But not Liberatarian, Randian thinking, Ron Paul thinking, is only thinly disguised Conservative Elitism, "I've got mine, screw you!" and is popular with Silicon Valley Engineers and their billionaire pimps:-)
The human condition is that people are stupid and selfish. And yet we live in a time when crowding is making us more interdependent, somewhat to the dismay of the antisocial personalities that go into tech and support Libertarian nonsense. But, no matter, if selfishness wins out, and the people who say that human activity is not destroying the earth (for a profit) get their way, the Fermi Conjecture will get the last word as the human race goes extinct.
That is the fault of the U.S. Constitution which, although it doesn't specify the number of parties, pretty much assures a two party system with a winner take all process in the Electoral College. This colors all political strategy as third parties have an almost impossible hurdle to over come. If the U.S. would go to direct election, this situation would quickly change and if representatives were elected at large by popular vote, third parties and coelition politics would easlly emerge.
Since the duopoly, with its corporate moneybags, has a lock in the current system, it would take a major crisis, such as a prolonged fiscal shutdown or a stolen national election to get people to change their attitudes.
But be careful, the UK has no room to talk about diversity and the lack of a ruling class, locked in. If the U.S. has a Capitalist elite calling the shots, the UK has that and the institutionalized aristocracy controlling things, amounting to the recent decline of civil liberties in the UK. I wouldn't aspire to be one of the Queen's subjects at all, but we share the prospect that each of our constitutional systems has lost the promise of democratic institutions where all men are equal, clearly if you are a greedy wealthy American or a member of the English Aristocracy, you are more equal than everybody else.
The graphics I was able to see for this story shows the temperature pressure plot from 0.001 Megabars ( or 100 times atmospheric pressure) at 0 deg. K up 10,000 deg K at 100 megabars. The pressure curves are for planet interiors, for the earth, it maxes at 1 Mb, and 6,000 deg. K. It shows a zone of of stability for diamond and graphite up to the melting point of carbon at about 4500 deg. K and 0.1 Mb at which all three phases, carbon melt, graphite and diamond are stable. Above that the melting point generally rises in the region of the planet pressure curves and the phase of the solid is diamond. Whether to call the melt diamond has to do as to if some of the crystallographic properties of diamond are visible in the melt. At low pressures a carbon melt might be no different from one at the high temperatures. It looks like the phase boundary into the high range of P and T has been described. It clearly says that what would result from the freezing of the melt above the point described above would be diamond. Since the pressure curves for Jupiter and Saturn carry their interiors across the carbon melt and diamond boundary, carbon melt freezing into diamond could tale place. This does not happen for the earth and other gas giants.
What an idiot. One way to look at iMac evolution is that it is already using smart phone technology by integrating the computer into the desktop display and removing or reducing spining media. Shuttleworth is a dollar short and a day late on this and is just projecting his business plan, but Apple beat him to it long ago. The only place Shuttleworth has a position is on price point. If he can offer iMac functionality for $100 then maybe he has something to say. There are already $100 machines out there than can run any Linux you port to them, they may lack the packaging and the glitz. This is not hard. Someone, come out with a set top box or a smart phone form factor that can run Linux and into which I can plug in my USB hub that supports my desktop preopherals and NAS. That can't be that difficult.
And succeed from the Union. As the 15th largest economy in the world and a place where business interests from the South and Midwest are unpopular, read agribusiness and carbon based fuels, we can address the gridlock in Washington caused by the political abuse of these interests and separate from them. That includes Wall Street and the Right Wing of the Republican Party and the Bible Thumppers in the South. We can tell them all to take a hike. We wouldn't even need their water since having unlimited electricity means that we could desalinate from the Pacific Ocean. We can grow our own food, get out own water and have as much energy as we need, we can reduce the need for the internal combustion engine and use our own oil for petrochemicals, not burn it.
These arguments that turn on the ideal market and the ideal technology that will save all our problems, either the so-called freedom of choice in markets, and the co-called freedom of a CEO to spend as he or she sees fit, is bunk.
People don't have freedom of choice about what they do to survive when circumstance forces them to choose from what is available to them.The smug message we get is from people who already had resources to sit out a bad opportunity. They are elitists.
What limits the freedom of choice is investment, the people who have the money and decide where to put it. The rest of us are either charged to execute or are payed by someone in the line of command to do assigned tasks, and we are relatively unfree. So the smug assurance that markets give us freedom of choice is made by liars who know how the market is rigged, by analysts, by financial insiders, by politicians, and the choices are limited by investors, whose overall intelligence and sense of general welfare is doubtful.
So, the people who insist on the wisdom of markets, in the fairness of overall self-interest may have their convictions tested and soon. They may have to pay with their comfort and safety for their conviction that unguided self-interest and possibly greed is the best way to set the priorities in a nation and in the world. They may have to fight, literally, to support the right of labor markets to behave as they do.
This may come to a head sooner than conventional thinking expects, and the people who cause the crisis may not have any idea that they are lighting a fuse. People's perception change suddenly, which is why economics is not a science, and why smug assurances have a way of vanishing instantly.
It can easily be said that the lopsided income distribution and the corruption it is causing in the government are both caused by the digital revolution. Programmed trading has so distorted equity markets that they really aren't the domain of mere human investors, and the application of the high technology of digital mathematics has fed the most craven urges of mankind, leaving the majority of people at a disadvantage. I wouldn't go so far as to advocate Luddism, but human institutions need to catch up with digital institutions, particularly in finance. Whether or not digital technology creates more jobs or not, I think that more jobs have been marginalized and lost than have been created, and even the new jobs aren't safe from elimination, there is the overarching question of how societies create roles for people not needed in economic activity other than turning them into cannon fodder.
The warning is clear, and it may already be sounding in other parts of the world, that the great Unwashed, the non-elites, will get their say about the smug images some people here have been putting out, and that otherwise very intelligent people become victims of history because smart or no, mankind is very poor at predicting the future, which is again why economics is a dubious line of reasoning to argue from.
This is a good example of how economics stunts our thinking processes. Relying on a whole host of questions on short term market conditions while there are much bigger issues to consider is rubbish. We need to find out if carbon burning is poisoning the biosphere, the way it has possibly done in many of the mass extinction events of geologic time. This also entails the whole carbon cycle and the process by which we even have these carbon fuels in the first place.
Dealing with this is a major political impact since many of the producers are very partisan and have huge cash reserves to buy off elections. Many of the people who run energy companies are hardbitten, greedy and cynical, I know I have met some of them early in my career and they caused me to avoid a career that would have taken me into the oil exploration business. I wish that we were running out of carbon fuels rather than producing more of it.
I just saw a piece on frakking the Marcellus Shale in Pa., and the detection of radionuclides and heavy metals, all for greed.
First, the marketplace doesn't meet the need of 50+ million people for affordable health insurance. Either the insurance industry hasn't done enough to presaude young people that they need to buy it, and spread the risk for large payout, or the break even for a profitable industry is too high
The ACA is possibly a tax subsidy for private business, insurance companies, whose business model is failing, risk is squeezing profit from available premiums, and they are cherry picking the available population for low risk clients and excluding many others. ACA attempts to repair this imbalance. It does little to address the core of the problem which is that the payouts of insurers has gone up, way up, because of costs in the health care system, which is mostly private and for profit.
I can easily get you to shit in your pants by suggesting that socializing medicine is the way out of this problem, Or I can suggest that the economic power of the government can be used to reform private business practices based on poor investment and greed.
I can assert with confidence that self-interest doesn't always result in a healthy market or is fair, and lack of fairness can have dire consequences beyond taxes and capital. It can send people into the streets, which is what will happen if selfish bastards win out. By that I mean that protest and threat of violence is always an answer to a rigged economic system, so being rich and in the cat bird seat to tell the rest of the people "I got mine, screw you!" isn't going to save your ass in the long run,
I don't agree with the contention in this article. And it is foolish to think that we can do away with technology, with digital technology and its far reaching impact. But I would argue that the lopsided income distribution and flat income of about 60% of Americans is a direct result of technology. While productivity in the economy has been increasing, it is due to the effort of a smaller and smaller segment of the population. The reason why the rest have lower-paying less secure jobs is because compared to the top 10% they are marginalized. One can argue that the original Luddites were just not used to retraining or to having multiple roles in a life time, but the current situation is far worse than that. The rate of innovation is marginalizing some very skilled and valuable people subject to short-term investment thinking. This is not something that can be effectively predicted or planned for. And even the most highly skilled of today could be marginalized by advances in AI, so that if you are a software developer today, you might have vastly diminished opportunities within a decade if all the mundane jobs are taken over by AI programs, and only the most arcane problems are left for people.
Suppose the future is that most of the productive work is done by smaller and smaller minorities of people. Aside from the very real issue of where the eralth in the economy resides, what role will all the vast majority of people, who are just not necessary for the infrastructure and production to happen, not everybody is creative or motivated. What happens them. Past history says that they become cannon fodder of some sort.
So, is there anything stopping me from clobbering what facebook sends to my device? I can use my own Javascript to redo the entire UI locally. For example, I hate the textareas and would rather edit posts and comments in my own WYSIWYG editor and then submit to Facebook. Does it care what I do in my browser? Is the registering of apps and cookies requested by Facebook the control it has over the client side? Is there any way to get around that? There are registered 3rd party apps that have a simple interface to Facebook. I even tried the mobile interface in my desktop browser. It has lots of problems, but it was close to what I really want.
I guess is that Facebook got worried about Social Fixer messing with its UI, even though it sucks, but there might be only a couple of places where Facebook snoops on your browser, when you submit posts and comments, and when it tries to run ads and media files on your browser. Can it be fooled? And what right does Facebook really have to control more than that? If you wanted to edit your comments in emacs, not a bad idea, why should Facebook really care? You can't upload text files to Facebook, only images, so because I hate the editing tools so much I had actually posted screenshots of text and rendered HTML files.
One reason for the problems Social Fixer faces is that writing on top of Facebook's design is like standing in quicksand. Every other day, some feature has been broken by Facebook engineering.
I have been using Social Fixer for accessibility. I prefer big light characters on a dark background. I heard from a NetTuts+ article on Facebook's design that it was shaped by Mark Zuckerberg's own color blindness. never mind that I have a cataract and low acuity and need almost the exact opposite adjustments. I hope Social Fixer doesn't go away. In fact this interface for Slash-Dot is hard on me, too. It would be nice to find a stylesheet that I could use with it.
I can hear the techie snobs out there gearing up to assert that anyone who would use Facebook is a luser, and 98% of what people do there is crap, even by your friends and family, but that is still OK unless you have a blog of your own on the Internet and all your family and friends know its address. "What is that address to your blog, again? I can never remember it." The idea of the global friends list is genius. The only problem is that the rest of Facebook just sucks, the UI, its inflexibility because of the monolithic CMS, the business model, the invasions of privacy, even the cheezy flashing ads; the same spam we have been ignornign on websites for years. I can't wait for investors to get tired of Facebook and cause the company to fail, and then someone can do the whole design much better. They can unbundle the UI from the CMS, maybe regionalize the data, The only core task is to maintain the global list of friends, the rest of it could be distributed.
If people get emotional and check their thinking skills at the door, then you are right. Attacking someone because of typos is a classic case of ad homenum attack. Criticize someone for one thing when you disagree with them for something else, or attack their character because you can't argue effectively to what they said that you disagree with. I know, poor vision leads to many types, which could be the cause for the exchange in this thread. What one has to learn to do is to stay on topic, especially if one has a reasoned argument for what one believes and is willing to use words to express it. I think that because many people are lazy and do not have developed reasoning and debate skills that they avoid discussions that they should be part of, especially if they wish to be citizens in a democratic state, or have aspirations to have their voice heard in some way. It may be that there are bullies who want to squash reasonable discussion because of some political agenda they have, or even because they are angry and don't have the wits to think through to a solution for their life's problems, but if we are being intimidated by such people into not thinking, then the Brown Shirts will not be far behind. It is our civic duty to discuss and debate if need be, and to demand that the people who represent us do the same with honestly. To avoid doing this because you dislike contention is a sign of weakness which some tyrant will exploit.
I think that the message is that other sites will follow in their stead, that is, they will move to disallow comments. I can't say that I will miss comments all that much, or at least they could make you do some work before you get to comment. If you want to comment, you have to show that you really want to make an effort. Moderation has become somewhat impractical, forcing people to make a real effort in some way would help matters greatly.
I propose that an anti-Twitter approach might work to eliminate much of the problem. This is to force people to write. This means that instead of an upper bound in the number of characters, there should be a lower bound, MORE than some number of characters. This might remove some of the moderation issues and a simple content analysis could remove the most obvious forms of abuse. But raising the bar to be able to comment by composing complete sentences and paragraphs would all but eliminate trolls and other causal abuses that are predicated on the Twitter and cell phone model. If you look at the abusers, the first marker is that the posts are all short. When people want to persuade and to show that they are thoughtful they take the time to write complete sentences where the thoughts follow one another in an orderly way, and they don't take shortcuts of informal fallacy.
This sounds to me like a smug counterphobic response to having to think, don't think because everything is a wash, whether of opinion, or of fact. Were that true Science would not be possible since no one would be able to discover decidable issues. "The fault, dear Brutus, in not in our stars, but in ourselves", meaning that the the analysis reflectes badly on the speaker, it is he who is ill-informed, and cannot reason to some kind of answer.
So, rather than avoiding things altogether, lets say that the washing out of issues is due to mass ignorance. If decision is no more than flipping a die then either the participants want to avoid responsibility altogether or they are just totally unaware, uneducated, as to the facts.
Public discussion and debate in America are at a dreadful low. I am not absolutely sure of the reason, but some of it is that the level of critical thinking seems to have dropped. What I see in most Internet reporting on science is two things, journalistic types missing the core of the story totally, as compared to either the abstract or press release, or the article when it is released and not behind a paywall, and perhaps 80% of replies on blogs that reveal gross ignorance or laziness in thinking. I am not merely talking about the Bible Thumpers who are opposed to Evolution, but I am talking about the general low processing quality of the responses. I do not read lots of relplies, but I have read some; it won't miss it if they are not allowed, but the poor journalism does worry me a great deal, not that even newspapers and magazines you pay for are uniformly better. I notice that some of the posts on Gizmoto seem to be written by snotty-nosed kids whose reaction is little more than "gee-wiz!" and not much more thought than that.
In the quote from the top, I note that the end Permian mass extinction at 251 MYA and the K/T extinction at 65 MYA are not on the list. The first is the largest of the five largest ME's The one at 415 is on that top list as the Ordovician ME, which was less significant than the K/T one. It is the one for which a gamma ray burst has been proposed, which is controversial.
I haven't read the article, yet, but questions I would have concern how they define what the sun's motion in orbit around our galaxy encounters. Is it the crossing of the plane of the galaxy where problem objects might be more numerous or is it true spiral arms? I note the clustering of two events in the Carboniferous at 322 and 300 MYA, there is a major magmatic event in Siberia linked to those events and the massive erruption of the Siberain Trapps at 251 MYA has been implicated in the Permo-Triasic extinction. The sun takes about 150 MY to orbit the galaxy, so the authors would have to convince me that 1) they know the spiral arm configuration all the way around the galaxy and 2) that is it stable over 400+ MY. I might doubt that.
This story may be due to astronomers and physcists speculating about geologic and biologic events where alternative explanations are more likely. The geologic record in sediments and fossils for these events records changes in biota and changes in the chemistry of rocks, almost no direct evidence of an astrophysical nature. The Ir anomaly in the KT boundary is the sole exception. I am not sure what they might offer as evidence to look for. I assume that they would say the the earth would be a risk of encountering a nearby supernovae or gamma ray event. Would nearby energetic events leave something like different isotope ratios that can't be explaned by climate change?
People who really believe in religion and other forms of spirituality are not threatened by science. The findings of science do not shake their belief in whatever unknowns they believe are out there.
Creationism and Intelligent Design, as used by many of the Christians asking for legislatures to pass laws for enforce their religion and theology, are rhetorical positions that defend the most vulnerable elements of their religion and social thinking, for most perhaps all of these people are also social conservatives. By being conservatives they believe that they are better than their fellows perhaps in holding the beliefs defended by the rhetorical positions, such as their reading of Scripture that is as subjective and open to dispute as they insist that Scripture in inerrant. This is the clue to the real motive behind such people. it is to win moral arguments by force and that motive is supported by arrogance and entitlement, much as supports the Tea Parties in the House of Representatives.
A rhetorical position is a delaying tactic, a distraction, to steer the discussion away from a weak justification for a prejudiced position. It might be necessary to defend school curriculum in Texas from this attack, but ultimately if the political will is to allow such a travistry in Texas and other states, such as mostly in the Midwest and South, we can react by moving the innovative parts of society out of those places that don't want it in order to accept the sham pushed by some of these Christian congregations, and on the general matter of politics, whether social conservativism or movements like the Tea Parties, other more enlightened places in the nation can seek to separate themselves from these backward or self-interested places, for energy policy and the self interest of carbon fuel producing interests in Texas, and other states, who have funded the extreme conservatives in these states and the Congress, can be removed from the commonwealth, or thse other places separate themselves from them.
Maybe the Russians and Chinese will corner the supply of Pu on earth and NASA and other space agencies will be forced to buy it from them to power their probes? Then we will have been probed by the Communists, yet again, and all due to our cheapscape policies. I think that Reds have figured out how to screw with Capitalism, just appear to the scarcity and miserly impulse in financial people. Beat them at their own game.
So, social science is not physical science as in the latter the perceptions of the observers changes the outcome, not the same as quantum physics. "Social Standing" is but a perception, and so a little bad press is much like mass, only if it is antimatter, it goes poof when it interacts with real matter and a lot of energy is generated even though it lacks substance. Any one checked on the reputation of S&P or Moody's lately?
It might help you to believe in unintended consequences and the failure of conspiracies e.g. the financial system. People really ARE idiots and the more so as it concerns money and wealth, and economics has the worst track record at predicting anything other than averages over long periods of time, much longer than the average planning cycle and even longer than most careers last and approaching human life-times. So, not to worry, trust to fate, and to external forces that people are bad at fore seeing and take a healthy does of both skepticism and humility.
'Where they operate in narrower, less competitive markets — like where they’ve become an Internet service provider, for example — they abandon those commitments.'
Like where, give examples...
OK, despite Google Docs and the ability to host web pages on Google if you have a Gmail account, the service contains incumbrances that violate standards such as web standards. You cannot upload HTML and CSS to their web host and expect it to run. I accept their effort to make web authorship easy for people who can't hand code their HTML and CSS, but if you wanted that much control over your web pages, even just static web pages, then what Google offers is not a full hosting service, not by a long shot, and it favors their products, some of which are broken, but it misrepresents what it is. It is not open hosting, but a closed document system.
Google Books is broken, terribly broken. It is laughable how broken it is. A few months ago I looked for and found free sheet music, public domain music scanned and available as is in "free", but in point of fact the resource was useless, obstructed. Google advertises that free books can be downloaded as PDFs. In fact generating PDFs has never worked, and the viewer is broken and not usable for following music from a recording or for reading it at the piano. It is useless.
Listen to corporate slogans as their negations. "Do no Evil" sets a pretty high standard, when in fact "Do some evil" is closer to the mark and even though Google's defenders rush out to say that it doesn't do as much evil as other corporations is only a comparative statement about the overpowering urge to do evil. So Google's slogan, like most other such slogans is that they are silly efforts to conceal exactly what they are doing, but most shadow, that is, disavow, when doing that is an essential part of their existence.
So what is evil about Google? Sponsered links appearing on search pages, more of them, and often repeated on every page, so that a page containing about 20 hits now have about 5 sponsored links that repeat. In Google Books, doing the implementation of the service so poorly that it is basac;ly a tease; the intent was never to provide access to books, not even free books, but to make the experience so bad that you would go and pay for the copyright version, anyway. Provide a closed document system that porports to meet cloud document needs, but into which you can'r really import or export content. It is a captive market stretegy, which might be justified in a purely business sense, but we don't have to buy into it, do we? I was able to diagnose this pretty quickly and I have kept my investment very small, because once there, my stuff isn't mine.
Better, get BSD for free, run on hardware that costs 1/3 what Mac costs and compile to your heart's content, or not, and you'd still have most of the functionality of OS X, which you pay Apple to run anyway.
As in so many cases dealing with a free or subsidized service, remember that users != customers, and it will become clear why user complaints aren't really important to the company.
This lesson can be generalized.
Oh, that is far too pat, and I wonder at people who say pat things at all. Surely to analyze exceptions to the rule teach us more about reality than just reinforcing belief in the rule. So is discounting the exceptions just a counterphobic response to reality?
So, the exceptions to this generality are that people use services free or not for doing things, and even though the reason a service is free or not is not related directly to their use of it doesn't mean that they can't be as passionate about what they use it for if they paid. An example, and why Face Book contributes to mass mental illness, is that ordinary non-technical people used to the telephone or e-mail forget that Face Book is not a direct private interpersonal conversation. They forget that it is public and asynchronous and that non-human agents inject content into their experience. This confuses lots of people and it has caused interpersonal disasters. Just wait until come jury finds Face Book at fault for causing some liability or contributing to crime. This is bound to happen and because of some neglect that reasonable people know how to deal with. It is hard for a bunch of techies on this blog to comprehend the basic misunderstanding the idea of Face Book and the UI design leads to. It might be intentional, catch people off guard in emotional turmoil with targeted ads. It is even hard to distinguish between chat, which is live, and coments which are not. Zuckerberg says he is trying to keep the interface simple, but he may be exposing his company to liability by confusing contexts. I am rooting against him, BTW. I'd love to see FB get mailed on a number of scores, for being deceptive about privacy and preferences, and for not supporting contextual replies, among others.
Sounds plausable, but it is hardly the end of the story, for regardless of nice pat business models and ruthless manageement decision making, what makes business sense in a narrow self-interested way is not the last word. If someone can find a way to seal from or do it better they will, and if investors realize that what FB has done is unnecessarily expensive they will pull their money out. Right now it costs advertisers so much to get seen on Face Book, There is nothing to stop that from changing and beyond the expectations of FB or its investors and customers. Shams that abuse the users for seeming psychological and business reasons, exploiting users, ultimately create bad will, which is what has been happening for some time. It wouldn't take much of a change to destroy the status quo, which is to say that if someone advised me to invest in FB, I'd laugh at them and then chide them for not seeing anything better in the economy than that to risk my money on.
Yes, FB can set the rules, and lock out alternatives to its UI, but ultimately at its own risk. There is enough discontent with FB's design decisions that its over controlling its property carries risks. For one, it is not impossible to thwart their design. Even their own SDK allows third parties to build stand alone apps to post to a page. So if their javascript is malicious WRT spamming, what is to stop the local client from hacking what it gets from FB? First, it is already possible to run jQuery with FB SDK, FB has a page that shows you how. So in an app, you would do something quite simple and hide the right panel. The difficulty might be cookies FB demands from clients, but processing cookies can expose their servers to performance hits, so the cat and mouse game could eventually cost them big time.
Despite the investment, the stock price is as high as it has ever been, that may reveal the gullibility of investors, who are the weakest link in a capitalist system, it might dawn on some of them eventually that FB's Big Data model isn't worth the cost and the downside in terms of degraded user experience and that the inflexibility it creates is unnecessary. The result could be that the CMS and UI could be unbundled and the social medium run much cheaper and with fer less revenue pressure. Facebook could serve its central function as the global friends' list and spin off regional CMS and thrid party UI alternatives.
I understand the urge to protect an investment with an iron fist, but I also note the success of Creative Destruction caused when investors realize that they can get more bang at less up-front cost and the same results for much less, and fix some of the deficiencies for customers and users in the process. Yes, FB had to satisfy its investors, but it doesn't have to abuse its users and it doesn't have to be guarenteed the survival of its business model. I wish that investors would de-fund FB, so someone can write a better solution.
Slashdot Mirror
But not Liberatarian, Randian thinking, Ron Paul thinking, is only thinly disguised Conservative Elitism, "I've got mine, screw you!" and is popular with Silicon Valley Engineers and their billionaire pimps :-)
The human condition is that people are stupid and selfish. And yet we live in a time when crowding is making us more interdependent, somewhat to the dismay of the antisocial personalities that go into tech and support Libertarian nonsense. But, no matter, if selfishness wins out, and the people who say that human activity is not destroying the earth (for a profit) get their way, the Fermi Conjecture will get the last word as the human race goes extinct.
That is the fault of the U.S. Constitution which, although it doesn't specify the number of parties, pretty much assures a two party system with a winner take all process in the Electoral College. This colors all political strategy as third parties have an almost impossible hurdle to over come. If the U.S. would go to direct election, this situation would quickly change and if representatives were elected at large by popular vote, third parties and coelition politics would easlly emerge.
Since the duopoly, with its corporate moneybags, has a lock in the current system, it would take a major crisis, such as a prolonged fiscal shutdown or a stolen national election to get people to change their attitudes.
But be careful, the UK has no room to talk about diversity and the lack of a ruling class, locked in. If the U.S. has a Capitalist elite calling the shots, the UK has that and the institutionalized aristocracy controlling things, amounting to the recent decline of civil liberties in the UK. I wouldn't aspire to be one of the Queen's subjects at all, but we share the prospect that each of our constitutional systems has lost the promise of democratic institutions where all men are equal, clearly if you are a greedy wealthy American or a member of the English Aristocracy, you are more equal than everybody else.
The graphics I was able to see for this story shows the temperature pressure plot from 0.001 Megabars ( or 100 times atmospheric pressure) at 0 deg. K up 10,000 deg K at 100 megabars. The pressure curves are for planet interiors, for the earth, it maxes at 1 Mb, and 6,000 deg. K. It shows a zone of of stability for diamond and graphite up to the melting point of carbon at about 4500 deg. K and 0.1 Mb at which all three phases, carbon melt, graphite and diamond are stable. Above that the melting point generally rises in the region of the planet pressure curves and the phase of the solid is diamond. Whether to call the melt diamond has to do as to if some of the crystallographic properties of diamond are visible in the melt. At low pressures a carbon melt might be no different from one at the high temperatures. It looks like the phase boundary into the high range of P and T has been described. It clearly says that what would result from the freezing of the melt above the point described above would be diamond. Since the pressure curves for Jupiter and Saturn carry their interiors across the carbon melt and diamond boundary, carbon melt freezing into diamond could tale place. This does not happen for the earth and other gas giants.
What an idiot. One way to look at iMac evolution is that it is already using smart phone technology by integrating the computer into the desktop display and removing or reducing spining media. Shuttleworth is a dollar short and a day late on this and is just projecting his business plan, but Apple beat him to it long ago. The only place Shuttleworth has a position is on price point. If he can offer iMac functionality for $100 then maybe he has something to say. There are already $100 machines out there than can run any Linux you port to them, they may lack the packaging and the glitz. This is not hard. Someone, come out with a set top box or a smart phone form factor that can run Linux and into which I can plug in my USB hub that supports my desktop preopherals and NAS. That can't be that difficult.
And succeed from the Union. As the 15th largest economy in the world and a place where business interests from the South and Midwest are unpopular, read agribusiness and carbon based fuels, we can address the gridlock in Washington caused by the political abuse of these interests and separate from them. That includes Wall Street and the Right Wing of the Republican Party and the Bible Thumppers in the South. We can tell them all to take a hike. We wouldn't even need their water since having unlimited electricity means that we could desalinate from the Pacific Ocean. We can grow our own food, get out own water and have as much energy as we need, we can reduce the need for the internal combustion engine and use our own oil for petrochemicals, not burn it.
These arguments that turn on the ideal market and the ideal technology that will save all our problems, either the so-called freedom of choice in markets, and the co-called freedom of a CEO to spend as he or she sees fit, is bunk.
People don't have freedom of choice about what they do to survive when circumstance forces them to choose from what is available to them.The smug message we get is from people who already had resources to sit out a bad opportunity. They are elitists.
What limits the freedom of choice is investment, the people who have the money and decide where to put it. The rest of us are either charged to execute or are payed by someone in the line of command to do assigned tasks, and we are relatively unfree. So the smug assurance that markets give us freedom of choice is made by liars who know how the market is rigged, by analysts, by financial insiders, by politicians, and the choices are limited by investors, whose overall intelligence and sense of general welfare is doubtful.
So, the people who insist on the wisdom of markets, in the fairness of overall self-interest may have their convictions tested and soon. They may have to pay with their comfort and safety for their conviction that unguided self-interest and possibly greed is the best way to set the priorities in a nation and in the world. They may have to fight, literally, to support the right of labor markets to behave as they do.
This may come to a head sooner than conventional thinking expects, and the people who cause the crisis may not have any idea that they are lighting a fuse. People's perception change suddenly, which is why economics is not a science, and why smug assurances have a way of vanishing instantly.
It can easily be said that the lopsided income distribution and the corruption it is causing in the government are both caused by the digital revolution. Programmed trading has so distorted equity markets that they really aren't the domain of mere human investors, and the application of the high technology of digital mathematics has fed the most craven urges of mankind, leaving the majority of people at a disadvantage. I wouldn't go so far as to advocate Luddism, but human institutions need to catch up with digital institutions, particularly in finance. Whether or not digital technology creates more jobs or not, I think that more jobs have been marginalized and lost than have been created, and even the new jobs aren't safe from elimination, there is the overarching question of how societies create roles for people not needed in economic activity other than turning them into cannon fodder.
The warning is clear, and it may already be sounding in other parts of the world, that the great Unwashed, the non-elites, will get their say about the smug images some people here have been putting out, and that otherwise very intelligent people become victims of history because smart or no, mankind is very poor at predicting the future, which is again why economics is a dubious line of reasoning to argue from.
This is a good example of how economics stunts our thinking processes. Relying on a whole host of questions on short term market conditions while there are much bigger issues to consider is rubbish. We need to find out if carbon burning is poisoning the biosphere, the way it has possibly done in many of the mass extinction events of geologic time. This also entails the whole carbon cycle and the process by which we even have these carbon fuels in the first place.
Dealing with this is a major political impact since many of the producers are very partisan and have huge cash reserves to buy off elections. Many of the people who run energy companies are hardbitten, greedy and cynical, I know I have met some of them early in my career and they caused me to avoid a career that would have taken me into the oil exploration business. I wish that we were running out of carbon fuels rather than producing more of it.
I just saw a piece on frakking the Marcellus Shale in Pa., and the detection of radionuclides and heavy metals, all for greed.
First, the marketplace doesn't meet the need of 50+ million people for affordable health insurance. Either the insurance industry hasn't done enough to presaude young people that they need to buy it, and spread the risk for large payout, or the break even for a profitable industry is too high
The ACA is possibly a tax subsidy for private business, insurance companies, whose business model is failing, risk is squeezing profit from available premiums, and they are cherry picking the available population for low risk clients and excluding many others. ACA attempts to repair this imbalance. It does little to address the core of the problem which is that the payouts of insurers has gone up, way up, because of costs in the health care system, which is mostly private and for profit.
I can easily get you to shit in your pants by suggesting that socializing medicine is the way out of this problem, Or I can suggest that the economic power of the government can be used to reform private business practices based on poor investment and greed.
I can assert with confidence that self-interest doesn't always result in a healthy market or is fair, and lack of fairness can have dire consequences beyond taxes and capital. It can send people into the streets, which is what will happen if selfish bastards win out. By that I mean that protest and threat of violence is always an answer to a rigged economic system, so being rich and in the cat bird seat to tell the rest of the people "I got mine, screw you!" isn't going to save your ass in the long run,
I don't agree with the contention in this article. And it is foolish to think that we can do away with technology, with digital technology and its far reaching impact. But I would argue that the lopsided income distribution and flat income of about 60% of Americans is a direct result of technology. While productivity in the economy has been increasing, it is due to the effort of a smaller and smaller segment of the population. The reason why the rest have lower-paying less secure jobs is because compared to the top 10% they are marginalized. One can argue that the original Luddites were just not used to retraining or to having multiple roles in a life time, but the current situation is far worse than that. The rate of innovation is marginalizing some very skilled and valuable people subject to short-term investment thinking. This is not something that can be effectively predicted or planned for. And even the most highly skilled of today could be marginalized by advances in AI, so that if you are a software developer today, you might have vastly diminished opportunities within a decade if all the mundane jobs are taken over by AI programs, and only the most arcane problems are left for people.
Suppose the future is that most of the productive work is done by smaller and smaller minorities of people. Aside from the very real issue of where the eralth in the economy resides, what role will all the vast majority of people, who are just not necessary for the infrastructure and production to happen, not everybody is creative or motivated. What happens them. Past history says that they become cannon fodder of some sort.
So, is there anything stopping me from clobbering what facebook sends to my device? I can use my own Javascript to redo the entire UI locally. For example, I hate the textareas and would rather edit posts and comments in my own WYSIWYG editor and then submit to Facebook. Does it care what I do in my browser? Is the registering of apps and cookies requested by Facebook the control it has over the client side? Is there any way to get around that? There are registered 3rd party apps that have a simple interface to Facebook. I even tried the mobile interface in my desktop browser. It has lots of problems, but it was close to what I really want.
I guess is that Facebook got worried about Social Fixer messing with its UI, even though it sucks, but there might be only a couple of places where Facebook snoops on your browser, when you submit posts and comments, and when it tries to run ads and media files on your browser. Can it be fooled? And what right does Facebook really have to control more than that? If you wanted to edit your comments in emacs, not a bad idea, why should Facebook really care? You can't upload text files to Facebook, only images, so because I hate the editing tools so much I had actually posted screenshots of text and rendered HTML files.
One reason for the problems Social Fixer faces is that writing on top of Facebook's design is like standing in quicksand. Every other day, some feature has been broken by Facebook engineering.
I have been using Social Fixer for accessibility. I prefer big light characters on a dark background. I heard from a NetTuts+ article on Facebook's design that it was shaped by Mark Zuckerberg's own color blindness. never mind that I have a cataract and low acuity and need almost the exact opposite adjustments. I hope Social Fixer doesn't go away. In fact this interface for Slash-Dot is hard on me, too. It would be nice to find a stylesheet that I could use with it.
I can hear the techie snobs out there gearing up to assert that anyone who would use Facebook is a luser, and 98% of what people do there is crap, even by your friends and family, but that is still OK unless you have a blog of your own on the Internet and all your family and friends know its address. "What is that address to your blog, again? I can never remember it." The idea of the global friends list is genius. The only problem is that the rest of Facebook just sucks, the UI, its inflexibility because of the monolithic CMS, the business model, the invasions of privacy, even the cheezy flashing ads; the same spam we have been ignornign on websites for years. I can't wait for investors to get tired of Facebook and cause the company to fail, and then someone can do the whole design much better. They can unbundle the UI from the CMS, maybe regionalize the data, The only core task is to maintain the global list of friends, the rest of it could be distributed.
If people get emotional and check their thinking skills at the door, then you are right. Attacking someone because of typos is a classic case of ad homenum attack. Criticize someone for one thing when you disagree with them for something else, or attack their character because you can't argue effectively to what they said that you disagree with. I know, poor vision leads to many types, which could be the cause for the exchange in this thread. What one has to learn to do is to stay on topic, especially if one has a reasoned argument for what one believes and is willing to use words to express it. I think that because many people are lazy and do not have developed reasoning and debate skills that they avoid discussions that they should be part of, especially if they wish to be citizens in a democratic state, or have aspirations to have their voice heard in some way. It may be that there are bullies who want to squash reasonable discussion because of some political agenda they have, or even because they are angry and don't have the wits to think through to a solution for their life's problems, but if we are being intimidated by such people into not thinking, then the Brown Shirts will not be far behind. It is our civic duty to discuss and debate if need be, and to demand that the people who represent us do the same with honestly. To avoid doing this because you dislike contention is a sign of weakness which some tyrant will exploit.
I think that the message is that other sites will follow in their stead, that is, they will move to disallow comments. I can't say that I will miss comments all that much, or at least they could make you do some work before you get to comment. If you want to comment, you have to show that you really want to make an effort. Moderation has become somewhat impractical, forcing people to make a real effort in some way would help matters greatly.
I propose that an anti-Twitter approach might work to eliminate much of the problem. This is to force people to write. This means that instead of an upper bound in the number of characters, there should be a lower bound, MORE than some number of characters. This might remove some of the moderation issues and a simple content analysis could remove the most obvious forms of abuse. But raising the bar to be able to comment by composing complete sentences and paragraphs would all but eliminate trolls and other causal abuses that are predicated on the Twitter and cell phone model. If you look at the abusers, the first marker is that the posts are all short. When people want to persuade and to show that they are thoughtful they take the time to write complete sentences where the thoughts follow one another in an orderly way, and they don't take shortcuts of informal fallacy.
This sounds to me like a smug counterphobic response to having to think, don't think because everything is a wash, whether of opinion, or of fact. Were that true Science would not be possible since no one would be able to discover decidable issues. "The fault, dear Brutus, in not in our stars, but in ourselves", meaning that the the analysis reflectes badly on the speaker, it is he who is ill-informed, and cannot reason to some kind of answer.
So, rather than avoiding things altogether, lets say that the washing out of issues is due to mass ignorance. If decision is no more than flipping a die then either the participants want to avoid responsibility altogether or they are just totally unaware, uneducated, as to the facts.
Public discussion and debate in America are at a dreadful low. I am not absolutely sure of the reason, but some of it is that the level of critical thinking seems to have dropped. What I see in most Internet reporting on science is two things, journalistic types missing the core of the story totally, as compared to either the abstract or press release, or the article when it is released and not behind a paywall, and perhaps 80% of replies on blogs that reveal gross ignorance or laziness in thinking. I am not merely talking about the Bible Thumpers who are opposed to Evolution, but I am talking about the general low processing quality of the responses. I do not read lots of relplies, but I have read some; it won't miss it if they are not allowed, but the poor journalism does worry me a great deal, not that even newspapers and magazines you pay for are uniformly better. I notice that some of the posts on Gizmoto seem to be written by snotty-nosed kids whose reaction is little more than "gee-wiz!" and not much more thought than that.
In the quote from the top, I note that the end Permian mass extinction at 251 MYA and the K/T extinction at 65 MYA are not on the list. The first is the largest of the five largest ME's The one at 415 is on that top list as the Ordovician ME, which was less significant than the K/T one. It is the one for which a gamma ray burst has been proposed, which is controversial.
I haven't read the article, yet, but questions I would have concern how they define what the sun's motion in orbit around our galaxy encounters. Is it the crossing of the plane of the galaxy where problem objects might be more numerous or is it true spiral arms? I note the clustering of two events in the Carboniferous at 322 and 300 MYA, there is a major magmatic event in Siberia linked to those events and the massive erruption of the Siberain Trapps at 251 MYA has been implicated in the Permo-Triasic extinction. The sun takes about 150 MY to orbit the galaxy, so the authors would have to convince me that 1) they know the spiral arm configuration all the way around the galaxy and 2) that is it stable over 400+ MY. I might doubt that.
This story may be due to astronomers and physcists speculating about geologic and biologic events where alternative explanations are more likely. The geologic record in sediments and fossils for these events records changes in biota and changes in the chemistry of rocks, almost no direct evidence of an astrophysical nature. The Ir anomaly in the KT boundary is the sole exception. I am not sure what they might offer as evidence to look for. I assume that they would say the the earth would be a risk of encountering a nearby supernovae or gamma ray event. Would nearby energetic events leave something like different isotope ratios that can't be explaned by climate change?
People who really believe in religion and other forms of spirituality are not threatened by science. The findings of science do not shake their belief in whatever unknowns they believe are out there.
Creationism and Intelligent Design, as used by many of the Christians asking for legislatures to pass laws for enforce their religion and theology, are rhetorical positions that defend the most vulnerable elements of their religion and social thinking, for most perhaps all of these people are also social conservatives. By being conservatives they believe that they are better than their fellows perhaps in holding the beliefs defended by the rhetorical positions, such as their reading of Scripture that is as subjective and open to dispute as they insist that Scripture in inerrant. This is the clue to the real motive behind such people. it is to win moral arguments by force and that motive is supported by arrogance and entitlement, much as supports the Tea Parties in the House of Representatives.
A rhetorical position is a delaying tactic, a distraction, to steer the discussion away from a weak justification for a prejudiced position. It might be necessary to defend school curriculum in Texas from this attack, but ultimately if the political will is to allow such a travistry in Texas and other states, such as mostly in the Midwest and South, we can react by moving the innovative parts of society out of those places that don't want it in order to accept the sham pushed by some of these Christian congregations, and on the general matter of politics, whether social conservativism or movements like the Tea Parties, other more enlightened places in the nation can seek to separate themselves from these backward or self-interested places, for energy policy and the self interest of carbon fuel producing interests in Texas, and other states, who have funded the extreme conservatives in these states and the Congress, can be removed from the commonwealth, or thse other places separate themselves from them.
Maybe the Russians and Chinese will corner the supply of Pu on earth and NASA and other space agencies will be forced to buy it from them to power their probes? Then we will have been probed by the Communists, yet again, and all due to our cheapscape policies. I think that Reds have figured out how to screw with Capitalism, just appear to the scarcity and miserly impulse in financial people. Beat them at their own game.
So, social science is not physical science as in the latter the perceptions of the observers changes the outcome, not the same as quantum physics. "Social Standing" is but a perception, and so a little bad press is much like mass, only if it is antimatter, it goes poof when it interacts with real matter and a lot of energy is generated even though it lacks substance. Any one checked on the reputation of S&P or Moody's lately?
It might help you to believe in unintended consequences and the failure of conspiracies e.g. the financial system. People really ARE idiots and the more so as it concerns money and wealth, and economics has the worst track record at predicting anything other than averages over long periods of time, much longer than the average planning cycle and even longer than most careers last and approaching human life-times. So, not to worry, trust to fate, and to external forces that people are bad at fore seeing and take a healthy does of both skepticism and humility.
'Where they operate in narrower, less competitive markets — like where they’ve become an Internet service provider, for example — they abandon those commitments.' Like where, give examples ...
OK, despite Google Docs and the ability to host web pages on Google if you have a Gmail account, the service contains incumbrances that violate standards such as web standards. You cannot upload HTML and CSS to their web host and expect it to run. I accept their effort to make web authorship easy for people who can't hand code their HTML and CSS, but if you wanted that much control over your web pages, even just static web pages, then what Google offers is not a full hosting service, not by a long shot, and it favors their products, some of which are broken, but it misrepresents what it is. It is not open hosting, but a closed document system.
Google Books is broken, terribly broken. It is laughable how broken it is. A few months ago I looked for and found free sheet music, public domain music scanned and available as is in "free", but in point of fact the resource was useless, obstructed. Google advertises that free books can be downloaded as PDFs. In fact generating PDFs has never worked, and the viewer is broken and not usable for following music from a recording or for reading it at the piano. It is useless.
Listen to corporate slogans as their negations. "Do no Evil" sets a pretty high standard, when in fact "Do some evil" is closer to the mark and even though Google's defenders rush out to say that it doesn't do as much evil as other corporations is only a comparative statement about the overpowering urge to do evil. So Google's slogan, like most other such slogans is that they are silly efforts to conceal exactly what they are doing, but most shadow, that is, disavow, when doing that is an essential part of their existence.
So what is evil about Google? Sponsered links appearing on search pages, more of them, and often repeated on every page, so that a page containing about 20 hits now have about 5 sponsored links that repeat. In Google Books, doing the implementation of the service so poorly that it is basac;ly a tease; the intent was never to provide access to books, not even free books, but to make the experience so bad that you would go and pay for the copyright version, anyway. Provide a closed document system that porports to meet cloud document needs, but into which you can'r really import or export content. It is a captive market stretegy, which might be justified in a purely business sense, but we don't have to buy into it, do we? I was able to diagnose this pretty quickly and I have kept my investment very small, because once there, my stuff isn't mine.
Better, get BSD for free, run on hardware that costs 1/3 what Mac costs and compile to your heart's content, or not, and you'd still have most of the functionality of OS X, which you pay Apple to run anyway.
....nailed on a number of scores.
As in so many cases dealing with a free or subsidized service, remember that users != customers, and it will become clear why user complaints aren't really important to the company.
This lesson can be generalized.
Oh, that is far too pat, and I wonder at people who say pat things at all. Surely to analyze exceptions to the rule teach us more about reality than just reinforcing belief in the rule. So is discounting the exceptions just a counterphobic response to reality?
So, the exceptions to this generality are that people use services free or not for doing things, and even though the reason a service is free or not is not related directly to their use of it doesn't mean that they can't be as passionate about what they use it for if they paid. An example, and why Face Book contributes to mass mental illness, is that ordinary non-technical people used to the telephone or e-mail forget that Face Book is not a direct private interpersonal conversation. They forget that it is public and asynchronous and that non-human agents inject content into their experience. This confuses lots of people and it has caused interpersonal disasters. Just wait until come jury finds Face Book at fault for causing some liability or contributing to crime. This is bound to happen and because of some neglect that reasonable people know how to deal with. It is hard for a bunch of techies on this blog to comprehend the basic misunderstanding the idea of Face Book and the UI design leads to. It might be intentional, catch people off guard in emotional turmoil with targeted ads. It is even hard to distinguish between chat, which is live, and coments which are not. Zuckerberg says he is trying to keep the interface simple, but he may be exposing his company to liability by confusing contexts. I am rooting against him, BTW. I'd love to see FB get mailed on a number of scores, for being deceptive about privacy and preferences, and for not supporting contextual replies, among others.
Sounds plausable, but it is hardly the end of the story, for regardless of nice pat business models and ruthless manageement decision making, what makes business sense in a narrow self-interested way is not the last word. If someone can find a way to seal from or do it better they will, and if investors realize that what FB has done is unnecessarily expensive they will pull their money out. Right now it costs advertisers so much to get seen on Face Book, There is nothing to stop that from changing and beyond the expectations of FB or its investors and customers. Shams that abuse the users for seeming psychological and business reasons, exploiting users, ultimately create bad will, which is what has been happening for some time. It wouldn't take much of a change to destroy the status quo, which is to say that if someone advised me to invest in FB, I'd laugh at them and then chide them for not seeing anything better in the economy than that to risk my money on.
Yes, FB can set the rules, and lock out alternatives to its UI, but ultimately at its own risk. There is enough discontent with FB's design decisions that its over controlling its property carries risks. For one, it is not impossible to thwart their design. Even their own SDK allows third parties to build stand alone apps to post to a page. So if their javascript is malicious WRT spamming, what is to stop the local client from hacking what it gets from FB? First, it is already possible to run jQuery with FB SDK, FB has a page that shows you how. So in an app, you would do something quite simple and hide the right panel. The difficulty might be cookies FB demands from clients, but processing cookies can expose their servers to performance hits, so the cat and mouse game could eventually cost them big time.
Despite the investment, the stock price is as high as it has ever been, that may reveal the gullibility of investors, who are the weakest link in a capitalist system, it might dawn on some of them eventually that FB's Big Data model isn't worth the cost and the downside in terms of degraded user experience and that the inflexibility it creates is unnecessary. The result could be that the CMS and UI could be unbundled and the social medium run much cheaper and with fer less revenue pressure. Facebook could serve its central function as the global friends' list and spin off regional CMS and thrid party UI alternatives.
I understand the urge to protect an investment with an iron fist, but I also note the success of Creative Destruction caused when investors realize that they can get more bang at less up-front cost and the same results for much less, and fix some of the deficiencies for customers and users in the process. Yes, FB had to satisfy its investors, but it doesn't have to abuse its users and it doesn't have to be guarenteed the survival of its business model. I wish that investors would de-fund FB, so someone can write a better solution.