None of that seems all that crazy or dangerous to me
Doubtlessly, it didn't seem "crazy or dangerous" to you if your parents had bought you a pony. Except that it might well have cost you your college education.
Sanders voted for $1 billion in handouts to big corporations while claiming to oppose crony capitalism. That alone tells you how confused the man is.
The "rone developer" often has no idea how, or no willingness, to set up a testing plan before releases, to integrate robust security, to make software high availability, or to scale it behind a certain very modest size.
My point is not that "lone developers" should tackle problems that are too large for them. My point is that if you are using a gaming framework worth its money, all of that should already be taken care of, since these are standard problems in game development. Justifying an expensive tool by saying that after buying it, you still need an army of programmers tells me that the tool isn't very useful.
But my point (which I think you agree with) is with a real programming project, the up-front engine cost is trivial compared to the cost of employees.
If you actually were running a business, you'd realize that there are no "trivial costs". For any expense, the question is not "how big is this relative to other expenses", but "is it going to make me more money than I spend on it".
When the premise is "this tool is expensive because it's useful only with large teams and you won't notice the expense in your budget relative to all the other crap you pay for", that's a bad premise. When the premise is "this tool lets you reduce the number of programmers you need from 10 to 2", that's a good premise.
I'm not denigrating hobbyist projects, after all, that's all I've ever been involved in.
But for a real programming project, the up-front cost of the engine is pretty small compared to the possible difference in programming time.
And by "real programming project", you mean a bloated project with dozens of programmers wasting their time arguing and figuring out how to work together?
With good tools, one or two programmers can produce software that's better than a dozen programmers. And good tools should support exactly doing that: greatly reducing the requirement for people on a project.
Of course, a real game project will have a lot of dull programming jobs unrelated to developing with the game engine: packaging, testing, building, asset management, etc. But since those don't need the game engine, they don't need a license either, and you shouldn't count them as justifying a high-priced game engine. Furthermore, you can increasingly outsource and automate those jobs.
The submission reported on the results of a survey. That's not a scientific paper. I suspect the reason it only had one reviewer is because all other reviewers thought it was utter crap, saw that the authors had an ax to grind, and didn't want to touch it with a ten foot pole.
If you can't find two well-qualified peers willing to review a paper, the paper should be rejected because it's obviously not of interest to anybody.
Acceptance and rejection decision are made by editors. Peer reviewers are intended to help the editor, nothing more. Editors frequently have to toss out bad reviews and get someone else to review a paper. Peer reviews are returned to authors to help them improve the paper.
The problem here is not primarily with the peer review, but with the editor, who didn't do his job. He should have tossed out the review because it obviously wasn't helpful for the author. He then should have gotten new peer reviewers if he needed them. On the other hand, it's unclear that he needed a peer reviewer in the first place, given that the paper dealt with a "survey of scientists", which is not appropriate material for a scientific publication.
When an experiment contradicts a theory, there are two possibilities
This experiment doesn't contradict any theory, it only contradicts the Platonic ideal of the vacuum and flat spacetime that Einstein used in the Theory of Relativity. In the real world, all we can say is that there is no good explanation how this setup could generate this amount of force.
Most likely, it's an experimental error, and few people are willing to waste much time on such out-there experiments. But it's good that some people are daring and check up on this stuff.
Given that space is far from empty (vacuum fluctuations, dark matter, dark energy), the traditional view of reactionless drives is also not entirely supported, since in non-empty media, you can "swim" in one form or another. So, you may not only be able to "swim" against spacetime (see the link), but also against these other backgrounds.
Of course, anything that ejects photos can also be used for propulsion (photon rocket), and you can eject photons even from an antenna, so in principle, even a wire with an oscillator can generate some thrust which looks reactionless.
1Gbit may be more than they need, but they weren't even getting reasonable internet either.
So what? When you move to rural areas like that, you already have decided that city infrastructure isn't something you care a great deal about. EPB is proposing spending $60 million (!) to serve at most 1000 customers, many of which are likely not going to be interested in spending $70/month on Gigabit Internet service. I mean, that's a subsidy of upwards of $60000 per customer. If you want to make people that happy, just give them the cash and forget about the Internet connection.
Do some basic math. According to your own article, the cost of the EPB expansion is "up to $60 million", and it would provide service for about 1000 people, many of whom obviously don't want high speed Internet. That's at least $60000 per user (probably a lot more)! And that's not going to be paid for by the beneficiaries of this largesse, because they will pay the same rates as everybody else.
The assertion that "EPB will not use taxpayer money" is bogus, because as a city-owned public utility, they are implicitly subsidized in numerous ways, starting with issuing bonds. Then there are the rate increases, which are also paid for by "tax payers", just not as taxes, and you don't have a choice but to pay them.
And for what? People who have moved to an area where dial-up is still the main option obviously don't care about high speed Internet. This mainly makes the area attractive for upper middle class folks to move into and gentrify the place.
This had been approved by the duly elected city council. From what I can see this looks like the voters actually like this.
Many voters also like increasing the minimum wage, "free" public education, and buy "luxury" foreign cars and live above their means. Many voters are just not very prudent with their money and aren't experts in economics, personal finance, or networking. The people presenting this to them may not have been honest about the actual costs and benefits either. If you tell them that Gigabit service is 100 times better than 10 Mbit service, they may think that they should get it "for their kids" or "to help the poor" to get "decent Internet" like "other civilized countries". Furthermore, they may reason rationally that EPB is going to screw them on rates anyway, so they might as well get something a little more useful out of it.
It is precisely because people "like" stuff that they should pay for it themselves, because if they can simply shift the costs of stuff they "like", we get into a fiscal mess.
in return the city *finally* gets reasonable internet service,
Gigabit service isn't "reasonable", it's a joke, a waste of money. There is no conceivable way in which the vast majority of people need that kind of service; filling that kind of pipe requires many parallel pipes to many sites. I'm a FOSS developer, telecommute, watch Netflix, listen to music; often, there are multiple streams from our home. We have 50 Mbps and even that is far more than we need.
One of the stories mentioned that they were largely out-of-copyright books, but I can't find it again. It also follows from the fact that many of the good children's book are, in fact, out of copyright.
What was confusing about the announcement is that Obama said "We're going to provide millions of e-books online". If this is a giveaway by the publishers, why does Obama claim that he is giving those books away too?
The whole thing just strikes me as stupid. You can get a decent brand-name Android tablet for under $100 and access millions of free e-books on there.
Actually, the books they will be providing for the $250 million appear to be largely out of copyright already. So this is even worse than paying the publishers for copyrighted books.
Obama is giving $250 million to big publishers and some software developers so that they can deliver out-of-copyright books that "the poor" could have downloaded for free from Project Gutenberg and Google already. All Hail our Crony Capitalist in Chief.
Look, the FCC already has the authority to regulate the internet in many ways. This hasn't been a problem
Really? Tell me, what kind of anti-consumer Internet regulation has the FCC been engaged in so far.
until they've tried to do it in a way that's pro-consumer, and now you're complaining about it.
You're starting from the premise that "net neutrality" is "pro-consumer". But the only beneficiaries I know of are going to be Netflix and YouTube, who end up not having to pay more. Seems pretty "pro-corporate" to me.
What's actually going on is that the FCC kept its fingers off the FCC, and now engages in a bit of crony capitalism to help some big corporations that have donated big bucks to Democrats. And a couple of years down the line, the cable companies will simply demand their cut; they'll say that these regulations hurt them and demand that the FCC engage in a bit of price fixing on their behalf. And consumers will be footing the bill.
Well. Calling a document that has been produced by the top scientists in a particular area (without being paid for it) 'pseudo science'.
I didn't call the document "pseudo-science", I called your use of it "pseudo-science". You cited this document as a scientific publication about climate change. But what it is is a summary of the beliefs of climate scientists, not actual scientific results. It's certainly legitimate to ask scientists about what they believe to be true, and it may even be useful, but the answers you get are still informed opinions, not actual science.
because you don't like the conclusions is not science
But I do like the conclusions of the report, because, vague, unscientific, and unsupported as they are, even taken at face value, they support my argument that governments should not act on climate change right now.
BTW there is also a full version of the report which refers to the full version of the underlying reports of the 3 workgroups which in their turn refer to the underlying scientific articles. But if the first didn't convince you I have little doubt that you will categorize the rest as 'pseudo-science' too.
Not at all: the underlying scientific publications are clearly science (though that doesn't make them automatically correct; a lot of science is wrong). But the output of the workgroups is not science, because the workgroups themselves are not operating according to the scientific method. "Science" is only the kind of knowledge produced and published according to the scientific method. Once the chain of the scientific method is broken, it ceases to be science. See, the problem here is with your lack of understanding of science, not mine.
All this can be found in the IPCC reports (link [www.ipcc.ch]).
Yes, you should read it, carefully! I have.
And yes doing nothing is more costly (damage to argriculture, building higher dikes, more storms, more deseases, people on the run) than actually doing something about it.
No, even taken the report at face value, that conclusion is not supported by the report. But, of course, you have to be extremely gullible to believe that "science" can assign a meaningful cost to things like diseases and migration that are supposed to occur decades in the future due to climate change.
So, there you have it. All your questions answerd...by science.
Apparently, your version of science is a "summary for policy makers", derived by "author teams" based on "expert judgment" found in working panel reports of a self-selected group of people interested in the topic and making lots of unstated and untested assumptions. Thank you, but I prefer to base my decision on actual science, not that kind of pseudo-science.
Do you really want the FCC regulating the Internet? An organization headed by a cable company guy? An organization that restricts indecent speech on TV? Yes, in theory, the FCC could do some good things for the Internet, and the rules used to justify giving it this authority sound appealing. But in practice, the FCC will invariably abuse that authority as it becomes subject to massive lobbying, revolving door staff, and political pressures from both the left and the right, and as presidents change.
Both as an end user and as someone running Internet services, I have never experienced a problem that would be helped by net neutrality rules. If there is a significant problem that requires giving the FCC more authority to regulate the Internet, then that's something for Congress to look into and pass a law, after careful presentation of the evidence; it's not something that the executive should just decide on their own.
The emissions limits will demonstrably help the situation.
No, they won't. They will simply delay the point at which climate models claim that disaster will happen by some years.
The only way to avert very high atmospheric CO2 concentrations is to stop burning fossil fuels as soon as possible, and for that, government intervention is counterproductive.
There's no "political theater", there's only the CO2 ppm and correlated temperature changes.
If climate models were based merely on correlation between CO2 ppm and temperature changes, we would have nothing to worry about. The dire predictions of climate modelers are based on assuming the existence of positive feedback mechanisms and the absence of sufficiently compensatory negative feedback mechanisms.
Umm apparently you missed the bit where the heartland said "The Earth has been warming since the end of the last Ice Age" and therefore it's nothing to be concerned about. The dishonesty on your part is that deniers accept the scientific evidence.
Which part of the Heartland statement do you believe contradicts scientific evidence? The Earth has been warming dramatically since the end of the last ice age. Temperatures have increased 6C (some of that in rapid spurts), sea levels have risen about 100m over a span of a little more than 10000 years, and climate has changed massively and repeatedly across the globe. Those changes have coincided with a flourishing of human civilization. All of that provides a strong argument that climate change is not necessarily something to be feared.
You're welcome to try to construct arguments saying why climate change should matter to us anyway, but denying those plain scientific facts makes you the "denier", not the Heartland institute.
Given recent climate history, if you try to make such arguments, you are getting into pretty speculative territory. For example, anthropogenic climate change is possibly faster than what humans experienced before, but that's no more than a guess, and it's not clear why it even should matter a great deal.
The libertarians (among others) are very, very scared of having an honest discussion about those issues, which is why they continually attempt to deny that climate change exists or has an anthropogenic cause.
I'm sorry, but you misunderstand that. Libertarians aren't "scared" of having an honest discussion with you about the existence of climate change, it simply isn't important to us.
We can talk about what we're going to do about it,
Yes, and the libertarian positions is: we looked at the evidence, the risks and threats scientists predict, and the IPCC reports and we think nothing needs to be done at the governmental level right now. Of course, as with all environmental issues, libertarians encourage you to make personal choices that you think help your fellow men, found companies that develop new technologies, and all that. Personally, I live in an energy-efficient home, bike to work, and eat very little meat.
who are pretty happy with the status quo and afraid of change.
It seems to me that you are afraid of change, namely climate change. Libertarians, on the other hand, don't fear change, including climate change, and believe that a free society and free markets can adapt well.
Religiously conservative Catholics are definitely drawn to the Republicans. But, the "radical baptists" I tried to cover with the "/conservative Christians".
The Church's teachings do not fit neatly into a red/blue box, on moral or economic issues.
Neither do those of socialists/communists. For example, while they technically legalized homosexuality, in practice they were wildly homophobic. Nevertheless, conservative Christians have largely hijacked the Republicans, and socialists/communists have largely hijacked Democrats.
The best description of the Church's preferred economic ideology is Distributism.
Yes, but their ideology is irrelevant as that of socialists or communists, because it's not actually what anybody practices. Political and economic ideologies are simply means for attracting followers. That's also why different groups (communists, fascists, Catholics, etc.) like to give different names to essentially the same ideas.
In fact, the ideology that "Distributism" is closest to is "third position" economics, the idea that people should have private property but be compelled to use it for the public good; that kind of economic ideology, plus its social conservatism, probably was one of the main drivers for the Catholic church to support the Nazis in the 1930's.
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Doubtlessly, it didn't seem "crazy or dangerous" to you if your parents had bought you a pony. Except that it might well have cost you your college education.
Sanders voted for $1 billion in handouts to big corporations while claiming to oppose crony capitalism. That alone tells you how confused the man is.
My point is not that "lone developers" should tackle problems that are too large for them. My point is that if you are using a gaming framework worth its money, all of that should already be taken care of, since these are standard problems in game development. Justifying an expensive tool by saying that after buying it, you still need an army of programmers tells me that the tool isn't very useful.
If you actually were running a business, you'd realize that there are no "trivial costs". For any expense, the question is not "how big is this relative to other expenses", but "is it going to make me more money than I spend on it".
When the premise is "this tool is expensive because it's useful only with large teams and you won't notice the expense in your budget relative to all the other crap you pay for", that's a bad premise. When the premise is "this tool lets you reduce the number of programmers you need from 10 to 2", that's a good premise.
Ah, there's the rub.
And by "real programming project", you mean a bloated project with dozens of programmers wasting their time arguing and figuring out how to work together?
With good tools, one or two programmers can produce software that's better than a dozen programmers. And good tools should support exactly doing that: greatly reducing the requirement for people on a project.
Of course, a real game project will have a lot of dull programming jobs unrelated to developing with the game engine: packaging, testing, building, asset management, etc. But since those don't need the game engine, they don't need a license either, and you shouldn't count them as justifying a high-priced game engine. Furthermore, you can increasingly outsource and automate those jobs.
The submission reported on the results of a survey. That's not a scientific paper. I suspect the reason it only had one reviewer is because all other reviewers thought it was utter crap, saw that the authors had an ax to grind, and didn't want to touch it with a ten foot pole.
If you can't find two well-qualified peers willing to review a paper, the paper should be rejected because it's obviously not of interest to anybody.
Acceptance and rejection decision are made by editors. Peer reviewers are intended to help the editor, nothing more. Editors frequently have to toss out bad reviews and get someone else to review a paper. Peer reviews are returned to authors to help them improve the paper.
The problem here is not primarily with the peer review, but with the editor, who didn't do his job. He should have tossed out the review because it obviously wasn't helpful for the author. He then should have gotten new peer reviewers if he needed them. On the other hand, it's unclear that he needed a peer reviewer in the first place, given that the paper dealt with a "survey of scientists", which is not appropriate material for a scientific publication.
This experiment doesn't contradict any theory, it only contradicts the Platonic ideal of the vacuum and flat spacetime that Einstein used in the Theory of Relativity. In the real world, all we can say is that there is no good explanation how this setup could generate this amount of force.
Most likely, it's an experimental error, and few people are willing to waste much time on such out-there experiments. But it's good that some people are daring and check up on this stuff.
There are a number of reactionless drive proposals, not all of them unreasonable:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
Given that space is far from empty (vacuum fluctuations, dark matter, dark energy), the traditional view of reactionless drives is also not entirely supported, since in non-empty media, you can "swim" in one form or another. So, you may not only be able to "swim" against spacetime (see the link), but also against these other backgrounds.
Of course, anything that ejects photos can also be used for propulsion (photon rocket), and you can eject photons even from an antenna, so in principle, even a wire with an oscillator can generate some thrust which looks reactionless.
So what? When you move to rural areas like that, you already have decided that city infrastructure isn't something you care a great deal about. EPB is proposing spending $60 million (!) to serve at most 1000 customers, many of which are likely not going to be interested in spending $70/month on Gigabit Internet service. I mean, that's a subsidy of upwards of $60000 per customer. If you want to make people that happy, just give them the cash and forget about the Internet connection.
Do some basic math. According to your own article, the cost of the EPB expansion is "up to $60 million", and it would provide service for about 1000 people, many of whom obviously don't want high speed Internet. That's at least $60000 per user (probably a lot more)! And that's not going to be paid for by the beneficiaries of this largesse, because they will pay the same rates as everybody else.
The assertion that "EPB will not use taxpayer money" is bogus, because as a city-owned public utility, they are implicitly subsidized in numerous ways, starting with issuing bonds. Then there are the rate increases, which are also paid for by "tax payers", just not as taxes, and you don't have a choice but to pay them.
And for what? People who have moved to an area where dial-up is still the main option obviously don't care about high speed Internet. This mainly makes the area attractive for upper middle class folks to move into and gentrify the place.
Many voters also like increasing the minimum wage, "free" public education, and buy "luxury" foreign cars and live above their means. Many voters are just not very prudent with their money and aren't experts in economics, personal finance, or networking. The people presenting this to them may not have been honest about the actual costs and benefits either. If you tell them that Gigabit service is 100 times better than 10 Mbit service, they may think that they should get it "for their kids" or "to help the poor" to get "decent Internet" like "other civilized countries". Furthermore, they may reason rationally that EPB is going to screw them on rates anyway, so they might as well get something a little more useful out of it.
It is precisely because people "like" stuff that they should pay for it themselves, because if they can simply shift the costs of stuff they "like", we get into a fiscal mess.
Gigabit service isn't "reasonable", it's a joke, a waste of money. There is no conceivable way in which the vast majority of people need that kind of service; filling that kind of pipe requires many parallel pipes to many sites. I'm a FOSS developer, telecommute, watch Netflix, listen to music; often, there are multiple streams from our home. We have 50 Mbps and even that is far more than we need.
One of the stories mentioned that they were largely out-of-copyright books, but I can't find it again. It also follows from the fact that many of the good children's book are, in fact, out of copyright.
What was confusing about the announcement is that Obama said "We're going to provide millions of e-books online". If this is a giveaway by the publishers, why does Obama claim that he is giving those books away too?
The whole thing just strikes me as stupid. You can get a decent brand-name Android tablet for under $100 and access millions of free e-books on there.
Actually, the books they will be providing for the $250 million appear to be largely out of copyright already. So this is even worse than paying the publishers for copyrighted books.
Obama is giving $250 million to big publishers and some software developers so that they can deliver out-of-copyright books that "the poor" could have downloaded for free from Project Gutenberg and Google already. All Hail our Crony Capitalist in Chief.
Yes, if you screw rate payers and force them to subsidize service most of them don't want or need, they get that service earlier. What's the point?
Really? Tell me, what kind of anti-consumer Internet regulation has the FCC been engaged in so far.
You're starting from the premise that "net neutrality" is "pro-consumer". But the only beneficiaries I know of are going to be Netflix and YouTube, who end up not having to pay more. Seems pretty "pro-corporate" to me.
What's actually going on is that the FCC kept its fingers off the FCC, and now engages in a bit of crony capitalism to help some big corporations that have donated big bucks to Democrats. And a couple of years down the line, the cable companies will simply demand their cut; they'll say that these regulations hurt them and demand that the FCC engage in a bit of price fixing on their behalf. And consumers will be footing the bill.
I didn't call the document "pseudo-science", I called your use of it "pseudo-science". You cited this document as a scientific publication about climate change. But what it is is a summary of the beliefs of climate scientists, not actual scientific results. It's certainly legitimate to ask scientists about what they believe to be true, and it may even be useful, but the answers you get are still informed opinions, not actual science.
But I do like the conclusions of the report, because, vague, unscientific, and unsupported as they are, even taken at face value, they support my argument that governments should not act on climate change right now.
Not at all: the underlying scientific publications are clearly science (though that doesn't make them automatically correct; a lot of science is wrong). But the output of the workgroups is not science, because the workgroups themselves are not operating according to the scientific method. "Science" is only the kind of knowledge produced and published according to the scientific method. Once the chain of the scientific method is broken, it ceases to be science. See, the problem here is with your lack of understanding of science, not mine.
Yes, you should read it, carefully! I have.
No, even taken the report at face value, that conclusion is not supported by the report. But, of course, you have to be extremely gullible to believe that "science" can assign a meaningful cost to things like diseases and migration that are supposed to occur decades in the future due to climate change.
Apparently, your version of science is a "summary for policy makers", derived by "author teams" based on "expert judgment" found in working panel reports of a self-selected group of people interested in the topic and making lots of unstated and untested assumptions. Thank you, but I prefer to base my decision on actual science, not that kind of pseudo-science.
Do you really want the FCC regulating the Internet? An organization headed by a cable company guy? An organization that restricts indecent speech on TV? Yes, in theory, the FCC could do some good things for the Internet, and the rules used to justify giving it this authority sound appealing. But in practice, the FCC will invariably abuse that authority as it becomes subject to massive lobbying, revolving door staff, and political pressures from both the left and the right, and as presidents change.
Both as an end user and as someone running Internet services, I have never experienced a problem that would be helped by net neutrality rules. If there is a significant problem that requires giving the FCC more authority to regulate the Internet, then that's something for Congress to look into and pass a law, after careful presentation of the evidence; it's not something that the executive should just decide on their own.
No, they won't. They will simply delay the point at which climate models claim that disaster will happen by some years.
The only way to avert very high atmospheric CO2 concentrations is to stop burning fossil fuels as soon as possible, and for that, government intervention is counterproductive.
If climate models were based merely on correlation between CO2 ppm and temperature changes, we would have nothing to worry about. The dire predictions of climate modelers are based on assuming the existence of positive feedback mechanisms and the absence of sufficiently compensatory negative feedback mechanisms.
Which part of the Heartland statement do you believe contradicts scientific evidence? The Earth has been warming dramatically since the end of the last ice age. Temperatures have increased 6C (some of that in rapid spurts), sea levels have risen about 100m over a span of a little more than 10000 years, and climate has changed massively and repeatedly across the globe. Those changes have coincided with a flourishing of human civilization. All of that provides a strong argument that climate change is not necessarily something to be feared.
You're welcome to try to construct arguments saying why climate change should matter to us anyway, but denying those plain scientific facts makes you the "denier", not the Heartland institute.
Given recent climate history, if you try to make such arguments, you are getting into pretty speculative territory. For example, anthropogenic climate change is possibly faster than what humans experienced before, but that's no more than a guess, and it's not clear why it even should matter a great deal.
I'm sorry, but you misunderstand that. Libertarians aren't "scared" of having an honest discussion with you about the existence of climate change, it simply isn't important to us.
Yes, and the libertarian positions is: we looked at the evidence, the risks and threats scientists predict, and the IPCC reports and we think nothing needs to be done at the governmental level right now. Of course, as with all environmental issues, libertarians encourage you to make personal choices that you think help your fellow men, found companies that develop new technologies, and all that. Personally, I live in an energy-efficient home, bike to work, and eat very little meat.
It seems to me that you are afraid of change, namely climate change. Libertarians, on the other hand, don't fear change, including climate change, and believe that a free society and free markets can adapt well.
Religiously conservative Catholics are definitely drawn to the Republicans. But, the "radical baptists" I tried to cover with the "/conservative Christians".
Neither do those of socialists/communists. For example, while they technically legalized homosexuality, in practice they were wildly homophobic. Nevertheless, conservative Christians have largely hijacked the Republicans, and socialists/communists have largely hijacked Democrats.
Yes, but their ideology is irrelevant as that of socialists or communists, because it's not actually what anybody practices. Political and economic ideologies are simply means for attracting followers. That's also why different groups (communists, fascists, Catholics, etc.) like to give different names to essentially the same ideas.
In fact, the ideology that "Distributism" is closest to is "third position" economics, the idea that people should have private property but be compelled to use it for the public good; that kind of economic ideology, plus its social conservatism, probably was one of the main drivers for the Catholic church to support the Nazis in the 1930's.
"After killing his parents, the son asked for leniency on account that he is an orphan."