Every generation since Malthus has predicted disaster at some invented threshold, and over and over these thresholds are surpassed.
Actually every generation before Malthus had that too, although their disasters tended to be more of the "second coming" or similar kind. It varied with which particular raving lunatic was popular in a given society, with followers of Jesus favouring different kinds of apocalypse than followers of Mohammed.
Malthusian catastrophism is just a secularization of the physical aspects of Abrahamic apocalysm in the same way Marxist revolutionary doctrine is a secularization of the social aspects.
It shows that the world was a safer place in the early sixties when the Cuban Missile Crisis almost started World War III.
Sure, because there was a charismatic Democrat in the White House. The "Bulletin of the Chemists" is a purely political organization that has always pushed a moderate Leftist agenda. As political lobbying organizations go they are relatively benign, but they should be recognized for exactly what they are: a group of moderate lefties who figured they could avoid defending their policies on their merits if instead they distracted everyone by "OMG we're all gonna die if you don't follow my plan" rhetoric.
Much of the "climate change" debate is carried on by the same kind of cowards: people who don't have the guts to stand up and say, "Money is more important to me than polar bears so I don't give a shit what happens to them" so they argue "Climate change doesn't exist and if it does it isn't anthropogenic and won't harm the polar bears." Cowardice, pure and simple.
How many simultaneous nuclear power plant failures would it take to end the world in the same way a WW III would have done?
The same as the number of coal plant failures or hydro-electric plant failures required to end the world in the same way WW III would have done, obviously.
If the US had the F35 for the past 10 years would it have made a difference in the Iraq or Afghan wars?
Sure, it would have made them much more expensive, funneling even more cash out of the pockets of working Americans who are doing something productive and useful with their lives and into the pockets of the dead-weight loss security-industrial complex.
The bigger concern is capture - like what happened in Iran. What would be particularly scary is if an enemy can take control of the drone, and either launch weapons at us or our allies, or at a civilian population - could you imagine if a Syria or Iran managed to take control of a U.S. drone and use it to attack protesters? Or a mosque, or a school? They could claim it was the U.S. doing the attack, and further incite hostilities amongst their people and cement their hold on power.
Given the frequency with which Americans have killed civilian people I don't see why you would given any special concern to remotely operated killing machines in this regard.
Furthermore, no one needs to control an American remotely operated killing machine to do this: they can more easily just send their own killing aircraft to kill protestors and then claim it was the Americans. People with power pull this kind of stunt all the time and always have, long before the era of killing aircraft.
The larger concern to my mind is that proliferation of automated and remotely operated killing machines demonstrates that the world is still full of people who are smart enough to build such machines but dumb enough to think that killing people is a particularly effective or efficient solution to any given problem. It takes only a cursory look at history to show that killing people is rarely effective and never efficient. For example, German politicians in the 1930's were deeply concerned with food security and chose to invest in killing people rather than researching more efficient and intensive agriculture. Rather than gaining food security this resulted in a nation where many people were dead, many buildings were destroyed, and many people were starving.
guess having eBook readers read Word documents is too much of a leap.
You are correct. Word documents are not appropriate for eBook readers because Word layout is handled via some collection of ad hoc and not very clever heuristics. PDF "eBooks" are even more broken, as PDF uses static layout that is incompatible with font scaling and other features you'd like an eBook to have.
ePub is XHTML and CSS with a few extra XML files for metadata. eBook readers are not much more than special-purpose Web browsers, which is sensible because layout is something Web browsers do really well. There is a problem that many eBook readers use a broken Adobe component for rendering, which simply doesn't work properly in many cases: for example, my Sony doesn't handle floating elements properly.
If you want to create eBooks my recommendation is to export your Word doc to plain text, write some Python or the like to process that plain text into XHTML, and use Sigl to create an ePub. That's what I do and it works brilliantly, with the one exception that Sigl uses WebKit for rendering so it isn't broken like the broken Adobe component that breaks on eBook readers that use it. What I do is generate and test the correct CSS in Sigl and then test on the various e-reader applications (Adobe Digital Editions, Amazon Kindle for PC and a couple of others) and put in the required hacks to get the correct rendering on the broken ones (of which Adobe is by far the worst... why anyone would go to a company with no Web browser experience for an HTML rendering component is beyond me.)
Better yet, you can skip Word entirely and write in plain text with your favourite editor (I use EMACS, myself). There is simply no advantage to a writer to using Word.
With regard to TFA: bad book design is ubiquitous, and decent book design is easy. Not ever book requires a unique design, and the number of best practices required to get something that looks as good or better than the average printed page is not high.
Kinda like the modernization of the Bronte sisters with vampires and such, I've seen those in the bookstore.
Wouldn't the correct equivalent be "Modern Lovecraft WITHOUT Cthulhu?" Now that would be something!
I've also seen a suggestion that the logical conclusion of the whole "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" trend would be "Frankenstein and Monsters".
OT: Tolkien's prose limps. People have talked about it being easy/hard to read, but that's not the point. Great art can be more or less accessible, and there is no particular virtue in either. The problem isn't Tolkien's accessibility or otherwise. It's that he was a pedestrian writer whose phrasing is generally unevocative and dull even while he's describing an incredibly rich world peopled with interesting characters. There's about three paragraphs of really beautiful prose in his description of the Battle of Helm's Deep, and it stands out like a diamond on a coal heap.
The one with the CS degree should be able explain when the radix sort is the best choice , the one without a CS degree from a good U might not even knows about the radix sort.
This is a great example, as it helps convey the reality that someone with a CS degree is a font of knowledge that is almost completely irrelevant to every real-world case. Furthermore, as anyone with a real education will tell you, the specific things like "when it is best to use X" are what fade fastest unless you are working in a field where that knowledge is used regularly, in which case it doesn't matter if you learn it in college or on the job.
Education is great, but I'll take a good developer with no degree over someone with a degree who thinks their mostly useless theoretical knowledge makes them special. Ideally, of course, I'll take a good developer with a degree, but those are amazingly hard to find.
The usual purpose of attending college isn't to learn the material, so much as being adequately credentialed for consideration for employment. So the question is, will the people doing the hiring consider them as sufficient alternatives to a traditional degree.
I thought the usual purpose of attending college was four years of drinking and ill-considered sexual escapades, which bond you into a social clique that will support you for the rest of your life by creating "old boy" job opportunities.
A month or two back there was an article on hiring practices on Wall St and why they only considered "name" schools. The argument came down to: it isn't about competency, it's about recognition (so if you consider that "credentialed" I guess I agree with your claim.) People with money want people from Yale or Harvard carrying water for them, regardless of actual competency.
The curious thing is that these online programs are likely to produce actual competency without significant credentialing, and at some point most employers do want a few people around who can actually do something useful. Online learning indicates a reasonable degree of self-motivation and self-organization, both of which are valuable in some businesses, so those businesses--and only those businesses--are likely to honour such learning.
Republic - A country with the head of state as an elected position
No, a republic is a country where the final legal authority is a public document that codifies the supreme law that governs everything, including the government and the courts that interpret it (this is your constitution in the US.)
This is distinct from a monarchy, where the final legal authority is embodied by the person of the monarch or their representative (the Governor General and Lieutenants Governor in Canada). A monarchy may be absolute (with no limit on royal fiat) or limited in various ways.
In an unqualified democracy anything that people vote for is law. In a republic it must pass muster against the public document that governs all. In a monarchy it must receive royal assent.
Most modern states are poorly categorized by this scheme: Britain is a democratic constitutional monarchy with an unwritten constitution. Canada is democratic constitutional monarchy with a written constitution. The US, Russia and France are democratic republics with written constitutions. The big difference is that in Canada and Britain Parliament can over-ride the constitution but not the monarch (this was tested in Canada recently when the Prime Minister prorogued Parliament under questionable circumstances, and really did have to put the case to the Governor General, who could well have asked the Opposition to form a new government.)
Iran is a weird case because it has many republican and democratic forms, but at root is a tyranny run by the supreme religious council who have no checks on their power.
There have been proposals in Canada to ditch the monarchy but keep the Governor General as an unelected head of state appointed for a limited term by lot from recipients of the Order of Canada, which would make us a democratic republic with a written constitution and an unelected head of state.
And we still can't accurately say where the next hurricane will make landfall in 3 days, or if I'm going to get rained on tomorrow.
Von Neumann apparently envisioned a world where computer scientists were like high priests, because he thought automated computation would allow us to control almost everything and predict what we couldn't control.
He couldn't imagine that there would be things so entirely resistant to prediction and control, and since for some reason he believed that the universe cared two pins for what he or anyone else could or could not imagine he concluded that no such processes could exist.
He didn't know about deterministic chaos, which turns out to be quite common, no matter how hard it is to imagine.
Weather forecasting is one such area where deterministic chaos reigns. Economic forecasting is another. Climate forecasting is may or may not be: wait a few hundred years and we'll see. There was a belief in the late '80's that the solar system was chaotic, but that turned out to be due to imperfections in our numerical models, which should be a cautionary tale for anyone wanting to drive policy from science that passes through climate models, although since limiting fossil fuel usage is such an obviously beneficial move to everyone outside the fossil industries it's not as if being skeptical about climate models is going to change any honest person's mind about environmental policy.
In fact, unless my memory is going, I think that the level of taxation may have had something to do with our country's founding.
Your memory is going. The LEVEL of taxation had almost nothing to do with your country's rebellion against it's lawful government. It was about the relationship between who decided on the taxes and who paid the taxes.
Likewise, no true conservative is ever concerned about the level of taxation. They are concerned about balanced budgets. Anyone who is in favour of "lower taxes" is not a conservative, but a wrecker. Conservatives want a society in which each generation and ideally each person pays their own way. Being in favour of "lower taxes" rather than "balanced budgets" is just a sign that a person is only interested in pushing as much debt as possible onto their children and grandchildren's generation.
A couple of kilos of the explosive of your choice and a terminal-phase guidance system (both within easy reach of the hobby-terrorist's budget.)
These things are short-range cruise missiles, suitable for assassinating--or at least scaring the hell out of--the person of your choice. Think about what the loser-idiots who think violence is in any way a good response to WTO meetings would do with this.
Up until recently anyone so stupid as to think violence will help their political cause--like people who want a unified Ireland or separate Basque or Tamil state--have been too stupid to deploy this kind of thing. Now, or soon, even the kind of drooling moron who has failed to notice that decades of killing people hasn't solved any will be able to use this sort of tech to express their mental deficiency with a bang.
Interestingly, the comic isn't making a commentary on the usefulness (or not) of cryptography. It's making fun of people who don't properly evaluate all their threats when they design security systems.
Yup. The big risk for most e-mail users is that a message intended for one person goes to another. That isn't going to be helped by crypto one bit.
This is all really good advice. The one thing I'd add is: "Make progress visible". I use various metrics to measure progress (tests passed, features implemented, bugs fixed, a sum over developer's own progress reports) and generate an imperfect but meaningful "progress" value that I chart on a paper chart stuck up in a visible place, so everyone can see we're on track or falling behind (I've never seen "ahead of the game" but I hear it can exist.)
All the successful technician-to-manager folks I've worked under have suggested solutions, listened when technicians explained problems and tried to get managerial roadblocks out of their way
My mantra as a manager is, "Trust your people." In one of my first management positions I took over a team that was having a really hard time (they'd been leaderless for a year, had political issues with senior management, etc) that was in the midst of shipping a major new release. Things were chaotic and the urge to micro-manage was intense. Fortunately I knew how technically proficient they were, and was able to discipline myself to trust them across the board on technical issues while I started the (ultimately successful) process of dealing with the political and people issues.
It's not necessarily that those coders suck, it's more that it's impossible to estimate the time to do some non-trivial new task, because there may or may not be hidden depths.
Almost completely false. Estimation is just not that hard in almost all cases, yet bring it up and people will focus on the 1% of cases that are genuinely hard rather as if that was the usual case rather than the rare exception.
Go read "Rapid Development" again for some simple and effective estimation practices. Invest in the discipline of reviewing your own work and look for objective metrics. During one phase of my career I was able to identify that creating a single fully documented and tested core model class in C++ took about a week. Based on that I could look at a UML diagram and give a pretty reasonable estimate of the time it would take to implement something. If you aren't designing or otherwise scoping features you're not in a position to make any claims about estimation anyway, because you have made no attempt to do even the most basic steps required to generate estimates.
This demonstrably false belief that "estimation is hard in the typical case" is just an excuse people use to avoid learning a new and valuable skill. That said, being able to estimate at all makes you the one-eyed person in the kingdom of the blind, which can be pretty damned uncomfortable, as well as frustrating.
"Editor", like most English words, has multiple meanings. One is "project manager at a publisher". Another is "person who edits copy", what you have incorrectly described as proof-reading.
Most authors, even good ones, need these and don't do them well themselves.
And apparently most people are incapable of understanding that it's possible to buy the first two of those things on a very modest budget (a few thousand) and the last has been something that mysteriously hasn't held back indie bands from becoming big. I wonder if there's any possible way an author might figure that one out too? I'm not totally sure how it'll be done, but I'm pretty sure it'll happen, and when it does the whole publishing eco-system will fall to bits.
You make an ironic case for why editors are needed in the process.
And neither you nor anyone else has made any case at all as to why authors can't hire their own editors. Editing a novel is not rocket science, and freelance editors are relatively cheap.
This weird "to have an editor you must have a publisher" claim makes no sense at all. It's like saying you can't have an indie band because only labels have producers.
People--including authors--who claim that professional publishing is impossible without publishing houses are living the previous century.
No, individual people don't have a say in energy policies, countries do.
That's hilarious! Not only do I have a say in my country's energy policy (and my province's, since in Canada energy is a provincial matter) but I have a great deal of control over the kind and amount of energy I use and produce.
Reification of nation-states is a purely political move made by people who don't have the intelligence or moral sense to consider individuals.
The reason traveling wave reactors were never used, even though the technology has been know for half a century, is that they produce no waste that is useful to making nuclear weapons. That is only reason why all nuclear power nations wanted the more dangerous reactors that ran on uranium and plutonium fission.
This makes very little sense even by the standards of the usual anti-nuke propaganda.
Plutonium production for the military is preferentially done using purpose-built reactors with about a thee-month fuel cycle. The Soviets even had ones that were underground, away from prying eyes (which continued to operate for years into the post-Soviet era.)
The reason why these exotic reactor cycles are never used is because they don't work (yet.) Conventional fuel cycles with exotic cooling, like pebble-bed reactors, have at least reached research operation, but fancy fuel cycles--other than thorium--have only very rarely been tested in operation. Traveling wave reactors have never been built.
And all nuclear reactors have essentially the same problem: the power density in the core is such that a relatively small event can result in a thermal spike that results in plastic deformation, which turns a multi-billion dollar investment into a slightly slumped heap of very expensive radioactive doodads. The safety issues from nuclear are very, very small. The economic issues are vastly more problematic.
I dunno, most Quebecois I know speak English that's on par with what passes for English in the US.
When I ran my own (Canadian) software consultancy I got about half my business from the US (admittedly in a niche where I have specialized expertise.) So outsourcing to Canada is nothing new.
I don't understand why this theory is "implausible" and why the article is so dismissive of it. Dark Matter was created for the sole purpose of explaining the orbital momentum of stars. There is NO other evidence for it.
False. So completely and entirely false that I really can't see you being anything other than a troll, but on the theory that sufficiently advanced ignorance is indistinguishable from malice, I'll point out what several others have already done above: the Bullet Cluster, various details of the CMB, and at various aspects of large-scale structure in galaxy clusters, up to and including the closure of the universe itself, are all evidence for Dark Matter of various kinds.
So all you've done here is declare, "I am completely ignorant of almost all of observational cosmology and THIS is my opinion on Dark Matter..."
After reading the first half of that sentence no one who knows anything about Dark Matter is going to be the least bit interested in what you have to say in the second half.
One of the uncomfortable truths (uncomfortable for MBA cost minimizers) is that know-how is between the ears. It is not in the manuals or specifications, which merely prove that their writers had the know-how. Even more important is the know-why, which is part of the institutional memory which also resides between the ears.
A quick perusal of this thread shows no mention of George O. Smith's story Lost Art, which emphasizes precisely this aspect of engineering knowledge. A couple of humans archeologists are digging in the Martian ruins and come upon an ancient Martian device with the manual, which proves to be almost useless until they have done the systematic experimentation to understand how it actually works.
It was published in December, 1943, which suggests this kind of problem has been happening again and again for the better part of a century. Unfortunately the solution to it (value your people and don't treat them as interchangeable parts to be laid off the moment its convenient to outsource their work) is so completely counter-intuitive to the sociopaths who have always been the ones in charge of large organizations that it will never be implemented consistently.
Slashdot Mirror
Every generation since Malthus has predicted disaster at some invented threshold, and over and over these thresholds are surpassed.
Actually every generation before Malthus had that too, although their disasters tended to be more of the "second coming" or similar kind. It varied with which particular raving lunatic was popular in a given society, with followers of Jesus favouring different kinds of apocalypse than followers of Mohammed.
Malthusian catastrophism is just a secularization of the physical aspects of Abrahamic apocalysm in the same way Marxist revolutionary doctrine is a secularization of the social aspects.
It shows that the world was a safer place in the early sixties when the Cuban Missile Crisis almost started World War III.
Sure, because there was a charismatic Democrat in the White House. The "Bulletin of the Chemists" is a purely political organization that has always pushed a moderate Leftist agenda. As political lobbying organizations go they are relatively benign, but they should be recognized for exactly what they are: a group of moderate lefties who figured they could avoid defending their policies on their merits if instead they distracted everyone by "OMG we're all gonna die if you don't follow my plan" rhetoric.
Much of the "climate change" debate is carried on by the same kind of cowards: people who don't have the guts to stand up and say, "Money is more important to me than polar bears so I don't give a shit what happens to them" so they argue "Climate change doesn't exist and if it does it isn't anthropogenic and won't harm the polar bears." Cowardice, pure and simple.
How many simultaneous nuclear power plant failures would it take to end the world in the same way a WW III would have done?
The same as the number of coal plant failures or hydro-electric plant failures required to end the world in the same way WW III would have done, obviously.
If the US had the F35 for the past 10 years would it have made a difference in the Iraq or Afghan wars?
Sure, it would have made them much more expensive, funneling even more cash out of the pockets of working Americans who are doing something productive and useful with their lives and into the pockets of the dead-weight loss security-industrial complex.
The bigger concern is capture - like what happened in Iran. What would be particularly scary is if an enemy can take control of the drone, and either launch weapons at us or our allies, or at a civilian population - could you imagine if a Syria or Iran managed to take control of a U.S. drone and use it to attack protesters? Or a mosque, or a school? They could claim it was the U.S. doing the attack, and further incite hostilities amongst their people and cement their hold on power.
Given the frequency with which Americans have killed civilian people I don't see why you would given any special concern to remotely operated killing machines in this regard.
Furthermore, no one needs to control an American remotely operated killing machine to do this: they can more easily just send their own killing aircraft to kill protestors and then claim it was the Americans. People with power pull this kind of stunt all the time and always have, long before the era of killing aircraft.
The larger concern to my mind is that proliferation of automated and remotely operated killing machines demonstrates that the world is still full of people who are smart enough to build such machines but dumb enough to think that killing people is a particularly effective or efficient solution to any given problem. It takes only a cursory look at history to show that killing people is rarely effective and never efficient. For example, German politicians in the 1930's were deeply concerned with food security and chose to invest in killing people rather than researching more efficient and intensive agriculture. Rather than gaining food security this resulted in a nation where many people were dead, many buildings were destroyed, and many people were starving.
guess having eBook readers read Word documents is too much of a leap.
You are correct. Word documents are not appropriate for eBook readers because Word layout is handled via some collection of ad hoc and not very clever heuristics. PDF "eBooks" are even more broken, as PDF uses static layout that is incompatible with font scaling and other features you'd like an eBook to have.
ePub is XHTML and CSS with a few extra XML files for metadata. eBook readers are not much more than special-purpose Web browsers, which is sensible because layout is something Web browsers do really well. There is a problem that many eBook readers use a broken Adobe component for rendering, which simply doesn't work properly in many cases: for example, my Sony doesn't handle floating elements properly.
If you want to create eBooks my recommendation is to export your Word doc to plain text, write some Python or the like to process that plain text into XHTML, and use Sigl to create an ePub. That's what I do and it works brilliantly, with the one exception that Sigl uses WebKit for rendering so it isn't broken like the broken Adobe component that breaks on eBook readers that use it. What I do is generate and test the correct CSS in Sigl and then test on the various e-reader applications (Adobe Digital Editions, Amazon Kindle for PC and a couple of others) and put in the required hacks to get the correct rendering on the broken ones (of which Adobe is by far the worst... why anyone would go to a company with no Web browser experience for an HTML rendering component is beyond me.)
Better yet, you can skip Word entirely and write in plain text with your favourite editor (I use EMACS, myself). There is simply no advantage to a writer to using Word.
With regard to TFA: bad book design is ubiquitous, and decent book design is easy. Not ever book requires a unique design, and the number of best practices required to get something that looks as good or better than the average printed page is not high.
Kinda like the modernization of the Bronte sisters with vampires and such, I've seen those in the bookstore.
Wouldn't the correct equivalent be "Modern Lovecraft WITHOUT Cthulhu?" Now that would be something!
I've also seen a suggestion that the logical conclusion of the whole "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" trend would be "Frankenstein and Monsters".
OT: Tolkien's prose limps. People have talked about it being easy/hard to read, but that's not the point. Great art can be more or less accessible, and there is no particular virtue in either. The problem isn't Tolkien's accessibility or otherwise. It's that he was a pedestrian writer whose phrasing is generally unevocative and dull even while he's describing an incredibly rich world peopled with interesting characters. There's about three paragraphs of really beautiful prose in his description of the Battle of Helm's Deep, and it stands out like a diamond on a coal heap.
The one with the CS degree should be able explain when the radix sort is the best choice , the one without a CS degree from a good U might not even knows about the radix sort.
This is a great example, as it helps convey the reality that someone with a CS degree is a font of knowledge that is almost completely irrelevant to every real-world case. Furthermore, as anyone with a real education will tell you, the specific things like "when it is best to use X" are what fade fastest unless you are working in a field where that knowledge is used regularly, in which case it doesn't matter if you learn it in college or on the job.
Education is great, but I'll take a good developer with no degree over someone with a degree who thinks their mostly useless theoretical knowledge makes them special. Ideally, of course, I'll take a good developer with a degree, but those are amazingly hard to find.
The usual purpose of attending college isn't to learn the material, so much as being adequately credentialed for consideration for employment. So the question is, will the people doing the hiring consider them as sufficient alternatives to a traditional degree.
I thought the usual purpose of attending college was four years of drinking and ill-considered sexual escapades, which bond you into a social clique that will support you for the rest of your life by creating "old boy" job opportunities.
A month or two back there was an article on hiring practices on Wall St and why they only considered "name" schools. The argument came down to: it isn't about competency, it's about recognition (so if you consider that "credentialed" I guess I agree with your claim.) People with money want people from Yale or Harvard carrying water for them, regardless of actual competency.
The curious thing is that these online programs are likely to produce actual competency without significant credentialing, and at some point most employers do want a few people around who can actually do something useful. Online learning indicates a reasonable degree of self-motivation and self-organization, both of which are valuable in some businesses, so those businesses--and only those businesses--are likely to honour such learning.
Republic - A country with the head of state as an elected position
No, a republic is a country where the final legal authority is a public document that codifies the supreme law that governs everything, including the government and the courts that interpret it (this is your constitution in the US.)
This is distinct from a monarchy, where the final legal authority is embodied by the person of the monarch or their representative (the Governor General and Lieutenants Governor in Canada). A monarchy may be absolute (with no limit on royal fiat) or limited in various ways.
In an unqualified democracy anything that people vote for is law. In a republic it must pass muster against the public document that governs all. In a monarchy it must receive royal assent.
Most modern states are poorly categorized by this scheme: Britain is a democratic constitutional monarchy with an unwritten constitution. Canada is democratic constitutional monarchy with a written constitution. The US, Russia and France are democratic republics with written constitutions. The big difference is that in Canada and Britain Parliament can over-ride the constitution but not the monarch (this was tested in Canada recently when the Prime Minister prorogued Parliament under questionable circumstances, and really did have to put the case to the Governor General, who could well have asked the Opposition to form a new government.)
Iran is a weird case because it has many republican and democratic forms, but at root is a tyranny run by the supreme religious council who have no checks on their power.
There have been proposals in Canada to ditch the monarchy but keep the Governor General as an unelected head of state appointed for a limited term by lot from recipients of the Order of Canada, which would make us a democratic republic with a written constitution and an unelected head of state.
The permutations are endless.
And we still can't accurately say where the next hurricane will make landfall in 3 days, or if I'm going to get rained on tomorrow.
Von Neumann apparently envisioned a world where computer scientists were like high priests, because he thought automated computation would allow us to control almost everything and predict what we couldn't control.
He couldn't imagine that there would be things so entirely resistant to prediction and control, and since for some reason he believed that the universe cared two pins for what he or anyone else could or could not imagine he concluded that no such processes could exist.
He didn't know about deterministic chaos, which turns out to be quite common, no matter how hard it is to imagine.
Weather forecasting is one such area where deterministic chaos reigns. Economic forecasting is another. Climate forecasting is may or may not be: wait a few hundred years and we'll see. There was a belief in the late '80's that the solar system was chaotic, but that turned out to be due to imperfections in our numerical models, which should be a cautionary tale for anyone wanting to drive policy from science that passes through climate models, although since limiting fossil fuel usage is such an obviously beneficial move to everyone outside the fossil industries it's not as if being skeptical about climate models is going to change any honest person's mind about environmental policy.
In fact, unless my memory is going, I think that the level of taxation may have had something to do with our country's founding.
Your memory is going. The LEVEL of taxation had almost nothing to do with your country's rebellion against it's lawful government. It was about the relationship between who decided on the taxes and who paid the taxes.
Likewise, no true conservative is ever concerned about the level of taxation. They are concerned about balanced budgets. Anyone who is in favour of "lower taxes" is not a conservative, but a wrecker. Conservatives want a society in which each generation and ideally each person pays their own way. Being in favour of "lower taxes" rather than "balanced budgets" is just a sign that a person is only interested in pushing as much debt as possible onto their children and grandchildren's generation.
What else do you want?
A couple of kilos of the explosive of your choice and a terminal-phase guidance system (both within easy reach of the hobby-terrorist's budget.)
These things are short-range cruise missiles, suitable for assassinating--or at least scaring the hell out of--the person of your choice. Think about what the loser-idiots who think violence is in any way a good response to WTO meetings would do with this.
Up until recently anyone so stupid as to think violence will help their political cause--like people who want a unified Ireland or separate Basque or Tamil state--have been too stupid to deploy this kind of thing. Now, or soon, even the kind of drooling moron who has failed to notice that decades of killing people hasn't solved any will be able to use this sort of tech to express their mental deficiency with a bang.
Interestingly, the comic isn't making a commentary on the usefulness (or not) of cryptography. It's making fun of people who don't properly evaluate all their threats when they design security systems.
Yup. The big risk for most e-mail users is that a message intended for one person goes to another. That isn't going to be helped by crypto one bit.
Watch your repositories!
This is all really good advice. The one thing I'd add is: "Make progress visible". I use various metrics to measure progress (tests passed, features implemented, bugs fixed, a sum over developer's own progress reports) and generate an imperfect but meaningful "progress" value that I chart on a paper chart stuck up in a visible place, so everyone can see we're on track or falling behind (I've never seen "ahead of the game" but I hear it can exist.)
All the successful technician-to-manager folks I've worked under have suggested solutions, listened when technicians explained problems and tried to get managerial roadblocks out of their way
My mantra as a manager is, "Trust your people." In one of my first management positions I took over a team that was having a really hard time (they'd been leaderless for a year, had political issues with senior management, etc) that was in the midst of shipping a major new release. Things were chaotic and the urge to micro-manage was intense. Fortunately I knew how technically proficient they were, and was able to discipline myself to trust them across the board on technical issues while I started the (ultimately successful) process of dealing with the political and people issues.
It's not necessarily that those coders suck, it's more that it's impossible to estimate the time to do some non-trivial new task, because there may or may not be hidden depths.
Almost completely false. Estimation is just not that hard in almost all cases, yet bring it up and people will focus on the 1% of cases that are genuinely hard rather as if that was the usual case rather than the rare exception.
Go read "Rapid Development" again for some simple and effective estimation practices. Invest in the discipline of reviewing your own work and look for objective metrics. During one phase of my career I was able to identify that creating a single fully documented and tested core model class in C++ took about a week. Based on that I could look at a UML diagram and give a pretty reasonable estimate of the time it would take to implement something. If you aren't designing or otherwise scoping features you're not in a position to make any claims about estimation anyway, because you have made no attempt to do even the most basic steps required to generate estimates.
This demonstrably false belief that "estimation is hard in the typical case" is just an excuse people use to avoid learning a new and valuable skill. That said, being able to estimate at all makes you the one-eyed person in the kingdom of the blind, which can be pretty damned uncomfortable, as well as frustrating.
For use with strategically sensitive strikes.
That sentence is so thickly slathered in euphemism I don't have a clue which type of killing what people under which circumstances you actually mean.
The only things I'm sure of are a) you're talking about killing people and b) you aren't making it clear that you are talking about killing people.
I don't think you know what an editor does.
"Editor", like most English words, has multiple meanings. One is "project manager at a publisher". Another is "person who edits copy", what you have incorrectly described as proof-reading.
Most authors, even good ones, need these and don't do them well themselves.
And apparently most people are incapable of understanding that it's possible to buy the first two of those things on a very modest budget (a few thousand) and the last has been something that mysteriously hasn't held back indie bands from becoming big. I wonder if there's any possible way an author might figure that one out too? I'm not totally sure how it'll be done, but I'm pretty sure it'll happen, and when it does the whole publishing eco-system will fall to bits.
You make an ironic case for why editors are needed in the process.
And neither you nor anyone else has made any case at all as to why authors can't hire their own editors. Editing a novel is not rocket science, and freelance editors are relatively cheap.
This weird "to have an editor you must have a publisher" claim makes no sense at all. It's like saying you can't have an indie band because only labels have producers.
People--including authors--who claim that professional publishing is impossible without publishing houses are living the previous century.
No, individual people don't have a say in energy policies, countries do.
That's hilarious! Not only do I have a say in my country's energy policy (and my province's, since in Canada energy is a provincial matter) but I have a great deal of control over the kind and amount of energy I use and produce.
Reification of nation-states is a purely political move made by people who don't have the intelligence or moral sense to consider individuals.
The reason traveling wave reactors were never used, even though the technology has been know for half a century, is that they produce no waste that is useful to making nuclear weapons. That is only reason why all nuclear power nations wanted the more dangerous reactors that ran on uranium and plutonium fission.
This makes very little sense even by the standards of the usual anti-nuke propaganda.
Plutonium production for the military is preferentially done using purpose-built reactors with about a thee-month fuel cycle. The Soviets even had ones that were underground, away from prying eyes (which continued to operate for years into the post-Soviet era.)
The reason why these exotic reactor cycles are never used is because they don't work (yet.) Conventional fuel cycles with exotic cooling, like pebble-bed reactors, have at least reached research operation, but fancy fuel cycles--other than thorium--have only very rarely been tested in operation. Traveling wave reactors have never been built.
And all nuclear reactors have essentially the same problem: the power density in the core is such that a relatively small event can result in a thermal spike that results in plastic deformation, which turns a multi-billion dollar investment into a slightly slumped heap of very expensive radioactive doodads. The safety issues from nuclear are very, very small. The economic issues are vastly more problematic.
Unless you make the mistake of going with Quebec.
I dunno, most Quebecois I know speak English that's on par with what passes for English in the US.
When I ran my own (Canadian) software consultancy I got about half my business from the US (admittedly in a niche where I have specialized expertise.) So outsourcing to Canada is nothing new.
I don't understand why this theory is "implausible" and why the article is so dismissive of it. Dark Matter was created for the sole purpose of explaining the orbital momentum of stars. There is NO other evidence for it.
False. So completely and entirely false that I really can't see you being anything other than a troll, but on the theory that sufficiently advanced ignorance is indistinguishable from malice, I'll point out what several others have already done above: the Bullet Cluster, various details of the CMB, and at various aspects of large-scale structure in galaxy clusters, up to and including the closure of the universe itself, are all evidence for Dark Matter of various kinds.
So all you've done here is declare, "I am completely ignorant of almost all of observational cosmology and THIS is my opinion on Dark Matter..."
After reading the first half of that sentence no one who knows anything about Dark Matter is going to be the least bit interested in what you have to say in the second half.
One of the uncomfortable truths (uncomfortable for MBA cost minimizers) is that know-how is between the ears. It is not in the manuals or specifications, which merely prove that their writers had the know-how. Even more important is the know-why, which is part of the institutional memory which also resides between the ears.
A quick perusal of this thread shows no mention of George O. Smith's story Lost Art, which emphasizes precisely this aspect of engineering knowledge. A couple of humans archeologists are digging in the Martian ruins and come upon an ancient Martian device with the manual, which proves to be almost useless until they have done the systematic experimentation to understand how it actually works.
It was published in December, 1943, which suggests this kind of problem has been happening again and again for the better part of a century. Unfortunately the solution to it (value your people and don't treat them as interchangeable parts to be laid off the moment its convenient to outsource their work) is so completely counter-intuitive to the sociopaths who have always been the ones in charge of large organizations that it will never be implemented consistently.