Re:silly rumors...
on
Pixar For Sale?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
"Last time I checked, Steve Jobs was not one of the bigger shareholders..."
From the first sentence of TFA:
"The New York Times reports Jobs, who owns about 50 percent of Pixar (Research), would want a strong premium to its current $5.9 billion market capitalization to consider a sale..."
Even if you can't win a case directly regarding the rootkit, I would sure hope [IANAL] you'd have a good case if exploits come out and damage occurs. If you try to play an ordinary disc in your computer and end up with a sneaky backdoor for hackers that was covertly and intentionally installed by Sony, then, say, lose thousands of dollars worth of software and information, I'd sure hope Sony would be found at least partially liable for that. If it's a widespread exploit, then perhaps a class-action lawsuit?
Yes, I should have clarified. Since it's the startup state, there are no applications open, it's just the operating system and related startup items. On most computers, this sure shouldn't be anything approaching 1 GB of data. I'd hope it would be well under 256MB, since most computers run with that little memory or less. And I wasn't specifying laptops, I didn't know about "hibernation," and wasn't specifically referring to a Laptop. I bet most desktops can read, say, 100 MB from disk faster than they can start up. OK, so it's still not instantaneous, but potentially fast.
Of course, when I was saying that fast startups are nothing new, I missed the obvious example of one of the best-selling computers of all time. My Commodore 64 was done starting up by about the time I'd finished flipping the switch and moved my eyes to the screen.
Not that I'd recommend a programming-language cum OS stored in ROM for a modern computer, but it sure loaded fast.
I read that instant startup was supposed to be a feature of the Apple Lisa, and I thought I'd heard before that this had been implemented, but I couldn't quickly Google up any references to it.
At any rate, the theory behind instant startup isn't too hard, it's just an engineering implementation.
All you do is make it so that, following shutdown procedures, the computer immediately switches to startup, except keeping track of the fact it was "shut down," not "restarted." When it finishes restarting, it writes the startup RAM state to disk, then turns itself off.
Upon being turned on, the computer just writes the stored RAM state back from the disk to RAM, and presto! It's just like starting up the computer, except really fast. At least, that was the theory. I've been sort of surprised not to see this implemented, it seems like everyone would like to see fast startups, but hardly anyone cares how long it takes to shut down (especially with soft power)- you're done with he computer anyway. I've heard that a lot of work goes into decreasing boot times for Windows and OSX. It seems like a lot less work to implement an "instant startup" plan, and then not have to care much if startup takes forever, than to carefully track, fiddle with, and optimize everything that happens during startup.
Of course, with this system, restarting after a crash would not be instant, it would take just as long as ever. So it might work to greater advantage on some operating systems than others, depending on why you usually restart.
That's exactly what I was thinking when I read that bit about books correcting themselves.
Gee, I could swear this chapter used to be critical of GW Bush and loaded with lots of facts critical of him, but now it's just glowing. It must have been found to be "pro-rerror" and "corrected."
Or someone will hack the system, and every book you buy will turn into The Unabomber's Manifesto on your way home from the store.
Or do more subtle hacks. I could have sworn this encyclopedia said that the Holocaust really did happen. Guess I was mistaken.
The Apple Store is already down for updates. When I go there now, it says "We'll be back soon. We are busy updating the store for you, and will be back within the hour."
Doesn't look there will be much of a wait to see these things, unless they're just updating the minis or some other product now and the iPods are coming later.
Did anyone else find it ironic that, by having their PR professionals handle the questions instead of the engineers, the interview resulted in terrible PR for Blizzard?
Well, kudos for responding, and being slightly more reasonable. At least you spent a lower percentage of that post insulting me. I usually try to refrain from insults, but as I found it hard to resist following some of your arguments, I decided to let you set the tone of the discussion.
For someone who "abhors such trickery" as "using emotionally laden words to convince people," I'm fascinated by your writing style.
"Wow. Touched a nerve there didn' I? Emotional tirade aside..."
That's a good, logical way to argue with me, sticking to your "actual facts or objective science," not in any way resembling "using emotionally laden words to convince people." The first personal attacks were due to being sleepy, but now further personal attacks are just good science?
Which makes me interested in what the emotional tirade was- I take it that's my first paragraph, in which I argue against slander and in favor of logical discourse? I guess that by saying I should not accuse you of "a faulty grasp of the english language, logic, and science," I'm having an emotional tirade, where your "You have a faulty grasp of how science works" is just plain good sense, not a personal attack, or god forbid, some of those abhorred "emotionally laden words to convince people.
Your whole "evidence" vs. "coherence" thing misses the point (Or intentionally evades it? No, I'm sure you'd "abhor such trickery.") I was pointing out a fallacy in your post: that semantic arguments regarding incorrect or loaded connotations to my word choice are useful in discrediting the points of my arguments. Now, I find this amusing. In your first post, you bypass my actual arguments to illogically claim that I'm wrong because I used the common definition for a word rather than a specialized one that you prefer. When I pointed out this error of reasoning, you argue against it by saying that the example I choose has an error in it, rather than arguing against the point of the example! It doesn't matter what example I pick, my point is that finding a single flaw in a paper, such as a punctuation mistake, is no argument against the content of the paper. I bow down to your art of circumlocution, of carefully avoiding the topic at hand, and instead pulling the neat trick of shifting the argument to an irrelevant topic, proving the irrelevant point, then declaring victory.
Even then, I'm amazed at the gall of your argument for your irrelevant point. Of course "evidence" and "coherence" are not the same, and have distinct and meaningful definitions. But you really think that a theory's "coherence with the rest of the accepted body of science" is not part of the "weight of evidence supporting a theory?" You're ignoring the meaning of the phrases, pulling one word from each, and saying those words have different meanings, therefore the meaning of one phrase cannot be a subset of the meaning of the other phrase. The argument within the trick was itself another trick.
But if I found all the neat trickery, loaded words, and distracting but illogical arguments in the first part amusing, your references really take the cake. Your link to "the original article from Science" doesn't go to an article, but to a large set of articles regarding climate change, but looking through all of them (I admit briefly, I did not have time to read hundreds of pages of papers), I could only find two that provided evidence regarding the frequency or severity of hurricanes.
In "Changes in Tropical Cyclone Number, Duration, and Intensity in a Warming Environment," by P. J. Webster,1 G. J. Holland,2 J. A. Curry,1 H.-R. Chang1, they only looked at data for, and claimed an increase for hurricanes in, the past 35 years; which everyone agrees with. This has no effect on the facts that longer-term data sets show greater previous activity when temperatures were lower.
The only other article on global warming's effects on hurricanes listed at the link you provided con
It's interesting that from my comment you can tell so much about my scientific underpinnings. I'd have hoped someone might be more scientific about verifying their understanding before attacking someone else's credibility. For example, from only reading your post, I would suspect that you have a faulty grasp of the english language, logic, and science. But with so little information to go on, I'd hesitate to accuse you of this. Perhaps you were just sleepy, or in hurry when you composed your post, or trying to support a political agenda, rather than incompetent.
I wasn't publishing a peer-reviewed scientific paper, I was posting a comment on Slashdot. I wasn't trying to use the scientific definition of "proof," the mathematical definiton of "proof," or the legal definition of "proof," I was just speaking plainly. I'm sure to your reasoning, the theory of gravity, the theory of evolution, the germ theory of disease, and the heliocentric theory of the solar system are only conjectures, which are not, and can never be, proven. But to all of us who are having a friendly discussion about what all this stuff means, these things have been "proven" by a commonly accepted colloquial use of the word "prove." Any conjecture that passes peer review, stands the test of time, makes it into the textbooks, and becomes a scientific theorem might be considered to have been "shown to be correct," or "generally accepted," or "undoubtedly accurate," or any other synonym or euphemism you might choose for the word "proven." I'm sure, from your message, that if I'd said "Andrew Wiles proved Fermat's Last Theorem" or "Louis de Branges proved the Bieberbach Conjecture," you'd attack me for "having a faulty grasp of mathematics," because they "only provided a logical proof within an assumed framework."
I'm fascinated by the way you twist your semantic quibbling into a "disproof," if you will, of every actual point I made in my post. It is as if I were to point out that your statement "their coherence with the rest of the accepted body of science" is redundant, because that's part of what constitutes "the weight of evidence supporting them", and then concluded that everything you'd written were false because I caught something that could be improved upon in the way you state your case.
In this case, there would be no reason to fall back on illogical, unscientific arguments for why you're wrong in saying "Currently the theory that nastier hurricanes are caused by global warming has more evidenciary support and is more coherent than competing theories, thus it is the currently accepted explanation," since I can rely on reason and scientific literature to back me up. With your keen grasp of science, I'm interested that you didn't feel the need to, for example, offer any sort of references, arguments, or data supporting any assertion you made in your post. So here's some. First, start with every argument I made in my post, and see if you can actually offer any counter argument to any of them. Then try to actually RTFA linked to the Slashdot story, and notice that this "trend" only exists for the narrow subset of data the researchers choose, and as soon as you throw in the data from 1925, the trend is reversed.
Unfortunately it isn't available online, (well, you can see some of it at Amazon.), but chapter 5 of Bjorn Lomburg's The Skeptical Environmentalist provides an overwhelming accumulation of peer-reviewed data culled from Science, Scientific American, and the UN Meteorological Organization showing that there is no positive correlation between global temperature and hurricane frequency or severity. In fact, the best available data shows a week negative correlation, although any long-term trend is nearly lost in
Yes, I was wondering if this is "10 times safer" according to the engineers, or the administrators? Because if it's according to the engineers, it might actually be as safe, but it it's the administrators, we can expect the figure to be exaggerated by 1,000 times.
If NASA's administrators say this is 10 times safer, and they haven't changed their criteria since Feynman's days, it's probably about 1/100 as safe. Count me out.
They certainly aren't going to be proving a connection anytime soon. There's no way they're going to set up a double-blind experiment where they vary the temperature of the ocean for long periods of time while holding all other factors constant, then carefully measure hurricane activity.
They like to set up models, but their climate models can't prove a connection either, because they're all based on a lot of assumptions, abstractions, and potentially erroneous inputs. We're a long way off from weather models with any level of certainty. When they can give spot-on weather reports for a month out, then it'll be time to start paying attention to the models.
All they have now are measurements, where they hope to see a correlation. But no matter what correlation they saw, even if it was the most beautiful curve you've ever seen, with a curve fit with an R value of 1.0, correlation does not imply cause and effect. But at least it wouldn't contradict their theory.
What they actually have is a tiny sample, where nearly any conceivable data set would mean nothing. The problem is that there are so many factors. While their actual data set is really jumpy and shows no really strong trend, suppose it were different- suppose they got their "ideal" data set over the past 30 years. Suppose it showed that the number of hurricanes is trending up sharply and steadily. If they had seen this trend, which would most strongly support the hypothesis of global warming, it would equally strongly support all of the following hypothesis:
1. We're in a natural cycle of hurricanes increasing, which global warming is making worse.
2. We're in a natural cycle of hurricanes increasing, which global warming is having no effect on.
3. We're in a natural cycle of hurricanes increasing, which global warming is partially alleviating.
4. There is no natural trend, and global warming is causing a rise in hurricane activity.
5. We are in a natural cycle of reduced hurricanes, and global warming is counteracting that entirely and actually increasing the number of hurricanes.
6. There is no actual trend at all. The number of hurricanes every year is entirely random, with no natural tendency or influence from global warming, and our 30-year sample happens to look like it has some trends, because any series of random numbers will appear to have some trends over certain samples.
Furthermore, with so many factors that affect weather, less than two dozen hurricanes per year, an apparently large natural variability, the probability there are many natural trends that could be working in conflict or in concert, using a mere 30-year sample is like trying to estimate global warming with a 30-day temperature sample. It would make all the difference in the world if you take your sample during spring or fall, and time you take it at all, it's extremely unlikely it would give you an accurate picture of what's going on at all. If they had 1,000 years of data, I might expect them to find something more convincing there.
In other news, an analyst has determined that Adobe's cost per copy to manufacture Adobe Photoshop is about $0.35. This leaves out all research and development costs, such as writing code.
What are they including in this $40 cost, the price for 1/10 of an oz of silicon? If you don't want to include developing x-ray laser lithography or designing the circuit layout for 55 million transistors, I'm sure they are cheap to pump out.
There are lots of companies for whom the marginal cost to them of providing an additional unit is often near 0 - software companies, airlines, informational databases, etc. For such companies, knowing their actual marginal cost of production doesn't give you much useful information.
It should be a dead giveaway that the marginal cost of production on a processor is very low, because the same processor always costs a fortune when it's introduced, and then is sold new for a small fraction if its original price a few years later, just before they pull it from the market. Clearly, they wouldn't lower the prices that much if they were losing money on each one.
Merely building a new chip fab represents a significant amount of money compared to the aggregate marginal manufacturing costs of every chip to come out of the entire plant for it's whole life. The semiconductor industry runs on huge R&D costs and small individual unit manufacturing costs. Pointing that out isn't really news.
That's interesting. It's interesting that it works that way for you, since it's not the way any of my Macintoshes running OSX work.
The first time every application is launched, I get the dialog. When I install a new application, the first time I run it, I always get the dialog. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with opening a document vs. the application itself.
Whenever I do a fresh clone of my hard drive, and boot off of it to check it, every application gives me the dialog upon attempted launch. Apparently, the file that keeps track of what's been run before is clone-proof.
Do you have any sources for OSX exhibiting this behavior? Aside from my own experience, Wired talks about this update and says "The alert is invoked whenever a disk image is mounted or an application is launched for the first time."
Also, this is unrelated, but I thought I'd mention that Safari now notifies the user for every download that contains an executable, in case you weren't expecting one. I don't use Mail; I'm interested to know if it also warns users about executables in attachments?
"On my computer here I run about 15 different applications on a regular basis. There are probably another 20 or 30 installed that I use every couple of months or so. I still don't understand why operating systems are so dumb that they let any old virus or piece of spyware execute without even asking me."
Try OSX. As of some update about a year ago, OSX stopped having "default permit" for launching applications by double-clicking. If you double-click and that leads to launching an executable that hasn't been run before, it pops up a dialog to ask you about it.
Thus, no more executables bearing viruses disguised as documents.
Note that in my original post, I didn't claim this would cause greater intelligence on the part of men- just that, given the same mean, evolution would favor a higher standard deviation on the intelligence (and other) curve(s) for men than for women.
A higher overall mean on a curve tends to signify an evolutionary change that increases the design efficiency or makes beneficial tradeoffs. In the case of increases in design efficiency, unless such a beneficial mutation happens to occur on the "y" chromosome, it should end up distributed throughout the population in both males and females. That's why I'd be surprised to find that men are (on average) much smarter than women; unless, possibly, it's a tradeoff caused by the x chromosome, rather than a more efficient brain design.
In other words: one would not expect evolution to lead to a more efficient muscle design in men than in women, because once a gene for more efficient muscle design has been selected, (unless it happens to be on the y chromosome), it should permeate across the population for both males and females. On the other hand, a tradeoff- say, more muscle mass in exchange for greater caloric requirements, is likely to be the sort of permutation that can only survive if it's sex-linked, because it can remain in one sex or the other if it's favored. The X and Y chromosomes seem to be involved most often with the extent to which other genes are expressed (greater muscle mass), rather than the actual design of things, ie, muscle tissue. So if men are smarter on average, I suspect it's a tradeoff for some other shortcoming we've inherited along the way, not an overall superior brain design, which would almost surely have been passed on to women too.
On the other hand, I do agree with your assertion that in the US, and undoubtedly lots of other places, IQ is strongly inversely correlated with reproduction. This isn't the case everywhere, though. I'm not up on their current policies, but for a long time, a family could only have one child unless they were well off and could buy the right to have more. Income it positively correlated with intelligence, so this would raise the IQ of the population.
If these policies continue for a few thousand years, once would expect to see a significantly higher average IQ in the countries where the smarter people are favored in reproduction. I suspect there may be some differences in average IQ between different populations already, but researching such a thing is probably so politically incorrect that we'll have to just keep wondering.
This is an interesting bit I've heard before. I don't know which curve has a higher mean, but the standard deviation for IQ among men is much higher than it is among women- there is a higher percentage of both idiots and geniuses among men than among women. It also happens that men's distribution curves have a higher standard deviation when measuring a whole lot of things- height, weight, metabolism, visual acuity, and many other things. It seems most likely that having the XY chromosome set results in a wider variance of expression than the XX chromosome set even for traits whose expression is primarily controlled by other genes.
It's easy to see why evolution would favor this outcome. Evolution favors any benefit that increases the probability of gene survival, which correlates with amount of reproduction. A woman who survives has a probability of attempting to reproduce (obtaining intercourse) of approximately 1. That is, nearly every woman who's capable of surviving is capable of getting a guy to have sex with her. Men, on the other hand, face a much more precarious situation. One highly successful male might copulate with many different women, while an unsuccessful male may never get the chance to reproduce at all.
Game theory tells us that, (ceteris paribus) lower chances of obtaining a goal, as well as exponential gains in the case of success, are both formulas that favor using a higher risk strategy. Thus, a higher standard deviation. Evolution is set up to favor greater genetic risk taking in males than in females.
"The linux community at large seems to have a strong sentiment in favor of using ogg over mp3"
I can give you one reason it's not as big on the Mac as it is on Linux- support. The Macintosh OS-plugin for Ogg never made it out of Beta, hasn't been updated in 15 months, and doesn't work with Quicktime 7- which includes pretty much everyone who's updated to Tiger or run software update under Panther. I mean no offense, I'm glad that people volunteer their time to make things like Ogg for free, but to be practical- I don't pay anything to rip to MP3, AAC, or Apple Lossless, and right now all my Ogg files won't play for who knows how long. It makes the format a pretty risky choice for Mac users.
Yes, I know that there are other applications that play Ogg files on the Mac, but they're not competitive with iTunes, and I'm not going to change players depending on what music file I want to listen to.
Slashdot Mirror
From the first sentence of TFA:
"The New York Times reports Jobs, who owns about 50 percent of Pixar (Research), would want a strong premium to its current $5.9 billion market capitalization to consider a sale..."
Even if you can't win a case directly regarding the rootkit, I would sure hope [IANAL] you'd have a good case if exploits come out and damage occurs. If you try to play an ordinary disc in your computer and end up with a sneaky backdoor for hackers that was covertly and intentionally installed by Sony, then, say, lose thousands of dollars worth of software and information, I'd sure hope Sony would be found at least partially liable for that. If it's a widespread exploit, then perhaps a class-action lawsuit?
It even meets the minimum system requirements for Longhorn!
Of course, when I was saying that fast startups are nothing new, I missed the obvious example of one of the best-selling computers of all time. My Commodore 64 was done starting up by about the time I'd finished flipping the switch and moved my eyes to the screen.
Not that I'd recommend a programming-language cum OS stored in ROM for a modern computer, but it sure loaded fast.
At any rate, the theory behind instant startup isn't too hard, it's just an engineering implementation.
All you do is make it so that, following shutdown procedures, the computer immediately switches to startup, except keeping track of the fact it was "shut down," not "restarted." When it finishes restarting, it writes the startup RAM state to disk, then turns itself off.
Upon being turned on, the computer just writes the stored RAM state back from the disk to RAM, and presto! It's just like starting up the computer, except really fast. At least, that was the theory. I've been sort of surprised not to see this implemented, it seems like everyone would like to see fast startups, but hardly anyone cares how long it takes to shut down (especially with soft power)- you're done with he computer anyway. I've heard that a lot of work goes into decreasing boot times for Windows and OSX. It seems like a lot less work to implement an "instant startup" plan, and then not have to care much if startup takes forever, than to carefully track, fiddle with, and optimize everything that happens during startup.
Of course, with this system, restarting after a crash would not be instant, it would take just as long as ever. So it might work to greater advantage on some operating systems than others, depending on why you usually restart.
Gee, I could swear this chapter used to be critical of GW Bush and loaded with lots of facts critical of him, but now it's just glowing. It must have been found to be "pro-rerror" and "corrected."
Or someone will hack the system, and every book you buy will turn into The Unabomber's Manifesto on your way home from the store.
Or do more subtle hacks. I could have sworn this encyclopedia said that the Holocaust really did happen. Guess I was mistaken.
The Apple Store is already down for updates. When I go there now, it says "We'll be back soon. We are busy updating the store for you, and will be back within the hour."
Doesn't look there will be much of a wait to see these things, unless they're just updating the minis or some other product now and the iPods are coming later.
A Shuffle in an iVault is probably about as close to indestructible as any portable electronics appliance ever made, excepting submersion.
OK, good point.
Did anyone else find it ironic that, by having their PR professionals handle the questions instead of the engineers, the interview resulted in terrible PR for Blizzard?
For someone who "abhors such trickery" as "using emotionally laden words to convince people," I'm fascinated by your writing style.
"Wow. Touched a nerve there didn' I? Emotional tirade aside..."
That's a good, logical way to argue with me, sticking to your "actual facts or objective science," not in any way resembling "using emotionally laden words to convince people." The first personal attacks were due to being sleepy, but now further personal attacks are just good science?
Which makes me interested in what the emotional tirade was- I take it that's my first paragraph, in which I argue against slander and in favor of logical discourse? I guess that by saying I should not accuse you of "a faulty grasp of the english language, logic, and science," I'm having an emotional tirade, where your "You have a faulty grasp of how science works" is just plain good sense, not a personal attack, or god forbid, some of those abhorred "emotionally laden words to convince people.
Your whole "evidence" vs. "coherence" thing misses the point (Or intentionally evades it? No, I'm sure you'd "abhor such trickery.") I was pointing out a fallacy in your post: that semantic arguments regarding incorrect or loaded connotations to my word choice are useful in discrediting the points of my arguments. Now, I find this amusing. In your first post, you bypass my actual arguments to illogically claim that I'm wrong because I used the common definition for a word rather than a specialized one that you prefer. When I pointed out this error of reasoning, you argue against it by saying that the example I choose has an error in it, rather than arguing against the point of the example! It doesn't matter what example I pick, my point is that finding a single flaw in a paper, such as a punctuation mistake, is no argument against the content of the paper. I bow down to your art of circumlocution, of carefully avoiding the topic at hand, and instead pulling the neat trick of shifting the argument to an irrelevant topic, proving the irrelevant point, then declaring victory.
Even then, I'm amazed at the gall of your argument for your irrelevant point. Of course "evidence" and "coherence" are not the same, and have distinct and meaningful definitions. But you really think that a theory's "coherence with the rest of the accepted body of science" is not part of the "weight of evidence supporting a theory?" You're ignoring the meaning of the phrases, pulling one word from each, and saying those words have different meanings, therefore the meaning of one phrase cannot be a subset of the meaning of the other phrase. The argument within the trick was itself another trick.
But if I found all the neat trickery, loaded words, and distracting but illogical arguments in the first part amusing, your references really take the cake. Your link to "the original article from Science" doesn't go to an article, but to a large set of articles regarding climate change, but looking through all of them (I admit briefly, I did not have time to read hundreds of pages of papers), I could only find two that provided evidence regarding the frequency or severity of hurricanes.
In "Changes in Tropical Cyclone Number, Duration, and Intensity in a Warming Environment," by P. J. Webster,1 G. J. Holland,2 J. A. Curry,1 H.-R. Chang1, they only looked at data for, and claimed an increase for hurricanes in, the past 35 years; which everyone agrees with. This has no effect on the facts that longer-term data sets show greater previous activity when temperatures were lower.
The only other article on global warming's effects on hurricanes listed at the link you provided con
I wasn't publishing a peer-reviewed scientific paper, I was posting a comment on Slashdot. I wasn't trying to use the scientific definition of "proof," the mathematical definiton of "proof," or the legal definition of "proof," I was just speaking plainly. I'm sure to your reasoning, the theory of gravity, the theory of evolution, the germ theory of disease, and the heliocentric theory of the solar system are only conjectures, which are not, and can never be, proven. But to all of us who are having a friendly discussion about what all this stuff means, these things have been "proven" by a commonly accepted colloquial use of the word "prove." Any conjecture that passes peer review, stands the test of time, makes it into the textbooks, and becomes a scientific theorem might be considered to have been "shown to be correct," or "generally accepted," or "undoubtedly accurate," or any other synonym or euphemism you might choose for the word "proven." I'm sure, from your message, that if I'd said "Andrew Wiles proved Fermat's Last Theorem" or "Louis de Branges proved the Bieberbach Conjecture," you'd attack me for "having a faulty grasp of mathematics," because they "only provided a logical proof within an assumed framework."
I'm fascinated by the way you twist your semantic quibbling into a "disproof," if you will, of every actual point I made in my post. It is as if I were to point out that your statement "their coherence with the rest of the accepted body of science" is redundant, because that's part of what constitutes "the weight of evidence supporting them", and then concluded that everything you'd written were false because I caught something that could be improved upon in the way you state your case.
In this case, there would be no reason to fall back on illogical, unscientific arguments for why you're wrong in saying "Currently the theory that nastier hurricanes are caused by global warming has more evidenciary support and is more coherent than competing theories, thus it is the currently accepted explanation," since I can rely on reason and scientific literature to back me up. With your keen grasp of science, I'm interested that you didn't feel the need to, for example, offer any sort of references, arguments, or data supporting any assertion you made in your post. So here's some. First, start with every argument I made in my post, and see if you can actually offer any counter argument to any of them. Then try to actually RTFA linked to the Slashdot story, and notice that this "trend" only exists for the narrow subset of data the researchers choose, and as soon as you throw in the data from 1925, the trend is reversed.
Unfortunately it isn't available online, (well, you can see some of it at Amazon.), but chapter 5 of Bjorn Lomburg's The Skeptical Environmentalist provides an overwhelming accumulation of peer-reviewed data culled from Science, Scientific American, and the UN Meteorological Organization showing that there is no positive correlation between global temperature and hurricane frequency or severity. In fact, the best available data shows a week negative correlation, although any long-term trend is nearly lost in
If NASA's administrators say this is 10 times safer, and they haven't changed their criteria since Feynman's days, it's probably about 1/100 as safe. Count me out.
They like to set up models, but their climate models can't prove a connection either, because they're all based on a lot of assumptions, abstractions, and potentially erroneous inputs. We're a long way off from weather models with any level of certainty. When they can give spot-on weather reports for a month out, then it'll be time to start paying attention to the models.
All they have now are measurements, where they hope to see a correlation. But no matter what correlation they saw, even if it was the most beautiful curve you've ever seen, with a curve fit with an R value of 1.0, correlation does not imply cause and effect. But at least it wouldn't contradict their theory.
What they actually have is a tiny sample, where nearly any conceivable data set would mean nothing. The problem is that there are so many factors. While their actual data set is really jumpy and shows no really strong trend, suppose it were different- suppose they got their "ideal" data set over the past 30 years. Suppose it showed that the number of hurricanes is trending up sharply and steadily. If they had seen this trend, which would most strongly support the hypothesis of global warming, it would equally strongly support all of the following hypothesis:
1. We're in a natural cycle of hurricanes increasing, which global warming is making worse.
2. We're in a natural cycle of hurricanes increasing, which global warming is having no effect on.
3. We're in a natural cycle of hurricanes increasing, which global warming is partially alleviating.
4. There is no natural trend, and global warming is causing a rise in hurricane activity.
5. We are in a natural cycle of reduced hurricanes, and global warming is counteracting that entirely and actually increasing the number of hurricanes.
6. There is no actual trend at all. The number of hurricanes every year is entirely random, with no natural tendency or influence from global warming, and our 30-year sample happens to look like it has some trends, because any series of random numbers will appear to have some trends over certain samples.
Furthermore, with so many factors that affect weather, less than two dozen hurricanes per year, an apparently large natural variability, the probability there are many natural trends that could be working in conflict or in concert, using a mere 30-year sample is like trying to estimate global warming with a 30-day temperature sample. It would make all the difference in the world if you take your sample during spring or fall, and time you take it at all, it's extremely unlikely it would give you an accurate picture of what's going on at all. If they had 1,000 years of data, I might expect them to find something more convincing there.
And yes, it would be male. They alternate genders, and the last hurricane on this year's list is "Wilma."
In other news, an analyst has determined that Adobe's cost per copy to manufacture Adobe Photoshop is about $0.35. This leaves out all research and development costs, such as writing code.
What are they including in this $40 cost, the price for 1/10 of an oz of silicon? If you don't want to include developing x-ray laser lithography or designing the circuit layout for 55 million transistors, I'm sure they are cheap to pump out.
There are lots of companies for whom the marginal cost to them of providing an additional unit is often near 0 - software companies, airlines, informational databases, etc. For such companies, knowing their actual marginal cost of production doesn't give you much useful information.
It should be a dead giveaway that the marginal cost of production on a processor is very low, because the same processor always costs a fortune when it's introduced, and then is sold new for a small fraction if its original price a few years later, just before they pull it from the market. Clearly, they wouldn't lower the prices that much if they were losing money on each one.
Merely building a new chip fab represents a significant amount of money compared to the aggregate marginal manufacturing costs of every chip to come out of the entire plant for it's whole life. The semiconductor industry runs on huge R&D costs and small individual unit manufacturing costs. Pointing that out isn't really news.
One that doesn't crash.
The Pentagon only gave gave him exactly what he asked for: the capability to order a "nucular" first strike.
The first time every application is launched, I get the dialog. When I install a new application, the first time I run it, I always get the dialog. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with opening a document vs. the application itself.
Whenever I do a fresh clone of my hard drive, and boot off of it to check it, every application gives me the dialog upon attempted launch. Apparently, the file that keeps track of what's been run before is clone-proof.
Do you have any sources for OSX exhibiting this behavior? Aside from my own experience, Wired talks about this update and says "The alert is invoked whenever a disk image is mounted or an application is launched for the first time."
Also, this is unrelated, but I thought I'd mention that Safari now notifies the user for every download that contains an executable, in case you weren't expecting one. I don't use Mail; I'm interested to know if it also warns users about executables in attachments?
Try OSX. As of some update about a year ago, OSX stopped having "default permit" for launching applications by double-clicking. If you double-click and that leads to launching an executable that hasn't been run before, it pops up a dialog to ask you about it.
Thus, no more executables bearing viruses disguised as documents.
A higher overall mean on a curve tends to signify an evolutionary change that increases the design efficiency or makes beneficial tradeoffs. In the case of increases in design efficiency, unless such a beneficial mutation happens to occur on the "y" chromosome, it should end up distributed throughout the population in both males and females. That's why I'd be surprised to find that men are (on average) much smarter than women; unless, possibly, it's a tradeoff caused by the x chromosome, rather than a more efficient brain design.
In other words: one would not expect evolution to lead to a more efficient muscle design in men than in women, because once a gene for more efficient muscle design has been selected, (unless it happens to be on the y chromosome), it should permeate across the population for both males and females. On the other hand, a tradeoff- say, more muscle mass in exchange for greater caloric requirements, is likely to be the sort of permutation that can only survive if it's sex-linked, because it can remain in one sex or the other if it's favored. The X and Y chromosomes seem to be involved most often with the extent to which other genes are expressed (greater muscle mass), rather than the actual design of things, ie, muscle tissue. So if men are smarter on average, I suspect it's a tradeoff for some other shortcoming we've inherited along the way, not an overall superior brain design, which would almost surely have been passed on to women too.
On the other hand, I do agree with your assertion that in the US, and undoubtedly lots of other places, IQ is strongly inversely correlated with reproduction. This isn't the case everywhere, though. I'm not up on their current policies, but for a long time, a family could only have one child unless they were well off and could buy the right to have more. Income it positively correlated with intelligence, so this would raise the IQ of the population.
If these policies continue for a few thousand years, once would expect to see a significantly higher average IQ in the countries where the smarter people are favored in reproduction. I suspect there may be some differences in average IQ between different populations already, but researching such a thing is probably so politically incorrect that we'll have to just keep wondering.
It's easy to see why evolution would favor this outcome. Evolution favors any benefit that increases the probability of gene survival, which correlates with amount of reproduction. A woman who survives has a probability of attempting to reproduce (obtaining intercourse) of approximately 1. That is, nearly every woman who's capable of surviving is capable of getting a guy to have sex with her. Men, on the other hand, face a much more precarious situation. One highly successful male might copulate with many different women, while an unsuccessful male may never get the chance to reproduce at all.
Game theory tells us that, (ceteris paribus) lower chances of obtaining a goal, as well as exponential gains in the case of success, are both formulas that favor using a higher risk strategy. Thus, a higher standard deviation. Evolution is set up to favor greater genetic risk taking in males than in females.
Oh yeah, Slashdot's a fair place to have this argument. Men outnumber women about 100:1 around here.
As if the argument wasn't already skewed enough, it's completely unfair since we're smarter than them.
I can give you one reason it's not as big on the Mac as it is on Linux- support. The Macintosh OS-plugin for Ogg never made it out of Beta, hasn't been updated in 15 months, and doesn't work with Quicktime 7- which includes pretty much everyone who's updated to Tiger or run software update under Panther. I mean no offense, I'm glad that people volunteer their time to make things like Ogg for free, but to be practical- I don't pay anything to rip to MP3, AAC, or Apple Lossless, and right now all my Ogg files won't play for who knows how long. It makes the format a pretty risky choice for Mac users.
Yes, I know that there are other applications that play Ogg files on the Mac, but they're not competitive with iTunes, and I'm not going to change players depending on what music file I want to listen to.
That's odd, does anyone else think it looks kind of strange? From the name, I was expecting it to look more like this.