they can sit there and claim plausible deniability when someone brings suit against them because their phone records were used against them in court wrogfully
What is this "court" thing you speak of?
Is that some sort of outmoded tribunal that interprets and enforces publically known laws in an open forum where the accused gets to face their accuser and answer to a specific charge?
This is 21st century America, not some bucolic republic governed by the rule of law!
We need a new spin on those lame "In Soviet Russia" jokes.
There's a related story about an otherwise healthy teenager developing DVT after only 10 hours [bbc.co.uk] playing on a game console.
I'm old enough to have teenage kids, and young enough to remember being one myself, and one of the things about teenage boys is the way they typically sit, or rather sprawl.
This kind of thing makes me think they're on to something. I've never been one to make a big deal about "sitting properly" (although posture is another matter!) and now I'm thinking I should be positively encouraging them to use chairs more like props for hanging off of at various odd angles rather than seats.
I'm always skeptical (and you should be too), when you hear about something that isn't even in clinical trials, as a possible cure for some disease people get.
Yeah, and you should be even more skeptical when a group funded by people dedicated to immunological mechanisms for fighting cancer find a "miracle" cure that has all kinds of properties no one would ever expect, like, say, a single injection of short-lived white blood cells confering lifetime immunity from the most aggressive cancers.
If it seems too good to be true, it probably is. If it seems to good to be true and there's money involved...
Re:It's no wonder people buy into Intellegent Desi
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One Big Bang, Or Many?
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If it's a scientific theory then by definition it cannot be proved, only disproved
This is Popper's view of science, and while it has it's merits it is nothing like the whole story.
In particular, the use of the word "proof" in the above sentence is extremely odd--it is used to mean "axiomatic, deductive, logically certain derivation", which is a very narrow, specialized meaning of the word that clearly has no relevance at all to a great deal of science. It even has quite narrow application within physics, which is the most mathematical of the sciences (though far less mathematical than mathematicians and some theorists would have you believe.)
"Proof" has a much broader sense which is far more relevant to those of us who live in the real world of the sciences rather than a philosopher's fantasy land where nothing not known with deductive certainly is considered to be known at all. On the contrary, we know all kinds of stuff, and can prove it, in the ordinary sense of the word. I know my name, I have a pretty good idea of my species, and I know the mass of the electron. I am able to know and to prove all these things, in the ordinary sense of the word, although I am not able to derive any of them.
This equivocation of "proof" with "derivation" is pernicious and wrong, and should be stopped. If you want to say that a scientific theory can never be derived by all means do so, but please be clear about what you are saying, and do not use the confusing and misleading term "proved" in the place of the more precise and accurate "derived".
Strange how this coincides with the theory of "Cosmic cycles" in Hinduism and other Vedic religions [wikipedia.org] like Buddhism [ttp]
Not strange at all. Cyclicity is all around us. The phases of the moon, the seasons, the passing of human generations...
A million monkeys banging out random religions on scriptural typewriters are bound to be biased toward cyclic phenomena, and in fact even a cursory examination of world religions, modern and ancient, indicates this is so. Against the eternal backdrop of the gods (which are themselves in some cases consumed by the periodic triumph of choas/disorder/destruction) the world is continually unmade and remade, sometimes daily.
The thing that is strange are the Judaic relegions--Judeism, Christianity and Islam--which are at best unicyclical.
It is also strange that you would think there is any relevance whatsoever to the religious speculations of ignorant people thousands of years ago to the scientific speculations of informed people today. The great Indian physicists of the past centuries were not using local scriptural traditions but rather rational analysis of empirical fact to guide their theories, just like the great Jewish physicists did.
Totally OT, but I just tried the IAD on three papers, all written by me, and it correctly identified one that was a pure history paper from two that were more like science (one debunking a crackpot theory, the other dealing with interpretations of QM.) Very impressive!
There is no way in hell I can find affordable health insurance on my own, and I can't afford the enormous cost of an ER trip out-of-pocket, or the couple hundred bucks per-month in medication while I'm in the "Eat ramen, max out the credit cards and work out of the garage" phase any solo gig or small company goes through for the first year or so
I run my own scientific and software consulting business in Canada, and during the startup phase lived on credit and nerves. I never had to worry about my kid's health care, though. An American friend who started in business at about the same time pointed out that he could only do it because he didn't have any kids. It was then that I came to appreciate just how good for the small, entrepeneurial business person the big bad socialist health care system here is.
It has lots of problems, but it is far, far better than what I experienced living in the U.S.
We're similar to bears, racoons, coyotes, and a number of other predators in that respect.
None of these animals would normally be classified as predators. They are scavangers capable of opportunistic predation, just like us. Polar bears are pretty much exclusively predatory, but black bears are pretty flexible with regard to lifestyle. I don't know if they're actually carrion-eaters, so "scavenger" might not quite fit, but they are certainly not exclusively predatory in the way big cats are, for example.
There have been suggestions that being omniverous scavengers was significant in the development of human intelligence--lots of choices to be made, lots of judgment calls, lots of flexibility to cope with. Raccoons are pretty similar to us in this regard--able to eat berries, willing to eat dead animals, and certainly willing and able to kill for food when the opportunity presents itself.
Perhaps what is most surprising is that despite the maturity of this research, it seems (at least to me) that very few people are aware of it.
The research demonstrating that more than a 35 - 40 hour work week results in steadily decreasing productivity is getting on for a century old, and yet faith-based bosses consult their feelings and find that it "just makes sense" that if we work insanely long hours we'll be more productive.
Management and work practices are more about hierarchy and power than actual productivity. Bosses like to have workers to boss, and value long hours far more than getting the job done. I once had the misfortune to in business with an guy who thought that working 220 hours per month and not getting the job done was better than working 180 hours per month and delivering on commitments. He couldn't understand that the key to doing the job is sometimes to work less, not more, despite the evidence staring him right in the face. He was tired, inefficient, unfocused and error-prone, and couldn't seem to grasp the impact of that on his work, despite having it pointed out to him both gently and forcefully at various times.
The basis of science is empirical observation. Not experiment, not theory, and certainly not hypotheses. When faced with an unexpected empirical observation the first thing a scientist does it try to understand it, to see how it fits or contradicts more familiar facts (some of which may be expressed in theoretical terms). Depending on the scientist's biases this attempt at understanding will be weighted toward incorporating or debunking the observation--attempting to reproduce it is a fundamental strategy that serves both these ends.
Debunking is not an unreasonable thing to try--it is well-known that 78% of all statistical conclusions are mistakes. But no scientist worthy of the name simply consults their feelings and denies the fact. That's called faith, and it is the way the majority of people respond to the facts about long hours and productivity.
So it is no surprise that they should to the same with regard to the fact that a large gap between rich and poor in wealthy nations produces poorer health amongst both rich and poor. After all, "it just makes sense" that having more money makes you healthier, right?
which expands to an implementation-defined null pointer constant;
This is why Stroustrup recommends using 0 rather than NULL in C++ code. 0 will always be cast to the right type, NULL may or may not be, resulting in spurious warnings.
Freedom to run a program means guaranteeing to an ordinary user that he or she will be able to run and use a program productively and free from complexity. What is the worth of freedom if it cannot be enjoyed by everyone?
Reality can be complex. Systems that interact with complex aspects of reality are also, of necessity, somewhat complex.
There is a poorly-defined concept for the property of persons that enables them to interact with the more complex aspects of reality. It is called intelligence. It is a maleable property, much like the ability to play the piano or write poetry--if you practice, you'll get better at it, although some people will always be better than others.
Lack of intelligence is not lack of freedom. We have distinct words because there are large differences between the concepts that any ordinary person understands.
This is sponsored FUD, just a sematic extension of the usual "free software has high TCO" for the linguistically challenged people who think that semantic hair-splitting is interesting, as if ordinary people don't use ordinary words to communicate more-or-less adequately every day. There is a place for such hair-splitting. That place is in university departments specializing in analytic philosophy.
Free software does have a problem with sometimes-excessive complexity, but that doesn't make it non-free, and only someone who is not able to deal with ordinary language as well as ordinary people can would suggest that was the case.
Perhaps the author of the article simply needs more practice with language to get over this difficulty. Or maybe they are just stupid.
I'll say it here, but it applies to many many of the other posts I've read today - this is not a great political statement he has made. It was a comedian act, in an event that hosts such act every year. He's a comedian
You seem to imply that because he is a commedian this is not a great political statement.
That is a complete non sequitur. If you really believe it, do please adduce some evidence for it. Please note that the proposition you must defend is not "some commedians are incapable of great political statements" but rather "ALL commedians are incapable of great poltiical statments, and NO commedy act is capable of great political statement." I believe, given the many counter-examples, you will find it very, very hard to create a rational, fact-based defense.
Many commedians have made great political statements, and Stephen Colbert has just taken first place in their ranks. He spoke the raw truth, in public, to the face of power. With an administration that has lied and obfuscated its way through six disasterous years of unnecessary deficit and unjustified war, that is a great and wonderful thing.
Basically, in the US you have two ways of protecting an innovative process: a patent or a trade secret.
But there are also a few ways of protecting yourself against an innovative process, if you're an established player with a lot on the line.
These include, "Buying legislators to change the law in favour of your outdated business model" (that would be the RIAA way) and, "Obliterating the competition by monopolistic business practices, FUD and various forms of technological and license-based customer lock-in" (the Microsoft way), and so on.
Big oil has a large investment in centralized production facilities and distribution networks. That existing infrastructure poses a substantial barrier to entry to any new players, which is just the way big oil wants it. Who wouldn't welcome limited competition and a familiar playing field where all your opponents are known quantities? A technological shift to decentralized production would be a major economic threat to big oil for this reason, because it will create many opportunities for new players with no costs from old tech to enter the fuels market.
There are two responses to this: buy in to the new technology, or fight it with every legal and most illegal means at your command.
History tells us with a high degree of certainty that some companies will take the first road, and a few of them will succeed, but most will take the second, and all of them will fail.
Companies have many of the characteristics of individuals: attitudes, aptitudes, outlooks. Changing the way a company does business is like an individual changing careers. Some people can manage it, others just don't have the flexibility to succeed, and most are simply too timid to try and would rather fight tooth and nail to maintain the safe and familiar status quo.
The only "thing" "teleported" is the quantum state, whose slippery ontological status makes it a bad candidate for thingness, and therefore an unlikely object of teleportation, which in normal usage refers to moving things, like Captain Kirk, and not non-things, like quantum state vectors.
The 'man-in-the-middle' can then intercept the encrypted message using the first OTP and re-transmit it to the intended receiver using the second OTP.
This is correct. So long as there are two independent quantum connections, a fully classical intermediary is permitted.
Because human beings are notoriously classical systems, the quantum nature of the state transmission only buys you proof against eavesdroppers, not men in the middle who are prepared to completely replicate the transmission and recieving apparatus. And of course, if quantum cryptography were in routine use, such apparatus would be relatively available.
Companies (countries, races, etc.) are not "evil" or "good", and they do not have "intentions."
It's hard to know what he might mean by this. Companies are persons in law, and have the ability to take action in the world under the guidance of more-or-less consistent policies, just like human individuals. To claim that properties like "good", "evil" and "intentionality" cannot be ascribed to such an entity, which has all of the attributes we normally ascribe to good, evil and/or intentional entities is more than a little weird.
The very fact that he would introduce such a naive and transparently false position suggests that there's a lot he'd like to sweep under the rug. After all, if companies "just can't be evil" you don't have to argue that Microsoft's monopolistic practices aren't actually evil, or good, or anything. They are like the rocks and the seas--just there. Or perhaps by some similarly specious make-believe logic they don't "really" exist.
Of course, neither do people--we are just a collection of cells.
On the contrary, it is morally offensive, at least to me.
There is a moral code that says, "Anything I can do to get money within or at least not more than a little bit beyond the strict bounds of the law is morally permissible." Note I say "get" and not "make"--"make" would imply the creation of something, rather than use of legal extortion methods.
To the human monsters who follow this morality, this patent might not be offensive. Such people have no conception of honour or decency, and no morality beyond their own pecunary interests. To the rest of us, this patent application is grossly indecent, dishonourable, and an excellent example of why, when the Revolution comes, folks like this will be first against the wall.
...each with their partial understanding of the whole system.
More to the point, the one person who might understand enough to debug it will be continually hectored by others who don't understand what is going on, but whose egos are so wound up in appearing smart that they can't resist giving advice, suggesting alternative paths, etc.
This will ensure two things: that the bug will take many times as long to fix, and when the one person who does know what is going on finally fixes it despite all the "help" some more politically savvy bastard will quickly leap in and grab the credit, because the fix will be completely unlike anything they suggested, but they will be too stupid to see that or too dishonest to admit it.
Only when they are managed by incompetents, the kind of losers who think that working longer hours is something other than a euphemism for low productivity.
No software project I have managed has been late by more than 10% of the total schedule. It just isn't that hard to deliver quality software, on time, every time. I've done it with research-oriented projects, whole applications, and feature upgrades, in Java and C++, working alone and managing largish (~10 developer) teams. I have been involved in very late, very large projects that I accurately predicted would be very late using basic quantitative estimation practices. Large projects are even easier to estimate than small projects because they average over so much diversity. Any two large projects are more similar than any two small projects.
There are two major factors that cause software projects to be late: technological optimism on the part of developers, and faith-based management and estimation practices. I hardly need to write about technological optimism here--we've all at one time or another gotten so enamoured of a new technology that we thought it would solve all our problems in half the time and not contain any gotchas.
Faith-based management practices are based on what people want to be true rather than what is true. They are the epistemology of a bible-believing Christian applied to logistics. We've all seen managers who want badly to believe that the schedule will be met, and so they lie to themselves and everyone one around them, and punish anyone who disagrees with their faith.
Quantitative estimation and management practices are not hard to learn or apply, but they continually come up with the "wrong" answers--ones that the bible-believers don't want to hear. When this happens the bible-believers characteristically make exceptionalist claims: "This is the chosen project! It is not not like all those other projects you based your estimates on! This project is special! It is outside the laws of time, space and logistics!"
Needless to say, like all bible-believers, they are impervious to facts, and so their projects crash merrily through deadline after deadline without any response except ill-conceived attempts to force their minnions and themselves to work ever-longer hours.
The solution to all of this is the Law of Common Humanity: We are just like Them. If industry data from the past century across a dozen different fields shows that working more than 35 or 40 hours a week results in significantly lower productivity, then that is probably true of us as well. If the quantitative estimation practices described in Rapid Development gave reasonable values for others, they probably will for us. If the causes of failure identified in Stephen Flowers excellent book Software Failure: Management Failure caused other projects to fail, they will probably cause ours to fail if we let them.
It is clear that Microsoft has never learned this lesson. They have been famous for late projects since Word1.0 two decades ago, and yet like bible-believers everywhere, they keep to the faith of their forefathers despite the wreckage it produces. On this basis, the odds of Microsoft being poised to unleash a river of innovation is simply not plausible.
Ironically, although the excuse for banning fuel reprocessing was because it could be used to create nuclear weapons, it was the breeder reactors used for creating nuclear weapons (and not peaceful energy) that remained in operation, both here and in the Soviet Union.
There are legitimate issues with the widespread use of breeder reactors for power generation. I'm not familiar with the details of modern civilian breeder technology, but current weapons reactors run on a three month fuel cycle, and this is likely to be the case for civilian reactors too (the 238U jacket will have to be cycled roughly every 90 days.) This is because 240Pu starts to build up significantly after that time, making the fuel difficult to handle. The rate of this process is fixed by the cross-sections. There's not a whole lot you can do about it.
So one is necessarily moving rather a lot of quite radioactive material around. Ideally one would like to do reprocessing on site for this reason, but that is expensive: it means you need to have as many reprocessing plants as you have reactors. On the other hand, advances in gas centrifuge technology in the past fifteen years have made isotopic separation so easy that a country run by wingnuts who believe a funny picture is worth rioting over can do it, so local reprocessing may be more practical now than it once was.
Central reprocessing would be cheaper, but it would mean moving all that hot fuel by truck or train. Accidents will happen, and theft is a definite possibility, but the real problem is inventory control. If you think about moving say 100,000 kg of fuel around for reprocessing every year, and your inventory control is good to 0.1%, you have a slop of 100 kg per year. It's moderately hard to feel safe in a world like that.
Thorium-cycle technology has a lot of appeal, although any technology other than CANDU-type D2O moderated natural uranium piles are going to necessarily involve materials and technologies that could be used for bombs. We should probably consider ourselves fortunate that it's so hard to make plutonium explode, given how much of it is likely to be sloshing around loose.
So my view is: slow neutron technology is a lousy investment because it only buys us a century. Fast neutron technlogy is worth some investment, particularly thorium-cycle stuff, but it should only be one area of focus, and not the primary one.
My own belief is that algal biodeisel or something like it is far more likely to be the long-term fuel of the future. Hydrocarbons are just too damned convenient. They have a human scale--a high enough power density to be really useful, but low enough that they rarely level more than a city block (although anyone who has seen a tank farm fire will be aware that they have dangers of their own.)
Basically they mean to say that businesses are becoming more and more open to externalizing anything that is not the core part of the business.
Part of the problem with SaaS and outsourcing generally is that "the core part of the business" has no intrinsic meaning, and soon comes to mean, "those activities that result in the greatest direct profits." On this model, "the core part of the business" is in all cases nothing more than sales and marketing--everything else is a support activity for those fundamental profit-generators.
Actually building the stuff you sell is not required, nor is having any inhouse technical expertise beyond that required to managed outsourced projects.
This trend will eventually result in incredibly shoddy products being sold by fantastically slick sales and marketing teams. Possibly this state has already been achieved in some business sectors.
That it is unsustainable is obvious to anyone who understands technology: lack of intimacy with the technology they sell is a chronic problem for modern companies, and while it works well enough for disposable consumer goods, it is in the end a prolifigately wasteful business model due to the number of inappropriate and/or inadequate systems customers wind up stuck with, and it will eventually be suplanted by a more balanced approach as this particular pendulum swings back toward the center.
If the array of hearing aids amplify only in-phase sounds, it will help to eliminate sounds that come from places other than where the user is looking. However, in order for all these microphones to coordinate, they must be able to communicate in some way, and a wire running through a pair of fake (or real) glasses is a good way to do that without looking strange. Thus, the glasses are just a transport mechanism.
Most high-end hearing aids have had external processors that do this kind of thing for a decade or more. My family has a congenital, progressive form of deafness, but my father's hearing actually improved between about 1985 nad 1995 when this kind of technology was being developed because hearing aids were getting better faster than his ears were getting worse.
The innovation here seems to be getting everything into a single wearable package that does not require the external unit, which was about the size of an iPod and communicated with the earpieces via RF.
There you go. Am I a) Happy, b) Upset, c) Mad, d) Indifferent, e) Horny, or f) all of the above? You can't tell. Even if you thought you knew, you you would be wrong
Your argument only holds water if you assume without a shred of evidence that people standing face to face have a clue what the other person is feeling.
There is an arbitrarily large body of evidence against the assumption.
Slashdot Mirror
they can sit there and claim plausible deniability when someone brings suit against them because their phone records were used against them in court wrogfully
What is this "court" thing you speak of?
Is that some sort of outmoded tribunal that interprets and enforces publically known laws in an open forum where the accused gets to face their accuser and answer to a specific charge?
This is 21st century America, not some bucolic republic governed by the rule of law!
We need a new spin on those lame "In Soviet Russia" jokes.
"In Belicose America, the NSA spies on YOU!"
Err, hang on a sec...
There's a related story about an otherwise healthy teenager developing DVT after only 10 hours [bbc.co.uk] playing on a game console.
I'm old enough to have teenage kids, and young enough to remember being one myself, and one of the things about teenage boys is the way they typically sit, or rather sprawl.
This kind of thing makes me think they're on to something. I've never been one to make a big deal about "sitting properly" (although posture is another matter!) and now I'm thinking I should be positively encouraging them to use chairs more like props for hanging off of at various odd angles rather than seats.
I'm always skeptical (and you should be too), when you hear about something that isn't even in clinical trials, as a possible cure for some disease people get.
Yeah, and you should be even more skeptical when a group funded by people dedicated to immunological mechanisms for fighting cancer find a "miracle" cure that has all kinds of properties no one would ever expect, like, say, a single injection of short-lived white blood cells confering lifetime immunity from the most aggressive cancers.
If it seems too good to be true, it probably is. If it seems to good to be true and there's money involved...
If it's a scientific theory then by definition it cannot be proved, only disproved
This is Popper's view of science, and while it has it's merits it is nothing like the whole story.
In particular, the use of the word "proof" in the above sentence is extremely odd--it is used to mean "axiomatic, deductive, logically certain derivation", which is a very narrow, specialized meaning of the word that clearly has no relevance at all to a great deal of science. It even has quite narrow application within physics, which is the most mathematical of the sciences (though far less mathematical than mathematicians and some theorists would have you believe.)
"Proof" has a much broader sense which is far more relevant to those of us who live in the real world of the sciences rather than a philosopher's fantasy land where nothing not known with deductive certainly is considered to be known at all. On the contrary, we know all kinds of stuff, and can prove it, in the ordinary sense of the word. I know my name, I have a pretty good idea of my species, and I know the mass of the electron. I am able to know and to prove all these things, in the ordinary sense of the word, although I am not able to derive any of them.
This equivocation of "proof" with "derivation" is pernicious and wrong, and should be stopped. If you want to say that a scientific theory can never be derived by all means do so, but please be clear about what you are saying, and do not use the confusing and misleading term "proved" in the place of the more precise and accurate "derived".
Strange how this coincides with the theory of "Cosmic cycles" in Hinduism and other Vedic religions [wikipedia.org] like Buddhism [ttp]
Not strange at all. Cyclicity is all around us. The phases of the moon, the seasons, the passing of human generations...
A million monkeys banging out random religions on scriptural typewriters are bound to be biased toward cyclic phenomena, and in fact even a cursory examination of world religions, modern and ancient, indicates this is so. Against the eternal backdrop of the gods (which are themselves in some cases consumed by the periodic triumph of choas/disorder/destruction) the world is continually unmade and remade, sometimes daily.
The thing that is strange are the Judaic relegions--Judeism, Christianity and Islam--which are at best unicyclical.
It is also strange that you would think there is any relevance whatsoever to the religious speculations of ignorant people thousands of years ago to the scientific speculations of informed people today. The great Indian physicists of the past centuries were not using local scriptural traditions but rather rational analysis of empirical fact to guide their theories, just like the great Jewish physicists did.
Totally OT, but I just tried the IAD on three papers, all written by me, and it correctly identified one that was a pure history paper from two that were more like science (one debunking a crackpot theory, the other dealing with interpretations of QM.) Very impressive!
There is no way in hell I can find affordable health insurance on my own, and I can't afford the enormous cost of an ER trip out-of-pocket, or the couple hundred bucks per-month in medication while I'm in the "Eat ramen, max out the credit cards and work out of the garage" phase any solo gig or small company goes through for the first year or so
I run my own scientific and software consulting business in Canada, and during the startup phase lived on credit and nerves. I never had to worry about my kid's health care, though. An American friend who started in business at about the same time pointed out that he could only do it because he didn't have any kids. It was then that I came to appreciate just how good for the small, entrepeneurial business person the big bad socialist health care system here is.
It has lots of problems, but it is far, far better than what I experienced living in the U.S.
We're similar to bears, racoons, coyotes, and a number of other predators in that respect.
None of these animals would normally be classified as predators. They are scavangers capable of opportunistic predation, just like us. Polar bears are pretty much exclusively predatory, but black bears are pretty flexible with regard to lifestyle. I don't know if they're actually carrion-eaters, so "scavenger" might not quite fit, but they are certainly not exclusively predatory in the way big cats are, for example.
There have been suggestions that being omniverous scavengers was significant in the development of human intelligence--lots of choices to be made, lots of judgment calls, lots of flexibility to cope with. Raccoons are pretty similar to us in this regard--able to eat berries, willing to eat dead animals, and certainly willing and able to kill for food when the opportunity presents itself.
Perhaps what is most surprising is that despite the maturity of this research, it seems (at least to me) that very few people are aware of it.
The research demonstrating that more than a 35 - 40 hour work week results in steadily decreasing productivity is getting on for a century old, and yet faith-based bosses consult their feelings and find that it "just makes sense" that if we work insanely long hours we'll be more productive.
Management and work practices are more about hierarchy and power than actual productivity. Bosses like to have workers to boss, and value long hours far more than getting the job done. I once had the misfortune to in business with an guy who thought that working 220 hours per month and not getting the job done was better than working 180 hours per month and delivering on commitments. He couldn't understand that the key to doing the job is sometimes to work less, not more, despite the evidence staring him right in the face. He was tired, inefficient, unfocused and error-prone, and couldn't seem to grasp the impact of that on his work, despite having it pointed out to him both gently and forcefully at various times.
The basis of science is empirical observation. Not experiment, not theory, and certainly not hypotheses. When faced with an unexpected empirical observation the first thing a scientist does it try to understand it, to see how it fits or contradicts more familiar facts (some of which may be expressed in theoretical terms). Depending on the scientist's biases this attempt at understanding will be weighted toward incorporating or debunking the observation--attempting to reproduce it is a fundamental strategy that serves both these ends.
Debunking is not an unreasonable thing to try--it is well-known that 78% of all statistical conclusions are mistakes. But no scientist worthy of the name simply consults their feelings and denies the fact. That's called faith, and it is the way the majority of people respond to the facts about long hours and productivity.
So it is no surprise that they should to the same with regard to the fact that a large gap between rich and poor in wealthy nations produces poorer health amongst both rich and poor. After all, "it just makes sense" that having more money makes you healthier, right?
NULL
which expands to an implementation-defined null pointer constant;
This is why Stroustrup recommends using 0 rather than NULL in C++ code. 0 will always be cast to the right type, NULL may or may not be, resulting in spurious warnings.
Freedom to run a program means guaranteeing to an ordinary user that he or she will be able to run and use a program productively and free from complexity. What is the worth of freedom if it cannot be enjoyed by everyone?
Reality can be complex. Systems that interact with complex aspects of reality are also, of necessity, somewhat complex.
There is a poorly-defined concept for the property of persons that enables them to interact with the more complex aspects of reality. It is called intelligence. It is a maleable property, much like the ability to play the piano or write poetry--if you practice, you'll get better at it, although some people will always be better than others.
Lack of intelligence is not lack of freedom. We have distinct words because there are large differences between the concepts that any ordinary person understands.
This is sponsored FUD, just a sematic extension of the usual "free software has high TCO" for the linguistically challenged people who think that semantic hair-splitting is interesting, as if ordinary people don't use ordinary words to communicate more-or-less adequately every day. There is a place for such hair-splitting. That place is in university departments specializing in analytic philosophy.
Free software does have a problem with sometimes-excessive complexity, but that doesn't make it non-free, and only someone who is not able to deal with ordinary language as well as ordinary people can would suggest that was the case.
Perhaps the author of the article simply needs more practice with language to get over this difficulty. Or maybe they are just stupid.
I'll say it here, but it applies to many many of the other posts I've read today - this is not a great political statement he has made. It was a comedian act, in an event that hosts such act every year. He's a comedian
You seem to imply that because he is a commedian this is not a great political statement.
That is a complete non sequitur. If you really believe it, do please adduce some evidence for it. Please note that the proposition you must defend is not "some commedians are incapable of great political statements" but rather "ALL commedians are incapable of great poltiical statments, and NO commedy act is capable of great political statement." I believe, given the many counter-examples, you will find it very, very hard to create a rational, fact-based defense.
Many commedians have made great political statements, and Stephen Colbert has just taken first place in their ranks. He spoke the raw truth, in public, to the face of power. With an administration that has lied and obfuscated its way through six disasterous years of unnecessary deficit and unjustified war, that is a great and wonderful thing.
Basically, in the US you have two ways of protecting an innovative process: a patent or a trade secret.
But there are also a few ways of protecting yourself against an innovative process, if you're an established player with a lot on the line.
These include, "Buying legislators to change the law in favour of your outdated business model" (that would be the RIAA way) and, "Obliterating the competition by monopolistic business practices, FUD and various forms of technological and license-based customer lock-in" (the Microsoft way), and so on.
Big oil has a large investment in centralized production facilities and distribution networks. That existing infrastructure poses a substantial barrier to entry to any new players, which is just the way big oil wants it. Who wouldn't welcome limited competition and a familiar playing field where all your opponents are known quantities? A technological shift to decentralized production would be a major economic threat to big oil for this reason, because it will create many opportunities for new players with no costs from old tech to enter the fuels market.
There are two responses to this: buy in to the new technology, or fight it with every legal and most illegal means at your command.
History tells us with a high degree of certainty that some companies will take the first road, and a few of them will succeed, but most will take the second, and all of them will fail.
Companies have many of the characteristics of individuals: attitudes, aptitudes, outlooks. Changing the way a company does business is like an individual changing careers. Some people can manage it, others just don't have the flexibility to succeed, and most are simply too timid to try and would rather fight tooth and nail to maintain the safe and familiar status quo.
but somehow exploit photon teleportation
No photon has ever been teleported. Ever.
The only "thing" "teleported" is the quantum state, whose slippery ontological status makes it a bad candidate for thingness, and therefore an unlikely object of teleportation, which in normal usage refers to moving things, like Captain Kirk, and not non-things, like quantum state vectors.
The 'man-in-the-middle' can then intercept the encrypted message using the first OTP and re-transmit it to the intended receiver using the second OTP.
This is correct. So long as there are two independent quantum connections, a fully classical intermediary is permitted.
Because human beings are notoriously classical systems, the quantum nature of the state transmission only buys you proof against eavesdroppers, not men in the middle who are prepared to completely replicate the transmission and recieving apparatus. And of course, if quantum cryptography were in routine use, such apparatus would be relatively available.
Companies (countries, races, etc.) are not "evil" or "good", and they do not have "intentions."
It's hard to know what he might mean by this. Companies are persons in law, and have the ability to take action in the world under the guidance of more-or-less consistent policies, just like human individuals. To claim that properties like "good", "evil" and "intentionality" cannot be ascribed to such an entity, which has all of the attributes we normally ascribe to good, evil and/or intentional entities is more than a little weird.
The very fact that he would introduce such a naive and transparently false position suggests that there's a lot he'd like to sweep under the rug. After all, if companies "just can't be evil" you don't have to argue that Microsoft's monopolistic practices aren't actually evil, or good, or anything. They are like the rocks and the seas--just there. Or perhaps by some similarly specious make-believe logic they don't "really" exist.
Of course, neither do people--we are just a collection of cells.
It's not like it's morally offensive
On the contrary, it is morally offensive, at least to me.
There is a moral code that says, "Anything I can do to get money within or at least not more than a little bit beyond the strict bounds of the law is morally permissible." Note I say "get" and not "make"--"make" would imply the creation of something, rather than use of legal extortion methods.
To the human monsters who follow this morality, this patent might not be offensive. Such people have no conception of honour or decency, and no morality beyond their own pecunary interests. To the rest of us, this patent application is grossly indecent, dishonourable, and an excellent example of why, when the Revolution comes, folks like this will be first against the wall.
...each with their partial understanding of the whole system.
More to the point, the one person who might understand enough to debug it will be continually hectored by others who don't understand what is going on, but whose egos are so wound up in appearing smart that they can't resist giving advice, suggesting alternative paths, etc.
This will ensure two things: that the bug will take many times as long to fix, and when the one person who does know what is going on finally fixes it despite all the "help" some more politically savvy bastard will quickly leap in and grab the credit, because the fix will be completely unlike anything they suggested, but they will be too stupid to see that or too dishonest to admit it.
How often are software projects late? Um, always?
Only when they are managed by incompetents, the kind of losers who think that working longer hours is something other than a euphemism for low productivity.
No software project I have managed has been late by more than 10% of the total schedule. It just isn't that hard to deliver quality software, on time, every time. I've done it with research-oriented projects, whole applications, and feature upgrades, in Java and C++, working alone and managing largish (~10 developer) teams. I have been involved in very late, very large projects that I accurately predicted would be very late using basic quantitative estimation practices. Large projects are even easier to estimate than small projects because they average over so much diversity. Any two large projects are more similar than any two small projects.
There are two major factors that cause software projects to be late: technological optimism on the part of developers, and faith-based management and estimation practices. I hardly need to write about technological optimism here--we've all at one time or another gotten so enamoured of a new technology that we thought it would solve all our problems in half the time and not contain any gotchas.
Faith-based management practices are based on what people want to be true rather than what is true. They are the epistemology of a bible-believing Christian applied to logistics. We've all seen managers who want badly to believe that the schedule will be met, and so they lie to themselves and everyone one around them, and punish anyone who disagrees with their faith.
Quantitative estimation and management practices are not hard to learn or apply, but they continually come up with the "wrong" answers--ones that the bible-believers don't want to hear. When this happens the bible-believers characteristically make exceptionalist claims: "This is the chosen project! It is not not like all those other projects you based your estimates on! This project is special! It is outside the laws of time, space and logistics!"
Needless to say, like all bible-believers, they are impervious to facts, and so their projects crash merrily through deadline after deadline without any response except ill-conceived attempts to force their minnions and themselves to work ever-longer hours.
The solution to all of this is the Law of Common Humanity: We are just like Them. If industry data from the past century across a dozen different fields shows that working more than 35 or 40 hours a week results in significantly lower productivity, then that is probably true of us as well. If the quantitative estimation practices described in Rapid Development gave reasonable values for others, they probably will for us. If the causes of failure identified in Stephen Flowers excellent book Software Failure: Management Failure caused other projects to fail, they will probably cause ours to fail if we let them.
It is clear that Microsoft has never learned this lesson. They have been famous for late projects since Word1.0 two decades ago, and yet like bible-believers everywhere, they keep to the faith of their forefathers despite the wreckage it produces. On this basis, the odds of Microsoft being poised to unleash a river of innovation is simply not plausible.
Ironically, although the excuse for banning fuel reprocessing was because it could be used to create nuclear weapons, it was the breeder reactors used for creating nuclear weapons (and not peaceful energy) that remained in operation, both here and in the Soviet Union.
There are legitimate issues with the widespread use of breeder reactors for power generation. I'm not familiar with the details of modern civilian breeder technology, but current weapons reactors run on a three month fuel cycle, and this is likely to be the case for civilian reactors too (the 238U jacket will have to be cycled roughly every 90 days.) This is because 240Pu starts to build up significantly after that time, making the fuel difficult to handle. The rate of this process is fixed by the cross-sections. There's not a whole lot you can do about it.
So one is necessarily moving rather a lot of quite radioactive material around. Ideally one would like to do reprocessing on site for this reason, but that is expensive: it means you need to have as many reprocessing plants as you have reactors. On the other hand, advances in gas centrifuge technology in the past fifteen years have made isotopic separation so easy that a country run by wingnuts who believe a funny picture is worth rioting over can do it, so local reprocessing may be more practical now than it once was.
Central reprocessing would be cheaper, but it would mean moving all that hot fuel by truck or train. Accidents will happen, and theft is a definite possibility, but the real problem is inventory control. If you think about moving say 100,000 kg of fuel around for reprocessing every year, and your inventory control is good to 0.1%, you have a slop of 100 kg per year. It's moderately hard to feel safe in a world like that.
Thorium-cycle technology has a lot of appeal, although any technology other than CANDU-type D2O moderated natural uranium piles are going to necessarily involve materials and technologies that could be used for bombs. We should probably consider ourselves fortunate that it's so hard to make plutonium explode, given how much of it is likely to be sloshing around loose.
So my view is: slow neutron technology is a lousy investment because it only buys us a century. Fast neutron technlogy is worth some investment, particularly thorium-cycle stuff, but it should only be one area of focus, and not the primary one.
My own belief is that algal biodeisel or something like it is far more likely to be the long-term fuel of the future. Hydrocarbons are just too damned convenient. They have a human scale--a high enough power density to be really useful, but low enough that they rarely level more than a city block (although anyone who has seen a tank farm fire will be aware that they have dangers of their own.)
Basically they mean to say that businesses are becoming more and more open to externalizing anything that is not the core part of the business.
Part of the problem with SaaS and outsourcing generally is that "the core part of the business" has no intrinsic meaning, and soon comes to mean, "those activities that result in the greatest direct profits." On this model, "the core part of the business" is in all cases nothing more than sales and marketing--everything else is a support activity for those fundamental profit-generators.
Actually building the stuff you sell is not required, nor is having any inhouse technical expertise beyond that required to managed outsourced projects.
This trend will eventually result in incredibly shoddy products being sold by fantastically slick sales and marketing teams. Possibly this state has already been achieved in some business sectors.
That it is unsustainable is obvious to anyone who understands technology: lack of intimacy with the technology they sell is a chronic problem for modern companies, and while it works well enough for disposable consumer goods, it is in the end a prolifigately wasteful business model due to the number of inappropriate and/or inadequate systems customers wind up stuck with, and it will eventually be suplanted by a more balanced approach as this particular pendulum swings back toward the center.
If the array of hearing aids amplify only in-phase sounds, it will help to eliminate sounds that come from places other than where the user is looking. However, in order for all these microphones to coordinate, they must be able to communicate in some way, and a wire running through a pair of fake (or real) glasses is a good way to do that without looking strange. Thus, the glasses are just a transport mechanism.
Most high-end hearing aids have had external processors that do this kind of thing for a decade or more. My family has a congenital, progressive form of deafness, but my father's hearing actually improved between about 1985 nad 1995 when this kind of technology was being developed because hearing aids were getting better faster than his ears were getting worse.
The innovation here seems to be getting everything into a single wearable package that does not require the external unit, which was about the size of an iPod and communicated with the earpieces via RF.
There is nothing mutually exclusive about going to war for an ideology and going to war for money.
"Paging Professor Kant...Professor Kant to Slashdot, please...."
Until the US adopts reasonable human rights laws in compliance with international agreements why risk handing him over?
You mis-typed "in compliance with the Constitution of the United States of America, particularly the IVth, Vth and VIth ammendments thereto."
"LaCosaNostradamus, I'ma bitchslap you."
There you go. Am I a) Happy, b) Upset, c) Mad, d) Indifferent, e) Horny, or f) all of the above?
You can't tell. Even if you thought you knew, you you would be wrong
Your argument only holds water if you assume without a shred of evidence that people standing face to face have a clue what the other person is feeling.
There is an arbitrarily large body of evidence against the assumption.