I find BT's change of heart on FTTP interesting - originally it was for greenfield only, now they're going to do 2.5 million houses. Quite a bold move for the normally very conservative BT. Hopefully we'll go further in that direction - FTTC is fine but I'm not sure it's *so* much better as to provide a qualitative distinction over normal broadband the way that ADSL did over dialup, particularly at the lower end of the speed range (20 Mbps). Ah well, we'll see.
BT do have a fibre plan for about 40% of UK households over the next couple of years. It's mostly FTTC, but they said they'd use FTTP for about a quarter of the deployment.
One of the reasons it's taken so long was that it's harder to make a profit if you have to share your infrastructure. Nevertheless, I'm glad they do have to - I'd rather fibre turn up more slowly than have BT Retail as the only ISP.
The "far right" may have been true in the 80s (and even then they weren't far right in the fascist sense) and to a lesser extent in the pre-Cameron days, but now there's not a whole lot distinguishing them from Labour. Yes, they're a bit more right wing economically, but nothing like the huge gulf of the past.
Do you perchance come from a strong Labour family background? Politics in the UK seems to be part apathy, part tribalism.
I disagree, it's neither necessary nor sufficient. It may be helpful, but its value is rather overstated. I've seen nicely laid out code that was buggy and spaghetti that worked fine.
Since *proving* correctness in the mathematical sense is impractical for most programs, the best approach is to make sure it's well tested, and to have multiple analyses with different people and code.
>Do it the same way you do it in industry: document the model number of the oscilloscope, the firmware revision and every important setting you can get your hands on.
There's no reason on earth why you'd even do that. Just say "the voltage was measured to be x +- y". Results from science experiments should *not* depend on specifics of equipment any more than they should depend on a specific scientist. In fact, the wider the variety of equipment, code and analysis methods used to measure the same thing, the better - it makes the result more robust.
In your example, both people should recheck their results independently, perhaps try different methods, even do another experiment.
There are some situations where seeing the code is useful, but only after all other methods to reproduce the result have failed. Sharing code is just inviting common errors.
In your hypothetical scenario below, the result could be reproduced by writing a new program to do the same thing.
If they use an oscilloscope, do they have to publish full details of its internal structure? Or can we just assume that it behaves in a certain, standard way?
Similarly, with code, what's published is a description of the process that the code implements. Then anyone can go off and write their own code to do the same thing. Results should not depent on a particular implementation - that would be quite as silly as demanding that the analysis should be done by one particular individual.
>So, while it is perfectly understandable that, say, physicists can't spend 5 years learning CS, at the very least they should be made aware that it requires trained people to write sane code and that they must hand the job to specialists, and spend their valuable time doing what the're skilled at.
And where will they get these specialists, and who will pay for them?
Add the overhead of explaining exactly what the code is supposed to do, and the fact that the specialist won't know the physics purpose of it all, and I wouldn't be suprised if there were more errors this way, not fewer. Most science code is fairly short, so all the fuss about "structured programming" (or is it OOP these days?) isn't as important.
Nonsense, they're not trying to produce code, they're trying to produce science. It doesn't matter how ugly the code is, or how inefficient, as long as it produces correct answers. Since software engineering "best practices" seem to change every week (and do not prove program correctness in any case), what are they supposed to do, spend huge amounts of time learning as much as a professional software engineer would? Do you do that for all the tools you use?
Does anyone have any evidence that the code is *wrong*? I.e. does it actually produce significantly wrong answers? I suspect not - this is just the latest FUD-spreading trick.
This is just typical programmer "when your tool's a hammer" mentality. Software's not the most important thing in the world, and science has better ways to verify correctness - have several independent analyses of the same thing for example, or different ways of measuring the same thing to check for consistency.
Except that it would be clearly in their interests to show that global warming was false, if they could. A tiny fraction of their spending (and it would be, the oil companies are huge) directed towards research which would prevent hurtful measures (to them) such as carbon taxes would easily pay for itself.
He said it was a Focus, which is an average sized hatchback (for the UK, probably a small one for the US). The Mondeo diesels are a similar size to the Camry and get 40-45 mpg (US) on average. Long trips somewhat better.
They are, however, manual transmission, which wouldn't go down well in the US. And Ford's automatics seem to have a very large fuel consumption penalty - 20%.
Fast breeders don't necessarily produce any plutonium, unlike normal thermal reactors. A PWR on a current once-through cycle will burn mostly U-235 and produce Pu-239 - so no plutonium in, some plutonium out. A fast breeder with a closed cycle and Pu as the fissile material can be arranged so that only as much plutonium comes out as goes in.
You can't indefinitely recycle plutonium in a thermal reactor due to complications with particular isotopes building up, affecting stability.
Interestingly, that's one way the UK is notably *ahead* of other countries - the police aren't routinely armed. When I visited the US or other countries where armed police are routine, there was a noticeable uneasy feeling. It's a rather more obvious expression of state power over the individual than a camera - a camera can't kill you.
The surveillance still sucks, of course. It's not as pervasive as the stories on Slashdot suggest, but there's still more than enough.
Which more or less sums up the ghastlyness of the modern business world. When did risk-taking become good? Maybe the recent recession could have been avoided if people had been a bit more cautious and careful.
I'm not trying to defend China - I'm just interested in where we draw the line. At what point does censorship become a human rights violation severe enough to require non-cooperation? Some forms of censorship have widespread public support (e.g. child porn).
So, is DMCA-style censorship bad enough? Censorship of pornography or violence in films? Restrictions on what news can be reported or discussed openly?
I don't think any country is completely free of questionable activities in the area of human rights. China is worse than most, to be sure.
Sure you can logically draw comparisons between the DMCA and chinese censorship laws, it's not particularly hard or imaginative. The problem is when you compare the two on equal grounds. One involves gross violations of basic human rights, the other involves less Brittany Spears remixes on youtube.
I'm not sure censorship counts as "gross violations of basic human rights". It's not good, certainly, but not in the same league as arbitrary imprisonment, torture or executions (things the US is not exactly innocent of). If Google was cooperating in those, I'd be all for boycotting it.
The greek nu is the standard notation for frequency in physics, or at least it generally was when I did that kind of thing. f is sometimes used, though less commonly. However, photons are not relevant for RF - the photon energy is so small that the quantum nature of the radiation is not apparent, and it behaves for all practical purposes as a classical wave.
Hardly. Overnight elimination of carbon emissions may do that, but there are lots of low hanging fruit not being exploited in terms of efficiency, as well as a lot of relatively cheap lower-carbon energy options.
For example, coal fired electricity is responsible for a large amount of emission. Nuclear power is estimated to be only slightly more expensive, at least if done at scale (and we need to). Obviously at some point we'll run out of the easy options, but we're nowhere near there yet.
(try looking at ROOT from CERN for C++ that will make you want to cry!).
It's quite shocking isn't it? And not just a "this code isn't very pretty" problem either, but the instability of the thing is remarkable. Even the sloppiest of my own code was never that bad. So many segfaults... I ended up writing as much as possible outside the ROOT framework after trying (and failing) to understand the behaviour of TObjArray regarding memory management. I'm surprised that any analysis actually successfully gets done, sometimes.
Of course, it depends on what level of "correctness" we're talking about. A good deal of programming is of the good enough variety - it doesn't have to be correct, just to work well enough to sell. How else would you explain the pre-NT series of Windows? I'm sure there are cases where higher correctness guarantees are required, but how common are they?
My point was really that typically in programming you know what your program is supposed to do so you can test your answer - maybe not completely, but to the point where it's good enough. That's much harder in science since you don't know what answer you're supposed to get.
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I find BT's change of heart on FTTP interesting - originally it was for greenfield only, now they're going to do 2.5 million houses. Quite a bold move for the normally very conservative BT. Hopefully we'll go further in that direction - FTTC is fine but I'm not sure it's *so* much better as to provide a qualitative distinction over normal broadband the way that ADSL did over dialup, particularly at the lower end of the speed range (20 Mbps). Ah well, we'll see.
BT do have a fibre plan for about 40% of UK households over the next couple of years. It's mostly FTTC, but they said they'd use FTTP for about a quarter of the deployment.
One of the reasons it's taken so long was that it's harder to make a profit if you have to share your infrastructure. Nevertheless, I'm glad they do have to - I'd rather fibre turn up more slowly than have BT Retail as the only ISP.
10 million homes aren't getting fibre though, are they? I thought that number included 8 million or so "fibre to the cabinet" deployments.
The "far right" may have been true in the 80s (and even then they weren't far right in the fascist sense) and to a lesser extent in the pre-Cameron days, but now there's not a whole lot distinguishing them from Labour. Yes, they're a bit more right wing economically, but nothing like the huge gulf of the past.
Do you perchance come from a strong Labour family background? Politics in the UK seems to be part apathy, part tribalism.
I disagree, it's neither necessary nor sufficient. It may be helpful, but its value is rather overstated. I've seen nicely laid out code that was buggy and spaghetti that worked fine.
Since *proving* correctness in the mathematical sense is impractical for most programs, the best approach is to make sure it's well tested, and to have multiple analyses with different people and code.
>Do it the same way you do it in industry: document the model number of the oscilloscope, the firmware revision and every important setting you can get your hands on.
There's no reason on earth why you'd even do that. Just say "the voltage was measured to be x +- y". Results from science experiments should *not* depend on specifics of equipment any more than they should depend on a specific scientist. In fact, the wider the variety of equipment, code and analysis methods used to measure the same thing, the better - it makes the result more robust.
In your example, both people should recheck their results independently, perhaps try different methods, even do another experiment.
There are some situations where seeing the code is useful, but only after all other methods to reproduce the result have failed. Sharing code is just inviting common errors.
In your hypothetical scenario below, the result could be reproduced by writing a new program to do the same thing.
If they use an oscilloscope, do they have to publish full details of its internal structure? Or can we just assume that it behaves in a certain, standard way?
Similarly, with code, what's published is a description of the process that the code implements. Then anyone can go off and write their own code to do the same thing. Results should not depent on a particular implementation - that would be quite as silly as demanding that the analysis should be done by one particular individual.
>So, while it is perfectly understandable that, say, physicists can't spend 5 years learning CS, at the very least they should be made aware that it requires trained people to write sane code and that they must hand the job to specialists, and spend their valuable time doing what the're skilled at.
And where will they get these specialists, and who will pay for them?
Add the overhead of explaining exactly what the code is supposed to do, and the fact that the specialist won't know the physics purpose of it all, and I wouldn't be suprised if there were more errors this way, not fewer. Most science code is fairly short, so all the fuss about "structured programming" (or is it OOP these days?) isn't as important.
> 600 lines of code in the main, no functions, no comments
Does that make it function incorrectly?
Looking pretty and being correct are orthogonal issues. Code can be well-structured but wrong, after all.
Nonsense, they're not trying to produce code, they're trying to produce science. It doesn't matter how ugly the code is, or how inefficient, as long as it produces correct answers. Since software engineering "best practices" seem to change every week (and do not prove program correctness in any case), what are they supposed to do, spend huge amounts of time learning as much as a professional software engineer would? Do you do that for all the tools you use?
Does anyone have any evidence that the code is *wrong*? I.e. does it actually produce significantly wrong answers? I suspect not - this is just the latest FUD-spreading trick.
This is just typical programmer "when your tool's a hammer" mentality. Software's not the most important thing in the world, and science has better ways to verify correctness - have several independent analyses of the same thing for example, or different ways of measuring the same thing to check for consistency.
Except that it would be clearly in their interests to show that global warming was false, if they could. A tiny fraction of their spending (and it would be, the oil companies are huge) directed towards research which would prevent hurtful measures (to them) such as carbon taxes would easily pay for itself.
He said it was a Focus, which is an average sized hatchback (for the UK, probably a small one for the US). The Mondeo diesels are a similar size to the Camry and get 40-45 mpg (US) on average. Long trips somewhat better.
They are, however, manual transmission, which wouldn't go down well in the US. And Ford's automatics seem to have a very large fuel consumption penalty - 20%.
Fast breeders don't necessarily produce any plutonium, unlike normal thermal reactors. A PWR on a current once-through cycle will burn mostly U-235 and produce Pu-239 - so no plutonium in, some plutonium out. A fast breeder with a closed cycle and Pu as the fissile material can be arranged so that only as much plutonium comes out as goes in.
You can't indefinitely recycle plutonium in a thermal reactor due to complications with particular isotopes building up, affecting stability.
Interestingly, that's one way the UK is notably *ahead* of other countries - the police aren't routinely armed. When I visited the US or other countries where armed police are routine, there was a noticeable uneasy feeling. It's a rather more obvious expression of state power over the individual than a camera - a camera can't kill you.
The surveillance still sucks, of course. It's not as pervasive as the stories on Slashdot suggest, but there's still more than enough.
Which more or less sums up the ghastlyness of the modern business world. When did risk-taking become good? Maybe the recent recession could have been avoided if people had been a bit more cautious and careful.
Uh, what happens in China if you try to bypass censorship? That would be arbitrary imprisonment, torture, or executions
No, it wouldn't be arbitrary, it would be for breaking the law. As long as the law is made clear, you can avoid the penalties.
That doesn't make it right, but it's not the same thing.
I'm not trying to defend China - I'm just interested in where we draw the line. At what point does censorship become a human rights violation severe enough to require non-cooperation? Some forms of censorship have widespread public support (e.g. child porn).
So, is DMCA-style censorship bad enough?
Censorship of pornography or violence in films?
Restrictions on what news can be reported or discussed openly?
I don't think any country is completely free of questionable activities in the area of human rights. China is worse than most, to be sure.
Sure you can logically draw comparisons between the DMCA and chinese censorship laws, it's not particularly hard or imaginative. The problem is when you compare the two on equal grounds. One involves gross violations of basic human rights, the other involves less Brittany Spears remixes on youtube.
I'm not sure censorship counts as "gross violations of basic human rights". It's not good, certainly, but not in the same league as arbitrary imprisonment, torture or executions (things the US is not exactly innocent of). If Google was cooperating in those, I'd be all for boycotting it.
I know they don't work at radio frequencies (RF).
The greek nu is the standard notation for frequency in physics, or at least it generally was when I did that kind of thing. f is sometimes used, though less commonly. However, photons are not relevant for RF - the photon energy is so small that the quantum nature of the radiation is not apparent, and it behaves for all practical purposes as a classical wave.
How are PWRs meltdown proof? Three Mile Island was a PWR.
It was more the rest of what he said that was an illustration of ignorance, rather than the "series of tubes" remark itself.
Hardly. Overnight elimination of carbon emissions may do that, but there are lots of low hanging fruit not being exploited in terms of efficiency, as well as a lot of relatively cheap lower-carbon energy options.
For example, coal fired electricity is responsible for a large amount of emission. Nuclear power is estimated to be only slightly more expensive, at least if done at scale (and we need to). Obviously at some point we'll run out of the easy options, but we're nowhere near there yet.
(try looking at ROOT from CERN for C++ that will make you want to cry!).
It's quite shocking isn't it? And not just a "this code isn't very pretty" problem either, but the instability of the thing is remarkable. Even the sloppiest of my own code was never that bad. So many segfaults... I ended up writing as much as possible outside the ROOT framework after trying (and failing) to understand the behaviour of TObjArray regarding memory management. I'm surprised that any analysis actually successfully gets done, sometimes.
Of course, it depends on what level of "correctness" we're talking about. A good deal of programming is of the good enough variety - it doesn't have to be correct, just to work well enough to sell. How else would you explain the pre-NT series of Windows? I'm sure there are cases where higher correctness guarantees are required, but how common are they?
My point was really that typically in programming you know what your program is supposed to do so you can test your answer - maybe not completely, but to the point where it's good enough. That's much harder in science since you don't know what answer you're supposed to get.