So these may be crackpot theories. Let's put emotions aside and try to describe these risks in scientific terms. What is the chance of a supernova-sized Pac Man materializing in space tomorrow and swallowing the planets of the solar system in quick linear succession? Small, too small for the word "small" to be appropriate. But what if there's a God with an overly nerdy sense of humor? For all we know, the chance isn't quite 0. It's perhaps 1e-10000000, or 1-e1-e30. Hard to quantify for sure, but I'm pretty sure that as far as risk evaluation goes, I can put a lower bound on it that's greater than 0.
Clearly the same can be said about these theories. While the risks involved are greater than that of the Pac Man theory, they are probably smaller than, say, the risk that any of the scientists involved will die in a car accident tomorrow, and possibly smaller than the risk that they will ALL die in simultaneous, unrelated car accidents on the same minute of the same hour tomorrow. But even if they all did, in what is undoubtedly another statistical near-impossibility, in the end we would have lost a bunch of scientists, not the entire human race and the planet to boot.
This is why the expected value of the loss, not the probability alone, should be the relevant measure here. The expected loss is the probability of the loss times the value of the loss. There are very few ways we can endanger the entire planet in a catastrophically irreversible way. If this astoundingly improbable event should come to be, we'd lose the human race, the animal kingdom, and the Earth. While the value of all that is almost too large to ponder, it exists and it is finite.
The point here is that it's too easy to throw one's arms in the air and dismiss this risk assessment because the probability of the loss is inconceivably small and the value of the loss is inconceivably high. Very very small numbers multiplied by very very large numbers can yield very accessible and understandable numbers. As far as I know, the expected loss could be 1 cent, or $1 million trillion dollars. After reading TFA and a couple of related sites, I can plug some wild numerical guesses for these two factors and get either result.
Which is why we also need to look at the benefit half of the equation:
(net expected value of the LHC) = (probability of scientific discoveries) x (value of discoveries) - (probability of black hole swallowing earth) x (value of the earth)
The left side is easier to quantify, but not by much. I'm pretty sure that even the most optimistic scientist, the one most willing to bet the farm on this will come up with a number smaller than $1 million trillion dollars, so a risk evaluation is order. IMHO, it would be reasonable to spend as much as 10% or more of the total budget of the LHC in coming up with the most accurate possible risk assessment. Now intuitively, I'm sure the actual risk assessment budget was much smaller than that - orders of magnitude smaller.
Which brings me to the truly scary side of all this: the inevitable difference between the social expected value of the scientific discoveries ("social" meaning to the entire human race, which is betting the farm on all this no matter what the probabilities are) and their private value to the scientists involved, the scientific community at large, and the particular politicians and bureaucrats associated with the project. These are classic externalities in economics: the managers at the upstream factory that's polluting the river have to drink the polluted water as well, but the private benefit they derive from polluting outweighs their share of the social cost, so the decision to pollute brings a net private benefit to them. Now I don't mean to offend the scientific community with that example: scientists aren't evil and certainly aren't on the same moral ground as polluters. But they're certainly more gung-ho about scientific experiments and their benefits than laymans are, or in other words are generally predisposed to overvalue the
I'm not a climatologist. I just don't know enough about it to come up with a sembiance of
a scientific opinion on my own.
I would readily accept the prevailing scientific view if the issue hadn't become ultra-politicized, with Evangelicals believing that it
doesn't exist, and Greens believing that it does. This puts it squarely in the realm
of issues that seem to have transcended their original scientific domain and descended
into a public fray of warring factions, like Creation/Evolution and sexual psychology.
So pardon me if you've already concluded one way or the other, and if
you interpret my uncertainties on the subject as a "middle of the road" position that's just
as, if not more, dangerously heretic as that of your diametrical opponents. But if you're looking for a recruit and think I can be
swayed by a luringly sound argument, as opposed to bashed into the ground for the miscreant
that I am, feel free to chime in.
Here are some facts that I've been able to filter in from my exposure to the issue:
1. It's an important issue. It might be a dud, but it might mean global devastation. So I
should definitely care, on the chance that it's indeed a preventable global disaster.
2. Nobody seems to dispute that temperature levels are currently rising.
3. Nobody seems to dispute that temperature levels have a history of "natural" wild swings,
for whatever consolation their natural origin might be to the species that goes extinct
during a glaciation period.
4. The positive, or fact-finding, debate is centered on what percentage of the
current rate of increase is due to mankind generally and industrialization specifically.
The normative, or what-to-do-about-it, debate is centered on how much we should
cut back by on CO2 emissions to try to correct it.
5. Very little attention seems to be paid to alternative methods of compensating for
increasing temperatures, perhaps because such methods are in fact unworkable. However it seems to me that research into such methods would be very appealing at face value,
since it sidesteps the positive debate entirely, in that the methods would work whether or not the
greenhouse effect due to industrialization accounts for the bulk of the temperature
rise. Very little comes up about this in popular writings about global warming. Perhaps I should try to inform myself more, on the off chance that this particular area of research hasn't yet become politicized.
6. Extremists at both ends have ulterior motives. Religious fundamentalists propose that
God is clearly in the driver's seat when it comes to the health of the planet, and to do
anything in that department is to deny it, or worse, to interfere with his plans. Ultra-
environmentalists favor de-industrialization per se, so an impending doom that
leads in that direction is convenient at a minimum.
7. The costs involved are enormous. The possible damage to coastal cities from rising
sea levels are atrocious, and the worldwide costs of compliance with CO2 reduction
standards are highly onerous.
If extremists are behind the bad science, the externality potential is huge. Bible
holders may as well have you risk drowning in seawater, and environmentalists may as
well have you go poor, if that furthers their goals, at
little non-generalized loss to them.
In fact, what if they're ironically both wrong? What if global warming ends up melting the polar caps in spite of significant CO2 reductions, because we largely ignored the problem on one side, and largely overlooked other causes of warming on the other (or maybe accepted them since they were natural?)
According to another Walker County Messenger article, this guy was found "not guilty on five counts of child molestation and guilty of 106 counts of sexual exploitation of children" at his trial. Sounds like the child molestation charges were what prompted the case - and the forensic investigation of his computer - to begin with.
It also sounds like Superior Court Judge Kristina Connelly might not have been in agreement with the not guilty verdict (or for that matter, terribly pleased by it) and handed him a 20-year sentence for possessing child porn by (ab-)using consecutive sentencing - a sort of reverse "jury nullification." Now I don't know for sure that's what happened, and I hate pedophiles as much as the next guy, but every time a judge reshapes a jury verdict to his own liking during sentencing, justice loses. If pedophiles felt at risk of getting 20 years in jail for every 4 hours of binging on kiddie porn, they'd figure they might as well go out and try the real thing.
...after the obligatory period of shock, somebody would eventually find a set of backup sources somewhere, but they'd probably prove useless.
The ideal operating system is componentized, not monolythic: a microkernel, surrounded by a few standardized core API's implemented by replaceable OS components, surrounded by a larger set of services API's also implemented by replaceable OS components. That way there is no natural monopoly. What it takes are well-defined semantics for the APIs. It also takes a committee to administer upgrade discipline (anything that requires API changes requires a newly versioned module to coexist with the old module.)
The problem is that it's been impossible to move the market towards a standardized, componentized solution, since every OS has always been faced with Windows' existence. Sure enough Windows was never going to be componentized, so every other OS has been captive to the "David vs. Goliath" syndrome, or the need to build a "full solution" in order to be able to compete. But if Microsoft were to disappear, the Goliath would lay slain, and it'd take about as long for another Goliath (Apple? Linux?) to grow large enough as it would to introduce a componentized, "cooperative yet competitive" solution, the latter being much more attractive to consumers, and to producers with no realistic chance of becoming the new Goliath.
But the greatest effect of Microsoft's disappearance would be the resurrection of the software industry. There is no software industry today, no matter what Oracle, Adobe and EA tell you. It's a fraction of what it was in %-GDP terms in the 80's, and a microfraction of what it would be without MS. Simplistically put, software has been grossly underinvested in because MS deprives business plans of most of their upside. As a new software venture, you can be grossly unsuccessful, mildly unsuccessful, mildly successful, but you can never be greatly successful - if it looked like you were going to be, MS would step in and turn you into the next Netscape, by either acquiring you for pennies, or by copying your technology and leveraging their OS business to overcome any time-to-market or superior-technology advantage you might have had. That depresses the expected return of any new venture so much, that most of them go unstarted or unfunded.
This last effect alone is probably worth 100 to 1000 times what MS's continued existence is worth. In other words, if the DOJ commended the dissolution of Microsoft (probably about as likely as the black hole option, at least in this administration) it'd do economic wonders.
The only effect this would have is to force spammers or their clients to incur extra costs to follow fake leads, but since you wouldn't decrease the size of the pool of people who respond sincerely, the effect would only be marginal. Your only hope would be to drive their costs up so much as to drive the spammer out of business entirely, but that would take a lot of coordination and resolve on the part of the responders. Remember, spammers keep making money while they're at it, whereas responders just get some measure of satisfaction, which is likely to wear off the more spam you respond to.
Finally, your assertion that it would incentivate less spam from individual spammers is wrong, since the ratio of fake to real responses is the same for a large mailing list as it is for a smaller one. In other words, you have "constant returns to spam." The only way it would incentivate less spam is if you managed to drive some of the spammers out of business. More likely, it would lead to more spam, as spammers scramble to find more addresses to offset their lower "spam margin."
...than anything existing in the first place, for all we know for sure. What's the difference between a Universe and a Simulation? Not much... the latter requires an outer Universe to contain the Machinery that performs the Simulation. It's also no less believable than the concept of parallel universes, especially ones bound by our same physics. What about other physics, other realities, with no connections plausible or possible? Only metaphysical realities are unique, and the concepts and characters that inhabit them, while they do not "exist," nevertheless "are." Pinocchio, Homer Simpson, and Iraq's WMDs count as "beings," then. The thing that's truly surprising, to me and Homer alike, is that there is an Universe in the first place. Or is there? Perhaps Homer is as physically alive as we are, just on a different medium. Does the fact that Homer was ideated by a sentient being really make any difference in substance?
OK, I've had mine for 10 days, the SuperDrive (DVD-R/CD-RW) version with 640MB and the Airport Extreme (802.11g) card and base station.
As for the heat, it's definitely not "among the hottest around" as the OSNews article claims - for one it's a lot less hot than the older TiBooks IMHO. He says he suspects his lower RAM configuration could be to blame. I suspect his suspicion is right - 256MB just isn't realistic for OS X. Furthermore, it's hard to hear (or even feel) the drive spin, so VM activity can easily go unnoticed.
I don't agree with his criticism of the display either. Admittedly I'm not too picky in this area, but I just don't see this supposedly outrageous difference in quality between my 17" Apple Studio Display and the PowerBook's display. Besides, it's hard to buy into the disappointment, since all it takes is a quick trip to the store to check it out (at least for people who don't buy computers just to review them;-)
The rest of the criticism goes right at the price differentiation variables: "maxes out at 640MB", "no L3 cache", "not a 1GHz processor", "screen is only 12"" etc etc... Well guess what, that's why it's the $1799 model instead of the $3299 model... that's half as much plus $150. The better comparison is between the older $2299-$2799 TiBook inventory that Apple still officially carries and the 12". Would you rather have:
- A 15.2" screen, DVI connector, and Titanium enclosure, or
- A later gen with a faster bus, DDR RAM, Bluetooth, 802.11g compatibility, and $500 in your pocket
I also built my own PVR, and I wish I could run linux on it. Alas, I'm stuck using the ATI Windows PVR software that came with my All-In-Wonder 7500, whose video capture and TV-out functions are supposedly supported under linux by Gatos, but I for one sure can't figure out how to get them to work, no matter how many afternoons I throw at it. Sad, since the ATI software is probably the buggiest and quirkiest thing I use on a regular basis save for Windows itself.
My motivation was not only to avoid the TiVo monthly fees, co-branding activities and privacy intrusions, but also to record movies and store them long term... hard drive space is still cost-competitive with DVD-R media, and you can't beat the random-access ease. Right now I'm up to 450GB, about two-thirds full. The last drive I added was a 250GB Maxtor for $299 after rebate. Even if the cost equation changes, I can always dump the least-watched movies off to DVD since they're stored in DVD-compatible MPEG-2. I don't think I could keep adding drives to a TiVo, let alone play games on my TV off the same box, etc.
ATI's RF remote is also pretty cool and it works around the house. I just wish gatos worked for me, and that ATI's HDTV adapter didn't require an 8500-series card... though I'll probably end up getting one of those just for that.
Slashdot Mirror
Clearly the same can be said about these theories. While the risks involved are greater than that of the Pac Man theory, they are probably smaller than, say, the risk that any of the scientists involved will die in a car accident tomorrow, and possibly smaller than the risk that they will ALL die in simultaneous, unrelated car accidents on the same minute of the same hour tomorrow. But even if they all did, in what is undoubtedly another statistical near-impossibility, in the end we would have lost a bunch of scientists, not the entire human race and the planet to boot.
This is why the expected value of the loss, not the probability alone, should be the relevant measure here. The expected loss is the probability of the loss times the value of the loss. There are very few ways we can endanger the entire planet in a catastrophically irreversible way. If this astoundingly improbable event should come to be, we'd lose the human race, the animal kingdom, and the Earth. While the value of all that is almost too large to ponder, it exists and it is finite.
The point here is that it's too easy to throw one's arms in the air and dismiss this risk assessment because the probability of the loss is inconceivably small and the value of the loss is inconceivably high. Very very small numbers multiplied by very very large numbers can yield very accessible and understandable numbers. As far as I know, the expected loss could be 1 cent, or $1 million trillion dollars. After reading TFA and a couple of related sites, I can plug some wild numerical guesses for these two factors and get either result.
Which is why we also need to look at the benefit half of the equation:
(net expected value of the LHC) = (probability of scientific discoveries) x (value of discoveries) - (probability of black hole swallowing earth) x (value of the earth)
The left side is easier to quantify, but not by much. I'm pretty sure that even the most optimistic scientist, the one most willing to bet the farm on this will come up with a number smaller than $1 million trillion dollars, so a risk evaluation is order. IMHO, it would be reasonable to spend as much as 10% or more of the total budget of the LHC in coming up with the most accurate possible risk assessment. Now intuitively, I'm sure the actual risk assessment budget was much smaller than that - orders of magnitude smaller.
Which brings me to the truly scary side of all this: the inevitable difference between the social expected value of the scientific discoveries ("social" meaning to the entire human race, which is betting the farm on all this no matter what the probabilities are) and their private value to the scientists involved, the scientific community at large, and the particular politicians and bureaucrats associated with the project. These are classic externalities in economics: the managers at the upstream factory that's polluting the river have to drink the polluted water as well, but the private benefit they derive from polluting outweighs their share of the social cost, so the decision to pollute brings a net private benefit to them. Now I don't mean to offend the scientific community with that example: scientists aren't evil and certainly aren't on the same moral ground as polluters. But they're certainly more gung-ho about scientific experiments and their benefits than laymans are, or in other words are generally predisposed to overvalue the
I would readily accept the prevailing scientific view if the issue hadn't become ultra-politicized, with Evangelicals believing that it doesn't exist, and Greens believing that it does. This puts it squarely in the realm of issues that seem to have transcended their original scientific domain and descended into a public fray of warring factions, like Creation/Evolution and sexual psychology.
So pardon me if you've already concluded one way or the other, and if you interpret my uncertainties on the subject as a "middle of the road" position that's just as, if not more, dangerously heretic as that of your diametrical opponents. But if you're looking for a recruit and think I can be swayed by a luringly sound argument, as opposed to bashed into the ground for the miscreant that I am, feel free to chime in.
Here are some facts that I've been able to filter in from my exposure to the issue:
1. It's an important issue. It might be a dud, but it might mean global devastation. So I should definitely care, on the chance that it's indeed a preventable global disaster.
2. Nobody seems to dispute that temperature levels are currently rising.
3. Nobody seems to dispute that temperature levels have a history of "natural" wild swings, for whatever consolation their natural origin might be to the species that goes extinct during a glaciation period.
4. The positive, or fact-finding, debate is centered on what percentage of the current rate of increase is due to mankind generally and industrialization specifically. The normative, or what-to-do-about-it, debate is centered on how much we should cut back by on CO2 emissions to try to correct it.
5. Very little attention seems to be paid to alternative methods of compensating for increasing temperatures, perhaps because such methods are in fact unworkable. However it seems to me that research into such methods would be very appealing at face value, since it sidesteps the positive debate entirely, in that the methods would work whether or not the greenhouse effect due to industrialization accounts for the bulk of the temperature rise. Very little comes up about this in popular writings about global warming. Perhaps I should try to inform myself more, on the off chance that this particular area of research hasn't yet become politicized.
6. Extremists at both ends have ulterior motives. Religious fundamentalists propose that God is clearly in the driver's seat when it comes to the health of the planet, and to do anything in that department is to deny it, or worse, to interfere with his plans. Ultra- environmentalists favor de-industrialization per se, so an impending doom that leads in that direction is convenient at a minimum.
7. The costs involved are enormous. The possible damage to coastal cities from rising sea levels are atrocious, and the worldwide costs of compliance with CO2 reduction standards are highly onerous.
If extremists are behind the bad science, the externality potential is huge. Bible holders may as well have you risk drowning in seawater, and environmentalists may as well have you go poor, if that furthers their goals, at little non-generalized loss to them.
In fact, what if they're ironically both wrong? What if global warming ends up melting the polar caps in spite of significant CO2 reductions, because we largely ignored the problem on one side, and largely overlooked other causes of warming on the other (or maybe accepted them since they were natural?)
Then I'll really be pissed.
It also sounds like Superior Court Judge Kristina Connelly might not have been in agreement with the not guilty verdict (or for that matter, terribly pleased by it) and handed him a 20-year sentence for possessing child porn by (ab-)using consecutive sentencing - a sort of reverse "jury nullification." Now I don't know for sure that's what happened, and I hate pedophiles as much as the next guy, but every time a judge reshapes a jury verdict to his own liking during sentencing, justice loses. If pedophiles felt at risk of getting 20 years in jail for every 4 hours of binging on kiddie porn, they'd figure they might as well go out and try the real thing.
...after the obligatory period of shock, somebody would eventually find a set of backup sources somewhere, but they'd probably prove useless.
The ideal operating system is componentized, not monolythic: a microkernel, surrounded by a few standardized core API's implemented by replaceable OS components, surrounded by a larger set of services API's also implemented by replaceable OS components. That way there is no natural monopoly. What it takes are well-defined semantics for the APIs. It also takes a committee to administer upgrade discipline (anything that requires API changes requires a newly versioned module to coexist with the old module.)
The problem is that it's been impossible to move the market towards a standardized, componentized solution, since every OS has always been faced with Windows' existence. Sure enough Windows was never going to be componentized, so every other OS has been captive to the "David vs. Goliath" syndrome, or the need to build a "full solution" in order to be able to compete. But if Microsoft were to disappear, the Goliath would lay slain, and it'd take about as long for another Goliath (Apple? Linux?) to grow large enough as it would to introduce a componentized, "cooperative yet competitive" solution, the latter being much more attractive to consumers, and to producers with no realistic chance of becoming the new Goliath.
But the greatest effect of Microsoft's disappearance would be the resurrection of the software industry. There is no software industry today, no matter what Oracle, Adobe and EA tell you. It's a fraction of what it was in %-GDP terms in the 80's, and a microfraction of what it would be without MS. Simplistically put, software has been grossly underinvested in because MS deprives business plans of most of their upside. As a new software venture, you can be grossly unsuccessful, mildly unsuccessful, mildly successful, but you can never be greatly successful - if it looked like you were going to be, MS would step in and turn you into the next Netscape, by either acquiring you for pennies, or by copying your technology and leveraging their OS business to overcome any time-to-market or superior-technology advantage you might have had. That depresses the expected return of any new venture so much, that most of them go unstarted or unfunded.
This last effect alone is probably worth 100 to 1000 times what MS's continued existence is worth. In other words, if the DOJ commended the dissolution of Microsoft (probably about as likely as the black hole option, at least in this administration) it'd do economic wonders.
Finally, your assertion that it would incentivate less spam from individual spammers is wrong, since the ratio of fake to real responses is the same for a large mailing list as it is for a smaller one. In other words, you have "constant returns to spam." The only way it would incentivate less spam is if you managed to drive some of the spammers out of business. More likely, it would lead to more spam, as spammers scramble to find more addresses to offset their lower "spam margin."
...than anything existing in the first place, for all we know for sure. What's the difference between a Universe and a Simulation? Not much... the latter requires an outer Universe to contain the Machinery that performs the Simulation. It's also no less believable than the concept of parallel universes, especially ones bound by our same physics. What about other physics, other realities, with no connections plausible or possible? Only metaphysical realities are unique, and the concepts and characters that inhabit them, while they do not "exist," nevertheless "are." Pinocchio, Homer Simpson, and Iraq's WMDs count as "beings," then. The thing that's truly surprising, to me and Homer alike, is that there is an Universe in the first place. Or is there? Perhaps Homer is as physically alive as we are, just on a different medium. Does the fact that Homer was ideated by a sentient being really make any difference in substance?
As for the heat, it's definitely not "among the hottest around" as the OSNews article claims - for one it's a lot less hot than the older TiBooks IMHO. He says he suspects his lower RAM configuration could be to blame. I suspect his suspicion is right - 256MB just isn't realistic for OS X. Furthermore, it's hard to hear (or even feel) the drive spin, so VM activity can easily go unnoticed.
I don't agree with his criticism of the display either. Admittedly I'm not too picky in this area, but I just don't see this supposedly outrageous difference in quality between my 17" Apple Studio Display and the PowerBook's display. Besides, it's hard to buy into the disappointment, since all it takes is a quick trip to the store to check it out (at least for people who don't buy computers just to review them ;-)
The rest of the criticism goes right at the price differentiation variables: "maxes out at 640MB", "no L3 cache", "not a 1GHz processor", "screen is only 12"" etc etc... Well guess what, that's why it's the $1799 model instead of the $3299 model... that's half as much plus $150. The better comparison is between the older $2299-$2799 TiBook inventory that Apple still officially carries and the 12". Would you rather have:
- A 15.2" screen, DVI connector, and Titanium enclosure, or
- A later gen with a faster bus, DDR RAM, Bluetooth, 802.11g compatibility, and $500 in your pocket
My motivation was not only to avoid the TiVo monthly fees, co-branding activities and privacy intrusions, but also to record movies and store them long term... hard drive space is still cost-competitive with DVD-R media, and you can't beat the random-access ease. Right now I'm up to 450GB, about two-thirds full. The last drive I added was a 250GB Maxtor for $299 after rebate. Even if the cost equation changes, I can always dump the least-watched movies off to DVD since they're stored in DVD-compatible MPEG-2. I don't think I could keep adding drives to a TiVo, let alone play games on my TV off the same box, etc.
ATI's RF remote is also pretty cool and it works around the house. I just wish gatos worked for me, and that ATI's HDTV adapter didn't require an 8500-series card... though I'll probably end up getting one of those just for that.
Many thanks to the California A.G... now I'm gonna have to revise my biases.
...my ping time is so high only my dog can hear it.