That is why it is better to pay for performance and goals than it is for time
Unfortunately, having real performance metrics and achievable goals requires that management get their heads out of their asses, which is frequently a non-starter. It's far easier to just measure "time spent at desk" and call it a day.
If it costs $2700, that implies there's a fair bit of energy going into making it, whether directly or indirectly. If that's mostly labor costs, what do you think those employees do with that money?
It costs $2700 because these are basically prototypes; from the article, the guy talks about how sales have been growing in "double digit numbers" - they probably make less than a thousand of these per year. If they increase production, the price will probably come down.
Except that is not what I am saying, I think you are missing my point, so I'll paraphase myself; Is the existence of science itself the evidence of "Gods" existence?
Only if you play tricky games with labels.
Let's do some substitution, shall we? I'll replace the words "god" and "science" with the definitions used by most people in the USA:
Is the existence of a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe itself evidence of "the God of Abraham, who came to Earth as Jesus Christ, who died for our sins and who came back to life and who will grant his followers life everlasting's" existence?
Well, no. It trivially isn't. There's no real need to test it, because it's like asking if the existence of daffodils are evidence of the existence of fairies. They're orthogonal concepts.
How can you possibly not know about the Bullet Cluster? That is pretty much blatant evidence that there appears to be something there which is both dark and massive. Wouldn't a theory of dark matter be appropriate when presented with such evidence? (and, by the way, structures like the Bullet Cluster were predicted by the theory of dark matter - people said "well if it doesn't interact electromagnetically, we should be able to see places where normal matter got pushed but dark matter didn't, like when two clusters collide" - so they set out to look for something like that, and lo and behold they found it!)
And that's not even going in to the other things that dark matter predicts and nothing else does, like the Cosmic Microwave Background.
Or you could just read Starts with a Bang, Ethan Siegel is a lot better at explaining this stuff than Slashdot is.
What if I was to posit that what we call "God" is actually the universe itself and that life is an attempt by the universe to understand itself, using reason, in the brief period that life can exist before the universe subsequently decays into entropy.
You're free to do that if you want, we really can't stop you.
However, after that point, when you tell someone "I believe God exists", they will not have the faintest clue what you're talking about - they'll think you're talking about the usual definition of God, which in the USA means something at least vaguely like the God of the Christian Bible. At the most general level, that usually implies that this is a God who came to earth, sacrificed himself (to himself but that's another story), and then rose from the dead. What you're saying is that the Universe came to earth, sacrificed itself, and then rose from the dead.
Honestly, that makes even less sense than religions generally do.
What you're talking about might carry the label "God" in your mind, but pretty much everyone else you talk to will have an entirely different concept of what that word means.
That's because you're essentially saying "If we redefine God to be a deepity, wouldn't it exist?" - well, yes, that's true (trivially, the universe itself does exist), but you can't really have a conversation when you use your own, unique definitions of words.
See the blue part of this image? That's dark matter right there.
Just because it doesn't interact electromagnetically (that is, we can't "see" it) doesn't mean it doesn't exist, and it doesn't mean we can't tell it's there.
I've long thought that the concept of dark matter was a manifestation of the inability of some scientists to admit "Hell, I don't know".
..what? Dark matter is, by definition, little bits of "hell, I don't know". Fuck, we don't even know if it's bits or bobs or particles or globs! We have no idea what it is at all!
I mean, why do you think we call it "dark matter"? That is literally all we know about it - we know it has weak electromagnetic interactions (i.e, it's dark), but strong gravitational interactions (i.e, it's matter).
The thing you really seem to object to is that scientists will say "Hell, I don't know - but I'll put a name on it, and start narrowing down what it can and cannot be".
I mean, what do you expect? That we'll admit "hell, I don't know" and just stop? And just give up right there? Hell no - saying "I don't know" is the first step of doing science, not the last step!
I'd love to see how his model explains something like (e.g) the Bullet Cluster, because quite frankly I don't think it does - the article states that his theory explains the speeding up of galactic rotation (the reason why we first hypothesized dark matter), but the article goes on to state that his hypothesis doesn't actually cover a ton of other stuff like the CMB.
Furthermore, this theory is based on the hypothesis that matter and antimatter are gravitationally repulsive, which (imo) is absolute BS. It's true, we haven't generated enough antimatter yet to know for a fact that it acts the same way as regular matter in a gravitational field generated by regular matter, but we have absolutely no reason to think that it would be gravitationally repulsive. If that turns out to be true, there will need to be a shit-ton of rejiggering of models and basically everything we think we know about physics will have to be moved around.
Basically, he's said "If pigs can levitate, then I can account for the discrepancy in galactic rotation curves without dark matter" - except if pigs can levitate, we'll need to rethink everything anyway.
For the small trade-off you get cheat-free economy and you can play both single-player and multiplayer with the same characters.
Cheat-free economy? I think you mean "cheat-legalized" economy.
Paying cash for items is not allowed in Diablo 2. Diablo 3 is going to have a real cash auction house, where you can essentially buy power (with Blizzard taking a cut at every step of the process).
Why would one crash bring an end to robotic cars? Crashes can be expected while they are still developing this car.
I know, I wouldn't trust a robotic car that had never crashed - after all, if it's never crashed, then the engineers making it have no idea what real-world failure modes it has.
I'm as green as the next Liberal, but I've got 3 kids in child seats (we need three rows of seating) and I make lots of runs to home depot. We don't own an SUV for safety or to see "over and around" other vehicles, but because its big and can haul a lot of stuff and people.
You know, alternatives do exist. They're called "minivans". They'll carry just as many people, they'll haul as much stuff from the Home Depot as you're willing to carry, and they're more fuel efficient and safer overall because they're not perched up on top of a ridiculously heavy and tall offroad truck chassis.
If you're not going offroad (no matter what you think, you're not) but you have a lot of people to move around, you're way better off getting a minivan than you are getting an SUV. Those grotesqueries were only made to exploit a loophole in the tax laws that (IIRC) has since been closed, anyway.
Frost's suggestion is that these choices of path may seem insignificant at the time -- both paths being nearly the same; but that, as "way leads on to way," there's no going back and thus we may find ourselves down a path that leads to unexpected places. When Linus Torvalds wrote linux, he could not know that "the path less traveled" would lead to fame and fortune, literally. The college kids who created Slashdot could not know it would make them rich.
In fact, the point of the poem is exactly that it does matter which path you take. But that you don't always know how your choice is going to turn out. Frost himself might have continued his career as a teacher, a stable and certain means of supporting his family. Instead, he chose to focus on his poetry. He took a chance. And it worked well for him.
You know, just because you have a positive interpretation of the poem doesn't mean that it's more supported by the text than a negative one.
Basically, Robert Frost was trolling, and you got bit by it. Why do you think he ended the poem with such a great couplet? Even though it makes such little sense in the context of the rest of the poem? (the dude's thinking about how he's going to talk about it in the future, the rest of the poem is about how the paths are equal) Because he knew it would catch people's attention, and that then they'd look in to the poem some more and see the dissonance. We've just gotten to the point where the popular interpretation is so positive people just ignore the incongruities.
Look: the narrator is vain and shallow because he's dithering about a minor choice in his life, and in his head it's this giant, life-altering moment.
Imagine if someone said to you "It took me a long time to decide if I should wear navy socks or black socks this morning" - you'd think they were kinda silly for even thinking about it.
If they said "I'll tell people about this day - the day I wore black socks, and not navy socks - I'll tell them with a sigh, that I took the pair less traveled by, and that has made all the difference", you'd think they were, well, vain and shallow. Their choice in socks is the most important thing ever! Oh em gee!
Look, all those things you got out of the poem, those positive life-affirming things about making choices and stuff - that's all great. It really is. There's definitely a place for that in everyone's life.
But that's not what this poem is about. You're projecting what you want to see onto the poem, instead of taking it in as a blank slate and seeing what the author wrote.
I mean, I know what that's like. I was disappointed the first time I read the poem. I'd heard people - people like you, in fact - talk about how it's all about taking the road less traveled and being your own person and taking chances, so when I realized I could just read it on my own I was kinda excited, I thought it was gonna be awesome with him thinking about it and then striking out on his own.
But no, he doesn't! I was prepared for the "road less traveled" to be some third option, not going through either of the paths but striking out on his own. Instead, the narrator sits and dithers and thinks about it and just picks one basically at random. I mean, what bullshit is this? If you're going to take the road less traveled, then it damn well better be less traveled! If you're picking from two clearly laid out choices that other people have walked through, that's not the road less traveled - there's no chances, there's no being your own person, none of that stuff. You're just picking which footsteps to follow in, and then rationalizing it afterwards as having been "the road less traveled".
The last lines are ironic, and Robert Frost is spinning in his grave singing the trolololo song.
(funnily enough, the poem also predicts hipsters before they were popular)
You said "focus on his criteria for choosing; by doing that we can see this that and the other".
My response was:
1. His criteria for choosing is that he "took the road less traveled by" 2. But he also said that "the passing there/Had worn them really about the same" 3. Therefore, his criteria for choosing was meaningless; both roads were equally traveled by. 4. Furthermore, from my original reply: he doesn't actually know that taking this particular path will make much of a difference; he talks about how in the future he imagines he'll tell people that, but it hasn't actually happened yet.
How is that "lalalaing" past your point? You said "if A then B C D"; I said "well, A isn't true and here's why". I think that meets your point head on, honestly.
And yes, there is something in this poem that disturbs me deeply: it's the fact that people take it as a shallow, affirming soundbite just because they like the couplet at the end, and completely skip over the rest of it. There's some interesting observations in there, about the way indecision can make unimportant things loom in the imagination and the way everyone is a hero in his own story, but nobody ever sees them because they're too busy sitting around feeling self-satisfied that they take the road less traveled by - when the point of the poem is that in the end, it doesn't matter!
I think the poem makes more sense if you focus on his criteria for choosing rather than this specific choice.
No, it doesn't. What was his criteria for choosing one path over the other? That it was "less traveled by".
Which path was less traveled by? Neither.
Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same
The poem is simpler and "nicer" if you reduce everything down to a single life affirming sound bite, but then what's the point of having an entire poem?
If it still doesn't make sense to you, pretend he's talking about socks. There's the black socks, and the navy socks. He picks the ones he uses less, and says that "ages and ages hence, I shall be telling this with a sigh; two socks diverged in a drawer, and I - I took the ones less traveled by. And that has made all the difference."
You'd laugh at how pretentious and shallow he was being!
The halting problem is more a question of being able to tell if a program given an input ever reaches its end without actually running it
Nope, that is incorrect. The Halting Problem is being able to tell if an arbitrary program will ever halt on a given input, even if you are allowed to run it. That's what makes it tricky, because even if you run a program for X time and it doesn't terminate, maybe you just didn't run it long enough - maybe if you run it for 2X time, it will terminate.
The thing is, the thing a lot of CS people don't know or forget, is that a lot of the time when we say something is hard or impossible, what we're really saying is "there exists at least one case for which this is hard or impossible".
So, you know, Travelling Salesman? Not that hard, if there's only a hundred nodes or so. Especially if it's the subset of the TSP we see in reality; in real life, moving a little bit east will put you a little bit closer to everything in the east, which is not true at all in the general TSP.
Halting Problem? Totally doable, on a lot of the programs you're likely to see out in the real world; after all, they're all supposed to terminate. It's not like people write programs that loop trickily on purpose specifically to confuse halting problem solving programs. A well written halting problem program could probably catch like 80-90% of unintentional infinite loops.
Robert Frost had a fairly depressing outlook on life, and the point of the poem is that it doesn't matter what road you take.
I mean, just pay attention to the narrative tense in the last stanza, the one people take to be so life-affirming and "do something different!". The narrator isn't saying "I did this, and I know it was important"; he's saying "I did this, and I think that in the future I'm going to tell people it was important".
The narrator is a vain, shallow individual who frets about insignificant decisions like this, thinking that they will have some gigantic impact on his life, and then later on blows those choices up to be of earthshattering proportions. This is all despite the fact that half the poem is about how the roads are effectively identical; and in the end, he doesn't even tell us what was important about the path he took, just that it was the "one less traveled by" (which makes no sense! They were "just as fair", they had been "worn... really about the same", they "both that morning equally lay".)
Basically, if we apply this poem to the current situation, what it's saying is that in alternate 2011 we'd have an article about how null-terminated strings would have been better than Pascal strings. It doesn't matter what path you take, if you're the right kind of person you'll always blow up the significance of it in your mind later.
There are lots of devices that do the same thing going for significantly less than a hundred.
Hell, I'm not even convinced that the thing does more than a Wii, and those things are $250 as well - nowadays they even support Youtube, Netflix and Hulu, which I'm sure covers like 90% of the uses you'd put this box to.
It worries me how many legitimate articles on climate change may be hiding because they are against current predictions and models, and researchers are fearing public lynching . It's truly worrying.
Seriously? A shitty paper using bad models written by a creationist was picked up by Forbes, and you're wondering how many legitimate articles are in hiding because they're against the consensus?
Look, if Roy Spencer's paper got published and was picked up by a major magazine, you can be damn sure that a better paper arguing the same thing would have also been published, and would have been picked up by Forbes or Fox News or pretty much any media outlet.
The fact that no such papers are in evidence makes it pretty convincing that no such papers exist. After all, there is a shitload of money to be made writing and publicizing such a paper; it's not like there's any incentive at all to keep something like that under wraps.
Oh good grief, did you read the references on the site you linked to? You're still talking about "Mike's Nature trick" as if it meant something. Here's a hint: "Nature" is a respected scientific journal. If "Mike's Nature Trick" was any sort of foul play, the journal would have retracted his paper. It didn't. I wonder why?
Here's what "Mike's Nature Trick" really is: since the 1960s, some tree ring data does not match instrumental temperature records. For reasons we don't understand, the tree ring data shows a significant decline in surface temperatures. This does not mean that there was a real decline in surface temperatures, because we have actual instrumental measurements for those years.
What you are saying is, literally, "Throw out the actual measurements of temperature and replace them with a known-to-be incorrect proxy for measurements of temperature". You're saying "throw out all that data gathered by people with actual thermometers, and instead use data based on the width of tree rings. The only criteria for this is because I like the trees better, even though they currently disagree with almost every other direct measurement or proxy measurement."
Well actually no, you're not saying that - you're just endorsing a website that says that. I can only hope that you, yourself, would not say something so stupid.
If you look critically, you'll find that CO2 increases trail temperature increases.
Uhm... you realize that this doesn't help your case at all, right? If CO2 increases trail temperature increases, that means a higher mean surface temperature leads to more CO2 in the atmosphere, or there is some hidden variable that increases CO2 first and then temperature. Occam's razor would indicate that we should not impute hidden variables where unnecessary, and in fact there are several plausible mechanisms by which increased temperatures could increase the CO2 in the atmosphere; so we're left with the conclusion that higher mean surface temperatures => more CO2.
Back in the late 19th century, Svante Arrhenius proved that more CO2 in the atmosphere means a higher mean surface temperature. The physics behind this is pretty much rock solid.
So what you're saying is "hey, CO2 trails global warming! Therefore, more CO2 => higher temperatures!"
And then basic, well-established physics says "Hey, as we increase the CO2 in the atmosphere, the surface temperature increases! Therefore, higher temperatures => more CO2!"
Do you see why this is kinda scary? If you're right, and CO2 increases trail temperature increases, then we've just kicked off a vicious cycle that will eventually leave the Earth a much warmer place than it is now.
His argument was laughably bogus, even to me with my very thin background. Can't remember the guy's name, but he had won a Nobel prize for his work in chemistry...
Yeah, that's called the Nobel disease. It seems to come from thinking, essentially, "Well, I have a Nobel Prize, so clearly I'm always right - no matter what the facts say".
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, having real performance metrics and achievable goals requires that management get their heads out of their asses, which is frequently a non-starter. It's far easier to just measure "time spent at desk" and call it a day.
It costs $2700 because these are basically prototypes; from the article, the guy talks about how sales have been growing in "double digit numbers" - they probably make less than a thousand of these per year. If they increase production, the price will probably come down.
Only if you play tricky games with labels.
Let's do some substitution, shall we? I'll replace the words "god" and "science" with the definitions used by most people in the USA:
Is the existence of a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe itself evidence of "the God of Abraham, who came to Earth as Jesus Christ, who died for our sins and who came back to life and who will grant his followers life everlasting's" existence?
Well, no. It trivially isn't. There's no real need to test it, because it's like asking if the existence of daffodils are evidence of the existence of fairies. They're orthogonal concepts.
How can you possibly not know about the Bullet Cluster? That is pretty much blatant evidence that there appears to be something there which is both dark and massive. Wouldn't a theory of dark matter be appropriate when presented with such evidence? (and, by the way, structures like the Bullet Cluster were predicted by the theory of dark matter - people said "well if it doesn't interact electromagnetically, we should be able to see places where normal matter got pushed but dark matter didn't, like when two clusters collide" - so they set out to look for something like that, and lo and behold they found it!)
And that's not even going in to the other things that dark matter predicts and nothing else does, like the Cosmic Microwave Background.
Or you could just read Starts with a Bang, Ethan Siegel is a lot better at explaining this stuff than Slashdot is.
You're free to do that if you want, we really can't stop you.
However, after that point, when you tell someone "I believe God exists", they will not have the faintest clue what you're talking about - they'll think you're talking about the usual definition of God, which in the USA means something at least vaguely like the God of the Christian Bible. At the most general level, that usually implies that this is a God who came to earth, sacrificed himself (to himself but that's another story), and then rose from the dead. What you're saying is that the Universe came to earth, sacrificed itself, and then rose from the dead.
Honestly, that makes even less sense than religions generally do.
What you're talking about might carry the label "God" in your mind, but pretty much everyone else you talk to will have an entirely different concept of what that word means.
That's because you're essentially saying "If we redefine God to be a deepity, wouldn't it exist?" - well, yes, that's true (trivially, the universe itself does exist), but you can't really have a conversation when you use your own, unique definitions of words.
See the blue part of this image? That's dark matter right there.
Just because it doesn't interact electromagnetically (that is, we can't "see" it) doesn't mean it doesn't exist, and it doesn't mean we can't tell it's there.
I mean, why do you think we call it "dark matter"? That is literally all we know about it - we know it has weak electromagnetic interactions (i.e, it's dark), but strong gravitational interactions (i.e, it's matter).
The thing you really seem to object to is that scientists will say "Hell, I don't know - but I'll put a name on it, and start narrowing down what it can and cannot be".
I mean, what do you expect? That we'll admit "hell, I don't know" and just stop? And just give up right there? Hell no - saying "I don't know" is the first step of doing science, not the last step!
I'd love to see how his model explains something like (e.g) the Bullet Cluster, because quite frankly I don't think it does - the article states that his theory explains the speeding up of galactic rotation (the reason why we first hypothesized dark matter), but the article goes on to state that his hypothesis doesn't actually cover a ton of other stuff like the CMB.
Furthermore, this theory is based on the hypothesis that matter and antimatter are gravitationally repulsive, which (imo) is absolute BS. It's true, we haven't generated enough antimatter yet to know for a fact that it acts the same way as regular matter in a gravitational field generated by regular matter, but we have absolutely no reason to think that it would be gravitationally repulsive. If that turns out to be true, there will need to be a shit-ton of rejiggering of models and basically everything we think we know about physics will have to be moved around.
Basically, he's said "If pigs can levitate, then I can account for the discrepancy in galactic rotation curves without dark matter" - except if pigs can levitate, we'll need to rethink everything anyway.
Cheat-free economy? I think you mean "cheat-legalized" economy.
Paying cash for items is not allowed in Diablo 2. Diablo 3 is going to have a real cash auction house, where you can essentially buy power (with Blizzard taking a cut at every step of the process).
So what model laptop is it? It's kinda funny you spent the whole post raving about the thing, without ever mentioning anything more than the make.
I know, I wouldn't trust a robotic car that had never crashed - after all, if it's never crashed, then the engineers making it have no idea what real-world failure modes it has.
Unfortunately that's not how the public works, one failure of an incomprehensible technology means you're out, while one failure of an understandable technology means nothing.
You know, alternatives do exist. They're called "minivans". They'll carry just as many people, they'll haul as much stuff from the Home Depot as you're willing to carry, and they're more fuel efficient and safer overall because they're not perched up on top of a ridiculously heavy and tall offroad truck chassis.
If you're not going offroad (no matter what you think, you're not) but you have a lot of people to move around, you're way better off getting a minivan than you are getting an SUV. Those grotesqueries were only made to exploit a loophole in the tax laws that (IIRC) has since been closed, anyway.
You know, just because you have a positive interpretation of the poem doesn't mean that it's more supported by the text than a negative one.
Basically, Robert Frost was trolling, and you got bit by it. Why do you think he ended the poem with such a great couplet? Even though it makes such little sense in the context of the rest of the poem? (the dude's thinking about how he's going to talk about it in the future, the rest of the poem is about how the paths are equal) Because he knew it would catch people's attention, and that then they'd look in to the poem some more and see the dissonance. We've just gotten to the point where the popular interpretation is so positive people just ignore the incongruities.
Look: the narrator is vain and shallow because he's dithering about a minor choice in his life, and in his head it's this giant, life-altering moment.
Imagine if someone said to you "It took me a long time to decide if I should wear navy socks or black socks this morning" - you'd think they were kinda silly for even thinking about it.
If they said "I'll tell people about this day - the day I wore black socks, and not navy socks - I'll tell them with a sigh, that I took the pair less traveled by, and that has made all the difference", you'd think they were, well, vain and shallow. Their choice in socks is the most important thing ever! Oh em gee!
Look, all those things you got out of the poem, those positive life-affirming things about making choices and stuff - that's all great. It really is. There's definitely a place for that in everyone's life.
But that's not what this poem is about. You're projecting what you want to see onto the poem, instead of taking it in as a blank slate and seeing what the author wrote.
I mean, I know what that's like. I was disappointed the first time I read the poem. I'd heard people - people like you, in fact - talk about how it's all about taking the road less traveled and being your own person and taking chances, so when I realized I could just read it on my own I was kinda excited, I thought it was gonna be awesome with him thinking about it and then striking out on his own.
But no, he doesn't! I was prepared for the "road less traveled" to be some third option, not going through either of the paths but striking out on his own. Instead, the narrator sits and dithers and thinks about it and just picks one basically at random. I mean, what bullshit is this? If you're going to take the road less traveled, then it damn well better be less traveled! If you're picking from two clearly laid out choices that other people have walked through, that's not the road less traveled - there's no chances, there's no being your own person, none of that stuff. You're just picking which footsteps to follow in, and then rationalizing it afterwards as having been "the road less traveled".
The last lines are ironic, and Robert Frost is spinning in his grave singing the trolololo song.
(funnily enough, the poem also predicts hipsters before they were popular)
You said "focus on his criteria for choosing; by doing that we can see this that and the other".
My response was:
1. His criteria for choosing is that he "took the road less traveled by"
2. But he also said that "the passing there/Had worn them really about the same"
3. Therefore, his criteria for choosing was meaningless; both roads were equally traveled by.
4. Furthermore, from my original reply: he doesn't actually know that taking this particular path will make much of a difference; he talks about how in the future he imagines he'll tell people that, but it hasn't actually happened yet.
How is that "lalalaing" past your point? You said "if A then B C D"; I said "well, A isn't true and here's why". I think that meets your point head on, honestly.
And yes, there is something in this poem that disturbs me deeply: it's the fact that people take it as a shallow, affirming soundbite just because they like the couplet at the end, and completely skip over the rest of it. There's some interesting observations in there, about the way indecision can make unimportant things loom in the imagination and the way everyone is a hero in his own story, but nobody ever sees them because they're too busy sitting around feeling self-satisfied that they take the road less traveled by - when the point of the poem is that in the end, it doesn't matter!
No, it doesn't. What was his criteria for choosing one path over the other? That it was "less traveled by".
Which path was less traveled by? Neither.
The poem is simpler and "nicer" if you reduce everything down to a single life affirming sound bite, but then what's the point of having an entire poem?
If it still doesn't make sense to you, pretend he's talking about socks. There's the black socks, and the navy socks. He picks the ones he uses less, and says that "ages and ages hence, I shall be telling this with a sigh; two socks diverged in a drawer, and I - I took the ones less traveled by. And that has made all the difference."
You'd laugh at how pretentious and shallow he was being!
And that's the point of this poem.
Nope, that is incorrect. The Halting Problem is being able to tell if an arbitrary program will ever halt on a given input, even if you are allowed to run it. That's what makes it tricky, because even if you run a program for X time and it doesn't terminate, maybe you just didn't run it long enough - maybe if you run it for 2X time, it will terminate.
The thing is, the thing a lot of CS people don't know or forget, is that a lot of the time when we say something is hard or impossible, what we're really saying is "there exists at least one case for which this is hard or impossible".
So, you know, Travelling Salesman? Not that hard, if there's only a hundred nodes or so. Especially if it's the subset of the TSP we see in reality; in real life, moving a little bit east will put you a little bit closer to everything in the east, which is not true at all in the general TSP.
Halting Problem? Totally doable, on a lot of the programs you're likely to see out in the real world; after all, they're all supposed to terminate. It's not like people write programs that loop trickily on purpose specifically to confuse halting problem solving programs. A well written halting problem program could probably catch like 80-90% of unintentional infinite loops.
Everyone misunderstands that poem.
Robert Frost had a fairly depressing outlook on life, and the point of the poem is that it doesn't matter what road you take.
I mean, just pay attention to the narrative tense in the last stanza, the one people take to be so life-affirming and "do something different!". The narrator isn't saying "I did this, and I know it was important"; he's saying "I did this, and I think that in the future I'm going to tell people it was important".
The narrator is a vain, shallow individual who frets about insignificant decisions like this, thinking that they will have some gigantic impact on his life, and then later on blows those choices up to be of earthshattering proportions. This is all despite the fact that half the poem is about how the roads are effectively identical; and in the end, he doesn't even tell us what was important about the path he took, just that it was the "one less traveled by" (which makes no sense! They were "just as fair", they had been "worn ... really about the same", they "both that morning equally lay".)
Basically, if we apply this poem to the current situation, what it's saying is that in alternate 2011 we'd have an article about how null-terminated strings would have been better than Pascal strings. It doesn't matter what path you take, if you're the right kind of person you'll always blow up the significance of it in your mind later.
Nobody would ever find you, they'd all be looking under the sea.
You realize that, by your own numbers, you're making something like $96/hr? ($500k / (100 hour work weeks * 52 weeks in a year))
That's the equivalent of making $200k per year, and working 40 hours per week - which won't burn you out in a year.
Hell, I'm not even convinced that the thing does more than a Wii, and those things are $250 as well - nowadays they even support Youtube, Netflix and Hulu, which I'm sure covers like 90% of the uses you'd put this box to.
Seriously? A shitty paper using bad models written by a creationist was picked up by Forbes, and you're wondering how many legitimate articles are in hiding because they're against the consensus?
Look, if Roy Spencer's paper got published and was picked up by a major magazine, you can be damn sure that a better paper arguing the same thing would have also been published, and would have been picked up by Forbes or Fox News or pretty much any media outlet.
The fact that no such papers are in evidence makes it pretty convincing that no such papers exist. After all, there is a shitload of money to be made writing and publicizing such a paper; it's not like there's any incentive at all to keep something like that under wraps.
Oh good grief, did you read the references on the site you linked to? You're still talking about "Mike's Nature trick" as if it meant something. Here's a hint: "Nature" is a respected scientific journal. If "Mike's Nature Trick" was any sort of foul play, the journal would have retracted his paper. It didn't. I wonder why?
Here's what "Mike's Nature Trick" really is: since the 1960s, some tree ring data does not match instrumental temperature records. For reasons we don't understand, the tree ring data shows a significant decline in surface temperatures. This does not mean that there was a real decline in surface temperatures, because we have actual instrumental measurements for those years.
What you are saying is, literally, "Throw out the actual measurements of temperature and replace them with a known-to-be incorrect proxy for measurements of temperature". You're saying "throw out all that data gathered by people with actual thermometers, and instead use data based on the width of tree rings. The only criteria for this is because I like the trees better, even though they currently disagree with almost every other direct measurement or proxy measurement."
Well actually no, you're not saying that - you're just endorsing a website that says that. I can only hope that you, yourself, would not say something so stupid.
Uhm... you realize that this doesn't help your case at all, right? If CO2 increases trail temperature increases, that means a higher mean surface temperature leads to more CO2 in the atmosphere, or there is some hidden variable that increases CO2 first and then temperature. Occam's razor would indicate that we should not impute hidden variables where unnecessary, and in fact there are several plausible mechanisms by which increased temperatures could increase the CO2 in the atmosphere; so we're left with the conclusion that higher mean surface temperatures => more CO2.
Back in the late 19th century, Svante Arrhenius proved that more CO2 in the atmosphere means a higher mean surface temperature. The physics behind this is pretty much rock solid.
So what you're saying is "hey, CO2 trails global warming! Therefore, more CO2 => higher temperatures!"
And then basic, well-established physics says "Hey, as we increase the CO2 in the atmosphere, the surface temperature increases! Therefore, higher temperatures => more CO2!"
Do you see why this is kinda scary? If you're right, and CO2 increases trail temperature increases, then we've just kicked off a vicious cycle that will eventually leave the Earth a much warmer place than it is now.
Yeah, that's called the Nobel disease. It seems to come from thinking, essentially, "Well, I have a Nobel Prize, so clearly I'm always right - no matter what the facts say".
Where did this dude use a rule-of-thumb modifier?