" Wasn't it a Windows lockup that took out Los Angeles air traffic control system last month? I think the procedure tells them to reboot once a month and they just forgot."
Yes. suddenly all the windshields of flying aircrafts turned blue;-)
" my experience is that people who crack on the stability of Win2K servers and above either don't use them or horribly misuse them. Real Win2k admins simply don't have an issue with stability."
...that's the problem. I am *not* a real win2k admin. I think that the learning curve is too steep, if not in effort, in risk. It could get difficult for me to sleep at night, if I had to learn that on my skin.
Besides, no one is giving me a copy of win2k server for free to play on. Apache, anyone?
"Economics does in fact work (as I'm sure you know) - higher prices means less demand, and cars with better gas mileage are far more common in Europe. Heck, diesel is far more common in Europe than in the US, and even pushing for an increased diesel adoption in the US would be better, because diesel engines on average have 20% higher gas mileage than gasoline burning engines."
Now, you'd think that diesel burning cars here in Europe had been incentivized somewhat. Nothing further from the truth. Actually the pundits are all puzzled, because given the average use in miles, the equivalent gasoline models are cheaper in total cost of ownership, all else being equal.
Since the oil price fluctuates, and gas price at the pump fluctuates as a result, the pundits are wrong, and all the average joes here think; " gas is 1,20 Euros a liter now, but who knows haw high it will be in the future; diesel fuel is 1,00 Euros a liter, and I squeeze more mileage out of that." It is like buying insurance. So, what are the politicians up to? why, they are busily making sure that diesel cars, especially small ones, get less economical to buy and use, all in the name of the environment, of course: stringent pollutant laws, obligatory filters etc.But, as you surmised, economics work: the pump price is so high that people buy diesel cars anyway. Do they understand? No, obviously.
Another example: a couple of years back, an Italian politician , a highly placed member of the green party and member of the european parliament, said that to reduce pollution crude oil should have been paid one hundred bucks per barrel by european consumers (at the well it was below 30 at the time).
Lo and behold, the equivalent price I paid at the pump was at the time OVER 100$.Go figure.
As for the US, you have the CAFE act. the point is that light trucks are exempt, so the car producers push for those. Ironically, they have grown popular even here, where this kind of loophole is neither existent nor necessary. BUT, over 70% of the Ford mondeos sold here are diesel cars.
"I have an ancient car with over 300,000 miles on it that runs on diesel fuel. After it is running, I can disconnect the battery and it will still run the same."
This might be OT, but I remember that during the Korean war and early in the Vietnam war, US flying gunships detected trucks by electronically listening to their RF. Since what you say it's true, this didn't work on diesel trucks, so it became progressively less effective as the years wore on.
...As it always happen, the points of agreement overwhelm differences. Let's see.....
"We know how to do it now - we replace oil burning cars with hydrogen fuel cells, we replace oil/coal/natural gas power plants with nuclear/solar/wind. "
I couldn't agree more, but that's a "rational"answer; then over a beer we would start talking about the total energy balance of the various alternatives, scale, size, PIUS reactors , and how mad some politician are when they forgo the true in their quest for the obvious.
A small real life example: here in Italy, both for conservation and environmental purposes, heating hours in wintertime are limited, and the temperatures in house should not exceed 20C(that's 68F). Now, what does it mean practically? Every building has a heater that's overly big, because it must overcome every day thermal inertia, and it must heat the circulating water quickly, and that means more consumption. Moreover, everybody and his uncle sets the max temp at over the limit, because otherwise when there's an extended period in which the heater is off (night) temps fall off too much for comfort. The individual dwellers do not install regulators on the individual warmers, because there's no point in doing so, and they would run the risk of not getting enough heating to bridge the periods if they throttled their own heaters. Peak usage happens at the same time for everybody, increasing exposure to pollutants. You and I would NOT build it that way, for reasons that should be self evident. Evidently, they're not.
Luckily, at least where I live, most of the city is converting to "Teleheating":a couple of electricity generating plants feed their own cooling water as heating water for residential purposes, and the energy balance is waaaay better.Interestingly enough, the most vocal "green" advocates are the fathers of the FORMER idea, and the new solution has been pushed through by the local utility, for their own "greedy" purposes.
You know what scares me about all this? the more I see the grass roots of the "global warming " movement, the more I think that in the middle age cold period they would have told us all to slash and burn all the forests.
There's another thing you said that I find interesting:"As for people changing their lifestyles, that has to happen anyway. " That happens all the time, but the average joe doesn't want to know it. Entertainers rightly poke fun at that from time to time, our collective inability to have a memory of what things were in the past is a hindrance. try seeing a 1975 Film with friends, it seems another era.Coming back to the topic, the average reaction looking at cars would be:" did they REALLY buy those smoking POS?"
"No, it wasn't in good faith. They had no reasonable belief to assert such a statement. If they said that, it was self-serving fearmongering (or paranoia)."
..It seems to me that you are implicitly defining "reason" in contemporary terms. Remember, we had to go through the french revolution to have a non religious view of "reason" or "truth". So, I have to reiterate that, for a preacher in AD 998, there were all kinds of reasons to believe that the End was near. Heck, as far as I know there are flat earthers even now, and while I concede that they are wrong, I don't have elements to assert their bad faith.
"[...]What's a "viable climate model"? One which explains all changes to the climate and predicts all weather perfectly? That's never going to happen - ever. And it's not needed, either."
I am sorry if I haven't been clear enough. in another post, I asserted that since it's not possible to have a "lab mice"(i.e. another Earth without human beings), I would have liked any model to appropriately "explain" temp changes in the past: for example, average temps here in Italy have had significant swings in historical times when human activity, espacially CO2 related, can be assessed as varying between "negligible" to "nonexistent". As you see, no predictive content is required, only a "best fit". Coming back to your post, no "fundamental theory" ever entered my thoughts: as you can see from my bio, I work in Finance, which didn't earn the moniker "dismal science" for nothing. the point is that I think that something that does not adequately model the past, that is known, is a doubtful guide into an unknown future. You are perfecly right in saying that CO2 is a earth warmer, and reducing that could impact; but what if it is later proven that it's all in the sunspots cycle, or other things? We're talking serious money here, and people have to be satisfied that a reasonable amount of thought has been used before asking them to cough up or to change their lifestyles forever.
" If Office were on Linux I could port all my end users to Linux without issue."
That's why Microsoft MUST make every program as monolithic as it can, in spite of all techical evidence that an opposite way would be simpler and cost effective. ...The trouble is programming costs are just too small in relation to revenue; this means that cutting programming costs by 5 % wouldn't be appreciated, whilst programming with a view to tie customers to the cash cow (office) is far more effective. It also sells better in Wall Street, where the honchos' stock must go up to make them rich.
I recall, but you guys can help me there, that at the time of the first monopoly suit there was talk about splitting MS into "operating systems" and "applications", with everything in the operating system adequately documented. where would be open office now?
" Yah, oddly enough, people have made bad predictions before.
But note that they didn't suggest human action was the culprit then. There was nothing people could do except prepare for possible change to minimize any impact a changing climate could have upon the food production."
That's what we know NOW. I fully expect that this was the same point of view of migrant preachers hollerin', in the years going to 1000: "The end is near! repent ye sinners!", and remember: they were in good faith. unless these climatologists present a viable climate model by which changes in human activity determine the climate, they have the same credibility, I'm afraid.
Remember that they had to keep up the charade of looking like a bunch of tolerably good guys fro the benefits of Europe and the UN, see the Khatami fan movement over here. Now that they are busy working on a nuke and that the IAEA sniffed it, there's no point ln lulling us schmucks into quietness.
"If the program recognized that another player was not a Southampton entry, it would immediately defect to act as a spoiler for the non-Southampton player. The result is that Southampton had the top three performers -- but also a load of utter failures at the bottom of the table who sacrificed themselves for the good of the team."
That is possible in real life, think mutual funds families:
1.you decide which fund will be best of breed;
2. take money out of the looosers, and pump the winner;
3. advertise on the WSJ that you have the best fund in the industry;
4. PROFIT!!
BTW, don't let the SEC know: they usually bite your head off and use it for bowling.
"So the payoff of alternating is 2.5. This is still lower than "tit for tat" if the "tit for tat" programme manages to cooperate all the time. But this will generally not be the case."
In reality this WILL be the case. Tit for Tat cooperates at the first turn, and then copies the opponent, so the payoff is 3 with no volatility of returns.For all the effort they make, both TFTs could go have a beer and let a computer take over;-). S/M has a lower return, PLUS it pays something in the handshake period.
Now for something really interesting: nobody has really spent time on the economy of effort of the TFT strategy. all the other strategies that proved viable, not only did not win, but they needed substantially more resources (line of code, etc). In my view, that's part of the reason of the survival of cooperation in its present form: it is simple, it works, and when you play with someone using it you're buddies for life.
" Clearly, the only winning move is not to play:) "
No, the only winning strategy is not to lose. both player knew that overkill was a mug's game, but they needed to have a second hit available. Interestingly enough, as Tom Clancy has surmised, it is impossible to get rid of ALL nukes. Think about it. It's game theory as well.
"certainly some specices have formed partnerships with other, often larger species, and if you define "win" as something besides "just survive", they might be seen as subjugating themselves to the other creature, so that the partnership prospers, even if their life doesn't seem that swell."
To the extent that the prisoners' dilemma formalizations are adaptable to evolution theory, the superiority of Tit for Tat is still valid in this case. think about how many successive generations it must have taken for symbiosis to appear, evidently all cooperating.
"If it is a TFT vs TFT situation, both players will alternately cooperate/defect."
In reality, both would continue to cooperate ad infinitum, since no one would defect at the first turn.
As to an anonymous society, I really do not know, but I remember another "real life" view of the prisoner's dilemma especially relevant in this Internet era: sales via catalogue.The formalisation, if you come to think of it, is almost the same, especially if you make a a turnstile-like mechanism of exchange. this is Offtopic, butI wonder if other slashdotters can help me on that: I remember having read in a sci-fi book an encounter between two civilizations in which, to assess which goods could be traded, the aliens had built a carousel mechanism by which you could take something out only by putting something in return. I remember that the aliens took only cigarettes, tat were like cocaine for them (that tells you how old are the book and I:-( ). Does someone remember the title and author?
"the question is "what's probably the best strategy for any given individual in Prisoner's Dilemna" and they changed the question to "how can we get some individuals to be super-players with the way this prisoner's dilemna simulator is setup""
. How very true.I doubt that this solution is applicable in real life, if only for the fact that one of the assumptions would be that a subset of a winning team consistently and repeatably wants to be defeated. Mother nature took care of those long ago.
...that adds to the problems explained in prospect theory. the outcome also depends on how the problem is "framed" as anyone that has been offered a compex financial product should know.
"[...]How well a given strategy does depends on the strategies other in its community are using. If the population is heavily cheater based, then agents that cooperate will lose big time. However, if there are enough cooperators, then they will form a coalition of sorts, and even though they will lose to the cheaters, in the end they will come out on top."
I remember reading about the tournament in a "Science" magazine article, back when the original tournament was done; Tit for Tat won irrespectively of the number of strategies it played against. Furthermore, in a variant in which the winning strategy "spawned" more often, and the loser did not, Tit for Tat became a majority of the population irrespective of the initial sample, except in the extreme case of only one tit for tat and defectors. This is explained better here. The most interesting thing was, for me, the fact that Tit for Tat was superior to a strategy in which the program responded with a delay, i.e. it made the opponent's move two turns down the line. So, remember this if you have kids, or a pet, or both like me: whatever reaction you deem appropriate, it should be done soon, or not at all.
NOTE: the payoff was described as such:if A cooperates and B cooperates, both get X points; if A "defects" it gets W points to Z for B;if both defect, they get Y, where:
"There is a small cadre of pseudo-scientists (they are working outside their domain of knowledge in an area of science which is notoriously inaccessible) in the pay of the big polluters that are casting about for any indication it may not be caused by human activities."
.... Funny, I thought that truth was not dependent on the number of people supporting it, or the entity funding the research. It is called "indipendent verification". BTW, Columbus day, anyone?
Slashdot Mirror
" Wasn't it a Windows lockup that took out Los Angeles air traffic control system last month? I think the procedure tells them to reboot once a month and they just forgot."
;-)
Yes. suddenly all the windshields of flying aircrafts turned blue
" my experience is that people who crack on the stability of Win2K servers and above either don't use them or horribly misuse them. Real Win2k admins simply don't have an issue with stability."
...that's the problem. I am *not* a real win2k admin. I think that the learning curve is too steep, if not in effort, in risk. It could get difficult for me to sleep at night, if I had to learn that on my skin.
Besides, no one is giving me a copy of win2k server for free to play on. Apache, anyone?
It gets worse than that.
"Economics does in fact work (as I'm sure you know) - higher prices means less demand, and cars with better gas mileage are far more common in Europe. Heck, diesel is far more common in Europe than in the US, and even pushing for an increased diesel adoption in the US would be better, because diesel engines on average have 20% higher gas mileage than gasoline burning engines."
Now, you'd think that diesel burning cars here in Europe had been incentivized somewhat. Nothing further from the truth. Actually the pundits are all puzzled, because given the average use in miles, the equivalent gasoline models are cheaper in total cost of ownership, all else being equal.
Since the oil price fluctuates, and gas price at the pump fluctuates as a result, the pundits are wrong, and all the average joes here think; " gas is 1,20 Euros a liter now, but who knows haw high it will be in the future; diesel fuel is 1,00 Euros a liter, and I squeeze more mileage out of that." It is like buying insurance.
So, what are the politicians up to? why, they are busily making sure that diesel cars, especially small ones, get less economical to buy and use, all in the name of the environment, of course: stringent pollutant laws, obligatory filters etc.But, as you surmised, economics work: the pump price is so high that people buy diesel cars anyway. Do they understand? No, obviously.
Another example: a couple of years back, an Italian politician , a highly placed member of the green party and member of the european parliament, said that to reduce pollution crude oil should have been paid one hundred bucks per barrel by european consumers (at the well it was below 30 at the time).
Lo and behold, the equivalent price I paid at the pump was at the time OVER 100$.Go figure.
As for the US, you have the CAFE act. the point is that light trucks are exempt, so the car producers push for those. Ironically, they have grown popular even here, where this kind of loophole is neither existent nor necessary. BUT, over 70% of the Ford mondeos sold here are diesel cars.
Where's IG NOBEL when we need it?
"I have an ancient car with over 300,000 miles on it that runs on diesel fuel. After it is running, I can disconnect the battery and it will still run the same."
This might be OT, but I remember that during the Korean war and early in the Vietnam war, US flying gunships detected trucks by electronically listening to their RF. Since what you say it's true, this didn't work on diesel trucks, so it became progressively less effective as the years wore on.
You forgot: turn the key, and keep it turned for three minutes to start the engine.
...As it always happen, the points of agreement overwhelm differences. Let's see.....
"We know how to do it now - we replace oil burning cars with hydrogen fuel cells, we replace oil/coal/natural gas power plants with nuclear/solar/wind. "
I couldn't agree more, but that's a "rational"answer; then over a beer we would start talking about the total energy balance of the various alternatives, scale, size, PIUS reactors , and how mad some politician are when they forgo the true in their quest for the obvious.
A small real life example: here in Italy, both for conservation and environmental purposes, heating hours in wintertime are limited, and the temperatures in house should not exceed 20C(that's 68F).
Now, what does it mean practically?
Every building has a heater that's overly big, because it must overcome every day thermal inertia, and it must heat the circulating water quickly, and that means more consumption. Moreover, everybody and his uncle sets the max temp at over the limit, because otherwise when there's an extended period in which the heater is off (night) temps fall off too much for comfort.
The individual dwellers do not install regulators on the individual warmers, because there's no point in doing so, and they would run the risk of not getting enough heating to bridge the periods if they throttled their own heaters. Peak usage happens at the same time for everybody, increasing exposure to pollutants. You and I would NOT build it that way, for reasons that should be self evident. Evidently, they're not.
Luckily, at least where I live, most of the city is converting to "Teleheating":a couple of electricity generating plants feed their own cooling water as heating water for residential purposes, and the energy balance is waaaay better.Interestingly enough, the most vocal "green" advocates are the fathers of the FORMER idea, and the new solution has been pushed through by the local utility, for their own "greedy" purposes.
You know what scares me about all this? the more I see the grass roots of the "global warming " movement, the more I think that in the middle age cold period they would have told us all to slash and burn all the forests.
There's another thing you said that I find interesting:"As for people changing their lifestyles, that has to happen anyway. "
That happens all the time, but the average joe doesn't want to know it. Entertainers rightly poke fun at that from time to time, our collective inability to have a memory of what things were in the past is a hindrance. try seeing a 1975 Film with friends, it seems another era.Coming back to the topic, the average reaction looking at cars would be:" did they REALLY buy those smoking POS?"
have you trying upgrading the java VM? it worked for me.
"No, it wasn't in good faith. They had no reasonable belief to assert such a statement. If they said that, it was self-serving fearmongering (or paranoia)."
..It seems to me that you are implicitly defining "reason" in contemporary terms. Remember, we had to go through the french revolution to have a non religious view of "reason" or "truth". So, I have to reiterate that, for a preacher in AD 998, there were all kinds of reasons to believe that the End was near. Heck, as far as I know there are flat earthers even now, and while I concede that they are wrong, I don't have elements to assert their bad faith.
"[...]What's a "viable climate model"? One which explains all changes to the climate and predicts all weather perfectly? That's never going to happen - ever. And it's not needed, either."
I am sorry if I haven't been clear enough. in another post, I asserted that since it's not possible to have a "lab mice"(i.e. another Earth without human beings), I would have liked any model to appropriately "explain" temp changes in the past: for example, average temps here in Italy have had significant swings in historical times when human activity, espacially CO2 related, can be assessed as varying between "negligible" to "nonexistent". As you see, no predictive content is required, only a "best fit".
Coming back to your post, no "fundamental theory" ever entered my thoughts: as you can see from my bio, I work in Finance, which didn't earn the moniker "dismal science" for nothing. the point is that I think that something that does not adequately model the past, that is known, is a doubtful guide into an unknown future. You are perfecly right in saying that CO2 is a earth warmer, and reducing that could impact; but what if it is later proven that it's all in the sunspots cycle, or other things? We're talking serious money here, and people have to be satisfied that a reasonable amount of thought has been used before asking them to cough up or to change their lifestyles forever.
" If Office were on Linux I could port all my end users to Linux without issue."
...The trouble is programming costs are just too small in relation to revenue; this means that cutting programming costs by 5 % wouldn't be appreciated, whilst programming with a view to tie customers to the cash cow (office) is far more effective. It also sells better in Wall Street, where the honchos' stock must go up to make them rich.
That's why Microsoft MUST make every program as monolithic as it can, in spite of all techical evidence that an opposite way would be simpler and cost effective.
I recall, but you guys can help me there, that at the time of the first monopoly suit there was talk about splitting MS into "operating systems" and "applications", with everything in the operating system adequately documented. where would be open office now?
" Yah, oddly enough, people have made bad predictions before. But note that they didn't suggest human action was the culprit then. There was nothing people could do except prepare for possible change to minimize any impact a changing climate could have upon the food production."
That's what we know NOW. I fully expect that this was the same point of view of migrant preachers hollerin', in the years going to 1000: "The end is near! repent ye sinners!", and remember: they were in good faith.
unless these climatologists present a viable climate model by which changes in human activity determine the climate, they have the same credibility, I'm afraid.
Remember that they had to keep up the charade of looking like a bunch of tolerably good guys fro the benefits of Europe and the UN, see the Khatami fan movement over here. Now that they are busy working on a nuke and that the IAEA sniffed it, there's no point ln lulling us schmucks into quietness.
"If the program recognized that another player was not a Southampton entry, it would immediately defect to act as a spoiler for the non-Southampton player. The result is that Southampton had the top three performers -- but also a load of utter failures at the bottom of the table who sacrificed themselves for the good of the team."
That is possible in real life, think mutual funds families:
1.you decide which fund will be best of breed;
2. take money out of the looosers, and pump the winner;
3. advertise on the WSJ that you have the best fund in the industry;
4. PROFIT!!
BTW, don't let the SEC know: they usually bite your head off and use it for bowling.
"So the payoff of alternating is 2.5. This is still lower than "tit for tat" if the "tit for tat" programme manages to cooperate all the time. But this will generally not be the case."
;-).
In reality this WILL be the case. Tit for Tat cooperates at the first turn, and then copies the opponent, so the payoff is 3 with no volatility of returns.For all the effort they make, both TFTs could go have a beer and let a computer take over
S/M has a lower return, PLUS it pays something in the handshake period.
Now for something really interesting: nobody has really spent time on the economy of effort of the TFT strategy. all the other strategies that proved viable, not only did not win, but they needed substantially more resources (line of code, etc). In my view, that's part of the reason of the survival of cooperation in its present form: it is simple, it works, and when you play with someone using it you're buddies for life.
" Clearly, the only winning move is not to play :) "
No, the only winning strategy is not to lose. both player knew that overkill was a mug's game, but they needed to have a second hit available. Interestingly enough, as Tom Clancy has surmised, it is impossible to get rid of ALL nukes. Think about it. It's game theory as well.
I believ it IS the first time.
not to this extent in percentage of the public spending, while it does on an absolute monetary level.
"certainly some specices have formed partnerships with other, often larger species, and if you define "win" as something besides "just survive", they might be seen as subjugating themselves to the other creature, so that the partnership prospers, even if their life doesn't seem that swell."
To the extent that the prisoners' dilemma formalizations are adaptable to evolution theory, the superiority of Tit for Tat is still valid in this case. think about how many successive generations it must have taken for symbiosis to appear, evidently all cooperating.
"If it is a TFT vs TFT situation, both players will alternately cooperate/defect."
:-( ). Does someone remember the title and author?
In reality, both would continue to cooperate ad infinitum, since no one would defect at the first turn.
As to an anonymous society, I really do not know, but I remember another "real life" view of the prisoner's dilemma especially relevant in this Internet era: sales via catalogue.The formalisation, if you come to think of it, is almost the same, especially if you make a a turnstile-like mechanism of exchange.
this is Offtopic, butI wonder if other slashdotters can help me on that: I remember having read in a sci-fi book an encounter between two civilizations in which, to assess which goods could be traded, the aliens had built a carousel mechanism by which you could take something out only by putting something in return. I remember that the aliens took only cigarettes, tat were like cocaine for them (that tells you how old are the book and I
...maybe M/$ would have been better ;-)
"the question is "what's probably the best strategy for any given individual in Prisoner's Dilemna" and they changed the question to "how can we get some individuals to be super-players with the way this prisoner's dilemna simulator is setup""
. How very true.I doubt that this solution is applicable in real life, if only for the fact that one of the assumptions would be that a subset of a winning team consistently and repeatably wants to be defeated. Mother nature took care of those long ago.
...that adds to the problems explained in prospect theory. the outcome also depends on how the problem is "framed" as anyone that has been offered a compex financial product should know.
"[...]How well a given strategy does depends on the strategies other in its community are using. If the population is heavily cheater based, then agents that cooperate will lose big time. However, if there are enough cooperators, then they will form a coalition of sorts, and even though they will lose to the cheaters, in the end they will come out on top."
I remember reading about the tournament in a "Science" magazine article, back when the original tournament was done; Tit for Tat won irrespectively of the number of strategies it played against.
Furthermore, in a variant in which the winning strategy "spawned" more often, and the loser did not, Tit for Tat became a majority of the population irrespective of the initial sample, except in the extreme case of only one tit for tat and defectors. This is explained better here. The most interesting thing was, for me, the fact that Tit for Tat was superior to a strategy in which the program responded with a delay, i.e. it made the opponent's move two turns down the line. So, remember this if you have kids, or a pet, or both like me: whatever reaction you deem appropriate, it should be done soon, or not at all.
NOTE: the payoff was described as such:if A cooperates and B cooperates, both get X points; if A "defects" it gets W points to Z for B;if both defect, they get Y, where:
W > X > Y > Z, all positive integers.
...As I recall, when the first VCRs came out, Pr0n was available only for the VHS format. Betamax was far superior, undeniably the best.
.....guess who won.
"There is a small cadre of pseudo-scientists (they are working outside their domain of knowledge in an area of science which is notoriously inaccessible) in the pay of the big polluters that are casting about for any indication it may not be caused by human activities."
.... Funny, I thought that truth was not dependent on the number of people supporting it, or the entity funding the research. It is called "indipendent verification". BTW, Columbus day, anyone?