The article abstract doesn't reveal how sudden the sea (eustatic) level change was, only dating it to a wide interval of time. Other research on more recent climate change gives time scales of decades to a couple of centuries of large change. 5 MYA Pliocene geography was different than now. The land bridge connecting North and South America hadn't fully formed yet and so the warm equatorial current could get into the Eastern Pacific. The dynamics of cooling would be different although the layout of continents was well on its way to cooling the global climate overall. 20 M or about 60 feet of sudden eustatic sea level rise would drown most cities on the coasts of the world. If this happens suddenly, within a couple of decades, the effects would be very hard on us.
Isn't this the same effect as the trouble the financial markets and investment banks, are still in, that caused the Great recession of 2008? Too much trust in "quants"; too much trust in mysterious mathematical formulas no one looked at critically, to didn't have the knowledge to. Just as you can lie with Statistics you can lie with math and for the same reason. Math can fail on faulty assumptions and faulty reasoning. Just as ignoring rare outcomes doesn't make them go away, which was why the banks almost crashed because of mortgage risk, and are still vulnerable to the same errors, others can fail if they use analytics unwisely as well.
I know how to make Face Book dirt cheap and free of ads. Get rid of the expensive backend which is only there for the benefit of advertizers, distribute it regionally with outler access, and make the friends's list the only global thing. Face Book as the global entity would be much cheaper to run and the small regional CMS much less in need of costly support. To punish free users of the current model with ads that you have to pay not to see is just another businessman scam. If the model is to reduce the cost of running a social media service, then do away with the global CMS.
The global CMS is why the UI for Face Book is so crappy and inflexible. The impetus for its design is not ease of use by users but access from FB's investors to the "privacy", not, of users. Do away with the problem by running the whole thing more cheaply and by doing away with the investors, or the need for expensive investors. Face Book doesn't need to be as capitalized as it is, another business scam. It isn't as local as a blog, even though most blogs have a better UI now, and you and I don't care that its backend can support more than 1 billion users when you and I only care about a few hundred at most and only three or four at a time. Do away with it, it is unnecessary. Shortly its investors will figure this all out and leave. Then it can be done at a better scale and for cheap. No need for a Premium service.
In fact the true fault might lay with business cutting corners for profit and causing nutritional degredation of products, if not outright introducing toxic additives.
And supplements are also just another profit scheme as well, and the problem is that they might be made in forms that the body is not well adapted to use, or it might be the wrong form or even a dangerous form of the supplement, vitamin or nutrient.
In addition, most people assume that the FDA is there to protect them against fraud and remedies that lack efficacy or pose unforeseen risks, but it can't do so. The reason is that it is underfunded, intentionally so, by Congress to enforce law designed to protect consumers, and like most agencies of the Federal government, it has a built in conflict of interest that either the business people have too much direct access to push their agenda, and the agency is charged with both regulating them and promoting the interest of the industry it regulates. Most cabinet level agencies of the government have this flaw and the problem gets worse when the special business interests have greater access to the Congress, like they do at the present time.
And so it is fashionable in some corners of society to blame the problem of abuse on individuals, as though we have conscious free choice as it that was a faculty granted us by the Bill of Rights. But the world we live in is one of subtle subliminal messages skillfully designed by the advertizing and public relations departments of corporations that do business here and also their trade and lobbying organizations. These deceive and mislead otherwise sapient beings who think they are the masters of their own decisions, and the perpertrators of the propaganda know otherwise. People who push the myth of responsibility and free conscious choice of consumers in such an environments are either naive or marketers and propagandists who know what they are doing.
The example that I love to describe, because it is so deceptive and cynical, is the American Beverage Council campaign to defeat state and local inatives for limit sugar in soft drinks, really high fructose corn syrup, which is a major contribuiter to obesity and diabetes. I have seen two ads, one is less objectionable and claims that the beverage industry is trying to change what it does to address the concern, but the second one toutes the myth that consumers have conscious free choice and that they are equipped to decide what to buy and to not have government interferrence. Sounds good, untill you realize that the beverage industry has the upper hand in the propaganda war and can create subliminal messages that contradict rational health concerns. They do this for the same reason every business resists changes, They are locked into their chosen business model for a time, that includes the price of sweetener, and the number of people who get sick and who die as a result is a risk of continuing to do business until the business model can be changed,
The naive, "responsible" model of human choice, that we are aware of everything we decide, parallels the equally naive Christian model of morality in which we face a conscious choice as compared to the standard given us via upbringing with a moral authority. It is "rationalistic" and conscious, which is why the Brave New World, not of drugs, but of the unconscious is really still very frightening to some people. They despirately want to believe that the subliminal and unconscious don't apply to them, or they might push the myth because they want to use it to control others in turn. That is what the Beverage Consul ads are about.
I have a special case. I have only one eye with low acuity and it is developing a cataract. I like e-books because I can control the zoom, that includes HTML and PDF.
I like e-books for tech, especially for coding, because I can cut and paste code directly into a file or interpreter. Having poor vision makes this easier than typing especially when I do not have the sources in an archive from the publisher.
Sheet music is possibly easier to read on a large display, but the page controls for most readers, especially for PDF are not optimized for this application. Following a recording with a full score is problematic at any useful resolution. Using piano music is easier. It is possible to read piano music at the music keyboard from a large display and the size is often better than for the printed original.
Going back to Hoyle and Fowler's famous paper of 1956 on nucleosynthesis in stars, the "heavy" elements, those heavier than Iron, needed to have some different process than can be run in ordinary stars to create them. This "r" process for rapid neutron capture builds necuiii greater then about mass of 60. For a long time the principle mechanism was thought to be nova and supernova explosions. I gather that the primary article is suggesting gamma ray bursts within our galaxy and before 4.6 BYA as the source for most of the heavy elements in our solar system, more precisely, the terrestrial and some meteoric abundances. It is possible that when galactic black holes have lots of matter to consume forming quasars, that the energy is high enough in the ejected matter in their polar jets, note M87 in Virgo, that heavy element synthesis is possible and at a greater efficiency than in supernovas. The problem with GRBs is that they must be pretty rare in one galaxy and so to cite them as a major contributor tp heavy element synthesis might be problematic when more common but lower energy alternatives might be available.
I don't know if heavy element spectra have been detected in quasar jets, or if they are sen in the light echos from GRBs. It may be that the energies are too high. Too much radiation and neutron flus would photodisintegrate heavy atoms. The flux would have to be just right.
Man do I agree with you. 'F*ck" whether it is followed by "You" or some other object, is the most useless response ever, and it peppers public discourse everywhere. It is the cancer that is destroying the country, just as using the F-word as every orther word in a sentence degrades the conversation it is part of. So why even open your mouth?
There are many people. it seems mostly with penises, who would have it no other way, and I am tired of them and wish they would go live somewhere else, or change their tunes. What I am realizing is that it is revealing a most unmanly cowardice, a fear, to make the effort to argue to find solutions to problems. It is a dismissal not even due to arrogance and bigotry, but of nothing between the ears, as if growing up offered no useful experience or knowledge. So shut up and stop wasting our time unless you can figure out how to put two or three thought in a sequence coherently.
The attention is selective here, just like the weekly M = 7 quakes that occur every week or so around the world that nobody mentions because they happen in unpopulated places. Most quakes happen on plate margins, and although I am not denying any of the findings of the article, the fact is nothing new. Human activities do cause events that are recorded in the Richter range of M = 1 to M = 5, but the number and range of events caused by geologic processes is much more significant.
Still, it is true that pumping fluids into and out of porous rocks can cause events on significantly correlated time scales. Explosions of all types including those for mining can also cause events, Seimographs are a significant tool for monitoring nuclear tests, especially of they are illegal and secret. North Korea's tests were detected very quickly by USGS as would any Iran might conduct.
Yes, and you get what you pay for, half-assed results IMHO. Agile is just a marketing and political ploy, designed to make managers look good. It is bogus. Results still depended on implementation and keeping feature bloat low. I would give huge push back even so far as to find the door or cause the asshole calling the shots to find the door. I wish more assholes were pooped out of some of these organizations, especially the MBAs and financial types, flesh 'em down the tubes.
The article cited in the press release is behind a paywall, and the abstract for it isn't even available.
If research is funded by public funds, journals should make an e-copy available for free. Journals should not be able to hide research, especially that funded by a government, for profit. Even the need to find reviewers does not justify that they get to charge for access, at least ot an e-copy. IMHO.
What the article probably argues for is that correlation of units on Antarctica, and Australia are well correlated. The number of linkages for India seem to be fewer, but other geologic features elucidate that history pretty will, It begins about 165 MYA, but this latest reconstruction dates the split of the rest as much more recent, about 35 MYA. I assule that the magnetic anomaloies in the sea floor shown in the video are well dated, but the innovation is the correlation of terraines. Before there was more uncertaintly of how the pieces we have today were connected. Now that picture might be much more constrained, as the video suggests. We will have to wait and see if the conclusions hold up. I haven't tried to get to the journal article, I expect it to be behind a paywall, and hence not available for detailed reading. All I expect to see is the abstract.
If you want terrorism to stop, then just don't participate in it.
The same exact thing applies to NSA and all other government terrorist organisations.
But waidaminit, if your business is fighting terrorism, you don't want it to go away, you stop some of it but you make more of it too, that is job security.
Could this be but a special case of the wider phenomenon of children being forced to move back in with their parents because the economy doesn't give them enough resources to make it on their own? Couple that with stigma and you get recluses, albeit with Internet access. It is possible to be physically cloistered and yet have a wide electronic social network that includes job opportunities. These are not working out, perhaps.
A figure that I heard for the U.S. is that there are several million people in their 20's who have been forced to move back in with their parents. This is perhaps the best metric for how the economy is NOT working.
Of course I know what vi is. The machines I work on typically have cygwin installed because I can do things faster even in windows with Unix command line utilities.
Of course the systems I have bought from retail have all had Windows installed, before I installed a Linux on them, I have installed cygwin and usually with X11 and then Gnu-emacs. Even though I worry about running Windows because of security problems, if it is what I had to use, even for a short time, I install cygwin on it just to have a familiar POSIX set of tools, and when I get annoyed with the clunky Windows tools I open an xterm and use familiar *NIX commands.
I am not an EMACS user. This was a career decision made long ago. If it's Unix, it has vi. It almost certainly doesn't have EMACS. And I didn't feel like carrying a tape everywhere with me.
I have long since avoided editor flame wars. It is useless to criticize people for their choice of either vi or emacs, You are right, the choice is often a matter of personal history, in fact my first exposure to *NIX editing was ed(1) and then(ex). I did system admin. and you are quite correct that vi was much more likely to be available than emacs, although today's systems having access to more ram, it is no longer much of an issue, even in an entirely ram based system. There are many people who are perfectly fine with using vi alone for system admin and development. Initially, I had trouble with the old modes of vi, but that is no longer an issue in vim.
Or, there used to be a way to use vi in line mode, and I'm ok with that too.
There was a "mode" for ex, the line editor form underlying vi. You enter modes by typing the colon so ":ex" put you in line editor mode from vi. In the
case of a Solaris system that wouldn't boot into full-screen mode, I had to edit some system file using this to get the system to come up fullly. Emacs wouldn't work and neither would vi full-screen mode.
I need to check out vim, which is much more like emacs in that it is more modesless, you no longer have to go into and exit insert mode. I would want to see if vim supports the:ex mode or not.
I don't game. It's natural to assume that "I need Windows" means "I have resource intensive games that only run on Windows" but that's not always the case. In my particular case, I use certain (rather expensive) Adobe products intensively. I know there are open source products that run on Linux and purport to do the same thing, but they don't really, yet. (I check every now and then.) And no, I don't want to screw around with Wine just to be able to say that I'm Windows Free. Using Win7 is not exactly like a date with Kate Upton, (It's more like hammering a nail with a 55 gallon drum) but in certain areas it does get the job done.
I've often said that the moment certain products are ported natively to Android or Linux, I'll dump winders and never look back. I still stand by that.
If Microsoft is aced out of the tablet market, Windows will not be able to keep market share in moving to new technology, it may retain its presence on desktops, but the incentives will be far greater for software companies like Adobe to port the big applications to new devices even if they all run something derived from Linux. Adobe has already done this for subsets of its Photoshop functionality and you are right that Gimp and other open source alternatives are playing catch up. People may say the same thing about MS Office vs. LibreOffice, in fact porting the former to all these new devices might be what keeps Microsoft from going out of business. To give perspective, pundits had said that Microsoft was going to kill UNIX and then Linux, partly because they assumed that if you paid for a proprietary product it has to be better engineered or at least you were buying into a captive market. Those predictions are failing because Open Source while far fro
Of course, I am not discounting your bad experience. The outcome depends on the luck of the draw. One can have either good or bad experiences and that may have to do with how good the management understands how people can work together. Since I have had good and bad coworkers and managers the proposition is dicey,
Now, is your decision to answer the problem of others controlling you by moving into management just puting you in the position to make other people's lives miserable in turn? Promoting people into management just because they are senior and were team players while being managed is no assurance that they are decent managers in turn. In fact, good management requires skills that might be in short supply if you were concentrated on details of your skill.
I have known others who were far worse in that they passed through quasi technical roles in order to get enough power to be able to smooze with the senior management; these were image conscious and narcissistic types, more concerned with themselves and willing to pass blame for whatever mistakes happened on their watch down the chain of command. They were often Hatchet Men. I have come across a couple of these. They deserve our worst.
Communication skills never go out of style and are always in demand.
I can find gazillions of Java or C or Perl or PHP programmers. Heck, I'm sure I can even dig up quite a few PL/I, PL/X, IBM mainframe Assembly or JCL slingers.
But find me that one programmer who can communicate technically to a team of 10-20 programmers and be able to communicate in plain English or in the business language to management and customers and he or she will be a keeper for a long time.
Really now, You want it all, to keep all the balls in the air and to be everything to everyone, and you project that on others. Well good, but you are likely to get both a half-assed marketing team and a bunch of half-witted programmers. There is a reason for the divide between managers, marketers, and techies. It is because people come is different shapes and sizes in the way they think and what they are best at. The theory of personality is a partition theory. That means that being strong in one trait makes you weak in some other. Perfectly balanced people are either jack's of all trades who are proficient in none or frauds. They have their place, but I know of no profession, medicine and some sciences, that don't demand high levels of proficiency and concentration on detail, and that makes it hard to be a generalist and speak to very different groups of people. What usually happens is frustration. A good communicator who can adapt to a diverse audience is rare. Go listen to the on-line lectures, videos on You Tube, from the experts from our best Universities and ask yourself how many fit that criterion. It turns out very few do, and yet would you fire them from their jobs? I hope not.
People who are outer-directed, who enjoy pressing the flesh and smoozing, just don't get this, and in general many people fall into the flaw that they don't appreciate that others are different from themselves and cannot be changed to be like themselves, so there is continual misunderstanding between otherwise smart people who can't seem to understand that minds work differently between people. The best managers know this and direct people into their strengths, but most people I've met do not have a clue, and especially people who have been put into management positions because of ambition.
Actually, I had an experience with pair programming that thrills me to this day. The person I remember with fondness because he was generous to me as a mentor would be. The time frame was when object programming was just being accepted. Java didn't exist and C++ may have been around but possibly the compilers were not available or too expensive for our project. It was around 1987 or so. We had Sun4's and Sparcs, running probably Solaris 2.4, and Sun's C compiler. What we did was to write a library with function pointers so that we could encapsulate methods and classes the same way you do in C++, but the discipline was all our's in ANSI C, so we had structs and pointers. I was able to act as a sounding board and tester, so I saw the code and used it. Maybe the application was a low memory embedded system in which all we had was the C-compiler for a dedicated CPU, I don't remember, so maybe we developed on Solaris to cross compile for some other hardware. Anyway the person I was working with had been diagnosed with cancer, and was in remission, but I heard maybe two years later that he had died, but the memory of how well our pair programming effort went stays with me.
I didn't read anything in the article that distinguished programmers for other type of workers. They might be more sensitive to being asked to be "flexible", meaning the mgr says "Do it this way, because I said so.". The issue is the amount of time and effort it takes to master new tools on short notice, and that is related to the lack of generality and ease of use of tools in an industry that has a ways to mature. Managers often either don't understand the effort it takes to become skilled, because they often haven't achieved that level of skill, or they don't care, looking up the chain of command for recognition rather than respecting the level of expertise they have working for them. This is not really all that unique to programmers. All kind of creatives have faced this problem over recorded history.
I had been a programmer of legacy languages and scripting tools and was suddenly asked to support java and a java IDE under development. I balked, and I didn't come to the reason why until much later. It wasn't that I could't learn java, but due to the fact that the language is very wordy and the libraries clunky and the stream of debugging data I would have to deal with is very hard on a visually impaired person. I have low acuity in only one eye, blind in the other, all I have is about 20/70, and the quality of the data coming out of the development version of the software I was asked to support was so compact and busy that it was nearly impossible for me to read. It wasn't just a matter solved by large fonts, but the use of camel text in a very cramped, poorly formatted, dump was very difficult.
A visually impaired system administrator I met later. flat out asserted that java was not accessible. This is quite apart from the complexity of class libraries, which is daunting on its own. I think that most programmers would agree today that java is well past its prime with better languages around. Even javascript, by being able to encapsulate frameworks so well, and languages like python are superior. Had I been aware of the disadvantage created for me at the time by that manager's decision, I would have sued the company under the ADA. In retrospect, I have a clear case. I understand that lots of shops have a legacy investment in java and must maintain java code. It is still widely used, but for me it is not a happy environment to work in. If I choose to get snarky about it I could say that like PL/1, Java is not a better C, K&R had a wonderful simplicity and the standard C library was concise, but I could call java "security through obvescation" which is why it was so appealing to corporate IT departments, but I am only speaking for myself and if people use it, fine, but it is not for me.
So people invent names, and astronomers have traditions for naming solar system objects, so to name the moons for mythological cohorts of the Roman God Pluto is conventional. Vulcan is far more removed from the convention and some newer even fashionable idea was probably rejected because it doesn't fit the tradition, and as it is the AIU that makes the agreements between astronomers. If you are really incensed you can use Pluto I, II, III, IV, etc.
It is odd that Samiulsen would see cyber crime as the biggest threat of the Internet when he has had a front row seat to its biggest negative impact on economics, strategic planning and markets. By allowing for the speedup of human processes, the Internet has taken the prudence and "sleep on it" caution out of business. This started back around 1990 when because of the instantaneous flow of information about finance, stock performance, and business intelligence, long term planning was abandoned. Companies went to much more short-term thinking as investors demanded shorter time scales for ROI. This has led to more volitility and instability and has introduced an impulsive push to the conduct of business, most obvious in problems with program trading and with the impact of glitches in markets caused by events like the AP-Twitter Hoax. If the threat is cyber crime, that is already magnified by the rapidity of trading. The abuses in finance and banking that led to the Crash of 2008 haven't been fixed, and many people think that history would repeat itself in a few years. If I could make a rule, it would be that there had to be a 30 second delay on any electronic trade in the markets, and even a cap on the size of these trades in value.
People overgeneralize about what is needed, and they often do so according to the fixations of their own personality type. Those fixations often also provide what part of the elephant they do well, as in we are all blind, but to project that on others, especially if you are a hiring manager is tentamont to discrimination as much as having too may sales types and too few engineers, geeks, nerds, might be detramental to your business.
I wanted to raise the awareness of these differences and have experienced directly the harm ignoring them can do, especially at the hands of a modestly sociopathic or narcissistic manager. These are often the "3" types more concerned with the higher-up's and their image, and blaming the people they manage for their shortcomings. Such people shouldn't be allowed to manage, yet they are common in America.
I've said this before, but the purpose of computers is *not* to run the OS. It's to run applications. The OS is not an application.
Until the application or GUI breaks in some way and you need to find out what is beneath the surface. Up until the past few Windows releases, you got little
help from the OS to troubleshoot failures and if you had the sluthing skills to use what little was there, you could probably have used *nix command line tools and the log files to do *nix system administrationm, anyway.
Applications on *nix in a GUI are often based on command-line versions that have options removed, simplified, so they can be easily used from the GUI, and along with that trend developers aren't maintaining man pages when they should because they think that unless the documentation is in a web page users wouldn't dare open up a terminal and start issuing CLI commands. I'll bet that most Mac OS users have never opened terminal and read man pages even though there is a wealth of information there that they could use to fine-tune and diagnose their systems, writing bash scripts if they need to. My son came to me one day asking about python on Mac OS X. He knew it was there but was unsure how to use it. I opened terminal, looked at the man page and ran the interpreter for him, and then I showed him how to write source documents, compile and execute them.
Of course I'm not suggesting that we turn back the clock 35 years and go back to glass TTYs and the shell, but those powerful UNIX systems often ran in less than a MB of ram and were no bigger than 10 MB. Last year I ran then current Linux releases on a system with.75 gig of ram and no harddrive. Current Linices with GUI will run live off the DVD on machines that ran Win XP but are too small to run any newer Windows versions, and they boot much faster.
There are still times when the shell is better than a GUI app, and I often revert to emacs in a terminal to edit files because I know how to use it and it is reliable and non intrusive in ways that some newer GUI based editors and IDEs are. What I like about *nix systems is that the low-level complexity is really just below the surface and the number of years it has been tested and debugged is a hedge against the failures possible with new and not time-tested GUIs like Unity. So empire builders can mess up the interface as much as they wish, a huge win is to leave the legacy alone and give me access to the older stuff.
I'll grant you that if your use of computers is to play games that your generalization might hold, but it doesn't take much in the way of needing to get something done, such as writing a post or a web page before more than the universe of apps available from a particular GUI comes into play. Not all that many years ago I was able to rescue a system that wouldn't boot into its GUI and in fact it wouldn't run full screen text editor, such as vi. I had to go all the way back to my knowledge of the single line editing commands of ex, which I had used many years before, to edit one of the system files to bring the system back. You do know what vi is ( e.g.vim) and that there is a line editor mode buried inside it, (:ex). That is what I was forced to use on that occasion.
Slashdot Mirror
The article abstract doesn't reveal how sudden the sea (eustatic) level change was, only dating it to a wide interval of time. Other research on more recent climate change gives time scales of decades to a couple of centuries of large change. 5 MYA Pliocene geography was different than now. The land bridge connecting North and South America hadn't fully formed yet and so the warm equatorial current could get into the Eastern Pacific. The dynamics of cooling would be different although the layout of continents was well on its way to cooling the global climate overall. 20 M or about 60 feet of sudden eustatic sea level rise would drown most cities on the coasts of the world. If this happens suddenly, within a couple of decades, the effects would be very hard on us.
Isn't this the same effect as the trouble the financial markets and investment banks, are still in, that caused the Great recession of 2008? Too much trust in "quants"; too much trust in mysterious mathematical formulas no one looked at critically, to didn't have the knowledge to. Just as you can lie with Statistics you can lie with math and for the same reason. Math can fail on faulty assumptions and faulty reasoning. Just as ignoring rare outcomes doesn't make them go away, which was why the banks almost crashed because of mortgage risk, and are still vulnerable to the same errors, others can fail if they use analytics unwisely as well.
I know how to make Face Book dirt cheap and free of ads. Get rid of the expensive backend which is only there for the benefit of advertizers, distribute it regionally with outler access, and make the friends's list the only global thing. Face Book as the global entity would be much cheaper to run and the small regional CMS much less in need of costly support. To punish free users of the current model with ads that you have to pay not to see is just another businessman scam. If the model is to reduce the cost of running a social media service, then do away with the global CMS.
The global CMS is why the UI for Face Book is so crappy and inflexible. The impetus for its design is not ease of use by users but access from FB's investors to the "privacy", not, of users. Do away with the problem by running the whole thing more cheaply and by doing away with the investors, or the need for expensive investors. Face Book doesn't need to be as capitalized as it is, another business scam. It isn't as local as a blog, even though most blogs have a better UI now, and you and I don't care that its backend can support more than 1 billion users when you and I only care about a few hundred at most and only three or four at a time. Do away with it, it is unnecessary. Shortly its investors will figure this all out and leave. Then it can be done at a better scale and for cheap. No need for a Premium service.
In fact the true fault might lay with business cutting corners for profit and causing nutritional degredation of products, if not outright introducing toxic additives.
And supplements are also just another profit scheme as well, and the problem is that they might be made in forms that the body is not well adapted to use, or it might be the wrong form or even a dangerous form of the supplement, vitamin or nutrient.
In addition, most people assume that the FDA is there to protect them against fraud and remedies that lack efficacy or pose unforeseen risks, but it can't do so. The reason is that it is underfunded, intentionally so, by Congress to enforce law designed to protect consumers, and like most agencies of the Federal government, it has a built in conflict of interest that either the business people have too much direct access to push their agenda, and the agency is charged with both regulating them and promoting the interest of the industry it regulates. Most cabinet level agencies of the government have this flaw and the problem gets worse when the special business interests have greater access to the Congress, like they do at the present time.
And so it is fashionable in some corners of society to blame the problem of abuse on individuals, as though we have conscious free choice as it that was a faculty granted us by the Bill of Rights. But the world we live in is one of subtle subliminal messages skillfully designed by the advertizing and public relations departments of corporations that do business here and also their trade and lobbying organizations. These deceive and mislead otherwise sapient beings who think they are the masters of their own decisions, and the perpertrators of the propaganda know otherwise. People who push the myth of responsibility and free conscious choice of consumers in such an environments are either naive or marketers and propagandists who know what they are doing.
The example that I love to describe, because it is so deceptive and cynical, is the American Beverage Council campaign to defeat state and local inatives for limit sugar in soft drinks, really high fructose corn syrup, which is a major contribuiter to obesity and diabetes. I have seen two ads, one is less objectionable and claims that the beverage industry is trying to change what it does to address the concern, but the second one toutes the myth that consumers have conscious free choice and that they are equipped to decide what to buy and to not have government interferrence. Sounds good, untill you realize that the beverage industry has the upper hand in the propaganda war and can create subliminal messages that contradict rational health concerns. They do this for the same reason every business resists changes, They are locked into their chosen business model for a time, that includes the price of sweetener, and the number of people who get sick and who die as a result is a risk of continuing to do business until the business model can be changed,
The naive, "responsible" model of human choice, that we are aware of everything we decide, parallels the equally naive Christian model of morality in which we face a conscious choice as compared to the standard given us via upbringing with a moral authority. It is "rationalistic" and conscious, which is why the Brave New World, not of drugs, but of the unconscious is really still very frightening to some people. They despirately want to believe that the subliminal and unconscious don't apply to them, or they might push the myth because they want to use it to control others in turn. That is what the Beverage Consul ads are about.
I have a special case. I have only one eye with low acuity and it is developing a cataract. I like e-books because I can control the zoom, that includes HTML and PDF.
I like e-books for tech, especially for coding, because I can cut and paste code directly into a file or interpreter. Having poor vision makes this easier than typing especially when I do not have the sources in an archive from the publisher.
Sheet music is possibly easier to read on a large display, but the page controls for most readers, especially for PDF are not optimized for this application. Following a recording with a full score is problematic at any useful resolution. Using piano music is easier. It is possible to read piano music at the music keyboard from a large display and the size is often better than for the printed original.
Hmm, are you as concerned for the moral lapse as that he got caught for using technology stupidly? I hope the first.
Going back to Hoyle and Fowler's famous paper of 1956 on nucleosynthesis in stars, the "heavy" elements, those heavier than Iron, needed to have some different process than can be run in ordinary stars to create them. This "r" process for rapid neutron capture builds necuiii greater then about mass of 60. For a long time the principle mechanism was thought to be nova and supernova explosions. I gather that the primary article is suggesting gamma ray bursts within our galaxy and before 4.6 BYA as the source for most of the heavy elements in our solar system, more precisely, the terrestrial and some meteoric abundances. It is possible that when galactic black holes have lots of matter to consume forming quasars, that the energy is high enough in the ejected matter in their polar jets, note M87 in Virgo, that heavy element synthesis is possible and at a greater efficiency than in supernovas. The problem with GRBs is that they must be pretty rare in one galaxy and so to cite them as a major contributor tp heavy element synthesis might be problematic when more common but lower energy alternatives might be available.
I don't know if heavy element spectra have been detected in quasar jets, or if they are sen in the light echos from GRBs. It may be that the energies are too high. Too much radiation and neutron flus would photodisintegrate heavy atoms. The flux would have to be just right.
Is it really owned by Disney? ABC is, and that is bad.
Man do I agree with you. 'F*ck" whether it is followed by "You" or some other object, is the most useless response ever, and it peppers public discourse everywhere. It is the cancer that is destroying the country, just as using the F-word as every orther word in a sentence degrades the conversation it is part of. So why even open your mouth?
There are many people. it seems mostly with penises, who would have it no other way, and I am tired of them and wish they would go live somewhere else, or change their tunes. What I am realizing is that it is revealing a most unmanly cowardice, a fear, to make the effort to argue to find solutions to problems. It is a dismissal not even due to arrogance and bigotry, but of nothing between the ears, as if growing up offered no useful experience or knowledge. So shut up and stop wasting our time unless you can figure out how to put two or three thought in a sequence coherently.
Yes, you may be right. The thing to be communicates is "I don't take you seriously, and never will." That is devistating.
The attention is selective here, just like the weekly M = 7 quakes that occur every week or so around the world that nobody mentions because they happen in unpopulated places. Most quakes happen on plate margins, and although I am not denying any of the findings of the article, the fact is nothing new. Human activities do cause events that are recorded in the Richter range of M = 1 to M = 5, but the number and range of events caused by geologic processes is much more significant.
Still, it is true that pumping fluids into and out of porous rocks can cause events on significantly correlated time scales. Explosions of all types including those for mining can also cause events, Seimographs are a significant tool for monitoring nuclear tests, especially of they are illegal and secret. North Korea's tests were detected very quickly by USGS as would any Iran might conduct.
Yes, and you get what you pay for, half-assed results IMHO. Agile is just a marketing and political ploy, designed to make managers look good. It is bogus. Results still depended on implementation and keeping feature bloat low. I would give huge push back even so far as to find the door or cause the asshole calling the shots to find the door. I wish more assholes were pooped out of some of these organizations, especially the MBAs and financial types, flesh 'em down the tubes.
The article cited in the press release is behind a paywall, and the abstract for it isn't even available.
If research is funded by public funds, journals should make an e-copy available for free. Journals should not be able to hide research, especially that funded by a government, for profit. Even the need to find reviewers does not justify that they get to charge for access, at least ot an e-copy. IMHO.
The real result is here linked from the press release page. There is a citation to the refereed journal in the pressrelease.
http://vimeo.com/68311221
What the article probably argues for is that correlation of units on Antarctica, and Australia are well correlated. The number of linkages for India seem to be fewer, but other geologic features elucidate that history pretty will, It begins about 165 MYA, but this latest reconstruction dates the split of the rest as much more recent, about 35 MYA. I assule that the magnetic anomaloies in the sea floor shown in the video are well dated, but the innovation is the correlation of terraines. Before there was more uncertaintly of how the pieces we have today were connected. Now that picture might be much more constrained, as the video suggests. We will have to wait and see if the conclusions hold up. I haven't tried to get to the journal article, I expect it to be behind a paywall, and hence not available for detailed reading. All I expect to see is the abstract.
If you want terrorism to stop, then just don't participate in it.
The same exact thing applies to NSA and all other government terrorist organisations.
But waidaminit, if your business is fighting terrorism, you don't want it to go away, you stop some of it but you make more of it too, that is job security.
Could this be but a special case of the wider phenomenon of children being forced to move back in with their parents because the economy doesn't give them enough resources to make it on their own? Couple that with stigma and you get recluses, albeit with Internet access. It is possible to be physically cloistered and yet have a wide electronic social network that includes job opportunities. These are not working out, perhaps.
A figure that I heard for the U.S. is that there are several million people in their 20's who have been forced to move back in with their parents. This is perhaps the best metric for how the economy is NOT working.
Of course I know what vi is. The machines I work on typically have cygwin installed because I can do things faster even in windows with Unix command line utilities.
Of course the systems I have bought from retail have all had Windows installed, before I installed a Linux on them, I have installed cygwin and usually with X11 and then Gnu-emacs. Even though I worry about running Windows because of security problems, if it is what I had to use, even for a short time, I install cygwin on it just to have a familiar POSIX set of tools, and when I get annoyed with the clunky Windows tools I open an xterm and use familiar *NIX commands.
I am not an EMACS user. This was a career decision made long ago. If it's Unix, it has vi. It almost certainly doesn't have EMACS. And I didn't feel like carrying a tape everywhere with me.
I have long since avoided editor flame wars. It is useless to criticize people for their choice of either vi or emacs, You are right, the choice is often a matter of personal history, in fact my first exposure to *NIX editing was ed(1) and then(ex). I did system admin. and you are quite correct that vi was much more likely to be available than emacs, although today's systems having access to more ram, it is no longer much of an issue, even in an entirely ram based system. There are many people who are perfectly fine with using vi alone for system admin and development. Initially, I had trouble with the old modes of vi, but that is no longer an issue in vim.
Or, there used to be a way to use vi in line mode, and I'm ok with that too.
There was a "mode" for ex, the line editor form underlying vi. You enter modes by typing the colon so ":ex" put you in line editor mode from vi. In the case of a Solaris system that wouldn't boot into full-screen mode, I had to edit some system file using this to get the system to come up fullly. Emacs wouldn't work and neither would vi full-screen mode.
I need to check out vim, which is much more like emacs in that it is more modesless, you no longer have to go into and exit insert mode. I would want to see if vim supports the :ex mode or not.
I don't game. It's natural to assume that "I need Windows" means "I have resource intensive games that only run on Windows" but that's not always the case. In my particular case, I use certain (rather expensive) Adobe products intensively. I know there are open source products that run on Linux and purport to do the same thing, but they don't really, yet. (I check every now and then.) And no, I don't want to screw around with Wine just to be able to say that I'm Windows Free. Using Win7 is not exactly like a date with Kate Upton, (It's more like hammering a nail with a 55 gallon drum) but in certain areas it does get the job done.
I've often said that the moment certain products are ported natively to Android or Linux, I'll dump winders and never look back. I still stand by that.
If Microsoft is aced out of the tablet market, Windows will not be able to keep market share in moving to new technology, it may retain its presence on desktops, but the incentives will be far greater for software companies like Adobe to port the big applications to new devices even if they all run something derived from Linux. Adobe has already done this for subsets of its Photoshop functionality and you are right that Gimp and other open source alternatives are playing catch up. People may say the same thing about MS Office vs. LibreOffice, in fact porting the former to all these new devices might be what keeps Microsoft from going out of business. To give perspective, pundits had said that Microsoft was going to kill UNIX and then Linux, partly because they assumed that if you paid for a proprietary product it has to be better engineered or at least you were buying into a captive market. Those predictions are failing because Open Source while far fro
Of course, I am not discounting your bad experience. The outcome depends on the luck of the draw. One can have either good or bad experiences and that may have to do with how good the management understands how people can work together. Since I have had good and bad coworkers and managers the proposition is dicey,
Now, is your decision to answer the problem of others controlling you by moving into management just puting you in the position to make other people's lives miserable in turn? Promoting people into management just because they are senior and were team players while being managed is no assurance that they are decent managers in turn. In fact, good management requires skills that might be in short supply if you were concentrated on details of your skill.
I have known others who were far worse in that they passed through quasi technical roles in order to get enough power to be able to smooze with the senior management; these were image conscious and narcissistic types, more concerned with themselves and willing to pass blame for whatever mistakes happened on their watch down the chain of command. They were often Hatchet Men. I have come across a couple of these. They deserve our worst.
Communication skills never go out of style and are always in demand.
I can find gazillions of Java or C or Perl or PHP programmers. Heck, I'm sure I can even dig up quite a few PL/I, PL/X, IBM mainframe Assembly or JCL slingers.
But find me that one programmer who can communicate technically to a team of 10-20 programmers and be able to communicate in plain English or in the business language to management and customers and he or she will be a keeper for a long time.
Really now, You want it all, to keep all the balls in the air and to be everything to everyone, and you project that on others. Well good, but you are likely to get both a half-assed marketing team and a bunch of half-witted programmers. There is a reason for the divide between managers, marketers, and techies. It is because people come is different shapes and sizes in the way they think and what they are best at. The theory of personality is a partition theory. That means that being strong in one trait makes you weak in some other. Perfectly balanced people are either jack's of all trades who are proficient in none or frauds. They have their place, but I know of no profession, medicine and some sciences, that don't demand high levels of proficiency and concentration on detail, and that makes it hard to be a generalist and speak to very different groups of people. What usually happens is frustration. A good communicator who can adapt to a diverse audience is rare. Go listen to the on-line lectures, videos on You Tube, from the experts from our best Universities and ask yourself how many fit that criterion. It turns out very few do, and yet would you fire them from their jobs? I hope not.
People who are outer-directed, who enjoy pressing the flesh and smoozing, just don't get this, and in general many people fall into the flaw that they don't appreciate that others are different from themselves and cannot be changed to be like themselves, so there is continual misunderstanding between otherwise smart people who can't seem to understand that minds work differently between people. The best managers know this and direct people into their strengths, but most people I've met do not have a clue, and especially people who have been put into management positions because of ambition.
Actually, I had an experience with pair programming that thrills me to this day. The person I remember with fondness because he was generous to me as a mentor would be. The time frame was when object programming was just being accepted. Java didn't exist and C++ may have been around but possibly the compilers were not available or too expensive for our project. It was around 1987 or so. We had Sun4's and Sparcs, running probably Solaris 2.4, and Sun's C compiler. What we did was to write a library with function pointers so that we could encapsulate methods and classes the same way you do in C++, but the discipline was all our's in ANSI C, so we had structs and pointers. I was able to act as a sounding board and tester, so I saw the code and used it. Maybe the application was a low memory embedded system in which all we had was the C-compiler for a dedicated CPU, I don't remember, so maybe we developed on Solaris to cross compile for some other hardware. Anyway the person I was working with had been diagnosed with cancer, and was in remission, but I heard maybe two years later that he had died, but the memory of how well our pair programming effort went stays with me.
I didn't read anything in the article that distinguished programmers for other type of workers. They might be more sensitive to being asked to be "flexible", meaning the mgr says "Do it this way, because I said so.". The issue is the amount of time and effort it takes to master new tools on short notice, and that is related to the lack of generality and ease of use of tools in an industry that has a ways to mature. Managers often either don't understand the effort it takes to become skilled, because they often haven't achieved that level of skill, or they don't care, looking up the chain of command for recognition rather than respecting the level of expertise they have working for them. This is not really all that unique to programmers. All kind of creatives have faced this problem over recorded history.
I had been a programmer of legacy languages and scripting tools and was suddenly asked to support java and a java IDE under development. I balked, and I didn't come to the reason why until much later. It wasn't that I could't learn java, but due to the fact that the language is very wordy and the libraries clunky and the stream of debugging data I would have to deal with is very hard on a visually impaired person. I have low acuity in only one eye, blind in the other, all I have is about 20/70, and the quality of the data coming out of the development version of the software I was asked to support was so compact and busy that it was nearly impossible for me to read. It wasn't just a matter solved by large fonts, but the use of camel text in a very cramped, poorly formatted, dump was very difficult.
A visually impaired system administrator I met later. flat out asserted that java was not accessible. This is quite apart from the complexity of class libraries, which is daunting on its own. I think that most programmers would agree today that java is well past its prime with better languages around. Even javascript, by being able to encapsulate frameworks so well, and languages like python are superior. Had I been aware of the disadvantage created for me at the time by that manager's decision, I would have sued the company under the ADA. In retrospect, I have a clear case. I understand that lots of shops have a legacy investment in java and must maintain java code. It is still widely used, but for me it is not a happy environment to work in. If I choose to get snarky about it I could say that like PL/1, Java is not a better C, K&R had a wonderful simplicity and the standard C library was concise, but I could call java "security through obvescation" which is why it was so appealing to corporate IT departments, but I am only speaking for myself and if people use it, fine, but it is not for me.
So people invent names, and astronomers have traditions for naming solar system objects, so to name the moons for mythological cohorts of the Roman God Pluto is conventional. Vulcan is far more removed from the convention and some newer even fashionable idea was probably rejected because it doesn't fit the tradition, and as it is the AIU that makes the agreements between astronomers. If you are really incensed you can use Pluto I, II, III, IV, etc.
It is odd that Samiulsen would see cyber crime as the biggest threat of the Internet when he has had a front row seat to its biggest negative impact on economics, strategic planning and markets. By allowing for the speedup of human processes, the Internet has taken the prudence and "sleep on it" caution out of business. This started back around 1990 when because of the instantaneous flow of information about finance, stock performance, and business intelligence, long term planning was abandoned. Companies went to much more short-term thinking as investors demanded shorter time scales for ROI. This has led to more volitility and instability and has introduced an impulsive push to the conduct of business, most obvious in problems with program trading and with the impact of glitches in markets caused by events like the AP-Twitter Hoax. If the threat is cyber crime, that is already magnified by the rapidity of trading. The abuses in finance and banking that led to the Crash of 2008 haven't been fixed, and many people think that history would repeat itself in a few years. If I could make a rule, it would be that there had to be a 30 second delay on any electronic trade in the markets, and even a cap on the size of these trades in value.
I very much agree with what you say.
People overgeneralize about what is needed, and they often do so according to the fixations of their own personality type. Those fixations often also provide what part of the elephant they do well, as in we are all blind, but to project that on others, especially if you are a hiring manager is tentamont to discrimination as much as having too may sales types and too few engineers, geeks, nerds, might be detramental to your business.
I wanted to raise the awareness of these differences and have experienced directly the harm ignoring them can do, especially at the hands of a modestly sociopathic or narcissistic manager. These are often the "3" types more concerned with the higher-up's and their image, and blaming the people they manage for their shortcomings. Such people shouldn't be allowed to manage, yet they are common in America.
I've said this before, but the purpose of computers is *not* to run the OS. It's to run applications. The OS is not an application.
Until the application or GUI breaks in some way and you need to find out what is beneath the surface. Up until the past few Windows releases, you got little help from the OS to troubleshoot failures and if you had the sluthing skills to use what little was there, you could probably have used *nix command line tools and the log files to do *nix system administrationm, anyway.
Applications on *nix in a GUI are often based on command-line versions that have options removed, simplified, so they can be easily used from the GUI, and along with that trend developers aren't maintaining man pages when they should because they think that unless the documentation is in a web page users wouldn't dare open up a terminal and start issuing CLI commands. I'll bet that most Mac OS users have never opened terminal and read man pages even though there is a wealth of information there that they could use to fine-tune and diagnose their systems, writing bash scripts if they need to. My son came to me one day asking about python on Mac OS X. He knew it was there but was unsure how to use it. I opened terminal, looked at the man page and ran the interpreter for him, and then I showed him how to write source documents, compile and execute them.
Of course I'm not suggesting that we turn back the clock 35 years and go back to glass TTYs and the shell, but those powerful UNIX systems often ran in less than a MB of ram and were no bigger than 10 MB. Last year I ran then current Linux releases on a system with .75 gig of ram and no harddrive. Current Linices with GUI will run live off the DVD on machines that ran Win XP but are too small to run any newer Windows versions, and they boot much faster.
There are still times when the shell is better than a GUI app, and I often revert to emacs in a terminal to edit files because I know how to use it and it is reliable and non intrusive in ways that some newer GUI based editors and IDEs are. What I like about *nix systems is that the low-level complexity is really just below the surface and the number of years it has been tested and debugged is a hedge against the failures possible with new and not time-tested GUIs like Unity. So empire builders can mess up the interface as much as they wish, a huge win is to leave the legacy alone and give me access to the older stuff.
I'll grant you that if your use of computers is to play games that your generalization might hold, but it doesn't take much in the way of needing to get something done, such as writing a post or a web page before more than the universe of apps available from a particular GUI comes into play. Not all that many years ago I was able to rescue a system that wouldn't boot into its GUI and in fact it wouldn't run full screen text editor, such as vi. I had to go all the way back to my knowledge of the single line editing commands of ex, which I had used many years before, to edit one of the system files to bring the system back. You do know what vi is ( e.g.vim) and that there is a line editor mode buried inside it, (:ex). That is what I was forced to use on that occasion.