You offer an opinion backed by personal experience.
I offer an alternative opinion, backed by John Locke's original description of the dynamics of a fair market. Here is my opinion:
Calling DRM "abusive" is redundant, but appropriate. Furthermore, "Digital Rights Management" has nothing to do with managing the rights an individual has under copyright law, nor does DRM benefit the creators of the materials it is attached to. The beneficiaries of DRM are third party corporations who once had a purpose in preparing and distributing old media like vinyl and eight-track tapes, but are now obsolete and too dinosaur-stupid to figure out how to do anything else with their resources.
DRM is at best only one more weak reason for The Revolution. It isn't a particularly good reason of itself: history will regard it as insignificant.
And that also pretty much summarizes the problem with Vista. After years of promising all kinds of significant improvements in computering, when it finally came to market, we found that Microsoft had switched focus away from the significant things that were promised, and instead concentrated its efforts on insignificant and sometimes irritating "features" like DRM.
The revolution will not be televised; you will not see it in Vista commercials. The revolution will not come from Redmond. It is, however, unfolding all around you, and you will see it if you bother to look beyond the commercials for other ways to get things done and make your life richer.
[Usual disclaimers about I ain't no planetologist, etc]
This discussion of center of gravity is neat since partway down the page is an animation of the Earth and Moon orbiting their barycenter. The effect is sufficient to add a distinctive "wobble" to the Earth's orbit around the Sun: the Earth itself is about 6,000 miles closer to the Sun at the Full Moon than it is at the New Moon.
If the Earth kept the same face to the Moon at all times, the lithosphere would tend to evolve into the structure that most efficiently distributed the stress of this wobbling. But since the Earth rotates once through the barycenter every day, there are considerable dynamic forces constantly injected into the upper part of the Earth's lower mantle. The focus of these forces sweeps through that region, about 1000 miles beneath our feet, at more than 65 miles per hour. This has got to be a significant factor in geologic processes like plate tectonics, but I don't believe that geology is incorporating these forces into its models as yet.
Without the constant stirring by the tides, it is much less likely that the primordial soup of the oceans would have birthed life so quickly.
The Earth would not be what it is without the presence of the Moon. Looking at it this way, it is clear that the Earth and Moon are a binary planet: the Earth would not have its distinctive features without the presence of the Moon.
Parent post asserts that an inaccurate measure like nutritional calories is better than no measure at all. He implies that to think otherwise is laughable.
Hmm.
Epicycles are a reasonably easy way to understand celestial mechanics, and by Galileo's time, they had been refined to a high degree of accuracy. And they were tied up in navigation, and thus in the shipping industry that was the major money maker of the day, so there was a tremendous amount of support for their continued development and for training arithmetic technicians in their use.
As I recall, Galileo got into some severe trouble for suggesting that epicycles were the wrong way to look at celestial mechanics.
The nutritional calorie has become one of the epicycle systems of our times. It is increasingly apparent that whatever the nutritional calorie is thought to be measuring, it is on a dimension that is skew to the dimensions that are important to good nutrition. This continuing approach to nutrition makes about as much sense as trying to invoke germ theory as an explanation of the autoimmune disorders.
Expend more calories than you ingest. How can you NOT lose weight if you do this?
Oh, it's more than possible to gain weight on a reduced calorie diet.
On the illness side, there are several unpleasant diseases involving fluid retention where a diet like you suggest will cause weight gain through fluid retention if electrolyte balances aren't managed carefully. Renal failure and congestive heart failure come to mind.
In the realm of ordinary life, you can take any healthy but sedentary kid with a moderately high BMI of around 26 and put him through a Marine style boot camp on a low calorie diet, and he'll come out leaner, but heavier. It doesn't take much increase in muscle and bone to offset the loss of fat, which is pretty low density stuff.
Basically you can't apply the laws of physics to nutrition, because nutrition is a phenomenon of dynamic systems with very fuzzy boundaries, and not a branch of physics. Once you realize that a "nutritional calorie" cannot be equated with any measure of physical heat, despite it having originated from a rape of physics, you begin to see the fallacies of stealing a word from an established science and trying to build a theoretical structure around it in an entirely different context. We might someday have a science of nutrition, but not until nutritionists throw out their calorie (for just the same reason that early physicists threw out phlogiston some 230 odd years ago).
What parent is saying is quakery, along with a whole lot of nutrition "science".
It is no more appropriate to apply thermodynamics to nutritional calories than it would be to apply it to phlogiston.
In fact, there is a lot of similarity between phlogiston and the concept of the nutritional calorie. From the perspective of a thermodynamics engineer, both make about the same kind of sense. Which is to say, not much sense at all.
Good point. Let's see what kinds of calories we've got to work with.
Total calories in a food. We can measure that with a calorimeter.
Biologically available calories in that food. We can mash the food up into a paste, then wash that paste with various solvents, and if we choose our solvents correctly, we can remove all the digestible material. Then we can throw the result in a calorimeter and subtract what we find from the total calories. Yeah, we can do that. Sort of. Obviously the answer will be an approximation.
Contributed calories. Some portion of the biologically available calories never makes it out of the gut and into the body itself. What portion varies from person to person, and in sickness and in health, etc. Let's not get too graphic.
It is beginning to look like "calories" is an overly simplified term for a lot of stuff we really don't know much about.
And then there are the various ways calories are burned... For instance, we know that different kinds of thinking stimulate different parts of the brain, and we can infer that gray matter burns a lot more calories when it is active than when it is resting. IIRC, we even know that actively firing neurons are major glucose burners. If we allow the possibility that someone running on a treadmill is using up calories, we also need to acknowledge the possibility that someone doing intense mental work that engages a lot of the brain is also burning up calories. It could be that we have the capacity to think ourselves thin. Heck, for all we know right now, intensive daydreaming about certain subjects might be an effective way to lose weight, balance insulin and thyroxine and the other hormones, and reduce noxious greenhouse gasses.
Actually, more like the way the IBM PS2 flopped in the late 1980s, and IBM went from being the leading competitor in personal computer hardware to a distant also-ran in just a few short months. Now Microsoft is repeating the pattern in operating systems.
The hubris of believing that your company can lead the market anywhere just because its currently the largest vendor is once again causing a major player to stagger over the edge of a cliff... with most of the market sensibly staying back from that awful emptiness of null promises where there is no visible means of support.
If IBM had only had a couple of arrows in its quiver back in 1988, it would now be nothing more than a memory. But IBM had successfully diversified so it was able to weather the losses of the PS2. Microsoft, now... that's another story. They've always just kept shooting the same successful couple of arrows over and over and over... and now they broke one.
Yes, pdf is an open format. So is odt, txt, rtf, stf, etc.
None of these are web formats.
Slashdot is a web site.
It is fully appropriate for Slashdot to provide a warning that a given link does not conform to any of the web formats. It is the courteous thing to do.
Perhaps today within the subset of the world that you are familiar with this may not seem to add any value, but it also doesn't subtract any value.
For someone using Slashdot as fodder for experiments with an html/xml semantic analytic machine, this kind of warning can have quite a bit of value.
An interesting point tangent to this discussion is whether pdf, flash, and similar formats will survive as more than historic curiosities five years from now. Generating content that can be reliably processed by HSAMs is going to be increasingly important in advertising as well as research— in fact, in all aspects of global web publishing. Very much more so than search engine optimization is now. Yet the HSAMs are going to be reliant upon standard HTML, CSS, and XML formatting for cues to setting the semantic weights of words and phrases. The pdf format doesn't provide any equivalent semantic cues, and flash, etc, are of course even worse.
There are plenty of technologically simple solutions to radwaste.
Good, then give me some links that support that claim with cost figures and storage capabilities, and not just more of the highly abstract and overly generalized "arguments" like those in the parent post.
I've actually done some looking for these. Here is a quick summary of what I've found: Yucca Mountain might go operational, in a limited capacity, in 2010, and if utilized to its maximum extent, it will be able to store current and future waste coming from USA commercial nuclear power up to 2014. However it is unlikely to reach maximum capability until something like 2025. So by itself, the most it could do is provide sufficient long term storage to allow the USA to safely shut down all its existing nuclear power plants and replace them with coal fired plants by 2014, with the last of the nuclear waste being moved from short term to long term storage some 11 years after that.
And Yucca Mountain is the only plan the USA has for handling nuclear waste. This after more than 50 years of the USA nuclear power industry supposedly studying the problem.
This speaks quite loudly to the lack of quality of thinking in the USA nuclear power industry. There might well be some technologically simple solutions to "radwaste", but the USA nuclear power industry is too corrupt to be able to find them. I wouldn't trust these @ssholes to produce safe toys for tots or toothpaste or dog food.
France is quite a bit further along: they've got a fuel recycling process, and they expect to have the first stage of a continuing "pass the hot potato" approach to waste management in place by 2015. Their strategy is to reduce waste through recycling, then actively manage the remainder through relatively short term storage depots and continuous research into improved recycling techniques and long term storage containment. But this approach can't work in the USA because there is no profit in it. The USA would have to nationalize the entire power industry, and there are too many stockholders who are also voters for that to happen.
Back to the point. This is a technical problem because the technology simply does not exist in the USA, and there is no way anyone is going to fund its development. All the hot air devoted to talking about how easy it would be to make the technology is not going to handle a single millirem of "radwaste". Talking about technology does not create that technology. Somebody has to actually do the work, and nobody in the USA is going to pay for it.
California has a moratorium on licensing new nuclear power facilities until some measurable progress has been made in handling the long term waste issues. That is the only reasonable approach at this time.
Clean in this case means that if stored properly, the actual "dirty" parts never comes into contact with the environment in such a way that would cause any harm
Uh, right.
Of course, nuclear waste has a nasty way of changing from one group of elements to another: by definition, it is not chemically stable. What is worse is that the changing chemistry induces physical changes (in temperature, pressure, solubility, phase changes, crystal formation, etc) that can cause local changes in the radiation flux (by concentrating radioisotopes or altering moderator influences), and send things down surprising decay pathways. Basically, whatever you put into the soup (or vitreous glass) at the beginning, you simply don't know what you've got a few years or decades down the road. Currently that's all guesswork.
If we had an inert substance to build the nuclear waste containers out of, we could go ahead with permanent nuclear waste storage with relative safety. Or we could use it in the pipes and reagent vessels in our nuclear waste recycling plants. There is a name for this remarkable material: it is called unobtainium. It is unfortunately as rare as administratium is common in our regulatory agencies.
So basically I agree completely with parent post, with the caveat that we do not know what "stored properly" means, and it is very highly possible that we cannot learn what "stored properly" might mean in time enough to help us in making decisions about nuclear power.
By far the greatest cost of nuclear power generation is managing the waste stream. So far, nuclear power appears cheap only because nobody is yet managing the waste, or even talking realistically about it. All the waste is in "temporary storage".
Recycling it into new fuel makes a lot of sense, in theory. Let's see some real cost estimates of practical recycling plants. That get into the nitty-gritty of dealing with costs of a burst pipe, or a cooled crucible full of solidified sludge, or any of the other problems common to chemicals and materials handling that are magnified when dealing with radioisotopes. Show me some solid analysis of the net value-add of the entire nuclear industry, and lets see how that might stack up against other alternatives.
My guess is that there is a lot of public transit and maybe a bicycle in your future. There will come a time when you won't bother getting your driver's license renewed because you will no longer be able to justify the cost of gas for a car. Where your parents used to compare the advantages of one suburb to another, your buddies will compare the advantages of living on the ground floor with living on the tenth floor.
My guess is that when all the mind games are done, we're going to find that the only way forward is to reduce power consumption to 1950s levels, and learn to live with that. With all that we've learned about new materials and techniques, that might not be so bad. The bike that you commute to work on will be a high tech piece of art.
And you'll tell your kids stories about the Golden Age your parents enjoyed, where they'd drive out beyond the bus lines on a Saturday afternoon, just for a lark, just the two of them with the entire car to themselves, and nothing more than a picnic basket in trunk. And your kids won't believe such a tall tale.
Then we just have to worry about the CO2 we've already put in there.
That, and of course the radioactive waste that we have no practical handle on. I'm not against fission, but we've already got a dozen times more waste in "temporary" storage than there are plans for permanent storage facilities. We can't afford to let the nuclear power industry rush ahead in its optimism like Haliburton in Iraq— that won't take us to the kind of future we want to live in.
Oh, there's no question that she got paid for unused vacation time. Even if she had been fired, she would get that. And I doubt very much that she was fired: that would have created an unnecessary legal vulnerability.
She quit, and Management determined that her effective last day was that day. Management did everything it could to inconvenience her and humiliate her, and given the circumstances, I can't fault that approach. Handling the class she had been hired to teach was a bitch, and she had clearly intended to leave as big a mess behind her as she could. Perhaps she was trying to prove that she was indispensable. Idunno. I do know that in any business with more than 100 employees, nobody is indispensable. Businesses don't work that way.
Because the Chinese stand to learn more about US capabilities and tactics than the US will learn about China.
That's certainly part of the benefits China sees.
Another part is that now the USA has to devote its military brain power to developing strategies to counter this new threat, and to re-assessing defense strategies for Taiwan and other treaty parties in the region. Fewer resources will be available for assessing China's other possible activities, such as its space program, its long term interests in its border with India, and its possible interest in re-opening the old Silk Road through Afghanistan and Pakistan.
For the very small cost of surfacing one submarine, China is forcing the USA into some massive expenditures, and thus buying a lot of opportunities that otherwise wouldn't come at such a very low price.
On the subject of retraining, I'd be interested to see a link to back that up,
There was a story on slashdot within the last 3 or 4 days that mentioned Google had found that it was hard to assimilate people hired from Microsoft because of the training required to make the jump between the very different corporate cultures. It was a remark made in passing while talking about another aspect of Google's hiring and retention policies.
But since there is now more than 2 years of extensive publishing about Google's corporate culture, and more than 2 decades of published material about Microsoft's corporate culture, anyone with even a mild interest in comparative high tech business cultures would have the context to understand, and to give proper weight to, that remark. It wasn't a throw-away statement; it was a reference to common knowledge that required no further explanation.
I don't have the link at hand, but perhaps someone else will remember the article. In the meantime, I bet you could google for some interesting stuff: try "'corporate culture' retention Google Microsoft".
<div class="tongueInCheek">Of course, if you work in a repressive environment where "DRM modules" and such might be logging the web sites you visit, you might want to do this from a Mac or Linux machine from home </div>
I've only seen the bum's rush used once, when an instructor gave two weeks' notice the Thursday before the Monday when her 40 hour/week class was going to start, and said that since she had two weeks of vacation time coming, Friday would be her last day and she'd start her vacation on Monday. The manager told her, Nope, this is your last day and you have until noon to clear out your desk. He also cleared his schedule and parked himself at a vacant workstation in the same room until Ms Dippy had turned in her keys and was out the door.
I suppose you could rationalize this in some ways. But it was pretty clear to me that Ms Dippy had so pissed off the manager that he would have been unable to do much productive work that morning, and that his treating her like a piece of guck to scrape off the bottom of his shoe as soon as possible was somewhat therapeutic for him.
Maybe the Microsoft employees were escorted out by security not because they were going to Google, but because they were being assholes in their leave-taking behavior. Google is known to be looking for qualities other than diplomacy and tact, and Google has said that they don't like to hire long term Microsoft employees because it is to hard too retrain them. So these would have been young people who had not been at Microsoft long enough to have become tainted in Google's eyes. Which makes it more likely that they acted like assholes in saying their farewells.
There are circumstances where I think its fair for a manager to play tit for tat, and sometimes that might even be the right thing to do. Better for him to blow off steam in frog-marching the quitter out the door. And its a learning opportunity for the quitter, too.
They should drop CMYK support while they are at it.
When I read the part about making Photoshop configurable so that photo manipulators get what they need, and pre-press processing people get what they need, what went through my head was:
"Yeah, pull that CMYK separation stuff out of the main program and add it back as a pre-press module for the only guys who really need it. That makes sense..... Hey, that's like The GIMP's design, isn't it?"
Think of the maps of the world that were drawn in the 1400s, and then think of our current maps of Sol's neighborhood.
Notice, please, that there are no areas of our current star charts that say "Here Be Dragons".
That is the value of SETI. It assures that the imaginative fearmongers on Earth have less to work with in their efforts to scare people away from exploring space. It is like a vaccine against certain kinds of mass paranoia. The cost of SETI is minimal yet its benefits in preventing some stupid arguments against space exploration are phenomenal.
Yeah, it would change things tremendously if SETI ever found a signal. But knowing that signals are not bouncing around all over the place is also important, and worth the cost of the program.
ODF won't be worth anymore than the proprietary format OOo used before it, if there isn't enough added-value that it's worth it for common people to spend the resources to convert.
Well, that's pure bullshit.
The primary value of ODF is that it reduces archival, retrieval, and distribution costs of our largest institutions. You know, the really big and long-lived ones, like nations, states, businesses that have celebrated their centennial year, and so on. We will start to see the benefits in about 10 years, in improved information services, and therefore lower taxes and cost of goods than would otherwise be the case.
The direct costs to implement this are lower than any alternative. There are only two other strategies, and one variant of the ODF strategy, so let's do an exhaustive listing:
Maintain the archives in their existing formats and keep software on hand, and hardware to run it, that can work with each format as needed. If you've never had the pleasure of working in a mixed environment of WordPerfect, WordStar, Word, Lotus, and Quattro files, then don't pretend you could imagine the costs of this approach. Talk to somebody with relevant experience. We've not all retired yet.
Update every document in the archive to the latest and greatest format whenever the current market leader declares that its time for the world to upgrade to its latest product. Uh, hello??? The idea is to contain costs and improve services, not keep a company that's lost its way rolling in profits???
(the ODF variant) Rather than adopt ODF (which has been in development for a few years, has a pretty good track record, and is extensible), let's all go with a format whose documentation is an order of magnitude more complicated, lacks critical detail, and will require everyone who uses the only software that will be sure to run it to pay an annual licensing fee?
For completeness, here's the ODF approach one more time: Adopt ODF. Use existing FOSS to convert documents to ODF for archival purposes. If the documents don't convert properly, tell the author to rewrite them in good form, without the stupid bells and whistles. Use existing FOSS and slack time to convert old archived material to ODF for long term storage.
The indirect costs of implementation are dependent on how effective Microsoft can be with its campaign of FUD, bribery, and astroturfing. They do not seem to be as good at this as they used to be— their notoriety now precedes them— but they are still a force to be reckoned with.
Hey, you damn astroturfers, get your crap out of our meadow!
It is, perhaps, a superb improvement on what there was before - binary, undocumented file formats.
Finally, a post I can agree with!
It's like a car that a shade tree mechanic has been working on all summer. It used to be up on blocks, but now he's got the left side wheels on, so it's twice as roadworthy as it used to be.
But seriously, folks: Those who want to use MS Office 2007 can do so, and just save their final draft in MS Office 2003 format, then use OOo to convert that to a publishable form for the rest of the world and for archival purposes. It is not that hard to do. Anyone with any serious experience with MS Office version conversions will find this is a piece of cake. Yeah, some fancy stuff won't survive the conversion, but a good proofreader would have marked those sections as needing rewriting anyway, so it really is all good. Really!
Now I see where this is heading, thanks for triggering that flash of insight.
The Watch List is now almost big enough that a privatized White List can be set up, which could be called, ohIdon'tknow, maybe Graywater? (Since Whitewater isn't available).
This would be a kind of travel insurance that would be sold to corporations: for a subscription fee, a corporation could put any of its employees on the white list, and Graywater Inc would assure that person was NOT on the no-fly list, and through weekly checks assure that name stayed off the white list. The "Executive Account" would also include Graywater's ID card with photos and holograms and invisible watermarks and all that shit which the holder could flash at airport security guards and Homeland Defense Agents, and bypass all the usual lines and delays caused by our current ohSoNecessary hypervigilance.
This privatization of homeland security is not only good for the country's protection from evil bad people, but also provides an economic opportunity unparalleled in the history of the United States of Amerika.
If this patent is to be successfully contested on the basis of prior art, some corporation is going to have to go public with the details of its patent protection racket. That company would be exposing itself to a lot of nasty business risks (possibly RICO, possibly anti-trust measures, more probably loss of sales and market cap, very definitely some image problems). I doubt that there are very many CEOs who would like the risk/benefit ratio of such a plan, especially as this kind of thing could break their personal career even if it is successful in blocking the patent.
If IBM is awarded the patent, it can use it to publicly expose the backroom details of the MS - SCO deal, the MS - Novell deal, and similar deals where there is good cause to suspect that some form of patent protection was involved. Through lawsuit and discovery, the secret clauses in those contracts would become public. This would stifle a lot of those kinds of activities, which would be a Good Thing for anyone favoring competition of products based on their technical merit.
IBM could also put the patent in the Linux patent protection pool. I cannot see anything negative for FOSS coming out of that.
But basically I see this patent as a way of demonstrating just how absurd the entire business model patent structure is.
I bought the book several years ago and spent several weeks studying it. Then I gave it away.
I didn't mind the hype and ego so much; I figure genius is entitled to have a few minor faults like that. But I'm going to have to wait for someone to dummy down the reasoning to something my poor brain can comprehend. I think Wolfram might be on to something, but whatever it is, it has nothing to do with making presentations more understandable.
Let me know if there's a Readers Digest Condensed Version available yet.
try to apply such a simple system to a really complex domain (ie: natural language syntax) and it will fail.
But note that the failure is not due to something inherently wrong with the heuristic. It is instead the problem of mapping a highly complex domain into an n-dimensional geometry. In those simpler situations where it is possible to develop a useful map, the heuristic works very well.
In short, there is a "wisdom of the crowd" that can be tapped through the mechanism described in TFA, but this mechanism is not applicable to every problem.
To bring this back on topic, as parent states this is nothing new. However TFA's suggested use of its explanation as a way of addressing resistance to other counterintuitive concepts like Darwinian evolution is something new, and worth thinking about for a few minutes.
Slashdot Mirror
You offer an opinion backed by personal experience.
I offer an alternative opinion, backed by John Locke's original description of the dynamics of a fair market. Here is my opinion:
Calling DRM "abusive" is redundant, but appropriate. Furthermore, "Digital Rights Management" has nothing to do with managing the rights an individual has under copyright law, nor does DRM benefit the creators of the materials it is attached to. The beneficiaries of DRM are third party corporations who once had a purpose in preparing and distributing old media like vinyl and eight-track tapes, but are now obsolete and too dinosaur-stupid to figure out how to do anything else with their resources.
DRM is at best only one more weak reason for The Revolution. It isn't a particularly good reason of itself: history will regard it as insignificant.
And that also pretty much summarizes the problem with Vista. After years of promising all kinds of significant improvements in computering, when it finally came to market, we found that Microsoft had switched focus away from the significant things that were promised, and instead concentrated its efforts on insignificant and sometimes irritating "features" like DRM.
The revolution will not be televised; you will not see it in Vista commercials. The revolution will not come from Redmond. It is, however, unfolding all around you, and you will see it if you bother to look beyond the commercials for other ways to get things done and make your life richer.
[Usual disclaimers about I ain't no planetologist, etc]
This discussion of center of gravity is neat since partway down the page is an animation of the Earth and Moon orbiting their barycenter. The effect is sufficient to add a distinctive "wobble" to the Earth's orbit around the Sun: the Earth itself is about 6,000 miles closer to the Sun at the Full Moon than it is at the New Moon.
If the Earth kept the same face to the Moon at all times, the lithosphere would tend to evolve into the structure that most efficiently distributed the stress of this wobbling. But since the Earth rotates once through the barycenter every day, there are considerable dynamic forces constantly injected into the upper part of the Earth's lower mantle. The focus of these forces sweeps through that region, about 1000 miles beneath our feet, at more than 65 miles per hour. This has got to be a significant factor in geologic processes like plate tectonics, but I don't believe that geology is incorporating these forces into its models as yet.
Without the constant stirring by the tides, it is much less likely that the primordial soup of the oceans would have birthed life so quickly.
The Earth would not be what it is without the presence of the Moon. Looking at it this way, it is clear that the Earth and Moon are a binary planet: the Earth would not have its distinctive features without the presence of the Moon.
Parent post asserts that an inaccurate measure like nutritional calories is better than no measure at all. He implies that to think otherwise is laughable.
Hmm.
Epicycles are a reasonably easy way to understand celestial mechanics, and by Galileo's time, they had been refined to a high degree of accuracy. And they were tied up in navigation, and thus in the shipping industry that was the major money maker of the day, so there was a tremendous amount of support for their continued development and for training arithmetic technicians in their use.
As I recall, Galileo got into some severe trouble for suggesting that epicycles were the wrong way to look at celestial mechanics.
The nutritional calorie has become one of the epicycle systems of our times. It is increasingly apparent that whatever the nutritional calorie is thought to be measuring, it is on a dimension that is skew to the dimensions that are important to good nutrition. This continuing approach to nutrition makes about as much sense as trying to invoke germ theory as an explanation of the autoimmune disorders.
Oh, it's more than possible to gain weight on a reduced calorie diet.
On the illness side, there are several unpleasant diseases involving fluid retention where a diet like you suggest will cause weight gain through fluid retention if electrolyte balances aren't managed carefully. Renal failure and congestive heart failure come to mind.
In the realm of ordinary life, you can take any healthy but sedentary kid with a moderately high BMI of around 26 and put him through a Marine style boot camp on a low calorie diet, and he'll come out leaner, but heavier. It doesn't take much increase in muscle and bone to offset the loss of fat, which is pretty low density stuff.
Basically you can't apply the laws of physics to nutrition, because nutrition is a phenomenon of dynamic systems with very fuzzy boundaries, and not a branch of physics. Once you realize that a "nutritional calorie" cannot be equated with any measure of physical heat, despite it having originated from a rape of physics, you begin to see the fallacies of stealing a word from an established science and trying to build a theoretical structure around it in an entirely different context. We might someday have a science of nutrition, but not until nutritionists throw out their calorie (for just the same reason that early physicists threw out phlogiston some 230 odd years ago).
What parent is saying is quakery, along with a whole lot of nutrition "science".
It is no more appropriate to apply thermodynamics to nutritional calories than it would be to apply it to phlogiston.
In fact, there is a lot of similarity between phlogiston and the concept of the nutritional calorie. From the perspective of a thermodynamics engineer, both make about the same kind of sense. Which is to say, not much sense at all.
Good point. Let's see what kinds of calories we've got to work with.
It is beginning to look like "calories" is an overly simplified term for a lot of stuff we really don't know much about.
And then there are the various ways calories are burned... For instance, we know that different kinds of thinking stimulate different parts of the brain, and we can infer that gray matter burns a lot more calories when it is active than when it is resting. IIRC, we even know that actively firing neurons are major glucose burners. If we allow the possibility that someone running on a treadmill is using up calories, we also need to acknowledge the possibility that someone doing intense mental work that engages a lot of the brain is also burning up calories. It could be that we have the capacity to think ourselves thin. Heck, for all we know right now, intensive daydreaming about certain subjects might be an effective way to lose weight, balance insulin and thyroxine and the other hormones, and reduce noxious greenhouse gasses.
Yeah. Really.
Actually, more like the way the IBM PS2 flopped in the late 1980s, and IBM went from being the leading competitor in personal computer hardware to a distant also-ran in just a few short months. Now Microsoft is repeating the pattern in operating systems.
The hubris of believing that your company can lead the market anywhere just because its currently the largest vendor is once again causing a major player to stagger over the edge of a cliff... with most of the market sensibly staying back from that awful emptiness of null promises where there is no visible means of support.
If IBM had only had a couple of arrows in its quiver back in 1988, it would now be nothing more than a memory. But IBM had successfully diversified so it was able to weather the losses of the PS2. Microsoft, now... that's another story. They've always just kept shooting the same successful couple of arrows over and over and over... and now they broke one.
Yes, pdf is an open format. So is odt, txt, rtf, stf, etc.
None of these are web formats.
Slashdot is a web site.
It is fully appropriate for Slashdot to provide a warning that a given link does not conform to any of the web formats. It is the courteous thing to do.
Perhaps today within the subset of the world that you are familiar with this may not seem to add any value, but it also doesn't subtract any value.
For someone using Slashdot as fodder for experiments with an html/xml semantic analytic machine, this kind of warning can have quite a bit of value.
An interesting point tangent to this discussion is whether pdf, flash, and similar formats will survive as more than historic curiosities five years from now. Generating content that can be reliably processed by HSAMs is going to be increasingly important in advertising as well as research— in fact, in all aspects of global web publishing. Very much more so than search engine optimization is now. Yet the HSAMs are going to be reliant upon standard HTML, CSS, and XML formatting for cues to setting the semantic weights of words and phrases. The pdf format doesn't provide any equivalent semantic cues, and flash, etc, are of course even worse.
Good, then give me some links that support that claim with cost figures and storage capabilities, and not just more of the highly abstract and overly generalized "arguments" like those in the parent post.
I've actually done some looking for these. Here is a quick summary of what I've found: Yucca Mountain might go operational, in a limited capacity, in 2010, and if utilized to its maximum extent, it will be able to store current and future waste coming from USA commercial nuclear power up to 2014. However it is unlikely to reach maximum capability until something like 2025. So by itself, the most it could do is provide sufficient long term storage to allow the USA to safely shut down all its existing nuclear power plants and replace them with coal fired plants by 2014, with the last of the nuclear waste being moved from short term to long term storage some 11 years after that.
And Yucca Mountain is the only plan the USA has for handling nuclear waste. This after more than 50 years of the USA nuclear power industry supposedly studying the problem.
This speaks quite loudly to the lack of quality of thinking in the USA nuclear power industry. There might well be some technologically simple solutions to "radwaste", but the USA nuclear power industry is too corrupt to be able to find them. I wouldn't trust these @ssholes to produce safe toys for tots or toothpaste or dog food.
France is quite a bit further along: they've got a fuel recycling process, and they expect to have the first stage of a continuing "pass the hot potato" approach to waste management in place by 2015. Their strategy is to reduce waste through recycling, then actively manage the remainder through relatively short term storage depots and continuous research into improved recycling techniques and long term storage containment. But this approach can't work in the USA because there is no profit in it. The USA would have to nationalize the entire power industry, and there are too many stockholders who are also voters for that to happen.
Back to the point. This is a technical problem because the technology simply does not exist in the USA, and there is no way anyone is going to fund its development. All the hot air devoted to talking about how easy it would be to make the technology is not going to handle a single millirem of "radwaste". Talking about technology does not create that technology. Somebody has to actually do the work, and nobody in the USA is going to pay for it.
California has a moratorium on licensing new nuclear power facilities until some measurable progress has been made in handling the long term waste issues. That is the only reasonable approach at this time.
Uh, right.
Of course, nuclear waste has a nasty way of changing from one group of elements to another: by definition, it is not chemically stable. What is worse is that the changing chemistry induces physical changes (in temperature, pressure, solubility, phase changes, crystal formation, etc) that can cause local changes in the radiation flux (by concentrating radioisotopes or altering moderator influences), and send things down surprising decay pathways. Basically, whatever you put into the soup (or vitreous glass) at the beginning, you simply don't know what you've got a few years or decades down the road. Currently that's all guesswork.
If we had an inert substance to build the nuclear waste containers out of, we could go ahead with permanent nuclear waste storage with relative safety. Or we could use it in the pipes and reagent vessels in our nuclear waste recycling plants. There is a name for this remarkable material: it is called unobtainium. It is unfortunately as rare as administratium is common in our regulatory agencies.
So basically I agree completely with parent post, with the caveat that we do not know what "stored properly" means, and it is very highly possible that we cannot learn what "stored properly" might mean in time enough to help us in making decisions about nuclear power.
By far the greatest cost of nuclear power generation is managing the waste stream. So far, nuclear power appears cheap only because nobody is yet managing the waste, or even talking realistically about it. All the waste is in "temporary storage".
Recycling it into new fuel makes a lot of sense, in theory. Let's see some real cost estimates of practical recycling plants. That get into the nitty-gritty of dealing with costs of a burst pipe, or a cooled crucible full of solidified sludge, or any of the other problems common to chemicals and materials handling that are magnified when dealing with radioisotopes. Show me some solid analysis of the net value-add of the entire nuclear industry, and lets see how that might stack up against other alternatives.
My guess is that there is a lot of public transit and maybe a bicycle in your future. There will come a time when you won't bother getting your driver's license renewed because you will no longer be able to justify the cost of gas for a car. Where your parents used to compare the advantages of one suburb to another, your buddies will compare the advantages of living on the ground floor with living on the tenth floor.
My guess is that when all the mind games are done, we're going to find that the only way forward is to reduce power consumption to 1950s levels, and learn to live with that. With all that we've learned about new materials and techniques, that might not be so bad. The bike that you commute to work on will be a high tech piece of art.
And you'll tell your kids stories about the Golden Age your parents enjoyed, where they'd drive out beyond the bus lines on a Saturday afternoon, just for a lark, just the two of them with the entire car to themselves, and nothing more than a picnic basket in trunk. And your kids won't believe such a tall tale.
That, and of course the radioactive waste that we have no practical handle on. I'm not against fission, but we've already got a dozen times more waste in "temporary" storage than there are plans for permanent storage facilities. We can't afford to let the nuclear power industry rush ahead in its optimism like Haliburton in Iraq— that won't take us to the kind of future we want to live in.
Oh, there's no question that she got paid for unused vacation time. Even if she had been fired, she would get that. And I doubt very much that she was fired: that would have created an unnecessary legal vulnerability.
She quit, and Management determined that her effective last day was that day. Management did everything it could to inconvenience her and humiliate her, and given the circumstances, I can't fault that approach. Handling the class she had been hired to teach was a bitch, and she had clearly intended to leave as big a mess behind her as she could. Perhaps she was trying to prove that she was indispensable. Idunno. I do know that in any business with more than 100 employees, nobody is indispensable. Businesses don't work that way.
That's certainly part of the benefits China sees.
Another part is that now the USA has to devote its military brain power to developing strategies to counter this new threat, and to re-assessing defense strategies for Taiwan and other treaty parties in the region. Fewer resources will be available for assessing China's other possible activities, such as its space program, its long term interests in its border with India, and its possible interest in re-opening the old Silk Road through Afghanistan and Pakistan.
For the very small cost of surfacing one submarine, China is forcing the USA into some massive expenditures, and thus buying a lot of opportunities that otherwise wouldn't come at such a very low price.
Shrewd. Very shrewd.
There was a story on slashdot within the last 3 or 4 days that mentioned Google had found that it was hard to assimilate people hired from Microsoft because of the training required to make the jump between the very different corporate cultures. It was a remark made in passing while talking about another aspect of Google's hiring and retention policies.
But since there is now more than 2 years of extensive publishing about Google's corporate culture, and more than 2 decades of published material about Microsoft's corporate culture, anyone with even a mild interest in comparative high tech business cultures would have the context to understand, and to give proper weight to, that remark. It wasn't a throw-away statement; it was a reference to common knowledge that required no further explanation.
I don't have the link at hand, but perhaps someone else will remember the article. In the meantime, I bet you could google for some interesting stuff: try "'corporate culture' retention Google Microsoft".
<div class="tongueInCheek">Of course, if you work in a repressive environment where "DRM modules" and such might be logging the web sites you visit, you might want to do this from a Mac or Linux machine from home </div>
Agreed, it's mostly a matter of perception.
I've only seen the bum's rush used once, when an instructor gave two weeks' notice the Thursday before the Monday when her 40 hour/week class was going to start, and said that since she had two weeks of vacation time coming, Friday would be her last day and she'd start her vacation on Monday. The manager told her, Nope, this is your last day and you have until noon to clear out your desk. He also cleared his schedule and parked himself at a vacant workstation in the same room until Ms Dippy had turned in her keys and was out the door.
I suppose you could rationalize this in some ways. But it was pretty clear to me that Ms Dippy had so pissed off the manager that he would have been unable to do much productive work that morning, and that his treating her like a piece of guck to scrape off the bottom of his shoe as soon as possible was somewhat therapeutic for him.
Maybe the Microsoft employees were escorted out by security not because they were going to Google, but because they were being assholes in their leave-taking behavior. Google is known to be looking for qualities other than diplomacy and tact, and Google has said that they don't like to hire long term Microsoft employees because it is to hard too retrain them. So these would have been young people who had not been at Microsoft long enough to have become tainted in Google's eyes. Which makes it more likely that they acted like assholes in saying their farewells.
There are circumstances where I think its fair for a manager to play tit for tat, and sometimes that might even be the right thing to do. Better for him to blow off steam in frog-marching the quitter out the door. And its a learning opportunity for the quitter, too.
When I read the part about making Photoshop configurable so that photo manipulators get what they need, and pre-press processing people get what they need, what went through my head was:
"Yeah, pull that CMYK separation stuff out of the main program and add it back as a pre-press module for the only guys who really need it. That makes sense. .... Hey, that's like The GIMP's design, isn't it?"
SETI has already paid for itself.
Think of the maps of the world that were drawn in the 1400s, and then think of our current maps of Sol's neighborhood.
Notice, please, that there are no areas of our current star charts that say "Here Be Dragons".
That is the value of SETI. It assures that the imaginative fearmongers on Earth have less to work with in their efforts to scare people away from exploring space. It is like a vaccine against certain kinds of mass paranoia. The cost of SETI is minimal yet its benefits in preventing some stupid arguments against space exploration are phenomenal.
Yeah, it would change things tremendously if SETI ever found a signal. But knowing that signals are not bouncing around all over the place is also important, and worth the cost of the program.
Well, that's pure bullshit.
The primary value of ODF is that it reduces archival, retrieval, and distribution costs of our largest institutions. You know, the really big and long-lived ones, like nations, states, businesses that have celebrated their centennial year, and so on. We will start to see the benefits in about 10 years, in improved information services, and therefore lower taxes and cost of goods than would otherwise be the case.
The direct costs to implement this are lower than any alternative. There are only two other strategies, and one variant of the ODF strategy, so let's do an exhaustive listing:
The indirect costs of implementation are dependent on how effective Microsoft can be with its campaign of FUD, bribery, and astroturfing. They do not seem to be as good at this as they used to be— their notoriety now precedes them— but they are still a force to be reckoned with.
Hey, you damn astroturfers, get your crap out of our meadow!
Finally, a post I can agree with!
It's like a car that a shade tree mechanic has been working on all summer. It used to be up on blocks, but now he's got the left side wheels on, so it's twice as roadworthy as it used to be.
But seriously, folks: Those who want to use MS Office 2007 can do so, and just save their final draft in MS Office 2003 format, then use OOo to convert that to a publishable form for the rest of the world and for archival purposes. It is not that hard to do. Anyone with any serious experience with MS Office version conversions will find this is a piece of cake. Yeah, some fancy stuff won't survive the conversion, but a good proofreader would have marked those sections as needing rewriting anyway, so it really is all good. Really!
Now I see where this is heading, thanks for triggering that flash of insight.
The Watch List is now almost big enough that a privatized White List can be set up, which could be called, ohIdon'tknow, maybe Graywater? (Since Whitewater isn't available).
This would be a kind of travel insurance that would be sold to corporations: for a subscription fee, a corporation could put any of its employees on the white list, and Graywater Inc would assure that person was NOT on the no-fly list, and through weekly checks assure that name stayed off the white list. The "Executive Account" would also include Graywater's ID card with photos and holograms and invisible watermarks and all that shit which the holder could flash at airport security guards and Homeland Defense Agents, and bypass all the usual lines and delays caused by our current ohSoNecessary hypervigilance.
This privatization of homeland security is not only good for the country's protection from evil bad people, but also provides an economic opportunity unparalleled in the history of the United States of Amerika.
There is a fix for the "Windows Update" problem. If universally applied, it will also fix the Storm Worm.
You know what it is.
This is a wonderful, delightful piece of work!
If this patent is to be successfully contested on the basis of prior art, some corporation is going to have to go public with the details of its patent protection racket. That company would be exposing itself to a lot of nasty business risks (possibly RICO, possibly anti-trust measures, more probably loss of sales and market cap, very definitely some image problems). I doubt that there are very many CEOs who would like the risk/benefit ratio of such a plan, especially as this kind of thing could break their personal career even if it is successful in blocking the patent.
If IBM is awarded the patent, it can use it to publicly expose the backroom details of the MS - SCO deal, the MS - Novell deal, and similar deals where there is good cause to suspect that some form of patent protection was involved. Through lawsuit and discovery, the secret clauses in those contracts would become public. This would stifle a lot of those kinds of activities, which would be a Good Thing for anyone favoring competition of products based on their technical merit.
IBM could also put the patent in the Linux patent protection pool. I cannot see anything negative for FOSS coming out of that.
But basically I see this patent as a way of demonstrating just how absurd the entire business model patent structure is.
Go IBM!
I bought the book several years ago and spent several weeks studying it. Then I gave it away.
I didn't mind the hype and ego so much; I figure genius is entitled to have a few minor faults like that. But I'm going to have to wait for someone to dummy down the reasoning to something my poor brain can comprehend. I think Wolfram might be on to something, but whatever it is, it has nothing to do with making presentations more understandable.
Let me know if there's a Readers Digest Condensed Version available yet.
But note that the failure is not due to something inherently wrong with the heuristic. It is instead the problem of mapping a highly complex domain into an n-dimensional geometry. In those simpler situations where it is possible to develop a useful map, the heuristic works very well.
In short, there is a "wisdom of the crowd" that can be tapped through the mechanism described in TFA, but this mechanism is not applicable to every problem.
To bring this back on topic, as parent states this is nothing new. However TFA's suggested use of its explanation as a way of addressing resistance to other counterintuitive concepts like Darwinian evolution is something new, and worth thinking about for a few minutes.