You completely undermined your own fantastic point less than 3 sentences after you made it
Really? How exactly? I responded to an utterly irrelevant comment about the evil the US has done by agreeing with it, so we could get back to discussing the far greater and more relevant evil that China is doing.
Since that in no way resembles the situation I was describing, where someone responds to legitimate criticism of a country that is NOT the United States by irrelevantly introducing an attack on the United States, I'm not totally clear on how it undermines my point.
Perhaps, as one dumb Canadian to another, you could enlighten me?
Assuming you are equating "the United States" with this "American Empire" then you have dismissed your own argument;
You and the guy immediately below you really need to read what I wrote again, put it in context, think real hard and see if my comment agreeing with the OP's evaluation of the US as a sometime-evil country so we could get back to talking about China really falls within the scope of "responding to the criticism of any country by irrelevantly pointing out how bad the US is".
Most scientific study is based on the Popper philosophy of disproving something rather than proving its opposite.
Not so. Popper's ideas apply to a very narrow scope of actual science. Theories can sometimes be disproved by predictive failure, and for reasons that aren't clear Popperians want this to be the only process of proof or disproof that science has, although that claim is obviously nonsense. In particular, the existence of things can be proven by observation of those things.
Admittedly what constitutes an "observation" is complex and subtle, as this case shows. And there also many cases where we disprove the existence of something (n-rays, phlogiston and caloric for example, do not exist, and we proved this by experiment in the perfectly ordinary sense of "proof" that everyone including scientists uses all the time, and is only disputed by sophmoronic philosophers.)
I suppose, in consideration of theology, it depends on who you're asking.
This is true of everyone. The OP who is all pumped up about "this changes everything" means "this changes everything for anyone who hasn't given the matter any thought in the past hundred years, since the time we realized that other stars were much like ours and therefore likely to harbour life."
So it'll change everything for the incurious bores who haven't been paying attention. For thinking people it'll change nothing much, as the existence of extra-terrestrial life now seems so probable that its confirmation will be joyous but not surprising.
IDer's will have no problem with this. They'll just say Martians were gay, and God hates gays (and, according to Pat Robertson, Haitians) so they were killed off. Old Earth Creationists have the least tenable of any position, as they have to pretend to accept geology, including geo-chemistry, while denying the laws of probability. Who knows what they'll say--the only thing we can be sure of is that it won't make any sense. Young Earth Creationists already believe that God is either not omnipotent, or is a liar, a charlatan and a cheat, so nothing much will change for them.
Lacking the rule of law has nothing to do with lacking laws. There were laws in the Soviet Union, too, but the rule of law--access to an independent judiciary, a right to a fair and public trial, minimal political interference in the judicial process, etc--was lacking.
The rule of law is a human right. It gets violated egregiously in China every day. So it's pretty damned funny to what the spoiled children of the Party who rule China whining about how important it is to respect the rule of law.
Others have pointed out you're comparing apples to apple seeds here, but there is a larger point to be made, the Cold War equivalent of Godwin's Law: Anyone who responds to a criticism of any country with a rant about how bad the United States is has immediately lost the argument because they have failed to address any of the criticisms, but instead introduced a lot of emotionally-charged irrelevancy based on the false assumption that the original critic is somehow an admirer or defender of the United States.
It didn't make any sense during the Cold War (for us non-Americans, especially!) and it makes even less sense now. The American Empire is broadly speaking evil. Everything thinking person agrees with this. To impute the belief that the American Empire is basically good too someone who points out how utterly vile the Chinese government is, and then to try to turn the discussion to the completely irrelevant area of American crimes, is simply the act of someone who knows how evil the Chinese government is, who knows they do not have a single fact to defend the Chinese government with, and who wants to distract everyone by bringing up how evil the American Empire is.
So let's call it "Godwin's Second Law" that anyone pulling this particular lame stunt automatically loses, and move on to the actual subject of discussion in this thread, which is how outrageous it is for the Chinese government to pretend that the rule of law is the least bit important.
Like so much stuff coming out of Chemistry groups right now - cute and cool but not likely to be of any real value in the next decade or three.
While I agree with all of that, I'm reminded of Faraday's famous quip when asked what good electricity is: "What good is a baby?"
When people complain about the short-term mindset of the modern world, this is what they're speaking of: we can give individual cells injections! The cool factor alone is worth it, and as someone who has had the misfortune of analying gene expression data from chemically transfected human cell lines I can tell you just the dream of the possibility of being able to mechanically inject cells with interesting molecules puts a smile on my face. The thought of the cells being chemically pristine instead of almost terminally messed up by the transfection process is just delightful.
Think of this as equivalent to a single atom trap: not something that every lab has, but a technique that has allowed us to do some amazing physics by making precision, controlled measurements on a single atom that we couldn't possibly make otherwise.
Raised in the right environment they thrive, and the traits that are considered flaws become strengths, even allowing them success beyond their dandelion brethren.
Thanks for this article, although it is written in that annoyingly formulaic Atlantic Monthly style, right down to the personal annecdote.
Threre's a lot of really interesting material there, though, and it's good to see our understanding of the role of enviornment/gene interaction becoming a primary focus of study. The role of parents simply getting down on the floor and being with their kids can't be underestimated.
But I'm as certain as anything that on/. in 2025 there will still be people asking, "So is it nature or nurture?" as if the two were orthogonal. And there'll be people ignoring these results because they are based on evolution. And there will be "spare the rod and spoil the child" types who just like to hit people, and aren't about to let science or the well-being of their kids stand in their way.
we will not be making any changes to the service you are currently receiving for the foreseeable future.
Yeah, and I bet they are telling the soon-to-be-former employees of EveryDNS that they don't have any staffing changes planned "for the forseeable future" either, the "forseeable future" for the average PHB being about 4 seconds.
Here [topfoto.co.uk] is Marco Pantani in the Tour in 2002, no helmet. I'm guessing he is well aware of the risk.
So you're answering a large and statistically valid body of data and the conclusions drawn from it with an anecdote about some guy who you guess is more knowledgeable about the risk/reward trade-off than the scientists who actually study the subject.
Ok, I guess that makes perfect sense. What a compelling argument!
Yet for some odd reason we rode our bikes and are still alive.
But have apparently been hit on the head too hard to bother looking at the data, which shows that childhood death from bicycle-induced head injuries has dropped dramatically in the past 30 years.
You survived. So did I. Lots of others didn't, and if we'd all been wearing helmets most of them would have.
This is the danger with cutting and pasting mathematics.
Actually it's a danger with getting your tech news from a site with no editorial oversight, or at best editors who have so little clue about the subject that they let nonsense like this get through (I know zip about cryptography, but knew enough that the values in the summary made no sense, although not enough to infer the correct values. That's how low the bar is that the/. editors fail to reach.)
Walmart forces suppliers to lower prices, and this is exactly what we get. It is Walmart's fault.
Walmart merely provides customers with what they want: lower prices. Clearly if individuals had the well-being of their children in mind they would not buy goods from China.
So people who buy cheap Chinese goods are clearly to blame. It is there fault and they should all be fined tens of thousands of dollars.
If that sounds stupid, it's because it is stupid, just as blaming an abstraction like "Walmart" is stupid. The only reason why one ought to go after the corporation is ease of administration, not moral culpability, which can only be assigned to actual humans, not legally-constituted virtual persons.
America spends more on it's military than the next several nations combined.
Actually, America spends as much on its miltary as every other nation in the world combined.
Your huge military is necessary to maintain your status as "the world's only superpower", which is one of the reasons why the dollar is the reserve currency. For reasons that are basically simian people are more comfortable putting their wealth in the hands of the alpha nation. So there is a vicious cycle between your role as a superpower, your dollar as the reserve currency, and your astonishingly high military spending.
The end-game for poor Americans is that joining the military is one of the most viable survival strategies (economically, perhaps not physically...) So the poor wind up serving as the grunts who do the dirty work for the system that has impoverished them.
How we break this cycle without reducing the world to chaos is the big problem of the 21st century, for both America and the world.
For example, one could have the servers managed by government agency
Right, because no one ever wants to watch foreign content, and no one minds giving their government the information that they are the proud owner of "Revolutionary Techniques for the Young Radical" or "Debby Does Someplace-that-starts-with-D".
It would be bad enough having a bunch of corporations having access to all that data. Having governments--and possibly foreign governments--would be even worse.
Governments are also remarkably fickle: they start and stop wars of convenience, for example. Deciding to save money by shutting down some servers would be a no-brainer. Imagine if some anti-pr0n nutjob got into office on a platform of shutting down DRM2010 for DRM-NO-PORN...
So your suggested cure is way worse than the disease, and demonstrates a basic failure in critical thinking: no one cares what happens when the system works as you envision. The only thing interesting to anyone but the people selling it is what happens when it fails.
Sounds like a case of developers testing their own code, or in this case engineers testing their own product. There is a strong tendency to create impressive tests for the product's strengths while carefully avoiding the weaknesses.
You need independent testers who don't feel they've done their job until the product is good and truly borken.
I suddenly feel a little bit smug having only spent $25 on my vibrator, and the occasional pocket change on lotion and AA batteries.
You should seriously upgrade to a magic wand (about $50) or if you want to go all the way, try to an erosolator (very pricey, north of $100). My g/f swears by the latter, and while it took a bit of convincing for me to get her to try the former she's been very happy with it. Plug-in vibrators have significantly more power than battery-operated ones, which makes them qualitatively different according to the fairly large number of women I've talked to about them.
Apropos the story: embedded intelligence is going to be the enabling technology of the next industrial revolution. That pr0n is at the forefront is a positive sign that embedded intelligence really is going to be able to power us out of the current recession and into a new era of prosperity.
I'd argue that probability theory isn't as hard as people make it seem, but statisticians are wankers. Most of what we think of statistics was developed by people who were intimately engaged with empirical research, but modern statisticians are mathematicians, many of whom have never actually performed an experiment. They think the statistics are real, whereas experimental scientists know the truth: God made the Probability Distribution Functions. All else is the work of man.
Furthermore, modern computing has made a lot of the conceptual apparatus of conventional statistics irrelevant, as it is designed to deal with the problem of reducing problems to something that can be computed by hand and finished off with a single table lookup. Today its a rare case that we can't get at the PDFs directly, bypassing much of conventional statistics. But due to how badly the stats are taught, and how poorly probability theory is understood, we are still living in a world where p-values are the exception, not the norm, and when they are quoted they are frequently unrealistic because they are based on statistical assumptions that are not warranted given the non-idealities of the data.
So I'd argue that statistics is basically a dead field populated by zombies who are dedicated to infecting as many students as possible. If we taught thermodynamics or mechanics with equally outmoded concepts they would be really hard too.
In addition, having different levels of quality in different packets of the same stream (the more packet you have, the better the quality), has been proposed in lots of old systems
I'm not sure what you're commenting on here. The patent claim is built around "truncatable packets", not "different levels of quality in different packets."
Your analysis doesn't seem to have anything to do with what MS has actually been granted a patent on (which admittedly looks like a stupid idea described badly, as is typical with patents and especially software patents, but one of the major features of the patent system in the US is to allow very narrow claims to avoid vaguely similar prior art.)
At least this time the/. editors didn't call a patent application a patent, although they did as usual vaguely describe the general area of the application, rather than the claims, and for some reason declare the patent had been granted on the general area rather the specific claims.
It takes actual diplomacy and person to person interaction, so people don't just go to work for a paycheck, but actually feel valued.
No, it takes an ironclad commitment to not lay people off the instant it becomes convenient.
Since that isn't going to happen in the post-Jack-Welch business environment, anything else compaies do to build "employee morale" or "employee loyalty" amounts to lieing to them.
Smart employees know this: they are disposable, and any loyalty they give to the company will not be repaid at layoff time. As such, they should give no loyalty beyond their next paycheque, they should always be in the job market (keeping their CV up to date, keeping an eye out for new skills they can acquire, building networks to connect them to the next opportunity, etc.) They should come into work every day and give their current employer their money's worth, and nothing more.
In the modern layoff culture of disposable employees, everyone is working for themselves. Corporations have established this environment as fact, and it is up to employees to recognize it and behave appropriately. They are essentially full-time contractors, and should behave as such.
Find someplace where the company culture includes a work ethic because productivity means profit and profit means paychecks... for the bosses.
For the employees, of course, it means lame excuses from exec's explaining how they DO have enough money to fly some VP half way around the world whenever he feels like it, but DON'T have enough money to give you a raise that keeps up with the rate of inflation.
After a few years of that they lay you off.
And then complain about how there's not employee loyalty to the company any more.
That's entirely the attitude the article addresses: hubris.
You mean the hubris of the arrogant idiots who are putting the entire world at risk with their endless legalistics promotion of irrational fears and fantasy scenarios?
How do you know that the very act of posting this arrogant and uninformed response won't bring about the end of civilization? Show me the proof that it is safe for you to post here. I'm waiting.
This is the problem: scientists are being held to a standard by arrogant idiot lawyers (but I repeat myself) that they do not hold themselves too. The cowards who pretend to be so concerned about this particular incredibly implausible scenario are somehow silent when it comes to the massive risks to others entailed by their own behaviour.
We know that civilizations have ended due to becoming moribund with legalistic bureacracy. How do you know you aren't in the process of killing ours? And when your self-aggrandizing antics result in social collapse, who pays?
Once you've answered that, you can start calling other people arrogant. Until then, people who have dedicated their lives to deepening human understanding of the universe will know you for what you are: a cowardly hypocrite, who fears the imaginary consequences of other's actions while never examining the far more probable negative consequences of their own.
If you had comprehension skills, you'd be able to ascertain that it relates to an implementation of an arbitrary precision numerics engine
What is this "it" of which you speak? The summary and headline talk about a patent, but there is no patent, only a patent application. I didn't realize this when I made my comment because following up on patent stories on/. is a waste of time, for pretty much the reasons I describe: they are always false.
In this case the summary happens to have described the claims more-or-less accurately, but is completely misleading with regard to the nature of the document. It is not a patent, and the headline is simply false.
I'm not sure why you or anyone else is all worked up about this patent application. Anyone can apply to patent anything, including hundred-year-old techniques, and patent examiners routinely reject them.
Why all the beating of chests and gnashing of teeth about that?
All imaging technologies can (help) save us from (some) terrorists. Specifically, those individuals carrying dangerous/unknown objects or materials outside their body, whether integrated with their clothes or simply bound to their body
The one link to a thermal image you provide below does nothing to support this claim.
External imaging technologies can be trivially defeated. Watch out for women with external breast enhancements. And don't get me started on men with prosthetic bellies. Remember: we are talking about people willing to blow themselves up. They might just be willing to spend a little time and money defeating these fancy imaging systems.
As near as I can tell nothing but full-body transmission x-rays will do the job. Wanna bet we see fluoroscopes in airports for flights to the US (and only to the US) in the next twenty years? Americans--or at least the Organs of the American State--have demonstrated themselves to be abject cowards when it comes to the risk of being blown up, although they neglect to notice the tens of thousands of people murdered every year all around them.
These full-body scanners are just security theatre, inconveniencing the many in the name of failing to prevent the few.
Slashdot Mirror
You completely undermined your own fantastic point less than 3 sentences after you made it
Really? How exactly? I responded to an utterly irrelevant comment about the evil the US has done by agreeing with it, so we could get back to discussing the far greater and more relevant evil that China is doing.
Since that in no way resembles the situation I was describing, where someone responds to legitimate criticism of a country that is NOT the United States by irrelevantly introducing an attack on the United States, I'm not totally clear on how it undermines my point.
Perhaps, as one dumb Canadian to another, you could enlighten me?
Assuming you are equating "the United States" with this "American Empire" then you have dismissed your own argument;
You and the guy immediately below you really need to read what I wrote again, put it in context, think real hard and see if my comment agreeing with the OP's evaluation of the US as a sometime-evil country so we could get back to talking about China really falls within the scope of "responding to the criticism of any country by irrelevantly pointing out how bad the US is".
Most scientific study is based on the Popper philosophy of disproving something rather than proving its opposite.
Not so. Popper's ideas apply to a very narrow scope of actual science. Theories can sometimes be disproved by predictive failure, and for reasons that aren't clear Popperians want this to be the only process of proof or disproof that science has, although that claim is obviously nonsense. In particular, the existence of things can be proven by observation of those things.
Admittedly what constitutes an "observation" is complex and subtle, as this case shows. And there also many cases where we disprove the existence of something (n-rays, phlogiston and caloric for example, do not exist, and we proved this by experiment in the perfectly ordinary sense of "proof" that everyone including scientists uses all the time, and is only disputed by sophmoronic philosophers.)
I suppose, in consideration of theology, it depends on who you're asking.
This is true of everyone. The OP who is all pumped up about "this changes everything" means "this changes everything for anyone who hasn't given the matter any thought in the past hundred years, since the time we realized that other stars were much like ours and therefore likely to harbour life."
So it'll change everything for the incurious bores who haven't been paying attention. For thinking people it'll change nothing much, as the existence of extra-terrestrial life now seems so probable that its confirmation will be joyous but not surprising.
IDer's will have no problem with this. They'll just say Martians were gay, and God hates gays (and, according to Pat Robertson, Haitians) so they were killed off. Old Earth Creationists have the least tenable of any position, as they have to pretend to accept geology, including geo-chemistry, while denying the laws of probability. Who knows what they'll say--the only thing we can be sure of is that it won't make any sense. Young Earth Creationists already believe that God is either not omnipotent, or is a liar, a charlatan and a cheat, so nothing much will change for them.
I am pretty sure there *are* laws in China
Lacking the rule of law has nothing to do with lacking laws. There were laws in the Soviet Union, too, but the rule of law--access to an independent judiciary, a right to a fair and public trial, minimal political interference in the judicial process, etc--was lacking.
The rule of law is a human right. It gets violated egregiously in China every day. So it's pretty damned funny to what the spoiled children of the Party who rule China whining about how important it is to respect the rule of law.
They do in USA too
Huh?
Others have pointed out you're comparing apples to apple seeds here, but there is a larger point to be made, the Cold War equivalent of Godwin's Law: Anyone who responds to a criticism of any country with a rant about how bad the United States is has immediately lost the argument because they have failed to address any of the criticisms, but instead introduced a lot of emotionally-charged irrelevancy based on the false assumption that the original critic is somehow an admirer or defender of the United States.
It didn't make any sense during the Cold War (for us non-Americans, especially!) and it makes even less sense now. The American Empire is broadly speaking evil. Everything thinking person agrees with this. To impute the belief that the American Empire is basically good too someone who points out how utterly vile the Chinese government is, and then to try to turn the discussion to the completely irrelevant area of American crimes, is simply the act of someone who knows how evil the Chinese government is, who knows they do not have a single fact to defend the Chinese government with, and who wants to distract everyone by bringing up how evil the American Empire is.
So let's call it "Godwin's Second Law" that anyone pulling this particular lame stunt automatically loses, and move on to the actual subject of discussion in this thread, which is how outrageous it is for the Chinese government to pretend that the rule of law is the least bit important.
Like so much stuff coming out of Chemistry groups right now - cute and cool but not likely to be of any real value in the next decade or three.
While I agree with all of that, I'm reminded of Faraday's famous quip when asked what good electricity is: "What good is a baby?"
When people complain about the short-term mindset of the modern world, this is what they're speaking of: we can give individual cells injections! The cool factor alone is worth it, and as someone who has had the misfortune of analying gene expression data from chemically transfected human cell lines I can tell you just the dream of the possibility of being able to mechanically inject cells with interesting molecules puts a smile on my face. The thought of the cells being chemically pristine instead of almost terminally messed up by the transfection process is just delightful.
Think of this as equivalent to a single atom trap: not something that every lab has, but a technique that has allowed us to do some amazing physics by making precision, controlled measurements on a single atom that we couldn't possibly make otherwise.
Raised in the right environment they thrive, and the traits that are considered flaws become strengths, even allowing them success beyond their dandelion brethren.
Thanks for this article, although it is written in that annoyingly formulaic Atlantic Monthly style, right down to the personal annecdote.
Threre's a lot of really interesting material there, though, and it's good to see our understanding of the role of enviornment/gene interaction becoming a primary focus of study. The role of parents simply getting down on the floor and being with their kids can't be underestimated.
But I'm as certain as anything that on /. in 2025 there will still be people asking, "So is it nature or nurture?" as if the two were orthogonal. And there'll be people ignoring these results because they are based on evolution. And there will be "spare the rod and spoil the child" types who just like to hit people, and aren't about to let science or the well-being of their kids stand in their way.
we will not be making any changes to the service you are currently receiving for the foreseeable future.
Yeah, and I bet they are telling the soon-to-be-former employees of EveryDNS that they don't have any staffing changes planned "for the forseeable future" either, the "forseeable future" for the average PHB being about 4 seconds.
Here [topfoto.co.uk] is Marco Pantani in the Tour in 2002, no helmet. I'm guessing he is well aware of the risk.
So you're answering a large and statistically valid body of data and the conclusions drawn from it with an anecdote about some guy who you guess is more knowledgeable about the risk/reward trade-off than the scientists who actually study the subject.
Ok, I guess that makes perfect sense. What a compelling argument!
Yet for some odd reason we rode our bikes and are still alive.
But have apparently been hit on the head too hard to bother looking at the data, which shows that childhood death from bicycle-induced head injuries has dropped dramatically in the past 30 years.
You survived. So did I. Lots of others didn't, and if we'd all been wearing helmets most of them would have.
This is the danger with cutting and pasting mathematics.
Actually it's a danger with getting your tech news from a site with no editorial oversight, or at best editors who have so little clue about the subject that they let nonsense like this get through (I know zip about cryptography, but knew enough that the values in the summary made no sense, although not enough to infer the correct values. That's how low the bar is that the /. editors fail to reach.)
Walmart forces suppliers to lower prices, and this is exactly what we get. It is Walmart's fault.
Walmart merely provides customers with what they want: lower prices. Clearly if individuals had the well-being of their children in mind they would not buy goods from China.
So people who buy cheap Chinese goods are clearly to blame. It is there fault and they should all be fined tens of thousands of dollars.
If that sounds stupid, it's because it is stupid, just as blaming an abstraction like "Walmart" is stupid. The only reason why one ought to go after the corporation is ease of administration, not moral culpability, which can only be assigned to actual humans, not legally-constituted virtual persons.
America spends more on it's military than the next several nations combined.
Actually, America spends as much on its miltary as every other nation in the world combined.
Your huge military is necessary to maintain your status as "the world's only superpower", which is one of the reasons why the dollar is the reserve currency. For reasons that are basically simian people are more comfortable putting their wealth in the hands of the alpha nation. So there is a vicious cycle between your role as a superpower, your dollar as the reserve currency, and your astonishingly high military spending.
The end-game for poor Americans is that joining the military is one of the most viable survival strategies (economically, perhaps not physically...) So the poor wind up serving as the grunts who do the dirty work for the system that has impoverished them.
How we break this cycle without reducing the world to chaos is the big problem of the 21st century, for both America and the world.
The unit of measure of tritium in water is the tritium unit (TU). One tritium unit equals 1 tritium atom in 1018 hydrogen atoms.
10^18?
Also, it's polite to cite the sources you copy large blocks of text from
For example, one could have the servers managed by government agency
Right, because no one ever wants to watch foreign content, and no one minds giving their government the information that they are the proud owner of "Revolutionary Techniques for the Young Radical" or "Debby Does Someplace-that-starts-with-D".
It would be bad enough having a bunch of corporations having access to all that data. Having governments--and possibly foreign governments--would be even worse.
Governments are also remarkably fickle: they start and stop wars of convenience, for example. Deciding to save money by shutting down some servers would be a no-brainer. Imagine if some anti-pr0n nutjob got into office on a platform of shutting down DRM2010 for DRM-NO-PORN...
So your suggested cure is way worse than the disease, and demonstrates a basic failure in critical thinking: no one cares what happens when the system works as you envision. The only thing interesting to anyone but the people selling it is what happens when it fails.
It's a bit funny just how fast he breaks it.
Sounds like a case of developers testing their own code, or in this case engineers testing their own product. There is a strong tendency to create impressive tests for the product's strengths while carefully avoiding the weaknesses.
You need independent testers who don't feel they've done their job until the product is good and truly borken.
I suddenly feel a little bit smug having only spent $25 on my vibrator, and the occasional pocket change on lotion and AA batteries.
You should seriously upgrade to a magic wand (about $50) or if you want to go all the way, try to an erosolator (very pricey, north of $100). My g/f swears by the latter, and while it took a bit of convincing for me to get her to try the former she's been very happy with it. Plug-in vibrators have significantly more power than battery-operated ones, which makes them qualitatively different according to the fairly large number of women I've talked to about them.
Apropos the story: embedded intelligence is going to be the enabling technology of the next industrial revolution. That pr0n is at the forefront is a positive sign that embedded intelligence really is going to be able to power us out of the current recession and into a new era of prosperity.
Statistics is HARD, for two reasons:
I'd argue that probability theory isn't as hard as people make it seem, but statisticians are wankers. Most of what we think of statistics was developed by people who were intimately engaged with empirical research, but modern statisticians are mathematicians, many of whom have never actually performed an experiment. They think the statistics are real, whereas experimental scientists know the truth: God made the Probability Distribution Functions. All else is the work of man.
Furthermore, modern computing has made a lot of the conceptual apparatus of conventional statistics irrelevant, as it is designed to deal with the problem of reducing problems to something that can be computed by hand and finished off with a single table lookup. Today its a rare case that we can't get at the PDFs directly, bypassing much of conventional statistics. But due to how badly the stats are taught, and how poorly probability theory is understood, we are still living in a world where p-values are the exception, not the norm, and when they are quoted they are frequently unrealistic because they are based on statistical assumptions that are not warranted given the non-idealities of the data.
So I'd argue that statistics is basically a dead field populated by zombies who are dedicated to infecting as many students as possible. If we taught thermodynamics or mechanics with equally outmoded concepts they would be really hard too.
In addition, having different levels of quality in different packets of the same stream (the more packet you have, the better the quality), has been proposed in lots of old systems
I'm not sure what you're commenting on here. The patent claim is built around "truncatable packets", not "different levels of quality in different packets."
Your analysis doesn't seem to have anything to do with what MS has actually been granted a patent on (which admittedly looks like a stupid idea described badly, as is typical with patents and especially software patents, but one of the major features of the patent system in the US is to allow very narrow claims to avoid vaguely similar prior art.)
At least this time the /. editors didn't call a patent application a patent, although they did as usual vaguely describe the general area of the application, rather than the claims, and for some reason declare the patent had been granted on the general area rather the specific claims.
It takes actual diplomacy and person to person interaction, so people don't just go to work for a paycheck, but actually feel valued.
No, it takes an ironclad commitment to not lay people off the instant it becomes convenient.
Since that isn't going to happen in the post-Jack-Welch business environment, anything else compaies do to build "employee morale" or "employee loyalty" amounts to lieing to them.
Smart employees know this: they are disposable, and any loyalty they give to the company will not be repaid at layoff time. As such, they should give no loyalty beyond their next paycheque, they should always be in the job market (keeping their CV up to date, keeping an eye out for new skills they can acquire, building networks to connect them to the next opportunity, etc.) They should come into work every day and give their current employer their money's worth, and nothing more.
In the modern layoff culture of disposable employees, everyone is working for themselves. Corporations have established this environment as fact, and it is up to employees to recognize it and behave appropriately. They are essentially full-time contractors, and should behave as such.
Find someplace where the company culture includes a work ethic because productivity means profit and profit means paychecks... for the bosses.
For the employees, of course, it means lame excuses from exec's explaining how they DO have enough money to fly some VP half way around the world whenever he feels like it, but DON'T have enough money to give you a raise that keeps up with the rate of inflation.
After a few years of that they lay you off.
And then complain about how there's not employee loyalty to the company any more.
That's entirely the attitude the article addresses: hubris.
You mean the hubris of the arrogant idiots who are putting the entire world at risk with their endless legalistics promotion of irrational fears and fantasy scenarios?
How do you know that the very act of posting this arrogant and uninformed response won't bring about the end of civilization? Show me the proof that it is safe for you to post here. I'm waiting.
This is the problem: scientists are being held to a standard by arrogant idiot lawyers (but I repeat myself) that they do not hold themselves too. The cowards who pretend to be so concerned about this particular incredibly implausible scenario are somehow silent when it comes to the massive risks to others entailed by their own behaviour.
We know that civilizations have ended due to becoming moribund with legalistic bureacracy. How do you know you aren't in the process of killing ours? And when your self-aggrandizing antics result in social collapse, who pays?
Once you've answered that, you can start calling other people arrogant. Until then, people who have dedicated their lives to deepening human understanding of the universe will know you for what you are: a cowardly hypocrite, who fears the imaginary consequences of other's actions while never examining the far more probable negative consequences of their own.
If you had comprehension skills, you'd be able to ascertain that it relates to an implementation of an arbitrary precision numerics engine
What is this "it" of which you speak? The summary and headline talk about a patent, but there is no patent, only a patent application. I didn't realize this when I made my comment because following up on patent stories on /. is a waste of time, for pretty much the reasons I describe: they are always false.
In this case the summary happens to have described the claims more-or-less accurately, but is completely misleading with regard to the nature of the document. It is not a patent, and the headline is simply false.
I'm not sure why you or anyone else is all worked up about this patent application. Anyone can apply to patent anything, including hundred-year-old techniques, and patent examiners routinely reject them.
Why all the beating of chests and gnashing of teeth about that?
All imaging technologies can (help) save us from (some) terrorists. Specifically, those individuals carrying dangerous/unknown objects or materials outside their body, whether integrated with their clothes or simply bound to their body
The one link to a thermal image you provide below does nothing to support this claim.
External imaging technologies can be trivially defeated. Watch out for women with external breast enhancements. And don't get me started on men with prosthetic bellies. Remember: we are talking about people willing to blow themselves up. They might just be willing to spend a little time and money defeating these fancy imaging systems.
As near as I can tell nothing but full-body transmission x-rays will do the job. Wanna bet we see fluoroscopes in airports for flights to the US (and only to the US) in the next twenty years? Americans--or at least the Organs of the American State--have demonstrated themselves to be abject cowards when it comes to the risk of being blown up, although they neglect to notice the tens of thousands of people murdered every year all around them.
These full-body scanners are just security theatre, inconveniencing the many in the name of failing to prevent the few.