Yes, but profit = money in - money out. If you increase money in (by selling more of what you usually make, by diversifying in some way, etc) by more than you increase the money going out to do so, you make more.
Non sequitur. A lot of things are never done correctly, but that doesn't mean the imperfect implementation can be ignored.
I'll accept you hold such a view. For me, the argument always starts at the theoretical decides what point you want to get to, determines if you can get there from here, and determines the consequence of doing so. I don't really see any merit in looking at imperfect implementations as they are done today or were done yesterday, because they're only implemented temporarily until something better comes along and if the ideal is as good as I think it is, then the solutions of today would all be replaced fairly quickly with it once it gets invented.
To an extent, that's my software engineering heritage. I start by specifying the characteristics of the end result that I want and work backwards. I don't start with what I have got and work forwards. In this particular case, I see the forwards approach as particularly troublesome as companies will rightly argue that incremental improvements for a large outlay will hurt them. And indeed they have done so. What they need is to be confronted with a solution that offers dramatic improvements, even if it's for even greater outlay. It's all profit:cost ratios.
You have to make the system such that pollution costs them. Hence, the need for regulation, pollution emission credits or taxes, etc.
The point here is that businesses as a whole will pollute and generate other externalities unless there are policies in place to make that more costly than not doing so. The indirect effect of pollution on society just doesn't in itself generate enough cost on a business to prevent pollution.
Mmmmm. I don't like that argument. Not because I'm pro-free-market (I'm one of those damnable socialists) but because I don't see how to sell it to a public that is highly suspicious and skeptical of ANY regulation whatsoever, no matter what. If the Democrats can't sell halving the deaths from heart attacks and raising the life expectancy of Americans by almost a decade to the public, as that's what the AFCA will end up doing, then they can't sell gold to a money addict and they're certainly not going to sell stringent pollution controls to people who are terrified it'll mean higher bills and fewer jobs. It won't, but you aren't going to get Joe Public to realize that.
I'll accept what you're saying, but I would prefer to be able to present an argument that showed cleanly, clearly and veritably that substantial gains can be made without harming anyone or anything. Provided that would be honest. Money talks and if it can be shown that there's money to be made in being environmentally sound, then that is what the successful businesses will do.
I agree that it is a poorly-done paper, I regard it less as evidence of a 1:N relationship (where N approaches 1) and more as evidence that kooks are attracted to the anti-global warming lobby because of similarities in the structure of the argument as presented by the more hostile elements. That doesn't, of course, mean that the more serious elements of the anti-global warming community do not have a valid point. To argue otherwise would be as stupid as linking the most extreme elements in ANY community with any single element they might have in common with someone else. (I'm sure neo-Nazis put money into banks, it's likely there are drug-runners who support their local parent-teacher associations, etc. It's not possible to take the arguments of the lunatic fringe and extrapolate those arguments to everyone else.)
I know, for example, that there are two highly significant anti-global warming campaigners in Britain - Johnny Ball, a highly gifted mathematician/TV presenter (and former head of the NAGC), beloved by several generations, and David Bellamy, a highly gifted botanist/TV presenter/environmentalist, beloved by a generation of comedians for his expansive style and well-remembered by many who saw his shows,
It's obvious that Johnny Ball has the mathematical skills necessary. Anyone who can teach relativity to 7 year olds at some considerable depth in a short sketch in a TV show AND SUCCEED is a bloody good mathematician. I am unsure of his reasoning, although it does involve him being unconvinced by some of the science, but I am absolutely certain he has very good reasoning. He is nobody's fool. I'd ask him but I admit to having too much damn respect for all his work. He's also old and has had a lot of bad flak over some of the things he's said.
It's also obvious that David Bellamy has the scientific skills. His knowledge of biology and botany are considerable. He's had nothing but flak for most of his working life - entirely undeserved, I might add, and almost entirely political in nature - and again I highly respect what he has been able to do, making me feel very awkward about asking him either. Like Johnny Ball, he's earned respect with blood, sweat and tears. I'd rather he spell out his views than risk offending someone I regard as one of the great heroes of scientific television. Because of his work in ecology and environmentalism, he's provably not in the pockets of the oil companies. Again, he's the kind of guy who I can absolutely trust to have a good reason for his opinion. I think it wrong, in regards to global warming, but I can be certain that he feels his reasoning is solid or he wouldn't hold to it.
It is incredibly difficult for someone nominally on the "outside" to be able to sensibly and maturely sit down and discuss these issues with these sorts of people, although I would dearly love to. First, I -am- an unknown, my opinion has no scientific weight, so why should they listen? But secondly, they're incredibly busy with projects of far greater importance to them. Johnny Ball is forever on speaking events regarding the teaching of mathematics at school and the importance of going beyond mere numeracy into true understanding. They don't have the time to address - to them - very unimportant side-issues.
I regard them as highly probably genuine skeptics - people who would be convinced with the right scientific data processed using reasonable, intelligent methods, presented in a sane, rational manner. I regard most of the scientists who are still in the "skeptical" side as genuine skeptics, with only a few who are religiously devoted to the anti-side with no interest in the science itself. (Just as doctors are investigated and/or struck off for malpractice, scientists who have a religious devotion to an argument in the field they practice without regard to the science should likewise be scrutinized. 1 is never 2, regardless of your personal beliefs, and if you are a scientist in such-and-such a field, you are an authoritative figure on whether x is y. Lying in science i
No, it is a cost imposed on someone without their choice. One doesn't impose costs just so they can lose money.
I'll rephrase. Pollution is a byproduct of purchased raw materials and energy, and therefore consists of materials that are paid for. If you generate mercury waste, you paid for that mercury to begin with, albeit usually in conjunction with something else the company wants. Nonetheless, you buy the whole ore or whatever it is you are processing. The pollution generates no income. Thus, ultimately in a system-wide view, it is something the company has bought and obtained no return on.
There's not much you can do with something like mercury, unless there's a sudden surge in demand for old-fashioned thermometers, but other byproducts may contain things that are rather more useful. Even with mercury, there's probably something you could sell it for.
(I am not considering regulatory costs in any of this. Regulation, if done correctly, should be a pressure on a company to do its best, to overcome the resistance towards change. In other words, nothing more than the minimum force needed to overcome inertia in a company, where people choose the easy solution rather than the right solution. Regulation is NEVER done correctly, as such it is not worthy of consideration. I will not lower myself to considering substandard processes. And since correct regulation produces the same result as a fully-optimized company, correct regulation has zero impact on such a company.)
Which everyone bothers to do to some degree.
Not in my experience and I've worked in a wide range of companies. They've usually not been successful companies, true, but there's not that many industry giants and if I assume that my experience is a fair reflection of the percentage of good vs wannabes, then most companies aren't optimizing resources. Workflows, maybe. Personnel, maybe. Actual resources, not so much.
And let us keep in mind that the cost of cleanup != the cost of the pollution externality to the rest of society. It frequently is much higher.
I guess I should add that again I'm looking at a system-wide view. The cost of not cleaning up can damage the health of locals and employees, damage the environment (which, in turn, can impact the company - the metal-eating bacteria in the Peak District from pollution release by Industrial Revolution-era industries are playing merry hell with just about everything) and so on. True, this all takes time, hence the idea of looking at cost over two and a half decades rather than three months. It's not direct damage, but it is still damage that impacts the company even without considering regulatory costs.
That doesn't make sense, since the parameter we're changing is amount of clean up costs not the company's degree of compliance with regulation. Obviously, the optimal from the company's point of view here is zero clean up costs. But we already know that results in considerable costs to the rest of society.
I regard regulation as a bunch of BS, so I'm ignoring it. If a company is making the most out of what it has, it is guaranteed to be in compliance with all sensible regulation. Neurotoxins in the food chain damage employees and lower effectiveness, increase sick days and increase insurance costs to the company. It makes no economic sense for a company to mutilate its own staff. But since everyone in the area eats from the same food sources, keeping the staff healthy and mentally at peak will involve keeping everyone in the community healthy and mentally at peak. Especially in the longer-term, since the next-generation of employees will be from the "everyone else" in the community.
This goes for the other considerable costs to society, too. New Orleans was as badly struck as it was by Katrina because industries had altered the river delta in a manner that destroyed sand banks and other naturally-occurring pr
Pollution is a resource you paid for and get no profit from. Ergo, it is an expense.
The "law of diminishing returns" refers to that area of the logistic function (or S-Curve) that is above the midway point. Virtually all economic systems obey the logistic function. Wastage certainly does. If you plot the effort to obtain a resource vs the percent of resource obtained, you will get an S-Curve. The cost to put in any given amount of effort follows an exponential curve.
To maximize money earned, you must minimize wastage. That should be obvious. To maximize profit, you must stop at the point at which the cost to reduce wastage further exceeds the returns from not wasting that resource minus the overheads involved in producing that waste. (Calculators are permitted.)
To maximize short-term profits, you assume zero overheads. That is the current approach used in the US, at leas in companies that bother optimizing at all. SIMPLEX is ancient and superseded but most companies haven't even reached what was state-of-the-art 60 years ago. A zero overhead assumption isn't terribly accurate, as corporations and individuals then pay oodles of tax and/or fines to clean up the mess, but estimating that cost is not trivial and is highly dependent on the timeframe you're concerned with. You will get very different results depending on whether you are analyzing over a quarter year or a quarter century.
However, as most major corporations have a life expectancy in excess of 25 years, a quarter century sounds a better timeframe to work with. You then calculate the cost to the company over that time to employ different waste reduction strategies minus the sum of the reduction in cost to the company due to there being less pollution plus extra revenue through producing more.
The maximum of this is your sweet spot. That is where the company will make the greatest profits over the long term after all clean-up costs have been considered (and therefore no significant pollution remaining).
Most of these countries do little or nothing on the basis that America doesn't and they can't compete with a rogue superpower.
Secondly, if you compare the pollution and profits produced by former East European industries with American industries, you see American industries produce lower pollution and higher profit. That won't continue forever, sure, but only a fool believes American industries are anywhere near the sweet spot. Ergo, if the USA cuts CO2 emissions AND increases profit as a result, other nations will follow suit simply because that's where the money is.
Anyone willing to believe in extreme conspiracy theories is, by definition, not working on evidence. They are starting from a conclusion and cherry-picking facts, factoids and tabloid/yellow journalism.
Only the skeptics are likely to be concerned with the results and there simply aren't many of those still opposed to AGW. You need only look at the posts of those hostile to AGW on Slashdot. This is a de-facto nerd/geek hangout, so unlike Yahoo's comment section, the intelligence here is higher than average. The comments, though, are vitriolic, political and dogmatic. They have nothing to do with the evidence or the data, despite the fact that - by definition - these are people capable of understanding both. If you cannot convince the right-wingers on Slashdot, you're not going to convince them anywhere.
Look, NOTHING these days is fit for intended purpose. This is a Seldon Crisis and we don't have a Second Foundation to help us out. (I've been working on it, but between work and beer, there's just no time to get the damn Prime Radiant working.)
As noted in the Q&A session above, a vaccuum is the minimum energy state, not an empty state. An empty state actually has greater energy than a vaccuum.
Another way to look at it is that an empty state must have zero entropy (forbidden by the laws of thermodynamics). Physics doesn't work well with zeros. Physics allows you to have a system which -averages- out to zero, which is what quantum foam does, but it doesn't permit any individual point in that system to have a zero state.
Quantum foam is the preferred solution. Particles spontaneously appear, diverge, converge, collide and annihilate. Provided the particles have a sum of zero energy and zero mass, and provided they have equal velocity (so momentum also sums to zero), no law has been violated. On average, there is nothing there. The only time that nothing becomes something is when you have superluminal acceleration, such as during the inflationary phase of the universe. At that point, the particles cannot recombine and, because there is NEVER any empty space during that phase, you've now got a hell of a lot of particles with no pairing particle anywhere in the area.
(Remember, a particle cannot collide with an antiparticle whose values don't match, since you'd end up with mass, energy and momentum with nothing to carry it. At the quantum level, ALL interactions must result in a valid state or no interaction occurs.)
Due to some properties of symmetry I don't fully understand, anti-particles can become particles more readily than particles can become anti-particles. The result is that, given long enough, a super-stretched quantum foam will gain positive mass even though it started with an average of zero mass.
If the two are distinct but numerically the same, then you must introduce some mechanism to couple the two.
Do we have any mechanisms for coupling two particles, such that one particle will have a state that has the same absolute value as the other particle?
Weeelll, yes we do, but I can think of no obvious reason why gravitons and Higgs bosons would be entangled, nor why those which were entangled would be found solely in the same object. As such, although it could conceivably be something like that, I am not convinced it's the right answer. It does, however, show that it is possible to couple the two fields in the required way. But since experimentation already shows that they are, having a proof of concept for something you already know is kinda pointless.
Yes I am disagreeing with that. I do not regard Security Essentials as better than nothing, I regard it as equal to (at best) and possibly worse than nothing (since it encourages risky behaviour). Security Essentials is about as useful as a perforated condom that has been exposed to intense UV bombardment for a week.
We're talking specifically about Windows systems so this pedantry isn't germane.
The fact that you're buying Windows doesn't change the fact that you are spending the money to do so, so no it isn't pedantry. Microsoft talks of Total Cost of Ownership and I agree that TCO is important. And here I say that TCO means that you don't get Security Essentials for zero cost.
Free-as-in-libre? There ARE open-source anti-virus and malware blockers for Windows 7 - you do know this, right? So Free-as-in-libre is a perfectly valid point to raise.
Nothing happened in 2000 not because Y2K was a non-story, but because the IT industry practically doubled in size for 3 years to fix billions of programs on a global scale.
Within 24 hours of the Salt Lake lawyers spamming Usenet with advertising and publishing a book on how to pervert the Internet into an electronic billboard, it was obvious to 99%+ of the community that protocols needed replacing.
Since that time, the other 1% have ripped ALL the security features out of IPv6, deprived the Internet of electronic congestion controls, exterminated network neutrality and otherwise done everything that 1%-ers usually do to make life hell for the 99%.
Yes, humans have always engaged in risky behaviour. And when done appropriately, this works extremely well. With appropriate risk-taking, you can maximize your benefits and minimize your costs.
Of course, there's always INappropriate risk-taking. The Darwin Awards are based on one form, the Gor novels on another.
Today, computer users don't understand AND simply don't care about the risks involved. Since it's a boolean AND, not a boolean OR, there's no uncertainty involved.
The problem with DNS poisoning is that DNS caches change slowly. Also, DNS is often slow and unreliable so zone transfers to locally mirror the bits of DNS needed is a fairly routine practice. This keeps the poison in the system.
Security Essentials isn't free (it requires you to buy Windows, so it's not free-as-in-beer, and it's not open-source so isn't free-as-in-libre). It's also b. useless. I've known almost nothing to be stopped by it. There are a great many Russian antivirus tools that seem to work very well, and then there's the ones from Finland (Linux) and Canada (OpenBSD) that also allow you to do useful things as well.
The correct way IS to be disruptive. Be as disruptive as possible. Evolve or perish is the whole of the law. Complacency allows the least-fit to survive as "captains of industry". And we found out with the Titanic what happens when an unfit captain is left in charge. Why repeat the experience?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, duh. Computers handle everything in 1s and 0s. If you eliminate the 1s....
Hey! I didn't know Ben Elton had a Slashdot account! Why are you posting anonymously?
Yes, but profit = money in - money out. If you increase money in (by selling more of what you usually make, by diversifying in some way, etc) by more than you increase the money going out to do so, you make more.
I'll accept you hold such a view. For me, the argument always starts at the theoretical decides what point you want to get to, determines if you can get there from here, and determines the consequence of doing so. I don't really see any merit in looking at imperfect implementations as they are done today or were done yesterday, because they're only implemented temporarily until something better comes along and if the ideal is as good as I think it is, then the solutions of today would all be replaced fairly quickly with it once it gets invented.
To an extent, that's my software engineering heritage. I start by specifying the characteristics of the end result that I want and work backwards. I don't start with what I have got and work forwards. In this particular case, I see the forwards approach as particularly troublesome as companies will rightly argue that incremental improvements for a large outlay will hurt them. And indeed they have done so. What they need is to be confronted with a solution that offers dramatic improvements, even if it's for even greater outlay. It's all profit:cost ratios.
Mmmmm. I don't like that argument. Not because I'm pro-free-market (I'm one of those damnable socialists) but because I don't see how to sell it to a public that is highly suspicious and skeptical of ANY regulation whatsoever, no matter what. If the Democrats can't sell halving the deaths from heart attacks and raising the life expectancy of Americans by almost a decade to the public, as that's what the AFCA will end up doing, then they can't sell gold to a money addict and they're certainly not going to sell stringent pollution controls to people who are terrified it'll mean higher bills and fewer jobs. It won't, but you aren't going to get Joe Public to realize that.
I'll accept what you're saying, but I would prefer to be able to present an argument that showed cleanly, clearly and veritably that substantial gains can be made without harming anyone or anything. Provided that would be honest. Money talks and if it can be shown that there's money to be made in being environmentally sound, then that is what the successful businesses will do.
I agree that it is a poorly-done paper, I regard it less as evidence of a 1:N relationship (where N approaches 1) and more as evidence that kooks are attracted to the anti-global warming lobby because of similarities in the structure of the argument as presented by the more hostile elements. That doesn't, of course, mean that the more serious elements of the anti-global warming community do not have a valid point. To argue otherwise would be as stupid as linking the most extreme elements in ANY community with any single element they might have in common with someone else. (I'm sure neo-Nazis put money into banks, it's likely there are drug-runners who support their local parent-teacher associations, etc. It's not possible to take the arguments of the lunatic fringe and extrapolate those arguments to everyone else.)
I know, for example, that there are two highly significant anti-global warming campaigners in Britain - Johnny Ball, a highly gifted mathematician/TV presenter (and former head of the NAGC), beloved by several generations, and David Bellamy, a highly gifted botanist/TV presenter/environmentalist, beloved by a generation of comedians for his expansive style and well-remembered by many who saw his shows,
It's obvious that Johnny Ball has the mathematical skills necessary. Anyone who can teach relativity to 7 year olds at some considerable depth in a short sketch in a TV show AND SUCCEED is a bloody good mathematician. I am unsure of his reasoning, although it does involve him being unconvinced by some of the science, but I am absolutely certain he has very good reasoning. He is nobody's fool. I'd ask him but I admit to having too much damn respect for all his work. He's also old and has had a lot of bad flak over some of the things he's said.
It's also obvious that David Bellamy has the scientific skills. His knowledge of biology and botany are considerable. He's had nothing but flak for most of his working life - entirely undeserved, I might add, and almost entirely political in nature - and again I highly respect what he has been able to do, making me feel very awkward about asking him either. Like Johnny Ball, he's earned respect with blood, sweat and tears. I'd rather he spell out his views than risk offending someone I regard as one of the great heroes of scientific television. Because of his work in ecology and environmentalism, he's provably not in the pockets of the oil companies. Again, he's the kind of guy who I can absolutely trust to have a good reason for his opinion. I think it wrong, in regards to global warming, but I can be certain that he feels his reasoning is solid or he wouldn't hold to it.
It is incredibly difficult for someone nominally on the "outside" to be able to sensibly and maturely sit down and discuss these issues with these sorts of people, although I would dearly love to. First, I -am- an unknown, my opinion has no scientific weight, so why should they listen? But secondly, they're incredibly busy with projects of far greater importance to them. Johnny Ball is forever on speaking events regarding the teaching of mathematics at school and the importance of going beyond mere numeracy into true understanding. They don't have the time to address - to them - very unimportant side-issues.
I regard them as highly probably genuine skeptics - people who would be convinced with the right scientific data processed using reasonable, intelligent methods, presented in a sane, rational manner. I regard most of the scientists who are still in the "skeptical" side as genuine skeptics, with only a few who are religiously devoted to the anti-side with no interest in the science itself. (Just as doctors are investigated and/or struck off for malpractice, scientists who have a religious devotion to an argument in the field they practice without regard to the science should likewise be scrutinized. 1 is never 2, regardless of your personal beliefs, and if you are a scientist in such-and-such a field, you are an authoritative figure on whether x is y. Lying in science i
I'll rephrase. Pollution is a byproduct of purchased raw materials and energy, and therefore consists of materials that are paid for. If you generate mercury waste, you paid for that mercury to begin with, albeit usually in conjunction with something else the company wants. Nonetheless, you buy the whole ore or whatever it is you are processing. The pollution generates no income. Thus, ultimately in a system-wide view, it is something the company has bought and obtained no return on.
There's not much you can do with something like mercury, unless there's a sudden surge in demand for old-fashioned thermometers, but other byproducts may contain things that are rather more useful. Even with mercury, there's probably something you could sell it for.
(I am not considering regulatory costs in any of this. Regulation, if done correctly, should be a pressure on a company to do its best, to overcome the resistance towards change. In other words, nothing more than the minimum force needed to overcome inertia in a company, where people choose the easy solution rather than the right solution. Regulation is NEVER done correctly, as such it is not worthy of consideration. I will not lower myself to considering substandard processes. And since correct regulation produces the same result as a fully-optimized company, correct regulation has zero impact on such a company.)
Not in my experience and I've worked in a wide range of companies. They've usually not been successful companies, true, but there's not that many industry giants and if I assume that my experience is a fair reflection of the percentage of good vs wannabes, then most companies aren't optimizing resources. Workflows, maybe. Personnel, maybe. Actual resources, not so much.
I guess I should add that again I'm looking at a system-wide view. The cost of not cleaning up can damage the health of locals and employees, damage the environment (which, in turn, can impact the company - the metal-eating bacteria in the Peak District from pollution release by Industrial Revolution-era industries are playing merry hell with just about everything) and so on. True, this all takes time, hence the idea of looking at cost over two and a half decades rather than three months. It's not direct damage, but it is still damage that impacts the company even without considering regulatory costs.
I regard regulation as a bunch of BS, so I'm ignoring it. If a company is making the most out of what it has, it is guaranteed to be in compliance with all sensible regulation. Neurotoxins in the food chain damage employees and lower effectiveness, increase sick days and increase insurance costs to the company. It makes no economic sense for a company to mutilate its own staff. But since everyone in the area eats from the same food sources, keeping the staff healthy and mentally at peak will involve keeping everyone in the community healthy and mentally at peak. Especially in the longer-term, since the next-generation of employees will be from the "everyone else" in the community.
This goes for the other considerable costs to society, too. New Orleans was as badly struck as it was by Katrina because industries had altered the river delta in a manner that destroyed sand banks and other naturally-occurring pr
Pollution is a resource you paid for and get no profit from. Ergo, it is an expense.
The "law of diminishing returns" refers to that area of the logistic function (or S-Curve) that is above the midway point. Virtually all economic systems obey the logistic function. Wastage certainly does. If you plot the effort to obtain a resource vs the percent of resource obtained, you will get an S-Curve. The cost to put in any given amount of effort follows an exponential curve.
To maximize money earned, you must minimize wastage. That should be obvious. To maximize profit, you must stop at the point at which the cost to reduce wastage further exceeds the returns from not wasting that resource minus the overheads involved in producing that waste. (Calculators are permitted.)
To maximize short-term profits, you assume zero overheads. That is the current approach used in the US, at leas in companies that bother optimizing at all. SIMPLEX is ancient and superseded but most companies haven't even reached what was state-of-the-art 60 years ago. A zero overhead assumption isn't terribly accurate, as corporations and individuals then pay oodles of tax and/or fines to clean up the mess, but estimating that cost is not trivial and is highly dependent on the timeframe you're concerned with. You will get very different results depending on whether you are analyzing over a quarter year or a quarter century.
However, as most major corporations have a life expectancy in excess of 25 years, a quarter century sounds a better timeframe to work with. You then calculate the cost to the company over that time to employ different waste reduction strategies minus the sum of the reduction in cost to the company due to there being less pollution plus extra revenue through producing more.
The maximum of this is your sweet spot. That is where the company will make the greatest profits over the long term after all clean-up costs have been considered (and therefore no significant pollution remaining).
Ammo explodes at high temperature. Stock up on baseball bats.
Most of these countries do little or nothing on the basis that America doesn't and they can't compete with a rogue superpower.
Secondly, if you compare the pollution and profits produced by former East European industries with American industries, you see American industries produce lower pollution and higher profit. That won't continue forever, sure, but only a fool believes American industries are anywhere near the sweet spot. Ergo, if the USA cuts CO2 emissions AND increases profit as a result, other nations will follow suit simply because that's where the money is.
There is a correlation between those who believe the moon landings were a hoax and AGW cynics (I will not call them skeptics - a skeptic is what Richard Muller is - a person who works on evidence).
Anyone willing to believe in extreme conspiracy theories is, by definition, not working on evidence. They are starting from a conclusion and cherry-picking facts, factoids and tabloid/yellow journalism.
Only the skeptics are likely to be concerned with the results and there simply aren't many of those still opposed to AGW. You need only look at the posts of those hostile to AGW on Slashdot. This is a de-facto nerd/geek hangout, so unlike Yahoo's comment section, the intelligence here is higher than average. The comments, though, are vitriolic, political and dogmatic. They have nothing to do with the evidence or the data, despite the fact that - by definition - these are people capable of understanding both. If you cannot convince the right-wingers on Slashdot, you're not going to convince them anywhere.
Look, NOTHING these days is fit for intended purpose. This is a Seldon Crisis and we don't have a Second Foundation to help us out. (I've been working on it, but between work and beer, there's just no time to get the damn Prime Radiant working.)
Why bother with something that requires reach?
As noted in the Q&A session above, a vaccuum is the minimum energy state, not an empty state. An empty state actually has greater energy than a vaccuum.
Another way to look at it is that an empty state must have zero entropy (forbidden by the laws of thermodynamics). Physics doesn't work well with zeros. Physics allows you to have a system which -averages- out to zero, which is what quantum foam does, but it doesn't permit any individual point in that system to have a zero state.
Quantum foam is the preferred solution. Particles spontaneously appear, diverge, converge, collide and annihilate. Provided the particles have a sum of zero energy and zero mass, and provided they have equal velocity (so momentum also sums to zero), no law has been violated. On average, there is nothing there. The only time that nothing becomes something is when you have superluminal acceleration, such as during the inflationary phase of the universe. At that point, the particles cannot recombine and, because there is NEVER any empty space during that phase, you've now got a hell of a lot of particles with no pairing particle anywhere in the area.
(Remember, a particle cannot collide with an antiparticle whose values don't match, since you'd end up with mass, energy and momentum with nothing to carry it. At the quantum level, ALL interactions must result in a valid state or no interaction occurs.)
Due to some properties of symmetry I don't fully understand, anti-particles can become particles more readily than particles can become anti-particles. The result is that, given long enough, a super-stretched quantum foam will gain positive mass even though it started with an average of zero mass.
If the two are distinct but numerically the same, then you must introduce some mechanism to couple the two.
Do we have any mechanisms for coupling two particles, such that one particle will have a state that has the same absolute value as the other particle?
Weeelll, yes we do, but I can think of no obvious reason why gravitons and Higgs bosons would be entangled, nor why those which were entangled would be found solely in the same object. As such, although it could conceivably be something like that, I am not convinced it's the right answer. It does, however, show that it is possible to couple the two fields in the required way. But since experimentation already shows that they are, having a proof of concept for something you already know is kinda pointless.
Yes. They're in geostationary orbit.
Yeah, but they don't matter. Brooke Bond, on the other hand...
Nonono, Mr Sit-down is a yellow, big fellow.
What about the Tour de France?
Yes I am disagreeing with that. I do not regard Security Essentials as better than nothing, I regard it as equal to (at best) and possibly worse than nothing (since it encourages risky behaviour). Security Essentials is about as useful as a perforated condom that has been exposed to intense UV bombardment for a week.
The fact that you're buying Windows doesn't change the fact that you are spending the money to do so, so no it isn't pedantry. Microsoft talks of Total Cost of Ownership and I agree that TCO is important. And here I say that TCO means that you don't get Security Essentials for zero cost.
Free-as-in-libre? There ARE open-source anti-virus and malware blockers for Windows 7 - you do know this, right? So Free-as-in-libre is a perfectly valid point to raise.
Nothing happened in 2000 not because Y2K was a non-story, but because the IT industry practically doubled in size for 3 years to fix billions of programs on a global scale.
Within 24 hours of the Salt Lake lawyers spamming Usenet with advertising and publishing a book on how to pervert the Internet into an electronic billboard, it was obvious to 99%+ of the community that protocols needed replacing.
Since that time, the other 1% have ripped ALL the security features out of IPv6, deprived the Internet of electronic congestion controls, exterminated network neutrality and otherwise done everything that 1%-ers usually do to make life hell for the 99%.
We really need an Occupy Gopher day.
Yes, humans have always engaged in risky behaviour. And when done appropriately, this works extremely well. With appropriate risk-taking, you can maximize your benefits and minimize your costs.
Of course, there's always INappropriate risk-taking. The Darwin Awards are based on one form, the Gor novels on another.
Today, computer users don't understand AND simply don't care about the risks involved. Since it's a boolean AND, not a boolean OR, there's no uncertainty involved.
The problem with DNS poisoning is that DNS caches change slowly. Also, DNS is often slow and unreliable so zone transfers to locally mirror the bits of DNS needed is a fairly routine practice. This keeps the poison in the system.
Security Essentials isn't free (it requires you to buy Windows, so it's not free-as-in-beer, and it's not open-source so isn't free-as-in-libre). It's also b. useless. I've known almost nothing to be stopped by it. There are a great many Russian antivirus tools that seem to work very well, and then there's the ones from Finland (Linux) and Canada (OpenBSD) that also allow you to do useful things as well.
The correct way IS to be disruptive. Be as disruptive as possible. Evolve or perish is the whole of the law. Complacency allows the least-fit to survive as "captains of industry". And we found out with the Titanic what happens when an unfit captain is left in charge. Why repeat the experience?