Uber/Lyft/whoever buys a small fleet of buses. You use a smartphone app to say you want to get to B by 3pm, ridesharing service responds "I can pick you up between 2:20-2:30 and drop you off between 2:50-3". One of the buses already carrying a small group of passengers then makes a small detour to pick you up (maintaining all the other contracts it agreed to, basically a travelling salesman problem) and you're on your way. You could even arrange a daily pickup for work.
It's tough as hell to pull off, but it's flexible, it's something the system described in the article could grow into organically, and it could actually compete with mass transit on price and environmental efficiency.
Since the book(s) have all the action in the background, and the big reveal in the post crisis recap, I am sure the movie will suck.
First, it's a series, not a movie.
Second, HBO usually does a great job with these types of series. Game of Thrones doesn't have every battle that's in the books, but they often-times refer to the battles and the aftermath in dialog. No reason to think this would be any different.
Except GRRM grew up in the age of television and has written for television. Even if he didn't write with the aim of a television adaption his books were still written with the influence of television storytelling and visual action. They're a lot easier to adapt for television as a result.
Asimov grew up with pulp magazines and the major non-book mass media would have been radio (which also influenced the pulp fiction), as a result his stories emphasized dialogue over visual storytelling.
They still might be able to make a great adaption, but the only way to make it remotely faithful might be to make it more of a political drama.
Epic's Unreal Engine 4 and the Unity engine both have Linux versions already. So does Valve's (obviously). EA's Frostbite engine has an OpenGL version, so that's part of the way. There's no market. Not a significant one, anyhow. Most people that are in the market to buy games either have a console, handheld, or a Windows/OSX PC. The vast majority. Then you've got the people like me, who dual boot all of their systems (so we're already customers, anyhow).
Of course there aren't a lot of gamers who run pure Linux systems, because there aren't enough high quality games to be a gamer on a pure Linux system.
But if SteamOS becomes more popular then some Linux gamers who dual boot start going pure Linux (and playing more games because rebooting is less of a hassle). And some current pure Linux users who do a little gaming, and have been satisfied with basic Linux games, start buying modern games through valve.
It's not a huge market but there's enough that I can see them being interested, particularly since it gives Valve a chance to corner the new market.
my point being, they're not reporting a new discovery of any kind. they're announcing the start of a new line of inquiry... which, you know is exactly the thing that you do when you're not satisfied with the old line of inquiry.
the title and summary are specifically highlighting that scientists think other life forms exist that may be more novel than we previously thought.
my question would be... did this thought just occur to you? that maybe we don't know everything about the way life can be expressed? it's news that some people have suddenly decided to stumble upon a realization that most people have already had?
my first thought when reading the article was "no duh"
For me the bulk of the article talking about the problem of detecting novel forms of life on earth was setup, ie you're reading a science story here's the background. The actual payload was the bit about the new methods they're developing now. I do agree they could have highlighted the new advancements a bit better as that part was a bit vague.
I was under the impression that news was about you know, new things.
If that's your criteria for science news then you're going to get low quality science news because new science is typically wrong in some way.
This is just an article highlighting that money has up until now been targetted toward things we are pretty sure exist. you know, novel creatures not using radically different genetic bases. This is just some dudes going, "yup, there might be more out there than we thought" which is you know, the basic premise of all the sciences.
Come back to me when they actually find something that uses a sixth nucleotide.
Incidentally, where might this new life have hidden, that we haven't searched already. We've got extremophiles in the middle of godforsaken rocks already... there aren't that many new places that i imagine we
A. haven't looked already B. aren't already colonized by the cousins we know.
Generally speaking, the new life would need to be able to outcompete, in certain circumstances, the stuff we know or it wouldn't survive too well the 2 billion years that bacteria have dominated the planet.
i'd think the only viable thing would be viruses, maybe, and us not fully understanding them. but then i'd imagine if an different nucleotide were somehow incorporated into a virus we'd already found, it'd also be present enough to show up as an unknown nucleotide. Might not know what it was, but we'd most likely have an idea that it were there.
It's more than that.
For one they do cite evidence in the form of viruses with what seems to be very old DNA that isn't present in current known lifeforms. They figgured the viruses got those codes a very long time ago and had merely preserved them but they're now exploring the possibility those lifeforms are still around somewhere.
It also mentions they're beginning this new line of investigation, developing techniques to look for novel lifeforms that wouldn't be detected under current methods, for instance looking for DNA bases that aren't used by any known organisms. I think the start of the investigation is newsworthy in itself, if you only hear about the discoveries you're missing out on a lot of the story.
Russia has just announced that the times 9:41 and 9:42 are banned as promoting sodomy.
New clocks must be designed so that upon reaching 9:40 they advance directly to 9:43. Unfortunately there will be a transition period where gay fascist clocks are still in wide circulation. Patriotic Russians around such a clock while it displays 9:41 or 9:42 are advised to defend themselves from the homosexual propaganda by deeply meditating on the manly deeds of Vladamir Putin.
A number of similar articles have revealed more tidbits of Apples' Jobs-worship culture recently.
Taken one by one, they just come across as nice gestures to honor the company's co-founder. Additively they're starting to become really, really weird.
When Tim Cook dropped the bomb during his Charlie Rose interview that Jobs' office is maintained exactly as it was before his death, sealed, undisturbed - it raised an eyebrow.
The entire affair reminds me of the religion that pulp science fiction author started - the one with an office maintained in his honor at all their locations. You know the one. I suppose next we'll discover there is a Steve Jobs alcove located in the rear stockroom of all Apple stores.
Look, I got my first Apple product in 1983, and own quite a few current models at this time. But... admiration is one thing, hero worship is quite another. No thanks.
I suspect it's more marketing. People like to personify companies to get a better understanding of them, a charismatic CEO like Jobs makes it that much easier. Jobs being dead makes him more likeable (and less likely to do something stupid), if Apple can keep Jobs around as a sort of spirit guide it helps sales.
Though for this story I think it's less about Jobs and more about showing off their attention to detail.
Lacking a physics background, I'm not the right person to make it.
This being Slashdot, I will anyway. It's like you went to a car sales lot with 100 fully functional cars on display. You put them all into a (really) huge car compactor, and out comes a baseball-sided chunk of metal, plastic, and glass. Its brake-lights don't work.
I feel like a sports analogy is in order here.
Lacking a physics background, I'm not the right person to make it
This being Slashdot, I will anyway. It's like you have a hockey team with a bunch of good players. You then add a bunch of face-punchers who get in fights and act gritty, and out comes a dysfunction train wreck of a hockey team. They don't show up on the scoresheet.
After Apple CEO Tim Cook publicly called for sodomy
I know this is terrible and all, but as someone completely unaffected by this (not an apple fanboy, russian or gay) I find some kind of weird surreal humour in the whole thing.
I wonder if that's intentional. If there's any liberalism left in Russia it would be in technology companies (particularly ones with Apple fanboys), and if they want to protect themselves distancing themselves from a suddenly controversial company is a good idea.
If that's the case a ridiculous statement like "Apple CEO Tim Cook publicly called for sodomy" might be their own little in-joke at the absurdity of the politics.
You have your opinion about which scientists have valid opinions, I have mine. Thus we part ways. Compelling data requires no advocates - e.g. I went quickly from scoffing at dark matter to believing the WIMP model whole-heartedly based on the CMBR data, which had nothing to do with the opinion of any given scientist. Such data may yet emerge for a particular climate model that stands out from the crowd, but as yet none have distinguished themselves even from the null hypothesis.
On a fundamental level why do you trust your judgement more than the people whom have been studying it full time for years or decades?
Do you think them to be incompetent? Unethical? It just strikes me as exceptionally arrogant to place so much faith in your own reasoning that you'd completely discount the opinions of one of the smartest and most honest groups on the planet.
And to be honest if you talked about Mullis because also buy into AIDS denialism then you need to step back and seriously reassess how you evaluate evidence.
More like: that's a non-scientific event staged for a political purpose. Who organized the "coming together" and picked the scientist to participate in the "coming together"?
So you don't trust the UN as a venue for gathering scientists, you're still showing no evidence that it's a problem.
Opinions (especially guesses) are useful in the process of science, but are not scientific outcomes. Consensus is meaningless.
Consensus is meaningless....
So you've created a standard whereby you can pretty much ignore all the scientsts.
Models that falsifiably predict outcomes (which differ from the null hypothesis), and then such outcomes emerge - that's compelling. Data that selects one accurate model out of a large pack of models as the only successful predictor - that's compelling.
So the virtually unanimous opinions of numbers experts is meaningless. But the textbook definition of a publication bias is compelling.
Not if they wanted funding, ever again.
Yes...
Because the last thing a scientist wants to do is discover something new or prove the consensus wrong...
Also, societal forces are powerful.
Here's an anecdote unrelated to climate. Kary Mullis, Nobel Laureate for biochem, once tried to present a paper at a biochem-themed conference on AIDS research. His presentation (would have) pointed out that there's no actual causal evidence between HIV and AIDS - the correlation is inarguable, but there was no understood process by which HIV might cause the symptoms of AIDS (at a detailed level). He was physically ejected from the conference for daring to question the received wisdom. That's the opposite of good science, but that social force is common, and dissenting opinions get quashed under it.
Kary Mullis's paper wouldn't have pointed that out, the causal evidence for HIV and AIDS is overwhelming. Whatever happened at that conference happened because he was selling junk science that's literally getting people killed. Yes he won a Nobel, he also believes in astrology, you really think he's the brave iconoclast you want to use as an example?
You keep saying all you care about is the data, yet you seem to think these people who have the data are somehow incapable of convincing people of their conclusions.
Did you consider the scenario that top scientists are actually very knowledable and rational in their fields, and the reason they're not criticizing the IPCC reports is because they're generally right?
My boss once wrote kernel code for a living, but he's a second-level manager now. Is he a coder? The farther up the chain you move, the more you align yourself with the interests of the organization.
So if a scientist expresses an opinion on AGW you can ignore them because it's just one scientist's opinion (and you probably won't hear the opinion anyway since they're probably not doing much media).
If a group of scientists come together to all endorse the same message, you can ignore them because they're just a bunch of politicians who's opinions are determined by the organization.
So there's pretty much no scenario in which you have to confront the existence of a scientific consensus.
Btw, note that your accusation that the IPCC is being dominated by the politics instead of the science is testable. Namely if it were true we'd see parades of high profile climatologists and scientists criticizing the process and the outcome. Instead the lists of 'dissidents' are uniformly unimpressive. This tells me the science behind the report is of far higher quality than you suggest.
But the UN is not a gathering of scientists; it's a gathering of politicians, and as such they make political announcements. As a political body with 1 vote per country, pretty much all they ever do is call for redistribution of wealth, and that directly motivates any muddled reading of science that you'll get from them.
The caption on the article's first photo reads "UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, left, and Chairman of the IPCC Rajendra K. Pachauri present a..."
"He joined the North Carolina State University in Raleigh, USA, where he obtained an MS in Industrial Engineering in 1972, and a PhD with co-majors in Industrial Engineering and Economics in 1974. His doctoral thesis was titled, A dynamic model for forecasting of electrical energy demand in a specific region located in North and South Carolina"
Since the Chairman of the IPCC, the group who wrote the report, is a scientist, I'm curious where you're finding all of these politicians? It seems to me like you're using a heuristic where any scientist who makes a recommendation that runs contrary to your politics gets automatically reclassified as a politician.
"The broad assumption is that a high percentage of their black and Latino employees work in their warehouses."
You mean they discriminate against White and Asian warehouse employees?
I think it's obvious that most people would agree that working as a software delevoper is preferable to working in a warehouse.
There's a strong argument that Amazon isn't the one to blame for it's poor diversity among the technical ranks. But I think it's far from ideal that high status jobs are overwhelmingly held by Whites and East Asians while Blacks and Hispanics struggle to get even low status work.
By his standard, they can't compel you to give your fingerprint *for this purpose*. It's about compelling you to divulge information. If they already have your fingerprint *not solely for this purpose*, they have no need to compel you to unlock your phone with your own fingers. If they don't have the right tools to do it, too fucking bad for them.
I have no interest in making it easy for government thugs to force people to incriminate themselves, unlike you and your straw men.
If you want to argue that the courts are given too much power to compel disclosure you can make that argument.
But to me this ruling seems perfectly in line with existing standards.
Giving a fingerprint for the purpose is basically the same as giving a passcode, since either way they get access all sorts of information on your phone, which you're forced to help them retrieve. Unsurprising that a judge would try to find 'clever' ways around the spirit of the constitution and put little thought into their decision.
In reality, they shouldn't be able to force you to do any such thing. No passcodes, and no fingerprints for the purposes of granting them access to your information.
So by your standard they're not able to hack your computer, or access your email account, or search your house, because all of those things reveal tons of information about you.
Nor can they have you give fingerprints, stand in a line up, or respond to a supeona since they're forcing you to do something.
This was the right decision and completely in line with the US constitution. This wasn't a warrantless search done during a traffic stop. This was a request made by the prosecutor during a trial, the defendent doesn't have to speak, they just have to press their information to a pad to unlock information the court has requested.
It looks like the majority of the top 20 most cited papers cover new methods or tools (e.g., a new lab technique or a new software program), not new fundamental scientific discoveries (e.g., the structure of DNA or expansion of the universe). I guess this isn't really surprising, but it is interesting. One could conclude that scientists who want to make a major impact on their field should spend their time inventing new methods for doing fundamental research and let other scientists actually do the research.
I think something else is going on.
The point of science is discovery so if you make some great discovery people start investigating it. With every new paper someone is pushing further into the unknown, eventually enough people have built on your discovery si that when someone wants to build on your work they don't cite your paper, they cite the paper that cited your paper.
But with methods the bigger concern is simply getting things done. So you may get fewer advancements because fewer people develop them and the state of the art stays current longer. But more importantly the important thing it to bring the reader up to speed with what you did as quickly as possible. Therefore you cite the paper that everyone else cites so you can say "I did more or less what everyone else did", you can then offer further citations if you used refinements of the method.
It likely was a combination of factors, they say, including ocean circulation, changing wind patterns and terrestrial processes.
Actually they do know, they just don't know precisely.
You're basically implying their knowledge is zero, the truth is they've already ruled out countless possibilities, they just haven't gotten all the way to the truth.
"This abrupt, centennial-scale variability of CO2 appears to be a fundamental part of the global carbon cycle. "Previous research has hinted at the possibility that spikes in atmospheric carbon dioxide may have accelerated the last deglaciation, but that hypothesis had not been resolved, the researchers say.
The earth has been from +14 to -6 degrees on average from where it is today. Historically speaking, were in the "colder than usual" range of the bell curve today, and thats with using ice cores to detect CO2 levels and temperature histories. Its not like we had a thermocouple hooked up to a server recording that data for millions of years. These deductions are best effort conclusions on data that only tells a very broad stroke of the story.
Interesting but I'm not sure how it's relevant.
What upsets me is how demonizing the argument about Global Warming / Climate Change is. The earth will change its temperature. That will happen with or without us, just look at the historical record. Earths temperature isn't stable.
You're arguing a strawman, no one has ever argued that climate is completely stable without us. The claim is that we're undergoing an extreme and dangerous rate of change due to human causes.
And for all those who argue we are burning too much fossil fuels, those carbon atoms weren't created into existence in the ground as they were today, unless you believe the earth is 6000 years old!
Ahh, I get it.
AGW deniers are often associated with Young Earth Creationists (YECs) because the religious right and YECs are fairly well represented in the AGW denier community. Therefore you compare AGW proponents to YECs, and if any show outrage at the comparison you can say they're hypocritical because of how people associate YECs with denialists.
They were a part of the global carbon cycle, and buried during mass extinction events and processes that sequestered them to where they are today. It isn't science to say "for sure this and for sure that". Its science to say: "To the level of our current understanding...". Thats it. You can't know for certain, just like they didn't know for certain that the earth was the center of the universe, even though it was proselytized. Its not OK to attack the character of an individual when they are skeptical of your conclusions. All of science works better when there are those who are skeptical. It refines your proof if you are right, or betters your understanding if you are wrong.
As for the problems associated with climate change, it will happen. For those of us living where it will flood, there will be a new continent to live on, once it unfreezes (again!).
And again I'm not sure what the point of this section was other than to accuse the researchers of not doing science... and then promptly follow that up with a deliciously ironic complaint that people shouldn't "attack the character of an individual when they are skeptical of your conclusions".
I can assure you, when I analyze any hardware/software system I don't in any manner way shape or form categorize anything, or base any decision on the age of, and subsystem.
I doubt I'm the only competent analyst.
I'm not saying competent analysts can find these bugs. What I'm suggesting is that they don't have a lot of motive to look and I think this story is evidence of that. If a lot of analysts were already examining Linux and all the basic tools then why the sudden flood of bugs now?
"But with Linux most contributors, be they individuals or companies, are primarily concerned with their own projects."
Your definition of contributor is skewed. A FOSS contributor may do so in many ways. Clearly a project lead for a major project isn't going to contribute further by analyzing the ecosystem; their plate is full. There are others, also known as contributors, who do this. Other contributors administer project websites or write documentation. There is a whole wide array of types of contributors.
That being said, clearly there are more developers than people doing security audits, and it would be nice to see more contribtors in all the other categories, actually.
My definition of contributor didn't exclude non-coders. The point was that most contributors, except for a few individuals, are contributing with a specific goal or direction in mind. Implement feature X, support customer Y, make nicer docs, make a nicer build, etc. All of those tasks have a nice tangible outcome that is good for motivating people.
Auditing old code for potential security vulnerabilities is hard work, it isn't fun, and it's unlikely to scratch a particular itch. Those kind of problems aren't a strength of the open source model.
... to the masses of sarcastic "I though Open Source was more secure!" crowd: in an Open Source forum, when vulnerabilities are found, they are patched. Since it's a public forum, the vulnerabilities are disclosed, and patches / updates made available. The poor, sorry state of the first cut gets rapidly and openly improved.
With closed source, the vulnerabilities merely stay hidden and undisclosed, and you have no ability to know about it, or fix it yourself. the poor, sorry state of the first cut never improves. Yes, there are some cultures that take security seriously. You have no way of knowing.
This, right here, is what "more secure" looks like: public notification of the vulnerabilities and patches to distribute.
The disclosure and fixing is definitely a good thing, but the number of vulnerabilities and the ease with which people are finding them is worrying.
I don't think that this really disproves Linus's Law, "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". More likely I suspect that the eyeballs aren't as numerous or well distributed as we think. There's a lot of tools that have been around a really long time and may not have undergone rigorous review when they were written. Even if maintainance if fairly active (the wget changelog is pretty healthy) these are decent sized code bases and there's going to be a lot of places where bugs can hide for a very long time.
The place where propietary software companies like windows have an advantage here is they can afford to pay people to do the thankless task of auditing old code. But with Linux most contributors, be they individuals or companies, are primarily concerned with their own projects. They simply don't have the same incentive to start auditing the whole ecosystem looking for random old bugs.
Sort of like, "I'm proud to be 5'10"", or, "I'm proud to be male" or something. We have exactly nothing to do with creating these conditions so why would we be proud of them? Things to be proud of would be, "I wrote some amazing code." Or perhaps, "I ran five miles and made my personal best time." You aren't supposed to be proud of things you had no control of...
The accomplishment is he's embraced that identity, something a lot of people are still unable to do privately, much less openly. That's the thing he's rightfully proud of.
And this announcement is important. Can you name another CEO of a major corporation who is openly gay? CEO's are supposed to be vanilla with dull personal lives. By being the first Tim Cook has not only made it a lot easier for other major business figures to come out of the closet, but also made it easier for other gay people hoping to get into management to be open about their identities.
If you build your employer a piece of software that ends up making hundreds of millions of dollars wouldn't you feel entitled to some of that wealth?
Who really earned the hundreds of millions? Was it the guy who wrote the software, the manager who thought up and approved the project, the marketer who figured out how to sell it, the salesman who found the big customers? There's a lot of people who had a critical contribution and even with something as singular as an comic book there's a lot more cooks than you realize.
I think exceptional employees do tend to get shortchanged on the value of their contributions. But the upside is that even if the project bombs completely you still get a paycheck.
I know this is petulant and pedantic, but Dunning-Kruger is statistical, and only reflects the naturalness of a lack of detailed introspection.
More over, some people are genuinely competent at things. I want to object to the notion that it's an inescapable human failing, because Dunning and Kruger's research didn't show that. Just a strong overall trend.
I wouldn't call it pedantic. Whether all people are major victims of this phenomena, or merely a substantial portion of people, is a critical distinction.
Personally I think I'm relatively good at professing my lack of expertise and/or confidence in areas in which I have low competence.
Unfortunately a person suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect would think the exact same thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's an idea.
Uber/Lyft/whoever buys a small fleet of buses. You use a smartphone app to say you want to get to B by 3pm, ridesharing service responds "I can pick you up between 2:20-2:30 and drop you off between 2:50-3". One of the buses already carrying a small group of passengers then makes a small detour to pick you up (maintaining all the other contracts it agreed to, basically a travelling salesman problem) and you're on your way. You could even arrange a daily pickup for work.
It's tough as hell to pull off, but it's flexible, it's something the system described in the article could grow into organically, and it could actually compete with mass transit on price and environmental efficiency.
Since the book(s) have all the action in the background, and the big reveal in the post crisis recap, I am sure the movie will suck.
Except GRRM grew up in the age of television and has written for television. Even if he didn't write with the aim of a television adaption his books were still written with the influence of television storytelling and visual action. They're a lot easier to adapt for television as a result.
Asimov grew up with pulp magazines and the major non-book mass media would have been radio (which also influenced the pulp fiction), as a result his stories emphasized dialogue over visual storytelling.
They still might be able to make a great adaption, but the only way to make it remotely faithful might be to make it more of a political drama.
Epic's Unreal Engine 4 and the Unity engine both have Linux versions already. So does Valve's (obviously). EA's Frostbite engine has an OpenGL version, so that's part of the way. There's no market. Not a significant one, anyhow. Most people that are in the market to buy games either have a console, handheld, or a Windows/OSX PC. The vast majority. Then you've got the people like me, who dual boot all of their systems (so we're already customers, anyhow).
Of course there aren't a lot of gamers who run pure Linux systems, because there aren't enough high quality games to be a gamer on a pure Linux system.
But if SteamOS becomes more popular then some Linux gamers who dual boot start going pure Linux (and playing more games because rebooting is less of a hassle). And some current pure Linux users who do a little gaming, and have been satisfied with basic Linux games, start buying modern games through valve.
It's not a huge market but there's enough that I can see them being interested, particularly since it gives Valve a chance to corner the new market.
:) was being a bit snippy.
I share the same tendency :)
my point being, they're not reporting a new discovery of any kind. they're announcing the start of a new line of inquiry... which, you know is exactly the thing that you do when you're not satisfied with the old line of inquiry.
the title and summary are specifically highlighting that scientists think other life forms exist that may be more novel than we previously thought.
my question would be... did this thought just occur to you? that maybe we don't know everything about the way life can be expressed? it's news that some people have suddenly decided to stumble upon a realization that most people have already had?
my first thought when reading the article was "no duh"
For me the bulk of the article talking about the problem of detecting novel forms of life on earth was setup, ie you're reading a science story here's the background. The actual payload was the bit about the new methods they're developing now. I do agree they could have highlighted the new advancements a bit better as that part was a bit vague.
I was under the impression that news was about you know, new things.
If that's your criteria for science news then you're going to get low quality science news because new science is typically wrong in some way.
This is just an article highlighting that money has up until now been targetted toward things we are pretty sure exist. you know, novel creatures not using radically different genetic bases. This is just some dudes going, "yup, there might be more out there than we thought" which is you know, the basic premise of all the sciences.
Come back to me when they actually find something that uses a sixth nucleotide.
Incidentally, where might this new life have hidden, that we haven't searched already. We've got extremophiles in the middle of godforsaken rocks already... there aren't that many new places that i imagine we
A. haven't looked already
B. aren't already colonized by the cousins we know.
Generally speaking, the new life would need to be able to outcompete, in certain circumstances, the stuff we know or it wouldn't survive too well the 2 billion years that bacteria have dominated the planet.
i'd think the only viable thing would be viruses, maybe, and us not fully understanding them. but then i'd imagine if an different nucleotide were somehow incorporated into a virus we'd already found, it'd also be present enough to show up as an unknown nucleotide. Might not know what it was, but we'd most likely have an idea that it were there.
It's more than that.
For one they do cite evidence in the form of viruses with what seems to be very old DNA that isn't present in current known lifeforms. They figgured the viruses got those codes a very long time ago and had merely preserved them but they're now exploring the possibility those lifeforms are still around somewhere.
It also mentions they're beginning this new line of investigation, developing techniques to look for novel lifeforms that wouldn't be detected under current methods, for instance looking for DNA bases that aren't used by any known organisms. I think the start of the investigation is newsworthy in itself, if you only hear about the discoveries you're missing out on a lot of the story.
Russia has just announced that the times 9:41 and 9:42 are banned as promoting sodomy.
New clocks must be designed so that upon reaching 9:40 they advance directly to 9:43. Unfortunately there will be a transition period where gay fascist clocks are still in wide circulation. Patriotic Russians around such a clock while it displays 9:41 or 9:42 are advised to defend themselves from the homosexual propaganda by deeply meditating on the manly deeds of Vladamir Putin.
A number of similar articles have revealed more tidbits of Apples' Jobs-worship culture recently.
Taken one by one, they just come across as nice gestures to honor the company's co-founder. Additively they're starting to become really, really weird.
When Tim Cook dropped the bomb during his Charlie Rose interview that Jobs' office is maintained exactly as it was before his death, sealed, undisturbed - it raised an eyebrow.
The entire affair reminds me of the religion that pulp science fiction author started - the one with an office maintained in his honor at all their locations. You know the one. I suppose next we'll discover there is a Steve Jobs alcove located in the rear stockroom of all Apple stores.
Look, I got my first Apple product in 1983, and own quite a few current models at this time. But... admiration is one thing, hero worship is quite another. No thanks.
I suspect it's more marketing. People like to personify companies to get a better understanding of them, a charismatic CEO like Jobs makes it that much easier. Jobs being dead makes him more likeable (and less likely to do something stupid), if Apple can keep Jobs around as a sort of spirit guide it helps sales.
Though for this story I think it's less about Jobs and more about showing off their attention to detail.
I feel a car analogy is in order here.
Lacking a physics background, I'm not the right person to make it.
This being Slashdot, I will anyway. It's like you went to a car sales lot with 100 fully functional cars on display. You put them all into a (really) huge car compactor, and out comes a baseball-sided chunk of metal, plastic, and glass. Its brake-lights don't work.
I feel like a sports analogy is in order here.
Lacking a physics background, I'm not the right person to make it
This being Slashdot, I will anyway. It's like you have a hockey team with a bunch of good players. You then add a bunch of face-punchers who get in fights and act gritty, and out comes a dysfunction train wreck of a hockey team. They don't show up on the scoresheet.
After Apple CEO Tim Cook publicly called for sodomy
I know this is terrible and all, but as someone completely unaffected by this (not an apple fanboy, russian or gay) I find some kind of weird surreal humour in the whole thing.
I wonder if that's intentional. If there's any liberalism left in Russia it would be in technology companies (particularly ones with Apple fanboys), and if they want to protect themselves distancing themselves from a suddenly controversial company is a good idea.
If that's the case a ridiculous statement like "Apple CEO Tim Cook publicly called for sodomy" might be their own little in-joke at the absurdity of the politics.
You have your opinion about which scientists have valid opinions, I have mine. Thus we part ways. Compelling data requires no advocates - e.g. I went quickly from scoffing at dark matter to believing the WIMP model whole-heartedly based on the CMBR data, which had nothing to do with the opinion of any given scientist. Such data may yet emerge for a particular climate model that stands out from the crowd, but as yet none have distinguished themselves even from the null hypothesis.
On a fundamental level why do you trust your judgement more than the people whom have been studying it full time for years or decades?
Do you think them to be incompetent? Unethical? It just strikes me as exceptionally arrogant to place so much faith in your own reasoning that you'd completely discount the opinions of one of the smartest and most honest groups on the planet.
And to be honest if you talked about Mullis because also buy into AIDS denialism then you need to step back and seriously reassess how you evaluate evidence.
More like: that's a non-scientific event staged for a political purpose. Who organized the "coming together" and picked the scientist to participate in the "coming together"?
So you don't trust the UN as a venue for gathering scientists, you're still showing no evidence that it's a problem.
Opinions (especially guesses) are useful in the process of science, but are not scientific outcomes. Consensus is meaningless.
Consensus is meaningless....
So you've created a standard whereby you can pretty much ignore all the scientsts.
Models that falsifiably predict outcomes (which differ from the null hypothesis), and then such outcomes emerge - that's compelling. Data that selects one accurate model out of a large pack of models as the only successful predictor - that's compelling.
So the virtually unanimous opinions of numbers experts is meaningless. But the textbook definition of a publication bias is compelling.
Not if they wanted funding, ever again.
Yes...
Because the last thing a scientist wants to do is discover something new or prove the consensus wrong...
Also, societal forces are powerful.
Here's an anecdote unrelated to climate. Kary Mullis, Nobel Laureate for biochem, once tried to present a paper at a biochem-themed conference on AIDS research. His presentation (would have) pointed out that there's no actual causal evidence between HIV and AIDS - the correlation is inarguable, but there was no understood process by which HIV might cause the symptoms of AIDS (at a detailed level). He was physically ejected from the conference for daring to question the received wisdom. That's the opposite of good science, but that social force is common, and dissenting opinions get quashed under it.
Kary Mullis's paper wouldn't have pointed that out, the causal evidence for HIV and AIDS is overwhelming. Whatever happened at that conference happened because he was selling junk science that's literally getting people killed. Yes he won a Nobel, he also believes in astrology, you really think he's the brave iconoclast you want to use as an example?
You keep saying all you care about is the data, yet you seem to think these people who have the data are somehow incapable of convincing people of their conclusions.
Did you consider the scenario that top scientists are actually very knowledable and rational in their fields, and the reason they're not criticizing the IPCC reports is because they're generally right?
My boss once wrote kernel code for a living, but he's a second-level manager now. Is he a coder? The farther up the chain you move, the more you align yourself with the interests of the organization.
So if a scientist expresses an opinion on AGW you can ignore them because it's just one scientist's opinion (and you probably won't hear the opinion anyway since they're probably not doing much media).
If a group of scientists come together to all endorse the same message, you can ignore them because they're just a bunch of politicians who's opinions are determined by the organization.
So there's pretty much no scenario in which you have to confront the existence of a scientific consensus.
Btw, note that your accusation that the IPCC is being dominated by the politics instead of the science is testable. Namely if it were true we'd see parades of high profile climatologists and scientists criticizing the process and the outcome. Instead the lists of 'dissidents' are uniformly unimpressive. This tells me the science behind the report is of far higher quality than you suggest.
Science is not a "political decision",
But the UN is not a gathering of scientists; it's a gathering of politicians, and as such they make political announcements. As a political body with 1 vote per country, pretty much all they ever do is call for redistribution of wealth, and that directly motivates any muddled reading of science that you'll get from them.
The caption on the article's first photo reads "UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, left, and Chairman of the IPCC Rajendra K. Pachauri present a..."
So who's Rajendra K. Pachauri?
"He joined the North Carolina State University in Raleigh, USA, where he obtained an MS in Industrial Engineering in 1972, and a PhD with co-majors in Industrial Engineering and Economics in 1974. His doctoral thesis was titled, A dynamic model for forecasting of electrical energy demand in a specific region located in North and South Carolina"
Since the Chairman of the IPCC, the group who wrote the report, is a scientist, I'm curious where you're finding all of these politicians? It seems to me like you're using a heuristic where any scientist who makes a recommendation that runs contrary to your politics gets automatically reclassified as a politician.
"The broad assumption is that a high percentage of their black and Latino employees work in their warehouses."
You mean they discriminate against White and Asian warehouse employees?
I think it's obvious that most people would agree that working as a software delevoper is preferable to working in a warehouse.
There's a strong argument that Amazon isn't the one to blame for it's poor diversity among the technical ranks. But I think it's far from ideal that high status jobs are overwhelmingly held by Whites and East Asians while Blacks and Hispanics struggle to get even low status work.
So by your standard
By his standard, they can't compel you to give your fingerprint *for this purpose*. It's about compelling you to divulge information. If they already have your fingerprint *not solely for this purpose*, they have no need to compel you to unlock your phone with your own fingers. If they don't have the right tools to do it, too fucking bad for them.
I have no interest in making it easy for government thugs to force people to incriminate themselves, unlike you and your straw men.
If you want to argue that the courts are given too much power to compel disclosure you can make that argument.
But to me this ruling seems perfectly in line with existing standards.
Giving a fingerprint for the purpose is basically the same as giving a passcode, since either way they get access all sorts of information on your phone, which you're forced to help them retrieve. Unsurprising that a judge would try to find 'clever' ways around the spirit of the constitution and put little thought into their decision.
In reality, they shouldn't be able to force you to do any such thing. No passcodes, and no fingerprints for the purposes of granting them access to your information.
So by your standard they're not able to hack your computer, or access your email account, or search your house, because all of those things reveal tons of information about you.
Nor can they have you give fingerprints, stand in a line up, or respond to a supeona since they're forcing you to do something.
This was the right decision and completely in line with the US constitution. This wasn't a warrantless search done during a traffic stop. This was a request made by the prosecutor during a trial, the defendent doesn't have to speak, they just have to press their information to a pad to unlock information the court has requested.
It looks like the majority of the top 20 most cited papers cover new methods or tools (e.g., a new lab technique or a new software program), not new fundamental scientific discoveries (e.g., the structure of DNA or expansion of the universe). I guess this isn't really surprising, but it is interesting. One could conclude that scientists who want to make a major impact on their field should spend their time inventing new methods for doing fundamental research and let other scientists actually do the research.
I think something else is going on.
The point of science is discovery so if you make some great discovery people start investigating it. With every new paper someone is pushing further into the unknown, eventually enough people have built on your discovery si that when someone wants to build on your work they don't cite your paper, they cite the paper that cited your paper.
But with methods the bigger concern is simply getting things done. So you may get fewer advancements because fewer people develop them and the state of the art stays current longer. But more importantly the important thing it to bring the reader up to speed with what you did as quickly as possible. Therefore you cite the paper that everyone else cites so you can say "I did more or less what everyone else did", you can then offer further citations if you used refinements of the method.
Actually they do know, they just don't know precisely.
You're basically implying their knowledge is zero, the truth is they've already ruled out countless possibilities, they just haven't gotten all the way to the truth.
Interesting but I'm not sure how it's relevant.
You're arguing a strawman, no one has ever argued that climate is completely stable without us. The claim is that we're undergoing an extreme and dangerous rate of change due to human causes.
Ahh, I get it.
AGW deniers are often associated with Young Earth Creationists (YECs) because the religious right and YECs are fairly well represented in the AGW denier community. Therefore you compare AGW proponents to YECs, and if any show outrage at the comparison you can say they're hypocritical because of how people associate YECs with denialists.
And again I'm not sure what the point of this section was other than to accuse the researchers of not doing science... and then promptly follow that up with a deliciously ironic complaint that people shouldn't "attack the character of an individual when they are skeptical of your conclusions".
There is no old code; only old auditors :-)
I can assure you, when I analyze any hardware/software system I don't in any manner way shape or form categorize anything, or base any decision on the age of, and subsystem.
I doubt I'm the only competent analyst.
I'm not saying competent analysts can find these bugs. What I'm suggesting is that they don't have a lot of motive to look and I think this story is evidence of that. If a lot of analysts were already examining Linux and all the basic tools then why the sudden flood of bugs now?
Your definition of contributor is skewed. A FOSS contributor may do so in many ways. Clearly a project lead for a major project isn't going to contribute further by analyzing the ecosystem; their plate is full. There are others, also known as contributors, who do this. Other contributors administer project websites or write documentation. There is a whole wide array of types of contributors.
That being said, clearly there are more developers than people doing security audits, and it would be nice to see more contribtors in all the other categories, actually.
My definition of contributor didn't exclude non-coders. The point was that most contributors, except for a few individuals, are contributing with a specific goal or direction in mind. Implement feature X, support customer Y, make nicer docs, make a nicer build, etc. All of those tasks have a nice tangible outcome that is good for motivating people.
Auditing old code for potential security vulnerabilities is hard work, it isn't fun, and it's unlikely to scratch a particular itch. Those kind of problems aren't a strength of the open source model.
... to the masses of sarcastic "I though Open Source was more secure!" crowd: in an Open Source forum, when vulnerabilities are found, they are patched. Since it's a public forum, the vulnerabilities are disclosed, and patches / updates made available. The poor, sorry state of the first cut gets rapidly and openly improved.
With closed source, the vulnerabilities merely stay hidden and undisclosed, and you have no ability to know about it, or fix it yourself. the poor, sorry state of the first cut never improves. Yes, there are some cultures that take security seriously. You have no way of knowing.
This, right here, is what "more secure" looks like: public notification of the vulnerabilities and patches to distribute.
The disclosure and fixing is definitely a good thing, but the number of vulnerabilities and the ease with which people are finding them is worrying.
I don't think that this really disproves Linus's Law, "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". More likely I suspect that the eyeballs aren't as numerous or well distributed as we think. There's a lot of tools that have been around a really long time and may not have undergone rigorous review when they were written. Even if maintainance if fairly active (the wget changelog is pretty healthy) these are decent sized code bases and there's going to be a lot of places where bugs can hide for a very long time.
The place where propietary software companies like windows have an advantage here is they can afford to pay people to do the thankless task of auditing old code. But with Linux most contributors, be they individuals or companies, are primarily concerned with their own projects. They simply don't have the same incentive to start auditing the whole ecosystem looking for random old bugs.
But his sexual orientation was published years ago, and came up again some time earlier this year in news articles.
There's a big difference between rumours and open secrets and something that's put on the public record.
Sort of like, "I'm proud to be 5'10"", or, "I'm proud to be male" or something. We have exactly nothing to do with creating these conditions so why would we be proud of them? Things to be proud of would be, "I wrote some amazing code." Or perhaps, "I ran five miles and made my personal best time." You aren't supposed to be proud of things you had no control of...
The accomplishment is he's embraced that identity, something a lot of people are still unable to do privately, much less openly. That's the thing he's rightfully proud of.
And this announcement is important. Can you name another CEO of a major corporation who is openly gay? CEO's are supposed to be vanilla with dull personal lives. By being the first Tim Cook has not only made it a lot easier for other major business figures to come out of the closet, but also made it easier for other gay people hoping to get into management to be open about their identities.
If you build your employer a piece of software that ends up making hundreds of millions of dollars wouldn't you feel entitled to some of that wealth?
Who really earned the hundreds of millions? Was it the guy who wrote the software, the manager who thought up and approved the project, the marketer who figured out how to sell it, the salesman who found the big customers? There's a lot of people who had a critical contribution and even with something as singular as an comic book there's a lot more cooks than you realize.
I think exceptional employees do tend to get shortchanged on the value of their contributions. But the upside is that even if the project bombs completely you still get a paycheck.
I know this is petulant and pedantic, but Dunning-Kruger is statistical, and only reflects the naturalness of a lack of detailed introspection.
More over, some people are genuinely competent at things. I want to object to the notion that it's an inescapable human failing, because Dunning and Kruger's research didn't show that. Just a strong overall trend.
I wouldn't call it pedantic. Whether all people are major victims of this phenomena, or merely a substantial portion of people, is a critical distinction.
Personally I think I'm relatively good at professing my lack of expertise and/or confidence in areas in which I have low competence.
Unfortunately a person suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect would think the exact same thing.