Long answer, even a warmer climate has stretches of cold years. Sounds like thing are pretty much consistent with the currently accepted climate models, at least for the time being.
Well, I agree that certain people in the Iranian government get a bit... overheated in their rhetoric. But it makes a difference who.
In the Iranian system, the President in particular is kept on a leash; he might run out pretty far, but there's a hand on the other end ready to give the leash a yank. He can say some alarming things, but it's not quite the same as it would be in a straightforward dictatorship -- or even if POTUS did something like this, although it's probably more than if a US rep said similar kinds of things.
There are people behind the President watching. Those people may matter more.
I know you're making a joke here, but the joke is less funny the more you know about Iran. Iran and Iraq differ by a lot more than one consonant. For one thing, the way their government works is much more complicated than the old Baghdad Bob's Baathist regime.
First of all, charming Mr. Ahmadinejad, although he is quite capable of saying some pretty outrageous things, doesn't wield supreme power, or even anything close to it. The Supreme Leader, Ali Khameni, is much more powerful. But even his power is arguably the ultimate one, it is by design much more awkward for him to wield than, say, Saddam's version of ultimate power.
There are even relative moderates in the government like Akbar Rafsanjani, former president and current chairman of both the Expendiency Council and Assembly of Experts. The Assembly theoretically has the power to dismiss the Supreme Leader, although no actions in that direction have ever, so far as we know, been taken.
The point here is that the Iranian government isn't even close to being the kind of dictatorship where everybody has to parrot the President's fantasies. To tell you the truth, it isn't quite like any other form of government I can think of, it's more like a hybrid of a democratic Republic and a theocracy, with the theocracy acting primarily in a judicial role but with certain executive powers theoretically in their direct or indirect control. Ack, that's a really bad summary, but the best I can do.
The important thing that everybody should understand about Iran is that the Iranian government is not anything monolithic entity driven by the ego or ideology of any single person, not even the Supreme Leader.
The way we deal with such a country isn't quite the same as you would deal with a dictatorship. Perhaps one might approach Iran in the way we dealt with the old totalitarian states, although Iran isn't really very much like them. There is a power structure there which, through its various organs, might be dealt with pragmatically. Such dealings might even, in some cases, tip the balance of power between factions.
The Iranians take seriously the idea of being an "Islamic Republic". It seems almost incomprehensible to the Western mind that this could be anything but a sham, but it's not. There's a thousand years of Shiite historical and religious thought which limits the ability of even senior religious leaders to wield absolute power.
Well, if you're going to standardize the object model, how much of a larger step would it be to define a virtual machine to go along with it? Then you could use any language you like, provided that it could be compiled for the VM.
It's funny that this wasn't the way things went, because that certainly works for many developers who don't want to share code, aside from the other things that would make this convenient. On the flip side, it's probably done a lot to encourage open source web UI frameworks, so it may be a good thing in the end. All those people copying snippets of javascript have in their script-kiddie way advanced the idea of sharing ideas through code.
I haven't watch the evolution of javascript over the years, so I can't say why it didn't go this way in the beginning. Perhaps things were so far from being sufficiently standardized this just wasn't that useful idea. I'd be interested to hear on this from somebody who's been more involved with the technology.
Some day, I may write an essay "Model View Controller Considered Harmful".
It's not that MVC is a harmful pattern. It's a natural pattern that often emerges from an application of sound design principles to many problems. It's that it has become such a design buzzword that it encourages a kind of "design first analyze later" phenomenon. People are so sure they're going to find MVC that they start with it and go looking for ways to fit the problem to it.
And they find them. The problem is that the first way you find to apply it isn't necessarily the best one or the only one. I think you're brining up an example of how the design first mindset introduces blinders into people's thinking. They can't see the obvious because they're too wrapped up in the idea that MVC will magically simplify design, whereas simplifying design will often generate MVC.
I've seen so many "MVC" designs that were superficially structured as MVC, but were in fact heavyweight, somewhat arbitrary abstractions through which all kinds of responsibilities are squeezed like so much meat through the grinder.
A good example would be the non-profit org who where sued by Miracle Grow for using GREEN and YELLOW on their package of fertilizer despite the package it's self looking NOTHING like a Miracle Grow package at all.
Well, last time I checked, a bucket of KFC chicken has Colonel Sanders on it, but there's nothing that looks like him in it. There's not even anything thing that looks like it might come from him, although perhaps we should be worried about what they mean by a "variety" bucket...
People who talk this way have never seriously been involved with any effort "for the good of all mankind".
Oddly enough, I have been; several times in fact.
One thing that happens when you get serious about doing something on any kind of scale is you discover that money is really, really important, even though that's not what you're out to get. People working full time on saving the world still have to eat, still have to support their families. And it's really not fair to expect them to live like monks, although many do make financial sacrifices.
When you really get serious about saving the world, you end up with things like budgets, income statements, balance sheets, and cash flow projections, all of which have to be managed very nearly exactly the same way as in a business. The only distinction is that anything that generates profit and isn't illegal is fair game in a business. A non-profit is always about having the greatest long term impact, an end which often entails a variety of profit maximizing decisions, but which is superior to the profit maximizing goal.
Well, this is what is technically called "fraud". Creating the "fiction" of a independence to break the law or violate a contract is looked upon negatively by the courts, unless I am mitaken.
In any case, I'm not sure that would be necessary or helpful. If China recognizes the patent, anybody selling in China could (theoretically) be sued there, whomever was the puppetmaster pulling their strings. And, if the violation is in China, I am guessing that the US courts don't have jurisdiction, unless there is some agreement between the parties to that effect.
often practice warfare to an unusual degree. High numbers of young male deaths leads to a surplus of marriageable women -- including widows. Polygamy allows the fertility rate to compensate, among other things.
It follows that while the cost of war is borne most by the dead, any potential benefits must be shared disproportionately more by the survivors.
By a similar logic, I'd bet that the countries in question have a much higher mortality rate for young men from all causes, and that survivors into old age posses, disproportionately, social fitness. In other words the poor die young and the rich live longer. This may also be exacerbated when you look at certain small and exceptional countries, such as Brunei.
In any case, there is only so far clever juxtaposition of gross numbers can get you. To really understand data, you have to disaggregate it, which is probably not possible in the datasets they have. Overall male life expectancy is a better measure of male health, not the survival rates of those who have already reached advanced age. That's practically asking to have your data confounded.
I don't know. It seems to me that the rockets of the 60's were pretty complex beasts too.
Probably every significant engineering project requires a few -- creative solutions to unexpected difficulties. It's when you find your pre-project assumptions falling like dominoes that you know you're screwed.
Well, first of all, not all women go through puberty the same way.
Second of all, the vault is just one discipline, and its distinct from the others in that it is the only one that uses a springboard.
If you watched the women's diving, you may have noticed a dramatic difference between platform divers and springboard divers. The platform divers looked like gymnasts -- extremely muscular but on a very petit frame. The springboard divers by comparison looked huge, like valkyries or something. I'm guessing that it has to do with the difference between have the use of an external spring vs. doing things by muscle alone.
People in many western countries have an expectation that governments and businesses behave in a mostly honorable manner.
Well, its almost impossible to count the ways that statement is false. For one thing, the concept of honorable can be very different in different places. It reminds me of the Catholic Church's reaction to priest pedophilia scandals. Canon law enjoins the hierarchy against doing anything that would bring the Church into disrepute, so of course that meant they had to cover it up. In case you didn't notice, that was sarcastic. It takes a special kind of blindness to interpret what would otherwise be a useful rule in such a damaging way.
Same thing here. The Chinese authorities used various kinds of trickery in the opening ceremonies. One you might not have heard of is the children representing 55 ethnic minority groups were all Han (Chinese) children dressed up in ethnic costumes. The constant theme of all these various stories is this: they treat keeping up appearances as a critical matter of national prestige, almost national security.
Now, let's move off the culturally relative topic of honor onto firmer ground of administration. The problem with any system in which the bureaucracies are allowed to manage appearances is that the people in those bureaucracies lose their capacity to recognize irony. Bureaucracies are good at handling complexity, but terrible at subtlety. Too many people taking their cues from other people just like them. Too much groupthink. Any reasonably clever individual would have foreseen that the torch relay business was asking for trouble, and that acting surprised and offended about the inevitable protests would play into the hands of the protesters. If you're a tough guy, when somebody kicks you in the groin, you're supposed to... raise one eyebrow, or laugh it off or something like that. You don't dance around holding your crotch in one hand and pointing an accusing finger with another and shout "unfair!" That tells everyone the protestors hit you in a weak spot, so if you aren't prepared to take it with a grin, you don't offer them the opportunity.
Any reasonably clever individual could figure out that trying to look even better than you could possibly be during the opening ceremonies would end up with people questioning even the bona fide amazing things you do.
Anybody with enough brains to be a top level government planner could figure out that hanging so much national pride and prestige on something like this, and doing it so transparently, is as good as hanging a sign on your national back saying "Kick me!" But you take all those excellent brains, and you embed them in a bureaucracy nobody's allowed to question, that is hermetically sealed from independent thought and touchy about criticism, and those individually excellent brains end up trudging along together, stuck in the groove of groupthink.
The Olympics might have been everything China dreamed for them to be, if the government had grasped one fundamental and ironic fact: you gain national prestige in something like this by doing really well while acting as if it wasn't important at all. The jingoistic, quasi-religious, neopagan ceremony of the Olympics is a trap. The more you act like this is supposed to be proof of national superiority or virility or something, the less you are measured by what you achieve. People start watching for how far you fall short of what you pretend to be.
Can you think of an engineering alternative to the regulation that says everyone has to drive in the same direction on the same side of the road (the driver's right side in most countries)?
I think the question is exactly what are they faking?
It seems they're building the face images out of a data model. They've done a good job on things like skin (a very complex biological structure). But where did they get the model? From an actress. So it's something like turning Andy Serkis in to Gollum, only more streamlined from a workflow standpoint.
When they can build the model from general instructions ("OK, 'Emily' should look angry here.") then they've got something which is, in a sense, scientifically impressive. But for now, they have something which is technologically impressive.
Funny, I have the same setup. I don't have the hard drive problem, and I almost never run my battery down on either system.
Toshiba is well known, by the way, to have a bad ACPI implementation. Rather than making the implementation compliant, they patch it so it runs OK in whatever version of Windows is coming out. For that reason Toshiba is very clear that their hardware doesn't support Linux. You can boot Linux on it, but you have to patch errors in the BIOS if you want everything to work properly. One of the changes you make is to have Linux mis-identify itself as Windows to the hardware, which magically fixes many problems. It makes you wonder whether Toshiba's poor performance under Linux is deliberate.
In any case, I don't recommend Toshiba laptops if you want to run Linux. You can't draw any general conclusions from your experience of Linux on a Toshiba laptop.
Well, break even is a matter of scaling, isn't it? Bigger reaction or longer duration. Mainly longer duration.
I know what you're talking about. I worked for a few months at a fusion lab. They had what looked like their own power plant, but was really a big motor/generator/flywheel combination. They needed that because they needed way more power than they could get of the grid, and they weren't even coming close to break even.
If we imagine these guys coming up with something that makes fusion power a reality, I don't think we'd imagine them breaking even with anything remotely looking like "conventional" ideas of what a fusion reactor would look like. Either it would be something that could be scaled into a conventional design making break even that much closer, or a design so unconventional what we're talking about doesn't apply.
Personally, I think it's just an interesting hobby that isn't going to produce much of practical use when it comes to energy generation; other inventions possibly. But you never know.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, "global warming" says too much, "global climate instability" says to little.
Short answer, yes.
Long answer, even a warmer climate has stretches of cold years. Sounds like thing are pretty much consistent with the currently accepted climate models, at least for the time being.
They should sign Krusty.
Hey hey, kids!
Well, I agree that certain people in the Iranian government get a bit ... overheated in their rhetoric. But it makes a difference who.
In the Iranian system, the President in particular is kept on a leash; he might run out pretty far, but there's a hand on the other end ready to give the leash a yank. He can say some alarming things, but it's not quite the same as it would be in a straightforward dictatorship -- or even if POTUS did something like this, although it's probably more than if a US rep said similar kinds of things.
There are people behind the President watching. Those people may matter more.
I know you're making a joke here, but the joke is less funny the more you know about Iran. Iran and Iraq differ by a lot more than one consonant. For one thing, the way their government works is much more complicated than the old Baghdad Bob's Baathist regime.
First of all, charming Mr. Ahmadinejad, although he is quite capable of saying some pretty outrageous things, doesn't wield supreme power, or even anything close to it. The Supreme Leader, Ali Khameni, is much more powerful. But even his power is arguably the ultimate one, it is by design much more awkward for him to wield than, say, Saddam's version of ultimate power.
There are even relative moderates in the government like Akbar Rafsanjani, former president and current chairman of both the Expendiency Council and Assembly of Experts. The Assembly theoretically has the power to dismiss the Supreme Leader, although no actions in that direction have ever, so far as we know, been taken.
The point here is that the Iranian government isn't even close to being the kind of dictatorship where everybody has to parrot the President's fantasies. To tell you the truth, it isn't quite like any other form of government I can think of, it's more like a hybrid of a democratic Republic and a theocracy, with the theocracy acting primarily in a judicial role but with certain executive powers theoretically in their direct or indirect control. Ack, that's a really bad summary, but the best I can do.
The important thing that everybody should understand about Iran is that the Iranian government is not anything monolithic entity driven by the ego or ideology of any single person, not even the Supreme Leader.
The way we deal with such a country isn't quite the same as you would deal with a dictatorship. Perhaps one might approach Iran in the way we dealt with the old totalitarian states, although Iran isn't really very much like them. There is a power structure there which, through its various organs, might be dealt with pragmatically. Such dealings might even, in some cases, tip the balance of power between factions.
The Iranians take seriously the idea of being an "Islamic Republic". It seems almost incomprehensible to the Western mind that this could be anything but a sham, but it's not. There's a thousand years of Shiite historical and religious thought which limits the ability of even senior religious leaders to wield absolute power.
Yes, I understand what you're saying, but javascript is far from ideal for that use.
Well, if you're going to standardize the object model, how much of a larger step would it be to define a virtual machine to go along with it? Then you could use any language you like, provided that it could be compiled for the VM.
It's funny that this wasn't the way things went, because that certainly works for many developers who don't want to share code, aside from the other things that would make this convenient. On the flip side, it's probably done a lot to encourage open source web UI frameworks, so it may be a good thing in the end. All those people copying snippets of javascript have in their script-kiddie way advanced the idea of sharing ideas through code.
I haven't watch the evolution of javascript over the years, so I can't say why it didn't go this way in the beginning. Perhaps things were so far from being sufficiently standardized this just wasn't that useful idea. I'd be interested to hear on this from somebody who's been more involved with the technology.
Some day, I may write an essay "Model View Controller Considered Harmful".
It's not that MVC is a harmful pattern. It's a natural pattern that often emerges from an application of sound design principles to many problems. It's that it has become such a design buzzword that it encourages a kind of "design first analyze later" phenomenon. People are so sure they're going to find MVC that they start with it and go looking for ways to fit the problem to it.
And they find them. The problem is that the first way you find to apply it isn't necessarily the best one or the only one. I think you're brining up an example of how the design first mindset introduces blinders into people's thinking. They can't see the obvious because they're too wrapped up in the idea that MVC will magically simplify design, whereas simplifying design will often generate MVC.
I've seen so many "MVC" designs that were superficially structured as MVC, but were in fact heavyweight, somewhat arbitrary abstractions through which all kinds of responsibilities are squeezed like so much meat through the grinder.
Well, last time I checked, a bucket of KFC chicken has Colonel Sanders on it, but there's nothing that looks like him in it. There's not even anything thing that looks like it might come from him, although perhaps we should be worried about what they mean by a "variety" bucket...
People who talk this way have never seriously been involved with any effort "for the good of all mankind".
Oddly enough, I have been; several times in fact.
One thing that happens when you get serious about doing something on any kind of scale is you discover that money is really, really important, even though that's not what you're out to get. People working full time on saving the world still have to eat, still have to support their families. And it's really not fair to expect them to live like monks, although many do make financial sacrifices.
When you really get serious about saving the world, you end up with things like budgets, income statements, balance sheets, and cash flow projections, all of which have to be managed very nearly exactly the same way as in a business. The only distinction is that anything that generates profit and isn't illegal is fair game in a business. A non-profit is always about having the greatest long term impact, an end which often entails a variety of profit maximizing decisions, but which is superior to the profit maximizing goal.
Well, this is what is technically called "fraud". Creating the "fiction" of a independence to break the law or violate a contract is looked upon negatively by the courts, unless I am mitaken.
In any case, I'm not sure that would be necessary or helpful. If China recognizes the patent, anybody selling in China could (theoretically) be sued there, whomever was the puppetmaster pulling their strings. And, if the violation is in China, I am guessing that the US courts don't have jurisdiction, unless there is some agreement between the parties to that effect.
Solution: hold the party in your parent's basement.
often practice warfare to an unusual degree. High numbers of young male deaths leads to a surplus of marriageable women -- including widows. Polygamy allows the fertility rate to compensate, among other things.
It follows that while the cost of war is borne most by the dead, any potential benefits must be shared disproportionately more by the survivors.
By a similar logic, I'd bet that the countries in question have a much higher mortality rate for young men from all causes, and that survivors into old age posses, disproportionately, social fitness. In other words the poor die young and the rich live longer. This may also be exacerbated when you look at certain small and exceptional countries, such as Brunei.
In any case, there is only so far clever juxtaposition of gross numbers can get you. To really understand data, you have to disaggregate it, which is probably not possible in the datasets they have. Overall male life expectancy is a better measure of male health, not the survival rates of those who have already reached advanced age. That's practically asking to have your data confounded.
I read it the same way. Maybe its a good omen; the "ass", or donkey, was a highly useful pack animal, especially in rough, high terrain.
I don't know. It seems to me that the rockets of the 60's were pretty complex beasts too.
Probably every significant engineering project requires a few -- creative solutions to unexpected difficulties. It's when you find your pre-project assumptions falling like dominoes that you know you're screwed.
Well, I suppose you got to compare that to the amortized weight of stuff that wouldn't make it to space as a result of the shaking.
Well, first of all, not all women go through puberty the same way.
Second of all, the vault is just one discipline, and its distinct from the others in that it is the only one that uses a springboard.
If you watched the women's diving, you may have noticed a dramatic difference between platform divers and springboard divers. The platform divers looked like gymnasts -- extremely muscular but on a very petit frame. The springboard divers by comparison looked huge, like valkyries or something. I'm guessing that it has to do with the difference between have the use of an external spring vs. doing things by muscle alone.
Well, its almost impossible to count the ways that statement is false. For one thing, the concept of honorable can be very different in different places. It reminds me of the Catholic Church's reaction to priest pedophilia scandals. Canon law enjoins the hierarchy against doing anything that would bring the Church into disrepute, so of course that meant they had to cover it up. In case you didn't notice, that was sarcastic. It takes a special kind of blindness to interpret what would otherwise be a useful rule in such a damaging way.
Same thing here. The Chinese authorities used various kinds of trickery in the opening ceremonies. One you might not have heard of is the children representing 55 ethnic minority groups were all Han (Chinese) children dressed up in ethnic costumes. The constant theme of all these various stories is this: they treat keeping up appearances as a critical matter of national prestige, almost national security.
Now, let's move off the culturally relative topic of honor onto firmer ground of administration. The problem with any system in which the bureaucracies are allowed to manage appearances is that the people in those bureaucracies lose their capacity to recognize irony. Bureaucracies are good at handling complexity, but terrible at subtlety. Too many people taking their cues from other people just like them. Too much groupthink. Any reasonably clever individual would have foreseen that the torch relay business was asking for trouble, and that acting surprised and offended about the inevitable protests would play into the hands of the protesters. If you're a tough guy, when somebody kicks you in the groin, you're supposed to ... raise one eyebrow, or laugh it off or something like that. You don't dance around holding your crotch in one hand and pointing an accusing finger with another and shout "unfair!" That tells everyone the protestors hit you in a weak spot, so if you aren't prepared to take it with a grin, you don't offer them the opportunity.
Any reasonably clever individual could figure out that trying to look even better than you could possibly be during the opening ceremonies would end up with people questioning even the bona fide amazing things you do.
Anybody with enough brains to be a top level government planner could figure out that hanging so much national pride and prestige on something like this, and doing it so transparently, is as good as hanging a sign on your national back saying "Kick me!" But you take all those excellent brains, and you embed them in a bureaucracy nobody's allowed to question, that is hermetically sealed from independent thought and touchy about criticism, and those individually excellent brains end up trudging along together, stuck in the groove of groupthink.
The Olympics might have been everything China dreamed for them to be, if the government had grasped one fundamental and ironic fact: you gain national prestige in something like this by doing really well while acting as if it wasn't important at all. The jingoistic, quasi-religious, neopagan ceremony of the Olympics is a trap. The more you act like this is supposed to be proof of national superiority or virility or something, the less you are measured by what you achieve. People start watching for how far you fall short of what you pretend to be.
Well, they should be able to visit each other in the hospital, but I draw the line at letting them get married.
I've never seen any other language in which so much good is done by so much bad code.
Can you think of an engineering alternative to the regulation that says everyone has to drive in the same direction on the same side of the road (the driver's right side in most countries)?
If not, then you lose the philosophical point.
I think the question is exactly what are they faking?
It seems they're building the face images out of a data model. They've done a good job on things like skin (a very complex biological structure). But where did they get the model? From an actress. So it's something like turning Andy Serkis in to Gollum, only more streamlined from a workflow standpoint.
When they can build the model from general instructions ("OK, 'Emily' should look angry here.") then they've got something which is, in a sense, scientifically impressive. But for now, they have something which is technologically impressive.
Hasn't "language evolves" come to mean "I can't wait until the ignorant take over the world?"
Oh, wait.
Funny, I have the same setup. I don't have the hard drive problem, and I almost never run my battery down on either system.
Toshiba is well known, by the way, to have a bad ACPI implementation. Rather than making the implementation compliant, they patch it so it runs OK in whatever version of Windows is coming out. For that reason Toshiba is very clear that their hardware doesn't support Linux. You can boot Linux on it, but you have to patch errors in the BIOS if you want everything to work properly. One of the changes you make is to have Linux mis-identify itself as Windows to the hardware, which magically fixes many problems. It makes you wonder whether Toshiba's poor performance under Linux is deliberate.
In any case, I don't recommend Toshiba laptops if you want to run Linux. You can't draw any general conclusions from your experience of Linux on a Toshiba laptop.
Well, break even is a matter of scaling, isn't it? Bigger reaction or longer duration. Mainly longer duration.
I know what you're talking about. I worked for a few months at a fusion lab. They had what looked like their own power plant, but was really a big motor/generator/flywheel combination. They needed that because they needed way more power than they could get of the grid, and they weren't even coming close to break even.
If we imagine these guys coming up with something that makes fusion power a reality, I don't think we'd imagine them breaking even with anything remotely looking like "conventional" ideas of what a fusion reactor would look like. Either it would be something that could be scaled into a conventional design making break even that much closer, or a design so unconventional what we're talking about doesn't apply.
Personally, I think it's just an interesting hobby that isn't going to produce much of practical use when it comes to energy generation; other inventions possibly. But you never know.