He wouldn't even check to see if it was my computer or the connection.
That's it right there. They're saying that they won't test and fix their problems because of your operating system. It's nothing more than an excuse to renege on their support obligations. What next? "I'm sorry sir, you've admitted that you're drinking coffee and we don't support coffee drinkers"?
As for Verizon it seems they are the only ones getting with the program. With their FiOS
Sort of.
I just got off the phone with Verizon a few hours ago, trying to resolve problems with my new FiOS line (it works Ok for light browsing, but SSH, youtube, VPN etc. choke it). I suspect it's just a bad box (other people in the area are using it heavily with no problems that I've heard of). But one thing in the tech support call really annoyed me.
They don't support linux, which I can understand, but they won't even open a ticket if the person making the call is using anything but MS Windows. Even though I had all the information they wanted, I had to go reproduce the problems on my kid's game machine because linux "isn't trustworthy" according to Verizon (yes, that's right, a five plus year old XP install is more trustworthy in their eyes than a current Kubuntu machine). At the end of the call the tech told me "Next time, just don't mention that you're running linux."
So in other words, bringing the case and the evidence to the table is somebody else's responsibility, not yours.
Uh, yeah. That's how the rule of law works. What you seem to be advocating (behind your thin veil of snide) is called "taking the law into your own hands" and is, in many cases, a crime.
I'm not allowed to frisk my fellow airline passengers for weapons, issue myself a warrant to search my neighbors house, or plant bugs on my coworkers to collect evidence of their wrongdoing, either. There are laws in place for dealing with these cases, and no of them give me the right to act on my own. Executive branch crimes follow the same pattern. The Constitution clearly spells out how these sorts of crimes are to be handled, and it is the job of the US House of Representatives, not mine, to do it.
My job is to keep an eye on them, press them to do their jobs, and, if they fail, make sure they are replaced by someone who will.
They probably contain evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors
Then the Senate could execute discovery on them.
Why haven't you persuaded a majority of the Senate to do so?
Firstly, in the normal flow of things, this would have to start in the House, not the Senate, and the House leadership (yeah, I'm looking at you Pelosi) has steadfastly insisted that it's "off the table" no matter what new information comes to light.
But secondly, the whole reason we know about this is because various congressional comities have tried to execute discovery on them. And they got a series of "the dog ate my homework" answers (including a truly bazaar sequence featuring a "oh, but he barfed this particular one back up" tap dance when they accidentally produced some of the lost emails). The Congress is certainly being lackadaisical in pursuing the matter, but they are pursuing it, and have issued a variety of subpoenas for the information. Were it not for these requests, we might never have learned that the emails were missing (except when they aren't).
In case you are missing the context here, the emails in question are interesting for a whole slew of reasons. The probably contain evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors (most likely by Cheney, but who knows) and pretty much have to contain evidence of perjury (with the morass of statements that have been made under oath, someone is surely lying, we just don't know who). And them there's the Hacth act violations, the Abrimoff issues, the election tampering, and on and on.
Could you explain this more? Why exactly is it bad to get noticed? I find your viewpoint interesting but there isn't much content in your post...
Because in the normal flow of things he's not supposed to get noticed, so that would mean by definition that he was out of the normal flow of things. It's set up that way because upper management simply can't keep tabs on all the junior staff; that's what middle managers are for.
But upper management does occasionally take notice of someone at the bottom of the food chain. This can happen for all sorts of reasons:
The newbie is such a phenomenal screwup that they can't help noticing
They need someone to give a project to that no one with a clue would touch
They need a scapegoat
They are looking for a sexual conquest
They need someone to make an example of
They need a spy / mole / stoolie
The list goes on and on, and the details can vary enormously, but it never works out well for the newbie.
You seem to be assuming throughout all this that an atheist is "someone who does not believe in a god or gods" (and thus is characterized by the absence of a belief) when in fact an atheist is someone who believes that there are no gods (characterized by the presence of a belief).
These do not form a dichotomy. It is quite cogent to not believe in the existence of something without actively believing that the thing does not exist. For example, on the question of your oldest surviving third cousin's best friend having a pet, I neither believe nor disbelieve. I, frankly, do not even know if you have any surviving third cousins, let alone presuming to have an opinion about this hypothetical person's hypothetical best friend's status vis a vis animal companions. I don't know, and I see no shame in admitting it.
This question, however, is far more tractable than the whole theist issue. We could, if we cared enough, find out if you have an oldest surviving third cousin and if they have a best friend, and from there determine if this person is a pet owner. Conversely, I see no way to even get started on the god question, since it doesn't seem like there is a good definition of what a god is, let alone a solid explanation of what existence would mean for such a creature.
Thus, I am an agnostic. I don't know if gods exist, and I don't see how you could even begin to answer the question. But you can not jump from that to claiming I must be an atheist, since I also have no clue how you would go about proving the nonexistence of a god given the epistemological swamp that surounds the subject.
To see what I mean, I'll ask you flat out:
Do you believe in unreified wall snappers? If so, you are an uwsist, and if not you must be an auwsist and thus believe that there is no such thing, anywhere. No claiming you don't know now. And no pointing out that I haven't given you a clear definition of what an unreified wall snapper is. Just answer the question.
See how silly that is?
My suspicion is that you just think you're an atheist because you've fallen into the trap of thinking that you know what a god is, just because the people who think they believe in gods seem so sure that they know what gods are. Really, you're an agnostic and you're stuck being one until someone can show you a god and say "Look, see, this is a god!", in which case you'll be a theist.
But atheist are just people who've fallen for the idea of gods far enough to think that the question of their existence or non-existence is meaningful, but not far enough to tithe and wear funny hats and things on some god's behalf.
For most people two levels above the new guy, they just don't care who he is yet and don't want to hear about him unless he's done something noteworthy
More importantly, he doesn't want them to care who he is yet.
Trust me, new hires do not (or should not, if they have any sense) want to come to the attention of people two or more levels above them. Bad things will come of it.
It never plays out the same way, but it always turns out bad for the new hire.
Trust me, you do not want upper management to know who you are yet.
--MarkusQ
P.S. There's an old saying "Whether the pitcher hits the rock or the rock hits the pitcher, it bodes ill for the pitcher."
word microcode was used to differentiate a specific type of state machine, where the logic functions were encoded in a regular grid-shaped ROM array
While this was by far the most common sort of implementation, it wasn't what drove the definition. Many factors can effect how things ultimately get laid out on the silicon, and nobody ever said "well, we thought it was going to be micro coded but the ROM area wound up L shaped instead of rectangular, so I guess it isn't."
What drove the definition was what differentiated micro-coded architectures from their piers and predecessors--the explicit use of a systematic way to organize and sequence the control lines (and there was some overlap and blur around the edges--ad hoc systems with "meta-control lines," gates arrays, RAM, and even demultiplexors instead of ROMS, etc.) to permit the design of more complex instructions. Because they were systematic, such systems could be written down like code instead of being laid out like circuits (which the ultimately were) and thus the name.
Microcode is a way of designing (and thinking about) a CPU, not at the end of the day a way of implementing one. You could take a fully specified microcoded architecture and opportunistically replace some or all of the microstore with a gatemaze without effecting it's formal behaviour. Since the result would often be smaller, faster, and use less power this was commonly done.
That most certainly does not make it microcoded. Microcode is a set of words encoded in ROM memory that are read out one per clock, whose bits directly control the logic units of a processor. Microcode usually runs sequentially, in a fixed order, may contain subroutines, and is usually not very efficient.
Modern CISC CPUs translate the incoming instructions into a different set of hardware instructions. These instructions are not coded in a ROM, and they can run independently, out of order and concurrently. They are much closer to RISC instructions than to any microcode.
The distinction you seem to be trying to draw here is not very sound. Modern CPUs "translating instructions into hardware instructions" with a gate maze is essentially the same thing as pulling a wide microcode word from ROM whose bits directly control the logic units. In both cases you put some bits in to start the process off, and you get a larger number of bits as a wide bus of signals out, which are used to direct traffic inside the CPU. The picture only looks
Specifically, the different parts of each microcode instruction executed in parallel then, just as now, though out of order execution was much rarer (some DSPs had it IIRC). This was not because microcode as it was then conceived couldn't handle it, but that the in-CPU hardware to support it wasn't there. There's no point going through gymnastics to feed your ALU if you've only got one and it's an order of magnitude slower than the circuit that feeds it.
One of the biggest annoyances of staying in any one field for too long is having to watch some technology following the logical path from conception to fruition go through an endless series of renaming (AKA jargon upgrades) that add nothing but confusion and pomposity to the field.
Research and Development can usually be mirrored nicely as science and engineering.
Agreed. My point is that, while you can do science without knowing what it is you are studying, it is essentially impossible to do engineering this way. No one in the real world builds something and then turns it on with a dramatic flourish to find out what they've invented.
Everyone talks about the vague benefits of the Apollo program, but no one really knows what they are. When they do give specifics, they turn out to be independently developed. At a minimum, it would have been more effective to just develop the technologies directly.
Nuts. That's not how technology works. We conceptually divide R & D into an R-part and a D-part for a reason. As the old saying goes, if you know what you are trying to accomplish, how long it will take, or what it will cost, you aren't doing research. Research is a process of filling in the gaps in your knowledge, figuring out how the piece fit, and in general pursuing knowledge directly.
But eventually, in any given area, this process winds down and stops.
That's where the development part comes in. It is the mirror image of research, the logical complement in which you take what you've learned and try to apply it to some concrete goal. By it's very nature it can't be done without some sort of goal (more typically, thousands of interrelated goals), any more than you can become a concert pianist without ever sitting down trying to play some specific piece of music.
Science comes out of the former, and technology comes out of the later. Both have their special needs, rewards, and limitations. In this case of technology, which is what we call the results of trying to apply some sort of science to accomplish some goal, these needs include a) some science, and b) a goal.
To drive this point home, can you name one single significant technology that was ever, in the whole course of history, developed directly by some person or group of people who weren't trying to accomplish some goal?
The market discounts all future cash flow -- near and long term -- by an appropriate discount (risk) factor.
Not quite. The market discounts future cash flow by a factor based on the estimate of the risk. Humans are notoriously bad at doing such calculations often being off by orders of magnitude in either direction once you enter the realm of big consequences and low probabilities. People buy lottery tickets, will walk in the middle of the street at night during a rain storm (presumably because the trees along the sides of the road increase your chance of getting hit by lightning), invest huge amounts of money in companies that sell dog food over the internet and so on.
Space exploitation is risky, yes, but the risks are, objectively, dwarfed by the rewards. The market is simply failing to properly weigh the risks and the benefits.
For just one example, consider the fact that sending a couple of dozen people to the moon in the 60s (including developing much of the technology and building much of the infrastructure from scratch) cost roughly $100B in today's dollars, or less than 20% of what the Iraq war has cost. In addition, the Apollo program gave us a huge number of ancillary benefits and made subsequent operations (e.g. Skylab much cheaper). Putting an amount of effort (money, mandate, and manpower) less than what we've sunk into Iraqi (and with substantially lower loss of life) into space-based solar power would get us complete independence from foreign oil, go a long way towards solving global warming, and probably have huge side benefits that we can't even conceive of yet. Given the facts, it would seem a no brainer to support such a program if it weren't for the human tendency to grossly misestimate risks. But a handful of astronauts dying spectacularly on national television makes space exploitation seem far riskier (at an emotional level at least) than thousands of people dying quietly in a war somewhere. So we go for the more expensive, more dangerous plan with the lower payoff based on a flawed risk assessment.
So much to respond to, so little time. Picking a few points at semi-random:
There wouldn't be talk of "universal health care", "single payer health care" in that case.
No one is talking about universal health care, they're talking about universal health insurance (although they all try to blur this distinction as much as possible). Using the power of the state to enrich corporate backers is a hallmark of fascist (far right wing) political systems.
Academia is far left wing.
Are you riffing off of the Colbert quip "The truth has a well know liberal bias" or are you serious that you think anyone engaged in the study or teaching of anything is "far left wing"? Would you, for example, consider the faculty of Brigam Young are all far left wingers?
If the media were right of center, we'd be talking about abolishing the Federal Income Tax, abolishing the Federal Reserve
If you are correct there should be several countries that are farther to the right than the US, and thus have no taxation and no national banking system and don't not attempt to regulate the value of their currency. Please name a few. If you can't then either a) the US is farther to the right than any other country, b) your definition is whacked, or c) both.
This should give you a rough idea of my response to your entire thesis.
FOX represents the extreme right while NBC, CBS, and CNN represent the right.
At this point, NPR is pretty far to the right as well. Just how far was driven home to me the other day when they were talking about Berry Goldwater, and the comment was made that his views were "pretty consistently liberal by todays standards." There was a round of hearty agreement from the panel and no one seemed to recognize the significance of what they were saying.
If Barry Goldwater looks like a leftist to you, you have passed the rumble strips and are now driving off the shoulder to the right.
--MarkusQ
P.S. And I'd have to agree with some of the posters on adjacent threads: there is no "left" in American politics at present, and apart from a few blogs and a couple of low power AM radio stations, very little "left" left in the media.
If it was stored in gas form at atmospheric pressure, it wouldn't be a problem (it would just be silly). The problem is that if it's stored in highly compressed or solid form, then if something goes wrong and it goes back to gas, it *will* go up and escape, potentially killing anyone in the area.
Gas at atmospheric pressure in air is only one possible solution. For another, consider that at higher pressure,
CO2 is denser than water under the same conditions. Thus, if sequestered under the sea it would be even more stable than the gas at one atmosphere in air case. There are other solutions as well.
CO2 is not as simple a substance as you seem to be supposing, nor are extrapolations from familiar situations always valid..
Your statement hinges on the fact that coal industry has indeed given any rational arguments to support the burying of CO2 (A very literal way of 'burying your head in the sand', don't you think?).
That's exactly the sort of thing I mean. Carbon sequestration is an idea. There are arguments for and against it, and each of these arguments will have some degree of merit and applicability. If you are being rational, that's all that matters. I am making no assumption whatsoever about where the arguments come from, but you immediately attribute them to the coal industry. I fail to see how this is productive.
Renewable energy is a solution.
Not in and of itself, surely. The things most people mean by "renewable energy" simply aren't up to the task, and most have not-so-hidden costs that make them worse than the alternative (and given how bad fossil fuels are, that's saying something. If you're talking about nuclear, space based solar, or sacrificing most of the world's deserts to do molten salt solar I might buy it, but I doubt that's hat you're thinking.
Cutting back on energy usage is a solution.
Not unless you are going to impose your plan through the use of force, and are willing to kill a large number of people in the process. Tem million uppies switching to compact florescent bulbs isn't going to do it.
In the short term it prevents CO2 from immediately going into the atmosphere but burying it can't continue indefinitely,...
...and it does nothing to reduce our reliance on coal - a finite source
I fear this (and only this) is the real objection. Which (if true) is sad since a) it would be better to focus on solving the actual problem (HCGW) and not get distracted by red herrings (reliance on coal), and b) the very fact that fossil fuels are finite resources is a good thing.
We'd really be screwed if there were effectively unlimited supplies of coal that could be profitably mined at today's prices. Global Warming would then be truly impossible to prevent. Luckily, supplies are limited and thus prices will continue to go up and up until alternative are much more attractive. That is what will send the fossil fuel industry packing, leaving them on the discard pile with slide rules, steam shovels, and buggy whips.
No amount of exaggeration (Moonbeams?) on your part will change that.
Flip, yes, but not entirely an exaggeration. Some of the "alternative energy sources" that have been proposed over the years actually yield, in the best case, less energy than the Earth gets in the form of sunlight reflected off the moon. But I will concede that such flippancy is counterproductive and detracts from my main point.
Considering that CO2 is heavier than Oxygen, I wouldn't like to be anywhere near (i.e. within tens of km if not more) a site that stores thousands of tons of CO2
that's why all the plans involve putting it down somewhere. I'd oppose sequestration in huge towers outside of major metropolitan areas, but putting it deep down in the ground makes a lot of sense.
That's the main problem with environmental groups. At their core, many of them are just as immune to rational argument and unwilling to consider proposals that don't line up with their pre-conceived notions as the fossil fuel industries and their pet politicians.
The arguments against sequestration are (so far as I've seen) just as bogus as the anti-nuclear waste disposal arguments. I'm glad that these groups recognize when there are problems with any given technology, I just wish their response to any attempt to address the problem wasn't a knee-jerk claim that the proposed fix was a scam and that the only solution was to abandon the technology and switch to moonbeams.
In any case, there is no real voting without anonymity.
Likewise, there's no real voting when you push a button and the machine ignores your selection and records a vote for whoever the programmers wants to win.
The difference being, in one case you know, and can easily prove that your vote was stolen. In the other, you have no recourse whatsoever. What are you going to do, demand a recount?
Anonymity, by the way, is the wrong word for what you are advocating. You aren't, I suspect, saying that anyone should be able to walk into a polling place and vote without identifying themselves in any way, and without having the fact that they voted recorded in the voting logs. Surely you can see how easy that would be to abuse.
Instead, what you are advocating should more rightly be called "unverifiable voting" since it's main feature is that it's impossible to prove that your vote was recorded as going to who you intended to vote for. I note that this is only ever proposed as a vital component of voting when the masses are voting. Nobody is saying that our congress critters should have their votes counted this way (even though lobbying and influence peddling is a serious problem). No one is proposing that the electoral college should work this way (making every delegate in effect a "super delegate" and turning the presidential election into a sort of poll with no binding effect).
So why is that? Why is it that when I say I'd like to be able to see proof that my vote was counted correctly, and that it wasn't negated by the vote of some imaginary person, my right to cast an unverifiable vote always comes up as if it were a cornerstone principle of all fair voting systems?. What about having a right to have my vote counted correctly?
Which makes it that much easier to catch the people doing it. In order to coehce the people into voting a certain way, they will have to tell them before the election. That puts anyone who wants to do so in the doomed position of having to anounce their intent to commit the crime beforehand. Any way you slice it, a system where the voter's franchise can't be usurped without their knowledge is better than one in which votes can be stolen quietly and anonymously.
I prefer neither A or B
As do I. But I believe that the correct solution is to have a system that permits a voter to prove who they voted for, and confirm that their vote was counted correctly, and to deal with the sort of extortion and one by one electioneering you are worried about as a separate issue. Ther are systems that permit complete voter verification but do not allow the sort of extortion you are concerned with, or at least make it prohibitively risky / difficult for the bad guys.
I can't believe that people STILL don't understand what is wrong with a receipt of how you voted that you remove from the polling place.
And I can't believe people are still raising this objection. If the choice came down to:
A. The system you describe where individuals could be pressed to vote a certain way individually or face consequences from known or knowable others who would be committing a crime which would be easy to prosecute.
B. The system we have now, where votes can be stolen wholesale and there's not a damn thing anyone can do about it.
...would you actually prefer B? If so, this seems very illogical. It's like saying "people shouldn't be allowed to carry money out of the bank, or even proof of how much money they have, because criminals could use the information". Yes, there are risks associated with A, but they are nothing compared to the risks associated with B.
The principle here in both cases is: I have all the authority but none of the responsibility.
BushCheney have taken corporate law as legal framework for Executive.
Almost, but not quite. They seem to have based it off of the sort of cartoon version of extreme CEO power you're painting. Real CEOs still can't play grab ass with underlings (they do have to listen to HR), they can't just take money from one bucket and sneak it into another (they are answerable to finance) and so forth. Yes, there are CEOs that think they can do whatever they want. We hear about a disproportionate number of them because they are the ones that wind up making the news for their misdeeds.
Sadly, Congress seems to be taking its model from the Board That Sees No Evil stereotype. Which means the splat, when it finally comes, is going to be louder and messier.
Your point strikes me as an odd variation, of the old "but Clinton did it too!" canard.
I was implying that Clinton did indeed benefit from the Lewinsky scandal, as it acted as a distraction...it also blocked out cover of a President lying under oath, a very serious and troubling circumstance that is accompanied by all sorts of serious legal question that impact the underpinnings of American Democracy.
Uh, in the same way that rain distracts attention from all that water falling from the sky? If there had been no Lewinski scandal he wouldn't have been asked about it and certainly wouldn't have lied about it. Or are you saying Clinton would have just spontaneously sworn himself in and said "I never had sex with that woman" for no apparent reason even if there had never been a Lewinski scandal?
Are you implying that our military can be used to invade anyone the President damn well pleases to, as long as it is done quickly? It isn't illegal for me to rob your house, as long as I get in and back out fast enough?
Boy, that's a stretch.
First off, no, I'm not saying that; it's the main reason I'm so pissed at Bush. But Clinton never invaded anyone. We bombed Kosavo (as NATO) but we never invaded.
Second, it isn't the speed per se, but the factual basis (or lack there of) behind the actions. Clinton's use of force turned out, in retrospect, to have been based on good and factual evidence. Bush's invasion and occupation, on the other hand, was based on false statements which we subsequently learned the administration knew to be false at the time they made them. If you're going to get all worked up of the effect of Presidential honesty on the underpinings of American Democracy, chew on that one. The Bush administration knowingly lied to get us into a war.
Third, while speed isn't everything a certain amount of competence is to be hoped for. Unless Bush's goal was to make Iran more powerful tha nthey could ever hope and drive up al Queada recruiting numbers while raising the price of oil, destroying the American dollar and dragging our reputation through the mud, he messed up pretty badly in his handling of the invasion and occupation which he lied us into.
I'm no fan of Clinton, but I'm getting pretty tired of people trying to excuse every stupid thing Bush does by coming up with some convoluted way to claim that, in some abstract sense "Clinton did it too" as if that makes Bush's stupidity, duplicity, and incompetence Clinton's fault. Especially when you leave yourself open for fact based smack downs of the form "No, Clinton never did that, but Hitler did" on everything from "extraordinary renditions" and "enhanced interrogation techniques," to domestic spying and racial vilification.
Slashdot Mirror
That's it right there. They're saying that they won't test and fix their problems because of your operating system. It's nothing more than an excuse to renege on their support obligations. What next? "I'm sorry sir, you've admitted that you're drinking coffee and we don't support coffee drinkers"?
--MarkusQ
Sort of.
I just got off the phone with Verizon a few hours ago, trying to resolve problems with my new FiOS line (it works Ok for light browsing, but SSH, youtube, VPN etc. choke it). I suspect it's just a bad box (other people in the area are using it heavily with no problems that I've heard of). But one thing in the tech support call really annoyed me.
They don't support linux, which I can understand, but they won't even open a ticket if the person making the call is using anything but MS Windows. Even though I had all the information they wanted, I had to go reproduce the problems on my kid's game machine because linux "isn't trustworthy" according to Verizon (yes, that's right, a five plus year old XP install is more trustworthy in their eyes than a current Kubuntu machine). At the end of the call the tech told me "Next time, just don't mention that you're running linux."
Grrrr...
-- MarkusQ
Uh, yeah. That's how the rule of law works. What you seem to be advocating (behind your thin veil of snide) is called "taking the law into your own hands" and is, in many cases, a crime.
I'm not allowed to frisk my fellow airline passengers for weapons, issue myself a warrant to search my neighbors house, or plant bugs on my coworkers to collect evidence of their wrongdoing, either. There are laws in place for dealing with these cases, and no of them give me the right to act on my own. Executive branch crimes follow the same pattern. The Constitution clearly spells out how these sorts of crimes are to be handled, and it is the job of the US House of Representatives, not mine, to do it.
My job is to keep an eye on them, press them to do their jobs, and, if they fail, make sure they are replaced by someone who will.
--MarkusQ
Firstly, in the normal flow of things, this would have to start in the House, not the Senate, and the House leadership (yeah, I'm looking at you Pelosi) has steadfastly insisted that it's "off the table" no matter what new information comes to light.
But secondly, the whole reason we know about this is because various congressional comities have tried to execute discovery on them. And they got a series of "the dog ate my homework" answers (including a truly bazaar sequence featuring a "oh, but he barfed this particular one back up" tap dance when they accidentally produced some of the lost emails). The Congress is certainly being lackadaisical in pursuing the matter, but they are pursuing it, and have issued a variety of subpoenas for the information. Were it not for these requests, we might never have learned that the emails were missing (except when they aren't).
--MarkusQ
In case you are missing the context here, the emails in question are interesting for a whole slew of reasons. The probably contain evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors (most likely by Cheney, but who knows) and pretty much have to contain evidence of perjury (with the morass of statements that have been made under oath, someone is surely lying, we just don't know who). And them there's the Hacth act violations, the Abrimoff issues, the election tampering, and on and on.
These are the missing 18 minutes gone gonzo,
--MarkusQ
Because in the normal flow of things he's not supposed to get noticed, so that would mean by definition that he was out of the normal flow of things. It's set up that way because upper management simply can't keep tabs on all the junior staff; that's what middle managers are for.
But upper management does occasionally take notice of someone at the bottom of the food chain. This can happen for all sorts of reasons:
The list goes on and on, and the details can vary enormously, but it never works out well for the newbie.
--MarkusQ
You seem to be assuming throughout all this that an atheist is "someone who does not believe in a god or gods" (and thus is characterized by the absence of a belief) when in fact an atheist is someone who believes that there are no gods (characterized by the presence of a belief).
These do not form a dichotomy. It is quite cogent to not believe in the existence of something without actively believing that the thing does not exist. For example, on the question of your oldest surviving third cousin's best friend having a pet, I neither believe nor disbelieve. I, frankly, do not even know if you have any surviving third cousins, let alone presuming to have an opinion about this hypothetical person's hypothetical best friend's status vis a vis animal companions. I don't know, and I see no shame in admitting it.
This question, however, is far more tractable than the whole theist issue. We could, if we cared enough, find out if you have an oldest surviving third cousin and if they have a best friend, and from there determine if this person is a pet owner. Conversely, I see no way to even get started on the god question, since it doesn't seem like there is a good definition of what a god is, let alone a solid explanation of what existence would mean for such a creature.
Thus, I am an agnostic. I don't know if gods exist, and I don't see how you could even begin to answer the question. But you can not jump from that to claiming I must be an atheist, since I also have no clue how you would go about proving the nonexistence of a god given the epistemological swamp that surounds the subject.
To see what I mean, I'll ask you flat out:
See how silly that is?
My suspicion is that you just think you're an atheist because you've fallen into the trap of thinking that you know what a god is, just because the people who think they believe in gods seem so sure that they know what gods are. Really, you're an agnostic and you're stuck being one until someone can show you a god and say "Look, see, this is a god!", in which case you'll be a theist.
But atheist are just people who've fallen for the idea of gods far enough to think that the question of their existence or non-existence is meaningful, but not far enough to tithe and wear funny hats and things on some god's behalf.
--MarkusQ
More importantly, he doesn't want them to care who he is yet.
Trust me, new hires do not (or should not, if they have any sense) want to come to the attention of people two or more levels above them. Bad things will come of it.
It never plays out the same way, but it always turns out bad for the new hire.
Trust me, you do not want upper management to know who you are yet.
--MarkusQ
P.S. There's an old saying "Whether the pitcher hits the rock or the rock hits the pitcher, it bodes ill for the pitcher."
While this was by far the most common sort of implementation, it wasn't what drove the definition. Many factors can effect how things ultimately get laid out on the silicon, and nobody ever said "well, we thought it was going to be micro coded but the ROM area wound up L shaped instead of rectangular, so I guess it isn't."
What drove the definition was what differentiated micro-coded architectures from their piers and predecessors--the explicit use of a systematic way to organize and sequence the control lines (and there was some overlap and blur around the edges--ad hoc systems with "meta-control lines," gates arrays, RAM, and even demultiplexors instead of ROMS, etc.) to permit the design of more complex instructions. Because they were systematic, such systems could be written down like code instead of being laid out like circuits (which the ultimately were) and thus the name.
Microcode is a way of designing (and thinking about) a CPU, not at the end of the day a way of implementing one. You could take a fully specified microcoded architecture and opportunistically replace some or all of the microstore with a gatemaze without effecting it's formal behaviour. Since the result would often be smaller, faster, and use less power this was commonly done.
--MarkusQ
The distinction you seem to be trying to draw here is not very sound. Modern CPUs "translating instructions into hardware instructions" with a gate maze is essentially the same thing as pulling a wide microcode word from ROM whose bits directly control the logic units. In both cases you put some bits in to start the process off, and you get a larger number of bits as a wide bus of signals out, which are used to direct traffic inside the CPU. The picture only looks
Specifically, the different parts of each microcode instruction executed in parallel then, just as now, though out of order execution was much rarer (some DSPs had it IIRC). This was not because microcode as it was then conceived couldn't handle it, but that the in-CPU hardware to support it wasn't there. There's no point going through gymnastics to feed your ALU if you've only got one and it's an order of magnitude slower than the circuit that feeds it.
One of the biggest annoyances of staying in any one field for too long is having to watch some technology following the logical path from conception to fruition go through an endless series of renaming (AKA jargon upgrades) that add nothing but confusion and pomposity to the field.
--MarkusQ
Agreed. My point is that, while you can do science without knowing what it is you are studying, it is essentially impossible to do engineering this way. No one in the real world builds something and then turns it on with a dramatic flourish to find out what they've invented.
--MarkusQ
Nuts. That's not how technology works. We conceptually divide R & D into an R-part and a D-part for a reason. As the old saying goes, if you know what you are trying to accomplish, how long it will take, or what it will cost, you aren't doing research. Research is a process of filling in the gaps in your knowledge, figuring out how the piece fit, and in general pursuing knowledge directly.
But eventually, in any given area, this process winds down and stops.
That's where the development part comes in. It is the mirror image of research, the logical complement in which you take what you've learned and try to apply it to some concrete goal. By it's very nature it can't be done without some sort of goal (more typically, thousands of interrelated goals), any more than you can become a concert pianist without ever sitting down trying to play some specific piece of music.
Science comes out of the former, and technology comes out of the later. Both have their special needs, rewards, and limitations. In this case of technology, which is what we call the results of trying to apply some sort of science to accomplish some goal, these needs include a) some science, and b) a goal.
To drive this point home, can you name one single significant technology that was ever, in the whole course of history, developed directly by some person or group of people who weren't trying to accomplish some goal?
--MarkusQ
Not quite. The market discounts future cash flow by a factor based on the estimate of the risk. Humans are notoriously bad at doing such calculations often being off by orders of magnitude in either direction once you enter the realm of big consequences and low probabilities. People buy lottery tickets, will walk in the middle of the street at night during a rain storm (presumably because the trees along the sides of the road increase your chance of getting hit by lightning), invest huge amounts of money in companies that sell dog food over the internet and so on.
Space exploitation is risky, yes, but the risks are, objectively, dwarfed by the rewards. The market is simply failing to properly weigh the risks and the benefits.
For just one example, consider the fact that sending a couple of dozen people to the moon in the 60s (including developing much of the technology and building much of the infrastructure from scratch) cost roughly $100B in today's dollars, or less than 20% of what the Iraq war has cost. In addition, the Apollo program gave us a huge number of ancillary benefits and made subsequent operations (e.g. Skylab much cheaper). Putting an amount of effort (money, mandate, and manpower) less than what we've sunk into Iraqi (and with substantially lower loss of life) into space-based solar power would get us complete independence from foreign oil, go a long way towards solving global warming, and probably have huge side benefits that we can't even conceive of yet. Given the facts, it would seem a no brainer to support such a program if it weren't for the human tendency to grossly misestimate risks. But a handful of astronauts dying spectacularly on national television makes space exploitation seem far riskier (at an emotional level at least) than thousands of people dying quietly in a war somewhere. So we go for the more expensive, more dangerous plan with the lower payoff based on a flawed risk assessment.
--MarkusQ
As of the end of last week at least, Ron Paul was still in the race.
I suspect Hillary finds this fact very inspiring.
--MarkusQ
So much to respond to, so little time. Picking a few points at semi-random:
No one is talking about universal health care, they're talking about universal health insurance (although they all try to blur this distinction as much as possible). Using the power of the state to enrich corporate backers is a hallmark of fascist (far right wing) political systems.
Are you riffing off of the Colbert quip "The truth has a well know liberal bias" or are you serious that you think anyone engaged in the study or teaching of anything is "far left wing"? Would you, for example, consider the faculty of Brigam Young are all far left wingers?
If you are correct there should be several countries that are farther to the right than the US, and thus have no taxation and no national banking system and don't not attempt to regulate the value of their currency. Please name a few. If you can't then either a) the US is farther to the right than any other country, b) your definition is whacked, or c) both.
This should give you a rough idea of my response to your entire thesis.
--MarkusQ
At this point, NPR is pretty far to the right as well. Just how far was driven home to me the other day when they were talking about Berry Goldwater, and the comment was made that his views were "pretty consistently liberal by todays standards." There was a round of hearty agreement from the panel and no one seemed to recognize the significance of what they were saying.
If Barry Goldwater looks like a leftist to you, you have passed the rumble strips and are now driving off the shoulder to the right.
--MarkusQ
P.S. And I'd have to agree with some of the posters on adjacent threads: there is no "left" in American politics at present, and apart from a few blogs and a couple of low power AM radio stations, very little "left" left in the media.
Gas at atmospheric pressure in air is only one possible solution. For another, consider that at higher pressure, CO2 is denser than water under the same conditions. Thus, if sequestered under the sea it would be even more stable than the gas at one atmosphere in air case. There are other solutions as well.
CO2 is not as simple a substance as you seem to be supposing, nor are extrapolations from familiar situations always valid..
--MarkusQ
That's exactly the sort of thing I mean. Carbon sequestration is an idea. There are arguments for and against it, and each of these arguments will have some degree of merit and applicability. If you are being rational, that's all that matters. I am making no assumption whatsoever about where the arguments come from, but you immediately attribute them to the coal industry. I fail to see how this is productive.
Not in and of itself, surely. The things most people mean by "renewable energy" simply aren't up to the task, and most have not-so-hidden costs that make them worse than the alternative (and given how bad fossil fuels are, that's saying something. If you're talking about nuclear, space based solar, or sacrificing most of the world's deserts to do molten salt solar I might buy it, but I doubt that's hat you're thinking.Not unless you are going to impose your plan through the use of force, and are willing to kill a large number of people in the process. Tem million uppies switching to compact florescent bulbs isn't going to do it.
I fear this (and only this) is the real objection. Which (if true) is sad since a) it would be better to focus on solving the actual problem (HCGW) and not get distracted by red herrings (reliance on coal), and b) the very fact that fossil fuels are finite resources is a good thing.
We'd really be screwed if there were effectively unlimited supplies of coal that could be profitably mined at today's prices. Global Warming would then be truly impossible to prevent. Luckily, supplies are limited and thus prices will continue to go up and up until alternative are much more attractive. That is what will send the fossil fuel industry packing, leaving them on the discard pile with slide rules, steam shovels, and buggy whips.
Flip, yes, but not entirely an exaggeration. Some of the "alternative energy sources" that have been proposed over the years actually yield, in the best case, less energy than the Earth gets in the form of sunlight reflected off the moon. But I will concede that such flippancy is counterproductive and detracts from my main point.
--MarkusQ
that's why all the plans involve putting it down somewhere. I'd oppose sequestration in huge towers outside of major metropolitan areas, but putting it deep down in the ground makes a lot of sense.
--MarkusQ
That's the main problem with environmental groups. At their core, many of them are just as immune to rational argument and unwilling to consider proposals that don't line up with their pre-conceived notions as the fossil fuel industries and their pet politicians.
The arguments against sequestration are (so far as I've seen) just as bogus as the anti-nuclear waste disposal arguments. I'm glad that these groups recognize when there are problems with any given technology, I just wish their response to any attempt to address the problem wasn't a knee-jerk claim that the proposed fix was a scam and that the only solution was to abandon the technology and switch to moonbeams.
--MarkusQ
Likewise, there's no real voting when you push a button and the machine ignores your selection and records a vote for whoever the programmers wants to win.
The difference being, in one case you know, and can easily prove that your vote was stolen. In the other, you have no recourse whatsoever. What are you going to do, demand a recount?
Anonymity, by the way, is the wrong word for what you are advocating. You aren't, I suspect, saying that anyone should be able to walk into a polling place and vote without identifying themselves in any way, and without having the fact that they voted recorded in the voting logs. Surely you can see how easy that would be to abuse.
Instead, what you are advocating should more rightly be called "unverifiable voting" since it's main feature is that it's impossible to prove that your vote was recorded as going to who you intended to vote for. I note that this is only ever proposed as a vital component of voting when the masses are voting. Nobody is saying that our congress critters should have their votes counted this way (even though lobbying and influence peddling is a serious problem). No one is proposing that the electoral college should work this way (making every delegate in effect a "super delegate" and turning the presidential election into a sort of poll with no binding effect).
So why is that? Why is it that when I say I'd like to be able to see proof that my vote was counted correctly, and that it wasn't negated by the vote of some imaginary person, my right to cast an unverifiable vote always comes up as if it were a cornerstone principle of all fair voting systems?. What about having a right to have my vote counted correctly?
--MarkusQ
Which makes it that much easier to catch the people doing it. In order to coehce the people into voting a certain way, they will have to tell them before the election. That puts anyone who wants to do so in the doomed position of having to anounce their intent to commit the crime beforehand. Any way you slice it, a system where the voter's franchise can't be usurped without their knowledge is better than one in which votes can be stolen quietly and anonymously.
As do I. But I believe that the correct solution is to have a system that permits a voter to prove who they voted for, and confirm that their vote was counted correctly, and to deal with the sort of extortion and one by one electioneering you are worried about as a separate issue. Ther are systems that permit complete voter verification but do not allow the sort of extortion you are concerned with, or at least make it prohibitively risky / difficult for the bad guys.
--MarkusQ
And I can't believe people are still raising this objection. If the choice came down to:
A. The system you describe where individuals could be pressed to vote a certain way individually or face consequences from known or knowable others who would be committing a crime which would be easy to prosecute.
B. The system we have now, where votes can be stolen wholesale and there's not a damn thing anyone can do about it.
...would you actually prefer B? If so, this seems very illogical. It's like saying "people shouldn't be allowed to carry money out of the bank, or even proof of how much money they have, because criminals could use the information". Yes, there are risks associated with A, but they are nothing compared to the risks associated with B.
--MarkusQ
Almost, but not quite. They seem to have based it off of the sort of cartoon version of extreme CEO power you're painting. Real CEOs still can't play grab ass with underlings (they do have to listen to HR), they can't just take money from one bucket and sneak it into another (they are answerable to finance) and so forth. Yes, there are CEOs that think they can do whatever they want. We hear about a disproportionate number of them because they are the ones that wind up making the news for their misdeeds.
Sadly, Congress seems to be taking its model from the Board That Sees No Evil stereotype. Which means the splat, when it finally comes, is going to be louder and messier.
--MarkusQ
Your point strikes me as an odd variation, of the old "but Clinton did it too!" canard.
Uh, in the same way that rain distracts attention from all that water falling from the sky? If there had been no Lewinski scandal he wouldn't have been asked about it and certainly wouldn't have lied about it. Or are you saying Clinton would have just spontaneously sworn himself in and said "I never had sex with that woman" for no apparent reason even if there had never been a Lewinski scandal?
Boy, that's a stretch.
First off, no, I'm not saying that; it's the main reason I'm so pissed at Bush. But Clinton never invaded anyone. We bombed Kosavo (as NATO) but we never invaded.
Second, it isn't the speed per se, but the factual basis (or lack there of) behind the actions. Clinton's use of force turned out, in retrospect, to have been based on good and factual evidence. Bush's invasion and occupation, on the other hand, was based on false statements which we subsequently learned the administration knew to be false at the time they made them. If you're going to get all worked up of the effect of Presidential honesty on the underpinings of American Democracy, chew on that one. The Bush administration knowingly lied to get us into a war.
Third, while speed isn't everything a certain amount of competence is to be hoped for. Unless Bush's goal was to make Iran more powerful tha nthey could ever hope and drive up al Queada recruiting numbers while raising the price of oil, destroying the American dollar and dragging our reputation through the mud, he messed up pretty badly in his handling of the invasion and occupation which he lied us into.
I'm no fan of Clinton, but I'm getting pretty tired of people trying to excuse every stupid thing Bush does by coming up with some convoluted way to claim that, in some abstract sense "Clinton did it too" as if that makes Bush's stupidity, duplicity, and incompetence Clinton's fault. Especially when you leave yourself open for fact based smack downs of the form "No, Clinton never did that, but Hitler did" on everything from "extraordinary renditions" and "enhanced interrogation techniques," to domestic spying and racial vilification.
--MarkusQ