Well, remember that the next time you drive in another state.
We used to have this thing called a 'community'. Sadly, that seems to have gone away. We're all tragedy now and no commons.
Cooperation has tremendous benefit. Some actors won't cooperate if the risk is too high, even if there is great benefit-- that's when you need a bully, i.e., government.
There's also a lot of money to be made by saying that global warming is not a man-made phenomena, too. I'm not an economist, so I couldn't tell you for sure where more of the money is, but given that global warming deniers are arguing from the status quo, I'd say that there's more money in denying global warming.
Yes, as the GP pointed out, science is supposed to work by critical analysis. The problem is this: the general public is too dumb. They don't understand logic. They don't understand basic statistical methods. Heck, most of them can't even form a cogent argument using facts they do know. But modern civilization requires that public policy be determined by the facts, and sometimes, those facts are complicated. You need an education in science to understand them.
So what do we do? Obviously, the right solution is education, but that takes time. When you have urgent issues that the public must act on, you run a public campaign, i.e., propaganda. Sometimes this is a good thing. Sometimes it is not. Successful public policy has depended on an implicit trust the public has in the experts. I don't think that the public will ever stop looking to experts-- but a big worry here is that they start thinking that the local minister or the blowhard on the radio is the expert, and not the scientist who has spent a lifetime studying the thing. That would have major repercussions for our quality of life.
I should point out that the term "scare tactic" is itself a bit of propaganda. If the guy who's calling a global warming campaign a "scare tactic" is a lobbyist for an oil company, guess what-- you've been duped. When you hear that term, think about who's saying it.
Somewhere, some nerd in the basement of a "computer history museum" desperately wants this to happen. He keeps his trackball extra clean for just such an occasion.
Hey, hate to break it to you, but the Greeks lost the battle at Thermopylae. They lost the next few battles, too. Fortunately Xerxes got cold feet about being stuck in Europe and ended up withdrawing most of his forces, which allowed the Greeks to repel the remaining forces at Plataea.
should have their U.N. member status revoked. Of course, U.N. membership is already somewhat of a farce, the U.N. essentially now being a forum for cronyism, but it would at least take away another venue for people like Ahmadinejad to get up on a podium and spout hatred. Too bad we didn't keep Mossadegh around, huh?
Actually, that's not true. A lack of correlation MUST mean that there is no direct causal relation between the two things you are studying. Otherwise, there would be some correlation. If there is indeed a causal relation, but your experimental data shows no correlation, it means that your experiment is not testing your hypothesis.
This actually happened to me once. I asked a question on a forum, and the person who responded posted a link to me posting the question many years before. Worst part: someone answered it back then. D'oh!
Right, but you also should know that a single data point is not representative. Even if the CRU *is* corrupt, it does not invalidate the argument that every else is making.
Seconded. Anyone whose ever used a BSD system can attest to the quality of the documentation. I think the reason for this is that BSD devs are often required to submit documentation with their patches. The more decentralized Linux development model tends to overlook this. It drives me nuts; fortunately, most of BSD userland and Linux userland are the same, so I can refer to BSD docs for Linux stuff. Don't try to use BSD docs for GNU make, though. Oh, and don't get me started on Info pages. WTF.
Oh, and Apple's documentation: HA! Sun writes some nice docs, though.
Oh certainly, it is ironic, particularly when you consider that the development of packet-switched networks was largely motivated by a desire to break out of the extremely limited network model that the phone company used.
But it's also not that simple. The available bandwidth is extremely dependent on the distance from the CO. This is why you can't always get DSL even though you can get POTS-- the further you go, the more the impedance of the wire attenuates the signal. The frequency characteristics of the POTS network were chosen so that all POTS wiring would meet those specs, but that means that short wires have loads of extra bandwidth, and long wires do not. Tannenbaum has a nice graph for this in his Computer Networks book. Telephones include filtering circuitry to keep the signal's frequency within the proscribed range; DSL is taking advantage of the fact that much of this bandwidth is not utilized.
Modern modem protocols do not attenuate their signals-- they first shoot for as much bandwidth as possible, and then choose an encoding scheme to take advantage of that. This is why very rural phone customers still can't get high-speed modem connections. Because VOIP is, like POTS, attenuated to match the requirements of the human voice, modem connections over VOIP are problematic. Not to mention-- there's essentially no latency on an analog line; packet-switching is mostly appropriate when latency is not an issue.
So for long runs of POTS wiring, VOIP may not be a good thing, unless that POTS wiring is replaced. I don't know what the minimum bandwidth requirements are for VOIP-- they may in fact be less than POTS-- but VOIP also adds a lot of protocol overhead, since with POTS, there is no protocol. The phone company may even be running their VOIP service on top of some other network/transport software; TCP/IP is probably not a good choice here, particularly when it comes to QoS.
"invented global warming"? I hate to break it to you, guy, but the Greenhouse Effect was discovered in the 1850's, with people like Callendar pointing to anthropogenic sources in the 1930's. Nearly ALL of the early global warming researchers believed that this phenomena would be a net positive, so their research was far from a scare tactic. The effect was noticeable enough by the 1960's that researchers from separate disciplines (i.e., not climate scientists) began to notice the trend independently.
There is a huge amount of data that supports the claim that the planet is warming. The data is unequivocal. The cause of this warming, and whether is is anthropogenic or not, has been a major research focus for more than 40 years. Your claim that there's this cabal of scientists conspiring to brainwash the general public into believing in a theory of anthropogenic warming is ludicrous. Do you know how many people you're talking about?
Verizon licenses public spectrum and has privileges like right-of-way to lay cable. I don't know the exact repercussions of such things (IANAL), but I suspect that there's some tradeoff there.
An engineer can slap a piece of paper on a building that says "if it falls, it ain't our fault" just as a programmer can claim no liability for software. In both cases, saying such a thing does not make it so. The big difference is that most bugs in most software doesn't have the potential to kill people.
If you're a programmer and you work on a critical system, you bet your ass you can be held liable! Where in the article does it say that the programmers will be shielded from consequences?
I think the interesting fallout of this is that large corporations may find that it is too risky to operate as a large multinational corporation. The regulatory environments are too different. That's an interesting (and perhaps welcome) check on the size of a corporation, at least with the variety that operate both in the US and Europe.
OTOH, what with the distinction being less clear between private and public money in Europe, I can't help wonder if the EU isn't just protecting its own corporate interests.
Exactly right. With regard to conviction, why is unimportant. It is [supposed to be] a simple determination of fact. Sentencing, on the other hand, can introduce mitigating factors. "Your honor, I stole from the pharmacy because my daughter was dying and I could not afford the medication." The judge or jury can then choose an appropriate punishment.
It would be interesting to compare the proportion of "psychopathic" people who commit crimes to those who don't against the proportion of seemingly "normal" people who commit crimes to those who don't. I wouldn't be surprised if psychopaths committed crimes more often, but if that's the case, we may find that our tendency to view people with mental illness as 'not culpable' is irreconcilable with the practical requirement to administer justice.
This is also something that can be addressed in the design of the software at the site. As someone who runs a site with redundant links, I can say-- it's not for everyone. It is very expensive, and running requires a high level of competence, which also means $$$.
OTOH, if you design your software so that your software can tolerate periodic downtime, this kind of problem can be mitigated. Instead of the knee-jerk reaction, "install redundant links!", VA should probably analyze the data on failures and see which solution or combination of solutions would be the most cost-effective.
In the past, I too, have been involved in the bidding process. One of my first jobs out of college was to help write them at a University, so I understand the perils of only getting what you pay for. But I also know that the process is not so rigid that a vendor can't say, "Hey! You're missing an important piece here!" at which point the original process is recalled, and a new one starts. So I fault Northrup here-- the perils of distributed systems have been well-known for at least 40 years, with Northrup being in a position of great experience. They could have easily made the case that the specifications were incomplete.
I have a friend from college who is doing fairly well as a porn producer. He says that there's another factor preventing people in the porn industry from having sexual relationships with people outside of it: most people have tremendous hang ups about sex. As a result, it's very difficult to maintain a relationship with someone who is not a porn star when you yourself are, so people in the industry tend to date other people in the industry.
Freezing only kills some food-bourne pathogens. Parasites are only a part of the story. Camphylobacterneeds to be frozen for extended periods of time to see a significant reduction in bacteria count-- probably not long enough from the time the ship catches and freezes the fish to the time it is served. There's a reason why (at least in Massachusetts) all raw food comes with a little warning on the menu.
It's not like this is a new thing, or surprising, though. People have been catching all kinds of nasty things from raw seafood, like Hep A from oysters, for a long time.
So..., you're saying that some kind of evil bureaucracy is being allowed to get between a patient and his or her doctor?
I realize here that you're trying to imply here that a government-run health care system is more of the same, or worse, but at best, your post points out the need for more regulation, not less. Which pocket the money comes out of is a different matter. This healthcare insurer, which is a publicly-traded corporation, is the thing stepping in between in between the patient and the doctor. It's actions may be illegal, but they definitely should be. The same would go for the the government-run system.
On the other hand, let's not pretend that Manulife doesn't have some reason to practice oversight-- they are, after all, the ones paying out, and they have a responsibility to their other beneficiaries to ensure that health care fraud is not happening. We obviously don't know the whole story here.
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Well, remember that the next time you drive in another state.
We used to have this thing called a 'community'. Sadly, that seems to have gone away. We're all tragedy now and no commons.
Cooperation has tremendous benefit. Some actors won't cooperate if the risk is too high, even if there is great benefit-- that's when you need a bully, i.e., government.
There's also a lot of money to be made by saying that global warming is not a man-made phenomena, too. I'm not an economist, so I couldn't tell you for sure where more of the money is, but given that global warming deniers are arguing from the status quo, I'd say that there's more money in denying global warming.
Yes, as the GP pointed out, science is supposed to work by critical analysis. The problem is this: the general public is too dumb. They don't understand logic. They don't understand basic statistical methods. Heck, most of them can't even form a cogent argument using facts they do know. But modern civilization requires that public policy be determined by the facts, and sometimes, those facts are complicated. You need an education in science to understand them.
So what do we do? Obviously, the right solution is education, but that takes time. When you have urgent issues that the public must act on, you run a public campaign, i.e., propaganda. Sometimes this is a good thing. Sometimes it is not. Successful public policy has depended on an implicit trust the public has in the experts. I don't think that the public will ever stop looking to experts-- but a big worry here is that they start thinking that the local minister or the blowhard on the radio is the expert, and not the scientist who has spent a lifetime studying the thing. That would have major repercussions for our quality of life.
I should point out that the term "scare tactic" is itself a bit of propaganda. If the guy who's calling a global warming campaign a "scare tactic" is a lobbyist for an oil company, guess what-- you've been duped. When you hear that term, think about who's saying it.
Somewhere, some nerd in the basement of a "computer history museum" desperately wants this to happen. He keeps his trackball extra clean for just such an occasion.
Hey, hate to break it to you, but the Greeks lost the battle at Thermopylae. They lost the next few battles, too. Fortunately Xerxes got cold feet about being stuck in Europe and ended up withdrawing most of his forces, which allowed the Greeks to repel the remaining forces at Plataea.
should have their U.N. member status revoked. Of course, U.N. membership is already somewhat of a farce, the U.N. essentially now being a forum for cronyism, but it would at least take away another venue for people like Ahmadinejad to get up on a podium and spout hatred. Too bad we didn't keep Mossadegh around, huh?
Actually, that's not true. A lack of correlation MUST mean that there is no direct causal relation between the two things you are studying. Otherwise, there would be some correlation. If there is indeed a causal relation, but your experimental data shows no correlation, it means that your experiment is not testing your hypothesis.
D'oh. There's nothing quite like typing the opposite of what you mean.
This actually happened to me once. I asked a question on a forum, and the person who responded posted a link to me posting the question many years before. Worst part: someone answered it back then. D'oh!
Right, but you also should know that a single data point is not representative. Even if the CRU *is* corrupt, it does not invalidate the argument that every else is making.
Seconded. Anyone whose ever used a BSD system can attest to the quality of the documentation. I think the reason for this is that BSD devs are often required to submit documentation with their patches. The more decentralized Linux development model tends to overlook this. It drives me nuts; fortunately, most of BSD userland and Linux userland are the same, so I can refer to BSD docs for Linux stuff. Don't try to use BSD docs for GNU make, though. Oh, and don't get me started on Info pages. WTF.
Oh, and Apple's documentation: HA! Sun writes some nice docs, though.
Oh certainly, it is ironic, particularly when you consider that the development of packet-switched networks was largely motivated by a desire to break out of the extremely limited network model that the phone company used.
But it's also not that simple. The available bandwidth is extremely dependent on the distance from the CO. This is why you can't always get DSL even though you can get POTS-- the further you go, the more the impedance of the wire attenuates the signal. The frequency characteristics of the POTS network were chosen so that all POTS wiring would meet those specs, but that means that short wires have loads of extra bandwidth, and long wires do not. Tannenbaum has a nice graph for this in his Computer Networks book. Telephones include filtering circuitry to keep the signal's frequency within the proscribed range; DSL is taking advantage of the fact that much of this bandwidth is not utilized.
Modern modem protocols do not attenuate their signals-- they first shoot for as much bandwidth as possible, and then choose an encoding scheme to take advantage of that. This is why very rural phone customers still can't get high-speed modem connections. Because VOIP is, like POTS, attenuated to match the requirements of the human voice, modem connections over VOIP are problematic. Not to mention-- there's essentially no latency on an analog line; packet-switching is mostly appropriate when latency is not an issue.
So for long runs of POTS wiring, VOIP may not be a good thing, unless that POTS wiring is replaced. I don't know what the minimum bandwidth requirements are for VOIP-- they may in fact be less than POTS-- but VOIP also adds a lot of protocol overhead, since with POTS, there is no protocol. The phone company may even be running their VOIP service on top of some other network/transport software; TCP/IP is probably not a good choice here, particularly when it comes to QoS.
The CRU is but one of MANY research groups. If you had any familiarity with the scientific community, you would know this.
"invented global warming"? I hate to break it to you, guy, but the Greenhouse Effect was discovered in the 1850's, with people like Callendar pointing to anthropogenic sources in the 1930's. Nearly ALL of the early global warming researchers believed that this phenomena would be a net positive, so their research was far from a scare tactic. The effect was noticeable enough by the 1960's that researchers from separate disciplines (i.e., not climate scientists) began to notice the trend independently.
There is a huge amount of data that supports the claim that the planet is warming. The data is unequivocal. The cause of this warming, and whether is is anthropogenic or not, has been a major research focus for more than 40 years. Your claim that there's this cabal of scientists conspiring to brainwash the general public into believing in a theory of anthropogenic warming is ludicrous. Do you know how many people you're talking about?
Let's all be happy! Maybe then you can both stop picking on us widdle computer scientists.
Verizon licenses public spectrum and has privileges like right-of-way to lay cable. I don't know the exact repercussions of such things (IANAL), but I suspect that there's some tradeoff there.
An engineer can slap a piece of paper on a building that says "if it falls, it ain't our fault" just as a programmer can claim no liability for software. In both cases, saying such a thing does not make it so. The big difference is that most bugs in most software doesn't have the potential to kill people.
If you're a programmer and you work on a critical system, you bet your ass you can be held liable! Where in the article does it say that the programmers will be shielded from consequences?
I think the interesting fallout of this is that large corporations may find that it is too risky to operate as a large multinational corporation. The regulatory environments are too different. That's an interesting (and perhaps welcome) check on the size of a corporation, at least with the variety that operate both in the US and Europe.
OTOH, what with the distinction being less clear between private and public money in Europe, I can't help wonder if the EU isn't just protecting its own corporate interests.
Exactly right. With regard to conviction, why is unimportant. It is [supposed to be] a simple determination of fact. Sentencing, on the other hand, can introduce mitigating factors. "Your honor, I stole from the pharmacy because my daughter was dying and I could not afford the medication." The judge or jury can then choose an appropriate punishment.
It would be interesting to compare the proportion of "psychopathic" people who commit crimes to those who don't against the proportion of seemingly "normal" people who commit crimes to those who don't. I wouldn't be surprised if psychopaths committed crimes more often, but if that's the case, we may find that our tendency to view people with mental illness as 'not culpable' is irreconcilable with the practical requirement to administer justice.
This is also something that can be addressed in the design of the software at the site. As someone who runs a site with redundant links, I can say-- it's not for everyone. It is very expensive, and running requires a high level of competence, which also means $$$.
OTOH, if you design your software so that your software can tolerate periodic downtime, this kind of problem can be mitigated. Instead of the knee-jerk reaction, "install redundant links!", VA should probably analyze the data on failures and see which solution or combination of solutions would be the most cost-effective.
In the past, I too, have been involved in the bidding process. One of my first jobs out of college was to help write them at a University, so I understand the perils of only getting what you pay for. But I also know that the process is not so rigid that a vendor can't say, "Hey! You're missing an important piece here!" at which point the original process is recalled, and a new one starts. So I fault Northrup here-- the perils of distributed systems have been well-known for at least 40 years, with Northrup being in a position of great experience. They could have easily made the case that the specifications were incomplete.
The trick was to pour the champagne into the spot that they found the baguette. Physicists are so smrt.
It's also important to have a porn star. It's the frosting on the cup cake of faux-intellectualism.
I have a friend from college who is doing fairly well as a porn producer. He says that there's another factor preventing people in the porn industry from having sexual relationships with people outside of it: most people have tremendous hang ups about sex. As a result, it's very difficult to maintain a relationship with someone who is not a porn star when you yourself are, so people in the industry tend to date other people in the industry.
Wow, cool. Thanks for the link.
Freezing only kills some food-bourne pathogens. Parasites are only a part of the story. Camphylobacter needs to be frozen for extended periods of time to see a significant reduction in bacteria count-- probably not long enough from the time the ship catches and freezes the fish to the time it is served. There's a reason why (at least in Massachusetts) all raw food comes with a little warning on the menu.
It's not like this is a new thing, or surprising, though. People have been catching all kinds of nasty things from raw seafood, like Hep A from oysters, for a long time.
So..., you're saying that some kind of evil bureaucracy is being allowed to get between a patient and his or her doctor?
I realize here that you're trying to imply here that a government-run health care system is more of the same, or worse, but at best, your post points out the need for more regulation, not less. Which pocket the money comes out of is a different matter. This healthcare insurer, which is a publicly-traded corporation, is the thing stepping in between in between the patient and the doctor. It's actions may be illegal, but they definitely should be. The same would go for the the government-run system.
On the other hand, let's not pretend that Manulife doesn't have some reason to practice oversight-- they are, after all, the ones paying out, and they have a responsibility to their other beneficiaries to ensure that health care fraud is not happening. We obviously don't know the whole story here.