Bringing foreign engineers to work here is not a zero sum game between them and the US engineers. The problem with the H1-b program is that we kick them out of the country AFTER we've trained them to do our jobs. If we encouraged the ones who could find employment here to stay, the program would be GOOD for American engineers.
Why?
Because engineering jobs go where it is easiest to find talent that knows how to get the job done. If you have an Internet startup, you locate it in the Bay Area, even though you're competing with tons of other employers for talent, because you know the talent pool is there.
Even more important, software engineers tend to create jobs for other software engineers. A software engineer building a web application creates a job for an engineer building a framework, which in turn creates jobs for engineers to use that framework and supply infrastructure and tools to the framework developer.
The H1-B program as it is now is structured to MOVE jobs overseas.
Since language is all important in today's politics, I suggest that Network Neutrality is a misnomer. It suggests that it is an issue only for network providers.
It suggests correctly. Net neutrality is the network version of freedom of association. It's about forbidding the providers of the tubes say, "You must get this content from A rather than B." It has nothing to do with A saying, "I don't want you to have this content," or "I don't want you to have this content unless you do certain things (e.g., pay me, use the playback devices of people who pay me, etc.)."
A content provider discriminating against *users* is not a net neutrality issue, even if that discrimination is unreasonable, or even *illegal*. There are legitimate reasons to discriminate against users (e.g., users who haven't paid for content, protecting the privacy of other users, etc.) Not every reasonable person agrees on every single case of this, but I think most reasonable persons who has looked at the question of net neutrality would agree it's a good idea, provided they don't have some stake in giving network providers control over content choices.
The point of net neutrality is to preserve a free market for content. It's to keep low barriers to entry for people who have a new idea for an information service. Imagine you've got an idea that will revolutionize online music delivery. Imagine that as wonderful as this would be for users, the network provider makes more from its side deals with existing delivery services than it would from a deal with you. Good luck getting access to that network's subscribers.
Net neutrality is about maintaining an even playing field when it comes to accessing customers or services. It's not about forcing content providers to provide content to people they don't want to have it. Nor is it about things like bandwidth caps and pricing. I think the network providers should be free to slap bandwidth caps on accounts and charge premium prices for guaranteed bandwidth if they want, so long as they're (a) up front about what they're doing and (b) don't use bandwidth to favor one content provider over another.
"Freedom of the Internet" would be almost a Orwellian term, since it would force people to provide content to people they don't want to have it. Net Neutrality is a concept entirely consistent with the ideas of classical liberalism, like markets and competition. Case in point. I used Hulu for a bit a couple years back. Since then I've got several devices which I use to view media (including an Android phone with flash), and Hulu doesn't work on any of them. As a result Hulu's share of my media consumption time is diluted, and any chance of hooking me is quashed.
Hulu is not run by people too stupid to see something that obvious. I'm sure they'd be delighted to simplify their delivery model, reach more customers, and grab a greater share of their customers' attention, but they've got to juggle that with the intractable, self-destructive paranoia of the content owners. It's quite possible that they'll miss the wave as consumer habits change, but it won't be because they don't know the wave is coming.
How long before my ISP starts punishing me for using the Internet to do legal things that the Internet was designed for?
Designed for? Are you kidding?
The one thing the Internet was NOT designed for at the outset was stuff that required consistent slices of bandwidth ALL the time with consistent packet delivery. Initially you couldn't do things like telephony or video conferencing over the Internet. Two things made these apps possible.
(1) Statistical multiplexing for apps with sporadic bandwidth requirements was a HUGE incentive to build more network.
If you can squeeze a dozen users onto a link and most of the time they don't need ANY bandwidth, those dozen users are happy to pay a lot more for getting MOST of that link MOST of the times they want it than they'd pay to get 1/12 the bandwidth ALL the time.That makes building out networks immensely more profitable.
(2) The development of sophisticated codecs means users of apps like Internet telephony and streaming media perceive what appears to be a consistent stream of information, but the apps convert them to variable streams of bits.
You can *still* statistically multiplex these uses and get more out of each link, but there are limits. If there's one person streaming a movie in a neighborhood and a dozen looking at web pages, everyone STILL gets all the bandwidth whenever they happen to need it. That's a lot cheaper than paying for all the bandwidth they'd ever need all the time. If a dozen people are streaming movies, somebody has to build a lot more network and users have to pay for it, user notions of bandwidth as birthright notwithstanding.
The nature of an app and its implementation matter. In many respects iTunes rental and Netflix downloads are interchangeable, but in terms of how much network you have to build to keep users happy, there's no comparison.
In the first half of the last century, could you have imagined all the uses for earth orbit satellites?
Yes. Not ALL of the uses of course, but surely many of them: spying, storm tracking, land-use remote sensing, communications certainly. GPS? No, I wouldn't have thought of that one.
It's obvious that satellites are useful, because up to the minute knowledge of the Earth has obvious utility. You can't argue from analogy without examining the circumstances of the case you are reasoning from.
Before we had computers it might have been hard to envision all the potential uses.
Does this mean it would have been rational to invest in the development of a personal computer in 1960? At every stage of the development of the computer, funding came because of useful developments expected in the near future.
This is not to discount basic research, but travel to Mars is predominantly applied research. The basic research aspects could be done for much less money near the Earth. Which is not to suggest I'm against going to Mars. I'm against going to Mars under the dubious assumption that the enterprise will be a success in purely economic terms.
Dont count out new discoveries.
I haven't. But it is best not to count *on* new discoveries either.
Hate crimes are misnamed. The issue is not how the person committing the crime *feels* about the victim, it is what he *depriving the victim of*. What we call a "hate crime" is a deprivation of liberty, not only to the direct victim of the crime, but to countless people like him. In fact, it is tantamount to terrorism.
When somebody burns a cross on your lawn, it isn't simple trespass. The burning cross says in no uncertain terms,"None of you can live here. Try and you'll die." That's an attempt to alter the future behavior of an entire community against its will, using threat of violence. If that is not terrorism, what is?
When somebody beats up somebody because he "looks gay", it tells everyone they must look and act according to rules the perpetrator has chosen for them, otherwise they'll get the same. That's a deprivation of liberty, plain and simple. Nobody has a right to set themselves up as the regulator of manners, fashion and appearance for other people going about their business. I don't think they have the right to regulate others' sexual mores, either.
It mystifies me that people don't seem to get this, when they understand perfectly well how the essential distinction functions in all kind of analogous situations. If I beat you up, that's simple assault. If I say, "pay me protection or this will happen to you and your family again," then I beat you up, THAT is extortion, which is a much more serious crime than assault. If I say, "If your country doesn't change your foreign policy, none of you will be safe from injury or death," then I've graduated to terrorism.
NASA's work in creating orbital systems has easily paid for itself, including the showboating projects like going to the moon. Imagine a world without satellite communications, GPS, weather satellites, or remote sensing.
All of that is an accidental outgrowth of the dream of human space exploration. The problem is that now we're on the threshold of serious exploration of the Solar System, and its hard to imagine gains made outside Earth's orbit paying for anything in an economic sense.
To a first approximation, sure. To be more precise, when you can match the energy density of liquid hydrocarbons, and get energy into and out of the car just as quickly, you've reached the point where electric cars becom a no-brainer across the board, including highway driving. Until that happens, and for the foreseeable future, electric vehicles represent a set of tradeoffs, and the utility of those tradeoffs depends on the style of driving you do, the private cost of various energy sources, and the public costs of concentrating emissions certain places vs. certain other places.
Electric vehicles will be a sensible option for many users long before they look like a silver bullet solution to everyone. For many others, they won't be practical *until* they're a silver bullet solution. Between those points there's a lot of ground to cover. As ICE only cars slowly become impractical in a post peak oil world, there is certain to be a long period of increasing technological diversity driven by radical differentiation of market segments. That's probably not a happy scenario for established car makers.
Gosh, I remember having to explain what "email" was to people. Their reaction: "Why would I send some kind of computer message? If I'm in a rush, I'll phone. If I'm not, I'll send a letter. If I'm in a rush and they need a record, I'll fax." Hell, when radio was introduced people thought of it as wireless telegraphy. You could locate a telegraph office anywhere without running wires. Speaking of telegraph offices, many people imagined that we'd be going to the telegraph office to pick up written messages transcribed from the telephone.
We evaluate new tools in terms of how we use familiar ones. If all we've known is the hammer, then we're pretty shrewd about evaluating the latest innovation in hammer technology. But then we look at the first screwdriver and see nothing more than a very awkward way to drive nails.
Well, keyboards are neither here nor there. It simply makes sense to build programming languages out of Latin symbols, digits, arithmetic operators, and a small, common set of punctuation (".") and glyphs ("/"). Really, TFA is are naive about the problems of K&R C, which have little to do with ASCII per se. The problem with C wasn't that it didn't have enough distinct looking operators, the problem was the nature of the data types that those operators acted upon.
C was designed to be a replacement for assembly language that allows programmers to express themselves in terms of multi-operator expressions, structured flow of control, and functions. If you look at C's data types, they represent the state of hardware artifacts in a kind of idealized, standardized machine: bytes (chars), words (ints), long words (long), single (float) and double (double) floating point numbers and finally, memory addresses. It was up to the programmer to provide semantics in K&R C. "If (a | b | c)" is almost the exact equivalent of how you would perform a test in assembler: store (a | b) in d; store (d | d) in d; jump on non-zero d... The programmer is responsible for expressing what he means in terms of mechanical artifacts.
We used to say that C was "weakly typed"; but that implicitly frames the question in a way that is foreign to C's initial goals, which where to make an expressive, low-level (close to the iron) language you could write most of an operating system in. Thus C was less than perfect from an application programmer's standpoint. Take the C "char"; it really represents a byte (which initially was understood to be the smallest addressable collection of bits, not necessarily 8 bits). This also happened to be very convenient in the 7-bit ASCII days for representing characters, but even in C's heyday a byte wasn't big enough to represent the value space of many languages' character sets. An application programmer has little or no need for a data type with the semantics of C's "char"; he only uses "char" because the C language doesn't provide him with what he really needs: a data type that represents a single glyph within a string. If he called "fgetc" on an alphanumeric file, sometimes he'd get eight bits, other times sixteen, but he would neither know nor care. If he wrote "fooString[1]" sometimes he'd get something offset eight bits from the start of "fooString", other times sixteen or even thrity-two, because he doesn't really care about memory layout. An operating system writer *does* care about the layout of memory, because semantically he's moving bytes around, not characters. He knows darn well the size of an 'int' on his target platform, and how struct members are aligned; it's part of his model of his problem domain.
C only took off as an application programming language because of the limitations of early microcomputers (typically 32K of RAM, about 1 MHz clock, eight and sixteen bit registers). C could target such systems very effectively.
True story about a practical application of what I learned in chemistry.
A friend of mine started a cooking oil fire in his kitchen. The residue from the fire was a thick, slimy sludge which got over everything. He got it on his hands, and nothing h tried would get it off (soap, detergent, scalding hot water, scrubbing with an abrasive pad). As he was subjecting his hand to increasingly nasty stuff, I sat and thought about the problem, and remembered "like dissolves like." I took out the cooking oil and handed it to him, saying, "try a hair of the dog." It worked perfectly.
Although I am not a scientist myself, one of my regular pleasures over the thirty years since I got out of high school has been following developments in science through Science News and Scientific American, and other publications for the general public. I think this makes me a better, more informed citizen. I might possibly be just as well informed now had I never studied physics, biology, chemistry or four years of math in high school. But it hasn't hurt me.
Well, the point isn't that all that math was good for *you*. It's good for the *country* to have a supply of people who can do mathematics on the high school level and above, and the methods of teaching math we have used historically aren't very productive. So everybody gets math through trigonometry and analytic geometry as means of scraping the bottom of the barrel.
I actually think ed reform, at least in my state, will begin producing a lot more mathematics capable high school grads in a few years. If that is case, I think people on a liberal arts track won't need the full curriculum they're getting in high school. Instead, I think after a basic numeracy class covering statistics and probability in their 9th grade year, liberal arts folks should be treated to three years with Euclid, straight from the book (Elements).
Why? Because that is a very rigorous education in a style of reasoning you aren't going to get to learn in college. That's not to belittle the kind of reasoning styles you learn when you study literature or visual arts. It's to provide you with a useful tool for your mental toolbox, one that until the twentieth century was one of the cornerstones of a liberal education.
Here's a little known fact: after Abraham Lincoln left Congress, he felt that his reasoning powers were not sharp enough. So he bought himself a copy of Euclid's Elements and taught himself geometry.
I really don't get why people think Empire was the best.
Because it had a script written by somebody other than George Lucas and was directed by somebody other than Lucas. In fact, Lucas' involvement in Ep V was remarkably small. Now I will admit that Lucas really *is* a genius, but that doesn't mean he can do everything well. In my opinion he has three serious shortcomings as an auteur director/screenwriter: (1) he can't write dialog and (2) he can't direct actors (3) he has a kind of creative Asperger's that never seems to pick up on an idea that's outlasted its welcome.
Now those of you who grew up with Star Wars probably don't realize this, but Ep IV really changed the movies. Before Ep IV, movies took their time setting up and unfolding the story. They were slow, in other words. Ep IV was something new, a movie whose plot ran through it like a dose of castor oil. This was making a virtue of necessity. Not having the money or prestige to do the space opera Lawrence of Arabia he wanted to make, and doubting he'd get a crack at a sequel, Lucas stuffed a three and a half hour epic into 121 minutes runtime.
After that, he didn't have so much story left over for the rest of the envisioned middle trilogy, and as you point out most of that ended up in Episode VI, which ran a stately 131 minutes. This left 124 minutes of what writers call "world building" in Ep V, but by then the fans were already invested in the world and the characters. They'd have paid good money to watch an imperial travelogue, but this movie also treated us character development in the hands of a competent screenwriter and director. Ultimately, characters the thing that binds fans to any serial story, so it is no wonder that Ep V is remembered so fondly.
Well, if you can manage to do it, the proper way to measure BTU/citizen (or CO2/citizen) is to go all the way back along the supply chain to China, then all the way back to where the raw materials were extracted.
As a country, we've shifted a huge fraction of our pollution and energy consumption to China.
I don't know about that. The problem is that *most* people *won't* create a co-op, and the ones that do won't amount to a drop in the bucket.
Think about this: you could have a single corporation that controls the newspapers (if they exist), radio, television and most Internet access in a region. It wouldn't be that expensive to do, given that what you get out of it: a jujitsu hold on the region's economy and government.
Actually, this reminds me of the classic AI simulation program "Blocks World", which *was* written in Lisp.
Basically, it modeled a group of stacked blocks, and you could tell it, "put the red block on the blue block." If there were a yellow block on top of the red block, it would figure out that in order to meet its goal of picking up the red block, it had to remove the yellow one first.
What was especially cool is it could explain itself. You could ask "Why did you move the yellow block?" and it would say "To get at the red block." If you asked "Why did you move the red block" it would say "Because you told me."
That doesn't seem like much today, but thirty years ago it was the next thing to wizardry. Once you figured out how the program worked, you really understood why recursion is such a big deal in AI programs. Each individual inductive step was simple, but the results were impressive.
To actually get the lego machine to fabricate parts is no big deal; that's just running through a predefined set of motions. What would be cool is if, like Blocks World, you told it what you wanted, and it took care of the details for you.
Considering the observation that Sculley makes that MS is all about hiring geeks and smart people and Apple is all about hiring designers and marketers ("Apple is a designers company, not an engineers company," as he says), it still amazes me that MS is so bashed on/. and Apple so celebrated.
Well, because as a geek you want to see your work in some user's hands, you want the users to love it, and you want to feel proud of that. And if you want that experience, you need those designers and marketers. How many engineers have done first class work on a product, only to have that work disappear without a trace because the product didn't sell?
Yeah, yeah we all know about the "cool kids" back in school who scoffed at geeks because of what they knew, but who's celebrating ignorance now? Design and marketing are professions that not everyone can do... just like engineering. By in large it's *stupid* marketing and *bad* design we all hate. There's every reason to respect *anyone* who does a difficult job well, especially if its a job that's *usually* done badly.
Indeed. I hate progress in anything other than technology as much as anyone else, but it is just barely possible that "nanoscale" is a reasonable term to use here. They are talking about very small physical changes in the electrode as Lithium atoms migrate away from it.
AFAIK, there's not official definition of "nanoscale", but I understand it usually refers to measurements between 1 and 100nm. It seems reasonable to apply the term to any kind of thing that is convenient to describe in nm (e.g., anything whose size is larger than an Angstrom but smaller than a micron).
Well, I'm all for the middle ground, but where it apparently lies depends on where you're standing.
The US corporate income tax rate is AMONG the highest in the world. Fortunately, large companies at least don't pay anything near that. Some of the largest, most complex and profitable companies manage to avoid paying taxes altogether.
Here's another way of looking at it. Who contributes more taxes, individuals or corporations? If you answered "individuals", you are right. So right there you can see that the de facto corporate tax rates are lower than individual tax rates, despite being high in theory.
Now for extra credit, which of the following figures represents the gross amount of the corporate income tax paid in America as a fraction of the gross paid by individuals like you or me?
In general, Apple pays a lot of attention to things that it wants to matter to you. If that's not the same as what actually matters to you, then things can get a little rough.
For example, it's really easy to download the latest episode of the most popular TV series in iTunes, or to buy the latest top 40 hits. It's a lousy system for finding obscure stuff, even if its in the store; it keeps trying steer you back in the herd.
It's not all that hard to get an iPod touch synching with Google Mail. It's impossible to get it to display entire track titles if they're too long. How could Apple have screwed up something so basic? I guess it's not part of the buying experience, it's not part of the selling experience so Apple doesn't care about a detail like that.
If you accidentally turn lyrics display off, there is no manifest interface for turning them back on. You have turn to Google to figure out how.
Not to rag on Apple's UI design, because they're head and shoulders over most of the competition; they're just far from where they ought to be, because despite Jobs legendary obsession with some details, he just doesn't care about others, and those don't get taken care of.
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Bringing foreign engineers to work here is not a zero sum game between them and the US engineers.
The problem with the H1-b program is that we kick them out of the country AFTER we've trained them to do our jobs. If we encouraged the ones who could find employment here to stay, the program would be GOOD for American engineers.
Why?
Because engineering jobs go where it is easiest to find talent that knows how to get the job done. If you have an Internet startup, you locate it in the Bay Area, even though you're competing with tons of other employers for talent, because you know the talent pool is there.
Even more important, software engineers tend to create jobs for other software engineers. A software engineer building a web application creates a job for an engineer building a framework, which in turn creates jobs for engineers to use that framework and supply infrastructure and tools to the framework developer.
The H1-B program as it is now is structured to MOVE jobs overseas.
Since language is all important in today's politics, I suggest that Network Neutrality is a misnomer. It suggests that it is an issue only for network providers.
It suggests correctly. Net neutrality is the network version of freedom of association. It's about forbidding the providers of the tubes say, "You must get this content from A rather than B." It has nothing to do with A saying, "I don't want you to have this content," or "I don't want you to have this content unless you do certain things (e.g., pay me, use the playback devices of people who pay me, etc.)."
A content provider discriminating against *users* is not a net neutrality issue, even if that discrimination is unreasonable, or even *illegal*. There are legitimate reasons to discriminate against users (e.g., users who haven't paid for content, protecting the privacy of other users, etc.) Not every reasonable person agrees on every single case of this, but I think most reasonable persons who has looked at the question of net neutrality would agree it's a good idea, provided they don't have some stake in giving network providers control over content choices.
The point of net neutrality is to preserve a free market for content. It's to keep low barriers to entry for people who have a new idea for an information service. Imagine you've got an idea that will revolutionize online music delivery. Imagine that as wonderful as this would be for users, the network provider makes more from its side deals with existing delivery services than it would from a deal with you. Good luck getting access to that network's subscribers.
Net neutrality is about maintaining an even playing field when it comes to accessing customers or services. It's not about forcing content providers to provide content to people they don't want to have it. Nor is it about things like bandwidth caps and pricing. I think the network providers should be free to slap bandwidth caps on accounts and charge premium prices for guaranteed bandwidth if they want, so long as they're (a) up front about what they're doing and (b) don't use bandwidth to favor one content provider over another.
"Freedom of the Internet" would be almost a Orwellian term, since it would force people to provide content to people they don't want to have it. Net Neutrality is a concept entirely consistent with the ideas of classical liberalism, like markets and competition. Case in point. I used Hulu for a bit a couple years back. Since then I've got several devices which I use to view media (including an Android phone with flash), and Hulu doesn't work on any of them. As a result Hulu's share of my media consumption time is diluted, and any chance of hooking me is quashed.
Hulu is not run by people too stupid to see something that obvious. I'm sure they'd be delighted to simplify their delivery model, reach more customers, and grab a greater share of their customers' attention, but they've got to juggle that with the intractable, self-destructive paranoia of the content owners. It's quite possible that they'll miss the wave as consumer habits change, but it won't be because they don't know the wave is coming.
How long before my ISP starts punishing me for using the Internet to do legal things that the Internet was designed for?
Designed for? Are you kidding?
The one thing the Internet was NOT designed for at the outset was stuff that required consistent slices of bandwidth ALL the time with consistent packet delivery. Initially you couldn't do things like telephony or video conferencing over the Internet. Two things made these apps possible.
(1) Statistical multiplexing for apps with sporadic bandwidth requirements was a HUGE incentive to build more network.
If you can squeeze a dozen users onto a link and most of the time they don't need ANY bandwidth, those dozen users are happy to pay a lot more for getting MOST of that link MOST of the times they want it than they'd pay to get 1/12 the bandwidth ALL the time.That makes building out networks immensely more profitable.
(2) The development of sophisticated codecs means users of apps like Internet telephony and streaming media perceive what appears to be a consistent stream of information, but the apps convert them to variable streams of bits.
You can *still* statistically multiplex these uses and get more out of each link, but there are limits. If there's one person streaming a movie in a neighborhood and a dozen looking at web pages, everyone STILL gets all the bandwidth whenever they happen to need it. That's a lot cheaper than paying for all the bandwidth they'd ever need all the time. If a dozen people are streaming movies, somebody has to build a lot more network and users have to pay for it, user notions of bandwidth as birthright notwithstanding.
The nature of an app and its implementation matter. In many respects iTunes rental and Netflix downloads are interchangeable, but in terms of how much network you have to build to keep users happy, there's no comparison.
The example of cat ownership had not escaped my notice.
to voluntarily lodge a nocturnal killing machine in your own home.
the summary sounds like his friggen' obituary.
In the first half of the last century, could you have imagined all the uses for earth orbit satellites?
Yes. Not ALL of the uses of course, but surely many of them: spying, storm tracking, land-use remote sensing, communications certainly. GPS? No, I wouldn't have thought of that one.
It's obvious that satellites are useful, because up to the minute knowledge of the Earth has obvious utility. You can't argue from analogy without examining the circumstances of the case you are reasoning from.
Before we had computers it might have been hard to envision all the potential uses.
Does this mean it would have been rational to invest in the development of a personal computer in 1960? At every stage of the development of the computer, funding came because of useful developments expected in the near future.
This is not to discount basic research, but travel to Mars is predominantly applied research. The basic research aspects could be done for much less money near the Earth. Which is not to suggest I'm against going to Mars. I'm against going to Mars under the dubious assumption that the enterprise will be a success in purely economic terms.
Dont count out new discoveries.
I haven't. But it is best not to count *on* new discoveries either.
Hate crimes are misnamed. The issue is not how the person committing the crime *feels* about the victim, it is what he *depriving the victim of*. What we call a "hate crime" is a deprivation of liberty, not only to the direct victim of the crime, but to countless people like him. In fact, it is tantamount to terrorism.
When somebody burns a cross on your lawn, it isn't simple trespass. The burning cross says in no uncertain terms,"None of you can live here. Try and you'll die." That's an attempt to alter the future behavior of an entire community against its will, using threat of violence. If that is not terrorism, what is?
When somebody beats up somebody because he "looks gay", it tells everyone they must look and act according to rules the perpetrator has chosen for them, otherwise they'll get the same. That's a deprivation of liberty, plain and simple. Nobody has a right to set themselves up as the regulator of manners, fashion and appearance for other people going about their business. I don't think they have the right to regulate others' sexual mores, either.
It mystifies me that people don't seem to get this, when they understand perfectly well how the essential distinction functions in all kind of analogous situations. If I beat you up, that's simple assault. If I say, "pay me protection or this will happen to you and your family again," then I beat you up, THAT is extortion, which is a much more serious crime than assault. If I say, "If your country doesn't change your foreign policy, none of you will be safe from injury or death," then I've graduated to terrorism.
NASA's work in creating orbital systems has easily paid for itself, including the showboating projects like going to the moon. Imagine a world without satellite communications, GPS, weather satellites, or remote sensing.
All of that is an accidental outgrowth of the dream of human space exploration. The problem is that now we're on the threshold of serious exploration of the Solar System, and its hard to imagine gains made outside Earth's orbit paying for anything in an economic sense.
To a first approximation, sure. To be more precise, when you can match the energy density of liquid hydrocarbons, and get energy into and out of the car just as quickly, you've reached the point where electric cars becom a no-brainer across the board, including highway driving. Until that happens, and for the foreseeable future, electric vehicles represent a set of tradeoffs, and the utility of those tradeoffs depends on the style of driving you do, the private cost of various energy sources, and the public costs of concentrating emissions certain places vs. certain other places.
Electric vehicles will be a sensible option for many users long before they look like a silver bullet solution to everyone. For many others, they won't be practical *until* they're a silver bullet solution. Between those points there's a lot of ground to cover. As ICE only cars slowly become impractical in a post peak oil world, there is certain to be a long period of increasing technological diversity driven by radical differentiation of market segments. That's probably not a happy scenario for established car makers.
Gosh, I remember having to explain what "email" was to people. Their reaction: "Why would I send some kind of computer message? If I'm in a rush, I'll phone. If I'm not, I'll send a letter. If I'm in a rush and they need a record, I'll fax." Hell, when radio was introduced people thought of it as wireless telegraphy. You could locate a telegraph office anywhere without running wires. Speaking of telegraph offices, many people imagined that we'd be going to the telegraph office to pick up written messages transcribed from the telephone.
We evaluate new tools in terms of how we use familiar ones. If all we've known is the hammer, then we're pretty shrewd about evaluating the latest innovation in hammer technology. But then we look at the first screwdriver and see nothing more than a very awkward way to drive nails.
Well, keyboards are neither here nor there. It simply makes sense to build programming languages out of Latin symbols, digits, arithmetic operators, and a small, common set of punctuation (".") and glyphs ("/"). Really, TFA is are naive about the problems of K&R C, which have little to do with ASCII per se. The problem with C wasn't that it didn't have enough distinct looking operators, the problem was the nature of the data types that those operators acted upon.
C was designed to be a replacement for assembly language that allows programmers to express themselves in terms of multi-operator expressions, structured flow of control, and functions. If you look at C's data types, they represent the state of hardware artifacts in a kind of idealized, standardized machine: bytes (chars), words (ints), long words (long), single (float) and double (double) floating point numbers and finally, memory addresses. It was up to the programmer to provide semantics in K&R C. "If (a | b | c)" is almost the exact equivalent of how you would perform a test in assembler: store (a | b) in d; store (d | d) in d; jump on non-zero d ... The programmer is responsible for expressing what he means in terms of mechanical artifacts.
We used to say that C was "weakly typed"; but that implicitly frames the question in a way that is foreign to C's initial goals, which where to make an expressive, low-level (close to the iron) language you could write most of an operating system in. Thus C was less than perfect from an application programmer's standpoint. Take the C "char"; it really represents a byte (which initially was understood to be the smallest addressable collection of bits, not necessarily 8 bits). This also happened to be very convenient in the 7-bit ASCII days for representing characters, but even in C's heyday a byte wasn't big enough to represent the value space of many languages' character sets. An application programmer has little or no need for a data type with the semantics of C's "char"; he only uses "char" because the C language doesn't provide him with what he really needs: a data type that represents a single glyph within a string. If he called "fgetc" on an alphanumeric file, sometimes he'd get eight bits, other times sixteen, but he would neither know nor care. If he wrote "fooString[1]" sometimes he'd get something offset eight bits from the start of "fooString", other times sixteen or even thrity-two, because he doesn't really care about memory layout. An operating system writer *does* care about the layout of memory, because semantically he's moving bytes around, not characters. He knows darn well the size of an 'int' on his target platform, and how struct members are aligned; it's part of his model of his problem domain.
C only took off as an application programming language because of the limitations of early microcomputers (typically 32K of RAM, about 1 MHz clock, eight and sixteen bit registers). C could target such systems very effectively.
True story about a practical application of what I learned in chemistry.
A friend of mine started a cooking oil fire in his kitchen. The residue from the fire was a thick, slimy sludge which got over everything. He got it on his hands, and nothing h tried would get it off (soap, detergent, scalding hot water, scrubbing with an abrasive pad). As he was subjecting his hand to increasingly nasty stuff, I sat and thought about the problem, and remembered "like dissolves like." I took out the cooking oil and handed it to him, saying, "try a hair of the dog." It worked perfectly.
Although I am not a scientist myself, one of my regular pleasures over the thirty years since I got out of high school has been following developments in science through Science News and Scientific American, and other publications for the general public. I think this makes me a better, more informed citizen. I might possibly be just as well informed now had I never studied physics, biology, chemistry or four years of math in high school. But it hasn't hurt me.
Will it embrace IDIC?
Well, the point isn't that all that math was good for *you*. It's good for the *country* to have a supply of people who can do mathematics on the high school level and above, and the methods of teaching math we have used historically aren't very productive. So everybody gets math through trigonometry and analytic geometry as means of scraping the bottom of the barrel.
I actually think ed reform, at least in my state, will begin producing a lot more mathematics capable high school grads in a few years. If that is case, I think people on a liberal arts track won't need the full curriculum they're getting in high school. Instead, I think after a basic numeracy class covering statistics and probability in their 9th grade year, liberal arts folks should be treated to three years with Euclid, straight from the book (Elements).
Why? Because that is a very rigorous education in a style of reasoning you aren't going to get to learn in college. That's not to belittle the kind of reasoning styles you learn when you study literature or visual arts. It's to provide you with a useful tool for your mental toolbox, one that until the twentieth century was one of the cornerstones of a liberal education.
Here's a little known fact: after Abraham Lincoln left Congress, he felt that his reasoning powers were not sharp enough. So he bought himself a copy of Euclid's Elements and taught himself geometry.
I really don't get why people think Empire was the best.
Because it had a script written by somebody other than George Lucas and was directed by somebody other than Lucas. In fact, Lucas' involvement in Ep V was remarkably small. Now I will admit that Lucas really *is* a genius, but that doesn't mean he can do everything well. In my opinion he has three serious shortcomings as an auteur director/screenwriter: (1) he can't write dialog and (2) he can't direct actors (3) he has a kind of creative Asperger's that never seems to pick up on an idea that's outlasted its welcome.
Now those of you who grew up with Star Wars probably don't realize this, but Ep IV really changed the movies. Before Ep IV, movies took their time setting up and unfolding the story. They were slow, in other words. Ep IV was something new, a movie whose plot ran through it like a dose of castor oil. This was making a virtue of necessity. Not having the money or prestige to do the space opera Lawrence of Arabia he wanted to make, and doubting he'd get a crack at a sequel, Lucas stuffed a three and a half hour epic into 121 minutes runtime.
After that, he didn't have so much story left over for the rest of the envisioned middle trilogy, and as you point out most of that ended up in Episode VI, which ran a stately 131 minutes. This left 124 minutes of what writers call "world building" in Ep V, but by then the fans were already invested in the world and the characters. They'd have paid good money to watch an imperial travelogue, but this movie also treated us character development in the hands of a competent screenwriter and director. Ultimately, characters the thing that binds fans to any serial story, so it is no wonder that Ep V is remembered so fondly.
Well, if you can manage to do it, the proper way to measure BTU/citizen (or CO2/citizen) is to go all the way back along the supply chain to China, then all the way back to where the raw materials were extracted.
As a country, we've shifted a huge fraction of our pollution and energy consumption to China.
I don't know about that. The problem is that *most* people *won't* create a co-op, and the ones that do won't amount to a drop in the bucket.
Think about this: you could have a single corporation that controls the newspapers (if they exist), radio, television and most Internet access in a region. It wouldn't be that expensive to do, given that what you get out of it: a jujitsu hold on the region's economy and government.
Actually, this reminds me of the classic AI simulation program "Blocks World", which *was* written in Lisp.
Basically, it modeled a group of stacked blocks, and you could tell it, "put the red block on the blue block." If there were a yellow block on top of the red block, it would figure out that in order to meet its goal of picking up the red block, it had to remove the yellow one first.
What was especially cool is it could explain itself. You could ask "Why did you move the yellow block?" and it would say "To get at the red block." If you asked "Why did you move the red block" it would say "Because you told me."
That doesn't seem like much today, but thirty years ago it was the next thing to wizardry. Once you figured out how the program worked, you really understood why recursion is such a big deal in AI programs. Each individual inductive step was simple, but the results were impressive.
To actually get the lego machine to fabricate parts is no big deal; that's just running through a predefined set of motions. What would be cool is if, like Blocks World, you told it what you wanted, and it took care of the details for you.
Considering the observation that Sculley makes that MS is all about hiring geeks and smart people and Apple is all about hiring designers and marketers ("Apple is a designers company, not an engineers company," as he says), it still amazes me that MS is so bashed on /. and Apple so celebrated.
Well, because as a geek you want to see your work in some user's hands, you want the users to love it, and you want to feel proud of that. And if you want that experience, you need those designers and marketers. How many engineers have done first class work on a product, only to have that work disappear without a trace because the product didn't sell?
Yeah, yeah we all know about the "cool kids" back in school who scoffed at geeks because of what they knew, but who's celebrating ignorance now? Design and marketing are professions that not everyone can do ... just like engineering. By in large it's *stupid* marketing and *bad* design we all hate. There's every reason to respect *anyone* who does a difficult job well, especially if its a job that's *usually* done badly.
Indeed. I hate progress in anything other than technology as much as anyone else, but it is just barely possible that "nanoscale" is a reasonable term to use here. They are talking about very small physical changes in the electrode as Lithium atoms migrate away from it.
AFAIK, there's not official definition of "nanoscale", but I understand it usually refers to measurements between 1 and 100nm. It seems reasonable to apply the term to any kind of thing that is convenient to describe in nm (e.g., anything whose size is larger than an Angstrom but smaller than a micron).
Well, I'm all for the middle ground, but where it apparently lies depends on where you're standing.
The US corporate income tax rate is AMONG the highest in the world. Fortunately, large companies at least don't pay anything near that. Some of the largest, most complex and profitable companies manage to avoid paying taxes altogether.
Here's another way of looking at it. Who contributes more taxes, individuals or corporations? If you answered "individuals", you are right. So right there you can see that the de facto corporate tax rates are lower than individual tax rates, despite being high in theory.
Now for extra credit, which of the following figures represents the gross amount of the corporate income tax paid in America as a fraction of the gross paid by individuals like you or me?
(1) 90%
(2) 75%
(3) 50%
(4) 25%
(5) 10%
Well, that's the downside of "open". Sometimes a hardware manufacturer delivers dud. The upside is that you can change handsets without any fuss.
For the record, my Motorola Droid's GPS works perfectly. If your problems *are* a software problem, it's still a Samsung issue.
In general, Apple pays a lot of attention to things that it wants to matter to you. If that's not the same as what actually matters to you, then things can get a little rough.
For example, it's really easy to download the latest episode of the most popular TV series in iTunes, or to buy the latest top 40 hits. It's a lousy system for finding obscure stuff, even if its in the store; it keeps trying steer you back in the herd.
It's not all that hard to get an iPod touch synching with Google Mail. It's impossible to get it to display entire track titles if they're too long. How could Apple have screwed up something so basic? I guess it's not part of the buying experience, it's not part of the selling experience so Apple doesn't care about a detail like that.
If you accidentally turn lyrics display off, there is no manifest interface for turning them back on. You have turn to Google to figure out how.
Not to rag on Apple's UI design, because they're head and shoulders over most of the competition; they're just far from where they ought to be, because despite Jobs legendary obsession with some details, he just doesn't care about others, and those don't get taken care of.
In Soviet Canada, ignorance is a dish best served cold.