dig a 30 feet deep hole and let water cascade into hole. But wait a minute, wouldn't the hole fill up pretty quickly, thus vanishing any said advantage? Generally yes, but not so if you can find sandy, dry soil that has very low water retention capability.
This is but one way to harness water power in the absence of natural elevation. There are others. Which one they used? I have no clue.
You think it's human nature to tend to do things sensibly?
Yes, when the things they are doing weight 3 tons and they have to move 10,000 of them. Otherwise I agree with you, if the task is not extremely challenging we tend to do whatever we are used to doing, without thinking twice about it.
Lets see... MS took an existing Operating system, repackaged it, and sold it to IBM. And thus an empire was born.
You need to review your PC history, there were a lot more twists and turns along the way. For the longest time it looked like _other_ companies were going to beat Microsoft, including Lotus, Novell, Apple, Borland and not so long ago even Netscape and Sun. Even today the biggest cash cow is Microsoft Office, not the OS.
Huh... I seem to remember seeing an article purporting that at least half of the spam-zombies perpetuating these stock pump-and-dump schemes are Win XP SP2 boxen...
Pretty amazing once you consider that XP SP2 boxen account for something like 80% of all boxes. This means that other OSes are infected at rates that are several multiples of XP.
Whatever method they used had to be a sensible method. It is human nature to device techniques that minimize effort. Whether it was poured concrete, a method involving hydraulic power which was plentiful with the pyramids being next to the longest river in the world or some here-to-fore yet unknown technology, there had to be a relatively easy way to do it. For example, in Easter Island, the latest belief is that natives built woden "railways" or "railtracks" over which the stones could slide with rather minimal effort.
Personally I've always favored a mixture of poured concrete and water powered elevators.
Correct. We went over the figures carefully and average USA households at can tolerate up to $150 barrel of oil without any major changes in habits. Its only past that that threshold where we would start to see substantial shifts in daily driving patterns, location of residence and sales-per-model type figures.
Did you even bother to look for them?
I did, and for the first n years most of them were embarrassing. They boiled down to credential checking --as the great-grand parent post did-- or nit picking, i.e. pointing minor insignificant errors in the data. Only much later did the first more cogent coutner-arguments started to appear.
I'm not going to provide links.
You can't even provide a name, so I don't expect you to be able to do anything complicated such as provide references.
Your posting is a perfect example of how *not* to attack Lomborg. It doesn't matter what your credentials are, either your facts and conclusions are right or they are not. You don't agree with Lomborg? show us when and where he rushed to conclusions (in fact, some others have).
Having read his book I think he puts forward a cogent, well researched argument that deserves a likewise response from the experts that be.
people accustomed to work with microsoft code
Microsoft code is no worse than the rest of the industry. FOSS fanboys used to sneer at the high-bug-rate memory-hogging IE, and guess what? when firefox came out it was (and still is) equally buggy and memory hoggy.
It was pretty much developed from scratch. The code from Spyglass was pretty useless and back then (pre-frame, pre-CSS world) developing a whole new browser wasn't that hard. Today it would take several years, as Mozilla learned.
For example, Sun Labs was in charge of the DARPA project at Sun. They have "invested" 3 years on that. My question is "what do they have to show?".
3 /b3886007.htm
erh.... $50 million in cash from the last round of funding?
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_2
Recently it has come to be known that the Nobel committee did have her in mind as a potential awardee, had she not died. She still would have needed to clear many hurdles, but they were aware that she was as much part of the team as Watson, Crick and Wilkins.
BS. While Microsoft did license Spyglass' code and did rip them in the process by bullying them into a pittance of a payment, Spyglass' browser was waaaaaaay crappier than Netscape or the first version of Internet Explorer.