Couldn't they get all the same benefits with a simple barcode?
I'm not a big fan of the whole universal RFID thing, but my experience with a chipped passport has been positive. I'm a Canadian scientific consultant, and have a TN visa for a job in the US that contains an RFID chip. I routinely cross the Canada/US border at one of the five crossings equiped with RFID readers.
The thing that it gives you that a bar code does not is the ability to read the thing before I get to customs. There are scanners at the stop line before the booth, so by the time I get to the booth the customs guy already has all my info in front of him.
This is all of a few seconds difference, but it is a big deal in the workflow, because the customs guy has those few seconds to "get to know" me. Psychologically, there is a big difference between having those few seconds in hand, vs having to read the information off the screen while I'm sitting there waiting. It creates a "handshake" phase to the interaction that speeds and smooths it.
So yeah, I think in this case there is some justification for RFID chips, but I'm a scurvy foreigner coming to the US as a guest-worker, not a citizen. I'd be a good deal less keen on having a chip as a permanent part of my passport.
There is no such thing as "Ohm's Law", in the sense of a "Law".
?
"There's no such thing as a Ford in the sense of 'Car'."
Ohm's law is a canonical example of a good law. A quite general, non-trival relationship between various practically important qualities. If this is not a "law", then what, pray-tell, is?
You seem to think that there is something else, something more or better. And while it is true that Ohm's law can be derived from Maxwell's equations, this does not make it any less law-like, unless you are using an arbitrary personal definition of "law" that is totally unlike what anyone who actually does physics for a living means by the term.
Trust me, when a boss talks about wanting passionate employees, they don't mean someone who has a healthy work-life balance. They mean someone whose emotional attachment to what they do can be exploited for the good of the company--and the CEO.
The cure for passion is professionalism, which is amongst other things is the attitude that high quality work deserves high quality compensation.
I think, that this internal struggle for dominance is not the real point of most businesses.
One might argue that it ought not be the real point of most businesses. But as a matter of empirical fact, it is. By my own observation, business hierarchies have far more to do with monkey psychology than they do with efficiency or effectiveness.
The business world is full of charismatic underachievers who understand that "passion" really means "kissing up to the boss" and "manipulating the poltics and emotional weightings of a situation so that you can take credit for any success while avoiding responsibility for any failure."
The problem with using "passion" as a metric in business is quite simple: it cannot be measured. As such, it is a purely political evaluation, unrelated to actualy productivity or capability. I've worked in organizations that valued "passion", and to a one they undervalued actually getting the job done. They undervalued real achievement because it made the fruitless efforts of the idiots who thought working stupidly long hours proved how great they were look like the low-productivity waste of time that they actually were.
The article says, in summary: "I stupidly believe stuff that is false, and now I'm, like, totally surprised that it doesn't make sense!"
The argument goes like this: QM predicts a vacuum energy that is really big, implying a very, very large cosmological constant. But we observe that the cosmological constant is almost identically zero. Theorists have long thought zero to be a special number, like 1/137 used to be. Theorists, unlike experimentalists, don't learn from experience. One can imagine a symmetry argument that would produce an identically zero cosmological constant, just like one can imagine a symmetry argument that would produce perfectly circular planetary orbits. But experience teaches that symmetry arguments are not always true, and that even when they are true, they are sometimes a lot more complicated in their effects than one would expect.
I mean look, planetary orbits are nearly perfect circles. The eccentricity of the Earth's orbit is less than 2%. What kind of ridiculous number is that! So close to zero, and yet not quite there. It flies in the face of all conventional wisdom of planetary physics! Aren't you just AMAZED at how smart I am for pointing that out? I know I am.
Symmetry arguments are like C++: powerful enough to blow your own leg off, especially in the hands of an incompetent who doesn't know his own limitations.
Rising fuel prices during the 1970s prompted the development of a new technology that used sails shaped like aircraft wings turned on end to take some of the burden off the engines and save fuel.
I remember a Popular Science article on this from the '70's, but can't find any images from it on Google either. The kite approach is interesting because it is better-suited for retrofit than this mast-based technology, but has the downside of providing less ability to sail against the wind (on the other hand, the keels are modern ships aren't exactly designed for that either.)
You could make a case that they are as much Fiorina's as Hurd's. The effects of strategic moves like buying Compaq stretch out over years.' So, which is it? Did Carly kill the HP way? Or did she save what was left of it?"
This assumes that executives are more than very, very weakly related to a company's success and failure.
There is no correlation between executive pay and company success--this is well-known and well-documented. So why does anyone think who is at the top makes a difference to how the company does? Is it the generals who win the war, or the foot-soldiers?
Or is it neither? Do factors like being well-established in the market, having a great diversity of product offerings, and a rudimentary ability to exploit opportunties that come up now and then make far more difference than anything else? That is, is corporate success due as much to luck and circumstance as anything else?
If you look at the success of second-time entrepreneurs, people who've made big money on their first business and are looking for another opportunity, you'll find that they have a success rate that is no better than average. If CEO ability really mattered, this is not likely to be the case.
Also, if you look at how often companies do really, really badly and whose CEOs go on to other CEO jobs, it should be clear that no one really thinks success is due to CEO activity. Or rather, a bunch of faith-based managers think that CEOs should take credit for success but not be blamed for failure.
Yet, anyways. It's still possible to break the chain somewhere and extract content. I'm guessing that'll always be the case too, at least for a good long while. Only way to get around that with what we have today would be if MS started selling PCs that are welded shut.
Purists will get all in a knot about degraded signal quality, but in fact all you have to do is multiple capatures of an analog playback, do some averaging or other signal processing, and you can recover something that is pretty much arbitrarily close to the digital orginal.
Yet, anyways. It's still possible to break the chain somewhere and extract content. I'm guessing that'll always be the case too, at least for a good long while. Only way to get around that with what we have today would be if MS started selling PCs that are welded shut.
And that don't have any output.
So long as it's possible to get output, it's possible to produce a nearly-perfect digital replica of any content.
A/D conversion isn't perfect because of noise, but you can play back the movie/audio/whatever as many times as you want and average the noise away, or use fancier statistical algorithms to reclaim the original content, pixel-by-pixel, frame-by-frame. If you're worried about A/D bias, run it through multiple playbacks on different hardware. It just isn't that hard. Anyone who has worked in digital imaging (my own backgroud is in realtime x-ray) knows how easy this is.
I can see the videophile's system of the future: a video driver card with an external analog output plugged into a video capture card, plus a bit of software to repeat the process of playing the movie and averaging the frames until the desired quality is reached. Instant (ok, maybe 1 day turn-around) DVD/Blur-ray/HDTV-quality non-DRM'd video.
We've hardly begun to scratch the surface of means for making DRM obsolete. People who invest in DRM Just Don't Get It(tm).
It's not hard to find examples where doctors have been wrong about the safety of treatments in the past, so we know they are not infallible. The Bible on the other hand......is known to be false in almost every particular. I'm sure a few folks will jump in with minor claims from the Bible that are demonstrably true, although none comes to mind offhand. The lilies of the field do indeed toil, for example--they are working as hard to maintain their lives as any organism, respiring and fighting off disease and reproducing.
The psychology of faith is fascinating--humans who are infected by it will defend to the death (often someone else's death) propositions that are known to be false in the ordinary sense of the word. It is something that we all do to some extent, and the difference between good people and evil people is that good people struggle against this universal tendency toward faith and evil people embrace it.
One could almost say that faith is the secular humanist's equivalent of orginal sin: something that we have been bequeathed by our (evolutionary) forebearers that we have to struggle to overcome imperfectly every day of our lives.
there is increasing evidence that race is useful as a medical/biological concept. I think the sources I quoted support that point.
No, they support the point that genetic differences are a useful medical/biological concept. The correlation with nominal racial categories is at best local, at worst none at all. How an individual gets categorized as a "member of a given race" is almost purely social/political, so in practical medical and biological terms it means almost nothing.
For example, my mother's family roots go back in North America to the late 1600's, mostly in the Eastern U.S. The odds of me not having a significant fraction of "black" genes are practically zero.
I have seen East Indians categorized as "black" in the U.S., and the difference between "latino" and "hispanic" has vastly greater social significance than it does biological significance. To claim that "race" has medical or biological significance is to ignore these hugely important social and political factors in defining "races" and assigning individuals to them. If you define "race" in purely genetic terms, then indeed it is significant. But the point is that in practical politics race is never defined in terms of genetics, and if it was it would result in assignments of individuals to races that would be extremely unsatisfactory to your average racist.
I had not, but I was aware of another Buddhist sect in Tibet that practices violence, eats meat, and the like.
I will stand by my assessment of Buddhism as a genuinely peaceful religion. The fact that there are some sects that have practiced violence, especially in the distant past, does not seem to me to be sufficient to change my assessment of the broader religious movement.
In the same way, the fact that there are many Christian sects that practice peace and charity (the Menonites come prominently to mind) does not change the fact that Christianity became a successful social force in Europe due to the willingness of the Church in various guises to use violence and intimidation to suppress distent, heresy and non-Christian practice. This was not a short-lived or local phenomenon, but something that went on in various forms from the fall of the Western Empire to the start of the Enlightenment.
There is no rationale behind it whatsoever and having a pedigree to show that say, (for the most common example) a white supremacist and Martin Luther King Jr. share common ancestors 60 or so generations back would not change their attitudes.
I agree it won't change their attitude, but given the deplorable fact of extensive inter-breeding between mostly black slaves and mostly-white plantation owners prior to the Civil War, it is extremely likely that a white supremacist in the U.S. South and Martin Luther King Jr. would share a common ancestor a lot less than 60 generations back.
The idea of "racial purity" is a myth for stupid people, and as more knowledge of human genetics and human ancestry accumulates this will become so obvious that even people stupid enough to be racists will have a hard time avoiding it. We will find there is a literal handful of "racially pure" people on the planet, and they will be from isolated tribes who simply lacked the opportunity to practice the vigorous out-breeding that is part of humanity's evolutionary modus operandi.
Conclusion: interbreeding in a narrow gene pool only has a negative effect if there are defect genes in it
It is a matter of established fact that all individuals have some of what you would call "defect" genes. You have defect genes. Go get yourself a full-on genetic profile if you think I'm not telling the truth, or ask any biologist.
The reason for the "defect" genes is multi-fold. One is that evolution produces adequate, not optimal, solutions to the problem of survival. The other is that genes for some genetic diseases are implicated in resistance to particular environmental threats--I believe the gene that produces sickle cell annemia is correlated with resistance to malaria, for example.
To believe in the possibility of a "perfect" organism with no deleterious genes is to believe in a myth or a lie, because what counts as "defect" or "benefit" will change with the circumstances, but your genes will most certainly not do so.
Just because one side can kill better than the other does not mean that the more peaceful side will not win in the end.
The Gnostics might disagree with you there. Early Christianity, which took on recognizable form some decades after Jesus' death, had a variety of factions. Some were more peaceful than others. The most violent, autocratic and centralized one prevailed through the use of armed force.
Christianity became a successful religion only because of its follower's willingness to use violence to capture, torture and kill their opponents. By infiltrating the halls of power and gaining influence over the secular means of repression they were able to extend their reach even further.
Buddhism, in contrast, is a genuinely peaceful religion, and has never succeeded in displacing Hinduism.
In either case, if Mohammed and Jesus had met each other they would almost certainly have hated each other. The world only has room for so many charismatic megalomaniacs at once. Furthermore, comparing Jesus and Mohammed isn't really fair: comparing Paul and Mohammed would be closer. They both founded universal, evangelical religions. Jesus saw himself as a Jewish prophet of a Jewish god to the Jewish people, which is no surprise because that's what he was.
The test is probably real, it's just that there isn't really set "race genes."
That's because "race" is far more of a social phenomenon than a biological phenomenon, and the obsession with defining or determining which race a person belongs to is something that does not stem from anything other than politics and sociology. It is a question that no biologist would ever think to ask, because race is not a useful or interesting biological category. There are two reasons for this.
The first is that few if any racial characteristics show any significant discontinuity in the population at large--the lightest-skinned "black" person is lighter than the darkest-skinned "white" person. Without such discontinuities the idea of race becomes entirely arbitrary, based on a line drawn for purely political purposes.
The second is that insofar as there are relatively-disconnected pools of genes in the human population, they are small and don't last very long because of our aggressive pursuit of exogamy (breeding outside our kin-group). Most primate species practice inbreeding more than outbreeding. In humans it is rather the opposite. In simple terms, most of us are of mixed race. This is especially true of North Americans with regard to mixing of blacks and whites, for well-known reasons.
Anyone who believes that "racial purity" is either possible or desirable is merely proclaiming their ignorance of human biology.
Besides, what's a huge winner?? Gmail has millions of users... but I guess due to their market cap, Gmail will only be a big winner if it has BILLIONS of users??
The standards being applied are stupid. TFA whines about how services that are only a few months or years old haven't yet toppled the established leaders. Phrases like "only 17% as much as market leader Microsoft..." abound. Personally, I'd be pretty damned pleased if a product offering not yet out of diapers is able to pull in almost a fifth of the business that goes to the leader. But that's because I'm not insane.
News reports are like Mark Twain's comment on science: you get such an enormous return in unreflective hype for such a tiny investment in fact.
The fact is that Google Maps is doing well. Google Earth is a major entry in the GIS world that will help kill the dozens of loser-startups with big egos and no talent that have fragmented that space. Gmail is doing well. Google News is a major news agregator. Are any of them leaders? Not yet, but who says you have to be number one to be a success? That's a stupid criterion, based entirely on alpha-monkey thinking. I guess if you're a monkey that's ok, but for those of us who aspire to humanity a more rational criterion, like "generates sufficient revenue to sustain itself" and "explores diverse opportunities in an evolving medium" make more sense.
Google would be a failure if it stuck only to search as an advertising draw. Given the newness of the Web as a commerical medium, and the fact that no one knows what the most profitable/sustainable business model for it will be, a healthy company should continue to explore and fail if it wants to have a chance to really profit from the Web's potential.
if you're not doing anything wrong, why should you mind being watched?
What a weird question.
"If you aren't doing anything wrong, why should you mind being hit on the head?"
The reasons why being watched bothers us is built deeply into our monkey brains. Most chimpanzees, most of the time, need some privacy. So do most humans. If this were not the case, we wouldn't have stalls in public toilets and the like.
Beyond that, of course, is the kind of answer you're trolling for, which is so obvious and has been repeated so often that it really isn't worth mentioning again.
Why do we constantly look for the "next big thing" when the "big thing" is simply experience?
Because experience without intelligence, taste and good good judgement is practiacally useless.
Experience converts a bright young developer into a very good older developer. It converts a stupid young developer into a stupid older developer with a big ego and a bunch of fixed ideas about what's possible and what's not possible based on the irrefutable evidence of their experience.
I've had the misfortune to work on projects with the latter type. The ones who "know" the estimation and scheduling are nigh-on impossible, because they've failed at them so many times. They either vastly over-invest in inappropriate scheduling and estimation efforts, which fail because no amount of effort can save you when you're stupid, or they say "why bother" and go at it peicemeal.
It's well-known that stupid people are deficient in the judgement of thier own abilities, and nowhere is this clearer than in the kind of clueless loser who routinely fails to meet deadlines, and in response attacks the very possibility of meeting a deadline rather than looking at the stupid, stupid things they do that cause them fail over and over again.
By showing the Chinese people ways to exist comfortably within the restrictions imposed by an immoral government we're not helping them to reach a better place in life.. namely a free and democratic Republic of China.
Think how much easier the revolution will be to organize and execute with open access to the Internet.
Freedom of information isn't an abstract end-in-itself. It is a practical tool used by free people everywhere, especially those living under dictatorships, to gain power over their own lives.
I'm sure many traditionally-raised folks might see this as immature or selfish...
And people who are not insane will see it as mature and responsible.
People who do not want children should not have children.
People who think everyone should have children, or that anyone has any kind of "duty" to have children, are childish and immature. They can't separate their own desires from those of others, and they don't understand that it is the basest kind of evil to create a human being who is not fundamentally wanted and loved, but rather considered a burden or a duty.
We live in a society that doesn't particularly value children, and I frequently see parents who view their kids as a burden. If you listen to the "back-to-school" ads at the end of summer you will see how anti-child we are, and how wide-spread the assumption is that everyone is really looking forward to shipping their kids back to the warehouse. As a parent who actually likes children, I hate the end of summer as much as they do. And yes, I do work for a living--just in a way that gives me time to do what I really care about.
If you don't like doing kid-stuff with kids, you shouldn't have kids. Anything else will just increase the unhappy population of the Earth, which is more than large enough already.
Is it a good idea to simply let them have the power to do these things and assume they'll never exercise it?
No. It is a fundamental law of human behaviour: All power gets used.
If you grant power to someone that power will eventually be used. History suggests sooner rather than later. Things you'd think would never happen in a million years have a way of being done well ahead of schedule. And any power will be used to the benefit of the people wielding it unless there are obvious negative consequences in doing so. Secret power is absolute power, because it can be used for anything with no consequences to the wielders.
And for anyone still using the "you have nothing to worry about if you've done nothing wrong" line, I would like to point out that that line requires assuming that the organs of the state Never Make Mistakes. Good luck with that.
Which free market? Designed by whom? For whose benefit? With what barriers to entry? With what legal artefacts to codify relations between participants?
You at least had the good sense to acknowledge that there are many different free markets. But unfortunately that fact makes your subsquent claim regarding that market--that it would sort out net neutrality quite nicely--complete nonsense. Some markets, appropriately designed, probably would. Other markets most certainly would not.
Markets, like governments, are just machines. They can be well or badly designed to solve any particular problem. To simply say "a market could solve it" is like saying "a team of horses could solve it" with regard to a transportation problem. Depending on the problem, and the team, horses may or may not be the best solution. Without far more detail it is impossible to know, and you are making a statement of faith to claim otherwise.
Measureing the ground temperature, and temperature at varous altitudes of each of these places is impossible.
There are well-known satellite measurements that do exactly this. There are issues with the analysis of these data, but a growing consensus within the scientific community that suggests a warming o 0.1 to 0.15 C per decade, if memory serves.
Ice core data are also good aggregate measures of global atmospheric temperature, and they also indicate a significant global warming trend over the past few decades.
You can find more about these things via Google.
However, it is worth noting that the temperature of a mixed medium is a lousy proxy for the heat content, which is what really matters. You can add heat to the atmosphere without increasing its temperature--the added heat may instead appear as a change in moisture content. The change in total atmospheric enthalpy is due to both increases in temperature and changes in heat capacity. Modern measures of climate change should be focussed on changes in atmospheric (and ocean) heat content. Ocean heat content is more closely correlated with ocean temperature because it is a simpler medium.
Finally, you make a comment to the effect that it's not like climate change has been obvious and dramatic. This is true. But in the geographically recent past there have been very large changes in hemispheric, if not global, climate that have taken at most a few decades to occur. Google "younger dryas" for more info.
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Couldn't they get all the same benefits with a simple barcode?
I'm not a big fan of the whole universal RFID thing, but my experience with a chipped passport has been positive. I'm a Canadian scientific consultant, and have a TN visa for a job in the US that contains an RFID chip. I routinely cross the Canada/US border at one of the five crossings equiped with RFID readers.
The thing that it gives you that a bar code does not is the ability to read the thing before I get to customs. There are scanners at the stop line before the booth, so by the time I get to the booth the customs guy already has all my info in front of him.
This is all of a few seconds difference, but it is a big deal in the workflow, because the customs guy has those few seconds to "get to know" me. Psychologically, there is a big difference between having those few seconds in hand, vs having to read the information off the screen while I'm sitting there waiting. It creates a "handshake" phase to the interaction that speeds and smooths it.
So yeah, I think in this case there is some justification for RFID chips, but I'm a scurvy foreigner coming to the US as a guest-worker, not a citizen. I'd be a good deal less keen on having a chip as a permanent part of my passport.
There is no such thing as "Ohm's Law", in the sense of a "Law".
?
"There's no such thing as a Ford in the sense of 'Car'."
Ohm's law is a canonical example of a good law. A quite general, non-trival relationship between various practically important qualities. If this is not a "law", then what, pray-tell, is?
You seem to think that there is something else, something more or better. And while it is true that Ohm's law can be derived from Maxwell's equations, this does not make it any less law-like, unless you are using an arbitrary personal definition of "law" that is totally unlike what anyone who actually does physics for a living means by the term.
Some of you are confusing passion with obsession.
Trust me, when a boss talks about wanting passionate employees, they don't mean someone who has a healthy work-life balance. They mean someone whose emotional attachment to what they do can be exploited for the good of the company--and the CEO.
The cure for passion is professionalism, which is amongst other things is the attitude that high quality work deserves high quality compensation.
I think, that this internal struggle for dominance is not the real point of most businesses.
One might argue that it ought not be the real point of most businesses. But as a matter of empirical fact, it is. By my own observation, business hierarchies have far more to do with monkey psychology than they do with efficiency or effectiveness.
The business world is full of charismatic underachievers who understand that "passion" really means "kissing up to the boss" and "manipulating the poltics and emotional weightings of a situation so that you can take credit for any success while avoiding responsibility for any failure."
The problem with using "passion" as a metric in business is quite simple: it cannot be measured. As such, it is a purely political evaluation, unrelated to actualy productivity or capability. I've worked in organizations that valued "passion", and to a one they undervalued actually getting the job done. They undervalued real achievement because it made the fruitless efforts of the idiots who thought working stupidly long hours proved how great they were look like the low-productivity waste of time that they actually were.
The man is an arrogant idiot.
The article says, in summary: "I stupidly believe stuff that is false, and now I'm, like, totally surprised that it doesn't make sense!"
The argument goes like this: QM predicts a vacuum energy that is really big, implying a very, very large cosmological constant. But we observe that the cosmological constant is almost identically zero. Theorists have long thought zero to be a special number, like 1/137 used to be. Theorists, unlike experimentalists, don't learn from experience. One can imagine a symmetry argument that would produce an identically zero cosmological constant, just like one can imagine a symmetry argument that would produce perfectly circular planetary orbits. But experience teaches that symmetry arguments are not always true, and that even when they are true, they are sometimes a lot more complicated in their effects than one would expect.
I mean look, planetary orbits are nearly perfect circles. The eccentricity of the Earth's orbit is less than 2%. What kind of ridiculous number is that! So close to zero, and yet not quite there. It flies in the face of all conventional wisdom of planetary physics! Aren't you just AMAZED at how smart I am for pointing that out? I know I am.
Symmetry arguments are like C++: powerful enough to blow your own leg off, especially in the hands of an incompetent who doesn't know his own limitations.
Rising fuel prices during the 1970s prompted the development of a new technology that used sails shaped like aircraft wings turned on end to take some of the burden off the engines and save fuel.
I remember a Popular Science article on this from the '70's, but can't find any images from it on Google either. The kite approach is interesting because it is better-suited for retrofit than this mast-based technology, but has the downside of providing less ability to sail against the wind (on the other hand, the keels are modern ships aren't exactly designed for that either.)
You could make a case that they are as much Fiorina's as Hurd's. The effects of strategic moves like buying Compaq stretch out over years.' So, which is it? Did Carly kill the HP way? Or did she save what was left of it?"
This assumes that executives are more than very, very weakly related to a company's success and failure.
There is no correlation between executive pay and company success--this is well-known and well-documented. So why does anyone think who is at the top makes a difference to how the company does? Is it the generals who win the war, or the foot-soldiers?
Or is it neither? Do factors like being well-established in the market, having a great diversity of product offerings, and a rudimentary ability to exploit opportunties that come up now and then make far more difference than anything else? That is, is corporate success due as much to luck and circumstance as anything else?
If you look at the success of second-time entrepreneurs, people who've made big money on their first business and are looking for another opportunity, you'll find that they have a success rate that is no better than average. If CEO ability really mattered, this is not likely to be the case.
Also, if you look at how often companies do really, really badly and whose CEOs go on to other CEO jobs, it should be clear that no one really thinks success is due to CEO activity. Or rather, a bunch of faith-based managers think that CEOs should take credit for success but not be blamed for failure.
Yet, anyways. It's still possible to break the chain somewhere and extract content. I'm guessing that'll always be the case too, at least for a good long while. Only way to get around that with what we have today would be if MS started selling PCs that are welded shut.
Purists will get all in a knot about degraded signal quality, but in fact all you have to do is multiple capatures of an analog playback, do some averaging or other signal processing, and you can recover something that is pretty much arbitrarily close to the digital orginal.
DRM is Just Plain Dumb(tm).
Yet, anyways. It's still possible to break the chain somewhere and extract content. I'm guessing that'll always be the case too, at least for a good long while. Only way to get around that with what we have today would be if MS started selling PCs that are welded shut.
And that don't have any output.
So long as it's possible to get output, it's possible to produce a nearly-perfect digital replica of any content.
A/D conversion isn't perfect because of noise, but you can play back the movie/audio/whatever as many times as you want and average the noise away, or use fancier statistical algorithms to reclaim the original content, pixel-by-pixel, frame-by-frame. If you're worried about A/D bias, run it through multiple playbacks on different hardware. It just isn't that hard. Anyone who has worked in digital imaging (my own backgroud is in realtime x-ray) knows how easy this is.
I can see the videophile's system of the future: a video driver card with an external analog output plugged into a video capture card, plus a bit of software to repeat the process of playing the movie and averaging the frames until the desired quality is reached. Instant (ok, maybe 1 day turn-around) DVD/Blur-ray/HDTV-quality non-DRM'd video.
We've hardly begun to scratch the surface of means for making DRM obsolete. People who invest in DRM Just Don't Get It(tm).
It's not hard to find examples where doctors have been wrong about the safety of treatments in the past, so we know they are not infallible. The Bible on the other hand... ...is known to be false in almost every particular. I'm sure a few folks will jump in with minor claims from the Bible that are demonstrably true, although none comes to mind offhand. The lilies of the field do indeed toil, for example--they are working as hard to maintain their lives as any organism, respiring and fighting off disease and reproducing.
The psychology of faith is fascinating--humans who are infected by it will defend to the death (often someone else's death) propositions that are known to be false in the ordinary sense of the word. It is something that we all do to some extent, and the difference between good people and evil people is that good people struggle against this universal tendency toward faith and evil people embrace it.
One could almost say that faith is the secular humanist's equivalent of orginal sin: something that we have been bequeathed by our (evolutionary) forebearers that we have to struggle to overcome imperfectly every day of our lives.
there is increasing evidence that race is useful as a medical/biological concept. I think the sources I quoted support that point.
No, they support the point that genetic differences are a useful medical/biological concept. The correlation with nominal racial categories is at best local, at worst none at all. How an individual gets categorized as a "member of a given race" is almost purely social/political, so in practical medical and biological terms it means almost nothing.
For example, my mother's family roots go back in North America to the late 1600's, mostly in the Eastern U.S. The odds of me not having a significant fraction of "black" genes are practically zero.
I have seen East Indians categorized as "black" in the U.S., and the difference between "latino" and "hispanic" has vastly greater social significance than it does biological significance. To claim that "race" has medical or biological significance is to ignore these hugely important social and political factors in defining "races" and assigning individuals to them. If you define "race" in purely genetic terms, then indeed it is significant. But the point is that in practical politics race is never defined in terms of genetics, and if it was it would result in assignments of individuals to races that would be extremely unsatisfactory to your average racist.
I take it you've never heard of the Sohei ...
I had not, but I was aware of another Buddhist sect in Tibet that practices violence, eats meat, and the like.
I will stand by my assessment of Buddhism as a genuinely peaceful religion. The fact that there are some sects that have practiced violence, especially in the distant past, does not seem to me to be sufficient to change my assessment of the broader religious movement.
In the same way, the fact that there are many Christian sects that practice peace and charity (the Menonites come prominently to mind) does not change the fact that Christianity became a successful social force in Europe due to the willingness of the Church in various guises to use violence and intimidation to suppress distent, heresy and non-Christian practice. This was not a short-lived or local phenomenon, but something that went on in various forms from the fall of the Western Empire to the start of the Enlightenment.
There is no rationale behind it whatsoever and having a pedigree to show that say, (for the most common example) a white supremacist and Martin Luther King Jr. share common ancestors 60 or so generations back would not change their attitudes.
I agree it won't change their attitude, but given the deplorable fact of extensive inter-breeding between mostly black slaves and mostly-white plantation owners prior to the Civil War, it is extremely likely that a white supremacist in the U.S. South and Martin Luther King Jr. would share a common ancestor a lot less than 60 generations back.
The idea of "racial purity" is a myth for stupid people, and as more knowledge of human genetics and human ancestry accumulates this will become so obvious that even people stupid enough to be racists will have a hard time avoiding it. We will find there is a literal handful of "racially pure" people on the planet, and they will be from isolated tribes who simply lacked the opportunity to practice the vigorous out-breeding that is part of humanity's evolutionary modus operandi.
Conclusion: interbreeding in a narrow gene pool only has a negative effect if there are defect genes in it
It is a matter of established fact that all individuals have some of what you would call "defect" genes. You have defect genes. Go get yourself a full-on genetic profile if you think I'm not telling the truth, or ask any biologist.
The reason for the "defect" genes is multi-fold. One is that evolution produces adequate, not optimal, solutions to the problem of survival. The other is that genes for some genetic diseases are implicated in resistance to particular environmental threats--I believe the gene that produces sickle cell annemia is correlated with resistance to malaria, for example.
To believe in the possibility of a "perfect" organism with no deleterious genes is to believe in a myth or a lie, because what counts as "defect" or "benefit" will change with the circumstances, but your genes will most certainly not do so.
Just because one side can kill better than the other does not mean that the more peaceful side will not win in the end.
The Gnostics might disagree with you there. Early Christianity, which took on recognizable form some decades after Jesus' death, had a variety of factions. Some were more peaceful than others. The most violent, autocratic and centralized one prevailed through the use of armed force.
Christianity became a successful religion only because of its follower's willingness to use violence to capture, torture and kill their opponents. By infiltrating the halls of power and gaining influence over the secular means of repression they were able to extend their reach even further.
Buddhism, in contrast, is a genuinely peaceful religion, and has never succeeded in displacing Hinduism.
In either case, if Mohammed and Jesus had met each other they would almost certainly have hated each other. The world only has room for so many charismatic megalomaniacs at once. Furthermore, comparing Jesus and Mohammed isn't really fair: comparing Paul and Mohammed would be closer. They both founded universal, evangelical religions. Jesus saw himself as a Jewish prophet of a Jewish god to the Jewish people, which is no surprise because that's what he was.
The test is probably real, it's just that there isn't really set "race genes."
That's because "race" is far more of a social phenomenon than a biological phenomenon, and the obsession with defining or determining which race a person belongs to is something that does not stem from anything other than politics and sociology. It is a question that no biologist would ever think to ask, because race is not a useful or interesting biological category. There are two reasons for this.
The first is that few if any racial characteristics show any significant discontinuity in the population at large--the lightest-skinned "black" person is lighter than the darkest-skinned "white" person. Without such discontinuities the idea of race becomes entirely arbitrary, based on a line drawn for purely political purposes.
The second is that insofar as there are relatively-disconnected pools of genes in the human population, they are small and don't last very long because of our aggressive pursuit of exogamy (breeding outside our kin-group). Most primate species practice inbreeding more than outbreeding. In humans it is rather the opposite. In simple terms, most of us are of mixed race. This is especially true of North Americans with regard to mixing of blacks and whites, for well-known reasons.
Anyone who believes that "racial purity" is either possible or desirable is merely proclaiming their ignorance of human biology.
Besides, what's a huge winner?? Gmail has millions of users... but I guess due to their market cap, Gmail will only be a big winner if it has BILLIONS of users??
The standards being applied are stupid. TFA whines about how services that are only a few months or years old haven't yet toppled the established leaders. Phrases like "only 17% as much as market leader Microsoft..." abound. Personally, I'd be pretty damned pleased if a product offering not yet out of diapers is able to pull in almost a fifth of the business that goes to the leader. But that's because I'm not insane.
News reports are like Mark Twain's comment on science: you get such an enormous return in unreflective hype for such a tiny investment in fact.
The fact is that Google Maps is doing well. Google Earth is a major entry in the GIS world that will help kill the dozens of loser-startups with big egos and no talent that have fragmented that space. Gmail is doing well. Google News is a major news agregator. Are any of them leaders? Not yet, but who says you have to be number one to be a success? That's a stupid criterion, based entirely on alpha-monkey thinking. I guess if you're a monkey that's ok, but for those of us who aspire to humanity a more rational criterion, like "generates sufficient revenue to sustain itself" and "explores diverse opportunities in an evolving medium" make more sense.
Google would be a failure if it stuck only to search as an advertising draw. Given the newness of the Web as a commerical medium, and the fact that no one knows what the most profitable/sustainable business model for it will be, a healthy company should continue to explore and fail if it wants to have a chance to really profit from the Web's potential.
Yup, life is competition, which means losers. To believe otherwise is to deny humanity.
One might as well say, "Life is co-operation, which means collaboration. To believe otherwise is to deny humanity."
Of course, that would be equally stupid, at least if you took it to mean, "Life is only co-operation..."
if you're not doing anything wrong, why should you mind being watched?
What a weird question.
"If you aren't doing anything wrong, why should you mind being hit on the head?"
The reasons why being watched bothers us is built deeply into our monkey brains. Most chimpanzees, most of the time, need some privacy. So do most humans. If this were not the case, we wouldn't have stalls in public toilets and the like.
Beyond that, of course, is the kind of answer you're trolling for, which is so obvious and has been repeated so often that it really isn't worth mentioning again.
Why do we constantly look for the "next big thing" when the "big thing" is simply experience?
Because experience without intelligence, taste and good good judgement is practiacally useless.
Experience converts a bright young developer into a very good older developer. It converts a stupid young developer into a stupid older developer with a big ego and a bunch of fixed ideas about what's possible and what's not possible based on the irrefutable evidence of their experience.
I've had the misfortune to work on projects with the latter type. The ones who "know" the estimation and scheduling are nigh-on impossible, because they've failed at them so many times. They either vastly over-invest in inappropriate scheduling and estimation efforts, which fail because no amount of effort can save you when you're stupid, or they say "why bother" and go at it peicemeal.
It's well-known that stupid people are deficient in the judgement of thier own abilities, and nowhere is this clearer than in the kind of clueless loser who routinely fails to meet deadlines, and in response attacks the very possibility of meeting a deadline rather than looking at the stupid, stupid things they do that cause them fail over and over again.
By showing the Chinese people ways to exist comfortably within the restrictions imposed by an immoral government we're not helping them to reach a better place in life.. namely a free and democratic Republic of China.
Think how much easier the revolution will be to organize and execute with open access to the Internet.
Freedom of information isn't an abstract end-in-itself. It is a practical tool used by free people everywhere, especially those living under dictatorships, to gain power over their own lives.
I'm sure many traditionally-raised folks might see this as immature or selfish...
And people who are not insane will see it as mature and responsible.
People who do not want children should not have children.
People who think everyone should have children, or that anyone has any kind of "duty" to have children, are childish and immature. They can't separate their own desires from those of others, and they don't understand that it is the basest kind of evil to create a human being who is not fundamentally wanted and loved, but rather considered a burden or a duty.
We live in a society that doesn't particularly value children, and I frequently see parents who view their kids as a burden. If you listen to the "back-to-school" ads at the end of summer you will see how anti-child we are, and how wide-spread the assumption is that everyone is really looking forward to shipping their kids back to the warehouse. As a parent who actually likes children, I hate the end of summer as much as they do. And yes, I do work for a living--just in a way that gives me time to do what I really care about.
If you don't like doing kid-stuff with kids, you shouldn't have kids. Anything else will just increase the unhappy population of the Earth, which is more than large enough already.
Is it a good idea to simply let them have the power to do these things and assume they'll never exercise it?
No. It is a fundamental law of human behaviour: All power gets used.
If you grant power to someone that power will eventually be used. History suggests sooner rather than later. Things you'd think would never happen in a million years have a way of being done well ahead of schedule. And any power will be used to the benefit of the people wielding it unless there are obvious negative consequences in doing so. Secret power is absolute power, because it can be used for anything with no consequences to the wielders.
And for anyone still using the "you have nothing to worry about if you've done nothing wrong" line, I would like to point out that that line requires assuming that the organs of the state Never Make Mistakes. Good luck with that.
a free market
Which free market? Designed by whom? For whose benefit? With what barriers to entry? With what legal artefacts to codify relations between participants?
You at least had the good sense to acknowledge that there are many different free markets. But unfortunately that fact makes your subsquent claim regarding that market--that it would sort out net neutrality quite nicely--complete nonsense. Some markets, appropriately designed, probably would. Other markets most certainly would not.
Markets, like governments, are just machines. They can be well or badly designed to solve any particular problem. To simply say "a market could solve it" is like saying "a team of horses could solve it" with regard to a transportation problem. Depending on the problem, and the team, horses may or may not be the best solution. Without far more detail it is impossible to know, and you are making a statement of faith to claim otherwise.
Measureing the ground temperature, and temperature at varous altitudes of each of these places is impossible.
There are well-known satellite measurements that do exactly this. There are issues with the analysis of these data, but a growing consensus within the scientific community that suggests a warming o 0.1 to 0.15 C per decade, if memory serves.
Ice core data are also good aggregate measures of global atmospheric temperature, and they also indicate a significant global warming trend over the past few decades.
You can find more about these things via Google.
However, it is worth noting that the temperature of a mixed medium is a lousy proxy for the heat content, which is what really matters. You can add heat to the atmosphere without increasing its temperature--the added heat may instead appear as a change in moisture content. The change in total atmospheric enthalpy is due to both increases in temperature and changes in heat capacity. Modern measures of climate change should be focussed on changes in atmospheric (and ocean) heat content. Ocean heat content is more closely correlated with ocean temperature because it is a simpler medium.
Finally, you make a comment to the effect that it's not like climate change has been obvious and dramatic. This is true. But in the geographically recent past there have been very large changes in hemispheric, if not global, climate that have taken at most a few decades to occur. Google "younger dryas" for more info.