Well, orders of magnitude have this way of piling up, and when they do so, it matters.
So, you need offsetting orders of magnitude: money, brains, luck, or some combination thereof.
I've worked with fusion researchers; some of them were jerks, but all of them were pretty damned smart. They didn't have much money relative to what they wanted to do, but they were spending lots more than any hobbyists are.
That leaves luck. Somebody might just happen on something that others could have thought of, but didn't. The right piece of information at the right time sort of thing.
You can't dismiss luck. But you can quantify it. Personally I wouldn't bet on the entire community of fusion hobbyists to produce a practical power reactor, or even something that will make such a thing possible.
Move EU and America to AE and nukes combined with electric cars. Russia would dry up quickly.
Hmmm. While this might be worth doing, it doesn't strike me as being as easy as you seem to be suggesting. For one thing it'd take several years to bring the new cars into production and a decade longer to replace the current fleet.
So overall, not a quick and easy solution to the Russia problem.
Well, it's a myth that environmentalists destroyed the nuclear industry, although it's perfectly true they didn't do it any favors.
The problem was that nuclear wasn't cheap, in a world with cheap oil, natural gas and coal. A lot of energy technologies died when oil went from $78 to $27 per bbl in the 1980s and stayed around there.
Even granting the role of environmental criticism in reducing the profitability of nuclear power, the effect was at worst marginal.
Well, sure, but in case you haven't noticed, acreage isn't the constraining factor here. Last time I checked, there was a lot of land in the US. A more relevant question is the size of US uranium reserves compared to its energy needs.
Nuclear is a discussion we ought to be having, but it doesn't mean that we shouldn't develop new technologies. One advantage I see to developing solar is that the future price of fuel is stable. If you built a nuclear plant, at some point you would be refueling it, and it is possible that in a world that has substantially all its eggs in the nuclear basket, that price might be quite a bit different.
I'm not anti-nuclear. I don't think we'll be able to avoid nuclear as part of the mix in the next fifty years, so we might as well get on with developing new and better nuclear technology. But I don't think we should look on nuclear power as the solution. World uranium reserves are finite too, and a lot of them may be located in countries we don't like. And since we're generating electricity, potentially any source of electricity can be an equal part of the energy mix That's not as true when people run their cars on gasoline and heat their homes with natural gas or oil.
If you adjust for inflation, NASA's budget is about half [wikipedia.org] of what it was during the space race years in the 60's.
What is to say that amount is the right amount to spend?
I agree that we aren't going to Mars on the current NASA budget. I probably disagree with you over whether this is a good thing or not in the near term. But I think we can agree that pretending to being going to Mars is a luxury that space program cannot afford.
What matters is not gross expenditures, what matters is what you want to spend the money on.
It makes perfect sense to change your mind on funding another Shuttle mission, in my opinion. It depends on how quickly the project to create the Shuttle's successor is coming along. If its not coming along quickly enough, then we'll need another Shuttle mission and possibly some program changes to speed it up, if we're going to keep a toehold in space.
As far as doubling the space program expenditures, I don't see this kind of benchmarking as a reasonable way to budget. We can price a realistic program to get us to Mars in our lifetimes when it exists.
I think you've put your finger on the essential point here, which is the Russian desire to create a sphere of influence.
The problem I see with a "very hard line" is that it's not credible. You've got to imagine yourself in Putin's shoes (which are the ones that count). Take a blank piece of paper and draw a line down the middle. On the left hand side you list the advantages to meddling in Georgia. On the right hand side you put the disadvantages.
What, exactly, is the United States able to credibly add to the right hand side of the equation? Not bloody much other than tough talk, which, I'm afraid, is not going to scare Putin very much. Our military is already over committed. Our economy is weak and vulnerable to energy price fluctuations. Speaking of energy prices, Russia has our allies spread-eagled over the energy barrel. Even we import 762 thousand barrels of Russian oil a day, which is about 15% as much as we produce domestically.
It's going to take patience to address the issue of Russian meddling in other countries, and a lot more credibility than the US currently enjoys.
Well, I'm not so sure it's so simple -- ethically speaking.
Suppose you think that software patents are perfectly OK. Then clearly it's your duty to assist your employer with the patent application, because you did the inventing for hire.
Suppose you think software patents are evil. It is sometimes a moral duty to resist an employer's effort to do evil, even if it is their legal right. For example, the law in some country may allow your company to use concentration camp labor; making that practice profitable would be in most people's opinion wrong. Few people would think software patents are that evil, but the principle might well apply for some.
Finally, even if you think patents are morally OK doesn't mean it is always your duty to assist in filing questionable patents. There is no precise line, but clearly fraudulent patent claims are both wrong and illegal.
It's worth noting that what rights you have, and the practicality of pursuing those rights, depends on the state you live in. This is not only true for statutory reasons, but also the body of common law precedent differs from state to state. A precedent set in one state can be influential in other states with similar laws, but it is not binding.
So while your observation is correct, it's really important if it is coming down to a potential firing you need to talk to a lawyer who practices in your state. Some states also see it as their role to help employees obtain their rights, others see it as their role to interfere as little as possible in a private dispute between the employee and employer. In Massachusetts, where I live, the state AG's office has a bureau that helps employees and employers avoid and settle disputes.
Finally, if the patent application being fraudulent that's almost certainly a different kettle of fish. Of course, nearly any software patent can be challenged as being too close to prior art. It's only because nobody really wants to find prior art that most of them get granted. Dig up enough prior art and the patent application will look less appealing. Once you know of that art, it's arguably fraudulent not to disclose it on the application, although clearly where to draw the line is a judgment call. A dispute over this means time to lawyer up.
It's probably best to avoid a dispute. One thing to understand is what the company's motivation in getting the patent is. If it's for the classical "rewarding the inventor" model, you can probably argue the patent is too weak. If the inventor seems quite certain the invention is not original, that's a strong argument. But sometimes companies want patents for other reasons. They may wish to sell themselves to a larger company, in which case patents look like a valuable asset. They may want the patent so they can use it defensively against other patent infringement claims. Those are more complicated scenarios.
Well, it reminds me of the reportedly apocryphal story of the exchange between Lady Astor and Winston Churchill.
"Winston, you're drunk!" she is reported to have said. Churchill replied, "Yes, Madam, and you are ugly. But in the morning, I will be sober."
Of course, the joke is about the difference between temporary and permanent situations, and Churchill was semi-permanently drunk. In later years he used to do his morning's work in bed while he swilled a bottle of brandy.
The question with respect to the toolkit isn't whether it is visually ugly. That can probably be repaired. The question is whether it has ugly use patterns, which would be much harder to repair. In the next release, a visually ugly toolkit might not be ugly, but an awkward toolkit will probably remain so.
In any case, I've designed a number of mobile apps over the years, and every time I do one, the next one diverges more strongly from styles of interface I used to use on desktop applications. Mobile apps work benefit greatly from being radically streamlined. The biggest aesthetic problem with most desktop programs are clutter and complications; this problem is greatly amplified by the constraints of mobile apps.
It follows that a well designed mobile app should be pared to the bone. While it is still possible to have bits of ugliness, like really bad font rendering, a streamlined interface has much less scope for ugliness.
Some of the demo LWUIT screenshots are supposed to show as many of the toolkit's features as possible. Any actual app that looked that way would be really badly designed. That's all too common of course, but there isn't any system I can think of that is both general purpose and can't be used to create ugliness.
I think the whole "free will" thing is just a linguistic bug, or perhaps a case of a useful model whose boundary of application isn't well defined.
Suppose a mugger points a gun at you and demands your wallet. Common usage would say that you provided the wallet "against your will." This is not precisely correct. You actually make a choice, determining that surrendering your wallet and reducing the chances of being shot is preferable to keeping your wallet and increasing the chances you will be shot. If the mugger pointed his motor-control-ray at you and caused your arm to remove your wallet and hold it out where he could grab it, that would be unquestionably against your will.
I don't think any model of "free will" which is based on the notion of absence of causation can hold up to scrutiny. Which is not to say that randomness, probably even quantum randomness can't affect people's actions. But it seems to me that what we want to talk about when we talk about free will is really more a matter of determinism than randomness. It's the idea that we make judgements, according to our values and beliefs, which naturally are formed by a combination of biology and the circumstances of our past life. These things are not in your control. You can't control your genetics. Your character of course shaped your past experience, but that in turn was shaped by external circumstances and chance.
The sum of these things are beyond simplistic characterization (e.g. your being a "liberal" or your being a "type a personality"), which limits the degree to which others can make accurate determinations of what is in your best interests.
So it seems to me what we want the word "free" in "free will" to do is establish a claim to certain rights. Such claims arise from certain (informal) models of our psychology. Where the psychology comes from is an interesting question, but not necessarily relevant when it comes to any specific claim.
The sense in which mugger violates our will is that he interferes with plans we might have for our money and time. This may or may not be morally right -- after all one man's privateer is another man's pirate. Where those plans come from is not necessarily relevant; in the common street mugging scenario most people would say not. Whether you are planning to donate the money to a shelter, use it to pay off a loan shark, or buy a bag of heroin has no bearing on the question.
Well, if you want any of your car energy consumption to be satisfied by, say nuclear, the only way to do this is to have a car, like a plug-in hybrid or electric car, that can be charged from the grid.
At least in the near future.
Electricity is not an energy source, its an energy transmission medium, and a damned versatile one. If there is no one "solution" to maintaining our economy in a post-petroleum world, then having a versatile, standardized medium for transporting energy will at least make cobbling together partial solutions possible.
I once worked with a guy who just broke things. We'd have the same laptop, and after about three months his had cracks in the case, missing keys, and half-torn out power connector. Mine would be pristine after over a year and a half, except the paint on the keycaps would be worn off.
The guy wasn't dumb or irresponsible, or even clumsy. He was just rough with machines.
Some people have a lighter touch with machines than others. My car is a standard, and when my wife drives it I wince every time she shifts and the transmission makes a "kerr-lunk" noise. When it's time shift she just steps on the clutch and shoves the shifter from one position to another. She doesn't take that tiny fraction of an instant to feel that point where the gears will mesh smoothly and silently or bother to get the engine RPMS just right.
It's not that our value systems are different or anything like that; we both regard the car as a way to get from point A to point B and other than that just an inconvenience. It's that she doesn't have that kind of unconscious awareness of what the car is up to that most drivers do.
Connectors of all sorts are sources of trouble in the real world. I've worked on mobile applications, and you wouldn't believe the difference in longevity of PDAs with a cradle and those that have to be plugged into a cable. I've seen tons of problems with proprietary connectors on cell phones. I've seen CF card slots torn off their PCBs by vigorous card insertion. Now I could probably insert a CF card ten times a day for ten years straight and never once do anything like that, but there are plenty of people who will do this, reliably, within a hundred insertions or so.
Connectors ought to be completely bulletproof and foolproof, simple to connect and disconnect, tolerant of rough or sloppy connection or disconnection, tolerant of accidental disconnection (as when a cable is snagged), but stay securely connected otherwise, and work consistently for thousands and thousands of connections and disconnections. Oh, yes, and if it goes on the end of the cable, a large person should be able to step on it without damaging it. That's a tall order, and no connector is perfect, but many connectors, particularly proprietary connectors, are truly awful.
Motorola for years on some of their phones had a connector that had teeny tiny little spring clips that were supposed to mate with teeny tiny little holes (if I recall) on the receptacle. This was,I suppose, supposed to give the connectors a positive lock. That was a stupid idea unless the receptacle is built like a piece of climbing equipment, but what was worse was that it was mushy and didn't give any tactile or auditory feedback. So people just shoved the cables in and yanked them out. Most of the cables I saw had the little spring clips broken off or bent after a month or two. Many of the phones had damaged receptacles and seriously bent or even ripped out connectors weren't unheard of -- from one of those rare occasions when the connectors did lock together.
The six pin firewire and full size USB "B" (device end) connectors are pretty good. The four pin Firewire and full size USB "A" (master end) connectors are middling-lousy. The mini-USB connectors on some PDAs and phone are reasonable, and a huge improvement over some of the proprietary connectors they often replace. I don't know about the USB EMU type connectors.
Barrel type power connectors are usually pretty good, although in some cases they are susceptible to causing equipment damage during accidental disconnect (the classic foot tangled in the power cord scenario). Some of them are fine, others tend to take a bit of the device with them when they go. There really ought to be a break away plug design where you plug a small flexible extension into things like laptops, unless the cord and connectors are designed to survive a strong sideways tug.
In any case, it's too damned bad that the type A connector is being kept. It's not the worst connector in common use. It's probably OK to plug your printer into your PC once and leave it there. But it's too fragile (both the male and female) for field use where connections are made frequently.
Well, you might not have noticed, but some USB plugs are, well, cheap. As in really soft metal you can bend with a small amount of finger force.
In an ideal world, we are all very careful to unplug cables by pulling directly out, even the socket is on the back of a computer under a desk and doing so requires mastering postures from The Advanced Manual of IT Yoga. And nobody ever cheats and pulls a cable out by the cable, no matter how much of a rush they're in or how bad their day has been. And of course USB plugs are so sturdy you can use them to pop the lid on a can of paint.
If the guy (who's something of a genius) bleats publicly for half an hour on what *exactly* he likes about poker, a team of people just as competent and dedicated as his own team might be able to get all the inspiration they need from that to create one of the best chance-based games of all time.
I know that people think this is a huge danger, but I can't really think of any examples of anything like that happening.
After the fact, when a successful product has been launched, sure imitation is a problem. But after the fact you benefit from all the thought and problem solving that went into original product development, as well as from real world response to those decisions. A well funded competitor is very dangerous in that respect. However a company that relies on having lots of money to invest doesn't stay that way if it chases every will-o-the-wisp. Better to let the little guys prove the market exists for a product then crush them like a bug before they get too big. Second mover advantage is a very real for second movers with deep pockets.
But preempting a product by stealing its idea? It very seldom happens.
Creating products is hard, and expensive. It's more like piloting a ship than aiming an arrow at a target. Chances are if you are well positioned to exploit an idea, you've got plenty of your own.
Companies, like Apple, that are ostentatiously secretive about upcoming products primarily benefit from controlling the product buzz. Even after all these years, competitors have yet to build an iPod killer, because the iPod's strengths don't boil down to any single idea or small set of ideas. There's a kind of product gestalt that, if it qualifies as an idea, is not something you can glean from some offhand remarks. It's more of a system property.
This applies to Nintendo's games. Suppose Miyamoto lets it slip that they're working on Wii Philately. So, you whip up your own stamp collecting game to steal his thunder. How likely is that to work? How close would your game be to his?
I'm not saying that ideas don't sometimes need to be kept secret -- although that's different than saying they are valuable in themselves. But you have to have a number of exceptional circumstances, few of which are likely to apply to games. In most cases the value of keeping an idea secret is marginal. Where you have somebody with lots of ideas, letting him blab about them might actually leave competitors less informed.
I'd be much more concerned about Miyamoto talking about the philosophy of game design, or the things that work or don't work about his development team, than the fact he really likes to collect stamps. Creativity is about coming up with the right idea at the right time, then doing the right things that generate additional right times. It's 90% about mastering the process.
Essentially, the police can make any observations they want, provided they do it from a vantage point they have a right to be. They can, for example, make aerial observations of your home provided they don't fly lower than is normal or prudent.
A cop can watch you walk across a public square. He can even note this down if he wants to. Technology adds the wrinkle that he doesn't necessarily have to be in the square to do this. He can use surveillance cameras. Or a computer with face recognition software.
This is a bug in the Bill of Rights. It was hacked together all too hastily, therefore it isn't very good about laying out actual rights. It's more focused on curbing specific abuses. Well times change, and technology changes, and with it the kinds of abuses that are possible.
The law as we inherited it from our forbears assumes that surveillance is too costly to employ frivolously, and that therefore the government has a strong disincentive to use it; and if it is used there is an assumption the government has a strong incentive to stop. And this was true for a long time. As a consequence, suspicion is viewed from a legal standpoint as something more benign than it really is. Suspicion leads to investigation which either leads to exoneration or an indictment. Failing either of these results probably meant that there just wasn't enough investigation possible given the resources and time available.
Anyhow, that's how you can fall onto a terrorist watch list and the onus is on you to get yourself off and if the system keeps dropping you on it, tough luck for you. The possibility of cheap, automated suspicion is something that would never have occurred to the founders.
The new frontier of tyranny is the use of widespread, unpredictable surveillance, not for gathering information, but for exerting social control. The Chinese are masters of this. Under this form of tyranny, you end up internalizing whatever rules the masters want.
There is nothing specific in the Constitution that keeps the government from using technology to watch, catalog and cross reference every movement of every member of the population, provided that the information is obtained legally. Legally would include any observations they make from a public place, or can buy from a private source. And since surveillance is clearly one of the things the government is empowered to do, and such uses of surveillance aren't expressly forbidden, there is a school of Constitutional thought that says this is allowable.
Fortunately, this kind of literalist reading of the Constitution is not yet the prevailing one.
With respect to the GPS on the car -- that could be an interesting Constitutional case, although not one I'd like to see before this court. But then, you never know. It reminds me of a case a few years back in which the police used thermal imaging of a suspect's home walls as probable cause to support a (successful) search for a marijuana garden. The arguments were all over the place as you might imagine, but Scalia, if I recall, was one of those who thought this was probably not allowable.
"Economic Health" of course is a metaphor, which is misleading in this case.
The question is who are going to provide the most serous competition when it comes to highly intellectually skilled work?
China and India are obvious candidates because they have such huge populations; even if grossly mismanaged, the brainpower pool in those countries is very, very large. Brazil is also a very populous country, although only a bit more than half as populous as the US, it has the potential to grow it's usable pool of brainpower.
Of course, this is a crude analysis. Countries can be more prominent than their population suggests, or less so. Still, we needn't worry about Liechtenstein becoming an engineering superpower.
Well, one thing that business has taught me is how little value ideas really have.
I know it's heretical to say this, but ideas just aren't that valuable. Discernment, discipline, patience, timing, creativity, craftsmanship, relationships with vendors and customers, and of course money have to be added before an idea generates a single penny of profit.
Take the idea of a car racing game with cute characters driving. Miyamoto's gone to that well multiple times, but nobody else has scored big with it, even though it isn't a copyrightable or patentable thing. He's got a team that gets the details right.
Well, I imagine the problem wouldn't be so much with the roommate, as the people who come... er... are associated with her. It's wise to remember that when you get a roommate, s/he comes with relatives, friends, acquaintances and possibly clients of sorts. Orgy girl's party might be fun to drop in on, but you wouldn't want to live there.
Still, it might be interesting to be persuaded otherwise.
The important thing to remember, though, is that absolutely preventing people from gaming the system is financially inefficient.
In business, for example, it's all about making your net numbers. There is some attempt to contain agency costs, but like everything else business does, there is a diminishing return on a rising investment. A business will spend a dollar to save a dollar of fraudulent losses, but it won't spend more than a dollar. Government will readily spend two dollars to save a dollar.
What does informed mean? It doesn't mean just having data; it means having a collection data that enables you to make a good decision. The most informative kinds of data sets contain data that cut across each other. When you take income and deduct expenses, each of which is raw data, you get profit, which is derived. You become informed when a piece of data falls into your hands that alters the significance of the data that you always have.
It isn't as hard to become informed as people pretend it is. It's not such a long, arduous and complex process. The unpleasantness of becoming informed is of a different nature: you have to be open to data that undermines what you already believe to be true.
This is the problem of a world in which people have access to 500 cable channels and a countless number of politically partisan blogs and news aggregators. It becomes very easy to avoid the pain of revising your opinions. Thus, while people consume more data than ever, they are becoming progressively less informed.
You're not entirely sure I'm being serious because I'm not entirely serious.
It's an interesting idea but I can think of a lot of engineering objections to it.
With respect to slipstreaming, why not? For that matter, one thing I've thought incredibly stupid for a long time is the fact that vehicle bumpers are not at a precisely standardized height. Why not standardize this, and provide a physical link as between train cars? It's probably not strictly necessary given computer control, but it would give people more confidence in the system.
It's not possible to combine the thought processes of tens or hundreds of millions of people into anything that resembles thinking or reasoning.
On a large scale, democracy cannot make wise choices in governing, nor can representative democracy be counted on to make wise choices of governors.
The one thing that makes democracy worthwhile is accountability. Democracy is no good at selecting good leaders, but it is better than any other kind of system at throwing bad ones out. Sometimes a bad leader might get lucky with the timing of an election of course, but in systems where opposition to the regime is a crime, a bad regime can always hang on until it's preferable to face jail or worse than tolerate for an instant longer.
This, incidentally, is why I don't believe in term limits. I don't believe in democracy's ability to select good leaders. However, it can pressure incumbent leaders not to be as bad as they might be. I therefore favor a system without term limits, provided the machinery of accountability is healthy and intact: open government, an independent and confrontational free press, an intact and reliable voting system. It is critical that leaders fear the wrath of the people, otherwise there is no point.
Philosophy has a lot to say (or perhaps better, ask) about whether assertions about the attributes of God are consistent with each other. One question I'd ask is whether an omniscient and omnipotent God be called, in any reasonable sense of the word, a person? Can an omniscient and omnipotent being have free will? If not, can that being be said to be good, or even rational?
We can appeal to mathematics as well. If God is omnipotent -- that is to say he can do anything he pleases -- can he create a system of arithmetic where all true, and only true propositions can be proved? Mathematics tells us this is impossible, that any formal system will will either be unable to prove some truths, or will derive contradictions and thus prove anything. So is God omnipotent in a way that makes Him superior to logic?
Let's presume that God is limited by logic. Theologians, after all, do this all the time when they explain why God does such and so.
Science tells us precisely nothing about the means by which an omnipotent being could act. Science is based, ultimately, on observations, and inductions made from observations. It is therefore always possible to presume the existence of something which is outside of scientific experience.
Science, in a sense, isn't about discovering Truth, but evaluating arguments. It's about generating evidence, and making inductions from that evidence, and making deductions from theories created from those inductions. Therefore, science doesn't pronounce something true or false, so much as pronouncing the arguments for or against it as well founded or ill founded. However, an invalid argument is not necessarily untrue, it just doesn't carry its point.
Finally, it should be pointed out that most conceptions of God (or gods) don't posit omniscience or omnipotence. It isn't even in the Judeo-Christian scriptures, which clearly show a God who although mighty and wise, is sometimes unsure of what to do, makes mistakes (or at least does things He regrets) and learns from them, and who can actually, in the case of Abraham and Sodom and Gomorrah, be argued with, or in the case of Job, chastised. One can only suppose that the whole omnipotence thing arose over the centuries through a kind of theological one upmanship over who could flatter God the most. In an ironic way, this trivializes God. The Kabbalists, to avoid this pitfall in their quest for a direct experience of closeness to God, introduced a kind of dichotomy between the Shekinah, which is the manifestation of God in the world, and Ein Sof that which lies outside the Universe an therefore is forever beyond the reach of human understanding.
Which brings us back to mathematics. In Kabbalistic numerology (gematria), the Hebrew letter aleph is assigned the value 1. However, Aleph is the the first letter of "Ein Sof", which means boundless, or infinite. Popular speculation attributes to this Georg Cantor's choice of aleph in designation of transfinite numbers: aleph-0, aleph-1 etc.
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Well, orders of magnitude have this way of piling up, and when they do so, it matters.
So, you need offsetting orders of magnitude: money, brains, luck, or some combination thereof.
I've worked with fusion researchers; some of them were jerks, but all of them were pretty damned smart. They didn't have much money relative to what they wanted to do, but they were spending lots more than any hobbyists are.
That leaves luck. Somebody might just happen on something that others could have thought of, but didn't. The right piece of information at the right time sort of thing.
You can't dismiss luck. But you can quantify it. Personally I wouldn't bet on the entire community of fusion hobbyists to produce a practical power reactor, or even something that will make such a thing possible.
But I'm glad they're doing it.
Yep, it's Duke Nukem Updated For The Time Being. Just shows the advantages and limitations of agile methods.
Hmmm. While this might be worth doing, it doesn't strike me as being as easy as you seem to be suggesting. For one thing it'd take several years to bring the new cars into production and a decade longer to replace the current fleet.
So overall, not a quick and easy solution to the Russia problem.
Well, it's a myth that environmentalists destroyed the nuclear industry, although it's perfectly true they didn't do it any favors.
The problem was that nuclear wasn't cheap, in a world with cheap oil, natural gas and coal. A lot of energy technologies died when oil went from $78 to $27 per bbl in the 1980s and stayed around there.
Even granting the role of environmental criticism in reducing the profitability of nuclear power, the effect was at worst marginal.
Well, sure, but in case you haven't noticed, acreage isn't the constraining factor here. Last time I checked, there was a lot of land in the US. A more relevant question is the size of US uranium reserves compared to its energy needs.
Nuclear is a discussion we ought to be having, but it doesn't mean that we shouldn't develop new technologies. One advantage I see to developing solar is that the future price of fuel is stable. If you built a nuclear plant, at some point you would be refueling it, and it is possible that in a world that has substantially all its eggs in the nuclear basket, that price might be quite a bit different.
I'm not anti-nuclear. I don't think we'll be able to avoid nuclear as part of the mix in the next fifty years, so we might as well get on with developing new and better nuclear technology. But I don't think we should look on nuclear power as the solution. World uranium reserves are finite too, and a lot of them may be located in countries we don't like. And since we're generating electricity, potentially any source of electricity can be an equal part of the energy mix That's not as true when people run their cars on gasoline and heat their homes with natural gas or oil.
What is to say that amount is the right amount to spend?
I agree that we aren't going to Mars on the current NASA budget. I probably disagree with you over whether this is a good thing or not in the near term. But I think we can agree that pretending to being going to Mars is a luxury that space program cannot afford.
What matters is not gross expenditures, what matters is what you want to spend the money on.
It makes perfect sense to change your mind on funding another Shuttle mission, in my opinion. It depends on how quickly the project to create the Shuttle's successor is coming along. If its not coming along quickly enough, then we'll need another Shuttle mission and possibly some program changes to speed it up, if we're going to keep a toehold in space.
As far as doubling the space program expenditures, I don't see this kind of benchmarking as a reasonable way to budget. We can price a realistic program to get us to Mars in our lifetimes when it exists.
I think you've put your finger on the essential point here, which is the Russian desire to create a sphere of influence.
The problem I see with a "very hard line" is that it's not credible. You've got to imagine yourself in Putin's shoes (which are the ones that count). Take a blank piece of paper and draw a line down the middle. On the left hand side you list the advantages to meddling in Georgia. On the right hand side you put the disadvantages.
What, exactly, is the United States able to credibly add to the right hand side of the equation? Not bloody much other than tough talk, which, I'm afraid, is not going to scare Putin very much. Our military is already over committed. Our economy is weak and vulnerable to energy price fluctuations. Speaking of energy prices, Russia has our allies spread-eagled over the energy barrel. Even we import 762 thousand barrels of Russian oil a day, which is about 15% as much as we produce domestically.
It's going to take patience to address the issue of Russian meddling in other countries, and a lot more credibility than the US currently enjoys.
Well, I'm not so sure it's so simple -- ethically speaking.
Suppose you think that software patents are perfectly OK. Then clearly it's your duty to assist your employer with the patent application, because you did the inventing for hire.
Suppose you think software patents are evil. It is sometimes a moral duty to resist an employer's effort to do evil, even if it is their legal right. For example, the law in some country may allow your company to use concentration camp labor; making that practice profitable would be in most people's opinion wrong. Few people would think software patents are that evil, but the principle might well apply for some.
Finally, even if you think patents are morally OK doesn't mean it is always your duty to assist in filing questionable patents. There is no precise line, but clearly fraudulent patent claims are both wrong and illegal.
It's worth noting that what rights you have, and the practicality of pursuing those rights, depends on the state you live in. This is not only true for statutory reasons, but also the body of common law precedent differs from state to state. A precedent set in one state can be influential in other states with similar laws, but it is not binding.
So while your observation is correct, it's really important if it is coming down to a potential firing you need to talk to a lawyer who practices in your state. Some states also see it as their role to help employees obtain their rights, others see it as their role to interfere as little as possible in a private dispute between the employee and employer. In Massachusetts, where I live, the state AG's office has a bureau that helps employees and employers avoid and settle disputes.
Finally, if the patent application being fraudulent that's almost certainly a different kettle of fish. Of course, nearly any software patent can be challenged as being too close to prior art. It's only because nobody really wants to find prior art that most of them get granted. Dig up enough prior art and the patent application will look less appealing. Once you know of that art, it's arguably fraudulent not to disclose it on the application, although clearly where to draw the line is a judgment call. A dispute over this means time to lawyer up.
It's probably best to avoid a dispute. One thing to understand is what the company's motivation in getting the patent is. If it's for the classical "rewarding the inventor" model, you can probably argue the patent is too weak. If the inventor seems quite certain the invention is not original, that's a strong argument. But sometimes companies want patents for other reasons. They may wish to sell themselves to a larger company, in which case patents look like a valuable asset. They may want the patent so they can use it defensively against other patent infringement claims. Those are more complicated scenarios.
Well, it reminds me of the reportedly apocryphal story of the exchange between Lady Astor and Winston Churchill.
"Winston, you're drunk!" she is reported to have said. Churchill replied, "Yes, Madam, and you are ugly. But in the morning, I will be sober."
Of course, the joke is about the difference between temporary and permanent situations, and Churchill was semi-permanently drunk. In later years he used to do his morning's work in bed while he swilled a bottle of brandy.
The question with respect to the toolkit isn't whether it is visually ugly. That can probably be repaired. The question is whether it has ugly use patterns, which would be much harder to repair. In the next release, a visually ugly toolkit might not be ugly, but an awkward toolkit will probably remain so.
In any case, I've designed a number of mobile apps over the years, and every time I do one, the next one diverges more strongly from styles of interface I used to use on desktop applications. Mobile apps work benefit greatly from being radically streamlined. The biggest aesthetic problem with most desktop programs are clutter and complications; this problem is greatly amplified by the constraints of mobile apps.
It follows that a well designed mobile app should be pared to the bone. While it is still possible to have bits of ugliness, like really bad font rendering, a streamlined interface has much less scope for ugliness.
Some of the demo LWUIT screenshots are supposed to show as many of the toolkit's features as possible. Any actual app that looked that way would be really badly designed. That's all too common of course, but there isn't any system I can think of that is both general purpose and can't be used to create ugliness.
I think the whole "free will" thing is just a linguistic bug, or perhaps a case of a useful model whose boundary of application isn't well defined.
Suppose a mugger points a gun at you and demands your wallet. Common usage would say that you provided the wallet "against your will." This is not precisely correct. You actually make a choice, determining that surrendering your wallet and reducing the chances of being shot is preferable to keeping your wallet and increasing the chances you will be shot. If the mugger pointed his motor-control-ray at you and caused your arm to remove your wallet and hold it out where he could grab it, that would be unquestionably against your will.
I don't think any model of "free will" which is based on the notion of absence of causation can hold up to scrutiny. Which is not to say that randomness, probably even quantum randomness can't affect people's actions. But it seems to me that what we want to talk about when we talk about free will is really more a matter of determinism than randomness. It's the idea that we make judgements, according to our values and beliefs, which naturally are formed by a combination of biology and the circumstances of our past life. These things are not in your control. You can't control your genetics. Your character of course shaped your past experience, but that in turn was shaped by external circumstances and chance.
The sum of these things are beyond simplistic characterization (e.g. your being a "liberal" or your being a "type a personality"), which limits the degree to which others can make accurate determinations of what is in your best interests.
So it seems to me what we want the word "free" in "free will" to do is establish a claim to certain rights. Such claims arise from certain (informal) models of our psychology. Where the psychology comes from is an interesting question, but not necessarily relevant when it comes to any specific claim.
The sense in which mugger violates our will is that he interferes with plans we might have for our money and time. This may or may not be morally right -- after all one man's privateer is another man's pirate. Where those plans come from is not necessarily relevant; in the common street mugging scenario most people would say not. Whether you are planning to donate the money to a shelter, use it to pay off a loan shark, or buy a bag of heroin has no bearing on the question.
Well, if you want any of your car energy consumption to be satisfied by, say nuclear, the only way to do this is to have a car, like a plug-in hybrid or electric car, that can be charged from the grid.
At least in the near future.
Electricity is not an energy source, its an energy transmission medium, and a damned versatile one. If there is no one "solution" to maintaining our economy in a post-petroleum world, then having a versatile, standardized medium for transporting energy will at least make cobbling together partial solutions possible.
I once worked with a guy who just broke things. We'd have the same laptop, and after about three months his had cracks in the case, missing keys, and half-torn out power connector. Mine would be pristine after over a year and a half, except the paint on the keycaps would be worn off.
The guy wasn't dumb or irresponsible, or even clumsy. He was just rough with machines.
Some people have a lighter touch with machines than others. My car is a standard, and when my wife drives it I wince every time she shifts and the transmission makes a "kerr-lunk" noise. When it's time shift she just steps on the clutch and shoves the shifter from one position to another. She doesn't take that tiny fraction of an instant to feel that point where the gears will mesh smoothly and silently or bother to get the engine RPMS just right.
It's not that our value systems are different or anything like that; we both regard the car as a way to get from point A to point B and other than that just an inconvenience. It's that she doesn't have that kind of unconscious awareness of what the car is up to that most drivers do.
Connectors of all sorts are sources of trouble in the real world. I've worked on mobile applications, and you wouldn't believe the difference in longevity of PDAs with a cradle and those that have to be plugged into a cable. I've seen tons of problems with proprietary connectors on cell phones. I've seen CF card slots torn off their PCBs by vigorous card insertion. Now I could probably insert a CF card ten times a day for ten years straight and never once do anything like that, but there are plenty of people who will do this, reliably, within a hundred insertions or so.
Connectors ought to be completely bulletproof and foolproof, simple to connect and disconnect, tolerant of rough or sloppy connection or disconnection, tolerant of accidental disconnection (as when a cable is snagged), but stay securely connected otherwise, and work consistently for thousands and thousands of connections and disconnections. Oh, yes, and if it goes on the end of the cable, a large person should be able to step on it without damaging it. That's a tall order, and no connector is perfect, but many connectors, particularly proprietary connectors, are truly awful.
Motorola for years on some of their phones had a connector that had teeny tiny little spring clips that were supposed to mate with teeny tiny little holes (if I recall) on the receptacle. This was,I suppose, supposed to give the connectors a positive lock. That was a stupid idea unless the receptacle is built like a piece of climbing equipment, but what was worse was that it was mushy and didn't give any tactile or auditory feedback. So people just shoved the cables in and yanked them out. Most of the cables I saw had the little spring clips broken off or bent after a month or two. Many of the phones had damaged receptacles and seriously bent or even ripped out connectors weren't unheard of -- from one of those rare occasions when the connectors did lock together.
The six pin firewire and full size USB "B" (device end) connectors are pretty good. The four pin Firewire and full size USB "A" (master end) connectors are middling-lousy. The mini-USB connectors on some PDAs and phone are reasonable, and a huge improvement over some of the proprietary connectors they often replace. I don't know about the USB EMU type connectors.
Barrel type power connectors are usually pretty good, although in some cases they are susceptible to causing equipment damage during accidental disconnect (the classic foot tangled in the power cord scenario). Some of them are fine, others tend to take a bit of the device with them when they go. There really ought to be a break away plug design where you plug a small flexible extension into things like laptops, unless the cord and connectors are designed to survive a strong sideways tug.
In any case, it's too damned bad that the type A connector is being kept. It's not the worst connector in common use. It's probably OK to plug your printer into your PC once and leave it there. But it's too fragile (both the male and female) for field use where connections are made frequently.
Well, you might not have noticed, but some USB plugs are, well, cheap. As in really soft metal you can bend with a small amount of finger force.
In an ideal world, we are all very careful to unplug cables by pulling directly out, even the socket is on the back of a computer under a desk and doing so requires mastering postures from The Advanced Manual of IT Yoga. And nobody ever cheats and pulls a cable out by the cable, no matter how much of a rush they're in or how bad their day has been. And of course USB plugs are so sturdy you can use them to pop the lid on a can of paint.
I know that people think this is a huge danger, but I can't really think of any examples of anything like that happening.
After the fact, when a successful product has been launched, sure imitation is a problem. But after the fact you benefit from all the thought and problem solving that went into original product development, as well as from real world response to those decisions. A well funded competitor is very dangerous in that respect. However a company that relies on having lots of money to invest doesn't stay that way if it chases every will-o-the-wisp. Better to let the little guys prove the market exists for a product then crush them like a bug before they get too big. Second mover advantage is a very real for second movers with deep pockets.
But preempting a product by stealing its idea? It very seldom happens.
Creating products is hard, and expensive. It's more like piloting a ship than aiming an arrow at a target. Chances are if you are well positioned to exploit an idea, you've got plenty of your own.
Companies, like Apple, that are ostentatiously secretive about upcoming products primarily benefit from controlling the product buzz. Even after all these years, competitors have yet to build an iPod killer, because the iPod's strengths don't boil down to any single idea or small set of ideas. There's a kind of product gestalt that, if it qualifies as an idea, is not something you can glean from some offhand remarks. It's more of a system property.
This applies to Nintendo's games. Suppose Miyamoto lets it slip that they're working on Wii Philately. So, you whip up your own stamp collecting game to steal his thunder. How likely is that to work? How close would your game be to his?
I'm not saying that ideas don't sometimes need to be kept secret -- although that's different than saying they are valuable in themselves. But you have to have a number of exceptional circumstances, few of which are likely to apply to games. In most cases the value of keeping an idea secret is marginal. Where you have somebody with lots of ideas, letting him blab about them might actually leave competitors less informed.
I'd be much more concerned about Miyamoto talking about the philosophy of game design, or the things that work or don't work about his development team, than the fact he really likes to collect stamps. Creativity is about coming up with the right idea at the right time, then doing the right things that generate additional right times. It's 90% about mastering the process.
They don't need a warrant.
Essentially, the police can make any observations they want, provided they do it from a vantage point they have a right to be. They can, for example, make aerial observations of your home provided they don't fly lower than is normal or prudent.
A cop can watch you walk across a public square. He can even note this down if he wants to. Technology adds the wrinkle that he doesn't necessarily have to be in the square to do this. He can use surveillance cameras. Or a computer with face recognition software.
This is a bug in the Bill of Rights. It was hacked together all too hastily, therefore it isn't very good about laying out actual rights. It's more focused on curbing specific abuses. Well times change, and technology changes, and with it the kinds of abuses that are possible.
The law as we inherited it from our forbears assumes that surveillance is too costly to employ frivolously, and that therefore the government has a strong disincentive to use it; and if it is used there is an assumption the government has a strong incentive to stop. And this was true for a long time. As a consequence, suspicion is viewed from a legal standpoint as something more benign than it really is. Suspicion leads to investigation which either leads to exoneration or an indictment. Failing either of these results probably meant that there just wasn't enough investigation possible given the resources and time available.
Anyhow, that's how you can fall onto a terrorist watch list and the onus is on you to get yourself off and if the system keeps dropping you on it, tough luck for you. The possibility of cheap, automated suspicion is something that would never have occurred to the founders.
The new frontier of tyranny is the use of widespread, unpredictable surveillance, not for gathering information, but for exerting social control. The Chinese are masters of this. Under this form of tyranny, you end up internalizing whatever rules the masters want.
There is nothing specific in the Constitution that keeps the government from using technology to watch, catalog and cross reference every movement of every member of the population, provided that the information is obtained legally. Legally would include any observations they make from a public place, or can buy from a private source. And since surveillance is clearly one of the things the government is empowered to do, and such uses of surveillance aren't expressly forbidden, there is a school of Constitutional thought that says this is allowable.
Fortunately, this kind of literalist reading of the Constitution is not yet the prevailing one.
With respect to the GPS on the car -- that could be an interesting Constitutional case, although not one I'd like to see before this court. But then, you never know. It reminds me of a case a few years back in which the police used thermal imaging of a suspect's home walls as probable cause to support a (successful) search for a marijuana garden. The arguments were all over the place as you might imagine, but Scalia, if I recall, was one of those who thought this was probably not allowable.
"Economic Health" of course is a metaphor, which is misleading in this case.
The question is who are going to provide the most serous competition when it comes to highly intellectually skilled work?
China and India are obvious candidates because they have such huge populations; even if grossly mismanaged, the brainpower pool in those countries is very, very large. Brazil is also a very populous country, although only a bit more than half as populous as the US, it has the potential to grow it's usable pool of brainpower.
Of course, this is a crude analysis. Countries can be more prominent than their population suggests, or less so. Still, we needn't worry about Liechtenstein becoming an engineering superpower.
Which shows why banning somebody from talking about hobbies is silly.
Well, one thing that business has taught me is how little value ideas really have.
I know it's heretical to say this, but ideas just aren't that valuable. Discernment, discipline, patience, timing, creativity, craftsmanship, relationships with vendors and customers, and of course money have to be added before an idea generates a single penny of profit.
Take the idea of a car racing game with cute characters driving. Miyamoto's gone to that well multiple times, but nobody else has scored big with it, even though it isn't a copyrightable or patentable thing. He's got a team that gets the details right.
Well, I imagine the problem wouldn't be so much with the roommate, as the people who come ... er ... are associated with her. It's wise to remember that when you get a roommate, s/he comes with relatives, friends, acquaintances and possibly clients of sorts. Orgy girl's party might be fun to drop in on, but you wouldn't want to live there.
Still, it might be interesting to be persuaded otherwise.
The important thing to remember, though, is that absolutely preventing people from gaming the system is financially inefficient.
In business, for example, it's all about making your net numbers. There is some attempt to contain agency costs, but like everything else business does, there is a diminishing return on a rising investment. A business will spend a dollar to save a dollar of fraudulent losses, but it won't spend more than a dollar. Government will readily spend two dollars to save a dollar.
What does informed mean? It doesn't mean just having data; it means having a collection data that enables you to make a good decision. The most informative kinds of data sets contain data that cut across each other. When you take income and deduct expenses, each of which is raw data, you get profit, which is derived. You become informed when a piece of data falls into your hands that alters the significance of the data that you always have.
It isn't as hard to become informed as people pretend it is. It's not such a long, arduous and complex process. The unpleasantness of becoming informed is of a different nature: you have to be open to data that undermines what you already believe to be true.
This is the problem of a world in which people have access to 500 cable channels and a countless number of politically partisan blogs and news aggregators. It becomes very easy to avoid the pain of revising your opinions. Thus, while people consume more data than ever, they are becoming progressively less informed.
You're not entirely sure I'm being serious because I'm not entirely serious.
It's an interesting idea but I can think of a lot of engineering objections to it.
With respect to slipstreaming, why not? For that matter, one thing I've thought incredibly stupid for a long time is the fact that vehicle bumpers are not at a precisely standardized height. Why not standardize this, and provide a physical link as between train cars? It's probably not strictly necessary given computer control, but it would give people more confidence in the system.
Actually, I prefer to think of it this way.
It's not possible to combine the thought processes of tens or hundreds of millions of people into anything that resembles thinking or reasoning.
On a large scale, democracy cannot make wise choices in governing, nor can representative democracy be counted on to make wise choices of governors.
The one thing that makes democracy worthwhile is accountability. Democracy is no good at selecting good leaders, but it is better than any other kind of system at throwing bad ones out. Sometimes a bad leader might get lucky with the timing of an election of course, but in systems where opposition to the regime is a crime, a bad regime can always hang on until it's preferable to face jail or worse than tolerate for an instant longer.
This, incidentally, is why I don't believe in term limits. I don't believe in democracy's ability to select good leaders. However, it can pressure incumbent leaders not to be as bad as they might be. I therefore favor a system without term limits, provided the machinery of accountability is healthy and intact: open government, an independent and confrontational free press, an intact and reliable voting system. It is critical that leaders fear the wrath of the people, otherwise there is no point.
Not science, but possibly philosophy.
Philosophy has a lot to say (or perhaps better, ask) about whether assertions about the attributes of God are consistent with each other. One question I'd ask is whether an omniscient and omnipotent God be called, in any reasonable sense of the word, a person? Can an omniscient and omnipotent being have free will? If not, can that being be said to be good, or even rational?
We can appeal to mathematics as well. If God is omnipotent -- that is to say he can do anything he pleases -- can he create a system of arithmetic where all true, and only true propositions can be proved? Mathematics tells us this is impossible, that any formal system will will either be unable to prove some truths, or will derive contradictions and thus prove anything. So is God omnipotent in a way that makes Him superior to logic?
Let's presume that God is limited by logic. Theologians, after all, do this all the time when they explain why God does such and so.
Science tells us precisely nothing about the means by which an omnipotent being could act. Science is based, ultimately, on observations, and inductions made from observations. It is therefore always possible to presume the existence of something which is outside of scientific experience.
Science, in a sense, isn't about discovering Truth, but evaluating arguments. It's about generating evidence, and making inductions from that evidence, and making deductions from theories created from those inductions. Therefore, science doesn't pronounce something true or false, so much as pronouncing the arguments for or against it as well founded or ill founded. However, an invalid argument is not necessarily untrue, it just doesn't carry its point.
Finally, it should be pointed out that most conceptions of God (or gods) don't posit omniscience or omnipotence. It isn't even in the Judeo-Christian scriptures, which clearly show a God who although mighty and wise, is sometimes unsure of what to do, makes mistakes (or at least does things He regrets) and learns from them, and who can actually, in the case of Abraham and Sodom and Gomorrah, be argued with, or in the case of Job, chastised. One can only suppose that the whole omnipotence thing arose over the centuries through a kind of theological one upmanship over who could flatter God the most. In an ironic way, this trivializes God. The Kabbalists, to avoid this pitfall in their quest for a direct experience of closeness to God, introduced a kind of dichotomy between the Shekinah, which is the manifestation of God in the world, and Ein Sof that which lies outside the Universe an therefore is forever beyond the reach of human understanding.
Which brings us back to mathematics. In Kabbalistic numerology (gematria), the Hebrew letter aleph is assigned the value 1. However, Aleph is the the first letter of "Ein Sof", which means boundless, or infinite. Popular speculation attributes to this Georg Cantor's choice of aleph in designation of transfinite numbers: aleph-0, aleph-1 etc.