That's not a troll. Yes, there is a finite amount of fossil fuel in the Earth. But, no, we're not likely to consume all of it, or even very much of it. That's because there's a lot more there that's hard to get to, hard to extract, hard to refine, whatever. As we run out of the easy stuff, there will be economic pressures to switch to something else. Eventually we will. Long before the supply of fossil fuel runs out.
Well, seeing as we're correcting some basic misconceptions about the seasons that you have, I'll also mention that it's not the number of hours of daylight that makes the difference, either.
Not the Earth's distance from the Sun, not the number of hours of daylight.[1] Hmm. What could it be?
[1] That neither of these are the case should be obvious with just a little reflection on some matters of geography that are known to almost all schoolchildren.
...because I didn't want my previous post to be too lengthy.
Yesterday, Perl and Larry Wall came up in, believe it or not, a conversation I had with a friend regarding moviemaking. I had recently watched the director's commentary tracks on the DVDs of Rodriquez's "El Mariachi" and "Desperado", and I was explaining how impressed I was with his pragmatism. One of the most astonishing examples of this, to me, were his repeated admissions of complete disregard for certain kinds of continuity because "this is an action movie, things are happening very fast, and no one is going to notice it anyway." (That's a paraphrase.) He explained that he has x amount of time to get y amount of shots in a day's shooting, and worrying about details that no one is going to notice just doesn't make any sense.
Prior to watching these commentaries, I had rewatched Payne's "Election", which I think is a brilliant film, and after watching it I also watched it with the director's commentary. Payne is clearly a perfectionist, and he went to great lengths to preserve continuity and to create verisimilitude. (For example, two of his pet peeves in movies are cars without windshield mounted rear-view mirrors, and cars that are too clean.) I greatly admired Payne's attention to detail. Similarly, I greatly admire Kubrick's filmaking.
As the rare kind of guy who has both Knuth and Wall on my bookshelf behind me and who esteems both highly[1], and who appreciates both Rodriguez's pragmatic efficiency and Kubrick's auteur obsessiveness, I don't actually believe that there's the conflict there that other people assume there is. To me, it's a question of appropriateness. One approach is "correct" in one situation but "incorrect" in another.
To me, the very best filmmaker would know when to be like Rodriguez and when to be like Kubrick. Similarly, the best programmers would know when to be like Larry Wall and when to be like, say, Wirth. But that kind of versatility is rare. As is the case in so many things, human nature being what it is, most people have a preferred modality of thought and problem-solving, and operate in that mode whether it's effective or not. That's okay, providing that they somehow limit themselves to problems where their preferred method is appropriate. But many don't; and, worse, some proseltyze that their modality is what's "best" for everyone else, in every situation.
[1] Or, another supposed opposition: Tannenbaum and Torvalds. In their debate, Tannenbaum was the purist, Torvalds the pragmatist. If they were actually arguing about the same problem space, one of them would have had to be wrong and the other right. But they really weren't. I think that many of Tannenbaum's points about the superiority of microkernel architecture were correct and have been proven to be correct. On the other hand, you can't really argue with the success of Linux.
"Actually from a grammer standpoint Perl is far closer to a real human language than almost any other language."
And let's not forget that Wall's education is as a linguist, and not as a computer scientist.
To my mind, the best computing language designer would be someone with extensive education and experience in: computer engineering, computer science, linguistics, mathematics, engineering and business processes, maybe psychology, and perhaps some other things I'm forgetting at the moment. My point is that a good designer would have a very strong comprehension of the problem space (the problems this tool is intended to solve), how the tool is likely to actually be used in the real world, how the problem space will evolve over time, all coupled with a very strong comprehension of the most efficient method of implementing this tool in the technology available. That's asking a lot.
In Wall's case, I think that he has a fair amount of experience as a practical coder, which is the impetus for his extremely strong emphasis on pragmatism in his language design. This would be a disaster for most designers, probably, but Wall's education in linguistics probably tempers that pragmatism with some comprehension of higher-level abstraction and some imposition of rigor. You can most clearly see this aspect of Wall's world-view coming through in the Perl 6 design.
However, even though in some sense the scientific view related to linguistics is an abstraction similar to the scientific view of computer science, they're fundamentally dissimilar. Linguistics is an attempt to comprehend and formalize a very complex and exquisitely functional system--human language. In contrast, Computer Science is not a descriptive science; it tends to be proscriptive--looking for the best way to do things, often from an ahistorical almost-Platonic perspective. As a result, it tends to be overly ideological. I chose the word "proscriptive" with some care, as in the realm of human language it identifies a fault line. Linguists tend to be notoriously relativist, asserting that what is "correct" is simple what exists. Proscriptivists, such as one's fourth grade English teacher, insist that there's truly "correct" and "incorrect" usage. In this sense, Wall's background in linguistics clearly has influenced his philosophy of computing language design; and, I think, computing language purists really are psychologically akin to the proscriptivist grammarians like the aforementioned fourth grade teacher.
For my part, in the realm of tools, I prefer aesthetic purity or elegance only when it serves utility (or, at least, doesn't interfere with utility). Perl is well-matched to its problem space, and in this it actually does have, in my opinion, some beauty. I mean, from one perspective a Swiss Army knife is god-awful ugly; but from another, its compact and wide-ranging utility is attractive. Because Perl is intended to operate in such a large problem space, I believe that simplicity, and the form of beauty that is a function of simplicity, is largely denied to it. So? We can't have everything. Ideally, there'd be a wide range of computing languages each perfectly and exquisitely engineered for their respective problem spaces. But, right now, computing isn't even close to being mature enough to support such a thing. In other engineering and science disciplines, there are a variety of tools and methods and specializations each well-suited to the problem domain they serve. And it works because a civil engineer isn't expected to do nuclear engineering work, nor an astrophysicist to do nuclear physics. But programmers are still expected to be jack-of-all-trades, and thus their tools are required to be as versatile--but also as unoptimized--as they are.
That's a very interesting and valid observation and I am completely willing to admit that identity is closely associated, psychologically, with the face. It was unfair and arrogant of me to dismiss all such concerns as being entirely simple-minded.
However, it was the phrasing of the question that was so provocative to me. It was very absolute: whether someone's identity is changed if their face changes. It's not a very nuanced question, and mine was not a nuanced response.
I think I'm more astonished by this than most people would be. I certainly don't equate my own face with my identity. Not coincidentally, probably, I also am very uninterested in hiding or changing my identity in any way. My identity is my self as I see my self--all the various public versions of my self that exist in other people's minds are secondary and not of great importance to me. My conception of "self" is a self that's solidly behind my facade--the outward facing part that other people associate with me is merely contingent. It occurs to me that many or most other people probably don't think this way.
I was utterly astonished at the then-current results of the accompanying little web survey: Do face transplants change a person's identity?Yes and No have each received 46% of the vote.
Why in the world does anyone think that identity depends upon someone's face? Are people really that simple-minded?
Also, from the article:
"Butler told me of a psychological survey that he conducted of 120 people at his own hospital, one-third of them doctors, one-third nurses and one-third laypeople. The majority answered that they would accept someone else's face if they required one. No one, however, not even his closest colleagues, said they would donate their own."
I'm no more reluctant to donate my face for organ harvesting as I am my liver or kidneys. That is to say, I'm not reluctant at all.
To the people who've asked about how much the recipient would look like the donor:
"''Certainly, identity is a central issue -- 'will I look like the donor?''' he explained in a rapid-fire, silken Irish brogue. ''But what we're proposing is taking the skin envelope with or without some muscle. So if I were to transplant my face onto you, it would look much more like you than me, because the skin envelope is elastic. It would redrape around your bone and cartilage structure. The things you would have of mine are skin tone, texture, eyebrow color, beard, things of that nature. That's why what I'm doing now is establishing a database for what is essentially a matching process. You and I, for example, are reasonably well matched, but obviously. . ..'' He gestured to a dark-skinned gentleman who had just stepped up to a nearby side counter to stir cream into his coffee. ''I wouldn't transplant your face onto his.''"
However, later in the article it's mentioned that more complicated procedured could harvest some of the cartilage and bone as well as the skin and muscle. I imagine that eventually they could probably come very close to recreating someone's face on someone else, so the idea isn't completely far-fetched. Still, though, our ability to recognize a face is still somewhat of a mystery, although it's understood that our brains put together a great many different subtle clues. My point is that even though we see faces as near monolithic and emminently identifiable structures, the truth is that even a small differences in muscle or bone structure might make a large difference in the overall recognizability of the face. So, I suspect that a surgeon would probably have to be intending to duplicate someone's face via a transplant in order to achieve such an effect.
Oh, please. Wolfram has made some important contributions to CA, but his "new science" is the science of complexity which has been doing just fine, thank you very much, since long before he "discovered" it.
In related news, Bush recently announced his new "War on Identity Theft". His initiative includes dramatically increased minimum prison sentencing for anyone who uses a computer for "unauthorized purposes", a 30 billion military spending increase on "related technology", and a tax cut for the wealthy.
That's being overly generous. "Average", in everyday usage, is understood to be synonymous with "mean". All schoolchildren know how to calculate an "average", very few people understand what a "median" is. For this reason, while it's the case that people will use "average" as synonymous with "mean", no one ever uses "average" as synonymous with "median". Writers (and speakers) always specify "median" when that is the idea they're trying to communicate. I was not wrong to assume that is what he meant.
NT didn't kill UNIX, but it injured it. What Byte was reporting was the possibility of the transition from UNIX workstations to NT boxes that is nowadays commonplace. People seem to forget that it was only a little more than six years ago that the thought of porting any workstation-class apps over to NT was considered ludicrous. The idea of any important servers--database or web or whatever--running NT instead of UNIX was absurd.
Now, I still greatly prefer UNIX or workalike to NT for any enterprise application. But the extremely expensive, huge geophysical mapping application that I once was the build manager for--which, at the time, was supported on AIX, Solaris, IRIX, and HP/UX--eventually was ported to NT and probably Linux. Also, for example, tons of enterprise-class companies--unwisely, in my opinion--use 2K and IIS and SQLserver.
If you look at what happened in the workstation/server market that UNIX lived within, you'll see that on a market-share basis, UNIX lost an enormous amount of ground to NT/2K. So, the prediction was in a sense accurate but not precise. NT "replaced" what would have otherwise been UNIX installations. However, the overall market increased significantly such that UNIX has managed to remain significant and viable where it still is clearly (and very noticably) superior to NT/2K.
What this reveals is that predictions of these sorts usually have built-in assumptions that are proven false over time. Often, the assumption is of a static environment. This prediction assumed a static market for UNIX and NT where, naturally, the cheaper and sufficiently powerful NT would marginalize UNIX and eventually kill it. If the entire market hadn't dramatically grown and changed in some interesting ways, this would have been true. But why assume that? A more responsible prediction would have been, "NT will replace UNIX in many applications". Which it has.
Years and years ago, when I was about 23 or so, I was "recruited" by somone to some sort of insurance selling thing that was actually a sort of pyramid scam. This became more and more obvious as the presentation went on. But, you know, I could have been wrong. So I asked questions. They weren't used to people asking questions. During a break, I asked some of the other people there if they really thought this was all on the up and up and that they were guaranteed a five or six figure income within the first year. "Why wouldn't this be true?" was their universal response.
To my mind, the idea that you could go and do something trivially easy and become rich makes it self-evidently untrue. Otherwise, everyone would be doing it. However, the people that fall for these sorts of things see it the other way around. They think, "But your skepticism is an example of why everyone isn't doing this, and why people like us--who can see an opportunity for what it is--are the few that make so much money this way."
Personally, I think this susceptibility is a specific example of a more general problem. The general problem is that people are not even remotely aware enough of how likely they are--on any given judgment--to be wrong. I'm always aware that a) I could be wrong about any specific matter; and b) I am definitely wrong about some significant number of matters at any given time. I'm always looking for evidence that contradicts my always-a-work-in-progress judgment. People that want to influence you and fool you about something, if you're not ever vigilant (and have a prideful fear of being proven wrong), will only need to sumrount that first and only barrier of doubt--then they have you hooked. It's smooth sailing from then on out.
"
Every time I hear news like this I have to remind myself that 50% of the human race is below average intelligence. Usually when I mention this to someone they say 'that can't be true!' Then I know that they are one of the lower half. A fool and his money.."
...to which Moritz Moeller responded:
"
I am 6 trillion times smarter than everyone else. So 99.99 % of the world population are of below average intelligence.
What you mean is below median intelligence."
Yeah, from where I'm standing, codewolf has demonstrated that he's the one in the bottom 50%. Further, the people that are skeptical of his statement are right to be skeptical.
I just love this kind of thing. There's almost nothing more delightful to me than seeing someone arrogantly proclaim their superiority while actually demonstrating their inferiority.
Sure you can. The "Western Union" wire-transfer scam featured in Mamet's "House of Games" comes to mind. It goes like this:
The con artist goes to a Western Union outlet and sits down as if he's (she's) waiting for a wire transfer. Time passes. The mark comes in, someone who is obviously waiting for a transfer and is impatient when they find that it's not arrived. The con artist strikes up a friendly conversation with the mark. They both mention how they're waiting for a desperately needed wire transfer and they're both impatient. The con artist suddenly gets an idea. "Hey", he says, "You know what? If my wire gets here before yours does, what'll you say that I just loan you the $X you need and you can pay me back tomorrow after your transfer gets here?" The mark says, "Gosh, that's really nice of you. And I'll do the same thing for you." Since the con artist doesn't actually have money coming in, inevitably the mark gets his transfer and offers the loan to the con artist. The con artist takes it and walks away, never to be heard from again.
Now, this is only marginally plausible, but it's the example that came to my mind. Most people these days would politely refuse the offer, but some wouldn't, and some of them would gullibly offer to reciprocate.
"Mike", the con artist in "House of Games" that demonstrates this con to the psychiatrist, asks her if she know why these are called "confidence games". She responds, "Because someone gives you their confidence?" Mike says, "No. Because I give themmy confidence." Which is a brilliant line and also very true.
Almost every person has some "weakness" or another that makes them vulnerable to a con artist. Often, yes, it's greed and dishonesty. But it can also be generosity, compassion, or simple confusion. And, more often than you might think, it can be arrogance or over-confidence. Some of the people here who are ridiculing all victims of a scam as being "stupid" may be vulnerable to having their overconfidence exploited. Carl Sagan (and others) wrote about how it is that scientists seem to be surprisingly easily tricked by "scientific" fraudsters (paranormalists, etc.). It's because the scientist's overconfidence is taken advantage of; that the fraudsters, like magicians, misdirect the scientist's attention to areas that they naturally focus upon and perform their slight of hand in places where the scientists aren't looking and didn't think to look. A con artist will do the same thing--set up something that looks like a scam to attract the suspicious mark's attention, then perform the real scam in a direction the mark isn't looking.
Everyone thinks they are immune to being conned. They're almost all wrong.
That said, there's almost no chance that I could be scammed by a con artist appealing to my greed. I'm automatically suspicious of any potential windfall from any source. But, on the other hand, I'm almost certainly vulnerable to a carefully crafted scam that takes advantage of generosity or compassion like the one I detail above. The only comfort I take in that is that there are more scams leveraging the mark's greed than there are that leverage other characteristics.
A classic, authoritative book on the history, psychology, and sociology of confidence artists and their cons is "The Big Con" by David Maurer.
"I guess a lot of people hear 'and sundry' as 'insundry'."
I notice quite a few such misspellings on Slashdot and similar sites. I've tended to assume that the writers were either relatively young (and thus not very familiar with a phrase), or relatively illiterate (not really illiterate...you know what I mean).
Unfortunately, Ms. Garrett looks to be older (in her forties or fifties) and is definitely pretty literate and educated. (Well, actually her education is in biology through the graduate level--journalism was a sideline that became her career.)
So, I dunno. Obviously, my assumptions above must still apply to some people. But other people, like apparently Ms. Garrett, perhaps just don't think very much about the language they use. They use idiomatic expressions and never parse them out.
Insundry just isn't a word and makes no sense. Perhaps she meant "various in sundry", which is a little more defensible. Barely. It's still pretty nonsensical.
I'm not without fault. For years I used the expression "beyond the pale" assuming it was "beyond the pail", never wondering what that could possibly mean. Someone corrected me and I learned what a "pale" was in this context.
"Yes, all white people. I was reading your post hoping to gain some insite, but then I realized you're as racist as Jesse Jackson."
Whether he is or not, do you also think he's lying about his experience? I don't. Regarldess of how truthful the other people he talked to were, there still is the data point of a young black man being arrested in front of his house for no good reason. He also mentions that he didn't encounter this sort of bias when he lived in suburbia, nor when he was in the military. (Which would seem to contradict your assumption that he's racist and generalizing about all white people in all situations.)
How likely do you think it is that you would be arrested in the same situation?
Your response is an example of disregarding what someone says on an ad hominem pretext because you just plain don't want to hear what they have to say and dismiss it out-of-hand. It's irresponsible.
Almost all of my encounters with the police have been extremely fair and pleasant. With one exception: I was at a party in an hispanic ghetto where I was the only anglo person among more than a hundred people. The cops came because it was a big party (as I've seen the cops come to many other big parties I've been at in my life). In this case, though, they acted completely differently than I'd ever seen them act. They didn't knock politely, they just came marching in and yelling at people and threatening them. All my life until then I'd been very skeptical of all those stories about the police abusing their powers (or just disregarding civil liberties). Suddenly, it was like I was in some movie where the police were the bad guys, not the good guys.
This is the sort of relationship that young minority urban males have with the police from as far back as they can remember. From before they ever even thought about breaking the law. They grew up where they were assumed to be criminals or potential criminals from the earliest ages. Isn't it possible that this creates a culture where there's a vicious cycle of self-fulfilling prophecy? And isn't it possible that you, like so many white people, don't have a freaking clue about what it's like living in that world?
"I'm sure you're convinced that U.S. interventionist policies are what landed us in this mess in the first place, aren't you?"
You may be sure, but you're wrong. I say that I'm an internationalist, and that the Bush administration is incompetent in foreign policy, and from that you make all sorts of assumptions about my politics? Is everyone in your world either Susan Sontag or Rush Limbaugh? Because, thank God, everyone in my world isn't.
This sounds just like the case with the free PCI device list. The fundamental problem is not the USAGE of the trademark, rather the fact that it is not clearly marked AS SUCH.
Rather than throwing a hissy fit, I suspect the problem can be resolved by simply placing a small note next to the "Googling" entry reminding the reader that "Google" is a registered trademark."
Wow. You just wrote an "IANAL" post speculating on a legal matter using an analogy involving esoteric PC hardware issues. You epitomize the Slashdot culture. Congratulations.
"poke your browser over the some foreign english-lanugage news sites from those countries to find out if you're missing anything if you live in the USA."
I read the BBC Online news regularly.
To be fair to the US press, though, it should be mentioned that the US's peculiar geographical and cultural isolation, along with the simple fact that it's the dominant economy and, er, culture in the world, conspire to create milleau where information from outside the nation is not as relevant to people's lives as it is for other people elsewhere.
Now, I think it's a lot more relevant than most Americans do; but my point is that, even so, it's not as relevant to us as it is to most other people.
I am very internationalist in outlook, and I'm also skeptical by nature and was taught as a child not to trust any particular information source exclusively. I don't think the US media is as bad as many other people think it is, but it's definitely got its biases and its blind-spots, and I prefer to supplement what I know from non-US sources.
Americans are not xenophobic. I strongly believe that Americans are actually less xenophobic than many other nationalities are. We're actually a lot more friendly and open-minded than many people around the world think we are. I know this because I've known a considerable number of foreigners that have come to the US and have been surprised to find that their stereotypes were mostly false (but still partly true).
However, even if Americans aren't really that xenophpbic, they are quite willfully ignorant and indifferent. I'm frequently one of the few Americans that ever bother to ask my foreign friends about their home countries and their lives there and whatnot. Most people just seem to not care. Furthermore, I recall vividly one startling conversation I had with a very conservative friend. We were talking about foreign affairs and my general high level of knowledge about the world outside the US, and that I think that it's important that US leaders understand that we live in a globalized world and understand what that really means. And his reponse? "That's why I would never vote for you for President." My outward-looking visage was seen by him to be a bad thing.
That's especially interesting coming from a conservative--given that the Republicans are supposedly the foreign policy people and the Democracts are supposedly the domestic policy people. But, with this current administration, we can see just how "adept" at foreign policy conservatives can really be. Regardless of whether or not an Iraq war is justified, Bush's diplomacy has been a complete disaster.
Hey, on a story like this, you should definitely browse at "0" since there's going to be many people "in the know" that will have to post as AC. There's at least two good posts that I've found from people that currently work at LANL that are posted as AC and scored (currently) at 0.
(And you might also mod up the post of mine which contains a link to a detailed map and description of Tech Area 33. Some hard information is useful in this discussion.)
"
I don't agree that it was nothing of consequence. He was able to enter, without breaking in, a facility considered secret. He deomnstrated that the level of security that was claimed didn't exist, and that it may well be possible for someone so minded to wreak havoc at the facility."
An AC wrote:
"
Gaining unauthorized access to a Top Secret nuclear weapons facility is not "of any real consequence"? Perhaps he should have tried to remove some material from that shack he was in, that would make you happy, that would be something of consequence?"
And another AC wrote:
"
Anyone can get in, and the ARMED SECURITY don't even have weapons in their holster!"
As I've written elsewhere, Los Alamos National Laboratories is not a single, secure facility. There are seperate facilities scattered throughout the area. Each of these facilities are seperately secured.
And here is a pdf in two parts (part one and
part two) that describes every tech area, and includes maps. The description and map of TA-33 is in part one.
Looking at the detail of the area of TA-33 near Highway 4 (because there's a whole bunch of TA-33 away from the highway!), I see dozens of buildings. Clearly, the writer couldn't have approached either of the two buildings that are designated as being in the "hazard category" because they are well within the perimeter of TA-33 and along the main roadway that serves the cluster of buildings at that northern portion of TA-33. He tries to make it sound as if the whole of TA-33--a huge area covering a range of terrain--is or should be guarded with high-level perimeter security and that, once he crossed the perimeter into TA-33, he was "in". But this is just silly. Buildings within technical areas have their own security, and the most senstitive buildings have the most intense security. He walked up to a "silver building" that was near the roadway. Big deal! That means nothing.
You and all the other people here who don't know anything about LANL are being misled by this writer who is preying upon your preconceived ideas about what such an installation is like. LANL is not like what most people imagine. There are lower and higher level security areas. There are areas that are essentially completely insecure. It covers a huge amount of territory, in some cases seemingly intermingled with the town.
I have nothing but contempt for this writer because he took a stupid risk for a trivial payoff. If he believed that the labs were insecure in this way, then he should have researched what the most sensitive buildings were, and attempted to enter them. As it is, his account reads like someone who was driving around, saw that the fence ended, and decided to snoop in the name of journalism. Then, afterwards, he contacted some "sources" and used their claim that TA-33 involved "black-op" stuff to make it seem like the one little portion of it he tresspassed upon was itself important.
He doesn't provide a map, doesn't provide a description of TA-33, doesn't tell you how much area TA-33 covers, doesn't tell you how many different buildings there are. He provides no context from which the ignorant reader can evaluate his claims of discovering a serious security lapse. He does, however, through insinuation and omission, strongly imply that he's done something extraordinary. But he hasn't.
Breaking the law in this manner should be punished regardless. Nevertheless, I'd be willing to applaud his efforts and courage if he was actually doing something worthwhile and noble. Instead, he's grandstanding and being stupid about it, to boot. He deserves to be thrown in jail just for being such a pathetic example of a journalist.
Um, there's hardly anyone that supports a "free media" more than I do. But that doesn't include a media that is allowed to break the law. The media is as bound by the law as everyone else is. Why shouldn't they be?
He was foolish because he could have gotten himself shot, and he will probably find himself being prosecuted for it. He was obnoxiously foolish because he didn't prove anything of any real consequence. It was a stunt. That's bad journalism. It's probably more self-aggrandizement than anything else.
"
So a guy with a camera hops a fense in the middle of a radioactive desert, and snaps a few pics of some ominous-looking signs near said fence.
Actually, if he was along NM 4, then he was at about 8,500 feet and in a sub-alpine area with lots of wildlife and lots of conifers. In fact, if he did it recently, there was probably a considerable amount of snow on the ground.
Los Alamos is in the mountains.
The little pond in the middle of town, Ashley Pond, regularly freezes over for the winter and people ice skate on it. The scientists at LANL during the Manhatten Project took some dynamite up the nearby mountain, blew up some trees, installed a rope ski lift, and built one of the first downhill ski runs in NM. Cross country skiing is a popular winter pastime in Los Alamos. According to the weather report I just consulted, the current temperature is 36 degrees F, with snow flurries and snowfall today and all this week. (Ironically, Austin, TX, where I am, is currently 27 degrees F, with ice on the ground and the city is shut down completely.)
The place where they tested the first bomb, Trinity Site, is in the desert about 200 miles south of there and is much lower in elevation.
"
Because, by definition, "criminal" trespass requires "criminal" intent, or the intent to do harm. Walking across someone's lawn is not criminal."
Wrong. "Intent" only rarely matters in criminal cases, and even then it usually only differentiates the degree of the crime. I don't know where you get your legal information. The comics?
Slashdot Mirror
That's not a troll. Yes, there is a finite amount of fossil fuel in the Earth. But, no, we're not likely to consume all of it, or even very much of it. That's because there's a lot more there that's hard to get to, hard to extract, hard to refine, whatever. As we run out of the easy stuff, there will be economic pressures to switch to something else. Eventually we will. Long before the supply of fossil fuel runs out.
Not the Earth's distance from the Sun, not the number of hours of daylight.[1] Hmm. What could it be?
[1] That neither of these are the case should be obvious with just a little reflection on some matters of geography that are known to almost all schoolchildren.
Yesterday, Perl and Larry Wall came up in, believe it or not, a conversation I had with a friend regarding moviemaking. I had recently watched the director's commentary tracks on the DVDs of Rodriquez's "El Mariachi" and "Desperado", and I was explaining how impressed I was with his pragmatism. One of the most astonishing examples of this, to me, were his repeated admissions of complete disregard for certain kinds of continuity because "this is an action movie, things are happening very fast, and no one is going to notice it anyway." (That's a paraphrase.) He explained that he has x amount of time to get y amount of shots in a day's shooting, and worrying about details that no one is going to notice just doesn't make any sense.
Prior to watching these commentaries, I had rewatched Payne's "Election", which I think is a brilliant film, and after watching it I also watched it with the director's commentary. Payne is clearly a perfectionist, and he went to great lengths to preserve continuity and to create verisimilitude. (For example, two of his pet peeves in movies are cars without windshield mounted rear-view mirrors, and cars that are too clean.) I greatly admired Payne's attention to detail. Similarly, I greatly admire Kubrick's filmaking.
As the rare kind of guy who has both Knuth and Wall on my bookshelf behind me and who esteems both highly[1], and who appreciates both Rodriguez's pragmatic efficiency and Kubrick's auteur obsessiveness, I don't actually believe that there's the conflict there that other people assume there is. To me, it's a question of appropriateness. One approach is "correct" in one situation but "incorrect" in another.
To me, the very best filmmaker would know when to be like Rodriguez and when to be like Kubrick. Similarly, the best programmers would know when to be like Larry Wall and when to be like, say, Wirth. But that kind of versatility is rare. As is the case in so many things, human nature being what it is, most people have a preferred modality of thought and problem-solving, and operate in that mode whether it's effective or not. That's okay, providing that they somehow limit themselves to problems where their preferred method is appropriate. But many don't; and, worse, some proseltyze that their modality is what's "best" for everyone else, in every situation.
[1] Or, another supposed opposition: Tannenbaum and Torvalds. In their debate, Tannenbaum was the purist, Torvalds the pragmatist. If they were actually arguing about the same problem space, one of them would have had to be wrong and the other right. But they really weren't. I think that many of Tannenbaum's points about the superiority of microkernel architecture were correct and have been proven to be correct. On the other hand, you can't really argue with the success of Linux.
To my mind, the best computing language designer would be someone with extensive education and experience in: computer engineering, computer science, linguistics, mathematics, engineering and business processes, maybe psychology, and perhaps some other things I'm forgetting at the moment. My point is that a good designer would have a very strong comprehension of the problem space (the problems this tool is intended to solve), how the tool is likely to actually be used in the real world, how the problem space will evolve over time, all coupled with a very strong comprehension of the most efficient method of implementing this tool in the technology available. That's asking a lot.
In Wall's case, I think that he has a fair amount of experience as a practical coder, which is the impetus for his extremely strong emphasis on pragmatism in his language design. This would be a disaster for most designers, probably, but Wall's education in linguistics probably tempers that pragmatism with some comprehension of higher-level abstraction and some imposition of rigor. You can most clearly see this aspect of Wall's world-view coming through in the Perl 6 design.
However, even though in some sense the scientific view related to linguistics is an abstraction similar to the scientific view of computer science, they're fundamentally dissimilar. Linguistics is an attempt to comprehend and formalize a very complex and exquisitely functional system--human language. In contrast, Computer Science is not a descriptive science; it tends to be proscriptive--looking for the best way to do things, often from an ahistorical almost-Platonic perspective. As a result, it tends to be overly ideological. I chose the word "proscriptive" with some care, as in the realm of human language it identifies a fault line. Linguists tend to be notoriously relativist, asserting that what is "correct" is simple what exists. Proscriptivists, such as one's fourth grade English teacher, insist that there's truly "correct" and "incorrect" usage. In this sense, Wall's background in linguistics clearly has influenced his philosophy of computing language design; and, I think, computing language purists really are psychologically akin to the proscriptivist grammarians like the aforementioned fourth grade teacher.
For my part, in the realm of tools, I prefer aesthetic purity or elegance only when it serves utility (or, at least, doesn't interfere with utility). Perl is well-matched to its problem space, and in this it actually does have, in my opinion, some beauty. I mean, from one perspective a Swiss Army knife is god-awful ugly; but from another, its compact and wide-ranging utility is attractive. Because Perl is intended to operate in such a large problem space, I believe that simplicity, and the form of beauty that is a function of simplicity, is largely denied to it. So? We can't have everything. Ideally, there'd be a wide range of computing languages each perfectly and exquisitely engineered for their respective problem spaces. But, right now, computing isn't even close to being mature enough to support such a thing. In other engineering and science disciplines, there are a variety of tools and methods and specializations each well-suited to the problem domain they serve. And it works because a civil engineer isn't expected to do nuclear engineering work, nor an astrophysicist to do nuclear physics. But programmers are still expected to be jack-of-all-trades, and thus their tools are required to be as versatile--but also as unoptimized--as they are.
However, it was the phrasing of the question that was so provocative to me. It was very absolute: whether someone's identity is changed if their face changes. It's not a very nuanced question, and mine was not a nuanced response.
I think I'm more astonished by this than most people would be. I certainly don't equate my own face with my identity. Not coincidentally, probably, I also am very uninterested in hiding or changing my identity in any way. My identity is my self as I see my self--all the various public versions of my self that exist in other people's minds are secondary and not of great importance to me. My conception of "self" is a self that's solidly behind my facade--the outward facing part that other people associate with me is merely contingent. It occurs to me that many or most other people probably don't think this way.
Why in the world does anyone think that identity depends upon someone's face? Are people really that simple-minded?
Also, from the article:
I'm no more reluctant to donate my face for organ harvesting as I am my liver or kidneys. That is to say, I'm not reluctant at all.To the people who've asked about how much the recipient would look like the donor:
However, later in the article it's mentioned that more complicated procedured could harvest some of the cartilage and bone as well as the skin and muscle. I imagine that eventually they could probably come very close to recreating someone's face on someone else, so the idea isn't completely far-fetched. Still, though, our ability to recognize a face is still somewhat of a mystery, although it's understood that our brains put together a great many different subtle clues. My point is that even though we see faces as near monolithic and emminently identifiable structures, the truth is that even a small differences in muscle or bone structure might make a large difference in the overall recognizability of the face. So, I suspect that a surgeon would probably have to be intending to duplicate someone's face via a transplant in order to achieve such an effect.Oh, please. Wolfram has made some important contributions to CA, but his "new science" is the science of complexity which has been doing just fine, thank you very much, since long before he "discovered" it.
That's being overly generous. "Average", in everyday usage, is understood to be synonymous with "mean". All schoolchildren know how to calculate an "average", very few people understand what a "median" is. For this reason, while it's the case that people will use "average" as synonymous with "mean", no one ever uses "average" as synonymous with "median". Writers (and speakers) always specify "median" when that is the idea they're trying to communicate. I was not wrong to assume that is what he meant.
Now, I still greatly prefer UNIX or workalike to NT for any enterprise application. But the extremely expensive, huge geophysical mapping application that I once was the build manager for--which, at the time, was supported on AIX, Solaris, IRIX, and HP/UX--eventually was ported to NT and probably Linux. Also, for example, tons of enterprise-class companies--unwisely, in my opinion--use 2K and IIS and SQLserver.
If you look at what happened in the workstation/server market that UNIX lived within, you'll see that on a market-share basis, UNIX lost an enormous amount of ground to NT/2K. So, the prediction was in a sense accurate but not precise. NT "replaced" what would have otherwise been UNIX installations. However, the overall market increased significantly such that UNIX has managed to remain significant and viable where it still is clearly (and very noticably) superior to NT/2K.
What this reveals is that predictions of these sorts usually have built-in assumptions that are proven false over time. Often, the assumption is of a static environment. This prediction assumed a static market for UNIX and NT where, naturally, the cheaper and sufficiently powerful NT would marginalize UNIX and eventually kill it. If the entire market hadn't dramatically grown and changed in some interesting ways, this would have been true. But why assume that? A more responsible prediction would have been, "NT will replace UNIX in many applications". Which it has.
To my mind, the idea that you could go and do something trivially easy and become rich makes it self-evidently untrue. Otherwise, everyone would be doing it. However, the people that fall for these sorts of things see it the other way around. They think, "But your skepticism is an example of why everyone isn't doing this, and why people like us--who can see an opportunity for what it is--are the few that make so much money this way."
Personally, I think this susceptibility is a specific example of a more general problem. The general problem is that people are not even remotely aware enough of how likely they are--on any given judgment--to be wrong. I'm always aware that a) I could be wrong about any specific matter; and b) I am definitely wrong about some significant number of matters at any given time. I'm always looking for evidence that contradicts my always-a-work-in-progress judgment. People that want to influence you and fool you about something, if you're not ever vigilant (and have a prideful fear of being proven wrong), will only need to sumrount that first and only barrier of doubt--then they have you hooked. It's smooth sailing from then on out.
I just love this kind of thing. There's almost nothing more delightful to me than seeing someone arrogantly proclaim their superiority while actually demonstrating their inferiority.
You see it a lot on Slashdot, actually.
The con artist goes to a Western Union outlet and sits down as if he's (she's) waiting for a wire transfer. Time passes. The mark comes in, someone who is obviously waiting for a transfer and is impatient when they find that it's not arrived. The con artist strikes up a friendly conversation with the mark. They both mention how they're waiting for a desperately needed wire transfer and they're both impatient. The con artist suddenly gets an idea. "Hey", he says, "You know what? If my wire gets here before yours does, what'll you say that I just loan you the $X you need and you can pay me back tomorrow after your transfer gets here?" The mark says, "Gosh, that's really nice of you. And I'll do the same thing for you." Since the con artist doesn't actually have money coming in, inevitably the mark gets his transfer and offers the loan to the con artist. The con artist takes it and walks away, never to be heard from again.
Now, this is only marginally plausible, but it's the example that came to my mind. Most people these days would politely refuse the offer, but some wouldn't, and some of them would gullibly offer to reciprocate.
"Mike", the con artist in "House of Games" that demonstrates this con to the psychiatrist, asks her if she know why these are called "confidence games". She responds, "Because someone gives you their confidence?" Mike says, "No. Because I give them my confidence." Which is a brilliant line and also very true.
Almost every person has some "weakness" or another that makes them vulnerable to a con artist. Often, yes, it's greed and dishonesty. But it can also be generosity, compassion, or simple confusion. And, more often than you might think, it can be arrogance or over-confidence. Some of the people here who are ridiculing all victims of a scam as being "stupid" may be vulnerable to having their overconfidence exploited. Carl Sagan (and others) wrote about how it is that scientists seem to be surprisingly easily tricked by "scientific" fraudsters (paranormalists, etc.). It's because the scientist's overconfidence is taken advantage of; that the fraudsters, like magicians, misdirect the scientist's attention to areas that they naturally focus upon and perform their slight of hand in places where the scientists aren't looking and didn't think to look. A con artist will do the same thing--set up something that looks like a scam to attract the suspicious mark's attention, then perform the real scam in a direction the mark isn't looking.
Everyone thinks they are immune to being conned. They're almost all wrong.
That said, there's almost no chance that I could be scammed by a con artist appealing to my greed. I'm automatically suspicious of any potential windfall from any source. But, on the other hand, I'm almost certainly vulnerable to a carefully crafted scam that takes advantage of generosity or compassion like the one I detail above. The only comfort I take in that is that there are more scams leveraging the mark's greed than there are that leverage other characteristics.
A classic, authoritative book on the history, psychology, and sociology of confidence artists and their cons is "The Big Con" by David Maurer.
I notice quite a few such misspellings on Slashdot and similar sites. I've tended to assume that the writers were either relatively young (and thus not very familiar with a phrase), or relatively illiterate (not really illiterate...you know what I mean).
Unfortunately, Ms. Garrett looks to be older (in her forties or fifties) and is definitely pretty literate and educated. (Well, actually her education is in biology through the graduate level--journalism was a sideline that became her career.)
So, I dunno. Obviously, my assumptions above must still apply to some people. But other people, like apparently Ms. Garrett, perhaps just don't think very much about the language they use. They use idiomatic expressions and never parse them out.
Insundry just isn't a word and makes no sense. Perhaps she meant "various in sundry", which is a little more defensible. Barely. It's still pretty nonsensical.
I'm not without fault. For years I used the expression "beyond the pale" assuming it was "beyond the pail", never wondering what that could possibly mean. Someone corrected me and I learned what a "pale" was in this context.
How likely do you think it is that you would be arrested in the same situation?
Your response is an example of disregarding what someone says on an ad hominem pretext because you just plain don't want to hear what they have to say and dismiss it out-of-hand. It's irresponsible.
Almost all of my encounters with the police have been extremely fair and pleasant. With one exception: I was at a party in an hispanic ghetto where I was the only anglo person among more than a hundred people. The cops came because it was a big party (as I've seen the cops come to many other big parties I've been at in my life). In this case, though, they acted completely differently than I'd ever seen them act. They didn't knock politely, they just came marching in and yelling at people and threatening them. All my life until then I'd been very skeptical of all those stories about the police abusing their powers (or just disregarding civil liberties). Suddenly, it was like I was in some movie where the police were the bad guys, not the good guys.
This is the sort of relationship that young minority urban males have with the police from as far back as they can remember. From before they ever even thought about breaking the law. They grew up where they were assumed to be criminals or potential criminals from the earliest ages. Isn't it possible that this creates a culture where there's a vicious cycle of self-fulfilling prophecy? And isn't it possible that you, like so many white people, don't have a freaking clue about what it's like living in that world?
To be fair to the US press, though, it should be mentioned that the US's peculiar geographical and cultural isolation, along with the simple fact that it's the dominant economy and, er, culture in the world, conspire to create milleau where information from outside the nation is not as relevant to people's lives as it is for other people elsewhere.
Now, I think it's a lot more relevant than most Americans do; but my point is that, even so, it's not as relevant to us as it is to most other people.
I am very internationalist in outlook, and I'm also skeptical by nature and was taught as a child not to trust any particular information source exclusively. I don't think the US media is as bad as many other people think it is, but it's definitely got its biases and its blind-spots, and I prefer to supplement what I know from non-US sources.
Americans are not xenophobic. I strongly believe that Americans are actually less xenophobic than many other nationalities are. We're actually a lot more friendly and open-minded than many people around the world think we are. I know this because I've known a considerable number of foreigners that have come to the US and have been surprised to find that their stereotypes were mostly false (but still partly true).
However, even if Americans aren't really that xenophpbic, they are quite willfully ignorant and indifferent. I'm frequently one of the few Americans that ever bother to ask my foreign friends about their home countries and their lives there and whatnot. Most people just seem to not care. Furthermore, I recall vividly one startling conversation I had with a very conservative friend. We were talking about foreign affairs and my general high level of knowledge about the world outside the US, and that I think that it's important that US leaders understand that we live in a globalized world and understand what that really means. And his reponse? "That's why I would never vote for you for President." My outward-looking visage was seen by him to be a bad thing.
That's especially interesting coming from a conservative--given that the Republicans are supposedly the foreign policy people and the Democracts are supposedly the domestic policy people. But, with this current administration, we can see just how "adept" at foreign policy conservatives can really be. Regardless of whether or not an Iraq war is justified, Bush's diplomacy has been a complete disaster.
(And you might also mod up the post of mine which contains a link to a detailed map and description of Tech Area 33. Some hard information is useful in this discussion.)
Oh, hell, here's the link again:
DESCRIPTION OF TECHNICAL AREAS AND FACILITIES AT LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY--1997
Here is a page describing LANL, and includes a map. Notice the scale of the map and how huge an area LANL covers. Notice that TA-33 is one of the most remote facilities.
And here is a pdf in two parts (part one and part two) that describes every tech area, and includes maps. The description and map of TA-33 is in part one.
Looking at the detail of the area of TA-33 near Highway 4 (because there's a whole bunch of TA-33 away from the highway!), I see dozens of buildings. Clearly, the writer couldn't have approached either of the two buildings that are designated as being in the "hazard category" because they are well within the perimeter of TA-33 and along the main roadway that serves the cluster of buildings at that northern portion of TA-33. He tries to make it sound as if the whole of TA-33--a huge area covering a range of terrain--is or should be guarded with high-level perimeter security and that, once he crossed the perimeter into TA-33, he was "in". But this is just silly. Buildings within technical areas have their own security, and the most senstitive buildings have the most intense security. He walked up to a "silver building" that was near the roadway. Big deal! That means nothing.
You and all the other people here who don't know anything about LANL are being misled by this writer who is preying upon your preconceived ideas about what such an installation is like. LANL is not like what most people imagine. There are lower and higher level security areas. There are areas that are essentially completely insecure. It covers a huge amount of territory, in some cases seemingly intermingled with the town.
I have nothing but contempt for this writer because he took a stupid risk for a trivial payoff. If he believed that the labs were insecure in this way, then he should have researched what the most sensitive buildings were, and attempted to enter them. As it is, his account reads like someone who was driving around, saw that the fence ended, and decided to snoop in the name of journalism. Then, afterwards, he contacted some "sources" and used their claim that TA-33 involved "black-op" stuff to make it seem like the one little portion of it he tresspassed upon was itself important.
He doesn't provide a map, doesn't provide a description of TA-33, doesn't tell you how much area TA-33 covers, doesn't tell you how many different buildings there are. He provides no context from which the ignorant reader can evaluate his claims of discovering a serious security lapse. He does, however, through insinuation and omission, strongly imply that he's done something extraordinary. But he hasn't.
Breaking the law in this manner should be punished regardless. Nevertheless, I'd be willing to applaud his efforts and courage if he was actually doing something worthwhile and noble. Instead, he's grandstanding and being stupid about it, to boot. He deserves to be thrown in jail just for being such a pathetic example of a journalist.
Well, I tend to think that protection of sources is a valid concern.
He was foolish because he could have gotten himself shot, and he will probably find himself being prosecuted for it. He was obnoxiously foolish because he didn't prove anything of any real consequence. It was a stunt. That's bad journalism. It's probably more self-aggrandizement than anything else.
Los Alamos is in the mountains.
The little pond in the middle of town, Ashley Pond, regularly freezes over for the winter and people ice skate on it. The scientists at LANL during the Manhatten Project took some dynamite up the nearby mountain, blew up some trees, installed a rope ski lift, and built one of the first downhill ski runs in NM. Cross country skiing is a popular winter pastime in Los Alamos. According to the weather report I just consulted, the current temperature is 36 degrees F, with snow flurries and snowfall today and all this week. (Ironically, Austin, TX, where I am, is currently 27 degrees F, with ice on the ground and the city is shut down completely.)
The place where they tested the first bomb, Trinity Site, is in the desert about 200 miles south of there and is much lower in elevation.