For the $400 per hour I get charged, that PhD can focus his whole attention on my MRI. If you job is important enough to complain about possibly degraded video, it's also important enough to not multitask. Listen to MP3's on your own dime.
Could you show us some data regarding the effect of listening to music on the performance of experts doing high-concentration tasks?
I know that when I'm doing really hard coding, I want music. Less difficult stuff, I really don't care. By "really hard" I mean things like highly optimized interacting-particle monte carlo simulations. Having the music in the background seems to help me tune out everything (including, strangely enough, the music) and focus entirely on the task at hand for long periods of time. I could speculate as to why this might be so, but what matters here is that this is a fact. Music improves my performance on high-concentration tasks.
You, on the other hand, seem to have faith that someone listening to music is not able to focus as much attention on the task at hand as someone who is not. Faith is not a good basis for any kind of policy. Especially not policy that could affect the quality of health care, which is poor enough as it stands.
Electoral problems should be scrutinized and fixed based on their severity and merits, not how well they play into some "what if the other guy had won?" scenario.
But surely the effect on the outcome of the election is the best measure of "severity". If I wave a pointed stick around in a crowded room and kill someone, that is more severe than someone firing an RPG into an empty field.
Both acts, mind you, are serious crimes, but of two crimes commited with the same intent, the one that has the worst outcome is the more serious of the two.
Whoever moded this as troll is either PHB and was upset or long-time telecomuter who hasn't seen PHB in a while.
I think my posts may sometimes get modded down by people who can't handle the truth expressed in my.sig, which is nothing more than an uncontroversial statement of fact based on perfectly sound statistical reasoning from well-known probability distributions.
Eh, I'd say being able to hold a whiteboard conversation with ones peers is extremely convenient.
Yeah, but that's not what the article is talking about, according to the summary: Company executives want face time with their employees, the study said
The point is that PHB's want their minions in sight so everyone knows who's boss. It's all about power and primate heirarchy, and nothing at all to do with efficiency and productivity.
Over the past 50 years, the gender gap has dramatically decreased in many fields requiring intelligent, technical people, but much of science and engineering has resisted diversification.
Law, medicine and accounting are all respected professions that pay well.
Engineering and science are not well-respected, and do not pay particularly well.
Consider Ph.D.'s and MD's working in cancer therapy. The average length of training is comparable, and believe me, if the Ph.D. physicist in your friendly neighbourhood radiotherapy suite screws up, you can die, so the level of responsibility (the cost of mistakes) is comparable. But MDs get paid more than twice what physicists get paid.
Or consider the hourly rate of any lawyer compared to an engineer. It's rare to find engineering time billed out at more than $200/hr, whereas I know a patent lawyer who bills at twice that rate.
Some years ago the Ontario government required that all public servants making more than $100k have their income made public. That included university professors. A tiny handful of scientists made it onto the list, much to the envy of the vast majority.
So it's no surprise that most women don't want to become scientists or engineers. The hours are long, the work is badly paid and accorded little respect. Popular culture is full of negative stereotypes of scientists and engineers: we are boring, unkempt and poor.
Women are simply making a rational calculation as to where their greatest benefit lies, and if we want to see more women in science and engineering (and who wouldn't want that?) we need most of all to see an increase in pay and status for scientists and engineers.
Creationists don't deny changes inside a species, such as developing resistances to pesticides and the like. What they deny is that one species can change so much that it becomes another species. In technical terms, what they refuse is the notion of macroevolution. That of microevolution isn't a problem for them.
Which is a huge problem, very nearly a logical contradiction, since macroevolution procedes by exactly the same processes as microevolution, albeit under rarer circumstances (founder events and what-have-you.)
Given the fact of micro-evolution, and the fact that small populations are certain to become isolated now and then, and the fact of genetic disasters in isolated populations (primate chromosome 2, for example) there is absolutely no way to avoid speciation.
Young Earth Creationists have to deny geology, history and biology.
Old Earth Creationists have to deny the laws of probability.
What we argue (not deny) is how much influence mankind has had, and we call bullshit on people who think the climate would, right now, be different if only Bush had signed the Kyoto Accords.
So if I understand you correctly, you are claiming three things:
1) Human beings may or may not have had an influence on the Earth's climate in the past few hundred years.
2) There exist people who claim that the Earth's climate would, right now, be different if only Bush had signed the Kyoto Accords (which is a very weird way to put it, since as I recall the support for ratification in the U.S. Senate was pretty much zero, taking it out of the President's hands.)
3) You disagree with the people described in point 2, who do not, in fact, exist.
Now, since you are clearly comfortable believing things that are contrary to known fact, why are you holding claims about global climate change to a higher standard than your ridiculous belief that there exist people who claim that the Earth's climate would be significantly different today if Bush had ignored the Senate and the constitution (hey, it wouldn't be the first time) and ratified the Kyoto Treaty?
The public debate on climate change does have a number of looney doomsayers. But for the most part scientists are pretty levelheaded about what the models say. And no one at all believes that Kyoto will have a prompt effect on the Earth's climate.
In fact, the only people I see making extravagant claims about climate disaster are people who say they do not believe in global climate change, and they always attribute those extravagant claims to un-named opponents, or they present the most extreme output of older models as if those were the results that the original modelers claimed were most probable, which is always false.
You know you're well on your way to winning a public debate when all your opponents can do is lie about what your own position is. It means that they have nothing at all left to say for themselves. They have nothing to say about the data, nothing to say about the models, no substantive critique at all.
1) The BSD license clause 3 says the FOLLOWING conditions must apply.
2) They wonder if "apply" means "apply" or something else, like "apple" or "penguin".
3) They note that one of the FOLLOWING conditions is the warranty.
4) They wonder if one of the PRECEDING conditions (clause 2) ought to be handled the same way as the the warranty.
In a narrowly construed legal sense they may have a point.
In a human being sense, if anyone has ever wondered why we all hate lawyers and think they are wankers, this is pretty much it.
It is, of course, impossible to create an unambigous document, and yet lawyers pretend to be able to do this, and then make a fortune out of their failures.
No one, ever, anywhere, has ever had any question as to what the BSD license means. So clearly there is a valid and correct reading that means what everyone knows it to mean. So clearly any reading that completely reverses that meaning must be making a mistake somewhere.
This post, by the way, can be interpreted as a love sonnet addressed to a musk ox, if you look at it closely enough and make up the meaning of a sufficiently large number of words, and wonder when I say, "it is, of course, impossible to create an unambigous document" if I really mean, "misey were the borogoves, and the momrath outrabe."
Actually, it wasn't until the advent of smokeless powder that firearms really got the upper hand.
I've seen several (U.S.) Civil War-era breastplates in museum collections.
There may have been some variation over time as to which had the upper hand. I've seen an English civil war era (cica 1640) breastplate with a nice round hole in it over the heart. Looked like 45 calibre ball or thereabouts. But that armour was probably made of very low-grade steel compared to the relatively modern steel available during the American civil war 200 years later.
We live in the Exotic Materials Age, and it is quite possible that for a time armour will once again give significant protection against most weapons. The ascendency of firearms over armour is not quite so monotonic as it is often portrayed.
The stated concern is not that the content of the tags has no standard, but that the format of the tags has no standard.
The medium, as Marshall Maclluhan said, is the message. As soon as you standardize the format of the tags you will restrict the kind of information people can convey with them. That may be an acceptable limitation to you, but not to others, and they will find workarounds that effectively break the standard.
For example, if tags were standardized on underscores to separate words you would have to forbid spaces and caps to enforce that standard. And then we would have no way of distinguishing between Polish and polish, which would be bad if you were looking for things to do with Eastern European culture or furniture care products. People would then start doing things like expressing capitalization by some other syntactical hack which would be inconsistently applied and a greater mess would ensue.
Alternatively, tags could be represented as more complex markup: <tag> <word order="1">really</word> <word order="2">stupid</word> </tag>
But because words and concepts have no general one-to-one correspondence (many words do not convey a unique concept or a concept at all, and many concepts cannot be conveyed in one word) this would be inadequate, and in any case even if the content model of the "word" tag forbade spaces, caps and underscores, people would still create tags that looked like:
<tag><word>reallystupid</word></tag>
The basic idea of "semantic markup" is wrong. From the summary:
the very embodiment of a semantic web. Unfortunately, they're not. Far from it, tags create more discord and confusion than they do minimize it. I have to say, it would be nice to just learn one way of tagging content and using it everywhere.
Actually, tags as they stand are the very embodiment of the semantic web. The only function of the semantic web is to create confusion and discord, because confusion and discord is the essence of the human epistemological condition. And the call for "one way of doing X" has a nice religious ring to it, history shows that attempts to standardize things relating to human thought are very much misguided.
Anyways, my point is that it doesn't matter if the older people don't use the metric system. Teach it to the young, and switch the entire country to the metric system on all official items. It will all sort itself out in time.
The problem in the U.S. is that short-term business interests are very resistant to this kind of change. Factories need to retool over time, mechanics need to keep two sets of tools, etc. This was an issue in Canada for a while, and I still own two sets of wrenches.
Likewise, the building trades in Canada are still very much Imperial: I'm putting an addition on my house, and all the design was done in feet and inches, the flooring is 3/4 inch plywood, etc. I know that it isn't "real" 3/4 inch ply, but rather a metric standard that is almost the same, but it's interesting that people refer to it as such.
Just as the Imperial system is a result of a collision between two ancient systems, one of them based on factors of ten and two, the other based on twelves, I can imagine a future where we retain Imperial names for particular artefacts, so two-by-fours will continue to be called that even though they are defined in millimetres (the building trades in Canada offically use mm, not metres). This makes as much sense as the old situation, where dressed 2x4's weren't two inches by four inches, so the fact that they are now 50 x 100 mm or whatever shouldn't make any difference.
There isn't much chance of the U.S. government adopting a "foreign" system of measurement any time soon, and when they do it will take a generation or two to complete the transition. My kids know their weight and height in pounds and feet, although they also probably know them in kg and m, and it is likely that my grandkids will know only the metric values.
Americans, being so much more conservative than the rest of the world (if the Democrats were a Canadian party they would be on the far, far, right) are likely to take considerably longer to make the transition.
Christianity
"When your brother, the son of your mother, or your son or your daughter, or the wife of your bosom, or your friend who is as your own soul, entices you secretly, saying 'Let us go and serve other gods,' . . . you shall kill him, your hand shall be first against him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people. You shall stone him to death with stones, because he sought to draw you away from the Lord your God. . . " (Deuteronomy 13: 6-10)
Why are you quoting the Old Testament as if it was relevant to Christianity? Jesus said very clearly that "to love God and love your neighbour even as you love yourself" is "the law and the prophets", which is to say: replaces the Old Testament as a moral guide. This is, amongst other things, why Christians don't obey Jewish dietary laws and are allowed to wear cotton-polyester.
I know that many people who call themselves Christian make the same mistake you're making, but you should hold yourself to a higher standard than them.
The problem with Christianity, and all other religions, is espistemological, not moral: they want you to take certain answers to questions on faith, and refuse to countenance any kind of investigation into those answers. This ultimately results in moral horrors, but the cause is not the religious morality as such (who would quibble with Christ's dictum of self-love, loving others, and loving some fundamental aspect of existence?) but rather the violence you have to do to your own mind to take anything on faith.
Note that "faith" does not simply mean "believes without proof" but rather, "believes in such a way that proof is not needed and disproof is not accepted."
The problem with nuclear power is that the worst case is very bad.
The real problem with nuclear power (other than the proliferating potential of all that plutonium) is that the not-nearly-so-bad case is very, very expensive.
The problem with fission is that a relatively small screw-up results in you owning a few tons of radioactive scrap metal where your core used to be. Comparable screw-ups in hydrocarbon-fueled plants result in expensive shut-downs of a couple of weeks while welders go in and patch things up, but even those cases rarely happen because there is no part of a coal plant that you can't get at whenever you need to do preventative maintenance.
Modern reactor designs will improve things over old-style designs a good deal, but the extremely high energy density in the core makes it pretty much impossible to avoid entirely. And even the best old-style designs (CANDUs) have taught us that small errors in engineering result in billions of extra costs down the road--appropos of the article, the problem with CANDUs was excessive corrosion brought on by unexpectedly high radiation damage to the fuel channels.
Scaremongering about fantasy scenarios forty years after we have seen that they really have a very low probability of happening even with terrible design and Platonically incompetent operators (Chernobyl) serves no one's interests. But on the other hand, the sunny optimism I'm hearing from nuclear boosters sounds implausibly similar to "power too cheap to meter". And the terrible reality is that every nuclear power but one has used their "civilian" nuclear program to build bombs, so the concern about proliferation cannot simply be dismissed as a bunch of whining lefty enviros who want us to all freeze in the dark.
Finally, as is often pointed out, the one long-term, low-power pebble-bed test reactor case study we have was shut down after this inherently safe design suffered an accident (partly due to operator interference) that released some radiation into the environment. This is the kind of fact that technological optimists have to put front-and-center if they are to make a plausible case for new designs. There is no point in wishing the facts away and saying, "It's perfectly safe!" No one sane will believe that. The only viable argument is one that says, "It's safe enough, and the benefits outweight the risks."
Jobs is looking for the top buyers who will pay nearly anything for a phone that just plain works and has simple email/text messaging and maybe a web browser. In this market, the iPod is really just a bonus.
Jobs is not an idiot, and it is just barely possible that Apple has done a little market research on this subject, so your statement is probably correct. This is not a phone for the average/. reader. It is a phone for the VP of Sales and/or Marketing at the company the average/. reader works for. People like that wouldn't know how to install a 3rd party app, but they sure as hell want to impress everyone else in the boardroom with their slick new phone.
If Apple follows the iPod legacy, they'll produce a device with stupidly high usability and a narrowly defined feature set that serves the objectively-identified desires of their target customers: wealthy, style-and-trend-conscious technophiles who don't actually know anything about technology. Pre-iPod, MP3 players were like those 19th century automobiles that you steered with a tiller rather than a steering wheel. The iPod didn't add any new functionality, but it made existing functionality vastly easier to use. If the iPhone does the same thing it'll be a major hit. Open or closed really doesn't matter, because that's not something that the target purchaser cares about.
I've read of computer economic models that examine wealth distribution in society. The conclusion of these models is independent of the starting conditions, and is true for a large variety of system rules where there is free trade. The conclusion is that there will be one or two extreemly individuals, with the rest of society living in poverty.
This is why I'm a social democrat, not a libertarian. Wealth tends to protect itself, and over time it is very difficult to imagine a libertarian system that does not wind up with practically everything in the hands of a relatively small clique of individuals and families.
True-believer libertarians will claim that this only happens because the wealthy can today protect themselves via illegitimate manipulations of the legal process, and that with sufficient constitutional protections against government intrusions into anything other than "law enforcement, the courts and defense" there will be no opportunity for the wealthy to suborn the law in the traditional fashion. Unfortunately, this is fantasy: no such system has ever been seen, and the few successful anarchies (medieval Iceland, say) proved to be very fragile with regard to external powers.
The challenge for us going forward is to evolve a system in which we have relatively free trade and the benefits thereof without EITHER the tendency for a small number of individuals to become extremely wealthy at the expense of everyone else OR the tendency of governmental oversight to devolve into statist corruption. Both of these tendencies, as the history of 19th century capitalism and 20th century socialism shows us, are real and dangerous. Today we still have libertarians on one side and lefties on the other claiming that only the other guy's problems are real and that their own side is problem free, which is a-historical nonsense.
I think the fundamental tool that will save us from all these bad things is the network that is connecting us right now. 100 years from now we will barely recognize the world's economy, and it will be because the 'Net has allowed us to find efficiencies that no one would have dreamed of a generation ago. Maybe that's just hopeful fantasy, but I know that the poor have always been good at finding tools to better their lot, and this seems to me to be the best tool there has ever been.
What, exactly, is the long-term, steady-state outcome of globalization going to look like for the U.S.?
First off, there is no long-term stability in the world economy, period. It is a system of dynamic equilibrium (we hope!) There may be a decade here or there of moderately stable conditions, usually ones of comfortable growth. The last time that happened was in the 50's and early 60's, which started to stagnate in the late '60's and came unhinged in the early '70's between the unpegging of the U.S. dollar from gold, and the first oil shock.
That said, the U.S. position relative to the rest of the world is likely to decline in the next few decades as the rest of the world catches up. This is a good thing, certainly for the rest of the world. Wealth for Indians does not mean poverty for Americans, UNLESS Americans cease to have anything of value to offer the world. Given the dynamic nature of parts of the American market (leaving out heavily subsidized and protected industries like farming) it is likely that there will continue to be value that Americans can provide the rest of the world. It may not be sufficient to support your enormous parasite load (litigation lawyers) but it should be enough to keep you from starving.
The squeeze for the U.S. is less from globalization as such than from the role of the dollar as the world currency. This is what is supporting the current account deficit. Because everyone wants a significant fraction of their wealth in dollars, everyone is happy selling goods to the U.S. in return for those dollars. In the short term this is ok--I once heard it described as "they send us TVs and cars and we send them little pieces of paper with 'In God We Trust' written on them". But it will maintain an artificially high value for the U.S. currency, which distorts the American economy by, amongst other things, encouraging outsourcing by making foreign workers artificially cheap.
This is not a stable situation in the long term. Galbraith apparently once suggested the creation of an artifical unit of international currency, not unlike the Euro, to protect any one nation from this kind of thing (at the time it was the post-war British economy that was being battered by the same phenomenon, as everyone wanted pounds sterling but no one wanted British-made goods.) Encouraging an orderly transition to Euros as the world currency would help the U.S., but it would also be a blow to some of the less savoury aspects of America's self-image.
Worst case, at some point American production falls so low that no one wants to buy anything from you any more (and protectionists step in to prevent the purchase of American land and assets by foreigners.) In that case we all get to experience a run on the dollar, and a global economic realignment. Who knows what the world will look like after that, but it won't look much like what we have now. Best case, the flexibility and robustness of the international currency system keeps things more-or-less stable, and America becomes one of the many wealthy nations around the world, but not the singular power it is now.
The one thing we do know: free trade is almost always better for everyone than protectionism, but free movement of capital and goods must go alongside free movement of people to maximize the benefits and minimize the costs. Otherwise local populations can be held hostage to corporations and governments who can move capital in and out of regions, but the people cannot migrate to improve their own lot. Money should not have freedoms that people do not.
First off, once they're rejected (assuming they're really rejected rather "reply hazy, ask again later"), there is zero reason to spend another second more on them.
Building relationships is key to business success, and today's losers have a way of turning into tomorrow's winners. They tend to be highly motivated.
That does not mean you have any obligation to candidates who are clearly not qualified at the current time. But history is full of people who could only get jobs a lowly patent clerks and yet wind up revolutionizing our understanding of the universe. Or who drop out of university and found companies that change industries.
Not every loser grows up to be a winner, but enough do, and they are hard enough to recognize, that it would be extremely foolish to say that you have zero reason to spend another second on someone. epsilon reason, maybe. But not zero.
The rational incentive to help others is so obvious that it hardly needs pointing out, but one place to start is: do you want to live in a world where there are people who help others? If so, there is exactly one way of ensuring that you do. Think about it for long enough and you'll figure out what it is. And companies exist embedded in the social landscape, so despite not being human they share similar incentives.
When nobody is looking, they revert to approximations.
Not quite: when nobody can be looking, they become undefined (not an approximation, which is defined but imprecise).
Since you mentioned simulation, think of it in these terms: an unobservable (not unobserved!) aspect of reality is represented by a null pointer in the view (the universe of space and time). When the simulation detects that an observation can be made by dint of strong coupling to a system with many degrees of freedom that will result in decoherence, the null pointer is assigned and points to a value from the model (whatever lies behind the quantum veil.)
Because the model is no respecter of space or time or any of the rules of the view, this is quite different from the pointer pointing to a value all along that we just don't happen to know about. The value "exists" in some fairly ethereal sense (we can assign a probability distribution to the values the model might assign to it) but the model uses unknowable rules to do the actual concrete assignment, which violate the constraints of the view (i.e. violate Bell's Inequalities).
Regardless, you are attempting a negative proof or proof of impossibility. This is a logical fallacy.
I always laugh when I hear this. Back in the day when I was part of the search for physics beyond the standard model, all we did, all day, year in and year out for decades, was prove negatives.
Protons do not decay in less that some large number of years.
The 17 keV neutrino does not exist.
There are no further generations of quarks beyond the known three.
And so on ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
It is, using certain limited forms of deductive logic, impossible to prove with deductive certainty some veryt narrowly construed types of "negative" proposition.
It is, using the much broader toolkit of empirical and theoretical science, perfectly possible to prove a very wide range of negative propositions, and we do this every day.
Even within the limits of the sort of mathematical logic used in theoretical physics we prove negatives routinely. In the late 80's and early 90's there was some interest in nonthermal plasmas and self-colliding beams for 3He or p-B fusion. Then some grad student published a proof that no such system could have a plasma beta above some critical limit, which proved that you would never be able to achieve breakeven.
This kind of thing happens all the time. The claim that "it is logically impossible to prove a negative" is either false or uninteresting. It simply does not address the kind logic and the kind of negatives that scientists routinely use.
good health insurance, stock options and 401k plans, long term security
For those of us outside the U.S., the health insurance thing isn't such a big issue. Not having to deal with an insurance market where for some unfathomable reason health insurance is tied to employment also makes it a whole lot easier to start your own company if you are outside the U.S.
Stock options are generally better with smaller companies, although they can work out for big as well. Pension plans aren't looking as good these days, with the transition away from defined benefit plans and the unfunded liability that some large companies are facing with growing retiree populations.
Long-term security can only be found in having a skill-set and professional attitude that will make you continuously employable. Some companies may be a little slower to lay people off than others, but none of them offer anything that could properly be called job security. But a good education and professional skill-set can certainly offer employment security, which is as much as anyone can ask for.
But people aren't willing to wait or pay for engineered software.
I think you've mistaken "overdesigned software" for "engineered software". In my experience engineered software is cheaper than the usual mess, because there are fewer bugs and they are found earlier in the development process. Modularity is strictly enforced so the scope of bugs is smaller and unit testing is easier.
It is certainly possible to expend huge amounts on designing a thing to death, but given the howling screw-ups that NASA has produced over the years (was that metric or Imperial?) I wouldn't hold them up as anything like an exemplar of good software engineering practice.
Remember, engineering of all kinds is a matter of finding adequate approximations and compromises to meet specified performance criteria. It is not and never has been about making everything "perfect" by some impossible standard. Perfectionism is expensive. Engineering is cheap.
The real problem with software engineering is that the vast majority of people writing software today simply do not have the intellectual discipline to undertake it.
You won't find the word "citizen" anywhere in the 4th Ammendment or anywhere else in the Bill of Rights.
I've pointed this out endlessly in the past few years, and it's good to see someone else doing it.
The American Bill of Rights is a profoundly limiting document--it restrains governments from doing certain things, period. The enumeration of rights, as clearly stated in the 9th Ammendement, is not exhaustive--it is just a list of things that the founders knew governments were particularly prone to do. And they therefore forbade the government from doing those things, without regard to whom they were being done to.
Fingerprinting non-citizens will not even raise the proverbial eye-brow of the nation...
And don't forget, it's only the terrorists who have anything to worry about, according to the article: 'We will have a world in which any terrorist who has ever been in a safe house or has ever been in a training camp is going to ask himself or herself this question: have I ever left a fingerprint anywhere?' Chertoff said.
After all, everyone who has ever been in a building or location that is later identified as a "safe house" or "training camp" by the utterly infalible authorities is obviously a terrorist, so what possible objection could there be?
Slashdot Mirror
For the $400 per hour I get charged, that PhD can focus his whole attention on my MRI. If you job is important enough to complain about possibly degraded video, it's also important enough to not multitask. Listen to MP3's on your own dime.
Could you show us some data regarding the effect of listening to music on the performance of experts doing high-concentration tasks?
I know that when I'm doing really hard coding, I want music. Less difficult stuff, I really don't care. By "really hard" I mean things like highly optimized interacting-particle monte carlo simulations. Having the music in the background seems to help me tune out everything (including, strangely enough, the music) and focus entirely on the task at hand for long periods of time. I could speculate as to why this might be so, but what matters here is that this is a fact. Music improves my performance on high-concentration tasks.
You, on the other hand, seem to have faith that someone listening to music is not able to focus as much attention on the task at hand as someone who is not. Faith is not a good basis for any kind of policy. Especially not policy that could affect the quality of health care, which is poor enough as it stands.
Electoral problems should be scrutinized and fixed based on their severity and merits, not how well they play into some "what if the other guy had won?" scenario.
But surely the effect on the outcome of the election is the best measure of "severity". If I wave a pointed stick around in a crowded room and kill someone, that is more severe than someone firing an RPG into an empty field.
Both acts, mind you, are serious crimes, but of two crimes commited with the same intent, the one that has the worst outcome is the more serious of the two.
Whoever moded this as troll is either PHB and was upset or long-time telecomuter who hasn't seen PHB in a while.
.sig, which is nothing more than an uncontroversial statement of fact based on perfectly sound statistical reasoning from well-known probability distributions.
I think my posts may sometimes get modded down by people who can't handle the truth expressed in my
Eh, I'd say being able to hold a whiteboard conversation with ones peers is extremely convenient.
Yeah, but that's not what the article is talking about, according to the summary: Company executives want face time with their employees, the study said
The point is that PHB's want their minions in sight so everyone knows who's boss. It's all about power and primate heirarchy, and nothing at all to do with efficiency and productivity.
Over the past 50 years, the gender gap has dramatically decreased in many fields requiring intelligent, technical people, but much of science and engineering has resisted diversification.
Law, medicine and accounting are all respected professions that pay well.
Engineering and science are not well-respected, and do not pay particularly well.
Consider Ph.D.'s and MD's working in cancer therapy. The average length of training is comparable, and believe me, if the Ph.D. physicist in your friendly neighbourhood radiotherapy suite screws up, you can die, so the level of responsibility (the cost of mistakes) is comparable. But MDs get paid more than twice what physicists get paid.
Or consider the hourly rate of any lawyer compared to an engineer. It's rare to find engineering time billed out at more than $200/hr, whereas I know a patent lawyer who bills at twice that rate.
Some years ago the Ontario government required that all public servants making more than $100k have their income made public. That included university professors. A tiny handful of scientists made it onto the list, much to the envy of the vast majority.
So it's no surprise that most women don't want to become scientists or engineers. The hours are long, the work is badly paid and accorded little respect. Popular culture is full of negative stereotypes of scientists and engineers: we are boring, unkempt and poor.
Women are simply making a rational calculation as to where their greatest benefit lies, and if we want to see more women in science and engineering (and who wouldn't want that?) we need most of all to see an increase in pay and status for scientists and engineers.
Creationists don't deny changes inside a species, such as developing resistances to pesticides and the like. What they deny is that one species can change so much that it becomes another species. In technical terms, what they refuse is the notion of macroevolution. That of microevolution isn't a problem for them.
Which is a huge problem, very nearly a logical contradiction, since macroevolution procedes by exactly the same processes as microevolution, albeit under rarer circumstances (founder events and what-have-you.)
Given the fact of micro-evolution, and the fact that small populations are certain to become isolated now and then, and the fact of genetic disasters in isolated populations (primate chromosome 2, for example) there is absolutely no way to avoid speciation.
Young Earth Creationists have to deny geology, history and biology.
Old Earth Creationists have to deny the laws of probability.
I know which one I'd be on being wrong...
What we argue (not deny) is how much influence mankind has had, and we call bullshit on people who think the climate would, right now, be different if only Bush had signed the Kyoto Accords.
So if I understand you correctly, you are claiming three things:
1) Human beings may or may not have had an influence on the Earth's climate in the past few hundred years.
2) There exist people who claim that the Earth's climate would, right now, be different if only Bush had signed the Kyoto Accords (which is a very weird way to put it, since as I recall the support for ratification in the U.S. Senate was pretty much zero, taking it out of the President's hands.)
3) You disagree with the people described in point 2, who do not, in fact, exist.
Now, since you are clearly comfortable believing things that are contrary to known fact, why are you holding claims about global climate change to a higher standard than your ridiculous belief that there exist people who claim that the Earth's climate would be significantly different today if Bush had ignored the Senate and the constitution (hey, it wouldn't be the first time) and ratified the Kyoto Treaty?
The public debate on climate change does have a number of looney doomsayers. But for the most part scientists are pretty levelheaded about what the models say. And no one at all believes that Kyoto will have a prompt effect on the Earth's climate.
In fact, the only people I see making extravagant claims about climate disaster are people who say they do not believe in global climate change, and they always attribute those extravagant claims to un-named opponents, or they present the most extreme output of older models as if those were the results that the original modelers claimed were most probable, which is always false.
You know you're well on your way to winning a public debate when all your opponents can do is lie about what your own position is. It means that they have nothing at all left to say for themselves. They have nothing to say about the data, nothing to say about the models, no substantive critique at all.
It's rather sad, really.
Gah! I'm a terrible speller and try to proof my posts. But not, apparently, my subject lines.
They seem to be saying this:
1) The BSD license clause 3 says the FOLLOWING conditions must apply.
2) They wonder if "apply" means "apply" or something else, like "apple" or "penguin".
3) They note that one of the FOLLOWING conditions is the warranty.
4) They wonder if one of the PRECEDING conditions (clause 2) ought to be handled the same way as the the warranty.
In a narrowly construed legal sense they may have a point.
In a human being sense, if anyone has ever wondered why we all hate lawyers and think they are wankers, this is pretty much it.
It is, of course, impossible to create an unambigous document, and yet lawyers pretend to be able to do this, and then make a fortune out of their failures.
No one, ever, anywhere, has ever had any question as to what the BSD license means. So clearly there is a valid and correct reading that means what everyone knows it to mean. So clearly any reading that completely reverses that meaning must be making a mistake somewhere.
This post, by the way, can be interpreted as a love sonnet addressed to a musk ox, if you look at it closely enough and make up the meaning of a sufficiently large number of words, and wonder when I say, "it is, of course, impossible to create an unambigous document" if I really mean, "misey were the borogoves, and the momrath outrabe."
Actually, it wasn't until the advent of smokeless powder that firearms really got the upper hand.
I've seen several (U.S.) Civil War-era breastplates in museum collections.
There may have been some variation over time as to which had the upper hand. I've seen an English civil war era (cica 1640) breastplate with a nice round hole in it over the heart. Looked like 45 calibre ball or thereabouts. But that armour was probably made of very low-grade steel compared to the relatively modern steel available during the American civil war 200 years later.
We live in the Exotic Materials Age, and it is quite possible that for a time armour will once again give significant protection against most weapons. The ascendency of firearms over armour is not quite so monotonic as it is often portrayed.
The stated concern is not that the content of the tags has no standard, but that the format of the tags has no standard.
The medium, as Marshall Maclluhan said, is the message. As soon as you standardize the format of the tags you will restrict the kind of information people can convey with them. That may be an acceptable limitation to you, but not to others, and they will find workarounds that effectively break the standard.
For example, if tags were standardized on underscores to separate words you would have to forbid spaces and caps to enforce that standard. And then we would have no way of distinguishing between Polish and polish, which would be bad if you were looking for things to do with Eastern European culture or furniture care products. People would then start doing things like expressing capitalization by some other syntactical hack which would be inconsistently applied and a greater mess would ensue.
Alternatively, tags could be represented as more complex markup:
<tag>
<word order="1">really</word>
<word order="2">stupid</word>
</tag>
But because words and concepts have no general one-to-one correspondence (many words do not convey a unique concept or a concept at all, and many concepts cannot be conveyed in one word) this would be inadequate, and in any case even if the content model of the "word" tag forbade spaces, caps and underscores, people would still create tags that looked like:
<tag><word>reallystupid</word></tag>
The basic idea of "semantic markup" is wrong. From the summary:
the very embodiment of a semantic web. Unfortunately, they're not. Far from it, tags create more discord and confusion than they do minimize it. I have to say, it would be nice to just learn one way of tagging content and using it everywhere.
Actually, tags as they stand are the very embodiment of the semantic web. The only function of the semantic web is to create confusion and discord, because confusion and discord is the essence of the human epistemological condition. And the call for "one way of doing X" has a nice religious ring to it, history shows that attempts to standardize things relating to human thought are very much misguided.
Anyways, my point is that it doesn't matter if the older people don't use the metric system. Teach it to the young, and switch the entire country to the metric system on all official items. It will all sort itself out in time.
The problem in the U.S. is that short-term business interests are very resistant to this kind of change. Factories need to retool over time, mechanics need to keep two sets of tools, etc. This was an issue in Canada for a while, and I still own two sets of wrenches.
Likewise, the building trades in Canada are still very much Imperial: I'm putting an addition on my house, and all the design was done in feet and inches, the flooring is 3/4 inch plywood, etc. I know that it isn't "real" 3/4 inch ply, but rather a metric standard that is almost the same, but it's interesting that people refer to it as such.
Just as the Imperial system is a result of a collision between two ancient systems, one of them based on factors of ten and two, the other based on twelves, I can imagine a future where we retain Imperial names for particular artefacts, so two-by-fours will continue to be called that even though they are defined in millimetres (the building trades in Canada offically use mm, not metres). This makes as much sense as the old situation, where dressed 2x4's weren't two inches by four inches, so the fact that they are now 50 x 100 mm or whatever shouldn't make any difference.
There isn't much chance of the U.S. government adopting a "foreign" system of measurement any time soon, and when they do it will take a generation or two to complete the transition. My kids know their weight and height in pounds and feet, although they also probably know them in kg and m, and it is likely that my grandkids will know only the metric values.
Americans, being so much more conservative than the rest of the world (if the Democrats were a Canadian party they would be on the far, far, right) are likely to take considerably longer to make the transition.
Christianity
"When your brother, the son of your mother, or your son or your daughter, or the wife of your bosom, or your friend who is as your own soul, entices you secretly, saying 'Let us go and serve other gods,' . . . you shall kill him, your hand shall be first against him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people. You shall stone him to death with stones, because he sought to draw you away from the Lord your God. . . " (Deuteronomy 13: 6-10)
Why are you quoting the Old Testament as if it was relevant to Christianity? Jesus said very clearly that "to love God and love your neighbour even as you love yourself" is "the law and the prophets", which is to say: replaces the Old Testament as a moral guide. This is, amongst other things, why Christians don't obey Jewish dietary laws and are allowed to wear cotton-polyester.
I know that many people who call themselves Christian make the same mistake you're making, but you should hold yourself to a higher standard than them.
The problem with Christianity, and all other religions, is espistemological, not moral: they want you to take certain answers to questions on faith, and refuse to countenance any kind of investigation into those answers. This ultimately results in moral horrors, but the cause is not the religious morality as such (who would quibble with Christ's dictum of self-love, loving others, and loving some fundamental aspect of existence?) but rather the violence you have to do to your own mind to take anything on faith.
Note that "faith" does not simply mean "believes without proof" but rather, "believes in such a way that proof is not needed and disproof is not accepted."
The problem with nuclear power is that the worst case is very bad.
The real problem with nuclear power (other than the proliferating potential of all that plutonium) is that the not-nearly-so-bad case is very, very expensive.
The problem with fission is that a relatively small screw-up results in you owning a few tons of radioactive scrap metal where your core used to be. Comparable screw-ups in hydrocarbon-fueled plants result in expensive shut-downs of a couple of weeks while welders go in and patch things up, but even those cases rarely happen because there is no part of a coal plant that you can't get at whenever you need to do preventative maintenance.
Modern reactor designs will improve things over old-style designs a good deal, but the extremely high energy density in the core makes it pretty much impossible to avoid entirely. And even the best old-style designs (CANDUs) have taught us that small errors in engineering result in billions of extra costs down the road--appropos of the article, the problem with CANDUs was excessive corrosion brought on by unexpectedly high radiation damage to the fuel channels.
Scaremongering about fantasy scenarios forty years after we have seen that they really have a very low probability of happening even with terrible design and Platonically incompetent operators (Chernobyl) serves no one's interests. But on the other hand, the sunny optimism I'm hearing from nuclear boosters sounds implausibly similar to "power too cheap to meter". And the terrible reality is that every nuclear power but one has used their "civilian" nuclear program to build bombs, so the concern about proliferation cannot simply be dismissed as a bunch of whining lefty enviros who want us to all freeze in the dark.
Finally, as is often pointed out, the one long-term, low-power pebble-bed test reactor case study we have was shut down after this inherently safe design suffered an accident (partly due to operator interference) that released some radiation into the environment. This is the kind of fact that technological optimists have to put front-and-center if they are to make a plausible case for new designs. There is no point in wishing the facts away and saying, "It's perfectly safe!" No one sane will believe that. The only viable argument is one that says, "It's safe enough, and the benefits outweight the risks."
Jobs is looking for the top buyers who will pay nearly anything for a phone that just plain works and has simple email/text messaging and maybe a web browser. In this market, the iPod is really just a bonus.
/. reader. It is a phone for the VP of Sales and/or Marketing at the company the average /. reader works for. People like that wouldn't know how to install a 3rd party app, but they sure as hell want to impress everyone else in the boardroom with their slick new phone.
Jobs is not an idiot, and it is just barely possible that Apple has done a little market research on this subject, so your statement is probably correct. This is not a phone for the average
If Apple follows the iPod legacy, they'll produce a device with stupidly high usability and a narrowly defined feature set that serves the objectively-identified desires of their target customers: wealthy, style-and-trend-conscious technophiles who don't actually know anything about technology. Pre-iPod, MP3 players were like those 19th century automobiles that you steered with a tiller rather than a steering wheel. The iPod didn't add any new functionality, but it made existing functionality vastly easier to use. If the iPhone does the same thing it'll be a major hit. Open or closed really doesn't matter, because that's not something that the target purchaser cares about.
I've read of computer economic models that examine wealth distribution in society. The conclusion of these models is independent of the starting conditions, and is true for a large variety of system rules where there is free trade. The conclusion is that there will be one or two extreemly individuals, with the rest of society living in poverty.
This is why I'm a social democrat, not a libertarian. Wealth tends to protect itself, and over time it is very difficult to imagine a libertarian system that does not wind up with practically everything in the hands of a relatively small clique of individuals and families.
True-believer libertarians will claim that this only happens because the wealthy can today protect themselves via illegitimate manipulations of the legal process, and that with sufficient constitutional protections against government intrusions into anything other than "law enforcement, the courts and defense" there will be no opportunity for the wealthy to suborn the law in the traditional fashion. Unfortunately, this is fantasy: no such system has ever been seen, and the few successful anarchies (medieval Iceland, say) proved to be very fragile with regard to external powers.
The challenge for us going forward is to evolve a system in which we have relatively free trade and the benefits thereof without EITHER the tendency for a small number of individuals to become extremely wealthy at the expense of everyone else OR the tendency of governmental oversight to devolve into statist corruption. Both of these tendencies, as the history of 19th century capitalism and 20th century socialism shows us, are real and dangerous. Today we still have libertarians on one side and lefties on the other claiming that only the other guy's problems are real and that their own side is problem free, which is a-historical nonsense.
I think the fundamental tool that will save us from all these bad things is the network that is connecting us right now. 100 years from now we will barely recognize the world's economy, and it will be because the 'Net has allowed us to find efficiencies that no one would have dreamed of a generation ago. Maybe that's just hopeful fantasy, but I know that the poor have always been good at finding tools to better their lot, and this seems to me to be the best tool there has ever been.
What, exactly, is the long-term, steady-state outcome of globalization going to look like for the U.S.?
First off, there is no long-term stability in the world economy, period. It is a system of dynamic equilibrium (we hope!) There may be a decade here or there of moderately stable conditions, usually ones of comfortable growth. The last time that happened was in the 50's and early 60's, which started to stagnate in the late '60's and came unhinged in the early '70's between the unpegging of the U.S. dollar from gold, and the first oil shock.
That said, the U.S. position relative to the rest of the world is likely to decline in the next few decades as the rest of the world catches up. This is a good thing, certainly for the rest of the world. Wealth for Indians does not mean poverty for Americans, UNLESS Americans cease to have anything of value to offer the world. Given the dynamic nature of parts of the American market (leaving out heavily subsidized and protected industries like farming) it is likely that there will continue to be value that Americans can provide the rest of the world. It may not be sufficient to support your enormous parasite load (litigation lawyers) but it should be enough to keep you from starving.
The squeeze for the U.S. is less from globalization as such than from the role of the dollar as the world currency. This is what is supporting the current account deficit. Because everyone wants a significant fraction of their wealth in dollars, everyone is happy selling goods to the U.S. in return for those dollars. In the short term this is ok--I once heard it described as "they send us TVs and cars and we send them little pieces of paper with 'In God We Trust' written on them". But it will maintain an artificially high value for the U.S. currency, which distorts the American economy by, amongst other things, encouraging outsourcing by making foreign workers artificially cheap.
This is not a stable situation in the long term. Galbraith apparently once suggested the creation of an artifical unit of international currency, not unlike the Euro, to protect any one nation from this kind of thing (at the time it was the post-war British economy that was being battered by the same phenomenon, as everyone wanted pounds sterling but no one wanted British-made goods.) Encouraging an orderly transition to Euros as the world currency would help the U.S., but it would also be a blow to some of the less savoury aspects of America's self-image.
Worst case, at some point American production falls so low that no one wants to buy anything from you any more (and protectionists step in to prevent the purchase of American land and assets by foreigners.) In that case we all get to experience a run on the dollar, and a global economic realignment. Who knows what the world will look like after that, but it won't look much like what we have now. Best case, the flexibility and robustness of the international currency system keeps things more-or-less stable, and America becomes one of the many wealthy nations around the world, but not the singular power it is now.
The one thing we do know: free trade is almost always better for everyone than protectionism, but free movement of capital and goods must go alongside free movement of people to maximize the benefits and minimize the costs. Otherwise local populations can be held hostage to corporations and governments who can move capital in and out of regions, but the people cannot migrate to improve their own lot. Money should not have freedoms that people do not.
First off, once they're rejected (assuming they're really rejected rather "reply hazy, ask again later"), there is zero reason to spend another second more on them.
Building relationships is key to business success, and today's losers have a way of turning into tomorrow's winners. They tend to be highly motivated.
That does not mean you have any obligation to candidates who are clearly not qualified at the current time. But history is full of people who could only get jobs a lowly patent clerks and yet wind up revolutionizing our understanding of the universe. Or who drop out of university and found companies that change industries.
Not every loser grows up to be a winner, but enough do, and they are hard enough to recognize, that it would be extremely foolish to say that you have zero reason to spend another second on someone. epsilon reason, maybe. But not zero.
The rational incentive to help others is so obvious that it hardly needs pointing out, but one place to start is: do you want to live in a world where there are people who help others? If so, there is exactly one way of ensuring that you do. Think about it for long enough and you'll figure out what it is. And companies exist embedded in the social landscape, so despite not being human they share similar incentives.
When nobody is looking, they revert to approximations.
Not quite: when nobody can be looking, they become undefined (not an approximation, which is defined but imprecise).
Since you mentioned simulation, think of it in these terms: an unobservable (not unobserved!) aspect of reality is represented by a null pointer in the view (the universe of space and time). When the simulation detects that an observation can be made by dint of strong coupling to a system with many degrees of freedom that will result in decoherence, the null pointer is assigned and points to a value from the model (whatever lies behind the quantum veil.)
Because the model is no respecter of space or time or any of the rules of the view, this is quite different from the pointer pointing to a value all along that we just don't happen to know about. The value "exists" in some fairly ethereal sense (we can assign a probability distribution to the values the model might assign to it) but the model uses unknowable rules to do the actual concrete assignment, which violate the constraints of the view (i.e. violate Bell's Inequalities).
Regardless, you are attempting a negative proof or proof of impossibility. This is a logical fallacy.
I always laugh when I hear this. Back in the day when I was part of the search for physics beyond the standard model, all we did, all day, year in and year out for decades, was prove negatives.
Protons do not decay in less that some large number of years.
The 17 keV neutrino does not exist.
There are no further generations of quarks beyond the known three.
And so on ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
It is, using certain limited forms of deductive logic, impossible to prove with deductive certainty some veryt narrowly construed types of "negative" proposition.
It is, using the much broader toolkit of empirical and theoretical science, perfectly possible to prove a very wide range of negative propositions, and we do this every day.
Even within the limits of the sort of mathematical logic used in theoretical physics we prove negatives routinely. In the late 80's and early 90's there was some interest in nonthermal plasmas and self-colliding beams for 3He or p-B fusion. Then some grad student published a proof that no such system could have a plasma beta above some critical limit, which proved that you would never be able to achieve breakeven.
This kind of thing happens all the time. The claim that "it is logically impossible to prove a negative" is either false or uninteresting. It simply does not address the kind logic and the kind of negatives that scientists routinely use.
What bothers me more is their excessive flashlight use and inability to, oh, you know, TURN ON THE FUCKING LIGHT SWITCH.
Relief. Shadows. Focus of attention.
good health insurance, stock options and 401k plans, long term security
For those of us outside the U.S., the health insurance thing isn't such a big issue. Not having to deal with an insurance market where for some unfathomable reason health insurance is tied to employment also makes it a whole lot easier to start your own company if you are outside the U.S.
Stock options are generally better with smaller companies, although they can work out for big as well. Pension plans aren't looking as good these days, with the transition away from defined benefit plans and the unfunded liability that some large companies are facing with growing retiree populations.
Long-term security can only be found in having a skill-set and professional attitude that will make you continuously employable. Some companies may be a little slower to lay people off than others, but none of them offer anything that could properly be called job security. But a good education and professional skill-set can certainly offer employment security, which is as much as anyone can ask for.
But people aren't willing to wait or pay for engineered software.
I think you've mistaken "overdesigned software" for "engineered software". In my experience engineered software is cheaper than the usual mess, because there are fewer bugs and they are found earlier in the development process. Modularity is strictly enforced so the scope of bugs is smaller and unit testing is easier.
It is certainly possible to expend huge amounts on designing a thing to death, but given the howling screw-ups that NASA has produced over the years (was that metric or Imperial?) I wouldn't hold them up as anything like an exemplar of good software engineering practice.
Remember, engineering of all kinds is a matter of finding adequate approximations and compromises to meet specified performance criteria. It is not and never has been about making everything "perfect" by some impossible standard. Perfectionism is expensive. Engineering is cheap.
The real problem with software engineering is that the vast majority of people writing software today simply do not have the intellectual discipline to undertake it.
You won't find the word "citizen" anywhere in the 4th Ammendment or anywhere else in the Bill of Rights.
I've pointed this out endlessly in the past few years, and it's good to see someone else doing it.
The American Bill of Rights is a profoundly limiting document--it restrains governments from doing certain things, period. The enumeration of rights, as clearly stated in the 9th Ammendement, is not exhaustive--it is just a list of things that the founders knew governments were particularly prone to do. And they therefore forbade the government from doing those things, without regard to whom they were being done to.
Fingerprinting non-citizens will not even raise the proverbial eye-brow of the nation...
And don't forget, it's only the terrorists who have anything to worry about, according to the article: 'We will have a world in which any terrorist who has ever been in a safe house or has ever been in a training camp is going to ask himself or herself this question: have I ever left a fingerprint anywhere?' Chertoff said.
After all, everyone who has ever been in a building or location that is later identified as a "safe house" or "training camp" by the utterly infalible authorities is obviously a terrorist, so what possible objection could there be?