Very true - I do not care how much of a super-tasker you are when your focus shifts - it well shifts.
I can talk just fine with my cell - I can do so nearly as good as when someone else is in the care with me (I would be more interested in why those are different, though I have my own theories), yet you can not dial, press the answer, and all sorts of other actions without removing focus (and texting - really? Someone thinks they can text with no imparement?). I can fiddle with the radio and do so from time to time, yet I know how much that distracts from driving and few argue that, yet is is many time less than actions taken on the cell phone. I drive a manual and still find the ability to manage which hand is doing what during a conversation OK - indeed I've played more than one online game just fine whilst doing the same thing - while the consequences aren't near as large the concentration needed is MUCH higher.
It is nothing more than you are placing yourself in a position where you *can not* be aware of what is going on around you. Your peripheral vision is only so good no matter who you are, while the OP's advice is good if you are determined to do something dangerous, it is sorta like saying helmets, shoulder pads, and all the other safety equipment is a Good Thing when playing Football - yep, but you are still taking a high risk of serious damage to your body and long term you aren't going to avoid it all. It may *minimize* said risk, but it doesn't remotely alleviate it.
Further a lot of it amounts to what situation you are in - most of the time a 5% degradation in ability is irrelevant - other times not so much. Personally while I feel my ability isn't impaired that much I just avoid it anyway. The energies involved in a wreck are just so high that I avoid something that easy. Yea, I still answer the damn thing from certain numbers (setting ring tones based on numbers helps there quite a bit) but even then I will somwties ignore them. I know some get irritated by the delay of me calling back no more than five minutes later (for certain rings I pull over at the first spot - 10 for others), but I figure the contiued support for thier call from a living person person is more important than the 30 seconds to five minutes before I can find a nice place to pull over.
But hey, maybe I'm not in those top categories and they can write code, fly an airplane, and solve world hunger all at the the same time. I just wish they would get one with the potential they have and quit goofing off. Until then I will assume that they aren't 10x better than the best we can find (they are just hiding - no one wants that type of recognition).
There is an implication there that the previous presidents wishes were carried out and he was to blame but the currents are ignored so not his fault. That really doesn't make sense - they are both equally responsible for what occurs under their tenure. If ture then it is an intelligence agency failing and nearly all need to be replaced. You can not hold one culpable for things under thier tenure that you forgive others for - or at least you can nto do so and be considered anything other than a partisan political hack.
Further as to you question on overall requests that has been answered - fewer than before but there are other ways to parse the numbers that give a different view point.
In this case I think the metrics are assuming too much anyways - you could have 10x the denials with half the requests and find that it is a more open government. In this case I do not think that is the case, though I have yet to see anything Obama has done that is noticeably more or less secretive than Bush. The main thing I have noticed is who cares that this is the case.
But then I am more or less (well less) a supporter of Bush and more or less (more I suppose) a detractor of Obama so take it as you will. I hate to say that giving a person a 4 out of 10 vs a 2 out of 10 makes me a supporter but in today's political world that is the reality. Of the places I would have disagreed with Bush there is little change, of those I agreed there has been movement backwards. As such I would take the person who was more or less what they appeared to be instead of the one I could never tell what they were going to do and tried to be everything to everyone whilst doing whatever they wanted (which was close to the same damn thing I saw for 8 years before yet now without an opposition party).
The sad thing is that you are more correct than not.
First off he makes it clear he is a comedic show in the first place - comedy is *not* an attempt at unbiased reporting but is inherently biased. Further he doesn't have the staff to do real in depth reports that a real news organization could - I've seen him on more than one occasion truly outclassed by a guest that he was antagonistic towards (and that has occurred on things he - or at least the show - has disagreed on with both parties). Both him and the show are comedies first and news second yet he does better than the real news.
Next is that he fairly well wears his bias openly. If we ignore the "comedy" part there is little argument that he is more leftist and a Democrat. Nor would one find him to be a so called "yellow dog" as he is quick to criticize them too when he doesn't agree with them. Nothing wrong with that - I daily read several hard left blogs (being a conservative I find little to no reason to read right to hard-right) and as long as we can all process how you are thinking we can make MUCH more informed judgments about what we read.
At this point in time traditional print, video, and radio news sources are a waste of time. Some are obviously bad but all but a VERY few are of the type I call a "soft bias" - they may be biased HUGELY in one direction but they do so in a way that allows their listeners to feel they are on top of the news and doing so in an informed way.
If done truly there is hardly "scientific consensus" - to start with anyone claiming that is simply wrong.
Scientific process is *supposed* to weed ideas like that out. Wide peer review, open data/procedures, specific and exacting processes - these are what should stop that. However, science has morphed into more of a pseudo-scientific religion. It stands on Dogma instead of suspicion and questioning and replaces use of math and scientific sounding with correct processes. Scientific consensus is that even laws may one day be broken/wrong let alone theories (and much of what we call "scientific consensus" isn't anything more than a hypothesis due to poor processes).
I see people responding to you immediately jumped into Anthropogenic Global Warming and, yes I do meant that too (I'll focus on it largely because it is a *really* good example and is current). However the sad fact is that so much of our body of knowledge is that way that it allowed something done that poorly to be "consensus". I was working at Oak Ridge National Labs when they got in trouble for bad research on Cold Fusion and made a great sounding report on having done it. They didn't and if they had done a proper peer review it would have been caught. So, while I think that AGW is a highly visible one I am not really dismayed with it, it tends to be more or less non-scientists or the soft-sciences that didn't see it coming a mile away. It does, however, greatly distress me when things like the Cold Fusion thing happens at ORNL, I saw with my own eyes how institutionalized some of that was, the shakeup of it (including some well deserved gloating and vindication of the old timers who ranted in general about the relaxing of standards and processes and what will occur), and the difficulty younger scientists had with the whole idea.
Richard Feynman books for the semi-layman are great, while the really are not directly focused on it there is a common thread in most of them of what science is. IIRC it was him that told what science was (may be wrong, but it sounds like a story he would use so I'll run with it:)). That is researchers go out and look at geese and note there are no black ones so they make a hypothesis that there are no black geese. They then go and try everything they can do to find a black one or figure out how a black one can exists. As they rule different things out the make note of it and also note supporting reasons for no black geese. It doesn't matter how many white geese they see or how logical it is that you can't have a black one - you have to look for one. Science is finding out what *isn't* true and that is really the only thing you truly know. For highly modeled theories - say much of Einstein's work this was true - you then have to look both at what it predicts will happen and what it predicts will *not* happen. If something predicts, well, everything then it is worthless. There have been more than a few times when some of the harder to measure predictions of his theories has become testable and it's a big thing - if it fails to accurately predict that then a lot of ideas are going to go down the drain, they may have very well appeared to be correct up till this point, but if it isn't right here then something is missed (to harp back on AGW - mainly because it is *really* bad in this case and is my primary complaint - every weather pattern we can see is predicted in one of the models - it *can't* be wrong as they can adjust their model to fit anything and predict anything).
The reason why all that means there is nothing such as "scientific consensus" (which implies that the debate is over, as is said for a myriad of different mathematical models) is that the only thing they can truly create that level of certainty on is what isn't. For instance - one that many roll their eyes at but is a simple illustration of the idea: the ceolacanth (sadly it is used not to show that you can't truly say "doesn't exists" but is usually used to show that it is likely Bigfoot is around). A fish though extinc
I once hit a really old TV at the time (no idea exactly how old, it was half buried in a sink hole) with a bottle and it exploded *really* nicely - it shot glass particles nearly 15 feet. We had earlier in the day been beating it with a hammer trying to get it to break and couldn't - in retrospect it was good it didn't:). This was around 1988 - 1993 as we moved there before I left middle school and this was before I graduated high school - I do recall the TV had vacuum tubes and we busted them afterwords. Since I recognized what a vacuum tube was but didn't know enough about a CRT I would expect early high school, this incident was one of the "interesting" things that pushed me into general technology.
Newer stuff has never been as interesting. Most of it just... breaks. My father tells of using an old TV he took apart to melt metals. The TV had a small screen and used a glass magnifying glass to make it a "nineteen inch" TV (or whatever the screen size was - it's been a while since I heard the stories of what it could melt). That would have really and truly trumped the Big Implosion that the CRT I hit with a bottle did. New stuff needs those explosives to be neat.
Pfft - I'm making a million billion a year using just that and a little bit more(+).
For free I will tell you how I do it, you just have to agree to a few things*
*you are not guaranteed to make money, your individual results may vary. I will also charge 200 dollars shipping and handling as it takes me A LOT of handling to get the stuff out. If you are a hot female I also need nude photos (in that case it takes handling charges of 25$ extra as it takes more "handling").
+I make a million billion a year in "Luethke Money" - how this relates to American dollars will depend on the current exchange rates, and depending on my current financial status.
That's about as a good a deal as you will get on other infomercials - though truthfully there have been a very very very small handful that were decent.
"But don't an equal number of opportunities exist for the contrary side?"
Sure there is. Thus why a large part of "science" is publishing your data and your methodologies. That removes most of those opportunities from *either* side.
"Wouldn't a researcher who proved AGW was a hoax be bathed in media attention, career opportunities, etc.? With good enough research, couldn't journals be shamed into publishing?"
In this case, no. As it turns out the community is so insular that the very people cooking the numbers (go read some of the published source code and data - whole parts of it are simply made up because they didn't have any raw data) are the gatekeepers of who gets published it is near impossible to publish otherwise. We can clearly see from the e-mails that when something *did* get published - and therefore supposedly made it through even that level of collusion in the peer review process - that group successfully got those editors fired. Nor can one "prove" it either way. Basically the AGW people got there first and won, not through science but through manipulating the system better.
"Anyone foolish enough to think they'll advance their careers with false science will be caught out soon enough."
True enough - see these released papers for that happening. There ought to be some felony cases (FOIA deletions, especially given that they were intentional to avoid them) and it should have a number of careers killed. It would have killed mine to do this type of stuff and I'm was supposedly in one of the "soft sciences" (Computer Science) as far as methodology is concerned.
Sadly the so called wagons are circling - too many have too much riding on the models to be accurate (money, careers, belief system). It is a combination of a failure of our edumacational system (I refuse to call it an educational system) to teach proper research methodologies and the politicization of science. It has become a "belief" instead of going where the research shows. It doesn't even need some insidious plot, I've known some of the people involved here (not the main people but recipients and colleagues at ORNL) and their level of belief was VERY strong (some long stories there, in short an example is one of them decided that Linux was wrong and he was not getting the cache miss rate reported because he had calculated differently - couldn't have been a bug in his code). Of the ones that were not Believers this is the story I got from them about the state of the climatology world, though it has been a lonely world in that knowledge.
These systems should have *never* been allowed to get to where this is a bombshell. The circular reasoning with the reliance on the models as the primary tool for outcomes (that is models trumped raw data - see said e-mails and much of the public raw data for the last 10 or so years), the secrecy of the data and models, and the structured used to peer review articles (you do not even need the e-mails again, though now they offer inside proof of what was obvious from the outside). Further so much of the work outside of this group uses data they did release (along with no ability to research how they arrived at it - from the leaked information we know some of it was simply made up because they didn't have it) and it is all based on garbage.
As is we simply just *do not know* it could be no AGW, it could be *worse*, it could be exactly as they said. You can't put garbage in, process it with bad procedures, and get gold out. Heck you can't even put gold in, improperly process it, and get gold out! None of this takes one to be an expert in climatology - it only takes one to note that the procedures being used are incapable of creating a conclusion with a high degree of likelihood of being correct. That is they used a Garbage in Garbage Out method and said we had Gold Out. You hit it exactly (though I do not think you meant it this way) in that there are equal opportunities to do something similar on the other side - if things were working as they are supposed too that wou
The problem isn't so much what is being done, it is how it is being done.
Say, for instance, I am president of a local archery club. We have trouble getting enough workers for some events (all volunteer workers). Many have wanted to have a two tier membership plan - normal dues are 100 dollars a year and non-working dues are and extra 50. If you want to see anger, propose that.
Yet, one can turn around and say that normal membership is 150 dollars and if you work you get a 50 dollar discount and people are happy (unless you start off with the above, then everyone sees you as a hack trying to force what you wanted in the first place). Same thing but instead of getting punished you are getting a deal.
In this case the "Move to India or loose your job" is pretty much the first case - VERY poorly worded. If it had been offered differently I'm sure many more would have taken it - for many that sure beats unemployment.
Then there is also that many people nowadays have unrealistic expectations. There is always thought that they idea that they want is possible - after all look at all the other "impossible" stuff we do today. Sometimes, however, there are no good choices. We will learn that one day - we will do so either early enough that we can recover or it will take basic death.
I know of a number of people in the mid 00's at the worst of the dot com bust that learned it the *really* hard way. But alas, not enough have learned it for the community as a whole. I imagine there are getting ready to be some IBM (or rather ex-IBM employees) getting ready for a really bitter lesson. Hopefully they will all find jobs elsewhere, but at least for the next little bit I wouldn't hold my breath - I would highly imagine in about 6 or so months that India job will look *mighty* tempting to many of them but will be too late.
OTOH I wouldn't of taken it either, but then I generally feel it's a nice move from IBM instead of doing the normal "lay off and hire over there" thing. There was no requirement to even offer it and it is one of the VERY few times I've heard of anyplace doing that.
In this particular case we already know that Chu has experience managing govt labs as he is the director of Lawrence Berkley National Lab and by all measures is doing good.
Indeed, I would be more surprised if he actually did any actual research on this breakthrough than him being a bad manager. Staff at that level are organizers first and VERY rarely, if ever, have time to do more than manage. I can not say "never have time", though I have yet to find even staff at a group leader level do more than chase funding, tell you that you are doing good work, and sign their name on your papers (not that this is wrong - couldn't be there without chasing said funding).
At that level there are also many wanting his name on their paper (it gets both funding and press), it is not uncommon for people in his seat to have had almost *nothing* to do with the projects (including chase funding), simply look at how many projects he heads and number of papers published - they guy would have to be a dynamo, live in a world with 48 hour long days, and never sleep in order to even come close to doing more than having a 2 hour meeting a quarter per project (and then probably given to someone else - I never saw any lab director at any of those meetings I attended).
Of course, they also have to able to do real research, they didn't get to that position through the academic weenie path by not being academics, but the chances of him doing more than reading the paper and giving his thumbs up is slim. Indeed - most research staff in national labs have to go through a decision phase on if they go into management or stay as a researcher (management being the only way to move "up" pay grade scales) - even then a large portion of them more or less guide a number of post-docs and grad students.
Worse? Well, he could appoint Darl McBride as the Secretary of Commerce. Or how about the Rev Wright to the Secretary of Education and Blagojevich to head any Ethics commissions. One can almost always get worse and you do not even have to look hard into his past to find them (nor are the latter two listed even close to the worst in his contact list). Oooh, or how about Dick Cheney as head of the NSA?
Any one who really and truly bought the idea of Change and Hope from a junior Senator who flew the ranks of Chicago Politics (and in one of the more corrupt areas to boot) is crazy. Welcome to the world of being bamboozled by a charismatic speaker - you aren't the first, nor will you be the last, and all thought those on the other side were idiots who couldn't see what you did (well, true to some extent - just we were bigger cynics and the magic didn't work on us).
I will say that, so far, Obama has far exceeded my expectations so I can't say I'm unhappy either. But then when your expectations are "fire, brimstone, and ruination" it isn't really that hard to exceed them either. Of course there is still time for all three of those, and MORE than plenty for just two of them. I'll take a person with no real beliefs that uses associates to gain popular support from those he represents over a hard line extremist any day (though that's sort like saying I would loose a foot over both arms and legs any day - neither one is a good choice yet one is clearly better).
I'll add one more thing to my post - people old enough will remember back in the 70 and early 80's when we thought we were causing a massive cooling and heading towards and ice age. The same arguments about "geoengineering" (though that wasn't the term used) recommended putting massive amounts of greenhouse gasses in the air to stabilize things.
Good thing things like timeOday's thought process was more or less ignored back then. Back to that whole understanding things along with unintended consequences. We better be *damn* sure we know what will happen when we intentionally release more change into the world than what we are trying to fix. I'm certain that any industrial complex that, say, released that much iron into the Indian Ocean would bee called the worst polluter of the century and they would be right - it would be best we totally understand things before intentionally becoming the worst environmental "change" in history (and hope that change is better than what we have now).
Well, we had a real problem in the southeastern US with soil erosion - especially on road embankments as our highway system expanded.
What to do? All sorts of theories were proposed, finally many states decided to import Kudzu as it yielded *great* soil erosion techniques and even looked pretty. Anything that might happen would have to been less worse than the Kudzu.
Well, except that we didn't understand the effect on our environment that the Kudzu would play. Turns out that it wasn't such a hot idea and was SIGNIFICANTLY worse than just letting nature grow plants back on the bare soil (let alone if we had just planted grass - but people felt that would take too long). Many of the same arguments, in fact if you look at pretty much any of those "unintended consequences" you will see VERY similar arguments.
Of course, this time we truly understand things - right? There is a great scientific consensus on the subject so it can not be wrong. We are smarter than that now - nothing we ever do any more does something we didn't intend and that something be very bad for us.
If this has the equivalent impact of the Kudzu we are going to kill the planet faster than Global Warming (even in it's wildest forms) could ever do. Your analogy of medicine can not do that. Heck, in fact as well tested and regulated as medicine is we still have MAJOR unintended consequences - we only have to look towards medicines like Thalidomide for examples of where unintended consequences are quite bad.
Personally when we start playing with things that can sterilize the planet if we do not understand it well enough I get kinda cautious - others, well, CO2 is the Devil and must be eradicated (after all, nothing is ever worse than the Devil). But, alas, like any other religion rational thought isn't what got many to where they are today and rational thought isn't going to get them to a reasonable stance. It will not be recognized as bad until those unintended consequences get bad enough that there is not choice but to see them and then everyone else will be blamed.
"I don't know. Depending on how strict the regime gets, I can easily see things being so risky that people simply don't want to mess with the geek-created tools, even if they exist."
True, few in our "modern" world seem to truly understand this - there are more places in the world where the rule of law is "kill first, ask later". We can easily ban *anything* - your possession is immediate execution. History shows again and again that this works (along with nature pointing out the folly of man)
Sadly there is almost no shortage of those willing to enforce this. Each group always thinks it is justified in doing some draconian measure because the Other Side(TM) did it first (and is almost 100% not true to an outside observer).
Yay - someone on Slashdot at least gets some market information correct (do not know about your ideas outside of this post - I've known people who translate what you said into some strange form of a strong command economy).
I somewhat supported the bailout of the financial industry simply because of how much of our world runs on credit and the issue was mostly industry wide. However I also felt that we needed to re-examine things like out anti-trust laws. There were a few companies in there that were specifically targeted.
That is, I adhere to the following logic: any company that is so large it can not be allowed to fail is too large and need to be broken up. Our normal anti-trust laws adhere to competition, yet I think this is at least as important (and maybe even more so given than that, like some of the Auot manufacturers are talking of doing, they want the money and have no change in their business).
Of course that also leaves industry wide issues - like a decent portion of the financial industry bailout. Were this truly an industry issue instead of the fact that the industry is so dominated by three entities that they can do any stupid thing and expect to be bailed out then I would support said bailout.
This isn't so much an "auto industry bailout" as much as it is a "big three bailout" (well, IIRC Ford, while having problems, isn't taking part of the pie so I guess it is "big two bailout"), the former I support, the latter I do not.
Right now I would eve support a specific companies bailout if we were moving towards breaking them up to prevent this in the future - after all few really saw this coming. If they want bailout money then they are too large and need broken up, if they aren't so large that they can not fail then they can do what all others do - chapter 11 or chapter 7.
If these companies were given that choice I wonder how many would go to the govt teat and instead choose chapter 11 and what it was meant for? Same is true for the Financial industry - I would have *loved* to see that same idea there (even though my retirement was managed by AIG).
It is only "debunked" in the world that really wishes it to be so (for various different reasons). It is the difference between "purchase price" and "total cost of ownership" - myself I care more about TCO than I do about purchase price - however many want purchase price to be the limiting factor.
Overhead *is* part of your salary. Is it take home pay? Nope, not in the least yet still part of what your overall costs are.
Indeed - when one sees the TCO of an employee be more than three times their take home salary they have to realize they are *worse* than the US federal govt (who has between 2 and 2.5 times overhead - at least in the national lab I worked in and that was considered "wasteful" by the bean counters). No company that depends on profits can remotely work in the long term under those conditions, the federal govt isn't even looking in good shape in the past few years and it has a *forced* income from everyone.
The "debunked" cost is fairly close to the way management calculates their cost per employee and how they calculate how many people they can afford to hire (of course a few other costs/income comes into play too). But then there are many that hate management and the above statement means it is "bad".
Is it what they take home? Nope, but then my paltry pay of 30k a year at a govt lab didn't include the roughly 15-20k of computing equipment I got per year either - yet that equipment costs was part of how many we could employee and my cost to the project.
And your point of "but that's because they're competing against nations which benefit from "socialized medicine"" is of the same line - someone somewhere *has* to pay for it. It *is* part of your salary regardless of if it comes out of overhead, take home, and/or take home with benefits. The cost of the retirees, ex-employees, taxes, and other costs are "overhead" and are, therefore, distributed over the working population.
Sadly Factcheck has become so intent on debunking everything that they have become near worthless, they aren't really politically biased as much as they are biased to the point that if they can "debunk" something they go all out. Factcheck almost seems to get this, but then stops short of it. Like it or not, the figure is relatively accurate as far as cost per worker per hour goes and it is WAY off what they can afford. In fact it is way off of what non-union auto manufacturing (say Japanese plants) make.
You know, there have been a few cases of trying to work with some Open Source software that I find the following bit of logic in there:
If (1){ do stuff } more stuff
(well, other than any syntax errors - being dyslexic if I write two lines without them then I'm doing good)
And I never could figure out why the whole "if(1)". I always left it in the code because I figured someone somewhere had a reason and who am I to change it? I recall hearing Donald Becker rant about people taking "worthless" code out of his drivers and it being for some specific architecture. Though in this case I have always thought that someone was too lazy to change it initially (after all you had to find the other "}" and everyone else after them had the same idea I did.
Now I know for sure - some AI someplace added in some code that no one else understands and must stay in under their own little world. But then I guess that is something along the lines of Becker's complaint that it didn't hurt other hardware yet was required for some specific vendor.
I'm loath to change working code, even when it has something like the above.
Well, I mean really, there is no other component in your PC that touches everything as much as your PSU does and there is hardly a component that gets less attention (for many the case gets less but that is OK). As such there is a market for cheap PSU's. A bad PSU can ruin *any* component in your PC (including itself), not even your motherboard can boast that.
We know that there can be HUGE differences between top and bottom end if for nothing more than quality of soldering. Next we know that that both skill and time are needed to make high quality joints and skill and time are not cheap. We also know margins have to be kept such that the company turns a profit. Therefore we can pretty much assume that high end PSU's will be expensive and low end ones cheap (though, of course, expensive doesn't necessarily mean high end), especially given that there are places where the high end are are a *requirement* and thus people will spend whatever is needed, that is where margins are made so that the low end stuff can still be sold and mostly work.
*shrug* having been bit once in the past (around 2001 or so) by some cheap PSU's in a small-medium (64 node) computational cluster I know what bad ones can do. We had our server room (halon fire suppression system) call us one day that one of the nodes was smoking and what should they do: "umm that big red button? Push it, then run". It was all nice and melty when I took it apart (halon system didn't deploy thankfully so it was just an amusing story), I used to have a nifty picture of it and the scorch marks but I can't find the picture anymore - however it was obviously it had an actual flame.
Later on when we moved to large clusters then MTB of all the components started to become important. Even then the PSU was one of the higher failure rate parts, I always assumed that this had something to do with the few nodes we had with redundant hardware always had more PSU's than they really should need (other components being just as important yet not having a main and three backups).
In many venues they have what I would call certain signs of death. This is one of them - basically the idea that whoring oneself more will somehow make them viable.
In some cases - those truly a whore - more and more selling of oneself is only a logical conclusion. After all, when you are the "best" (be it a person who can sell their body) one can name their price, but then as you slide you have to be willing to sell for less as your "worth" drops (say, loose your beauty).
There is a difference here - graphics sell to a large extent but there is also the time spent in game that can not be transferred (in the whore analogy, well your own parts transfer in whatever state they were in at the end of the last encounter - however in a MMO you will start out as a total newbie). As such things like this may very will get a boost of last breath revenue and I can not blame them for doing it.
Of course, I would also say at this point the fact that EQ is still alive enough to whore itself out is amazing. I mean, this is like a 140 year old chain smoker alcoholic deciding to whore themselves out for another few years of life.
And, lastly, the game isn't a person so the "whore" analogy fails miserably there and we come back to shareholders stake in the claim. While some will want to say that is a "whore" the rest of us with a 401k realize that this isn't so. Shareholder's worth is an important thing.
I can't say I applaud this decision. Even were I a shareholder I bet there will be more loss than gain in this case. At the point any game is revenue based as to win, those that have no chance to win will quit (and that is 99% of your player base). For the last few months I guess you may maximize profits and I suppose so.
I agree - I will also add that there are currently more legal addicts than illegal.
I know of quite a number of people who are addicted to prescription pain medication and have been for years. 15 minutes before "time" for their pill and they get all panicky trying to find the thing (if they do not take it one time they will experience "pain" - I've yet to find a pain pill that works that way). Many of them take the same, and more, pills as so called "drug addicts" that would be put in jail because they do not have a doctors script. I have realities who had knee surgery (torn ACL - a real injury) and 15 years later are on regular high strength drugs. Heck, I have relatives who are trying to "get off" those pills and have been going to a methadone clinic for over two years now (uh huh - they really are wanting to get off).
As far as I can tell is that most of the legal addicts can still function in society despite their addiction - though a number will do things any addict does when the supply starts to stop (say, for instance, a cousins mother decided to quit paying for the methadone clinic and suddenly, in an totally unexplained and unrelated incidence, the exact amount of money needed for the clinic "disappeared" from her purse and he disappears during those same days he used to go - of course those are totally unrelated incidences).
I would also add that the number of people that wanted my fathers higher dosage of hydrocodone given to him after his bypass surgery were an absolute shock to us. Even worse were the people who just picked on up out of his hand when the noted what he had (they had a prescription, but for a lesser does and were "hurting" that day).
As of right now the main thing separating legal vs illegal addicts is the ability to maintain a steady job while addicted or have enough money to fund any doctor out there. The illegals can not control the addiction enough for a part time job and enough to pay the slightly greater cost of the legal market for them.
I do not necessarily disagree with that - though I think that scenario is now very unlikely (OSS systems have enough acceptance that it would be... difficult for Intel to do that).
That is why you encourage Intel to Do The Right Thing. They may - one day - do so. However, if you tell them do it or else chances are they will take or else. Further when your OS can no longer run those extensions then your OS will not be run. Not even microsoft can take that hard line a stance and get away with it - I fail to see why many that have a comparatively minuscule market share think that they can.
So, lets take another scenario (which is much more likely). Intel produces a closed 16 core CPU that requires proprietary microcode. Linux vendors demand it be fully open or they refuse to support it all. Customers needing the 16 CPU core (or wanting it) have two choices: purchase MS products and have it supported or figure out how to hack it into the system yourself through unapproved patches and probably paying someone to re-write what is needed to get it to work (guess which one will be picked). Intel then releases a 32 core processor and noting that few used their last product they decide to not even support OSS at all. While yours *may* happen if I get my way, mine *will* if you get yours.
Of course, what will really happen is option three - RedHat (and several others) will ignore Stallman and do what they need to sell product. Many of the purists have somewhat woken up and have started to use what they are fighting against (licenses, patents, and such) to *force* OSS to what they want but the thing is just too easy to fork. Distro's that go the "pure" way will live only in hobby land.
Of course, that is part of why companies like Redhat are both loved and hated - they brought Linux to the commercial success that it is today but "betrayed" those political/social ideals that many in the OSS community started with. Of course, having never truly believed those (like me, they read ESR and thought that buy made a lot of sense) they didn't really betray anything, they more or less showed that one side could gain a larger market and mind share than the other (which is probably even more infuriating than an actual betrayal).
Now, of course, when HURD is ready then it will sweep the world - but until then I suspect that ESR's view of OSS will win pretty much every time it comes in conflict with Stallman's.
"I don't understand why people don't want others have the freedom to install proprietary software on Linux system."
Because some see OSS as a political movement, not a tool.
Personally I see it as a tool. Open source allows many different things that I could not do with closed source and, even back when it wasn't as technically sound an option it still often won because I could do what I needed with it.
As a tool many OSS projects have been a great successes - better than most would have believed ten years ago. It has been so mainly for the reasons above plus it was *really* easy for companies to adopt into their corporate structure (after all, it was not only free as in beer but free as in speech). ESR "won" in this sense.
As a political movement OSS has been an abject failure. It didn't achieve any of the goals of that drive the various founders. Some that were - hmm, not sure an actual term that fits term - but a mix of anti-corporation, anarchism, anti-capitalism and a few other political movements didn't see the fall of corporate structures. Some - which would be Stallman - didn't see a wave of community based software production where we all gave come about.
It turned out that when you give people "freedom" they often do things you do not like. Indeed their vision simply strengthened those policies and companies they were fighting.
In the end the problem with using it as a political tool is that there is still other choices. If I am going to have to choose between using an OSS product (even assuming I like the vision Stallman had) chances are I will go with Microsoft and all it's ills and have my company function instead of let it die and be "pure". Not allowing *any* non-open binary, not allowing any company that patents things you do not like to use your software, and a whole host of other things that many OSS projects are moving towards is a fine political statement - I have no issue whatsoever with someone doing that.
If you are looking for your software to also be a tool you can't do that - after all if your hammer comes with a long list of stuff you can't build my bet is that you will go spend the money to get one you can build anything with - even if the former hammer is free money wise. Indeed, few would consider the hammer that you could not build anything the hammer's maker didn't like to be "enforcing freedom".
OSS first hurdle was back when the decision was finally made to allow corporate interests to contribute with both code and direction. Many fought it but, in the end, a greatly improved set of software won out.
OSS is in the next of it's critical times where it will morph into something that can truly beat Microsoft or become a mostly hobbiest's tool. It's been building for some time - at least the last five years. It's still not to a head but it is getting there.
Personally I've of a mind that it is too late now - it will just cause a fork. Redhat, IBM, Debian, and many others will choose to keep their companies afloat over other entries and the "truly free" options will become hobbiest tools. GPL3 is pretty much as far as is going to be allowed and still be acceptable in the cooperate world (and even that one is hard to chew and has pushed a number of companies back to Microsoft).
I wouldn't and do not. I can't see any real need for it and it is simply something else that may go wrong and hurt something.
Yes, we like to think we can do all this totally 100% orthogonal and have it just be "fun" - but we all also know how well that works in practice in software products we have purchased/used. I'm certain that programmer thought it would be harmless, cute, and he was more than good enough to put it in there.
Of course, if you have a good QA department and said easter egg goes through that process too then that is also another story - would you really want *any* un-tested code in critical software even if it only pops up a smiley face? You always will get some - code is too complex to be other wise - but I would generally avoid intentionally untested code and I doubt anyplace is going to be happy to spend money testing your easter eggs.
If I want to personally sign things I do so in the comments. While most of mine are direct and to the point there is generally some humor in them and personal touches. It is one place I feel fairly confident that it will not hurt anything else and the reality is that this is the only place anyone is really going to have any idea that the easter egg is actually yours.
Now, in some products (say entertainment products) I think easter eggs should be a near requirement. However for working code I do not want them in there on either things I produce or things I purchase.
To a large extent I didn't need to see it - it's the same list SGI trotted out for their immersive systems. As someone else above me pointed out - SGI sold a number of them too, and where are they now?
The interface has been done a number of times, even in full 3-d immersive environments. It's just not a useful interface outside of a few niche applications. It's not new.
For those applications, yes it is great. So, how many millions was spent developing this for what - 20-30 sales? Can you charge them enough to recoupe your cost and have your company stay in the black?
SGI, along with a few others (none as had near the product SGI had) say no - you can not. While the interface is *really* nice are you going to spend 500-750k on a system for a project that's annual budget is 400k? Nope. And that's being generous - OK, this thing is great for CAD (as was the CAVE, and amongst the things it was pushed for) - now justify why I need to spend that amount of money when a 5000 dollar program does 90% as good.
At some point in the future it will become viable for certain applications. Heck, as I said, there was nothing like playing a video game using a CAVE (even true on the ImmersaDesk with 3-d rendering turned off). Before I graduated college I did enough CAD work to know how beneficial this would be for that system. And, of course, as one of the industries listed it is tailor made for the defense industry.
And yet - are they going to pay that much for the system? Defense - maybe, SGI surely counted on it and it didn't quite happen. But then, at some point it will - maybe these guys have the timing needed and will be the first. I know I would still love one of the older SGI ImmersaDesks in my house.
OK, maybe this is the wave of the future. I will not say it isn't - but that promo didn't sell it. It looked like what they claim to be - based on a Hollywood custom script. I want to see how I would use this in the real world - I'm not going to be standing around and moving those text blocks around, nor did I really see why having that matrix of Asian language characters (I don't know which language - I can't read any of them) in that grid would help someone deal with the massive amount of letters anyway. It seems to me since most of them are based on pen strokes that that the arrangement is - hmm - only made to be visual appealing to westerners (which I am one of).
I had used an SGI CAVE a few years back for a few different things (well, others in the group I worked with wrote the stuff - I played with it simply because it was neat) and I see many similarities. Given that products history I do not see that as a Good Thing for them. In fact they seem to be a good 5-10 years behind the curve - the last time I used one was five years ago and they were already doing all this nice stuff from what I can see.
It was really good for things that were meant to be visual. For instance they had this really neat data set of a human (some convict that donated their body to science) and you could interact with a 3-dimensional representation of them. Their body "displayed" (or rather appeared too) in the center of the CAVE and then you could select (using a wand that the system kept tract of it's position in the room) a "window" and move/drag it around and see just that slice of the body in a high amount of detail. You could lock that and have as many 2-d slices going through the body as you want.
They also had a car wreck that you could do a similar thing - but you watched the "slice" as the wreck happened in real time. They actually crashed a car to get the data.
There were also quite a number of specialized tasks that benefited from it and I still run into some today.
But, other than that we pretty much played quake on it. Why? Well most data doesn't really need that type of visual representation. Our current screens work quite well and you are simply adding overhead for the heck of it. Even for those that the system worked well for they still did OK on a normal screen. A large monitor costs a few thousand, these systems cost a few hundred thousand. Well, you should get the picture there (and knowing that I worked in a govt research lab at the time should tell you why no one cared that it was a few hundred thousand more).
This system has the 3-d input but not the nice 3-d output that the SGI systems had so I can't see it working any better - it is just as specialized hardware intensive and I bet just as expensive. Even if it isn't - is the increased productivity for those specialized application going to be worth the cost? I also bet not.
You will note that even a group that has quite a bit of experience making true Hollywood scenes couldn't come up with better. Perfect for massive data - uh huh - and what did that wonderful things you show of arcs moving around *really* give you? You mean where you put a circle over one of the other circles and it turned yellow?
Is there *any* reason whatsoever that the majority of that could not be accomplished with a mouse and a large LCD? Nope - so why purchase this? At least the pretty much failed SGI stuff had the whole 3-d output to go with it - and trust me, there is no experience in the world like playing quake in a fully 3-d environment that you are freaking standing in the middle of and the virtual gun actually is being held by your hand. But then - how many are going to pay 250k for that?
This type of thing is so 1990's and dot com - ten years ago these guys would have been flush with cash from countless venture capitalist. Heck, their video even screams late 90's and early 00's. As is they better really be able to back up the claims they make to even have a shot at it, let alone be truly successful. I didn't particularly see anyt
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Very true - I do not care how much of a super-tasker you are when your focus shifts - it well shifts.
I can talk just fine with my cell - I can do so nearly as good as when someone else is in the care with me (I would be more interested in why those are different, though I have my own theories), yet you can not dial, press the answer, and all sorts of other actions without removing focus (and texting - really? Someone thinks they can text with no imparement?). I can fiddle with the radio and do so from time to time, yet I know how much that distracts from driving and few argue that, yet is is many time less than actions taken on the cell phone. I drive a manual and still find the ability to manage which hand is doing what during a conversation OK - indeed I've played more than one online game just fine whilst doing the same thing - while the consequences aren't near as large the concentration needed is MUCH higher.
It is nothing more than you are placing yourself in a position where you *can not* be aware of what is going on around you. Your peripheral vision is only so good no matter who you are, while the OP's advice is good if you are determined to do something dangerous, it is sorta like saying helmets, shoulder pads, and all the other safety equipment is a Good Thing when playing Football - yep, but you are still taking a high risk of serious damage to your body and long term you aren't going to avoid it all. It may *minimize* said risk, but it doesn't remotely alleviate it.
Further a lot of it amounts to what situation you are in - most of the time a 5% degradation in ability is irrelevant - other times not so much. Personally while I feel my ability isn't impaired that much I just avoid it anyway. The energies involved in a wreck are just so high that I avoid something that easy. Yea, I still answer the damn thing from certain numbers (setting ring tones based on numbers helps there quite a bit) but even then I will somwties ignore them. I know some get irritated by the delay of me calling back no more than five minutes later (for certain rings I pull over at the first spot - 10 for others), but I figure the contiued support for thier call from a living person person is more important than the 30 seconds to five minutes before I can find a nice place to pull over.
But hey, maybe I'm not in those top categories and they can write code, fly an airplane, and solve world hunger all at the the same time. I just wish they would get one with the potential they have and quit goofing off. Until then I will assume that they aren't 10x better than the best we can find (they are just hiding - no one wants that type of recognition).
There is an implication there that the previous presidents wishes were carried out and he was to blame but the currents are ignored so not his fault. That really doesn't make sense - they are both equally responsible for what occurs under their tenure. If ture then it is an intelligence agency failing and nearly all need to be replaced. You can not hold one culpable for things under thier tenure that you forgive others for - or at least you can nto do so and be considered anything other than a partisan political hack.
Further as to you question on overall requests that has been answered - fewer than before but there are other ways to parse the numbers that give a different view point.
In this case I think the metrics are assuming too much anyways - you could have 10x the denials with half the requests and find that it is a more open government. In this case I do not think that is the case, though I have yet to see anything Obama has done that is noticeably more or less secretive than Bush. The main thing I have noticed is who cares that this is the case.
But then I am more or less (well less) a supporter of Bush and more or less (more I suppose) a detractor of Obama so take it as you will. I hate to say that giving a person a 4 out of 10 vs a 2 out of 10 makes me a supporter but in today's political world that is the reality. Of the places I would have disagreed with Bush there is little change, of those I agreed there has been movement backwards. As such I would take the person who was more or less what they appeared to be instead of the one I could never tell what they were going to do and tried to be everything to everyone whilst doing whatever they wanted (which was close to the same damn thing I saw for 8 years before yet now without an opposition party).
The sad thing is that you are more correct than not.
First off he makes it clear he is a comedic show in the first place - comedy is *not* an attempt at unbiased reporting but is inherently biased. Further he doesn't have the staff to do real in depth reports that a real news organization could - I've seen him on more than one occasion truly outclassed by a guest that he was antagonistic towards (and that has occurred on things he - or at least the show - has disagreed on with both parties). Both him and the show are comedies first and news second yet he does better than the real news.
Next is that he fairly well wears his bias openly. If we ignore the "comedy" part there is little argument that he is more leftist and a Democrat. Nor would one find him to be a so called "yellow dog" as he is quick to criticize them too when he doesn't agree with them. Nothing wrong with that - I daily read several hard left blogs (being a conservative I find little to no reason to read right to hard-right) and as long as we can all process how you are thinking we can make MUCH more informed judgments about what we read.
At this point in time traditional print, video, and radio news sources are a waste of time. Some are obviously bad but all but a VERY few are of the type I call a "soft bias" - they may be biased HUGELY in one direction but they do so in a way that allows their listeners to feel they are on top of the news and doing so in an informed way.
If done truly there is hardly "scientific consensus" - to start with anyone claiming that is simply wrong.
Scientific process is *supposed* to weed ideas like that out. Wide peer review, open data/procedures, specific and exacting processes - these are what should stop that. However, science has morphed into more of a pseudo-scientific religion. It stands on Dogma instead of suspicion and questioning and replaces use of math and scientific sounding with correct processes. Scientific consensus is that even laws may one day be broken/wrong let alone theories (and much of what we call "scientific consensus" isn't anything more than a hypothesis due to poor processes).
I see people responding to you immediately jumped into Anthropogenic Global Warming and, yes I do meant that too (I'll focus on it largely because it is a *really* good example and is current). However the sad fact is that so much of our body of knowledge is that way that it allowed something done that poorly to be "consensus". I was working at Oak Ridge National Labs when they got in trouble for bad research on Cold Fusion and made a great sounding report on having done it. They didn't and if they had done a proper peer review it would have been caught. So, while I think that AGW is a highly visible one I am not really dismayed with it, it tends to be more or less non-scientists or the soft-sciences that didn't see it coming a mile away. It does, however, greatly distress me when things like the Cold Fusion thing happens at ORNL, I saw with my own eyes how institutionalized some of that was, the shakeup of it (including some well deserved gloating and vindication of the old timers who ranted in general about the relaxing of standards and processes and what will occur), and the difficulty younger scientists had with the whole idea.
Richard Feynman books for the semi-layman are great, while the really are not directly focused on it there is a common thread in most of them of what science is. IIRC it was him that told what science was (may be wrong, but it sounds like a story he would use so I'll run with it :)). That is researchers go out and look at geese and note there are no black ones so they make a hypothesis that there are no black geese. They then go and try everything they can do to find a black one or figure out how a black one can exists. As they rule different things out the make note of it and also note supporting reasons for no black geese. It doesn't matter how many white geese they see or how logical it is that you can't have a black one - you have to look for one. Science is finding out what *isn't* true and that is really the only thing you truly know. For highly modeled theories - say much of Einstein's work this was true - you then have to look both at what it predicts will happen and what it predicts will *not* happen. If something predicts, well, everything then it is worthless. There have been more than a few times when some of the harder to measure predictions of his theories has become testable and it's a big thing - if it fails to accurately predict that then a lot of ideas are going to go down the drain, they may have very well appeared to be correct up till this point, but if it isn't right here then something is missed (to harp back on AGW - mainly because it is *really* bad in this case and is my primary complaint - every weather pattern we can see is predicted in one of the models - it *can't* be wrong as they can adjust their model to fit anything and predict anything).
The reason why all that means there is nothing such as "scientific consensus" (which implies that the debate is over, as is said for a myriad of different mathematical models) is that the only thing they can truly create that level of certainty on is what isn't. For instance - one that many roll their eyes at but is a simple illustration of the idea: the ceolacanth (sadly it is used not to show that you can't truly say "doesn't exists" but is usually used to show that it is likely Bigfoot is around). A fish though extinc
I once hit a really old TV at the time (no idea exactly how old, it was half buried in a sink hole) with a bottle and it exploded *really* nicely - it shot glass particles nearly 15 feet. We had earlier in the day been beating it with a hammer trying to get it to break and couldn't - in retrospect it was good it didn't :). This was around 1988 - 1993 as we moved there before I left middle school and this was before I graduated high school - I do recall the TV had vacuum tubes and we busted them afterwords. Since I recognized what a vacuum tube was but didn't know enough about a CRT I would expect early high school, this incident was one of the "interesting" things that pushed me into general technology.
Newer stuff has never been as interesting. Most of it just ... breaks. My father tells of using an old TV he took apart to melt metals. The TV had a small screen and used a glass magnifying glass to make it a "nineteen inch" TV (or whatever the screen size was - it's been a while since I heard the stories of what it could melt). That would have really and truly trumped the Big Implosion that the CRT I hit with a bottle did. New stuff needs those explosives to be neat.
Pfft - I'm making a million billion a year using just that and a little bit more(+).
For free I will tell you how I do it, you just have to agree to a few things*
*you are not guaranteed to make money, your individual results may vary. I will also charge 200 dollars shipping and handling as it takes me A LOT of handling to get the stuff out. If you are a hot female I also need nude photos (in that case it takes handling charges of 25$ extra as it takes more "handling").
+I make a million billion a year in "Luethke Money" - how this relates to American dollars will depend on the current exchange rates, and depending on my current financial status.
That's about as a good a deal as you will get on other infomercials - though truthfully there have been a very very very small handful that were decent.
A good place to start from a programmers perspective is Eric S Raymond:
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1447
Not sure how else to take it.
"But don't an equal number of opportunities exist for the contrary side?"
Sure there is. Thus why a large part of "science" is publishing your data and your methodologies. That removes most of those opportunities from *either* side.
"Wouldn't a researcher who proved AGW was a hoax be bathed in media attention, career opportunities, etc.? With good enough research, couldn't journals be shamed into publishing?"
In this case, no. As it turns out the community is so insular that the very people cooking the numbers (go read some of the published source code and data - whole parts of it are simply made up because they didn't have any raw data) are the gatekeepers of who gets published it is near impossible to publish otherwise. We can clearly see from the e-mails that when something *did* get published - and therefore supposedly made it through even that level of collusion in the peer review process - that group successfully got those editors fired. Nor can one "prove" it either way. Basically the AGW people got there first and won, not through science but through manipulating the system better.
"Anyone foolish enough to think they'll advance their careers with false science will be caught out soon enough."
True enough - see these released papers for that happening. There ought to be some felony cases (FOIA deletions, especially given that they were intentional to avoid them) and it should have a number of careers killed. It would have killed mine to do this type of stuff and I'm was supposedly in one of the "soft sciences" (Computer Science) as far as methodology is concerned.
Sadly the so called wagons are circling - too many have too much riding on the models to be accurate (money, careers, belief system). It is a combination of a failure of our edumacational system (I refuse to call it an educational system) to teach proper research methodologies and the politicization of science. It has become a "belief" instead of going where the research shows. It doesn't even need some insidious plot, I've known some of the people involved here (not the main people but recipients and colleagues at ORNL) and their level of belief was VERY strong (some long stories there, in short an example is one of them decided that Linux was wrong and he was not getting the cache miss rate reported because he had calculated differently - couldn't have been a bug in his code). Of the ones that were not Believers this is the story I got from them about the state of the climatology world, though it has been a lonely world in that knowledge.
These systems should have *never* been allowed to get to where this is a bombshell. The circular reasoning with the reliance on the models as the primary tool for outcomes (that is models trumped raw data - see said e-mails and much of the public raw data for the last 10 or so years), the secrecy of the data and models, and the structured used to peer review articles (you do not even need the e-mails again, though now they offer inside proof of what was obvious from the outside). Further so much of the work outside of this group uses data they did release (along with no ability to research how they arrived at it - from the leaked information we know some of it was simply made up because they didn't have it) and it is all based on garbage.
As is we simply just *do not know* it could be no AGW, it could be *worse*, it could be exactly as they said. You can't put garbage in, process it with bad procedures, and get gold out. Heck you can't even put gold in, improperly process it, and get gold out! None of this takes one to be an expert in climatology - it only takes one to note that the procedures being used are incapable of creating a conclusion with a high degree of likelihood of being correct. That is they used a Garbage in Garbage Out method and said we had Gold Out. You hit it exactly (though I do not think you meant it this way) in that there are equal opportunities to do something similar on the other side - if things were working as they are supposed too that wou
The problem isn't so much what is being done, it is how it is being done.
Say, for instance, I am president of a local archery club. We have trouble getting enough workers for some events (all volunteer workers). Many have wanted to have a two tier membership plan - normal dues are 100 dollars a year and non-working dues are and extra 50. If you want to see anger, propose that.
Yet, one can turn around and say that normal membership is 150 dollars and if you work you get a 50 dollar discount and people are happy (unless you start off with the above, then everyone sees you as a hack trying to force what you wanted in the first place). Same thing but instead of getting punished you are getting a deal.
In this case the "Move to India or loose your job" is pretty much the first case - VERY poorly worded. If it had been offered differently I'm sure many more would have taken it - for many that sure beats unemployment.
Then there is also that many people nowadays have unrealistic expectations. There is always thought that they idea that they want is possible - after all look at all the other "impossible" stuff we do today. Sometimes, however, there are no good choices. We will learn that one day - we will do so either early enough that we can recover or it will take basic death.
I know of a number of people in the mid 00's at the worst of the dot com bust that learned it the *really* hard way. But alas, not enough have learned it for the community as a whole. I imagine there are getting ready to be some IBM (or rather ex-IBM employees) getting ready for a really bitter lesson. Hopefully they will all find jobs elsewhere, but at least for the next little bit I wouldn't hold my breath - I would highly imagine in about 6 or so months that India job will look *mighty* tempting to many of them but will be too late.
OTOH I wouldn't of taken it either, but then I generally feel it's a nice move from IBM instead of doing the normal "lay off and hire over there" thing. There was no requirement to even offer it and it is one of the VERY few times I've heard of anyplace doing that.
In this particular case we already know that Chu has experience managing govt labs as he is the director of Lawrence Berkley National Lab and by all measures is doing good.
Indeed, I would be more surprised if he actually did any actual research on this breakthrough than him being a bad manager. Staff at that level are organizers first and VERY rarely, if ever, have time to do more than manage. I can not say "never have time", though I have yet to find even staff at a group leader level do more than chase funding, tell you that you are doing good work, and sign their name on your papers (not that this is wrong - couldn't be there without chasing said funding).
At that level there are also many wanting his name on their paper (it gets both funding and press), it is not uncommon for people in his seat to have had almost *nothing* to do with the projects (including chase funding), simply look at how many projects he heads and number of papers published - they guy would have to be a dynamo, live in a world with 48 hour long days, and never sleep in order to even come close to doing more than having a 2 hour meeting a quarter per project (and then probably given to someone else - I never saw any lab director at any of those meetings I attended).
Of course, they also have to able to do real research, they didn't get to that position through the academic weenie path by not being academics, but the chances of him doing more than reading the paper and giving his thumbs up is slim. Indeed - most research staff in national labs have to go through a decision phase on if they go into management or stay as a researcher (management being the only way to move "up" pay grade scales) - even then a large portion of them more or less guide a number of post-docs and grad students.
Worse? Well, he could appoint Darl McBride as the Secretary of Commerce. Or how about the Rev Wright to the Secretary of Education and Blagojevich to head any Ethics commissions. One can almost always get worse and you do not even have to look hard into his past to find them (nor are the latter two listed even close to the worst in his contact list). Oooh, or how about Dick Cheney as head of the NSA?
Any one who really and truly bought the idea of Change and Hope from a junior Senator who flew the ranks of Chicago Politics (and in one of the more corrupt areas to boot) is crazy. Welcome to the world of being bamboozled by a charismatic speaker - you aren't the first, nor will you be the last, and all thought those on the other side were idiots who couldn't see what you did (well, true to some extent - just we were bigger cynics and the magic didn't work on us).
I will say that, so far, Obama has far exceeded my expectations so I can't say I'm unhappy either. But then when your expectations are "fire, brimstone, and ruination" it isn't really that hard to exceed them either. Of course there is still time for all three of those, and MORE than plenty for just two of them. I'll take a person with no real beliefs that uses associates to gain popular support from those he represents over a hard line extremist any day (though that's sort like saying I would loose a foot over both arms and legs any day - neither one is a good choice yet one is clearly better).
I'll add one more thing to my post - people old enough will remember back in the 70 and early 80's when we thought we were causing a massive cooling and heading towards and ice age. The same arguments about "geoengineering" (though that wasn't the term used) recommended putting massive amounts of greenhouse gasses in the air to stabilize things.
Good thing things like timeOday's thought process was more or less ignored back then. Back to that whole understanding things along with unintended consequences. We better be *damn* sure we know what will happen when we intentionally release more change into the world than what we are trying to fix. I'm certain that any industrial complex that, say, released that much iron into the Indian Ocean would bee called the worst polluter of the century and they would be right - it would be best we totally understand things before intentionally becoming the worst environmental "change" in history (and hope that change is better than what we have now).
Well, we had a real problem in the southeastern US with soil erosion - especially on road embankments as our highway system expanded.
What to do? All sorts of theories were proposed, finally many states decided to import Kudzu as it yielded *great* soil erosion techniques and even looked pretty. Anything that might happen would have to been less worse than the Kudzu.
Well, except that we didn't understand the effect on our environment that the Kudzu would play. Turns out that it wasn't such a hot idea and was SIGNIFICANTLY worse than just letting nature grow plants back on the bare soil (let alone if we had just planted grass - but people felt that would take too long). Many of the same arguments, in fact if you look at pretty much any of those "unintended consequences" you will see VERY similar arguments.
Of course, this time we truly understand things - right? There is a great scientific consensus on the subject so it can not be wrong. We are smarter than that now - nothing we ever do any more does something we didn't intend and that something be very bad for us.
If this has the equivalent impact of the Kudzu we are going to kill the planet faster than Global Warming (even in it's wildest forms) could ever do. Your analogy of medicine can not do that. Heck, in fact as well tested and regulated as medicine is we still have MAJOR unintended consequences - we only have to look towards medicines like Thalidomide for examples of where unintended consequences are quite bad.
Personally when we start playing with things that can sterilize the planet if we do not understand it well enough I get kinda cautious - others, well, CO2 is the Devil and must be eradicated (after all, nothing is ever worse than the Devil). But, alas, like any other religion rational thought isn't what got many to where they are today and rational thought isn't going to get them to a reasonable stance. It will not be recognized as bad until those unintended consequences get bad enough that there is not choice but to see them and then everyone else will be blamed.
"I don't know. Depending on how strict the regime gets, I can easily see things being so risky that people simply don't want to mess with the geek-created tools, even if they exist."
True, few in our "modern" world seem to truly understand this - there are more places in the world where the rule of law is "kill first, ask later". We can easily ban *anything* - your possession is immediate execution. History shows again and again that this works (along with nature pointing out the folly of man)
Sadly there is almost no shortage of those willing to enforce this. Each group always thinks it is justified in doing some draconian measure because the Other Side(TM) did it first (and is almost 100% not true to an outside observer).
Yay - someone on Slashdot at least gets some market information correct (do not know about your ideas outside of this post - I've known people who translate what you said into some strange form of a strong command economy).
I somewhat supported the bailout of the financial industry simply because of how much of our world runs on credit and the issue was mostly industry wide. However I also felt that we needed to re-examine things like out anti-trust laws. There were a few companies in there that were specifically targeted.
That is, I adhere to the following logic: any company that is so large it can not be allowed to fail is too large and need to be broken up. Our normal anti-trust laws adhere to competition, yet I think this is at least as important (and maybe even more so given than that, like some of the Auot manufacturers are talking of doing, they want the money and have no change in their business).
Of course that also leaves industry wide issues - like a decent portion of the financial industry bailout. Were this truly an industry issue instead of the fact that the industry is so dominated by three entities that they can do any stupid thing and expect to be bailed out then I would support said bailout.
This isn't so much an "auto industry bailout" as much as it is a "big three bailout" (well, IIRC Ford, while having problems, isn't taking part of the pie so I guess it is "big two bailout"), the former I support, the latter I do not.
Right now I would eve support a specific companies bailout if we were moving towards breaking them up to prevent this in the future - after all few really saw this coming. If they want bailout money then they are too large and need broken up, if they aren't so large that they can not fail then they can do what all others do - chapter 11 or chapter 7.
If these companies were given that choice I wonder how many would go to the govt teat and instead choose chapter 11 and what it was meant for? Same is true for the Financial industry - I would have *loved* to see that same idea there (even though my retirement was managed by AIG).
It is only "debunked" in the world that really wishes it to be so (for various different reasons). It is the difference between "purchase price" and "total cost of ownership" - myself I care more about TCO than I do about purchase price - however many want purchase price to be the limiting factor.
Overhead *is* part of your salary. Is it take home pay? Nope, not in the least yet still part of what your overall costs are.
Indeed - when one sees the TCO of an employee be more than three times their take home salary they have to realize they are *worse* than the US federal govt (who has between 2 and 2.5 times overhead - at least in the national lab I worked in and that was considered "wasteful" by the bean counters). No company that depends on profits can remotely work in the long term under those conditions, the federal govt isn't even looking in good shape in the past few years and it has a *forced* income from everyone.
The "debunked" cost is fairly close to the way management calculates their cost per employee and how they calculate how many people they can afford to hire (of course a few other costs/income comes into play too). But then there are many that hate management and the above statement means it is "bad".
Is it what they take home? Nope, but then my paltry pay of 30k a year at a govt lab didn't include the roughly 15-20k of computing equipment I got per year either - yet that equipment costs was part of how many we could employee and my cost to the project.
And your point of "but that's because they're competing against nations which benefit from "socialized medicine"" is of the same line - someone somewhere *has* to pay for it. It *is* part of your salary regardless of if it comes out of overhead, take home, and/or take home with benefits. The cost of the retirees, ex-employees, taxes, and other costs are "overhead" and are, therefore, distributed over the working population.
Sadly Factcheck has become so intent on debunking everything that they have become near worthless, they aren't really politically biased as much as they are biased to the point that if they can "debunk" something they go all out. Factcheck almost seems to get this, but then stops short of it. Like it or not, the figure is relatively accurate as far as cost per worker per hour goes and it is WAY off what they can afford. In fact it is way off of what non-union auto manufacturing (say Japanese plants) make.
You know, there have been a few cases of trying to work with some Open Source software that I find the following bit of logic in there:
If (1){
do stuff
}
more stuff
(well, other than any syntax errors - being dyslexic if I write two lines without them then I'm doing good)
And I never could figure out why the whole "if(1)". I always left it in the code because I figured someone somewhere had a reason and who am I to change it? I recall hearing Donald Becker rant about people taking "worthless" code out of his drivers and it being for some specific architecture. Though in this case I have always thought that someone was too lazy to change it initially (after all you had to find the other "}" and everyone else after them had the same idea I did.
Now I know for sure - some AI someplace added in some code that no one else understands and must stay in under their own little world. But then I guess that is something along the lines of Becker's complaint that it didn't hurt other hardware yet was required for some specific vendor.
I'm loath to change working code, even when it has something like the above.
Well, I mean really, there is no other component in your PC that touches everything as much as your PSU does and there is hardly a component that gets less attention (for many the case gets less but that is OK). As such there is a market for cheap PSU's. A bad PSU can ruin *any* component in your PC (including itself), not even your motherboard can boast that.
We know that there can be HUGE differences between top and bottom end if for nothing more than quality of soldering. Next we know that that both skill and time are needed to make high quality joints and skill and time are not cheap. We also know margins have to be kept such that the company turns a profit. Therefore we can pretty much assume that high end PSU's will be expensive and low end ones cheap (though, of course, expensive doesn't necessarily mean high end), especially given that there are places where the high end are are a *requirement* and thus people will spend whatever is needed, that is where margins are made so that the low end stuff can still be sold and mostly work.
*shrug* having been bit once in the past (around 2001 or so) by some cheap PSU's in a small-medium (64 node) computational cluster I know what bad ones can do. We had our server room (halon fire suppression system) call us one day that one of the nodes was smoking and what should they do: "umm that big red button? Push it, then run". It was all nice and melty when I took it apart (halon system didn't deploy thankfully so it was just an amusing story), I used to have a nifty picture of it and the scorch marks but I can't find the picture anymore - however it was obviously it had an actual flame.
Later on when we moved to large clusters then MTB of all the components started to become important. Even then the PSU was one of the higher failure rate parts, I always assumed that this had something to do with the few nodes we had with redundant hardware always had more PSU's than they really should need (other components being just as important yet not having a main and three backups).
In many venues they have what I would call certain signs of death. This is one of them - basically the idea that whoring oneself more will somehow make them viable.
In some cases - those truly a whore - more and more selling of oneself is only a logical conclusion. After all, when you are the "best" (be it a person who can sell their body) one can name their price, but then as you slide you have to be willing to sell for less as your "worth" drops (say, loose your beauty).
There is a difference here - graphics sell to a large extent but there is also the time spent in game that can not be transferred (in the whore analogy, well your own parts transfer in whatever state they were in at the end of the last encounter - however in a MMO you will start out as a total newbie). As such things like this may very will get a boost of last breath revenue and I can not blame them for doing it.
Of course, I would also say at this point the fact that EQ is still alive enough to whore itself out is amazing. I mean, this is like a 140 year old chain smoker alcoholic deciding to whore themselves out for another few years of life.
And, lastly, the game isn't a person so the "whore" analogy fails miserably there and we come back to shareholders stake in the claim. While some will want to say that is a "whore" the rest of us with a 401k realize that this isn't so. Shareholder's worth is an important thing.
I can't say I applaud this decision. Even were I a shareholder I bet there will be more loss than gain in this case. At the point any game is revenue based as to win, those that have no chance to win will quit (and that is 99% of your player base). For the last few months I guess you may maximize profits and I suppose so.
I agree - I will also add that there are currently more legal addicts than illegal.
I know of quite a number of people who are addicted to prescription pain medication and have been for years. 15 minutes before "time" for their pill and they get all panicky trying to find the thing (if they do not take it one time they will experience "pain" - I've yet to find a pain pill that works that way). Many of them take the same, and more, pills as so called "drug addicts" that would be put in jail because they do not have a doctors script. I have realities who had knee surgery (torn ACL - a real injury) and 15 years later are on regular high strength drugs. Heck, I have relatives who are trying to "get off" those pills and have been going to a methadone clinic for over two years now (uh huh - they really are wanting to get off).
As far as I can tell is that most of the legal addicts can still function in society despite their addiction - though a number will do things any addict does when the supply starts to stop (say, for instance, a cousins mother decided to quit paying for the methadone clinic and suddenly, in an totally unexplained and unrelated incidence, the exact amount of money needed for the clinic "disappeared" from her purse and he disappears during those same days he used to go - of course those are totally unrelated incidences).
I would also add that the number of people that wanted my fathers higher dosage of hydrocodone given to him after his bypass surgery were an absolute shock to us. Even worse were the people who just picked on up out of his hand when the noted what he had (they had a prescription, but for a lesser does and were "hurting" that day).
As of right now the main thing separating legal vs illegal addicts is the ability to maintain a steady job while addicted or have enough money to fund any doctor out there. The illegals can not control the addiction enough for a part time job and enough to pay the slightly greater cost of the legal market for them.
I do not necessarily disagree with that - though I think that scenario is now very unlikely (OSS systems have enough acceptance that it would be ... difficult for Intel to do that).
That is why you encourage Intel to Do The Right Thing. They may - one day - do so. However, if you tell them do it or else chances are they will take or else. Further when your OS can no longer run those extensions then your OS will not be run. Not even microsoft can take that hard line a stance and get away with it - I fail to see why many that have a comparatively minuscule market share think that they can.
So, lets take another scenario (which is much more likely). Intel produces a closed 16 core CPU that requires proprietary microcode. Linux vendors demand it be fully open or they refuse to support it all. Customers needing the 16 CPU core (or wanting it) have two choices: purchase MS products and have it supported or figure out how to hack it into the system yourself through unapproved patches and probably paying someone to re-write what is needed to get it to work (guess which one will be picked). Intel then releases a 32 core processor and noting that few used their last product they decide to not even support OSS at all. While yours *may* happen if I get my way, mine *will* if you get yours.
Of course, what will really happen is option three - RedHat (and several others) will ignore Stallman and do what they need to sell product. Many of the purists have somewhat woken up and have started to use what they are fighting against (licenses, patents, and such) to *force* OSS to what they want but the thing is just too easy to fork. Distro's that go the "pure" way will live only in hobby land.
Of course, that is part of why companies like Redhat are both loved and hated - they brought Linux to the commercial success that it is today but "betrayed" those political/social ideals that many in the OSS community started with. Of course, having never truly believed those (like me, they read ESR and thought that buy made a lot of sense) they didn't really betray anything, they more or less showed that one side could gain a larger market and mind share than the other (which is probably even more infuriating than an actual betrayal).
Now, of course, when HURD is ready then it will sweep the world - but until then I suspect that ESR's view of OSS will win pretty much every time it comes in conflict with Stallman's.
"I don't understand why people don't want others have the freedom to install proprietary software on Linux system."
Because some see OSS as a political movement, not a tool.
Personally I see it as a tool. Open source allows many different things that I could not do with closed source and, even back when it wasn't as technically sound an option it still often won because I could do what I needed with it.
As a tool many OSS projects have been a great successes - better than most would have believed ten years ago. It has been so mainly for the reasons above plus it was *really* easy for companies to adopt into their corporate structure (after all, it was not only free as in beer but free as in speech). ESR "won" in this sense.
As a political movement OSS has been an abject failure. It didn't achieve any of the goals of that drive the various founders. Some that were - hmm, not sure an actual term that fits term - but a mix of anti-corporation, anarchism, anti-capitalism and a few other political movements didn't see the fall of corporate structures. Some - which would be Stallman - didn't see a wave of community based software production where we all gave come about.
It turned out that when you give people "freedom" they often do things you do not like. Indeed their vision simply strengthened those policies and companies they were fighting.
In the end the problem with using it as a political tool is that there is still other choices. If I am going to have to choose between using an OSS product (even assuming I like the vision Stallman had) chances are I will go with Microsoft and all it's ills and have my company function instead of let it die and be "pure". Not allowing *any* non-open binary, not allowing any company that patents things you do not like to use your software, and a whole host of other things that many OSS projects are moving towards is a fine political statement - I have no issue whatsoever with someone doing that.
If you are looking for your software to also be a tool you can't do that - after all if your hammer comes with a long list of stuff you can't build my bet is that you will go spend the money to get one you can build anything with - even if the former hammer is free money wise. Indeed, few would consider the hammer that you could not build anything the hammer's maker didn't like to be "enforcing freedom".
OSS first hurdle was back when the decision was finally made to allow corporate interests to contribute with both code and direction. Many fought it but, in the end, a greatly improved set of software won out.
OSS is in the next of it's critical times where it will morph into something that can truly beat Microsoft or become a mostly hobbiest's tool. It's been building for some time - at least the last five years. It's still not to a head but it is getting there.
Personally I've of a mind that it is too late now - it will just cause a fork. Redhat, IBM, Debian, and many others will choose to keep their companies afloat over other entries and the "truly free" options will become hobbiest tools. GPL3 is pretty much as far as is going to be allowed and still be acceptable in the cooperate world (and even that one is hard to chew and has pushed a number of companies back to Microsoft).
I wouldn't and do not. I can't see any real need for it and it is simply something else that may go wrong and hurt something.
Yes, we like to think we can do all this totally 100% orthogonal and have it just be "fun" - but we all also know how well that works in practice in software products we have purchased/used. I'm certain that programmer thought it would be harmless, cute, and he was more than good enough to put it in there.
Of course, if you have a good QA department and said easter egg goes through that process too then that is also another story - would you really want *any* un-tested code in critical software even if it only pops up a smiley face? You always will get some - code is too complex to be other wise - but I would generally avoid intentionally untested code and I doubt anyplace is going to be happy to spend money testing your easter eggs.
If I want to personally sign things I do so in the comments. While most of mine are direct and to the point there is generally some humor in them and personal touches. It is one place I feel fairly confident that it will not hurt anything else and the reality is that this is the only place anyone is really going to have any idea that the easter egg is actually yours.
Now, in some products (say entertainment products) I think easter eggs should be a near requirement. However for working code I do not want them in there on either things I produce or things I purchase.
To a large extent I didn't need to see it - it's the same list SGI trotted out for their immersive systems. As someone else above me pointed out - SGI sold a number of them too, and where are they now?
The interface has been done a number of times, even in full 3-d immersive environments. It's just not a useful interface outside of a few niche applications. It's not new.
For those applications, yes it is great. So, how many millions was spent developing this for what - 20-30 sales? Can you charge them enough to recoupe your cost and have your company stay in the black?
SGI, along with a few others (none as had near the product SGI had) say no - you can not. While the interface is *really* nice are you going to spend 500-750k on a system for a project that's annual budget is 400k? Nope. And that's being generous - OK, this thing is great for CAD (as was the CAVE, and amongst the things it was pushed for) - now justify why I need to spend that amount of money when a 5000 dollar program does 90% as good.
At some point in the future it will become viable for certain applications. Heck, as I said, there was nothing like playing a video game using a CAVE (even true on the ImmersaDesk with 3-d rendering turned off). Before I graduated college I did enough CAD work to know how beneficial this would be for that system. And, of course, as one of the industries listed it is tailor made for the defense industry.
And yet - are they going to pay that much for the system? Defense - maybe, SGI surely counted on it and it didn't quite happen. But then, at some point it will - maybe these guys have the timing needed and will be the first. I know I would still love one of the older SGI ImmersaDesks in my house.
OK, maybe this is the wave of the future. I will not say it isn't - but that promo didn't sell it. It looked like what they claim to be - based on a Hollywood custom script. I want to see how I would use this in the real world - I'm not going to be standing around and moving those text blocks around, nor did I really see why having that matrix of Asian language characters (I don't know which language - I can't read any of them) in that grid would help someone deal with the massive amount of letters anyway. It seems to me since most of them are based on pen strokes that that the arrangement is - hmm - only made to be visual appealing to westerners (which I am one of).
I had used an SGI CAVE a few years back for a few different things (well, others in the group I worked with wrote the stuff - I played with it simply because it was neat) and I see many similarities. Given that products history I do not see that as a Good Thing for them. In fact they seem to be a good 5-10 years behind the curve - the last time I used one was five years ago and they were already doing all this nice stuff from what I can see.
It was really good for things that were meant to be visual. For instance they had this really neat data set of a human (some convict that donated their body to science) and you could interact with a 3-dimensional representation of them. Their body "displayed" (or rather appeared too) in the center of the CAVE and then you could select (using a wand that the system kept tract of it's position in the room) a "window" and move/drag it around and see just that slice of the body in a high amount of detail. You could lock that and have as many 2-d slices going through the body as you want.
They also had a car wreck that you could do a similar thing - but you watched the "slice" as the wreck happened in real time. They actually crashed a car to get the data.
There were also quite a number of specialized tasks that benefited from it and I still run into some today.
But, other than that we pretty much played quake on it. Why? Well most data doesn't really need that type of visual representation. Our current screens work quite well and you are simply adding overhead for the heck of it. Even for those that the system worked well for they still did OK on a normal screen. A large monitor costs a few thousand, these systems cost a few hundred thousand. Well, you should get the picture there (and knowing that I worked in a govt research lab at the time should tell you why no one cared that it was a few hundred thousand more).
This system has the 3-d input but not the nice 3-d output that the SGI systems had so I can't see it working any better - it is just as specialized hardware intensive and I bet just as expensive. Even if it isn't - is the increased productivity for those specialized application going to be worth the cost? I also bet not.
You will note that even a group that has quite a bit of experience making true Hollywood scenes couldn't come up with better. Perfect for massive data - uh huh - and what did that wonderful things you show of arcs moving around *really* give you? You mean where you put a circle over one of the other circles and it turned yellow?
Is there *any* reason whatsoever that the majority of that could not be accomplished with a mouse and a large LCD? Nope - so why purchase this? At least the pretty much failed SGI stuff had the whole 3-d output to go with it - and trust me, there is no experience in the world like playing quake in a fully 3-d environment that you are freaking standing in the middle of and the virtual gun actually is being held by your hand. But then - how many are going to pay 250k for that?
This type of thing is so 1990's and dot com - ten years ago these guys would have been flush with cash from countless venture capitalist. Heck, their video even screams late 90's and early 00's. As is they better really be able to back up the claims they make to even have a shot at it, let alone be truly successful. I didn't particularly see anyt