Science isn't about *truth*, it is about *evidence*. But in all the mandatory science classes most people take there is always an oracle that has (in fact gets to *define*) the "right" answer: the teacher. Those classes are all about regurgitating static knowledge and performing rote procedures; the complexity of evidence seldom comes into them.
The effect you can see above, with the assumption that changing your opinion is somehow dishonest. If science claimed to have direct access to truth, the shift in the scientific consensus from global cooling to global warming would necessarily mean scientists were lying, either before or after.
But since science is about evidence, then changing your mind is often the more honest thing to do.
The conflation of "truth" and "evidence" is also evident in the poster's obvious resentment of "settled science". "Settled science" isn't "gospel truth"; it simply identifies where the burden of proof lies. Settled science is challenged all the time, because a successful assault on settled science is a career-making achievement.
The freedom of other people to make money with software you write -- provided they figure out how -- has always been part of the deal.
Thee free software economy is still capitalism, it's just capitalism where you're paid for what you do for a specific customer. The proprietary software market is one where investors in effect attempt to collect fees for a naturally unlimited resource created, almost always, by other people.
While it's always *possible* to build something more expensive than it needs to be, you used to be able to buy a CableCard tuner retail for around $100.
According to the old regs at least, the cable companies were banned from providing equipment with integrated encryption. They had to use a removable CableCard, so that instead of leasing a device from them you could purchase your own device and transfer the CableCard to your own equipment. The thing is, very few people knew about this, and the cable companies didn't go out of their way to inform them. The kind of people who knew are the kind of people who are cord cutters anyway.
The ban expired in 2015, which not coincidentally was when a new, encryption integrated cable box appeared on my doorstep -- which was quite manifestly a cheap P.O.S.; I'd be amazed if it cost the cable companies more than $20 to acquire in bulk. CableCard boxes are no longer available from retailers.
I'm not saying ebooks per se don't have advantages. What I'm saying is that the advantages of paper books aren't confined to the trivial examples you listed.
We can pretty confidently say that we can eliminate mosquitoes these days and we're almost 100% sure that our last practice run didn't create zika.
I worked in vector borne disease surveillance for decades, I can say with equal confidence there is no technology known or proposed that has the potential of completely eradicating a mosquito population from any region larger than a thousand acres or so. Even those genetically modified mosquitoes you've been hearing so much about only reduce an infected population in a limited area short term. That reduction will last, at most, for a matter of months; in many situations mere weeks. Still, even that could be useful in reducing anthroponotic (human-to-vector-to-human) transmission.
And by the way yes, human activities didn't create Zika, but they were a big factor in its global emergence. 70 years ago it likely existed only in a small population of rhesus monkeys in a forest on the shores of Lake Victoria, where it no doubt had persisted for thousands of years. Human encroachment offered an alternative host for the primate virus, and human trade and migration patterns carried across the entire tropical world, with anthroponotic outbreaks spreading into temperate climates. That same combination of human incursion on isolated animal populations and global emergence through migration and trade routes is behind SARS, Ebola, Marburg, MERS, Lassa Fever among others in modern times, and are likely the sources of influenza and measles.
I reiterate: life always finds a way, but given a rapid rate of global change it's not going to be a way we'll be happy about.
Rattlesnakes are fine if you have the sense to leave them alone. They have a rattle *to warn you off*. They don't want to inject you with venom, any more than you want to get up and run ten kilometers. You're about 3.5x as likely to be killed by a dog as you are by all venomous snakes combined.
As for mosquitoes, don't get your hopes up. One female can lay 100-500 eggs depending on species every three days; under the right conditions those eggs can reach sexual maturity in about ten days. That means, in theory, that missing a single gravid female in your pre-summer eradication efforts can lead to over a million trillion descendants by the end of a 13 week summer. While in practice no single mosquito is likely to be *that* reproductively successful, in practice you're always going to miss a lot more than just one.
This combination of short reproductive cycles and large brood sizes is characteristic of a "weedy" species. In a stable ecosystem, weedy species are kept in check by species with more specific adaptation to local conditions, but when you disrupt an ecosystem, it tilts the competitive balance towards species whose ecological niche is rapid colonization of unstable habitats.
Life always finds a way, but it doesn't mean it'll be a way we as humans will find pleasant. A world in which we don't constrain our disruptive activities will have plenty of life, but it'll be algal blooms rather than salmon runs; poison ivy and sumac rather than chestnut trees. A world of mouse plagues, poison ivy and mosquitoes.
Well, the storage promised isn't exactly "miraculous". It's well within the bounds of what is physically possible given the mechanism proposed.
But generally speaking your best bet with no information at your disposal is to always against anything new. That limits you to safe investments returning normal profits. How do you beat that? By being better informed than the next investor. Unfortunately every tech investor and entrepreneur thinks he's going to beat the odds, but the odds are what they are because most of them are going to fail.
Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm," but what he should have added is that no great fiasco is possible without enthusiasm either. Tempering enthusiasm with judgment is probably the toughest thing about developing a new technology.
My understanding is that Juno was von Braun's design -- not to minimize the contributions of Americans, they still would have been well behind without technology they got from Germany.
The point is countries don't acquire foreign technology, by whatever means, just to achieve indefinite parity -- which is the best you can expect if all you do is borrow. Parity is just a milestone, and the sooner you get there the sooner you get ahead.
China is in serious risk of falling into the middle income trap. The debt implosion is going to hit and it only a matter of when. When it does, at this level of debt China may never be able to attain parity with Japan or South Korea due to its massive population and demographic makeup.
Depends on what you mean by "parity". China is already immensely more militarily powerful than either of those countries. In space, China launches twice as many payloads as Japan does, and South Korea has only launched one orbital mission -- and that was on a rocket with the first stage bought from Russia.
China may never reach parity on a median-income basis, but it is already immensely more powerful than either South Korea or Japan economically and militarily, and in selected areas technologically.
How often has anyone ever been in a situation where they have to make such a choice? Once every trillion miles driven?
Well, just American drivers alone drive 3.2 trillion miles a year, so it would be a multiple-times-per-year event in the US alone, using that as the rate per mile. Globally the frequency would be much higher since the US accounts for only about 2% of pedestrian fatalities worldwide (about 5000 out of over a quarter million).
This is kind of a semi-broken way of thinking about this; yes the rate at which this situation happens is very low and likely to be lower for self-driving cars. But its a black swan event, a very rare event that you really can't leave out of your plans, because when it does happen it spells "crisis".
Anyhow, exactly the same kind of ethical calculations apply to car vs. car accidents, which are much more common. Those very often involve trading off the value of lives. The real problem is asking people what they *think* they'd do in a hypothetical situation doesn't tell you what would be right, even they are accurate in their predictions.
Americans haven't really wrapped their brain around China. Many apparently believe that China is somehow incapable of being a serious rival to the US without cheating.
One in five people on Earth lives in China; one in twenty in the US. The Chinese economy is currently about 2/3 the size of the US economy, ten years ago that figure was 1/3. And just this year, China surpassed the US in number of scientific papers published.
China is fully capable of becoming a serious technological, military and economic rival to the US without cheating. And it is willing to cheat. Without foreign scientists immigrating to the US, there's no way we can keep up with them through mid-century.
Well, America's space program was built by Nazis we snatched up before the Soviets could grab them. Is that any better? The first Americans in space went up on a derivative of the V2, a rocket that was developed and produced with slave labor.
While the Chinese government is certainly not beyond stealing technology, that's really just a matter of accelerating the inevitable Chinese parity with the West. China has a substantial space program that produces it own unique, indigenous designs.
that need a bunch of other things in place to become available before they really are successful.
The iPHone wasn't the first smartphone; as a developer I used a number of early attempts at "converged" phones. The first was probably the IBM Simon A massive 18 ounce brick of a phone with a monochrome display and a one hour battery life. These early converged phones were tour-de-forces of the day's technology, but they were still too big, too slow, too crude, and too battery-hungry to be anything more than curiosities.
What Steven Jobs did with the iPhone was catch the wave at exactly the right moment, when screens and processors and batteries and networks and UIs all got good good enough, cheap enough to make a blockbuster product possible. Other people were close -- Palm's Treo devices were pretty good, but ever-so-slightly clunky due to their legacy tech. Jobs had the advantage of a clean sheet.
It's not vision that's lacking in most failed attempts to get a new concept off the ground, it's timing.
Well, it'd be money well-spent if it had the same marketing impact.
Nobody wanted space in the Falcon Heavy test launch mission, but after demonstrating the ability to launch heavy payloads to escape velocity SpaceX has established credibility for launching large, geostationary payloads.
Yes, despite his manifest personal weirdness rms is completely right about his: you don't control your phone. Google/Apple and any vendor you give access to your mic and camera could be listening in on you at any time it is on. I am not convinced that turning your phone off that's it's necessarily *really* off -- Snowden agrees. There is no physical way to distinguish between the phone being off and malware which emulates the phone being off, or in the case of actors with "national means", hacked firmware; after all the "power" button isn't connected to the actual battery.
I've said for years now phones need at a hardware switch that disconnects their mic and cameras, and in addition to the standard power button a battery disconnect slide switch. If you took those features and added them to an iPhone 6 you could market it as a security phone.
Well, again that seems simplistic to me. Keynes said you could just bury money in the ground and let people dig it up, and it'd have a stimulative effect, and I'm sure that's true. But I do think it makes a difference what you spend money on. The government should spend money on things like infrastructure that improve private sector productivity when the economy turns around.
Either way. Why would you expect the effect of a minimum wage increase to always do the same thing, regardless of the size of the increase or other circumstances in the economy? I'd expect depending on the size and circumstance that the effects would vary.
It's kind of like how I feel about government spending. Politicians tighten the public belt when there's a recession and spend like crazy when times are good. They should do exactly the opposite. When times are good they're taking money out of an economy that's doing well at turning dollars to jobs. When times are bad they're keeping dollars in an economy that's not converting dollars to jobs very well.
Technically any misrepresentation of your identity violates Facebook's TOS, para 3.1. So any account from any non-American claiming to be American will get shut down.
Facebook is a private organization, which has the right to police the content of their site in any manner they see fit. Facebook has many content restrictions, which is its right, but the "real identity" policy happens to be content neutral.
Slashdot Mirror
Science isn't about *truth*, it is about *evidence*. But in all the mandatory science classes most people take there is always an oracle that has (in fact gets to *define*) the "right" answer: the teacher. Those classes are all about regurgitating static knowledge and performing rote procedures; the complexity of evidence seldom comes into them.
The effect you can see above, with the assumption that changing your opinion is somehow dishonest. If science claimed to have direct access to truth, the shift in the scientific consensus from global cooling to global warming would necessarily mean scientists were lying, either before or after.
But since science is about evidence, then changing your mind is often the more honest thing to do.
The conflation of "truth" and "evidence" is also evident in the poster's obvious resentment of "settled science". "Settled science" isn't "gospel truth"; it simply identifies where the burden of proof lies. Settled science is challenged all the time, because a successful assault on settled science is a career-making achievement.
The freedom of other people to make money with software you write -- provided they figure out how -- has always been part of the deal.
Thee free software economy is still capitalism, it's just capitalism where you're paid for what you do for a specific customer. The proprietary software market is one where investors in effect attempt to collect fees for a naturally unlimited resource created, almost always, by other people.
Nope. He was a white supremacist name Robert Bowers. Trump was not extreme enough for him.
While it's always *possible* to build something more expensive than it needs to be, you used to be able to buy a CableCard tuner retail for around $100.
According to the old regs at least, the cable companies were banned from providing equipment with integrated encryption. They had to use a removable CableCard, so that instead of leasing a device from them you could purchase your own device and transfer the CableCard to your own equipment. The thing is, very few people knew about this, and the cable companies didn't go out of their way to inform them. The kind of people who knew are the kind of people who are cord cutters anyway.
The ban expired in 2015, which not coincidentally was when a new, encryption integrated cable box appeared on my doorstep -- which was quite manifestly a cheap P.O.S.; I'd be amazed if it cost the cable companies more than $20 to acquire in bulk. CableCard boxes are no longer available from retailers.
I'm not saying ebooks per se don't have advantages. What I'm saying is that the advantages of paper books aren't confined to the trivial examples you listed.
We can pretty confidently say that we can eliminate mosquitoes these days and we're almost 100% sure that our last practice run didn't create zika.
I worked in vector borne disease surveillance for decades, I can say with equal confidence there is no technology known or proposed that has the potential of completely eradicating a mosquito population from any region larger than a thousand acres or so. Even those genetically modified mosquitoes you've been hearing so much about only reduce an infected population in a limited area short term. That reduction will last, at most, for a matter of months; in many situations mere weeks. Still, even that could be useful in reducing anthroponotic (human-to-vector-to-human) transmission.
And by the way yes, human activities didn't create Zika, but they were a big factor in its global emergence. 70 years ago it likely existed only in a small population of rhesus monkeys in a forest on the shores of Lake Victoria, where it no doubt had persisted for thousands of years. Human encroachment offered an alternative host for the primate virus, and human trade and migration patterns carried across the entire tropical world, with anthroponotic outbreaks spreading into temperate climates. That same combination of human incursion on isolated animal populations and global emergence through migration and trade routes is behind SARS, Ebola, Marburg, MERS, Lassa Fever among others in modern times, and are likely the sources of influenza and measles.
I reiterate: life always finds a way, but given a rapid rate of global change it's not going to be a way we'll be happy about.
You can't lose access to them because of a software glitch or the eBook distribution company going out of business.
Securing hosts from other, rogue hosts doesn't do much to protect them if the attack vector is a rogue user.
This is a data management agency and if you compromise the right user's devices those devices can be used to launch attacks on many hosts.
Rattlesnakes are fine if you have the sense to leave them alone. They have a rattle *to warn you off*. They don't want to inject you with venom, any more than you want to get up and run ten kilometers. You're about 3.5x as likely to be killed by a dog as you are by all venomous snakes combined.
As for mosquitoes, don't get your hopes up. One female can lay 100-500 eggs depending on species every three days; under the right conditions those eggs can reach sexual maturity in about ten days. That means, in theory, that missing a single gravid female in your pre-summer eradication efforts can lead to over a million trillion descendants by the end of a 13 week summer. While in practice no single mosquito is likely to be *that* reproductively successful, in practice you're always going to miss a lot more than just one.
This combination of short reproductive cycles and large brood sizes is characteristic of a "weedy" species. In a stable ecosystem, weedy species are kept in check by species with more specific adaptation to local conditions, but when you disrupt an ecosystem, it tilts the competitive balance towards species whose ecological niche is rapid colonization of unstable habitats.
Life always finds a way, but it doesn't mean it'll be a way we as humans will find pleasant. A world in which we don't constrain our disruptive activities will have plenty of life, but it'll be algal blooms rather than salmon runs; poison ivy and sumac rather than chestnut trees. A world of mouse plagues, poison ivy and mosquitoes.
Well, the storage promised isn't exactly "miraculous". It's well within the bounds of what is physically possible given the mechanism proposed.
But generally speaking your best bet with no information at your disposal is to always against anything new. That limits you to safe investments returning normal profits. How do you beat that? By being better informed than the next investor. Unfortunately every tech investor and entrepreneur thinks he's going to beat the odds, but the odds are what they are because most of them are going to fail.
Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm," but what he should have added is that no great fiasco is possible without enthusiasm either. Tempering enthusiasm with judgment is probably the toughest thing about developing a new technology.
My understanding is that Juno was von Braun's design -- not to minimize the contributions of Americans, they still would have been well behind without technology they got from Germany.
The point is countries don't acquire foreign technology, by whatever means, just to achieve indefinite parity -- which is the best you can expect if all you do is borrow. Parity is just a milestone, and the sooner you get there the sooner you get ahead.
China is in serious risk of falling into the middle income trap. The debt implosion is going to hit and it only a matter of when. When it does, at this level of debt China may never be able to attain parity with Japan or South Korea due to its massive population and demographic makeup.
Depends on what you mean by "parity". China is already immensely more militarily powerful than either of those countries. In space, China launches twice as many payloads as Japan does, and South Korea has only launched one orbital mission -- and that was on a rocket with the first stage bought from Russia.
China may never reach parity on a median-income basis, but it is already immensely more powerful than either South Korea or Japan economically and militarily, and in selected areas technologically.
How often has anyone ever been in a situation where they have to make such a choice? Once every trillion miles driven?
Well, just American drivers alone drive 3.2 trillion miles a year, so it would be a multiple-times-per-year event in the US alone, using that as the rate per mile. Globally the frequency would be much higher since the US accounts for only about 2% of pedestrian fatalities worldwide (about 5000 out of over a quarter million).
This is kind of a semi-broken way of thinking about this; yes the rate at which this situation happens is very low and likely to be lower for self-driving cars. But its a black swan event, a very rare event that you really can't leave out of your plans, because when it does happen it spells "crisis".
Anyhow, exactly the same kind of ethical calculations apply to car vs. car accidents, which are much more common. Those very often involve trading off the value of lives. The real problem is asking people what they *think* they'd do in a hypothetical situation doesn't tell you what would be right, even they are accurate in their predictions.
Americans haven't really wrapped their brain around China. Many apparently believe that China is somehow incapable of being a serious rival to the US without cheating.
One in five people on Earth lives in China; one in twenty in the US. The Chinese economy is currently about 2/3 the size of the US economy, ten years ago that figure was 1/3. And just this year, China surpassed the US in number of scientific papers published.
China is fully capable of becoming a serious technological, military and economic rival to the US without cheating. And it is willing to cheat. Without foreign scientists immigrating to the US, there's no way we can keep up with them through mid-century.
Well, America's space program was built by Nazis we snatched up before the Soviets could grab them. Is that any better? The first Americans in space went up on a derivative of the V2, a rocket that was developed and produced with slave labor.
While the Chinese government is certainly not beyond stealing technology, that's really just a matter of accelerating the inevitable Chinese parity with the West. China has a substantial space program that produces it own unique, indigenous designs.
that need a bunch of other things in place to become available before they really are successful.
The iPHone wasn't the first smartphone; as a developer I used a number of early attempts at "converged" phones. The first was probably the IBM Simon A massive 18 ounce brick of a phone with a monochrome display and a one hour battery life. These early converged phones were tour-de-forces of the day's technology, but they were still too big, too slow, too crude, and too battery-hungry to be anything more than curiosities.
What Steven Jobs did with the iPhone was catch the wave at exactly the right moment, when screens and processors and batteries and networks and UIs all got good good enough, cheap enough to make a blockbuster product possible. Other people were close -- Palm's Treo devices were pretty good, but ever-so-slightly clunky due to their legacy tech. Jobs had the advantage of a clean sheet.
It's not vision that's lacking in most failed attempts to get a new concept off the ground, it's timing.
Open hardware is best, of course, but it is sufficient to have a hardware switches that disconnect things.
You could repackage an iPhone 5s in a bulkier case and have a pretty securable phone.
The strength of the material is specified in pressure units -- in this case 80 gigapascals.
A simple unit conversion can give you the cross-sectional strength in newtons: 80 billion newtons per square meter.
Well, it'd be money well-spent if it had the same marketing impact.
Nobody wanted space in the Falcon Heavy test launch mission, but after demonstrating the ability to launch heavy payloads to escape velocity SpaceX has established credibility for launching large, geostationary payloads.
Yes, despite his manifest personal weirdness rms is completely right about his: you don't control your phone. Google/Apple and any vendor you give access to your mic and camera could be listening in on you at any time it is on. I am not convinced that turning your phone off that's it's necessarily *really* off -- Snowden agrees. There is no physical way to distinguish between the phone being off and malware which emulates the phone being off, or in the case of actors with "national means", hacked firmware; after all the "power" button isn't connected to the actual battery.
I've said for years now phones need at a hardware switch that disconnects their mic and cameras, and in addition to the standard power button a battery disconnect slide switch. If you took those features and added them to an iPhone 6 you could market it as a security phone.
Somebody's got to be on the left end of the emotional intelligence bell curve.
Well, again that seems simplistic to me. Keynes said you could just bury money in the ground and let people dig it up, and it'd have a stimulative effect, and I'm sure that's true. But I do think it makes a difference what you spend money on. The government should spend money on things like infrastructure that improve private sector productivity when the economy turns around.
Either way. Why would you expect the effect of a minimum wage increase to always do the same thing, regardless of the size of the increase or other circumstances in the economy? I'd expect depending on the size and circumstance that the effects would vary.
It's kind of like how I feel about government spending. Politicians tighten the public belt when there's a recession and spend like crazy when times are good. They should do exactly the opposite. When times are good they're taking money out of an economy that's doing well at turning dollars to jobs. When times are bad they're keeping dollars in an economy that's not converting dollars to jobs very well.
Technically any misrepresentation of your identity violates Facebook's TOS, para 3.1. So any account from any non-American claiming to be American will get shut down.
Facebook is a private organization, which has the right to police the content of their site in any manner they see fit. Facebook has many content restrictions, which is its right, but the "real identity" policy happens to be content neutral.
Actually, Robbie Barrat pioneered this kind of thing, but his stuff is much, much more interesting.