I mean, there's a simple fix, just add a law to prevent any elected official in Canada from having secondary health coverage.
Exactly. Pretty much every socialized system in the world except Canada's allows for a robust third-party care system. Including such rabid enemies of social democracy as Sweden, Germany and France. But if you suggest it here you get run out of town on a rail while hypocrites like Belinda Stronach skive off to the US for treatment the moment they become seriously ill.
Canada has a two-tier health care system: one for the rich (and what member of Parliament does not qualify as "rich" after two terms in office, given the present value of their pension?) and one for the rest of us.
This unfortunate reality is that this is made necessary by the predatory health care industry to the south of us, but it's time we figure out how to deal with that. In particular, I would argue for a law that had two parts, to be voted on separately. The first would affirm the principles of the Canada Health Act, which is what prevents covered services from being insured privately. The second would make it illegal (penalty: total asset forfeiture, including pension) for anyone who voted for the first part to ever access any health care services that were not covered for everyone under their provincial plan.
Single-payer public systems are obviously better than what the US has, but single-payer public systems of the kind that Sweden, Germany, France, Australia and quite a few other places have are obviously better than what Canada has, both in terms of quality of care and lower cost. The differences go beyond simple health care policy to social policy (preventative care, parental leave, etc) but it's not as if any of it is a great big mystery to anyone who isn't an ideology addled idiot.
To your point, the thing I find absolutely remarkable is the smug, holier-than-thou attitude which pervades most University-goers in the country - they have been completely brain-washed by their family and high schools that they need to go massively into debt for not only an undergraduate degree in Basketweaving, but a Masters and PhD before they can be any use to society
What I find absolutely remarkable is this aggressive, chip-on-the-should attitude of community college graduates, who seem to feel there is something inferior about their education so they are always implying that anyone who graduates from a university necessarily has a "degree in Basketweaving" as opposed to, say, physics or economics.
Nor is going massively in debt a requirement for a university degree in this country. I have two kids in good schools right now (neither one studying basketweaving, oddly enough) and know that the full cost of tuition and fees is under $10K in the most expensive programs at the the most expensive schools in Canada. Add living expenses and you're still under $20K/year.
Community colleges are cheaper than that, both because they have shorter programs and lower tuition, and they are a good choice for many. I know plenty of people with undergrad degrees in the sciences who wanted laboratory jobs in their field and went to a community college for technical diplomas.
Finally: two of the better coders I've worked with had degrees in english and music. They said their degrees taught them to think structurally, which allowed them to easily see software in ways that most programmers struggle with. So maybe "basketweaving" has some use after all.
Really finally: university degrees should not be vocational training, and in a world where your vocation is going to get outsourced or made technologically obsolete you need to get the broadest base for your future development possible. Knowing a single technical discipline is OK for ten years or so, maybe. But be prepared to go back and retrain a few times in different fields. Having a BSc under your beld may make that process a good deal easier, as you will have a deeper understanding of the foundations that your new field is being built on.
If The Scotsman newspaper runs this news then it's a guarantee that for a couple of days following the article the letters page would be full of "It was snowing here; so much for global warming" and "But I saw ice on the ground this morning" and similar variants.
Right, just like every time there is an usually hot month you get people saying, "SEEE this PROVES you must immediately use less/eat less/have less fun/etc."
It's good fun reminding those smug Puritan bastards that "weather is not climate", and one hot summer doth not an increase in global heat content make.
For the record, I think anthropogenic climate change is very plausible, but as a computational physicist who has looked at some climate models I also think the detailed predictions are likely quite wrong, as in fact they have proven to be every single time they have been put to test.
Those complete failures of the model predictions, which have seen things like serious under-estimates in the rate of Arctic sea-ice loss, have been taken by the anti-scientific political community that has encrusted itself around the cause of AGW as "proof" that "things are EVEN WORSE than we thought!" as if the climate was some one-dimensional system along the scientifically-irrelevant of "worse" and "better".
Let me say that again: almost every story that runs on AGW-related data reports a failure of GCMs to accurate predict the future. As a scientist I don't care about "worse" and "better", I care about "accurate" and "inaccurate", and unsurprisingly (to anyone who actually understands computational physics, which apparently many climatologists don't) the models are not very accurate.
This is a very bad thing in several ways, only one of which is that we may be in deeper shit than we expected. In particular, we may be in a quite different kind of shit than we expected. The climate is complex and non-linear, and the odds of things simply "getting hotter" are relatively small. I have no idea what might happen, but I'm pretty sure it won't be particularly close to what the models predict, and as soon as, say, a negative feedback results in a deviation below the model predictions the nay-sayers will use this to smear all of the science.
So I see anti-science crusaders on both sides (and I advocate investment in non-carbon power, including nuclear, as the only reasonably robust policy choice for dealing with this.)
It's the 21st century, hundreds of years into the Age of Reason.
WHY for the love of everything sane does anyone think what their gut says is remotely interesting or germane to any discussion of anything?
Announcing that you've not done any numerical analysis or quantitative reasoning regarding a purely quantitative question is a really, really bad way of convincing anyone rational you have anything interesting to say.
And as other posters have pointed out, because the people who are doing this are Not Idiots(TM) they have already considered your point and are planning to do the actual cooling using the liquid hydrogen fuel.
The simple winner-take-all plurality type voting system pretty much guarantees you'll end up with a two-party system.
It does nothing of the kind, as the most cursory inspection of non-US systems demonstrates. There have typically been three significant parties in the UK (some mix of Conservative, Liberal, Labour and Lib-Dem) over the past century. In Canada the average is closer to four, with some mix of Progressive Conservative, Liberal, BQ, Reform, Conservative, CCF/NDP and Social Credit a the federal level over the past 100 years. New parties in Canada pop up every twenty years or so (Progressive, Social Credit, CCF/NDP, BQ, Reform, and at the provincial level Wild Rose, Saskatchewan, ADQ...)
So it is clear that first-past-the-post has nothing whatsoever to do with the ossified dominance of the two major parties in the US. My guess is that a few straightforward administrative reforms in the US would open up the competition. In particular, a national arms-length organization to handle all voter registration and polling--the way Elections Canada does up here--would do a great deal to ease the bipartisan lock that the Democrats and Republicans have on the American electorate.
you're suggesting I should go back and create installers for this system that is only running in one production environment, and a handful of stage/dev environments? Really? Even if it were installed a few dozen times a year, it wouldn't justify the cost of automating that process, vs. a checklist.
That depends. Checklists are more error-prone than scripts, and doing things via scripts pretty much forces you to keep the scripts up-to-date, so there is a higher degree of knowledge capture. When I do things via checklists the checklist is often a few iterations behind the reality, because I know what the current deviations are. When I do things via scripts they are always up-to-date, and if I get hit by a bus my employer won't lose anything.
There is certainly a place for checklists, but for any software that is going to be deployed to customers--even one or two--scripts are almost always the right way to go, in part because they encourage in-house testing before release, and remove from the customer's hands a very error-prone and stressful step.
This is why the beetle is black - to radiate the maximum heat away from it's body in the night, so it's carapace is nice and cool for it's water collection in the morning.
The color of the beetle, which is determined by its absorption spectrum in the visible, is irrelevant to its IR emissivity, which is what determines its cooling rate.
What you're saying is equivalent to "That's why the beetle is blue, so it will emit lots of red light in the dark."
If the beetle is black for thermal reasons it may be because there is an advantage to warming up as quickly as possible in the morning. This is a big deal for flying insects (I don't know if the beetle flies) as they need to warm their wing muscles so they can take off, which may help them avoid predators. And it will also help them stay active into the night by getting good and hot during the day.
As a Canadian, It's terrifying that Americans think their center-right government is made up of "crazy radicals".
I dunno... if Obama ran in Canada he'd be so far to the right he wouldn't register... oh, you mean Americans think their far-right government is made up of crazy LEFT WING radicals!
Honestly I had to read your comment about three times before I figured out what you were talking about! And seriously: Obama makes Stephen Harper look like a socialist (which he isn't, but still...)
It's too late. The joy of Lost was the promise of a satisfactory conclusion to a coherent story arc. Now we know that there isn't one.
TV viewers are like Charlie Brown and the football: for some unfathomable reason you keep hoping that these shows with a mysterious back-story will end up with a grand revelation that is coherent and satisfactory, and despite disappointment after disappointment you always fall for the same trick again.
I'm guessing this is in part due to younger viewers who've never seen it happen before getting mislead by the entertainment industry press, whose job it is to put bums in seats.
While it does get rid of headcount, it runs a real risk of losing people that you can't actually afford to lose.
Other the CEO and their highly-paid cronies, who exactly can't a company afford to lose? As near as I can tell the modern "I can manage anything without knowing anything about it" manager thinks only THEY are indispensable. Everyone else--you know, the people who actually know stuff about the industry and technology the company depends on--is just a replaceable cog in the machine.
So while the point you make is obviously true there is ample evidence that CEOs are heavily selected to be the kind of person who is capable of ignoring obvious truths.
The proper translation is something like "stop-car-area" - when you try it now, you get the correct result.
This is a good example of why and how well this is going to work. It'll take time, but every single case anyone points out where machine translation is poor is just an instance of a rule that can be encoded in a machine translator.
There are a finite number of interesting and useful sentences in any language, although the number is large. Some of those sentences fall out of usage while new ones replace them.
Sentences that no native speaker of any language anywhere would ever say ("Buffalo buffalo..." etc) can be encoded to translate to the equivalent of "I am a complete wanker" in the target language.
So while there will always be difficult cases (don't expect poetry to ever translate well) the 80/20 rule most decidedly applies, and just like people learned Graffiti to overcome the deficiencies of machine handwriting recognition capabilities, people will learn the babelized version of their own language to allow reasonbly fluent translation based on the machine translation capabilities of current hardware.
This is going to create some really interesting possibilities, particularly with regard to linguistic minorities, who will no longer be under nearly so much pressure to learn the majority language if they want to participate in the majority economy. This is a good thing.
Canada will never have a low per capita rate of energy usage. Firstly, it's cold here. Heating energy use is related to population density and average temperature. Canada has a low population density, and with exceptions like Toronto and Vancouver, will likely always have that population distributed over a large area.
That's a lot of "never"s.
Urbanization is still progressing in Canada, and the dying off of our smaller communities, while a concern to some, is likely to mean that by 2050 or so we'll be one of the most highly concentrated peoples on Earth, with large even more empty hinterlands between our isolated city-states.
Furthermore, we have the potential for redeveloping our nuclear resources and continuing to run all that heavy industry with a fraction of our current carbon emissions.
Likewise, better insulation and higher thermal efficiency is something we're already really good at, and as older housing gets upgrade we'll continue to reduce the role heating plays in our energy budget.
The only thing really holding Canada back is the anti-environmental movement, lead by purely political, anti-scientific organizations like Greenpeace and the Suzuki Foundation, who never publish a study that doesn't mysteriously confirm their donor's political prejudices. The existence of those organizations helps rally support for the equally anti-environmental Big Oil supporters of our current Reform Party government.
If there was a pro-environment voice in Canadian politics it would get crushed by both sides of the current anti-environmental axis (look at what happened to Energy Probe, or the Ontario Green Party, or the original Greenpeace), which is unfortunate, because we're well-positioned to lead the world on this stuff and instead get hamstrung by political hacks who don't care one bit for science or the environment.
What this means, and what conclusions can be drawn... seems speculative to the point of parlour games.
And yet the very facts you adduce lead one almost trivially to the same conclusion as TFA: if anything remotely resembling "intelligence" is both heritable and results in a reproductive advantage, then it is almost certain that we have the least of it of any generation in recent (evolutionary) history.
Nor does one have to go back 6000 years. a few hundred will do, when the human population started its several-ten-fold expansion from a few hundred million to getting on for 10 billion today. That tells us the selective pressure of all kinds have been essentially zero in the past ten-ish generations.
Since we have posited that something vaguely resembling "intelligence" was selected for, and has not been selected for in the past 10+ generations, we can be certain that a lot of dumb people survived to breed who would not have done so previously (me, for example, if we include various kinds of social sagacity in the multi-factor definition of "intelligence").
I've pointed this out in the past on/.: if you grant those two assumptions--even slightly heritable intelligence and an even slight selective advantage for the more intelligent--the complete absence of selection in the past several hundred years necessarily implies we ain't too bright, on average, compared to our historical ancestors.
Or maybe it's more like those guys who built a time capsule out of an old salt mine and placed a car and other items so they would be in mint condition and valuable when they opened it after 50 just to find a water source infiltrated the cavern and they were all rust.
That looks rather more like a concrete vault just below the surface in urban Tulsa than a salt mine, which is not entirely surprising because that is what it is, according to the articles on the subject.
The reason this is important is that salt domes are one of the preferred storage sites for nuclear waste, precisely because they are exceptionally dry environments, so one wouldn't want to even inadvertently give the inaccurate impression that salt mines are somehow at significant risk of water infiltration.
Yeah, the number of times "perfect" was used in the first part of the summary was a clear flag that "except" was going to loom large in the second part.
"Perfect" is such an abstract concept that almost all of its uses are misleading: the primary purpose of abstraction is to lie and mislead, and the more abstract the concept the few non-misleading uses it has. As such, "perfect" is a word that should be used very rarely in an engineering context.
I know another term for reverse-racism... it's "racism". It shouldn't be made different in any way. If people keep doing things to treat any type of racism differently, it will never stop.
Yet no one anywhere has any difficulty distinguishing "reverse-racism" from racism. Why is that? Think really hard about it and ask yourself, "Beyond irrelevant characteristics like skin colour, what distinguishes 'reverse-racists' from racists?"
Could it, perhaps, have something to do with the distribution of wealth and power between the two groups? Negative attitudes by members of one artificially delimited social group against another are irrelevant if the people doing the discrimination are powerless to act on their negative beliefs.
So you might conclude that "reverse-racism" could also be called "irrelevant-racism", while racism remains as relevant today as it ever was, sadly.
African-American are just as prejudiced against people who are not like them or are not a part of their group as any other group.
Which is an irrelevant distraction because black Americans are not in position of class privilege or power. But thanks for bringing it up! Discussions of racism need more irrelevant distractions from people who have managed to fail to notice what the actual issues are about, but instead focus on irrelevancies.
Personally, I am at a quandary. Since my ethnicity includes European (northern and southern), African (north and central), Asian (near, middle, and far), and the new "Latino" and older Hispanic, who should I disdain?
The poor grammarian, for whom there is no excuse but ignorance and lack of education, as evinced by the rest of your post.
This actually shows that Silver is poorly calibrated. if he were accurately calibrated, 80% of his 80%-confidence predictions would come true, 50% of his 50%-confidence predictions would come true, etc. But 100% of his >50%-confidence predictions came true. In the future, he should be more sure of his predictions.
Not necessarily. Most of the uncertainty in his predictions was due to the conditional probability of systematic bias in likely voter models. For example, Gallup was showing much better results for Romney and the Rac... err... Republicans across the board, which was probably due to how they screened people who responded.
Systematic error shows up as a conditional probability, so you are lumping together completely disjoint realities into your final result. In terms of discrete conditional probabilites, imagine that based on historical data you have three equally likley possible conditions: 5% Democratic bias, no bias, and 5% Republican bias. You run your simulations with each of these three biases, and you get a result that says senators D0, D1, D2, D3, D4, D5, D6, D7, D8 and D9 are all 80% likely to win. But 99% of that 20% chance they'll lose comes from the condition where there's a 5% Republican bias.
But remember: those three conditions describe completely disjoint realities. They are not sampling error, but statements of ignorance about the actual state of the world.
Now the world really is just one way (it may be ambiguous relative to some human categorization, but then that ambiguity is just part of the one unique way the world realy is.) So only one of the three conditions are true. If it happens that the no-bias case is the way the world really is, then 100% of those 80% chances will come true.
That said, in future elections Bayesian predictions of the kind Silver and everyone else in this space are making will lower the conditional probabilities of bias, because this election demonstrated good low-bias results, but so long as the ultimate uncertainty is dominated by the systematic error, Bayesian predictors will tend to appear either uncannily accurate or dismayingly inaccurate.
However, averaged over many, many election cycles (18 or more) you would expect to get statisics such that 80% of the 80% calls are correct, and so on. But within individual elections that use fixed likely-voter models that won't be the case.
Conditional probabilities are one of the most difficult things for humans to understand (the Monty Hall problem is a classic case where all the confusion comes from treating a conditional probability as if it was a total probability) so it's worth practicing the art of thinking carefully about these things, and the odds are still good I've said at least one confusing or incorrect thing in the above.
DVDs don't have military encrypted GPSs attached to them.
It wouldn't matter if they did. You're pointing (repeatedly) to the strongest part of the system and pretending that it's the point that has to be hacked, whereas we all know that it's the weakest part that will be the point of attack.
What's the weakest point? I don't know, but I do know that it'll be far, far weaker than the encryption on military-grade GPS signals. Likely it'll be in the hardware that handles the actual unlocking of the control system. Remember, at the end of the day we are talking about nothing more than the presence or absence of a few volts on a wire, and physical accesss can always circumvent all technological protections, often far more simply than overly clever designers realize.
So your argument comes down to, "Brown people are stupid" or something like that. Any time you have physical access you are falling back to security through obscurity, and we know that never works.
Even granted that the dycryption is embedded in the controller chip, so the avionics just won't work without the correct encryption keys coming along in realtime, you're assuming that no one will ever under any circumstances be able to pull on of those chips and send it off to a friendly laboratory in Pakistan for analysis. You're assuming that no one from the rebel forces will ever have access to even moderately powerful reverse engineering tools, and that this stockpile of potentially deadly weapons will just be allowed to sit peacefully while stupid brown people shrug and say, "Gosh, I wish we were smart enough to contact my cousin Yousef who's doing a master's at MIT in VLSI design. If only we were smart enough to do that we could make millions selliing this pile of otherwise-useless missles to the highest bidder."
From the late 90's up until 2008-2010, there were two camps: the old school and the web crowd. But now the old school is learning web, and the web crowd is finally learning OO, design patterns, etc. So now everyone's the same.
The new divide is between embedded and non-embedded programming. While mobile devices with friendly operating systems are all the rage now amongst low-skill young developers because they can throw together a "minimum viable app" in a very shor time thanks to the deep libraries and decent development tools that exist for those platforms, there is another class of embedded devices that is a lot less forgiving.
Those of us who grew up coding on 680x chips and the like find modern microcontrollers very familiar environments and have no great trouble working with the extreme constraints they impose on us. Younger people often find that frustrating and weird, because it's so unlike everything they have encountered before. This is not to say younger people can't handle it, and the ones that do are quite exceptional precisely because they have eschewed the low-hanging fruit that tempts their peers. But for older coders there is simply no barrier to entry for these devices.
Agreed. Anyone who thinks that highly of Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged needs their head examined.
That's true, but I don't know what it has to do with Ryan, who hates pretty much everything Ayn Rand stood for and argued for in Atlas Shrugged. He's a deeply religious social conservative who would deny what Rand described as one of the most fundamental rights, the right a woman to control her own body.
There's an old joke about how you can tell when a politician is lying: their lips are moving. Ryan's supposed views of Rand are an example of that.
But people would probably listen to you a bit more if you explained how *communities* can both protect the rights of innocent people, as well as deal with potential threats to life and liberty.
This is a very strange question, as the article is about police actions in "the war on drugs", which is not a case of police dealing with a potential threat to life and liberty. It is, rather, a case of the police being a potential threat to life and liberty.
So first off, many if not most civil libertarians would agree that legalization of most drugs and medicalization of drug adiction would do a great deal to protect communities from abuse of power by police.
Then you go off on completely unrelated matters, to do with actual crimes--murder and child molestation--that have nothing whatsoever to do with the war on drugs. Again, this is weird. Why are you bringing these crimes up in this context? Have civil libertarianss been calling for repeal of laws againsts murder or child abuse? If so, where? I've seen civil libertarians argue for the protection of the legal rights of accused murderers or child abusers, but never seen them call for a repeal of the laws against such things.
That said, knowing who your neighbours are and being involved in your community are two of the biggest things you can do to protect yourself from the harms you seem concerned with.
The data are clear that greater police powers, longer sentences and harsher punishments do not generally result in lower crime rates, so obviously no one who cares about reducing crime would be advocating such things. More integrated communities of involved individuals do reduce crime, so that is the obvious place to start.
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We design whole realities nowadays.
"Freedom is freedom to say 2+2=4. Grant that and everything else follows." You're familiar with the source, so I won't bother to cite it.
Wish I had mod points though: your post definitely deserves a
+1 Funny".
I mean, there's a simple fix, just add a law to prevent any elected official in Canada from having secondary health coverage.
Exactly. Pretty much every socialized system in the world except Canada's allows for a robust third-party care system. Including such rabid enemies of social democracy as Sweden, Germany and France. But if you suggest it here you get run out of town on a rail while hypocrites like Belinda Stronach skive off to the US for treatment the moment they become seriously ill.
Canada has a two-tier health care system: one for the rich (and what member of Parliament does not qualify as "rich" after two terms in office, given the present value of their pension?) and one for the rest of us.
This unfortunate reality is that this is made necessary by the predatory health care industry to the south of us, but it's time we figure out how to deal with that. In particular, I would argue for a law that had two parts, to be voted on separately. The first would affirm the principles of the Canada Health Act, which is what prevents covered services from being insured privately. The second would make it illegal (penalty: total asset forfeiture, including pension) for anyone who voted for the first part to ever access any health care services that were not covered for everyone under their provincial plan.
Single-payer public systems are obviously better than what the US has, but single-payer public systems of the kind that Sweden, Germany, France, Australia and quite a few other places have are obviously better than what Canada has, both in terms of quality of care and lower cost. The differences go beyond simple health care policy to social policy (preventative care, parental leave, etc) but it's not as if any of it is a great big mystery to anyone who isn't an ideology addled idiot.
To your point, the thing I find absolutely remarkable is the smug, holier-than-thou attitude which pervades most University-goers in the country - they have been completely brain-washed by their family and high schools that they need to go massively into debt for not only an undergraduate degree in Basketweaving, but a Masters and PhD before they can be any use to society
What I find absolutely remarkable is this aggressive, chip-on-the-should attitude of community college graduates, who seem to feel there is something inferior about their education so they are always implying that anyone who graduates from a university necessarily has a "degree in Basketweaving" as opposed to, say, physics or economics.
Nor is going massively in debt a requirement for a university degree in this country. I have two kids in good schools right now (neither one studying basketweaving, oddly enough) and know that the full cost of tuition and fees is under $10K in the most expensive programs at the the most expensive schools in Canada. Add living expenses and you're still under $20K/year.
Community colleges are cheaper than that, both because they have shorter programs and lower tuition, and they are a good choice for many. I know plenty of people with undergrad degrees in the sciences who wanted laboratory jobs in their field and went to a community college for technical diplomas.
Finally: two of the better coders I've worked with had degrees in english and music. They said their degrees taught them to think structurally, which allowed them to easily see software in ways that most programmers struggle with. So maybe "basketweaving" has some use after all.
Really finally: university degrees should not be vocational training, and in a world where your vocation is going to get outsourced or made technologically obsolete you need to get the broadest base for your future development possible. Knowing a single technical discipline is OK for ten years or so, maybe. But be prepared to go back and retrain a few times in different fields. Having a BSc under your beld may make that process a good deal easier, as you will have a deeper understanding of the foundations that your new field is being built on.
I can tell you that there's simply no practical reason to have kids. It's purely emotional.
I think you need to to reconsider the nature of "practical" and the role that emotion plays in the life of a social primate.
You might argue that there's not economic reason to have kids, but impractical? Your own post belies this.
If The Scotsman newspaper runs this news then it's a guarantee that for a couple of days following the article the letters page would be full of "It was snowing here; so much for global warming" and "But I saw ice on the ground this morning" and similar variants.
Right, just like every time there is an usually hot month you get people saying, "SEEE this PROVES you must immediately use less/eat less/have less fun/etc."
It's good fun reminding those smug Puritan bastards that "weather is not climate", and one hot summer doth not an increase in global heat content make.
For the record, I think anthropogenic climate change is very plausible, but as a computational physicist who has looked at some climate models I also think the detailed predictions are likely quite wrong, as in fact they have proven to be every single time they have been put to test.
Those complete failures of the model predictions, which have seen things like serious under-estimates in the rate of Arctic sea-ice loss, have been taken by the anti-scientific political community that has encrusted itself around the cause of AGW as "proof" that "things are EVEN WORSE than we thought!" as if the climate was some one-dimensional system along the scientifically-irrelevant of "worse" and "better".
Let me say that again: almost every story that runs on AGW-related data reports a failure of GCMs to accurate predict the future. As a scientist I don't care about "worse" and "better", I care about "accurate" and "inaccurate", and unsurprisingly (to anyone who actually understands computational physics, which apparently many climatologists don't) the models are not very accurate.
This is a very bad thing in several ways, only one of which is that we may be in deeper shit than we expected. In particular, we may be in a quite different kind of shit than we expected. The climate is complex and non-linear, and the odds of things simply "getting hotter" are relatively small. I have no idea what might happen, but I'm pretty sure it won't be particularly close to what the models predict, and as soon as, say, a negative feedback results in a deviation below the model predictions the nay-sayers will use this to smear all of the science.
So I see anti-science crusaders on both sides (and I advocate investment in non-carbon power, including nuclear, as the only reasonably robust policy choice for dealing with this.)
My gut says...
It's the 21st century, hundreds of years into the Age of Reason.
WHY for the love of everything sane does anyone think what their gut says is remotely interesting or germane to any discussion of anything?
Announcing that you've not done any numerical analysis or quantitative reasoning regarding a purely quantitative question is a really, really bad way of convincing anyone rational you have anything interesting to say.
And as other posters have pointed out, because the people who are doing this are Not Idiots(TM) they have already considered your point and are planning to do the actual cooling using the liquid hydrogen fuel.
The simple winner-take-all plurality type voting system pretty much guarantees you'll end up with a two-party system.
It does nothing of the kind, as the most cursory inspection of non-US systems demonstrates. There have typically been three significant parties in the UK (some mix of Conservative, Liberal, Labour and Lib-Dem) over the past century. In Canada the average is closer to four, with some mix of Progressive Conservative, Liberal, BQ, Reform, Conservative, CCF/NDP and Social Credit a the federal level over the past 100 years. New parties in Canada pop up every twenty years or so (Progressive, Social Credit, CCF/NDP, BQ, Reform, and at the provincial level Wild Rose, Saskatchewan, ADQ...)
So it is clear that first-past-the-post has nothing whatsoever to do with the ossified dominance of the two major parties in the US. My guess is that a few straightforward administrative reforms in the US would open up the competition. In particular, a national arms-length organization to handle all voter registration and polling--the way Elections Canada does up here--would do a great deal to ease the bipartisan lock that the Democrats and Republicans have on the American electorate.
you're suggesting I should go back and create installers for this system that is only running in one production environment, and a handful of stage/dev environments? Really? Even if it were installed a few dozen times a year, it wouldn't justify the cost of automating that process, vs. a checklist.
That depends. Checklists are more error-prone than scripts, and doing things via scripts pretty much forces you to keep the scripts up-to-date, so there is a higher degree of knowledge capture. When I do things via checklists the checklist is often a few iterations behind the reality, because I know what the current deviations are. When I do things via scripts they are always up-to-date, and if I get hit by a bus my employer won't lose anything.
There is certainly a place for checklists, but for any software that is going to be deployed to customers--even one or two--scripts are almost always the right way to go, in part because they encourage in-house testing before release, and remove from the customer's hands a very error-prone and stressful step.
This is why the beetle is black - to radiate the maximum heat away from it's body in the night, so it's carapace is nice and cool for it's water collection in the morning.
The color of the beetle, which is determined by its absorption spectrum in the visible, is irrelevant to its IR emissivity, which is what determines its cooling rate.
What you're saying is equivalent to "That's why the beetle is blue, so it will emit lots of red light in the dark."
If the beetle is black for thermal reasons it may be because there is an advantage to warming up as quickly as possible in the morning. This is a big deal for flying insects (I don't know if the beetle flies) as they need to warm their wing muscles so they can take off, which may help them avoid predators. And it will also help them stay active into the night by getting good and hot during the day.
As a Canadian, It's terrifying that Americans think their center-right government is made up of "crazy radicals".
I dunno... if Obama ran in Canada he'd be so far to the right he wouldn't register... oh, you mean Americans think their far-right government is made up of crazy LEFT WING radicals!
Honestly I had to read your comment about three times before I figured out what you were talking about! And seriously: Obama makes Stephen Harper look like a socialist (which he isn't, but still...)
RTFAMC: the nautical charts the ship's crew was using were correct. The /. summary is misleading and wrong (boy, that's a surprise!)
It's too late. The joy of Lost was the promise of a satisfactory conclusion to a coherent story arc. Now we know that there isn't one.
TV viewers are like Charlie Brown and the football: for some unfathomable reason you keep hoping that these shows with a mysterious back-story will end up with a grand revelation that is coherent and satisfactory, and despite disappointment after disappointment you always fall for the same trick again.
I'm guessing this is in part due to younger viewers who've never seen it happen before getting mislead by the entertainment industry press, whose job it is to put bums in seats.
While it does get rid of headcount, it runs a real risk of losing people that you can't actually afford to lose.
Other the CEO and their highly-paid cronies, who exactly can't a company afford to lose? As near as I can tell the modern "I can manage anything without knowing anything about it" manager thinks only THEY are indispensable. Everyone else--you know, the people who actually know stuff about the industry and technology the company depends on--is just a replaceable cog in the machine.
So while the point you make is obviously true there is ample evidence that CEOs are heavily selected to be the kind of person who is capable of ignoring obvious truths.
The proper translation is something like "stop-car-area" - when you try it now, you get the correct result.
This is a good example of why and how well this is going to work. It'll take time, but every single case anyone points out where machine translation is poor is just an instance of a rule that can be encoded in a machine translator.
There are a finite number of interesting and useful sentences in any language, although the number is large. Some of those sentences fall out of usage while new ones replace them.
Sentences that no native speaker of any language anywhere would ever say ("Buffalo buffalo..." etc) can be encoded to translate to the equivalent of "I am a complete wanker" in the target language.
So while there will always be difficult cases (don't expect poetry to ever translate well) the 80/20 rule most decidedly applies, and just like people learned Graffiti to overcome the deficiencies of machine handwriting recognition capabilities, people will learn the babelized version of their own language to allow reasonbly fluent translation based on the machine translation capabilities of current hardware.
This is going to create some really interesting possibilities, particularly with regard to linguistic minorities, who will no longer be under nearly so much pressure to learn the majority language if they want to participate in the majority economy. This is a good thing.
Canada will never have a low per capita rate of energy usage. Firstly, it's cold here. Heating energy use is related to population density and average temperature. Canada has a low population density, and with exceptions like Toronto and Vancouver, will likely always have that population distributed over a large area.
That's a lot of "never"s.
Urbanization is still progressing in Canada, and the dying off of our smaller communities, while a concern to some, is likely to mean that by 2050 or so we'll be one of the most highly concentrated peoples on Earth, with large even more empty hinterlands between our isolated city-states.
Furthermore, we have the potential for redeveloping our nuclear resources and continuing to run all that heavy industry with a fraction of our current carbon emissions.
Likewise, better insulation and higher thermal efficiency is something we're already really good at, and as older housing gets upgrade we'll continue to reduce the role heating plays in our energy budget.
The only thing really holding Canada back is the anti-environmental movement, lead by purely political, anti-scientific organizations like Greenpeace and the Suzuki Foundation, who never publish a study that doesn't mysteriously confirm their donor's political prejudices. The existence of those organizations helps rally support for the equally anti-environmental Big Oil supporters of our current Reform Party government.
If there was a pro-environment voice in Canadian politics it would get crushed by both sides of the current anti-environmental axis (look at what happened to Energy Probe, or the Ontario Green Party, or the original Greenpeace), which is unfortunate, because we're well-positioned to lead the world on this stuff and instead get hamstrung by political hacks who don't care one bit for science or the environment.
What this means, and what conclusions can be drawn... seems speculative to the point of parlour games.
And yet the very facts you adduce lead one almost trivially to the same conclusion as TFA: if anything remotely resembling "intelligence" is both heritable and results in a reproductive advantage, then it is almost certain that we have the least of it of any generation in recent (evolutionary) history.
Nor does one have to go back 6000 years. a few hundred will do, when the human population started its several-ten-fold expansion from a few hundred million to getting on for 10 billion today. That tells us the selective pressure of all kinds have been essentially zero in the past ten-ish generations.
Since we have posited that something vaguely resembling "intelligence" was selected for, and has not been selected for in the past 10+ generations, we can be certain that a lot of dumb people survived to breed who would not have done so previously (me, for example, if we include various kinds of social sagacity in the multi-factor definition of "intelligence").
I've pointed this out in the past on /.: if you grant those two assumptions--even slightly heritable intelligence and an even slight selective advantage for the more intelligent--the complete absence of selection in the past several hundred years necessarily implies we ain't too bright, on average, compared to our historical ancestors.
Or maybe it's more like those guys who built a time capsule out of an old salt mine and placed a car and other items so they would be in mint condition and valuable when they opened it after 50 just to find a water source infiltrated the cavern and they were all rust.
Just a nitpick on your information: there's nothing to suggest this car was buried in a salt mine, and a great deal to suggest it was not. Here is a picture of it being unearthed: http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/02/07/automobiles/20100207-tulsa_index-2.html
That looks rather more like a concrete vault just below the surface in urban Tulsa than a salt mine, which is not entirely surprising because that is what it is, according to the articles on the subject.
The reason this is important is that salt domes are one of the preferred storage sites for nuclear waste, precisely because they are exceptionally dry environments, so one wouldn't want to even inadvertently give the inaccurate impression that salt mines are somehow at significant risk of water infiltration.
If there are caveats, it's not perfect
Yeah, the number of times "perfect" was used in the first part of the summary was a clear flag that "except" was going to loom large in the second part.
"Perfect" is such an abstract concept that almost all of its uses are misleading: the primary purpose of abstraction is to lie and mislead, and the more abstract the concept the few non-misleading uses it has. As such, "perfect" is a word that should be used very rarely in an engineering context.
I know another term for reverse-racism ... it's "racism". It shouldn't be made different in any way. If people keep doing things to treat any type of racism differently, it will never stop.
Yet no one anywhere has any difficulty distinguishing "reverse-racism" from racism. Why is that? Think really hard about it and ask yourself, "Beyond irrelevant characteristics like skin colour, what distinguishes 'reverse-racists' from racists?"
Could it, perhaps, have something to do with the distribution of wealth and power between the two groups? Negative attitudes by members of one artificially delimited social group against another are irrelevant if the people doing the discrimination are powerless to act on their negative beliefs.
So you might conclude that "reverse-racism" could also be called "irrelevant-racism", while racism remains as relevant today as it ever was, sadly.
African-American are just as prejudiced against people who are not like them or are not a part of their group as any other group.
Which is an irrelevant distraction because black Americans are not in position of class privilege or power. But thanks for bringing it up! Discussions of racism need more irrelevant distractions from people who have managed to fail to notice what the actual issues are about, but instead focus on irrelevancies.
Personally, I am at a quandary. Since my ethnicity includes European (northern and southern), African (north and central), Asian (near, middle, and far), and the new "Latino" and older Hispanic, who should I disdain?
The poor grammarian, for whom there is no excuse but ignorance and lack of education, as evinced by the rest of your post.
This actually shows that Silver is poorly calibrated. if he were accurately calibrated, 80% of his 80%-confidence predictions would come true, 50% of his 50%-confidence predictions would come true, etc. But 100% of his >50%-confidence predictions came true. In the future, he should be more sure of his predictions.
Not necessarily. Most of the uncertainty in his predictions was due to the conditional probability of systematic bias in likely voter models. For example, Gallup was showing much better results for Romney and the Rac... err... Republicans across the board, which was probably due to how they screened people who responded.
Systematic error shows up as a conditional probability, so you are lumping together completely disjoint realities into your final result. In terms of discrete conditional probabilites, imagine that based on historical data you have three equally likley possible conditions: 5% Democratic bias, no bias, and 5% Republican bias. You run your simulations with each of these three biases, and you get a result that says senators D0, D1, D2, D3, D4, D5, D6, D7, D8 and D9 are all 80% likely to win. But 99% of that 20% chance they'll lose comes from the condition where there's a 5% Republican bias.
But remember: those three conditions describe completely disjoint realities. They are not sampling error, but statements of ignorance about the actual state of the world.
Now the world really is just one way (it may be ambiguous relative to some human categorization, but then that ambiguity is just part of the one unique way the world realy is.) So only one of the three conditions are true. If it happens that the no-bias case is the way the world really is, then 100% of those 80% chances will come true.
That said, in future elections Bayesian predictions of the kind Silver and everyone else in this space are making will lower the conditional probabilities of bias, because this election demonstrated good low-bias results, but so long as the ultimate uncertainty is dominated by the systematic error, Bayesian predictors will tend to appear either uncannily accurate or dismayingly inaccurate.
However, averaged over many, many election cycles (18 or more) you would expect to get statisics such that 80% of the 80% calls are correct, and so on. But within individual elections that use fixed likely-voter models that won't be the case.
Conditional probabilities are one of the most difficult things for humans to understand (the Monty Hall problem is a classic case where all the confusion comes from treating a conditional probability as if it was a total probability) so it's worth practicing the art of thinking carefully about these things, and the odds are still good I've said at least one confusing or incorrect thing in the above.
DVDs don't have military encrypted GPSs attached to them.
It wouldn't matter if they did. You're pointing (repeatedly) to the strongest part of the system and pretending that it's the point that has to be hacked, whereas we all know that it's the weakest part that will be the point of attack.
What's the weakest point? I don't know, but I do know that it'll be far, far weaker than the encryption on military-grade GPS signals. Likely it'll be in the hardware that handles the actual unlocking of the control system. Remember, at the end of the day we are talking about nothing more than the presence or absence of a few volts on a wire, and physical accesss can always circumvent all technological protections, often far more simply than overly clever designers realize.
So your argument comes down to, "Brown people are stupid" or something like that. Any time you have physical access you are falling back to security through obscurity, and we know that never works.
Even granted that the dycryption is embedded in the controller chip, so the avionics just won't work without the correct encryption keys coming along in realtime, you're assuming that no one will ever under any circumstances be able to pull on of those chips and send it off to a friendly laboratory in Pakistan for analysis. You're assuming that no one from the rebel forces will ever have access to even moderately powerful reverse engineering tools, and that this stockpile of potentially deadly weapons will just be allowed to sit peacefully while stupid brown people shrug and say, "Gosh, I wish we were smart enough to contact my cousin Yousef who's doing a master's at MIT in VLSI design. If only we were smart enough to do that we could make millions selliing this pile of otherwise-useless missles to the highest bidder."
From the late 90's up until 2008-2010, there were two camps: the old school and the web crowd. But now the old school is learning web, and the web crowd is finally learning OO, design patterns, etc. So now everyone's the same.
The new divide is between embedded and non-embedded programming. While mobile devices with friendly operating systems are all the rage now amongst low-skill young developers because they can throw together a "minimum viable app" in a very shor time thanks to the deep libraries and decent development tools that exist for those platforms, there is another class of embedded devices that is a lot less forgiving.
Those of us who grew up coding on 680x chips and the like find modern microcontrollers very familiar environments and have no great trouble working with the extreme constraints they impose on us. Younger people often find that frustrating and weird, because it's so unlike everything they have encountered before. This is not to say younger people can't handle it, and the ones that do are quite exceptional precisely because they have eschewed the low-hanging fruit that tempts their peers. But for older coders there is simply no barrier to entry for these devices.
Agreed. Anyone who thinks that highly of Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged needs their head examined.
That's true, but I don't know what it has to do with Ryan, who hates pretty much everything Ayn Rand stood for and argued for in Atlas Shrugged. He's a deeply religious social conservative who would deny what Rand described as one of the most fundamental rights, the right a woman to control her own body.
There's an old joke about how you can tell when a politician is lying: their lips are moving. Ryan's supposed views of Rand are an example of that.
But people would probably listen to you a bit more if you explained how *communities* can both protect the rights of innocent people, as well as deal with potential threats to life and liberty.
This is a very strange question, as the article is about police actions in "the war on drugs", which is not a case of police dealing with a potential threat to life and liberty. It is, rather, a case of the police being a potential threat to life and liberty.
So first off, many if not most civil libertarians would agree that legalization of most drugs and medicalization of drug adiction would do a great deal to protect communities from abuse of power by police.
Then you go off on completely unrelated matters, to do with actual crimes--murder and child molestation--that have nothing whatsoever to do with the war on drugs. Again, this is weird. Why are you bringing these crimes up in this context? Have civil libertarianss been calling for repeal of laws againsts murder or child abuse? If so, where? I've seen civil libertarians argue for the protection of the legal rights of accused murderers or child abusers, but never seen them call for a repeal of the laws against such things.
That said, knowing who your neighbours are and being involved in your community are two of the biggest things you can do to protect yourself from the harms you seem concerned with.
The data are clear that greater police powers, longer sentences and harsher punishments do not generally result in lower crime rates, so obviously no one who cares about reducing crime would be advocating such things. More integrated communities of involved individuals do reduce crime, so that is the obvious place to start.