This is just the overload/decoy argument that was one of the core criticisms of the original SDI plan floated by the Reagan administration in the 1980s. In the total nuclear war scenarios that were being addressed at the time, this was a compelling and realistic criticism. TFA seeks to move this argument into the smaller-scale defensive scenarios that AEGIS is designed to cope with. There are two core problems that weaken this argument with respect to AEGIS:
Since AEGIS is intended to defend against isolated attacks from "rogue states" there is a more legitimate question about the economic opportunity for a small state to overload the defensive capacity of AEGIS. The cost for the attacking state multiplies with each decoy launch, and the Total Cost of Ownership of a weapons system with multiple decoys grows as well. The USSR managed to bankrupt itself in the process of participating in the arms race with the USA. The capacity for a country like Iran or North Korea to successfully fund an overload strategy is questionable.
Additionally, one needs to look at the underlying logic behind this argument in the first place. The fear over SDI is that it would undermine the deterrent effect of a strategic nuclear arsenal. "Mutually Assured Destruction" was, in essence, a 50-year long Mexican Standoff that the entire world was playing. A partially effective SDI program owned by one power (the USA) was seen as something that would actually encourage the USSR to engage in a pre-emptive first strike. The AEGIS situation is entirely different. The nuclear scenarios AEGIS is trying to defend against here are based on the assumption that a rogue state is inherently unstable and cannot be trusted to NOT use it's nuclear arsenal, whether that is because the regime leadership is batshit crazy, blindly fanatical, or insecure enough to allow their weaponry to fall into the wrong hands. Assuming you buy that argument, then the more basic idea that "some defense is better than none defense" is a sound one. In other words, you go with AEGIS even if your enemy attempts an overload strategy, because you simply need the best outcome posssible in the event of an attack.
"Since population growth and per capita economic growth are dependent on ever-increasing energy consumption, it is physically impossible for renewable energy to provide an indefenite supply of unlimited energy. Therefore, demand reduction is the only really-long-term answer."
While I actually agree with this position, it's freaking worthless. First off, the author's argument and the WWF paper are speaking to entirely different time scales. It's functionally equivalent to saying we shouldn't waste time advocating the use of seat belts because they don't protect pedestrians. Scope matters!
The second and larger issue here is that her counter-argument is just as reality-deprived as she claims the WWF paper to be. In her conlcusion, she states simply, "To which I say: Why don't we just not do it?" i.e. why don't we exert self-control as a species and stop growing. Stop adding to total population. Stop increasing per capita consumption. It simply doesn't matter how true that is on paper. I find it amusing that she name checks the Do the Math blog which has been linked on Slashdot previously. The blog is compelling and well-written. It also avoids the flippant suggestion that converting to a zero-energy-growth global society will somehow be as obvious as a Nike commercial. The "reality check" is that the reckoning over energy consumption will be painful. Death and violence are in the cards long before equilibrium is reached. Human beings have the capacity to plan for the future and execute on those plans, but the number of years forward we are motivated to act upon have finite congnitive limits. The climate change issue is a recent-but-not-exclusive example of these limitations at work.
There is of course an amusing logical fallacy in her argument as a whole. If we are to ever reach the equilibrium she seeks, whether that is by design or through painful reaction, that equilibrium would have to be completely fueled by renewable resources, since we must eventually run out of the non-renewable ones. Doh!
Still, I'm glad this got posted to Slashdot. Undeneath her specific arguments there is a clear undercurrent. "Physicists are smarter than all the rest of you because we deal with real stuff so all of you can suck it." That kind of attitude definitely belongs here.
So we have list A, made up of the day-to-day commentary of college undergraduates. Then we have list B, made up of random snippets of contemporary popular literature. The context for both lists are stripped away, and then they are fed to college undergraduates to see which set is more resonant?
Why of course, this must have to do with some sort of innate cognitive affinity for poorly constructed sentences! What else could it be?!?!?!?! One thing I know for sure... the results of this research are going to be really hard for me to remember later on.
China has replaced their "One Child" program of population control with a new "One Lung" policy.If you can't get rid of the babies, at least you can weed out the weak, the old, and the heavy breathers.
The goal isn't to actually do any work or help people. The goal is to make sure you close the tasks in your queue before the end of the sprint so that the productivity reports are stellar.
Well hello, you appear to be agreeing with my sentiments. Agile is allegedly supposed to sweep away all the "bureacracy" that interferes with brilliant programmers writing beautiful, functional code. Nice in theory. Once you actually bake it into an actual organization of any size, it effectively becomes a codified work avoidance process. Fuck quality, we're SPRINTING baby.
Honestly, it's the people like your boss and the worker bees that buy into their thinking that I'm railing against. How many points in your sprint planning gets allocated to QA? Support documentation? Who knows? I will fully admit I'm not studied on what Agile's formal methodologies suggest, but from what I can tell in the implementations I've witnessed, things like QA and docs are just two more undefined activities that can be easily ignored if they look like they'll sully the productivity reports.
I agree with your overall suggestion that poorly defined requirements lead to poorly executed projects, but this statement is some serious overreach on your part. So all devs have an innate understanding of all business needs? Devs have an innate understanding of the expectations of the user base? If such things were true, there would be no need to "push back." Trust me, people on the revenue side of the house do NOT want to go through the exhausting process of trying to communicate their needs. They would love it if you could read their minds and give them what they want.
Given free reign however, developers will tend to give the users what the devs want to make, not what the users want to use. I wonder how you would feel if [warning: gratuitous car analogy] the auto industry decided that seatbelts and airbags are wasteful because only incompetent people need them? Yet this is how many devs think when faced with the tedious, onerous business of building something to satisfy the needs of others.
It really fascinates me how this attitude continues to survive in geek culture. In most other creative professions, the creative types are obsessed with winning the adoration of their audience. This frequently leads to less talented people being branded as "hacks" or "panderers" who choose the easy path and are focused solely on pleasing an audience without demonstrating any true artfulness. Somehow many software devs continue to live in this bizarro world were they do what they feel like and pity the poor mortals that don't appreciate their genius.
Those of us who fix problems, rather than create them, are not amused. I'd rather work with a pandering hack than an arrogant prima donna any day of the week. My recommendation for your specific gripe is to make a point of reaching out to the project managers and the business analysts in your organization and offer to put resources from your team into the lion's den during the requirements definition phase of the project. Then you don't have to push back against decisions that were made without your input. You were there when the decisions were made. Good luck with that though. Apparently requirements definition is a fancy name for those "boring meetings" modded 5-insightful at the top of the post.
Sorry AC, not a user. I work on the support/administration end, where 90% of my life is cleaning up turds left behind by cowboy devs who think that "practices" interfere with their "creativity," and the "users" (aka THE PEOPLE YOUR JOB EXISTS TO SERVE) are somehow beneath notice. But thank you, I really appreciate your dropping by and proving my point for me.
Oh wait! I forgot, this is supposed to be about things developer's DON'T like. Not the things that developers love to do that make everyone else miserable.
Q: Why would any enterprise allow/sanction/encourage the use of mobile devices in their workspace? Why would they add a Blackberry Enterprise Server or an ActiveSync connection and allow their staff to pull down corporate messaging onto their personal devices? Don't they understand about the security risks and the administrative/support overhead of bridging the gap betwen company equipment and personal equipment?
A: Silly rabbit. These technologies push the executive mindset of being permanently at work down the management chain and into the front line staff. Employees "steal" 5 minutes away from work to check their bank balance etc. only to lose 10 back responding to "urgent" emails or chasing arbitrary deadlines that can only be met by working after hours. Extending the enterprise into employee's mobile devices is effectively a rollback of decades of labor law that today's workers accept willingly. Remember kids: Stay in "non-exempt" job positions as long as possible!
Nine times out of ten it's an electric razor. But every once in a while it's a dildo. Of course, it's company policy never to imply ownership in the event of a dildo. We have to use the indefinite article, "a dildo", never "your dildo."
My electric razor was in fact responsible for delaying the takeoff of a plane once. Thankfully this was prior to 9/11. Aside from the delay, the only adverse impact was having to dissapoint the two bored baggage handlers who knew the Fight Club reference and were desperately hoping that I would produce something embarassing. Today, I'd expect that the bag would be destroyed and I would be held for questioning. I love to fly but airlines, airports, and the TSA have all convinced me to opt for the road trip for anything inside a 600 mile radius.
The development of modern computing and telecommunications is not an industrial revolution of the type characterized by IR #1 and IR #2, and this is where Gordon's assumptions falter and Krugman's skepticism gains traction.
The "I" in this case refers to Information not Industry, and it is the 2nd one. The 1st one was the development of the printing press. From this standpoint, IR #1 (the printing press and movable type) took centuries for it's impact to be fully realized. The depth and breadth of it's influence on western civilization is difficult to measure in "simple" macroeconomic terms. Likewise, IR #2 (the electronic digitization of information) is a revolution that is so fundamental in nature that I don't believe it lends itself to being mapped as cleanly as Gordon implies.
Krugman starts the conversation in a couple of good spots: robotics and it's impact on GDP, and the potential of Big Data to drive decision making. What about desktop manufacturing (aka 3D printing)? MOOC? Genomics? Realtime translation?
In fact the more that I think about it, the more I think that Gordon has successfully found an important trend, but has the wrong story to explain it. The first two Industrial revolutions owe their economic impacts to advances in our energy metabolism as a species. Gordon's IR#1 was about the conversion of hydrocarbons into mechanical energy using steam. Gordon's IR#2 was about the conversion of hydrocarbons into electricity using steam turbines, and into mechanical energy using internal combustion. Economic benefits from the digital revolution has much more to do with efficiency and productivity, and almost nothing to do with finding new sources of energy to exploit. Indeed we're using more energy than ever to push information around, but each joule expended has had a significant ROI from an economic standpoint. Consider Just In Time production techniques, which are dependent on the ability to rapidly gather and disseminate information up and down the manufacturing supply chain. There's not a whole hell of a lot more efficiency that we're going to wring out of JIT. In fact, Japan's Tsunami disaster demonstrated that we are now SO optimized from an industrial standpoint that natural disasters in one part of the world can have nearly immediate impacts across the global economy. In other words, we have reached the point of diminishing returns on the productivity gains that digital information can provide to the industrial economy.
I programmed this in my spare time as a service to my lab. If you pay me to write it for android and ios, i'd gladly do so. But I'm not paid enough to listen to ugly flames like this:-p
Simple solution James. Release the source. Most of the knee-jerks will ignore it, but I would be surprised if you didn't get at least a couple useful optimizations passed back up to you. It's amazing too how many knee-jerk whiners crawl back into the woodwork when they are confronted with a little empowerment.
Great. I was wondering what it would take for the Slashdot crowd to pervert this dipshit into a hero.
"Dude, check it out! He destroyed all his data before he did this! That way, them dirty screws in law enforcement won't ever know a thing about him, won't understand what happened, and won't have any way to prevent it from happening again! Yeah! That's so awesome! Power to the privacy! Privacy rights for all! Woo!"
Attempting to smash up his PC and HDD and leaving the wreckage in his place is about the most n00bish form of data destruction you can imagine, and has probably only been partially successful at best. I'll leave it to the numerous other comments already posted to detail this sick kid's failure to cover his tracks adequately. If you're going to irresponsibly portray privacy and security advocates as paranoid deviants who cheer mass murder, you're going to need to try harder.
There is only one method known to science available today which will reliably remove carbon dioxide from the atmostphere for long-term sequestration, but it is entirely feasible in both centralized and distributed models, which is reforestation. I won't get into a ton of details about the value of individual effort vs. collective effort vs. policy activism. Long story short, you're wrong.
I can totally see this winding up on the floor of the Experience Music Prject at some point in the near future. Paul Allen has an immense collection of nerd-friendly, one-of-a-kind memorabilia, even recently displaying such obscure gems as Mr. Pointy.
'A European security source said investigators now believe the suspect became disgruntled because he felt he was being ignored and his advice on operating the data systems was not being taken seriously.'"
Okay poindexter, what exactly was the issue? Some non-technical middle manager didn't understand the overarching brilliance of your recommended filesystem? Afraid the key length is too short? Too much Linux? Not enough Linux? Welcome to the real world, where your temper tantrum effects no change for anyone else but you. Hope your issue wasn't genuinely important, you'll have a hard time making your case from prison./facepalm.
There is nothing about the current FB process that contains any true accountability. This is a marketing exercise designed to give the noisiest contingent of FB users something they can do to create the illusion that they have a voice. Consider:
1. The current voting process has a minimum participation requirement for decisions to be binding. This participation threshold has never been met.
2. One of the changes being voted for is doing away with the voting system.
This is how it's going to play out: Facebook is going to work harder and harder to monetize the details of your personal life until somebody powerful and/or well-loved by the public is burned by their behavior, a la Gen. Petraues. Then there will be legislation to curb the powers of private entities like Facebook as a knee-jerk reaction. That is what a real "messy democracy" looks like.
1. Advanced material wealth and higher education suppress birth rates.
2. Advanced material wealth and higher education attract immigrants.
3. Emigrating is difficult under the best and most legal circumstances. Therefore, immigrants tend to be more ambitious and harder working than average.
4. Consequently, immigrants can supplement native birth in broadening the economic base, while simultaneously adding economic dynamism via their own ambition and the more generalized effects of cultural diffusion.
5. Profit!!!
6. GOTO 1.
All of the "Why the hell are we talking about sports on Slashdot?" commentary above is to be expected... but let's get this established for the record: You people are talking about of your ass.
To the uninitiated, watching basketball can feel tedious and repetetive, with guys running back and forth, making similar looking movements, play being stopped for unfathomable reasons, and so forth. If you experience this sensation, it is because you are a noob. N00B. You are not trained to understand the numerous split-second decisions that are being executed within the span of a 24-second shot clock. Of all professional sports, watching basketball has the steepest learning curve. That is reason #1 why it is the perfect spectator sport for geeks.
This leads to the next point, which is that basketball is the most cognitively demanding of all professional sports for the player as well. Because the game is has a relatively small number of players on each side, and each player faces an ongoing series of 1-on-1 interactions with those players over the course of a quarter, a game, or a season. Good players study detailed scouting reports of their opponents in each game which details their strenghts, weaknesses, and habits. If you are going to defend Steve Novak knowing he is a phenominal 3-point shooter but not good on the dribble drive, then you are going to close in on him so that you can bother his jump shooting. But a guy who has a strong ability to drive will get right past you if you get too close to him on defense. If you're defending a guy like Kobe Bryant who can both shoot and drive, you've got a much harder job. Another player on your team may have to offer "help defense" which means rotating off of his own man to help you defend. That means the NEXT player over on the court has to notice that the help defender has left his own man, and the next guy "rotates" over so that the one guy on the floor being left open is as far away from the ball as possible. If the player on offense then chooses to throw a pass to the open man, the entire defensive lineup needs to rotate back into proper position. Good team defense requires the coordination of a dance team while improvising like jazz musicians. So that's reason #2 for nerds to like basketball. The stereotypical "dumb jock" will not excel in this game.
Actually, I have to cite another example for reason #2 because I know I'm going to get pushback on the notion that people who devote their lives to physical activity might possibly be really smart: Guys who have phenomenal bodies and weak minds can be successful in pro ball assuming they don't get injured... but eventually their limited mental agility makes them predictable, which makes them less effective. "The book" is out on them and they become easy to counter. Once they start getting near 30 years old, they lose their elite athleticism as well and become largely useless. Guys like Kobe Bryant, Tim Duncan, and Ray Allen who continue to be highly effective, star-level players into their mid-30s do so because they have tremendous minds for the game they are playing.
"Moneyball" was largely about using statistical analysis to acquire players who were undervalued by other teams because the old-school methods of player evaluation were unscientific and based on folklore and assumptions regarding pro baseball. Baseball is, in video game parlance, a "turn based" game. It is slow. Everyone has a clearly defined role. The mathematics involved in baseball analytics isn't trivial, but it's roughly akin to "value investing" in financial terms. It's harder than balancing your checkbook but it ain't rocket science. OTOH, basketball analytics really *IS* rocket science. Basketball is chaotic and non-deterministic by nature. Outcomes result from a rapidly cascading series of interrelated events. Quantifying this is possible, but it is really, really hard. The Moneyball revolution has led to many NBA teams hiring and retaining full-time analytics teams where statisticians and data miners vie to determine who should b
American soldiers have to pull the trigger. Period. Any "anti-theft" modification to an existing weapon system is either going to going to be vulnerable to cheap circumvention or is going to take far too long to develop and implement to be relevant for this conflict. Or both for that matter.
This is a political problem, not a technology problem, and not a logistics problem. If NPR can put American reporters on the front lines in Aleppo, then SOCOM can insert and extract anyone they need to at any point. That's not a solution to the political problem either. Even if special forces personnel got in and out without being noticed, it would be impossible to deny US involvement and be believed. At that point, you might as well just do what we did in Lybia: Establish air superiority, pure and simple.
Personally, I suspect that we haven't gotten more involved in Syria specifically because of the election cycle. Our "I got your back" strategy in Libya was very successful but outside of the circle of foriegn policy nerds, the administration got surprisingly little credit for a creative solution that saved thousands of lives and manufactured a lot of goodwill in the region. With that tepid public reaction, there was no way were they going to stick their feet in the Syrian swamp before today. Assuming a re-election is secured, you can expect US involvement in bringing down Assad to move back to the front burner. Our foreign policy goals with respect to both Iran and Israel are too important to let this bump along indefinitely.
Simply scale up the reaction to a level where it is self-sustaining on the ambient hydrogen in space, and then collect the resulting photon emissions with an array of photovoltaic converters.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait, that's the combination on my luggage!
This is just the overload/decoy argument that was one of the core criticisms of the original SDI plan floated by the Reagan administration in the 1980s. In the total nuclear war scenarios that were being addressed at the time, this was a compelling and realistic criticism. TFA seeks to move this argument into the smaller-scale defensive scenarios that AEGIS is designed to cope with. There are two core problems that weaken this argument with respect to AEGIS:
A more accurate synopsis of her argument is this:
"Since population growth and per capita economic growth are dependent on ever-increasing energy consumption, it is physically impossible for renewable energy to provide an indefenite supply of unlimited energy. Therefore, demand reduction is the only really-long-term answer."
While I actually agree with this position, it's freaking worthless. First off, the author's argument and the WWF paper are speaking to entirely different time scales. It's functionally equivalent to saying we shouldn't waste time advocating the use of seat belts because they don't protect pedestrians. Scope matters!
The second and larger issue here is that her counter-argument is just as reality-deprived as she claims the WWF paper to be. In her conlcusion, she states simply, "To which I say: Why don't we just not do it?" i.e. why don't we exert self-control as a species and stop growing. Stop adding to total population. Stop increasing per capita consumption. It simply doesn't matter how true that is on paper. I find it amusing that she name checks the Do the Math blog which has been linked on Slashdot previously. The blog is compelling and well-written. It also avoids the flippant suggestion that converting to a zero-energy-growth global society will somehow be as obvious as a Nike commercial. The "reality check" is that the reckoning over energy consumption will be painful. Death and violence are in the cards long before equilibrium is reached. Human beings have the capacity to plan for the future and execute on those plans, but the number of years forward we are motivated to act upon have finite congnitive limits. The climate change issue is a recent-but-not-exclusive example of these limitations at work.
There is of course an amusing logical fallacy in her argument as a whole. If we are to ever reach the equilibrium she seeks, whether that is by design or through painful reaction, that equilibrium would have to be completely fueled by renewable resources, since we must eventually run out of the non-renewable ones. Doh!
Still, I'm glad this got posted to Slashdot. Undeneath her specific arguments there is a clear undercurrent. "Physicists are smarter than all the rest of you because we deal with real stuff so all of you can suck it." That kind of attitude definitely belongs here.
So we have list A, made up of the day-to-day commentary of college undergraduates. Then we have list B, made up of random snippets of contemporary popular literature. The context for both lists are stripped away, and then they are fed to college undergraduates to see which set is more resonant?
Why of course, this must have to do with some sort of innate cognitive affinity for poorly constructed sentences! What else could it be?!?!?!?! One thing I know for sure... the results of this research are going to be really hard for me to remember later on.
China has replaced their "One Child" program of population control with a new "One Lung" policy.If you can't get rid of the babies, at least you can weed out the weak, the old, and the heavy breathers.
The goal isn't to actually do any work or help people. The goal is to make sure you close the tasks in your queue before the end of the sprint so that the productivity reports are stellar.
Well hello, you appear to be agreeing with my sentiments. Agile is allegedly supposed to sweep away all the "bureacracy" that interferes with brilliant programmers writing beautiful, functional code. Nice in theory. Once you actually bake it into an actual organization of any size, it effectively becomes a codified work avoidance process. Fuck quality, we're SPRINTING baby.
Honestly, it's the people like your boss and the worker bees that buy into their thinking that I'm railing against. How many points in your sprint planning gets allocated to QA? Support documentation? Who knows? I will fully admit I'm not studied on what Agile's formal methodologies suggest, but from what I can tell in the implementations I've witnessed, things like QA and docs are just two more undefined activities that can be easily ignored if they look like they'll sully the productivity reports.
We know bad requirements when we see them
I agree with your overall suggestion that poorly defined requirements lead to poorly executed projects, but this statement is some serious overreach on your part. So all devs have an innate understanding of all business needs? Devs have an innate understanding of the expectations of the user base? If such things were true, there would be no need to "push back." Trust me, people on the revenue side of the house do NOT want to go through the exhausting process of trying to communicate their needs. They would love it if you could read their minds and give them what they want.
Given free reign however, developers will tend to give the users what the devs want to make, not what the users want to use. I wonder how you would feel if [warning: gratuitous car analogy] the auto industry decided that seatbelts and airbags are wasteful because only incompetent people need them? Yet this is how many devs think when faced with the tedious, onerous business of building something to satisfy the needs of others.
It really fascinates me how this attitude continues to survive in geek culture. In most other creative professions, the creative types are obsessed with winning the adoration of their audience. This frequently leads to less talented people being branded as "hacks" or "panderers" who choose the easy path and are focused solely on pleasing an audience without demonstrating any true artfulness. Somehow many software devs continue to live in this bizarro world were they do what they feel like and pity the poor mortals that don't appreciate their genius.
Those of us who fix problems, rather than create them, are not amused. I'd rather work with a pandering hack than an arrogant prima donna any day of the week. My recommendation for your specific gripe is to make a point of reaching out to the project managers and the business analysts in your organization and offer to put resources from your team into the lion's den during the requirements definition phase of the project. Then you don't have to push back against decisions that were made without your input. You were there when the decisions were made. Good luck with that though. Apparently requirements definition is a fancy name for those "boring meetings" modded 5-insightful at the top of the post.
Users like yourself
Sorry AC, not a user. I work on the support/administration end, where 90% of my life is cleaning up turds left behind by cowboy devs who think that "practices" interfere with their "creativity," and the "users" (aka THE PEOPLE YOUR JOB EXISTS TO SERVE) are somehow beneath notice. But thank you, I really appreciate your dropping by and proving my point for me.
Oh wait! I forgot, this is supposed to be about things developer's DON'T like. Not the things that developers love to do that make everyone else miserable.
Q: Why would any enterprise allow/sanction/encourage the use of mobile devices in their workspace? Why would they add a Blackberry Enterprise Server or an ActiveSync connection and allow their staff to pull down corporate messaging onto their personal devices? Don't they understand about the security risks and the administrative/support overhead of bridging the gap betwen company equipment and personal equipment?
A: Silly rabbit. These technologies push the executive mindset of being permanently at work down the management chain and into the front line staff. Employees "steal" 5 minutes away from work to check their bank balance etc. only to lose 10 back responding to "urgent" emails or chasing arbitrary deadlines that can only be met by working after hours. Extending the enterprise into employee's mobile devices is effectively a rollback of decades of labor law that today's workers accept willingly. Remember kids: Stay in "non-exempt" job positions as long as possible!
Nine times out of ten it's an electric razor. But every once in a while it's a dildo. Of course, it's company policy never to imply ownership in the event of a dildo. We have to use the indefinite article, "a dildo", never "your dildo."
My electric razor was in fact responsible for delaying the takeoff of a plane once. Thankfully this was prior to 9/11. Aside from the delay, the only adverse impact was having to dissapoint the two bored baggage handlers who knew the Fight Club reference and were desperately hoping that I would produce something embarassing. Today, I'd expect that the bag would be destroyed and I would be held for questioning. I love to fly but airlines, airports, and the TSA have all convinced me to opt for the road trip for anything inside a 600 mile radius.
The development of modern computing and telecommunications is not an industrial revolution of the type characterized by IR #1 and IR #2, and this is where Gordon's assumptions falter and Krugman's skepticism gains traction.
The "I" in this case refers to Information not Industry, and it is the 2nd one. The 1st one was the development of the printing press. From this standpoint, IR #1 (the printing press and movable type) took centuries for it's impact to be fully realized. The depth and breadth of it's influence on western civilization is difficult to measure in "simple" macroeconomic terms. Likewise, IR #2 (the electronic digitization of information) is a revolution that is so fundamental in nature that I don't believe it lends itself to being mapped as cleanly as Gordon implies.
Krugman starts the conversation in a couple of good spots: robotics and it's impact on GDP, and the potential of Big Data to drive decision making. What about desktop manufacturing (aka 3D printing)? MOOC? Genomics? Realtime translation?
In fact the more that I think about it, the more I think that Gordon has successfully found an important trend, but has the wrong story to explain it. The first two Industrial revolutions owe their economic impacts to advances in our energy metabolism as a species. Gordon's IR#1 was about the conversion of hydrocarbons into mechanical energy using steam. Gordon's IR#2 was about the conversion of hydrocarbons into electricity using steam turbines, and into mechanical energy using internal combustion. Economic benefits from the digital revolution has much more to do with efficiency and productivity, and almost nothing to do with finding new sources of energy to exploit. Indeed we're using more energy than ever to push information around, but each joule expended has had a significant ROI from an economic standpoint. Consider Just In Time production techniques, which are dependent on the ability to rapidly gather and disseminate information up and down the manufacturing supply chain. There's not a whole hell of a lot more efficiency that we're going to wring out of JIT. In fact, Japan's Tsunami disaster demonstrated that we are now SO optimized from an industrial standpoint that natural disasters in one part of the world can have nearly immediate impacts across the global economy. In other words, we have reached the point of diminishing returns on the productivity gains that digital information can provide to the industrial economy.
So Gordon is wrong, but about the right things.
I programmed this in my spare time as a service to my lab. If you pay me to write it for android and ios, i'd gladly do so. But I'm not paid enough to listen to ugly flames like this :-p
Simple solution James. Release the source. Most of the knee-jerks will ignore it, but I would be surprised if you didn't get at least a couple useful optimizations passed back up to you. It's amazing too how many knee-jerk whiners crawl back into the woodwork when they are confronted with a little empowerment.
Great. I was wondering what it would take for the Slashdot crowd to pervert this dipshit into a hero.
"Dude, check it out! He destroyed all his data before he did this! That way, them dirty screws in law enforcement won't ever know a thing about him, won't understand what happened, and won't have any way to prevent it from happening again! Yeah! That's so awesome! Power to the privacy! Privacy rights for all! Woo!"
Attempting to smash up his PC and HDD and leaving the wreckage in his place is about the most n00bish form of data destruction you can imagine, and has probably only been partially successful at best. I'll leave it to the numerous other comments already posted to detail this sick kid's failure to cover his tracks adequately. If you're going to irresponsibly portray privacy and security advocates as paranoid deviants who cheer mass murder, you're going to need to try harder.
There is only one method known to science available today which will reliably remove carbon dioxide from the atmostphere for long-term sequestration, but it is entirely feasible in both centralized and distributed models, which is reforestation. I won't get into a ton of details about the value of individual effort vs. collective effort vs. policy activism. Long story short, you're wrong.
I can totally see this winding up on the floor of the Experience Music Prject at some point in the near future. Paul Allen has an immense collection of nerd-friendly, one-of-a-kind memorabilia, even recently displaying such obscure gems as Mr. Pointy.
'A European security source said investigators now believe the suspect became disgruntled because he felt he was being ignored and his advice on operating the data systems was not being taken seriously.'"
Okay poindexter, what exactly was the issue? Some non-technical middle manager didn't understand the overarching brilliance of your recommended filesystem? Afraid the key length is too short? Too much Linux? Not enough Linux? Welcome to the real world, where your temper tantrum effects no change for anyone else but you. Hope your issue wasn't genuinely important, you'll have a hard time making your case from prison. /facepalm.
There is nothing about the current FB process that contains any true accountability. This is a marketing exercise designed to give the noisiest contingent of FB users something they can do to create the illusion that they have a voice. Consider:
1. The current voting process has a minimum participation requirement for decisions to be binding. This participation threshold has never been met.
2. One of the changes being voted for is doing away with the voting system.
This is how it's going to play out: Facebook is going to work harder and harder to monetize the details of your personal life until somebody powerful and/or well-loved by the public is burned by their behavior, a la Gen. Petraues. Then there will be legislation to curb the powers of private entities like Facebook as a knee-jerk reaction. That is what a real "messy democracy" looks like.
You mean like... THE INTERNET? http://www.sadtrombone.com/
1. Advanced material wealth and higher education suppress birth rates.
2. Advanced material wealth and higher education attract immigrants.
3. Emigrating is difficult under the best and most legal circumstances. Therefore, immigrants tend to be more ambitious and harder working than average.
4. Consequently, immigrants can supplement native birth in broadening the economic base, while simultaneously adding economic dynamism via their own ambition and the more generalized effects of cultural diffusion.
5. Profit!!!
6. GOTO 1.
All of the "Why the hell are we talking about sports on Slashdot?" commentary above is to be expected... but let's get this established for the record: You people are talking about of your ass.
To the uninitiated, watching basketball can feel tedious and repetetive, with guys running back and forth, making similar looking movements, play being stopped for unfathomable reasons, and so forth. If you experience this sensation, it is because you are a noob. N00B. You are not trained to understand the numerous split-second decisions that are being executed within the span of a 24-second shot clock. Of all professional sports, watching basketball has the steepest learning curve. That is reason #1 why it is the perfect spectator sport for geeks.
This leads to the next point, which is that basketball is the most cognitively demanding of all professional sports for the player as well. Because the game is has a relatively small number of players on each side, and each player faces an ongoing series of 1-on-1 interactions with those players over the course of a quarter, a game, or a season. Good players study detailed scouting reports of their opponents in each game which details their strenghts, weaknesses, and habits. If you are going to defend Steve Novak knowing he is a phenominal 3-point shooter but not good on the dribble drive, then you are going to close in on him so that you can bother his jump shooting. But a guy who has a strong ability to drive will get right past you if you get too close to him on defense. If you're defending a guy like Kobe Bryant who can both shoot and drive, you've got a much harder job. Another player on your team may have to offer "help defense" which means rotating off of his own man to help you defend. That means the NEXT player over on the court has to notice that the help defender has left his own man, and the next guy "rotates" over so that the one guy on the floor being left open is as far away from the ball as possible. If the player on offense then chooses to throw a pass to the open man, the entire defensive lineup needs to rotate back into proper position. Good team defense requires the coordination of a dance team while improvising like jazz musicians. So that's reason #2 for nerds to like basketball. The stereotypical "dumb jock" will not excel in this game.
Actually, I have to cite another example for reason #2 because I know I'm going to get pushback on the notion that people who devote their lives to physical activity might possibly be really smart: Guys who have phenomenal bodies and weak minds can be successful in pro ball assuming they don't get injured... but eventually their limited mental agility makes them predictable, which makes them less effective. "The book" is out on them and they become easy to counter. Once they start getting near 30 years old, they lose their elite athleticism as well and become largely useless. Guys like Kobe Bryant, Tim Duncan, and Ray Allen who continue to be highly effective, star-level players into their mid-30s do so because they have tremendous minds for the game they are playing.
"Moneyball" was largely about using statistical analysis to acquire players who were undervalued by other teams because the old-school methods of player evaluation were unscientific and based on folklore and assumptions regarding pro baseball. Baseball is, in video game parlance, a "turn based" game. It is slow. Everyone has a clearly defined role. The mathematics involved in baseball analytics isn't trivial, but it's roughly akin to "value investing" in financial terms. It's harder than balancing your checkbook but it ain't rocket science. OTOH, basketball analytics really *IS* rocket science. Basketball is chaotic and non-deterministic by nature. Outcomes result from a rapidly cascading series of interrelated events. Quantifying this is possible, but it is really, really hard. The Moneyball revolution has led to many NBA teams hiring and retaining full-time analytics teams where statisticians and data miners vie to determine who should b
American soldiers have to pull the trigger. Period. Any "anti-theft" modification to an existing weapon system is either going to going to be vulnerable to cheap circumvention or is going to take far too long to develop and implement to be relevant for this conflict. Or both for that matter.
This is a political problem, not a technology problem, and not a logistics problem. If NPR can put American reporters on the front lines in Aleppo, then SOCOM can insert and extract anyone they need to at any point. That's not a solution to the political problem either. Even if special forces personnel got in and out without being noticed, it would be impossible to deny US involvement and be believed. At that point, you might as well just do what we did in Lybia: Establish air superiority, pure and simple.
Personally, I suspect that we haven't gotten more involved in Syria specifically because of the election cycle. Our "I got your back" strategy in Libya was very successful but outside of the circle of foriegn policy nerds, the administration got surprisingly little credit for a creative solution that saved thousands of lives and manufactured a lot of goodwill in the region. With that tepid public reaction, there was no way were they going to stick their feet in the Syrian swamp before today. Assuming a re-election is secured, you can expect US involvement in bringing down Assad to move back to the front burner. Our foreign policy goals with respect to both Iran and Israel are too important to let this bump along indefinitely.
One question: Does Kickstarter accept ISK?
Simply scale up the reaction to a level where it is self-sustaining on the ambient hydrogen in space, and then collect the resulting photon emissions with an array of photovoltaic converters.
I smell a patent infringement lawsuit from Professor Farnsworth!