This is the "faith" part of science that confuses the hell out of religious and atheistic people alike, science (Natural philososphy) requires the "faith that the real world exists", it answers the proverbial "tree falling in the forest" question with a self-confident - yes!
The problem with this claim is you're using the same word--"faith"--to describe two completely unrelated things. A belief that the world that exists exists is not faith in the relevant sense. It's either a tautology, or contingent on evidence and therefore subject to change like any other scientific (Bayesian) proposition.
To a Bayesian--which is to say, a scientist--"faith" describes a particular type of epistemic error: ascribing to a proposition a plausiblity that is strictly 1 or 0. Such a proposition is immune to change regardless of the evidence presented against it.
A belief that the world that exists exists may be falsified. I can't imagine how, but what I can or cannot imagine is not determinative of reality. If I were presented with evidence that the world that exists does not exist--presumably due to some subtle shift in meaning of "exists" between the two uses, thus breaking the tautology--I would take that evidence seriously. Ergo, my belief that the world that exists exists is not faith in the Bayesian sense of the word.
A religious person's belief that "God exists" or "God so loved the world that He sent an enormous flood to kill everyone but Noah and his family" is faith in this sense: no amount of contrary evidence will change it.
Today's accelerator is tomorrow's medical proton beam to cure cancer. And maybe, just maybe, the grandkids will get warp drive out of it.
There was a long exchange of letters during the run-up the the SSC funding fight between Weinberg and an applied physicist whose name I don't recall in "Physics Today" about this. This would have been in the late '80's (the SSC was funded in the late '80's, canceled in the early '90's.)
The applied physicist's argument went like this: "Classical physics, EM, optics, first quantization, etc is the physics of stuff that happens on Earth. Nuclear physics is the physics of stuff that happens on Earth and nearby in the solar system. Particle physics is the physics of stuff that hasn't happened anywhere since a few seconds after the Big Bang. As such, we can expect classical and nuclear physics to have real-world applications that will be of direct practical benefit, and particle physics to have none.
Weinberg's reply was, "But particle physics is a grand culture quest!"
Applied Physicist: "I agree, and it should be funded as such, at the level as other cultural activities as the opera and ballet."
I have a foot in both worlds, and agree that particle physics is a useful platform to push certain areas of technology, which the LHC certainly has. This is a good thing, and to my mind worth the money put in.
But I also agree that expecting practical applications out of particle physics is completely unrealistic. I do not expect to ever see any practical application of the knowledge that the Higgs exists, or that it has some particular set of properties vs others (is a Standard Model Higgs vs a Minimally Super-Symmetric Higgs, etc.)
But that said, even such ridiculous esoterica as the mathematics of String Theory have found practical application in solid state physics, so it's impossible to say what will be "useless". Except, as you suggest, war, which is always the worst possible way to spend money in pursuit of solutions to human problems.
I would far rather "waste" money measuring the Higgs more precisely than really waste money on the dead-weight loss of the security-industrial complex's escapades of mass organized killing.
So low that the standard model predicts that the vacuum should be unstable
Not quite. The Higgs looks like it is just above the threshold for a stable EM vacuum, which is quite curious, and suggests that there may be some new physics that drives the Higgs mass down to that point, but not below it.
Of course, the solution may then be to increase the number of people who get a 1, but then at that 1/2 boundary you have the EXACT same problem.
No, the solution is to measure people against objective criteria, not by "ranking" them against each other.
I see no reason why the best performer amongst a bunch of losers should be rewarded in the same way as the top performer on average or exceptional teams.
Rank-based performance metrics are management failure, pure and simple. They are the product of "managers" who think "a good manager can manage anything, even something they know nothing about". They can't, because unless you know the field you have no way to apply objective metrics to the people on your team, and therefore no way to hire, fire, reward or punish anyone that isn't arbitrary and ultimately destructive.
If employers start seeing their very-hard-to-replace talent walk out the door because of draconian, 30+ year old management paradigms, they may be forced to change.
This hope--that employer behaviour will be changed by employees leaving--is, unfortunately, empirically false. And companies like Microsoft have so much money in the bank and such a dominant market position that it'll take a generation for the company to fail despite the bad management.
Don't base your actions on "common sense" or "logic": base them on facts, on what actually happens in the world. Not what you think ought to happen. Wisdom is the realization that most of what we think ought to happen is utterly unrelated to what actually happens
For example, in the BP spill in the Gulf, the people who made the really bad decisions that caused the blowout were on the rig, and some of them were killed in the explosion... but that doesn't stop the unenlightened from saying that putting the decision-makers at risk for their bad decisions would prevent that kind of thing... it makes perfect sense, but just happens to be completely wrong.
Unions are great IF they don't have laws written to give them special rights.
Unlike corporations, then.
Unions exist with special legal status precisely because corporations exist with special legal status.
A corporation is not a "a group of people freely associating to promote their self-interests": it is an inherently coercive organization protected by the full legal muscle of the various Companies Acts around the world. When a person employed by a corporation interacts with someone outside the corporation they are protected by a shield of laws that completely over-rides the ordinary operations of free behaviour.
So, if you really want unions to not have special legal protections, you need to eliminate the special legal protections given to corporations, which means you need to eliminate corporations as such, and go back to the situation before 1850 or so when the first modern Companies Act was passed in Britain. That system was unwieldy and inefficient, as no single entity with quasi-individual legal status (the corporation) could do anything like sign contracts, etc.
Yet for some reason I have never heard anyone who makes the kind of arguments you do against unions point any of this out. Why is that?
And don't forget: I'm typing with my brain right now. I've been typing with my brain for years, and so have lots of other people.
As a matter of interest, if you aren't typing with your brain, what are you typing with? Your liver? Your kidneys?
What I haven't been doing is "using a few million dollars of highly specialized gear to type without using my hands", which is what this story is actually about, along with all these other ridiculous "using ONLY your brain" claims written by people who seem not to have used even their brains.
All particle physics experiments have two aspects: they are designed with some very specific target in mind, and once that target is found or excluded they are then run for as long as humanly possible searching for new stuff, both by going to higher energies and making more precise measurements on things already known (different decay channels, etc.)
Sometimes--as in the case of the Kamiokande detector, which was originally aimed at proton decay--we repurpose the system for different particles entirely (solar neutrinos, say.)
So your "fear" is that the LHC teams will behave completely differently from every particle physics team ever anywhere. Good luck with that.
tl;dr: all but a small handful of scholars consider the weight of the evidence is strongly in favour of Jefferson as the father, particularly in the context of the culture of the time. Humans have a great deal of trouble with deductive closure, and there's no reason Jefferson was any better at it than the rest of us.
On the other hand, isn't it remarkable that someone who was still so deeply embedded in the evils of his time was able to do so much good?
We have plenty of real things to worry about rather than to fall for FUD.
The problem is you have nothing to counter the FUD but RUC: Reassuring Unsupported Claims.
"You bet"... FedEX would encrypt them, eh? I'm glad you feel that your gambling problem is relevant to this discussion of actual reality, but I have no idea why you think it is. Neither I nor anyone else cares what your bet is. We care what FedEX will actually do, when it comes time to deploy drones with software supplied by the lowest bidder.
Furthermore, while FedEX may be some years from getting drones, closing our eyes to the potential problems in the meantime doesn't help. FedEX or someone like them will get drones. This is a certainty. That they don't have them now is irrelevant.
I'm also grateful that you have informed us so authoritatively as to "the way the current system probably works." I'm sure you have a very good imagination, but what you imagine and what is real are unrelated. No one is interested in what you imagine. We only care about what is real, which you have told us nothing about.
Your whole post is classic security-industrial bluff and bluster, full of RUC, but no more substantive or meaningful than the FUD you claim to dispute.
I'm much more of the opinion that the drone malfunctioned, crash landed, and the Iranians went "PR Jackpot!".
Likewise, the US security-industrial complex has a long history of vastly overstating the difficulty of defeating or reproducing American technology, starting with the A-bomb, which the Russians weren't supposed to get for decades (it took them a couple of years, thanks to some well-placed spies) and the H-bomb (primarily due to careful analysis of fall-out from atmospheric testing, which allowed them to reverse-engineer the basic structure in some detail.)
Unless you're going to claim that Iranian scientists, engineers and spies are somehow all completely incompetent, you have to admit that it's more-or-less a tie as to who is more likely lying in the case of the American drone captured by the Iranians.
That's a service that is truly focused on its users.
Users? Not a chance. Customers? That is, the people who pay them money? Sure.
Craigslist is a terrible experience for a number of routine tasks. Their ads are full of scams that could be easily removed by simple filters (how do I know this? I've written the filters for my own use, likely breaking CL's terms of service in the process.)
Their search capability is so lame as to be almost useless for anything interesting. I've used CL to search for apartments and boats, and my kids have looked at it for jobs. It is barely usable for the first and completely useless for the latter.
The problem with the apartments and boats is that search and classification capabilities are poor. The problem with jobs is that where I am there are nothing but scam postings (this seems to vary by geography, so YMMV.)
BUT... if you are a landlord who just wants to get ads up easily and quickly in front of a lot of eyeballs, you go to CL. It's a perfect example of a company that has so much first-mover advantage that it is very difficult to compete with despite the poor experience for users, although PadMap/PadList is trying (and getting cease and desist orders from CL in the process due to terms of service violations.)
Alternatives face a major chicken-and-egg problem: to get customers using it they have to have users, and to get users they have to have listers. This is the great unsolved problem of the Internet, and it seems to mostly be worked around by various activities of questionable legality (scraping competitive sites and putting up copies of their ads.)
We can keep fucking with them, or we can work on decreasing tensions.
No, no, no. You don't understand: the existence of tensions is proof that Iran and North Korea can only be dealt with via military action! That's what all the mindless war-monger's in this discussion are saying at least. The simple fact that the world is a rough and dangerous place is absolute and complete justification for all military action of any kind by the United States against anyone for any reason. Any suggestion that there exist alternatives is just Stern Letter Diplomacy, because to a Real American there are only two options: military attack and abject surrender.
You can kind of see how this makes sense. After all, look at the great things that war has done for everyone. Why, Pakistan and India have been at war for decades, and look at how well it has solved all their problems! Have you ever seen two countries so completely free of problems, especially with each other?
And of course, if you do anything other than engage in warfare to solve international disputes you will not produce heaps of dead young men, so alternatives are obviously inferior to war. Can your notion that "we can work to decrease tensions" kill a few thousand young American men? I think not! So clearly it is a second-rate solution.
Or is he just the sort of Freedom Loving Pacifist that would have us dawdling around writing more "Sternly Worded Letters" until Iran finally trotted out a bomb and wiped out an entire city full of people?
Ah, cowardice and fear-mongering, the ever-eager fellow travelers of the security-industrial complex!
When you have an actual argument, do please make it. Until then your reliance on invalid assumption and misleading innuendo makes you look pretty stupid. After all, everyone knows that war is dead last in terms of efficient, effective ways of solving international disputes, just as interpersonal violence is the least effective and inefficient way of solving private disputes. If you don't advocate interpersonal violence you can't consistently advocate war: they are equally stupid, and likewise largely ineffective, and always hideously inefficient.
With regard to the "Iranian bomb": Iran is not pursuing nuclear weapons. We know this from a very simple piece of evidence: they don't have them.
The Israelis have been accusing Iran of pursuing nuclear weapons for twenty years. It took barely four years to build them from scratch the first time, with much of the basic technology being invented along the way, by a nation with far fewer technological advantages than those enjoyed by modern Iranians simply by virtue of being modern. There is no possible way any nation-state could pursue nuclear weapons today for more than five years and not have them.
Ergo: the "Iranian bomb" is fear-mongering propaganda invented by cowards to justify looting the productive economy for the benefit of the dead-weight loss security-industrial complex. Good luck with that!
The astonishing thing is that anyone in the Obama administration was stupid enough to think that secrecy could be maintained on this indefinitely. Unlike physical warfare, in which the aftermath can be sanitized and obfuscated, software never goes away.
We all know this: full erasure of a worm in the wild is impossible to ensure, because you never know when some vital assumption is going to change. So the Iranians would have caught on eventually.
Add to that the equal certainty that eventually a programming error or assumption violation would result in the worm getting out into the larger would and you have as close to a guarantee as possible that Stuxnet would eventually be discovered and traced back to its source.
Yet it appears the attack was planned on the basis of perpetual secrecy, which is just stupid. I'm sure there are lots of idiots who will say, "But if only the world had been a little different than the way it actually is then THIS PARTICULAR leak wouldn't have happened!" Sure, but some other leak would have.
The militarization of the 'Net by the Government of the United States started under George W Bush and ramped up dramatically by Barrack Obama is one of the biggest disasters in the history of information technology, and the ultimate economic cost is going to dwarf the cost of Bush's idiotic physical wars.
This false claim that the climate has never undergone a natural fluctuation comparable to the currently postulated anthropogenic one is actually kind of useful: it clearly identifies political hacks who don't care a tithe for science but who are either willful liars or inexcusably ignorant of the Earth's actual climate history.
In fact it would be more accurate to state it as the government redefines the 'poverty line' as needed to ensure that 10-15% of the population will always be in 'poverty' and thus willing to sign up for military service to fight in the wars big-government Republicans keep starting to line the pockets of their friends in the security/industrial complex
Fixed that for you. Or not. One idiotic catch-all bogeyman is pretty much as dumb as the other.
plus a couple of weeks of software engineering to tune them to the INDIVIDUAL User.
False. Walk into an audiologist, get plugged into a simple machine to run your audiogram, hook your aides to the computer, push a button and you're done.
The number of completely false claims about the supposed complexity of the hearing aide customization process in this thread is astonishing.
Each hearing aid (in the ear/canal) is custom made by hand, if done wrong, it is re-done at full cost, but the customer doesn't pay for remakes (as stated above). Plus the hearing aid isn't "Make everything louder". It's a very complex device.
Your first claim is both false in general (behind the ear aides require no customization) and indictment of obsolete manufacturing processes, not a justification for high costs.
The complexity argument fails because aides have been that complex for nigh-on two decades. Nothing you've described is remotely cutting-edge, so why haven't prices for exactly the same functionality come down?
This whole thread of "hearing aides are expensive because we have to do so much customization and special electronics" is nothing but blow-hard self-justification on the part of manufacturers (yes, my attitude is the precise complement of those people saying those of us who want cheaper hearing aides and feel like we're being gouged are whiners.)
If people had to buy these things out of pocket exclusively, the economics would be totally different, and that's true regardless of your political outlook.
Except this is demonstrably not true. Many people have already posted here pointing out that it is atypical for hearing aides to be covered by insurance. This is certainly true in Canada, where I am. Neither the public health insurance system nor most employer supplementary health insurance plans cover hearing aides. The province of Ontario kicks in $500/ear every three years, and even that's unusual: most provinces give nothing.
Yet our hearing aide costs are dead in line with the prices I'm seeing the Americans in this thread talk about.
I can tell you that the digital hearing aid I have been using for the last twenty years is from ReSound.
But there are idiots up the thread assuring us that all that digital processing stuff that you've been benefiting from for 20 years is new, so you must be totally wrong about that.
I'm getting new aides this summer (currently have a decent set from Seimens but they haven't been quite the same since I dove in the ocean with them on last summer...) and will check out ReSound, if they're still making them. The only feature I really want on my new ones is a telecoil. I certainly agree that nothing much helps in large parties with loud chatter.
They are not covered by our single-payer system in Canada, either, although some provinces chip in a subsidy ($500/ear every three years in Ontario, zero in BC.) Most employer health plans here give slim-to-none coverage for them. Hearing loss is just not that common a problem amongst the working age population.
Why on Earth are you bringing up something as completely irrelevant as a experiment? Measuring an audiogram for the purpose of programming a hearing aid is done with a machine that a monkey could operate. There's no anechoic chamber and whatnot these days. It's done by an audiologist in an ordinary office with a device that would surprise me if it cost more than $100K.
I don't work in audiology, but I have worked in the medical device industry and I have had audiograms done, which is a diagnostic procedure, not an experiment.
The whole process of measuring and programming is almost completely automated. Again: a monkey could do it.
Which leaves the question open: Why am I a paying as much or more for hearing aids as my father did, fifteen or twenty years after all the fancy signal processing tech was built into them in the late 80's and early 90's?
That, and today's hearing aids don't just simply amplify external sound.
So did yesterday's. Absolutely everything you describe (except bluetooth, which is rare) have been bog-standard on hearing aids since the '90's. There was a big gain in sophistication in the late 80's and early 90's when all the "new" things you are talking about were invented. That was two decades ago.
Claiming or implying that these functions--which were added when Win3.1 and OS2 were fighting it out and the Linux kernel was somewhere in the 0.79-0.93 range--is fantastically disingenuous.
I can buy commodity computing hardware that is hundreds of times more powerful than a 100 MHz 486 at half the price or less. But I'm paying the same price or more than my father did for hearing aids, and the question still stands: how come?
"I am ignorant of features that hearing aids had getting on for 20 years ago so they must be new" is not an answer to that question.
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This is the "faith" part of science that confuses the hell out of religious and atheistic people alike, science (Natural philososphy) requires the "faith that the real world exists", it answers the proverbial "tree falling in the forest" question with a self-confident - yes!
The problem with this claim is you're using the same word--"faith"--to describe two completely unrelated things. A belief that the world that exists exists is not faith in the relevant sense. It's either a tautology, or contingent on evidence and therefore subject to change like any other scientific (Bayesian) proposition.
To a Bayesian--which is to say, a scientist--"faith" describes a particular type of epistemic error: ascribing to a proposition a plausiblity that is strictly 1 or 0. Such a proposition is immune to change regardless of the evidence presented against it.
A belief that the world that exists exists may be falsified. I can't imagine how, but what I can or cannot imagine is not determinative of reality. If I were presented with evidence that the world that exists does not exist--presumably due to some subtle shift in meaning of "exists" between the two uses, thus breaking the tautology--I would take that evidence seriously. Ergo, my belief that the world that exists exists is not faith in the Bayesian sense of the word.
A religious person's belief that "God exists" or "God so loved the world that He sent an enormous flood to kill everyone but Noah and his family" is faith in this sense: no amount of contrary evidence will change it.
Today's accelerator is tomorrow's medical proton beam to cure cancer. And maybe, just maybe, the grandkids will get warp drive out of it.
There was a long exchange of letters during the run-up the the SSC funding fight between Weinberg and an applied physicist whose name I don't recall in "Physics Today" about this. This would have been in the late '80's (the SSC was funded in the late '80's, canceled in the early '90's.)
The applied physicist's argument went like this: "Classical physics, EM, optics, first quantization, etc is the physics of stuff that happens on Earth. Nuclear physics is the physics of stuff that happens on Earth and nearby in the solar system. Particle physics is the physics of stuff that hasn't happened anywhere since a few seconds after the Big Bang. As such, we can expect classical and nuclear physics to have real-world applications that will be of direct practical benefit, and particle physics to have none.
Weinberg's reply was, "But particle physics is a grand culture quest!"
Applied Physicist: "I agree, and it should be funded as such, at the level as other cultural activities as the opera and ballet."
I have a foot in both worlds, and agree that particle physics is a useful platform to push certain areas of technology, which the LHC certainly has. This is a good thing, and to my mind worth the money put in.
But I also agree that expecting practical applications out of particle physics is completely unrealistic. I do not expect to ever see any practical application of the knowledge that the Higgs exists, or that it has some particular set of properties vs others (is a Standard Model Higgs vs a Minimally Super-Symmetric Higgs, etc.)
But that said, even such ridiculous esoterica as the mathematics of String Theory have found practical application in solid state physics, so it's impossible to say what will be "useless". Except, as you suggest, war, which is always the worst possible way to spend money in pursuit of solutions to human problems.
I would far rather "waste" money measuring the Higgs more precisely than really waste money on the dead-weight loss of the security-industrial complex's escapades of mass organized killing.
So low that the standard model predicts that the vacuum should be unstable
Not quite. The Higgs looks like it is just above the threshold for a stable EM vacuum, which is quite curious, and suggests that there may be some new physics that drives the Higgs mass down to that point, but not below it.
Of course, the solution may then be to increase the number of people who get a 1, but then at that 1/2 boundary you have the EXACT same problem.
No, the solution is to measure people against objective criteria, not by "ranking" them against each other.
I see no reason why the best performer amongst a bunch of losers should be rewarded in the same way as the top performer on average or exceptional teams.
Rank-based performance metrics are management failure, pure and simple. They are the product of "managers" who think "a good manager can manage anything, even something they know nothing about". They can't, because unless you know the field you have no way to apply objective metrics to the people on your team, and therefore no way to hire, fire, reward or punish anyone that isn't arbitrary and ultimately destructive.
If employers start seeing their very-hard-to-replace talent walk out the door because of draconian, 30+ year old management paradigms, they may be forced to change.
This hope--that employer behaviour will be changed by employees leaving--is, unfortunately, empirically false. And companies like Microsoft have so much money in the bank and such a dominant market position that it'll take a generation for the company to fail despite the bad management.
Don't base your actions on "common sense" or "logic": base them on facts, on what actually happens in the world. Not what you think ought to happen. Wisdom is the realization that most of what we think ought to happen is utterly unrelated to what actually happens
For example, in the BP spill in the Gulf, the people who made the really bad decisions that caused the blowout were on the rig, and some of them were killed in the explosion... but that doesn't stop the unenlightened from saying that putting the decision-makers at risk for their bad decisions would prevent that kind of thing... it makes perfect sense, but just happens to be completely wrong.
Unions are great IF they don't have laws written to give them special rights.
Unlike corporations, then.
Unions exist with special legal status precisely because corporations exist with special legal status.
A corporation is not a "a group of people freely associating to promote their self-interests": it is an inherently coercive organization protected by the full legal muscle of the various Companies Acts around the world. When a person employed by a corporation interacts with someone outside the corporation they are protected by a shield of laws that completely over-rides the ordinary operations of free behaviour.
So, if you really want unions to not have special legal protections, you need to eliminate the special legal protections given to corporations, which means you need to eliminate corporations as such, and go back to the situation before 1850 or so when the first modern Companies Act was passed in Britain. That system was unwieldy and inefficient, as no single entity with quasi-individual legal status (the corporation) could do anything like sign contracts, etc.
Yet for some reason I have never heard anyone who makes the kind of arguments you do against unions point any of this out. Why is that?
And don't forget: I'm typing with my brain right now. I've been typing with my brain for years, and so have lots of other people.
As a matter of interest, if you aren't typing with your brain, what are you typing with? Your liver? Your kidneys?
What I haven't been doing is "using a few million dollars of highly specialized gear to type without using my hands", which is what this story is actually about, along with all these other ridiculous "using ONLY your brain" claims written by people who seem not to have used even their brains.
This is the mistake I fear CERN is going to make.
All particle physics experiments have two aspects: they are designed with some very specific target in mind, and once that target is found or excluded they are then run for as long as humanly possible searching for new stuff, both by going to higher energies and making more precise measurements on things already known (different decay channels, etc.)
Sometimes--as in the case of the Kamiokande detector, which was originally aimed at proton decay--we repurpose the system for different particles entirely (solar neutrinos, say.)
So your "fear" is that the LHC teams will behave completely differently from every particle physics team ever anywhere. Good luck with that.
The Great Wiki mostly disagrees:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson-Hemings_controversy
tl;dr: all but a small handful of scholars consider the weight of the evidence is strongly in favour of Jefferson as the father, particularly in the context of the culture of the time. Humans have a great deal of trouble with deductive closure, and there's no reason Jefferson was any better at it than the rest of us.
On the other hand, isn't it remarkable that someone who was still so deeply embedded in the evils of his time was able to do so much good?
We have plenty of real things to worry about rather than to fall for FUD.
The problem is you have nothing to counter the FUD but RUC: Reassuring Unsupported Claims.
"You bet"... FedEX would encrypt them, eh? I'm glad you feel that your gambling problem is relevant to this discussion of actual reality, but I have no idea why you think it is. Neither I nor anyone else cares what your bet is. We care what FedEX will actually do, when it comes time to deploy drones with software supplied by the lowest bidder.
Furthermore, while FedEX may be some years from getting drones, closing our eyes to the potential problems in the meantime doesn't help. FedEX or someone like them will get drones. This is a certainty. That they don't have them now is irrelevant.
I'm also grateful that you have informed us so authoritatively as to "the way the current system probably works." I'm sure you have a very good imagination, but what you imagine and what is real are unrelated. No one is interested in what you imagine. We only care about what is real, which you have told us nothing about.
Your whole post is classic security-industrial bluff and bluster, full of RUC, but no more substantive or meaningful than the FUD you claim to dispute.
I'm much more of the opinion that the drone malfunctioned, crash landed, and the Iranians went "PR Jackpot!".
Likewise, the US security-industrial complex has a long history of vastly overstating the difficulty of defeating or reproducing American technology, starting with the A-bomb, which the Russians weren't supposed to get for decades (it took them a couple of years, thanks to some well-placed spies) and the H-bomb (primarily due to careful analysis of fall-out from atmospheric testing, which allowed them to reverse-engineer the basic structure in some detail.)
Unless you're going to claim that Iranian scientists, engineers and spies are somehow all completely incompetent, you have to admit that it's more-or-less a tie as to who is more likely lying in the case of the American drone captured by the Iranians.
That's a service that is truly focused on its users.
Users? Not a chance. Customers? That is, the people who pay them money? Sure.
Craigslist is a terrible experience for a number of routine tasks. Their ads are full of scams that could be easily removed by simple filters (how do I know this? I've written the filters for my own use, likely breaking CL's terms of service in the process.)
Their search capability is so lame as to be almost useless for anything interesting. I've used CL to search for apartments and boats, and my kids have looked at it for jobs. It is barely usable for the first and completely useless for the latter.
The problem with the apartments and boats is that search and classification capabilities are poor. The problem with jobs is that where I am there are nothing but scam postings (this seems to vary by geography, so YMMV.)
BUT... if you are a landlord who just wants to get ads up easily and quickly in front of a lot of eyeballs, you go to CL. It's a perfect example of a company that has so much first-mover advantage that it is very difficult to compete with despite the poor experience for users, although PadMap/PadList is trying (and getting cease and desist orders from CL in the process due to terms of service violations.)
Alternatives face a major chicken-and-egg problem: to get customers using it they have to have users, and to get users they have to have listers. This is the great unsolved problem of the Internet, and it seems to mostly be worked around by various activities of questionable legality (scraping competitive sites and putting up copies of their ads.)
We can keep fucking with them, or we can work on decreasing tensions.
No, no, no. You don't understand: the existence of tensions is proof that Iran and North Korea can only be dealt with via military action! That's what all the mindless war-monger's in this discussion are saying at least. The simple fact that the world is a rough and dangerous place is absolute and complete justification for all military action of any kind by the United States against anyone for any reason. Any suggestion that there exist alternatives is just Stern Letter Diplomacy, because to a Real American there are only two options: military attack and abject surrender.
You can kind of see how this makes sense. After all, look at the great things that war has done for everyone. Why, Pakistan and India have been at war for decades, and look at how well it has solved all their problems! Have you ever seen two countries so completely free of problems, especially with each other?
And of course, if you do anything other than engage in warfare to solve international disputes you will not produce heaps of dead young men, so alternatives are obviously inferior to war. Can your notion that "we can work to decrease tensions" kill a few thousand young American men? I think not! So clearly it is a second-rate solution.
Or is he just the sort of Freedom Loving Pacifist that would have us dawdling around writing more "Sternly Worded Letters" until Iran finally trotted out a bomb and wiped out an entire city full of people?
Ah, cowardice and fear-mongering, the ever-eager fellow travelers of the security-industrial complex!
When you have an actual argument, do please make it. Until then your reliance on invalid assumption and misleading innuendo makes you look pretty stupid. After all, everyone knows that war is dead last in terms of efficient, effective ways of solving international disputes, just as interpersonal violence is the least effective and inefficient way of solving private disputes. If you don't advocate interpersonal violence you can't consistently advocate war: they are equally stupid, and likewise largely ineffective, and always hideously inefficient.
With regard to the "Iranian bomb": Iran is not pursuing nuclear weapons. We know this from a very simple piece of evidence: they don't have them.
The Israelis have been accusing Iran of pursuing nuclear weapons for twenty years. It took barely four years to build them from scratch the first time, with much of the basic technology being invented along the way, by a nation with far fewer technological advantages than those enjoyed by modern Iranians simply by virtue of being modern. There is no possible way any nation-state could pursue nuclear weapons today for more than five years and not have them.
Ergo: the "Iranian bomb" is fear-mongering propaganda invented by cowards to justify looting the productive economy for the benefit of the dead-weight loss security-industrial complex. Good luck with that!
The astonishing thing is that anyone in the Obama administration was stupid enough to think that secrecy could be maintained on this indefinitely. Unlike physical warfare, in which the aftermath can be sanitized and obfuscated, software never goes away.
We all know this: full erasure of a worm in the wild is impossible to ensure, because you never know when some vital assumption is going to change. So the Iranians would have caught on eventually.
Add to that the equal certainty that eventually a programming error or assumption violation would result in the worm getting out into the larger would and you have as close to a guarantee as possible that Stuxnet would eventually be discovered and traced back to its source.
Yet it appears the attack was planned on the basis of perpetual secrecy, which is just stupid. I'm sure there are lots of idiots who will say, "But if only the world had been a little different than the way it actually is then THIS PARTICULAR leak wouldn't have happened!" Sure, but some other leak would have.
The militarization of the 'Net by the Government of the United States started under George W Bush and ramped up dramatically by Barrack Obama is one of the biggest disasters in the history of information technology, and the ultimate economic cost is going to dwarf the cost of Bush's idiotic physical wars.
Climate change within 100 years didn't happen before except after catastrophical events like continent wide volcanism or a large meteorite impact.
False: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dansgaard%E2%80%93Oeschger_event
This false claim that the climate has never undergone a natural fluctuation comparable to the currently postulated anthropogenic one is actually kind of useful: it clearly identifies political hacks who don't care a tithe for science but who are either willful liars or inexcusably ignorant of the Earth's actual climate history.
In fact it would be more accurate to state it as the government redefines the 'poverty line' as needed to ensure that 10-15% of the population will always be in 'poverty' and thus willing to sign up for military service to fight in the wars big-government Republicans keep starting to line the pockets of their friends in the security/industrial complex
Fixed that for you. Or not. One idiotic catch-all bogeyman is pretty much as dumb as the other.
plus a couple of weeks of software engineering to tune them to the INDIVIDUAL User.
False. Walk into an audiologist, get plugged into a simple machine to run your audiogram, hook your aides to the computer, push a button and you're done.
The number of completely false claims about the supposed complexity of the hearing aide customization process in this thread is astonishing.
Each hearing aid (in the ear/canal) is custom made by hand, if done wrong, it is re-done at full cost, but the customer doesn't pay for remakes (as stated above). Plus the hearing aid isn't "Make everything louder". It's a very complex device.
Your first claim is both false in general (behind the ear aides require no customization) and indictment of obsolete manufacturing processes, not a justification for high costs.
The complexity argument fails because aides have been that complex for nigh-on two decades. Nothing you've described is remotely cutting-edge, so why haven't prices for exactly the same functionality come down?
And the behind the ear models still have custom-fit moulding and what not.
No, they don't. Check this out, for example: http://www.embracehearing.com/ See any steps for custom moulding?
This whole thread of "hearing aides are expensive because we have to do so much customization and special electronics" is nothing but blow-hard self-justification on the part of manufacturers (yes, my attitude is the precise complement of those people saying those of us who want cheaper hearing aides and feel like we're being gouged are whiners.)
If people had to buy these things out of pocket exclusively, the economics would be totally different, and that's true regardless of your political outlook.
Except this is demonstrably not true. Many people have already posted here pointing out that it is atypical for hearing aides to be covered by insurance. This is certainly true in Canada, where I am. Neither the public health insurance system nor most employer supplementary health insurance plans cover hearing aides. The province of Ontario kicks in $500/ear every three years, and even that's unusual: most provinces give nothing.
Yet our hearing aide costs are dead in line with the prices I'm seeing the Americans in this thread talk about.
I can tell you that the digital hearing aid I have been using for the last twenty years is from ReSound.
But there are idiots up the thread assuring us that all that digital processing stuff that you've been benefiting from for 20 years is new, so you must be totally wrong about that.
I'm getting new aides this summer (currently have a decent set from Seimens but they haven't been quite the same since I dove in the ocean with them on last summer...) and will check out ReSound, if they're still making them. The only feature I really want on my new ones is a telecoil. I certainly agree that nothing much helps in large parties with loud chatter.
Many insurance plans don't pay for them.
They are not covered by our single-payer system in Canada, either, although some provinces chip in a subsidy ($500/ear every three years in Ontario, zero in BC.) Most employer health plans here give slim-to-none coverage for them. Hearing loss is just not that common a problem amongst the working age population.
Ever administer a psychophysical experiment?
Why on Earth are you bringing up something as completely irrelevant as a experiment? Measuring an audiogram for the purpose of programming a hearing aid is done with a machine that a monkey could operate. There's no anechoic chamber and whatnot these days. It's done by an audiologist in an ordinary office with a device that would surprise me if it cost more than $100K.
I don't work in audiology, but I have worked in the medical device industry and I have had audiograms done, which is a diagnostic procedure, not an experiment.
The whole process of measuring and programming is almost completely automated. Again: a monkey could do it.
Which leaves the question open: Why am I a paying as much or more for hearing aids as my father did, fifteen or twenty years after all the fancy signal processing tech was built into them in the late 80's and early 90's?
That, and today's hearing aids don't just simply amplify external sound.
So did yesterday's. Absolutely everything you describe (except bluetooth, which is rare) have been bog-standard on hearing aids since the '90's. There was a big gain in sophistication in the late 80's and early 90's when all the "new" things you are talking about were invented. That was two decades ago.
Claiming or implying that these functions--which were added when Win3.1 and OS2 were fighting it out and the Linux kernel was somewhere in the 0.79-0.93 range--is fantastically disingenuous.
I can buy commodity computing hardware that is hundreds of times more powerful than a 100 MHz 486 at half the price or less. But I'm paying the same price or more than my father did for hearing aids, and the question still stands: how come?
"I am ignorant of features that hearing aids had getting on for 20 years ago so they must be new" is not an answer to that question.