Whether or not any particular religious person is "delusional" is not something I want to judge.
"Delusional" is the correct term for anti-Bayesian beliefs, and religious beliefs are by definition anti-Bayesian, because they are founded on faith, which is a belief that is by definition impervious to evidence.
Believing something is plausible based on evidence, and being willing to update that belief in the face of new evidence according to Bayes' rule, is not faith. Faith is specifically a profound commitment to ignore all evidence that would under the ordinary application of Bayes' rule lead to a decreased plausibility for the belief in question.
So while Dawkins is unduly aggressive in his presentation at times--although of course vastly more gentle than even moderate religious people in his defense of reason and science against anti-Bayesian zealots--his use of the term "delusional" for religious people is well within the bounds of ordinary language, however distasteful the many sincerely deluded religious people may find it.
Surprsingly many religious people even on./ are ignorant of Bayesianism and are unaware that their beliefs are a violation of the only possible self-consistent method of updating beliefs in the face of new evidence (the "only possible" claim is mathematically provable.) Those people may be plausibly called "ignorant" rather than "deluded".
Not at all. When men went to sea, the boat they were on, nurtured them and kept them safe from harm and alive.
When men aren't being stupid, they know women are the stronger sex. It is women they lean on when they are afraid. It seems only natural to think of that boat beneath their feet as a woman.
This is such a great example of normalizing a purely cultural phenomenon via imaginary biology that I feel obliged to point out that in Soviet Russia (and in post-Soviet Russia, too) ships are refered to using the masculine pronoun.
Maybe it's time for capitalism and the free market thinkers to acknowledge the fact that corporations have as much power to destroy the balance of the free market, as the governments
Since Adam Smith did this over 200 years ago I'd say it's a little weird that anyone who calls themself a "free market thinker" would find this in any way news.
Corporations do not exist in free markets. For corporations to exist requires an act of legislative interference with free markets in the form of a Companies Act, which is a pure exercise in market interference by the Nanny State.
No one who holds themselves a defender of free markets is or can be a defender of corporations, and anyone who says otherwise is either ignorant or lying.
From the vendor side there's such a huge amount of pressure to ship stuff--and an embedded belief that "software is easy... if it was hard it would be called hardware". I've been told by prospective clients that they could "hire a twelve year old" to do what I do. This is apparently because managers are idiots who can't tell the difference between a web page and an embedded algorithm that does something that was impossible the year before and won't be easy for another decade.
The bottom line is the bottom line: if I quote on an embedded system that's fully secure it'll cost five times as much and take three times as long (and it still won't be FULLY secure, just not totally wide open.) Since no one in the purchasing decision making process values security--or even understands the least little bit about the gear they're buying above a black-box 'push this button and that happens' level--there is no pressure on vendors to make stuff secure.
Which is fortunate, because if there was, the security requirements would run head-on into the functional requirements, which require anyone with an MD to do anything with the gear with no training and without bothering to read the manual...
I would set it up as a physically separate network that only connects to the local network in one place and have my firewall there.
Your whole reply can be summarized as, "I have never worked in anything like a hospital IT environment."
Moving many gigabypes of information around transparently and quickly between subtly incompatible devices (DICOM isn't so much a "standard" as a "suggestion" if you look at the way vendors actually implement) coupled to a bespoke PACS network is barely possible without any additional list of pie-in-the-sky requirements of the kind you list.
Add to that fun requirements such as that many hospitals are also teaching environments and so have to interface (again, transparently and at very high speed) to university networks, and then bring in external consulting scienctists (Hi) who may need access to some patient data AND who may be hooking up research devices to your pristine medical network for clinical trials (this is how progress gets made, you see) and your cartoon locked-down network becomes competely useless in the real world because you've only considered about 60% of the actual uses it has to support.
With impossibly high standards like yours, it's a wonder any other physical model still holds up.
There's nothing particularly high about the standard of "accurate" prediction, although with climate models we're in the peculiar position of being asked to take the results at face value long before anything like a decent empirical check can be made.
The comparision with QED is entirely wrong-headed, because QED is an exact theory that can be used to compute results in its domain with astonishing accuracy and checked by controlled experiments, whereas climate models are a pile of approximations that cannot be used to predict anything that is subject to experimental--or even observational--verification on a timescale that would be useful to resolve the thorny political questions raised by the gigatonnes of garbage we are dumping into the atmosphere.
Please note that I am in favour of cap-and-trade as a means of reducing CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions independently of the correctness of the GCMs, which makes me honest, unlike the vast majority of "the science is in" folks who want to defend their political positions by hiding behind science they don't understand.
The last paragraph also suggests that universe might be in such a state of bi-periodic motion, and then asks, "if such a state requires an observer to make it work, who is the observer in the case of the universe?" or something like that.
The idea that "observation" of a quantum system requires consciousness is controversial at best, and generally not held by working physicists, although mathematicians like Penrose sometimes argue for it.
Beyond that, the question seems like an open invitation to answer in terms of various Bronze Age myths, as if "X requires a conciousness observing the universe; my favourite Bronze Age Myth posits a conscioussness observing the universe; therefore the conciousness observing the universe must be the one identified in my favourite Bronze Age myth" was an argument rather than a logical fallacy to the tune of "Humans crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the late 1400's; I believe humans in the late 1400's could fly by flapping their arms; therefore humans must have crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the late 1400's by flapping their arms."
which means the only other people who will buy it are geeks.
More likely some kind of "eco-tour for urbanites" outfit that will buy them and rent them to people whose idea of getting out into nature is to tear as much of it up as possible while being loud, obnoxious, and dangerous to themselves and others.
It's like calling electrons around a proton a "perpetual motion machine".
There's actually a book from the '50's or '60's by physicist Alan Stewart called "Perpetual Motion" that uses exactly this hook to talk about atomic physics (long out of print, and I can't find anything about it via the Great Search Engine, so perhaps it's all in my imagination.)
Probably the best bet would be a RC quad-rotor carrying Semtex for a practical DIY guided weapon. Range, speed, and altitude would be limited, ditto the practical carrying capacity.
10th-scale modelers would probably suggest a few other alternatives. This has been possible since the early 90's, and Donald Kingsbury's "The Moon Goddess and the Son"--which was published in the mid-80's--introduced the idea (if it was new even then) of a homebuilt guided (cruise) missile. He had MIT students doing it, if memory serves, but the threshold for entry has gotten a LOT lower since then.
The curious thing is that no one has actually done this, and it gives me hope that anyone smart enough to do so is also smart enough to NOT do so.
Now if we could only ensure that the people smart enough to quote on the DHS proposal are also smart enough to ignore it as a waste of their precious time. You only get so many years on this planet, and to blow them on obsolete technologies of control in service to pre-modern ideologies would be really sad.
The key is how undense it is. When a physicist talks about "temperature" in this context it's just short-hand for "average velocity"... it doesn't necessarily imply thermal equilibrium, even. So 1e6K means a high average velocity. Now, if it were a dense gas there might be collisions that would do things like excite electrons into higher states, which would then decay by emitting photons (light), and so the gas would lose thermal-kinetic energy over time.
In a sufficiently diffuse gas, loss processes like this are very slow because the chances of collision are very slow, so it can stay "hot" (that is, have a high average velocity) for a long, long time.
Back in the 1990s this was developed at Los Alamos and a few other accelerator centers. it's not new or unique to belgium.
But because it's a technological solution to a political problem, it's a wheel that will keep being reinvented and everyone who ignored it the previous time will be surprised by it the subsequent time.
The dialog goes like this:
Anti-nukes: "Nuclear power is unsafe. We must ban it!"
Engineer: "Look, I have found a way to make nuclear power safer than coal!"
Anti-nukes: "That would be terrible! It would make people want nuclear power, but we can't be having with that because nuclear power is unsafe. We must ban it!"
Until we have a solution for the political problem, which is that there is a large body of ignorant and fearful people who think that nuclear power is far more dangerous than it actually is and who will steadfastly refuse to ever under any circumstances to compare nuclear power with any other viable source of base-load industrial supply, the advances of technology will be almost completely irrelevant to human progress.
This is why so many people are into software: because it's cheap and easy and you can get results in an afternoon with a monkey at the keyboard. Software is really, really hard to do well, but incredibly easy to do well enough to make something that more-or-less-sorta-kinda works.
Hardware--both mechanical and electronic--is fantastically difficult by comparison and requires far more nuanced and insightful debugging process. Noise, ground-loops and marginal components can create the most remarkable effects in electronics, differential wear, unanticipated friction and tolerances can do likewise in mechanics.
That's where the idea of carbon taxes or cap-and-trade come from
Since cap-and-trade is the classical liberal move of creating and enforcing property rights as a legal mechanism for overcoming the crisis of an over-exploited commons, that should be "carbon taxes AND cap-and-trade", not "OR".
This is undoubtedly nit-picking, because no one would really ever be so disingenous or ignorant of economics and history to confuse property rights with a taxes! But while I'm pretty sure in your case this is an innocent slip, my nit-picking mind requires me to speak up, in case there really are some people out there so unbelievably out of touch with reality that they can't tell the difference between a property right and a tax.
In a tech company, it makes sense to have everyone take something along the lines of CS101.
And in a legal practice or doctor's office it makes sense for everyone to have a bit of legal or medical education, which for the most part people do.
But only a gibbering idiot would think that in any way supports the statement, "Everyone should learn to draft contracts" or "Everyone should learn to diagnose and treat diseases" simply because they work in legal or medical environments.
Why are you not nailing their balls to the wall? if this were any other product on the planet you would be having massive boycotts and giving them hell. You know that free broken shit is STILL broken shit, correct?
And broken shit is worth what we pay for it.
I've been running Slackware on my netbook lately (13.37) after experiencing Very Bad Things from Ubuntu, Debian, Mint and another distro I can't recall. It's been OK, but just today I had a crash in the Xserver that took me down to the command line when I opened the lid. Besides that, printing still doesn't work (I can see the shared printer on my WinXP box but can't print to it, although I've been chipping away at that issue and it's been getting better). And wireless networking is hit and miss: some networks that I can connect fine with XP don't work, some do. The fancier the encryption the less likely things are to work, it seems.
So the story for "Linux on the desktop" in 2012 is pretty sad: still crashes, only Slackware actually worked out the box (and I've been using it since '94 or so, pre-1.0, so I'm happy tweaking it and building stuff I need from source, etc.) And basic functions like wireless networking and network printing are poor, and power management sucks.
But: it doesn't cost me anything but time (which is a non-trivial concern) and I get a few extra years out of an older machine even as Microsoft is twilighting XP (it's too lame to run Win7 on, but performance with Slackware is pretty good, in terms of raw responsiveness.) I put up with the clunky, broken, barely adequate feature set because of those things.
Not that it didn't happen, but can you cite a reference to a time when food was not plentiful in the developed world.
You might be curious to know that no small part of the NAZI's plan to conquer Eastern Europe revolved around food security. In a way it actually worked, too, because the lessons learned about nitrate chemistry during the war were later applied to fertilizers by people who weren't batshit insane, and eventually led to the Green Revolution, which is why so few people are starving today.
But food security was a real issue in the '20's and especially the '30's, even in the US, due to crop failures and adverse climate conditions.
Thank you for linking this! It's good to know that/. readers can make up for the inadequacies of/. "editors".
Figure 1 in the paper tells the story: the author's claims are highly questionable. The figure is a bit hard to read, but shows histograms of time of death for male and female rats under various situations. The thin/medium/thick lines are the 11%, 22% and 33% treatment groups, and the dotted line is the control group.
One thing you want to do in cases like this is look at the dose-response curve, and according to Figure 1, by far the worst case is the very lowest dose of GMO maize with no Roundup, if you're a male rate. In most other cases it's the 22% group that has the worst outcomes. In no case does the group with the highest dose have the worst outcome.
Now, biology is famously non-linear, but in general the toxicity of toxic substances increases with dose, especially over this kind of range (we aren't talking about trace amounts vs large amounts, for example.)
Also, the data suggest that the GMO maize on its own is worse than the GMO maize in combination with Roundup or Roundup on its own. This is curious, though far from conclusive of anything much either way. But it shows that the story here is a lot more complicated than "GMO bad, Roundup bad, Monsanto evil" (although we hardly need detailed statistics to demonstrate the latter.)
I support GMO labelling both because I'm opposed to monoculture and because I view the inevitable (and already recorded) cross-polination of GMO crops with wild-type crops as a particularly nasty form of trespass. But this work does little or nothing to support claims that GMO crops or Roundup are health hazards, particularly as the word was done in rats and focuses on tumors, and it is well known that rats will get cancer from a dirty look, whereas humans are far more robust in that regard, so using rats as an animal model in this case is questionable at best.
The "one hit and you're hooked for life" thing is just prohibition propaganda.
Depends on the person. I had one shot of morphine medically as a teenager and I would never, ever go near any optiate ever again. It just feels too fucking good.
On the other hand, I know people who've had morphine and found themselves thinking, "What's the big deal? When do I get this awesome warm glow people talk about?"
Anecdata, for sure, but not implausible, and not inconsistent with the notion that while the majority of people don't face any major issues with most drugs (except meth, which has clinically observable and apparently permanent effects on brain structure in just a few hits) there is a small population of adicits who cause the big problems--although the problems the cause aren't nearly as severe as the prohibitionist policies that misguided moralists often engage to deal with them.
You will never actually reach production with things like this, for the same reason you will never reach a wall by moving in increments of 1/2.
You mean you won't reach production because you're too fucking stupid to realize that "an infinite number of intervals of diminishing size" is completely different from "an infinite distance", even after it's been explained to you dozens of times by multiple people over the course of more than 2000 years?
Perhaps you'd want detailed numerical models to match with the back of the envelope calculations, and you'd want to ask nineteen different groups on four continents to make different computer models; you'd want temperature measurements taken from a variety of different methods-- say, ground, ocean, balloon, and satellite-- to all agree; you'd want satellite measurements of infrared; you'd want vertical temperature profiles...
WIthout denying that anthropogenic CO2 represents a problem (I'm an advocate on cap-and-trade, which for some reason people who know nothing about economics call a "tax") I'm skeptical of the authority of climate models.
Unlike the people writing climate models, I'm a computational physicist, and I've done far too much work on far too many systems where apparently "minor" approximations and unphysical parameterizations result in wildly unphysical results. Even the best current GCMs currently contain "leaks" in their energy book-keeping that's on the same order as the entire effect of CO2 (handling of water vapour in one model results in an inbalance of 0.5 W/m**2, as opposed to the canonical 1.6 W/m**2 for CO2).
So I'm concerned that the active and irrational denial community has in fact resulted in a complementary phenonmenon in opposition, where the model results are vastly over-sold, both in terms of their correctness and the magnitude of likely consequences: there can be no admission that the effects of additional CO2 might be modest in most areas and positively beneficial in some, or the denial community will have won, seems to go the thinking.
While this does have potentially horrendous consequnces (I consider any energy plan for the 21st century that involves the word "coal" a pretty horrendous outcome) it also creates significant risks for the credibility of science, as the real uncertainties in the models are not being discussed as forthrightly as they ought, and when the models turn out to be badly wrong in some respects, which they most certainly will, science will have egg on its face.
Likewise an environmentalist told me, "it doesn't matter if global warming isn't caused by man made CO2, because by forcing a cut of CO2 you cut production and you cut consumption â"â" it is about reducing GREED"
We really need a new term for this kind of person, as they have no actual interest in the environment and often advocate policies--like lowered reliance on nuclear power--that do considerable environmental harm.
I am interested in how anyone would predict the successfull contributions of people who have been hiding in the patent office for several years being denied promotions for their lack of credentials.
I believe the general statement is "Prediction is hard, especially with regard to the future".
As to that famous patent clerk, he couldn't get a job not because of lack of credentials (although he didn't complete his doctoral degree until 1905) but at least in part because he belonged to some religious or ethnic classification that was moderately unpopular at the time.
Finally, based on this metric, I must be enormously successful in academia, because I've published (in good journals) on everything from pure physics to applied physics to genomics, with side-lines into image processing and the psychology of perception. All of that jumping around actually hurt my career a a lot, while people who focused exclusively on one thing and beat the living hell out of it were far more successful than I have been (part of the reason I left academia except for the odd adjunct appointment was that I didn't think a successful academic career was compatible with my broad range of interests.)
Yeah, believe it or not there are people who have preferences that are not only different from yours, but diametrically opposed to yours. Incredible, isn't it? (Not incredible that people have different preferences, but that you've reached an age where you're posting on/. and apparently are still shocked by this.)
I have a Blackberry precisely because I have strong personal preference for a physical keyboard, and because they're remarkably robust. I upgraded my phone recently (and ditched the most hideous third-rate carrier in the world, the Canadian company Rogers Wireless) and was strongly temped by an Android phone with touchscreen, but there was no way it was going to stand up to the routine rough handling my phones get (I've had years where I went through three phones before I got a BB.)
They aren't for everyone, but for some of us they are just the right thing, and it's unfortunate the company is likely to go the way of Nortel and other Canadian tech greats, run into the ground by poor marketing and bad management decisions.
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Whether or not any particular religious person is "delusional" is not something I want to judge.
"Delusional" is the correct term for anti-Bayesian beliefs, and religious beliefs are by definition anti-Bayesian, because they are founded on faith, which is a belief that is by definition impervious to evidence.
Believing something is plausible based on evidence, and being willing to update that belief in the face of new evidence according to Bayes' rule, is not faith. Faith is specifically a profound commitment to ignore all evidence that would under the ordinary application of Bayes' rule lead to a decreased plausibility for the belief in question.
So while Dawkins is unduly aggressive in his presentation at times--although of course vastly more gentle than even moderate religious people in his defense of reason and science against anti-Bayesian zealots--his use of the term "delusional" for religious people is well within the bounds of ordinary language, however distasteful the many sincerely deluded religious people may find it.
Surprsingly many religious people even on ./ are ignorant of Bayesianism and are unaware that their beliefs are a violation of the only possible self-consistent method of updating beliefs in the face of new evidence (the "only possible" claim is mathematically provable.) Those people may be plausibly called "ignorant" rather than "deluded".
Not at all. When men went to sea, the boat they were on, nurtured them and kept them safe from harm and alive.
When men aren't being stupid, they know women are the stronger sex. It is women they lean on when they are afraid. It seems only natural to think of that boat beneath their feet as a woman.
This is such a great example of normalizing a purely cultural phenomenon via imaginary biology that I feel obliged to point out that in Soviet Russia (and in post-Soviet Russia, too) ships are refered to using the masculine pronoun.
Maybe it's time for capitalism and the free market thinkers to acknowledge the fact that corporations have as much power to destroy the balance of the free market, as the governments
Since Adam Smith did this over 200 years ago I'd say it's a little weird that anyone who calls themself a "free market thinker" would find this in any way news.
Corporations do not exist in free markets. For corporations to exist requires an act of legislative interference with free markets in the form of a Companies Act, which is a pure exercise in market interference by the Nanny State.
No one who holds themselves a defender of free markets is or can be a defender of corporations, and anyone who says otherwise is either ignorant or lying.
From the vendor side there's such a huge amount of pressure to ship stuff--and an embedded belief that "software is easy... if it was hard it would be called hardware". I've been told by prospective clients that they could "hire a twelve year old" to do what I do. This is apparently because managers are idiots who can't tell the difference between a web page and an embedded algorithm that does something that was impossible the year before and won't be easy for another decade.
The bottom line is the bottom line: if I quote on an embedded system that's fully secure it'll cost five times as much and take three times as long (and it still won't be FULLY secure, just not totally wide open.) Since no one in the purchasing decision making process values security--or even understands the least little bit about the gear they're buying above a black-box 'push this button and that happens' level--there is no pressure on vendors to make stuff secure.
Which is fortunate, because if there was, the security requirements would run head-on into the functional requirements, which require anyone with an MD to do anything with the gear with no training and without bothering to read the manual...
I would set it up as a physically separate network that only connects to the local network in one place and have my firewall there.
Your whole reply can be summarized as, "I have never worked in anything like a hospital IT environment."
Moving many gigabypes of information around transparently and quickly between subtly incompatible devices (DICOM isn't so much a "standard" as a "suggestion" if you look at the way vendors actually implement) coupled to a bespoke PACS network is barely possible without any additional list of pie-in-the-sky requirements of the kind you list.
Add to that fun requirements such as that many hospitals are also teaching environments and so have to interface (again, transparently and at very high speed) to university networks, and then bring in external consulting scienctists (Hi) who may need access to some patient data AND who may be hooking up research devices to your pristine medical network for clinical trials (this is how progress gets made, you see) and your cartoon locked-down network becomes competely useless in the real world because you've only considered about 60% of the actual uses it has to support.
With impossibly high standards like yours, it's a wonder any other physical model still holds up.
There's nothing particularly high about the standard of "accurate" prediction, although with climate models we're in the peculiar position of being asked to take the results at face value long before anything like a decent empirical check can be made.
The comparision with QED is entirely wrong-headed, because QED is an exact theory that can be used to compute results in its domain with astonishing accuracy and checked by controlled experiments, whereas climate models are a pile of approximations that cannot be used to predict anything that is subject to experimental--or even observational--verification on a timescale that would be useful to resolve the thorny political questions raised by the gigatonnes of garbage we are dumping into the atmosphere.
Please note that I am in favour of cap-and-trade as a means of reducing CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions independently of the correctness of the GCMs, which makes me honest, unlike the vast majority of "the science is in" folks who want to defend their political positions by hiding behind science they don't understand.
The last paragraph also suggests that universe might be in such a state of bi-periodic motion, and then asks, "if such a state requires an observer to make it work, who is the observer in the case of the universe?" or something like that.
The idea that "observation" of a quantum system requires consciousness is controversial at best, and generally not held by working physicists, although mathematicians like Penrose sometimes argue for it.
Beyond that, the question seems like an open invitation to answer in terms of various Bronze Age myths, as if "X requires a conciousness observing the universe; my favourite Bronze Age Myth posits a conscioussness observing the universe; therefore the conciousness observing the universe must be the one identified in my favourite Bronze Age myth" was an argument rather than a logical fallacy to the tune of "Humans crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the late 1400's; I believe humans in the late 1400's could fly by flapping their arms; therefore humans must have crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the late 1400's by flapping their arms."
which means the only other people who will buy it are geeks.
More likely some kind of "eco-tour for urbanites" outfit that will buy them and rent them to people whose idea of getting out into nature is to tear as much of it up as possible while being loud, obnoxious, and dangerous to themselves and others.
It's like calling electrons around a proton a "perpetual motion machine".
There's actually a book from the '50's or '60's by physicist Alan Stewart called "Perpetual Motion" that uses exactly this hook to talk about atomic physics (long out of print, and I can't find anything about it via the Great Search Engine, so perhaps it's all in my imagination.)
Probably the best bet would be a RC quad-rotor carrying Semtex for a practical DIY guided weapon. Range, speed, and altitude would be limited, ditto the practical carrying capacity.
10th-scale modelers would probably suggest a few other alternatives. This has been possible since the early 90's, and Donald Kingsbury's "The Moon Goddess and the Son"--which was published in the mid-80's--introduced the idea (if it was new even then) of a homebuilt guided (cruise) missile. He had MIT students doing it, if memory serves, but the threshold for entry has gotten a LOT lower since then.
The curious thing is that no one has actually done this, and it gives me hope that anyone smart enough to do so is also smart enough to NOT do so.
Now if we could only ensure that the people smart enough to quote on the DHS proposal are also smart enough to ignore it as a waste of their precious time. You only get so many years on this planet, and to blow them on obsolete technologies of control in service to pre-modern ideologies would be really sad.
retain it's 1,000,000K for 14,000,000 years?
First, that's 14,000,000,000, not 14 million.
The key is how undense it is. When a physicist talks about "temperature" in this context it's just short-hand for "average velocity"... it doesn't necessarily imply thermal equilibrium, even. So 1e6K means a high average velocity. Now, if it were a dense gas there might be collisions that would do things like excite electrons into higher states, which would then decay by emitting photons (light), and so the gas would lose thermal-kinetic energy over time.
In a sufficiently diffuse gas, loss processes like this are very slow because the chances of collision are very slow, so it can stay "hot" (that is, have a high average velocity) for a long, long time.
Back in the 1990s this was developed at Los Alamos and a few other accelerator centers. it's not new or unique to belgium.
But because it's a technological solution to a political problem, it's a wheel that will keep being reinvented and everyone who ignored it the previous time will be surprised by it the subsequent time.
The dialog goes like this:
Anti-nukes: "Nuclear power is unsafe. We must ban it!"
Engineer: "Look, I have found a way to make nuclear power safer than coal!"
Anti-nukes: "That would be terrible! It would make people want nuclear power, but we can't be having with that because nuclear power is unsafe. We must ban it!"
Until we have a solution for the political problem, which is that there is a large body of ignorant and fearful people who think that nuclear power is far more dangerous than it actually is and who will steadfastly refuse to ever under any circumstances to compare nuclear power with any other viable source of base-load industrial supply, the advances of technology will be almost completely irrelevant to human progress.
Hardware is nasty.
This.
This is why so many people are into software: because it's cheap and easy and you can get results in an afternoon with a monkey at the keyboard. Software is really, really hard to do well, but incredibly easy to do well enough to make something that more-or-less-sorta-kinda works.
Hardware--both mechanical and electronic--is fantastically difficult by comparison and requires far more nuanced and insightful debugging process. Noise, ground-loops and marginal components can create the most remarkable effects in electronics, differential wear, unanticipated friction and tolerances can do likewise in mechanics.
I don't pirate stuff, but I could see myself buying a Win7 or 8 licence to try this out. Thanks!
That's where the idea of carbon taxes or cap-and-trade come from
Since cap-and-trade is the classical liberal move of creating and enforcing property rights as a legal mechanism for overcoming the crisis of an over-exploited commons, that should be "carbon taxes AND cap-and-trade", not "OR".
This is undoubtedly nit-picking, because no one would really ever be so disingenous or ignorant of economics and history to confuse property rights with a taxes! But while I'm pretty sure in your case this is an innocent slip, my nit-picking mind requires me to speak up, in case there really are some people out there so unbelievably out of touch with reality that they can't tell the difference between a property right and a tax.
In a tech company, it makes sense to have everyone take something along the lines of CS101.
And in a legal practice or doctor's office it makes sense for everyone to have a bit of legal or medical education, which for the most part people do.
But only a gibbering idiot would think that in any way supports the statement, "Everyone should learn to draft contracts" or "Everyone should learn to diagnose and treat diseases" simply because they work in legal or medical environments.
Why are you not nailing their balls to the wall? if this were any other product on the planet you would be having massive boycotts and giving them hell. You know that free broken shit is STILL broken shit, correct?
And broken shit is worth what we pay for it.
I've been running Slackware on my netbook lately (13.37) after experiencing Very Bad Things from Ubuntu, Debian, Mint and another distro I can't recall. It's been OK, but just today I had a crash in the Xserver that took me down to the command line when I opened the lid. Besides that, printing still doesn't work (I can see the shared printer on my WinXP box but can't print to it, although I've been chipping away at that issue and it's been getting better). And wireless networking is hit and miss: some networks that I can connect fine with XP don't work, some do. The fancier the encryption the less likely things are to work, it seems.
So the story for "Linux on the desktop" in 2012 is pretty sad: still crashes, only Slackware actually worked out the box (and I've been using it since '94 or so, pre-1.0, so I'm happy tweaking it and building stuff I need from source, etc.) And basic functions like wireless networking and network printing are poor, and power management sucks.
But: it doesn't cost me anything but time (which is a non-trivial concern) and I get a few extra years out of an older machine even as Microsoft is twilighting XP (it's too lame to run Win7 on, but performance with Slackware is pretty good, in terms of raw responsiveness.) I put up with the clunky, broken, barely adequate feature set because of those things.
Not that it didn't happen, but can you cite a reference to a time when food was not plentiful in the developed world.
You might be curious to know that no small part of the NAZI's plan to conquer Eastern Europe revolved around food security. In a way it actually worked, too, because the lessons learned about nitrate chemistry during the war were later applied to fertilizers by people who weren't batshit insane, and eventually led to the Green Revolution, which is why so few people are starving today.
But food security was a real issue in the '20's and especially the '30's, even in the US, due to crop failures and adverse climate conditions.
Thank you for linking this! It's good to know that /. readers can make up for the inadequacies of /. "editors".
Figure 1 in the paper tells the story: the author's claims are highly questionable. The figure is a bit hard to read, but shows histograms of time of death for male and female rats under various situations. The thin/medium/thick lines are the 11%, 22% and 33% treatment groups, and the dotted line is the control group.
One thing you want to do in cases like this is look at the dose-response curve, and according to Figure 1, by far the worst case is the very lowest dose of GMO maize with no Roundup, if you're a male rate. In most other cases it's the 22% group that has the worst outcomes. In no case does the group with the highest dose have the worst outcome.
Now, biology is famously non-linear, but in general the toxicity of toxic substances increases with dose, especially over this kind of range (we aren't talking about trace amounts vs large amounts, for example.)
Also, the data suggest that the GMO maize on its own is worse than the GMO maize in combination with Roundup or Roundup on its own. This is curious, though far from conclusive of anything much either way. But it shows that the story here is a lot more complicated than "GMO bad, Roundup bad, Monsanto evil" (although we hardly need detailed statistics to demonstrate the latter.)
I support GMO labelling both because I'm opposed to monoculture and because I view the inevitable (and already recorded) cross-polination of GMO crops with wild-type crops as a particularly nasty form of trespass. But this work does little or nothing to support claims that GMO crops or Roundup are health hazards, particularly as the word was done in rats and focuses on tumors, and it is well known that rats will get cancer from a dirty look, whereas humans are far more robust in that regard, so using rats as an animal model in this case is questionable at best.
The "one hit and you're hooked for life" thing is just prohibition propaganda.
Depends on the person. I had one shot of morphine medically as a teenager and I would never, ever go near any optiate ever again. It just feels too fucking good.
On the other hand, I know people who've had morphine and found themselves thinking, "What's the big deal? When do I get this awesome warm glow people talk about?"
Anecdata, for sure, but not implausible, and not inconsistent with the notion that while the majority of people don't face any major issues with most drugs (except meth, which has clinically observable and apparently permanent effects on brain structure in just a few hits) there is a small population of adicits who cause the big problems--although the problems the cause aren't nearly as severe as the prohibitionist policies that misguided moralists often engage to deal with them.
You will never actually reach production with things like this, for the same reason you will never reach a wall by moving in increments of 1/2.
You mean you won't reach production because you're too fucking stupid to realize that "an infinite number of intervals of diminishing size" is completely different from "an infinite distance", even after it's been explained to you dozens of times by multiple people over the course of more than 2000 years?
Perhaps you'd want detailed numerical models to match with the back of the envelope calculations, and you'd want to ask nineteen different groups on four continents to make different computer models; you'd want temperature measurements taken from a variety of different methods-- say, ground, ocean, balloon, and satellite-- to all agree; you'd want satellite measurements of infrared; you'd want vertical temperature profiles...
WIthout denying that anthropogenic CO2 represents a problem (I'm an advocate on cap-and-trade, which for some reason people who know nothing about economics call a "tax") I'm skeptical of the authority of climate models.
Unlike the people writing climate models, I'm a computational physicist, and I've done far too much work on far too many systems where apparently "minor" approximations and unphysical parameterizations result in wildly unphysical results. Even the best current GCMs currently contain "leaks" in their energy book-keeping that's on the same order as the entire effect of CO2 (handling of water vapour in one model results in an inbalance of 0.5 W/m**2, as opposed to the canonical 1.6 W/m**2 for CO2).
So I'm concerned that the active and irrational denial community has in fact resulted in a complementary phenonmenon in opposition, where the model results are vastly over-sold, both in terms of their correctness and the magnitude of likely consequences: there can be no admission that the effects of additional CO2 might be modest in most areas and positively beneficial in some, or the denial community will have won, seems to go the thinking.
While this does have potentially horrendous consequnces (I consider any energy plan for the 21st century that involves the word "coal" a pretty horrendous outcome) it also creates significant risks for the credibility of science, as the real uncertainties in the models are not being discussed as forthrightly as they ought, and when the models turn out to be badly wrong in some respects, which they most certainly will, science will have egg on its face.
Likewise an environmentalist told me, "it doesn't matter if global warming isn't caused by man made CO2, because by forcing a cut of CO2 you cut production and you cut consumption â"â" it is about reducing GREED"
We really need a new term for this kind of person, as they have no actual interest in the environment and often advocate policies--like lowered reliance on nuclear power--that do considerable environmental harm.
I am interested in how anyone would predict the successfull contributions of people who have been hiding in the patent office for several years being denied promotions for their lack of credentials.
I believe the general statement is "Prediction is hard, especially with regard to the future".
As to that famous patent clerk, he couldn't get a job not because of lack of credentials (although he didn't complete his doctoral degree until 1905) but at least in part because he belonged to some religious or ethnic classification that was moderately unpopular at the time.
Finally, based on this metric, I must be enormously successful in academia, because I've published (in good journals) on everything from pure physics to applied physics to genomics, with side-lines into image processing and the psychology of perception. All of that jumping around actually hurt my career a a lot, while people who focused exclusively on one thing and beat the living hell out of it were far more successful than I have been (part of the reason I left academia except for the odd adjunct appointment was that I didn't think a successful academic career was compatible with my broad range of interests.)
Are you serious?
Yeah, believe it or not there are people who have preferences that are not only different from yours, but diametrically opposed to yours. Incredible, isn't it? (Not incredible that people have different preferences, but that you've reached an age where you're posting on /. and apparently are still shocked by this.)
I have a Blackberry precisely because I have strong personal preference for a physical keyboard, and because they're remarkably robust. I upgraded my phone recently (and ditched the most hideous third-rate carrier in the world, the Canadian company Rogers Wireless) and was strongly temped by an Android phone with touchscreen, but there was no way it was going to stand up to the routine rough handling my phones get (I've had years where I went through three phones before I got a BB.)
They aren't for everyone, but for some of us they are just the right thing, and it's unfortunate the company is likely to go the way of Nortel and other Canadian tech greats, run into the ground by poor marketing and bad management decisions.