Perhaps that was the irony disguised by the text based communication, but I think I've already forgotten;) And I'm not really that old, just prematurely cynical.
That was the point of running the large number of people through a long study with lots of statistics. There is a significant correlation with age. Correlation may not imply causation, but when it's a case of senescence backed up by the second law... that's some serious eyebrow waggling.
You're right, there's definitely a flaw in this scientific process: 7,000 subjects (British civil servants), eight authors (of mixed age, gender, and nationality), greater than a decade long study, rigorous statistics, peer review in a well respected journal, and... you.
Have you seen the general population these days? I'd consider that the upper range. I think cognitive decline starts right around when you become a teenager, and for a lot of people it just gets worse as they get older...
See - this is the problem with text based communication. I think you're making a joke here, but instead of modding you funny I have to stop to make sure you weren't seriously suggesting that the peak of human intellectual achievement is best observed in our teenagers. You weren't were you? Were you?
Would that be the Xytronic which sells some really cute soldering irons with identical pictures to those in the catalog of Xytronic who states "Ninety percent of XYTRONIC product is exported with major customers in the US, Canada, Australia, Japan and Western Europe"?
You forgot to mention the bandwidth differences between embedded software on a microprocessor and an OS controlled I/O system. There is a (theoretical) huge performance difference in high speed/response between the two.
And to the AC mentioning competition: these are not really in the same product class. There are probably a large number of applications where the end goal could be achieved with either set of hardware, but there are probably more projects which do not overlap (especially if your concerned with efficiency or practicality - perhaps a really ambitious person could assemble the Linux kernel and make a Beowulf cluster of Audrinos..., but QED).
I've soldered plenty of SM components myself, but you may be overlooking the novice oriented aspects of this system (and the comments you dismiss), especially when it comes to the tools available. Besides, practice only takes you so far; even an experienced plastic surgeon may have a hard time making something look pretty if he's only got leather-working tools available.
If you consider that the computer is marketed as cheap, and this board is an educational add on (presumably also cheap) (well the board is functional, but the article points out the educational advantages, including the population), then it would probably be safe to assume that the soldering iron will also be cheap. A soldering iron allowing comfortable SM work is easily double or triple the cost of the computer - over an order of magnitude for the good ones. So, if one were to use a soldering iron of comparable or less cost than the system (what a novice may choose to start with), SM could be very hard if not impossible.
Many schools had the Apple ][ series (particularly the e) because of the special pricing Apple gave schools. (And school teachers). That academic program (with it's vendor / software / learning curve buy in) is probably what kept them floating through a few different phases in their history. There were a number of years, to my childhood perspective, that the only time you had an apple was if you worked with the schools or did graphics (gs and early to mid macs).
Did the Commodore ever have a similar program, I don't remember running across it, although I think I remember a few of those in some of the labs, but not anywhere near as many as the Apples? I bet the non x86 market would have shaped up differently if the Commodore was pushed harder into the schools.
I don't ever remember an Atari at school, I mostly remember them for the games I played at a friends house like Defender of the Crown, Bard's Tale (although that was multi-platform), and some sort of skim across the snow and shoot things game - Arctic Fox maybe?
Sorry, but when did you ever meet an engineer who was taught how to program like that? Most curriculum don't have any explicit programming requirements outside of the syntax you might need for numerical analysis (check ABET if you like, but I don't think it's required yet and probably won't ever be). Engineers are generally great at self teaching just enough to make things work.
What you're talking about is like bringing the communication with computers to an almost scientific level - I think there's a discipline for that, and I don't think that's their general stance on the commenting of code.
Decisions based merely on results, divorced from ethics and morality can bring disastrous results....
Good thing we engineers have to go through ethics courses. Otherwise we might just give in to those natural impulses to design a bridge that won't fall down until the most fun moment. Do you suppose that's the problem with the way other disciplines influence the world? Do political scientists, business students, or economists have to take an ethics course?
Of course, to be completely honest, I think an appropriately pragmatic engineer would be competent enough to recognize the possible perturbations arising from outside the designed system which may impact its metastable state, thus working in sufficient safeguards (with a % safety over-design) to prevent things like your police state or extreme variable medical trials due to their historical instability.
No. Engineers may work in paper mills, sewage plants, and might even design weapons for indiscriminate sale, but some things will always cross the line... properly commenting our own code, for example.
If phase 1 goes well I'd be extremely surprised if this didn't go fast track. There's a chance that the FDA would even approve a hybrid 2/3. Of course, while fast tracks do usually go to life threatening diseases without other treatment options, the potential population size here might make the FDA a little cautious. When you've got a vaccine that everyone in the world should probably receive, and it's the only thing which will save two generations on a whole continent - they might just opt for a little caution. Also, the whole-virus vaccine may not be completely effective on every variant of HIV.
Also note: "Sumagen Canada has secured patents to the vaccine in more than 70 countries." Which could translate as: "Sumagen Canada is going to get very very rich off of first tier economies, and if they're feeling really nice - they might just exchange the vaccine for the title deed to Sub-Saharan Africa (it's the only way they could pay for it)."
Watson was a postdoc and his name still goes before Crick. What you're describing about the credit to the senior scientist is either because they actually are driving a long term series of experiments (longer than a single grad student sticks around) or an ethical issue where the senior scientist is falsely putting his or her name on a student's work. People on Nobel committees are usually pretty good at spotting the difference.
...until senescence anyway. Women have to sacrifice some of their career for a family (maybe not more than a few months, but the little things add up too). Old people have to retire (or expire). Biological imperatives don't care about HR policy.
So what do you do with the feet-firsters? When you've got an octa- or non- genarian holding up at least three person's salaries (mid or regular-senior career), they'll eventually start to fade, and even if management decides they can afford the severance package - letting them go is likely going to literally kill them. It can get pretty ugly towards the end if you keep them around, especially if money gets tight or deadlines need to be met. It can be heartbreaking and extremely frustrating to spend hours reminding a well respected legend how to do some of the most basic tasks; repeatedly. You also choke off the promotion route for your mid-level persons, they'll effectively have to leave the company so you'll be left with an experience gap when the end does come. Seems like it'd be easier to deal with this problem in the mid sixties or early seventies when everyone still has their full faculties and can reasonably talk about it.
Besides, if the publication curve is flat (and in almost every case it will eventually it will decline), it still makes more financial sense to hire two or three fifty year olds (or younger) to take the place of the one eighty year old.
Getting the other user to use encryption has always been the problem. If you only encrypt some items it's not a habit, and until you get every eight year old nephew and your mother in law using a client on the other end, it's not going to happen. And that's not going to happen until encryption comes default, and runs almost invisibly on every web based system and OS default mail client.
Encryption is fundamentally opposite to the primary function of email (share information). Privacy of email is a secondary function, and already guaranteed by wiretapping laws in most countries. There's nothing inherently secure about postal mail; just because you send postal mail in an envelope doesn't mean someone can't steam it open, parse it, and seal it back up before it reaches the intended recipient. In some ways electronic mail is inherently more secure than an envelope which sits in a metal box in front of someone's house while they're at work all day. Although, being electronic, it's possible for someone to read a lot more mail in shorter time spans (or check out what's going through the "post office" while wearing an invisibility cloak).
So until either confidentiality becomes of equal importance to the content one is communicating, or encryption happens invisibly and effortlessly; encryption is not going to be main stream.
My prediction is that digital signatures (and time stamps) have a far better chance of hitting popularity than whole email encryption. There's a lot of people who want to do things electronically while their legal departments still force the paper and fax modality. Once identity and time are of equal (or better) verification status (i.e. subpoena of phone records), then there's a chance that electronic documents will make further progress. But that means every entrenched legal department will have to embrace a new way of doing things - and while I love the tech-savvyness of those awesome dudes over at the EFF, it has not been my experience that they represent the norm among lawyers.
And I thought it was poking fun at the thugs who fail to account for the full cost of breaking a crypto nerd. Come on, if you had only budgeted $5 for that wrench, the evil mastermind in your organizational structure would rake you over the coals for not even doing a heuristic price analysis for various blunt objects!
First paragraph of what? Brandenburg vs. Ohio's Wikipedia article outline the Supreme Court's decision which clearly states that the government can not outlaw (or prosecute) speech (even speech promoting violence) unless it is directed to and immediately incite "imminent lawless action."
Schenck vs. United States is the original case in which the falsely shouting fire example comes from, but again this decision was overturned by the Brandenburg vs. Ohio decision. In that later decision, Justice Douglas wrote directly about the false fire example and stated that it may be the only style of event where speech might be successfully prosecuted as the speech itself is "brigaded with action." No definite there, probably take another Supreme Court decision to iron out the specifics, and chances are that the prosecution would be smart enough to stick to other charges to avoid the ambiguity and uncertainty (damages arising from the action, manslaughter, etc...). (Excerpt below).
Justice Douglas's concurrence reflected the absolutist position that only he and Black ever fully subscribed to, namely that the phrase "no law" in the First Amendment ought to be interpreted very literally, and that all speech is immune from prosecution, regardless of the governmental interests advanced in suppressing some particular instance of speech. He briefly traced the history of the clear and present danger test, illustrating how it had been used over the years since its debut in Schenck to dismiss dozens of what Douglas viewed as legitimate First Amendment claims.
A short but interesting section of Douglas's opinion indicated that he might be open to allowing the government greater latitude in controlling speech during time of "declared war" (making clear that he was not referring to the then-current Vietnam War), although he only phrased that possibility in terms of doubt (as opposed to his certainty that the clear and present danger test was irreconcilable with the First Amendment during time of peace).
Douglas also pointed out the legitimate role of symbolic speech in First Amendment doctrine, using examples of a person ripping up a Bible to celebrate the abandonment of his faith or tearing a copy of the Constitution in order to protest a Supreme Court decision, and assailed the previous term's United States v. O'Brien, 391 U.S. 367 (1968), which had allowed for the prosecution of a man for burning his draft card. In all these situations, Douglas argued, an action was a vital way of conveying a certain message, and thus the action itself deserved First Amendment protection.
Finally, Douglas dealt with the classic example of a man "falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic." In order to explain why someone could be legitimately prosecuted for this, Douglas called it an example in which "speech is brigaded with action." In the view of Douglas and Black, this was probably the only sort of case in which a person could be prosecuted for speech.
That's right, if God had intended for us to manipulate genomes He would have given us... actually, that ends rather crudely.
Try this one: If scientists were meant to manipulate genomes they would have won grants by knowing how to use their delicate instruments.
Ah, that didn't go terribly well did it. Let me try a car analogy: there's nothing wrong with taking off the brakes if you have taken alternative steps to achieve proper protection.... Like expert handling or using the stick to really gear down.
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Think of the polar bears and ski resorts you insensitive clod! :)
Perhaps that was the irony disguised by the text based communication, but I think I've already forgotten ;) And I'm not really that old, just prematurely cynical.
Especially when they put you in a nice home with young ladies delivering you food on trays?
That was the point of running the large number of people through a long study with lots of statistics. There is a significant correlation with age. Correlation may not imply causation, but when it's a case of senescence backed up by the second law... that's some serious eyebrow waggling.
You're right, there's definitely a flaw in this scientific process: 7,000 subjects (British civil servants), eight authors (of mixed age, gender, and nationality), greater than a decade long study, rigorous statistics, peer review in a well respected journal, and... you.
Have you seen the general population these days? I'd consider that the upper range. I think cognitive decline starts right around when you become a teenager, and for a lot of people it just gets worse as they get older...
See - this is the problem with text based communication. I think you're making a joke here, but instead of modding you funny I have to stop to make sure you weren't seriously suggesting that the peak of human intellectual achievement is best observed in our teenagers. You weren't were you? Were you?
Would that be the Xytronic which sells some really cute soldering irons with identical pictures to those in the catalog of Xytronic who states "Ninety percent of XYTRONIC product is exported with major customers in the US, Canada, Australia, Japan and Western Europe"?
Didn't know we had capable irons down in that range. Thanks for the tip.
You forgot to mention the bandwidth differences between embedded software on a microprocessor and an OS controlled I/O system. There is a (theoretical) huge performance difference in high speed/response between the two.
And to the AC mentioning competition: these are not really in the same product class. There are probably a large number of applications where the end goal could be achieved with either set of hardware, but there are probably more projects which do not overlap (especially if your concerned with efficiency or practicality - perhaps a really ambitious person could assemble the Linux kernel and make a Beowulf cluster of Audrinos..., but QED).
I've soldered plenty of SM components myself, but you may be overlooking the novice oriented aspects of this system (and the comments you dismiss), especially when it comes to the tools available. Besides, practice only takes you so far; even an experienced plastic surgeon may have a hard time making something look pretty if he's only got leather-working tools available.
If you consider that the computer is marketed as cheap, and this board is an educational add on (presumably also cheap) (well the board is functional, but the article points out the educational advantages, including the population), then it would probably be safe to assume that the soldering iron will also be cheap. A soldering iron allowing comfortable SM work is easily double or triple the cost of the computer - over an order of magnitude for the good ones. So, if one were to use a soldering iron of comparable or less cost than the system (what a novice may choose to start with), SM could be very hard if not impossible.
NTP is great if you can get it for your platform, but I can't find a Turing tape of it anywhere for my mechanical watch!
Many schools had the Apple ][ series (particularly the e) because of the special pricing Apple gave schools. (And school teachers). That academic program (with it's vendor / software / learning curve buy in) is probably what kept them floating through a few different phases in their history. There were a number of years, to my childhood perspective, that the only time you had an apple was if you worked with the schools or did graphics (gs and early to mid macs).
Did the Commodore ever have a similar program, I don't remember running across it, although I think I remember a few of those in some of the labs, but not anywhere near as many as the Apples? I bet the non x86 market would have shaped up differently if the Commodore was pushed harder into the schools.
I don't ever remember an Atari at school, I mostly remember them for the games I played at a friends house like Defender of the Crown, Bard's Tale (although that was multi-platform), and some sort of skim across the snow and shoot things game - Arctic Fox maybe?
Sorry, but when did you ever meet an engineer who was taught how to program like that? Most curriculum don't have any explicit programming requirements outside of the syntax you might need for numerical analysis (check ABET if you like, but I don't think it's required yet and probably won't ever be). Engineers are generally great at self teaching just enough to make things work.
What you're talking about is like bringing the communication with computers to an almost scientific level - I think there's a discipline for that, and I don't think that's their general stance on the commenting of code.
Decisions based merely on results, divorced from ethics and morality can bring disastrous results....
Good thing we engineers have to go through ethics courses. Otherwise we might just give in to those natural impulses to design a bridge that won't fall down until the most fun moment. Do you suppose that's the problem with the way other disciplines influence the world? Do political scientists, business students, or economists have to take an ethics course?
Of course, to be completely honest, I think an appropriately pragmatic engineer would be competent enough to recognize the possible perturbations arising from outside the designed system which may impact its metastable state, thus working in sufficient safeguards (with a % safety over-design) to prevent things like your police state or extreme variable medical trials due to their historical instability.
No. Engineers may work in paper mills, sewage plants, and might even design weapons for indiscriminate sale, but some things will always cross the line... properly commenting our own code, for example.
And it's been what? Fifteen? Sixteen? Years since Quake was released? Don't forget the Metamucil on the way to your nap. :)
If phase 1 goes well I'd be extremely surprised if this didn't go fast track. There's a chance that the FDA would even approve a hybrid 2/3. Of course, while fast tracks do usually go to life threatening diseases without other treatment options, the potential population size here might make the FDA a little cautious. When you've got a vaccine that everyone in the world should probably receive, and it's the only thing which will save two generations on a whole continent - they might just opt for a little caution. Also, the whole-virus vaccine may not be completely effective on every variant of HIV.
Also note: "Sumagen Canada has secured patents to the vaccine in more than 70 countries." Which could translate as: "Sumagen Canada is going to get very very rich off of first tier economies, and if they're feeling really nice - they might just exchange the vaccine for the title deed to Sub-Saharan Africa (it's the only way they could pay for it)."
Never met a feet-firster? Someone determined to keep their lab/office until they've got to be carried out feet first?
Watson was a postdoc and his name still goes before Crick. What you're describing about the credit to the senior scientist is either because they actually are driving a long term series of experiments (longer than a single grad student sticks around) or an ethical issue where the senior scientist is falsely putting his or her name on a student's work. People on Nobel committees are usually pretty good at spotting the difference.
Smart people are still smart when they grow up...
...until senescence anyway. Women have to sacrifice some of their career for a family (maybe not more than a few months, but the little things add up too). Old people have to retire (or expire). Biological imperatives don't care about HR policy.
So what do you do with the feet-firsters? When you've got an octa- or non- genarian holding up at least three person's salaries (mid or regular-senior career), they'll eventually start to fade, and even if management decides they can afford the severance package - letting them go is likely going to literally kill them. It can get pretty ugly towards the end if you keep them around, especially if money gets tight or deadlines need to be met. It can be heartbreaking and extremely frustrating to spend hours reminding a well respected legend how to do some of the most basic tasks; repeatedly. You also choke off the promotion route for your mid-level persons, they'll effectively have to leave the company so you'll be left with an experience gap when the end does come. Seems like it'd be easier to deal with this problem in the mid sixties or early seventies when everyone still has their full faculties and can reasonably talk about it.
Besides, if the publication curve is flat (and in almost every case it will eventually it will decline), it still makes more financial sense to hire two or three fifty year olds (or younger) to take the place of the one eighty year old.
Getting the other user to use encryption has always been the problem. If you only encrypt some items it's not a habit, and until you get every eight year old nephew and your mother in law using a client on the other end, it's not going to happen. And that's not going to happen until encryption comes default, and runs almost invisibly on every web based system and OS default mail client.
Encryption is fundamentally opposite to the primary function of email (share information). Privacy of email is a secondary function, and already guaranteed by wiretapping laws in most countries. There's nothing inherently secure about postal mail; just because you send postal mail in an envelope doesn't mean someone can't steam it open, parse it, and seal it back up before it reaches the intended recipient. In some ways electronic mail is inherently more secure than an envelope which sits in a metal box in front of someone's house while they're at work all day. Although, being electronic, it's possible for someone to read a lot more mail in shorter time spans (or check out what's going through the "post office" while wearing an invisibility cloak).
So until either confidentiality becomes of equal importance to the content one is communicating, or encryption happens invisibly and effortlessly; encryption is not going to be main stream.
My prediction is that digital signatures (and time stamps) have a far better chance of hitting popularity than whole email encryption. There's a lot of people who want to do things electronically while their legal departments still force the paper and fax modality. Once identity and time are of equal (or better) verification status (i.e. subpoena of phone records), then there's a chance that electronic documents will make further progress. But that means every entrenched legal department will have to embrace a new way of doing things - and while I love the tech-savvyness of those awesome dudes over at the EFF, it has not been my experience that they represent the norm among lawyers.
And I thought it was poking fun at the thugs who fail to account for the full cost of breaking a crypto nerd. Come on, if you had only budgeted $5 for that wrench, the evil mastermind in your organizational structure would rake you over the coals for not even doing a heuristic price analysis for various blunt objects!
First paragraph of what? Brandenburg vs. Ohio's Wikipedia article outline the Supreme Court's decision which clearly states that the government can not outlaw (or prosecute) speech (even speech promoting violence) unless it is directed to and immediately incite "imminent lawless action."
Schenck vs. United States is the original case in which the falsely shouting fire example comes from, but again this decision was overturned by the Brandenburg vs. Ohio decision. In that later decision, Justice Douglas wrote directly about the false fire example and stated that it may be the only style of event where speech might be successfully prosecuted as the speech itself is "brigaded with action." No definite there, probably take another Supreme Court decision to iron out the specifics, and chances are that the prosecution would be smart enough to stick to other charges to avoid the ambiguity and uncertainty (damages arising from the action, manslaughter, etc...). (Excerpt below).
That's right, if God had intended for us to manipulate genomes He would have given us... actually, that ends rather crudely.
Try this one: If scientists were meant to manipulate genomes they would have won grants by knowing how to use their delicate instruments.
Ah, that didn't go terribly well did it. Let me try a car analogy: there's nothing wrong with taking off the brakes if you have taken alternative steps to achieve proper protection.... Like expert handling or using the stick to really gear down.
Regenerative braking perhaps?