It's a bit soon to be calling it "the next Windows ME or Vista 2.0" - that's what people said about Windows 7 and that has been pretty good. I mean, yes, there's be a lot of hate for the Metro interface, but no more than for Unity on Ubuntu, and no one is claiming that's dying.
That already happens - if a peer is found to be sending frequent chunks that fail the hash then the client automatically blocks it and knows it is unreliable. The BT protocol is already pretty good at detecting and routing around poisoned seeds/peers.
Assuming that there's at least one good seed in the swarm, all this will do is slow down the time it takes to complete a file and more wasted chunks/more hashfails.
The movie industry could take a page from the music industry's book. All of that poisoning of p2p networks did nothing to slow down music piracy. What really made a difference was offering a product that people wanted to buy at a reasonable price: DRM-free tracks in good quality for a sensible price. Give people what they want and they will buy it, even in the presence of "free". The music industry learnt this (albeit by being dragged kicking and screaming into the future) and are now reaping the benefits. The movie industry is not there yet - the difference between the two sides of the iTunes store, for example, is quite telling. Enormously expensive DRM-crippled videos on one side, that are not even price competitive with DVD and BluRays in stores, vs cheap, DRM-free, high quality music files on the other that are selling like hot cakes.
On the one hand, a cartel that charges ridiculous prices for messaging. On the other, a service which will not allow you to send messages to users of other services.
+5 Insightful for a post that is factually incorrect? Only on slashdot!
You can send messages in and out of the FB messaging system from any email client. You don't even need a FB account of your own.
I understand that, but the original comment was that Apple couldn't simply get their hands on 100 billion dollars because when people *say* that's what a company has, or when it buys another business etc, they really mean a combination of assets, capital, stock price etc. My point was nothing more than Apple actually has 100 billion *in just cash* available if it wants it, without having to use stock price or other assets to reach the figure.
It's unusual, since most companies won't leave that sort of money to simply stick around in the bank (either issuing a dividend with it or using it for other purposes), but Apple's never been a normal business case when it comes to its cash reserve - it has simply allowed it to pile up over time.
At no point did I advocate that Apple should withdraw it all, or that it was a sensible idea.
I don't think it is. I think it's another of those far-too-obvious ones like "googlewatch" and "apple-fan" which I think have just been set up to troll.
If it's being paid for (as we;re meant to believe has been going on for ages) then the subtlety level has dropped an order of magnitude.
Also, the names of the accounts are all highly suspect - this one just so happens to be named after the programming language used in OS X and iOS? Come on!
It seems like Microsoft is really going out of it's way to innovate in Windows 8. I just hope both Apple and Linux developers would add something similar, as it's hard drive failure can lead to huge problems. Yes, you can use RAID or something, but that will bring costs significantly up. It's better to see these things before failure actually happens.
Rather than take sane precautions with your data such as RAID and/or backing up your information, you want a warning 1 minute before your drive fails?
Apparently "priorities" like healthcare and food issues have already been ignored.
You'll have to zoom in to see most of the stuff on the chart. And to think, the laughable debate about defunding NPR and education etc to help "balance the budget" because it is wasteful spending. But don't you dare touch that defence spending, it's absolutely essential... because... because terrorism!
Now, I'm not saying building a starship is a practical use of a trillion dollars, but there are a lot of things we *could* fund that cost nowhere near a trillion that would have huge benefits to society - like fusion power, or a permanent moon base.
It's not about being assholes, it's about being evil.
Yes, that's right. The board of Apple sits around all day not thinking about economics or profit, but how best to be evil. *eyeroll*
You're being a stupid fuck. They don't sit around trying to figure out how to be evil; they are evil, so they will do anything for money. This does not distinguish them from the vast majority of corporatists out there, of course; I didn't say they were more evil.
Look, I'll still be here when you grow up.
No, you won't. You're not here now. You're off in fucking la-la land.
They *are* evil? Jesus, just listen to yourself. Really, take a step back and listen to what you're saying. If anyone is in "la-la land" it's not me.
If your definition of "evil" is "will do anything for money" (presumably with the laws of the United States given that they have to operate there) then we really have nothing to discuss.
So, what are we talking about here that qualifies them? Suing Android manufacturers? Having a premium pricing structure? Running a closed source operating system on mobile devices? Controlling the user experience and distribution platform on mobile devices? I'm struggling for things they do that apparently make them uniquely evil compared to every other consumer electronics company in existence.
Or perhaps *all* consumer electronics companies are evil too? I assume that's the only possible position here, unless you're a hypocrite, which is always possible.
The other thing you might have to do is consider your definition of the term "evil". As a matter of interest (and I'm not trying to draw comparisons here, just clarifying terminology), how would you describe something like the Khmer Rouge or a certain German political party that had some success in Europe in the early to mid 40s? I mean, if "being evil" is only about doing anything to make money, then I assume we're going to have to come up with a different word to describe them, otherwise the term will just be so broad as to be meaningless.
You're blaming the wrong people. Scientists do this work and publish it, knowing full well it;s not commercial yet and needs a lot of work, or is 5% efficient etc. However, that's not sexy enough for the media, or likely to generate many ad impressions, so they draw ridiculous conclusions that are a long way away from being reality.
Scientists may say that *in the future* a mature process might provide a viable way to produce hydrogen from water (low energy catalytic splitting of water to make hydrogen/protons and oxygen in a mimic of Photosystem II is one of the holy grails of energy research), but they're not saying it's anywhere near ready.
Your suggestion that they wait until they have an actual commercial product is nonsense - they are not working on a commercial product, they are doing research into the processes behind science that can be maybe be used in the future in a commercial product. It might never be used - it might be a dead end. That's all part of scientific research.
This is the biggest annoyance that scientists have at the moment. So much is said about the "wasteful" spending on things like the LHC or fusion research, or various other "big budget" science projects, and people lap it up because they don't get a sense of scale. Sure hundreds of millions of dollars is a lot of money in real terms, but compared to the 8 billion spent on the useless TSA, or the $20 billion spent air conditioning Afghanistan?
Fusion needs a cash injection that we (as in, humans) could easily afford, but instead the media talks instead out the the two main competing research streams competing for the comparative scraps of money provided. Why not fund both?
Fusion power is not out of our technical reach, it's just out of reach right now because the funding is a comparative trickle compared to two useless wars for oil in the Middle East. The real worry for energy companies is that fusion becomes commercially viable, then the price of oil will plummet (it will still be an essential commodity, but the days of it being the thing we invade countries for will be over).
Energy independence and near-limitless power from commercial fusion plants is a very scary thought... for those in control of the current energy supply (oil, gas, coal etc).
Apple's stock price has no bearing on funding fusion if they wanted - they have $100 billion in actual cash assets that they could simply withdraw from the bank in quarters (if they wanted to be douches) or dimes (if they were total douches). Well, assuming the bank could raise that sort of money in cash on hand in one place.
You use the electricity generated by nuclear power stations to drive the (energy intensive) process of generating hydrogen, that you then use for fuelling vehicles.
It's the same process as simply charging up an electric car, it's just a different energy storage method.
Like the purely electric car, however, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles have the problem of range brought about because hydrogen has an extremely low energy density and is difficult to store effectively as a gas or a liquid (compared to a liquid hydrocarbon fuel, for example).
The market is all interlinked, and that market is energy.
2. Reproducibility means exactly that - if you follow the method set out in the paper can you reproduce the results that the paper claims? There's no "system" for testing reproducibility because there doesn't need to be one - you simply do what the authors of the paper did and either it works or it doesn't. If you haven't been given enough information to reproduce the paper's results then the paper is invalid and needs to be corrected.
3. Studies are a particular tool of science, and are one of the most abused, misunderstood and mistrusted tools we have, for all of the reasons you mentioned and more. A huge number of studies are conducted poorly for a large number of reasons. Analysing and critiquing the study itself is large part of peer review.
4. This is just nonsense rambling. I'm sure there are some "career development for PhD's" that is not "science" but it hardly describes the majority of science being doing that is funded by means other than the taxpayer. This just reads like an anti-science talking point with nothing to substantiate it. You know if you're reaching for character attacks on scientists themselves you've run out of arguments.
5. This is definitely true. The media's reporting and (often wilful, most times ignorant) misunderstanding of what scientific studies are reporting is rife and it is one of the main reasons science is so misunderstood by the general public. Quoting scientists out of context, or just plain making stuff up is also widespread. "Scientists say....", "some experts believe...." etc etc.
Also, consider this, can you trust the findings of a scientist without a moral compass?
That's a bit of a non-sequitur. You can replace "scientist" in that sentence with almost any profession. Lawyer, politician, police officer, doctor etc... How does it relate to the issue under discussion, unless you're claiming that *all* scientists have no moral compass?
"Scientists" are not forcing anyone to do anything - that's what politicians do. We just do the science. Now, if we end up discovering, for example, that CFCs are damaging the ozone layer, or that PbEt4 in gasoline is poisoning the air then we bring that to the attention of people who can make a decision on what to do about that. We can certainly offer suggestions of what to do about it - stop using CFCs (and develop alternatives) and stop using PbEt4 in gasoline (and work on alternatives) etc, but ultimately sometimes changes have to be made that people aren't going to like.
We don't enjoy "telling people what to do" or set about to discover things that will allow us to dictate to people what to do - ideally we want to find solutions to things that have a minimal impact on people's lives.
We're not in this to control people - we just do science. We don't want to "force" people to do anything, but sometimes what we discover necessitates change in order to benefit everyone as a whole (like removing lead from gasoline, or switching to non-CFC propellants and refrigerants). That's just life I'm afraid.
And there's jerks like you who claim that anyone who dare look askance at your work are "anti-intellectual" are are too stupid to sort out what to trust in a scientific publication (are you saying that scientific publications, Nature, et. al. have untrustworthy material in it?)
Ah, classic twisting of my words. I'm talking about anti-intellectualism as a movement. Those doing it are extremely smart - that's what makes them good at it. They're good at duping people into following their cause. I am not personally calling individual people stupid unless they actually demonstrate that they are.
And yes, I'm absolutely saying that scientific publications contain untrustworthy information, including the big hitters like Science and Nature - their size and prestige is no assurance of infallibility, and in fact can work against them since people are often reluctant to question them. That's the nature of scientific publishing - until results have been replicated, single-source experiments and models need to be looked at with extreme skepticism.
Last year I performed some work that disproved a piece of published literature (in a non-controversial area of chemistry). I didn't set out to disprove it - I set out to see if I could replicate the results and I determined that the published paper was incorrect. My own conclusions, method and data set were published in response, with some discussion on why the previous paper was drawing incorrect conclusions (mainly an issue with experimental control). My situation is one that is repeated constantly - it's how science works. The stuff that can't be replicated is corrected, the stuff that is replicated becomes more solid.
It's not the layman's fault that they don;t understand some of the intricacies of how peer review and scientific publishing and research works. They're not stupid for not getting that in the same way that I'm not stupid for not understanding the first thing about programming - it's simply not my area of expertise. Where the stupidity *does* arise, however, is when people start to distrust scientists out of hand because they're being told to do so by certain media outlets or special interests. It happened with vaccinations due to a corrupt doctor manipulating a very weak study with the ultimate aim to push a competing vaccine made by a company that paid him off, but it backfired spectacularly - far from getting the competing vaccine popular, people rejected vaccination entirely against their own interests, putting their own and everyone else's kids at more risk. It's this sort of media frenzy and associated public panic and distrust of science (even now, people refuse to believe scientists on the issue, despite the original study being totally debunked and Wakefield himself being struck off the medical register et and the whole thing exposed as a sham).
That's the sort of thing I'm talking about here. We saw it with the MMR vaccine, we see it with nuclear power, we see it with stem cell research, we see it with GM foods (and there *are* some legitimate issues to be raised there, being drowned out by typical media hysteria), we see it with climate science - again, there are legitimate issues to be raised and discussed on a topic that is *gigantic* in scope in the scientific community, but it's being drowned in so much media hysteria and political propaganda that it's almost impossible to get anything done.
Of course, equating people who don't drink your Kool Aid to those who deny the Holocaust really helps your cause to be seen as our nights in shining armor.
Where did I say that? You're dangerously close to Godwining the thread by trying to imply that I brought that up when I did no such thing. The hyperbole serves no one, it only makes your arguments look weak.
I'm not looking to be anyone's "night [sic] in shining armor", nor are most scientists. We just work on the science in our field and go where that leads us. If we wanted to be knights rescuing people I'd have joined the fire service or something. I became a scientist to ultimately help mankind and further our collective knowledge, but I'm no superhero or white knight.
Yep. I've got an unexpensive Android device with a QVGA screen. Native apps are a must with such a resolution because they just fit much better than websites. BTW, how is RIM going to push for HTML5 apps on iOS?
If that's their plan, I'm afraid you can stick a fork on RIM, they're done.
Why would it need to push for HTML5 apps on iOS? iOS already has them - they predate the App Store, and are still supported. If BB can get this working for them, which I doubt since the BB train has long since sailed in the US market, then they might be able to salvage something.
I think they have left it far too late, however, and they've been pushed into irrelevance by iOS and Android.
Yes, but these new ones are going after you hit "play" and before the movie starts. Much harder to skip them by letting the disk do its thing while people are in the bathroom, getting drinks etc. This one won't start until you're all sat down and ready to start the movie.
Thus, much easier to just buy the DVD then either rip it or torrent it. *Much* superior product from a torrent site. With my connection I can get most HD content in about 5 minutes, so that can be downloading while people use the bathroom, get drinks etc, then it will play when I hit play. No bullshit.
That's the insidious thing about these new ones though - they won't play until *after* you press play on the menu. So you get all that shit you can just pre-load by putting the disc in before swapping the TV over the DVD feed, but you can't get past these new segments so easily.
I wasn't talking about that one, but the other audits that have been carried out, on a regular basis, since Apple began to use outsourced factories. Still, your own link there already contradicts your earlier claim here regarding suicides:
Really? Care to prove that they did anything before the Foxconn suicides hit the press?
Since that extra PR audit was in response to some media attention in 2006, which is long before the "Apple Suicide Factory" stuff started showing up. Back in 2006 Apple was a much smaller player in the tech world compared to its position now and no one outside the rumour sites was paying much attention (this was a year pre-iPhone). Most talk about Apple in the press back then was about how Apple might have a popular music player, but that they weren't going to get anywhere in the PC market and that they were slowly dying - summer 2006 was a year after their switch to x86, so many were predicting their demise now they were "just a regular PC maker with an expensive case".
Doesn't change the fact that they were still conducting their own supplier audits, on working conditions and environmental issues (such as management of waste and the sourcing of raw materials from "ethical" suppliers further down the chain.
Damn right scientists are angry. The pervasive anti-intellectualism and well-funded attacks on science to suit political ends are getting ridiculous. Positive bias in peer review is a problem that needs to be addressed, but it is all part of science - studies that cannot be replicated are examined in detail and their models either rejected or refined to be tested again. Just because something is published does not make it "the truth" - it means it is a set of conclusions based on experiments that were done by a particular team of scientists. If it's not repeatable then future publications will say so - that's how the back and forth and refining of models happens. Things don't get held back until the issue is "settled" then get published, it simply doesn't work like that.
Where things start to fall down (and where the anti-science folk with an agenda have such an easy time) is that it can be hard for the layman to sort out what to trust in a scientific publication, since the well-hammered, repeated-by-many-groups stuff is sitting alongside single publications claiming XYZ based on PQR from a single data set in a single research group. It's so easy to wade in there and say "look at this! see! scientists can't agree! it's all a big con to get more money! they'll say anything to further their agenda!".
Again, I'm not dismissing the problems of positive bias - it's a factor of peer review and the way human beings approach the reporting of science, but the job is made much harder by a barely-science-literate blogosphere working full steam to discredit anything they can to make it look like there's some sort of global conspiracy of scientists working against the general public in whatever field the propaganda machines are working against. Climate change is clearly the biggest one at the moment, but it's not restricted to that. There's almost anything related to things that challenge fossil fuels and energy research towards energy independence, then there's anything in the biology field relating to stem cells, vaccinations, pharmaceuticals, etc.
The rise of public opinion that science is somehow something to be regarded with great suspicion and that scientists are actively working against the public good is not only troubling, it's highly counterproductive. It's time we started getting angry about it, it's just almost impossible to fight back - scientists are not equipped to do so against a highly organised and well funded group of individuals who do that sort of character assassination and propaganda for a living.
I see that you clearly don't understand the economics of this, which is presumably why you're not head of hardware and supply chain at Apple.
"The factory"? In this country, we open another factory close to where the workers are, we don't expect them to walk halfway across the fucking nation to assemble iPods.
What the hell are you talking about? Where exactly do you put the factory "where the workers are" when there is no single place in the USA to build your factory where there's a large enough workforce to staff it? That's the whole point. The link is already in this thread - the US simply doesn't have a workforce capable of staffing a factory of the size Apple needs, and breaking it up into multiple smaller factories to put several "where the workers are"? Please, that's just naive.
I'm not "making excuses for Apple", I'm merely laying out the facts of reality. I understand that you hate Apple with some sort of burning child-like hatred like a kid who loses all perspective when the topic comes up, but you hating them doesn't change the facts at hand. There's no "excuses" to be made for them, it's simply not possible for Apple to build a factory of the size they need in the USA. Hatred of them has nothing to do with it. It's not a situation unique to Apple either - the US just doesn't have the strong manufacturing base it once had, and a single company making consumer electronics can't change that on its own, regardless of how much cash it has in the back. The laughable comments I've seen on this story about how Apple could take "a few million" and set up something on the scale of its leased iOS hardware assembly lines in the US demonstrates how little armchair quarterbacks on/. really understand about the whole situation.
The economics simply do not add up. Where they do, Apple does use US manufacturing, as do other large consumer electronics makers, but for handheld assembly of phones and iPads? Not feasible. It's not "excusing assholes" to point that out. Something being economically and physically possible to do does not depend on whether they are assholes.
They'd love to, I'm sure (after all, it's great PR) and they used to manufacture in the US but there simply isn't the capacity to do it in the US or Europe any more.
*Maybe* Germany, but even there in a country with a consistently high performing and well-funded manufacturing sector, they just don't have the manpower to be able to do the sort of volume and timescale that Apple needs. It's not just a case of saying "we'll build the factory there!" - you need employees to staff it and the scale of the workforce at Foxconn's multiple plants are simply way over what you'll be able to manage in any European or US setup.
Saying that, Apple does do some manufacturing of components in the US, namely in Texas via Samsung's chip fab there. They just sunk a ton of money into it so Samsung could extend it further, although the raw number of job increases was not huge due to the nature of chip fabrication. It's nowhere near the worker density of an assembly line.
Slashdot Mirror
How do you know? Have you used it?
It's a bit soon to be calling it "the next Windows ME or Vista 2.0" - that's what people said about Windows 7 and that has been pretty good. I mean, yes, there's be a lot of hate for the Metro interface, but no more than for Unity on Ubuntu, and no one is claiming that's dying.
That already happens - if a peer is found to be sending frequent chunks that fail the hash then the client automatically blocks it and knows it is unreliable. The BT protocol is already pretty good at detecting and routing around poisoned seeds/peers.
Assuming that there's at least one good seed in the swarm, all this will do is slow down the time it takes to complete a file and more wasted chunks/more hashfails.
The movie industry could take a page from the music industry's book. All of that poisoning of p2p networks did nothing to slow down music piracy. What really made a difference was offering a product that people wanted to buy at a reasonable price: DRM-free tracks in good quality for a sensible price. Give people what they want and they will buy it, even in the presence of "free". The music industry learnt this (albeit by being dragged kicking and screaming into the future) and are now reaping the benefits. The movie industry is not there yet - the difference between the two sides of the iTunes store, for example, is quite telling. Enormously expensive DRM-crippled videos on one side, that are not even price competitive with DVD and BluRays in stores, vs cheap, DRM-free, high quality music files on the other that are selling like hot cakes.
On the one hand, a cartel that charges ridiculous prices for messaging. On the other, a service which will not allow you to send messages to users of other services.
+5 Insightful for a post that is factually incorrect? Only on slashdot!
You can send messages in and out of the FB messaging system from any email client. You don't even need a FB account of your own.
I understand that, but the original comment was that Apple couldn't simply get their hands on 100 billion dollars because when people *say* that's what a company has, or when it buys another business etc, they really mean a combination of assets, capital, stock price etc. My point was nothing more than Apple actually has 100 billion *in just cash* available if it wants it, without having to use stock price or other assets to reach the figure.
It's unusual, since most companies won't leave that sort of money to simply stick around in the bank (either issuing a dividend with it or using it for other purposes), but Apple's never been a normal business case when it comes to its cash reserve - it has simply allowed it to pile up over time.
At no point did I advocate that Apple should withdraw it all, or that it was a sensible idea.
I don't think it is. I think it's another of those far-too-obvious ones like "googlewatch" and "apple-fan" which I think have just been set up to troll.
If it's being paid for (as we;re meant to believe has been going on for ages) then the subtlety level has dropped an order of magnitude.
Also, the names of the accounts are all highly suspect - this one just so happens to be named after the programming language used in OS X and iOS? Come on!
It seems like Microsoft is really going out of it's way to innovate in Windows 8. I just hope both Apple and Linux developers would add something similar, as it's hard drive failure can lead to huge problems. Yes, you can use RAID or something, but that will bring costs significantly up. It's better to see these things before failure actually happens.
Rather than take sane precautions with your data such as RAID and/or backing up your information, you want a warning 1 minute before your drive fails?
1 minute should be more than enough for anybody.
Apparently "priorities" like healthcare and food issues have already been ignored.
You'll have to zoom in to see most of the stuff on the chart. And to think, the laughable debate about defunding NPR and education etc to help "balance the budget" because it is wasteful spending. But don't you dare touch that defence spending, it's absolutely essential... because... because terrorism!
http://www.pitchinteractive.com/usbudget/
Now, I'm not saying building a starship is a practical use of a trillion dollars, but there are a lot of things we *could* fund that cost nowhere near a trillion that would have huge benefits to society - like fusion power, or a permanent moon base.
It's not about being assholes, it's about being evil.
Yes, that's right. The board of Apple sits around all day not thinking about economics or profit, but how best to be evil. *eyeroll*
You're being a stupid fuck. They don't sit around trying to figure out how to be evil; they are evil, so they will do anything for money. This does not distinguish them from the vast majority of corporatists out there, of course; I didn't say they were more evil.
Look, I'll still be here when you grow up.
No, you won't. You're not here now. You're off in fucking la-la land.
They *are* evil? Jesus, just listen to yourself. Really, take a step back and listen to what you're saying. If anyone is in "la-la land" it's not me.
If your definition of "evil" is "will do anything for money" (presumably with the laws of the United States given that they have to operate there) then we really have nothing to discuss.
So, what are we talking about here that qualifies them? Suing Android manufacturers? Having a premium pricing structure? Running a closed source operating system on mobile devices? Controlling the user experience and distribution platform on mobile devices? I'm struggling for things they do that apparently make them uniquely evil compared to every other consumer electronics company in existence.
Or perhaps *all* consumer electronics companies are evil too? I assume that's the only possible position here, unless you're a hypocrite, which is always possible.
The other thing you might have to do is consider your definition of the term "evil". As a matter of interest (and I'm not trying to draw comparisons here, just clarifying terminology), how would you describe something like the Khmer Rouge or a certain German political party that had some success in Europe in the early to mid 40s? I mean, if "being evil" is only about doing anything to make money, then I assume we're going to have to come up with a different word to describe them, otherwise the term will just be so broad as to be meaningless.
It's not about being assholes, it's about being evil.
Yes, that's right. The board of Apple sits around all day not thinking about economics or profit, but how best to be evil. *eyeroll*
Look, I'll still be here when you grow up.
You're blaming the wrong people. Scientists do this work and publish it, knowing full well it;s not commercial yet and needs a lot of work, or is 5% efficient etc. However, that's not sexy enough for the media, or likely to generate many ad impressions, so they draw ridiculous conclusions that are a long way away from being reality.
Scientists may say that *in the future* a mature process might provide a viable way to produce hydrogen from water (low energy catalytic splitting of water to make hydrogen/protons and oxygen in a mimic of Photosystem II is one of the holy grails of energy research), but they're not saying it's anywhere near ready.
Your suggestion that they wait until they have an actual commercial product is nonsense - they are not working on a commercial product, they are doing research into the processes behind science that can be maybe be used in the future in a commercial product. It might never be used - it might be a dead end. That's all part of scientific research.
This is the biggest annoyance that scientists have at the moment. So much is said about the "wasteful" spending on things like the LHC or fusion research, or various other "big budget" science projects, and people lap it up because they don't get a sense of scale. Sure hundreds of millions of dollars is a lot of money in real terms, but compared to the 8 billion spent on the useless TSA, or the $20 billion spent air conditioning Afghanistan?
Fusion needs a cash injection that we (as in, humans) could easily afford, but instead the media talks instead out the the two main competing research streams competing for the comparative scraps of money provided. Why not fund both?
Fusion power is not out of our technical reach, it's just out of reach right now because the funding is a comparative trickle compared to two useless wars for oil in the Middle East. The real worry for energy companies is that fusion becomes commercially viable, then the price of oil will plummet (it will still be an essential commodity, but the days of it being the thing we invade countries for will be over).
Energy independence and near-limitless power from commercial fusion plants is a very scary thought... for those in control of the current energy supply (oil, gas, coal etc).
Apple's stock price has no bearing on funding fusion if they wanted - they have $100 billion in actual cash assets that they could simply withdraw from the bank in quarters (if they wanted to be douches) or dimes (if they were total douches). Well, assuming the bank could raise that sort of money in cash on hand in one place.
You use the electricity generated by nuclear power stations to drive the (energy intensive) process of generating hydrogen, that you then use for fuelling vehicles.
It's the same process as simply charging up an electric car, it's just a different energy storage method.
Like the purely electric car, however, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles have the problem of range brought about because hydrogen has an extremely low energy density and is difficult to store effectively as a gas or a liquid (compared to a liquid hydrocarbon fuel, for example).
The market is all interlinked, and that market is energy.
Peace of mind, and the ability to self-justify downloading.
1. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/scientific+method
2. Reproducibility means exactly that - if you follow the method set out in the paper can you reproduce the results that the paper claims? There's no "system" for testing reproducibility because there doesn't need to be one - you simply do what the authors of the paper did and either it works or it doesn't. If you haven't been given enough information to reproduce the paper's results then the paper is invalid and needs to be corrected.
3. Studies are a particular tool of science, and are one of the most abused, misunderstood and mistrusted tools we have, for all of the reasons you mentioned and more. A huge number of studies are conducted poorly for a large number of reasons. Analysing and critiquing the study itself is large part of peer review.
4. This is just nonsense rambling. I'm sure there are some "career development for PhD's" that is not "science" but it hardly describes the majority of science being doing that is funded by means other than the taxpayer. This just reads like an anti-science talking point with nothing to substantiate it. You know if you're reaching for character attacks on scientists themselves you've run out of arguments.
5. This is definitely true. The media's reporting and (often wilful, most times ignorant) misunderstanding of what scientific studies are reporting is rife and it is one of the main reasons science is so misunderstood by the general public. Quoting scientists out of context, or just plain making stuff up is also widespread. "Scientists say....", "some experts believe...." etc etc.
Also, consider this, can you trust the findings of a scientist without a moral compass?
That's a bit of a non-sequitur. You can replace "scientist" in that sentence with almost any profession. Lawyer, politician, police officer, doctor etc... How does it relate to the issue under discussion, unless you're claiming that *all* scientists have no moral compass?
I believe the game the Americans play is called "Hand Egg".
Seems to make sense.
"Scientists" are not forcing anyone to do anything - that's what politicians do. We just do the science. Now, if we end up discovering, for example, that CFCs are damaging the ozone layer, or that PbEt4 in gasoline is poisoning the air then we bring that to the attention of people who can make a decision on what to do about that. We can certainly offer suggestions of what to do about it - stop using CFCs (and develop alternatives) and stop using PbEt4 in gasoline (and work on alternatives) etc, but ultimately sometimes changes have to be made that people aren't going to like.
We don't enjoy "telling people what to do" or set about to discover things that will allow us to dictate to people what to do - ideally we want to find solutions to things that have a minimal impact on people's lives.
We're not in this to control people - we just do science. We don't want to "force" people to do anything, but sometimes what we discover necessitates change in order to benefit everyone as a whole (like removing lead from gasoline, or switching to non-CFC propellants and refrigerants). That's just life I'm afraid.
And there's jerks like you who claim that anyone who dare look askance at your work are "anti-intellectual" are are too stupid to sort out what to trust in a scientific publication (are you saying that scientific publications, Nature, et. al. have untrustworthy material in it?)
Ah, classic twisting of my words. I'm talking about anti-intellectualism as a movement. Those doing it are extremely smart - that's what makes them good at it. They're good at duping people into following their cause. I am not personally calling individual people stupid unless they actually demonstrate that they are.
And yes, I'm absolutely saying that scientific publications contain untrustworthy information, including the big hitters like Science and Nature - their size and prestige is no assurance of infallibility, and in fact can work against them since people are often reluctant to question them. That's the nature of scientific publishing - until results have been replicated, single-source experiments and models need to be looked at with extreme skepticism.
Last year I performed some work that disproved a piece of published literature (in a non-controversial area of chemistry). I didn't set out to disprove it - I set out to see if I could replicate the results and I determined that the published paper was incorrect. My own conclusions, method and data set were published in response, with some discussion on why the previous paper was drawing incorrect conclusions (mainly an issue with experimental control). My situation is one that is repeated constantly - it's how science works. The stuff that can't be replicated is corrected, the stuff that is replicated becomes more solid.
It's not the layman's fault that they don;t understand some of the intricacies of how peer review and scientific publishing and research works. They're not stupid for not getting that in the same way that I'm not stupid for not understanding the first thing about programming - it's simply not my area of expertise. Where the stupidity *does* arise, however, is when people start to distrust scientists out of hand because they're being told to do so by certain media outlets or special interests. It happened with vaccinations due to a corrupt doctor manipulating a very weak study with the ultimate aim to push a competing vaccine made by a company that paid him off, but it backfired spectacularly - far from getting the competing vaccine popular, people rejected vaccination entirely against their own interests, putting their own and everyone else's kids at more risk. It's this sort of media frenzy and associated public panic and distrust of science (even now, people refuse to believe scientists on the issue, despite the original study being totally debunked and Wakefield himself being struck off the medical register et and the whole thing exposed as a sham).
That's the sort of thing I'm talking about here. We saw it with the MMR vaccine, we see it with nuclear power, we see it with stem cell research, we see it with GM foods (and there *are* some legitimate issues to be raised there, being drowned out by typical media hysteria), we see it with climate science - again, there are legitimate issues to be raised and discussed on a topic that is *gigantic* in scope in the scientific community, but it's being drowned in so much media hysteria and political propaganda that it's almost impossible to get anything done.
Of course, equating people who don't drink your Kool Aid to those who deny the Holocaust really helps your cause to be seen as our nights in shining armor.
Where did I say that? You're dangerously close to Godwining the thread by trying to imply that I brought that up when I did no such thing. The hyperbole serves no one, it only makes your arguments look weak.
I'm not looking to be anyone's "night [sic] in shining armor", nor are most scientists. We just work on the science in our field and go where that leads us. If we wanted to be knights rescuing people I'd have joined the fire service or something. I became a scientist to ultimately help mankind and further our collective knowledge, but I'm no superhero or white knight.
Yep. I've got an unexpensive Android device with a QVGA screen. Native apps are a must with such a resolution because they just fit much better than websites. BTW, how is RIM going to push for HTML5 apps on iOS?
If that's their plan, I'm afraid you can stick a fork on RIM, they're done.
Why would it need to push for HTML5 apps on iOS? iOS already has them - they predate the App Store, and are still supported. If BB can get this working for them, which I doubt since the BB train has long since sailed in the US market, then they might be able to salvage something.
I think they have left it far too late, however, and they've been pushed into irrelevance by iOS and Android.
Yes, but these new ones are going after you hit "play" and before the movie starts. Much harder to skip them by letting the disk do its thing while people are in the bathroom, getting drinks etc. This one won't start until you're all sat down and ready to start the movie.
Thus, much easier to just buy the DVD then either rip it or torrent it. *Much* superior product from a torrent site. With my connection I can get most HD content in about 5 minutes, so that can be downloading while people use the bathroom, get drinks etc, then it will play when I hit play. No bullshit.
That's the insidious thing about these new ones though - they won't play until *after* you press play on the menu. So you get all that shit you can just pre-load by putting the disc in before swapping the TV over the DVD feed, but you can't get past these new segments so easily.
I wasn't talking about that one, but the other audits that have been carried out, on a regular basis, since Apple began to use outsourced factories. Still, your own link there already contradicts your earlier claim here regarding suicides:
Really? Care to prove that they did anything before the Foxconn suicides hit the press?
Since that extra PR audit was in response to some media attention in 2006, which is long before the "Apple Suicide Factory" stuff started showing up. Back in 2006 Apple was a much smaller player in the tech world compared to its position now and no one outside the rumour sites was paying much attention (this was a year pre-iPhone). Most talk about Apple in the press back then was about how Apple might have a popular music player, but that they weren't going to get anywhere in the PC market and that they were slowly dying - summer 2006 was a year after their switch to x86, so many were predicting their demise now they were "just a regular PC maker with an expensive case".
Doesn't change the fact that they were still conducting their own supplier audits, on working conditions and environmental issues (such as management of waste and the sourcing of raw materials from "ethical" suppliers further down the chain.
angry much?
Damn right scientists are angry. The pervasive anti-intellectualism and well-funded attacks on science to suit political ends are getting ridiculous. Positive bias in peer review is a problem that needs to be addressed, but it is all part of science - studies that cannot be replicated are examined in detail and their models either rejected or refined to be tested again. Just because something is published does not make it "the truth" - it means it is a set of conclusions based on experiments that were done by a particular team of scientists. If it's not repeatable then future publications will say so - that's how the back and forth and refining of models happens. Things don't get held back until the issue is "settled" then get published, it simply doesn't work like that.
Where things start to fall down (and where the anti-science folk with an agenda have such an easy time) is that it can be hard for the layman to sort out what to trust in a scientific publication, since the well-hammered, repeated-by-many-groups stuff is sitting alongside single publications claiming XYZ based on PQR from a single data set in a single research group. It's so easy to wade in there and say "look at this! see! scientists can't agree! it's all a big con to get more money! they'll say anything to further their agenda!".
Again, I'm not dismissing the problems of positive bias - it's a factor of peer review and the way human beings approach the reporting of science, but the job is made much harder by a barely-science-literate blogosphere working full steam to discredit anything they can to make it look like there's some sort of global conspiracy of scientists working against the general public in whatever field the propaganda machines are working against. Climate change is clearly the biggest one at the moment, but it's not restricted to that. There's almost anything related to things that challenge fossil fuels and energy research towards energy independence, then there's anything in the biology field relating to stem cells, vaccinations, pharmaceuticals, etc.
The rise of public opinion that science is somehow something to be regarded with great suspicion and that scientists are actively working against the public good is not only troubling, it's highly counterproductive. It's time we started getting angry about it, it's just almost impossible to fight back - scientists are not equipped to do so against a highly organised and well funded group of individuals who do that sort of character assassination and propaganda for a living.
I see that you clearly don't understand the economics of this, which is presumably why you're not head of hardware and supply chain at Apple.
"The factory"? In this country, we open another factory close to where the workers are, we don't expect them to walk halfway across the fucking nation to assemble iPods.
What the hell are you talking about? Where exactly do you put the factory "where the workers are" when there is no single place in the USA to build your factory where there's a large enough workforce to staff it? That's the whole point. The link is already in this thread - the US simply doesn't have a workforce capable of staffing a factory of the size Apple needs, and breaking it up into multiple smaller factories to put several "where the workers are"? Please, that's just naive.
I'm not "making excuses for Apple", I'm merely laying out the facts of reality. I understand that you hate Apple with some sort of burning child-like hatred like a kid who loses all perspective when the topic comes up, but you hating them doesn't change the facts at hand. There's no "excuses" to be made for them, it's simply not possible for Apple to build a factory of the size they need in the USA. Hatred of them has nothing to do with it. It's not a situation unique to Apple either - the US just doesn't have the strong manufacturing base it once had, and a single company making consumer electronics can't change that on its own, regardless of how much cash it has in the back. The laughable comments I've seen on this story about how Apple could take "a few million" and set up something on the scale of its leased iOS hardware assembly lines in the US demonstrates how little armchair quarterbacks on /. really understand about the whole situation.
The economics simply do not add up. Where they do, Apple does use US manufacturing, as do other large consumer electronics makers, but for handheld assembly of phones and iPads? Not feasible. It's not "excusing assholes" to point that out. Something being economically and physically possible to do does not depend on whether they are assholes.
They'd love to, I'm sure (after all, it's great PR) and they used to manufacture in the US but there simply isn't the capacity to do it in the US or Europe any more.
*Maybe* Germany, but even there in a country with a consistently high performing and well-funded manufacturing sector, they just don't have the manpower to be able to do the sort of volume and timescale that Apple needs. It's not just a case of saying "we'll build the factory there!" - you need employees to staff it and the scale of the workforce at Foxconn's multiple plants are simply way over what you'll be able to manage in any European or US setup.
Saying that, Apple does do some manufacturing of components in the US, namely in Texas via Samsung's chip fab there. They just sunk a ton of money into it so Samsung could extend it further, although the raw number of job increases was not huge due to the nature of chip fabrication. It's nowhere near the worker density of an assembly line.