Well, yeah, how much humans contribute to the problem and perhaps more importantly what we can do about it now are the big questions. But there's one question you have to answer before we know whether it's worth discussing this with you: is there any kind of evidence that could change your opinions on this? If not, well you may be right, you may be wrong, but there's no point in arguing with you. Indeed there's no point in doing science at all on these issues as far as you're concerned.
I happen to think that humans are largely responsible for the warming trends we've seen, but I can easily envision ways that my belief in anthropogenic climate change could be negated. Pretty much they're the obvious one, and they've all been tried without success, but they could be successful in the future. Some are more promising than others. I very much doubt we'll see proof, for example, that climate has *not* been getting warmer. It's even less likely that CO2 concentrations are incapable of affecting climate. That's the kind of argument that assumes scientists have failed to actually do the basic calculations involved.
Most promising would be the discovery of some other heat retaining mechanism as yet unknown or underestimated. Something involving water vapor would be a good candidate because of the positive feedback loops involved.
So conceptually, my belief in AGW is quite easy to overturn -- if you've got the evidence. But at this point you'll need more than a plausible argument without solid and confirmed evidence, because AGW is now the scientific consensus.
Now if you *don't* believe in AGW, and there's *no* evidence that could possibly convince you of AGW, then we're both wasting our time talking about evidence; evidence has no bearing on your opinion.
Now I happen to have no idea whether we can do anything about the future course of climate change. Because this is a question about what will happen in the future, there's no way to conclusively argue one way or the other on this. We can only make plausible arguments from what we know about AGW. If your belief one way or the other is not negatable, then your opinion of what is plausible in the argument about the future isn't very credible. I think it's plausible that a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions could slow the rate of global warming (worthwhile even if it is not stoppable); but I don't have a strong belief one way or the other. I have to approach this as a kind of expected cost/benefit question.
My understanding is that the important thing is the absorption spectrum of the gas.
Well, there's your problem right. You're using the highly technical sense of the word, which nobody (who matters) understands and which therefore is irrelevant to the political debate.
Technical jargon leads to unwieldy, hard to understand arguments. It's *inefficient*. For example, I am basing this response entirely upon the first paragraph of your post. Your post appears to have *three* paragraphs, but they are obviously superfluous because they contain lots of long words.
(1) Amazon did not exist in 1980 when this story emerged. (2) There never actually was a $600 hammer. The actual (averaged) price to the program was $435. (3) That $435 included $420 the design and testing of the toolkit, amortized over each thing in it. For example, if you paid the vendor a nickel for an allen key, you'd call that $420.05, even though you only paid a nickel. The actual marginal cost (i.e. what the government actually paid the vendor) for the hammer in question was $15. (4) Using the same accounting methods that arrived at $435 for the hammer would yield $476.99 for your Ampco hammer, regardless of what you actually paid the vendor for it.
What does this show? That you should beware when somebody peddles this kind of story. They're more interested in how effectively the story sways your opinion than whether the story is true.
Many of the biggest money wasters in government are stupid attempts to save money, as in the case we are discussion here.
I think it's a bit like the uncanny valley. MREs are close enough to regular food that you focus on the differences between them and freshly prepared food. They really aren't bad for something that can be eaten after sitting on the shelf unrefrigerated for years, being exposed to temperatures ranging from -60F to +120F, then dropped 100 feet.
The old C-rations left no doubt as to what they were about. It was quite obvious the only reason anyone would willingly consume a C-ration was that the alternative was death by starvation. It also weighed 5.5 lb, as opposed to 1lb 2oz - 1lb 10oz for a modern MRE. K rations were so bad that even the prospect of starvation wasn't enough. Men in one unit lost an average of 35 pounds living on them and contracted pellagra and beriberi. According to one report, soldiers who'd been forced to survive on K-rations would vomit at the mere sight of a K ration box afterwards.
No prepackaged meals have ever been as good as even mediocre fresh cooking. Yet people still buy frozen dinners and freeze-dried camping food. MREs seem to be in the same range as that stuff. You wouldn't want to live on them, but they sure beat starvation.
I'm not sure it does "exactly what Siri does"; from the demos I've seen of Vlingo it accomplishes the same things but in a different way, and the way something is done can have a big impact on usability.
What's really impressive about Siri isn't the voice recognition; Android phones have been doing that from the start. What's really impressive is its natural language processing abilities. I haven't used either, but from I've seen both apps allow you to search and handle messaging with voice control, but Siri allows you to interact with the app in a much more natural way -- more like talking to a person than speaking an incantation.
Does it matter? Impressive as the linguistic abilities Siri displays are, at present I don't think it matters very much. You can get the job done without needing an AI assistant that understands the difference between a definite and indefinite article or can figure out what a pronoun referring back to an earlier sentence means. As the applications become more ambitious, maybe.
And, Windows 8 tablets will have the advantage of being able to run standard Windows programs if they want to (.NET apps should work even without recompiling).
That's possible now in Windows 7 tablets. I happen to own one, and I can tell you that running your desktop apps on a tablet is one of those ideas that sounds good until you actually try it. The problem is that the desktop and tablet experiences are far more different than the desktop and laptop are. It turns out that the mouse (or trackpad or trackpoint for that matter) is a far better tool for moving a cursor around than fingers are.
Even though you can sort of get it to work, it doesn't work well. Tablets apps are about direct manipulation. You grab something and drag it around with your finger, not some kind of virtual waldo. This isn't something that can be fixed by tweaking the OS UI; you've got to redesign the application as a tablet app.
Yeah, but the problem is with vigilantes is that there's no guarantee they'll agree with you what an "asshole" is in less clear-cut cases. Sure, if a vigilante rescues me from being beaten up, I'd be grateful. But what if he "rescues" me from buying liquor, or porn, or having an abortion? The fantasy of being a vigilante isn't limited to doing good, it includes getting to decide what *is* good to do. And without somebody looking over your shoulder, it's easy to screw that up.
Take this case. If you watch the video (http://vimeo.com/30307440), you see a bunch of people -- probably drunk -- standing around while a couple of guys are doing the bear-hugging drunk fight thing. Then Mr. Jones wades in with his Jumbo-sized can of pepper spray. Who's to say he didn't do more harm than these guys were going to do to each other?
When we imagine ourselves as superheroes, we imagine ourselves with superhuman traits to go with it. Even if that doesn't include obvious superpowers, it includes non-obvious ones: superhuman judgment (always being right) and superhuman luck (always winning in the end). The reality is that people are fallible. Of course the cops are fallible too, but they have one big advantage: numbers. Even if they don't arrive in force, even a single cop has the promise of dozens of others at his call. The best way to end a fight like this is overwhelming force, which Mr. Jones does not possess. He has to bring a weapon into the fight, thus *escalating* the conflict.
Everything you don't like about cops can be true of vigilantes, except they don't regard themselves as accountable to anyone else even in *principle*.
Anything and everything to motivate them. Coddling children doesn't do them any favors.
This is what is known as a false dichotomy: either you try *everything*, or you are coddling unworthy students.
I am not insensitive to this scheme's many virtues. It is simple to implement and enforce. It doesn't require money be spent on new curriculum material or on hiring better teachers. It doesn't ask anyone involved to spend any time figuring out why some students might be doing less well than they could. These are considerable practical advantages, and I think any scheme promising them should be looked at seriously. Unfortunately, most people don't seem to understand that looking at something "seriously" means examining it "critically". Before putting such a scheme into effect, somebody ought to curb their enthusiasm long enough to ponder whether unintended consequences might produce the opposite effect than that which is hoped for.
The flaw I see with this scheme is that the school district fatuously imagines that it has much greater control over the social pecking order than it actually does. Apparently they've never heard the "student of the week" called "geek of the week".
There are often quite intelligent people who for whatever reason don't test well or perform well in school. Under the right conditions, some of those people develop a kind of ruthless social cunning at quite a young age. Crude and heavy-handed experiments in social engineering like this seem to me almost the ideal way to foster petty tyranny. And if one studies historical examples where such methods were liberally employed (e.g. the 19th C. English boarding school), that is precisely the result obtained. The schoolboy bully has so many tactical advantages over the school's masters he can easily turn their crude efforts to his purposes.
The false dichotomists will no doubt complain that acknowledging the tactical advantages bullies enjoy "coddles" those bullies. But that assumes that if you don't have an *easy* solution to something, you give up entirely. If you can't accept that some things are possible, but very difficult to accomplish, all you're left with are simplistic solutions that treat the way things actually are as negligible in comparison to your *wishes*.
Well, there is such a thing as professional pride, which in a way is loyalty to self. Maybe the poster prefers to be a stand-up guy when people put their trust in him, whether or not they'd do the same for him. Maybe be actually (gasp) cares about his work, or his customers and co-workers.
If push comes to shove, sure: look out for number one. But that doesn't mean you have to be a heartless bastard.
What I would do in this case is approach the second company first, and say, "This is a critical time for my current employer; I'd like to give him longer notice than just two weeks. I'll also need to be available to answer questions and maybe go to an occasional meeting to get my replacement over the tough spots." If the new company doesn't understand and support this, I'd have my doubts about working for them.
You can if you use Linux. On Ubuntu the default is to open the jar with the archive manager (which I think is sensible and safe), but you can change that to open a jar for execution with JRE or JDK instead in about five seconds. On Windows there's a command line executable -- "ftype" or something like that, or you could use the registry editor. In any case I doubt it'd take more than five minutes to figure it out.
It's possible that the reason you don't care is simply that you don't know anything.
Suppose your neighbor stands on the sidewalk in front of your house and shouts political slogans through a bullhorn at 3AM. You can call the cops and the First Amendment doesn't keep them from arresting him, as long as that's what they always do in cases like this. What they can't do is listen to the guy and treat him differently based on whether they agree or disagree with him.
What the long-standing interpretation of the First Amendment is in such cases is this: the government may regulate the *manner* of speech, provided that there is a legitimate purpose (in this case protecting the peace and privacy of people in their homes minding their own business), the regulations are narrowly tailored for that purpose (not arresting people having normal conversations that don't intrude into other peoples' homes) and they don't discriminate based on the content of the speech (say, arresting the commie but giving the born-again Christian a pass).
Permits can fall into the category of reasonable regulation or not, depending on how they're handled. There are many legitimate purposes in a case like this for requiring permits. One is to be able to prepare for the protection of the rights of people using the space in question. This includes both people going to and from work, and the protesters themselves.
A permit requirement can be unconstitutional if it discriminates base on who the protesters are or what they're protesting, if it is unreasonably restrictive (e.g. requiring a protest against Wall Street to be held in Brooklyn) or burdensome (e.g. requiring a permit fee that's so expensive it would discourage the protesters).
In other words the government can ask protesters to do reasonable things, so long as doing those things don't meaningfully restrict the protesters right to protest.
I understand that HP sells servers and IT services. If that's all they did then it would be a different story. The point is that at present they're too unfocused to make a broad statement like "open source will save their business". That would have been true back in the day when they focused on the stuff they spun off into Agilent. But seriously, 1.2 million for Palm?
This contradicts my instincts about the chemistry of our atmosphere. Just who performed these "laboratory studies"? If they were funded by government money in any way then they are probably part of the vast left-wing conspiracy to debunk my gut feelings.
Alright, comrades, the jig's up. BitHive caught us red (of course) handed. Now everyone will know about our scheme:
(1) Threaten everyone with gut debunking. (2) They start hollerin' for single payer. (3) ??? (4) Redistribute wealth!
There was a time in which HP had a corporate identity that would have fit well with open source. They made great hardware, mostly for professionals. Now they're just another mish-mash jack of all trades tech company that needs to sell consumer products to a disappearing middle class in order to thrive. It doesn't really stand a chance. The only tech company dependent on selling to consumers that's doing well in the last several years is Apple, because they're selling luxury goods.
The best definition of "bad policy" I've ever heard is this: one that leads to a position where you have no good options.
Baling out Wall Street was a bad option. Letting the economy collapse because liquidity dried up would be a bad option too. Judge which is the worst. The sensible thing looking back on these no-win situations is not to criticize the choice taken, but the path that led up to that choice.
The same goes for NASA's retirement of the shuttle without a successor. The path to that decision is littered with programmatic missteps. First, the entire program was predicated on an unrealistic projection of the demand for the vehicle. This put the agency under financial strain, which no doubt accounts for its repeated failures to develop a successor craft. Had the possibility of stretching the program until 2011 and then having NO manned access to space been taken seriously twenty years ago, perhaps we'd have followed through on a patient, long term replacement program rather than a series of crash programs that, well, crashed.
So the upshot of kicking the shuttle replacement can down the road for twenty years is we're faced with nothing but lousy choices. Either continue the very expensive shuttle program, which by this date probably should also include a recertification of the orbiters given their age; or bum rides off the Russians (if they happen to be flying) as we undertake yet another crash program in Shuttle replacement. You can bellyache about the decision to retire the Shuttle, but if we'd managed things sensibly we'd have its replacement ready to fly NOW.
That's bad policy for you. Seems like a good idea at the time ("look, we cut the space budget and we're still flying"), until you find yourself with nothing but bad options.
True, but remember what happened with Hubble. They mis-configured their test jig, and when it disagreed with their less precise checks they chose to believe it because they thought it was their most reliable source of information.
That kind of mistake is why a result has to be scrutinized, then repeated by others independently. The best and most meticulous researcher can unconsciously introduce bias into his measurements.
At present, the smart money is on the researchers screwing something up. My hat's off to them though, because it takes a lot of guts to get up and make a claim like this. First, they're almost certainly wrong. If they are wrong, they'll forever be known for one of the great scientific misfires of our generation, right up there with cold fusion and water memory. Second, in the very unlikely case that they've got something other than a mistake here, they're still going to catch hell from people who are sure they're wrong. This is a kind of test of scientific character. You've got to expose your human fallibility to mercilessly critical examination.
OK, I'm a liberal, so I've can't let that pass. Liberals care about lots of things that don't affect them -- drowning polar bears, leaking nuclear waste a thousand years from now, educating the offspring of undocumented immigrants. Just don't ask us to do anything about them. We've signed the petition, so we've done our part.
I'll fight any injustice, so long as all I have to do is blog about it.
MIT is not a university -- or at least they didn't claim to be when I went there. As far as it being elite, so far as I know you can't get in by being rich. I don't know their stance on "legacy" admissions, but it really is a non-issue because the bigger problem is *staying* in. At MIT they cover what would be two semesters of calculus in most places in under a semester. And as far as I can see there is no "old boy's network" for MIT alumni, although the institute would probably like to see that happen.
As far as "old boy" networks at places like Harvard, I know they exist, but I think only in certain professions. If you are interested in investment banking, perhaps. But that's not really an elite university thing; it's part of the package of being rich and connected. People in money-centric professions like to connect with people who have money and know people with money. See the Clark Rockefeller case, where a con-man landed jobs in several financial institutions because of his falsely assumed name and his affected demeanor. He claimed to have gone to Yale, and despite having no connections from there that did the trick.
I think the Clark Rockefeller case shows that the problem is elitism per se, not "elite" universities. Because they are hard to get into, social elitism attaches to it just like it does to anything else perceived as desirable but hard to get.
The issue of business involvement in academic research is a complex one, but I think the answer is that if we don't want business driving the research agenda we should pony up the money in federal grants to support all the research that needs to be done. I don't know what you expect researchers to do without money from the public or the private sector.
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Well, yeah, how much humans contribute to the problem and perhaps more importantly what we can do about it now are the big questions. But there's one question you have to answer before we know whether it's worth discussing this with you: is there any kind of evidence that could change your opinions on this? If not, well you may be right, you may be wrong, but there's no point in arguing with you. Indeed there's no point in doing science at all on these issues as far as you're concerned.
I happen to think that humans are largely responsible for the warming trends we've seen, but I can easily envision ways that my belief in anthropogenic climate change could be negated. Pretty much they're the obvious one, and they've all been tried without success, but they could be successful in the future. Some are more promising than others. I very much doubt we'll see proof, for example, that climate has *not* been getting warmer. It's even less likely that CO2 concentrations are incapable of affecting climate. That's the kind of argument that assumes scientists have failed to actually do the basic calculations involved.
Most promising would be the discovery of some other heat retaining mechanism as yet unknown or underestimated. Something involving water vapor would be a good candidate because of the positive feedback loops involved.
So conceptually, my belief in AGW is quite easy to overturn -- if you've got the evidence. But at this point you'll need more than a plausible argument without solid and confirmed evidence, because AGW is now the scientific consensus.
Now if you *don't* believe in AGW, and there's *no* evidence that could possibly convince you of AGW, then we're both wasting our time talking about evidence; evidence has no bearing on your opinion.
Now I happen to have no idea whether we can do anything about the future course of climate change. Because this is a question about what will happen in the future, there's no way to conclusively argue one way or the other on this. We can only make plausible arguments from what we know about AGW. If your belief one way or the other is not negatable, then your opinion of what is plausible in the argument about the future isn't very credible. I think it's plausible that a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions could slow the rate of global warming (worthwhile even if it is not stoppable); but I don't have a strong belief one way or the other. I have to approach this as a kind of expected cost/benefit question.
My understanding is that the important thing is the absorption spectrum of the gas.
Well, there's your problem right. You're using the highly technical sense of the word, which nobody (who matters) understands and which therefore is irrelevant to the political debate.
Technical jargon leads to unwieldy, hard to understand arguments. It's *inefficient*. For example, I am basing this response entirely upon the first paragraph of your post. Your post appears to have *three* paragraphs, but they are obviously superfluous because they contain lots of long words.
(1) Amazon did not exist in 1980 when this story emerged.
(2) There never actually was a $600 hammer. The actual (averaged) price to the program was $435.
(3) That $435 included $420 the design and testing of the toolkit, amortized over each thing in it. For example, if you paid the vendor a nickel for an allen key, you'd call that $420.05, even though you only paid a nickel. The actual marginal cost (i.e. what the government actually paid the vendor) for the hammer in question was $15.
(4) Using the same accounting methods that arrived at $435 for the hammer would yield $476.99 for your Ampco hammer, regardless of what you actually paid the vendor for it.
What does this show? That you should beware when somebody peddles this kind of story. They're more interested in how effectively the story sways your opinion than whether the story is true.
Many of the biggest money wasters in government are stupid attempts to save money, as in the case we are discussion here.
I think it's a bit like the uncanny valley. MREs are close enough to regular food that you focus on the differences between them and freshly prepared food. They really aren't bad for something that can be eaten after sitting on the shelf unrefrigerated for years, being exposed to temperatures ranging from -60F to +120F, then dropped 100 feet.
The old C-rations left no doubt as to what they were about. It was quite obvious the only reason anyone would willingly consume a C-ration was that the alternative was death by starvation. It also weighed 5.5 lb, as opposed to 1lb 2oz - 1lb 10oz for a modern MRE. K rations were so bad that even the prospect of starvation wasn't enough. Men in one unit lost an average of 35 pounds living on them and contracted pellagra and beriberi. According to one report, soldiers who'd been forced to survive on K-rations would vomit at the mere sight of a K ration box afterwards.
No prepackaged meals have ever been as good as even mediocre fresh cooking. Yet people still buy frozen dinners and freeze-dried camping food. MREs seem to be in the same range as that stuff. You wouldn't want to live on them, but they sure beat starvation.
I'm not sure it does "exactly what Siri does"; from the demos I've seen of Vlingo it accomplishes the same things but in a different way, and the way something is done can have a big impact on usability.
What's really impressive about Siri isn't the voice recognition; Android phones have been doing that from the start. What's really impressive is its natural language processing abilities. I haven't used either, but from I've seen both apps allow you to search and handle messaging with voice control, but Siri allows you to interact with the app in a much more natural way -- more like talking to a person than speaking an incantation.
Does it matter? Impressive as the linguistic abilities Siri displays are, at present I don't think it matters very much. You can get the job done without needing an AI assistant that understands the difference between a definite and indefinite article or can figure out what a pronoun referring back to an earlier sentence means. As the applications become more ambitious, maybe.
And, Windows 8 tablets will have the advantage of being able to run standard Windows programs if they want to (.NET apps should work even without recompiling).
That's possible now in Windows 7 tablets. I happen to own one, and I can tell you that running your desktop apps on a tablet is one of those ideas that sounds good until you actually try it. The problem is that the desktop and tablet experiences are far more different than the desktop and laptop are. It turns out that the mouse (or trackpad or trackpoint for that matter) is a far better tool for moving a cursor around than fingers are.
Even though you can sort of get it to work, it doesn't work well. Tablets apps are about direct manipulation. You grab something and drag it around with your finger, not some kind of virtual waldo. This isn't something that can be fixed by tweaking the OS UI; you've got to redesign the application as a tablet app.
Yeah, but the problem is with vigilantes is that there's no guarantee they'll agree with you what an "asshole" is in less clear-cut cases. Sure, if a vigilante rescues me from being beaten up, I'd be grateful. But what if he "rescues" me from buying liquor, or porn, or having an abortion? The fantasy of being a vigilante isn't limited to doing good, it includes getting to decide what *is* good to do. And without somebody looking over your shoulder, it's easy to screw that up.
Take this case. If you watch the video (http://vimeo.com/30307440), you see a bunch of people -- probably drunk -- standing around while a couple of guys are doing the bear-hugging drunk fight thing. Then Mr. Jones wades in with his Jumbo-sized can of pepper spray. Who's to say he didn't do more harm than these guys were going to do to each other?
When we imagine ourselves as superheroes, we imagine ourselves with superhuman traits to go with it. Even if that doesn't include obvious superpowers, it includes non-obvious ones: superhuman judgment (always being right) and superhuman luck (always winning in the end). The reality is that people are fallible. Of course the cops are fallible too, but they have one big advantage: numbers. Even if they don't arrive in force, even a single cop has the promise of dozens of others at his call. The best way to end a fight like this is overwhelming force, which Mr. Jones does not possess. He has to bring a weapon into the fight, thus *escalating* the conflict.
Everything you don't like about cops can be true of vigilantes, except they don't regard themselves as accountable to anyone else even in *principle*.
Anything and everything to motivate them. Coddling children doesn't do them any favors.
This is what is known as a false dichotomy: either you try *everything*, or you are coddling unworthy students.
I am not insensitive to this scheme's many virtues. It is simple to implement and enforce. It doesn't require money be spent on new curriculum material or on hiring better teachers. It doesn't ask anyone involved to spend any time figuring out why some students might be doing less well than they could. These are considerable practical advantages, and I think any scheme promising them should be looked at seriously. Unfortunately, most people don't seem to understand that looking at something "seriously" means examining it "critically". Before putting such a scheme into effect, somebody ought to curb their enthusiasm long enough to ponder whether unintended consequences might produce the opposite effect than that which is hoped for.
The flaw I see with this scheme is that the school district fatuously imagines that it has much greater control over the social pecking order than it actually does. Apparently they've never heard the "student of the week" called "geek of the week".
There are often quite intelligent people who for whatever reason don't test well or perform well in school. Under the right conditions, some of those people develop a kind of ruthless social cunning at quite a young age. Crude and heavy-handed experiments in social engineering like this seem to me almost the ideal way to foster petty tyranny. And if one studies historical examples where such methods were liberally employed (e.g. the 19th C. English boarding school), that is precisely the result obtained. The schoolboy bully has so many tactical advantages over the school's masters he can easily turn their crude efforts to his purposes.
The false dichotomists will no doubt complain that acknowledging the tactical advantages bullies enjoy "coddles" those bullies. But that assumes that if you don't have an *easy* solution to something, you give up entirely. If you can't accept that some things are possible, but very difficult to accomplish, all you're left with are simplistic solutions that treat the way things actually are as negligible in comparison to your *wishes*.
Well, there is such a thing as professional pride, which in a way is loyalty to self. Maybe the poster prefers to be a stand-up guy when people put their trust in him, whether or not they'd do the same for him. Maybe be actually (gasp) cares about his work, or his customers and co-workers.
If push comes to shove, sure: look out for number one. But that doesn't mean you have to be a heartless bastard.
What I would do in this case is approach the second company first, and say, "This is a critical time for my current employer; I'd like to give him longer notice than just two weeks. I'll also need to be available to answer questions and maybe go to an occasional meeting to get my replacement over the tough spots." If the new company doesn't understand and support this, I'd have my doubts about working for them.
So... you're saying those grapes are *sour*?
You can if you use Linux. On Ubuntu the default is to open the jar with the archive manager (which I think is sensible and safe), but you can change that to open a jar for execution with JRE or JDK instead in about five seconds. On Windows there's a command line executable -- "ftype" or something like that, or you could use the registry editor. In any case I doubt it'd take more than five minutes to figure it out.
It's possible that the reason you don't care is simply that you don't know anything.
I like Elmo's new catch phrase: "Lets ENGINEER!"
If that doesn't send a once-more-into-the-breach-dear-friends chill down your spine, you're not cut out to be an engineer.
If you stopped doing things that might provoke somebody to an idiotic reaction, you'd never do anything.
I'd make my kids watch it, but they like math and they're afraid of monsters.
*sigh* It's not easy being green.
Suppose your neighbor stands on the sidewalk in front of your house and shouts political slogans through a bullhorn at 3AM. You can call the cops and the First Amendment doesn't keep them from arresting him, as long as that's what they always do in cases like this. What they can't do is listen to the guy and treat him differently based on whether they agree or disagree with him.
What the long-standing interpretation of the First Amendment is in such cases is this: the government may regulate the *manner* of speech, provided that there is a legitimate purpose (in this case protecting the peace and privacy of people in their homes minding their own business), the regulations are narrowly tailored for that purpose (not arresting people having normal conversations that don't intrude into other peoples' homes) and they don't discriminate based on the content of the speech (say, arresting the commie but giving the born-again Christian a pass).
Permits can fall into the category of reasonable regulation or not, depending on how they're handled. There are many legitimate purposes in a case like this for requiring permits. One is to be able to prepare for the protection of the rights of people using the space in question. This includes both people going to and from work, and the protesters themselves.
A permit requirement can be unconstitutional if it discriminates base on who the protesters are or what they're protesting, if it is unreasonably restrictive (e.g. requiring a protest against Wall Street to be held in Brooklyn) or burdensome (e.g. requiring a permit fee that's so expensive it would discourage the protesters).
In other words the government can ask protesters to do reasonable things, so long as doing those things don't meaningfully restrict the protesters right to protest.
I understand that HP sells servers and IT services. If that's all they did then it would be a different story. The point is that at present they're too unfocused to make a broad statement like "open source will save their business". That would have been true back in the day when they focused on the stuff they spun off into Agilent. But seriously, 1.2 million for Palm?
This contradicts my instincts about the chemistry of our atmosphere. Just who performed these "laboratory studies"? If they were funded by government money in any way then they are probably part of the vast left-wing conspiracy to debunk my gut feelings.
Alright, comrades, the jig's up. BitHive caught us red (of course) handed. Now everyone will know about our scheme:
(1) Threaten everyone with gut debunking.
(2) They start hollerin' for single payer.
(3) ???
(4) Redistribute wealth!
There was a time in which HP had a corporate identity that would have fit well with open source. They made great hardware, mostly for professionals. Now they're just another mish-mash jack of all trades tech company that needs to sell consumer products to a disappearing middle class in order to thrive. It doesn't really stand a chance. The only tech company dependent on selling to consumers that's doing well in the last several years is Apple, because they're selling luxury goods.
You state legislature forces your state university to charge low tuition but isn't willing to make up the difference out of tax revenue.
The best definition of "bad policy" I've ever heard is this: one that leads to a position where you have no good options.
Baling out Wall Street was a bad option. Letting the economy collapse because liquidity dried up would be a bad option too. Judge which is the worst. The sensible thing looking back on these no-win situations is not to criticize the choice taken, but the path that led up to that choice.
The same goes for NASA's retirement of the shuttle without a successor. The path to that decision is littered with programmatic missteps. First, the entire program was predicated on an unrealistic projection of the demand for the vehicle. This put the agency under financial strain, which no doubt accounts for its repeated failures to develop a successor craft. Had the possibility of stretching the program until 2011 and then having NO manned access to space been taken seriously twenty years ago, perhaps we'd have followed through on a patient, long term replacement program rather than a series of crash programs that, well, crashed.
So the upshot of kicking the shuttle replacement can down the road for twenty years is we're faced with nothing but lousy choices. Either continue the very expensive shuttle program, which by this date probably should also include a recertification of the orbiters given their age; or bum rides off the Russians (if they happen to be flying) as we undertake yet another crash program in Shuttle replacement. You can bellyache about the decision to retire the Shuttle, but if we'd managed things sensibly we'd have its replacement ready to fly NOW.
That's bad policy for you. Seems like a good idea at the time ("look, we cut the space budget and we're still flying"), until you find yourself with nothing but bad options.
True, but remember what happened with Hubble. They mis-configured their test jig, and when it disagreed with their less precise checks they chose to believe it because they thought it was their most reliable source of information.
That kind of mistake is why a result has to be scrutinized, then repeated by others independently. The best and most meticulous researcher can unconsciously introduce bias into his measurements.
At present, the smart money is on the researchers screwing something up. My hat's off to them though, because it takes a lot of guts to get up and make a claim like this. First, they're almost certainly wrong. If they are wrong, they'll forever be known for one of the great scientific misfires of our generation, right up there with cold fusion and water memory. Second, in the very unlikely case that they've got something other than a mistake here, they're still going to catch hell from people who are sure they're wrong. This is a kind of test of scientific character. You've got to expose your human fallibility to mercilessly critical examination.
Repeatable, not necessarily accurate; particularly in the case of DGPS.
OK, I'm a liberal, so I've can't let that pass. Liberals care about lots of things that don't affect them -- drowning polar bears, leaking nuclear waste a thousand years from now, educating the offspring of undocumented immigrants. Just don't ask us to do anything about them. We've signed the petition, so we've done our part.
I'll fight any injustice, so long as all I have to do is blog about it.
MIT is not a university -- or at least they didn't claim to be when I went there. As far as it being elite, so far as I know you can't get in by being rich. I don't know their stance on "legacy" admissions, but it really is a non-issue because the bigger problem is *staying* in. At MIT they cover what would be two semesters of calculus in most places in under a semester. And as far as I can see there is no "old boy's network" for MIT alumni, although the institute would probably like to see that happen.
As far as "old boy" networks at places like Harvard, I know they exist, but I think only in certain professions. If you are interested in investment banking, perhaps. But that's not really an elite university thing; it's part of the package of being rich and connected. People in money-centric professions like to connect with people who have money and know people with money. See the Clark Rockefeller case, where a con-man landed jobs in several financial institutions because of his falsely assumed name and his affected demeanor. He claimed to have gone to Yale, and despite having no connections from there that did the trick.
I think the Clark Rockefeller case shows that the problem is elitism per se, not "elite" universities. Because they are hard to get into, social elitism attaches to it just like it does to anything else perceived as desirable but hard to get.
The issue of business involvement in academic research is a complex one, but I think the answer is that if we don't want business driving the research agenda we should pony up the money in federal grants to support all the research that needs to be done. I don't know what you expect researchers to do without money from the public or the private sector.
This wouldn't fly in the US.
Neither would a job picking crops, but that doesn't make picking crops a bad idea.