I'm of the opinion that anyone that stores data for you in a professional capacity is acting as an agent on your behalf and should enjoy the same legal protections that you yourself would have if you had the data yourself.
That's not what I want since it leaves the provider the option to voluntarily share my data. What we have in Canada is far better: the holder of the data has a legal duty to protect your privacy and cannot share you data with anyone unless required to do so by law.
On a more serious note, anyone who has sat and given some thought to what the TFS talks about has probably realized that we could be one of the earliest sentient races. The universe didn't start with the ingredients of life. It was brewed in stars and then spread by the exploding of stars and the re-coalescence of that material. That shortens the possible time frame for sentient life
Actually if you actually read the paper (yes I know it's Slashdot so you are excused!;-) they mention this there. All the ingredients for life, including the heavy elements, are there in the second generation stars which formed a few million years after the first generation of stars which were around ~30MYr after the Big Bang. The large stars which go supernova have very short lifetimes so heavy elements were created and dispersed into the coalescing gas clouds really quite rapidly. So instead of ~13.6 billion years for life to evolve you have ~30+a few million years less i.e. negligibly less time.
That is not really what this paper is saying. All they have done is calculated when intelligent life is most likely to evolve given a constant probability per unit time for intelligent life to evolve on a planet in the habitable zone of a star. This is obviously going to be weighted towards the longest time periods available because they have assumed a constant probability per unit time and, unless I missed it, do not include any possibility for intelligent life to go extinct or otherwise disappear (e.g. "go beyond the rim" in B5-speak).
The real question which they fail to answer is what is the value of the probability per unit time for intelligent life to evolve on a planet in the habitable zone of a star? If we assume that Earth is a somewhat typical indication of this then the probability for intelligent life to have evolved somewhere else in the galaxy is overwhelmingly large already which is what leads to the Fermi Paradox. The fact that it is going to be higher in the future is no help to explaining why we do not see evidence of life elsewhere now.
To put this is simpler statistical terms it is as if we have already tossed a coin a thousand times and, as far as we can tell, have only manage to get one coin coming up heads. The fact that if we toss the coin another million times that at some point in the future we are far more likely to get some more heads than we have so far (which is what this paper points out) does nothing to solve the problem of why we appear to have only got one head in the first thousand tosses.
You do if you want to lead the project. So if Britain leaves it can get funding to take part in EU projects lead by EU scientists but it can never lead those projects itself. I expect this will cause many leaders in science to start thinking about a personal "brexit" plan of their own and these are the people who drive research programs and attract scientists from around the world.
I mean there's the Replication Crisis to consider, and the Decline Effect, and then somewhere north of 40,000 neurology papers that were a waste of time
Actually your examples point to the problem which is not how the grants are assigned within a field but the level of funding between different fields. The effects you point to are all predominantly (but not exclusively) related to medical sciences. This is an area where politicians, corporations and the public love to pour huge quantities of money into because of the intense personal connection medicine has to all of us.
A perfect grant allocation system will give the most promising research ideas the highest priority for funding until all the funds are allocated. This means that the more funds you have the lower the quality of research that will be funded even if you have a perfect allocation system. This is what I believe we are seeing today with a good, but obviously not perfect, allocation system.
The solution is to redirect research funding away from medicine to other areas of science. This will have the effect of increasing the output of other fields which will lead to discoveries some of which will in turn help advance medicine as well as advance productivity so we can pay for all the new medical techniques being developed. However this is hard to do because while we all have a strong personal connection directly or through loved ones to curing things like cancer or heart disease very few people have a strong personal connection to making a better battery, understanding superconductivity, finding the nature of Dark Matter or solving quantum gravity etc.
Those are consumables. If you only look at durable goods, and you multiply the number manufactured by the useful lifetime, then I nominate the AK-47.
You are forgetting the oft used quote about the pen being mightier than the sword. This is not really talking about the pen itself - although if this statistic is accurate a Bic Crystal ball point pen would only need to have a useful lifetime of 22 days to beat the AK47 if we assume an average lifetime of 60 years and even without taking into account subsequent sales since 2005.
However the quote it really referring to what the pen writes: books. If we take the best selling example, the Bible, then not only has this book alone sold ~5 billion copies (+/-1 billion depending on whom you believe) the oldest of which is almost 1,700 years old. Other religious texts such as the Qu'ran similarly have wide circulations and are older. So even with your criterion for age times circulation these will have the AK47 completely beaten.
Perhaps the majority of citizens of the UK don't want to "regard the EU as (their) country".
Perhaps. Sadly we may never know though because a huge number of British citizens, myself included, were denied the right to vote in the referendum simply because we were not living in the UK. I would argue that a huge majority of these, and there are over 2 million in the EU alone, would have voted in favour of remaining because they were actually treating the EU as their country.
As citizens of a sovereign state it is their right to make that determination.
I agree and as a citizen of that sovereign nation I was denied that right which is rather ironic since one of the major complaints of the brexit camp was the lack of democracy in the EU. As a result I and my kids will lose their EU citizenship and my only recourse is to finally get Canadian citizenship so I give a final parting two fingered salute to my former country as it turns its back on Europe and loses the right to call itself either 'Great' or 'United' - quite literally as Scotland will secede. It is a very sad time to be British.
The "natural state" is me hitting you and taking your stuff.
Which is exactly what is happening here. In deference to several thousand years of progress though the weapons of choice to hit you with are either armies of lawyers or, in this case, new laws (or rather new interpretation/enforcement of existing laws). Plus ça change.
Is that $70/month or $70/month*. There is a big difference with the '*' usually meaning that in 6 months time the rate will become huge. At least that's the trick they use all the time here in Canada. Still US$70/month is only a bit more that I pay here for just internet alone. Mind you I don't have to deal with Comcast which is probably worth quite a bit per month.
Don't even thing of trying to do the Mandelbrot set.
I actually did that on a 6502 in BASIC (floating point in assembly was beyond me at the time) on a BBC Model B. I was a school kid and got the algorithm off the back of a maths brochure from Leeds University which had a picture of the set on the front. It used to take all night plus most of the following day to run and you could not really zoom in that much but it worked albeit rather slowly!
How the fuck am I supposed to click that? I have big, dumb, sausage fingers!
Get you mum to do it after she has finished soldering on the new memory chips which is what is required to upgrade an iMac's memory unless it is old or top of the line.
You use a package like ROOT which we use at CERN for data analysis. The original author had the idea that he would save physicists the time to learn a separate scripting language by using interpreted C++ as a scripting language. As you can imagine this did not work out very well. Firstly C++ has an appallingly bad syntax for scripting use and secondly there are many features they were unable to script like virtual functions.
The result that the scripting language was more of a C+/- which was badly documented and also very buggy. One of the worst ones I ever found ws actually using compiled code where adding a blank line i.e. just a new line character to the source code caused duplicate symbol errors due to using the C preprocessor to generate a symbol which only differed by the line number the macro was called on!
Debugging in general was also bizarre because the error messages you got rarely if ever pointed you to the problem and the memory management is also extremely unclear. The only thing which kept it somewhat usable was the development of the python interface...which of course completely undermined the original vision of scripted C++.
There is another reason: the 6502 assembler is relatively easy to program (I was doing it at ~13-14) and you get a very significant performance boost. Modern CPUs have complex pipelined architectures and for efficient, fast execution modern assembly requires hints etc. so the CPU can make effective use of pipelines etc. This makes it far, far harder.
Even with a CPU as old as DEC's Alpha back in the late 1990's I was astounded when DEC's C++ compiler produced faster code than I could with basic assembly. Once I saw the hints it added I was able to up my game and beat it slightly but the speed gain was nothing like as impressive as it was for the 6502 based BBC Model B plus it required far more effort e.g. knowledge of the CPU architecture etc.
East of Wessex and north of Sussex but strangely not south Nossex since that anglo-saxon kingdom didn't last long enough to leave it's mark on history.
If you include all commercial pilots this seems plausible by the time you have included private business jets, cargo transports, crop dusters etc. It's also not clear whether this is just for the US or worldwide. If the later that would include non-western countries where pilot deaths may be higher and non-US countries where police deaths may be far be lower.
So, just in theory, what would happen if the Queen invoked some ancient but technically never repealed power to put an end to the Brexit?
Actually from the discussion in the UK media it would be quite easy for her to do this without resorting to arcane and ancient laws. Apparently invoking article 50 requires use of the "royal prerogative". Effectively the queen invokes the article herself as head of state. However this is only done on the advice of the prime minister. Technically the queen could just say "no" and refuse to invoke it. There is also a legal question in the courts at the moment about whether invoking the article lies under the royal prerogative or requires an act of parliament because entering the EU required an act.
The problem is that if the queen were ever to refuse the prime minister in this there would be an even bigger constitutional crisis which would probably result in the UK becoming a republic. However it does give the queen a chance to talk with the prime minister and to use her 60+ years of experience as the head of state to offer advice to the PM which is probably one of the few times the PM gets to talk to someone who is not part of the political machinations of Westminster. It might not be the most modern system in the world but it has stood the test of time so we can only hope it works now because we really need it to!
That's why you idiots are being lead to believe democracy is bad.
It's well known that democracy is bad but Churchill explained it best: "Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time".
I take it that you like people you never voted for or have heard of in a foreign country (Belgium in this case) decide what you have to do, too?
Brussels is the seat of the EU government (or at least parts of it) so when we refer to rules from Brussels we do not mean "rules from Belgium" (whose national laws have no sway outside Belgium) but "rules from the EU government in Brussels". This is the same way that Americans refer to "Washington". It does not refer to the mayor of Washington DC enforcing rules on the rest of the US but you national government in Washington passing laws. So its the same with us, just a different city.
As for "foreign countries" passing rules that makes as much sense as someone in California saying that some federal law they do not like was passed by "foreigners" in other states and forced on them without their say. Since California has representatives in the US government this is clearly false and it is the same with the UK in the EU. The difference is that California has been part of the US for long enough that they are used to this give and take between the local and national governments.
In contrast the UK has only been in the EU for just over 40 years and it does not have any recent experience of give and take between regional and national governments because the Tories stripped all meaningful power from county, city and town councils to centralize it all in Westminster and the areas which DO have experience with strong regional government, Scotland and Northern Ireland, voted overwhelmingly for the EU and while Wales has a national assembly it is very limited in power.
So really "foreign" is just a matter of perspective. If you are still stuck 40 years in the past then yes the EU means that "foreign" countries have some sway over the UK. However if you regard the EU as our country and UK as a part of it then no, foreign countries do not have any sway because a foreign country is one outside the EU.
You never voted for David Cameron in the first instance. You voted for your local member.
Actually this is technically true for the US as well - they do not actually vote for Trump to Clinton they vote for someone who will go to Washington and cast a vote to select Trump or Clinton as the US president....which could lead to some interesting events if they change their mind after being elected.
Technically true but if she actually held the power then I doubt we would be in this mess and when the politicians who do are far more right wing than your hereditary monarch you know you are in trouble.
How about rating Prime Ministers like films? Wouldn't that help even more?
Apparently not. The same idiot already made a play for a parental guidance (PG) rating by claiming that as a mother she would make a better prime minister. Unsurprisingly that didn't work out well either.
I'd like to say that she has no chance of being the next PM but she is being selected by Conservative party voters and a large fraction of them seem intent on destroying the UK given the recent referendum result so who knows?
More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were sent to prison, fired,[4] or executed as a part of this campaign - instigated by Lysenko to suppress his scientific opponents.
Could you explain how this is compatible with "bound to follow strict ethics guidelines"? Getting the government to get rid of those who disagree with you is usually not something allowed under even extremely loose ethical guidelines.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm of the opinion that anyone that stores data for you in a professional capacity is acting as an agent on your behalf and should enjoy the same legal protections that you yourself would have if you had the data yourself.
That's not what I want since it leaves the provider the option to voluntarily share my data. What we have in Canada is far better: the holder of the data has a legal duty to protect your privacy and cannot share you data with anyone unless required to do so by law.
On a more serious note, anyone who has sat and given some thought to what the TFS talks about has probably realized that we could be one of the earliest sentient races. The universe didn't start with the ingredients of life. It was brewed in stars and then spread by the exploding of stars and the re-coalescence of that material. That shortens the possible time frame for sentient life
Actually if you actually read the paper (yes I know it's Slashdot so you are excused! ;-) they mention this there. All the ingredients for life, including the heavy elements, are there in the second generation stars which formed a few million years after the first generation of stars which were around ~30MYr after the Big Bang. The large stars which go supernova have very short lifetimes so heavy elements were created and dispersed into the coalescing gas clouds really quite rapidly. So instead of ~13.6 billion years for life to evolve you have ~30+a few million years less i.e. negligibly less time.
So, we're those guys [wikipedia.org] after all?
That is not really what this paper is saying. All they have done is calculated when intelligent life is most likely to evolve given a constant probability per unit time for intelligent life to evolve on a planet in the habitable zone of a star. This is obviously going to be weighted towards the longest time periods available because they have assumed a constant probability per unit time and, unless I missed it, do not include any possibility for intelligent life to go extinct or otherwise disappear (e.g. "go beyond the rim" in B5-speak).
The real question which they fail to answer is what is the value of the probability per unit time for intelligent life to evolve on a planet in the habitable zone of a star? If we assume that Earth is a somewhat typical indication of this then the probability for intelligent life to have evolved somewhere else in the galaxy is overwhelmingly large already which is what leads to the Fermi Paradox. The fact that it is going to be higher in the future is no help to explaining why we do not see evidence of life elsewhere now.
To put this is simpler statistical terms it is as if we have already tossed a coin a thousand times and, as far as we can tell, have only manage to get one coin coming up heads. The fact that if we toss the coin another million times that at some point in the future we are far more likely to get some more heads than we have so far (which is what this paper points out) does nothing to solve the problem of why we appear to have only got one head in the first thousand tosses.
You don't have to be in the EU.
You do if you want to lead the project. So if Britain leaves it can get funding to take part in EU projects lead by EU scientists but it can never lead those projects itself. I expect this will cause many leaders in science to start thinking about a personal "brexit" plan of their own and these are the people who drive research programs and attract scientists from around the world.
I mean there's the Replication Crisis to consider, and the Decline Effect, and then somewhere north of 40,000 neurology papers that were a waste of time
Actually your examples point to the problem which is not how the grants are assigned within a field but the level of funding between different fields. The effects you point to are all predominantly (but not exclusively) related to medical sciences. This is an area where politicians, corporations and the public love to pour huge quantities of money into because of the intense personal connection medicine has to all of us.
A perfect grant allocation system will give the most promising research ideas the highest priority for funding until all the funds are allocated. This means that the more funds you have the lower the quality of research that will be funded even if you have a perfect allocation system. This is what I believe we are seeing today with a good, but obviously not perfect, allocation system.
The solution is to redirect research funding away from medicine to other areas of science. This will have the effect of increasing the output of other fields which will lead to discoveries some of which will in turn help advance medicine as well as advance productivity so we can pay for all the new medical techniques being developed. However this is hard to do because while we all have a strong personal connection directly or through loved ones to curing things like cancer or heart disease very few people have a strong personal connection to making a better battery, understanding superconductivity, finding the nature of Dark Matter or solving quantum gravity etc.
Those are consumables. If you only look at durable goods, and you multiply the number manufactured by the useful lifetime, then I nominate the AK-47.
You are forgetting the oft used quote about the pen being mightier than the sword. This is not really talking about the pen itself - although if this statistic is accurate a Bic Crystal ball point pen would only need to have a useful lifetime of 22 days to beat the AK47 if we assume an average lifetime of 60 years and even without taking into account subsequent sales since 2005.
However the quote it really referring to what the pen writes: books. If we take the best selling example, the Bible, then not only has this book alone sold ~5 billion copies (+/-1 billion depending on whom you believe) the oldest of which is almost 1,700 years old. Other religious texts such as the Qu'ran similarly have wide circulations and are older. So even with your criterion for age times circulation these will have the AK47 completely beaten.
Perhaps the majority of citizens of the UK don't want to "regard the EU as (their) country".
Perhaps. Sadly we may never know though because a huge number of British citizens, myself included, were denied the right to vote in the referendum simply because we were not living in the UK. I would argue that a huge majority of these, and there are over 2 million in the EU alone, would have voted in favour of remaining because they were actually treating the EU as their country.
As citizens of a sovereign state it is their right to make that determination.
I agree and as a citizen of that sovereign nation I was denied that right which is rather ironic since one of the major complaints of the brexit camp was the lack of democracy in the EU. As a result I and my kids will lose their EU citizenship and my only recourse is to finally get Canadian citizenship so I give a final parting two fingered salute to my former country as it turns its back on Europe and loses the right to call itself either 'Great' or 'United' - quite literally as Scotland will secede. It is a very sad time to be British.
The "natural state" is me hitting you and taking your stuff.
Which is exactly what is happening here. In deference to several thousand years of progress though the weapons of choice to hit you with are either armies of lawyers or, in this case, new laws (or rather new interpretation/enforcement of existing laws). Plus ça change.
Is that $70/month or $70/month*. There is a big difference with the '*' usually meaning that in 6 months time the rate will become huge. At least that's the trick they use all the time here in Canada. Still US$70/month is only a bit more that I pay here for just internet alone. Mind you I don't have to deal with Comcast which is probably worth quite a bit per month.
Don't even thing of trying to do the Mandelbrot set.
I actually did that on a 6502 in BASIC (floating point in assembly was beyond me at the time) on a BBC Model B. I was a school kid and got the algorithm off the back of a maths brochure from Leeds University which had a picture of the set on the front. It used to take all night plus most of the following day to run and you could not really zoom in that much but it worked albeit rather slowly!
Actually it is more like Top Gear: they have Hammond and May all they need now is Clarkson although Boris might not be a bad stand in.
How the fuck am I supposed to click that? I have big, dumb, sausage fingers!
Get you mum to do it after she has finished soldering on the new memory chips which is what is required to upgrade an iMac's memory unless it is old or top of the line.
How do you do c++ scripts?
You use a package like ROOT which we use at CERN for data analysis. The original author had the idea that he would save physicists the time to learn a separate scripting language by using interpreted C++ as a scripting language. As you can imagine this did not work out very well. Firstly C++ has an appallingly bad syntax for scripting use and secondly there are many features they were unable to script like virtual functions.
The result that the scripting language was more of a C+/- which was badly documented and also very buggy. One of the worst ones I ever found ws actually using compiled code where adding a blank line i.e. just a new line character to the source code caused duplicate symbol errors due to using the C preprocessor to generate a symbol which only differed by the line number the macro was called on!
Debugging in general was also bizarre because the error messages you got rarely if ever pointed you to the problem and the memory management is also extremely unclear. The only thing which kept it somewhat usable was the development of the python interface...which of course completely undermined the original vision of scripted C++.
Perhaps he'll finally be able to answer the question about whether hell is exothermic or endothermic.
There is another reason: the 6502 assembler is relatively easy to program (I was doing it at ~13-14) and you get a very significant performance boost. Modern CPUs have complex pipelined architectures and for efficient, fast execution modern assembly requires hints etc. so the CPU can make effective use of pipelines etc. This makes it far, far harder.
Even with a CPU as old as DEC's Alpha back in the late 1990's I was astounded when DEC's C++ compiler produced faster code than I could with basic assembly. Once I saw the hints it added I was able to up my game and beat it slightly but the speed gain was nothing like as impressive as it was for the 6502 based BBC Model B plus it required far more effort e.g. knowledge of the CPU architecture etc.
So, where is Essex?
East of Wessex and north of Sussex but strangely not south Nossex since that anglo-saxon kingdom didn't last long enough to leave it's mark on history.
I call BS on professional airline pilot.
If you include all commercial pilots this seems plausible by the time you have included private business jets, cargo transports, crop dusters etc. It's also not clear whether this is just for the US or worldwide. If the later that would include non-western countries where pilot deaths may be higher and non-US countries where police deaths may be far be lower.
So, just in theory, what would happen if the Queen invoked some ancient but technically never repealed power to put an end to the Brexit?
Actually from the discussion in the UK media it would be quite easy for her to do this without resorting to arcane and ancient laws. Apparently invoking article 50 requires use of the "royal prerogative". Effectively the queen invokes the article herself as head of state. However this is only done on the advice of the prime minister. Technically the queen could just say "no" and refuse to invoke it. There is also a legal question in the courts at the moment about whether invoking the article lies under the royal prerogative or requires an act of parliament because entering the EU required an act.
The problem is that if the queen were ever to refuse the prime minister in this there would be an even bigger constitutional crisis which would probably result in the UK becoming a republic. However it does give the queen a chance to talk with the prime minister and to use her 60+ years of experience as the head of state to offer advice to the PM which is probably one of the few times the PM gets to talk to someone who is not part of the political machinations of Westminster. It might not be the most modern system in the world but it has stood the test of time so we can only hope it works now because we really need it to!
That's why you idiots are being lead to believe democracy is bad.
It's well known that democracy is bad but Churchill explained it best: "Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time".
Forgot to add that London too has a strong regional government and also voted overwhelmingly in favour.
I take it that you like people you never voted for or have heard of in a foreign country (Belgium in this case) decide what you have to do, too?
Brussels is the seat of the EU government (or at least parts of it) so when we refer to rules from Brussels we do not mean "rules from Belgium" (whose national laws have no sway outside Belgium) but "rules from the EU government in Brussels". This is the same way that Americans refer to "Washington". It does not refer to the mayor of Washington DC enforcing rules on the rest of the US but you national government in Washington passing laws. So its the same with us, just a different city.
As for "foreign countries" passing rules that makes as much sense as someone in California saying that some federal law they do not like was passed by "foreigners" in other states and forced on them without their say. Since California has representatives in the US government this is clearly false and it is the same with the UK in the EU. The difference is that California has been part of the US for long enough that they are used to this give and take between the local and national governments.
In contrast the UK has only been in the EU for just over 40 years and it does not have any recent experience of give and take between regional and national governments because the Tories stripped all meaningful power from county, city and town councils to centralize it all in Westminster and the areas which DO have experience with strong regional government, Scotland and Northern Ireland, voted overwhelmingly for the EU and while Wales has a national assembly it is very limited in power.
So really "foreign" is just a matter of perspective. If you are still stuck 40 years in the past then yes the EU means that "foreign" countries have some sway over the UK. However if you regard the EU as our country and UK as a part of it then no, foreign countries do not have any sway because a foreign country is one outside the EU.
You never voted for David Cameron in the first instance. You voted for your local member.
Actually this is technically true for the US as well - they do not actually vote for Trump to Clinton they vote for someone who will go to Washington and cast a vote to select Trump or Clinton as the US president....which could lead to some interesting events if they change their mind after being elected.
UK is a monarchy. Nobody elected the Queen.
Technically true but if she actually held the power then I doubt we would be in this mess and when the politicians who do are far more right wing than your hereditary monarch you know you are in trouble.
How about rating Prime Ministers like films? Wouldn't that help even more?
Apparently not. The same idiot already made a play for a parental guidance (PG) rating by claiming that as a mother she would make a better prime minister. Unsurprisingly that didn't work out well either.
I'd like to say that she has no chance of being the next PM but she is being selected by Conservative party voters and a large fraction of them seem intent on destroying the UK given the recent referendum result so who knows?
More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were sent to prison, fired,[4] or executed as a part of this campaign - instigated by Lysenko to suppress his scientific opponents.
Could you explain how this is compatible with "bound to follow strict ethics guidelines"? Getting the government to get rid of those who disagree with you is usually not something allowed under even extremely loose ethical guidelines.