All of this is hosted on servers that are so fast that hundreds of people can be accessing it, usually w/o visible delay.
Really? Where I am (top 5 research university), people call it SlowLane. Not very witty, I know, but my experience is that it's not too good. The system used by NSERC, the Canadian equivalent of NSF, seemed much faster and more stable. Of course, they don't try to support as many formats (I think just PDF, text, and maybe RTF), and they're serving a smaller population, but still...
What is interesting about your analogy is that there is solid evidence (if you really desire the actual studies I could find them given some time) that the hunters in a group did not provide the majority of the caloric intake of a group.
That really depends on where you're talking about. For a particularly entertaining example, I suggest you visit Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump in Alberta, Canada. Yes, there is really a place with that name; I've been to the interpretive visitor centre there (the whole experience was a bit surreal). At various points in time, various native peoples lived near Head-Smashed-In, and got much of their food by driving herds of buffalo off a cliff (the name comes from the story of a guy who stood at the bottom of the cliff when a particularly large herd went off the top). They would then butcher dozens or even hundreds of buffalo, cure the meat, and live on it for quite a while. Elsewhere in Canada (coastal British Columbia), natives fished for salmon, which they smoked or cured, and which did comprise a large part of their diet. Hunting and fishing become practical ways of getting food as soon as you figure out a way to safely store the meat.
The feminist in question states that men's brains work differently and offers as proof the difference between mens and womens service station bathrooms.
Having never been in a women's service station bathroom, particularly not one in Sweden, I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Can you elaborate?
He asked the question. The problem is that he also tried to answer it.
God forbid scientists try to actually answer a question if the answer might be politically incorrect. Everyone knows that if your data suggest something that's not PC, massage the data, or at least don't have the nerve to publish, right? Everyone rants about how the Religious Right wants to make certain scientific subjects off-limits, but the Left is just as bad. In fact, Sweden has already banned research into gender differences in mental characteristics.
And his answer("Women aren't as good at men at math and science,") was offensive and incorrect, and rightly struck a blow to his reputation among the faculty.
It pisses me off to no end that everyone thinks Summers said women weren't as smart on average as men. He explicitly did not say this. What he did say is that there is evidence the standard deviation (not the mean!) for intelligence for men appears to be higher than the standard deviation for women. He proceeded to discuss the implications of this (more male morons, but also more male geniuses).
Go find a transcript of what Summers actually said (the whole damn thing, not a soundbyte), read it, and stop slandering the poor man.
Profit is supposed to be a carrot to "promote the progress of science and useful arts", not the purpose, though these days you'd never know that.
You're entirely correct. Profit is a means, not an end. Congress seems to have forgotten this, with its extension of copyright to life + 75 years. That said, TFA mentioned profit as if it was a dirty word. That's what I was reacting to. I probably should have been more careful, but then, it was a late-night rant.
They want to sell you the DVD version, the PSP version, the special edition, the remastered edition, the directors cut, the laser disc version, the VHS version.
[rant] Honestly, who wants to watch a movie more than once or twice? Get Netflix or Zip.ca or whatever, rent it once or twice, and you don't have to worry about buying it over and over again. It's also cheaper. I have a really hard time getting worked up about DRM for movies if that's all it's about. I'm not going to buy a movie more than once, period. If you own more than one copy of the Star Wars trilogy, get a life. Once you have a "life", you'll find it's useful for maintaining perspective on things like this. [/rant]
If DRM means that the movie execs feel comfortable digitally "renting" content to me for one-time viewing, and it's cheaper than Blockbuster, great. Without DRM, there's no market for digital rentals, because now you "own" it and can give it away. Thus, for the vast majority of us who just want to rent a movie to watch once, prices for digital content would end up in the range of DVD sales rather than DVD rentals.
Now, I'm aware of lots of DRM downsides. It's not interoperable, yada yada. Believe me, as a Mac user from long before the iTunes Music Store existed, I know how annoying it is when something isn't available for my OS of choice, and I feel for you Linux users who can't download the latest episodes of 24 from the iTMS. Of course, Season 6 was on bittorrent about a week before it even hit TV, and I don't think it's even on the iTMS yet, so it's not like the Linux users are really suffering. In short, DRM hasn't really hurt anyone too badly, because it's not too hard to circumvent. OTOH, it does keep Joe Consumer from committing copyright infringement, and it helps the studio execs feel good about releasing digital content. It's a compromise.
Oh, and don't even get me started on the article. Why even RTFA if the quality is this awful? What happened, did Digg buy up Slashdot last weekend? I'm just waiting for the first "DRM FTW" post. I especially like the briliant flashes of insight in TFA:
...the studios have turned to DRM (and the law) to create the scarcity.
Wow! What an awful new development! Except, oh right, creating scarcity to allow creators to profit was the original constitutional purpose of copyright. Ars may be up on the latest technology, but they seem to be a couple hundred years behind on the legal world.
Hmm... Maybe I should have put that [/rant] tag towards the end of my post...
When I asked one of the former Ontario reps why Molson changed formulas, he confided the original Rickard's Red was carmel-coloured Export.
That's kind of what it tastes like now. Several years ago (perhaps before it was bought by Molson or at least before they touched it), it didn't taste anything like a Molson product.
That's pretty much what he's saying - that unless you're prepared to go and fight yourself, and prove it by joining up and thus putting yourself in a position where you can fight, then you have no right to be pro-war and demand of others something you're not willing to do yourself.
Why stop with war? How about, if you're pro universal healthcare, you'd better be signing up for med school, or else you're a hypocrit. If you're not willing to become a doctor, you don't have the right to demand that doctors accept the payscale offered by the government healthcare agency. Or, even better, if you're pro-choice, you have to become an abortionist. If you think we need to do something about crime, you have to become a cop. If you want better public education, you have to become a teacher. Or maybe this whole line of reasoning is a stupid idea.
Newsflash--not everyone would make a good soldier, just like not everyone would make a good doctor, scientist, lawyer, mechanic, or whatever. Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage makes it clear it's more efficient for people to do what they're best at. We have a volunteer army, and pretty much everyone signing up knows that in doing so, there is a chance they will be sent to war (possibly even a war they don't agree with). It's their choice to join, and they do so knowing that it's civilians that decide whether they'll be sent to war or not.
I'm not all that impressed with the craft brewing/small breweries I've seen in Ontario.... To be fair, I've never been to British Columbia.
I'm originally from Canada, now living in the States. I'd put the microbrew/craft brewing industries of the two countries about equal. The fact that you've never been to BC means you've missed some good microbreweries (Granville Island, in particular). Alberta's Big Rock Brewery also makes some good stuff. As for Ontario, I haven't been there in a long while, but Sleeman does seem to be about the only decent thing they export out west (I'd have to go there to find the smaller breweries). As for mass-produced Canadian beer, try Rickard's Red. It used to be great, and is now merely "surprisingly drinkable", as the bottle says (what a horrible slogan, but it is OK for mass-produced beer).
In the US, I'd pick Fat Tire as my favorite. I also really enjoyed a pint of Yosemite Falls Double IPA I had in Yosemite Valley, but I haven't been able to find it anywhere else (it's brewed in Pasedena, CA, I think).
DISCLAIMER: I Am A Physicist (not a Climatologist)
Global warming is very uncontroversial in peer-reviewed journals. There is no debate about it in the scientific realm, only debate in the popular media.
I've read a number of peer-reviewed journal articles on global warming. I would say the vast majority agree with the basic idea that the earth is getting warmer and we have something to do with it, but that's where the agreement stops. There is enormous debate on how much warmer it's gotten, how fast it's warming, how much is our fault, and what to do about it. I'm thinking in particular about a series of articles addressing the discrepancy between satellite and balloon-borne atmospheric temperature measurements vs ground-based measurements. I read several articles in a back-and-forth about that, and I wasn't convinced either way. As far as I can remember, the satellite data initially suggested no warming has happened over the past few decades, and the balloon-borne data roughly agreed. Opponents pointed out the satellite data was skewed by orbital decay, and also that data where the satellite was not looking straight down was hard to analyze. The original authors accepted the orbital decay correction, but claimed the data now only showed a small warming trend. Opponents then re-analyzed the dataset after throwing out all the data for where the satellite was looking on an angle, and used an unusual fitting technique; this gave them a stronger warming trend. Others claimed that the balloon-borne instrumentation data was skewed because early instruments were not properly shielded from sunlight, whereas later instruments were shielded, resulting in a downward bias. These are both plausible explanations for why the satellite and balloon data could be wrong, but are certainly not conclusive. This was a couple years ago, and perhaps things have changed, but it seems to me that there is debate.
There are also accusations that research critical of global warming is being kept out of peer reviewed journals. This strikes me as unlikely but possible. I've heard of individual sub-disciplines within physics manipulating journals, and it's conceivable that it could happen in an entire field that is as politically charged a climatology. The one-way-blind peer review process used by so many journals makes it possible for a relatively small number of referees to block research they disagree with, if the editors turn a blind eye.
In short, the general public doesn't understand the global warming debate because it's bloody complicated--there's not just a simple consensus on how much the earth will warm by when. Sensing the disagreement over the details, the public adopts the approach of "giving equal time to everybody". I think this is the "consensus" strategy backfiring. It's pretty dangerous to claim consensus if there are even a few dissenting voices, as it lends credence to their whining that they're being suppressed. It would probably have been smarter to say something like "95% of climate scientists believe the earth will warm at least X degrees by 20YY if nothing is done". Then it's much harder to rebut with claims from one or two fringe scientists--the public will just chalk them up as the doubting 5%.
Also, I know Al Gore is trying to do a good thing, but his various references to the 2000 election and politics make "An Inconvenient Truth" seem politically motivated, and thus highly suspect to most Republicans. A more neutral figure would probably have had a better chance at reaching the red half of the country, and probably also wouldn't have pissed off this religious right guy Frosty.
The real implication of the mandate that Hardison got is that if the video is shown, the "opposing theory" that gets presented is his a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible.
I think the Supreme Court has already made it clear that that kind of fundamentalist BS posing as "science" doesn't cut it. No, I think a good starting point for the "opposing theory" would be Bjorn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist. Show "An Inconvenient Truth", then make the kids read Lomborg's book. Randomly assign half the kids to the "pro" side and half to the "con" side, then have a debate or have them write reports or whatever.
I can just smell it--the thread is about to turn into a big old "let's bash the religious right" flamefest. Been there, done that. Let's move on. The aptly-named global warming denier, Frosty Hardison, may be ridiculous, but that doesn't mean this isn't a great opportunity to teach kids about how science.
Consider--the school board says kids must be presented with both sides. Great--this is how science works. Global warming is probably the most controversial scientific subject today, so let's show kids the research on both sides, the rebuttals, the propaganda, etc. Turn it into the theme for an entire school year. In English, have them read and write reports on a few peer-reviewed global warming research papers or books about global warming. Analyze the rhetoric and the logic. In math, teach them how to interpret graphs using examples from those research papers. In physics, teach them about blackbody radiation, thermodynamics, and everything else you need to understand the basic principles of the greenhouse effect. In biology, cover photosynthesis and the carbon cycle.
Do everything right and the kids will not only get a much, much better picture of what's happening with global warming, they'll also understand the scientific method and learn how to spot junk science. Maybe the parents will even learn something from their kids.
Thus, if you are bitching on a blog or public forum, or publishing somewhere about our evil "root kit", it's because you are the recipient of stolen property.
OMG! Pwnies!
Not just it isn't a root-kit, but you've been pwned (or caught molesting) by one of the most old tricks ever. Yay!
It sounds like it's written by a mildly clever hacker who is way, way too in love with himself, and has the emotional maturity of a ten year old.
It's hard to cut through all the bragging to figure out what actually happened, but it sounds like LMH was able to determine that Jason Harris of Unsanity was using a script to try to get the next day's bug as early as possible. LMH infers from this that Harris is helping Landon Fuller do the Month of Apple Fixes. The whole thing strikes me as some sort of hacker-dick-measuring contest, rather than a real effort to find or clean up Apple bugs. If LMH was an ethical security researcher, he'd be disclosing the bugs to Apple a couple weeks in advance to give them time to release patches. AFAIK, Apple's got a decent record of responding to security bug tips. They even give credit in the release notes for their patches.
If you can't do what I described, you're not a serious programmer anyway as far as I'm concerned.
Look, there was a time when that was true, but that time has passed. What you're saying is in the same vein as "Real men use assembly" or "Compilers are for wimps". I could spend the time to write my own input validation library, just like I could learn assembly for every platform I might want to code for or teach myself compiler design, but I'd rather actually do something useful, like designing the hardware you'll be using in twenty years. Your point about libraries being a place for others to introduce vulnerabilities into your code is technically true, but irrelevant. Unless you hand-inspect your compiler at the binary level, you don't know your code is secure, and others can introduce backdoors into your code. Out of curiousity, do you allow your C++ programmers to use STL, or do they have to re-write that for themselves?
More seriously, there should be libraries--ideally, BSD-licensed libraries--that do the kind of input validation you describe. Why do I say BSD licensed instead of GPL? Because everyone would benefit if software got more secure, even if it's software they don't use. I don't use Windows, but I'd be happy if it became more secure because it would mean I'd get less spam.
then we'll be paying $6/lb for carrots. The inflationary pressure would literally starve millions of people born here and the welfare costs would skyrocket.
No, we wouldn't. Farm labor costs are a relatively small portion of food costs. Wages could go up dramatically, and the average person would see only a small increaase in their grocery bill. I saw some good statistics on this somewhere, and it was clear that we don't need illegal aliens to keep us from starving. I don't have the source for those particular statistics, but it's not too hard to do a quick and dirty calculation to see this for yourself, using the numbers from the USDA.
Note that about 2 percent of the total employment in the US is in production or farm inputs. That's 2 percent of about 165 million people employed. Let's say that, if we fired all the illegal immigrants and replaced them with legal workers, we'd have to pay every farm-related worker an average of $10,000 extra a year (probably a big overestimate). Add that up, then divide it by the 300 million people in the country, and you get an extra $9 per month per person for groceries (on average--poor people will probably see a smaller increase). Not great, but hardly a disaster. Saying people are going to starve because of an extra $9 a month on their grocery bill is a bit hyperbolic, don't you think?
Sadly my current version of Office is unusable on mactel machines (damn rosseta), and openoffice is a 200 pound gorilla.
When you have to deal with.doc files, try NeoOffice--it's a Mac-ified version of OpenOffice. It's not perfect, not blazingly fast, but very usable, and free.
If you have the freedom to do use whatever you want most of the time, look into LaTeX. It has a fairly steep learning curve, but the output is much, much nicer than Word. Using LaTeX is like fine wine or some other luxury--once you try it, you'll be horrified at the quality of the typography on whatever you were using before.
Tim Hortons coffee has one single redeeming property, however. You can get it ANYWHERE in Canada.
Except downtown Vancouver. I think there's only one Tim Horton's in the city. Starbucks, on the other hand, has two stores within fifty feet of each other in two parts of Vancouver. Downtown Vancouver quite possibly has the highest Starbucks density of anywhere.
But it's not a big exposure given the normal usage pattern.
Actually, it's a major real-world vulnerability in Apple's FileVault home directory encryption. The default hibernation mode ("Safe Sleep", in Apple's terminology) writes the text of any documents you might have open and in memory to disk, as well as also writing out the login password in plaintext. I've personally verified the former claim, and heard fairly reliable reports of the latter. In a typical Mac setup, the login password will decrypt the FileVault "protected" home directory.
From what I've seen, given root access (or physical access, which amounts to root) to a Mac laptop that had been put to sleep with "Safe Sleep" enabled, an attacked could have access to all the data within minutes.
I think you paint with a over broad brush. Remember the guy they arrested for espinoge had those charges dropped. I wouldn't over estimate Chinese patriotism to their homeland. Ther eis a reason why WE left.
Most (not all) of the charges against Wen Ho Lee were dropped; Lee plea bargained. As a physicist, I know people who know people at LANL, and usually up on the general lab gossip, but I don't actually know the reality of Lee's case. He may in fact have been spying and the government gave him a deal because the evidence was weak, or he may have been loyal and they just nailed him for protocol violations to save face. His particular case is not totally clear.
What is clear is that the PRC is running a massive intel campaign against the US, and much of it centers around getting military and high-tech secrets. The OP made it clear that Chinese patriotism was only one of the tools used; sometimes threats against family still in China will be made, and one doesn't have to be patriotic to be susceptible to that. Incidentally, Russia is also still conducting lots of intelligence ops against the US. Of course, this doesn't mean that all or most Chinese or Russians in the US are spys--just, that a few are.
Be careful with trusting FileVault on a newer Mac laptop. By default, any reasonably new Mac laptop has Safe Sleep enabled, which means the unencrypted contents of memory will be written to disk every time you sleep the computer, thus negating most of the security benefits of FileVault. You can turn off Safe Sleep using the pmset command to change the hibernatemode, but it may be reset any time any Energy Saver preference is changed.
Because of these issues, I wouldn't consider FileVault ready for high security on laptops in an enterprise environment.
Conway and Kocken probably shouldn't have used the phrase "free will", it is far too loaded and misleading of a phrase here. The way they defined it is so minimal that it is entirely irrelevant to this discussion. It does *not* even imply or require underlying non-determinism in physics.
I agree "free will" was a poor choice of phrase in terms of being as descriptive as possible, but I imagine they picked it for the publicity. However, their definition of free will does imply non-determinism, in the context of the Copenhagen interpretation (Many-worlds is cheating, for reasons I'll explain later). Take another look at their paper if you don't believe me.
Much of the rest of your post is devoted to a rebuttal to some imagined attack against atheism. In saying The rest of your argument was the equivalent of nothing more than saying "Jews drink babies' blood", you've surely triggered some corollary of Godwin's Law. My post was most certainly not an attack on atheism. Non-determinism is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a meaningful objective morality, and both are independent of the existence of god. I am very aware from personal experience that atheists can believe in an objective morality and are often very nice people. You don't need to argue with me about that.
There are two major interpretations of Quantum Mechanics, the Copenhagen Interpretation and the Oxford Interpretation.
Actually, there are substantially more than two interpretations (e.g., pilot-wave, plus all sorts of variants on Copenhagen with different theories of measurement), but really only the Copenhagen Interpretation is mainstream, if by mainstream you're referring to what a plurality of professional physicists believe.
The Copenhagen Interpretation involves non-deterministic random events that could open a doorway for the sort of Free Will you are arguing for, however the Oxford Interpretation also accurately accounts for all known physics and involves absolutely deterministic physics.
For someone who apparently rejects the idea of a single, unverifiable god, it's terribly ironic that you seem to believe in the Oxford Interpretation (aka Many Worlds). If believing in one unverifiable god is ridiculous, then believing in an uncountably infinite number of unmeasurable alternate universes must be truly, mind-blowingly absurd.
If you want to have a flame war, be my guest, and we can argue Copenhagen vs. Oxford Interpretation, but let's not get into the theism vs. atheism debate.
Interesting comment, Satanic Puppy. Can you clarify one thing for me--when you say that "having free will" doesn't mean anything, do you mean that the question has no meaning because it can never be decisively answered, or that, if we somehow magically got the answer, that it would be unimportant?
If it's the former, I'm in agreement with you for the following reason: we're much better off believing we have free will and being wrong, than believing we don't have free will and being wrong. If there is no free will, there can be no morality, and it doesn't really matter (in a moral sense) what we do. Jailing someone for something a brain tumor made them do would be a bummer for them, but of no moral consequence. On the other hand, if we have free will but we act amorally because we believe otherwise, we may do all sorts of immoral things.
If you were claiming the latter--that even an answer to the question of free will would be irrelevant--I can provide a counter-example. Recently, John Conway and Simon Kochen (of the Kochen-Specker Theorem) published a paper claiming that, for a minimal definition of free will (amounting to little more than non-determinism), humans must have free will or else the Aspect experiment and other test's of Bell's Theorem have little meaning.
In other words, if humans have "free will" (even just in the limited sense described by Conway and Kochen), the Aspect experiment and others like it show that reality is described by quantum mechanics or some other non-local physics. If we don't have free will, the experiments have no meaning, and physics could still be local.
On another track, if you were somehow presented with proof of the non-existence of free will, would you continue living your life the same way (and please avoid the glib "I'd live it however was pre-determined" type remarks)? It seems to me that any rational person would have to respond by ditching morality and living a hedonistic life. Sociopaths would be the new role models, as they would be free of all the now-irrational constraints of morality. This is why it's better we assume (wrongly, perhaps) that we do have free will...
Slashdot Mirror
All of this is hosted on servers that are so fast that hundreds of people can be accessing it, usually w/o visible delay.
Really? Where I am (top 5 research university), people call it SlowLane. Not very witty, I know, but my experience is that it's not too good. The system used by NSERC, the Canadian equivalent of NSF, seemed much faster and more stable. Of course, they don't try to support as many formats (I think just PDF, text, and maybe RTF), and they're serving a smaller population, but still...
What is interesting about your analogy is that there is solid evidence (if you really desire the actual studies I could find them given some time) that the hunters in a group did not provide the majority of the caloric intake of a group.
That really depends on where you're talking about. For a particularly entertaining example, I suggest you visit Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump in Alberta, Canada. Yes, there is really a place with that name; I've been to the interpretive visitor centre there (the whole experience was a bit surreal). At various points in time, various native peoples lived near Head-Smashed-In, and got much of their food by driving herds of buffalo off a cliff (the name comes from the story of a guy who stood at the bottom of the cliff when a particularly large herd went off the top). They would then butcher dozens or even hundreds of buffalo, cure the meat, and live on it for quite a while. Elsewhere in Canada (coastal British Columbia), natives fished for salmon, which they smoked or cured, and which did comprise a large part of their diet. Hunting and fishing become practical ways of getting food as soon as you figure out a way to safely store the meat.
The feminist in question states that men's brains work differently and offers as proof the difference between mens and womens service station bathrooms.
Having never been in a women's service station bathroom, particularly not one in Sweden, I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Can you elaborate?
He asked the question. The problem is that he also tried to answer it.
God forbid scientists try to actually answer a question if the answer might be politically incorrect. Everyone knows that if your data suggest something that's not PC, massage the data, or at least don't have the nerve to publish, right? Everyone rants about how the Religious Right wants to make certain scientific subjects off-limits, but the Left is just as bad. In fact, Sweden has already banned research into gender differences in mental characteristics.
And his answer("Women aren't as good at men at math and science,") was offensive and incorrect, and rightly struck a blow to his reputation among the faculty.
It pisses me off to no end that everyone thinks Summers said women weren't as smart on average as men. He explicitly did not say this. What he did say is that there is evidence the standard deviation (not the mean!) for intelligence for men appears to be higher than the standard deviation for women. He proceeded to discuss the implications of this (more male morons, but also more male geniuses).
Go find a transcript of what Summers actually said (the whole damn thing, not a soundbyte), read it, and stop slandering the poor man.
Profit is supposed to be a carrot to "promote the progress of science and useful arts", not the purpose, though these days you'd never know that.
You're entirely correct. Profit is a means, not an end. Congress seems to have forgotten this, with its extension of copyright to life + 75 years. That said, TFA mentioned profit as if it was a dirty word. That's what I was reacting to. I probably should have been more careful, but then, it was a late-night rant.
[rant] Honestly, who wants to watch a movie more than once or twice? Get Netflix or Zip.ca or whatever, rent it once or twice, and you don't have to worry about buying it over and over again. It's also cheaper. I have a really hard time getting worked up about DRM for movies if that's all it's about. I'm not going to buy a movie more than once, period. If you own more than one copy of the Star Wars trilogy, get a life. Once you have a "life", you'll find it's useful for maintaining perspective on things like this. [/rant]
If DRM means that the movie execs feel comfortable digitally "renting" content to me for one-time viewing, and it's cheaper than Blockbuster, great. Without DRM, there's no market for digital rentals, because now you "own" it and can give it away. Thus, for the vast majority of us who just want to rent a movie to watch once, prices for digital content would end up in the range of DVD sales rather than DVD rentals.
Now, I'm aware of lots of DRM downsides. It's not interoperable, yada yada. Believe me, as a Mac user from long before the iTunes Music Store existed, I know how annoying it is when something isn't available for my OS of choice, and I feel for you Linux users who can't download the latest episodes of 24 from the iTMS. Of course, Season 6 was on bittorrent about a week before it even hit TV, and I don't think it's even on the iTMS yet, so it's not like the Linux users are really suffering. In short, DRM hasn't really hurt anyone too badly, because it's not too hard to circumvent. OTOH, it does keep Joe Consumer from committing copyright infringement, and it helps the studio execs feel good about releasing digital content. It's a compromise.
Oh, and don't even get me started on the article. Why even RTFA if the quality is this awful? What happened, did Digg buy up Slashdot last weekend? I'm just waiting for the first "DRM FTW" post. I especially like the briliant flashes of insight in TFA: Wow! What an awful new development! Except, oh right, creating scarcity to allow creators to profit was the original constitutional purpose of copyright. Ars may be up on the latest technology, but they seem to be a couple hundred years behind on the legal world.
Hmm... Maybe I should have put that [/rant] tag towards the end of my post...
When I asked one of the former Ontario reps why Molson changed formulas, he confided the original Rickard's Red was carmel-coloured Export.
That's kind of what it tastes like now. Several years ago (perhaps before it was bought by Molson or at least before they touched it), it didn't taste anything like a Molson product.
That's pretty much what he's saying - that unless you're prepared to go and fight yourself, and prove it by joining up and thus putting yourself in a position where you can fight, then you have no right to be pro-war and demand of others something you're not willing to do yourself.
Why stop with war? How about, if you're pro universal healthcare, you'd better be signing up for med school, or else you're a hypocrit. If you're not willing to become a doctor, you don't have the right to demand that doctors accept the payscale offered by the government healthcare agency. Or, even better, if you're pro-choice, you have to become an abortionist. If you think we need to do something about crime, you have to become a cop. If you want better public education, you have to become a teacher. Or maybe this whole line of reasoning is a stupid idea.
Newsflash--not everyone would make a good soldier, just like not everyone would make a good doctor, scientist, lawyer, mechanic, or whatever. Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage makes it clear it's more efficient for people to do what they're best at. We have a volunteer army, and pretty much everyone signing up knows that in doing so, there is a chance they will be sent to war (possibly even a war they don't agree with). It's their choice to join, and they do so knowing that it's civilians that decide whether they'll be sent to war or not.
I'm not all that impressed with the craft brewing/small breweries I've seen in Ontario.... To be fair, I've never been to British Columbia.
I'm originally from Canada, now living in the States. I'd put the microbrew/craft brewing industries of the two countries about equal. The fact that you've never been to BC means you've missed some good microbreweries (Granville Island, in particular). Alberta's Big Rock Brewery also makes some good stuff. As for Ontario, I haven't been there in a long while, but Sleeman does seem to be about the only decent thing they export out west (I'd have to go there to find the smaller breweries). As for mass-produced Canadian beer, try Rickard's Red. It used to be great, and is now merely "surprisingly drinkable", as the bottle says (what a horrible slogan, but it is OK for mass-produced beer).
In the US, I'd pick Fat Tire as my favorite. I also really enjoyed a pint of Yosemite Falls Double IPA I had in Yosemite Valley, but I haven't been able to find it anywhere else (it's brewed in Pasedena, CA, I think).
A better analogy...
Better in the sense of being funnier, not actually more analogous.... Ooops.
Churches are tax-exempt, so they should have the same rules about equal time as public schools.
If schools were merely tax-exempt organizations that received no government funding, you might have a point.
A better analogy would be if PETA was required to devote equal time to barbecues.
DISCLAIMER: I Am A Physicist (not a Climatologist)
Global warming is very uncontroversial in peer-reviewed journals. There is no debate about it in the scientific realm, only debate in the popular media.
I've read a number of peer-reviewed journal articles on global warming. I would say the vast majority agree with the basic idea that the earth is getting warmer and we have something to do with it, but that's where the agreement stops. There is enormous debate on how much warmer it's gotten, how fast it's warming, how much is our fault, and what to do about it. I'm thinking in particular about a series of articles addressing the discrepancy between satellite and balloon-borne atmospheric temperature measurements vs ground-based measurements. I read several articles in a back-and-forth about that, and I wasn't convinced either way. As far as I can remember, the satellite data initially suggested no warming has happened over the past few decades, and the balloon-borne data roughly agreed. Opponents pointed out the satellite data was skewed by orbital decay, and also that data where the satellite was not looking straight down was hard to analyze. The original authors accepted the orbital decay correction, but claimed the data now only showed a small warming trend. Opponents then re-analyzed the dataset after throwing out all the data for where the satellite was looking on an angle, and used an unusual fitting technique; this gave them a stronger warming trend. Others claimed that the balloon-borne instrumentation data was skewed because early instruments were not properly shielded from sunlight, whereas later instruments were shielded, resulting in a downward bias. These are both plausible explanations for why the satellite and balloon data could be wrong, but are certainly not conclusive. This was a couple years ago, and perhaps things have changed, but it seems to me that there is debate.
There are also accusations that research critical of global warming is being kept out of peer reviewed journals. This strikes me as unlikely but possible. I've heard of individual sub-disciplines within physics manipulating journals, and it's conceivable that it could happen in an entire field that is as politically charged a climatology. The one-way-blind peer review process used by so many journals makes it possible for a relatively small number of referees to block research they disagree with, if the editors turn a blind eye.
In short, the general public doesn't understand the global warming debate because it's bloody complicated--there's not just a simple consensus on how much the earth will warm by when. Sensing the disagreement over the details, the public adopts the approach of "giving equal time to everybody". I think this is the "consensus" strategy backfiring. It's pretty dangerous to claim consensus if there are even a few dissenting voices, as it lends credence to their whining that they're being suppressed. It would probably have been smarter to say something like "95% of climate scientists believe the earth will warm at least X degrees by 20YY if nothing is done". Then it's much harder to rebut with claims from one or two fringe scientists--the public will just chalk them up as the doubting 5%.
Also, I know Al Gore is trying to do a good thing, but his various references to the 2000 election and politics make "An Inconvenient Truth" seem politically motivated, and thus highly suspect to most Republicans. A more neutral figure would probably have had a better chance at reaching the red half of the country, and probably also wouldn't have pissed off this religious right guy Frosty.
The real implication of the mandate that Hardison got is that if the video is shown, the "opposing theory" that gets presented is his a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible.
I think the Supreme Court has already made it clear that that kind of fundamentalist BS posing as "science" doesn't cut it. No, I think a good starting point for the "opposing theory" would be Bjorn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist . Show "An Inconvenient Truth", then make the kids read Lomborg's book. Randomly assign half the kids to the "pro" side and half to the "con" side, then have a debate or have them write reports or whatever.
I can just smell it--the thread is about to turn into a big old "let's bash the religious right" flamefest. Been there, done that. Let's move on. The aptly-named global warming denier, Frosty Hardison, may be ridiculous, but that doesn't mean this isn't a great opportunity to teach kids about how science.
Consider--the school board says kids must be presented with both sides. Great--this is how science works. Global warming is probably the most controversial scientific subject today, so let's show kids the research on both sides, the rebuttals, the propaganda, etc. Turn it into the theme for an entire school year. In English, have them read and write reports on a few peer-reviewed global warming research papers or books about global warming. Analyze the rhetoric and the logic. In math, teach them how to interpret graphs using examples from those research papers. In physics, teach them about blackbody radiation, thermodynamics, and everything else you need to understand the basic principles of the greenhouse effect. In biology, cover photosynthesis and the carbon cycle.
Do everything right and the kids will not only get a much, much better picture of what's happening with global warming, they'll also understand the scientific method and learn how to spot junk science. Maybe the parents will even learn something from their kids.
It sounds like it's written by a mildly clever hacker who is way, way too in love with himself, and has the emotional maturity of a ten year old.
It's hard to cut through all the bragging to figure out what actually happened, but it sounds like LMH was able to determine that Jason Harris of Unsanity was using a script to try to get the next day's bug as early as possible. LMH infers from this that Harris is helping Landon Fuller do the Month of Apple Fixes. The whole thing strikes me as some sort of hacker-dick-measuring contest, rather than a real effort to find or clean up Apple bugs. If LMH was an ethical security researcher, he'd be disclosing the bugs to Apple a couple weeks in advance to give them time to release patches. AFAIK, Apple's got a decent record of responding to security bug tips. They even give credit in the release notes for their patches.
If you can't do what I described, you're not a serious programmer anyway as far as I'm concerned.
Look, there was a time when that was true, but that time has passed. What you're saying is in the same vein as "Real men use assembly" or "Compilers are for wimps". I could spend the time to write my own input validation library, just like I could learn assembly for every platform I might want to code for or teach myself compiler design, but I'd rather actually do something useful, like designing the hardware you'll be using in twenty years. Your point about libraries being a place for others to introduce vulnerabilities into your code is technically true, but irrelevant. Unless you hand-inspect your compiler at the binary level, you don't know your code is secure, and others can introduce backdoors into your code. Out of curiousity, do you allow your C++ programmers to use STL, or do they have to re-write that for themselves?
More seriously, there should be libraries--ideally, BSD-licensed libraries--that do the kind of input validation you describe. Why do I say BSD licensed instead of GPL? Because everyone would benefit if software got more secure, even if it's software they don't use. I don't use Windows, but I'd be happy if it became more secure because it would mean I'd get less spam.
then we'll be paying $6/lb for carrots. The inflationary pressure would literally starve millions of people born here and the welfare costs would skyrocket.
No, we wouldn't. Farm labor costs are a relatively small portion of food costs. Wages could go up dramatically, and the average person would see only a small increaase in their grocery bill. I saw some good statistics on this somewhere, and it was clear that we don't need illegal aliens to keep us from starving. I don't have the source for those particular statistics, but it's not too hard to do a quick and dirty calculation to see this for yourself, using the numbers from the USDA.
Note that about 2 percent of the total employment in the US is in production or farm inputs. That's 2 percent of about 165 million people employed. Let's say that, if we fired all the illegal immigrants and replaced them with legal workers, we'd have to pay every farm-related worker an average of $10,000 extra a year (probably a big overestimate). Add that up, then divide it by the 300 million people in the country, and you get an extra $9 per month per person for groceries (on average--poor people will probably see a smaller increase). Not great, but hardly a disaster. Saying people are going to starve because of an extra $9 a month on their grocery bill is a bit hyperbolic, don't you think?
Sadly my current version of Office is unusable on mactel machines (damn rosseta), and openoffice is a 200 pound gorilla.
.doc files, try NeoOffice--it's a Mac-ified version of OpenOffice. It's not perfect, not blazingly fast, but very usable, and free.
When you have to deal with
If you have the freedom to do use whatever you want most of the time, look into LaTeX. It has a fairly steep learning curve, but the output is much, much nicer than Word. Using LaTeX is like fine wine or some other luxury--once you try it, you'll be horrified at the quality of the typography on whatever you were using before.
Vancouver beats San Francisco. I used to live in Vancouver. Now I live in the Bay Area, so I know what I'm talking about.
Tim Hortons coffee has one single redeeming property, however. You can get it ANYWHERE in Canada.
Except downtown Vancouver. I think there's only one Tim Horton's in the city. Starbucks, on the other hand, has two stores within fifty feet of each other in two parts of Vancouver. Downtown Vancouver quite possibly has the highest Starbucks density of anywhere.
But it's not a big exposure given the normal usage pattern.
Actually, it's a major real-world vulnerability in Apple's FileVault home directory encryption. The default hibernation mode ("Safe Sleep", in Apple's terminology) writes the text of any documents you might have open and in memory to disk, as well as also writing out the login password in plaintext. I've personally verified the former claim, and heard fairly reliable reports of the latter. In a typical Mac setup, the login password will decrypt the FileVault "protected" home directory.
From what I've seen, given root access (or physical access, which amounts to root) to a Mac laptop that had been put to sleep with "Safe Sleep" enabled, an attacked could have access to all the data within minutes.
I think you paint with a over broad brush. Remember the guy they arrested for espinoge had those charges dropped. I wouldn't over estimate Chinese patriotism to their homeland. Ther eis a reason why WE left.
Most (not all) of the charges against Wen Ho Lee were dropped; Lee plea bargained. As a physicist, I know people who know people at LANL, and usually up on the general lab gossip, but I don't actually know the reality of Lee's case. He may in fact have been spying and the government gave him a deal because the evidence was weak, or he may have been loyal and they just nailed him for protocol violations to save face. His particular case is not totally clear.
What is clear is that the PRC is running a massive intel campaign against the US, and much of it centers around getting military and high-tech secrets. The OP made it clear that Chinese patriotism was only one of the tools used; sometimes threats against family still in China will be made, and one doesn't have to be patriotic to be susceptible to that. Incidentally, Russia is also still conducting lots of intelligence ops against the US. Of course, this doesn't mean that all or most Chinese or Russians in the US are spys--just, that a few are.
Be careful with trusting FileVault on a newer Mac laptop. By default, any reasonably new Mac laptop has Safe Sleep enabled, which means the unencrypted contents of memory will be written to disk every time you sleep the computer, thus negating most of the security benefits of FileVault. You can turn off Safe Sleep using the pmset command to change the hibernatemode, but it may be reset any time any Energy Saver preference is changed.
Because of these issues, I wouldn't consider FileVault ready for high security on laptops in an enterprise environment.
Conway and Kocken probably shouldn't have used the phrase "free will", it is far too loaded and misleading of a phrase here. The way they defined it is so minimal that it is entirely irrelevant to this discussion. It does *not* even imply or require underlying non-determinism in physics.
I agree "free will" was a poor choice of phrase in terms of being as descriptive as possible, but I imagine they picked it for the publicity. However, their definition of free will does imply non-determinism, in the context of the Copenhagen interpretation (Many-worlds is cheating, for reasons I'll explain later). Take another look at their paper if you don't believe me.
Much of the rest of your post is devoted to a rebuttal to some imagined attack against atheism. In saying The rest of your argument was the equivalent of nothing more than saying "Jews drink babies' blood", you've surely triggered some corollary of Godwin's Law. My post was most certainly not an attack on atheism. Non-determinism is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a meaningful objective morality, and both are independent of the existence of god. I am very aware from personal experience that atheists can believe in an objective morality and are often very nice people. You don't need to argue with me about that.
There are two major interpretations of Quantum Mechanics, the Copenhagen Interpretation and the Oxford Interpretation.
Actually, there are substantially more than two interpretations (e.g., pilot-wave, plus all sorts of variants on Copenhagen with different theories of measurement), but really only the Copenhagen Interpretation is mainstream, if by mainstream you're referring to what a plurality of professional physicists believe.
The Copenhagen Interpretation involves non-deterministic random events that could open a doorway for the sort of Free Will you are arguing for, however the Oxford Interpretation also accurately accounts for all known physics and involves absolutely deterministic physics.
For someone who apparently rejects the idea of a single, unverifiable god, it's terribly ironic that you seem to believe in the Oxford Interpretation (aka Many Worlds). If believing in one unverifiable god is ridiculous, then believing in an uncountably infinite number of unmeasurable alternate universes must be truly, mind-blowingly absurd.
If you want to have a flame war, be my guest, and we can argue Copenhagen vs. Oxford Interpretation, but let's not get into the theism vs. atheism debate.
Interesting comment, Satanic Puppy. Can you clarify one thing for me--when you say that "having free will" doesn't mean anything, do you mean that the question has no meaning because it can never be decisively answered, or that, if we somehow magically got the answer, that it would be unimportant?
If it's the former, I'm in agreement with you for the following reason: we're much better off believing we have free will and being wrong, than believing we don't have free will and being wrong. If there is no free will, there can be no morality, and it doesn't really matter (in a moral sense) what we do. Jailing someone for something a brain tumor made them do would be a bummer for them, but of no moral consequence. On the other hand, if we have free will but we act amorally because we believe otherwise, we may do all sorts of immoral things.
If you were claiming the latter--that even an answer to the question of free will would be irrelevant--I can provide a counter-example. Recently, John Conway and Simon Kochen (of the Kochen-Specker Theorem) published a paper claiming that, for a minimal definition of free will (amounting to little more than non-determinism), humans must have free will or else the Aspect experiment and other test's of Bell's Theorem have little meaning.
In other words, if humans have "free will" (even just in the limited sense described by Conway and Kochen), the Aspect experiment and others like it show that reality is described by quantum mechanics or some other non-local physics. If we don't have free will, the experiments have no meaning, and physics could still be local.
On another track, if you were somehow presented with proof of the non-existence of free will, would you continue living your life the same way (and please avoid the glib "I'd live it however was pre-determined" type remarks)? It seems to me that any rational person would have to respond by ditching morality and living a hedonistic life. Sociopaths would be the new role models, as they would be free of all the now-irrational constraints of morality. This is why it's better we assume (wrongly, perhaps) that we do have free will...