There is one small thing you're missing. Since they can't be quoted, it makes the story harder to publish. If an accusation is important, an editor won't allow the story without an attribution, and with good reason. A story with unnamed sources is weak, because it lacks accountability.
It's not totally shutting people up, but it slows things down a lot. An engineer can speak to the press and then the journalist can try to get official, on-the-record confirmation. It doesn't let the administrator absolutely shut a story down, but he can dramatically weaken its impact.
While I agree with the point that they're miscalculating, don't assume that a loss to you is necessarily a gain for me. If I smash your car window, you've certainly taken a loss, but I'm up nothing except a grin.
I'm not so sure it's insane. The way we guarantee that the NSA isn't spying on us (as opposed to the FBI, who is allowed to spy on us) is by saying, "You don't tap wires anywhere within the US, period." If you start letting them tap wires within the US and they wink and say, "It's OK, we know that there are only foreigners on the line" it's a lot harder to verify that the NSA is following the rules.
The concern isn't really about whether or not they're allowed to spy on foreigners. We're all pretty happy to let them spy on foreigners. But the CIA and NSA proved in the 60s and 70s that if you don't keep an eye on them they'll also spy on American citizens. It was terrible behavior in the past that puts them in this bind today.
Since then it's been loosened to the point where they're allowed to get a warrant after the tapping has been done, which is actually a huge concession to them. It lets them put a tap on anybody, even in the US, and it's an opportunity for them to "accidentally" tap American citizens if they choose. I really don't think it's too much to ask, even if it requires 200 hours of work.
But we're Slashdotters! We only know how to reason by analogy.
Holding a Slashdot argument without using a flurry of conflicting and dubious analogies is like a car with brakes only on its left wheels... no, wait, it's like a door with a lock that accepts puns as an answer... no, it's like...
By making something more than the knowledge of 16 digits required for a loan (which is what they're doing when they authorize a credit transaction). Or even deducting the money directly from my account. Or, God forbid, knowing 9 measly digits from my SSN, as if that somehow were a secret.
It continually baffles me that credit card numbers are assumed to be somehow secret, despite the fact that you hand a waiter making $2.15 an hour a little piece of plastic with that number written on it without a thought.
The customer is in no position to create a new technology that ends this "open secret" way of verifying identities. There are much better mechanisms available, using public-key cryptography and some combination of passwords (entered into a smart card, not passed over the Internet), biometrics, and physical identity tokens.
That's up to the credit card companies. The reason people steal the numbers is that all they have to do is steal the number. Make it harder to steal and they'll stop stealing it. Until then it will continue to shock me that mere knowledge of a password which is regularly transmitted all over the place, and can be stolen from my wallet or my mail, is used as an identifier.
They blame it on the customer because they can, not because it's the customer's fault.
I don't believe that's a correct characterization.
To be NP, it means that it can be solved by a nondeterministic machine in polynomial time. Or, to put it another way, if you already knew the answer, you could check that it was the correct one in polynomial time.
It's not just "non-polynomial". There are plenty of problems that are truly non-polynomial: they'd be exponential to verify even if you already knew the correct answer. Whether a Turing machine will terminate on a given input is EXPTIME, and can't be solved in polynomial time even if you had a nondeterministic machine.
NP-complete means it's in the hardest category of NP-problems. All polynomial programs are in NP, too. NP-hard means that it it can't be solved in polynomial time on a deterministic machine, and NP-complete means that you can reduce all other NP problems to it. That is, if you have a machine to solve one, then you can use it to solve all of the others in the same amount of time, plus a polynomial-time transformation step.
This solves a nondeterministic-polynomial algorithm by using a very large number of parallel computations to simulate nondeterminism.
This was proposed some years ago for DNA computers as well, until somebody figured out that it would take a mass of DNA the size of the earth to figure out a non-trivial problem. So this is NOT the first time somebody has proposed a method for reducing NP problems to polynomial time, though this mechanism is novel as far as I know.
Photons are a lot smaller than DNA. N^N photons seems much more feasible. But even so... once N=100, 100^100 photons is way more than we can handle.
Minibar takes reservations exactly 1 month in advance. So basically you pick a date, and call one month before at 9 AM. They usually fill up by 9:05. And no cancellations.
I've watched the minibar from the tables at Cafe Atlantico, and this should be fantastic.
BTW: at Cafe Atlantico, the pre-dinner prix fixe meal is an excellent bargain. I also highly recommend Jaleo, just around the corner. It's tapas, and the menu is continually changing; I never order the same thing twice (even though it's all fantastic.)
Also, chef Jose Andres at Cafe Atlantico among others. One of my favorites: his "magic mojito", consisting of a ball of mojito-flavored cotton candy and a wad of "lime air", which is an intensely-flavored foam with a consistency of soap bubbles. (It's got to be some sort of edible emulsifier and lime oil.)
Next week I'm going to his Minibar, basically a 30-course showoff of molecular gastronomy (and a lot more than $25, I'm afraid. It's a birthday present to a foodie friend of mine and a once-in-a-lifetime experience, at least at that price.)
I'm beginning to wonder if the class-action lawsuit isn't a worse abuse of the commons than spam is. All they have to do is find one company with a lot of cash and one customer dumb enough to sue them in exchange for the trivial takings the customers always get from these lawsuits. The lawyers always get their fees in cash, and the customers always get coupons.
I get notified that I'm a party to these about every month of so. Sometimes I even get notified that I've "won" something, like one dollar off my monthly service of Verizon every three months until they've given me $12 (really). Or once, all I got was an apology, along with the satisfaction of knowing that the lawyers got several hundred thousand in fees.
We need the class action lawsuit; it's an important legal tool. But if you've got a better suggestion, I'd love to hear it.
How about this: if you're party to a class action lawsuit, and you choose to opt out and give up your right to sue individually, you get to punch the lawyers once. Not real hard, just a little bit. So an intelligent lawsuit gives you a mild bruising. And this lawsuit ends up with brains splattered all over walls.
Indeed, thank you ACLU. They are an important gadfly.
The state always arrogates rights to itself that it does not permit to individuals. The state can arrest you and hold you (for a short time) before you've been convicted, and if a police officer feels you're immediately dangerous, he can shoot you. They can take your money directly from your paycheck, and if you don't pay it, they have the right to take away your liberty.
We cede this rights to the state in the name of the public order, and we keep close tabs to ensure that the state is not abusing that privilege.
I suspect that the ACLU will lose on this, at least until they can prove that the state is mis-using the information. But it's very important that they bring up the point, so that we're aware that this can be abused (and the state knows that we are aware).
Hopefully the balance between the rights we've ceded and the order we create will continue to work, in part because these guys jump on everything immediately. They look paranoid, and they are, but I am grateful for their paranoia, even when a court decides that it's ultimately unjustified.
Eh... people like to bash on the free-energy loons every once in a while. It's a slow news day anyway. Think of it as a kind of puzzle, trying to find the flaw in their theory. It's like Where's Waldo for nerds, except a lot easier.
They get their say about their somewhat novel takes on the laws of physics, and get to call them morons. Everybody wins.
A/R dude/dudette: But we will put your face in every record store in America and play an overproduced, bland version of music on six radio stations in every market 19 times a day. You'll be completely broke but you'll get laid a lot.
We'd all love an apolitical court. We'd love an apolitical Presidency and an apolitical Congress, too. How do you plan to go about getting one?
Politics isn't some extra layer grafted onto an otherwise fair system. Politics is how we make group decisions. We put it to a vote and the majority (generally) wins. It's crappy and unfair and not truly representative and it's better than any other system I've heard of.
If you've got a better idea I'd love to hear it. We already remove politics from the Supreme Court as much as possible by appointing them for life, removing them from politics once they've been chosen. I'd actually say that's too much already, since it means that Bush's nice, young appointees will be on the court for several more decades.
10 GHz is a factor of two more than the present technology. The structures needed for a space elevator are a factor of a billion longer than the state of the art.
If Intel were to announce a 10,000 GHz chip for the near future, would you believe them?
Exactly. If you accept the Omniscient Omnipotent Atemporal Creator, creation makes perfect sense.
I just find evolution to be a more compelling solution, since it has high predictive power, whereas the OOAC theory is fairly low in making predictions. It's perfect for explaining what you've already observed, but not very useful for making predictions, and that's really the essence of science.
Actually, I misspoke: the question actually said "plant or animal". I know at least some people will accept microevolution but aren't able to wrap their minds around macroevolution. It doesn't seem that difficult a concept to me, but since it can't be demonstrated in a lab it takes a bit more insight. I think some people have a hard time grasping just how long "a billion years" is.
Me, I watched the original Russian version of the movie Solaris, so I think I have a pretty good idea. (A billion years is about half as long as that movie.)
The numbers roughly track with this Harris poll. The link gives a good description of the methodology.
In it, 54% said that humans are not the product of evolution and 45% rejected evolution for any living thing. 64% said that humans were created directly by God. Clearly, the exact question matters a lot, but you can use this poll to get an overview of public opinion.
It gives 12% as the number who believe God was uninvolved, the proxy for the "atheism" question, as you point out. That's within the margin of error to the 14% in their poll.
Well, given that Mr. Carter didn't become President until 1977, I don't think the contents of a 1975 report are going to have much on him except under-reporting peanut crops. The Governor of Georgia doesn't get to call out the CIA.
The other documents cover the "fifties to the seventies", and while that does include the Carter era, that's just the tail end of it. From the description it's largely about the targeting of leftists, and while that may have continued under Carter it sure wasn't his doing.
Ironically, the we actually get a non-luddite bonus. The credit card companies charge a fee for operating the credit card, but the credit card companies require that the price be the same as cash to the consumer.
As a merchant myself, I find cash (and checks) a hassle and am perfectly content to pay the exorbitant fees for letting them handle it. I don't even want any money orders. So I'm all for the luddite fee.
Without a doubt. I should have repeated my comment, made in a different post, that I prefer to get my science news from Science News than from the regular media outlets. The BBC is a bit worse than most on that score. Headline (and the rest of the article) were really badly written.
Remember the square-cube law. If it's twice as tall, it's got eight times as much volume. Double the height of 200 pound man and you get a 1,600 pound man. That puts us within a factor of two.
The thing must be somewhat rounder than we are. Remember that a horse the size of a man at the shoulder weighs over a ton. If it were shaped like a horse, at "twice the size" of a man it would weigh 16,000 pounds.
Clearly it's shaped somewhere between a human and a horse, and much closer to the human side of things. (Which makes sense, given that it's bipedal.)
Slashdot Mirror
There is one small thing you're missing. Since they can't be quoted, it makes the story harder to publish. If an accusation is important, an editor won't allow the story without an attribution, and with good reason. A story with unnamed sources is weak, because it lacks accountability.
It's not totally shutting people up, but it slows things down a lot. An engineer can speak to the press and then the journalist can try to get official, on-the-record confirmation. It doesn't let the administrator absolutely shut a story down, but he can dramatically weaken its impact.
While I agree with the point that they're miscalculating, don't assume that a loss to you is necessarily a gain for me. If I smash your car window, you've certainly taken a loss, but I'm up nothing except a grin.
I'm not so sure it's insane. The way we guarantee that the NSA isn't spying on us (as opposed to the FBI, who is allowed to spy on us) is by saying, "You don't tap wires anywhere within the US, period." If you start letting them tap wires within the US and they wink and say, "It's OK, we know that there are only foreigners on the line" it's a lot harder to verify that the NSA is following the rules.
The concern isn't really about whether or not they're allowed to spy on foreigners. We're all pretty happy to let them spy on foreigners. But the CIA and NSA proved in the 60s and 70s that if you don't keep an eye on them they'll also spy on American citizens. It was terrible behavior in the past that puts them in this bind today.
Since then it's been loosened to the point where they're allowed to get a warrant after the tapping has been done, which is actually a huge concession to them. It lets them put a tap on anybody, even in the US, and it's an opportunity for them to "accidentally" tap American citizens if they choose. I really don't think it's too much to ask, even if it requires 200 hours of work.
But we're Slashdotters! We only know how to reason by analogy.
Holding a Slashdot argument without using a flurry of conflicting and dubious analogies is like a car with brakes only on its left wheels... no, wait, it's like a door with a lock that accepts puns as an answer... no, it's like...
By making something more than the knowledge of 16 digits required for a loan (which is what they're doing when they authorize a credit transaction). Or even deducting the money directly from my account. Or, God forbid, knowing 9 measly digits from my SSN, as if that somehow were a secret.
It continually baffles me that credit card numbers are assumed to be somehow secret, despite the fact that you hand a waiter making $2.15 an hour a little piece of plastic with that number written on it without a thought.
The customer is in no position to create a new technology that ends this "open secret" way of verifying identities. There are much better mechanisms available, using public-key cryptography and some combination of passwords (entered into a smart card, not passed over the Internet), biometrics, and physical identity tokens.
That's up to the credit card companies. The reason people steal the numbers is that all they have to do is steal the number. Make it harder to steal and they'll stop stealing it. Until then it will continue to shock me that mere knowledge of a password which is regularly transmitted all over the place, and can be stolen from my wallet or my mail, is used as an identifier.
They blame it on the customer because they can, not because it's the customer's fault.
I don't believe that's a correct characterization.
To be NP, it means that it can be solved by a nondeterministic machine in polynomial time. Or, to put it another way, if you already knew the answer, you could check that it was the correct one in polynomial time.
It's not just "non-polynomial". There are plenty of problems that are truly non-polynomial: they'd be exponential to verify even if you already knew the correct answer. Whether a Turing machine will terminate on a given input is EXPTIME, and can't be solved in polynomial time even if you had a nondeterministic machine.
NP-complete means it's in the hardest category of NP-problems. All polynomial programs are in NP, too. NP-hard means that it it can't be solved in polynomial time on a deterministic machine, and NP-complete means that you can reduce all other NP problems to it. That is, if you have a machine to solve one, then you can use it to solve all of the others in the same amount of time, plus a polynomial-time transformation step.
This solves a nondeterministic-polynomial algorithm by using a very large number of parallel computations to simulate nondeterminism.
This was proposed some years ago for DNA computers as well, until somebody figured out that it would take a mass of DNA the size of the earth to figure out a non-trivial problem. So this is NOT the first time somebody has proposed a method for reducing NP problems to polynomial time, though this mechanism is novel as far as I know.
Photons are a lot smaller than DNA. N^N photons seems much more feasible. But even so... once N=100, 100^100 photons is way more than we can handle.
Minibar takes reservations exactly 1 month in advance. So basically you pick a date, and call one month before at 9 AM. They usually fill up by 9:05. And no cancellations.
I've watched the minibar from the tables at Cafe Atlantico, and this should be fantastic.
BTW: at Cafe Atlantico, the pre-dinner prix fixe meal is an excellent bargain. I also highly recommend Jaleo, just around the corner. It's tapas, and the menu is continually changing; I never order the same thing twice (even though it's all fantastic.)
Also, chef Jose Andres at Cafe Atlantico among others. One of my favorites: his "magic mojito", consisting of a ball of mojito-flavored cotton candy and a wad of "lime air", which is an intensely-flavored foam with a consistency of soap bubbles. (It's got to be some sort of edible emulsifier and lime oil.)
Next week I'm going to his Minibar, basically a 30-course showoff of molecular gastronomy (and a lot more than $25, I'm afraid. It's a birthday present to a foodie friend of mine and a once-in-a-lifetime experience, at least at that price.)
I'm beginning to wonder if the class-action lawsuit isn't a worse abuse of the commons than spam is. All they have to do is find one company with a lot of cash and one customer dumb enough to sue them in exchange for the trivial takings the customers always get from these lawsuits. The lawyers always get their fees in cash, and the customers always get coupons.
I get notified that I'm a party to these about every month of so. Sometimes I even get notified that I've "won" something, like one dollar off my monthly service of Verizon every three months until they've given me $12 (really). Or once, all I got was an apology, along with the satisfaction of knowing that the lawyers got several hundred thousand in fees.
We need the class action lawsuit; it's an important legal tool. But if you've got a better suggestion, I'd love to hear it.
How about this: if you're party to a class action lawsuit, and you choose to opt out and give up your right to sue individually, you get to punch the lawyers once. Not real hard, just a little bit. So an intelligent lawsuit gives you a mild bruising. And this lawsuit ends up with brains splattered all over walls.
Indeed, thank you ACLU. They are an important gadfly.
The state always arrogates rights to itself that it does not permit to individuals. The state can arrest you and hold you (for a short time) before you've been convicted, and if a police officer feels you're immediately dangerous, he can shoot you. They can take your money directly from your paycheck, and if you don't pay it, they have the right to take away your liberty.
We cede this rights to the state in the name of the public order, and we keep close tabs to ensure that the state is not abusing that privilege.
I suspect that the ACLU will lose on this, at least until they can prove that the state is mis-using the information. But it's very important that they bring up the point, so that we're aware that this can be abused (and the state knows that we are aware).
Hopefully the balance between the rights we've ceded and the order we create will continue to work, in part because these guys jump on everything immediately. They look paranoid, and they are, but I am grateful for their paranoia, even when a court decides that it's ultimately unjustified.
In my area, Peapod still does this.
I, personally, really enjoy grocery shopping (believe it or not) so I haven't used them, but I've heard it's pretty good and not too expensive.
Eh... people like to bash on the free-energy loons every once in a while. It's a slow news day anyway. Think of it as a kind of puzzle, trying to find the flaw in their theory. It's like Where's Waldo for nerds, except a lot easier.
They get their say about their somewhat novel takes on the laws of physics, and get to call them morons. Everybody wins.
You forgot the intermediate step:
A/R dude/dudette: But we will put your face in every record store in America and play an overproduced, bland version of music on six radio stations in every market 19 times a day. You'll be completely broke but you'll get laid a lot.
Unsigned Band: "Sold American!"
We'd all love an apolitical court. We'd love an apolitical Presidency and an apolitical Congress, too. How do you plan to go about getting one?
Politics isn't some extra layer grafted onto an otherwise fair system. Politics is how we make group decisions. We put it to a vote and the majority (generally) wins. It's crappy and unfair and not truly representative and it's better than any other system I've heard of.
If you've got a better idea I'd love to hear it. We already remove politics from the Supreme Court as much as possible by appointing them for life, removing them from politics once they've been chosen. I'd actually say that's too much already, since it means that Bush's nice, young appointees will be on the court for several more decades.
10 GHz is a factor of two more than the present technology. The structures needed for a space elevator are a factor of a billion longer than the state of the art.
If Intel were to announce a 10,000 GHz chip for the near future, would you believe them?
Exactly. If you accept the Omniscient Omnipotent Atemporal Creator, creation makes perfect sense.
I just find evolution to be a more compelling solution, since it has high predictive power, whereas the OOAC theory is fairly low in making predictions. It's perfect for explaining what you've already observed, but not very useful for making predictions, and that's really the essence of science.
Actually, I misspoke: the question actually said "plant or animal". I know at least some people will accept microevolution but aren't able to wrap their minds around macroevolution. It doesn't seem that difficult a concept to me, but since it can't be demonstrated in a lab it takes a bit more insight. I think some people have a hard time grasping just how long "a billion years" is.
Me, I watched the original Russian version of the movie Solaris, so I think I have a pretty good idea. (A billion years is about half as long as that movie.)
The numbers roughly track with this Harris poll. The link gives a good description of the methodology.
In it, 54% said that humans are not the product of evolution and 45% rejected evolution for any living thing. 64% said that humans were created directly by God. Clearly, the exact question matters a lot, but you can use this poll to get an overview of public opinion.
It gives 12% as the number who believe God was uninvolved, the proxy for the "atheism" question, as you point out. That's within the margin of error to the 14% in their poll.
Well, given that Mr. Carter didn't become President until 1977, I don't think the contents of a 1975 report are going to have much on him except under-reporting peanut crops. The Governor of Georgia doesn't get to call out the CIA.
The other documents cover the "fifties to the seventies", and while that does include the Carter era, that's just the tail end of it. From the description it's largely about the targeting of leftists, and while that may have continued under Carter it sure wasn't his doing.
Does it speak Chinese?
(And remember, kiddies: if you don't get the joke, it just might be because you haven't read enough philosophy.)
The article is from Wired. I'll let you figure it out from there.
Ironically, the we actually get a non-luddite bonus. The credit card companies charge a fee for operating the credit card, but the credit card companies require that the price be the same as cash to the consumer.
As a merchant myself, I find cash (and checks) a hassle and am perfectly content to pay the exorbitant fees for letting them handle it. I don't even want any money orders. So I'm all for the luddite fee.
Without a doubt. I should have repeated my comment, made in a different post, that I prefer to get my science news from Science News than from the regular media outlets. The BBC is a bit worse than most on that score. Headline (and the rest of the article) were really badly written.
Remember the square-cube law. If it's twice as tall, it's got eight times as much volume. Double the height of 200 pound man and you get a 1,600 pound man. That puts us within a factor of two.
The thing must be somewhat rounder than we are. Remember that a horse the size of a man at the shoulder weighs over a ton. If it were shaped like a horse, at "twice the size" of a man it would weigh 16,000 pounds.
Clearly it's shaped somewhere between a human and a horse, and much closer to the human side of things. (Which makes sense, given that it's bipedal.)