Proponents of AGW are asking for societies to completely revise their infrastructures and policies. They should expect a high degree of skepticism and deal with it head on rather than politicking, obfuscating, and downright covering things up.
And with all due respect, considering the gravity of this matter, skeptics are a bit unwise to require this incontestable proof to be served on a silver plate in front of them. This kind of attitude that "if someone doesn't convince me, then it isn't true" is a bit dangerous.
If AGW is happening, you should be asking for completely revised infrastructures and policies, for you own sake. It is your responsibility and in your own interest to find out what the truth of this matter is. Skeptics shouldn't expect others to do this work for them.
Maybe we live in different parts of the world, but I don't share your view of how skepticism has been dealt with. On the contrary, I find it commendable how some find the effort to continue arguing with, usually misinformed, deniers. But there comes a point when the discussion needs to be settled, because it could truly go on forever, or there will be no time left to act.
Rather than continuing to escalate the rhetoric, climatologists need to return to their core data and analysis methods to present their cases in a fair and rational manner.
Precisely that, is what peer-reviewed scientific journals are for. Have you been reading them?
You forgot one huge fundamental difference between the two: IR remotes emit photons in a narrow cone directed towards the device, whereas a Bluetooth transmitter sends its energy in every direction, wasting most of it. This alone makes up for a couple of orders of magnitude in energy.
I'd be very surprised if the Linux kernel code is so badly written that it can be reduced in size by an order of magnitude. It is not exactly your random open source project. Besides, I assume you had the 5000 lines of code at hand when you rewrote the classes? And presumably, you had some kind of framework to test and compare the implementations in. That is an entirely different thing than writing something from scratch.
And by the OP's metric, you'd still only have 55 seconds per line, even if you could hypothetically reduce the code size by a factor of ten. Nobody can write bug free low level operating system code at that speed.
I can watch the videos, but the player controls are unusable (clicking on them does nothing).
I think this has got to do with GDK using "client-side windows" nowadays. Try adding "export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1" in/usr/lib/nspluginwrapper/i386/linux/npviewer (or equivalent) to force it to use native windows.
The app running in the phone most likely knows what direction the camera i pointing in (by reading the phones compass and inclinometer data). And you have an approximate location using the GPS. This reduces the search space drastically. Next, running a SIFT-like feature matching on the images and solving for a projective transform (meaning you can handle small deviations in photographer location without the image looking too strange), such that it works for a demo, doesn't seem overly complicated to me if you know the mathematics behind it.
Sure, it's an engineering effort to make it work well and in real-time, and it looks rather impressive. But I'd still call it an incremental improvement. A cool one, but far from magic.
The point is that if they really were thinking mostly about getting more money, it's pretty disingenuous to try to sell what you do as something inherently bad. And considering these are likely rather intelligent people, the more probable conclusion is that they don't really keep the dollars on their mind.
Pursuing an academic career is rarely the most profitable path to take. In my experience, people with a sense for making money, having the corresponding skill set, usually head out into the business sector (often finance) or start a business of their own.
When you can achieve the same thing with 20 ft of air, which is almost free (you have to buy land), and maintenance costs drop significantly (for not having to dig), it just makes sense to do overhead lines.
The cost of repairing a power line drops, yes. However, because overhead line are much more susceptible to taking damage from bad weather and storms, the total maintenance cost isn't necessarily lower. Especially if you have to pay compensation to customers for extended power failures.
Where I live, power lines have been replaced by buried cables during recent years, to a degree where almost the entire power grid is now below ground, because they are more reliable and less expensive in the long run.
If Scrum is not understood and fully endorsed by the entire organisation, including higher management, it is doomed to fail. I agree this is a common problem, but the problem is not really with the methodology as such.
Correct me if I am wrong, but the way I have understood the idea of stealth technology, at least today, isn't to try to become completely invisible. Rather, the idea is simply to be able to see the enemy and lock on to him before he sees you, and in that way gain an advantage. If the range at which your radar can detect the enemy is greater than that at which his radar can detect you, you can simply fire off a medium-range missile and get out of there.
Thus, the strict dichotomy of stealth aircraft versus normal aircraft is maybe a bit misleading. You always want to reduce the visibility, but the emphasis varies, so you end up with a range of different degrees of stealth.
I agree with you that nothing is as important for success as a skilled workforce, althought this is not limited to management. I would also argue that, in practice, skilled people will work in a similar way regardless of what methodology you put them in.
However, that said, there still are differences between methodologies that are worth considering. Since we were talking about Scrum; one it it's most important aspects is not so much to dictate how you should work, but rather to provide tools and processes for exposing problems and deficiencies early. If management, as in your example, pressures the team to reach a sprint goal at the cost of quality, that should come up in the following sprint retrospective:
Team member: "I think we wrote crappy code at the end?"
Scrum master: "And why did we do that?"
Team member: "Because management urged us to reach the complete goal, and there wasn't enough time due to reason X. We should have dropped a couple of the least prioritised stories."
Scrum master: "What can we do about it in the future?"
Team member: "Commit to fewer story points in the next sprint."
Team member: "Or make sure we are not interrupted by support requests as much."
Scrum master: "I will discuss the interruptions with management, and make sure they understand how it affects our efficiency."
Also, it is the Scrum Masters job to shield the team from pressure from higher management. Stakeholders are allowed to (and must) prioritise tasks, but the influence should end there.
And now they add the only thing to it, that in even more horrible? Agile?? Or in other words: Spaghetti coding with the motto: “If perfect planning is impossible, maybe not planning at all will work.”
It is obvious that you have never worked with a properly implemented agile process.
First of all, spaghetti code is absolutely not accepted. High quality code is imperative to maintain a successful product in the long run, and something methodologies such a Scrum explicitly declare as non-negotiable. In fact, one of the main points of Scrum is to try to eliminate stakeholders' influence over the quality--time trade-off.
And secondly: Of course you do planning when you work with Agile! It's just that you don't stipulate what will be achieved by a certain dead-line -- instead you estimate. And this is the only sensible thing to do. You cannot be more efficient than 100%, no matter how much you need to. If things take longer, then they were harder than you thought (and hence you try to make a better estimate the next time). You can reduce the scope of the task, or you can put in more hours for a temporary boost, but the map has to change if it differs from reality.
If you with "planning" mean writing specifications, then no, you don't write as much specifications. But that doesn't mean that you do not write any specifications at all. Again, common sense dictates the rule. Specify what you need to, but don't try to specify things just for the sake of it. That is pointless at best and usually detrimental.
Sometimes I get the feeling that Facebook is one of those accidental successes that somehow managed to get a critical mass to drive its own growth, but doesn't really deserve it on technical merits. The unfortunate thing about web communities like Facebook is that there can't really be any functioning competition. You can't simply use some other site if all your friends are on Facebook.
The only reason I'm using Facebook myself is that the social handicap of staying out eventually grew to big. You may call it succumbing to the group pressure if you like, but you have to prioritize in life. I'm usually very careful with what I upload, but I have come to realize that this is a somewhat futile struggle as your friends quickly accumulate all kinds of data about you that you have absolutely no way to control.
I think the meaning of "the math works" in this case is that the math successfully predicts the outcome of experiments. In that case, use it, even if you can't intuitively understand "why" it gives correct predictions.
Another little detail of information, in case anyone reads the links that are included in the summary:
I noticed that Google Translate writes the last couple of sentences of the news release as: "PiratePad is freely available to all users. The party will save any logs from the service." What it actually says in Swedish is: "PiratePad is freely available to all users. The party will not save any logs from the service."
If you want people to believe in global warming's existence, you've got to prove it, irrefutably.
What if it's not possible to produce a proof that would convince you? Does that make global warming impossible in itself?
Suppose that global warming really is happening. In that case you have just made it someone else's burden to convince you to save your own skin.
Tax fuel so people drive less? Great, you just made maintaining one's lifestyle more expensive.
If global warming is happening, your lifestyle is expensive. The difference is that the bill will arrive after a few decades, instead of when you refuel your car, and will be addressed to someone else.
It isn't and should be up to single individuals to take personal responsibility for fixing a problem that we as a civilization all have caused. It would be both impractical and distributes the burden unfairly.
Furthermore, "the politicians" isn't a homogeneous group of people that is out to take your money. The reason taxes and/or cap and trade schemes are suggested for dealing with carbon reductions, is because it allows the market to manage the allocation of emissions, instead of politicians, as the market can do this much better. It puts a price tag on what costs money for all of us (climate change), which otherwise isn't mapped into the economical system.
These taxes or certificate costs doesn't necessarily go to any government -- generally you try to make it a zero sum game where money is circulating, while keeping the net taxation level unchanged. For example, you can use the money you get from taxing petrol to subsidize carbon neutral fuels.
This means that, if you like to continue driving a SUV running on petrol or whatever, you can do that completely without shame. You'd be paying for it, so that others can reduce carbon emissions more, and that prioritization is entirely up to you to make.
My chronic tinnitus aside, if you limit my decibelage, I will find a way to crank it.
And that's just fine. People are and still will be allowed to damage their hearing if they like. The idea isn't to "control" people, even if some reflexively seem to think that every time a government tries to protect it's citizens. The idea is to prevent that the market is filled with devices that injure people without them realizing it (typically teenagers). It is a pragmatic trade-off, reducing hearing loss at large while making it somewhat more cumbersome to produce an arbitrary sound volume.
Personally, I wouldn't mind having an MP3 player that warn me with a "please override" message before I accidentally expose myself to unhealthy sound levels. When the ambient noise is loud, it's often very hard to notice how high you've cranked the volume.
On the other hand, I can see practical problems with this, as it is quite common to replace the stock earbuds.
Use objective facts to show your boss what a twat he is.
While I like the idea, objectivity is going to be a huge problem in this case. The boss is just going to say that "Well, your productivity did go down during this period, but that's what you wanted me to see so you could listen to music again". And frankly, he or she is probably going to be right -- you'd be severely biased trying to prove a point.
At the very least, you'd have to do this measurement without any of the developers knowing about it. But even then you are going to have a big problem interpreting the data objectively. How do you even measure productivity, objectively (and at the same time relevantly)?
Additionally, there are so many significant external factors (such as what project you are currently working in) that you'd probably have to run this experiment over several years or on hundreds of teams to get any statistically useful data.
But, as for man CAUSING global warming - BULLSHIT!!! How many ice ages has the earth had now? And, how many interglacial periods?
You seem to suggest that the history of ice ages disproves AGW. Are you saying that, because climate is known to change by itself, it must therefore be impossible to change it through external means?
Just for the sake of argument, assume that we really are changing the climate. What do you expect would be different today than how it is? Would there be nobody to question it? Would there be some definitive proof that could convince you of it? What would that proof be?
If you can't come up with an idea of something that, in the presence of actual AGW, would convince you of its existence, it is time to start reconsidering you logic. Because that means if it really is happening, you still wouldn't believe it or act on it.
Now, you may respond with a reference to Occam's razor and make some argument about absence of disproof not being proof or something like that, but before you do that I would like to point a few things out:
We know that the Earth's climate depends on a greenhouse effect. (Basic physics -- radiation equilibrium with the Sun would otherwise make the Earth much cooler).
We know that carbon dioxide absorbs a certain amount of heat in the atmosphere (by looking at the light spectrum from space).
We know that we are emitting huge amounts of carbon previously bound in oil and coal, and that it forms carbon dioxide. (High school chemistry and math.)
Frankly, given those easily verifiable facts alone, the possibility of anthropogenic global warming being real is pretty far from unimaginable. We are not talking about a flying spaghetti monster here.
Slashdot Mirror
And with all due respect, considering the gravity of this matter, skeptics are a bit unwise to require this incontestable proof to be served on a silver plate in front of them. This kind of attitude that "if someone doesn't convince me, then it isn't true" is a bit dangerous.
If AGW is happening, you should be asking for completely revised infrastructures and policies, for you own sake. It is your responsibility and in your own interest to find out what the truth of this matter is. Skeptics shouldn't expect others to do this work for them.
Maybe we live in different parts of the world, but I don't share your view of how skepticism has been dealt with. On the contrary, I find it commendable how some find the effort to continue arguing with, usually misinformed, deniers. But there comes a point when the discussion needs to be settled, because it could truly go on forever, or there will be no time left to act.
Precisely that, is what peer-reviewed scientific journals are for. Have you been reading them?
That is only democratic as long as the wealth is distributed reasonably evenly among the population. Otherwise it becomes a plutocracy.
You forgot one huge fundamental difference between the two: IR remotes emit photons in a narrow cone directed towards the device, whereas a Bluetooth transmitter sends its energy in every direction, wasting most of it. This alone makes up for a couple of orders of magnitude in energy.
I'd be very surprised if the Linux kernel code is so badly written that it can be reduced in size by an order of magnitude. It is not exactly your random open source project. Besides, I assume you had the 5000 lines of code at hand when you rewrote the classes? And presumably, you had some kind of framework to test and compare the implementations in. That is an entirely different thing than writing something from scratch.
And by the OP's metric, you'd still only have 55 seconds per line, even if you could hypothetically reduce the code size by a factor of ten. Nobody can write bug free low level operating system code at that speed.
Hardware random number generators are often biased, and there are well known ways to deal with that. (See for example Wikipedia.)
I think this has got to do with GDK using "client-side windows" nowadays. Try adding "export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1" in /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper/i386/linux/npviewer (or equivalent) to force it to use native windows.
The app running in the phone most likely knows what direction the camera i pointing in (by reading the phones compass and inclinometer data). And you have an approximate location using the GPS. This reduces the search space drastically. Next, running a SIFT-like feature matching on the images and solving for a projective transform (meaning you can handle small deviations in photographer location without the image looking too strange), such that it works for a demo, doesn't seem overly complicated to me if you know the mathematics behind it.
Sure, it's an engineering effort to make it work well and in real-time, and it looks rather impressive. But I'd still call it an incremental improvement. A cool one, but far from magic.
What people must go through these days to earn the title of pirate...
The point is that if they really were thinking mostly about getting more money, it's pretty disingenuous to try to sell what you do as something inherently bad. And considering these are likely rather intelligent people, the more probable conclusion is that they don't really keep the dollars on their mind.
Pursuing an academic career is rarely the most profitable path to take. In my experience, people with a sense for making money, having the corresponding skill set, usually head out into the business sector (often finance) or start a business of their own.
Funny they say that strong AI will likely be bad for humanity, then.
The cost of repairing a power line drops, yes. However, because overhead line are much more susceptible to taking damage from bad weather and storms, the total maintenance cost isn't necessarily lower. Especially if you have to pay compensation to customers for extended power failures.
Where I live, power lines have been replaced by buried cables during recent years, to a degree where almost the entire power grid is now below ground, because they are more reliable and less expensive in the long run.
Um... straw man?
If Scrum is not understood and fully endorsed by the entire organisation, including higher management, it is doomed to fail. I agree this is a common problem, but the problem is not really with the methodology as such.
Correct me if I am wrong, but the way I have understood the idea of stealth technology, at least today, isn't to try to become completely invisible. Rather, the idea is simply to be able to see the enemy and lock on to him before he sees you, and in that way gain an advantage. If the range at which your radar can detect the enemy is greater than that at which his radar can detect you, you can simply fire off a medium-range missile and get out of there.
Thus, the strict dichotomy of stealth aircraft versus normal aircraft is maybe a bit misleading. You always want to reduce the visibility, but the emphasis varies, so you end up with a range of different degrees of stealth.
I agree with you that nothing is as important for success as a skilled workforce, althought this is not limited to management. I would also argue that, in practice, skilled people will work in a similar way regardless of what methodology you put them in.
However, that said, there still are differences between methodologies that are worth considering. Since we were talking about Scrum; one it it's most important aspects is not so much to dictate how you should work, but rather to provide tools and processes for exposing problems and deficiencies early. If management, as in your example, pressures the team to reach a sprint goal at the cost of quality, that should come up in the following sprint retrospective:
Team member: "I think we wrote crappy code at the end?"
Scrum master: "And why did we do that?"
Team member: "Because management urged us to reach the complete goal, and there wasn't enough time due to reason X. We should have dropped a couple of the least prioritised stories."
Scrum master: "What can we do about it in the future?"
Team member: "Commit to fewer story points in the next sprint."
Team member: "Or make sure we are not interrupted by support requests as much."
Scrum master: "I will discuss the interruptions with management, and make sure they understand how it affects our efficiency."
Also, it is the Scrum Masters job to shield the team from pressure from higher management. Stakeholders are allowed to (and must) prioritise tasks, but the influence should end there.
It is obvious that you have never worked with a properly implemented agile process.
First of all, spaghetti code is absolutely not accepted. High quality code is imperative to maintain a successful product in the long run, and something methodologies such a Scrum explicitly declare as non-negotiable. In fact, one of the main points of Scrum is to try to eliminate stakeholders' influence over the quality--time trade-off.
And secondly: Of course you do planning when you work with Agile! It's just that you don't stipulate what will be achieved by a certain dead-line -- instead you estimate. And this is the only sensible thing to do. You cannot be more efficient than 100%, no matter how much you need to. If things take longer, then they were harder than you thought (and hence you try to make a better estimate the next time). You can reduce the scope of the task, or you can put in more hours for a temporary boost, but the map has to change if it differs from reality.
If you with "planning" mean writing specifications, then no, you don't write as much specifications. But that doesn't mean that you do not write any specifications at all. Again, common sense dictates the rule. Specify what you need to, but don't try to specify things just for the sake of it. That is pointless at best and usually detrimental.
Sometimes I get the feeling that Facebook is one of those accidental successes that somehow managed to get a critical mass to drive its own growth, but doesn't really deserve it on technical merits. The unfortunate thing about web communities like Facebook is that there can't really be any functioning competition. You can't simply use some other site if all your friends are on Facebook.
The only reason I'm using Facebook myself is that the social handicap of staying out eventually grew to big. You may call it succumbing to the group pressure if you like, but you have to prioritize in life. I'm usually very careful with what I upload, but I have come to realize that this is a somewhat futile struggle as your friends quickly accumulate all kinds of data about you that you have absolutely no way to control.
I think the meaning of "the math works" in this case is that the math successfully predicts the outcome of experiments. In that case, use it, even if you can't intuitively understand "why" it gives correct predictions.
Another little detail of information, in case anyone reads the links that are included in the summary:
I noticed that Google Translate writes the last couple of sentences of the news release as:
"PiratePad is freely available to all users. The party will save any logs from the service."
What it actually says in Swedish is:
"PiratePad is freely available to all users. The party will not save any logs from the service."
What if it's not possible to produce a proof that would convince you? Does that make global warming impossible in itself?
Suppose that global warming really is happening. In that case you have just made it someone else's burden to convince you to save your own skin.
If global warming is happening, your lifestyle is expensive. The difference is that the bill will arrive after a few decades, instead of when you refuel your car, and will be addressed to someone else.
It isn't and should be up to single individuals to take personal responsibility for fixing a problem that we as a civilization all have caused. It would be both impractical and distributes the burden unfairly.
Furthermore, "the politicians" isn't a homogeneous group of people that is out to take your money. The reason taxes and/or cap and trade schemes are suggested for dealing with carbon reductions, is because it allows the market to manage the allocation of emissions, instead of politicians, as the market can do this much better. It puts a price tag on what costs money for all of us (climate change), which otherwise isn't mapped into the economical system.
These taxes or certificate costs doesn't necessarily go to any government -- generally you try to make it a zero sum game where money is circulating, while keeping the net taxation level unchanged. For example, you can use the money you get from taxing petrol to subsidize carbon neutral fuels.
This means that, if you like to continue driving a SUV running on petrol or whatever, you can do that completely without shame. You'd be paying for it, so that others can reduce carbon emissions more, and that prioritization is entirely up to you to make.
Sure, if it's rated in dB. Of course, it isn't the only aspect I'd be looking at, so I wouldn't buy an iPod for this reason alone.
And that's just fine. People are and still will be allowed to damage their hearing if they like. The idea isn't to "control" people, even if some reflexively seem to think that every time a government tries to protect it's citizens. The idea is to prevent that the market is filled with devices that injure people without them realizing it (typically teenagers). It is a pragmatic trade-off, reducing hearing loss at large while making it somewhat more cumbersome to produce an arbitrary sound volume.
Personally, I wouldn't mind having an MP3 player that warn me with a "please override" message before I accidentally expose myself to unhealthy sound levels. When the ambient noise is loud, it's often very hard to notice how high you've cranked the volume.
On the other hand, I can see practical problems with this, as it is quite common to replace the stock earbuds.
While I like the idea, objectivity is going to be a huge problem in this case. The boss is just going to say that "Well, your productivity did go down during this period, but that's what you wanted me to see so you could listen to music again". And frankly, he or she is probably going to be right -- you'd be severely biased trying to prove a point.
At the very least, you'd have to do this measurement without any of the developers knowing about it. But even then you are going to have a big problem interpreting the data objectively. How do you even measure productivity, objectively (and at the same time relevantly)?
Additionally, there are so many significant external factors (such as what project you are currently working in) that you'd probably have to run this experiment over several years or on hundreds of teams to get any statistically useful data.
You seem to suggest that the history of ice ages disproves AGW. Are you saying that, because climate is known to change by itself, it must therefore be impossible to change it through external means?
Just for the sake of argument, assume that we really are changing the climate. What do you expect would be different today than how it is? Would there be nobody to question it? Would there be some definitive proof that could convince you of it? What would that proof be?
If you can't come up with an idea of something that, in the presence of actual AGW, would convince you of its existence, it is time to start reconsidering you logic. Because that means if it really is happening, you still wouldn't believe it or act on it.
Now, you may respond with a reference to Occam's razor and make some argument about absence of disproof not being proof or something like that, but before you do that I would like to point a few things out:
Frankly, given those easily verifiable facts alone, the possibility of anthropogenic global warming being real is pretty far from unimaginable. We are not talking about a flying spaghetti monster here.