I defy you to find a site name in this space that is so crass, so crude, so offensive to the belief that love and respect have something to do with happy relations between men and women that someone has not already registered it.
If you ever want to get really depressed about the state of humanity, spend a little time coming up with the most egregiously sexist URL's you can imagine, and then type them into your browser.
I tried this one day when a friend was bitching about men treating women like whores (there was some Craigslist ad he was pissed off about, offering free rent to a woman in exchange for sex) and I wanted to prove to him that women could be just as crass. It didn't convince him (he has a naively romantic view of women) but it sure as hell depressed me, even though I know full well that not all women--or even the majority--are quite as wretched as the ones who inhabit these sites (and in fairness, the site I've linked above has at least one link to a site for gay golddiggers... it's clear that a certain fraction of humans in every imaginable category are basically sleazy.)
Do people even know what they want from a partner?
Yeah, they do. 99.9% of women want "a good man who loves to laugh and is fun and just an ordinary guy."
I'm a divorced man in a small (~100,000) town and have used online dating sites off-and-on for about five years--mostly Plenty Of Fish, but also LavaLife and OkCupid. I've met two absolutely wonderful women this way--both of whom were so wonderful that after a year or three with me their careers took them off to bigger, far-distant centres, although in both cases we're still friends.
I've also met the biggest collection of flakes, losers, liars, bores and nutjobs you could possibly imagine, and I am currently ready to slap anyone whose entire self-description is, "I love to laugh, like long walks on the beach and am just looking for an ordinary guy."
Seriously, have you ever met anyone anywhere who doesn't like to laugh? It's what we laugh at that's interesting, and hardly anyone ever says what that is.
The trick for all these sites is to weed out the common things that everyone has, and to reduce people who have zero self-awareness to abject silence until they come up with sufficient self-knowledge to say something about themselves that isn't woefully banal. OkCupid's system of questions does that, although I can think of some simple improvements that would make it better.
The key thing is to focus on the concrete. There should be very nearly zero abstraction in any of the information gathered from users, and the site should then generate the abstract categories the user is assigned to based on that information.
For example, don't ask people what their "body type" is (abstract category) but what their height and weight are, how fast they can run or walk a mile, how many miles they run or walk each week, when was the last time they walked more than a mile, or biked more than a five miles, or swam more than 500 m, and so on. Then generate the abstract category for them: "couch potato", "morbidly obese", etc, rather than letting users define "athletic" or "slim" or "average" any way they want to (I've seen morbidly obese people, who have posted pictures of themselves, categorize themselves as "average".)
Mostly, these sites are selling fantasies to liars (women) and idiots (men), so doing anything that would provide more accurate information about what differentiates one person from another is counter-productive relative to their business model. The few honest, intelligent people out there have to wade through a huge amount of dross to find each other. Fortunately, that is still possible, and despite their flaws these sites remain a sensible component of anyone's search for companionship. Just be prepared to do a lot of filtering by hand.
and possibly also showed him examples of things the NSA has intercepted via the wiretapping that has in some way benefited the national security of the nation or helped in the war on terror.
Explain to me again how violating the Constitution increases "the national security of the nation"?
Indeed, which is why the vast majority of studies that get tagged by the moronic "correlationisnotcausation" involve some application of Mill's Methods and/or statistical and theoretical inference to demonstrate causation based on the observed correlations.
What gets reported is the correlation, because reporters are even dumber than/. taggers, but the researchers generally have thought a little bit about elementary logical errors somewhere along the path of their experiment design.
The tag is particularly idiotic when you consider that every correlation is caused by something, so the OP here is absolutely correct: if you really believe that there is no relationship whatsoever between correlation and causation, such that you can reflexively dismiss every reported correlation with this little snippet of nonsense, then you're pretty much committed to nothing being caused by anything.
Tagging stories this way is completely vacuous. All it tells us is that you haven't read the study or considered whether the usual methods have been employed to properly infer causation from correlation. It would be as useful and relevant to tag all stories with "theskyisblue", which is true in one sense (although the sky happens to be overcast where I am right now) but is only true in a way that is a) known by everyone and b) adds nothing of value to the discussion.
it will just prolong their life and alter the proximal cause of death from radiation sickness to (most likely) a flood of lymphomas.
Assuming they aren't lying about their animal models, this is not the case, nor would one expect it to be.
Apoptosis is a programmed response to generic cellular damage (amongst other things.)
We evolved in a low radiation environment, so there was no selection for more clever apoptosis triggers than, "lots of damage, time to die!" Because such a mechanism would only kill off a cell needlessly now and then, it posed no risk. It was, like so many evolved solutions to problems, good enough.
Unfortunately this generic and rather indiscriminate mechanism is not appropriate to the rare and artificial case of high radiation exposure, in which many cells sustain lots of damage, but most of it reparable. Under these circumstances, turning off apoptosis and letting the expensive machinery of cellular and genetic repair do its thing is more desirable.
It is still likely that there is an elevated long-term risk of cancer comparable to that from high non-lethal doses, but since the usual mechanism of apoptosis will turn back on as the drug clears the system, most of the irreparable cells will off themselves at that time.
Charge several thousand people $2.31 too much and you can make an alright profit.
What exactly was being "made" in this case?
Taken, yes. Made... not so much.
Re:Software Projects vs. Traditional Projects
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Why New Systems Fail
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· Score: 1
I was discussing with a friend how software projects are probably the most difficult to run and predict, especially with very large projects. He disagreed and said that all large projects are difficult...
Actually, all large projects are equally easy with regard to prediction. A larger project is even more amenable to a statistical estimation approach, because the workforce and circumstances are averaged over the larger size, creating a more homogeneous, stable mass.
For any organization that has built more than one of something, you have lots of hard data from previous schedules and estimates to base your new schedules and estimates on, if your project managers are even minimally competent. After all, it isn't exactly rocket science to keep a table of numbers ("how long we expected the project to take" and "how long it actually took.") This also requires adequate requirements documents, and that's a more difficult problem, but it's hardly surprising that "projects teams that don't know what they're building have a hard time estimating how long it will take to build it."
The first project an organization undertakes is a bit trickier, but again, even a modestly competent project manager will track schedule progress against real time, and after about three weeks will have a correction factor to the original schedule that will bring things pretty close to reality. This should be done anyway, on all projects, of course, because circumstances do vary from project to project, but on subsequent projects the correction factor should be closer to unity than not.
The thing that makes project scheduling and estimation "hard" is that most project managers are either incompetent, or so beaten up the first they tell the suits the truth that they spend the rest of their days lying to avoid further abuse. I've known people in both categories, and the first group are the ones who crow most loudly that project estimation is hard because it is so far beyond their modest competencies. The second group will pull it out as a backup excuse when things go badly wrong next time, and because suits are idiots they are willing to believe it, thus perpetuating the cycle whereby everyone gets off the hook for failing to do an incredibly simple job: keeping a table of numbers, and applying a simple numerical multiplier to their schedule after the first three weeks.
Someone below quoted Tolstoy about all unhappy families being unhappy in their own way. This is funny, but it's false in the case of project management. There are very few ways projects go bad, and one of the the most common is an excessive focus on the particularities, rather than a global view that sees the individual circumstances as a valid statistical ensemble that can be averaged over meaningfully.
There is nothing particularly difficult, intellectually, about project estimation. Virtually all the difficulty comes in the politics of the organization, and a deep grounding in solid empirical estimation practises will help you navigate those waters. McConnell's Rapid Development has some nice starter material on estimation that is well worth having a look at.
This is bullshit. It's not about stupidity at all, it's about control.
Never assume venality where stupidity will do. I agree that even stupid people can do better with a more free flow of information. But most people do not take the many simple and effective steps that are available to increase information flow, and frequently acquiesce to restrictions on information flow for bogus reasons. This demonstrates empirically that they are stupid.
And as I said in the GP, people who are both evil and stupid take advantage of this by using information flow restrictions to control others.
this and the example listed here are a perfect example of how a bank can get so large that they can't even deal with themselves.
It's not the size, it's the stupidity.
Everything I know about management I learned from the "telephone game" we played as kids, where you whisper a message around in a circle and find that after about three hops it gets completely mangled.
Stupid people ignore this phenomenon, and go through their lives acting as if telling someone something once is sufficient to get the message across. Stupid people run stupid organizations that radically under-communicate. Some people who are both stupid and evil use this to create private fiefdoms within organizations.
Smart people recognize this phenomena, and create organizations with multiple, redundant and simple lines of communication, and work to keep policies clear and concise so they are harder to mangle in the communications process.
Organizations run by stupid people are therefore extremely complex and hard to understand, whereas those run by smart people are generally simple. This leads stupid people--who are vastly in the majority--to think that organizations run by smart people aren't very capable, because they are too stupid to realize that capability comes with simplicity, not complexity.
Corporate America is hugely invested in the myth of complexity, and hires and trains managers accordingly. Attempts to simplify are fought at every turn. This creates the kind of environment where an organization can actively pursue and defend a lawsuit against itself, by itself, rather than carrying through the pro-forma motions required by law, because the people on both sides are too stupid to consider any other possibility.
And remember: this comes down to a couple of people. They are embedded within a large organization, but it is at the end of the day just them. It isn't like there are huge teams on this. An organization with clear lines of communication and responsibility would make it easy for the people in question to talk to each other, and the issue would be resolved. But that would be smart, and there is nothing smart about the people working for American banks these days.
Just as we get to the first flights of Orion, which will almost certainly slip past 1Q2016
Here's the question, though: why are American project planners so completely incompetent? Since everyone knows that this kind of project will probably slip, and there's loads of historical data on the slip factor, predicting the correct schedule pretty accurately is a matter of simple multiplication. You'd have to be an idiot not to do it.
So the question is: why aren't project managers for the American government capable of doing it?
Any time anyone says, "Well, of course the project is late! It's new/different/big/difficult!" the question that should be asked is, "If you say that everyone should have expected to the project to be late, why didn't you apply the appropriate correction to initial schedule to start with? Are you an idiot, that you knew it would miss the original schedule, but didn't correct for that knowledge?"
Project estimation is actually an incredibly easy task, intellectually. It is a difficult task morally, as people give in to the temptation to lie--to themselves and others--far too easily, and we are far too forgiving when they do.
Politics is probably in play here: with the shuttle phased out, there will be no big $ for American contractors to support the IIS, because launch costs are going to be the greater part of ongoing costs. So the US government would be in a position of spending a lot of money on foreign launch vehicles, which means "No pork for you!" with regard to domestic campaign contributors.
Ergo, the US government would be supporting an international effort that would not feed back much of anything in terms of pork barrel spending into the domestic economy. Since pork is one of the major means by which the Party maintains control of the state, this is unacceptable.
Furthermore, because the US is an imperial power, it can't afford to be seen as weak or second-rate, so if it ceases to participate in the ISS the station must come down, because otherwise foreigners would have "the high ground."
If something doesn't make sense, there is usually politics behind it, and behind the politics there is usually money.
...never do anything stupid, so the Mayor pointing out "It would be stupid to commit a crime" is a really excellent example of how compelling the case is for using this sort of surveillance technology.
If politicians and police were honest about this they'd be doing a controlled experiment on these deployments, putting out these systems in ways that varied both in space and time that allowed them to determine whether these things had any effect on quality of life amongst the citizens, which is the metric that matters.
Instead, they are content to make stuff up, and the average person is so relentlessly anti-empirical that they have no idea what they are missing.
just because government does something doesn't always mean they do it badly.
The track record of the US federal government in the past 20 years is appallingly bad, and pointing fingers at specific members of the Party is misleading and distracting from the central issue, which is that the US federal government is systemically broken.
The Yucca Mountain debacle is iconic in this regard: members of both wings of the Party failed over multiple administrations and changes in congressional control to effectively implement a solution for disposing of nuclear waste. This cannot be blamed on particular individuals, but on the system of government itself.
Until you guys figure out how to free your federal government from Party control, you're going to continue to see messes like Katrina. Not because you just happen to elect crappy people, but because the Party ensures that the people you elect will always be answerable to the Party, and not the people.
Remember, this is the kind of process they would bring to health care.
This is not flamebait, but a perfectly reasonable opinion on the ability of the American government to deliver the goods on any given program.
I am a citizen of a country where we have a reasonably cheap and good universal public health care system, and I've lived in the States and seen up-close-and-personal the appalling mess that is your current health care system, and how badly you need a universal system of the kind found in Germany, France, Australia, Canada, or elsewhere.
But the reality is that the American government has shown itself repeatedly unable to manage much of anything very well. There is a systemic dysfunctional culture that is the result of Party members focusing on Party priorities rather than anything that is good for the American people.
If the core problem of Partisan capture of the American government is not fixed, the odds of it being able to create anything other than a bigger mess with universal health care are depressingly high.
This is not a problem with universal health care, which everywhere has a lower cost and better outcomes than the American system: in Canada we pay less for our universal public system than Americans pay for their limited and inadequate Medicare and Medicaid systems, and we live long, more healthy lives. But if an organization as fundamentally broken as the American federal government tried to run such a system it would almost certainly screw it up entirely, based on recent experience in everything from Iraq reconstruction to the Yucca Mountain fiasco.
It's a pity that the nation that once was able to organize and execute the first human landing on the moon forty years ago is no longer able to do much of anything effectively, but until that problem is solved there is a legitimate argument to be made that a universal public health care system in the US should be the least of your priorities, because Americans just aren't up to the problem of running such a system effectively.
But when we analyze, for instance, the way chimps can be taught something that seems rather akin to a proto-language
And it would be unbelievably shocking if this were not the case. Evolution operates by elaboration, and it is practically inconceivable that humans should have such rich and nuanced linguistic production and comprehension systems in their brains and not have fairly closely related species showing some kind of rudimentary linguistic ability.
So rather than everyone going, "Wow, that's amazing and surprising!" when we find that chimps have rudimentary linguistic capabilities, we should be saying, "Yeah, that's just the kind of thing we would predict based on the evolutionary origins of human's language capabilities."
Studying the linguistic abilities of other species is still worth-while, because the empirical data will tell us stuff in detail that we couldn't know otherwise, but that there are linguistic abilities in other species for us to study is no surprise at all.
C\o\r\p\o\r\a\t\i\o\n\s\ PEOPLE would turn your grandma into Soylent Green if they thought they could get away with it and make a profit.
Corporations, like governments, unions, workers cooperatives, churches, cricket teams, whatevers, are nothing but the collective motives of the people making the decisions. To place the locus of blame for bad behaviour on a particular form of social organization was a popular sport in the 20th century, which resulted in more dead humans and ruined lives than anything previously seen.
Humans are human, and a rational society would recognize that all forms of collective organization need similar constraints placed on them. Ideologues who think that taking a group of humans and calling them a "corporation" makes them evil but taking the same group of humans and calling them a "government" or a "union" or a "church" makes them good are living in a separate reality.
Summary: there is some evidence that Earth's albedo has decreased by as much as 2% (absolute, almost 10% relative) in the past twenty years. A decrease in albedo means less visible light is being reflected by the planet, implying that more is being absorbed, which would tend to increase planetary heat content.)
A 2.0% variation in albedo is huge: over twice the effect of all anthropogenic greenhouse gases combined (6.8 W/m**2 vs about 5 W/m**2). However, because much of the change is due to changes in cloud cover, one must also account for the changes in infrared absorption from different kinds of clouds, which makes a head-to-head comparison tricky. However, while the effect of different types of cloud cover can reduce the effect of albedo variations, the residual is still as large or larger than current estimates of human greenhouse gas contributions to climate forcing.
Final grain of salt: albedo is a physically meaningful term, unlike "global average temperature", but it is still very tricky to measure, and therefore these results should be taken with a grain of salt. However, the magnitude of the effect is such that it is difficult--but not impossible--to imagine it not having a pretty major influence on climate.
Cloud cover maybe correlated with cosmic ray flux, which may be correlated with sunspot activity.
Based on the data we have, it appears Earth's albedo has been anomalously low in the past decade or more, and may now be popping back up to something closer to the long term average (0.315 as opposed to as low as 0.305 in the past decade). If that is the case, then we can expect to see a pronounced drop in "global average temperature" in the next few years.
If that happens, then climate forcing due to albedo variation is going to start looking pretty plausible as a significant cause of the high "global average temperatures" seen in the past decade.
The fact that it's open source or royalty free doesn't mean there are no patent trolls ready to file a lawsuit once Apple or Microsoft use it.
Likewise, simply because the MPEG LA controls the licensing of KNOWN patents for H.264 doesn't mean there are no patent trolls ready to file a lawsuit once it gets adopted as a standard.
There is also no assurance that the MPEG LA won't try to monetize their position as the sole licensing authority for H.264 if it were to be adopted into the standard. Unisys anyone?
So Apple's case would only be plausible if they can show that there is any reason to believe that the software-patent-related risk is higher for Theora than H.264, and they have not done that.
A friend recently told me a story about a girl he knew from his hometown, and I will share the anecdote with you now: This girl's girlfriends got her to come down to LA to do "modeling" which then turned into drinking and drugs on a scale she wasn't used to, which then became "modeling with titties", then "modeling with a cock out", etc etc. She then wound up having violent sex she wasn't at all in to, then the tape got sold out of gas stations everywhere, and she couldn't show here face in her home town, now she's some kind of shut-in.
Funny, a friend recently told me a story about a guy his cousin grew up with, whose friends got him to go to university to do "computing science", which then turned into drinking and drugs on a scale he wasn't used to, which then became "programming", which then became "programming with VB" etc etc. He then wound up writing Word Macro viruses he wasn't at all into, then the virus infected documents in corporate offices everywhere, and he couldn't show his face in his home town, and now he's some kind of shut-in.
Slashdot Mirror
What would you call such a service? Golddiggers.com?
It's already taken: http://www.golddiggers.com/
I defy you to find a site name in this space that is so crass, so crude, so offensive to the belief that love and respect have something to do with happy relations between men and women that someone has not already registered it.
In the salary cheque that is.
If you ever want to get really depressed about the state of humanity, spend a little time coming up with the most egregiously sexist URL's you can imagine, and then type them into your browser.
http://www.sugardaddies.com/
I tried this one day when a friend was bitching about men treating women like whores (there was some Craigslist ad he was pissed off about, offering free rent to a woman in exchange for sex) and I wanted to prove to him that women could be just as crass. It didn't convince him (he has a naively romantic view of women) but it sure as hell depressed me, even though I know full well that not all women--or even the majority--are quite as wretched as the ones who inhabit these sites (and in fairness, the site I've linked above has at least one link to a site for gay golddiggers... it's clear that a certain fraction of humans in every imaginable category are basically sleazy.)
Do people even know what they want from a partner?
Yeah, they do. 99.9% of women want "a good man who loves to laugh and is fun and just an ordinary guy."
I'm a divorced man in a small (~100,000) town and have used online dating sites off-and-on for about five years--mostly Plenty Of Fish, but also LavaLife and OkCupid. I've met two absolutely wonderful women this way--both of whom were so wonderful that after a year or three with me their careers took them off to bigger, far-distant centres, although in both cases we're still friends.
I've also met the biggest collection of flakes, losers, liars, bores and nutjobs you could possibly imagine, and I am currently ready to slap anyone whose entire self-description is, "I love to laugh, like long walks on the beach and am just looking for an ordinary guy."
Seriously, have you ever met anyone anywhere who doesn't like to laugh? It's what we laugh at that's interesting, and hardly anyone ever says what that is.
The trick for all these sites is to weed out the common things that everyone has, and to reduce people who have zero self-awareness to abject silence until they come up with sufficient self-knowledge to say something about themselves that isn't woefully banal. OkCupid's system of questions does that, although I can think of some simple improvements that would make it better.
The key thing is to focus on the concrete. There should be very nearly zero abstraction in any of the information gathered from users, and the site should then generate the abstract categories the user is assigned to based on that information.
For example, don't ask people what their "body type" is (abstract category) but what their height and weight are, how fast they can run or walk a mile, how many miles they run or walk each week, when was the last time they walked more than a mile, or biked more than a five miles, or swam more than 500 m, and so on. Then generate the abstract category for them: "couch potato", "morbidly obese", etc, rather than letting users define "athletic" or "slim" or "average" any way they want to (I've seen morbidly obese people, who have posted pictures of themselves, categorize themselves as "average".)
Mostly, these sites are selling fantasies to liars (women) and idiots (men), so doing anything that would provide more accurate information about what differentiates one person from another is counter-productive relative to their business model. The few honest, intelligent people out there have to wade through a huge amount of dross to find each other. Fortunately, that is still possible, and despite their flaws these sites remain a sensible component of anyone's search for companionship. Just be prepared to do a lot of filtering by hand.
and possibly also showed him examples of things the NSA has intercepted via the wiretapping that has in some way benefited the national security of the nation or helped in the war on terror.
Explain to me again how violating the Constitution increases "the national security of the nation"?
correlationdoesnnotnecessarilymeancausation
Indeed, which is why the vast majority of studies that get tagged by the moronic "correlationisnotcausation" involve some application of Mill's Methods and/or statistical and theoretical inference to demonstrate causation based on the observed correlations.
What gets reported is the correlation, because reporters are even dumber than /. taggers, but the researchers generally have thought a little bit about elementary logical errors somewhere along the path of their experiment design.
The tag is particularly idiotic when you consider that every correlation is caused by something, so the OP here is absolutely correct: if you really believe that there is no relationship whatsoever between correlation and causation, such that you can reflexively dismiss every reported correlation with this little snippet of nonsense, then you're pretty much committed to nothing being caused by anything.
Tagging stories this way is completely vacuous. All it tells us is that you haven't read the study or considered whether the usual methods have been employed to properly infer causation from correlation. It would be as useful and relevant to tag all stories with "theskyisblue", which is true in one sense (although the sky happens to be overcast where I am right now) but is only true in a way that is a) known by everyone and b) adds nothing of value to the discussion.
it will just prolong their life and alter the proximal cause of death from radiation sickness to (most likely) a flood of lymphomas.
Assuming they aren't lying about their animal models, this is not the case, nor would one expect it to be.
Apoptosis is a programmed response to generic cellular damage (amongst other things.)
We evolved in a low radiation environment, so there was no selection for more clever apoptosis triggers than, "lots of damage, time to die!" Because such a mechanism would only kill off a cell needlessly now and then, it posed no risk. It was, like so many evolved solutions to problems, good enough.
Unfortunately this generic and rather indiscriminate mechanism is not appropriate to the rare and artificial case of high radiation exposure, in which many cells sustain lots of damage, but most of it reparable. Under these circumstances, turning off apoptosis and letting the expensive machinery of cellular and genetic repair do its thing is more desirable.
It is still likely that there is an elevated long-term risk of cancer comparable to that from high non-lethal doses, but since the usual mechanism of apoptosis will turn back on as the drug clears the system, most of the irreparable cells will off themselves at that time.
Overall, I am cautiously optimistic about this.
Still reason to waterboard the testers.
Yeah, because that works so well too.. uh... remind me what it was that was supposed to accomplish again?
Charge several thousand people $2.31 too much and you can make an alright profit.
What exactly was being "made" in this case?
Taken, yes. Made... not so much.
I was discussing with a friend how software projects are probably the most difficult to run and predict, especially with very large projects. He disagreed and said that all large projects are difficult...
Actually, all large projects are equally easy with regard to prediction. A larger project is even more amenable to a statistical estimation approach, because the workforce and circumstances are averaged over the larger size, creating a more homogeneous, stable mass.
For any organization that has built more than one of something, you have lots of hard data from previous schedules and estimates to base your new schedules and estimates on, if your project managers are even minimally competent. After all, it isn't exactly rocket science to keep a table of numbers ("how long we expected the project to take" and "how long it actually took.") This also requires adequate requirements documents, and that's a more difficult problem, but it's hardly surprising that "projects teams that don't know what they're building have a hard time estimating how long it will take to build it."
The first project an organization undertakes is a bit trickier, but again, even a modestly competent project manager will track schedule progress against real time, and after about three weeks will have a correction factor to the original schedule that will bring things pretty close to reality. This should be done anyway, on all projects, of course, because circumstances do vary from project to project, but on subsequent projects the correction factor should be closer to unity than not.
The thing that makes project scheduling and estimation "hard" is that most project managers are either incompetent, or so beaten up the first they tell the suits the truth that they spend the rest of their days lying to avoid further abuse. I've known people in both categories, and the first group are the ones who crow most loudly that project estimation is hard because it is so far beyond their modest competencies. The second group will pull it out as a backup excuse when things go badly wrong next time, and because suits are idiots they are willing to believe it, thus perpetuating the cycle whereby everyone gets off the hook for failing to do an incredibly simple job: keeping a table of numbers, and applying a simple numerical multiplier to their schedule after the first three weeks.
Someone below quoted Tolstoy about all unhappy families being unhappy in their own way. This is funny, but it's false in the case of project management. There are very few ways projects go bad, and one of the the most common is an excessive focus on the particularities, rather than a global view that sees the individual circumstances as a valid statistical ensemble that can be averaged over meaningfully.
There is nothing particularly difficult, intellectually, about project estimation. Virtually all the difficulty comes in the politics of the organization, and a deep grounding in solid empirical estimation practises will help you navigate those waters. McConnell's Rapid Development has some nice starter material on estimation that is well worth having a look at.
This is bullshit. It's not about stupidity at all, it's about control.
Never assume venality where stupidity will do. I agree that even stupid people can do better with a more free flow of information. But most people do not take the many simple and effective steps that are available to increase information flow, and frequently acquiesce to restrictions on information flow for bogus reasons. This demonstrates empirically that they are stupid.
And as I said in the GP, people who are both evil and stupid take advantage of this by using information flow restrictions to control others.
certificate infrastructures can be enormously complex.
This is the problem: simplicity is the key to security. A complex system is just one with more places to hide exploits.
this and the example listed here are a perfect example of how a bank can get so large that they can't even deal with themselves.
It's not the size, it's the stupidity.
Everything I know about management I learned from the "telephone game" we played as kids, where you whisper a message around in a circle and find that after about three hops it gets completely mangled.
Stupid people ignore this phenomenon, and go through their lives acting as if telling someone something once is sufficient to get the message across. Stupid people run stupid organizations that radically under-communicate. Some people who are both stupid and evil use this to create private fiefdoms within organizations.
Smart people recognize this phenomena, and create organizations with multiple, redundant and simple lines of communication, and work to keep policies clear and concise so they are harder to mangle in the communications process.
Organizations run by stupid people are therefore extremely complex and hard to understand, whereas those run by smart people are generally simple. This leads stupid people--who are vastly in the majority--to think that organizations run by smart people aren't very capable, because they are too stupid to realize that capability comes with simplicity, not complexity.
Corporate America is hugely invested in the myth of complexity, and hires and trains managers accordingly. Attempts to simplify are fought at every turn. This creates the kind of environment where an organization can actively pursue and defend a lawsuit against itself, by itself, rather than carrying through the pro-forma motions required by law, because the people on both sides are too stupid to consider any other possibility.
And remember: this comes down to a couple of people. They are embedded within a large organization, but it is at the end of the day just them. It isn't like there are huge teams on this. An organization with clear lines of communication and responsibility would make it easy for the people in question to talk to each other, and the issue would be resolved. But that would be smart, and there is nothing smart about the people working for American banks these days.
Just as we get to the first flights of Orion, which will almost certainly slip past 1Q2016
Here's the question, though: why are American project planners so completely incompetent? Since everyone knows that this kind of project will probably slip, and there's loads of historical data on the slip factor, predicting the correct schedule pretty accurately is a matter of simple multiplication. You'd have to be an idiot not to do it.
So the question is: why aren't project managers for the American government capable of doing it?
Any time anyone says, "Well, of course the project is late! It's new/different/big/difficult!" the question that should be asked is, "If you say that everyone should have expected to the project to be late, why didn't you apply the appropriate correction to initial schedule to start with? Are you an idiot, that you knew it would miss the original schedule, but didn't correct for that knowledge?"
Project estimation is actually an incredibly easy task, intellectually. It is a difficult task morally, as people give in to the temptation to lie--to themselves and others--far too easily, and we are far too forgiving when they do.
the resulting black hole.
It's well known that the LHC will produce unicorns, not black holes. Don't you read the science news?
Honestly, after all the money we've spent, I don't see them just plopping it into the ocean
Right, because that would be like spending five billion or so on disposing of nuclear waste and then shutting the program down after 25 years without disposing of any nuclear waste and leaving the United States as one of the few countries in the developed world without an ongoing waste disposal strategy.
Surely no government would ever do that!
Politics is probably in play here: with the shuttle phased out, there will be no big $ for American contractors to support the IIS, because launch costs are going to be the greater part of ongoing costs. So the US government would be in a position of spending a lot of money on foreign launch vehicles, which means "No pork for you!" with regard to domestic campaign contributors.
Ergo, the US government would be supporting an international effort that would not feed back much of anything in terms of pork barrel spending into the domestic economy. Since pork is one of the major means by which the Party maintains control of the state, this is unacceptable.
Furthermore, because the US is an imperial power, it can't afford to be seen as weak or second-rate, so if it ceases to participate in the ISS the station must come down, because otherwise foreigners would have "the high ground."
If something doesn't make sense, there is usually politics behind it, and behind the politics there is usually money.
...never do anything stupid, so the Mayor pointing out "It would be stupid to commit a crime" is a really excellent example of how compelling the case is for using this sort of surveillance technology.
If politicians and police were honest about this they'd be doing a controlled experiment on these deployments, putting out these systems in ways that varied both in space and time that allowed them to determine whether these things had any effect on quality of life amongst the citizens, which is the metric that matters.
Instead, they are content to make stuff up, and the average person is so relentlessly anti-empirical that they have no idea what they are missing.
You're welcome
just because government does something doesn't always mean they do it badly.
The track record of the US federal government in the past 20 years is appallingly bad, and pointing fingers at specific members of the Party is misleading and distracting from the central issue, which is that the US federal government is systemically broken.
The Yucca Mountain debacle is iconic in this regard: members of both wings of the Party failed over multiple administrations and changes in congressional control to effectively implement a solution for disposing of nuclear waste. This cannot be blamed on particular individuals, but on the system of government itself.
Until you guys figure out how to free your federal government from Party control, you're going to continue to see messes like Katrina. Not because you just happen to elect crappy people, but because the Party ensures that the people you elect will always be answerable to the Party, and not the people.
Remember, this is the kind of process they would bring to health care.
This is not flamebait, but a perfectly reasonable opinion on the ability of the American government to deliver the goods on any given program.
I am a citizen of a country where we have a reasonably cheap and good universal public health care system, and I've lived in the States and seen up-close-and-personal the appalling mess that is your current health care system, and how badly you need a universal system of the kind found in Germany, France, Australia, Canada, or elsewhere.
But the reality is that the American government has shown itself repeatedly unable to manage much of anything very well. There is a systemic dysfunctional culture that is the result of Party members focusing on Party priorities rather than anything that is good for the American people.
If the core problem of Partisan capture of the American government is not fixed, the odds of it being able to create anything other than a bigger mess with universal health care are depressingly high.
This is not a problem with universal health care, which everywhere has a lower cost and better outcomes than the American system: in Canada we pay less for our universal public system than Americans pay for their limited and inadequate Medicare and Medicaid systems, and we live long, more healthy lives. But if an organization as fundamentally broken as the American federal government tried to run such a system it would almost certainly screw it up entirely, based on recent experience in everything from Iraq reconstruction to the Yucca Mountain fiasco.
It's a pity that the nation that once was able to organize and execute the first human landing on the moon forty years ago is no longer able to do much of anything effectively, but until that problem is solved there is a legitimate argument to be made that a universal public health care system in the US should be the least of your priorities, because Americans just aren't up to the problem of running such a system effectively.
But when we analyze, for instance, the way chimps can be taught something that seems rather akin to a proto-language
And it would be unbelievably shocking if this were not the case. Evolution operates by elaboration, and it is practically inconceivable that humans should have such rich and nuanced linguistic production and comprehension systems in their brains and not have fairly closely related species showing some kind of rudimentary linguistic ability.
So rather than everyone going, "Wow, that's amazing and surprising!" when we find that chimps have rudimentary linguistic capabilities, we should be saying, "Yeah, that's just the kind of thing we would predict based on the evolutionary origins of human's language capabilities."
Studying the linguistic abilities of other species is still worth-while, because the empirical data will tell us stuff in detail that we couldn't know otherwise, but that there are linguistic abilities in other species for us to study is no surprise at all.
C\o\r\p\o\r\a\t\i\o\n\s\ PEOPLE would turn your grandma into Soylent Green if they thought they could get away with it and make a profit.
Corporations, like governments, unions, workers cooperatives, churches, cricket teams, whatevers, are nothing but the collective motives of the people making the decisions. To place the locus of blame for bad behaviour on a particular form of social organization was a popular sport in the 20th century, which resulted in more dead humans and ruined lives than anything previously seen.
Humans are human, and a rational society would recognize that all forms of collective organization need similar constraints placed on them. Ideologues who think that taking a group of humans and calling them a "corporation" makes them evil but taking the same group of humans and calling them a "government" or a "union" or a "church" makes them good are living in a separate reality.
It's well known that CJKV is more like QPZA than ASDF, although TYRX process is probably better documented than either.
Recent developments in RWRI technology have seen a lot of uptake by the IRWR community, leading some to believe that ASDF is on its way out entirely.
That's a completely clear and informative SUMMARY of the issue, right?
There are some interesting data available on Earth's albedo (reflectivity): http://earth.myfastforum.org/sutra1069.php Check out the linked sources, in particular.
Summary: there is some evidence that Earth's albedo has decreased by as much as 2% (absolute, almost 10% relative) in the past twenty years. A decrease in albedo means less visible light is being reflected by the planet, implying that more is being absorbed, which would tend to increase planetary heat content.)
A 2.0% variation in albedo is huge: over twice the effect of all anthropogenic greenhouse gases combined (6.8 W/m**2 vs about 5 W/m**2). However, because much of the change is due to changes in cloud cover, one must also account for the changes in infrared absorption from different kinds of clouds, which makes a head-to-head comparison tricky. However, while the effect of different types of cloud cover can reduce the effect of albedo variations, the residual is still as large or larger than current estimates of human greenhouse gas contributions to climate forcing.
Final grain of salt: albedo is a physically meaningful term, unlike "global average temperature", but it is still very tricky to measure, and therefore these results should be taken with a grain of salt. However, the magnitude of the effect is such that it is difficult--but not impossible--to imagine it not having a pretty major influence on climate.
Cloud cover maybe correlated with cosmic ray flux, which may be correlated with sunspot activity.
Based on the data we have, it appears Earth's albedo has been anomalously low in the past decade or more, and may now be popping back up to something closer to the long term average (0.315 as opposed to as low as 0.305 in the past decade). If that is the case, then we can expect to see a pronounced drop in "global average temperature" in the next few years.
If that happens, then climate forcing due to albedo variation is going to start looking pretty plausible as a significant cause of the high "global average temperatures" seen in the past decade.
The fact that it's open source or royalty free doesn't mean there are no patent trolls ready to file a lawsuit once Apple or Microsoft use it.
Likewise, simply because the MPEG LA controls the licensing of KNOWN patents for H.264 doesn't mean there are no patent trolls ready to file a lawsuit once it gets adopted as a standard.
There is also no assurance that the MPEG LA won't try to monetize their position as the sole licensing authority for H.264 if it were to be adopted into the standard. Unisys anyone?
So Apple's case would only be plausible if they can show that there is any reason to believe that the software-patent-related risk is higher for Theora than H.264, and they have not done that.
A friend recently told me a story about a girl he knew from his hometown, and I will share the anecdote with you now: This girl's girlfriends got her to come down to LA to do "modeling" which then turned into drinking and drugs on a scale she wasn't used to, which then became "modeling with titties", then "modeling with a cock out", etc etc. She then wound up having violent sex she wasn't at all in to, then the tape got sold out of gas stations everywhere, and she couldn't show here face in her home town, now she's some kind of shut-in.
Funny, a friend recently told me a story about a guy his cousin grew up with, whose friends got him to go to university to do "computing science", which then turned into drinking and drugs on a scale he wasn't used to, which then became "programming", which then became "programming with VB" etc etc. He then wound up writing Word Macro viruses he wasn't at all into, then the virus infected documents in corporate offices everywhere, and he couldn't show his face in his home town, and now he's some kind of shut-in.
Top-shelf developer, ruined by university.