You know, this sounds distinctly like the sort of power sources that were ubiquitous in a lot of Asimov's sci-fi, e.g., the foundation series. When I was reading that, I noted that he clearly thought that shortly everything in society would run on nuclear power. In one book, they even talked about the decay of a society until, gasp!, they went back to primitive fossil fuels. I figure that irrational fear of nuclear power and radiation is one reason why this has not come to pass, but maybe now it will.
I really can't speak from personal knowledge here. The street value that was quoted in the paper (based on some commonly used police figure) was something like $100k. Of course, it would not shock me if the numbers they use are inflated. Note also (assuming you're a brit) that the street value of pot could be considerably different in USA and the UK.
Trust me, if you were more familiar with the incident you'd probably agree with the "brain dead" description. Several points:
Police apparently already suspected there was one of these mail drop operations (where packages were shipped to an innocent person only to be swiped off their porch), so they knew the package was likely not for him.
Rather than having some officers come to the door, they had a SWAT team break down the door unannounced, shoot the dogs (at least one of whom was simply running away), and cuff the residents on the floor (where they remained for several hours). The quantity of drugs (30 lbs of marijuana, IIRC) was such that it could not quickly be destroyed, and they had no other reason to think they would encounter violent resistance. Which brings us to the next point...
They did no preparatory research. They did not even know who lived there. The officers on scene did not believe he was the mayor (which they would have known if they'd done even a Google search). What this says is that they simply deployed maximum force (maximally endangering everyone in the house) rather than any reasoned approach based on the likely resistance.
Police entered without first announcing themselves. This requires a "no-knock" warrant, which they did not have.
The package actually sat on the front porch for the better part of the day. The guy even walked his dogs when he got home before taking the package in. That should have been a tip-off that he didn't realize it contained >$100k of drugs.
Basically, they did not take a reasoned approach but simply used maximal force, thereby terrorizing and endangering the innocent. Moreover, their sloppy police work quite possibly would have allowed him to get off even if he had been involved. They certainly should have investigated, but they way they did it was utterly irresponsible.
Your analogy is flawed for a number of reasons: First, arresting someone in their car is considerably less dangerous (to everyone involved) than breaking into someone's house unannounced and firing shots. Second, murder is considerably more serious (and suggestive of suspect resistance) than drug trafficking. And third, it's unlikely that an individual would be victim of a body dumping scheme while it's trivial to mail someone a package with something illegal in it.
I don't know, this sort of reminds me of a recent case of fraud in Physics. If a PhD physicist can make such a mistake, it doesn't seem totally unbelievable to me that a polling firm might. Also, you have to ask yourself if they ever actually expected their results to come under much scrutiny.
Not that I disagree with your sentiment here, but why is it always scientists just assuming they are right without doing actual studies?
I mean, yes scientifically what we know says this *shouldn't* have any effect on the crop. But how many articles do you see in a month in the format "scientists discover/observe phenomenon X that was previously thought impossible"
You would think that by now we would stop saying "that's impossible" and start saying "that's improbable"
In fact, if we're being really strict all we can ever say in science is that something is improbable, even if we've tested the exact same thing before; any experiment has statistical uncertainties, so you can only ever use an experiment to rule out something with a certain probability. Thus, if we're speaking scientifically then "impossible" must always be taken to mean "highly improbable". There really isn't a distinction.
Even ignoring that issue, in most cases a hypothetical situation won't be exactly like one you've tested, so you could always discover that there's some unknown effect that makes the differences important. So, if we adopted the standard you're talking about, we could essentially never say anything is "impossible". To put it another way, we say something is impossible if it conflicts with the rules we've derived from past observations. It's possible that new observations will require us to change the rules, but the burden of proof is on the person claiming such a thing is possible.
gold is basically worthless it has very few industrial uses
I don't think that's accurate. Because it is a good electrical conductor and highly resistant to corrosion, there are a number of good uses for gold in electronics and elsewhere. I imagine that the main reason it's not used a lot more is that its price is so high for non-utilitarian reasons. If people didn't use gold for money or jewelry I'm sure it would be a lot less valuable, but I imagine that it would still have significant value.
Yes, I'm sure the hundreds upon hundreds of farms I've passed and visited while living in the middle of rural America for my entire life are *completely* unrepresentative of how beef cattle are raised in this area.... Most people raise their cattle on a mix of grass and corn...
It's true that most cattle are fed grass at some point during their lives, but 3/4 of US beef is finished on corn (or other grains) in a feed lot, i.e., not grazing the pasture down by the road. I think finishing can comprise a significant portion of the steer's life (at least for grain finished beef), though I don't know the numbers off-hand. Of course, a high density feed lot is, well, high density and takes up a lot less area, which might explain why your experience from driving around was not representative. Remember, the plural of "anecdote" is not "data".
all of the beef cattle I see raised around here spend most of their days pretty much the same as they do in the wild - wandering around through a wide open field eating grass.
AFAIK the vast majority of beef cattle in the US are corn fed. Grass fed beef is much more difficult to come by and usually considerably more expensive. So, if that's what you've seen around where you live, it is not a representative sample.
Thanks for posting this, though I realize a lot of people don't have access.
The abstract of the article in Science actually makes matters quite clear:
While sources of magnetic fields--magnetic monopoles--have so far proven elusive as elementary particles, several scenarios have been proposed recently in condensed matter physics of emergent quasiparticles resembling monopoles. A particularly simple proposition pertains to spin ice...well-described by networks of aligned dipoles resembling solenoidal tubes--classical, and observable, versions of a Dirac string. Where these tubes end, the resulting defect looks like a magnetic monopole.
[emphasis mine]
This makes it clear that they have not discovered a fundamental particle that is a monopole, which people have been searching for for a while. What they've discovered is a material where under certain conditions you can model the behavior as though there were monopoles present, but it's an imaginary construction, not an actual particle; that's what they mean by quasi-particle. As someone else mentioned, this is similar to how you can describe as hole, where an electron is missing in a semiconductor, as though it were a positive charged particle moving around in the material. In this case, they have a long series of aligned dipoles that they're saying is similar to a very long solenoid. If you're outside the solenoid near one of the ends it just looks like a monopole (because all the magnetic flux going the other day is confined to the narrow region inside the solenoid).
If I had successfully transported 300,000 people per flight every day for a year without an accident, using a new fleet of super-giant airplanes, and then I built an airplane even bigger that could hold 2,000,000 people, would you take a flight on that new super-super-giant airplane? Or would you stand back and tell everyone getting on that plane that they are morons while you go get on a smaller plane?
A very flawed analogy. Obviously, materials science dictates practical upper limits to the size of planes (until we can build nanotube planes or something). But more importantly, gmail is not some hypothetical service. It has been running for quite a while now, so there is data from which to estimate reliability. It's not the sort of speculative choice you suggest.
...the difference is how many other people are dying simultaneously, all of whom were relying on the pilot not to be flying drunk, or relying on a small team of maintenance guys to put back all the nuts they took off the engine during the last tune-up. Lack of control actually ends up getting people dead or injured in many situations in the real world.
This sort of reasoning is precisely the problem. It's not that the risks are not real, it's that people cannot estimate their magnitude well at all. Yes, the pilot could be drunk or the maintenance guys could screw up, but statistically it's way less likely to get you killed than driving from here to there. The problem is essentially the people far overestimate the safety of their driving and their car. The truth is that your car can have mechanical problems (because your mechanic screwed up or because you simply haven't been getting the necessary maintenance) or you can make mistakes, as can those on the road around you (not to mention being impaired by alcohol). People irrationally overestimate the safety when they have some measure of control. The only rational approach is to look at the data, in this case the statistics.
These cloud services are developed and run by human beings, and human beings make mistakes.
I think you'll find that most solutions have this problem (except perhaps those offered by Cyberdyne Systems). I'm not an IT professional, so I don't claim to be sure what sort of solution is better, but any rational argument about it must stem from statistics. Most of the arguments I've seen offered against hosted email solutions (on reliability, not privacy or other issues like that) don't proceed from the data but rather from irrational arguments like those offered above, i.e. "if I'm in control it's obviously safer".
As a non-professional, my suspicion is that hosted email services will generally end up being superior, basically due to economies of scale: When a company does things on a large enough scale they can afford to hire people who are really good specifically at those skills, they can choose whatever hardware is most appropriate (i.e., if the most effective solution is a $500k machine that's okay as long as it services enough people), and they are in a position to more reasonably implement things like redundancy, off-site backups, etc.
The main rational counter-argument I can see (other than simply data on reliability or per-user cost) is basically that there's always a trade-off of cost vs. reliability and it may be that you're in a position where email reliability is worth much more to you than the average gmail user. In that case, the choices gmail makes may not be the right trade-off for you. I suspect, however, that gmail's reliability is high enough that almost no one is willing to spend enough to significantly beat it, so this is probably a non-issue.
I think it's just the psychological impact of the lack of control. It's the same reason that people fear flying more than driving (one of the reasons, anyway) or that it's much scarier when you're the passenger during a dangerous maneuver than if you are driving the car and doing the same thing yourself.
Another thing they don't tell you about Bell's theorem is that it's for particles.
Bell's Theorem can actually be formulated in a very general way, so that it doesn't really pre-suppose any particular structure other than two measurements that can be made independently of one another and treated via probability theory. It certainly does not imply anything about treating particles or waves specifically.
I can accept that sort of definition as somewhat reasonably, but that seems to remove it entirely from the realm of metaphysical arguments people like to have about free will.
When you model the universe in terms of will-less mechanisms, you will (amazing!) discover that free will is a logical impossibility.
So the quantum-mechanical model of the universe is incompatible with any free-will-is-real model of the universe. So what? This incompatibility doesn't make either theory right or wrong. The evidence for each theory is all that matters.
I've never seen a definition of "free will" that would be empirically testable. Actually, I don't think I've ever seen a definition of free will that is even logically coherent. Those would be preconditions for debating whether science endorses free will. My own position for the moment is that the concept is not well defined and, hence, the question of whether we have free will is meaningless.
I once had someone argue to me that free will was a necessary condition to make an arbitrary choice, so that was a test. But, of course, making an arbitrary choice just shows you're non-deterministic. If that's your definition of free will, then an electron has free will. However, if your actions are just determined randomly I'm not sure why you'd call that a "will".
Firstly, I find the title of the submission a little odd. I mean, Entanglement can easily be understood as "deterministic" in a sense in conventional quantum mechanics. The generation of entanglement via the Schroedinger equation is quite deterministic. What's usually understood as non-deterministic is what happens when you measure.
I saw a talk by t'Hooft a number of years ago (I actually had lunch with him and my adviser). He was talking about a similar idea then, and my interpretation was that it evaded Bell's Theorem by being a non-local hidden variables theory. I haven't read the paper, so I'm not certain if this new idea is significantly different.
For background: Bell's Theorem is a result that shows that a local realistic hidden variables theory (a theory where each, say, particle has some hidden degree of freedom that determines the outcome of a measurement on it before the measurement is made) cannot reproduce the results of quantum mechanics for an entangled quantum state. To get around this obstacle, it's generally said that you either have to give up determinism (things don't have one specific state, etc. , before they're measured) or locality (the outcome of an experiment in one place may be totally changed by events happening at the same time arbitrarily far away)
Oh yeah, I'm all for getting the data out there in a form that can easily be analyzed, which I think is essentially what Data.gov is about. The problem is that I think this tool will give people the illusion they understand when, in fact, they don't understand at all. And it doesn't provide the tools to reach a correct understanding.
For something like DataMasher to be very useful, it would have to provide more sophisticated tools, and those tools would have to be paired with some sort of resources that teach people about things like spurious effects and how to control for them. That's a tool that seems hard to build and I'm not sure there's much of an audience for it.
I imagine that a lot of good statistical analysis done by experts is already out there. What I'd imagine is needed is not a tool for generating it but a way to finding it and for separating good from bad.
I think the motivation behind DataMasher is to give people a tool to visualize and understand information about the country, and that's a great goal. But I feel pretty certain that in practice DataMasher would end up mostly generating a lot of bad information. The site as it exists now seems to encourage you to think about issues in a really simplistic way (with a simple arithmetic combination of two numbers on a state by state basis) that's going to mislead more often than inform. The devil is always in the spurious correlations, and DataMasher just doesn't give you ability to get at that sort of thing (nor do most people have the understanding of statistics anyway).
Basically, I looked at the highest rated mashups, and it just seems like a series of cautionary tales in how this could lead you astray. On the one hand you have seemingly meaningless combinations, like the product of gun ownership and teen pregnancy. On the other hand you have a comparison of (SAT score)/($ spent per student): People seem to be drawing conclusions about which states are "doing it right", when the results are likely explainable by diminishing returns on spending (once you've spent enough you don't get much more by spending more) and other social conditions (spending is hardly the only thing that affects student performance). Not to mention the fact there's no clue of how much of that money is spent on teachers vs. facilities vs. administration.
Statistics are extremely useful in determining public policy, but only if used carefully. There's already so much bad use of statistics in our public policy debates, and DataMasher seems perfectly designed (unintentionally, I'm sure) to exacerbate the problem.
I'm not a computer scientist, so this may be obvious, but how does the halting problem come into this? I mean, the summary suggests that you know this OS won't crash, but wouldn't a general method for proving that be solving the halting problem? I'm guessing that the answer is that they've just proved it meets the spec, and the spec cannot be proved not to crash. Or perhaps it's that they've proved that this program won't crash by a method that's not generally applicable to all problems, so they would not have solved the halting problem. Okay CS people, what's the answer?
I'm not debating whether the cop should have showed up to check out the call, nor whether he should have tried to verify that Gates was the homeowner. Since we have conflicting information about what happened, it's pointless to argue over whether Gates was acting reasonably. However, to the best of my knowledge (note, I haven't followed this story closely) both people agree that a) Gates eventually showed ID that satisfied the officer that he was the homeowner, and b) Gates did not attempt to physically assault the officer. Based on that information, I'd say it's totally inappropriate for him to be arrested in his own home.
Gates may well have been acting like a jerk (like I said, we can't know), but that should not be an arrestable offense in a free society. As far as waisting time, there is the charge for impeding an investigation, which could be used but only in extreme cases. The extra cost of this to the tax payer would almost certainly be extremely small, and I'm willing to pay a few more bucks of taxes if it means that police cannot arrest anyone they arbitrarily decide is a jerk or waisting their time.
If you've modified a machine and Apple replaced your cheap-o RAM or bargain-basement hard drive if it's found to be at fault, they'd be Major League Chumps.
Given what Apple charges for RAM upgrades, you can install quite nice RAM and still make a savings. If you buy a MacBook, they'll currently charge you $100 for 4 GB of RAM, when the same type will cost you only $50 from Crucial, Kingston, or another major manufacturer.
The AppleCare Warranty is actually VERY clear: Any defective part that Apple sold you is fully warranted for three years as long as the defect isn't traceable to customer abuse or accident.
The ambiguity is in how carefully and fairly that is determined. No doubt in many cases it's unclear why the system failed (e.g., with a dead motherboard). Then the question will be is the 3rd party RAM you put in guilty until proved innocent or the other way around. The point is that it's a lot of money to pay for a warranty if you're not sure how you'll actually be covered in practice.
Slashdot Mirror
If you live on the moon (or somewhere else with no appreciable atmosphere), but otherwise no.
You know, this sounds distinctly like the sort of power sources that were ubiquitous in a lot of Asimov's sci-fi, e.g., the foundation series. When I was reading that, I noted that he clearly thought that shortly everything in society would run on nuclear power. In one book, they even talked about the decay of a society until, gasp!, they went back to primitive fossil fuels. I figure that irrational fear of nuclear power and radiation is one reason why this has not come to pass, but maybe now it will.
I really can't speak from personal knowledge here. The street value that was quoted in the paper (based on some commonly used police figure) was something like $100k. Of course, it would not shock me if the numbers they use are inflated. Note also (assuming you're a brit) that the street value of pot could be considerably different in USA and the UK.
Trust me, if you were more familiar with the incident you'd probably agree with the "brain dead" description. Several points:
Basically, they did not take a reasoned approach but simply used maximal force, thereby terrorizing and endangering the innocent. Moreover, their sloppy police work quite possibly would have allowed him to get off even if he had been involved. They certainly should have investigated, but they way they did it was utterly irresponsible.
Your analogy is flawed for a number of reasons: First, arresting someone in their car is considerably less dangerous (to everyone involved) than breaking into someone's house unannounced and firing shots. Second, murder is considerably more serious (and suggestive of suspect resistance) than drug trafficking. And third, it's unlikely that an individual would be victim of a body dumping scheme while it's trivial to mail someone a package with something illegal in it.
I don't know, this sort of reminds me of a recent case of fraud in Physics. If a PhD physicist can make such a mistake, it doesn't seem totally unbelievable to me that a polling firm might. Also, you have to ask yourself if they ever actually expected their results to come under much scrutiny.
In fact, if we're being really strict all we can ever say in science is that something is improbable, even if we've tested the exact same thing before; any experiment has statistical uncertainties, so you can only ever use an experiment to rule out something with a certain probability. Thus, if we're speaking scientifically then "impossible" must always be taken to mean "highly improbable". There really isn't a distinction.
Even ignoring that issue, in most cases a hypothetical situation won't be exactly like one you've tested, so you could always discover that there's some unknown effect that makes the differences important. So, if we adopted the standard you're talking about, we could essentially never say anything is "impossible". To put it another way, we say something is impossible if it conflicts with the rules we've derived from past observations. It's possible that new observations will require us to change the rules, but the burden of proof is on the person claiming such a thing is possible.
I don't think that's accurate. Because it is a good electrical conductor and highly resistant to corrosion, there are a number of good uses for gold in electronics and elsewhere. I imagine that the main reason it's not used a lot more is that its price is so high for non-utilitarian reasons. If people didn't use gold for money or jewelry I'm sure it would be a lot less valuable, but I imagine that it would still have significant value.
It's true that most cattle are fed grass at some point during their lives, but 3/4 of US beef is finished on corn (or other grains) in a feed lot, i.e., not grazing the pasture down by the road. I think finishing can comprise a significant portion of the steer's life (at least for grain finished beef), though I don't know the numbers off-hand. Of course, a high density feed lot is, well, high density and takes up a lot less area, which might explain why your experience from driving around was not representative. Remember, the plural of "anecdote" is not "data".
AFAIK the vast majority of beef cattle in the US are corn fed. Grass fed beef is much more difficult to come by and usually considerably more expensive. So, if that's what you've seen around where you live, it is not a representative sample.
Thanks for posting this, though I realize a lot of people don't have access.
The abstract of the article in Science actually makes matters quite clear:
This makes it clear that they have not discovered a fundamental particle that is a monopole, which people have been searching for for a while. What they've discovered is a material where under certain conditions you can model the behavior as though there were monopoles present, but it's an imaginary construction, not an actual particle; that's what they mean by quasi-particle. As someone else mentioned, this is similar to how you can describe as hole, where an electron is missing in a semiconductor, as though it were a positive charged particle moving around in the material. In this case, they have a long series of aligned dipoles that they're saying is similar to a very long solenoid. If you're outside the solenoid near one of the ends it just looks like a monopole (because all the magnetic flux going the other day is confined to the narrow region inside the solenoid).
A very flawed analogy. Obviously, materials science dictates practical upper limits to the size of planes (until we can build nanotube planes or something). But more importantly, gmail is not some hypothetical service. It has been running for quite a while now, so there is data from which to estimate reliability. It's not the sort of speculative choice you suggest.
This sort of reasoning is precisely the problem. It's not that the risks are not real, it's that people cannot estimate their magnitude well at all. Yes, the pilot could be drunk or the maintenance guys could screw up, but statistically it's way less likely to get you killed than driving from here to there. The problem is essentially the people far overestimate the safety of their driving and their car. The truth is that your car can have mechanical problems (because your mechanic screwed up or because you simply haven't been getting the necessary maintenance) or you can make mistakes, as can those on the road around you (not to mention being impaired by alcohol). People irrationally overestimate the safety when they have some measure of control. The only rational approach is to look at the data, in this case the statistics.
I think you'll find that most solutions have this problem (except perhaps those offered by Cyberdyne Systems). I'm not an IT professional, so I don't claim to be sure what sort of solution is better, but any rational argument about it must stem from statistics. Most of the arguments I've seen offered against hosted email solutions (on reliability, not privacy or other issues like that) don't proceed from the data but rather from irrational arguments like those offered above, i.e. "if I'm in control it's obviously safer".
As a non-professional, my suspicion is that hosted email services will generally end up being superior, basically due to economies of scale: When a company does things on a large enough scale they can afford to hire people who are really good specifically at those skills, they can choose whatever hardware is most appropriate (i.e., if the most effective solution is a $500k machine that's okay as long as it services enough people), and they are in a position to more reasonably implement things like redundancy, off-site backups, etc.
The main rational counter-argument I can see (other than simply data on reliability or per-user cost) is basically that there's always a trade-off of cost vs. reliability and it may be that you're in a position where email reliability is worth much more to you than the average gmail user. In that case, the choices gmail makes may not be the right trade-off for you. I suspect, however, that gmail's reliability is high enough that almost no one is willing to spend enough to significantly beat it, so this is probably a non-issue.
I think it's just the psychological impact of the lack of control. It's the same reason that people fear flying more than driving (one of the reasons, anyway) or that it's much scarier when you're the passenger during a dangerous maneuver than if you are driving the car and doing the same thing yourself.
Bell's Theorem can actually be formulated in a very general way, so that it doesn't really pre-suppose any particular structure other than two measurements that can be made independently of one another and treated via probability theory. It certainly does not imply anything about treating particles or waves specifically.
I can accept that sort of definition as somewhat reasonably, but that seems to remove it entirely from the realm of metaphysical arguments people like to have about free will.
I've never seen a definition of "free will" that would be empirically testable. Actually, I don't think I've ever seen a definition of free will that is even logically coherent. Those would be preconditions for debating whether science endorses free will. My own position for the moment is that the concept is not well defined and, hence, the question of whether we have free will is meaningless.
I once had someone argue to me that free will was a necessary condition to make an arbitrary choice, so that was a test. But, of course, making an arbitrary choice just shows you're non-deterministic. If that's your definition of free will, then an electron has free will. However, if your actions are just determined randomly I'm not sure why you'd call that a "will".
Firstly, I find the title of the submission a little odd. I mean, Entanglement can easily be understood as "deterministic" in a sense in conventional quantum mechanics. The generation of entanglement via the Schroedinger equation is quite deterministic. What's usually understood as non-deterministic is what happens when you measure.
I saw a talk by t'Hooft a number of years ago (I actually had lunch with him and my adviser). He was talking about a similar idea then, and my interpretation was that it evaded Bell's Theorem by being a non-local hidden variables theory. I haven't read the paper, so I'm not certain if this new idea is significantly different.
For background: Bell's Theorem is a result that shows that a local realistic hidden variables theory (a theory where each, say, particle has some hidden degree of freedom that determines the outcome of a measurement on it before the measurement is made) cannot reproduce the results of quantum mechanics for an entangled quantum state. To get around this obstacle, it's generally said that you either have to give up determinism (things don't have one specific state, etc. , before they're measured) or locality (the outcome of an experiment in one place may be totally changed by events happening at the same time arbitrarily far away)
Oh yeah, I'm all for getting the data out there in a form that can easily be analyzed, which I think is essentially what Data.gov is about. The problem is that I think this tool will give people the illusion they understand when, in fact, they don't understand at all. And it doesn't provide the tools to reach a correct understanding.
For something like DataMasher to be very useful, it would have to provide more sophisticated tools, and those tools would have to be paired with some sort of resources that teach people about things like spurious effects and how to control for them. That's a tool that seems hard to build and I'm not sure there's much of an audience for it.
I imagine that a lot of good statistical analysis done by experts is already out there. What I'd imagine is needed is not a tool for generating it but a way to finding it and for separating good from bad.
I think the motivation behind DataMasher is to give people a tool to visualize and understand information about the country, and that's a great goal. But I feel pretty certain that in practice DataMasher would end up mostly generating a lot of bad information. The site as it exists now seems to encourage you to think about issues in a really simplistic way (with a simple arithmetic combination of two numbers on a state by state basis) that's going to mislead more often than inform. The devil is always in the spurious correlations, and DataMasher just doesn't give you ability to get at that sort of thing (nor do most people have the understanding of statistics anyway).
Basically, I looked at the highest rated mashups, and it just seems like a series of cautionary tales in how this could lead you astray. On the one hand you have seemingly meaningless combinations, like the product of gun ownership and teen pregnancy. On the other hand you have a comparison of (SAT score)/($ spent per student): People seem to be drawing conclusions about which states are "doing it right", when the results are likely explainable by diminishing returns on spending (once you've spent enough you don't get much more by spending more) and other social conditions (spending is hardly the only thing that affects student performance). Not to mention the fact there's no clue of how much of that money is spent on teachers vs. facilities vs. administration.
Statistics are extremely useful in determining public policy, but only if used carefully. There's already so much bad use of statistics in our public policy debates, and DataMasher seems perfectly designed (unintentionally, I'm sure) to exacerbate the problem.
Raw potatoes do contain varying amounts of a toxic substance. Which is not to say people won't generally survive eating them, but it's probably not a good thing to eat.
So the point is that the method they're using is not general?
I'm not a computer scientist, so this may be obvious, but how does the halting problem come into this? I mean, the summary suggests that you know this OS won't crash, but wouldn't a general method for proving that be solving the halting problem? I'm guessing that the answer is that they've just proved it meets the spec, and the spec cannot be proved not to crash. Or perhaps it's that they've proved that this program won't crash by a method that's not generally applicable to all problems, so they would not have solved the halting problem. Okay CS people, what's the answer?
Thanks. I think that will be far more authoritative for people reading the thread.
I'm not debating whether the cop should have showed up to check out the call, nor whether he should have tried to verify that Gates was the homeowner. Since we have conflicting information about what happened, it's pointless to argue over whether Gates was acting reasonably. However, to the best of my knowledge (note, I haven't followed this story closely) both people agree that a) Gates eventually showed ID that satisfied the officer that he was the homeowner, and b) Gates did not attempt to physically assault the officer. Based on that information, I'd say it's totally inappropriate for him to be arrested in his own home.
Gates may well have been acting like a jerk (like I said, we can't know), but that should not be an arrestable offense in a free society. As far as waisting time, there is the charge for impeding an investigation, which could be used but only in extreme cases. The extra cost of this to the tax payer would almost certainly be extremely small, and I'm willing to pay a few more bucks of taxes if it means that police cannot arrest anyone they arbitrarily decide is a jerk or waisting their time.
Given what Apple charges for RAM upgrades, you can install quite nice RAM and still make a savings. If you buy a MacBook, they'll currently charge you $100 for 4 GB of RAM, when the same type will cost you only $50 from Crucial, Kingston, or another major manufacturer.
The ambiguity is in how carefully and fairly that is determined. No doubt in many cases it's unclear why the system failed (e.g., with a dead motherboard). Then the question will be is the 3rd party RAM you put in guilty until proved innocent or the other way around. The point is that it's a lot of money to pay for a warranty if you're not sure how you'll actually be covered in practice.
I think you're right, but it'd be much more convincing if you could cite some source (preferably with legal expertise).