I used to have a fixed wireless link in San Jose years ago, and while the bandwidth was nice the latency sucked. Supposedly wimax has ways of attacking this problem.
Anyone know whether the latency is likely to suck in practice?
since 9/11. Sure it sucked but eventually folks here will have to realize that the rest of the industrialized world didn't stop competing because we "discovered" terrorism.
Good government policy is a critical part of having a competitive economy. (Where do you think the Internet came from? Private industry alone? Hardly.)
The current administration couldn't care less about any of what we're taking about here - it doesn't speak to their core constituencies of the very rich (who are insulated from the public sphere by their gated communities, private schools, etc.) and the very stupid (who are convinced the Rapture is around the corner - "Econamy? Technalogy? Future? What *are* you all babbling about?".)
Unless we get rulers that actually *care* about any of this, we're just going to have to get used to slipping further behind every year.
They have to play the game by the rules. Just because they're good at the game doesn't mean they like the rules.
What? You don't think MS knows it's a big company now?
Sure they've been a bit annoyed by softpats in the past. That pales by comparison with the damage they could cause to OS projects in the future.
Don't think they don't know that. Something has held them back so far. Maybe it's waiting for the EU to enact the new standard. Maybe it's something else. But whatever it is don't depend on their restraint sticking around for long.
Sooner or later it stands to reason they're gonna use all the weapons at their disposal.
It's one of those noise phrases (like "War on/Generic Noun/") that's a sure giveaway that the speaker is a fool or thinks you are one. I mean why don't you just come out and say "people I don't like" and be done with it?
(In this case I'd bet it's because even that would take too much thought - I'd bet dollars to donuts that you don't even know which interest groups own Gov. Steroids - and thus have no idea who the folks that are going to lose as a result of him being made governor.)
You can be sure that whenever a politician is railing against "special interests" it's cause they really don't want you to look behind them and see who *they* represent.
The quoted snippet states that the melting might start in 25 years. Once started, it probably would take thousands of years to gain an appreciable effect. It certainly won't affect the next generation. We'll all be more likely to die from nuclear war.
Read the transcript and do a little research before you get all relaxed about things. It's given as one example of what model adjustments might predict. There's plenty in there that would effect the next generation. Heck, there's plenty in the current situation that effects people right now.
I also take offense at the quote as suggesting that once something starts to melt, it will melt in a way that can't be stopped. That statement is a scare tactic. If you take an ice cube out of your freezer, and it starts to melt, there's no way you could prevent it from freezing again under the right circumstances (i.e. shoving it back in the freezer.)
After your second paragraph I don't think you have any place on getting high and mighty on anyone. Sure it might have been more accurate to say "no reputable climate scientist thinks that depending on fixing climate problems later rather than sooner is a good bet" but this is a TV show. Get over it.
Screwing with the climate is now officially dumb
on
BBC on Global Dimming
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· Score: 1
So your "we simply do not know" is dead wrong. We've been warned that there's a serious threat here. Do we know absolutely? Of course not. But uncertainty isn't an argument against action - not when the stakes are so high and the measures themselves so doable. (Uncertainty also things could be worse than we thought - which is precisely what this article argues)
This is not some Paris Hilton story that you can blow off that easily. These are serious people who are worried about serious threats.
Listen to Peter Cox, a researcher at the UK's Hadley Center, who's suddenly facing a situation where his models may have to be recalibrated:
"We've got two competing effects really.... If it turns out that the cooling is stronger than we thought then the warming also is a lot stronger than we thought, and that means the climate's more sensitive to carbon dioxide than we originally thought, and it means our models may be under sensitive to carbon dioxide."
What might this mean?
"If we don't do anything by about twenty thirty we could have a global warming of exceeding two degrees, and at that point it's believed the Greenland ice sheet would start to melt in a way that you wouldn't be able to stop it once it started it, it would melt. Take a long time to melt but ultimately it would lead to a sea level rise of seven or eight metres."
That's 25 years away. Maybe these people are a bunch of wackos who just happen to also be well-published climatologists, but are you willing to bet the next generation's well-being on that?
With the tsunami in the Indian Ocean we've gotten a little taste in what can happen when you don't keep up with what going on with the planet. This story sounds much much bigger than that - and unlike undersea earthquakes, humans are in the drivers seat on this one.
There's a strong scientific consensus that you're wrong. Of course, since you're a member of the rich world maybe you're not *dead* wrong. But articles like these suggest a lot of folks are gonna die due to pigheaded-do nothing attitudes like yours.
Purposely setting the US up as the fall guy on global warming may look pretty amazingly stupid in just a decade or two. All those WWII era Germans and Arab terrorists that are the stock embodiment of evil today? I'm not looking forward to it changing to a fat American in a Humvee. (Some of my best friends are overweight and many of them like to travel.) Fair? Of course not. But the price of stupidity rarely is just...
That's a red herring. To a first approximation NO ONE worth reading is arguing that you shouldn't have *any* property rights.
Read a bit by serious people - the argument is about the balance between property rights and other rights. For instance, what's the optimal term for a copyright? What should constitute fair use? Should living organisms be subject to patent law? Should humans? (Okay that one is a bit outside the norm now, but give it a few.) Should software be patentenable? What should constitute a novel and non-obvious invention?
There's lots of room here for interesting discussions without throwing around nonsense like claiming that anyone serious is proposing the entry of "any new creation into part of the public domain"
It is pretty amazing how good and cheap the Costco (Fuji) prints are. And where I live they only charge three dollars for 12 by 18 prints. I have a large-format Canon color inkjet and the materials cost for me to do such are print would be higher.
It's gotten so I mainly use the printer just for doing small format test prints. Combined with the general unreliability of photo printers (check out the printing forums on dpreview.com some time), home printing doesn't really make sense anymore for anyone other than serious photographers.
Try to get stability control or all-wheel-drive on a Japanese sedan in the US. With few exceptions (stability control is starting show up as an option on a few Toyota models) Japanese automakers keep the good stuff for their luxury lines in the US.
Overseas you can get advanced features on their mainline models.
For cell phones I see why the lack of infrastructure in the US limits importation, but I don't understand what the deal is with the cars.
The guy is a professor of Statistics for Political "Science". Not exactly a great background for commenting on paleoclimatology or geochemistry or environmental biology or any of the other specialized disciplines he asserts have somehow gotten it totally wrong.
(E.O. Wilson's decades of field work? Useless stupidity - how could he learn anything by staring at ants all those years? He should have spent his time productively misrepresenting other peoples work, like Lomborg.)
So it's no surprise his work's not popular with people who actually do science - he doesn't seem to care what is actually going on with the biosphere.
His political and monetary success, however, does at least put the lie to the old saw that "those that can't do, teach"...
When will people learn that God didn't mandate the current distribution of power? That "cushy existence" was the result of folks fighting for a way of doing business that gave some power to the working stiff. The rich didn't allow "cushiness" to arise because they felt it was somehow nice, they did it because they were forced to.
Attempting to go it alone (e.g. "competing") can often just mean "screw me as soon as you get around to it, please".:-)
Some of us techies, of course, have skills (and social networks) that are still worth enough that we can get paid well for them. Those of us that are cluefull don't pretend that result is completely under our control or our fault...
The comment by the Canadian is something that we Americans might as well get used to. While Canadians produce about the same amount of carbon dioxide per capita as Americans do, the Canadians weren't stupid enough to strongly identify their country with environmental destruction worldwide.
Thanks to the the Bush administration's self-indulgent high-profile nose-thumbing (and all those chromed up Escalades in the music videos we keep sending out), the United States is now firmly established in everyone else's consciousness as that country where "they just don't give a damn". If global climate change does turn out to have serious consequences in the next couple of decades, who do you think is going to be chosen as the fall guy?
Looking at the tutorial for the camera, it doesn't appear that there's anything to stop anyone in wifi range from intercepting the video stream. Seems to be an odd oversight in something intended to provide security.
I guess that might be acceptable if the cameras only looked outside, but your neighbors might have other ideas...
here's another perspective on the whole size and safety thing. The folks at LBL summarized their study with a nice graph that shows the relationship between safety and size is pretty complicated. For example, a Toyota Camry is safer for its occupants than a large SUV like a Chevy Suburban. While a Corolla scores better than a Dodge Ram. (And that's ignoring the fact that the Dodge Ram is five times more likely to kill somebody else.)
The main message of the study is that, in the real world, design trumps mere weight advantage (an Escort is twice as dangerous as a similarly light Civic) - something to warm the heart of every real geek...
A scam is an arrangement that pretends to be one thing (generally a mutually beneficial arrangement) but is, in fact, something quite else. Just reading the introduction indicates that the authors are arguing that there a large and increasing gap between what kind of arrangement the current patent is and what kind it pretends to be.
Is that gap large enough to make it a "scam"? The authors wouldn't use that word because in the social context they occupy it would undermine their credibility. On Slashdot folks tend to use slightly stronger language - so IMHO my use of "scam" seems an entirely appropriate translation of the gist of their book.
And if it doesn't reach your definition of "scam" yet, just give it few years. Lots folks are working really hard to get it there.
When Win95 came out MacHeads used to chide that "Windows95 = Mac89". Some wag (Be sage Erich Ringewald if I remember right) countered that, unfortunately, "Mac95 also = Mac89". The US hasn't moved it's democracy forward enough in the last few decades to stay competitive.
In fact, the centralization of the American mass media under the control of a few multi-national corporations has more or less made US democracy a bad joke. You might say the USDemocracy2004 = USDemocracy1972, but even that might be optimistic:-)
"The US - a Beacon of Really Bad Political TV" doesn't quite have the same ring somehow...
Re:low unemployment compared to europe
on
The Jobs Crunch
·
· Score: 1
In Western Europe only the big countries of France, Germany, Italy and Spain generally have higher unemployment than the US. This paper argues that most countries in western Europe - Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands and so on tend to have lower unemployment. If you believe that paper, it's a mistake to lump all of Western Europe in one basket. (It's also pretty funny to see those horribly socialist countries like Sweden and Norway with lower unemployment than the US:-) (Although Sweden is now closer to the US rate, Norway is still below.)
They're not open-sourcing anything resembling ViaVoice to the Eclipse folks. Check out the eclipse voice tools proposal. It's directed at making it easier at creating call-center type voice reco apps - not at making Eclipse a voice-directed IDE.
If you're interested in open-source voice recognition check out OSSRI - an effort to bring together some sort of practical large vocab speech recog to linux. They're just starting up, but the mailing list archives hold a fair amount of discussion about the current state of the open-source SR world. (Which, to sum up, isn't that great:-) As a stop-gap they're hoping to get WINE support for Dragon/Scansoft NaturallySpeaking.
I have a better theory than Creation Science. I say the world was created last Wednesday. By a supernatural entity I like to call "Al". Al has the ability to make a universe, set into motion all the physical processes in such a way that they "appear" to have started before last Wednesday and so forth.
Disprove it? You can't. Which is why invoking the supernatural is a forbidden move in real science. Once you allow it science as a way of knowing becomes untenable. (Which, of course, doesn't mean that Al didn't create the universe last Wednesday, just that if that sort of thing is going to happen much, predicting the future on the basis of observing the past will be kinda pointless.)
Cold fusion is a whole different animal. IMHO while it got dissed because of institutional and cultural problems as well as real scientifically sound holes in the idea, it was possibly a valid scientific theory.
Creationism isn't even a *possibly* valid scientific theory. Therefore, it's safe to say that people who advance it are just clueless about what science is about.
Once low-sulfur diesel does phase in diesels will be interesting in the US.
Hybrids still have substantial advantages (especially in traffic jams) - but of course there's no reason you couldn't build diesel-electric hybrids. This study shows that a diesel hybrid could be even better than a fuel cell vehicle.
My friend's 2004 got 50 MPG on the last long trip I was along for. (That was with three people and all their camping gear, too.) And it does 0-60 in 10 seconds - most diesels are considerably slower.
It also does the 3000+ foot climb over Snoqualmie pass on I-90 without a problem - so that issue is not a real one.
Diesels won't really make sense in the US until after the new low sulfur fuel comes in (a few years away), anyway.
As long as Mozilla/Firefox doesn't pose a real threat to IE (and it doesn't, of course) I'm sure MS appreciates its minions dropping the occaisional complement on Moz. That way they have something to point to when the EU people start making anti-trust noises.
You can bet that if Moz had a chance of getting 20% marketshare, the MS folks would be trash talking it constantly.
It would be surprising if Slate ran an article about how great Linux was as a desktop OS - but the browser wars are over (at least until Linux becomes a major force on the desktop at which point who knows....)
Slashdot Mirror
I used to have a fixed wireless link in San Jose years ago, and while the bandwidth was nice the latency sucked. Supposedly
wimax has ways of attacking this problem.
Anyone know whether the latency is likely to suck in practice?
since 9/11. Sure it sucked but eventually folks here will have to realize that the rest of the industrialized world didn't stop competing because we "discovered" terrorism.
We're a net importer of technology now. (The trade deficit in technology grew to $37 billion last year.) Think about *that* for a second.
Good government policy is a critical part of having a competitive economy. (Where do you think the Internet came from? Private industry alone? Hardly.)
The current administration couldn't care less about any of what we're taking about here - it doesn't speak to their core constituencies of the very rich (who are insulated from the public sphere by their gated communities, private schools, etc.) and the very stupid (who are convinced the Rapture is around the corner - "Econamy? Technalogy? Future? What *are* you all babbling about?".)
Unless we get rulers that actually *care* about any of this, we're just going to have to get used to slipping further behind every year.
They have to play the game by the rules. Just because they're good at the game doesn't mean they like the rules.
What? You don't think MS knows it's a big company now?
Sure they've been a bit annoyed by softpats in the past. That pales by comparison with the damage they could cause to OS projects in the future.
Don't think they don't know that. Something has held them back so far. Maybe it's waiting for the EU to enact the new standard. Maybe it's something else. But whatever it is don't depend on their restraint sticking around for long.
Sooner or later it stands to reason they're gonna use all the weapons at their disposal.
It's one of those noise phrases (like "War on /Generic Noun/") that's a sure giveaway that the speaker is a fool or thinks you are one. I mean why don't you just come out and say "people I don't like" and be done with it?
(In this case I'd bet it's because even that would take too much thought - I'd bet dollars to donuts that you don't even know which interest groups own Gov. Steroids - and thus have no idea who the folks that are going to lose as a result of him being made governor.)
You can be sure that whenever a politician is railing against "special interests" it's cause they really don't want you to look behind them and see who *they* represent.
Read the transcript and do a little research before you get all relaxed about things. It's given as one example of what model adjustments might predict. There's plenty in there that would effect the next generation. Heck, there's plenty in the current situation that effects people right now.
After your second paragraph I don't think you have any place on getting high and mighty on anyone. Sure it might have been more accurate to say "no reputable climate scientist thinks that depending on fixing climate problems later rather than sooner is a good bet" but this is a TV show. Get over it.
Such statements [like yours for instance] suggest that there might be substantive disagreement in the scientific community about the reality of anthropogenic climate change. This is not the case.
So your "we simply do not know" is dead wrong. We've been warned that there's a serious threat here. Do we know absolutely? Of course not. But uncertainty isn't an argument against action - not when the stakes are so high and the measures themselves so doable. (Uncertainty also things could be worse than we thought - which is precisely what this article argues)
This is not some Paris Hilton story that you can blow off that easily. These are serious people who are worried about serious threats.
... If it turns out that the cooling is stronger than we thought then the warming also is a lot stronger than we thought, and that means the climate's more sensitive to carbon dioxide than we originally thought, and it means our models may be under sensitive to carbon dioxide."
Listen to Peter Cox, a researcher at the UK's Hadley Center, who's suddenly facing a situation where his models may have to be recalibrated:
"We've got two competing effects really.
What might this mean?
"If we don't do anything by about twenty thirty we could have a global warming of exceeding two degrees, and at that point it's believed the Greenland ice sheet would start to melt in a way that you wouldn't be able to stop it once it started it, it would melt. Take a long time to melt but ultimately it would lead to a sea level rise of seven or eight metres."
That's 25 years away. Maybe these people are a bunch of wackos who just happen to also be well-published climatologists, but are you willing to bet the next generation's well-being on that?
With the tsunami in the Indian Ocean we've gotten a little taste in what can happen when you don't keep up with what going on with the planet. This story sounds much much bigger than that - and unlike undersea earthquakes, humans are in the drivers seat on this one.
There's a strong scientific consensus that you're wrong. Of course, since you're a member of the rich world maybe you're not *dead* wrong. But articles like these suggest a lot of folks are gonna die due to pigheaded-do nothing attitudes like yours.
Purposely setting the US up as the fall guy on global warming may look pretty amazingly stupid in just a decade or two. All those WWII era Germans and Arab terrorists that are the stock embodiment of evil today? I'm not looking forward to it changing to a fat American in a Humvee. (Some of my best friends are overweight and many of them like to travel.) Fair? Of course not. But the price of stupidity rarely is just...
That's a red herring. To a first approximation NO ONE worth reading is arguing that you shouldn't have *any* property rights.
Read a bit by serious people - the argument is about the balance between property rights and other rights. For instance, what's the optimal term for a copyright? What should constitute fair use? Should living organisms be subject to patent law? Should humans? (Okay that one is a bit outside the norm now, but give it a few.) Should software be patentenable? What should constitute a novel and non-obvious invention?
There's lots of room here for interesting discussions without throwing around nonsense like claiming that anyone serious is proposing the entry of "any new creation into part of the public domain"
It is pretty amazing how good and cheap the Costco (Fuji) prints are. And where I live they only charge three dollars for 12 by 18 prints. I have a large-format Canon color inkjet and the materials cost for me to do such are print would be higher.
It's gotten so I mainly use the printer just for doing small format test prints. Combined with the general unreliability of photo printers (check out the printing forums on dpreview.com some time), home printing doesn't really make sense anymore for anyone other than serious photographers.
Try to get stability control or all-wheel-drive on a Japanese sedan in the US. With few exceptions (stability control is starting show up as an option on a few Toyota models) Japanese automakers keep the good stuff for their luxury lines in the US.
Overseas you can get advanced features on their mainline models.
For cell phones I see why the lack of infrastructure in the US limits importation, but I don't understand what the deal is with the cars.
The guy is a professor of Statistics for Political "Science". Not exactly a great background for commenting on paleoclimatology or geochemistry or environmental biology or any of the other specialized disciplines he asserts have somehow gotten it totally wrong.
...
(E.O. Wilson's decades of field work? Useless stupidity - how could he learn anything by staring at ants all those years? He should have spent his time productively misrepresenting other peoples work, like Lomborg.)
So it's no surprise his work's not popular with people who actually do science - he doesn't seem to care what is actually going on with the biosphere.
His political and monetary success, however, does at least put the lie to the old saw that "those that can't do, teach"
When will people learn that God didn't mandate the current distribution of power? That "cushy existence" was the result of folks fighting for a way of doing business that gave some power to the working stiff. The rich didn't allow "cushiness" to arise because they felt it was somehow nice, they did it because they were forced to.
:-)
Attempting to go it alone (e.g. "competing") can often just mean "screw me as soon as you get around to it, please".
Some of us techies, of course, have skills (and social networks) that are still worth enough that we can get paid well for them. Those of us that are cluefull don't pretend that result is completely under our control or our fault...
The comment by the Canadian is something that we Americans might as well get used to. While Canadians produce about the same amount of carbon dioxide per capita as Americans do, the Canadians weren't stupid enough to strongly identify their country with environmental destruction worldwide.
Thanks to the the Bush administration's self-indulgent high-profile nose-thumbing (and all those chromed up Escalades in the music videos we keep sending out), the United States is now firmly established in everyone else's consciousness as that country where "they just don't give a damn". If global climate change does turn out to have serious consequences in the next couple of decades, who do you think is going to be chosen as the fall guy?
Yep. That's going to be US.
Canadian health care gets more or less the same results that American and other rich countries do.
How's that "terrible"? What do you think American health care would look like if we spent 40% *less* than we do?
Looking at the tutorial for the camera, it doesn't appear that there's anything to stop anyone in wifi range from intercepting the video stream. Seems to be an odd oversight in something intended to provide security.
I guess that might be acceptable if the cameras only looked outside, but your neighbors might have other ideas...
here's another perspective on the whole size and safety thing. The folks at LBL summarized their study with a nice graph that shows the relationship between safety and size is pretty complicated. For example, a Toyota Camry is safer for its occupants than a large SUV like a Chevy Suburban. While a Corolla scores better than a Dodge Ram. (And that's ignoring the fact that the Dodge Ram is five times more likely to kill somebody else.)
...
The main message of the study is that, in the real world, design trumps mere weight advantage (an Escort is twice as dangerous as a similarly light Civic) - something to warm the heart of every real geek
A scam is an arrangement that pretends to be one thing (generally a mutually beneficial arrangement) but is, in fact, something quite else. Just reading the introduction indicates that the authors are arguing that there a large and increasing gap between what kind of arrangement the current patent is and what kind it pretends to be.
Is that gap large enough to make it a "scam"? The authors wouldn't use that word because in the social context they occupy it would undermine their credibility. On Slashdot folks tend to use slightly stronger language - so IMHO my use of "scam" seems an entirely appropriate translation of the gist of their book.
And if it doesn't reach your definition of "scam" yet, just give it few years. Lots folks are working really hard to get it there.
When Win95 came out MacHeads used to chide that "Windows95 = Mac89". Some wag (Be sage Erich Ringewald if I remember right) countered that, unfortunately, "Mac95 also = Mac89". The US hasn't moved it's democracy forward enough in the last few decades to stay competitive.
:-)
In fact, the centralization of the American mass media under the control of a few multi-national corporations has more or less made US democracy a bad joke. You might say the USDemocracy2004 = USDemocracy1972, but even that might be optimistic
"The US - a Beacon of Really Bad Political TV" doesn't quite have the same ring somehow...
In Western Europe only the big countries of France, Germany, Italy and Spain generally have higher unemployment than the US. This paper argues that most countries in western Europe - Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands and so on tend to have lower unemployment. If you believe that paper, it's a mistake to lump all of Western Europe in one basket. (It's also pretty funny to see those horribly socialist countries like Sweden and Norway with lower unemployment than the US :-) (Although Sweden is now closer to the US rate, Norway is still below.)
They're not open-sourcing anything resembling ViaVoice to the Eclipse folks. Check out the eclipse voice tools proposal. It's directed at making it easier at creating call-center type voice reco apps - not at making Eclipse a voice-directed IDE.
:-) As a stop-gap they're hoping to get WINE support for Dragon/Scansoft NaturallySpeaking.
If you're interested in open-source voice recognition check out OSSRI - an effort to bring together some sort of practical large vocab speech recog to linux. They're just starting up, but the mailing list archives hold a fair amount of discussion about the current state of the open-source SR world. (Which, to sum up, isn't that great
I have a better theory than Creation Science. I say the world was created last Wednesday. By a supernatural entity I like to call "Al". Al has the ability to make a universe, set into motion all the physical processes in such a way that they "appear" to have started before last Wednesday and so forth.
Disprove it? You can't. Which is why invoking the supernatural is a forbidden move in real science. Once you allow it science as a way of knowing becomes untenable. (Which, of course, doesn't mean that Al didn't create the universe last Wednesday, just that if that sort of thing is going to happen much, predicting the future on the basis of observing the past will be kinda pointless.)
Cold fusion is a whole different animal. IMHO while it got dissed because of institutional and cultural problems as well as real scientifically sound holes in the idea, it was possibly a valid scientific theory.
Creationism isn't even a *possibly* valid scientific theory. Therefore, it's safe to say that people who advance it are just clueless about what science is about.
Wow! 54? That is impressive.
Once low-sulfur diesel does phase in diesels will be interesting in the US.
Hybrids still have substantial advantages (especially in traffic jams) - but of course there's no reason you couldn't build diesel-electric hybrids. This study shows that a diesel hybrid could be even better than a fuel cell vehicle.
40? Not bad but not comparable to a Prius.
My friend's 2004 got 50 MPG on the last long trip I was along for. (That was with three people and all their camping gear, too.) And it does 0-60 in 10 seconds - most diesels are considerably slower.
It also does the 3000+ foot climb over Snoqualmie pass on I-90 without a problem - so that issue is not a real one.
Diesels won't really make sense in the US until after the new low sulfur fuel comes in (a few years away), anyway.
As long as Mozilla/Firefox doesn't pose a real threat to IE (and it doesn't, of course) I'm sure MS appreciates its minions dropping the occaisional complement on Moz. That way they have something to point to when the EU people start making anti-trust noises.
You can bet that if Moz had a chance of getting 20% marketshare, the MS folks would be trash talking it constantly.
It would be surprising if Slate ran an article about how great Linux was as a desktop OS - but the browser wars are over (at least until Linux becomes a major force on the desktop at which point who knows....)