If it's controlling some flight systems or some medical device, then it should be very stringent about the environment that it operates in
This is why flight systems and medical devices are maintained by trained engineers who are governed by institutional policies that mandate the software changes that are permitted.
The only thing that Linus' is defending is manufacturer's right to prevent anyone from ever running anything they don't approve of. I personally want to be able to run anything I want on my hardware (that's what "my" means) and if the manufacturer has to tell a bunch of lame customers who've broken stuff that they don't get no support, I'm sure that the manufacturers won't have any trouble at all doing that.
I have managed support teams and had to deal personally with irate customers who were trying to run our product on WinME and the like, which was not supported. I had no trouble explaining to them clearly that they were not on a supported platform and they needed to upgrade their OS. It just isn't that hard, and honestly such users are a minisucle fraction of the total support burden.
Likewise, at this very moment, there is code running on computers in hospitals around the world that is secured only by hospital policy. I'm talking about systems in ORs and imaging suites, most of which...well, you don't want to know about the situtation with regard to passwords on such systems.
So far as I know, not one single accident has ever occured anywhere due to a user loading alternative code onto such a system. But I do know of cases where researchers have used their freedom to run alternative software to repurpose such system for all kinds of interesting and valuable experimental purposes.
Linus is proposing to allow hardware manufacturers to use software validation to prevent the owners of such hardware from being free to use it in novel ways.
There is no risk to the public due from the freedom to run alternate code. There is a very low added support burden from users running alternate code. There is currently a very good mechanism to prevent people from running alternate code in situations where it matters, starting with "voiding the warranty" and moving on up to "opening yourself to a lawsuit". Therefore there is no risk to anyone from hardware owners having the freedom to use their hardware as they see fit, and specious arguments invoking speculative situations with mission-critical hardware simply do not hold water.
Their actions are defensive and justified. If there is going to be peace, Hezbolla needs to stand down, disarm, and give back Lebanon to the Lebanese people.
Don't you mean, "Give back Lebanon to the Lebanese people who are still left alive"?
Look, Israel has a right to exist. What at least some of us critical of Israel's war on Lebanon don't get is how "Israel has a right to exist" is in any way logically related to "Israel has a right to kill hundreds of innocent people." This is beyond the Big Lie: it is the Big Non Sequitur.
The implicit argument that Irsael's defenders make is that Israel has no other option but to bomb Lebanon back into the '70's, destroying a functioning democratic state.
But this is false. It has only been a year since Syria was induced by a mix of domestic and international pressure to pull out of Lebanon. The Lebanese economy was still rebuilding after the civil war and the democratically elected government still struggling to build unity within the country across different kooky religions. Changes and improvements were continuing to happen in Lebanon, and life there was getting harder for Hezbollah, not easier. There are any number of things that Israel and her allies could have done to support that process of change--pushing for a beefed up UN mission of the kind being proposed currently, for example.
"Jaw jaw is better than war war," said a well-known fellow who saw a great deal of both.
Israel had not even begun to exhaust the options that were available when it started bombing and killing innocent Lebanese (and the odd Finn and a few Canadians here and there.)
It is well known that war is never economically rational. It is always a dead loss, and there are always cheaper means to achieve the same ends. Therefore, those who would defend Israel's war need to be aware that they are trying to justify a fundamentally irrational act. Dozens of Israelis have been killed in the past few weeks who would not have died had Israel not elected to go to war. So "saving Israeli lives" cannot be invoked as a justification for war.
The justification for invading another nation is always prospective. It is based on the usually-false belief that certain desirable outcomes will be achieved if the invasion takes place. "Iraqis will become a pluralistic democracy... England will have it's neck wrung like a chicken... Russia will capitulate when we reach Moscow... We will have peace once Hezbollah is destroyed..." These desired outcomes almost never come about. A "short victorious war" more often than not becomes a long inglorious defeat.
Geeks will be aware how often managers make plans based on hopeless optimism. There is good evidence that wars start based on just this kind of thinking, and I highly recommend anyone interested in modern warfare read the linked book. You will never try to justify pre-emptive war on rational grounds again.
Thus anyone who thinks that unique is a binary condition has made a rather simple logical mistake that should be corrected.
The meaning of words is determined by conventional usage (which changes over time), not logic.
Etymologically, "unique" comes from the Latin "unus" meaning "one". It was originally intended to mean "something there is exactly one of" and up until recently has been used fairly consistently to mean just that. "Very unique" and "somewhat unique" would on this usage have to be interpreted literally as "very exactly one of" and "somewhat exactly one of", both of which rather grate on the mind.
The promiscuous use of inappropriate modifiers is one of the more delightful features of English, however, and the above usage is becoming more common. I don't use it because I'm an old fossil, and I point out the oddity to people who do, but I would never say it was a logical mistake. More like an artistic one.
All good and fine. But if we have decades of good work with black holes and we've appeared to find quite a few of them, then why would we be throwing them away with just one possible MECO sighting?
Because the two are mutually exclusive.
Black Holes are (or have, depending on how pedantic you want to be) singularities--that is their defining characteristic. No one has ever "seen" a singularity. What we see is indirect evidence for objects that are compact and too massive to be neutron stars. The theoretical upper limits on neutron star masses is quite strong, so we do not believe they are neutron stars.
When a fairly massive star collapses, it stops when the density gets high enough that repulsive core of the strong force dominates gravity. When a really massive object collapses, the strong force is not strong enough, and the collapse goes on unimpeded, which creates a defect in our coordinate system known as an event horizon.
The thing is, if there is something that could interfere with the collapse, then the collapse would not occur. Apparently MECO theory includs something that will do this. I have no idea if it is right or not, but if it is it provides a generic mechanism that will operate in all collapsed objects, so none of them will ever get to the singularity stage.
Proofs that Black Holes exist have always been a matter of elimination--it isn't a duck or a neutron star, ergo it must be a Black Hole. If there is another viable alternative, the proof goes by the wayside until more information is discovered.
Ohh, and there are places like Lincoln labs or LANL which can be a whole lot of fun.
Used to be. I used to collaborate with people at LANL. They've all left the lab now, citing the kinds of issues with bureuacracy that have been talked about elsewhere in this thread.
I interviewed with JPL in the early '90's and they offered me a job in the advanced propulsion group. After much agonizing I turned them down, and over the years everything I've heard about the place makes me glad--too much managment, politics and bureuacray, not enough science and technology. I would have been building engines that never flew, ever.
Academia is a good stop-gap measure, but your experience will vary depending on the school. Post-doc positions, while they don't pay much, give you an opportunity to focus on research. After a few years of post-doc'ing I moved into the business world, and eventually wound up running my own consultancy. This actually gives me more time to work on research problems that I care about than most of the younger profs I know have. This is helped by the fact that I'm a computational physicist, so I don't need much in the way of lab facilities.
If you're an experimentalist who requires real infrastructure, I'd focus on finding a niche in academia where you aren't too burdened by teaching and admin (the admin is generally worse than the teaching, in my experience, but then again, I like teaching.)
The industrial labs of the 20th century were an anomaly. Science and technology are increasingly returning to the 19th century model where individuals find ways to pursue their interests in the intersices of academia, the military and industry. It's frustrating for us because we saw what was possible in the generation before, but the idiot bean counters have killed all of that, and left us to fend for ourselves.
Personally, I think the sooner it arrives, the sooner my fellow Americans will quit buying SUVs.
There are multiple responses to expensive gas:
1) Government subsidies
2) Price controls
3) Punitive anti-driving laws that bring the price down for the few who are still allowed on the road (who might just be well-connected individuals with access to political power)
4) Invading places that have oil to ensure domestic supply
Economic and technological pressures do not have just one solution, and it is a mistake to think that your prefered solution will naturally come about. Often, due to perverse political and economic forces, exactly the opposite happens.
The rise of the SUV, for example, is intimately linked to fleet limits on fuel efficiency. Light trucks were exempt from the limits, because the poor little Big Three whined that they wouldn't be able to make any money if they had to sell fuel-efficient light trucks, and it would cause great hardship to the average American light-truck driver.
Once they got the exemption, they turned around and started building passenger cars on light truck bodies and selling them as a new category of vehicle: the SUV.
So a combination of flagrant dishonesty and cynical opportunism turned an apparently sensible environmental measure into something with major negatives.
A moral of the story is: when business complains about the hardship some public health or environmental measure will cause them, they are lying through their teeth, and will exploit any variance made in their favour to rack up maximum profit regardless of the price to public health or the environment. Ergo, claims of hardship to business should never be taken seriously on such issues. They have cried wolf too often, and it's time to let them get eaten.
There is one thing that seems constant: The mix of successful, marginally successful, and just plain failed projects feels the same as ever, even though I'm positively sure that our knowledge of how to create software is much greater than it was.
For a given value of "our". As you point out, some people get it, some don't. The people who don't are called "managers".
The older I get, the more convinced I become that certain types of brain damage are common amongst managers. Toward the end of his life my father had a series of small strokes that damaged his temporal lobe. Although he could still read and write, carry on a conversation and do some kinds of reasoning perfectly well, he more-or-less lost his ability to estimate the time a task would take, to sequence events, and to understand that simultaneous actions are exclusive (that is, while a person is doing X they cannot at the same time be doing not-X.) My mother actually noticed the first effects during a trip when he suddenly became incapable of understanding that it was going to take five hours to get between points A and B. He could follow the argument, but the result was meaningless to him.
I have observed exactly the same deficits to be common in project managers. I think it might be instructive for one of these groups doing fMRI studies to have a look a manager's brains and see if they have any temporal lobe deficits. It would really explain a lot.
Face it: we've lost. The entire world is descending into darkness and despair, and this time there's no climbing out of it for a really long time (centuries, perhaps even millenia). Police states almost never collapse from within: it almost always takes an outside influence to topple them. That can't happen if the entire world is under the control of police states.
Don't make me laugh.
Here's a quote for you: "We are witnessing a sharp arrest in technological impetus. No more fundamental innovations are likely to be introduced to change the structure of our society... [T]he depression we have moved into will have no end. We can anticipate centuries of decline and exhaustion. There wil be no further industrial revolution in the cycles of our Western civilization." -- Jean Gimpel, from the preface of "The Medieval Machine", 1975.
Anyone who knows anything about history knows that the only universal law is: nothing lasts. Not triumph, not failure, not disaster, not victory. The only constant is hope, and even that is often lost to those who look at the past few years and think they see the threads of millenia.
Police states are vastly, enormously inefficient, and require a populace that is ignorant and unable to communicate or organize itself. What we are currently witnessing is the very painful birth of a new era in human self-organization. We don't know--can't even imagine--what the outcome will look like, any more than a caterpiller can imagine a butterfly. But we know that the change is coming, driven by the following technologies:
1) Distributed energy generation (green/renewable power from a variety of sources) 2) Better energy storage tech (mostly better batteries, which have improved vastly in my lifetime and show no sign of slowing down.) 3) Computers and communications tech, which will the the bloodstream of the new world order
All of these thigns are conspiring to give people the ability to act on the world in ways we have never seen before, and we are only just beginning to explore the range of possibilities open to us. The old nation-states will fight a rearguard action, but they are doomed. It's just that no one knows yet what the future will look like. In a real sense, the singularity, which is as it is conventionally portrayed in just silly, is already here. We are inside the event horizon. We just don't know it yet.
Remember, "You can't fight city hall" is government propoganda. You can, and computers and communciations technology is making it easier to do so all the time.
Google is hiring Computer Science Ph.D.s at an astounding rate. I guess you could call these people programmers (you'd hope they'd know how to write a program or two) but hopefully you'd also call them scientists.
Computer scientists are not scientists. They are at best mathematicians, but mathematics is not science, merely a tool that some sciences use.
Scientists investigate nature. Neither mathematics nor computers occur in nature. They are made things, artefacts, tools. Like all tools made by humans, they have laws limiting their scope (Godel's Theorems in mathematics, Turing computability in CS), and the discovery of those laws was a scientific process of investigating nature. But the vast majority of what computer scientists do today looks far more like either applied (sometimes pure) math or software engineering. The engineering component probably dominates since most applications depend fundamentally on the fact that a computer is not a Turing machine. Modern computers have a variety of capabilities that Turing machines do not, the most important being realtime interupts. Turing's theorems do not apply to such machines, which are fundamentally indeterministic.
The conceptually challenged will point out that the boundaries between science, math and engineering are fuzzy, and may go on to suggest that the fuzziness of the boundaries means there is no distinction. They are, of course, incorrect, as anyone who has ever crossed a road is aware: the finite width of the road and the existence of shoulders does not prevent it from having two different sides. I always wonder if the folks who claim not to be able to tell the difference between science, mathematics and engineering stand by the road wondering which side they are on.
So I do not think that Google labs or MS is a fair comparison to AT&T or Bell Labs. The latter were making discoveries about nature. The former are developing technologies for communication and computation which have a much more limited potential for creating new sources of power or other new technologies for disturbing the universe.
This seems a grand failure of basic logic. Getting negative results does not mean that something (in this case, cold fusion) can not actually happen.
Your extremely poor (in science it would be considered dishonest, unprofessional and possibly fraudulent) experimental description aside, this is a standard line trotted out by defenders of irreproducible phenomena, and it actually has some merit.
I was involved in the 17 keV neutrino mess, wherein there was evidence from a couple of different experiments that the electron neutrino had a 1% mixing with a very heavy (17 keV) neutrino. The original results were in tritium decay, which has an endpoint of 21 keV or so, so the spectral distortion was down close to the noise. But there were other results from 14C implanted in a Ge(Li) detector that were consistent with the tritium results.
A number of people produced negative results, however. The original researchers critiqued those results by saying essentially that a) their analyses were poor and b) their apparatus did not have the sensitivity to see the spectral distortion required. These critques had issues, but were basically fair, and were taken seriously by the community.
The experiment I worked on was one of several "second generation" tests that introduced spectral distortions as part of the experimental design that were of the same magnitude as those predicted from the original results. None of the second generation experiments produced positive results, and the original researchers were eventually able to find out what had gone wrong with their results. The wheels of science took a few years to turn, but it all worked out in the end.
This is typical when competent experimentalists are involved, and everyone in that controversy was resonably competent, and certainly honest. The people who had the original results defended them vigorously, but not beyond the standards of logic or reason, and when it became clear that experiments that were certainly able to detect the phenomenon had it existed were getting negative results, they focussed on understanding the subtle details of their apparatus that produced the orginal results.
Experimental physics is really, really hard. Every result is the product of a million subtle factors. Every honest physicist knows this, and tries to explain in detail what they did to get the results they did, and cooperates with anyone honestly challenging the results. It is a sure sign of fraud when people try to reproduce results, fail, and are accused of neglecting some critical detail that was not included in the original publication. If that happens more than once or twice the people that got the orignal result are not playing fair with the community and do not have a sufficiently good understanding of their own apparatus to justify their original publication.
The BBC ends up hiring a rival researcher to use the superior lab equipment to try to confirm bubble fusion. No dice. Of course, the original researcher then claims that he they weren't doing the experiment correctly, but refuses to help them redo the experiment with his special modifications.
This is typical of these cases. There is a good book on hafnium isomer explosives, "Imaginary Weapons", that goes into detail on the same pathology in another field.
There are good reason to not ignore negative result in science : because those are NOT failed experiment. They are *RESULTS* in themselves.
I used to work in "physics beyond the standard model", which is a cornucopia of negative results, and after a while got to telling people who measured non-zero phenomena, "Hey, don't worry--a postiive result is just as important as a negative result." The joke being that all of us who measured zero year after year got tired of being reassured that a negative result is just as good as positive result--the very fact that everyone felt obligated to say it and no one ever said the opposite proved that it was not true.
I don't think anyone is every going to win a Nobel for taking the limit on the lifetime for neutrinoless double beta decay up by another factor of two. So when Mike Moe or someone like him wins the Nobel for his long string of negative results, I'll believe that the physics community has finally recognized the equal importance of all knowledge.
Just because they weren't able to come up with a description of how to achieve cold fusion doesn't mean they didn't get it to happen in their lab by dumb luck.
Actually, the fact that they are still alive proves they did not achieve it.
Cold fusion requires that virtually all of nuclear physics be wrong, and that virtually all of solid state physics be wrong.
This is why: cold fusion (DD) will either produce neutrons, gamma rays, or very fast moving 4He nuclei, although the latter requires magic to occur. To be consistent with the energy production claimed by P&F, there will be a large number of these product particles--large enough to kill them in a short time if they were standing by the apparatus. Neutrons and gammas are also easily detectable.
But what about high-speed 4He? As any competent nuclear physicist knows, if you make a 4He nucleus move quickly in matter--like a paladium matrix, say--you will get all kinds of stuff going on. X-ray production, possibly spallation neutrons, quite likely gamma excitations...all of this is pretty dramatically measureable, and again, enough to seriously endanger the lives of the people standing next to the unshielded apparatus.
But what about the Mossbauer Effect? Couldn't the whole matrix recoil, leaving merely a paladium lattice absolutely chalk full of 4He? First, the amount of 4He anyone has ever reproducibly detected is not nearly sufficient to explain the energy production. Second, the Mossbaur Effect only occurs when the minimal phonon excitation energy in the matrix is greater than the energy transfered to the lattice during nuclear recoil. The phonon threshold in paladium is far less than 1 MeV, and no plausible alternative process exists.
None of this speaks to any claimed experimental results regarding energy production. It says simply that whatever is happening is certainly not a nuclear process that produces 4He or 3He+n as an end product. If it did, that 4He would behave the same way as all other 4He always has. 4He behaves the same way regardless if it is created via fission or fusion or alpha decay. This is one of the fun things that happens at the quantum level--elementary particles encode very little information, and in particular virtually no information as to the processes that created them. For cold fusion to be fusion, the perfectly ordinary 4He nuclei it creates must somehow know that htey are supposed to behave completely unlike any 4He nuclei have ever behaved anywhere under any circumstances. That simply contradicts far too many well-known experimental results and theoretical conclusions to be plausible.
Contra Sherlock Holmes, once you have eliminated the impossible, if what remains is enormously implausible you have almost certainly made a mistake.
The engineers complaining about some of the other work, such as having to train and mentor other employees, are arrogant and selfish. If they don't want to help improve their company's talent pool, the company will move jobs to places where people are very eager to take these jobs - and mentor workers.
And the companies, of course, will respond to this selfless sacrifice by showing great loyalty to the employees who are willing to dedicated themselves to improving their company's talent pool, and will retain them through thick and thin... And if you believe that I must tell you that I am the widow of the former Nigerian Minister of Mines, Guns and Extortion, and I have one MILLION rupees in an offshore bank account that I need the help of an understanding individual such as yourself to get access to...
Businesses are not charities. Any business that expects selfless (that would be the opposite of "selfish", which is how you characterized the recalitrant engineer's actions) actions on the part of its employees is trying to pull a scam.
Globalization can be a force for good, but to be really effective it must give equal freedom of choice to labour and capital. That is, if you want to be able to move your factory to India or Mexico, you had better be willing to let Indians or Mexicans move to your country. Without that symmetry, the balance of power tilts way too far in the direction of capital, resulting in arrogant and selfish capitalists thinking, quite erroneously, that they can dictate terms to the people who actually do the work.
The fundamental question is when does life begin. That's a question that every society must answer. Everyone agrees that killing a person is wrong.
No, no, no.
Most human societies throughout most of history have had accepted practices for getting rid of unwanted children. These practices usually involved some form of infanticide. Almost everyone almost everywhere agrees that the practice of killing infants is sometimes justified. The Jews were notable exceptions in the ancient world, and were considered weird by the Romans because of it.
So let's not start the debate with trivial falsehoods.
Nor has there ever been any doubt about or question about when "life begins" in societies that practice infanticide. The modern Indian or Chinese peasents who allow female children to die are not in any doubt as to the fact that their children are alive! What they are in doubt about is how valuable those lives are. That has been the fundamental question in most human societies throughout most of history.
Nor is it the case that "everyone agrees that killing a person is wrong." The obvious counter-example, alluded to in other replies, are advocates of capital punishment.
Stripped on the lies and dishonesty that colour the picture on both sides of the fence, the question regarding abortion is this: Should a mother be allowed by society to choose to end her child's life in early pregnancy? I believe any humane invidual who is aware of the social realities will eventually realize that the answer to this question is clearly, yes. Killing an unwanted child is not a good thing. But giving birth to an unwanted child is a far, far greater evil. And taking the choice away from the adult whose life and body are most greatly affected by the decision, and who can reasonably be assumed to have the child's well-being more strongly in her mind than anyone else, is the greatest evil of all.
But so long as the debate is clouded by irrelevant non-questions like, "Is a zygote alive?" there will be no resolution. Of course a zygote is alive. Only an idiot would suggest otherwise. Every single cell in our bodies is alive, and with sufficient technological intervention it is quite likely that some day every single one of them will be a "potential human being." So long as the debate centres around this kind of nonsense rather than the real question of how or whether to practice infanticide in the modern world, it will just be a lot of pointless noise.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is waging a "reign of terror" against "defenseless people" in its efforts to prosecute people for illegal music downloads.
Over a hundred years ago Marx wrote, "What party in the opposition has not been called communistic?" or words to that effect (quoting from memory--dunno where my copy of the Communist Manifesto has got to.) For most of the century that followed it was safe in some circles to paint anything you didn't like--union organization, civil rights protests, anti-war activity, to name but a few--as "communist."
Today, we see the same trend with "terrorist". I have seen and heard accusations of "terrorism" against patent trolls, aggressive commercial competitors, angry former spouses...you name it. Terrorism is the trendy term-of-the-day for anyone you don't much like.
I'm tempted to put in some fairly obvious but sure-to-be-modded-flamebait links to stories on current events that might accurately be described as a "reign of terror" against "defenseless people", just to contrast these with the legal manueverings of the RIAA. I'm sure readers can think up their own links, which will vary depending on political persausion, but in every case they will involve stories where innocent people are living in fear of being killed by bombs, rockets, swords and guns. THAT is a "reign of terror", and I'm damned sure that most of those people would change places with the folks being sued by the RIAA in a moment.
So please, could we stop the hysteria and quit calling everything we don't like "terrorism"?
Google has the right idea, automatic extraction of semantics from content.
But content has no semantics.
Meaning is a verb, and "to mean" is an action of a knowing subject. Communication is an attempt to stimulate the same meanings in multiple subjects--kind of a psychological choreography.
As such, meaning is not extracted from content, ever. Rather, probable meaning is inferred from content, and the basis of inference is fundamentally psychological. What a given word, symbol, sentence, paragraph or page means will depend entirely on who is doing the meaning, and any attempt to infer meaning from content will therefore require a model of who is doing the meaning.
Building such a model is non-trivial, and multiple models will be required to serve the needs of multiple constituencies. The meaning of "nekkid women with goats" will vary widely depending on who is doing the meaning: a man or a woman, an religious person or a rational person, a child or an adult, and so on.
Tagging mechanisms that allow anyone who visits a page to classify it will be subject to an enormous range of variation even without spammers, bored teenagers and other malicious entities. People have mentioned the low quality of data in freeDB, and that is within an extremely narrow, specialized area with well-recognized commercially-created categories. Consider the mess that will result from the average American, nearly half of whom believe that god created humans in our current form in the past few thousand years being free to tag pages dealing with evolution and ID.
None of this is to say that some form of classification wouldn't be a good thing, nor that useful classifications aren't possible. But successful attempts at associating common (within a given culture/sex/age group) meanings with content are going to be vastly harder than most advocates of the semantic web believe, and will be based on a fundamental awareness that content on its own has no sematics. Until that fact is recognized and incorporated into the designs as the deepest level we will get nothing useful out of the semantic web.
Or those companies whose management is there for love of the business tend to do better.
Or that the highest compensation goes to charismatic manipulators with big egos rather than capable people who can actually do the job.
Having worked closely with a number of charismatic underachievers this seems by far the msot plausible reason to me. At the CEO level there are relatively few objective measures of success behaviour, so losers whose only asset is their ability to manipulate people will thrive in those positions, whereas lower down on the food chain they periodically get brought up short by reality and their own staggering lack of capabilities in any area other than manipulation.
If they had the sense to stay in marketing where they belong they'd be a benefit to everyone, but their basic stupidity and huge egos push them into management positions that are far beyond their abilities. But once in those positions their ability to manipulate others for their own gain will garner them greater rewards than their more capable peers.
To this end, "normal science" will often suppress novelties which undermine its foundations. Research is therefore not about discovering the unknown, but rather "a strenuous and devoted attempt to force nature into the conceptual boxes supplied by professional education".
While Kuhn was right to emphasize the risk of myopia imposed by a conceptual scheme, he is wrong in his sweeping statements of this kind. I'm not aware of people doing "normal science" ever suppressing novelties. They may under-weight them, but no one pretended, for example, that the ultra-violet catastrophe or the photo-electric effect didn't exist (although Einstein was famously denigrated for his support of the photon concept to explain it.) Likewise, hardly anyone challenged the quality of Michaelson and Morley's results, stellar abberation or the precession of the orbit of Mercury.
Furthermore, while the rate of scientific change varies, and the creation of a whole new dynamics is a once-per-few-centuries event, the distinction between "normal science" and "revolutionary science" is not that great. In the back of most people's minds in physics is a thin thread of awareness that with any experiment they could find something inexplicable, reproducible, and crucial to our future understanding of the universe. We don't expect it to happen, but we are aware that it could. So are we doing "normal science" or not?
In the fuzzier subjects, like geophysics and biology, there has been more resistance to change because the evidence is more observational than experimental and therefore more subject to interpretation and not capable of experimental replication. But even in cases like continental drift and the bacterial cause of ulcers, it took at most a few decades to resolve, and once the evidence became undisputable people doing science changed their minds.
In no other field of human endeavour does anything like this go on. I know philosophers who still think that Leibniz's Law is more than a historical curiousity with no relevance to the real world. Religious people are obviously still hung up on the utterances of people like Mohammed and Jesus from thousands of years ago, and the subsequent and equally questionable moral and factual teachings of their interpreters.
So the facts indicate that scientists are open to discovering new phenomena. That is, after all, how you become famous and successful. The facts also indicate that physicists in particular are the most easily fooled when investigating "paranormal" phenomena, as the past few decades have multiple examples of physicists who failed to indentify cases of poor experimental design and outright fraud in the investigation of "psychic" phenomena.
I'm always been surprised at the kind of reaction anything labeled "paranormal" gets from rational people. Why exactly couldn't telepathy exist? Is there some fundamental law of nature which states that two people cannot communicate over a distance without sound or visual cues? Obviously, you'd have to identify a mechanism for the communications. If telepathy exists, it isn't magic.
Decades of intensive study have produced no reproducible phenomenological evidence for telepathy, and no study of the brain or nervous system has ever produced any physiological evidence suggesting a mechanism for telepathy. The brain is basically a seething pool of reactive chemicals with a little bit of electrical activity riding herd, so if there are non-verbal communication mechanisms they are almost certainly chemical rather than electromagnetic, and encode desires rather than thoughts.
It is interesting to ask why the paranormal crowd haven't jumped on pheremonal science as an instantiation of their dreams and imaginings. Why the fixation on nonverbal communication of thoughts?
In any case, after a while funding more studies to find a phenomenon that has been searched for high and low without finding any evidence looks like a bad idea. The fact that there is no "fundamental law of nature" preventing telepathy from occuring is entirely uninteresting. There is no "fundamental law of nature" that prevents organisms from evolving wheels, so far as we know. So do you feel like funding my expedition to search for the mythical wheeldebeast? If not, why not?
The first said that the human brain works not only on chemical, electrical, and biological principles, but that it also takes advantage of quantum effects.
This is false. Long-range (ie. more than molecular-scale) quantum effects are important only in systems with very low dissipation. The brain is not such an environment on scales larger than a single molecule or so. There is no evidence that any non-trivial quantum effects are important in the brain, and a great deal of evidence that they are not. The speculation that they are is primarily due to Roger Penrose, who is a brilliant mathematician and wrote a book called The Emperor's New Mind on the subject.
The second article said we had isolated one quantum effect in the lab, that being entanglement. Through a process, two electrons become "entangled", and when separated experimentally up to 10 km, when the spin on one is changed, the spin on the other is changed immediately--with no speed-of-light delay.
This is false. Neither electron can be said to have a spin that might be changed prior to measurement. But when the spins are measured along the same axis they have the same value (and the joint probability distribution follows the equivalent law for the case when the spins are measured along different axes.) It is simply a mistake to subscribe to the classical notion that both electrons "really have" a spin-value "before" measurement (before in what frame of reference?) and that one of the spin values changes "when" (in what frame of reference?) the other one changes.
Remember: the order of measurement is arbitrary. No one can say which member of an entangled pair was measured "first", and asking the question (in the absense of some operational procedure that provides an unambigous answer) is like asking "How high is up?"
The quantum world is not capable of supporting the weight of classical ontologies, and if you try to view the quantum world through a classical lense you'll wind up far astray. I strongly recommend Heisenberg's "The Physical Principles of Quantum Mechanics" as a reasonably accessible explication of the fundamental problems--of all the founders of modern QM Heisenberg had the most useful combination of deep insight and clear exposition regarding the meaning of the new physics. Bohr may have seen more deeply, but he wrote so opaquely that no one can tell, and Einstein wrote clearly but didn't see so deeply. Heisenberg understood how weird it all was, and was very good at drawing the boundaries that it is a mistake to try to cross, because nothing definable within a classical ontology lies beyond them.
Which is, in the nutshell, just the old "security by obscurity" argument. Which has already been debated to hell and back and is known to not work that way. And, frankly, it's weird to see McAffee preaching that attitude, because the anti-virus makers should know the best that it never worked that way.
You are making the error of believing that people are swayed by facts. Most people, most of the time, operate on faith, and not just where religion is concerned. The opposite of faith is empiricism, and empircists are swayed by arguments that point out facts contrary to their opinions. The faithful are not.
A key phrase that can help identify people who are operating on faith is, "It just makes sense to me that..." People who use that phrase and others like it are announcing that what makes sense to them is more important in their judgements than the way the world actually is. This is a powerful simplifying assumption, much loved by people who are just too stupid to handle the profound and beautiful complexity of reality.
So it isn't really a surprise that people at McAffee still believe in security-through-obscurity even though it has been shown time and again not to work. The world is full of people (many of them not conventionally religious, and very many of them in management) who put "it just makes sense to me" before "it is."
Technical work is like this, it requires a full time devotion to stay on top of technology and to master it. Solutions created by people who think of themselves primarily as business men will be atrociously bad (even worse than normal), and businesses that rely on such people will quickly go under.
You are vastly over-rating the time and effort involved in running a business. If you are technically good, and have invested in acquiring a basic set of business skills, then running a business is no big deal if you're talking about a single person consultancy.
The things you need:
1) Basic accounting (and I mean VERY basic--my accountant does all the hard stuff. And besides, most of advanced accounting is learning ways to lie with numbers while still remaining a respected if not respectable member of the community. The least honest developer I know once voiced a desire to become an accountant, and I can well understand why.)
2) Basic business law, especially contract law (lawyers are a lot more expensive than accountants, but the cost of failure is also higher. Tread carefully.)
3) Presentation skills. Stay away from all the bullshit seminar stuff. Join your local community theatre group.
4) Reputation. Every business contact you have, ever professional contact, is marketing. Every arm's length interaction you have is marketing for your future business. Businesses don't start in a vacuum and they are essentially based on relationships of trust based on reputation. Build yours carefully and it will be your greatest asset when you strike out on your own.
It just isn't that hard to be in business for yourself. There is a certain level of complexity you have to deal with, and a lot of discipline required to deal with it (I update my books religiously ever Friday morning, for example--keeping on top of the paperwork is vital.) But 90% of my time is spent on purely technical work. I just get to keep 100% of the profit from that, instead of paying most of it to support an ignorant manager with a big ego.
It took me five years to move from academia to being in busines for myself. Every career move I made within that time was aimed at getting me closer to the goal. I took jobs so I could learn particular business skills or get a closer look at how a small business is run. Anyone with a brain can do this, and acquire sufficient business skills to run their own show. It just isn't that hard.
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If it's controlling some flight systems or some medical device, then it should be very stringent about the environment that it operates in
This is why flight systems and medical devices are maintained by trained engineers who are governed by institutional policies that mandate the software changes that are permitted.
The only thing that Linus' is defending is manufacturer's right to prevent anyone from ever running anything they don't approve of. I personally want to be able to run anything I want on my hardware (that's what "my" means) and if the manufacturer has to tell a bunch of lame customers who've broken stuff that they don't get no support, I'm sure that the manufacturers won't have any trouble at all doing that.
I have managed support teams and had to deal personally with irate customers who were trying to run our product on WinME and the like, which was not supported. I had no trouble explaining to them clearly that they were not on a supported platform and they needed to upgrade their OS. It just isn't that hard, and honestly such users are a minisucle fraction of the total support burden.
Likewise, at this very moment, there is code running on computers in hospitals around the world that is secured only by hospital policy. I'm talking about systems in ORs and imaging suites, most of which...well, you don't want to know about the situtation with regard to passwords on such systems.
So far as I know, not one single accident has ever occured anywhere due to a user loading alternative code onto such a system. But I do know of cases where researchers have used their freedom to run alternative software to repurpose such system for all kinds of interesting and valuable experimental purposes.
Linus is proposing to allow hardware manufacturers to use software validation to prevent the owners of such hardware from being free to use it in novel ways.
There is no risk to the public due from the freedom to run alternate code. There is a very low added support burden from users running alternate code. There is currently a very good mechanism to prevent people from running alternate code in situations where it matters, starting with "voiding the warranty" and moving on up to "opening yourself to a lawsuit". Therefore there is no risk to anyone from hardware owners having the freedom to use their hardware as they see fit, and specious arguments invoking speculative situations with mission-critical hardware simply do not hold water.
However, this is an arguement purely at the level of sematics.
:-)
Indeed it is, which is why I made the parenthetical comment about pendants in my original post.
Their actions are defensive and justified. If there is going to be peace, Hezbolla needs to stand down, disarm, and give back Lebanon to the Lebanese people.
Don't you mean, "Give back Lebanon to the Lebanese people who are still left alive"?
Look, Israel has a right to exist. What at least some of us critical of Israel's war on Lebanon don't get is how "Israel has a right to exist" is in any way logically related to "Israel has a right to kill hundreds of innocent people." This is beyond the Big Lie: it is the Big Non Sequitur.
The implicit argument that Irsael's defenders make is that Israel has no other option but to bomb Lebanon back into the '70's, destroying a functioning democratic state.
But this is false. It has only been a year since Syria was induced by a mix of domestic and international pressure to pull out of Lebanon. The Lebanese economy was still rebuilding after the civil war and the democratically elected government still struggling to build unity within the country across different kooky religions. Changes and improvements were continuing to happen in Lebanon, and life there was getting harder for Hezbollah, not easier. There are any number of things that Israel and her allies could have done to support that process of change--pushing for a beefed up UN mission of the kind being proposed currently, for example.
"Jaw jaw is better than war war," said a well-known fellow who saw a great deal of both.
Israel had not even begun to exhaust the options that were available when it started bombing and killing innocent Lebanese (and the odd Finn and a few Canadians here and there.)
It is well known that war is never economically rational. It is always a dead loss, and there are always cheaper means to achieve the same ends. Therefore, those who would defend Israel's war need to be aware that they are trying to justify a fundamentally irrational act. Dozens of Israelis have been killed in the past few weeks who would not have died had Israel not elected to go to war. So "saving Israeli lives" cannot be invoked as a justification for war.
The justification for invading another nation is always prospective. It is based on the usually-false belief that certain desirable outcomes will be achieved if the invasion takes place. "Iraqis will become a pluralistic democracy... England will have it's neck wrung like a chicken... Russia will capitulate when we reach Moscow... We will have peace once Hezbollah is destroyed..." These desired outcomes almost never come about. A "short victorious war" more often than not becomes a long inglorious defeat.
Geeks will be aware how often managers make plans based on hopeless optimism. There is good evidence that wars start based on just this kind of thinking, and I highly recommend anyone interested in modern warfare read the linked book. You will never try to justify pre-emptive war on rational grounds again.
Thus anyone who thinks that unique is a binary condition has made a rather simple logical mistake that should be corrected.
The meaning of words is determined by conventional usage (which changes over time), not logic.
Etymologically, "unique" comes from the Latin "unus" meaning "one". It was originally intended to mean "something there is exactly one of" and up until recently has been used fairly consistently to mean just that. "Very unique" and "somewhat unique" would on this usage have to be interpreted literally as "very exactly one of" and "somewhat exactly one of", both of which rather grate on the mind.
The promiscuous use of inappropriate modifiers is one of the more delightful features of English, however, and the above usage is becoming more common. I don't use it because I'm an old fossil, and I point out the oddity to people who do, but I would never say it was a logical mistake. More like an artistic one.
All good and fine. But if we have decades of good work with black holes and we've appeared to find quite a few of them, then why would we be throwing them away with just one possible MECO sighting?
Because the two are mutually exclusive.
Black Holes are (or have, depending on how pedantic you want to be) singularities--that is their defining characteristic. No one has ever "seen" a singularity. What we see is indirect evidence for objects that are compact and too massive to be neutron stars. The theoretical upper limits on neutron star masses is quite strong, so we do not believe they are neutron stars.
When a fairly massive star collapses, it stops when the density gets high enough that repulsive core of the strong force dominates gravity. When a really massive object collapses, the strong force is not strong enough, and the collapse goes on unimpeded, which creates a defect in our coordinate system known as an event horizon.
The thing is, if there is something that could interfere with the collapse, then the collapse would not occur. Apparently MECO theory includs something that will do this. I have no idea if it is right or not, but if it is it provides a generic mechanism that will operate in all collapsed objects, so none of them will ever get to the singularity stage.
Proofs that Black Holes exist have always been a matter of elimination--it isn't a duck or a neutron star, ergo it must be a Black Hole. If there is another viable alternative, the proof goes by the wayside until more information is discovered.
Ohh, and there are places like Lincoln labs or LANL which can be a whole lot of fun.
Used to be. I used to collaborate with people at LANL. They've all left the lab now, citing the kinds of issues with bureuacracy that have been talked about elsewhere in this thread.
I interviewed with JPL in the early '90's and they offered me a job in the advanced propulsion group. After much agonizing I turned them down, and over the years everything I've heard about the place makes me glad--too much managment, politics and bureuacray, not enough science and technology. I would have been building engines that never flew, ever.
Academia is a good stop-gap measure, but your experience will vary depending on the school. Post-doc positions, while they don't pay much, give you an opportunity to focus on research. After a few years of post-doc'ing I moved into the business world, and eventually wound up running my own consultancy. This actually gives me more time to work on research problems that I care about than most of the younger profs I know have. This is helped by the fact that I'm a computational physicist, so I don't need much in the way of lab facilities.
If you're an experimentalist who requires real infrastructure, I'd focus on finding a niche in academia where you aren't too burdened by teaching and admin (the admin is generally worse than the teaching, in my experience, but then again, I like teaching.)
The industrial labs of the 20th century were an anomaly. Science and technology are increasingly returning to the 19th century model where individuals find ways to pursue their interests in the intersices of academia, the military and industry. It's frustrating for us because we saw what was possible in the generation before, but the idiot bean counters have killed all of that, and left us to fend for ourselves.
Personally, I think the sooner it arrives, the sooner my fellow Americans will quit buying SUVs.
There are multiple responses to expensive gas:
1) Government subsidies
2) Price controls
3) Punitive anti-driving laws that bring the price down for the few who are still allowed on the road (who might just be well-connected individuals with access to political power)
4) Invading places that have oil to ensure domestic supply
Economic and technological pressures do not have just one solution, and it is a mistake to think that your prefered solution will naturally come about. Often, due to perverse political and economic forces, exactly the opposite happens.
The rise of the SUV, for example, is intimately linked to fleet limits on fuel efficiency. Light trucks were exempt from the limits, because the poor little Big Three whined that they wouldn't be able to make any money if they had to sell fuel-efficient light trucks, and it would cause great hardship to the average American light-truck driver.
Once they got the exemption, they turned around and started building passenger cars on light truck bodies and selling them as a new category of vehicle: the SUV.
So a combination of flagrant dishonesty and cynical opportunism turned an apparently sensible environmental measure into something with major negatives.
A moral of the story is: when business complains about the hardship some public health or environmental measure will cause them, they are lying through their teeth, and will exploit any variance made in their favour to rack up maximum profit regardless of the price to public health or the environment. Ergo, claims of hardship to business should never be taken seriously on such issues. They have cried wolf too often, and it's time to let them get eaten.
There is one thing that seems constant: The mix of successful, marginally successful, and just plain failed projects feels the same as ever, even though I'm positively sure that our knowledge of how to create software is much greater than it was.
For a given value of "our". As you point out, some people get it, some don't. The people who don't are called "managers".
The older I get, the more convinced I become that certain types of brain damage are common amongst managers. Toward the end of his life my father had a series of small strokes that damaged his temporal lobe. Although he could still read and write, carry on a conversation and do some kinds of reasoning perfectly well, he more-or-less lost his ability to estimate the time a task would take, to sequence events, and to understand that simultaneous actions are exclusive (that is, while a person is doing X they cannot at the same time be doing not-X.) My mother actually noticed the first effects during a trip when he suddenly became incapable of understanding that it was going to take five hours to get between points A and B. He could follow the argument, but the result was meaningless to him.
I have observed exactly the same deficits to be common in project managers. I think it might be instructive for one of these groups doing fMRI studies to have a look a manager's brains and see if they have any temporal lobe deficits. It would really explain a lot.
Face it: we've lost. The entire world is descending into darkness and despair, and this time there's no climbing out of it for a really long time (centuries, perhaps even millenia). Police states almost never collapse from within: it almost always takes an outside influence to topple them. That can't happen if the entire world is under the control of police states.
Don't make me laugh.
Here's a quote for you: "We are witnessing a sharp arrest in technological impetus. No more fundamental innovations are likely to be introduced to change the structure of our society... [T]he depression we have moved into will have no end. We can anticipate centuries of decline and exhaustion. There wil be no further industrial revolution in the cycles of our Western civilization." -- Jean Gimpel, from the preface of "The Medieval Machine", 1975.
Anyone who knows anything about history knows that the only universal law is: nothing lasts. Not triumph, not failure, not disaster, not victory. The only constant is hope, and even that is often lost to those who look at the past few years and think they see the threads of millenia.
Police states are vastly, enormously inefficient, and require a populace that is ignorant and unable to communicate or organize itself. What we are currently witnessing is the very painful birth of a new era in human self-organization. We don't know--can't even imagine--what the outcome will look like, any more than a caterpiller can imagine a butterfly. But we know that the change is coming, driven by the following technologies:
1) Distributed energy generation (green/renewable power from a variety of sources)
2) Better energy storage tech (mostly better batteries, which have improved vastly in my lifetime and show no sign of slowing down.)
3) Computers and communications tech, which will the the bloodstream of the new world order
All of these thigns are conspiring to give people the ability to act on the world in ways we have never seen before, and we are only just beginning to explore the range of possibilities open to us. The old nation-states will fight a rearguard action, but they are doomed. It's just that no one knows yet what the future will look like. In a real sense, the singularity, which is as it is conventionally portrayed in just silly, is already here. We are inside the event horizon. We just don't know it yet.
Remember, "You can't fight city hall" is government propoganda. You can, and computers and communciations technology is making it easier to do so all the time.
Google is hiring Computer Science Ph.D.s at an astounding rate. I guess you could call these people programmers (you'd hope they'd know how to write a program or two) but hopefully you'd also call them scientists.
Computer scientists are not scientists. They are at best mathematicians, but mathematics is not science, merely a tool that some sciences use.
Scientists investigate nature. Neither mathematics nor computers occur in nature. They are made things, artefacts, tools. Like all tools made by humans, they have laws limiting their scope (Godel's Theorems in mathematics, Turing computability in CS), and the discovery of those laws was a scientific process of investigating nature. But the vast majority of what computer scientists do today looks far more like either applied (sometimes pure) math or software engineering. The engineering component probably dominates since most applications depend fundamentally on the fact that a computer is not a Turing machine. Modern computers have a variety of capabilities that Turing machines do not, the most important being realtime interupts. Turing's theorems do not apply to such machines, which are fundamentally indeterministic.
The conceptually challenged will point out that the boundaries between science, math and engineering are fuzzy, and may go on to suggest that the fuzziness of the boundaries means there is no distinction. They are, of course, incorrect, as anyone who has ever crossed a road is aware: the finite width of the road and the existence of shoulders does not prevent it from having two different sides. I always wonder if the folks who claim not to be able to tell the difference between science, mathematics and engineering stand by the road wondering which side they are on.
So I do not think that Google labs or MS is a fair comparison to AT&T or Bell Labs. The latter were making discoveries about nature. The former are developing technologies for communication and computation which have a much more limited potential for creating new sources of power or other new technologies for disturbing the universe.
This seems a grand failure of basic logic. Getting negative results does not mean that something (in this case, cold fusion) can not actually happen.
Your extremely poor (in science it would be considered dishonest, unprofessional and possibly fraudulent) experimental description aside, this is a standard line trotted out by defenders of irreproducible phenomena, and it actually has some merit.
I was involved in the 17 keV neutrino mess, wherein there was evidence from a couple of different experiments that the electron neutrino had a 1% mixing with a very heavy (17 keV) neutrino. The original results were in tritium decay, which has an endpoint of 21 keV or so, so the spectral distortion was down close to the noise. But there were other results from 14C implanted in a Ge(Li) detector that were consistent with the tritium results.
A number of people produced negative results, however. The original researchers critiqued those results by saying essentially that a) their analyses were poor and b) their apparatus did not have the sensitivity to see the spectral distortion required. These critques had issues, but were basically fair, and were taken seriously by the community.
The experiment I worked on was one of several "second generation" tests that introduced spectral distortions as part of the experimental design that were of the same magnitude as those predicted from the original results. None of the second generation experiments produced positive results, and the original researchers were eventually able to find out what had gone wrong with their results. The wheels of science took a few years to turn, but it all worked out in the end.
This is typical when competent experimentalists are involved, and everyone in that controversy was resonably competent, and certainly honest. The people who had the original results defended them vigorously, but not beyond the standards of logic or reason, and when it became clear that experiments that were certainly able to detect the phenomenon had it existed were getting negative results, they focussed on understanding the subtle details of their apparatus that produced the orginal results.
Experimental physics is really, really hard. Every result is the product of a million subtle factors. Every honest physicist knows this, and tries to explain in detail what they did to get the results they did, and cooperates with anyone honestly challenging the results. It is a sure sign of fraud when people try to reproduce results, fail, and are accused of neglecting some critical detail that was not included in the original publication. If that happens more than once or twice the people that got the orignal result are not playing fair with the community and do not have a sufficiently good understanding of their own apparatus to justify their original publication.
The BBC ends up hiring a rival researcher to use the superior lab equipment to try to confirm bubble fusion. No dice. Of course, the original researcher then claims that he they weren't doing the experiment correctly, but refuses to help them redo the experiment with his special modifications.
This is typical of these cases. There is a good book on hafnium isomer explosives, "Imaginary Weapons", that goes into detail on the same pathology in another field.
There are good reason to not ignore negative result in science : because those are NOT failed experiment. They are *RESULTS* in themselves.
I used to work in "physics beyond the standard model", which is a cornucopia of negative results, and after a while got to telling people who measured non-zero phenomena, "Hey, don't worry--a postiive result is just as important as a negative result." The joke being that all of us who measured zero year after year got tired of being reassured that a negative result is just as good as positive result--the very fact that everyone felt obligated to say it and no one ever said the opposite proved that it was not true.
I don't think anyone is every going to win a Nobel for taking the limit on the lifetime for neutrinoless double beta decay up by another factor of two. So when Mike Moe or someone like him wins the Nobel for his long string of negative results, I'll believe that the physics community has finally recognized the equal importance of all knowledge.
Just because they weren't able to come up with a description of how to achieve cold fusion doesn't mean they didn't get it to happen in their lab by dumb luck.
Actually, the fact that they are still alive proves they did not achieve it.
Cold fusion requires that virtually all of nuclear physics be wrong, and that virtually all of solid state physics be wrong.
This is why: cold fusion (DD) will either produce neutrons, gamma rays, or very fast moving 4He nuclei, although the latter requires magic to occur. To be consistent with the energy production claimed by P&F, there will be a large number of these product particles--large enough to kill them in a short time if they were standing by the apparatus. Neutrons and gammas are also easily detectable.
But what about high-speed 4He? As any competent nuclear physicist knows, if you make a 4He nucleus move quickly in matter--like a paladium matrix, say--you will get all kinds of stuff going on. X-ray production, possibly spallation neutrons, quite likely gamma excitations...all of this is pretty dramatically measureable, and again, enough to seriously endanger the lives of the people standing next to the unshielded apparatus.
But what about the Mossbauer Effect? Couldn't the whole matrix recoil, leaving merely a paladium lattice absolutely chalk full of 4He? First, the amount of 4He anyone has ever reproducibly detected is not nearly sufficient to explain the energy production. Second, the Mossbaur Effect only occurs when the minimal phonon excitation energy in the matrix is greater than the energy transfered to the lattice during nuclear recoil. The phonon threshold in paladium is far less than 1 MeV, and no plausible alternative process exists.
None of this speaks to any claimed experimental results regarding energy production. It says simply that whatever is happening is certainly not a nuclear process that produces 4He or 3He+n as an end product. If it did, that 4He would behave the same way as all other 4He always has. 4He behaves the same way regardless if it is created via fission or fusion or alpha decay. This is one of the fun things that happens at the quantum level--elementary particles encode very little information, and in particular virtually no information as to the processes that created them. For cold fusion to be fusion, the perfectly ordinary 4He nuclei it creates must somehow know that htey are supposed to behave completely unlike any 4He nuclei have ever behaved anywhere under any circumstances. That simply contradicts far too many well-known experimental results and theoretical conclusions to be plausible.
Contra Sherlock Holmes, once you have eliminated the impossible, if what remains is enormously implausible you have almost certainly made a mistake.
The engineers complaining about some of the other work, such as having to train and mentor other employees, are arrogant and selfish. If they don't want to help improve their company's talent pool, the company will move jobs to places where people are very eager to take these jobs - and mentor workers.
And the companies, of course, will respond to this selfless sacrifice by showing great loyalty to the employees who are willing to dedicated themselves to improving their company's talent pool, and will retain them through thick and thin... And if you believe that I must tell you that I am the widow of the former Nigerian Minister of Mines, Guns and Extortion, and I have one MILLION rupees in an offshore bank account that I need the help of an understanding individual such as yourself to get access to...
Businesses are not charities. Any business that expects selfless (that would be the opposite of "selfish", which is how you characterized the recalitrant engineer's actions) actions on the part of its employees is trying to pull a scam.
Globalization can be a force for good, but to be really effective it must give equal freedom of choice to labour and capital. That is, if you want to be able to move your factory to India or Mexico, you had better be willing to let Indians or Mexicans move to your country. Without that symmetry, the balance of power tilts way too far in the direction of capital, resulting in arrogant and selfish capitalists thinking, quite erroneously, that they can dictate terms to the people who actually do the work.
The fundamental question is when does life begin. That's a question that every society must answer. Everyone agrees that killing a person is wrong.
No, no, no.
Most human societies throughout most of history have had accepted practices for getting rid of unwanted children. These practices usually involved some form of infanticide. Almost everyone almost everywhere agrees that the practice of killing infants is sometimes justified. The Jews were notable exceptions in the ancient world, and were considered weird by the Romans because of it.
So let's not start the debate with trivial falsehoods.
Nor has there ever been any doubt about or question about when "life begins" in societies that practice infanticide. The modern Indian or Chinese peasents who allow female children to die are not in any doubt as to the fact that their children are alive! What they are in doubt about is how valuable those lives are. That has been the fundamental question in most human societies throughout most of history.
Nor is it the case that "everyone agrees that killing a person is wrong." The obvious counter-example, alluded to in other replies, are advocates of capital punishment.
Stripped on the lies and dishonesty that colour the picture on both sides of the fence, the question regarding abortion is this: Should a mother be allowed by society to choose to end her child's life in early pregnancy? I believe any humane invidual who is aware of the social realities will eventually realize that the answer to this question is clearly, yes. Killing an unwanted child is not a good thing. But giving birth to an unwanted child is a far, far greater evil. And taking the choice away from the adult whose life and body are most greatly affected by the decision, and who can reasonably be assumed to have the child's well-being more strongly in her mind than anyone else, is the greatest evil of all.
But so long as the debate is clouded by irrelevant non-questions like, "Is a zygote alive?" there will be no resolution. Of course a zygote is alive. Only an idiot would suggest otherwise. Every single cell in our bodies is alive, and with sufficient technological intervention it is quite likely that some day every single one of them will be a "potential human being." So long as the debate centres around this kind of nonsense rather than the real question of how or whether to practice infanticide in the modern world, it will just be a lot of pointless noise.
The EMP from Starfish blew out phone lines and street lights in Hawaii, and even fused car ignitions.
Starfish also significantly altered the radiation flux in LEO for several years afterwards: In 1962, the Van Allen belts were temporarily amplified by a high-altitude nuclear explosion (the Starfish Prime test) and several satellites ceased operation. The codes used to model near-Earth radiation fluxes apparently had to be modified to include a "Starfish correction" that included the extra component, which decayed with a time constant of a year or so.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is waging a "reign of terror" against "defenseless people" in its efforts to prosecute people for illegal music downloads.
Over a hundred years ago Marx wrote, "What party in the opposition has not been called communistic?" or words to that effect (quoting from memory--dunno where my copy of the Communist Manifesto has got to.) For most of the century that followed it was safe in some circles to paint anything you didn't like--union organization, civil rights protests, anti-war activity, to name but a few--as "communist."
Today, we see the same trend with "terrorist". I have seen and heard accusations of "terrorism" against patent trolls, aggressive commercial competitors, angry former spouses...you name it. Terrorism is the trendy term-of-the-day for anyone you don't much like.
I'm tempted to put in some fairly obvious but sure-to-be-modded-flamebait links to stories on current events that might accurately be described as a "reign of terror" against "defenseless people", just to contrast these with the legal manueverings of the RIAA. I'm sure readers can think up their own links, which will vary depending on political persausion, but in every case they will involve stories where innocent people are living in fear of being killed by bombs, rockets, swords and guns. THAT is a "reign of terror", and I'm damned sure that most of those people would change places with the folks being sued by the RIAA in a moment.
So please, could we stop the hysteria and quit calling everything we don't like "terrorism"?
Google has the right idea, automatic extraction of semantics from content.
But content has no semantics.
Meaning is a verb, and "to mean" is an action of a knowing subject. Communication is an attempt to stimulate the same meanings in multiple subjects--kind of a psychological choreography.
As such, meaning is not extracted from content, ever. Rather, probable meaning is inferred from content, and the basis of inference is fundamentally psychological. What a given word, symbol, sentence, paragraph or page means will depend entirely on who is doing the meaning, and any attempt to infer meaning from content will therefore require a model of who is doing the meaning.
Building such a model is non-trivial, and multiple models will be required to serve the needs of multiple constituencies. The meaning of "nekkid women with goats" will vary widely depending on who is doing the meaning: a man or a woman, an religious person or a rational person, a child or an adult, and so on.
Tagging mechanisms that allow anyone who visits a page to classify it will be subject to an enormous range of variation even without spammers, bored teenagers and other malicious entities. People have mentioned the low quality of data in freeDB, and that is within an extremely narrow, specialized area with well-recognized commercially-created categories. Consider the mess that will result from the average American, nearly half of whom believe that god created humans in our current form in the past few thousand years being free to tag pages dealing with evolution and ID.
None of this is to say that some form of classification wouldn't be a good thing, nor that useful classifications aren't possible. But successful attempts at associating common (within a given culture/sex/age group) meanings with content are going to be vastly harder than most advocates of the semantic web believe, and will be based on a fundamental awareness that content on its own has no sematics. Until that fact is recognized and incorporated into the designs as the deepest level we will get nothing useful out of the semantic web.
Or those companies whose management is there for love of the business tend to do better.
Or that the highest compensation goes to charismatic manipulators with big egos rather than capable people who can actually do the job.
Having worked closely with a number of charismatic underachievers this seems by far the msot plausible reason to me. At the CEO level there are relatively few objective measures of success behaviour, so losers whose only asset is their ability to manipulate people will thrive in those positions, whereas lower down on the food chain they periodically get brought up short by reality and their own staggering lack of capabilities in any area other than manipulation.
If they had the sense to stay in marketing where they belong they'd be a benefit to everyone, but their basic stupidity and huge egos push them into management positions that are far beyond their abilities. But once in those positions their ability to manipulate others for their own gain will garner them greater rewards than their more capable peers.
To this end, "normal science" will often suppress novelties which undermine its foundations. Research is therefore not about discovering the unknown, but rather "a strenuous and devoted attempt to force nature into the conceptual boxes supplied by professional education".
While Kuhn was right to emphasize the risk of myopia imposed by a conceptual scheme, he is wrong in his sweeping statements of this kind. I'm not aware of people doing "normal science" ever suppressing novelties. They may under-weight them, but no one pretended, for example, that the ultra-violet catastrophe or the photo-electric effect didn't exist (although Einstein was famously denigrated for his support of the photon concept to explain it.) Likewise, hardly anyone challenged the quality of Michaelson and Morley's results, stellar abberation or the precession of the orbit of Mercury.
Furthermore, while the rate of scientific change varies, and the creation of a whole new dynamics is a once-per-few-centuries event, the distinction between "normal science" and "revolutionary science" is not that great. In the back of most people's minds in physics is a thin thread of awareness that with any experiment they could find something inexplicable, reproducible, and crucial to our future understanding of the universe. We don't expect it to happen, but we are aware that it could. So are we doing "normal science" or not?
In the fuzzier subjects, like geophysics and biology, there has been more resistance to change because the evidence is more observational than experimental and therefore more subject to interpretation and not capable of experimental replication. But even in cases like continental drift and the bacterial cause of ulcers, it took at most a few decades to resolve, and once the evidence became undisputable people doing science changed their minds.
In no other field of human endeavour does anything like this go on. I know philosophers who still think that Leibniz's Law is more than a historical curiousity with no relevance to the real world. Religious people are obviously still hung up on the utterances of people like Mohammed and Jesus from thousands of years ago, and the subsequent and equally questionable moral and factual teachings of their interpreters.
So the facts indicate that scientists are open to discovering new phenomena. That is, after all, how you become famous and successful. The facts also indicate that physicists in particular are the most easily fooled when investigating "paranormal" phenomena, as the past few decades have multiple examples of physicists who failed to indentify cases of poor experimental design and outright fraud in the investigation of "psychic" phenomena.
I'm always been surprised at the kind of reaction anything labeled "paranormal" gets from rational people. Why exactly couldn't telepathy exist? Is there some fundamental law of nature which states that two people cannot communicate over a distance without sound or visual cues? Obviously, you'd have to identify a mechanism for the communications. If telepathy exists, it isn't magic.
Decades of intensive study have produced no reproducible phenomenological evidence for telepathy, and no study of the brain or nervous system has ever produced any physiological evidence suggesting a mechanism for telepathy. The brain is basically a seething pool of reactive chemicals with a little bit of electrical activity riding herd, so if there are non-verbal communication mechanisms they are almost certainly chemical rather than electromagnetic, and encode desires rather than thoughts.
It is interesting to ask why the paranormal crowd haven't jumped on pheremonal science as an instantiation of their dreams and imaginings. Why the fixation on nonverbal communication of thoughts?
In any case, after a while funding more studies to find a phenomenon that has been searched for high and low without finding any evidence looks like a bad idea. The fact that there is no "fundamental law of nature" preventing telepathy from occuring is entirely uninteresting. There is no "fundamental law of nature" that prevents organisms from evolving wheels, so far as we know. So do you feel like funding my expedition to search for the mythical wheeldebeast? If not, why not?
The first said that the human brain works not only on chemical, electrical, and biological principles, but that it also takes advantage of quantum effects.
This is false. Long-range (ie. more than molecular-scale) quantum effects are important only in systems with very low dissipation. The brain is not such an environment on scales larger than a single molecule or so. There is no evidence that any non-trivial quantum effects are important in the brain, and a great deal of evidence that they are not. The speculation that they are is primarily due to Roger Penrose, who is a brilliant mathematician and wrote a book called The Emperor's New Mind on the subject.
The second article said we had isolated one quantum effect in the lab, that being entanglement. Through a process, two electrons become "entangled", and when separated experimentally up to 10 km, when the spin on one is changed, the spin on the other is changed immediately--with no speed-of-light delay.
This is false. Neither electron can be said to have a spin that might be changed prior to measurement. But when the spins are measured along the same axis they have the same value (and the joint probability distribution follows the equivalent law for the case when the spins are measured along different axes.) It is simply a mistake to subscribe to the classical notion that both electrons "really have" a spin-value "before" measurement (before in what frame of reference?) and that one of the spin values changes "when" (in what frame of reference?) the other one changes.
Remember: the order of measurement is arbitrary. No one can say which member of an entangled pair was measured "first", and asking the question (in the absense of some operational procedure that provides an unambigous answer) is like asking "How high is up?"
The quantum world is not capable of supporting the weight of classical ontologies, and if you try to view the quantum world through a classical lense you'll wind up far astray. I strongly recommend Heisenberg's "The Physical Principles of Quantum Mechanics" as a reasonably accessible explication of the fundamental problems--of all the founders of modern QM Heisenberg had the most useful combination of deep insight and clear exposition regarding the meaning of the new physics. Bohr may have seen more deeply, but he wrote so opaquely that no one can tell, and Einstein wrote clearly but didn't see so deeply. Heisenberg understood how weird it all was, and was very good at drawing the boundaries that it is a mistake to try to cross, because nothing definable within a classical ontology lies beyond them.
Which is, in the nutshell, just the old "security by obscurity" argument. Which has already been debated to hell and back and is known to not work that way. And, frankly, it's weird to see McAffee preaching that attitude, because the anti-virus makers should know the best that it never worked that way.
You are making the error of believing that people are swayed by facts. Most people, most of the time, operate on faith, and not just where religion is concerned. The opposite of faith is empiricism, and empircists are swayed by arguments that point out facts contrary to their opinions. The faithful are not.
A key phrase that can help identify people who are operating on faith is, "It just makes sense to me that..." People who use that phrase and others like it are announcing that what makes sense to them is more important in their judgements than the way the world actually is. This is a powerful simplifying assumption, much loved by people who are just too stupid to handle the profound and beautiful complexity of reality.
So it isn't really a surprise that people at McAffee still believe in security-through-obscurity even though it has been shown time and again not to work. The world is full of people (many of them not conventionally religious, and very many of them in management) who put "it just makes sense to me" before "it is."
Technical work is like this, it requires a full time devotion to stay on top of technology and to master it. Solutions created by people who think of themselves primarily as business men will be atrociously bad (even worse than normal), and businesses that rely on such people will quickly go under.
You are vastly over-rating the time and effort involved in running a business. If you are technically good, and have invested in acquiring a basic set of business skills, then running a business is no big deal if you're talking about a single person consultancy.
The things you need:
1) Basic accounting (and I mean VERY basic--my accountant does all the hard stuff. And besides, most of advanced accounting is learning ways to lie with numbers while still remaining a respected if not respectable member of the community. The least honest developer I know once voiced a desire to become an accountant, and I can well understand why.)
2) Basic business law, especially contract law (lawyers are a lot more expensive than accountants, but the cost of failure is also higher. Tread carefully.)
3) Presentation skills. Stay away from all the bullshit seminar stuff. Join your local community theatre group.
4) Reputation. Every business contact you have, ever professional contact, is marketing. Every arm's length interaction you have is marketing for your future business. Businesses don't start in a vacuum and they are essentially based on relationships of trust based on reputation. Build yours carefully and it will be your greatest asset when you strike out on your own.
It just isn't that hard to be in business for yourself. There is a certain level of complexity you have to deal with, and a lot of discipline required to deal with it (I update my books religiously ever Friday morning, for example--keeping on top of the paperwork is vital.) But 90% of my time is spent on purely technical work. I just get to keep 100% of the profit from that, instead of paying most of it to support an ignorant manager with a big ego.
It took me five years to move from academia to being in busines for myself. Every career move I made within that time was aimed at getting me closer to the goal. I took jobs so I could learn particular business skills or get a closer look at how a small business is run. Anyone with a brain can do this, and acquire sufficient business skills to run their own show. It just isn't that hard.