Embedded intelligence is going to drive the next industrial mini-revolution, in the same way that desktop and networked intelligence drove the last one.
Consumer robotics is going to be the Next Big Thing, and MS may be looking for ways to gain a foothold in that field.
After a couple hundred messages, you have to type each character and wait a second or two before you can type the next one.
I've found Wave basically unusable on my netbook with Firefox for much the same reason, even with small waves. The fastest it runs is unacceptabley slow, and this on a machine that is powerful enough to run OpenOffice acceptably fast.
What you claim is that an incorrect analysis of a realistic model has occurred, which is incorrect.
And yet for reasons that escape me these correct analyses of unrealistic models have been used in the marketing of quantum cryptography as a realistic solution to the problem of secure communication.
Can you provide any insight into how that situation has come about?
Alice and Bob compare measurement results before send the message. There is theoretically no way to intercept and resend bits or eavesdrop without introducing errors.
There's something here that one of us isn't understanding. Either you're missing the OP's point, or I'm missing yours.
The OP's point seems to me to be that the exchange between Alice and Bob necessarily goes like this:
1) Get individual quanta from an entangled source such that they have a shared secret that cannot have been interfered with.
2) Use that shared secret to encrypt in a conventional way and communicate.
The OP is pointing out that the MTM attack is just as practical against step 1 as step 2 by having Eve use two separate sources of entangled pairs, one for Alice and one for Bob. This requires that Eve have physical access to the source that Alice and Bob are using, so she can pretend to be Alice for Bob and Bob for Alice.
This is equivalent to Eve having both Alice and Bob's private keys in a public key scheme, but rather than requiring access to Alice and Bob's secrets individually, it requires instead access to the source of entangled quanta they are using, or rather the fiber that links them to that source.
One imagines a network setup for Alice and Bob to "compare meeasurement results before sending the message" that looks like:
Alice----------Source---------Bob
And for an MTM attack on the quantum key exchange becoming:
Alice-------ESA-Eve-ESB-------Bob
where "ESA" and "ESB" are both sources of entangled quanta.
You can argue that Eve getting physical access to the source is unlikely or unrealistic. You cannot argue that it is physically impossible. The communication between Alice and Bob is only as secure as the source, which is somewhat less secure than the laws of physics.
Selling quantum crytography as being "as secure as the laws of physics" is extremely misleading. Systems are only as secure as their weakest component, and one could easily argue that the entangled source is considerably more easily hacked than discoverying Alice and Bob's private keys would be.
please everyone, no apostrophe when writing plurals!
But "pro" is a contraction of "professional" and in English we generally use an apostrophe to indicate a contraction when the contracted part is internal to the word ("can't", "won't") but not when it is at the tail of the word ("pro", "doc", "prof").
So in the plural of a tail-contraction, the use of an apostrophe indicates the contraction, not the possessive, as adding the "s" makes it an internal contraction.
Ergo, your complaint is groundless, and your ignorance of English is strongly suggested by your inability or unwillingness to care about any of the other manifold conventions that make the language such a baroque delight.
I just want to input my algorithm and get a result I expect (not 5/2=2).
What result do you expect from 5/2? I expect 2... 5/2 == 2 in C, C++ and FORTRAN (I think... I don't write much FORTRAN code these days...)
Python does an excellent job of making both useful scientific functionality available via scipy and numpy and a wealth of other toolkits, and at the same time allowing us to package stuff up in usable applications. It provides all the real-world applications language facilities that MATLAB, Mathematica, R, etc lack.
I deal with people who "code" in those environments all the time, and they are not my peers: they have fundamentally failed to grasp almost everything important about programming, from design principles to documentation. For someone who knows how to write software--which MATLAB et al "programmers" do not, as a professional understands the term--Python is pretty much ideal for expressing algorithms and wrapping them in useful applications.
Also, the way everything is assembled brick by brick, you'd wonder why the base wouldn't be one giant piece, using his theory.
Not if you'd ever built anything big out of concrete, you wouldn't.
This is the problem with this kind of speculation: it is inevitably done by people who think they can see from their armchair how far more intelligent people[*] a few thousand years ago who were heirs to a deep and rich tradition of building techniques might have done things.
[*] The human population has grown by a factor of ten in the past 200 years, indicating selective pressures have dropped to essentially zero. If intelligence is heritable and selected on at all the current population of humans is therefore necessarily the stupidist that has ever lived, on average.
Nothing other than some modern day engineers couldn't do it with techniques assumed to have been used.
Yeah, it's pretty much like giving a modern computer scientist a quill, ink and parchment and asking them to work out Newtonian physics from scratch. Why anyone would expect someone with an utterly unrelated skill-set that is tuned up for the modern world to be able to replicate what ancient engineers did is beyond me.
The only thing stupider is when archeologists try to do the same thing: people who have clearly never built anything with their hands in their lives trying to intuit the optimal behaviour of people who, as you point out, had spent generations doing nothing but.
As an aside you'll notice the further north in the continents you go the better the slaves/natives were treated.
In Canada we treat our native peoples like shit, pretty much, despite some hopeful signs in northern British Columbia. There may be a tiny bit of truth to your observation, but natives were treated badly everywhere, to the extent possible, and by the time you get to Canada you're dealing with people who were eating very meat-heavy diets who were genetically low in alcohol dehydrogenase production, which meant that alcoholism finished in the 20th century what disease and cultural genocide started to do in the 19th.
The OP's comment about mythology in history is dead on: in Canada we have the "myth of the Northwest Mounted Police" as a civilizing and peaceful force compared to the American "wild west", but if you dig into the facts you find that Mounted Police constables and officers spent most of their time drinking, gambling, seducing each others wives, and buying and selling native women for the purpose of prostitution.
but when offered casual use in a carefree environment, get zombified. this is what the illegality prevents: the destruction of the lives of the carefree casual idiot
So you're aware that Portugal basically legalized drugs some years ago, without any notable zombie apocalypse of the kind you hypothecate?
Drugs are bad... we agree on that.
There's a large quantity of actual, empirical data that legalization of most drugs and medicalization of addiction is by far the least costly, most effective, social response to drug addiction. And by "least costly" I mean in all senses, particularly in terms of mangled lives of innocents.
You seem to have passed from "drugs are bad" to "the American War on (some) Drugs is absolutely justified in all of its destructive excess" without ever bothering to even consider the possibility that there might be more humane and effictive alternatives to police-state intervention in individual's lives.
Since it is clearly an issue you feel passionately about you would do well to educate yourself on the most effective means of combating the very real problems that drug use creates, rather than just knee-jerking in zombie-like support of the security-industrial complex and their counter-productive, destructive, inhumane and ineffective policy of criminalization and incarceration.
I dunno... they both are using him as an excuse for the largest power grab and rights-trampling stampede in American history.
The US government is currently in the process of pre-trial hearings for an illegally detained child soldier in Guantanomo Bay, which demonstrates the New American Empire's power to ignore the American constitution whenever it feels like it. And the illegally detained child soldier is a native-born Canadian citizen, so it is pretty clear that the New American Empire intends to extend its power across the world whenever it feels like it.
PJ O'Rourke said that giving money and power to politicians is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys, and bin Laden's actions have resulted in the oligarchs of the New American Empire being given a whole lot of both. They and bin Laden (and other Islamist nutjobs) are the only people who actually benefit from the "War on Terror", and they are effectively colluding together to maintain it[*] =====
[*] Although there is almost certainly no actual collusion involved--it is just that the natural intent of both groups, the Islamist nutjobs on the one hand and the oligarchs of the New American Empire on the other are aligned in their mutual opposition. It takes two to make a war, and the leadership of both sides are extremely interested in maintaining the war at all costs, right down to the last drop of someone else's blood...
I'm doing a PhD in a climate area now, and the science is DEFINITELY not out on whether increased clouds hurt or help us. It depends on the height, location, water content, droplet size.....
But I agree with Idiomatick below - it's clear that we're into at least 40 years of warming, even if we turned off every last CO2 source today!
I'm a computational physicist, and have serious doubts about the use of climate science as a guide to policy. For example, what you've said here appears to be, "We don't know what effect CO2 will have because we don't understand cloud forcing, but we know CO2 will produce warming."
I've written parameterized models of MUCH simpler systems than the Earth's climate, and produced nonsense results because of subtly unphysical dynamics in the parameterization. Conservation of energy, for example, absolutely must be strict if you want any long-term integration of your model to be more than nonsense. Any attempt to "fix up" things like non-conservation of energy by rebalancing after each integration step just adds more non-physical assumptions to an already unphysical model.
So why are you so sure CO2 will produce warming, when its clear that our computational models of the climate are a huge collection of extremely clever but not very physical parameterizations?
Changes to mitigate the sea level rise after the fact will be hugely expensive, more so than adjusting our behaviour now in my opinion.
That's nice... you're an economist specializing in global costs? No? They why do you expect anyone to care about your opinion?
Nothing you've said here is science: it is economic and political opinion. I happen to agree that running out of fossil fuels is a serious and significant looming problem, but I recognize any claims I make about the consquences as being completely unrelated to the quality of the science that has gone into reaching the conclusion about resource scarcity.
This is the problem with the AGW debate (one of them, anyway): mixing of hysterical speculation about economics and politics with some reasonably ok science. The science is reasonably ok--just not nearly solid enough to justify the hysterical speculations.
Pretty much, and those are exactly the same three fonts everyone uses. Font weenies are just a bunch of wankers who make so much noise about how important exactly the right font is that they get other people to pay attention to them.
They have done zero empirical testing on any aspect of font design, not even whether anyone can actually tell the difference between two "different" fonts without a detailed side-by-side comparison.
Basically, anyone who is worried about fonts beyond the three you mention is paying way to much attention to presentation and by implication far too little attention to content.
Did 85,000 employees that had absolutely nothing to do with Enron deserve to have their lives thrown into chaos as the company imploded?
I love how you bleeding heart libertarians come all over touchy-feely when a company goes bust because of management incompetence and dishonesty, as was the case at Arthur Anderson, but never shed a tear when its merely half the workforce getting canned for the same reason.
Who cares what workers "deserve"? It's a FREE MARKET, buddy, and if you can't stand the heat, stay out of the trading pit. Socialists like you are what is ruining the modern world--people who are too chicken to take real risks in the real market like a Real American.
One hardly knows what to say in response to such an incredible falsehood--this is worthy of Newt Gingrich or one of the other Republican shills who carefully parse words like "involved" to let them claim that black is white.
CRU scientists have been vigorous in their promotion of a particular interpetation of the data and their unphysical computer models with a clear eye to particular policy outcomes with regard to the restriction of CO2 emissions. While they have not been part of the specific policy formulation apparatus, their faux certainty has been a significant driver of the policy process, and they are certainly aware of this.
So really, nice attempt to side-track a completely reasonable analysis, but better luck next time!
The CRU are engaged in perfectly reasonable science, but most perfectly reasonable science is entirely inadequate to inform policy, and the CRU scientists know perfectly well that this is the case with regard to their own work. Yet they persist in presenting their work as if it was adequate to inform policy. That's what the "Climategate" e-mails show, and that's what sane people have a problem with (unfortunately the debate has been taken over by insane people on both sides...)
I always thought one line ended with "atom bombs bursting in air."
There's an old Canadian patriotic song, "The Maple Leaf Forever" that's not much sung anymore but was once a reasonable substitute for the national anthem. It has a line in it about "Wolfe the dauntless hero came/to plant Britannia's flag upon Quebec's fair domain" that makes it strangely unpopular amongst 25% of the Canadian population, post Quiet Revolution.
Back in the '30's it was sung regularly by school-children, and one of them wrote an essay a few years back on his traumatic experience with lyric mis-interpetation: he and one of his little friends in about grade three heard "Wolfe the donkless hero came...", "donk" being slang for "penis".
This resulted in him and his friend speculating on how General Wolfe had got his privates blown off, ultimately ending in asking their third-grade teacher about it. She apparently turned bright red, told them the correct reading of the line, and retreated to the teacher's prep room, from whence were heard gales of laughter...
Thanks--this is much clearer than the "Buffalo" example, which depends on both a place-name and a colloquialism.
The trick is: find a word that can be used as one or more nouns, an adjective and a verb, and as a noun is capable of being both subject and object of the verb (possibly in different senses of the noun, as in the Buffalo example, where in one place it refers to a city, in another an animal), then drop the pronoun because the adjective is treated as limited, and confuse people with nominally structurally correct sentences that are unparsable (and uninteresting).
Xadjective Xnoun who Xverb Xnoun', Xverb Xnoun''.
IA Cops who watch police, watch police.
IA Cops who watch IA Cops who watch police, watch IA Cops who watch police.
One curious thing is why anyone thinks dropping the pronoun is grammatical, as it would only be permited by a sane grammar when the adjectival limiting of the first noun is clear, which it manifestly is not in this case. So one could argue that sentences of this form are not gramatical, if grammar is more than just syntax (which it is.)
Green fish who eat fish, eat green fish. Green fish eat fish, eat green fish.
Is that second sentence really grammatical?
"Police police police Police police" is arguably gramatical, although like many things that depend only on syntax and literal semantics it is still pretty close to the outer edges of the English language. I've never in my life ever heard of anyone under any circumstances refer to IA as "Police police". And put a comma in it and it doesn't make any more sense than the fish example above.
Even granted that, this is a useful algorithm for writing badly, I guess, but it doesn't demonstrate anything other than "bad writing is hard to understand", which is not exactly news. It has a certain novelty value, but really... so what?
Why does anyone find this interesting? It certainly isn't interesting from the point of natural language understanding, which is far more likely to have to deal with things like this [ganked from some bad-writing examples site]: "This change will allow us to better leverage our talent base in an area where developmental roles are under way and strategically focuses us toward the upcoming Business System transition where Systems literacy and accuracy will be essential to maintain and to further improve service levels to our customer base going forward."
Or: "Y'know... the thing that gets me is why... 'cause really, it pisses me off, y'know? I can't tell her nothin'. Then she says... Or was that after the dog did that? Fuck it, I said. You know what I mean?"
Colourful green ideas sleep furiously. That parses grammatically, but it means absolutely nothing.
False. There's an entire sub-genre of micro-literature and poetry that creates contexts where "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" (to give what I think was Chomsky's original) can be used as a basis of meaning. It has been known for decades that Chomsky's example, however evocative, does not constitute anything but an artistic flourish that creates a false sense of plausibility for whatever Chomsky was arguing for at the time.
In any case, meaning is a verb, not an adjective. People who search for "the meaning of a sentence" are actually engaging in exactly the kind of nonsense activity that Chomsky in the '50's argued "colourless green ideas sleep furiously" implied.
People mean. Sentences just lie there, waiting for a human or other intelligence to be activily engaged with them and to mean something by them.
The entire premise of semantic linguistics is mistaken, the equivalent of the Ptolemaic model of the cosmos: useful up to a point, and full of curious internal structures that hint at something deeper, but ultimately a dead end that needs to be replaced at the foundations by a model of language and meaning built around a knowing subject that means things, not dead strings that happen to be one way of pragmatically and imperfectly conveying what we are meaning to others.
Is it rational to put yourself and your own needs above the needs of others?
In general, yes.
On the whole, though, society works better and is more stable when individuals put others first
I'm not aware of any such society as this. Can you point to a single example anywhere in the world that exists today?
Social/liberal democratic societies don't fulfill this claim, obviously, as they are in general better for everyone than socialist (China) or corporate/oligarchic (America) societies. But neither do socialist or corporate/oligarchic societies count as ones where people put the needs of others ahead of their own.
The difference between healthy social/liberal democratic societies and sick socialist or corporate/oligarchic societies is not that people put their own interests ahead of others in the latter but not the former. It is the system of checks and balances that exist in social/liberal democratic societies that effectively balances the competing interests of individuals, and a mature recognition on the part of the members of those societies that such a balance is to their own benefit.
I would have thought that after the blood-soaked lessons of the 20th century no one would be dumb enough to suggest that any attempt to organize a society based on the good of the abstract multitude rather than the concrete individual is a good idea. I guess there really is no limit to the depths of human ignorance, or the willingness of the arrogant new generation to repeat the same errors as the previous generations and still feigning suprise when exactly the same causes have exactly the same effect.
No, they read "Catholic Church" and think "pedophile", for the same reason one would read, "Christian Conservative" and think "cruising for gay hookers."
It's just the way the human brain works: things that are found together with relatively high frequency, like Catholic priests and child abuse, or Christian "Conservatives" and unseemly acts in public restrooms, tend to conjure each other up.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks! That's one of the most informative and useful replies I've ever had on /.
Embedded intelligence is going to drive the next industrial mini-revolution, in the same way that desktop and networked intelligence drove the last one.
Consumer robotics is going to be the Next Big Thing, and MS may be looking for ways to gain a foothold in that field.
After a couple hundred messages, you have to type each character and wait a second or two before you can type the next one.
I've found Wave basically unusable on my netbook with Firefox for much the same reason, even with small waves. The fastest it runs is unacceptabley slow, and this on a machine that is powerful enough to run OpenOffice acceptably fast.
Get "The King in Yellow" expansion. Most perfectly balanced co-operative game ever.
What you claim is that an incorrect analysis of a realistic model has occurred, which is incorrect.
And yet for reasons that escape me these correct analyses of unrealistic models have been used in the marketing of quantum cryptography as a realistic solution to the problem of secure communication.
Can you provide any insight into how that situation has come about?
Alice and Bob compare measurement results before send the message. There is theoretically no way to intercept and resend bits or eavesdrop without introducing errors.
There's something here that one of us isn't understanding. Either you're missing the OP's point, or I'm missing yours.
The OP's point seems to me to be that the exchange between Alice and Bob necessarily goes like this:
1) Get individual quanta from an entangled source such that they have a shared secret that cannot have been interfered with.
2) Use that shared secret to encrypt in a conventional way and communicate.
The OP is pointing out that the MTM attack is just as practical against step 1 as step 2 by having Eve use two separate sources of entangled pairs, one for Alice and one for Bob. This requires that Eve have physical access to the source that Alice and Bob are using, so she can pretend to be Alice for Bob and Bob for Alice.
This is equivalent to Eve having both Alice and Bob's private keys in a public key scheme, but rather than requiring access to Alice and Bob's secrets individually, it requires instead access to the source of entangled quanta they are using, or rather the fiber that links them to that source.
One imagines a network setup for Alice and Bob to "compare meeasurement results before sending the message" that looks like:
Alice----------Source---------Bob
And for an MTM attack on the quantum key exchange becoming:
Alice-------ESA-Eve-ESB-------Bob
where "ESA" and "ESB" are both sources of entangled quanta.
You can argue that Eve getting physical access to the source is unlikely or unrealistic. You cannot argue that it is physically impossible. The communication between Alice and Bob is only as secure as the source, which is somewhat less secure than the laws of physics.
Selling quantum crytography as being "as secure as the laws of physics" is extremely misleading. Systems are only as secure as their weakest component, and one could easily argue that the entangled source is considerably more easily hacked than discoverying Alice and Bob's private keys would be.
Unless, of course, I'm missing something...
please everyone, no apostrophe when writing plurals!
But "pro" is a contraction of "professional" and in English we generally use an apostrophe to indicate a contraction when the contracted part is internal to the word ("can't", "won't") but not when it is at the tail of the word ("pro", "doc", "prof").
So in the plural of a tail-contraction, the use of an apostrophe indicates the contraction, not the possessive, as adding the "s" makes it an internal contraction.
Ergo, your complaint is groundless, and your ignorance of English is strongly suggested by your inability or unwillingness to care about any of the other manifold conventions that make the language such a baroque delight.
I just want to input my algorithm and get a result I expect (not 5/2=2).
What result do you expect from 5/2? I expect 2... 5/2 == 2 in C, C++ and FORTRAN (I think... I don't write much FORTRAN code these days...)
Python does an excellent job of making both useful scientific functionality available via scipy and numpy and a wealth of other toolkits, and at the same time allowing us to package stuff up in usable applications. It provides all the real-world applications language facilities that MATLAB, Mathematica, R, etc lack.
I deal with people who "code" in those environments all the time, and they are not my peers: they have fundamentally failed to grasp almost everything important about programming, from design principles to documentation. For someone who knows how to write software--which MATLAB et al "programmers" do not, as a professional understands the term--Python is pretty much ideal for expressing algorithms and wrapping them in useful applications.
Also, the way everything is assembled brick by brick, you'd wonder why the base wouldn't be one giant piece, using his theory.
Not if you'd ever built anything big out of concrete, you wouldn't.
This is the problem with this kind of speculation: it is inevitably done by people who think they can see from their armchair how far more intelligent people[*] a few thousand years ago who were heirs to a deep and rich tradition of building techniques might have done things.
[*] The human population has grown by a factor of ten in the past 200 years, indicating selective pressures have dropped to essentially zero. If intelligence is heritable and selected on at all the current population of humans is therefore necessarily the stupidist that has ever lived, on average.
Nothing other than some modern day engineers couldn't do it with techniques assumed to have been used.
Yeah, it's pretty much like giving a modern computer scientist a quill, ink and parchment and asking them to work out Newtonian physics from scratch. Why anyone would expect someone with an utterly unrelated skill-set that is tuned up for the modern world to be able to replicate what ancient engineers did is beyond me.
The only thing stupider is when archeologists try to do the same thing: people who have clearly never built anything with their hands in their lives trying to intuit the optimal behaviour of people who, as you point out, had spent generations doing nothing but.
As an aside you'll notice the further north in the continents you go the better the slaves/natives were treated.
In Canada we treat our native peoples like shit, pretty much, despite some hopeful signs in northern British Columbia. There may be a tiny bit of truth to your observation, but natives were treated badly everywhere, to the extent possible, and by the time you get to Canada you're dealing with people who were eating very meat-heavy diets who were genetically low in alcohol dehydrogenase production, which meant that alcoholism finished in the 20th century what disease and cultural genocide started to do in the 19th.
The OP's comment about mythology in history is dead on: in Canada we have the "myth of the Northwest Mounted Police" as a civilizing and peaceful force compared to the American "wild west", but if you dig into the facts you find that Mounted Police constables and officers spent most of their time drinking, gambling, seducing each others wives, and buying and selling native women for the purpose of prostitution.
but when offered casual use in a carefree environment, get zombified. this is what the illegality prevents: the destruction of the lives of the carefree casual idiot
So you're aware that Portugal basically legalized drugs some years ago, without any notable zombie apocalypse of the kind you hypothecate?
Drugs are bad... we agree on that.
There's a large quantity of actual, empirical data that legalization of most drugs and medicalization of addiction is by far the least costly, most effective, social response to drug addiction. And by "least costly" I mean in all senses, particularly in terms of mangled lives of innocents.
You seem to have passed from "drugs are bad" to "the American War on (some) Drugs is absolutely justified in all of its destructive excess" without ever bothering to even consider the possibility that there might be more humane and effictive alternatives to police-state intervention in individual's lives.
Since it is clearly an issue you feel passionately about you would do well to educate yourself on the most effective means of combating the very real problems that drug use creates, rather than just knee-jerking in zombie-like support of the security-industrial complex and their counter-productive, destructive, inhumane and ineffective policy of criminalization and incarceration.
I presume neither party would like bin Laden
I dunno... they both are using him as an excuse for the largest power grab and rights-trampling stampede in American history.
The US government is currently in the process of pre-trial hearings for an illegally detained child soldier in Guantanomo Bay, which demonstrates the New American Empire's power to ignore the American constitution whenever it feels like it. And the illegally detained child soldier is a native-born Canadian citizen, so it is pretty clear that the New American Empire intends to extend its power across the world whenever it feels like it.
PJ O'Rourke said that giving money and power to politicians is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys, and bin Laden's actions have resulted in the oligarchs of the New American Empire being given a whole lot of both. They and bin Laden (and other Islamist nutjobs) are the only people who actually benefit from the "War on Terror", and they are effectively colluding together to maintain it[*]
=====
[*] Although there is almost certainly no actual collusion involved--it is just that the natural intent of both groups, the Islamist nutjobs on the one hand and the oligarchs of the New American Empire on the other are aligned in their mutual opposition. It takes two to make a war, and the leadership of both sides are extremely interested in maintaining the war at all costs, right down to the last drop of someone else's blood...
I'm doing a PhD in a climate area now, and the science is DEFINITELY not out on whether increased clouds hurt or help us. It depends on the height, location, water content, droplet size.....
But I agree with Idiomatick below - it's clear that we're into at least 40 years of warming, even if we turned off every last CO2 source today!
I'm a computational physicist, and have serious doubts about the use of climate science as a guide to policy. For example, what you've said here appears to be, "We don't know what effect CO2 will have because we don't understand cloud forcing, but we know CO2 will produce warming."
I've written parameterized models of MUCH simpler systems than the Earth's climate, and produced nonsense results because of subtly unphysical dynamics in the parameterization. Conservation of energy, for example, absolutely must be strict if you want any long-term integration of your model to be more than nonsense. Any attempt to "fix up" things like non-conservation of energy by rebalancing after each integration step just adds more non-physical assumptions to an already unphysical model.
So why are you so sure CO2 will produce warming, when its clear that our computational models of the climate are a huge collection of extremely clever but not very physical parameterizations?
Changes to mitigate the sea level rise after the fact will be hugely expensive, more so than adjusting our behaviour now in my opinion.
That's nice... you're an economist specializing in global costs? No? They why do you expect anyone to care about your opinion?
Nothing you've said here is science: it is economic and political opinion. I happen to agree that running out of fossil fuels is a serious and significant looming problem, but I recognize any claims I make about the consquences as being completely unrelated to the quality of the science that has gone into reaching the conclusion about resource scarcity.
This is the problem with the AGW debate (one of them, anyway): mixing of hysterical speculation about economics and politics with some reasonably ok science. The science is reasonably ok--just not nearly solid enough to justify the hysterical speculations.
I think I need 3 fonts to get along just fine
Pretty much, and those are exactly the same three fonts everyone uses. Font weenies are just a bunch of wankers who make so much noise about how important exactly the right font is that they get other people to pay attention to them.
They have done zero empirical testing on any aspect of font design, not even whether anyone can actually tell the difference between two "different" fonts without a detailed side-by-side comparison.
Basically, anyone who is worried about fonts beyond the three you mention is paying way to much attention to presentation and by implication far too little attention to content.
Did 85,000 employees that had absolutely nothing to do with Enron deserve to have their lives thrown into chaos as the company imploded?
I love how you bleeding heart libertarians come all over touchy-feely when a company goes bust because of management incompetence and dishonesty, as was the case at Arthur Anderson, but never shed a tear when its merely half the workforce getting canned for the same reason.
Who cares what workers "deserve"? It's a FREE MARKET, buddy, and if you can't stand the heat, stay out of the trading pit. Socialists like you are what is ruining the modern world--people who are too chicken to take real risks in the real market like a Real American.
The scientists at CRU aren't involved in policy
One hardly knows what to say in response to such an incredible falsehood--this is worthy of Newt Gingrich or one of the other Republican shills who carefully parse words like "involved" to let them claim that black is white.
CRU scientists have been vigorous in their promotion of a particular interpetation of the data and their unphysical computer models with a clear eye to particular policy outcomes with regard to the restriction of CO2 emissions. While they have not been part of the specific policy formulation apparatus, their faux certainty has been a significant driver of the policy process, and they are certainly aware of this.
So really, nice attempt to side-track a completely reasonable analysis, but better luck next time!
The CRU are engaged in perfectly reasonable science, but most perfectly reasonable science is entirely inadequate to inform policy, and the CRU scientists know perfectly well that this is the case with regard to their own work. Yet they persist in presenting their work as if it was adequate to inform policy. That's what the "Climategate" e-mails show, and that's what sane people have a problem with (unfortunately the debate has been taken over by insane people on both sides...)
from "pornos" meaning, you guessed it, "evil".
Nope. Pornoi were low-class prostitutes in ancient Greece. "Pornography" means "whore's writing", more-or-less.
I always thought one line ended with "atom bombs bursting in air."
There's an old Canadian patriotic song, "The Maple Leaf Forever" that's not much sung anymore but was once a reasonable substitute for the national anthem. It has a line in it about "Wolfe the dauntless hero came/to plant Britannia's flag upon Quebec's fair domain" that makes it strangely unpopular amongst 25% of the Canadian population, post Quiet Revolution.
Back in the '30's it was sung regularly by school-children, and one of them wrote an essay a few years back on his traumatic experience with lyric mis-interpetation: he and one of his little friends in about grade three heard "Wolfe the donkless hero came...", "donk" being slang for "penis".
This resulted in him and his friend speculating on how General Wolfe had got his privates blown off, ultimately ending in asking their third-grade teacher about it. She apparently turned bright red, told them the correct reading of the line, and retreated to the teacher's prep room, from whence were heard gales of laughter...
Understood as: Police (whom) police police, police police.
Thanks--this is much clearer than the "Buffalo" example, which depends on both a place-name and a colloquialism.
The trick is: find a word that can be used as one or more nouns, an adjective and a verb, and as a noun is capable of being both subject and object of the verb (possibly in different senses of the noun, as in the Buffalo example, where in one place it refers to a city, in another an animal), then drop the pronoun because the adjective is treated as limited, and confuse people with nominally structurally correct sentences that are unparsable (and uninteresting).
Xadjective Xnoun who Xverb Xnoun', Xverb Xnoun''.
IA Cops who watch police, watch police.
IA Cops who watch IA Cops who watch police, watch IA Cops who watch police.
One curious thing is why anyone thinks dropping the pronoun is grammatical, as it would only be permited by a sane grammar when the adjectival limiting of the first noun is clear, which it manifestly is not in this case. So one could argue that sentences of this form are not gramatical, if grammar is more than just syntax (which it is.)
Green fish who eat fish, eat green fish.
Green fish eat fish, eat green fish.
Is that second sentence really grammatical?
"Police police police Police police" is arguably gramatical, although like many things that depend only on syntax and literal semantics it is still pretty close to the outer edges of the English language. I've never in my life ever heard of anyone under any circumstances refer to IA as "Police police". And put a comma in it and it doesn't make any more sense than the fish example above.
Even granted that, this is a useful algorithm for writing badly, I guess, but it doesn't demonstrate anything other than "bad writing is hard to understand", which is not exactly news. It has a certain novelty value, but really... so what?
Why does anyone find this interesting? It certainly isn't interesting from the point of natural language understanding, which is far more likely to have to deal with things like this [ganked from some bad-writing examples site]: "This change will allow us to better leverage our talent base in an area where developmental roles are under way and strategically focuses us toward the upcoming Business System transition where Systems literacy and accuracy will be essential to maintain and to further improve service levels to our customer base going forward."
Or: "Y'know... the thing that gets me is why... 'cause really, it pisses me off, y'know? I can't tell her nothin'. Then she says... Or was that after the dog did that? Fuck it, I said. You know what I mean?"
Colourful green ideas sleep furiously. That parses grammatically, but it means absolutely nothing.
False. There's an entire sub-genre of micro-literature and poetry that creates contexts where "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" (to give what I think was Chomsky's original) can be used as a basis of meaning. It has been known for decades that Chomsky's example, however evocative, does not constitute anything but an artistic flourish that creates a false sense of plausibility for whatever Chomsky was arguing for at the time.
In any case, meaning is a verb, not an adjective. People who search for "the meaning of a sentence" are actually engaging in exactly the kind of nonsense activity that Chomsky in the '50's argued "colourless green ideas sleep furiously" implied.
People mean. Sentences just lie there, waiting for a human or other intelligence to be activily engaged with them and to mean something by them.
The entire premise of semantic linguistics is mistaken, the equivalent of the Ptolemaic model of the cosmos: useful up to a point, and full of curious internal structures that hint at something deeper, but ultimately a dead end that needs to be replaced at the foundations by a model of language and meaning built around a knowing subject that means things, not dead strings that happen to be one way of pragmatically and imperfectly conveying what we are meaning to others.
She also refers to "governments that have ill intent" or "authoritarian tendencies" as if there were any other kind...
Is it rational to put yourself and your own needs above the needs of others?
In general, yes.
On the whole, though, society works better and is more stable when individuals put others first
I'm not aware of any such society as this. Can you point to a single example anywhere in the world that exists today?
Social/liberal democratic societies don't fulfill this claim, obviously, as they are in general better for everyone than socialist (China) or corporate/oligarchic (America) societies. But neither do socialist or corporate/oligarchic societies count as ones where people put the needs of others ahead of their own.
The difference between healthy social/liberal democratic societies and sick socialist or corporate/oligarchic societies is not that people put their own interests ahead of others in the latter but not the former. It is the system of checks and balances that exist in social/liberal democratic societies that effectively balances the competing interests of individuals, and a mature recognition on the part of the members of those societies that such a balance is to their own benefit.
I would have thought that after the blood-soaked lessons of the 20th century no one would be dumb enough to suggest that any attempt to organize a society based on the good of the abstract multitude rather than the concrete individual is a good idea. I guess there really is no limit to the depths of human ignorance, or the willingness of the arrogant new generation to repeat the same errors as the previous generations and still feigning suprise when exactly the same causes have exactly the same effect.
You read "petabytes", and think "pedophile"?
No, they read "Catholic Church" and think "pedophile", for the same reason one would read, "Christian Conservative" and think "cruising for gay hookers."
It's just the way the human brain works: things that are found together with relatively high frequency, like Catholic priests and child abuse, or Christian "Conservatives" and unseemly acts in public restrooms, tend to conjure each other up.