His argument is that it's worth millions of dollars to not have to deal with this guy
Not even close. This is a complete false alternative.
First of all, "assume no one else can do what this guy does" is about as sensible as assuming unicorns are going to come charging through your door. The number of people who can do what no one else does is extremely small. And if your company depends on something that esoteric you're doomed anyway.
More importantly, you could replace this guy with a couple of top-rank developers who might not have his "genius" but who would be able to save the company 90% of those millions, and do so in a sustainable, maintainable way, creating far more value downstream while reducing the churn you experience on the rest of the team because no one can stand to work with this jerk.
Team skills are empirically known to be the most important predictor of developer productivity, not technical skills. Go look it up in your copy of "Rapid Development".
It is never "either/or": a better team player with somewhat weaker technical skills is generally a better hire than a guru who can't play nicely with others, and the notion that gurus are so singularly valuable that they can't be replaced is simply false if you are running a viable business in the long-term.
Look at the world around you and show me where 'hard work' is getting the best results for the worker.
When the worker is self-employed.
This is the critical thing: people who try to get ahead in the corporate world by hard work are suckers, because that's not what matters there. Pleasing your boss, etc, is.
As a freelancer and consultant, I get paid serious money for hard work, and because of the fields I work in my stuff has to actually, y'know, Do The Job. It isn't an easy position to get into, but not nearly as hard as is often made out, and far too many people get suckered into playing the suit's game.
My advice to any junior-level person or student is: focus on learning business skills, and aim at getting out on your own as soon as possible. It took me ten years to do it. I had some real limitations in terms of personality. But I had persistence, self-motivation and goal-directedness, and if you have those you have what it takes.
I was saying to a friend today that I live a writer's life (solitary, flexible, master of my own time) on a software developer's pay. That's a pretty sweet deal, and it is within the grasp of more people than you might think, if they are only willing to put in the hard work of learning the business skills and taking the risks.
One of the best ways of doing that is working for successively smaller businesses who do stuff in your domain of interest.
There is no such thing as a "protective patent", anymore than there is a "non-explosive nuclear weapon."
The key is not in the patent, but in the patent-holder, and we should keep that very much in mind because patent holders can change their minds, and patents can change hands.
In the case of Red Hat, sure they may be building up a defensive portfolio today, but tomorrow they might get bought by XYZ Corp whose sole purpose is to exploit that portfolio for gain. No matter how good-hearted and trustworthy people might feel Red Hat is today, there is no telling what might happen to them tomorrow. They might go bankrupt, and their debtors realize they could get a lot of money by using the patent portfolio offensively.
So I don't buy it: every software patent is a bomb waiting to go off, and creating more of them seems like a really bad idea as way to reform the patent system. They are too likely to simply act as a temptation to evil bastards, of whom their are no shortage in the corporate world, to go after the short-term gains they represent.
To say that people and dinosaurs certainly did not coexist is based on a lack of fossil evidence
No, it is based on Bayesian reasoning, as follows:
Given that we have many dinosaur fossils from several hundred million to sixty-five million years ago, what is the probability that NO dinosaur fossils can be found that date from less than a million years ago under the assumption that dinosaurs still existed then?
The answer is a very small number, no matter how you mess with the priors, so long as your priors are kept within the bounds of known data.
For example, it may be that there were very few dinosaurs a million years ago. But that would require the population density to be so low that they would have died out long before they reached such a low density, unless they reproduced parthenogentically. But there are no reptiles known that reproduce that way, nor even any fish that are purely parthenogenic, for well-known reasons that are a direct product of the laws of probability. So your priors now have to involve the laws of probability being wrong. And so on.
Unfortunately for creationists and their ilk, Bayesian reasoning treats their silly ideas as ordinary propositions, and assigns all of them extremely low plausibilities using the ordinary machinery of Bayesian logic: state your assumptions, estimate your priors, incorporate your evidence, compute the posterior probability. Under that procedure creationism isn't even worth mentioning--the required priors are so dismally small that no amount of evidence short of God walking up and saying, "I done it" would be adequate to overcome them.
The curious thing is that RailCorp is claiming copyright on the factual train times, but then says the problem is that it must protect users against the possibility of errors in the data the app provides. It obviously has no copyright claim against erroneous data.
If I were the developer, I'd consider shifting all of the numbers the app provides by an hour or a day or a minute or something--maybe randomly +/- a few minutes. If the table is no longer factual and makes no claim to be, the copyright claim may be somewhat weakened--or not. Worth looking into at any rate.
Even from a greed standpoint, that kind of crap didn't seem to make sense to me.
It's not about greed. It's about power.
The left have been yapping about greed for a century or more to distract you from their primary purpose: power and more power.
The right uses "think of the children" and "national security" for the same purpose, perhaps less successfully. Certainly more people seem to notice the power-hungry aspects of the right than the equally power-hungry aspects of the left.
None them give two pins for anyone not of their party. A plague on both their houses.
FF started out as a nice, stripped-down browser that you could customize any way you want with easy to install extensions. now it's become a bloated, slow beast
This is the way software seems to evolve, and it's interesting that free software is subject to it as well. Proprietary software adds new features as part of the forced upgrade cycle that they use to generate revenue, and they use proprietary file formats to virally propagate the need to upgrade even amongst users who hate the new features (I'm looking at you, Autodesk).
For proprietary software the feature bloat is necessary to justify marketing of the new version. But even free software is subject to this process of bloatification, so some of it must be due to other factors.
My best guess is that real users have diverse needs, and you can either try to satisfy all of them with an increasingly complex and unstable modular/plugin architecture or hugely complex configuration system, or you can adopt a philosophy of "this is what our software does, if you don't like it you should use something else."
Because browsers are universal they tend to go in the first direction. Slackware is a nice example of something that takes the other approach.
The problem with investing in configurability is that it eventually becomes too complex and annoying for people to use, and there are always going to be users for whom existing configuration facilities aren't quite configurable enough (see comments in this thread as to why existing workarounds for the Aweful Bar aren't doing it for them.) Every additional dimension of configurability makes testing harder and adds a layer of abstraction that makes things more bug-prone and slower. Eventually development grinds to a halt.
FireFox is a long way from that point, but I bet in a decade we'll be saying, "Remember FireFox?"
All they got to do is stop you from using the telegraph itself.
Which does enormous damage to the North Korean economy, ultimately causing the government and its associated state control apparatus to collapse.
This is how the Soviet Union died. To retain control of their populace, they had to limit people's actions. That has two costs: the opportunity cost of, say, not being able to make a long-distance phone call without government approval[*], and the cost of enforcement.
Both these costs grow with time, and modern economies are built on open, collaborative networks. If you forbid a person from using a tool of communication you either do so entirely, or you leave it open for "approved" purposes. In the first case, you lose economically. In the second case, your degree of control plummets for exactly the reasons you are suggesting.
At the end of the day darknets are nothing but VPNs, or at least attempts to solve the same problem. Wanna bet what the effect of banning VPNs would be on the US economy?
And it is impossible without enormous, growing, economic cost to ban the use of some VPNs while successfully extinguishing others.
This is the long war, and you have to play out the full ramifications of state attempts to control the citizenry. Many people will die horribly in places like North Korea while the war is being fought, but in the end the state control apparatus is going to lose, because it is up against fundamental economic laws that cannot be changed.
[*] Back in the early '90's I worked with a guy from Soviet Georgia, and he had to have three people, including the head of the lab, explain to him that just anyone could make a long-distance call to anywhere in the world without asking for anyone's permission.
In 1941, maps of the Soviet Union available to Germany showed a major highway going from Moscow to very nearly the border.
The Soviet Union continued to obfuscate maps available to civilians up until its demise. A friend who lived there in the '70's commented that he wasn't supposed to take pictures of bridges and the like, either.
I was viewing Moscow the other day on Google Earth and thinking what a wonderful world we live in. An open world, more free than we were back then.
I'd like to think that the US isn't going to adopt the same kind of silly things that their old enemy did, which didn't work at the time and will work even less well today.
There is no evidence that Gates is a particularly able developer, so it is a little weird that anyone would focus on the "10,000 hours" rule with regard to his computing skills.
He is a very capable, ruthless, driven, business-person. THAT is his talent, and I'd bet that MS began to really take off five or ten years after Gates entered the business world... which in fact it did.
The huge success he made of Microsoft is also due in significant part to luck. As others have pointed out here, very few business-people are successful more than once, which is clear empirical proof of factors beyond their control being a very large contributor to their initial success. There's even some evidence that successful business people are less likely to succeed in their second venture, because they are unable to appreciate how much the original success was due to luck.
This is not to say that hard work is not necessary. But the data clearly show it is not sufficient. One place where hard work does pay off is longevity: a business that lives a long time has a better chance of finding itself in the right place at the right time.
Just a thought but that fish looks like a deep water ocean fish. Large eye for seeing in the dark.
It's fairly common for fish that live near the littoral to have large eyes. Modern ratfish, of which this thing is an ancestor, have big eyes, and I've seen them in shallow water.
Not only is it dark half the time even at the surface, the amount of light available drops off very quickly with depth in most places due to plankton etc. Divers travel the world to find places with good visibility.
Furthermore, in high latitudes the amount of light that penetrates the surface when the sun is low in the sky can be amazingly small: I've been on evening dives in summer at 50 degrees north where it was pitch black at sixty feet even though it was bright and sunny on the surface.
So basically a lot of the ocean is dark most of the time, even within a few feet of the surface, and lakes are generally more turbid, which makes them even darker.
I've worked in the US twice, the first time in the early '90's in southern California, the second more recently in New England. Both times I felt like kissing the soil of my native country upon return.
Individual Americans are some of the most decent people I've met. Collectively, though, you people scare me.
The change between the early '90's and post-9/11 was striking, from the crazy stuff on TV (Glenn Beck pronouncing that 'security' is the most important thing to any American, when once upon a time it would have been something called 'liberty'), fast-food places with signs announcing that they only hired legal American citizens, and of course the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which temporarily stripped people like me from having access to Habeas Corpus protections.
On the surface, everything was the same. Underneath, the picture was not pretty.
The team I worked with was mostly non-Americans, from both the Far East and Europe, and most of them were highly educated and wanted to stay, but I could never figure out why.
On the good side, like Churchill said, Americans will always find the solution to the problem... after they've tried everything else.
This is actually not completely insane. Just dumping some guesses at "reasonable" parameters into a dumb-as-rocks bit of Python to simulate the encounter, a bungee with a relaxed length of 1000 km and a spring constant of 10^-3 N/m would do the job with a peak acceleration of about 160 g assuming 50 km/s delta-v. Total acceleration time is about 100 seconds, and the bungee stretches out to about two and a half times its relaxed length.
If you had a material that would stretch up to 10 times its relaxed length you could keep the peak acceleration down to about 25 g!
These calculations assume the asteroid is much more massive than the probe--if it is not then the numbers actually get a bit better, as the asteroid slows down a bit as the probe accelerates.
In any case, I wouldn't rule this out. Hardened instruments can take insanely high accelerations, and materials are getting more incredible all the time.
If you add a shitload of CO2 to the atmosphere, the temperature of the surface of the planet is going to rise.
Not necessarily. The heat content of the atmosphere may rise, assuming there are absolutely no non-linear feedbacks involved (hint: there are plenty.) But even if the heat content rises, the temperature may fall due to changes in global humidity, so it is far from obvious that the temperature will rise.
There just isn't a slam-dunk case that is quantitatively convincing: even if it were the case that the whole system was linear (which it isn't, even approximately) it is not necessarily the case that the amount of CO2 we are dumping will raise the heat content of the atmosphere by a significant degree. The computer models that purport to demonstrate this are unphysical, and therefore can't be taken as anything like "proof". They barely pass muster as plausibility arguments.
ALL of the data we have suggest that the earth will shift if we continue to emit carbon because the earth's systems will react.
I think it is an overstatement to say that ALL the data we have support this. We see here on/. regular announcements of climate scientists who are flabbergasted by some new datum, generally spun as "things are getting worse even faster than we thought!" as if the climate can full described by a single parameter, "worseness".
A more nuanced consideration of the same phenomenon might suggest that it reveals how little we understand about the climate, and how unsure we are in interpreting the evidence. If we weren't so lousy at interpreting the evidence, climate scientists wouldn't be surprised with such clockwork regularity.
And while it is true that there is very little evidence that cannot be interpreted as supporting the utterly uncontroversial hypothesis "the climate is changing, same as it always has", distinguishing natural from anthropogenic change is more challenging, and nominal matches between spotty data and unphysical models does not really constitute very significant support.
The real issue is that there is currently no unambiguous method of measuring the global temperature
No, the real problem is that "global temperature" isn't a meaningful thermodynamic quantity. Global atmospheric heat content is, but no one has a clue what that is because we need to know both temperature and humidity (ie, both wet and dry bulb temperatures) to determine it.
However, global ocean heat content appears to be measurable, and appears to be rising.
For the past four months, all the CEOs of all the banks have been singing the praises of communism.
Actually, no: the parasites running American banks have been singing the praises of National Socialism, which is a political and economic doctrine that states certain industries or companies are so important to the wellbeing of the Reich... err... Homeland that they must not be allowed to fail even though they remain in private hands.
Most of the American political class of both parties are also in favour of national socialism. So far it seems that most individual Americans are opposed to it, but have been so completely disenfranchised by the political class that they can't do much about it... yet.
Plausiblity for the win! That's a nice example. My counter-example would be the kind of old wooden farm building that I see a lot of, that really does slump slowly to the ground in exactly they way you say buildings don't. I used to wonder at these structures when I was growing up: old barns and outbuildings that would be in a state of almost complete collapse for years, but would never actually fall down. They just eased themselves slowly to the ground as their wooden structure deformed. Even a single structural member actually snapping wouldn't be enough to load the rest of the building to cause it to fall.
This is the point to stop arguing analogies and actually and do some science by modelling the process of ice-pore collapse and seeing if it conforms more to your concrete-snaps analogy or my wood-deforms analogy. On a small scale I can see where you're coming from: the image of a single ice crystal snapping suddenly is clear, and the process of cascading collapse makes a certain amount of sense given the right parameters. On a larger scale, snow is notably flexible, and even ice is a lot less like concrete than you might think.
Surely there must be some data out there on this stuff?
Why would you expect that ice and snow would happen to be in the range of strength/weight/accumulation parameters that would be required for this process to routinely take place due to a single year's accumulation of snow after a few decades or centuries of nothing much happening?
That combination of timescales--nothing much happening for decades or centuries, then closure in a single year--bounds the acceptable parameters from both sides, which means that it would be a little surprising if they just happened to fall into that range. This is pretty much the textbook definition of "peculiar".
Again, I am NOT saying this is impossible (although a big shout-out to the AC above who says I should be modded down because I'm a "deniallistalator" or whatever it's called) but I am saying that it strikes me that only a narrow range of physical parameters would happen to cause such sharp peaks after such a long time, and this sort of fine-tuning is the sort of thing that bothers physicists. It does happen: consider the famous result that the constants of nature are tuned such that toast almost always lands butter-side-down. This could be such a case.
One of the nice things about data like these is that they ought to give us some information about what the parameters actually are, and therefore contribute to our understanding of whether CO2 leads or lags atmospheric temperature changes at the poles.
If these really are the supernovae, doesn't this mean that "model B" is right and "model A" is wrong?
The two models look like extrema that bound the dates.
More interestingly, the sharpness of the spikes indicate that the sealing of atmospheric gases in the ice happens very suddenly. If it did not we would expect to see much broader and probably asymmetrical peaks.
This is consistent with, but does not absolutely prove, a rather prompt mechanism for such sealing, rather than the long lagtime process that is sometimes invoked to explain why temperatures always rise tens or hundreds of years before CO2 levels do in ice core data. It would be very peculiar, albeit not impossible, to have a process that sealed the ice tens or hundreds of years after it was laid down as snow, but did so on a timescale of a year or so.
Presumably, they'd follow the scientific method and adjust their theories to fit the new data.
Just like Mann et al did when it turned out some of their tree ring proxies were problematic, and it only took them a decade to replace them with better ones, which produced a conclusion that was similar to but far less sound-bite-worthy than the original.
This is the way science actually works: people generally defend their favoured belief kicking and screaming until they are absolutely forced to give it up. To suggest that people who find the popular press reports of impending doom from anthropogenic global warming less than compelling are in any way anti-scientific is a nice ad hominem that doesn't really belong in a scientific debate.
There are plenty of reasons to be sceptical about climate science: our inability to figure out what is happening to 30% of the CO2 we're polluting the atmosphere with is one of them, and this satellite will hopefully help figure that out.
Could someone explain to me why this is a real problem
I'm a physicist who runs a business that amongst other things does data analysis in the life sciences, mostly genomics. In this area data collection is relatively expensive (hundreds or thousands of dollars per sample) and disease states are relatively generic--follicular lymphoma is pretty much the same regardless of whether you are in Kansas or Karachi.
I recently invented a new algorithm for combing gene expression data for patterns of expression that distinguish sample classes. There are two ways to get this algorithm applied to more data: one is to develop an application and hope that a few thousand researchers will bother downloading it and using it on their data. The other is for me to go out and find published datasets and apply the algorithm to them myself.
I'm pursuing both paths, but having seen how hard it is to get people to adopt new software, even stuff that's dead easy to use (which my application is). Furthermore, even with really good software, having an expert look at the data carefully is highly desirable. We have yet to find a way to fully automate good judgement, and a certain amount of judgement is required in any hard analysis problem.
So I'm figuring that the most use I'll get out of this algorithm it is applying it to other people's data myself. I've already done this on a public schizophrenia dataset with some success, although I'm still trying to figure out what to do with the results (as a scientist I'd like to see them used for the betterment of humanity, as a businessperson I'd like to somehow get paid at least a little for my contribution.)
The widespread publication of well-curated datasets is absolutely vital to getting the most value out of the considerable amount of money spent on collecting data of this kind. How we deal with rewarding the various contributors to any commercially useful discoveries that result is an ongoing problem that can be dealt with on a case-by-case basis for now.
For your own safety, please read to the end of this comment before replying.
1. How can the Athenians have fought a war against another civilization at a time when all good archaeology and paleontology tells us humans didn't yet live in developed cities or fight wars?
2. How can Plato's source have known about Atlantis? It's not mentioned in any of the preserved archives of the ancient Egyptians.
Err... we have a very small fraction of material from ancient Egypt, thanks to the destruction of the great library at Alexandria. Hell, we know things about PLATO that are only attested to in secondary sources. There's no reason Atlantis couldn't be the same.
3. How can knowledge of this so-called war and apocalypse have survived until ca. 350 BCE when the Greeks didn't have reliable information about their own history going back before 1000 BCE? Hint: if you say "but the Iliad..." I am going to beat you repeatedly with a copy of the collected works of Milman Parry.
It is far easier for me to find out about the War of the Roses or the Hundred Years War than it is to find out about what happened in my hometown 100 years ago. Obviously a huge apocalyptic war is going to leave far more footprints in history than anything that happened in the Greek Dark Age, which was after all pretty goddamned black, to the extent that writing itself was lost.
Ok, if you've got this far I'll give you the REAL reason why we should take Plato seriously on Atlantis: Plato ALSO tells us that originally human beings had two halves and were four-legged, joined at the back. They split in two to create the humans we have today, and the natural sexual affinities that are observed in humans are the result of us seeking our other half. Those of us who should have been joined to another of different sex are heterosexuals, and those who should have been joined to another of the same sex are homosexuals.
Since this is obviously true, the story of Atlantis must be true as well. I mean, Plato wouldn't just make stuff up for the sake of a good story, would he?
The uncritical claim that the error stays consistent while the variable they are measuring purportedly nears zero is problematic at best.
There is no a priori reason to believe that the error in the old method will be constant over such a large range of variation, or that "precision can be achieved when accuracy is low simply by applying a consistent method across a wide range of values."
When the the value under consideration might approach zero, nothing but accuracy will do.
Slashdot Mirror
His argument is that it's worth millions of dollars to not have to deal with this guy
Not even close. This is a complete false alternative.
First of all, "assume no one else can do what this guy does" is about as sensible as assuming unicorns are going to come charging through your door. The number of people who can do what no one else does is extremely small. And if your company depends on something that esoteric you're doomed anyway.
More importantly, you could replace this guy with a couple of top-rank developers who might not have his "genius" but who would be able to save the company 90% of those millions, and do so in a sustainable, maintainable way, creating far more value downstream while reducing the churn you experience on the rest of the team because no one can stand to work with this jerk.
Team skills are empirically known to be the most important predictor of developer productivity, not technical skills. Go look it up in your copy of "Rapid Development".
It is never "either/or": a better team player with somewhat weaker technical skills is generally a better hire than a guru who can't play nicely with others, and the notion that gurus are so singularly valuable that they can't be replaced is simply false if you are running a viable business in the long-term.
Look at the world around you and show me where 'hard work' is getting the best results for the worker.
When the worker is self-employed.
This is the critical thing: people who try to get ahead in the corporate world by hard work are suckers, because that's not what matters there. Pleasing your boss, etc, is.
As a freelancer and consultant, I get paid serious money for hard work, and because of the fields I work in my stuff has to actually, y'know, Do The Job. It isn't an easy position to get into, but not nearly as hard as is often made out, and far too many people get suckered into playing the suit's game.
My advice to any junior-level person or student is: focus on learning business skills, and aim at getting out on your own as soon as possible. It took me ten years to do it. I had some real limitations in terms of personality. But I had persistence, self-motivation and goal-directedness, and if you have those you have what it takes.
I was saying to a friend today that I live a writer's life (solitary, flexible, master of my own time) on a software developer's pay. That's a pretty sweet deal, and it is within the grasp of more people than you might think, if they are only willing to put in the hard work of learning the business skills and taking the risks.
One of the best ways of doing that is working for successively smaller businesses who do stuff in your domain of interest.
it will take many such protective patents.
There is no such thing as a "protective patent", anymore than there is a "non-explosive nuclear weapon."
The key is not in the patent, but in the patent-holder, and we should keep that very much in mind because patent holders can change their minds, and patents can change hands.
In the case of Red Hat, sure they may be building up a defensive portfolio today, but tomorrow they might get bought by XYZ Corp whose sole purpose is to exploit that portfolio for gain. No matter how good-hearted and trustworthy people might feel Red Hat is today, there is no telling what might happen to them tomorrow. They might go bankrupt, and their debtors realize they could get a lot of money by using the patent portfolio offensively.
So I don't buy it: every software patent is a bomb waiting to go off, and creating more of them seems like a really bad idea as way to reform the patent system. They are too likely to simply act as a temptation to evil bastards, of whom their are no shortage in the corporate world, to go after the short-term gains they represent.
To say that people and dinosaurs certainly did not coexist is based on a lack of fossil evidence
No, it is based on Bayesian reasoning, as follows:
Given that we have many dinosaur fossils from several hundred million to sixty-five million years ago, what is the probability that NO dinosaur fossils can be found that date from less than a million years ago under the assumption that dinosaurs still existed then?
The answer is a very small number, no matter how you mess with the priors, so long as your priors are kept within the bounds of known data.
For example, it may be that there were very few dinosaurs a million years ago. But that would require the population density to be so low that they would have died out long before they reached such a low density, unless they reproduced parthenogentically. But there are no reptiles known that reproduce that way, nor even any fish that are purely parthenogenic, for well-known reasons that are a direct product of the laws of probability. So your priors now have to involve the laws of probability being wrong. And so on.
Unfortunately for creationists and their ilk, Bayesian reasoning treats their silly ideas as ordinary propositions, and assigns all of them extremely low plausibilities using the ordinary machinery of Bayesian logic: state your assumptions, estimate your priors, incorporate your evidence, compute the posterior probability. Under that procedure creationism isn't even worth mentioning--the required priors are so dismally small that no amount of evidence short of God walking up and saying, "I done it" would be adequate to overcome them.
The curious thing is that RailCorp is claiming copyright on the factual train times, but then says the problem is that it must protect users against the possibility of errors in the data the app provides. It obviously has no copyright claim against erroneous data.
If I were the developer, I'd consider shifting all of the numbers the app provides by an hour or a day or a minute or something--maybe randomly +/- a few minutes. If the table is no longer factual and makes no claim to be, the copyright claim may be somewhat weakened--or not. Worth looking into at any rate.
Even from a greed standpoint, that kind of crap didn't seem to make sense to me.
It's not about greed. It's about power.
The left have been yapping about greed for a century or more to distract you from their primary purpose: power and more power.
The right uses "think of the children" and "national security" for the same purpose, perhaps less successfully. Certainly more people seem to notice the power-hungry aspects of the right than the equally power-hungry aspects of the left.
None them give two pins for anyone not of their party. A plague on both their houses.
FF started out as a nice, stripped-down browser that you could customize any way you want with easy to install extensions. now it's become a bloated, slow beast
This is the way software seems to evolve, and it's interesting that free software is subject to it as well. Proprietary software adds new features as part of the forced upgrade cycle that they use to generate revenue, and they use proprietary file formats to virally propagate the need to upgrade even amongst users who hate the new features (I'm looking at you, Autodesk).
For proprietary software the feature bloat is necessary to justify marketing of the new version. But even free software is subject to this process of bloatification, so some of it must be due to other factors.
My best guess is that real users have diverse needs, and you can either try to satisfy all of them with an increasingly complex and unstable modular/plugin architecture or hugely complex configuration system, or you can adopt a philosophy of "this is what our software does, if you don't like it you should use something else."
Because browsers are universal they tend to go in the first direction. Slackware is a nice example of something that takes the other approach.
The problem with investing in configurability is that it eventually becomes too complex and annoying for people to use, and there are always going to be users for whom existing configuration facilities aren't quite configurable enough (see comments in this thread as to why existing workarounds for the Aweful Bar aren't doing it for them.) Every additional dimension of configurability makes testing harder and adds a layer of abstraction that makes things more bug-prone and slower. Eventually development grinds to a halt.
FireFox is a long way from that point, but I bet in a decade we'll be saying, "Remember FireFox?"
All they got to do is stop you from using the telegraph itself.
Which does enormous damage to the North Korean economy, ultimately causing the government and its associated state control apparatus to collapse.
This is how the Soviet Union died. To retain control of their populace, they had to limit people's actions. That has two costs: the opportunity cost of, say, not being able to make a long-distance phone call without government approval[*], and the cost of enforcement.
Both these costs grow with time, and modern economies are built on open, collaborative networks. If you forbid a person from using a tool of communication you either do so entirely, or you leave it open for "approved" purposes. In the first case, you lose economically. In the second case, your degree of control plummets for exactly the reasons you are suggesting.
At the end of the day darknets are nothing but VPNs, or at least attempts to solve the same problem. Wanna bet what the effect of banning VPNs would be on the US economy?
And it is impossible without enormous, growing, economic cost to ban the use of some VPNs while successfully extinguishing others.
This is the long war, and you have to play out the full ramifications of state attempts to control the citizenry. Many people will die horribly in places like North Korea while the war is being fought, but in the end the state control apparatus is going to lose, because it is up against fundamental economic laws that cannot be changed.
[*] Back in the early '90's I worked with a guy from Soviet Georgia, and he had to have three people, including the head of the lab, explain to him that just anyone could make a long-distance call to anywhere in the world without asking for anyone's permission.
In 1941, maps of the Soviet Union available to Germany showed a major highway going from Moscow to very nearly the border.
The Soviet Union continued to obfuscate maps available to civilians up until its demise. A friend who lived there in the '70's commented that he wasn't supposed to take pictures of bridges and the like, either.
I was viewing Moscow the other day on Google Earth and thinking what a wonderful world we live in. An open world, more free than we were back then.
I'd like to think that the US isn't going to adopt the same kind of silly things that their old enemy did, which didn't work at the time and will work even less well today.
because having access to a computer
There is no evidence that Gates is a particularly able developer, so it is a little weird that anyone would focus on the "10,000 hours" rule with regard to his computing skills.
He is a very capable, ruthless, driven, business-person. THAT is his talent, and I'd bet that MS began to really take off five or ten years after Gates entered the business world... which in fact it did.
The huge success he made of Microsoft is also due in significant part to luck. As others have pointed out here, very few business-people are successful more than once, which is clear empirical proof of factors beyond their control being a very large contributor to their initial success. There's even some evidence that successful business people are less likely to succeed in their second venture, because they are unable to appreciate how much the original success was due to luck.
This is not to say that hard work is not necessary. But the data clearly show it is not sufficient. One place where hard work does pay off is longevity: a business that lives a long time has a better chance of finding itself in the right place at the right time.
Just a thought but that fish looks like a deep water ocean fish. Large eye for seeing in the dark.
It's fairly common for fish that live near the littoral to have large eyes. Modern ratfish, of which this thing is an ancestor, have big eyes, and I've seen them in shallow water.
Not only is it dark half the time even at the surface, the amount of light available drops off very quickly with depth in most places due to plankton etc. Divers travel the world to find places with good visibility.
Furthermore, in high latitudes the amount of light that penetrates the surface when the sun is low in the sky can be amazingly small: I've been on evening dives in summer at 50 degrees north where it was pitch black at sixty feet even though it was bright and sunny on the surface.
So basically a lot of the ocean is dark most of the time, even within a few feet of the surface, and lakes are generally more turbid, which makes them even darker.
...have made them want to leave..
I've worked in the US twice, the first time in the early '90's in southern California, the second more recently in New England. Both times I felt like kissing the soil of my native country upon return.
Individual Americans are some of the most decent people I've met. Collectively, though, you people scare me.
The change between the early '90's and post-9/11 was striking, from the crazy stuff on TV (Glenn Beck pronouncing that 'security' is the most important thing to any American, when once upon a time it would have been something called 'liberty'), fast-food places with signs announcing that they only hired legal American citizens, and of course the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which temporarily stripped people like me from having access to Habeas Corpus protections.
On the surface, everything was the same. Underneath, the picture was not pretty.
The team I worked with was mostly non-Americans, from both the Far East and Europe, and most of them were highly educated and wanted to stay, but I could never figure out why.
On the good side, like Churchill said, Americans will always find the solution to the problem... after they've tried everything else.
Gigantic. Bungee.
This is actually not completely insane. Just dumping some guesses at "reasonable" parameters into a dumb-as-rocks bit of Python to simulate the encounter, a bungee with a relaxed length of 1000 km and a spring constant of 10^-3 N/m would do the job with a peak acceleration of about 160 g assuming 50 km/s delta-v. Total acceleration time is about 100 seconds, and the bungee stretches out to about two and a half times its relaxed length.
If you had a material that would stretch up to 10 times its relaxed length you could keep the peak acceleration down to about 25 g!
These calculations assume the asteroid is much more massive than the probe--if it is not then the numbers actually get a bit better, as the asteroid slows down a bit as the probe accelerates.
In any case, I wouldn't rule this out. Hardened instruments can take insanely high accelerations, and materials are getting more incredible all the time.
There just isn't a slam-dunk case that is quantitatively convincing
Replying to myself: the closest thing to a slam-dunk case is ocean heat content. See: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/06/ocean-heat-content-revisions/ for a discussion of recent work.
If you add a shitload of CO2 to the atmosphere, the temperature of the surface of the planet is going to rise.
Not necessarily. The heat content of the atmosphere may rise, assuming there are absolutely no non-linear feedbacks involved (hint: there are plenty.) But even if the heat content rises, the temperature may fall due to changes in global humidity, so it is far from obvious that the temperature will rise.
There just isn't a slam-dunk case that is quantitatively convincing: even if it were the case that the whole system was linear (which it isn't, even approximately) it is not necessarily the case that the amount of CO2 we are dumping will raise the heat content of the atmosphere by a significant degree. The computer models that purport to demonstrate this are unphysical, and therefore can't be taken as anything like "proof". They barely pass muster as plausibility arguments.
ALL of the data we have suggest that the earth will shift if we continue to emit carbon because the earth's systems will react.
I think it is an overstatement to say that ALL the data we have support this. We see here on /. regular announcements of climate scientists who are flabbergasted by some new datum, generally spun as "things are getting worse even faster than we thought!" as if the climate can full described by a single parameter, "worseness".
A more nuanced consideration of the same phenomenon might suggest that it reveals how little we understand about the climate, and how unsure we are in interpreting the evidence. If we weren't so lousy at interpreting the evidence, climate scientists wouldn't be surprised with such clockwork regularity.
And while it is true that there is very little evidence that cannot be interpreted as supporting the utterly uncontroversial hypothesis "the climate is changing, same as it always has", distinguishing natural from anthropogenic change is more challenging, and nominal matches between spotty data and unphysical models does not really constitute very significant support.
The real issue is that there is currently no unambiguous method of measuring the global temperature
No, the real problem is that "global temperature" isn't a meaningful thermodynamic quantity. Global atmospheric heat content is, but no one has a clue what that is because we need to know both temperature and humidity (ie, both wet and dry bulb temperatures) to determine it.
However, global ocean heat content appears to be measurable, and appears to be rising.
For the past four months, all the CEOs of all the banks have been singing the praises of communism.
Actually, no: the parasites running American banks have been singing the praises of National Socialism, which is a political and economic doctrine that states certain industries or companies are so important to the wellbeing of the Reich... err... Homeland that they must not be allowed to fail even though they remain in private hands.
Most of the American political class of both parties are also in favour of national socialism. So far it seems that most individual Americans are opposed to it, but have been so completely disenfranchised by the political class that they can't do much about it... yet.
Take an old building.
Plausiblity for the win! That's a nice example. My counter-example would be the kind of old wooden farm building that I see a lot of, that really does slump slowly to the ground in exactly they way you say buildings don't. I used to wonder at these structures when I was growing up: old barns and outbuildings that would be in a state of almost complete collapse for years, but would never actually fall down. They just eased themselves slowly to the ground as their wooden structure deformed. Even a single structural member actually snapping wouldn't be enough to load the rest of the building to cause it to fall.
This is the point to stop arguing analogies and actually and do some science by modelling the process of ice-pore collapse and seeing if it conforms more to your concrete-snaps analogy or my wood-deforms analogy. On a small scale I can see where you're coming from: the image of a single ice crystal snapping suddenly is clear, and the process of cascading collapse makes a certain amount of sense given the right parameters. On a larger scale, snow is notably flexible, and even ice is a lot less like concrete than you might think.
Surely there must be some data out there on this stuff?
Why peculiar? That's exactly what I would expect.
Why would you expect that ice and snow would happen to be in the range of strength/weight/accumulation parameters that would be required for this process to routinely take place due to a single year's accumulation of snow after a few decades or centuries of nothing much happening?
That combination of timescales--nothing much happening for decades or centuries, then closure in a single year--bounds the acceptable parameters from both sides, which means that it would be a little surprising if they just happened to fall into that range. This is pretty much the textbook definition of "peculiar".
Again, I am NOT saying this is impossible (although a big shout-out to the AC above who says I should be modded down because I'm a "deniallistalator" or whatever it's called) but I am saying that it strikes me that only a narrow range of physical parameters would happen to cause such sharp peaks after such a long time, and this sort of fine-tuning is the sort of thing that bothers physicists. It does happen: consider the famous result that the constants of nature are tuned such that toast almost always lands butter-side-down. This could be such a case.
One of the nice things about data like these is that they ought to give us some information about what the parameters actually are, and therefore contribute to our understanding of whether CO2 leads or lags atmospheric temperature changes at the poles.
If these really are the supernovae, doesn't this mean that "model B" is right and "model A" is wrong?
The two models look like extrema that bound the dates.
More interestingly, the sharpness of the spikes indicate that the sealing of atmospheric gases in the ice happens very suddenly. If it did not we would expect to see much broader and probably asymmetrical peaks.
This is consistent with, but does not absolutely prove, a rather prompt mechanism for such sealing, rather than the long lagtime process that is sometimes invoked to explain why temperatures always rise tens or hundreds of years before CO2 levels do in ice core data. It would be very peculiar, albeit not impossible, to have a process that sealed the ice tens or hundreds of years after it was laid down as snow, but did so on a timescale of a year or so.
Presumably, they'd follow the scientific method and adjust their theories to fit the new data.
Just like Mann et al did when it turned out some of their tree ring proxies were problematic, and it only took them a decade to replace them with better ones, which produced a conclusion that was similar to but far less sound-bite-worthy than the original.
This is the way science actually works: people generally defend their favoured belief kicking and screaming until they are absolutely forced to give it up. To suggest that people who find the popular press reports of impending doom from anthropogenic global warming less than compelling are in any way anti-scientific is a nice ad hominem that doesn't really belong in a scientific debate.
There are plenty of reasons to be sceptical about climate science: our inability to figure out what is happening to 30% of the CO2 we're polluting the atmosphere with is one of them, and this satellite will hopefully help figure that out.
Could someone explain to me why this is a real problem
I'm a physicist who runs a business that amongst other things does data analysis in the life sciences, mostly genomics. In this area data collection is relatively expensive (hundreds or thousands of dollars per sample) and disease states are relatively generic--follicular lymphoma is pretty much the same regardless of whether you are in Kansas or Karachi.
I recently invented a new algorithm for combing gene expression data for patterns of expression that distinguish sample classes. There are two ways to get this algorithm applied to more data: one is to develop an application and hope that a few thousand researchers will bother downloading it and using it on their data. The other is for me to go out and find published datasets and apply the algorithm to them myself.
I'm pursuing both paths, but having seen how hard it is to get people to adopt new software, even stuff that's dead easy to use (which my application is). Furthermore, even with really good software, having an expert look at the data carefully is highly desirable. We have yet to find a way to fully automate good judgement, and a certain amount of judgement is required in any hard analysis problem.
So I'm figuring that the most use I'll get out of this algorithm it is applying it to other people's data myself. I've already done this on a public schizophrenia dataset with some success, although I'm still trying to figure out what to do with the results (as a scientist I'd like to see them used for the betterment of humanity, as a businessperson I'd like to somehow get paid at least a little for my contribution.)
The widespread publication of well-curated datasets is absolutely vital to getting the most value out of the considerable amount of money spent on collecting data of this kind. How we deal with rewarding the various contributors to any commercially useful discoveries that result is an ongoing problem that can be dealt with on a case-by-case basis for now.
For your own safety, please read to the end of this comment before replying.
1. How can the Athenians have fought a war against another civilization at a time when all good archaeology and paleontology tells us humans didn't yet live in developed cities or fight wars?
Because all good archaeology might be wrong, and temple-based civilization, with the possibilities of undiscovered cities, may be 11,000 years old.
2. How can Plato's source have known about Atlantis? It's not mentioned in any of the preserved archives of the ancient Egyptians.
Err... we have a very small fraction of material from ancient Egypt, thanks to the destruction of the great library at Alexandria. Hell, we know things about PLATO that are only attested to in secondary sources. There's no reason Atlantis couldn't be the same.
3. How can knowledge of this so-called war and apocalypse have survived until ca. 350 BCE when the Greeks didn't have reliable information about their own history going back before 1000 BCE? Hint: if you say "but the Iliad..." I am going to beat you repeatedly with a copy of the collected works of Milman Parry.
It is far easier for me to find out about the War of the Roses or the Hundred Years War than it is to find out about what happened in my hometown 100 years ago. Obviously a huge apocalyptic war is going to leave far more footprints in history than anything that happened in the Greek Dark Age, which was after all pretty goddamned black, to the extent that writing itself was lost.
Ok, if you've got this far I'll give you the REAL reason why we should take Plato seriously on Atlantis: Plato ALSO tells us that originally human beings had two halves and were four-legged, joined at the back. They split in two to create the humans we have today, and the natural sexual affinities that are observed in humans are the result of us seeking our other half. Those of us who should have been joined to another of different sex are heterosexuals, and those who should have been joined to another of the same sex are homosexuals.
Since this is obviously true, the story of Atlantis must be true as well. I mean, Plato wouldn't just make stuff up for the sake of a good story, would he?
Oh, yeah: "The Iliad." (ducks)
That way the error stays consistent.
The uncritical claim that the error stays consistent while the variable they are measuring purportedly nears zero is problematic at best.
There is no a priori reason to believe that the error in the old method will be constant over such a large range of variation, or that "precision can be achieved when accuracy is low simply by applying a consistent method across a wide range of values."
When the the value under consideration might approach zero, nothing but accuracy will do.