Eh? Both of these are trivially stated mathematical theories. "Exotic", only if you are ignorant about your craft.
Dig into the article a little more. They are talking about hardware based on residue arithmetic to get around slow hardware speeds by making use of look-up tables that would be impractical with normal binary representation. The problem according to the paper is that this requires you to convert the representation of your numbers before doing a number of common tasks, including comparison, division, and overflow detection.
As for symbolic computing, they basically propose that the Russians might have created a super-optimizing compiler that can simplify complex equations to work "smarter not harder." This is one of those areas where it might be possible the Soviets were ahead of us, but that's really all the paper says. That it was a possibility.
To me, the document reads like a lot of DoD reports on Soviet capabilities have -- an exercise in fantasy and "what-ifs." I mean, the bit about implementing a processor to do the FFT with gaussian arithmetic is really kind of neat, but I'm just seeing an attempt to justify some interesting theoretical research by shaking down the Red scare. The report even states at the very end that it's "unlikely" that the Soviets had made such advances, but the future, man! Gotta worry about the future.
The media is pretty much int he tank for global climate change, or global warming, or whatever you're calling it now. Virtually every mainstream media outlet has been pouring out stories about devastating climate change for nearly twenty years now, and probably a bit longer.
The media is in the tank for controversy and sensationalism. Always has been; always will be. All the media wants is what any other business wants -- a product that sells well and costs a little as possible to manufacture (e.g. by forgoing actual journalism).
But that's grant money, as in money they don't get to take home with them. It's only use is to fund their research (pointless if the field is just made up), and to increase their standing with the university.
You're missing his point. It doesn't matter that you don't get to take the grant money home. What matters is that without the grant money to support your research, you don't have a job to justify the separate salary that you do get to take home. No grant money; no research; no justification for employing you. The scale doesn't matter -- merely the dependency on attention / approval from the right people to keep your job.
Not that I'm of the opinion in the slightest that climate change is all cooked up just to get grant money from whatever liberal overlords want to fund it for whatever mysterious purposes AGW deniers concoct in their fevered nightmares of government control. I'm just not going to go so far as to whitewash the fact that research is sometimes driven by concerns of whether or not one can get funding to actually do it. The need to earn a modest salary to make ends meet as a middle-class academician is arguably a far more powerful motivator than seeing another few points on oil investments that just buy luxuries for a rich man. (Hence why many scientists turn into industry shills, actually.)
So you agree that all those AGW advocates who attack every opponent by questioning their objectivity and ethics ("he's paid by Big Oil, that's all you need to know") or calling them idiots or worse, are in the wrong. That those who react to every letter in the editor in the local paper that questions AGW with a vitriolic response questioning the author's parents and lineage are behaving poorly.
Yes. I'd agree. Partisan idiocy is partisan idiocy no matter the party or position.
I know who you thought you were attacking, but the facts show that the opponents to AGW are a lot more civil about it than most advocates.
Could you show us those "facts?"
What you're probably experiencing is selection bias. Your favored news sites, blogs, etc. that cater to a more "skeptical" crowd probably tend to receive much more polite responses from people who agree with the position than don't. On the other hand, if you favor "believer" sites, you'll tend to see more polite responses from people who agree with that position and more trolling / hate from the opposite. Compare the comments section on Fox News's website v. Huffington Post after a climate change story runs, and you'll see the population difference. Also, you could simply be remembering idiocy from people who disagree with you more because it riles you up more. People tend to focus on the negative in their memories.
If you've got an objective, demographic study that actually show that as a population, one side is more vitriolic than the other, than I'd love to it, but I'm going to have to be a little skeptical about it until then.
For the advocates, the debate is OVER, the FACTS are the FACTS, there is no room for doubt, and anyone who doesn't agree is a knuckle-dragger.
Well, the scientific literature *is* pretty conclusive if you've dug into it deeply. I'll say that most people who believe climate change is happening *haven't* and are just appealing to authority, much like the people they bash.
It's like the evolution debate. The science is solid and clear and supported by 99% of the people working in the field. However, the main "debate" largely rages on both sides between in the uninformed masses of people who aren't scientists and who are just repeating catechisms at each other.
The pseudo-skeptics...
Yes, such a civil response, you can't even admit they exist.
That depends on how you're using the word. There's a difference between a "skeptic" and a "denier." A skeptic questions a position and wants to find out the truth. They will work to try to find that answer and can be won over if the facts suggest their position is wrong.
However, most laymen on both sides of the AGW "debate" are just believers and anti-believers attempting to thump dogma with little regard for truth-seeking beyond gratifying their own confirmation bias. Those people aren't skeptics no matter what their stance is.
I hold a skeptics view to the whole Global Warming thing, they say that this is what the earth will do in 100 years...yet they can't guess what its going to do next week with any certainty.
That's because you don't understand the difference between climate and weather. The former is far easier to make intelligent predictions about than the latter. You can think of climate as the global, long-term average of local, short-term weather. This is why 2009 can be tied for the warmest year on record AND have record-breaking snowfall during the blizzard in the mid-Atlantic US states that year.
Think of it like baseball. It's far easier to predict what someone's batting average will be like next year than it is to predict whether they will hit the ball on their next swing. Whether a person hits the ball or not has a lot of uncertainty, but the batting average is a clear predictive trend.
That and I just read two articles on two different news sites on the Same Day, One claiming that the Spring storms come later and later each year due to global warming and the other claiming that spring comes earlier and earlier due to it.
You're confusing science "journalism" for science. That's a huge mistake that has unfortunately clouded many public policy-science debates. The list of sins by science reporters against public understanding of science are frankly too long to enumerate here. Just because newspapers want a sensational story doesn't mean that actual academics are in huge disagreement.
Also, how the hell can they use data that seems to work for centuries "tree rings" and then STOP using it when it doesn't support their conclusions over the past few decades ie the whole Hide the Decline Fiasco.
This is another example of another tempest in a teacup created by the media and people with a political axe to grind.
The "hide the decline" fiasco originated in an attempt to deal with a specific set of tree ring temperature proxy data that does not match actual temperatures on record. Proxy records are used for approximation and aren't perfect, and it's well known that after 1960 latewood tree rings show a decline in temperatures despite the fact that all of our other records, including direct temperature measurements by thermometers, show a trend of warming.
That's the "decline" that was being "hidden." Not an actual decline in temperatures -- a false decline from bad proxies. You don't stick with bad data when you have proof its bad. (Unless you're one of these types who actually prefers tree rings to thermometers or who just desperately clings to *any* data that conforms to your world-view no matter its relative merit.)
The authors speculate that the Russians might have achieved breakthroughs in alternative computing methods such as residue arithmetic and symbolic computing.
Never propose a simple solution when exotic, impractical sounding one will do instead.
I'm not sure why this is even a "discovery." I thought it was very well known that existing "invisibility cloaks" only worked over one frequency of light, traveling in one direction.
Almost nowhere are you required to report such things to the police. If you find an abandoned item, it's yours. Anything beyond that is good-Samaritan territory. Now if it's discovered in this case then you MAY have some legal recourse on getting the property returned to you, but you'll never - EVER be able to pen theft on anyone for not reporting it to the police.
Perhaps you don't live in the US, but your second sentence is simply not true at common law, and the first sentence isn't true by statute in many US states.
At the common law, you can claim an item if you find it, but your rights are only secure against everyone but the original owner. In many jurisdictions, if you know who the original owner is, then you are not a "finder," and keeping the item is just theft. Even if you don't know who owns the item, many jurisdictions hold that you have certain duties to the original owner until their claim is extinguished. You can't convert the item for your own use (e.g. by disassembling it), and you can't deliver the object to another but the original owner (e.g. by selling it to Gizmodo). It's not actually yours until the statute of limitations runs for the owner to bring suit against you to get the item back, and if the owner is able to prove their claim in the meantime, you have to give it back.
On top of that, over 20 states have laws requiring some additional duties by finders to report or return items. You can find a list here. Here's a few of examples:
Connecticut. Must contact police within 48 hours and deliver to police within 7 days. Failure to do so can get you a $100 fine or 30 days in jail. Police keep the item for six months, and you have to pay for storage and efforts to contact the original owner to get it back.
Florida. Must contact police (immediately?) and turn over the item to them if you want to make a claim with money up-front for the cops to store it. (You're reimbursed if by the true owner if they claim it.) The police hold onto it for 90 days before giving it to you.
Missouri. Must swear an affidavit before a county judge within 10 days of finding the items telling when & where you found it, that you don't know the owner, and that you're reporting all of it. Appraisal by court-summoned community members and public notice is given. If no one claims it within 30 days, you have to run ads in the paper. Otherwise, it's yours after 180 days.
Oregon. If you don't know who owns an item worth >$100, you have to turn it over to the county clerk within 10 days and post a notice within 20 days in a local newspaper once each week for two consecutive weeks. You own the item after 3 months. The statute is silent on what happens if you know the owner.
Washington. Must turn over item to cops within 7 days. Only yours after 60 days. Item's owner must be unknown to claim; code is unclear about what happens when you know who owns it and they never claim it after the cops have it. Keeping an item w/o reporting or whose owner you know seems to be theft under criminal code.
Otherwise, what business of it of yours if someone files charges? What did those organizations and people ever do to you, personally, to make you want them to go to jail or face a punitive fine?
The funny thing about criminal justice is that's it's not about vindicating the victim. It's about defending society from lawlessness. That's why we have criminal prosecutors who are employees of the state to press charges instead of requiring that victims or their families hire a private attorney to go after criminals personally.
All people should have an interest in seeing thieves caught and apprehended, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to see justice done, even if you aren't directly affected. On the contrary, it's rather self-centered to insist that no one should have an interest in any wrong-doing that doesn't directly affect that person, and your accusations of fanboyism just for wanting to see the law executed is a sad and puzzling reaction.
Sorry, I missed it. Where did they admit to not returning the device, once they'd concluded it was Apple's? Granted, they didn't say that they did, but to "admit" to what you say, they've have to actually state that they didn't.
Actually, they now have a link claiming that they have tried to return it. That wasn't there earlier, so I can't comment on what they originally said because I don't remember it well enough. That should be enough to defeat a charge of theft unless the state could find evidence that they considered keeping it permanently at some point. For that period of time, "intent to deprive" would have been present, and a crime would be committed. But, as you point out, there's no admission that they did so.
However, even if they do return it, they're civilly liable for conversion or trespass to chattels. The deciding factor will be whether or not the phone is in its original, usable state or can be trivially restored to it.
As for the person who found it in a bar, though, that guy is clearly guilty of theft unless he happens to be on Gizmodo's staff. Giving one person's property to another without providing the original owner a way to get it back looks pretty much like intent to deprive to me.
Okay, so no *smart* criminals, but...
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Yeah, yeah, the device isn't fool-proof against criminals that take extraordinary measures to watch out for it, but most crime isn't committed by criminal masterminds. It's committed by idiots who can't find better solutions to their poor impulse control.
The device being proposed isn't going to help solve mysterious, planned assassinations because it only triggers when someone knows there's an emergency and tries to get help in some form. In other words, this only helps for the kinds of crimes where calling 911 might be useful. I hope you wouldn't say that just because no one is likely to call 911 during the commission of a poisoning or a sniper attack that hooking the police into 911 is useless (except for doing the cleanup and post-crime report).
Would this device help in domestic violence incidents? Would it help when someone breaks into your house? Would it help if you're witnessing a crime against someone else? Would it help in many of the most common violent crime situations?
I'm kind of horrified by the notion of having a device that records someone's life 24/7, especially if that person has any kind of regular contact with me and records my life, but a device that makes it easy to make emergency recordings isn't useless just because a smart criminal can beat it. No more so than having a house alarm, owning a dog or a gun, or setting up a neighborhood watch.
Because, sadly it's not often easy to tell what kind of manager you're going to have in an interview when they're on their best behavior, and many people are reluctant to leap right back into the job market right after getting a new job because it's easy to tell yourself that things will get better and that a bad job is better than unemployment.
I once jumped ship after two weeks on a job because of a horrible manager, and to this day I'm not sure how wise of a decision it was after considering how long it took me to find another job after I left. I was stuck between interviewing without a reference from my previous employer who would know how long I was at the new job before quitting or admitting up front that I left a job after two weeks. (Would you hire someone who did that? Or someone who was willing to bad mouth their previous employer so quickly?) I'm not sure I could make myself do it again.
Giz is such an Apple fanboy site (look at their non-stop love fest with the iPad) that they wouldn't risk getting into trouble with Apple over this.
I hope you don't think fanboy sites have never done anything dumb to attract the ire of Apple's attorneys or that Apple won't slap its ardent fans. After all, where is Think Secret today? See also Apple v. Does.
I could totally believe that Gizmodo would be dumb enough to do something like this. I could also believe that it's a viral marketing thing or that the phone is a fake (and Gizmodo knows). I guess we'll only know by waiting to see if Apple sues them or not.
The only other alternative is to come forward and confirm it as a real iPhone, which I can't see Apple doing.
Why not? Oh, maybe not immediately, but the statute of limitations is long enough that Apple can just wait until the final model is ready to debut and then press charges & file civil suit. It's what I'd do if someone took one of my prototypes and bragged about their theft to the entire internet.
If it's so important for Apple to get this phone back, I wonder why there's no reward...
Assuming the story is true, and not an act of viral marketing, Apple is under no obligation to offer a reward for their property. Gizmodo has a legal duty to return the property to its owner. Failure to do so is both a crime (petty theft) and something that they can be sued for (conversion). There's a host of other crimes and torts that they're admitting to.
So then the two of you are in agreement. Adam Smith opposed the imposition of government rules (which lead to things like government sanctioned monopolies, also known as corporations) on the Free Enterprise system.
You have a very, very strange interpretation of the text I quoted. Adam Smith was talking about the way the director/shareholder divide resulted in investors who don't know (and often don't care) about the internal operations of the company and in directors who are often negligent with other people's money. He was talking about principal-agent conflicts of interest.
Also, corporations are not inherently government-sanctioned monopolies. (That has to be the most bizarre attempt at a definition I've ever seen.) A corporation is just a liability shield for investors to encourage people to put up money on projects that carry too much financial risk. That's all.
"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow citizens."
-- Adam Smith
You want to appeal to authority? Fine. I'll see your Adam Smith quote and raise you another. Here's what he has to say about the corporations you'd rather see in charge of things:
"[T]he greater part of [general shareholders] seldom pretend to understand any thing of the business of the company; and when the spirit of faction happens not to prevail among them, give themselves no trouble about it, but receive contentedly such halfyearly or yearly dividend as the directors think proper to make to them. This total exemption front trouble and front risk, beyond a limited sum, encourages many people to become adventurers in [corporations], who would, upon no account, hazard their fortunes in any private [partnership].... The directors of such companies, however, being the managers rather of other people's money than of their own, it cannot well be expected that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private [partnership] frequently watch over their own. Like the stewards of a rich man, they are apt to consider attention to small matters as not for their master's honour, and very easily give themselves a dispensation from having it. Negligence and profusion, therefore, must always prevail, more or less, in the management of the affairs of such a company."
-- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, pp. 506 (some archaic terms substituted with modern ones.)
This only works if "aliens" don't care about the fact that their culture is lost through the process... or maybe culture also evolves similarly towards the inevitable conclusion that we must also launch panspermia capsules, ensuring that life persists in the universe.
Both dubious propositions at best. I find it more likely that a culture will abandon "life" (i.e. move to a non-biological strata) than that a civilization would abandon culture to ensure that other competing species arise...and then never talk to or make use of them.
I do not believe there is cause for alarm! Don't you think "personal nuclear power stations" sounds rather hyperbolic? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole
Could you offer some sort of counter-argument for why flying nuclear reactors is not a cause for concern? Maybe one that addresses one (or more!) of the points I raised? Or maybe one that quotes something I actually said when accusing me of hyperbole?
Also, I may make a typo or two, but I do have better than a 6th grade reading level. If you're going to link to something, try something informative and not patronizing.
A car that drives its self means no more designated drivers or having to wait to sober up before going home. It means the party can continue all the way home....If you know what I mean.
A flying car is just a waste of fuel & money that could be better spent on booze.:P
Traffic will not vanish just because people can fly in three dimensions. Without auto-drive, there will still be a clear need for channeled traffic to avoid collisions between people just flying off in any direction. It won't be a free for all unless you really do want cars dropping out of the sky on a daily basis.
With auto-drive, many traffic jams can be made to vanish. Most congestion is the result of pressure waves from human drivers starting, stopping, refusing to let other people over, gawking at unnecessary accidents, etc. Universal, intelligent driving could eliminate stop-and-go traffic entirely and reduce slow-downs immensely.
I'm hoping it will be practical to park such vehicles in the sun and be coated with solar panels so as to mostly charge themselves between commuting. The top of buildings would make great parking spots (if reinforced). I realize, though, that flying takes a lot of energy.
Flying takes a LOT more energy than driving, and we don't even have practical solar family cars yet. Most prototype flying cars we've seen only carry 1-2 people (no cargo) and get mileage on par with a mediocre 4-person sedan. Even 2D, land-based solar cars are a fantasy unless we get major advances in solar cell efficiency.
Till we all get personal nuclear power stations in our cars, they ain't going to fly. There simply isn't enough energy density in our current fuels to power a flying car safely.
You have a very strange definition of safety if putting a nuclear reactor in a flying vehicle owned and operated by random civilians is your idea of "safe." Even a well-contained (aside: heavy) RTG represents a source of dirty bomb material that you want to put out in the public's hands.
You also have to consider the clean up costs involved in scrapping such a vehicle after its useful life-span is over or it has crashed. Most metal scrapyards won't touch anything that has radioactives. You'd have to set up a specialty business to handle removing offensive components before sending the rest of the wreck off to be processed. I imagine that emergency services across the nation will love having to cart along radiation detectors as part of first response to any accident. (No matter how well you engineer containment, this will be necessary just in case.) And who all has liability if a nuclear flying car crashes into a house and does contaminate the land?
Also, do we even have electric engines capable of heavy lifting for VTOL? All the electric planes I'm aware of are light-weight models with huge wingspan (often to accommodate solar panels). I wouldn't be surprised if we did, but I'd like to ask for some examples.
OK, we've all whined about the fact that we are now firmly entrenched in the 21st Century and no flying cars.
No, I'm pretty sure I consider that to be a feature and not a bug in our technological progress. Movement in three dimensions is a waste of fuel for most tasks, and a humongous safety hazard in the hands of most drivers as well as in the case of engineering failure.
I don't want flying cars; I want cars that can drive themselves more safely than people can. That's my SF car of the future.
So you seem to think that if there are aliens capable of traveling vast distances in space, they would be incapable of living on anything other than some big ass rock?
I've reread my post twice, and I don't see where you got that impression from. I believe I mentioned "habitable space" and "foreign stars." Purely orbital construction is definitely a viable strategy, especially in systems with plenty of mineral and energy resources but no habitable worlds.
So, that doesn't really counter my point. In fact it gives a strong argument for why the majority of star systems that do not contain a sun like ours should still be good real estate to colonize and why we should expect to be surrounded by radio sources.
Planets really aren't that useful, it's the stars that are useful. If it's energy the aliens are after, then there isn't anything very interesting about our corner of the galaxy.
To flip that around, there's nothing particularly uninteresting about our corner of the galaxy either. There are plenty of stars pumping out energy with raw materials orbiting them. (There are 1400 stars within 50 light years alone.) Once you have the tech required to build new colonies using entirely extra-terrestrial materials (e.g. asteroids, comets, skimming gas giants, accumulating dust disks, etc.), then no star system that has some sort of orbital material is uninhabitable. Given the resource and time costs of bypassing an open star system to move to the next "richer" one, this makes the proposition that our corner of the universe has been visited and "skipped" an illogical waste.
Exponential expansion is the only logical outcome unless a species somehow evolved without the need to grow into new territory or overcame this natural impulse to grow. Personally, I find the silence comforting. It lets us know that we'll be safe to expand for at least several centuries before contact with any competition.
A few hundred years ago it was nearly impossible and highly, highly impractical to load up goods and persons on little wooden ships and sail them across the Atlantic. Yet we did. And yes, we colonized as we went. Did we, though, colonize every single leaf of grass we passed over? Not exactly. There are still wild areas of this Earth, even with humans being able to readily and easily travel to each inch of it.
We haven't colonized the whole planet YET. Ask again after 10,000 years of population pressure and resource depletion. The only factors which prevent this from being inevitable is the need for ecosystem balance (e.g. deforestation v. global warming), lack of suitability or desirability (e.g. Antarctica), or sentimental attachment (e.g. parks and nature preserves).
This doesn't work at the level of planets, and it ignores extra-planetary colonization via orbital structures that exploit the mineral and other resources of an uninhabitable world.
Is it not even remotely possible that another, more attractive system is nearby, and that was the one colonized?
Oh, yes. But how likely is it that no where in the galaxy has been colonized within the span of time that it would take for a radio signal to reach us?
For SETI purposes, we usually only consider stars within 50 light years of us because those are systems that our first radio signals could have reached that could have responded to us in time. Just in that small volume of space, there are 133 stars like our own sun and roughly 1400 total star systems. No one colonized any of these systems?
Okay, so maybe we live in a 50 ly radius "nature park." (Not that I can fathom what one principle would unify all these systems as "protected" instead of treating them individually, but we'll go with that.) What about radio signals from worlds that weren't aware of us at the time they were broadcasting? Why don't we see radar signals within 200 to 600 light-years?
That is a range of less than.1% of the width of the Milky Way (but good enough to cover the thickness), but for us not to have seen someone by now, they would have had to have evolved to space flight sometime in the past few hundred million years -- which is trivial compared to the age of the galaxy. Either we're one of the first (on a galactic time-scale), no one is interested in exploration, or we're alone.
At this point, if there's anyone else out there, they are so far out that we'll have millennia to prepare to meet them. We may as well just operate under the assumption that they aren't there because they'll have no impact on us any time soon.
Slashdot Mirror
Eh? Both of these are trivially stated mathematical theories. "Exotic", only if you are ignorant about your craft.
Dig into the article a little more. They are talking about hardware based on residue arithmetic to get around slow hardware speeds by making use of look-up tables that would be impractical with normal binary representation. The problem according to the paper is that this requires you to convert the representation of your numbers before doing a number of common tasks, including comparison, division, and overflow detection.
As for symbolic computing, they basically propose that the Russians might have created a super-optimizing compiler that can simplify complex equations to work "smarter not harder." This is one of those areas where it might be possible the Soviets were ahead of us, but that's really all the paper says. That it was a possibility.
To me, the document reads like a lot of DoD reports on Soviet capabilities have -- an exercise in fantasy and "what-ifs." I mean, the bit about implementing a processor to do the FFT with gaussian arithmetic is really kind of neat, but I'm just seeing an attempt to justify some interesting theoretical research by shaking down the Red scare. The report even states at the very end that it's "unlikely" that the Soviets had made such advances, but the future, man! Gotta worry about the future.
The media is pretty much int he tank for global climate change, or global warming, or whatever you're calling it now. Virtually every mainstream media outlet has been pouring out stories about devastating climate change for nearly twenty years now, and probably a bit longer.
The media is in the tank for controversy and sensationalism. Always has been; always will be. All the media wants is what any other business wants -- a product that sells well and costs a little as possible to manufacture (e.g. by forgoing actual journalism).
But that's grant money, as in money they don't get to take home with them. It's only use is to fund their research (pointless if the field is just made up), and to increase their standing with the university.
You're missing his point. It doesn't matter that you don't get to take the grant money home. What matters is that without the grant money to support your research, you don't have a job to justify the separate salary that you do get to take home. No grant money; no research; no justification for employing you. The scale doesn't matter -- merely the dependency on attention / approval from the right people to keep your job.
Not that I'm of the opinion in the slightest that climate change is all cooked up just to get grant money from whatever liberal overlords want to fund it for whatever mysterious purposes AGW deniers concoct in their fevered nightmares of government control. I'm just not going to go so far as to whitewash the fact that research is sometimes driven by concerns of whether or not one can get funding to actually do it. The need to earn a modest salary to make ends meet as a middle-class academician is arguably a far more powerful motivator than seeing another few points on oil investments that just buy luxuries for a rich man. (Hence why many scientists turn into industry shills, actually.)
So you agree that all those AGW advocates who attack every opponent by questioning their objectivity and ethics ("he's paid by Big Oil, that's all you need to know") or calling them idiots or worse, are in the wrong. That those who react to every letter in the editor in the local paper that questions AGW with a vitriolic response questioning the author's parents and lineage are behaving poorly.
Yes. I'd agree. Partisan idiocy is partisan idiocy no matter the party or position.
I know who you thought you were attacking, but the facts show that the opponents to AGW are a lot more civil about it than most advocates.
Could you show us those "facts?"
What you're probably experiencing is selection bias. Your favored news sites, blogs, etc. that cater to a more "skeptical" crowd probably tend to receive much more polite responses from people who agree with the position than don't. On the other hand, if you favor "believer" sites, you'll tend to see more polite responses from people who agree with that position and more trolling / hate from the opposite. Compare the comments section on Fox News's website v. Huffington Post after a climate change story runs, and you'll see the population difference. Also, you could simply be remembering idiocy from people who disagree with you more because it riles you up more. People tend to focus on the negative in their memories.
If you've got an objective, demographic study that actually show that as a population, one side is more vitriolic than the other, than I'd love to it, but I'm going to have to be a little skeptical about it until then.
For the advocates, the debate is OVER, the FACTS are the FACTS, there is no room for doubt, and anyone who doesn't agree is a knuckle-dragger.
Well, the scientific literature *is* pretty conclusive if you've dug into it deeply. I'll say that most people who believe climate change is happening *haven't* and are just appealing to authority, much like the people they bash.
It's like the evolution debate. The science is solid and clear and supported by 99% of the people working in the field. However, the main "debate" largely rages on both sides between in the uninformed masses of people who aren't scientists and who are just repeating catechisms at each other.
The pseudo-skeptics...
Yes, such a civil response, you can't even admit they exist.
That depends on how you're using the word. There's a difference between a "skeptic" and a "denier." A skeptic questions a position and wants to find out the truth. They will work to try to find that answer and can be won over if the facts suggest their position is wrong.
However, most laymen on both sides of the AGW "debate" are just believers and anti-believers attempting to thump dogma with little regard for truth-seeking beyond gratifying their own confirmation bias. Those people aren't skeptics no matter what their stance is.
I hold a skeptics view to the whole Global Warming thing, they say that this is what the earth will do in 100 years...yet they can't guess what its going to do next week with any certainty.
That's because you don't understand the difference between climate and weather. The former is far easier to make intelligent predictions about than the latter. You can think of climate as the global, long-term average of local, short-term weather. This is why 2009 can be tied for the warmest year on record AND have record-breaking snowfall during the blizzard in the mid-Atlantic US states that year.
Think of it like baseball. It's far easier to predict what someone's batting average will be like next year than it is to predict whether they will hit the ball on their next swing. Whether a person hits the ball or not has a lot of uncertainty, but the batting average is a clear predictive trend.
That and I just read two articles on two different news sites on the Same Day, One claiming that the Spring storms come later and later each year due to global warming and the other claiming that spring comes earlier and earlier due to it.
You're confusing science "journalism" for science. That's a huge mistake that has unfortunately clouded many public policy-science debates. The list of sins by science reporters against public understanding of science are frankly too long to enumerate here. Just because newspapers want a sensational story doesn't mean that actual academics are in huge disagreement.
Also, how the hell can they use data that seems to work for centuries "tree rings" and then STOP using it when it doesn't support their conclusions over the past few decades ie the whole Hide the Decline Fiasco.
This is another example of another tempest in a teacup created by the media and people with a political axe to grind.
The "hide the decline" fiasco originated in an attempt to deal with a specific set of tree ring temperature proxy data that does not match actual temperatures on record. Proxy records are used for approximation and aren't perfect, and it's well known that after 1960 latewood tree rings show a decline in temperatures despite the fact that all of our other records, including direct temperature measurements by thermometers, show a trend of warming.
That's the "decline" that was being "hidden." Not an actual decline in temperatures -- a false decline from bad proxies. You don't stick with bad data when you have proof its bad. (Unless you're one of these types who actually prefers tree rings to thermometers or who just desperately clings to *any* data that conforms to your world-view no matter its relative merit.)
You can read more about it here.
The authors speculate that the Russians might have achieved breakthroughs in alternative computing methods such as residue arithmetic and symbolic computing.
Never propose a simple solution when exotic, impractical sounding one will do instead.
I'm not sure why this is even a "discovery." I thought it was very well known that existing "invisibility cloaks" only worked over one frequency of light, traveling in one direction.
Almost nowhere are you required to report such things to the police. If you find an abandoned item, it's yours. Anything beyond that is good-Samaritan territory. Now if it's discovered in this case then you MAY have some legal recourse on getting the property returned to you, but you'll never - EVER be able to pen theft on anyone for not reporting it to the police.
Perhaps you don't live in the US, but your second sentence is simply not true at common law, and the first sentence isn't true by statute in many US states.
At the common law, you can claim an item if you find it, but your rights are only secure against everyone but the original owner. In many jurisdictions, if you know who the original owner is, then you are not a "finder," and keeping the item is just theft. Even if you don't know who owns the item, many jurisdictions hold that you have certain duties to the original owner until their claim is extinguished. You can't convert the item for your own use (e.g. by disassembling it), and you can't deliver the object to another but the original owner (e.g. by selling it to Gizmodo). It's not actually yours until the statute of limitations runs for the owner to bring suit against you to get the item back, and if the owner is able to prove their claim in the meantime, you have to give it back.
On top of that, over 20 states have laws requiring some additional duties by finders to report or return items. You can find a list here. Here's a few of examples:
Otherwise, what business of it of yours if someone files charges? What did those organizations and people ever do to you, personally, to make you want them to go to jail or face a punitive fine?
The funny thing about criminal justice is that's it's not about vindicating the victim. It's about defending society from lawlessness. That's why we have criminal prosecutors who are employees of the state to press charges instead of requiring that victims or their families hire a private attorney to go after criminals personally.
All people should have an interest in seeing thieves caught and apprehended, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to see justice done, even if you aren't directly affected. On the contrary, it's rather self-centered to insist that no one should have an interest in any wrong-doing that doesn't directly affect that person, and your accusations of fanboyism just for wanting to see the law executed is a sad and puzzling reaction.
Sorry, I missed it. Where did they admit to not returning the device, once they'd concluded it was Apple's? Granted, they didn't say that they did, but to "admit" to what you say, they've have to actually state that they didn't.
Actually, they now have a link claiming that they have tried to return it. That wasn't there earlier, so I can't comment on what they originally said because I don't remember it well enough. That should be enough to defeat a charge of theft unless the state could find evidence that they considered keeping it permanently at some point. For that period of time, "intent to deprive" would have been present, and a crime would be committed. But, as you point out, there's no admission that they did so.
However, even if they do return it, they're civilly liable for conversion or trespass to chattels. The deciding factor will be whether or not the phone is in its original, usable state or can be trivially restored to it.
As for the person who found it in a bar, though, that guy is clearly guilty of theft unless he happens to be on Gizmodo's staff. Giving one person's property to another without providing the original owner a way to get it back looks pretty much like intent to deprive to me.
Yeah, yeah, the device isn't fool-proof against criminals that take extraordinary measures to watch out for it, but most crime isn't committed by criminal masterminds. It's committed by idiots who can't find better solutions to their poor impulse control.
The device being proposed isn't going to help solve mysterious, planned assassinations because it only triggers when someone knows there's an emergency and tries to get help in some form. In other words, this only helps for the kinds of crimes where calling 911 might be useful. I hope you wouldn't say that just because no one is likely to call 911 during the commission of a poisoning or a sniper attack that hooking the police into 911 is useless (except for doing the cleanup and post-crime report).
Would this device help in domestic violence incidents? Would it help when someone breaks into your house? Would it help if you're witnessing a crime against someone else? Would it help in many of the most common violent crime situations?
I'm kind of horrified by the notion of having a device that records someone's life 24/7, especially if that person has any kind of regular contact with me and records my life, but a device that makes it easy to make emergency recordings isn't useless just because a smart criminal can beat it. No more so than having a house alarm, owning a dog or a gun, or setting up a neighborhood watch.
Why would anyone want to work for such a jerk?
Because, sadly it's not often easy to tell what kind of manager you're going to have in an interview when they're on their best behavior, and many people are reluctant to leap right back into the job market right after getting a new job because it's easy to tell yourself that things will get better and that a bad job is better than unemployment.
I once jumped ship after two weeks on a job because of a horrible manager, and to this day I'm not sure how wise of a decision it was after considering how long it took me to find another job after I left. I was stuck between interviewing without a reference from my previous employer who would know how long I was at the new job before quitting or admitting up front that I left a job after two weeks. (Would you hire someone who did that? Or someone who was willing to bad mouth their previous employer so quickly?) I'm not sure I could make myself do it again.
Giz is such an Apple fanboy site (look at their non-stop love fest with the iPad) that they wouldn't risk getting into trouble with Apple over this.
I hope you don't think fanboy sites have never done anything dumb to attract the ire of Apple's attorneys or that Apple won't slap its ardent fans. After all, where is Think Secret today? See also Apple v. Does.
I could totally believe that Gizmodo would be dumb enough to do something like this. I could also believe that it's a viral marketing thing or that the phone is a fake (and Gizmodo knows). I guess we'll only know by waiting to see if Apple sues them or not.
The only other alternative is to come forward and confirm it as a real iPhone, which I can't see Apple doing.
Why not? Oh, maybe not immediately, but the statute of limitations is long enough that Apple can just wait until the final model is ready to debut and then press charges & file civil suit. It's what I'd do if someone took one of my prototypes and bragged about their theft to the entire internet.
If it's so important for Apple to get this phone back, I wonder why there's no reward...
Assuming the story is true, and not an act of viral marketing, Apple is under no obligation to offer a reward for their property. Gizmodo has a legal duty to return the property to its owner. Failure to do so is both a crime (petty theft) and something that they can be sued for (conversion). There's a host of other crimes and torts that they're admitting to.
Rewards are for the honest.
So then the two of you are in agreement. Adam Smith opposed the imposition of government rules (which lead to things like government sanctioned monopolies, also known as corporations) on the Free Enterprise system.
You have a very, very strange interpretation of the text I quoted. Adam Smith was talking about the way the director/shareholder divide resulted in investors who don't know (and often don't care) about the internal operations of the company and in directors who are often negligent with other people's money. He was talking about principal-agent conflicts of interest.
Also, corporations are not inherently government-sanctioned monopolies. (That has to be the most bizarre attempt at a definition I've ever seen.) A corporation is just a liability shield for investors to encourage people to put up money on projects that carry too much financial risk. That's all.
"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow citizens."
-- Adam Smith
You want to appeal to authority? Fine. I'll see your Adam Smith quote and raise you another. Here's what he has to say about the corporations you'd rather see in charge of things:
"[T]he greater part of [general shareholders] seldom pretend to understand any thing of the business of the company; and when the spirit of faction happens not to prevail among them, give themselves no trouble about it, but receive contentedly such halfyearly or yearly dividend as the directors think proper to make to them. This total exemption front trouble and front risk, beyond a limited sum, encourages many people to become adventurers in [corporations], who would, upon no account, hazard their fortunes in any private [partnership]. ... The directors of such companies, however, being the managers rather of other people's money than of their own, it cannot well be expected that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private [partnership] frequently watch over their own. Like the stewards of a rich man, they are apt to consider attention to small matters as not for their master's honour, and very easily give themselves a dispensation from having it. Negligence and profusion, therefore, must always prevail, more or less, in the management of the affairs of such a company."
-- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, pp. 506 (some archaic terms substituted with modern ones.)
This only works if "aliens" don't care about the fact that their culture is lost through the process... or maybe culture also evolves similarly towards the inevitable conclusion that we must also launch panspermia capsules, ensuring that life persists in the universe.
Both dubious propositions at best. I find it more likely that a culture will abandon "life" (i.e. move to a non-biological strata) than that a civilization would abandon culture to ensure that other competing species arise ...and then never talk to or make use of them.
I do not believe there is cause for alarm! Don't you think "personal nuclear power stations" sounds rather hyperbolic? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole
Could you offer some sort of counter-argument for why flying nuclear reactors is not a cause for concern? Maybe one that addresses one (or more!) of the points I raised? Or maybe one that quotes something I actually said when accusing me of hyperbole?
Also, I may make a typo or two, but I do have better than a 6th grade reading level. If you're going to link to something, try something informative and not patronizing.
A car that drives its self means no more designated drivers or having to wait to sober up before going home. It means the party can continue all the way home. ...If you know what I mean.
A flying car is just a waste of fuel & money that could be better spent on booze. :P
But waiting in traffic is a waste of time.
Traffic will not vanish just because people can fly in three dimensions. Without auto-drive, there will still be a clear need for channeled traffic to avoid collisions between people just flying off in any direction. It won't be a free for all unless you really do want cars dropping out of the sky on a daily basis.
With auto-drive, many traffic jams can be made to vanish. Most congestion is the result of pressure waves from human drivers starting, stopping, refusing to let other people over, gawking at unnecessary accidents, etc. Universal, intelligent driving could eliminate stop-and-go traffic entirely and reduce slow-downs immensely.
I'm hoping it will be practical to park such vehicles in the sun and be coated with solar panels so as to mostly charge themselves between commuting. The top of buildings would make great parking spots (if reinforced). I realize, though, that flying takes a lot of energy.
Flying takes a LOT more energy than driving, and we don't even have practical solar family cars yet. Most prototype flying cars we've seen only carry 1-2 people (no cargo) and get mileage on par with a mediocre 4-person sedan. Even 2D, land-based solar cars are a fantasy unless we get major advances in solar cell efficiency.
Till we all get personal nuclear power stations in our cars, they ain't going to fly. There simply isn't enough energy density in our current fuels to power a flying car safely.
You have a very strange definition of safety if putting a nuclear reactor in a flying vehicle owned and operated by random civilians is your idea of "safe." Even a well-contained (aside: heavy) RTG represents a source of dirty bomb material that you want to put out in the public's hands.
You also have to consider the clean up costs involved in scrapping such a vehicle after its useful life-span is over or it has crashed. Most metal scrapyards won't touch anything that has radioactives. You'd have to set up a specialty business to handle removing offensive components before sending the rest of the wreck off to be processed. I imagine that emergency services across the nation will love having to cart along radiation detectors as part of first response to any accident. (No matter how well you engineer containment, this will be necessary just in case.) And who all has liability if a nuclear flying car crashes into a house and does contaminate the land?
Also, do we even have electric engines capable of heavy lifting for VTOL? All the electric planes I'm aware of are light-weight models with huge wingspan (often to accommodate solar panels). I wouldn't be surprised if we did, but I'd like to ask for some examples.
OK, we've all whined about the fact that we are now firmly entrenched in the 21st Century and no flying cars.
No, I'm pretty sure I consider that to be a feature and not a bug in our technological progress. Movement in three dimensions is a waste of fuel for most tasks, and a humongous safety hazard in the hands of most drivers as well as in the case of engineering failure.
I don't want flying cars; I want cars that can drive themselves more safely than people can. That's my SF car of the future.
So you seem to think that if there are aliens capable of traveling vast distances in space, they would be incapable of living on anything other than some big ass rock?
I've reread my post twice, and I don't see where you got that impression from. I believe I mentioned "habitable space" and "foreign stars." Purely orbital construction is definitely a viable strategy, especially in systems with plenty of mineral and energy resources but no habitable worlds.
So, that doesn't really counter my point. In fact it gives a strong argument for why the majority of star systems that do not contain a sun like ours should still be good real estate to colonize and why we should expect to be surrounded by radio sources.
Planets really aren't that useful, it's the stars that are useful. If it's energy the aliens are after, then there isn't anything very interesting about our corner of the galaxy.
To flip that around, there's nothing particularly uninteresting about our corner of the galaxy either. There are plenty of stars pumping out energy with raw materials orbiting them. (There are 1400 stars within 50 light years alone.) Once you have the tech required to build new colonies using entirely extra-terrestrial materials (e.g. asteroids, comets, skimming gas giants, accumulating dust disks, etc.), then no star system that has some sort of orbital material is uninhabitable. Given the resource and time costs of bypassing an open star system to move to the next "richer" one, this makes the proposition that our corner of the universe has been visited and "skipped" an illogical waste.
Exponential expansion is the only logical outcome unless a species somehow evolved without the need to grow into new territory or overcame this natural impulse to grow. Personally, I find the silence comforting. It lets us know that we'll be safe to expand for at least several centuries before contact with any competition.
A few hundred years ago it was nearly impossible and highly, highly impractical to load up goods and persons on little wooden ships and sail them across the Atlantic. Yet we did. And yes, we colonized as we went. Did we, though, colonize every single leaf of grass we passed over? Not exactly. There are still wild areas of this Earth, even with humans being able to readily and easily travel to each inch of it.
We haven't colonized the whole planet YET. Ask again after 10,000 years of population pressure and resource depletion. The only factors which prevent this from being inevitable is the need for ecosystem balance (e.g. deforestation v. global warming), lack of suitability or desirability (e.g. Antarctica), or sentimental attachment (e.g. parks and nature preserves).
This doesn't work at the level of planets, and it ignores extra-planetary colonization via orbital structures that exploit the mineral and other resources of an uninhabitable world.
Is it not even remotely possible that another, more attractive system is nearby, and that was the one colonized?
Oh, yes. But how likely is it that no where in the galaxy has been colonized within the span of time that it would take for a radio signal to reach us?
For SETI purposes, we usually only consider stars within 50 light years of us because those are systems that our first radio signals could have reached that could have responded to us in time. Just in that small volume of space, there are 133 stars like our own sun and roughly 1400 total star systems. No one colonized any of these systems?
Okay, so maybe we live in a 50 ly radius "nature park." (Not that I can fathom what one principle would unify all these systems as "protected" instead of treating them individually, but we'll go with that.) What about radio signals from worlds that weren't aware of us at the time they were broadcasting? Why don't we see radar signals within 200 to 600 light-years?
That is a range of less than .1% of the width of the Milky Way (but good enough to cover the thickness), but for us not to have seen someone by now, they would have had to have evolved to space flight sometime in the past few hundred million years -- which is trivial compared to the age of the galaxy. Either we're one of the first (on a galactic time-scale), no one is interested in exploration, or we're alone.
At this point, if there's anyone else out there, they are so far out that we'll have millennia to prepare to meet them. We may as well just operate under the assumption that they aren't there because they'll have no impact on us any time soon.