Every academic was a "long-haired, beared hippie-type" in the '60s, the following decade being essentially the '60s until the rise of neoliberalism and the resultant Oil Crisis.... And all the decent academics still are
You are mixing up being a hippy and having genius (i.e. *bad*) hair. When you've got too much brains, the hairs on your head get inspired then develop a mind of their own.
"Gamey" to me means it has a metallic, "liver-ish" aftertaste. But I happen to like that. Most Americans won't touch organ meat, but you get a hint of that flavor in game muscle tissue.
I once had a huge wild duck pig-out with a hunter friend of mine. The drumsticks, which wild ducks hardly use, were indistinguishable from domestic duck. If anything they were sweeter. The breast (which the animal uses to fly) was a much more powerful muscle, and it was distinctly gamey. I actually enjoyed the gamey breast better, because domestic duck I can have any day of the week. It also helped that the duck was cooked to perfection -- there isn't a lot of margin for error in cooking game if you don't want it to end up like shoe leather. This was at a Chinese restaurant that was willing to cook its customers game -- how cool is that?
I've had rattlesnake, which wasn't exactly chicken-like, but it did have a remote resemblance. I think the "tastes like chicken" thing means "leaner than marbled beef". When I was young, pork tasted quite different than it does now. Hog farmers, conscious of the negative public attitude toward fat, are producing lean pork that is very close to chicken in flavor. Recently I had some wild boar, and it was a revelation. The flavor was so intense I wasn't sure at first that I liked it. Imagine the taste difference between a pork chop and a chicken breast, then multiply that by 100x.
The plant equivalent of chicken, by the way, is "asparagus". For some reason many wild plants seem to remind people of asparagus.
Sounds like a badly designed experiment. If the statisticians were required to make extrapolations from many inadequate samples, of course their agreement with each other would be drastically reduced. However, given that accuracy increased with dataset size (and with that, agreement necessarily too), statistics seems to be vindicated within its claimed scope of utility.
It would be more correct to say statisticians without data are statistically worthless.
The notion that the M16 is unreliable got started with the shaky roll out in Vietnam. The normal teething problems of any system were exacerbated by a switch to ammunition that caused fouling problems. Recent surveys of combat troops show a very high rate of satisfaction with the weapon (80%).
I suspect the myth lives on in part because of lack of statistical sophistication. Any weapon will jam from time to time, and Afghanistan is America's longest running war ever. Over eleven years there have no doubt been countless jams, and firefights where multiple weapons jammed. These incidents are immediately taken as "proof" that the device is unreliable, failing to take into account the sheer number of rounds fired. There's probably no way to disprove this idea in the public mind, because every failure is "proof" of unreliability, and statistics showing failures are rare are bound to be seen as a cover-up.
I suppose it depends on the kind of plant -- I remember taking a tour of an oil fired plant that had auxiliary generators (very inefficient) which kicked in at peak demand. And in any case I obviously don't literally mean instantaneously halting the rotation of the generator. What I'm talking about is taking the load of the plant. I could have said it that way but I didn't want to get drawn into an irrelevant technical discussion. . . I'm always a bit tongue in cheek, but I'm quite serious about the main idea, which amounts to this: you plan for the *marginal* changes you'll need to make along the way, you don't worry about the problems you *would* have if you tried replacing the existing infrastructure overnight. Since you're not going to do it that way, why worry about the problems it presents?
You won't run into an energy storage problem with solar *before* solar exceeds fossil fuel generation capacity. You won't run into energy storage problems *after* solar exceeds fossil fuel generation capacity either. The reason is simple. If in the time it takes us to approach that point a solution isn't found, we'll stop building additional solar capacity.
Well, there's a terrific technology for storing that daytime solar energy that works as long as solar provides less than 50% of your electricity. Best of all the infrastructure to use it is *already* in place.
It's called unburned fossil fuels.
You simply shut that old oil burning plant during the day, leaving that bunker oil it would have burned in the tank. The result is up to a 50% reduction in pollution (including carbon footprint), and reduced price pressure on dwindling petroleum supplies.
Granted, as electric car technology becomes common, and if those cars rely on home charging stations, then UBFF might become less attractive. But it will take us a long, long time to get solar generation capacity to the same order of magnitude as oil, coal and natural gas combined. As we approach that point where we're using *more* solar electricity than fossil fuel generated electricity, a lot of what had been blue sky power storage ideas suddenly become attractive investments, whether that is superior battery technology or cooling your super-conducting grid with piped coolant liquid that can yield burnable hydrogen at the consumption end. Well before we get to parity, working energy storage systems connected to the grid would start paying investors profits.
Let me suggest you are a the victim of selection bias in the history books. Suppose your country is in a situation where it has certain objectives. It meets those objectives through diplomacy, perhaps trading off a few objectives of lesser importance. Twenty years later the conflict is forgotten.
Now let's suppose your country goes to war instead. It spends billions of dollars of treasure and hundreds of thousands of lives and eventually emerges victorious, compelling the other side to give it what it wants. You get the same outcome for higher cost, and a hundred years later children are reading about the glorious victory.
Now if you lose the war, or you don't gain your objectives through diplomacy, a generation later the situation is forgotten.
So it seems to me the big difference between war and diplomacy, other than war costing a great deal more and leaving piles of dead and maimed soldiers in its wake, is that if you win, people three or four generations hence have to read about it in the history books, and they may possibly enjoy a bank holiday.
Now for the advanced class: war and diplomacy aren't exclusive options. War is, noted by Von Clausewitz, "the continuation of politics by other means." If it makes you feel better, you can think of diplomacy as warfare by other means, it makes no logical difference. The question is one of skillful diplomacy (or warfare) vs. unskillful. The Iraq war was costly and left behind an unstable state which is not necessarily more favorable to us in the long run; that's un-skillful. The Marshall plan made a ton a money for the US economy rebuilding Europe while firmly establishing friendly alliances as a counterweight to the Soviet Union. That was skillful diplomacy, or if you prefer diplomatic warfare. In the end we crushed the Soviet Union without having to invade.
Plus it would be nice to have coverage that wasn't oriented toward idiots.
It started before the opening ceremonies, with the NBC presenters delivering what sounded like drug-addled, free association platitudes over a montage of US athletes. It went on through the parade of nations when one of NBC's presenters gave us a fat dose of his personal political opinions. It was not so much that the leadership of those countries he targeted wasn't contemptible, as that I don't need a sports announcer to tell me what to think. It goes on through interview after interview where the idiot interviewers ask "how does it feel to win" and try to pump as much emotion out of the athletes as possible. Discuss how the event went, or cut to a sport you're not covering, for Pete's sake.
Let me play devil's advocate here and say that the question is probably too vague to be meaningful. Developers should support the devices that the bulk of their target market wants. You might think *nobody* wants to use Windows Phone 8, but there are market segments which in the *grand* scheme of things might amount to nothing, but which could provide a good living for a small developer. Sometimes, a *single* client can carry your business for several years; other times an early adopter is your foot in the door to a market and might sway your market segment to your chosen platform.
If your plan is to create the next "Angry Birds", you'll probably give Windows Phone 8 a pass. If you're a vertical market app developer, and you have customers who use Windows Phones, and you have experience with and significant resources on Windows platforms, you'd at least want to give Windows Phone 8 a careful look. There's a lot of factors in a decision like this, and total platform market size is only one of them. If you can quickly and cheaply deliver (and more importantly *support*) an app on a particular platform, that may well trump market size. It makes no difference how many units you sell if at the price the market will bear you're losing money on each unit. Likewise the total market size isn't even the right thing to look at; you need to look at the market on a platform for your specific app.
Having been in the position to make this kind of choice myself, I can say that there's two ways to make it: the easy way and the hard way. The easy way is to go with the platform you like and which gives you *nachas* (joy, pride, gratification). The hard way is to try to figure what will happen in the future, to predict the future behavior and policies of customers, platform vendors, hardware vendors and service providers. If you are at all in a position to responsibly make the choice the easy way, then make it that way, because *nachas* may be the only thing you can reasonably promise yourself. If you *aren't* in a position to make the choice the easy way (i.e. if other people are depending on you to make the *right* choice), then start by deciding where you think the herd is going then look very closely for any potential deal killers down that path (like running afoul of Apple's content-selling policies).
Should developers support Windows Phone 8? No. *MIcrosoft* should support Windows Phone 8. Now be a good boy and go fetch your uncle a beer before he cuts you out of his will.
Well, I agree that *in general* intermittent power sources aren't a solution to the problems we have with electricity distribution. It's the other way around: better electricity generation will allow us to exploit more intermittent power sources. However I don't see how adding more local generating capacity, even *intermittent* capacity, *adds* to the stress of the grid when those sources are offline. Either way the rational approach is to build enough transmission capacity for peak transmission demand and charge the cost back to the customer. It makes the amortized cost of remotely generated electricity higher per kwh, but the *average* cost can still be lower.
As for the cost of building and maintaining wind and solar generating stations, that is paid for -- by selling the power generated. Just because your wind generator doesn't earn money when the wind isn't blowing doesn't mean it can't earn enough to pay for itself.
One of the most important things to know about a technological approach is that it *works*. Once you've demonstrated something works, it becomes much easier to copy the results, even if the specific details are forced to be different (e.g. by intellectual property restraints).
I don't think anyone can say how much building a working, full scale Silex plant will help other to obtain the intelligence they need to develop their own laser enrichment technology. That depends on how much our success depends on secret research done for the project and how much was predicated on the advance of technology in general. However I have no doubt that the knowledge that laser enrichment is actually practical is in itself a heavy blow against non-proliferation. IIRC, once you figure out how to do it, laser enrichment doesn't require the kind of complex industrial infrastructure we've been targeting in Iran. Reduced enrichment costs also make simpler, less efficient weapon design more attractive (like the Hiroshima bomb's "gun-type" warhead).
It makes sense to at least do the analysis of the impact of Silex on proliferation, but I'm not optimistic. The last hope we have to reduce proliferation is political, not technological. That's what we're doing in Iran. We can't stop them from getting enough enriched uranium eventually; we're just kicking the can down the road hoping for a political change to happen before we have to use military force. If we could make this technology part of a solution to energy independence, it might help us in the political dimensions of the problem.
Collecting e-mail without a warrant violates the fourth amendment.
In *spirit* certainly. *Literally* -- maybe not. An email message is not literally your person, papers, home or effects. It's a stream of bits that you hand off to your mail provider with implicit permission to forward to other third parties as part of delivering the message to its ultimate recipients.
That's why there's a Stored Communications Act, which provides much less protection for your emails than the 4th would (except in the 6th Circuit which ruled SCA's weaker protections unconstitutional on 4th Amendment grounds).
It's the 9th that warrantless email searches violate. Email doesn't narrowly fit within what is described in the 4th, but does any reasonable person doubt that if the framers knew about email the 4th would have been drafted to protect email as well? The difference between email and physical papers is one of implementation only, not intended use or expectations of privacy, and under the 9th we may not construe the protections given to personal "papers" narrowly.
It seems quite likely that the Koch brothers actually don't / didn't think anthropogenic global warming was real, and thus funded the study with that assumption thinking it would support their position.
That may be true - nobody is a mind-reader. But it's a particularly easy position for the Kochs to take because of the mobility of capital. In a free market, you want capital to move quickly to the best investments and away from the worst investments. That's economically efficient -- however *only with respect to resources that are assigned monetary values*. Things like clean air and water are not assigned any economic value, and so in the absence of regulation enterprises tend to over-consume those resources because they're *free*. The classic case is gold mining. Gold as a commodity has a well defined and generally high value. If you can reduce your extraction costs by polluting watersheds near your mine, that's economically efficient. So the rational, self-interested approach is to form a corporation, extract the gold, take your profits and leave behind a leaking leach pond. Because capital is mobile, *you* don't have to live with the costs.
And that's the problem with allowing people like Koch more political power than ordinary people. The Kochs have the resources to escape the consequences of policies that benefit them. No matter how damaged the Earth becomes, there will still be some pleasant and relatively unspoiled places, and they'll belong to the people who managed to extract the most wealth in the liquidation of the Earth's resources.
The diversity of life has historically increased with warming.
Yes, evolution will increase the biodiversity of the biosphere, but not in our lifetimes, or that of our grandchildren or great-great-great grandchildren.
The initial response of a stressed ecosystem is a shift to lower diversity. This might not be apparent because certain "weedy" species proliferate and we might mistakenly take this as an unmitigated good sign. Let me give you an example. A friend of mine belongs to an old-money family that owns a fairly large island (well over a thousand acres). It was a hunter's paradise because their ancestors eradicated wolves on the island and consequently it supported a large deer herd. This sounds great until you take into account that for years, every member of this guy's family contracted Lyme disease. Some thirty years ago a pack of coyotes established itself on the island. The deer herd was no longer limited only by starvation and disease, so it is much smaller is healthier. The coyotes also predate upon non-game mammals like voles, so the tick population has crashed. Today you can spend a week tramping around the woods and not see a single tick.
This illustrates the danger of picking out *one* positive result of ecological disruption and dancing a happy jig. Yes, the disruption may have certain effects we like (big deer herds) but it also tends to come with things we don't like (rampant vector-borne diseases). As the world shifts to a hotter climate, you may see faster growing crops, but chances are you'll also see faster growing weeds and pests. For example insect reproduction rate in temperate zones can be radically increased with temperature. *Eventually* the local ecosystem will adjust but in the short term you and your descendants will be using lots of pesticides and mosquito repellant.
What works best for human well-being is a rich, diverse, *stable* ecosystem. Ecological stability will occur as the world reaches a new, hotter equilibrium, but you and I won't be around to see that.
Alright, lets clear up this business about when ad hominem is a logical fallacy. Using ad hominem to impeach an argument is a fallacy. Using ad hominem to impeach evidence is perfectly valid.
If Romero makes an argument, drawing from generally accepted truths, that "Android is a piracy platform," you can't dismiss the argument because this is Romero talking. If, however, it is reported to you by a reliable that "Romero says that Android is a piracy platform," in the absence of any information on his argument (or if he is simply making an unsupported statement), you can take your opinion of his reliability on that subject matter into account when deciding how much credence to give that statement.
Imagine how much thinking you'd get done if you were obliged to hunt down and evaluate the arguments made by any nutcase with an ax to grind. Since nonsense can be generated instantly as needed, you'd spend all of your time trying to pick sense out of nonsense. Yes, when the argument is right there, or in special circumstances you do have an obligation to give even a nutcase's arguments a fair hearing. But in general if somebody has a track record of unreliable reasoning, you don't owe his arguments a hearing before dismissing them if the conclusion sounds unreasonable.
I once had a dear friend who believed anything. He stored his razor in a pyramid because "pyramid power" would keep it sharp. He didn't know anything about electronics, but following instructions in a book he built a UFO detector circuit which he asserted worked because "it goes off all the time." He believed in fairies, ghosts, bigfoot, and sentient clouds that lived in the stratosphere. I found his notions about cryptozoology particularly charming, because they *might* be true, and a tramp in the woods to hunt hoop snakes and Pukwudgies was harmless amusement. But I didn't feel the need to give his theories about "pyramid power" a fair hearing.
Well, it depends on the nature of the crime and the system in which the suspect is tried.
Consider the US drone assassination program. The crime is conspiring to attack innocent civilians -- so far so good. The trial system of "guilty if you can't survive a Hellfire missile strike," could use some work.
I dunno. I'm a member of AAA, which takes it upon itself to advocate for moving money away from public transit to more roads. It does this on my behalf, even though I don't agree with that position. Where I live the marginal value of the next dollar spent taking commuters off the road is greater than another dollar spent improving those roads, but the AAA management's interest is in getting *more* commuters onto the road.
I'm a AAA member because of the benefits. I support *some* of the political positions of AAA's management, but I take umbrage at the notion they *represent* me. My representative in Congress represents me.
If I were a shooting enthusiast, I might well be a member of the NRA without necessarily agreeing with their legislative agenda. I wouldn't necessarily agree with their political alliances, even if I agree with their legislative agenda because they're a one-issue organization. For example as a sportsman I might prefer a candidate who was stronger on environmental issues than necessarily the strongest gun rights candidate.
I have stopped and thought about it. The problem with the nuclear utopia idea is that it makes many unspoken assumptions that are questionable, for example that our nuclear reactor designs work according to our statistical targets over their lifetime, and that waste disposal is a negligible problem as we scale to an all-nuclear energy economy.
Which is not to say that nuclear isn't a good bet. I think it is a fairly good one, but I think we should think in terms of an energy portfolio. You don't take your entire retirement fund and put it in one hot stock, you develop a portfolio of investments with different levels of risk and reward and in which any one investment tanking is not a calamity. We want to do the same thing with energy production in the post-peak oil era. Nuclear might be the "hot stock", but it isn't necessary or desirable to stake *everything* on it.
We want a world in which it is easy, ideally effortless, to move between energy sources based on current market and environmental conditions. That would allow us to think in terms of *marginal* costs and benefits. For example, a handful of nuclear power plants might not be such a good investment, because of the special infrastructure you need to support them (expertise, inspection, waste internment) can't be cost justified for a few plants. The amortized cost of that infrastructure drops as we add more plants, up to a point where we start encountering dis-economies of scale (more plants than we can inspect; more waste generation than we can handle).
In other words there may be an optimal number of nuclear plants to have at various times that is somewhere between zero and enough plants to meet *all* our energy needs, and if so we want to be able to build exactly that many plants, and no more.
The key investments will be in electrical distribution infrastructure and battery technologies. This will allow us to regularly re-balance our energy generation portfolio without affecting end users and create market driven solutions to evolving energy needs. For example nuclear plants could be built in safe locations away from population centers (unlike Fukushima Daichi); producers with good access to wind power could sell that power to fuel vehicles in distant markets.
Well, the test of something's value shouldn't be whether it strikes you as silly.
The difference between this and phrenology is that phrenology is based on a fundamentally flawed assumption: that the external shape of the skull is correlated strongly to the size of medium scale anatomical structures of the brain. It's easy enough to debunk phrenology by looking at few skulls and comparing the interior to the exterior. In contrast it's quite plausible that a personality trait would be *correlated* in some way to answers on a questionnaire.
So what we need to know is whether the methods and assumptions of the researchers stand up to critical scrutiny, which is something more than making a few hand-waving analogies.
Presuming this idea stands up to scrutiny, the problem with it is that the people who might want to use it (e.g. law enforcement) don't have enough mathematical education to be trusted to use it correctly. Most people treat tests like magical oracles. Cops aren't the only ones who do this. My daughter's pediatrician wanted a certain uncomfortable test done on her. I asked him what the prevalence of the condition being tested for was in the general population. He didn't know. I asked him what the false positive and false negative rates on the test were. He didn't know. In other words, he had none of the information needed to interpret the results of the test, and even if he had that information he lacked the mathematical skills to do it.
Proof of anything requires developing independent lines of evidence; in the hands of the mathematically uneducated even a far more reliable test than this one is bound to be trouble. Drug screening tests are reliable enough to have considerable value, but I think that most drug screening programs are garbage because those programs are mandated, designed and administered by statistical ignoramuses. A test like this is bound to be a lot less credible in itself than testing somebody for opiate use, and if cops and corporate HR departments can't be trusted with *that*, then they certainly shouldn't be entrusted with *this*. Still, an idea like this could plausibly be useful to somebody who actually knew how to reason from data.
Solve problems? Ha! The Girlfriend (especially when upgraded to The Wife) creates tons MORE problems
Solving problems is what life is about.
which is why males no longer have time for more fun activities like gaming and hacking.
First of all, a tip. Don't talk in terms of "males" and "females" in front of "females"; in fact, best to keep your opinions on such subjects to yourself. Secondly, hacking is fun, but assuming it is better than sex suggests a certain, er, inexperience..
Too busy installing cabinets or working to pay off the bills.
Did you just awake from fifty years of suspended animation? These days women can earn paychecks and use power tools too.
Even the ones who CLAIM to be happy fill their conversations with backstabbing comments about their spouse.
Well, you're right, it's better to blame your shortcomings on yourself than a convenient scapegoat. But this is is independent of whether you have a wife or girlfriend. People have a kind of "set point" for happiness that's independent of their circumstances. If those people weren't complaining about the woman, they'd be complaining about The Man. The difference is that they wouldn't be having regular sex.
Slashdot Mirror
Every academic was a "long-haired, beared hippie-type" in the '60s, the following decade being essentially the '60s until the rise of neoliberalism and the resultant Oil Crisis. ... And all the decent academics still are
You are mixing up being a hippy and having genius (i.e. *bad*) hair. When you've got too much brains, the hairs on your head get inspired then develop a mind of their own.
"Gamey" to me means it has a metallic, "liver-ish" aftertaste. But I happen to like that. Most Americans won't touch organ meat, but you get a hint of that flavor in game muscle tissue.
I once had a huge wild duck pig-out with a hunter friend of mine. The drumsticks, which wild ducks hardly use, were indistinguishable from domestic duck. If anything they were sweeter. The breast (which the animal uses to fly) was a much more powerful muscle, and it was distinctly gamey. I actually enjoyed the gamey breast better, because domestic duck I can have any day of the week. It also helped that the duck was cooked to perfection -- there isn't a lot of margin for error in cooking game if you don't want it to end up like shoe leather. This was at a Chinese restaurant that was willing to cook its customers game -- how cool is that?
I've had rattlesnake, which wasn't exactly chicken-like, but it did have a remote resemblance. I think the "tastes like chicken" thing means "leaner than marbled beef". When I was young, pork tasted quite different than it does now. Hog farmers, conscious of the negative public attitude toward fat, are producing lean pork that is very close to chicken in flavor. Recently I had some wild boar, and it was a revelation. The flavor was so intense I wasn't sure at first that I liked it. Imagine the taste difference between a pork chop and a chicken breast, then multiply that by 100x.
The plant equivalent of chicken, by the way, is "asparagus". For some reason many wild plants seem to remind people of asparagus.
Sounds like a badly designed experiment. If the statisticians were required to make extrapolations from many inadequate samples, of course their agreement with each other would be drastically reduced. However, given that accuracy increased with dataset size (and with that, agreement necessarily too), statistics seems to be vindicated within its claimed scope of utility.
It would be more correct to say statisticians without data are statistically worthless.
Er... wouldn't you make the decision to restart the line based, not on how much we like the aircraft, but how many we need?
The notion that the M16 is unreliable got started with the shaky roll out in Vietnam. The normal teething problems of any system were exacerbated by a switch to ammunition that caused fouling problems. Recent surveys of combat troops show a very high rate of satisfaction with the weapon (80%).
I suspect the myth lives on in part because of lack of statistical sophistication. Any weapon will jam from time to time, and Afghanistan is America's longest running war ever. Over eleven years there have no doubt been countless jams, and firefights where multiple weapons jammed. These incidents are immediately taken as "proof" that the device is unreliable, failing to take into account the sheer number of rounds fired. There's probably no way to disprove this idea in the public mind, because every failure is "proof" of unreliability, and statistics showing failures are rare are bound to be seen as a cover-up.
I suppose it depends on the kind of plant -- I remember taking a tour of an oil fired plant that had auxiliary generators (very inefficient) which kicked in at peak demand. And in any case I obviously don't literally mean instantaneously halting the rotation of the generator. What I'm talking about is taking the load of the plant. I could have said it that way but I didn't want to get drawn into an irrelevant technical discussion.
. .
I'm always a bit tongue in cheek, but I'm quite serious about the main idea, which amounts to this: you plan for the *marginal* changes you'll need to make along the way, you don't worry about the problems you *would* have if you tried replacing the existing infrastructure overnight. Since you're not going to do it that way, why worry about the problems it presents?
You won't run into an energy storage problem with solar *before* solar exceeds fossil fuel generation capacity. You won't run into energy storage problems *after* solar exceeds fossil fuel generation capacity either. The reason is simple. If in the time it takes us to approach that point a solution isn't found, we'll stop building additional solar capacity.
Well, there's a terrific technology for storing that daytime solar energy that works as long as solar provides less than 50% of your electricity. Best of all the infrastructure to use it is *already* in place.
It's called unburned fossil fuels.
You simply shut that old oil burning plant during the day, leaving that bunker oil it would have burned in the tank. The result is up to a 50% reduction in pollution (including carbon footprint), and reduced price pressure on dwindling petroleum supplies.
Granted, as electric car technology becomes common, and if those cars rely on home charging stations, then UBFF might become less attractive. But it will take us a long, long time to get solar generation capacity to the same order of magnitude as oil, coal and natural gas combined. As we approach that point where we're using *more* solar electricity than fossil fuel generated electricity, a lot of what had been blue sky power storage ideas suddenly become attractive investments, whether that is superior battery technology or cooling your super-conducting grid with piped coolant liquid that can yield burnable hydrogen at the consumption end. Well before we get to parity, working energy storage systems connected to the grid would start paying investors profits.
No, they say the portrait of Jobs in the Apple boardroom shed a tear when the ads were screened. Or maybe they had the AC turned up too high.
Really? What has diplomacy EVER solved?
Let me suggest you are a the victim of selection bias in the history books. Suppose your country is in a situation where it has certain objectives. It meets those objectives through diplomacy, perhaps trading off a few objectives of lesser importance. Twenty years later the conflict is forgotten.
Now let's suppose your country goes to war instead. It spends billions of dollars of treasure and hundreds of thousands of lives and eventually emerges victorious, compelling the other side to give it what it wants. You get the same outcome for higher cost, and a hundred years later children are reading about the glorious victory.
Now if you lose the war, or you don't gain your objectives through diplomacy, a generation later the situation is forgotten.
So it seems to me the big difference between war and diplomacy, other than war costing a great deal more and leaving piles of dead and maimed soldiers in its wake, is that if you win, people three or four generations hence have to read about it in the history books, and they may possibly enjoy a bank holiday.
Now for the advanced class: war and diplomacy aren't exclusive options. War is, noted by Von Clausewitz, "the continuation of politics by other means." If it makes you feel better, you can think of diplomacy as warfare by other means, it makes no logical difference. The question is one of skillful diplomacy (or warfare) vs. unskillful. The Iraq war was costly and left behind an unstable state which is not necessarily more favorable to us in the long run; that's un-skillful. The Marshall plan made a ton a money for the US economy rebuilding Europe while firmly establishing friendly alliances as a counterweight to the Soviet Union. That was skillful diplomacy, or if you prefer diplomatic warfare. In the end we crushed the Soviet Union without having to invade.
Plus it would be nice to have coverage that wasn't oriented toward idiots.
It started before the opening ceremonies, with the NBC presenters delivering what sounded like drug-addled, free association platitudes over a montage of US athletes. It went on through the parade of nations when one of NBC's presenters gave us a fat dose of his personal political opinions. It was not so much that the leadership of those countries he targeted wasn't contemptible, as that I don't need a sports announcer to tell me what to think. It goes on through interview after interview where the idiot interviewers ask "how does it feel to win" and try to pump as much emotion out of the athletes as possible. Discuss how the event went, or cut to a sport you're not covering, for Pete's sake.
Let me play devil's advocate here and say that the question is probably too vague to be meaningful. Developers should support the devices that the bulk of their target market wants. You might think *nobody* wants to use Windows Phone 8, but there are market segments which in the *grand* scheme of things might amount to nothing, but which could provide a good living for a small developer. Sometimes, a *single* client can carry your business for several years; other times an early adopter is your foot in the door to a market and might sway your market segment to your chosen platform.
If your plan is to create the next "Angry Birds", you'll probably give Windows Phone 8 a pass. If you're a vertical market app developer, and you have customers who use Windows Phones, and you have experience with and significant resources on Windows platforms, you'd at least want to give Windows Phone 8 a careful look. There's a lot of factors in a decision like this, and total platform market size is only one of them. If you can quickly and cheaply deliver (and more importantly *support*) an app on a particular platform, that may well trump market size. It makes no difference how many units you sell if at the price the market will bear you're losing money on each unit. Likewise the total market size isn't even the right thing to look at; you need to look at the market on a platform for your specific app.
Having been in the position to make this kind of choice myself, I can say that there's two ways to make it: the easy way and the hard way. The easy way is to go with the platform you like and which gives you *nachas* (joy, pride, gratification). The hard way is to try to figure what will happen in the future, to predict the future behavior and policies of customers, platform vendors, hardware vendors and service providers. If you are at all in a position to responsibly make the choice the easy way, then make it that way, because *nachas* may be the only thing you can reasonably promise yourself. If you *aren't* in a position to make the choice the easy way (i.e. if other people are depending on you to make the *right* choice), then start by deciding where you think the herd is going then look very closely for any potential deal killers down that path (like running afoul of Apple's content-selling policies).
Should developers support Windows Phone 8? No. *MIcrosoft* should support Windows Phone 8. Now be a good boy and go fetch your uncle a beer before he cuts you out of his will.
Well, I agree that *in general* intermittent power sources aren't a solution to the problems we have with electricity distribution. It's the other way around: better electricity generation will allow us to exploit more intermittent power sources. However I don't see how adding more local generating capacity, even *intermittent* capacity, *adds* to the stress of the grid when those sources are offline. Either way the rational approach is to build enough transmission capacity for peak transmission demand and charge the cost back to the customer. It makes the amortized cost of remotely generated electricity higher per kwh, but the *average* cost can still be lower.
As for the cost of building and maintaining wind and solar generating stations, that is paid for -- by selling the power generated. Just because your wind generator doesn't earn money when the wind isn't blowing doesn't mean it can't earn enough to pay for itself.
One of the most important things to know about a technological approach is that it *works*. Once you've demonstrated something works, it becomes much easier to copy the results, even if the specific details are forced to be different (e.g. by intellectual property restraints).
I don't think anyone can say how much building a working, full scale Silex plant will help other to obtain the intelligence they need to develop their own laser enrichment technology. That depends on how much our success depends on secret research done for the project and how much was predicated on the advance of technology in general. However I have no doubt that the knowledge that laser enrichment is actually practical is in itself a heavy blow against non-proliferation. IIRC, once you figure out how to do it, laser enrichment doesn't require the kind of complex industrial infrastructure we've been targeting in Iran. Reduced enrichment costs also make simpler, less efficient weapon design more attractive (like the Hiroshima bomb's "gun-type" warhead).
It makes sense to at least do the analysis of the impact of Silex on proliferation, but I'm not optimistic. The last hope we have to reduce proliferation is political, not technological. That's what we're doing in Iran. We can't stop them from getting enough enriched uranium eventually; we're just kicking the can down the road hoping for a political change to happen before we have to use military force. If we could make this technology part of a solution to energy independence, it might help us in the political dimensions of the problem.
Collecting e-mail without a warrant violates the fourth amendment.
In *spirit* certainly. *Literally* -- maybe not. An email message is not literally your person, papers, home or effects. It's a stream of bits that you hand off to your mail provider with implicit permission to forward to other third parties as part of delivering the message to its ultimate recipients.
That's why there's a Stored Communications Act, which provides much less protection for your emails than the 4th would (except in the 6th Circuit which ruled SCA's weaker protections unconstitutional on 4th Amendment grounds).
It's the 9th that warrantless email searches violate. Email doesn't narrowly fit within what is described in the 4th, but does any reasonable person doubt that if the framers knew about email the 4th would have been drafted to protect email as well? The difference between email and physical papers is one of implementation only, not intended use or expectations of privacy, and under the 9th we may not construe the protections given to personal "papers" narrowly.
It seems quite likely that the Koch brothers actually don't / didn't think anthropogenic global warming was real, and thus funded the study with that assumption thinking it would support their position.
That may be true - nobody is a mind-reader. But it's a particularly easy position for the Kochs to take because of the mobility of capital. In a free market, you want capital to move quickly to the best investments and away from the worst investments. That's economically efficient -- however *only with respect to resources that are assigned monetary values*. Things like clean air and water are not assigned any economic value, and so in the absence of regulation enterprises tend to over-consume those resources because they're *free*. The classic case is gold mining. Gold as a commodity has a well defined and generally high value. If you can reduce your extraction costs by polluting watersheds near your mine, that's economically efficient. So the rational, self-interested approach is to form a corporation, extract the gold, take your profits and leave behind a leaking leach pond. Because capital is mobile, *you* don't have to live with the costs.
And that's the problem with allowing people like Koch more political power than ordinary people. The Kochs have the resources to escape the consequences of policies that benefit them. No matter how damaged the Earth becomes, there will still be some pleasant and relatively unspoiled places, and they'll belong to the people who managed to extract the most wealth in the liquidation of the Earth's resources.
The diversity of life has historically increased with warming.
Yes, evolution will increase the biodiversity of the biosphere, but not in our lifetimes, or that of our grandchildren or great-great-great grandchildren.
The initial response of a stressed ecosystem is a shift to lower diversity. This might not be apparent because certain "weedy" species proliferate and we might mistakenly take this as an unmitigated good sign. Let me give you an example. A friend of mine belongs to an old-money family that owns a fairly large island (well over a thousand acres). It was a hunter's paradise because their ancestors eradicated wolves on the island and consequently it supported a large deer herd. This sounds great until you take into account that for years, every member of this guy's family contracted Lyme disease. Some thirty years ago a pack of coyotes established itself on the island. The deer herd was no longer limited only by starvation and disease, so it is much smaller is healthier. The coyotes also predate upon non-game mammals like voles, so the tick population has crashed. Today you can spend a week tramping around the woods and not see a single tick.
This illustrates the danger of picking out *one* positive result of ecological disruption and dancing a happy jig. Yes, the disruption may have certain effects we like (big deer herds) but it also tends to come with things we don't like (rampant vector-borne diseases). As the world shifts to a hotter climate, you may see faster growing crops, but chances are you'll also see faster growing weeds and pests. For example insect reproduction rate in temperate zones can be radically increased with temperature. *Eventually* the local ecosystem will adjust but in the short term you and your descendants will be using lots of pesticides and mosquito repellant.
What works best for human well-being is a rich, diverse, *stable* ecosystem. Ecological stability will occur as the world reaches a new, hotter equilibrium, but you and I won't be around to see that.
Alright, lets clear up this business about when ad hominem is a logical fallacy. Using ad hominem to impeach an argument is a fallacy. Using ad hominem to impeach evidence is perfectly valid.
If Romero makes an argument, drawing from generally accepted truths, that "Android is a piracy platform," you can't dismiss the argument because this is Romero talking. If, however, it is reported to you by a reliable that "Romero says that Android is a piracy platform," in the absence of any information on his argument (or if he is simply making an unsupported statement), you can take your opinion of his reliability on that subject matter into account when deciding how much credence to give that statement.
Imagine how much thinking you'd get done if you were obliged to hunt down and evaluate the arguments made by any nutcase with an ax to grind. Since nonsense can be generated instantly as needed, you'd spend all of your time trying to pick sense out of nonsense. Yes, when the argument is right there, or in special circumstances you do have an obligation to give even a nutcase's arguments a fair hearing. But in general if somebody has a track record of unreliable reasoning, you don't owe his arguments a hearing before dismissing them if the conclusion sounds unreasonable.
I once had a dear friend who believed anything. He stored his razor in a pyramid because "pyramid power" would keep it sharp. He didn't know anything about electronics, but following instructions in a book he built a UFO detector circuit which he asserted worked because "it goes off all the time." He believed in fairies, ghosts, bigfoot, and sentient clouds that lived in the stratosphere. I found his notions about cryptozoology particularly charming, because they *might* be true, and a tramp in the woods to hunt hoop snakes and Pukwudgies was harmless amusement. But I didn't feel the need to give his theories about "pyramid power" a fair hearing.
You can get the WWE PPV the next day, in 720p for free.
Yeah, but it's not the same because the outcome is already determined.
Well, it depends on the nature of the crime and the system in which the suspect is tried.
Consider the US drone assassination program. The crime is conspiring to attack innocent civilians -- so far so good. The trial system of "guilty if you can't survive a Hellfire missile strike," could use some work.
I dunno. I'm a member of AAA, which takes it upon itself to advocate for moving money away from public transit to more roads. It does this on my behalf, even though I don't agree with that position. Where I live the marginal value of the next dollar spent taking commuters off the road is greater than another dollar spent improving those roads, but the AAA management's interest is in getting *more* commuters onto the road.
I'm a AAA member because of the benefits. I support *some* of the political positions of AAA's management, but I take umbrage at the notion they *represent* me. My representative in Congress represents me.
If I were a shooting enthusiast, I might well be a member of the NRA without necessarily agreeing with their legislative agenda. I wouldn't necessarily agree with their political alliances, even if I agree with their legislative agenda because they're a one-issue organization. For example as a sportsman I might prefer a candidate who was stronger on environmental issues than necessarily the strongest gun rights candidate.
I have stopped and thought about it. The problem with the nuclear utopia idea is that it makes many unspoken assumptions that are questionable, for example that our nuclear reactor designs work according to our statistical targets over their lifetime, and that waste disposal is a negligible problem as we scale to an all-nuclear energy economy.
Which is not to say that nuclear isn't a good bet. I think it is a fairly good one, but I think we should think in terms of an energy portfolio. You don't take your entire retirement fund and put it in one hot stock, you develop a portfolio of investments with different levels of risk and reward and in which any one investment tanking is not a calamity. We want to do the same thing with energy production in the post-peak oil era. Nuclear might be the "hot stock", but it isn't necessary or desirable to stake *everything* on it.
We want a world in which it is easy, ideally effortless, to move between energy sources based on current market and environmental conditions. That would allow us to think in terms of *marginal* costs and benefits. For example, a handful of nuclear power plants might not be such a good investment, because of the special infrastructure you need to support them (expertise, inspection, waste internment) can't be cost justified for a few plants. The amortized cost of that infrastructure drops as we add more plants, up to a point where we start encountering dis-economies of scale (more plants than we can inspect; more waste generation than we can handle).
In other words there may be an optimal number of nuclear plants to have at various times that is somewhere between zero and enough plants to meet *all* our energy needs, and if so we want to be able to build exactly that many plants, and no more.
The key investments will be in electrical distribution infrastructure and battery technologies. This will allow us to regularly re-balance our energy generation portfolio without affecting end users and create market driven solutions to evolving energy needs. For example nuclear plants could be built in safe locations away from population centers (unlike Fukushima Daichi); producers with good access to wind power could sell that power to fuel vehicles in distant markets.
Well, the test of something's value shouldn't be whether it strikes you as silly.
The difference between this and phrenology is that phrenology is based on a fundamentally flawed assumption: that the external shape of the skull is correlated strongly to the size of medium scale anatomical structures of the brain. It's easy enough to debunk phrenology by looking at few skulls and comparing the interior to the exterior. In contrast it's quite plausible that a personality trait would be *correlated* in some way to answers on a questionnaire.
So what we need to know is whether the methods and assumptions of the researchers stand up to critical scrutiny, which is something more than making a few hand-waving analogies.
Presuming this idea stands up to scrutiny, the problem with it is that the people who might want to use it (e.g. law enforcement) don't have enough mathematical education to be trusted to use it correctly. Most people treat tests like magical oracles. Cops aren't the only ones who do this. My daughter's pediatrician wanted a certain uncomfortable test done on her. I asked him what the prevalence of the condition being tested for was in the general population. He didn't know. I asked him what the false positive and false negative rates on the test were. He didn't know. In other words, he had none of the information needed to interpret the results of the test, and even if he had that information he lacked the mathematical skills to do it.
Proof of anything requires developing independent lines of evidence; in the hands of the mathematically uneducated even a far more reliable test than this one is bound to be trouble. Drug screening tests are reliable enough to have considerable value, but I think that most drug screening programs are garbage because those programs are mandated, designed and administered by statistical ignoramuses. A test like this is bound to be a lot less credible in itself than testing somebody for opiate use, and if cops and corporate HR departments can't be trusted with *that*, then they certainly shouldn't be entrusted with *this*. Still, an idea like this could plausibly be useful to somebody who actually knew how to reason from data.
Solve problems? Ha! The Girlfriend (especially when upgraded to The Wife) creates tons MORE problems
Solving problems is what life is about.
which is why males no longer have time for more fun activities like gaming and hacking.
First of all, a tip. Don't talk in terms of "males" and "females" in front of "females"; in fact, best to keep your opinions on such subjects to yourself. Secondly, hacking is fun, but assuming it is better than sex suggests a certain, er, inexperience..
Too busy installing cabinets or working to pay off the bills.
Did you just awake from fifty years of suspended animation? These days women can earn paychecks and use power tools too.
Even the ones who CLAIM to be happy fill their conversations with backstabbing comments about their spouse.
Well, you're right, it's better to blame your shortcomings on yourself than a convenient scapegoat. But this is is independent of whether you have a wife or girlfriend. People have a kind of "set point" for happiness that's independent of their circumstances. If those people weren't complaining about the woman, they'd be complaining about The Man. The difference is that they wouldn't be having regular sex.
Who needs that?
**cough***
Unfortunately they'd retaliate by giving America back to England and apologizing for the whole revolution misunderstanding.
And believe me, nobody wants an English-inspired McDonalds.
Steak 'n kids meal, anyone?