Lots of people still use IE6. Do you know why? Because their employer needs them to access ancient web apps that only work in IE6. Their employer doesn't need them to access You Tube.
Except that Mercury's sun side is 150 degrees Centigrade warmer than Venus (630 versus 480).
Well duh. But look at the average temperatures now, and explain that.
(Actually, to my surprise, according to the NASA factsheet, even the maximum temperature at Mercury (725 K) is lower than that of Venus (735 K). Like you, I've always been under the impression that maximum temp at Mercury was higher (but average and minimum much lower) than at Venus, but that seems to be wrong.)
Actually, it was Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who isn't a climatologist, but is an "environmental lawyer" (and thus one would have hoped he'd fact-check before publishing...)
Are you sure you're linking to the correct article? I can't find the quote you're talking about. He's reminiscing about the cold winters of his youth, but nowhere can I find any claim that it's never going to snow again. Except in the title of the article, but that seems to be someone else putting qords in his mouth.
But whatever outrageous claims mister Kennedy may have made elsewhere, if he's making those claims at all, and they are meant to be scientific and fact-checked, then there should be scientists you could have been linking to. Instead you're linking to what looks like a sleazebag column putting words in the mouth of someone who's not a scientist and never said anything like that anyway, and you try to suggest that means anything at all. It doesn't.
How the hell has it been proven to be a farce? Some faulty numbers in a huge WG2 report that was never meant to be scientific?
The green house effect is an old and proven theory. The prediction that our CO2 emissions will eventually lead to global warming is an old one, and so far the observed evidence supports the theory.
Saying some faulty numbers in a non-scientific report disproves all of this is like saying a single gap in the fossil record disproves the Theory of Evolution. Or lack of stars in a photo prove the moon landings are fake. It shows a complete lack of understanding of what the hell you're talking about. It's abusing and mutilating science to support your own preferred world view, rather than looking at science for what the real facts are. Don't rejoice because someone you disagree with made an error, try to figure out what the real facts are, no matter how inconvenient they might be for your world view.
The mouse-over text of the latest XKCD Comic is very relevant here: you don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.
It's actually the exact opposite from your scenario. GP claims that there exist letters in other people's mailboxes despite the fact that he doesn't know any of them. You seem to claim that nothing can exist unless you've personally experienced it.
Just look to the "Oh Noes, the Himalayan glaciers will melt by 2035" fiasco...
I don't see how anyone could ever have taken that figure seriously. Himalayan glaciers just don't melt that fast. Has they said the Kilimanjaro, or those famously fast-melting glaciers in the Andes, I wouldn't have had a problem with it, but the Himalaya is going to be among the last glaciers to melt. Probably only just before east-Antarctica.
The 2035 fiasco doesn't in any way disprove global warming, but it does prove that that one report was sloppily written and badly read.
"fusion" means something with sustained output > input, we have not had that. o/w we have had fusion since the 1950s.
No. Fusion means fusing lighter elements into heavier elements. Hence the name.
We have had fusion bombs since the 1950, but that's uncontrolled and unusable for anything other than a really big explosion. We have had more controlled fusion for quite some time now, but it only runs for a very short period before it smothers in its own end products. So far, doing it in a controlled way costs more energy than it creates, but that doesn't mean it's not fusion. It's just not efficient.
At my university, they used a program that analysed the parse tree, rather than the source code. Even changing spaces and variable names wouldn't distinguish it sufficiently from a copy. You need to really change the structure of your code, and then you might as well just write the whole thing yourself.
Interesting. Makes sense that (the development of) the first AI to pass the Turing test is driven by sex and greed, instead of higher intellectual motivations.
Just going to point out we already have holographic storage. There is just no commercial products that do it yet. Contrast with fusion and Turing test passing AI.
We already have fusion. It just costs more energy than it generates. It's just a matter of increasing the efficiency a bit more. Contrast that with Turing test passing.
Didn't they say something like this uhm like 20 years ago?
No. 20 years ago, AI researchers were getting very realistic about their predictions and abandoned the idea of Strong AI. Apparently that sensibility is out of the window again.
Interesting? Funny, perhaps, but not true. You still need the Ubuntu help forums (where actual humans still post) to figure out where to find the correct drivers. Those forums are great and very helpful (it was a lot more trouble to find the drivers for Windows), but Ubuntu is not smart enough yet to read them without human intervention.
Depends on your definition of “progress”, doesn’t it? I mean our food definitely was healthier. And we moved our asses more.
You mean our food is healthier, right? Malnutrition was a serious issue 100 years ago. Nowadays, everybody in Europe in the US at least has access to all the healthy food they need. (That some people choose not to use it is really their own fault.)
Technological change has also brought about much negative change that no one would have expected, either. Such as for all the low infant mortality in the first world, it's as bad as ever or worse in the third world (right? I'm not sure about this, just guessing).
You guess wrong. Infant mortality in the third world is way down, which means the population there is exploding, but the food production isn't. So they just die a bit older from starvation or civil war. Apparently you need to fix food production and political stability before you fix infant mortality. We didn't know that yet.
Exactly. Of course we could make an app that works fine in IE6, but it'd be uglier and slower and not do quite as much Ajax in the background. Now a single click on a checkbox can lead to a cascade of updates as we automatically recalculate values and show the result in the grand total in the sidebar. We could also make an explicit "recalculate" button and have the user explicitly submit stuff.
Wouldn't require as much jQuery, run faster in IE6, but is also a lot more painful to use for people with better browsers.
In the end, the question is: how much do you want technology to hold you back?
Don't be ridiculous. Unless it is just a vanity site where you don't care about your users, you support any browser that is popular. This still includes ie6.
IE6 popular? Still used a lot, perhaps, but I doubt it's very loved.
Personally, I only support IE6 if the customer demands it. Many still do, unfortunately. Even for intranet sites where the customer controls all workplaces that need to access the site.
I bet we'll get an issue that all the jQuery is too slow in IE6. And I fear the fix is not going to be to use a faster browser instead.
Pair programming is the typical example that won't work in game programming. Why ? Simply because you cannot afford to write every line of code by two programmers when you write a game.
Not every line of code, but for some lines it can make a lot of sense to write them in pairs.
Software development is still a craft.. more than art, but way less than engineering..
until we have tools to make software in a consistent, reproductible way, we can't apply engineering tecniques to software development
We've had tools for that since forever. `cp` for example. Reproducing software reliably is trivial in comparison to bridges, because software is only information, and not something physical. Writing software is not like building consistent and reproducible bridges, it's like inventing a new kind of bridge. There's always going to be some art, judgement and testing involved.
Failing to get a nail in using a screwdriver doesn't mean you're a fool (OK, you are a fool for choosing the screwdriver, but let's say you are ordered to use it),
It means somebody somewhere is a fool.
When he knows what he's doing, it's often better to let the guy doing the job choose the appropriate tool.
moreover, it helps a lot if you actually employ intelligent people who know what they're doing.
That should be pretty much method-independent.
It's not. Companies who have everything determined in rigid processes can get more useful out out of idiots than companies that still need to invent lots of things. Companies that have lots of stuff to figure out have a bigger need of smart people instead, and those are also more attractive to smart people, because they get the freedom to use their smarts.
Some companies prefer cheap programmers over expensive ones.
TFA starts out sounding like idiot drivel with strong anti-agile prejudices caused by bad experiences with bas, expensive consultants. Later on it gets very informative, however. It's not the Agile doesn't work. It's that, depending on your situation, it might not work for you.
Agile gives programmers freedom. If you've got good programmers, that's a good idea. If your programmers are crap, you're better off restricting their creativity. At least, that's the gist I'm getting from the first half of the article.
Slashdot Mirror
What other sites have content like You Tube?
Not everybody needs content like You Tube.
Lots of people still use IE6. Do you know why? Because their employer needs them to access ancient web apps that only work in IE6. Their employer doesn't need them to access You Tube.
There are 30,000 scientists who have signed paper saying the science behind AGW is questionable.
Was it a scientific paper?
Except that Mercury's sun side is 150 degrees Centigrade warmer than Venus (630 versus 480).
Well duh. But look at the average temperatures now, and explain that.
(Actually, to my surprise, according to the NASA factsheet, even the maximum temperature at Mercury (725 K) is lower than that of Venus (735 K). Like you, I've always been under the impression that maximum temp at Mercury was higher (but average and minimum much lower) than at Venus, but that seems to be wrong.)
Actually, it was Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who isn't a climatologist, but is an "environmental lawyer" (and thus one would have hoped he'd fact-check before publishing...)
Are you sure you're linking to the correct article? I can't find the quote you're talking about. He's reminiscing about the cold winters of his youth, but nowhere can I find any claim that it's never going to snow again. Except in the title of the article, but that seems to be someone else putting qords in his mouth.
But whatever outrageous claims mister Kennedy may have made elsewhere, if he's making those claims at all, and they are meant to be scientific and fact-checked, then there should be scientists you could have been linking to. Instead you're linking to what looks like a sleazebag column putting words in the mouth of someone who's not a scientist and never said anything like that anyway, and you try to suggest that means anything at all. It doesn't.
now that global warming is proving to be a farce
How the hell has it been proven to be a farce? Some faulty numbers in a huge WG2 report that was never meant to be scientific?
The green house effect is an old and proven theory. The prediction that our CO2 emissions will eventually lead to global warming is an old one, and so far the observed evidence supports the theory.
Saying some faulty numbers in a non-scientific report disproves all of this is like saying a single gap in the fossil record disproves the Theory of Evolution. Or lack of stars in a photo prove the moon landings are fake. It shows a complete lack of understanding of what the hell you're talking about. It's abusing and mutilating science to support your own preferred world view, rather than looking at science for what the real facts are. Don't rejoice because someone you disagree with made an error, try to figure out what the real facts are, no matter how inconvenient they might be for your world view.
The mouse-over text of the latest XKCD Comic is very relevant here: you don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.
It's actually the exact opposite from your scenario. GP claims that there exist letters in other people's mailboxes despite the fact that he doesn't know any of them. You seem to claim that nothing can exist unless you've personally experienced it.
Just look to the "Oh Noes, the Himalayan glaciers will melt by 2035" fiasco...
I don't see how anyone could ever have taken that figure seriously. Himalayan glaciers just don't melt that fast. Has they said the Kilimanjaro, or those famously fast-melting glaciers in the Andes, I wouldn't have had a problem with it, but the Himalaya is going to be among the last glaciers to melt. Probably only just before east-Antarctica.
The 2035 fiasco doesn't in any way disprove global warming, but it does prove that that one report was sloppily written and badly read.
"fusion" means something with sustained output > input, we have not had that. o/w we have had fusion since the 1950s.
No. Fusion means fusing lighter elements into heavier elements. Hence the name.
We have had fusion bombs since the 1950, but that's uncontrolled and unusable for anything other than a really big explosion. We have had more controlled fusion for quite some time now, but it only runs for a very short period before it smothers in its own end products. So far, doing it in a controlled way costs more energy than it creates, but that doesn't mean it's not fusion. It's just not efficient.
...at cheating. Bill Gates built Microsoft on cheating and got caught. See United States v. Microsoft.
And despite getting caught at cheating, he's still the richest person in the world. Now what does that teach you?
At my university, they used a program that analysed the parse tree, rather than the source code. Even changing spaces and variable names wouldn't distinguish it sufficiently from a copy. You need to really change the structure of your code, and then you might as well just write the whole thing yourself.
Haven't history taught you that violence begets violence?
Hollywood taught me that shotguns work very well against robotic spider infestations.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/09/1356201
Interesting. Makes sense that (the development of) the first AI to pass the Turing test is driven by sex and greed, instead of higher intellectual motivations.
Just going to point out we already have holographic storage. There is just no commercial products that do it yet. Contrast with fusion and Turing test passing AI.
We already have fusion. It just costs more energy than it generates. It's just a matter of increasing the efficiency a bit more. Contrast that with Turing test passing.
Didn't they say something like this uhm like 20 years ago?
No. 20 years ago, AI researchers were getting very realistic about their predictions and abandoned the idea of Strong AI. Apparently that sensibility is out of the window again.
Interesting? Funny, perhaps, but not true. You still need the Ubuntu help forums (where actual humans still post) to figure out where to find the correct drivers. Those forums are great and very helpful (it was a lot more trouble to find the drivers for Windows), but Ubuntu is not smart enough yet to read them without human intervention.
Depends on your definition of “progress”, doesn’t it?
I mean our food definitely was healthier. And we moved our asses more.
You mean our food is healthier, right? Malnutrition was a serious issue 100 years ago. Nowadays, everybody in Europe in the US at least has access to all the healthy food they need. (That some people choose not to use it is really their own fault.)
The most likely scenario is, AI which develops fusion and holographic storage.
And then uses it against us.
Technological change has also brought about much negative change that no one would have expected, either. Such as for all the low infant mortality in the first world, it's as bad as ever or worse in the third world (right? I'm not sure about this, just guessing).
You guess wrong. Infant mortality in the third world is way down, which means the population there is exploding, but the food production isn't. So they just die a bit older from starvation or civil war. Apparently you need to fix food production and political stability before you fix infant mortality. We didn't know that yet.
Exactly. Of course we could make an app that works fine in IE6, but it'd be uglier and slower and not do quite as much Ajax in the background. Now a single click on a checkbox can lead to a cascade of updates as we automatically recalculate values and show the result in the grand total in the sidebar. We could also make an explicit "recalculate" button and have the user explicitly submit stuff.
Wouldn't require as much jQuery, run faster in IE6, but is also a lot more painful to use for people with better browsers.
In the end, the question is: how much do you want technology to hold you back?
Don't be ridiculous. Unless it is just a vanity site where you don't care about your users, you support any browser that is popular. This still includes ie6.
IE6 popular? Still used a lot, perhaps, but I doubt it's very loved.
Personally, I only support IE6 if the customer demands it. Many still do, unfortunately. Even for intranet sites where the customer controls all workplaces that need to access the site.
I bet we'll get an issue that all the jQuery is too slow in IE6. And I fear the fix is not going to be to use a faster browser instead.
Pair programming is the typical example that won't work in game programming.
Why ? Simply because you cannot afford to write every line of code by two programmers when you write a game.
Not every line of code, but for some lines it can make a lot of sense to write them in pairs.
Software development is still a craft.. more than art, but way less than engineering..
until we have tools to make software in a consistent, reproductible way, we can't apply engineering tecniques to software development
We've had tools for that since forever. `cp` for example. Reproducing software reliably is trivial in comparison to bridges, because software is only information, and not something physical. Writing software is not like building consistent and reproducible bridges, it's like inventing a new kind of bridge. There's always going to be some art, judgement and testing involved.
Failing to get a nail in using a screwdriver doesn't mean you're a fool (OK, you are a fool for choosing the screwdriver, but let's say you are ordered to use it),
It means somebody somewhere is a fool.
When he knows what he's doing, it's often better to let the guy doing the job choose the appropriate tool.
That should be pretty much method-independent.
It's not. Companies who have everything determined in rigid processes can get more useful out out of idiots than companies that still need to invent lots of things. Companies that have lots of stuff to figure out have a bigger need of smart people instead, and those are also more attractive to smart people, because they get the freedom to use their smarts.
Some companies prefer cheap programmers over expensive ones.
TFA starts out sounding like idiot drivel with strong anti-agile prejudices caused by bad experiences with bas, expensive consultants. Later on it gets very informative, however. It's not the Agile doesn't work. It's that, depending on your situation, it might not work for you.
Agile gives programmers freedom. If you've got good programmers, that's a good idea. If your programmers are crap, you're better off restricting their creativity. At least, that's the gist I'm getting from the first half of the article.