Re:Crimes and rationality
on
The Laidoff Ninja
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· Score: 2, Informative
There was a guy who studied drug dealers in Chicago. The bosses make a decent amount of money, but the guys on the street are making ~ $10 an hour (this may be off because of inflation) at a job where they had a pretty good shot at being dead by 40.
I think I would phrase that as "You could try to paste a model of the car engine in, but it wouldn't be one anymore", or something like that.
I guess it is a good thing I don't write CAD software without thinking about it very much.
(The better example would have been to point out that 6 digits of precision is probably enough to choose which of your enemies eyeballs to aim the artillery at, if you can see well enough. Of course, the gun probably isn't that accurate.)
Fusion is awfully damn hard. The easiest proposals depend on a magnetic bottle we don't know how to build surrounded by perfect shielding that we don't know how to make (it has to capture nearly every neutron released by the fusion reaction and use it to convert lithium into tritium; you can make the tritium in a fission reactor, but getting enough of it that way would cost about $100 million a week at today's prices. Once you have the tritium, you have to make sure you use damn near all of it, and hydrogen has a fun habit of leaking.).
Laser pinches offer a different path to fusion, but they also need a lot of fuel, about 90,000 pellets a day. Current facilities make about 6 pellets a year, at a cost of $1 million per.
Lest you think I am just some crank making stuff up, this is from a Scientific American article published in March (sorry about the paywall):
That doesn't mean it is impossible, but we aren't anywhere close, even though we are close to technical breakeven (where a reaction releases more energy than was used to initiate it).
I don't know. I just made up an example where the inexact representation of a constant would not be a practical problem, and I tried to pick something that is pretty huge (I'm sure there are lots of things on an aircraft carrier where 1 mm matters, but they are they sort of things the designers try to get rid of, they are expensive to build).
(and sure, there are lots of tolerances in a car engine that are much less than 1 mm, but it is about 1 meter across, not 1/3 of a km)
Precision isn't that big a deal (we aren't so good at making physical things that 7 decimal digits become problematic, even on something the scale of an aircraft carrier, 6 digits is enough to place things within ~ 1 millimeter).
The bigger issue is how the errors combine when doing calculations, especially iterative calculations.
They haven't made any effort to constrain their point of view. God mode is on. So god should know what those people were up to the rest of the time. If they are introduced at the end in order to resolve the story, it smacks of hand of god.
(I suppose they might be drawing some very careful lines about what characters they show, but my viewing doesn't make it seem like that is the case)
I haven't watched the whole series, but the fact that they are still introducing new characters in the last 12 episodes screams of sloppiness (to me anyway).
Re:Article needs a course in experimental design
on
The Data-Driven Life
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· Score: 1
I understand the point of it. I'm saying (with near certainty) that the research subject would see through the blinds about 1 hour into the study, so they are so much puffery, he might as well just spend 6 weeks drinking his coffee and then spend 6 weeks not drinking coffee (or just drinking decaf), perhaps with a cooling off period in-between to make sure that withdrawal is not impacting the clean period.
Yeah, well, good thing I never said no one should want to buy Apple products, all I ever do is (mildly) argue that people shouldn't put up with their control-freak approach.
Sure. But they need to recognize the risk inherent in the "buy and bitch" approach.
For example, Stallman is careful to purchase hardware that he feels maximizes his freedom, rather than hope that the manufacturer will come around after he complains.
I think you are framing it in the wrong direction. The current market situation is that the freedom you speak of is not present.
So why do we need to fight for it?
(I certainly prefer devices that I can mess around with, and I probably won't participate in a walled garden like the ones Apple is building, but the people buying iPads don't think that they 'need to give up that freedom', they simply want the shiny and don't care about the freedom (so 'need' doesn't even enter into the analysis of it))
What context do you think is there? The story is about a federal border crossing in Michigan and you have linked an educational website in Tennessee that (apparently) advises cities. You make no mention of any legal scope (which, in context, means that "Here's the policy" implies that there is a single policy used everywhere). Nor did the AC that you replied to provide any context.
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There was a guy who studied drug dealers in Chicago. The bosses make a decent amount of money, but the guys on the street are making ~ $10 an hour (this may be off because of inflation) at a job where they had a pretty good shot at being dead by 40.
I think I would phrase that as "You could try to paste a model of the car engine in, but it wouldn't be one anymore", or something like that.
I guess it is a good thing I don't write CAD software without thinking about it very much.
(The better example would have been to point out that 6 digits of precision is probably enough to choose which of your enemies eyeballs to aim the artillery at, if you can see well enough. Of course, the gun probably isn't that accurate.)
Fusion is awfully damn hard. The easiest proposals depend on a magnetic bottle we don't know how to build surrounded by perfect shielding that we don't know how to make (it has to capture nearly every neutron released by the fusion reaction and use it to convert lithium into tritium; you can make the tritium in a fission reactor, but getting enough of it that way would cost about $100 million a week at today's prices. Once you have the tritium, you have to make sure you use damn near all of it, and hydrogen has a fun habit of leaking.).
Laser pinches offer a different path to fusion, but they also need a lot of fuel, about 90,000 pellets a day. Current facilities make about 6 pellets a year, at a cost of $1 million per.
Lest you think I am just some crank making stuff up, this is from a Scientific American article published in March (sorry about the paywall):
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fusions-false-dawn
And those are just the fuel problems.
That doesn't mean it is impossible, but we aren't anywhere close, even though we are close to technical breakeven (where a reaction releases more energy than was used to initiate it).
Sure, you can make it a problem, but it isn't particularly insidious.
And the part where I say "The bigger issue is how the errors combine when doing calculations" is a pretty compact version of what you said.
I don't know. I just made up an example where the inexact representation of a constant would not be a practical problem, and I tried to pick something that is pretty huge (I'm sure there are lots of things on an aircraft carrier where 1 mm matters, but they are they sort of things the designers try to get rid of, they are expensive to build).
(and sure, there are lots of tolerances in a car engine that are much less than 1 mm, but it is about 1 meter across, not 1/3 of a km)
Precision isn't that big a deal (we aren't so good at making physical things that 7 decimal digits become problematic, even on something the scale of an aircraft carrier, 6 digits is enough to place things within ~ 1 millimeter).
The bigger issue is how the errors combine when doing calculations, especially iterative calculations.
They haven't made any effort to constrain their point of view. God mode is on. So god should know what those people were up to the rest of the time. If they are introduced at the end in order to resolve the story, it smacks of hand of god.
(I suppose they might be drawing some very careful lines about what characters they show, but my viewing doesn't make it seem like that is the case)
I haven't watched the whole series, but the fact that they are still introducing new characters in the last 12 episodes screams of sloppiness (to me anyway).
I understand the point of it. I'm saying (with near certainty) that the research subject would see through the blinds about 1 hour into the study, so they are so much puffery, he might as well just spend 6 weeks drinking his coffee and then spend 6 weeks not drinking coffee (or just drinking decaf), perhaps with a cooling off period in-between to make sure that withdrawal is not impacting the clean period.
Yeah, well, good thing I never said no one should want to buy Apple products, all I ever do is (mildly) argue that people shouldn't put up with their control-freak approach.
Sure. But they need to recognize the risk inherent in the "buy and bitch" approach.
For example, Stallman is careful to purchase hardware that he feels maximizes his freedom, rather than hope that the manufacturer will come around after he complains.
You should probably try and be a little less sensitive.
Also, what the hell waiting rooms and restaurants are you in that you can actually hear the audio?
I think you are framing it in the wrong direction. The current market situation is that the freedom you speak of is not present.
So why do we need to fight for it?
(I certainly prefer devices that I can mess around with, and I probably won't participate in a walled garden like the ones Apple is building, but the people buying iPads don't think that they 'need to give up that freedom', they simply want the shiny and don't care about the freedom (so 'need' doesn't even enter into the analysis of it))
No, it's like people are complaining that their refrigerator can't keep chicken cold, it only works with beef.
It won't work. The amount of caffeine in a couple of cups of coffee isn't something someone who is acclimated can pretend to have consumed.
Before you tell me to try it, try it yourself.
Lay off coffee?
Are you trying to make him angry?
The worst is when someone finds out you exist.
I'm running out of places to hide the bodies of the people that deliver the mail.
What context do you think is there? The story is about a federal border crossing in Michigan and you have linked an educational website in Tennessee that (apparently) advises cities. You make no mention of any legal scope (which, in context, means that "Here's the policy" implies that there is a single policy used everywhere). Nor did the AC that you replied to provide any context.
Is that "the" policy, or is it simply "a" policy?
No, it's because I don't have iTunes installed.
Hence the theory that most spammers make their money by selling spam services, not by selling whatever the spam is advertising.
I guess a better way to phrase that is to say that the people paying to send the spam are the marks, not the people receiving the spam.
And the reply was that it seems to make it clean enough for millions of people (it isn't as if showering removes all the bacteria from your skin...).
Or they keep escaping.
But his acting is better than ever.
Pointing out that "Executive Decision" was one of his best movies will never get old.
If people were strictly controlled by the government and not allowed to produce anything, they wouldn't have anything to throw away.