Apple started the competing Macintosh and Lisa projects in 1978, funded, with teams building hardware and writing software, etc., so not just "ideas". The Lisa made it out first in January 1983, the Macintosh in January 1984. So if "when we started the Mac" is when they started working on it, he's right.
Yep. That was in 1983. The Mac started (internal development) in 1978.
Actually, HP claims their first personal computer was in 1980 (http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/abouthp/histnfacts/museum/personalsystems/0029/). Still after they started working on the Mac, but closer.
Sure, if you think that software, design, etc., aren't important, only component manufacturing.:-)
Note that Apple (reportedly) really wanted to manufacture the iPhone in the US, but found that the US manufacturing capacity had been wiped out by offshoring to the point where the US couldn't support large scale US electronics manufacturing. I recall a article saying that Apple would have had to hire ever single graduating manufacturing engineer in the US for five years just to have enough line managers to run the teams to manage production. In contrast, in China, they could get staffed in two weeks. Not only isn't their manufacturing capacity in the US, the schools don't train people to do the work, so there's nothing to even start with. And now not only is offshore manufacturing cheaper, it's generally better than the US, because US corporations basically invested in training them instead of US workers.
US trade strategy ("free trade") wiped out US manufacturing jobs, and they're basically not coming back, except for some high-margin niches (like the Mac Pro). But if Apple, with their resources, can't make manufacturing electronics in the US work, when they were willing to build the factories and hire the people and invest in the US economy even though the costs were a bit higher, then I can't see how anyone can make it work.
There are some niches where the US is competitive.
But contrast to Germany or Japan, where trade policy promotes local industry. Their economies are doing great, with good wages and benefits, because they're not doing what the US is, "race to the bottom" by trying to make the workers work hard for third-world wages and just barely survive, they're focusing on having a highly skilled, well paid workforce that out-engineers the competition. Turns out that's a much better strategy - businesses do better, workers do better, everyone wins. But it requires long-term strategic thinking, not just short-term penny-pinching. We're not good at that in the US, aside from a few companies like Apple.
So now Apple does design, software, etc., in the US, and manufacturing offshore (aside from a few small things like the Mac Pro). On the plus side, they have hundreds of stores with tons of employees there. Not as good as manufacturing jobs, but better than telephone sanitation engineers.
Apple Computer was rebranded Apple in 2007. It's clearly the same company, and had nothing to do with the launch of the Mac in 1984 - it was rebranding because Apple sells tons of phones and tablets, and not just "computers". And since it's clearly the same company, changing "Apple Computer" to "Apple" doesn't affect whether their claim is correct or not.
To drill into their details: - "When we started the Mac" was several years before the Mac shipped. Specifically, it was 1978, when the Lisa and Mac both started parallel development as competing teams. - Clearly when he said "computer" what he was talking about was "personal computer". There are still a few of the mainframe-era companies around and still selling mainframes. But in the early personal computer market, all of Apple's competitors from the early days are out of the business. Remember, Apple's founders left HP to start Apple specifically because HP didn't think personal computers were viable, so I'm pretty sure Apple didn't forget that HP existed. Arguably HP did sell their first personal computer, the incredibly obscure HP-85 starting in 1980 (http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/abouthp/histnfacts/museum/personalsystems/0029/). Long after Apple Computer was selling the Apple ][, and a few years after the Lisa and Mac projects started.
So IMO if you accept that by "computer" he meant "personal computer" and by "when we started the Mac" he meant when they started working on it, not when it shipped, I think his claim is true.
Impressive pile of hand waving. I'm not entirely sure what overall point you're trying to make, but I'll try to correct a few errors.
"I don't see anything wrong with "self-plagiarism". I mean, if X wrote it, X wrote it." - the problem isn't quoting yourself, the problem is reusing old material and claiming that it's original research, which is lying, and even more it's fraud, because the entire reason papers are published is for the original research. And in the scientific world, lying and fraud (taking credit for work you can't take credit for) is a serious offense that can wipe out journals and end careers. Perhaps you should consider a career in marketing or sales?
"OT1H, no one should be forced to publish sentiments with which he disagrees, or to associate with those with whom he disagrees. OTOH, sustaining the debate as openly and honestly as possibly is the thing." These two cancel each other out. In science, you're supposed to keep an open mind and certainly be willing to associated with those with whom you disagree - the first mindset is politics, not science. If your theories are so indefensible, and your ego so weak, that you can't even talk to people who disagree with you then you shouldn't work in science, which is a pretty aggressive, competitive field. And any professional journal had better be happy to print things that it "disagrees" with, because personal opinions aren't a legitimate measure of scientific value - research should be published as long as the science is valid. And since science is all ultimately based on objective facts determined by competing teams verifying each others' work, the sort of BS that you're imagining doesn't work for long. Sure, someone could try to throw a bunch of money into supporting their agenda, but ultimately either the science is solid (i.e. others can verify your work), or it isn't, and is rejected. So all the money can do is create some wasted effort for a while. For example, the cigarette companies spent a fortune funding "science" that "proved" that cigarettes don't cause cancer, which was all ultimately discredited. From a business perspective it was a successful tactic, because they made a fortune creating confusion and giving more people cancer for a few decades, but from a scientific perspective their attempt to corrupt science in their favor was ultimately rejected. And it's not terribly ethical.
That's pretty sleazy quoting so selectively, cutting out the part that addresses exactly the issue your raising, in order to say that I ignored that issue. It's almost like you're willing to use dishonest tactics to try to win an argument that you can't win legitimately. Instead, I'll go with sarcasm, and then quoting myself:
"Sure, there's corruption. But the scientific method is designed to provide disincentives to corruption, because collectively scientists care about, and reward, truth. For example, if you do flawed research, meaning that your results can't be independently duplicated by others, instead those others come along and disprove your research, and they're rewarded for doing so. If a journal doesn't do proper peer review, then they lose credibility and go out of business. And if an industry (e.g. cigarettes, oil) tries to pay researchers to do corrupt research, they'll find some willing to take the money, but journals have a strong incentive not to publish research that's flawed, because if they publish flawed research they'll lose credibility (which they care quite a bit about), and thus sales. And peer reviewers have a strong incentive not to let flawed research make it past them, because individually they'll lose credibility, and not get paid to do peer reviews in the future. And other scientists have strong incentives to disprove any flawed research that's published, because disproving someone else's research is very impressive. So while the corrupted research may be useful politically (e.g. cigarette companies published lots of quotes from "research" that "proves" that cigarettes didn't cause cancer, letting them sell more cigarettes and give more people cancer for a few more decades), ultimately their research was flawed, often with falsified data, and the authors and journals involved were discredited, while the accurate research survived peer review and other teams' challenges and was proved correct. So the scientific method worked despite all of the money and other incentives that were applied to try to corrupt it."
According to TFA: "The charges against him, of insulting religion and malicious blasphemy, were filed after Christos Pappas, a politician from the far-right Golden Dawn party, brought the issue before parliament. Pappas is currently detained pending trial on charges of belonging to a criminal group, as part of a government crackdown on Golden Dawn."
This is an interesting twist. The Golden Dawn is being cracked down on as a "criminal group:, and the person bringing the charges is in jail? Pretty wacky!
Capital punishment turns out in reality to have no deterrent effect. Most criminals think that they're not going to get caught, and they don't care about the difference between decades in jail and death sentence, so the death penalty existing isn't enough to change their behavior. And murders are often crimes of passion or panic, when the murderer isn't making ROI calculations about penalties. The result is that if you compare crimes in states that enthusiastically apply the death penalty (e.g. Texas) and states that never do so (e.g. Massachusetts), there's on average less crime in the non-death-penalty states, and states that have imposed the death penalty don't see crime rates drop, so it's hard to see any evidence to support the idea that state authorized executions actually reduce crime.
Since there's no deterrent effect, IMO the next factor is on us as a society. A society that has state sponsored killing has, by definition, devalued human life.
And there's also the issue that after the government has killed someone, there's no way to undo it. If they lock someone up, they can at least free them, clear their names, and give them the rest of their life back. We know convictions aren't 100% correct, because the justice system is composed of people and people are imperfect. An innocent person being jailed and later freed is a shame, but killing them is murder. I don't think we, as a society, should validate murder by performing it as a government function.
You're leaving out most of what was reported. His death took 25 minutes, including struggling to look at and talk to his family, choking and gasping for air, having more trouble breathing, then after 20 minutes or so, slowly falling unconscious, at which point there was a few minutes of "snorting or snoring". Leaving out 20 minutes, and pretending that the end was all that happened, is dishonest.
If what you said were what happened, people there wouldn't have been traumatized and calling what was done unethical.
It seems quite common to have the "extra Arduino" in the mix, because it's a great little processor for managing lots of I/O lines. And you can put the faster CPU asleep until something interesting happens. It probably only costs $3 for the Arduino chip by itself.
But I agree that for large scale production you'd want a custom PCB, rather than their board, because you don't want to waste the space on two stacked cards with pins between them, when you can put the chips on one PCB that's easier to manufacture, cheaper, etc.
The Nest uses the internet for useful stuff. For example, it knows the outside temperature (from weather data) so it can optimize temperature differential. It logs data to the server for longer-term trending, etc., since it has limited internal storage. And you can control multiple Nest devices from a single UI (e.g. see the temperature of all zones in your house on one screen).
Then there are things like being able to go on vacation, and tell the Nest as you're driving away that you're out so it can turn off the AC, and then when you're driving home you can tell it to turn on the AC so that your house is cool when you get there. All rather nice. Normal people don't use their cell phone to configure their router to open a port for their HVAC controller to use for a few minutes, so instead they connect it to the internet and rely on the vendor's security to keep people from changing the temperature.
They also trust telco's to route calls, banks not to loose their money, etc. It usually works out. And really, if someone changes the temperature in your house, is that worse than getting your credit card cloned by your waiter (a risk you face every time you eat in a restaurant)? Perhaps I'm not cynical enough, but at some point you have to trust companies to be basically competent, and deal with the occasional issue in return for which you get to do all sorts of nice things most of the time.:-)
The Nest is already a lot smarter than a dumb thermostat. That's why it's so much more power efficient. I've saved far more than the cost of two Nests (one per zone) since buying them. For example: - It's not a dumb on/off trigger switch, which bounces temperature up and down all day. Instead it (as far as I can tell) uses PID logic to much more efficiently maintain a level temperature. - It controls the fans separately from AC and heat, so it does things like kick in the fans to get the air moving to equalize temperature, and only use the AC or heating when needed. Thermostats turn fan and AC/heat on at the same time. - It knows when you're home or away, so it can let the temperature float when you're out, and bring it to comfortable range when you're back, saving power while you're out. - It knows when you're _usually_ out and home, so it can bring the house temp into comfortable range before you're likely to be home, so you don't have to wait for the house to heat/cool. - It knows the outside temperature, so it knows how much temperature differential to maintain. - You can tell it (or it figures out) you're out of town for a few days, so it spends $0 on HVAC. - You can see efficiency/cost ("leaf" for efficient) so you have a very visible encouragement to adjust the temperature to be more cost efficient. - And I can monitor and control it remotely, from my phone, office, etc., so I can control everything if I want to. Which is rarely, but it's good occasionally, such as turning the AC on a half hour before you get home from vacation, so the house is cool when you walk in.
The result? Power bills are way, way down. Relative to the savings (my power bill was cut in half!), the cost of the Nest is an easy spend. Heck, if you only save me 5% on my power bill, it'd be a good long-term ROI.
Why did Google buy them? IMO because they're one of the few companies that figured out what "internet of things" means for normal people. So while others were making all sorts of silly things (which are fun, admittedly), Nest found a deeply intuitive way to get people to switch from a stupid thermostat to a smart one, in a way was very easy for people, but saved them money, and with a design that people really like. So you may think the Nest is an expensive thermostat, but that just means that you missed the point. Dozens of companies made bad "smart" thermostats, and nobody used the "smarts" because they were unusable, designed by the same kind of people that made VCR's blink 12:00 for decades. Nest made smart thermostats not only usable, but a pleasure. And they made it an easy ROI.
On top of that, they figured out how to support the absurd fragmented mess that is HVAC, and to set up a national network of resellers/installers that can get their devices into every home.
Then they expanded to fire detection, including alerting services.
And their competition is still awful, despite having years to copy them. Because they're thinking of "features" instead of "consumer benefit".
Now picture smart HVAC and fire detectors in every house. How much data is that? How useful is that data? Can you think of any value in knowing people's waking/sleep schedule (movement), power consumption, etc.?
Nope. While you, clearly not understanding science, may not believe it, scientists hold it a virtue to give up positions when they are disproven. So in science, if a popular idea is conclusively disproven, it becomes quite unpopular quite quickly. And this has happened many times in the past. Look, for example, at relativity, which was an "insane" idea when first proposed, but was widely validated by independent researchers, and adopted as the concensus by the scientific community.
When a scientist tries to use their personal agenda using their reputation, what always happens is someone smarter and more right comes along, and being right his research survives peer review and is validated by other researchers, and the guy who was wrong loses. It's happened for centuries. It's not that scientists are angels - the reason the scientific method works is that it assumes that everyone has biases and their own agenda, and the entire system is structured to use people's individual agendas and biases and force them to compete, with whoever's theories are provably correct winning. It's important to understand that, unlike politics, scientific theories can be objectively proven or disproven, by having competing teams try to repeat your research, with strong incentives to prove that you're wrong because they want to beat you. So if your research is right, and nobody can disprove it, your theory wins, and you win. That's happened over and over again for centuries, and it's resulted in constant change in science, as mankind's understanding of the world advances.
Sure, there's corruption. But the scientific method is designed to provide disincentives to corruption, because collectively scientists care about, and reward, truth. For example, if you do flawed research, meaning that your results can't be independently duplicated by others, instead those others come along and disprove your research, and they're rewarded for doing so. If a journal doesn't do proper peer review, then they lose credibility and go out of business. And if an industry (e.g. cigarettes, oil) tries to pay researchers to do corrupt research, they'll find some willing to take the money, but journals have a strong incentive not to publish research that's flawed, because if they publish flawed research they'll lose credibility (which they care quite a bit about), and thus sales. And peer reviewers have a strong incentive not to let flawed research make it past them, because individually they'll lose credibility, and not get paid to do peer reviews in the future. And other scientists have strong incentives to disprove any flawed research that's published, because disproving someone else's research is very impressive. So while the corrupted research may be useful politically (e.g. cigarette companies published lots of quotes from "research" that "proves" that cigarettes didn't cause cancer, letting them sell more cigarettes and give more people cancer for a few more decades), ultimately their research was flawed, often with falsified data, and the authors and journals involved were discredited, while the accurate research survived peer review and other teams' challenges and was proved correct. So the scientific method worked despite all of the money and other incentives that were applied to try to corrupt it.
So no, the scientific method works, and has worked for centuries, and will continue to work as long as scientists are rewarded based on the scientific method.
That's not how science works. There are "revolutions" in science, disproving consensus, regularly. Because in science, popularity isn't relevant, being provably right is what matters. And, if anything, the incentives are strongly towards disproving what everyone believes, because they guy that pulls that off just proved that he's smarter and more right than everyone else, which gets him published, winning awards, etc. Scientists all need to do original research, since they don't publish the other kind, and disproving what everyone believes is HIGHLY original, while agreeing with what everyone believes is true is only marginally valuable, but isn't going to make anyone famous or rich. So you get some really weird theories (relativity, for example, etc.) that overturn the consensus because they're provably right, and amazingly enough, it's a virtue in a scientist that they change their mind when confronted with evidence that disproves their previous beliefs, and a career-ending failure to not to so. So all of the incentives are to disprove consensus, and then when that's successful for other scientists to take up the newly proven position.
Add to that the oil companies paying researchers tons of money to write anything that "disproves" global warming, and the complete lack of peer-reviewed research that disproves global warming probably means that there's not enough support for that position to stand up to any peer review at all.
Heck a publisher TRIED to run a journal dedicated to anti-global-warning research. The fact that they could only find an oil industry hack, and a bunch of "scientists" who used it as an opportunity to hire their buddies, and writers who tried to pass off old work as "original research" doesn't speak well to to the credibility of the people or the research supporting the anti-global-warming position.
If it's not original, it's not research. It might be nice writing, but if you're not moving the state of the art forward, you might as well be in Marketing.:-)
What an odd claim. In the real world, disproving a widely believed theory is a huge success that will make the scientist famous, sell lots of copies of magazines, etc., while doing research that supports what everyone knows doesn't get you much at all. In science, the incentive is _always_ to challenge the status quo. Add in that the oil companies are paying scientists extremely well if they can produce research to disprove global warming, and you'd think that if there was anything to the anti-global-warming theories there would be plenty of proof getting published because people like getting famous and paid well. If, despite all the incentives, there's no credible anti-global-warming research getting published in any scientific journals, that probably means that there's no credible way to support their arguments.
Yes, everyone has biases. That's why the scientific method is designed assuming that everyone has biases, so the truth must be based on facts and on multiple, independent scientists ability to reproduce experiments to validate them. The science doesn't care what your motivations or biases are. And no matter what your biases are, other teams' motivation and bias is to prove that you are wrong. And peer review panels' motivation is to not let any flawed research get published. So everyone's competing agendas end up countering each other, and the truth emerges from that competition, validated as the truth not due to popularity, but due to being able to withstand scrutiny and be validated. In science, popularity doesn't matter, being right matters, and right can be objectively measured.
Pretty much the opposite of politics. Which is probably why politicians can behave in ways that seem so absurd to a scientist, such as by promoting as "truth" something that's clearly not true, but which furthers a personal agenda. Which is effective for politicians, because the truth can't be objectively determined most of the time. But if scientists promote as "truth" something that's clearly not true, but which furthers a personal agenda, someone else comes along, proves that they're right and the first guy is wrong, and the first guy loses and the truth wins. And while individuals are imperfect, the system as a whole works remarkably well, getting us advancing at a remarkable rate scientifically for hundreds of years.
If only someone could work out a system for politics that worked as well...
That's only a valid complaint if laws do not affect people's behavior. Of course, in the real world, laws do affect people's behavior, which is why people care what laws are passed. For example if a regulation defines proper security procedures, and it's enforced with proper penalties, audits, etc., it will lead to increased security.
One of the ways that startups beat the bigger companies is that they take risks that larger organizations wouldn't. If his company bet that Google Wave would give them a huge edge in the market, and jumping on the platform very early could help them break out, that's the sort of decision that startups do all the time. Remember, if they engineered the way big companies typically do, they wouldn't be able to beat the big companies, because it'd be slow,expensive and risk averse. So startups take crazy risks, 90% fail, and the 10% do amazing things that the big guys are too timid to try.:-)
Text vs. binary protocols is an interesting discussion. I've designed several protocols, and we have this debate every time. It turns out in practice that binary protocols designed for 'efficiency' aren't more compact than XML on the wire (or JSON), because that kind of repetitive text compresses extremely well, so while it's human readable "inefficient" text at the endpoints where people can see it, it's quite efficient packed binary on the wire where it costs money to move the data. So the text format, in addition to being easier to implement, and easier to maintain, because you can leverage all of the work that's gone into parsers, schema definitions, existing standards (e.g. SOAP, REST) and data types,etc., while binary formats tend to be re-invented every time, and make the same mistakes over and over. By using SOAP (for example) you get headers, protocol versioning, data structures, message validation, etc., all done, so you just have to define your specific messaging, and bolt in a standard SOAP messaging library.
What a pathetic day, when political trolling, with not even a hit of actual technical content, is published as as story on Slashdot. Isn't someone paid to moderate this stuff for substance and relevance?
The law is more specific than that. The gun has to contain at least 2.7 oz of steel so that it can be detected by walk-through metal detectors. That way they don't have to pat down or X-ray every single person entering a secure area.
No, small pieces of metal, such as a single bullet, don't set off metal detectors, because they're calibrated to ignore small things like buttons and zippers. That's why guns are required to contain at least 2.7 oz of steel. And it's also illegal to make a gun that doesn't look like a gun to an X-ray machine.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple started the competing Macintosh and Lisa projects in 1978, funded, with teams building hardware and writing software, etc., so not just "ideas". The Lisa made it out first in January 1983, the Macintosh in January 1984. So if "when we started the Mac" is when they started working on it, he's right.
When they started working on the Mac was 1978.
Yep. That was in 1983. The Mac started (internal development) in 1978.
Actually, HP claims their first personal computer was in 1980 (http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/abouthp/histnfacts/museum/personalsystems/0029/). Still after they started working on the Mac, but closer.
Sure, if you think that software, design, etc., aren't important, only component manufacturing. :-)
Note that Apple (reportedly) really wanted to manufacture the iPhone in the US, but found that the US manufacturing capacity had been wiped out by offshoring to the point where the US couldn't support large scale US electronics manufacturing. I recall a article saying that Apple would have had to hire ever single graduating manufacturing engineer in the US for five years just to have enough line managers to run the teams to manage production. In contrast, in China, they could get staffed in two weeks. Not only isn't their manufacturing capacity in the US, the schools don't train people to do the work, so there's nothing to even start with. And now not only is offshore manufacturing cheaper, it's generally better than the US, because US corporations basically invested in training them instead of US workers.
US trade strategy ("free trade") wiped out US manufacturing jobs, and they're basically not coming back, except for some high-margin niches (like the Mac Pro). But if Apple, with their resources, can't make manufacturing electronics in the US work, when they were willing to build the factories and hire the people and invest in the US economy even though the costs were a bit higher, then I can't see how anyone can make it work.
There are some niches where the US is competitive.
But contrast to Germany or Japan, where trade policy promotes local industry. Their economies are doing great, with good wages and benefits, because they're not doing what the US is, "race to the bottom" by trying to make the workers work hard for third-world wages and just barely survive, they're focusing on having a highly skilled, well paid workforce that out-engineers the competition. Turns out that's a much better strategy - businesses do better, workers do better, everyone wins. But it requires long-term strategic thinking, not just short-term penny-pinching. We're not good at that in the US, aside from a few companies like Apple.
So now Apple does design, software, etc., in the US, and manufacturing offshore (aside from a few small things like the Mac Pro). On the plus side, they have hundreds of stores with tons of employees there. Not as good as manufacturing jobs, but better than telephone sanitation engineers.
Apple Computer was rebranded Apple in 2007. It's clearly the same company, and had nothing to do with the launch of the Mac in 1984 - it was rebranding because Apple sells tons of phones and tablets, and not just "computers". And since it's clearly the same company, changing "Apple Computer" to "Apple" doesn't affect whether their claim is correct or not.
To drill into their details:
- "When we started the Mac" was several years before the Mac shipped. Specifically, it was 1978, when the Lisa and Mac both started parallel development as competing teams.
- Clearly when he said "computer" what he was talking about was "personal computer". There are still a few of the mainframe-era companies around and still selling mainframes. But in the early personal computer market, all of Apple's competitors from the early days are out of the business. Remember, Apple's founders left HP to start Apple specifically because HP didn't think personal computers were viable, so I'm pretty sure Apple didn't forget that HP existed. Arguably HP did sell their first personal computer, the incredibly obscure HP-85 starting in 1980 (http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/abouthp/histnfacts/museum/personalsystems/0029/). Long after Apple Computer was selling the Apple ][, and a few years after the Lisa and Mac projects started.
So IMO if you accept that by "computer" he meant "personal computer" and by "when we started the Mac" he meant when they started working on it, not when it shipped, I think his claim is true.
Impressive pile of hand waving. I'm not entirely sure what overall point you're trying to make, but I'll try to correct a few errors.
"I don't see anything wrong with "self-plagiarism". I mean, if X wrote it, X wrote it." - the problem isn't quoting yourself, the problem is reusing old material and claiming that it's original research, which is lying, and even more it's fraud, because the entire reason papers are published is for the original research. And in the scientific world, lying and fraud (taking credit for work you can't take credit for) is a serious offense that can wipe out journals and end careers. Perhaps you should consider a career in marketing or sales?
"OT1H, no one should be forced to publish sentiments with which he disagrees, or to associate with those with whom he disagrees. OTOH, sustaining the debate as openly and honestly as possibly is the thing." These two cancel each other out. In science, you're supposed to keep an open mind and certainly be willing to associated with those with whom you disagree - the first mindset is politics, not science. If your theories are so indefensible, and your ego so weak, that you can't even talk to people who disagree with you then you shouldn't work in science, which is a pretty aggressive, competitive field. And any professional journal had better be happy to print things that it "disagrees" with, because personal opinions aren't a legitimate measure of scientific value - research should be published as long as the science is valid. And since science is all ultimately based on objective facts determined by competing teams verifying each others' work, the sort of BS that you're imagining doesn't work for long. Sure, someone could try to throw a bunch of money into supporting their agenda, but ultimately either the science is solid (i.e. others can verify your work), or it isn't, and is rejected. So all the money can do is create some wasted effort for a while. For example, the cigarette companies spent a fortune funding "science" that "proved" that cigarettes don't cause cancer, which was all ultimately discredited. From a business perspective it was a successful tactic, because they made a fortune creating confusion and giving more people cancer for a few decades, but from a scientific perspective their attempt to corrupt science in their favor was ultimately rejected. And it's not terribly ethical.
That's pretty sleazy quoting so selectively, cutting out the part that addresses exactly the issue your raising, in order to say that I ignored that issue. It's almost like you're willing to use dishonest tactics to try to win an argument that you can't win legitimately. Instead, I'll go with sarcasm, and then quoting myself:
"Sure, there's corruption. But the scientific method is designed to provide disincentives to corruption, because collectively scientists care about, and reward, truth. For example, if you do flawed research, meaning that your results can't be independently duplicated by others, instead those others come along and disprove your research, and they're rewarded for doing so. If a journal doesn't do proper peer review, then they lose credibility and go out of business. And if an industry (e.g. cigarettes, oil) tries to pay researchers to do corrupt research, they'll find some willing to take the money, but journals have a strong incentive not to publish research that's flawed, because if they publish flawed research they'll lose credibility (which they care quite a bit about), and thus sales. And peer reviewers have a strong incentive not to let flawed research make it past them, because individually they'll lose credibility, and not get paid to do peer reviews in the future. And other scientists have strong incentives to disprove any flawed research that's published, because disproving someone else's research is very impressive. So while the corrupted research may be useful politically (e.g. cigarette companies published lots of quotes from "research" that "proves" that cigarettes didn't cause cancer, letting them sell more cigarettes and give more people cancer for a few more decades), ultimately their research was flawed, often with falsified data, and the authors and journals involved were discredited, while the accurate research survived peer review and other teams' challenges and was proved correct. So the scientific method worked despite all of the money and other incentives that were applied to try to corrupt it."
According to TFA: "The charges against him, of insulting religion and malicious blasphemy, were filed after Christos Pappas, a politician from the far-right Golden Dawn party, brought the issue before parliament. Pappas is currently detained pending trial on charges of belonging to a criminal group, as part of a government crackdown on Golden Dawn."
This is an interesting twist. The Golden Dawn is being cracked down on as a "criminal group:, and the person bringing the charges is in jail? Pretty wacky!
Capital punishment turns out in reality to have no deterrent effect. Most criminals think that they're not going to get caught, and they don't care about the difference between decades in jail and death sentence, so the death penalty existing isn't enough to change their behavior. And murders are often crimes of passion or panic, when the murderer isn't making ROI calculations about penalties. The result is that if you compare crimes in states that enthusiastically apply the death penalty (e.g. Texas) and states that never do so (e.g. Massachusetts), there's on average less crime in the non-death-penalty states, and states that have imposed the death penalty don't see crime rates drop, so it's hard to see any evidence to support the idea that state authorized executions actually reduce crime.
Since there's no deterrent effect, IMO the next factor is on us as a society. A society that has state sponsored killing has, by definition, devalued human life.
And there's also the issue that after the government has killed someone, there's no way to undo it. If they lock someone up, they can at least free them, clear their names, and give them the rest of their life back. We know convictions aren't 100% correct, because the justice system is composed of people and people are imperfect. An innocent person being jailed and later freed is a shame, but killing them is murder. I don't think we, as a society, should validate murder by performing it as a government function.
You're leaving out most of what was reported. His death took 25 minutes, including struggling to look at and talk to his family, choking and gasping for air, having more trouble breathing, then after 20 minutes or so, slowly falling unconscious, at which point there was a few minutes of "snorting or snoring". Leaving out 20 minutes, and pretending that the end was all that happened, is dishonest.
If what you said were what happened, people there wouldn't have been traumatized and calling what was done unethical.
It seems quite common to have the "extra Arduino" in the mix, because it's a great little processor for managing lots of I/O lines. And you can put the faster CPU asleep until something interesting happens. It probably only costs $3 for the Arduino chip by itself.
But I agree that for large scale production you'd want a custom PCB, rather than their board, because you don't want to waste the space on two stacked cards with pins between them, when you can put the chips on one PCB that's easier to manufacture, cheaper, etc.
The Nest uses the internet for useful stuff. For example, it knows the outside temperature (from weather data) so it can optimize temperature differential. It logs data to the server for longer-term trending, etc., since it has limited internal storage. And you can control multiple Nest devices from a single UI (e.g. see the temperature of all zones in your house on one screen).
Then there are things like being able to go on vacation, and tell the Nest as you're driving away that you're out so it can turn off the AC, and then when you're driving home you can tell it to turn on the AC so that your house is cool when you get there. All rather nice. Normal people don't use their cell phone to configure their router to open a port for their HVAC controller to use for a few minutes, so instead they connect it to the internet and rely on the vendor's security to keep people from changing the temperature.
They also trust telco's to route calls, banks not to loose their money, etc. It usually works out. And really, if someone changes the temperature in your house, is that worse than getting your credit card cloned by your waiter (a risk you face every time you eat in a restaurant)? Perhaps I'm not cynical enough, but at some point you have to trust companies to be basically competent, and deal with the occasional issue in return for which you get to do all sorts of nice things most of the time. :-)
The Nest is already a lot smarter than a dumb thermostat. That's why it's so much more power efficient. I've saved far more than the cost of two Nests (one per zone) since buying them. For example:
- It's not a dumb on/off trigger switch, which bounces temperature up and down all day. Instead it (as far as I can tell) uses PID logic to much more efficiently maintain a level temperature.
- It controls the fans separately from AC and heat, so it does things like kick in the fans to get the air moving to equalize temperature, and only use the AC or heating when needed. Thermostats turn fan and AC/heat on at the same time.
- It knows when you're home or away, so it can let the temperature float when you're out, and bring it to comfortable range when you're back, saving power while you're out.
- It knows when you're _usually_ out and home, so it can bring the house temp into comfortable range before you're likely to be home, so you don't have to wait for the house to heat/cool.
- It knows the outside temperature, so it knows how much temperature differential to maintain.
- You can tell it (or it figures out) you're out of town for a few days, so it spends $0 on HVAC.
- You can see efficiency/cost ("leaf" for efficient) so you have a very visible encouragement to adjust the temperature to be more cost efficient.
- And I can monitor and control it remotely, from my phone, office, etc., so I can control everything if I want to. Which is rarely, but it's good occasionally, such as turning the AC on a half hour before you get home from vacation, so the house is cool when you walk in.
The result? Power bills are way, way down. Relative to the savings (my power bill was cut in half!), the cost of the Nest is an easy spend. Heck, if you only save me 5% on my power bill, it'd be a good long-term ROI.
Why did Google buy them? IMO because they're one of the few companies that figured out what "internet of things" means for normal people. So while others were making all sorts of silly things (which are fun, admittedly), Nest found a deeply intuitive way to get people to switch from a stupid thermostat to a smart one, in a way was very easy for people, but saved them money, and with a design that people really like. So you may think the Nest is an expensive thermostat, but that just means that you missed the point. Dozens of companies made bad "smart" thermostats, and nobody used the "smarts" because they were unusable, designed by the same kind of people that made VCR's blink 12:00 for decades. Nest made smart thermostats not only usable, but a pleasure. And they made it an easy ROI.
On top of that, they figured out how to support the absurd fragmented mess that is HVAC, and to set up a national network of resellers/installers that can get their devices into every home.
Then they expanded to fire detection, including alerting services.
And their competition is still awful, despite having years to copy them. Because they're thinking of "features" instead of "consumer benefit".
Now picture smart HVAC and fire detectors in every house. How much data is that? How useful is that data? Can you think of any value in knowing people's waking/sleep schedule (movement), power consumption, etc.?
Nope. While you, clearly not understanding science, may not believe it, scientists hold it a virtue to give up positions when they are disproven. So in science, if a popular idea is conclusively disproven, it becomes quite unpopular quite quickly. And this has happened many times in the past. Look, for example, at relativity, which was an "insane" idea when first proposed, but was widely validated by independent researchers, and adopted as the concensus by the scientific community.
When a scientist tries to use their personal agenda using their reputation, what always happens is someone smarter and more right comes along, and being right his research survives peer review and is validated by other researchers, and the guy who was wrong loses. It's happened for centuries. It's not that scientists are angels - the reason the scientific method works is that it assumes that everyone has biases and their own agenda, and the entire system is structured to use people's individual agendas and biases and force them to compete, with whoever's theories are provably correct winning. It's important to understand that, unlike politics, scientific theories can be objectively proven or disproven, by having competing teams try to repeat your research, with strong incentives to prove that you're wrong because they want to beat you. So if your research is right, and nobody can disprove it, your theory wins, and you win. That's happened over and over again for centuries, and it's resulted in constant change in science, as mankind's understanding of the world advances.
Sure, there's corruption. But the scientific method is designed to provide disincentives to corruption, because collectively scientists care about, and reward, truth. For example, if you do flawed research, meaning that your results can't be independently duplicated by others, instead those others come along and disprove your research, and they're rewarded for doing so. If a journal doesn't do proper peer review, then they lose credibility and go out of business. And if an industry (e.g. cigarettes, oil) tries to pay researchers to do corrupt research, they'll find some willing to take the money, but journals have a strong incentive not to publish research that's flawed, because if they publish flawed research they'll lose credibility (which they care quite a bit about), and thus sales. And peer reviewers have a strong incentive not to let flawed research make it past them, because individually they'll lose credibility, and not get paid to do peer reviews in the future. And other scientists have strong incentives to disprove any flawed research that's published, because disproving someone else's research is very impressive. So while the corrupted research may be useful politically (e.g. cigarette companies published lots of quotes from "research" that "proves" that cigarettes didn't cause cancer, letting them sell more cigarettes and give more people cancer for a few more decades), ultimately their research was flawed, often with falsified data, and the authors and journals involved were discredited, while the accurate research survived peer review and other teams' challenges and was proved correct. So the scientific method worked despite all of the money and other incentives that were applied to try to corrupt it.
So no, the scientific method works, and has worked for centuries, and will continue to work as long as scientists are rewarded based on the scientific method.
That's not how science works. There are "revolutions" in science, disproving consensus, regularly. Because in science, popularity isn't relevant, being provably right is what matters. And, if anything, the incentives are strongly towards disproving what everyone believes, because they guy that pulls that off just proved that he's smarter and more right than everyone else, which gets him published, winning awards, etc. Scientists all need to do original research, since they don't publish the other kind, and disproving what everyone believes is HIGHLY original, while agreeing with what everyone believes is true is only marginally valuable, but isn't going to make anyone famous or rich. So you get some really weird theories (relativity, for example, etc.) that overturn the consensus because they're provably right, and amazingly enough, it's a virtue in a scientist that they change their mind when confronted with evidence that disproves their previous beliefs, and a career-ending failure to not to so. So all of the incentives are to disprove consensus, and then when that's successful for other scientists to take up the newly proven position.
Add to that the oil companies paying researchers tons of money to write anything that "disproves" global warming, and the complete lack of peer-reviewed research that disproves global warming probably means that there's not enough support for that position to stand up to any peer review at all.
Heck a publisher TRIED to run a journal dedicated to anti-global-warning research. The fact that they could only find an oil industry hack, and a bunch of "scientists" who used it as an opportunity to hire their buddies, and writers who tried to pass off old work as "original research" doesn't speak well to to the credibility of the people or the research supporting the anti-global-warming position.
The data is published. The reason that you didn't find what you want is that you apparently didn't bother to look.
Here's a nice data source packaged up so that you can connect to it really easily: http://datamarket.azure.com/dataset/weathertrends/worldwidehistoricalweatherdata
And here's all the US' weather data: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/ .
The only person hiding data from you is, apparently, you.
If it's not original, it's not research. It might be nice writing, but if you're not moving the state of the art forward, you might as well be in Marketing. :-)
What an odd claim. In the real world, disproving a widely believed theory is a huge success that will make the scientist famous, sell lots of copies of magazines, etc., while doing research that supports what everyone knows doesn't get you much at all. In science, the incentive is _always_ to challenge the status quo. Add in that the oil companies are paying scientists extremely well if they can produce research to disprove global warming, and you'd think that if there was anything to the anti-global-warming theories there would be plenty of proof getting published because people like getting famous and paid well. If, despite all the incentives, there's no credible anti-global-warming research getting published in any scientific journals, that probably means that there's no credible way to support their arguments.
Yes, everyone has biases. That's why the scientific method is designed assuming that everyone has biases, so the truth must be based on facts and on multiple, independent scientists ability to reproduce experiments to validate them. The science doesn't care what your motivations or biases are. And no matter what your biases are, other teams' motivation and bias is to prove that you are wrong. And peer review panels' motivation is to not let any flawed research get published. So everyone's competing agendas end up countering each other, and the truth emerges from that competition, validated as the truth not due to popularity, but due to being able to withstand scrutiny and be validated. In science, popularity doesn't matter, being right matters, and right can be objectively measured.
Pretty much the opposite of politics. Which is probably why politicians can behave in ways that seem so absurd to a scientist, such as by promoting as "truth" something that's clearly not true, but which furthers a personal agenda. Which is effective for politicians, because the truth can't be objectively determined most of the time. But if scientists promote as "truth" something that's clearly not true, but which furthers a personal agenda, someone else comes along, proves that they're right and the first guy is wrong, and the first guy loses and the truth wins. And while individuals are imperfect, the system as a whole works remarkably well, getting us advancing at a remarkable rate scientifically for hundreds of years.
If only someone could work out a system for politics that worked as well...
All they have to do is take Windows 7 and draw a little loop, and ta-da, Windows 9! Efficient, stable, and usable by people without touchscreens.
That's only a valid complaint if laws do not affect people's behavior. Of course, in the real world, laws do affect people's behavior, which is why people care what laws are passed. For example if a regulation defines proper security procedures, and it's enforced with proper penalties, audits, etc., it will lead to increased security.
One of the ways that startups beat the bigger companies is that they take risks that larger organizations wouldn't. If his company bet that Google Wave would give them a huge edge in the market, and jumping on the platform very early could help them break out, that's the sort of decision that startups do all the time. Remember, if they engineered the way big companies typically do, they wouldn't be able to beat the big companies, because it'd be slow,expensive and risk averse. So startups take crazy risks, 90% fail, and the 10% do amazing things that the big guys are too timid to try. :-)
Text vs. binary protocols is an interesting discussion. I've designed several protocols, and we have this debate every time. It turns out in practice that binary protocols designed for 'efficiency' aren't more compact than XML on the wire (or JSON), because that kind of repetitive text compresses extremely well, so while it's human readable "inefficient" text at the endpoints where people can see it, it's quite efficient packed binary on the wire where it costs money to move the data. So the text format, in addition to being easier to implement, and easier to maintain, because you can leverage all of the work that's gone into parsers, schema definitions, existing standards (e.g. SOAP, REST) and data types,etc., while binary formats tend to be re-invented every time, and make the same mistakes over and over. By using SOAP (for example) you get headers, protocol versioning, data structures, message validation, etc., all done, so you just have to define your specific messaging, and bolt in a standard SOAP messaging library.
What a pathetic day, when political trolling, with not even a hit of actual technical content, is published as as story on Slashdot. Isn't someone paid to moderate this stuff for substance and relevance?
The law is more specific than that. The gun has to contain at least 2.7 oz of steel so that it can be detected by walk-through metal detectors. That way they don't have to pat down or X-ray every single person entering a secure area.
No, small pieces of metal, such as a single bullet, don't set off metal detectors, because they're calibrated to ignore small things like buttons and zippers. That's why guns are required to contain at least 2.7 oz of steel. And it's also illegal to make a gun that doesn't look like a gun to an X-ray machine.