It's not hard to make a firearm. It's hard to make an accurate, reliable firearm with useful ergonomic features like multi-shot magazines.
Kids have been making "zip guns" in shop for years. The simplest single shot designs use a nail driven by a rubber band to strike a cartridge held in a metal tube. For a.22 barrel you can use a length of copper tubing set in epoxy in a steel pipe. Or you can drill a hole in a solid piece of steel. For a shotgun shell, an iron or steel pipe will do.
If you want to ensure people are always armed, figure out a way to make *cartridges*. Or perhaps design a gun that works reliably with improvised cartridges. Maybe adapt a home cigarette rolling machine to make paper cartridges disguised as smokes.
His work is mostly speculative, and artificial in nature, and his assertions haven't been born out on the road.
Citations?
In fact his studies are some of the exact ones proven to have defects that icebike mentioned in his first linked article.
As far as I can see none of DL Strayer's papers are cited by Dr. Young's paper (doi: 10.1097/EDE.0b013e31823b5efc -- perhaps I've got the wrong one), referred to in the link above.
First there was icebike's claim that DL Strayer has never done any distracted driving studies. That about as wrong as wrong can be. Then there is your claim that the paper linked to by icebike specifically debunks several of DL Strayer's papers. I thought this was curious. If that were so, then why would icebike think that DL Strayer hasn't done any distracted driving studies? So I checked, and apparently Dr. Young's paper doesn't cite any of DL Strayer's publications. If that is so, then you must be mistaken.
I'll assume for now you guys mixed different studies up and simply didn't bother to check, but you can see how it would be forgivable for someone to come away with the impression you guys are just making stuff up.
In spite of this, in a fit of political correctness, the author feels compelled in the last paragraph of the story to print a quote from someone who has done no specific research on phoning while driving, but he still fees competent to weigh in suggesting bans be followed by stiffer enforcement.
The person being quoted is D. L. Strayer, who a quick google scholar search reveals has done a proverbial shitload of distracted driving research, much of it focused on phone use.
This is the second major study calling into question the idea that talking on the phone while driving is vastly more dangerous, as dangerous as drunk driving.
This study does no such thing. What this study shows is that talking on the phone being dangerous *is not disproven* by accident rates remaining the same after a ban. It does this by suggesting that people most affected by the ban are such (to use a scientific) boneheads that when you take away their cell phone they just find other ways to cause accidents. Another possibility is that these people ignore the ban, the way they ignore the prohibitions on tailgating and weaving.
The big question is that given that cell phone bans don't make much statistical difference in accident rates, should we have them? But to be fair, the same could be said of bans against weaving and tailgating. It's seems plausible that people who don't drive like idiots do so *because they're not idiots*. But as another researcher quoted in the article suggests, perhaps the problem is that we don't enforce laws against aggressive driving enough.
To be more precise, ad hominem is a fallacy *only* when used to refute an argument's conclusions. It *can* be used to refute a piece of *evidence*. Let me illustrate.
Alice: Charlie says some flying saucers must be pink. Bob: Oh, I don't believe that. Charlie's a nutcase.
Bob has just committed argumentum ad hominem. He has refuted an argument based on the person putting it forth.
Alice: Charlie says some flying saucers must be pink. Bob: How does he know? Alice: Charlie says he saw some pink ones. Bob: Oh, I don't believe that. Charlie's a nutcase.
Here Bob is doing something subtly different. He does not believe Charlie's *evidence*, based on Charlie's known lack of credibility in the paranormal event department. This has the same effect as the ad hominem, but it is valid because it's not a blanket refutation of *anything* Bob wishes to deny:
Alice: Charlie says some flying saucers must be pink. Bob: How does he know? Alice: It says so in the new erratum to Jane's *All the World's Aircraft*. Bob: ???
Wrong, sonny. Emacs command buffer is the native environment of us old folks. Back in the day, learning to hack at the speed of thought on a vt52 culled the herd, boy. We didn't learn some new language to solve a particular problem, we'd *write* the doggone things in Lex and Yacc. That is if knocking off a recursive descent parser in MACRO-11 was too much trouble.
As far as I can see, none of your examples has much to do with the app in question. Realtime video communication is a torture-test for a network whose capacity is planned and sold with statistical multiplexing in mind. Every commercial network in existence is predicated on the idea that users don't need peak bandwidth all the time, that need comes in bursts and bursts from users seldom overlap. That's what makes network access affordable; guaranteeing everyone peak bandwidth all the time would require dedicating a private channel to each user.
Modern video codecs would make a stream of a talking head against a relatively static background fairly bursty, but there's a limit to how low they can reduce bandwidth consumption. And mobile processors, while quite powerful these days, aren't magic. For example the more work they do, the more battery life they consume. So it's quite plausible, despite the examples you cite, that an app like this is a problem for the carrier. Skype would come the closest, but by *integrating the video app with the phone app* Apple guarantees much greater use and therefore network load. In any case without a side by side comparison with a network monitor we can't say whether Skype and Facetime are equivalent in their impact for any given call.
People get net neutrality all wrong -- even people who are for it. It's not about some kind of birthright to bandwidth, it's about non-discrimination. It's about freedom, but freedom doesn't mean freedom from consequences or costs. Network neutrality means people don't have to limit themselves to services chosen by the carrier provided by vendors chosen by the carrier. It means they do what they want with whomever they want, provided that the network is capable.
The easiest way to achieve non-discrimination is ignore app and user bandwidth consumption entirely. But to make that work, you'd have to charge people for traffic, particularly long bursts of traffic. Since people won't stand for that, they're pretty much guaranteed inconsistent service unless the provider starts throttling people or apps that send long streams of data. I'm actually OK with that, *as long as it is done consistently and on a purely technical basis*. This preserves competition. All app providers have to fall within the same network use limitations.
The problem is when carriers discriminate for marketing reasons (you must use *our* video conferencing app, you must use *our* email service, use our photo service to get your pictures off the phone). That's why featurephone apps never took off like smartphone apps. Smartphones are a competitive market any app developer can enter.
I won't argue whether this is or is not a violation of network neutrality, because that's not the important question. The important question is whether this leaves competition intact. We won't know until we see whether AT&T favors some apps or vendors over others.
When will people seriously get it into their think marketer heads that although cartoons or videos may be more initially eye-catching, they have low information density and are worse at getting actual information across than plain old text?
Information means different things. What most people mean when they say information is *meaning*. You can't make blanket statements about how much *meaning* a cartoon can carry vs. text. It depends on three things: (1) the topic; (2) the artist or writer's mastery of the topic; and (3) the artist or writer's mastery of his craft.
Google the corporate entity doesn't really have any say in daily operations on this scale, it can only react to stuff like this happening.
This isn't even baloney. It's olive loaf.
The way something like this works is that people have to collude. The way they collude is to use exactly the logic you have here: it's not *my* job to deal with the consequences. It's not *your* job. It's the job of someone not in this room.
The reason this is olive loaf is that everybody knows somebody has to do this job. Trace the chain of command up from this guy's boss, to the bosses boss and so forth. This is an important job. Someone fairly high up on that chain of command made sure it was getting done, and when he did, he must have known it was being done with contractors. That meant he made a conscious decision that this important job should be done by a low status worker which Google had no long term responsibility for. That person handed a "it's not my job" card to every manager down the line.
Any time you have someone who to all practical purposes looks like an employee, doing a permanent, line oriented job (as opposed to support like janitorial services), and that person is *not* an employee, there's something fishy going on.
"Requires labeling on raw or processed food offered for sale to consumers if made from plants or animals with genetic material changed in specified ways. Prohibits labeling or advertising such food as “natural.” Exempts foods that are: certified organic; unintentionally produced with genetically engineered material; made from animals fed or injected with genetically engineered material but not genetically engineered themselves; processed with or containing only small amounts of genetically engineered ingredients; administered for treatment of medical conditions; sold for immediate consumption such as in a restaurant; or alcoholic beverages."
Odd that it's not in the linked article. It seems strange to me that someone would write a piece about the ballot measure without actually summarizing what it says, or even *linking* to a summary.
A discussion of prop 37 can be found on ballotpedia and on the CA Secretary of State's voter information website. What should be clear is that much of what we're talking about here (e.g. labeling of accidentally contaminated crops, mandatory testing for genetic alterations) has no bearing on the actual proposal.
Since when is this a site for *tech* news? There are other sites that do that. This is a "news for nerds" site, and tech news is just part of that.
This "women can't get pregnant from forcible rape" meme has been around for a long time, though, and the right to life movement has been promoting this myth for years now. It has been used as an argument against emergency contraception.
This particular story is about public ignorance of science, so it may not be news *to* nerds, but it qualifies as news *for* nerds. It's not news that ignorant people believe in creationism, it *is* news when creationists use their clout to restrict the teaching of evolution or to give equal billing to creation "science". It isn't news that some people (largely the same people who push creationism) believe a woman can't get pregnant from rape. It *is* news when somebody runs for office proposing to make laws based on that superstition. It's news for *everybody*, but the nerd's special bailiwick is the science and math part.
First learn to run, then learn to walk through a room full of furniture, then learn to walk through a hallway full of morons talking on their cell phones.
And I expect computers on the road will get better the higher percentage of computer-driven cars there are on the road. The reasons is that people are very good at predicting the behavior of other people. Just the other day I was driving on the interstate in moderate, fast moving traffic and I saw a guy pull up behind a car in the right lane. "Watch this guy," I said to my wife, and sure enough he changed lanes, pulled up to within two feet of the car in front of me (at 70 mph) and cut in front of the first car with hardly a foot to spare. It was exactly what I'd expected him to do, based on the speed with he approached and the kind of car he was driving.
Of course a lot of predictive heuristics about human behavior could be programmed into an automated system. One of them might be recognizing the slow reactions of distracted drivers. As I approach intersections these days I'm always on the lookout for someone on the cross street who is not slowing as soon as he should. Frequently these are drivers on cell phones who not only miss the stop line, but end up well into the intersection before they start looking for traffic.
A robotic driver would be consistently aware and prudent. I suspect well before the point where a robot driver is as good as an average driver (if we aren't there already), we'd reach the point where the roads would be safer if all cars were robot piloted, simply by removing human inconsistency.
If you're a programmer and you've got the bit in your teeth, then it makes sense to go as long as you feel energized. Thats the apples half of the comparison.
It's a totally different thing when a project cost estimate is borked and you're chained to your desk trying to meet some foolishly chosen deadline. It saps enthusiasm because the goal is to make it under the wire even if you have to push utter crap out the door. That's the oranges half of the comparison.
Trying to increase productivity by working twelve to sixteen hours *in order to attend more meetings* simply beggars belief.
People like being productive. As a first approximation, if it doesn't generate at least *some* enthusiasm, it's probably wasting employee time. Even a meeting can generate enthusiasm if people walk out of it feeling a new sense of purpose, or that obstacles frustrating their success have just been removed. The occasional midnight coding session or teleconference can be interesting and productive, but if you do that *regularly* people will hate it *because they know their time is being wasted*.
It's how you can exclude a vendor (or vendors) you have no desire of even giving the opportunity to win the quote. This can be because of past history with the company's sales team, poor delivery, poor service, poor quality, and so on.
In other words words, the devil you know.
I've been on the other side of that equation, both as a winner and a loser. MOST often I found this vendor-slanted specification phenomenon was the result of the procurement rules UNDER-weighting confidence in the vendor. That's because we don't trust the judgment of government worker bees. A CEO can make a deal with a handshake on the golf course. Because CEOs are supposed to be geniuses, we trust his gut instinct. We think government workers are idiots, so we don't allow them to make gut decisions. Instead, we expect them to develop procurement criteria that reliably and objectively predict the future.
Procurement decisions tend to work by assigning point scores to various areas. There may be minimum scores in certain areas (vendor capacity) , but then each score area is added up linearly: Ax + By +..., etc. The problem is that value doesn't add linearly this way. Take, for example, tablets in the classroom. Batteries that don't last long enough to complete an assignment are a deal-breaker. No problem, you set a minimum score for battery life. Battery life that's longer than a school day adds no real utility. No problem, you set a maximum score for battery life.
But here's the tough part: battery life doesn't really measure anything useful in itself. Suppose two tablets, A & B, are identical in every way, but A is lighter and has a longer battery life. So A wins on specs, right? Maybe, maybe not. You're buying a tool, not a toy. So you decide to run pilot projects using A and B, and find that kids using A consistently report battery problems, kids using B never do. So B wins the empirical battery test, right? Wrong. What's happening is that the kids with sleek, lightweight A use their tablets so much they run the batteries down. The kids with clunky B don't use their tablets much. So A wins on usability, right? No. It turns out that the kids using A get slightly worse results than B, because they're goofing off on the tablet when they should be doing something else. The kids with B use their tablets when they *need* them, but no more. Going by *outcome*, B has enough battery life to get the job done and A does not, *even though A has a longer battery life*.
Granted, this is hypothetical, but reality is very much like this: so complicated it makes a reliable a priori test of optimality impossible. Sometimes you're better off going with what you think has the highest chance of succeeding, rather than what looks "best" on paper.
Most government workers are honest -- at least as honest as they can be and still get their jobs done. One of the ways they are less than perfectly honest is that they game the procurement system in order to ensure a satisfactory outcome.
You can't talk about some parameter in two different populations without talking about how the parameter was measured, specifically the sample chosen and methods used to estimate.
In Denver, people receive 0.3 rem per year excess radiation purely because of elevation. The sample we're talking about is everyone who doesn't live in a lead-lined house.
In Fukushima, presumably different people received different doses. What does "[some hot spots] showed radiation at the level of.1 rem" even mean? Did they measure? If they measured, how big was the sample? As an extreme example, suppose the estimate was based on measurements of a single person? Or did they estimate? Whether they estimated or measured, what do the data actually say? That the *average* exposure was.1 rem or the *maximum possible* exposure was.1 rem?
One interesting corollary to the fact you can't get rid of all waste in any program (government or otherwise) is that if you under-fund a program that kernel of waste becomes a larger fraction of the overall budget.
I've seen both scenarios: programs which are so underfunded they focus entirely on surviving instead of producing results, and programs so over-funded the challenge is to get all the cash dumped in their laps spent so as to avoid funding cuts next year.
In other words: any program has an *optimal* funding level with respect to efficiency. Above or below that level financial efficiency drops. Typically that level is *lean* -- that forces administrators to make tough choices and forgo things that would clearly be useful because they just aren't cost effective.
Now what I've never seen is a program that got more efficient via funding cuts. The reason is that government programs are divided into two groups: sacred cows that are wildly overfunded, and programs that are underfunded to pay for those sacred cows. The greatest sacred cow in the US budget is defense. Everyone's for a strong defense, and most people if given a choice would opt for a *stronger* defense, all other things being equal. But all other things aren't equal, *because when it comes to defense we use spending to keep score*. In other words, we use spending levels as a proxy for strength; if we spend more for defense this year, we assume we have a stronger defense; if we spend less, we assume our defense must be weaker.
In fact, "sacred cows" can be detected by this simple test: is *spending* the measure of accomplishment? We can see this in the recent attack on President Obama for "cutting Medicare", a "cut" *which involved no benefit reductions*. Medicare is a sacred cow, so the spending level is what matters politically, not what the program accomplishes.
If we measure "smaller government" by "lower Federal expenditures" (admittedly a simplistic measure), then as long as we have sacred cows government will never get much smaller. Look at the text of the article, in which we learn that the core of Mr. Ryan's plan for reducing the size of government focuses on "discretionary non-defense spending", a spending category which currently amounts to *a mere 15% of the Federal Budget*. If that category was zeroed out (including nearly all science), spending would not drop very much, but that's not Ryan's plan. His plan is to slow the growth of discretionary non-defense spending *over the next decade*. In other words his plan for smaller government is to spend more money on sacred cows and softening the tax blow by cutting relatively minor expenditures like scientific research.
I'll say this for Ryan: he is (or rather *was*) willing to take on the Medicare sacred cow. But he's not willing to take on the defense sacred cow. In that he is not unusual. There are plenty of politicians who are willing to take on *some* sacred cows, but none are willing to take on *all* of them. And as long as there are *any* sacred cows, spending won't ever decrease. Occasionally a coalition is able to kill a single sacred cow, but never has that resulted in federal spending decreasing. It results in money going to other sacred cows, sometimes with a tax rate cut and borrowing increase to produce the *illusion* of smaller government.
True story. My wife went to a presentation by a graduate student in which he proposed to do an ecological study of a small pond by rapidly freezing everything in place, thus getting a "snapshot" of the pond at one instant of time.
Since making water ice is obviously too energy intensive and slow, he proposed to use a compound that when dissolved in water set to a plastic-like compound via a rapid exothermic reaction. The climax of his presentation was a small-scale demonstration. Unfortunately the reaction was not *quite* instantaneous, and the goldfish he was using as a demonstration subject jumped out of the water and landed on the floor. Discreetly kicking the fish under the desk, the student calmly continued his presentation as if all had gone as planned.
Offtopic, I know, but juxtaposed with this story I guess the moral is that while only a few people appear awesome to others, everyone is awesome in their own imagination.
Without talking about bad implementation... it seems exceedingly unlikely that any law enforcement agency would have the ability to defeat modern encryption algorithms.
Without a paddle, it is exceedingly unlikely a kayaker would have the ability to defeat the current up the creek.
Going down the list, the majority of them appear to be either self-published or published by "vanity" press operations. The notion of economic damage is, for most of these writers, a fantasy.
I started to read sci-fi in the early 1970s, after the Golden Age but while many of the Golden Age writers were still with us. Time has passed and many great (and countless very good) writers are no longer with us are fading into obscurity: C.L. Moore, Alfred Bester, Clifford D. Simak, and Randall Garrett to name a few.
Well, being well known and oft-cited isn't the same as being appreciated for what you really are. Consider Adam Smith who wrote *The Wealth of Nations* a book far more cited than read.
Asimov was merely a *good* writer, but he was a *brilliant* thinker. There are, therefore, multiple layers of irony then in the way the three laws are cited. They don't have the kind of scientific validity they have in his robot story universe, where people simply cannot build robots that violate the laws. In the real world we are far from building robots that are capable of interpreting the three laws.
The real significance of the laws is literary. They killed the popularity of the robot-run-amok story, because suddenly everyone expected a more sophisticated -- or at least more clever story than a third-hand Frankenstein retread. Such a story would pose no challenge nor offer rewards to an intellect like his.
The ultimate irony is that while the three laws are the sci-fi trope par excellence, Asimov used them as an excuse to slip numerous variations on the classic locked room murder mystery past sci-fi readers. He wrote a number of great pure sci-fi stories, but I think he was at heart a mystery writer.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not hard to make a firearm. It's hard to make an accurate, reliable firearm with useful ergonomic features like multi-shot magazines.
Kids have been making "zip guns" in shop for years. The simplest single shot designs use a nail driven by a rubber band to strike a cartridge held in a metal tube. For a .22 barrel you can use a length of copper tubing set in epoxy in a steel pipe. Or you can drill a hole in a solid piece of steel. For a shotgun shell, an iron or steel pipe will do.
If you want to ensure people are always armed, figure out a way to make *cartridges*. Or perhaps design a gun that works reliably with improvised cartridges. Maybe adapt a home cigarette rolling machine to make paper cartridges disguised as smokes.
His work is mostly speculative, and artificial in nature, and his assertions haven't been born out on the road.
Citations?
In fact his studies are some of the exact ones proven to have defects that icebike mentioned in his first linked article.
As far as I can see none of DL Strayer's papers are cited by Dr. Young's paper (doi: 10.1097/EDE.0b013e31823b5efc -- perhaps I've got the wrong one), referred to in the link above.
First there was icebike's claim that DL Strayer has never done any distracted driving studies. That about as wrong as wrong can be. Then there is your claim that the paper linked to by icebike specifically debunks several of DL Strayer's papers. I thought this was curious. If that were so, then why would icebike think that DL Strayer hasn't done any distracted driving studies? So I checked, and apparently Dr. Young's paper doesn't cite any of DL Strayer's publications. If that is so, then you must be mistaken.
I'll assume for now you guys mixed different studies up and simply didn't bother to check, but you can see how it would be forgivable for someone to come away with the impression you guys are just making stuff up.
In spite of this, in a fit of political correctness, the author feels compelled in the last paragraph of the story to print a quote from someone who has done no specific research on phoning while driving, but he still fees competent to weigh in suggesting bans be followed by stiffer enforcement.
The person being quoted is D. L. Strayer, who a quick google scholar search reveals has done a proverbial shitload of distracted driving research, much of it focused on phone use.
This is the second major study calling into question the idea that talking on the phone while driving is vastly more dangerous, as dangerous as drunk driving.
This study does no such thing. What this study shows is that talking on the phone being dangerous *is not disproven* by accident rates remaining the same after a ban. It does this by suggesting that people most affected by the ban are such (to use a scientific) boneheads that when you take away their cell phone they just find other ways to cause accidents. Another possibility is that these people ignore the ban, the way they ignore the prohibitions on tailgating and weaving.
The big question is that given that cell phone bans don't make much statistical difference in accident rates, should we have them? But to be fair, the same could be said of bans against weaving and tailgating. It's seems plausible that people who don't drive like idiots do so *because they're not idiots*. But as another researcher quoted in the article suggests, perhaps the problem is that we don't enforce laws against aggressive driving enough.
To be more precise, ad hominem is a fallacy *only* when used to refute an argument's conclusions. It *can* be used to refute a piece of *evidence*. Let me illustrate.
Alice: Charlie says some flying saucers must be pink.
Bob: Oh, I don't believe that. Charlie's a nutcase.
Bob has just committed argumentum ad hominem. He has refuted an argument based on the person putting it forth.
Alice: Charlie says some flying saucers must be pink.
Bob: How does he know?
Alice: Charlie says he saw some pink ones.
Bob: Oh, I don't believe that. Charlie's a nutcase.
Here Bob is doing something subtly different. He does not believe Charlie's *evidence*, based on Charlie's known lack of credibility in the paranormal event department. This has the same effect as the ad hominem, but it is valid because it's not a blanket refutation of *anything* Bob wishes to deny:
Alice: Charlie says some flying saucers must be pink.
Bob: How does he know?
Alice: It says so in the new erratum to Jane's *All the World's Aircraft*.
Bob: ???
The desktop is our native environment.
Wrong, sonny. Emacs command buffer is the native environment of us old folks. Back in the day, learning to hack at the speed of thought on a vt52 culled the herd, boy. We didn't learn some new language to solve a particular problem, we'd *write* the doggone things in Lex and Yacc. That is if knocking off a recursive descent parser in MACRO-11 was too much trouble.
As far as I can see, none of your examples has much to do with the app in question. Realtime video communication is a torture-test for a network whose capacity is planned and sold with statistical multiplexing in mind. Every commercial network in existence is predicated on the idea that users don't need peak bandwidth all the time, that need comes in bursts and bursts from users seldom overlap. That's what makes network access affordable; guaranteeing everyone peak bandwidth all the time would require dedicating a private channel to each user.
Modern video codecs would make a stream of a talking head against a relatively static background fairly bursty, but there's a limit to how low they can reduce bandwidth consumption. And mobile processors, while quite powerful these days, aren't magic. For example the more work they do, the more battery life they consume. So it's quite plausible, despite the examples you cite, that an app like this is a problem for the carrier. Skype would come the closest, but by *integrating the video app with the phone app* Apple guarantees much greater use and therefore network load. In any case without a side by side comparison with a network monitor we can't say whether Skype and Facetime are equivalent in their impact for any given call.
People get net neutrality all wrong -- even people who are for it. It's not about some kind of birthright to bandwidth, it's about non-discrimination. It's about freedom, but freedom doesn't mean freedom from consequences or costs. Network neutrality means people don't have to limit themselves to services chosen by the carrier provided by vendors chosen by the carrier. It means they do what they want with whomever they want, provided that the network is capable.
The easiest way to achieve non-discrimination is ignore app and user bandwidth consumption entirely. But to make that work, you'd have to charge people for traffic, particularly long bursts of traffic. Since people won't stand for that, they're pretty much guaranteed inconsistent service unless the provider starts throttling people or apps that send long streams of data. I'm actually OK with that, *as long as it is done consistently and on a purely technical basis*. This preserves competition. All app providers have to fall within the same network use limitations.
The problem is when carriers discriminate for marketing reasons (you must use *our* video conferencing app, you must use *our* email service, use our photo service to get your pictures off the phone). That's why featurephone apps never took off like smartphone apps. Smartphones are a competitive market any app developer can enter.
I won't argue whether this is or is not a violation of network neutrality, because that's not the important question. The important question is whether this leaves competition intact. We won't know until we see whether AT&T favors some apps or vendors over others.
Larry Gonick.
When will people seriously get it into their think marketer heads that although cartoons or videos may be more initially eye-catching, they have low information density and are worse at getting actual information across than plain old text?
Information means different things. What most people mean when they say information is *meaning*. You can't make blanket statements about how much *meaning* a cartoon can carry vs. text. It depends on three things: (1) the topic; (2) the artist or writer's mastery of the topic; and (3) the artist or writer's mastery of his craft.
Google the corporate entity doesn't really have any say in daily operations on this scale, it can only react to stuff like this happening.
This isn't even baloney. It's olive loaf.
The way something like this works is that people have to collude. The way they collude is to use exactly the logic you have here: it's not *my* job to deal with the consequences. It's not *your* job. It's the job of someone not in this room.
The reason this is olive loaf is that everybody knows somebody has to do this job. Trace the chain of command up from this guy's boss, to the bosses boss and so forth. This is an important job. Someone fairly high up on that chain of command made sure it was getting done, and when he did, he must have known it was being done with contractors. That meant he made a conscious decision that this important job should be done by a low status worker which Google had no long term responsibility for. That person handed a "it's not my job" card to every manager down the line.
Any time you have someone who to all practical purposes looks like an employee, doing a permanent, line oriented job (as opposed to support like janitorial services), and that person is *not* an employee, there's something fishy going on.
Here is the summary:
"Requires labeling on raw or processed food offered for sale to consumers if made from plants or animals with genetic material changed in specified ways. Prohibits labeling or advertising such food as “natural.” Exempts foods that are: certified organic; unintentionally produced with genetically engineered material; made from animals fed or injected with genetically engineered material but not genetically engineered themselves; processed with or containing only small amounts of genetically engineered ingredients; administered for treatment of medical conditions; sold for immediate consumption such as in a restaurant; or alcoholic beverages."
Odd that it's not in the linked article. It seems strange to me that someone would write a piece about the ballot measure without actually summarizing what it says, or even *linking* to a summary.
A discussion of prop 37 can be found on ballotpedia and on the CA Secretary of State's voter information website. What should be clear is that much of what we're talking about here (e.g. labeling of accidentally contaminated crops, mandatory testing for genetic alterations) has no bearing on the actual proposal.
Since when is this a site for *tech* news? There are other sites that do that. This is a "news for nerds" site, and tech news is just part of that.
This "women can't get pregnant from forcible rape" meme has been around for a long time, though, and the right to life movement has been promoting this myth for years now. It has been used as an argument against emergency contraception.
This particular story is about public ignorance of science, so it may not be news *to* nerds, but it qualifies as news *for* nerds. It's not news that ignorant people believe in creationism, it *is* news when creationists use their clout to restrict the teaching of evolution or to give equal billing to creation "science". It isn't news that some people (largely the same people who push creationism) believe a woman can't get pregnant from rape. It *is* news when somebody runs for office proposing to make laws based on that superstition. It's news for *everybody*, but the nerd's special bailiwick is the science and math part.
First learn to run, then learn to walk through a room full of furniture, then learn to walk through a hallway full of morons talking on their cell phones.
And I expect computers on the road will get better the higher percentage of computer-driven cars there are on the road. The reasons is that people are very good at predicting the behavior of other people. Just the other day I was driving on the interstate in moderate, fast moving traffic and I saw a guy pull up behind a car in the right lane. "Watch this guy," I said to my wife, and sure enough he changed lanes, pulled up to within two feet of the car in front of me (at 70 mph) and cut in front of the first car with hardly a foot to spare. It was exactly what I'd expected him to do, based on the speed with he approached and the kind of car he was driving.
Of course a lot of predictive heuristics about human behavior could be programmed into an automated system. One of them might be recognizing the slow reactions of distracted drivers. As I approach intersections these days I'm always on the lookout for someone on the cross street who is not slowing as soon as he should. Frequently these are drivers on cell phones who not only miss the stop line, but end up well into the intersection before they start looking for traffic.
A robotic driver would be consistently aware and prudent. I suspect well before the point where a robot driver is as good as an average driver (if we aren't there already), we'd reach the point where the roads would be safer if all cars were robot piloted, simply by removing human inconsistency.
If you're a programmer and you've got the bit in your teeth, then it makes sense to go as long as you feel energized. Thats the apples half of the comparison.
It's a totally different thing when a project cost estimate is borked and you're chained to your desk trying to meet some foolishly chosen deadline. It saps enthusiasm because the goal is to make it under the wire even if you have to push utter crap out the door. That's the oranges half of the comparison.
Trying to increase productivity by working twelve to sixteen hours *in order to attend more meetings* simply beggars belief.
People like being productive. As a first approximation, if it doesn't generate at least *some* enthusiasm, it's probably wasting employee time. Even a meeting can generate enthusiasm if people walk out of it feeling a new sense of purpose, or that obstacles frustrating their success have just been removed. The occasional midnight coding session or teleconference can be interesting and productive, but if you do that *regularly* people will hate it *because they know their time is being wasted*.
It's how you can exclude a vendor (or vendors) you have no desire of even giving the opportunity to win the quote. This can be because of past history with the company's sales team, poor delivery, poor service, poor quality, and so on.
In other words words, the devil you know.
I've been on the other side of that equation, both as a winner and a loser. MOST often I found this vendor-slanted specification phenomenon was the result of the procurement rules UNDER-weighting confidence in the vendor. That's because we don't trust the judgment of government worker bees. A CEO can make a deal with a handshake on the golf course. Because CEOs are supposed to be geniuses, we trust his gut instinct. We think government workers are idiots, so we don't allow them to make gut decisions. Instead, we expect them to develop procurement criteria that reliably and objectively predict the future.
Procurement decisions tend to work by assigning point scores to various areas. There may be minimum scores in certain areas (vendor capacity) , but then each score area is added up linearly: Ax + By + ..., etc. The problem is that value doesn't add linearly this way. Take, for example, tablets in the classroom. Batteries that don't last long enough to complete an assignment are a deal-breaker. No problem, you set a minimum score for battery life. Battery life that's longer than a school day adds no real utility. No problem, you set a maximum score for battery life.
But here's the tough part: battery life doesn't really measure anything useful in itself. Suppose two tablets, A & B, are identical in every way, but A is lighter and has a longer battery life. So A wins on specs, right? Maybe, maybe not. You're buying a tool, not a toy. So you decide to run pilot projects using A and B, and find that kids using A consistently report battery problems, kids using B never do. So B wins the empirical battery test, right? Wrong. What's happening is that the kids with sleek, lightweight A use their tablets so much they run the batteries down. The kids with clunky B don't use their tablets much. So A wins on usability, right? No. It turns out that the kids using A get slightly worse results than B, because they're goofing off on the tablet when they should be doing something else. The kids with B use their tablets when they *need* them, but no more. Going by *outcome*, B has enough battery life to get the job done and A does not, *even though A has a longer battery life*.
Granted, this is hypothetical, but reality is very much like this: so complicated it makes a reliable a priori test of optimality impossible. Sometimes you're better off going with what you think has the highest chance of succeeding, rather than what looks "best" on paper.
Most government workers are honest -- at least as honest as they can be and still get their jobs done. One of the ways they are less than perfectly honest is that they game the procurement system in order to ensure a satisfactory outcome.
You can't talk about some parameter in two different populations without talking about how the parameter was measured, specifically the sample chosen and methods used to estimate.
In Denver, people receive 0.3 rem per year excess radiation purely because of elevation. The sample we're talking about is everyone who doesn't live in a lead-lined house.
In Fukushima, presumably different people received different doses. What does "[some hot spots] showed radiation at the level of .1 rem" even mean? Did they measure? If they measured, how big was the sample? As an extreme example, suppose the estimate was based on measurements of a single person? Or did they estimate? Whether they estimated or measured, what do the data actually say? That the *average* exposure was .1 rem or the *maximum possible* exposure was .1 rem?
One interesting corollary to the fact you can't get rid of all waste in any program (government or otherwise) is that if you under-fund a program that kernel of waste becomes a larger fraction of the overall budget.
I've seen both scenarios: programs which are so underfunded they focus entirely on surviving instead of producing results, and programs so over-funded the challenge is to get all the cash dumped in their laps spent so as to avoid funding cuts next year.
In other words: any program has an *optimal* funding level with respect to efficiency. Above or below that level financial efficiency drops. Typically that level is *lean* -- that forces administrators to make tough choices and forgo things that would clearly be useful because they just aren't cost effective.
Now what I've never seen is a program that got more efficient via funding cuts. The reason is that government programs are divided into two groups: sacred cows that are wildly overfunded, and programs that are underfunded to pay for those sacred cows. The greatest sacred cow in the US budget is defense. Everyone's for a strong defense, and most people if given a choice would opt for a *stronger* defense, all other things being equal. But all other things aren't equal, *because when it comes to defense we use spending to keep score*. In other words, we use spending levels as a proxy for strength; if we spend more for defense this year, we assume we have a stronger defense; if we spend less, we assume our defense must be weaker.
In fact, "sacred cows" can be detected by this simple test: is *spending* the measure of accomplishment? We can see this in the recent attack on President Obama for "cutting Medicare", a "cut" *which involved no benefit reductions*. Medicare is a sacred cow, so the spending level is what matters politically, not what the program accomplishes.
If we measure "smaller government" by "lower Federal expenditures" (admittedly a simplistic measure), then as long as we have sacred cows government will never get much smaller. Look at the text of the article, in which we learn that the core of Mr. Ryan's plan for reducing the size of government focuses on "discretionary non-defense spending", a spending category which currently amounts to *a mere 15% of the Federal Budget*. If that category was zeroed out (including nearly all science), spending would not drop very much, but that's not Ryan's plan. His plan is to slow the growth of discretionary non-defense spending *over the next decade*. In other words his plan for smaller government is to spend more money on sacred cows and softening the tax blow by cutting relatively minor expenditures like scientific research.
I'll say this for Ryan: he is (or rather *was*) willing to take on the Medicare sacred cow. But he's not willing to take on the defense sacred cow. In that he is not unusual. There are plenty of politicians who are willing to take on *some* sacred cows, but none are willing to take on *all* of them. And as long as there are *any* sacred cows, spending won't ever decrease. Occasionally a coalition is able to kill a single sacred cow, but never has that resulted in federal spending decreasing. It results in money going to other sacred cows, sometimes with a tax rate cut and borrowing increase to produce the *illusion* of smaller government.
True story. My wife went to a presentation by a graduate student in which he proposed to do an ecological study of a small pond by rapidly freezing everything in place, thus getting a "snapshot" of the pond at one instant of time.
Since making water ice is obviously too energy intensive and slow, he proposed to use a compound that when dissolved in water set to a plastic-like compound via a rapid exothermic reaction. The climax of his presentation was a small-scale demonstration. Unfortunately the reaction was not *quite* instantaneous, and the goldfish he was using as a demonstration subject jumped out of the water and landed on the floor. Discreetly kicking the fish under the desk, the student calmly continued his presentation as if all had gone as planned.
Offtopic, I know, but juxtaposed with this story I guess the moral is that while only a few people appear awesome to others, everyone is awesome in their own imagination.
Linux is a desktop kernel?
Without talking about bad implementation ... it seems exceedingly unlikely that any law enforcement agency would have the ability to defeat modern encryption algorithms.
Without a paddle, it is exceedingly unlikely a kayaker would have the ability to defeat the current up the creek.
I'm still waiting for the "failure" part.
Going down the list, the majority of them appear to be either self-published or published by "vanity" press operations. The notion of economic damage is, for most of these writers, a fantasy.
I started to read sci-fi in the early 1970s, after the Golden Age but while many of the Golden Age writers were still with us. Time has passed and many great (and countless very good) writers are no longer with us are fading into obscurity: C.L. Moore, Alfred Bester, Clifford D. Simak, and Randall Garrett to name a few.
Well, being well known and oft-cited isn't the same as being appreciated for what you really are. Consider Adam Smith who wrote *The Wealth of Nations* a book far more cited than read.
Asimov was merely a *good* writer, but he was a *brilliant* thinker. There are, therefore, multiple layers of irony then in the way the three laws are cited. They don't have the kind of scientific validity they have in his robot story universe, where people simply cannot build robots that violate the laws. In the real world we are far from building robots that are capable of interpreting the three laws.
The real significance of the laws is literary. They killed the popularity of the robot-run-amok story, because suddenly everyone expected a more sophisticated -- or at least more clever story than a third-hand Frankenstein retread. Such a story would pose no challenge nor offer rewards to an intellect like his.
The ultimate irony is that while the three laws are the sci-fi trope par excellence, Asimov used them as an excuse to slip numerous variations on the classic locked room murder mystery past sci-fi readers. He wrote a number of great pure sci-fi stories, but I think he was at heart a mystery writer.
Thanks for analyzing that paper's scientific value for me without actually reading it.