Re:It's ok because wikileaks does it to government
on
Assange Rape Case Reopened
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Tell me exactly who should be treated as 'government' and who should be a private citizen. Give me a cast iron definition in a single sentence.
One of the general principles I teach my kids is that people who think that difficulty in drawing an infinitely precise line based on a trivially simple criterion constitutes an argument are intellectually bankrupt.
Here's my counter-challenge: give me a cast-iron definition in a single sentence that will tell me exactly, to within the width of an atom, where the ocean ends and the land begins. Can't do it, can you? You can't even get one that will be good to within a couple of meters! So I guess you have to accept that boats and cars are impossible, as they would require knowing excatly where the land ends and the water begins.
Difficulty in defining precise boundaries is completely unrelated to the the ability to clearly identify entities that are undoubtedly on one side of the (ill-defined) line or the other, and only people who've never been to the beach can possibly believe otherwise.
it would seem to me there's disagreement on whether there was consent or not.
That doesn't seem the case to me at all. It is clear that there was consent with some reservations in both cases. But that is still consent.
Both women wanted to have sex with a man who was a public figure whom they admired, treating him callously as a mere means to their ends of self-gratification. He responded to this by using their desire to negotiate conditions they were uncomfortable with but ultimately acceded to. In the case of Woman B he may have exceeded those bounds by having sex with her in the morning without a condom, but she did NOT go to the police in that instance.
The telling fact is that both women went to the police only when they found out about each other. Nothing else matters. Neither one would have gone to the police had they not found out that this man whom they both wanted to have sex with and who agreed to have sex with both of them on very short acquaintance was in fact willing to have sex with pretty much any attractive younger woman who approached him, as demonstrated by the fact that that is what he did.
I think it admirable that Assange kept up his responsibilities to his fans by twittering and so on in the midst of his encounter with Woman B. That's his job, to be the public face of the international transparency movement. Woman B was clearly still willing to have sex with him despite his self-involved behaviour.
Again, it was only when the women found out that their delusional fantasies about a man whom they desired simply because of his public standing were in fact delusional fantasies that they went to the police. This is a case of women scorned, and nothing else. The sad thing is that the women have to be complete idiots to believe that a man who would have sex with them on such short acquaintance would not also have sex with anyone else who approached him in the same way.
The case has become so hugely public simply because Assange is a public figure, although apparently one who hasn't figured out how to pay a PR person to deal with this sort of mess, which is how the average successful musician or actor does it.
Assange's great failure was that he mislead both women as to his intent. If he'd just looked them in the eye at some point and said, "You know I'm a wanted man. My life is unstable, peripatetic, a whirlwind of change. I never know what secret, world-changing information is going to land in my inbox at any moment. So don't kid yourself: I'd love to feel your warm naked skin against mine, but we're just two lonely people enjoying a moment of pleasure in a crazy world. Please, don't believe it's anything more than that. I believe in truth and openess. I don't want to lie to you, even by implication."
Of course, maybe he did say that, and they just didn't accept the reality of it. It's pretty clear that neither one of them is very smart or very stable.
Wasn't the discover of penicillin similar to this empirical discovery?
It was "similar" in the sense that "human beings observed a pattern. Otherwise it was completely different both because of context and response.
Contextually, Flemming was working in an environment where he had a large body of well-established empirical fact to work within, notably the germ theory of disease, which had only been fully established for about thirty years when he made his discovery.
In terms of response, Flemming published his work and gained enough attention that others started thinking hard about how his discovery might be put to use. Apparently he wasn't the first to notice that fungus killed bacteria on agar plates, but he was the first to realize the implication in terms of the molecular basis of life, another very new idea in his time.
So no, the difference between Flemming and the Nubians is not peer review, it is science, which is the public testing of ideas by systematic observation and controlled experiment. The "public" aspect is important--if the work is not published it may as well not exist--but it is far less important than the "systematic" and "controlled" aspects, which are the major differences between what science does and what all pre-scientific cultures did.
Could it possibly be, as you and the article suggest, that they had empirical knowledge of what they were doing?
They probably had emprical knowledge, given the high doses of tetracycline found in the bones, but empirical knowledge of what? They certainly didn't have "empirical knowledge of anti-biotics" because they had no concept of "anti-biotics", nor any of the foundational concepts it depends on, like the germ theory of disease.
Curiously, the Wisdom of the Old supposedly includes knowledge of life after death, mysterious "energies" that flow through the body (chi and all that) and so on, but somehow missed the relatively mundane fact that there are tiny creatures that live in water and wet environments that cause a wide range of diseases.
The difference between scientific empiricism and everything that came before it is that scientific empiricism is relentless in both its reductionistic and synthetic intent: scientists try to break things down into atomic causes and to find links between disparate things (the tides, falling bodies, the motion of the wandering stars...)
There is no evidence that anyone in the ancient world practised anything like this in a remotely systematic way, which is no fault of theirs because this attitude of mind is really really hard to learn and incredibly difficult to sustain, so difficult that most people in the modern world are incapable of learning it and many who do learn it fail to apply it the moment their favourite article of personal faith--be it political, religious, or techincail--comes up for questioning.
I think the criticism here is aimed at the university labs, where people invent stuff using outrageous amounts of money that is difficult or impossible to commercialize.
Absolutely. Commerical labs rarely do this kind of whizz-bang pre-announcement, which means that virtually any story like this is about a technology that is a) still in the lab and b) will never get out.
You have to get to the second page of the article to find out that some tiny tech company no one has ever heard of is "testing" a 1 kilo-bit chip these guys have made. That's right, a whole 128 bytes!
Unsurprisingly, the company is impressed. I was always impressed by the stuff my clients were doing too, when I was doing contract research.
Genuine "news for nerds" would talk more about the physics of the nano-wire processes, which look remarkably interesting. They are doing chemistry on the surface of the wires, from the look of it, forming and destroying atomic and molecular bonds reversibly using electric current. That's damned interesting at a fundamental level, not just a short-sighted "we can make gazillions of dollars on this one particular application!"
none of that intellectual potential goes into moving the frontiers of the hard sciences
Science and engineering are both pretty sucky careers, and like men have been brought up in an environment where male self-sacrifice is held up as an ideal and "Men Last!" is a highly admired sentiment. So it only makes sense that they would be dominated by men, in the same way that jobs that kill people are dominated by men.
Women are more than capable of doing these things, they just haven't been indoctrinated with the irrational willingness to sacrifice themselves that men have.
This map at first glance appears to be decidedly western individuals only.
Glance again. You'll see Bose and Yukawa, at least, and a few others as well.
But I agree that the non-Westerners who invented calculus and laid down the foundations of physics, chemistry, natural history, evolutionary biology, relativity, cosmology and quantum mechanics do seem to be missing.
Since a salesman (or anyone else) generally doesn't know the optimal solution to the travelling salesman problem, torturing him will not reliably get you the correct solution, despite being able to check the solution.
Sure it will. It'll just take a very long time.
And since you never really know if the person you're torturing has the information you want--and in all practical cases your degree of uncertainty is extremely large, so this isn't some semantic quibble about "really knowing"--you never know if you're trying to solve an NP-complete problem or not. Good luck wit that.
I've never heard anyone in India suggest that the Indian government is anything but corrupt at all levels. However, unlike the United States, India has a semi-functioning semblance of democracy, which makes it necessary to hide this kind of shakedown behind "national security" claims. Although the ghost of democracy has just barely enough kick left in it in the US that those sometimes play out there, too.
So the difference between the bribes RIM is distributing in India today and the bribes they have distributed in the US in the past is that bribes in the US are legal campaign contributions, because corruption has been completely institutionalized in the US, whereas India still has quite a bit of catching up to do.
I actually debated with myself if it was NP or NP-complete or NP-hard, and I'll stand by the NP-Complete designation. If you tortured a travelling salesman for the optimal route he could easily spit out (along with his teeth, presumably) various possibles, which you could then "easily check" (including keeping an eye out for repetitions, of course.) Ergo: NP-Complete.
I also debated with myself about the word "easy", which is why I put it in scare-quotes. By "easy" I meant "imaginable that you might get reliable information from" as opposed to the far more typical "hard" case where you have a vanishingly small chance of that.
Torture is in general an unreliable epistemological method, and I stand by my analysis that your suggestion amounts to arguing that the only case where torture might be considered to produce reliable information is indeed NP-complete.
I will also note that even in cases where the results of torture or the threat of torture can easily be checked, they rarely are: do you think the Inquisitors who showed Galilleo the instruments of torture bothered to check if the phases of Venus were consistent with Venus and the Sun moving around the Earth in circular orbits? Or that they looked through any telescope to see if the moons of Jupiter were astronomical objects rather than optical artifacts as some people wanted to believe?
The object of torture is not now and never has been to determine the truth.
The purpose of torture is the pyschological gratification of the torturer, and the social objectification of the tortured.
Further all programmers want to stick with the tools they learned once--while to stick with programming over time, you have to be used to constantly changing.
This is not actually true, but it seems that way for the first decade of your career. By that point you should have settled on a tool-set with proven longevity and be focused on getting really good with it, rather than doing a half-assed job with the latest shiny.
I learned Emacs, vi, and VisualStudio over over a decade ago--in the case of the first two WELL over a decade ago. I'm still using them today, although I've recently been using Eclipse more. I've coded professionally in just a handful of languages: FORTRAN, C, C++, Java, Perl and Python. I guess I should include "various assembly languages" as well. Of those, only one is provably obsolete in the areas I'm still active in, although I'm almost exclusively C++ and Python these days.
The truly experienced developer recognizes the tools and languages that will have staying power, and learns them very, very well. This is not to say they don't have the ability to adapt rapidly and effectively to new tools, but they tend to have less interest in doing so "just for fun" because they've had the experience of learning many, many new tools and the novelty of seeing yet another small variation on doing XYZ is no longer very intersting (Unsurprisingly, the language that is catching my eye at the moment is Haskell, which is sufficiently different to be genuinely interesting. Ruby on Drugs and the like are just boring variations on a very, very old and tired theme to me.)
Unfortunately, this article suggests that the result of that dedication is a constantly declining salary after the age of 40.
Programming requires long nights staring blankly at mind-muddling objective languages.
You're doing it wrong.
This is the same attitude that puts every project behind schedule, because 20-something morons who have never seen a project managed competently think it's supposed to be that way.
So it's really an design error on the device side, not a true hack in that quantum states were undisturbed regardless of reading them.
Thanks for pointing that out! It makes the system so much more secure, knowing that...
This is a "true hack" in the same way that the cost of sending a mission to Mars is a "real problem": scientists and engineers often want to simplify the world by restricting the domain of "real problems" to ones they know how to solve. But reality doesn't care about human domain boundaries.
In this case, they have hacked the system, which has the effect of being able to read the communications that pass through it. No cryto system is more secure than the least secure channel, and they have demonstrated that even though part of the system is 100% secure the rest is pretty easily hackable. This will always be the case with quantum crypto so long as it has to interface with the classical world at some point.
BTW, per capita cost of health care in Norway (the most expensive country to live in in the world) costs less than half what it costs in the US, yet covers everyone. I believe that should be classed under 'nannying is damned cheap' if done using the Northern Europe style public management.
Powerful people within the Catholic Church wanted to believe that the Earth was the centre of God's creation. Galileo proved otherwise by observing the phases of Venus and the moons of Jupiter.
Guess what happened next?
If you keep pointing out the objective, measureable, successes of Nordic social/liberal democracy you are not going to convince the kind of person who thinks it natural to ask the laughable question, "Can [Brazil] succeed when the US recently failed to go digital?"
That depth of ignorance, both of their own nation's failures and the sucesses of the rest of the world, can only be maintained by the kind of wilfull dysfunction that the persecutors of Galilleo maintained.
Unfortunately such individuals always believe in the epistemology of violence, so you really need to think twice before pointing out the truth to them. They are so mired in the depths of thier own lies that they would rather kill the messenger than face the truth.
I'm getting bored to tears by all these "science imitates nature" articles.
Engineers have been using nature as a source of inspiration for hundreds of years, but clueless journalists "discover" it every few weeks.
The curious thing is that everyone is so keen to take ideas from nature without ever a thought of payment. Haven't they considered that without due recompense nature will stop coming up with ideas for people to imitate?
We would have been better off with the Avro Arrow [wikipedia.org].
Right, because Canada as a large arms manufacturer and exporter would make the world so much better.
Canadian nationalists are funny this way: they almost all pine for the Arrow as if its success wouldn't have meant we would now be selling its descendents to anyone with cash.
I simply do not see where this impossibility claim comes from
From the article: "'They’re looking for something with a very much larger effect than the force of neutrinos, but that doesn’t show up any other way,' he says."
That is, your inability to see is a result of your innumeracy. You have said "X effects Y" without any reference to the quantitative, numerical size of the effect.
The people who actually work on these things for a living have an excellent sense of the magnitudes without having to do a detailed calculation, and know that if the variation in neutrino flux caused by a 3% change in orbital distance was such a big deal then there would almost certainly be all kinds of other evidence for very large effects due to small variations in neutrino fluxes.
Those effects are not seen, ergo the odds of this effect being due to neutrinos is very small.
Your post looks like nothing so much as an argument by a medieval, pre-scientific philosopher. It is time to stop trying to pass off innumerate argument as reasoning and enter the modern age.
the term facebook originated at least as early as 1983 for a directory listing names and headshots among U.S. college students.
In that case it is doubtful that Facebook has much in the way of trademark rights even under common law. Trademark rights on words are extremely limited, even in a specialized business context. McDonald's can own "Big Mac" but not "hamburger".
Re:I hope they're smarter than the article writer
on
Low Energy Supercomputing
·
· Score: 3, Informative
It's like saying someone weighs 686 Newtons.
Nope, because that would be correct (other than capitalization). Newtons are a unit of force, and weight is the force of gravity on a thing.
It's not even like saying someone weights 100 kg, which is conventional but wrong: weight is not mass, weight is mass*acceleration.
It's more like saying someone weights 150 m/s. That is, it makes no sense whatsoever without supplying some additional information. If I had an instrument that accelerated objects under a constant force for a fixed time I could get a value in m/s that would allow me to compute the weight if I had the force and the time, in the same way it would be possible to get the energy from the amperage if you had the voltage and the time.
For a certain value of "invented". A number of people have made this claim in this discussion, but it is pretty marginal. The Jedac (possibly spelt "Jeddack" or "Jedack", I don't recall) were Martian warriors in Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom stories, ultimately based on Islamic (Suffi) mystic/warrior/assassins of the same name (whose apprentices were called "palawans" or something similar.
Google around a bit: Episode IV is basically a tale of Islamic liberation: an independence movement represented by a small peripheral desert planet whose inhabitants apparently 'hate the Empire' use mystical powers to fight against overwhelming technological and military superiority.
So Lucas is pulling a Disney: enclosing the historic cultural commons for his own benefit and suing anyone who dares to do him what he has done to others who didn't happen to have the awesome violence of the US government on their side.
Nobody has ever trained them how to effectively communicate patient state to their replacements.
Communication is the one thing that is harder for humans than thinking and remembering. The most important people management lesson I ever learned was playing the "Telephone" game as a kid: there's about 50% information loss on any transmission of even the simplest message.
A quick look at the documentation for your current project will suggest the same thing.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the leading cause of iatrogenic disease is mis-communication, not mistakes made by tired staff.
That said, the solution to the problem is overlapping shifts: nine hour shifts with an hour overlap, so the evening shift has an hour with the day shift still on, and so on. This--depth of time--is one of the most critical factors in effective communciation.
Whatever has happened to personal responsibility? Why is this such a problem? If a nurse is doing their job, then they will follow the tubing back to the source to ensure that they are connecting the right ones. Why is this so hard?
I'm guessing you are under 30 and/or have never worked on anything mission-critical. You've also never taken a statistics course, or if you have you have failed to apply its lessons.
It is "so hard" because nurses do this dozens of times a day to patients who change on a regular basis, and both thinking and remembering are hard. If a nurse has a 0.1% failure rate--when was the last time you got 99.9% on an exam, by the way?--they will do the wrong thing a few times a year. Most of those wrong things will be harmless. If they have a 0.001% failure rate they will still err every decade or so.
Anyone who knows anything about the actual, empirically verifiable nature of human beings, rather than some pulp fiction fantasy, knows that humans make mistakes. It is what we do. Intelligent people respond to that uncontroversial fact by building systems that make mistakes more difficult. Gibbering idiots thump their chests and witter on about personal responsibility.
Slashdot Mirror
Tell me exactly who should be treated as 'government' and who should be a private citizen. Give me a cast iron definition in a single sentence.
One of the general principles I teach my kids is that people who think that difficulty in drawing an infinitely precise line based on a trivially simple criterion constitutes an argument are intellectually bankrupt.
Here's my counter-challenge: give me a cast-iron definition in a single sentence that will tell me exactly, to within the width of an atom, where the ocean ends and the land begins. Can't do it, can you? You can't even get one that will be good to within a couple of meters! So I guess you have to accept that boats and cars are impossible, as they would require knowing excatly where the land ends and the water begins.
Difficulty in defining precise boundaries is completely unrelated to the the ability to clearly identify entities that are undoubtedly on one side of the (ill-defined) line or the other, and only people who've never been to the beach can possibly believe otherwise.
Fascinating essay. Thanks!
it would seem to me there's disagreement on whether there was consent or not.
That doesn't seem the case to me at all. It is clear that there was consent with some reservations in both cases. But that is still consent.
Both women wanted to have sex with a man who was a public figure whom they admired, treating him callously as a mere means to their ends of self-gratification. He responded to this by using their desire to negotiate conditions they were uncomfortable with but ultimately acceded to. In the case of Woman B he may have exceeded those bounds by having sex with her in the morning without a condom, but she did NOT go to the police in that instance.
The telling fact is that both women went to the police only when they found out about each other. Nothing else matters. Neither one would have gone to the police had they not found out that this man whom they both wanted to have sex with and who agreed to have sex with both of them on very short acquaintance was in fact willing to have sex with pretty much any attractive younger woman who approached him, as demonstrated by the fact that that is what he did.
I think it admirable that Assange kept up his responsibilities to his fans by twittering and so on in the midst of his encounter with Woman B. That's his job, to be the public face of the international transparency movement. Woman B was clearly still willing to have sex with him despite his self-involved behaviour.
Again, it was only when the women found out that their delusional fantasies about a man whom they desired simply because of his public standing were in fact delusional fantasies that they went to the police. This is a case of women scorned, and nothing else. The sad thing is that the women have to be complete idiots to believe that a man who would have sex with them on such short acquaintance would not also have sex with anyone else who approached him in the same way.
The case has become so hugely public simply because Assange is a public figure, although apparently one who hasn't figured out how to pay a PR person to deal with this sort of mess, which is how the average successful musician or actor does it.
Assange's great failure was that he mislead both women as to his intent. If he'd just looked them in the eye at some point and said, "You know I'm a wanted man. My life is unstable, peripatetic, a whirlwind of change. I never know what secret, world-changing information is going to land in my inbox at any moment. So don't kid yourself: I'd love to feel your warm naked skin against mine, but we're just two lonely people enjoying a moment of pleasure in a crazy world. Please, don't believe it's anything more than that. I believe in truth and openess. I don't want to lie to you, even by implication."
Of course, maybe he did say that, and they just didn't accept the reality of it. It's pretty clear that neither one of them is very smart or very stable.
Wasn't the discover of penicillin similar to this empirical discovery?
It was "similar" in the sense that "human beings observed a pattern. Otherwise it was completely different both because of context and response.
Contextually, Flemming was working in an environment where he had a large body of well-established empirical fact to work within, notably the germ theory of disease, which had only been fully established for about thirty years when he made his discovery.
In terms of response, Flemming published his work and gained enough attention that others started thinking hard about how his discovery might be put to use. Apparently he wasn't the first to notice that fungus killed bacteria on agar plates, but he was the first to realize the implication in terms of the molecular basis of life, another very new idea in his time.
So no, the difference between Flemming and the Nubians is not peer review, it is science, which is the public testing of ideas by systematic observation and controlled experiment. The "public" aspect is important--if the work is not published it may as well not exist--but it is far less important than the "systematic" and "controlled" aspects, which are the major differences between what science does and what all pre-scientific cultures did.
Could it possibly be, as you and the article suggest, that they had empirical knowledge of what they were doing?
They probably had emprical knowledge, given the high doses of tetracycline found in the bones, but empirical knowledge of what? They certainly didn't have "empirical knowledge of anti-biotics" because they had no concept of "anti-biotics", nor any of the foundational concepts it depends on, like the germ theory of disease.
Curiously, the Wisdom of the Old supposedly includes knowledge of life after death, mysterious "energies" that flow through the body (chi and all that) and so on, but somehow missed the relatively mundane fact that there are tiny creatures that live in water and wet environments that cause a wide range of diseases.
The difference between scientific empiricism and everything that came before it is that scientific empiricism is relentless in both its reductionistic and synthetic intent: scientists try to break things down into atomic causes and to find links between disparate things (the tides, falling bodies, the motion of the wandering stars...)
There is no evidence that anyone in the ancient world practised anything like this in a remotely systematic way, which is no fault of theirs because this attitude of mind is really really hard to learn and incredibly difficult to sustain, so difficult that most people in the modern world are incapable of learning it and many who do learn it fail to apply it the moment their favourite article of personal faith--be it political, religious, or techincail--comes up for questioning.
I think the criticism here is aimed at the university labs, where people invent stuff using outrageous amounts of money that is difficult or impossible to commercialize.
Absolutely. Commerical labs rarely do this kind of whizz-bang pre-announcement, which means that virtually any story like this is about a technology that is a) still in the lab and b) will never get out.
You have to get to the second page of the article to find out that some tiny tech company no one has ever heard of is "testing" a 1 kilo-bit chip these guys have made. That's right, a whole 128 bytes!
Unsurprisingly, the company is impressed. I was always impressed by the stuff my clients were doing too, when I was doing contract research.
Genuine "news for nerds" would talk more about the physics of the nano-wire processes, which look remarkably interesting. They are doing chemistry on the surface of the wires, from the look of it, forming and destroying atomic and molecular bonds reversibly using electric current. That's damned interesting at a fundamental level, not just a short-sighted "we can make gazillions of dollars on this one particular application!"
none of that intellectual potential goes into moving the frontiers of the hard sciences
Science and engineering are both pretty sucky careers, and like men have been brought up in an environment where male self-sacrifice is held up as an ideal and "Men Last!" is a highly admired sentiment. So it only makes sense that they would be dominated by men, in the same way that jobs that kill people are dominated by men.
Women are more than capable of doing these things, they just haven't been indoctrinated with the irrational willingness to sacrifice themselves that men have.
This map at first glance appears to be decidedly western individuals only.
Glance again. You'll see Bose and Yukawa, at least, and a few others as well.
But I agree that the non-Westerners who invented calculus and laid down the foundations of physics, chemistry, natural history, evolutionary biology, relativity, cosmology and quantum mechanics do seem to be missing.
Since a salesman (or anyone else) generally doesn't know the optimal solution to the travelling salesman problem, torturing him will not reliably get you the correct solution, despite being able to check the solution.
Sure it will. It'll just take a very long time.
And since you never really know if the person you're torturing has the information you want--and in all practical cases your degree of uncertainty is extremely large, so this isn't some semantic quibble about "really knowing"--you never know if you're trying to solve an NP-complete problem or not. Good luck wit that.
What are the bribes you are talking about?
I've never heard anyone in India suggest that the Indian government is anything but corrupt at all levels. However, unlike the United States, India has a semi-functioning semblance of democracy, which makes it necessary to hide this kind of shakedown behind "national security" claims. Although the ghost of democracy has just barely enough kick left in it in the US that those sometimes play out there, too.
So the difference between the bribes RIM is distributing in India today and the bribes they have distributed in the US in the past is that bribes in the US are legal campaign contributions, because corruption has been completely institutionalized in the US, whereas India still has quite a bit of catching up to do.
I actually debated with myself if it was NP or NP-complete or NP-hard, and I'll stand by the NP-Complete designation. If you tortured a travelling salesman for the optimal route he could easily spit out (along with his teeth, presumably) various possibles, which you could then "easily check" (including keeping an eye out for repetitions, of course.) Ergo: NP-Complete.
I also debated with myself about the word "easy", which is why I put it in scare-quotes. By "easy" I meant "imaginable that you might get reliable information from" as opposed to the far more typical "hard" case where you have a vanishingly small chance of that.
Torture is in general an unreliable epistemological method, and I stand by my analysis that your suggestion amounts to arguing that the only case where torture might be considered to produce reliable information is indeed NP-complete.
I will also note that even in cases where the results of torture or the threat of torture can easily be checked, they rarely are: do you think the Inquisitors who showed Galilleo the instruments of torture bothered to check if the phases of Venus were consistent with Venus and the Sun moving around the Earth in circular orbits? Or that they looked through any telescope to see if the moons of Jupiter were astronomical objects rather than optical artifacts as some people wanted to believe?
The object of torture is not now and never has been to determine the truth.
The purpose of torture is the pyschological gratification of the torturer, and the social objectification of the tortured.
Further all programmers want to stick with the tools they learned once--while to stick with programming over time, you have to be used to constantly changing.
This is not actually true, but it seems that way for the first decade of your career. By that point you should have settled on a tool-set with proven longevity and be focused on getting really good with it, rather than doing a half-assed job with the latest shiny.
I learned Emacs, vi, and VisualStudio over over a decade ago--in the case of the first two WELL over a decade ago. I'm still using them today, although I've recently been using Eclipse more. I've coded professionally in just a handful of languages: FORTRAN, C, C++, Java, Perl and Python. I guess I should include "various assembly languages" as well. Of those, only one is provably obsolete in the areas I'm still active in, although I'm almost exclusively C++ and Python these days.
The truly experienced developer recognizes the tools and languages that will have staying power, and learns them very, very well. This is not to say they don't have the ability to adapt rapidly and effectively to new tools, but they tend to have less interest in doing so "just for fun" because they've had the experience of learning many, many new tools and the novelty of seeing yet another small variation on doing XYZ is no longer very intersting (Unsurprisingly, the language that is catching my eye at the moment is Haskell, which is sufficiently different to be genuinely interesting. Ruby on Drugs and the like are just boring variations on a very, very old and tired theme to me.)
Unfortunately, this article suggests that the result of that dedication is a constantly declining salary after the age of 40.
Programming requires long nights staring blankly at mind-muddling objective languages.
You're doing it wrong.
This is the same attitude that puts every project behind schedule, because 20-something morons who have never seen a project managed competently think it's supposed to be that way.
While it's not reliable in general, it is reliable in cases where you can easily check whether the information given to you is correct.
You realize you've just defined extracting information under torture as an NP-Complete problem... and then implied that this was the "easy" case.
So it's really an design error on the device side, not a true hack in that quantum states were undisturbed regardless of reading them.
Thanks for pointing that out! It makes the system so much more secure, knowing that...
This is a "true hack" in the same way that the cost of sending a mission to Mars is a "real problem": scientists and engineers often want to simplify the world by restricting the domain of "real problems" to ones they know how to solve. But reality doesn't care about human domain boundaries.
In this case, they have hacked the system, which has the effect of being able to read the communications that pass through it. No cryto system is more secure than the least secure channel, and they have demonstrated that even though part of the system is 100% secure the rest is pretty easily hackable. This will always be the case with quantum crypto so long as it has to interface with the classical world at some point.
BTW, per capita cost of health care in Norway (the most expensive country to live in in the world) costs less than half what it costs in the US, yet covers everyone. I believe that should be classed under 'nannying is damned cheap' if done using the Northern Europe style public management.
Powerful people within the Catholic Church wanted to believe that the Earth was the centre of God's creation. Galileo proved otherwise by observing the phases of Venus and the moons of Jupiter.
Guess what happened next?
If you keep pointing out the objective, measureable, successes of Nordic social/liberal democracy you are not going to convince the kind of person who thinks it natural to ask the laughable question, "Can [Brazil] succeed when the US recently failed to go digital?"
That depth of ignorance, both of their own nation's failures and the sucesses of the rest of the world, can only be maintained by the kind of wilfull dysfunction that the persecutors of Galilleo maintained.
Unfortunately such individuals always believe in the epistemology of violence, so you really need to think twice before pointing out the truth to them. They are so mired in the depths of thier own lies that they would rather kill the messenger than face the truth.
I'm getting bored to tears by all these "science imitates nature" articles.
Engineers have been using nature as a source of inspiration for hundreds of years, but clueless journalists "discover" it every few weeks.
The curious thing is that everyone is so keen to take ideas from nature without ever a thought of payment. Haven't they considered that without due recompense nature will stop coming up with ideas for people to imitate?
We would have been better off with the Avro Arrow [wikipedia.org].
Right, because Canada as a large arms manufacturer and exporter would make the world so much better.
Canadian nationalists are funny this way: they almost all pine for the Arrow as if its success wouldn't have meant we would now be selling its descendents to anyone with cash.
Except the govermnent-run system can run at a loss forever and drive the competition out of the market.
So it's just like an investment bank or insurance company then?
I simply do not see where this impossibility claim comes from
From the article: "'They’re looking for something with a very much larger effect than the force of neutrinos, but that doesn’t show up any other way,' he says."
That is, your inability to see is a result of your innumeracy. You have said "X effects Y" without any reference to the quantitative, numerical size of the effect.
The people who actually work on these things for a living have an excellent sense of the magnitudes without having to do a detailed calculation, and know that if the variation in neutrino flux caused by a 3% change in orbital distance was such a big deal then there would almost certainly be all kinds of other evidence for very large effects due to small variations in neutrino fluxes.
Those effects are not seen, ergo the odds of this effect being due to neutrinos is very small.
Your post looks like nothing so much as an argument by a medieval, pre-scientific philosopher. It is time to stop trying to pass off innumerate argument as reasoning and enter the modern age.
the term facebook originated at least as early as 1983 for a directory listing names and headshots among U.S. college students.
In that case it is doubtful that Facebook has much in the way of trademark rights even under common law. Trademark rights on words are extremely limited, even in a specialized business context. McDonald's can own "Big Mac" but not "hamburger".
It's like saying someone weighs 686 Newtons.
Nope, because that would be correct (other than capitalization). Newtons are a unit of force, and weight is the force of gravity on a thing.
It's not even like saying someone weights 100 kg, which is conventional but wrong: weight is not mass, weight is mass*acceleration.
It's more like saying someone weights 150 m/s. That is, it makes no sense whatsoever without supplying some additional information. If I had an instrument that accelerated objects under a constant force for a fixed time I could get a value in m/s that would allow me to compute the weight if I had the force and the time, in the same way it would be possible to get the energy from the amperage if you had the voltage and the time.
And Lucas even invented the word
For a certain value of "invented". A number of people have made this claim in this discussion, but it is pretty marginal. The Jedac (possibly spelt "Jeddack" or "Jedack", I don't recall) were Martian warriors in Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom stories, ultimately based on Islamic (Suffi) mystic/warrior/assassins of the same name (whose apprentices were called "palawans" or something similar.
Google around a bit: Episode IV is basically a tale of Islamic liberation: an independence movement represented by a small peripheral desert planet whose inhabitants apparently 'hate the Empire' use mystical powers to fight against overwhelming technological and military superiority.
So Lucas is pulling a Disney: enclosing the historic cultural commons for his own benefit and suing anyone who dares to do him what he has done to others who didn't happen to have the awesome violence of the US government on their side.
Nobody has ever trained them how to effectively communicate patient state to their replacements.
Communication is the one thing that is harder for humans than thinking and remembering. The most important people management lesson I ever learned was playing the "Telephone" game as a kid: there's about 50% information loss on any transmission of even the simplest message.
A quick look at the documentation for your current project will suggest the same thing.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the leading cause of iatrogenic disease is mis-communication, not mistakes made by tired staff.
That said, the solution to the problem is overlapping shifts: nine hour shifts with an hour overlap, so the evening shift has an hour with the day shift still on, and so on. This--depth of time--is one of the most critical factors in effective communciation.
Whatever has happened to personal responsibility? Why is this such a problem? If a nurse is doing their job, then they will follow the tubing back to the source to ensure that they are connecting the right ones. Why is this so hard?
I'm guessing you are under 30 and/or have never worked on anything mission-critical. You've also never taken a statistics course, or if you have you have failed to apply its lessons.
It is "so hard" because nurses do this dozens of times a day to patients who change on a regular basis, and both thinking and remembering are hard. If a nurse has a 0.1% failure rate--when was the last time you got 99.9% on an exam, by the way?--they will do the wrong thing a few times a year. Most of those wrong things will be harmless. If they have a 0.001% failure rate they will still err every decade or so.
Anyone who knows anything about the actual, empirically verifiable nature of human beings, rather than some pulp fiction fantasy, knows that humans make mistakes. It is what we do. Intelligent people respond to that uncontroversial fact by building systems that make mistakes more difficult. Gibbering idiots thump their chests and witter on about personal responsibility.