I'd be curious about what "technical measures" you are talking about. There are some "universal IDs" that help to filter out some of the spam, but it still can slip through in a way that Captchas help prevent. There is also something philosophically wrong with trusting in some huge 3rd party vendor like Facebook, Microsoft, or Google to be processing authentication on your website, not to mention concerns about the NSA tracking everybody who is logging into your website as well.
Again, I'd be curious about what technical measures you are talking about.
Again, does he have any other substantial group in the scientific community that agrees with his theories?
I sort of thought so. That is sort of the definition of fringe science. He may be correct (sometimes fringe researchers hit upon a good idea that takes time to become accepted into mainstream science), but by far it is more likely that he is a loose cannon and drifting off into spouting off pure nonsense. He also tends to spout off some fringe political ideas in his videos too, which is something that seems to be a reason to question his reliability.
Like I said, use his information with a grain of salt. I did use one of his predictions to help see a real nice Aurora Borealis (aka Norther Lights). You can get a prediction for something like that from other sources, but he did seem to get the prediction a little bit earlier due to his watching sun spots like a hawk and suggested that such a solar flare might be coming.
While this guy seems to occasionally spot something not typically mentioned by science reporters, and especially seems to spot solar flare and other solar activity based upon his monitoring of various solar observatories over the internet about as good as any space weather forecaster, he has some really silly ideas about the causal relationships between solar storms and geological activity here on the Earth that goes into what could charitably called fringe science.
There are some pictographs that convey language and knowledge which are older than 5,000 years. The oldest writing of any kind dates back to about 40,000 years ago (admittedly not really writing in the sense of a Charles Dickens novel, but knowledge preservation none the less).
I'd agree with you though in general terms that written language is a comparatively modern accomplishment (compared to how long mankind has been on the Earth) and coincides with the construction of permanent cities. 5,000 years (give or take a few thousand in either direction) is nothing compared to over five million years or the nearly 5 billion years that the Earth has been around.
While it is a common to think that the settlers were responsible for hunting buffalo to near extinction, it really was a combination of a deliberate program by the U.S. Army to hunt buffalo (where they wouldn't even take the hide or meat.... leaving the animals to rot on the ground where they were killed) and the fact that much of the range of the buffalo was consumed by cattle... creatures that pretty much fill the same environmental niche.
The deliberate hunting of buffalo was done explicitly to drive the plains Indians into reservations by destroying their food sources. I'm not defending this practice as I consider it to be a war crime and unethical in so many ways, but it was a measured and purposeful act that killed far more buffalo than anything taken by the wagon trains going over the various westward migration trails.
The buffalo herds were so vast and the unoccupied land at the time of the game so large that it would be like somebody with a single fishing rod depleting the fish stock of the south Pacific Ocean. Bullets and weapons also offered protection not just from "Indians", but also a large number of "highwaymen" that hung out on the trails (often dressed up as native tribes to shift blame).
I'll also note that the pioneers also ate berries, nuts, roots, and pretty much anything else that they found along the trail. They even went fishing in many of the streams that they found along the path too. Why do you think all of this kind of food gathering was such a bad thing?
The problem is that those parameters and bounds checkers must also be in the software, hence it still can be identified and reverse engineered.
It still gets to the issue that if software can execute, it can be reverse engineered. It may be more complex than sticking a Java.jar file into a decompiler (quite easy to do), but you still need to have *something* read that software in order to operate.
Hardware enforced encryption, in other words something built into the CPU itself, is a bit harder to work with but even that can be reverse engineered. It just takes moving deeper into the system.
Frankly this kind of arms race for hiding software was something I thought was long dead, but I guess I'm mistaken on that too. It is futile as you spend far more time as a developer trying to come up with more interesting puzzles for those who want to reverse engineer your work. if anything, it becomes an intellectual game unto itself where you are just feeding would-be hackers with fun and a challenge. I completely agree with the GP post that called this whole thing BS, other than it just obfuscates everything to another level.
For any software worth running at all, it is worth hiring a team of software engineers to reverse engineer that software to figure out how things were done. If you want to protect your software from duplication, it is by far easier to simply use a team of lawyers and fight over copyright infringement instead. Either that or simply out-innovate your competition... which means you have your developers doing stuff they are really good at doing and don't bother wasting your resources on obfuscation crap like this.
Why didn't Benjamin Franklin get into a car accident? "It would have been impossible since cars weren't invented until after his death." seems a perfectly legitimate reason.
First of all, I did note that it hasn't been an evolutionary pressure for that long (at most just a few generations). That said, there are similar kinds of analogous situations that young adults have done in the past that certainly would require the same level of personal judgement. It used to be said that for every million dollars spent on a construction project, at least one person would die. This was often enough due to a lack of safety gear, but also due to young men doing stupid things and not paying attention to their personal safety on the job site. Sailing ships were also very dangerous to be in, and often sailors would do really stupid and reckless things when at sea... something that was available to Ben Franklin in particular as he did several trans-Atlantic crossings in his lifetime.
I'm not saying it is strictly with automobiles, but pretending that you are brave when in fact you are just reckless doesn't help.
A whole lot of young men also die doing stupid shit like that. I've been to far too many funerals of children of close friends where those children were doing stupid peacock stuff like you are talking about to know that the perception of some of these young men strutting their stuff like idiots is a sign of immortality.
Besides, most realistic women aren't really impressed by this kind of stupidity as well... or if they are attracted to it they also behave in a reckless manner. I'm serious too. Some people get lucky, but how many have died or hurt themselves or others?
It really is no different than perhaps the feeling of "cheating death" by being one of the few survivors storming the beaches of Normandy in June of 1944. Some survived, but a whole lot died. Some kept their head down when the bullets went by and acted smart, while others simply had bad luck. The foolish and reckless ones really did die. Perhaps a few brave folks too, but mostly not in that extreme circumstance.
I seriously doubt that it would be much of an evolutionary advantage to doing dangerous things as a young man. You are by far and away more likely to have your genes culled.
Automotive manslaughter is in legal code for a purpose. Yes, you can be accused of murder, or at least be charged with a criminal offense due to negligence if you are driving recklessly. There is a whole spectrum of responsibility here, and there definitely are drivers who are much more reckless than others.
I never said it was 100% perfect, but being cautious can help. It is an evolutionary pressure.... which goes back to the point of the original post and article and why anything which is an evolutionary pressure can be evaluated for what benefits it might provide. This is true even if those involved in changing their actions are unaware of why they are doing things in a certain manner.
BTW, while a cautious driver may not 100% reduce accidents and injuries, it certainly can cut that risk down substantially. That was my point. Yes I do think being careful, letting stupid drivers pass you by and letting them get into accidents elsewhere instead of with your vehicle can be a substantial reason why you didn't get into a vehicle accident this past month. Being irresponsible is also a reason why some people seem to regularly total vehicles as well.
Because Google (aka YouTube) will let you put copyrighted content up.... and then shunt all of the profits earned to a nebulous pot that goes to MPAA members (especially the major studios). It is usually of inferior quality, so it really doesn't matter to the major media companies.
Sometimes they will yank the videos off, but a surprising amount still is posted and of course Google still makes money off of the whole thing, which is the point. A few people think they are cute by posting copyrighted videos, but in the end it really doesn't matter. Many of those companies do cooperate with Google anyway as you can also do pay per view videos on YouTube as well.... if you really care to go that route. There are of course other ways to watch movies, but my point is that it still provides a source of revenue on the "long tail" of movies that are no longer being distributed.
Why else do you think the Star Wars Christmas Special is not getting yanked off of You Tube?
Can you explain why you *didn't* get into a car accident in the last month?
While I haven't been accident free, I do tend to drive more cautiously and I know of many drivers that aren't nearly so cautious. I've been a passenger in their vehicles, and sadly I've been around long enough to know of a great many people personally who have died due to idiotic things they've done (like being 8x the legal intoxication limit and driving off a bridge for somebody I knew).
Their genes have been pulled from the gene pool, although it could be said that automobiles haven't been driven by humans long enough for natural selection pressures to make model drivers yet. Based on the number of auto accidents each year though, I'd say there is some strong evolutionary pressure happening with that environment. Especially note the age at which most accidents happen (young adults usually less than age 30 with the highest risk for those who are new drivers).
Perhaps it is just that us older folks are more cautious and the younger idiots have been culled by the time they get to my age? A few learn from sad experience by their friends, which just means that their brain actually has an evolutionary advantage too.
But you can skip Hulu altogether.... and enough people are watching Hulu anyway in spite of the potential to find the videos elsewhere (aka on YouTube with a "pirated" copy from some throw-away account) that they can charge the extra prices for ad revenue.
If Hulu was pissing people off, they wouldn't be making any kind of money. Those who watch on Hulu are willing to put up with the ads. Besides, I sort of enjoy some of the Hulu advertisers as it really can be quite entertaining by itself... unlike some of the real crappy ads I see on many websites. You can tell what advertising methods really aren't working because they attract advertisers of extremely low quality that tend to offend the people receiving the advertising. I'm talking stuff like advertising by e-mail (which has an extremely low s/n ratio).
Admittedly this is for people who are trying to break into the industry and become established as opposed to those who are at the top of their game working for the major airliners, but if you want to become a pilot today and go through the steps to be qualified to become a commercial airline pilot, the path you must take today runs through these "crash pads" and comparatively low salaries. Note that few pilots start out from college or a decent air training school and go straight to major carriers. Former military pilots do get to count their flight time in military aircraft in a variety of ways for certified flying time, and some military aircraft definitely have civilian equivalents or certainly can compare in terms of general types that might get you into the major carriers after flying for the military for 20 years (necessary for retirement benefits), but not everybody can or cares to go that route either.
Airlines have also been gradually cutting salaries on their pilots and doing so in a variety of ways... with many of the airlines that paid the highest salaries simply going bankrupt (like Pan-Am... to name one airline in particular). I agree that life isn't nearly so bad as is sometimes claimed and a pilot who has been flying for 30 years can expect to be earning a pretty decent salary, but that is the end of their career, not the beginning.
The A-10 also led to the U.S. Army willing to take them on after the USAF decided to retire that aircraft. The problem was that the Army Air Corps was also going to be re-created.... and the USAF could have none of that.
It didn't help that the original schedule retirement was right around the time of the Gulf War, where the A-10 proved to be an essential part of that war.
You aren't in a position to be dictating the conditions of the conversation to others. You are, after all, trying to convince the scientific community and the public at large of a vast conspiracy stretching back 150 years and that independent observations of climate are being systematically altered by processes you can't describe for reasons you can't explain.
How independent are these observations, and what kind of observational parameters have changed from 150 years ago to today that might have some interesting consequences to what was measured, how that data was recorded, and the integrity of the data set?
It isn't quite so independent as you would suggest, as many of these observations you are talking about have been collected by just a handful of repositories, and furthermore the data has been manipulated in many cases.... sometimes legitimately but sometimes not as well. Some through human error, but there definitely have been some observational changes as well that sometimes aren't correlated into the data. Even the instruments being used today are different than was being used 150 years ago, and certainly the accuracy of the equipment being used 150 years ago doesn't match that which is being used today.
None of this really requires a vast conspiracy (the ultimate of a strawman argument anyway), but it is something that is usually glossed over and ignored unless it furthers your particular viewpoint.
I still don't know how measurements of climate change can be done in fractions of a degree with the base measurements are done with margins of error sometimes as much as 5-10 degrees. Accumulations of rounding errors alone would seem to indicate that reports should have much larger margins of error on computed values. That is but one of many problems with current observations in climatology.
The issue here is with those who claim the title of "climate scientist", or more correctly "climatologist", and if they are indeed following the scientific method or are instead engaging more in political activity than actual science.
I have no doubt that there are a great many scientific disciplines where it is in the culture to do just as you have said, where politics, academic ranks, and prestige in the greater world really don't matter in terms of your ability to criticize or to be able to make meaningful contributions. That is one of the reasons why science is still progressing (thank goodness) and that new discoveries are being made.
Unfortunately in this particular field, there is so much money tied up with trying to prove a particular hypothesis and so much political capital on the line that I think it is reasonable to question the messengers even, much less the quality of the science that is being produced as well as to question the motives of those who are involved. Mind you, the researchers themselves are likely not going to be getting much money, but the major power players in terms of government agencies, bureaucrats, and some people trying to earn favor with those politicians as well as earn favor with the constituents of those politicians certainly make a difference and that adds up to huge amounts of money... of the sort where "a billion here and a billion there soon add up to real money".
Climatology is also one of those disciplines where repeating an experiment is hard to do, and the data collection efforts can be easily manipulated without much oversight as to what the real numbers ought to be. I'm speaking with first hand knowledge of this particular issue, as I have been involved with digitization efforts of climate data and have seen the climate data manipulated in sometimes a manner that certainly should raise some flags and questions in terms of its integrity. Once a data set has been digitized, it is usually cost prohibitive to re-enter the data from original sources (assuming that those original paper sources even still exist). Even statistical samples trying to verify a data set can be incredibly expensive and usually aren't seen as worthy. Among the worst problems is that sometimes manipulated data (even when there is legitimate manipulation that is spelled out as a part of the methodology) deliberately throws away the original raw data set.... something that would be seen in other disciplines as reasons to refuse publication or at least question the validity of the results in a given paper. In climatology such things are common and aren't even questioned.
I know there are hard core advocates in climatology who will do anything including manipulation of the raw data to further their political goals. They've sometimes been identified, but they aren't always. I'll also say that includes both people who want to press forward the hypothesis or rather in some cases just a conjecture about "global warming" and those who want to refute such claims so it isn't just isolated to one camp in the debate either. Regardless, it is this quest to prove a hypothesis that warps the debate to the point you can't even find real science any more.
In many ways, I would look upon climatologists more as historians than actual scientists. You can and do find people who look upon events like the Battle of Waterloo or Gettysburg and debate about how different changes in minor parts of those battles could have had significant global changes. It is sometimes the same thing in terms of claiming what minor tweaks in the atmosphere might have done to change historical events like Hurricane Katrina, not to mention what they predict might be the climate 10 or 50 years from now. Is there much of a difference?
The Fisker business plan was doomed from the beginning because they could only make a profit assuming they would get the tax credits in the first place. Tesla planned on having the tax credits go away some time before the vehicles got into production and treated the tax credits as potential additional profit, but not necessary to get into the black. While I'd agree that Fisker had private investors, suggesting that the government money didn't have a negative impact upon the company is patently false.
Having seen the latest annual report for Tesla, most of the reason they are still in the red right now is because of massive amounts of R&D spending. That tends to in the long run result in much more revenue.... sort of the point of why you invest in an enterprise of that nature. The Tesla manufacturing plant itself is incredibly profitable right now.
The graveyard of automobile manufacturing companies is vast and contains a large number of names. The amazing thing is when anybody breaks past producing something for more than a couple of years as making automobiles in mass production is very, very hard to do.
You build a smart grid that charges the cars between 1AM and 5AM and you don't need to build more.
There has been a steady increase in electrical power demand... per person and overall combined... for quite some time. Conservation is not going to change that equation. While I'm not against more efficient use of what energy is being produced when practical, you can't conserve you way out of growth. There is simply this little thing called "physics" that sort of gets in the way.
At some point, the only way to "conserve" more energy is to either commit genocide or force people in large groups into poverty (essentially another form of genocide... just done more slowly and over several generations instead of at once). If you think that is an acceptable government policy, I will show you a government not worth existing and a society in decay that will not exist in a couple generations at all.
What progress of useful science or "the arts" (meaning further research into new ideas) happens with patents? I agree that is supposedly the reason why Congress was given the authority to be able to grant patents in the first place, but the rationale given by members of Congress as to why they pass certain pieces of legislation is to give the "little guy" protection.
I'm certainly not worried about the big guys, as they will clearly make money even without patents or even under a communist government and especially under a fascist government. The question is if patents will grind down individuals from making society a better place or will they prevent innovation from happening.... thus being counter to that process of trying to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts"?
A good point, but that doesn't seem to be the point of a patent as currently constituted under the United States Code, Title 35. That may make the entire code technically unconstitutional, but since when does Congress or for that matter anybody else in the federal government care about the U.S. Constitution?
The purpose of patents, supposedly, is to help protect the garage tinkerer that comes up with a really cool idea to have exclusive rights over that invention.
I've asked this question repeatedly on Slashdot and elsewhere, and I fail to get any sort of realistic reply:
Do you personally know somebody (aka a close blood relative, somebody you knew in your youth and considered a "best friend", somebody who would be at your bedside in a hospital if you got into a serious accident merely by hearing you by name were hurt) who has ever earned more than the patent filing fees on any patent they've developed?
I know personally (including my grandfather... who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in patent attorney fees over the course of many years) several people who have earned a patent, and many others who have invented some pretty interesting devices that definitely are worthy of patents. I also know of several people personally who have filed for patents due to work they've done for companies they worked for. Note: If you are an employee as an engineer, it is a standard contract that you will turn patentable inventions over to that company... often even if you come up with the idea outside of work. Certainly for stuff you invent "on the job". Some companies offer royalties on those inventions, but most companies simply assume your salary is compensation for those inventions.
I do know some people personally who have earned money from copyrighted content (mainly books, although some movies). I don't know a single person who has even earned "pizza money" (aka a few bucks "profit" to buy a pizza or something very cheap.) above and beyond even the filing fees from patents. I also know of several very prominent people (notably Philo Farnsworth and Nikola Tesla, not to mention the Wright Brothers) who spent an insane amount of time in courtrooms trying to defend their patents, often without effect, and in the mean time these incredibly prolific inventors wasted literally decades of their life in a fruitless attempt to earn money off of ideas that "the system" said they deserved.
The Robber Barons were only a problem because the government was still stepping in when it wasn't needed, and not stepping in when it was. Most of J. P. Getty's monopoly was enforced simply through thug tactics really no different than a street gang or even the cartels of Mexico.... and often even involved the "Mafia" where appropriate, including burning down structures of competitors, killing people, and making death threats when they didn't have to kill. That has never in American history every been legal, nor has it needed regulation. Of course the problem was that those who ordered that to happen weren't held liable or responsible for those actions. They can and should have had their wealth stripped from them and imprisoned for engaging in those actions.
Otherwise, most of U.S. history shows that small businesses in competition with each other tends to do a better job of making most things that we need, and that when we compete against each other in a genuine free market... free from tyranny and oppression from thugs and the power hungry who resort to physical violence to achieve their ends... will tend to resolve other problems without piles of government regulation. Yes, that may be a utopian fantasy for such a free market to exist, but it at least can be something to try for.
I completely disagree with the standard characterization of the "Robber Baron Era", and certainly for most typical Americans the progress out of poverty was substantially better then than it is today. Scientific progress, economic progress, and even cultural progress was all better when the government did its best to get out of the way other than to keep us from killing each other and maintain peace in a civil society. I'm not an anarchist, as I do think there is a role for a government to be around, but that role ought to be limited. I also understand the tragedy of the commons as well, but that can be addressed in several ways.
Enron was allowed to do the things it did precisely because the government kept potential competitors from being able to compete against them.
You can't get rid of it all - reprocessing actually generates more waste than you start off with - but you can at least get the really hot stuff out of the waste and make it easier to store what's left over and the now radioactive consumables you've used to get that far. People forget that Uranium has a high melting point and is very strong which makes it difficult to cut up fuel rods, which has made most reprocessing not much more than a proof of concept. It's all got to be done by robots due to how radioactive the fuel rods are. One promising alternative is liquid reactors where expired fuel rods and expired weapon material can be thrown into the molten fuel instead of the incredibly expensive and messy operation of reprocessing. The US had a couple of thorium based reactors along those lines but lobbying from the uranium dependant US nuclear lobby let to that work being shut down. The US nuclear industry has eaten it's own children in that way so expect advances to come from elsewhere.
The Idaho National Laboratory developed a pretty effective method of reprocessing radioactive waste without much extra waste.... and the stuff that was left over was pretty much low level radiation stuff that could be handled in some of the existing repositories designed for that low-level waste. It does take operating breeder reactors, and the #1 problem with the technology is that it in theory could be used to create bomb-grade material out of the waste products in the same facility. The major concern is that if the technology was perfected in the manner that has been suggested and became commonly known to countries like Iran and North Korea, that they would have a much easier time building nukes.
I'm still undecided if that is an acceptable trade-off, and there may be some wise reasons for not going down that technology path. It should at least be a part of the conversation about nuclear reactors. If that really is the reason why the major governments of the world don't build those kind of reactors and waste reprocessing plants, I wish they would be a little honest too.
Of course it is by design. That is where those who want to see more government regulations "to help protect the little guy" end up being mere pawns in the grand games of these big companies and end up screwing "the little guy" far more than if they simply kept their trap shut.
The best way to cut down on bribery is to simply make the situation so elected officials can't do anything... because the government can't do anything. Nobody cares to lobby a government official who is on a committee with no responsibilities.... or at least only in charge of a budget so small that the lobbying amounts to be nothing more than advertisements in the Sunday newspaper. The problem is when you have officials in charge of trillion dollar budgets, spending a couple hundred million is just pocket change on any project you might be working on.
It was screwy half-hearted deregulation where in many ways the worst parts were deregulated but the parts that really would spur on competition were kept heavily in regulations. It still is near impossible for a neighborhood to build a bunch of solar cell panels and small wind turbines as a neighborhood power co-op and sell the excess power on the grid (possible, but very difficult and full of regulations). That is the kind of thing that needs to happen.
It really is so weird that to go through the California regulations on power needs a full time team of lawyers (not just a single lawyer) even for a small neighborhood group, much less a private individual. The big power companies have those teams, which is why those kind of regulations stay in place. The de-regulation was simply that once the lawyers figured out how to weasel their way through the regulations and required forms, that the state couldn't stop them from any subsequent actions.
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I'd be curious about what "technical measures" you are talking about. There are some "universal IDs" that help to filter out some of the spam, but it still can slip through in a way that Captchas help prevent. There is also something philosophically wrong with trusting in some huge 3rd party vendor like Facebook, Microsoft, or Google to be processing authentication on your website, not to mention concerns about the NSA tracking everybody who is logging into your website as well.
Again, I'd be curious about what technical measures you are talking about.
Again, does he have any other substantial group in the scientific community that agrees with his theories?
I sort of thought so. That is sort of the definition of fringe science. He may be correct (sometimes fringe researchers hit upon a good idea that takes time to become accepted into mainstream science), but by far it is more likely that he is a loose cannon and drifting off into spouting off pure nonsense. He also tends to spout off some fringe political ideas in his videos too, which is something that seems to be a reason to question his reliability.
Like I said, use his information with a grain of salt. I did use one of his predictions to help see a real nice Aurora Borealis (aka Norther Lights). You can get a prediction for something like that from other sources, but he did seem to get the prediction a little bit earlier due to his watching sun spots like a hawk and suggested that such a solar flare might be coming.
Sigh.
While this guy seems to occasionally spot something not typically mentioned by science reporters, and especially seems to spot solar flare and other solar activity based upon his monitoring of various solar observatories over the internet about as good as any space weather forecaster, he has some really silly ideas about the causal relationships between solar storms and geological activity here on the Earth that goes into what could charitably called fringe science.
If you really want to see some more reliable forecasts, I'd recommend instead the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center
Still, this YouTube channel is at least worth an occasional chuckle or two. You certainly shouldn't take it too seriously.
There are some pictographs that convey language and knowledge which are older than 5,000 years. The oldest writing of any kind dates back to about 40,000 years ago (admittedly not really writing in the sense of a Charles Dickens novel, but knowledge preservation none the less).
I'd agree with you though in general terms that written language is a comparatively modern accomplishment (compared to how long mankind has been on the Earth) and coincides with the construction of permanent cities. 5,000 years (give or take a few thousand in either direction) is nothing compared to over five million years or the nearly 5 billion years that the Earth has been around.
While it is a common to think that the settlers were responsible for hunting buffalo to near extinction, it really was a combination of a deliberate program by the U.S. Army to hunt buffalo (where they wouldn't even take the hide or meat.... leaving the animals to rot on the ground where they were killed) and the fact that much of the range of the buffalo was consumed by cattle... creatures that pretty much fill the same environmental niche.
The deliberate hunting of buffalo was done explicitly to drive the plains Indians into reservations by destroying their food sources. I'm not defending this practice as I consider it to be a war crime and unethical in so many ways, but it was a measured and purposeful act that killed far more buffalo than anything taken by the wagon trains going over the various westward migration trails.
The buffalo herds were so vast and the unoccupied land at the time of the game so large that it would be like somebody with a single fishing rod depleting the fish stock of the south Pacific Ocean. Bullets and weapons also offered protection not just from "Indians", but also a large number of "highwaymen" that hung out on the trails (often dressed up as native tribes to shift blame).
I'll also note that the pioneers also ate berries, nuts, roots, and pretty much anything else that they found along the trail. They even went fishing in many of the streams that they found along the path too. Why do you think all of this kind of food gathering was such a bad thing?
The problem is that those parameters and bounds checkers must also be in the software, hence it still can be identified and reverse engineered.
It still gets to the issue that if software can execute, it can be reverse engineered. It may be more complex than sticking a Java .jar file into a decompiler (quite easy to do), but you still need to have *something* read that software in order to operate.
Hardware enforced encryption, in other words something built into the CPU itself, is a bit harder to work with but even that can be reverse engineered. It just takes moving deeper into the system.
Frankly this kind of arms race for hiding software was something I thought was long dead, but I guess I'm mistaken on that too. It is futile as you spend far more time as a developer trying to come up with more interesting puzzles for those who want to reverse engineer your work. if anything, it becomes an intellectual game unto itself where you are just feeding would-be hackers with fun and a challenge. I completely agree with the GP post that called this whole thing BS, other than it just obfuscates everything to another level.
For any software worth running at all, it is worth hiring a team of software engineers to reverse engineer that software to figure out how things were done. If you want to protect your software from duplication, it is by far easier to simply use a team of lawyers and fight over copyright infringement instead. Either that or simply out-innovate your competition... which means you have your developers doing stuff they are really good at doing and don't bother wasting your resources on obfuscation crap like this.
Why didn't Benjamin Franklin get into a car accident? "It would have been impossible since cars weren't invented until after his death." seems a perfectly legitimate reason.
First of all, I did note that it hasn't been an evolutionary pressure for that long (at most just a few generations). That said, there are similar kinds of analogous situations that young adults have done in the past that certainly would require the same level of personal judgement. It used to be said that for every million dollars spent on a construction project, at least one person would die. This was often enough due to a lack of safety gear, but also due to young men doing stupid things and not paying attention to their personal safety on the job site. Sailing ships were also very dangerous to be in, and often sailors would do really stupid and reckless things when at sea... something that was available to Ben Franklin in particular as he did several trans-Atlantic crossings in his lifetime.
I'm not saying it is strictly with automobiles, but pretending that you are brave when in fact you are just reckless doesn't help.
A whole lot of young men also die doing stupid shit like that. I've been to far too many funerals of children of close friends where those children were doing stupid peacock stuff like you are talking about to know that the perception of some of these young men strutting their stuff like idiots is a sign of immortality.
Besides, most realistic women aren't really impressed by this kind of stupidity as well... or if they are attracted to it they also behave in a reckless manner. I'm serious too. Some people get lucky, but how many have died or hurt themselves or others?
It really is no different than perhaps the feeling of "cheating death" by being one of the few survivors storming the beaches of Normandy in June of 1944. Some survived, but a whole lot died. Some kept their head down when the bullets went by and acted smart, while others simply had bad luck. The foolish and reckless ones really did die. Perhaps a few brave folks too, but mostly not in that extreme circumstance.
I seriously doubt that it would be much of an evolutionary advantage to doing dangerous things as a young man. You are by far and away more likely to have your genes culled.
Automotive manslaughter is in legal code for a purpose. Yes, you can be accused of murder, or at least be charged with a criminal offense due to negligence if you are driving recklessly. There is a whole spectrum of responsibility here, and there definitely are drivers who are much more reckless than others.
I never said it was 100% perfect, but being cautious can help. It is an evolutionary pressure.... which goes back to the point of the original post and article and why anything which is an evolutionary pressure can be evaluated for what benefits it might provide. This is true even if those involved in changing their actions are unaware of why they are doing things in a certain manner.
BTW, while a cautious driver may not 100% reduce accidents and injuries, it certainly can cut that risk down substantially. That was my point. Yes I do think being careful, letting stupid drivers pass you by and letting them get into accidents elsewhere instead of with your vehicle can be a substantial reason why you didn't get into a vehicle accident this past month. Being irresponsible is also a reason why some people seem to regularly total vehicles as well.
Because Google (aka YouTube) will let you put copyrighted content up.... and then shunt all of the profits earned to a nebulous pot that goes to MPAA members (especially the major studios). It is usually of inferior quality, so it really doesn't matter to the major media companies.
Sometimes they will yank the videos off, but a surprising amount still is posted and of course Google still makes money off of the whole thing, which is the point. A few people think they are cute by posting copyrighted videos, but in the end it really doesn't matter. Many of those companies do cooperate with Google anyway as you can also do pay per view videos on YouTube as well.... if you really care to go that route. There are of course other ways to watch movies, but my point is that it still provides a source of revenue on the "long tail" of movies that are no longer being distributed.
Why else do you think the Star Wars Christmas Special is not getting yanked off of You Tube?
That's not what they said about Welfare Queens.
Which gives us cities like Detroit. How is that working out?
Can you explain why you *didn't* get into a car accident in the last month?
While I haven't been accident free, I do tend to drive more cautiously and I know of many drivers that aren't nearly so cautious. I've been a passenger in their vehicles, and sadly I've been around long enough to know of a great many people personally who have died due to idiotic things they've done (like being 8x the legal intoxication limit and driving off a bridge for somebody I knew).
Their genes have been pulled from the gene pool, although it could be said that automobiles haven't been driven by humans long enough for natural selection pressures to make model drivers yet. Based on the number of auto accidents each year though, I'd say there is some strong evolutionary pressure happening with that environment. Especially note the age at which most accidents happen (young adults usually less than age 30 with the highest risk for those who are new drivers).
Perhaps it is just that us older folks are more cautious and the younger idiots have been culled by the time they get to my age? A few learn from sad experience by their friends, which just means that their brain actually has an evolutionary advantage too.
Because on hulu you can't skip ads....
But you can skip Hulu altogether.... and enough people are watching Hulu anyway in spite of the potential to find the videos elsewhere (aka on YouTube with a "pirated" copy from some throw-away account) that they can charge the extra prices for ad revenue.
If Hulu was pissing people off, they wouldn't be making any kind of money. Those who watch on Hulu are willing to put up with the ads. Besides, I sort of enjoy some of the Hulu advertisers as it really can be quite entertaining by itself... unlike some of the real crappy ads I see on many websites. You can tell what advertising methods really aren't working because they attract advertisers of extremely low quality that tend to offend the people receiving the advertising. I'm talking stuff like advertising by e-mail (which has an extremely low s/n ratio).
Perhaps this is just sensational journalism, but there are situations like this found with regional pilots (not major airlines):
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/video/inside-airline-pilot-crash-pads-12874917
http://www.foxnews.com/travel/2012/02/01/confessions-regional-jet-pilot/
Admittedly this is for people who are trying to break into the industry and become established as opposed to those who are at the top of their game working for the major airliners, but if you want to become a pilot today and go through the steps to be qualified to become a commercial airline pilot, the path you must take today runs through these "crash pads" and comparatively low salaries. Note that few pilots start out from college or a decent air training school and go straight to major carriers. Former military pilots do get to count their flight time in military aircraft in a variety of ways for certified flying time, and some military aircraft definitely have civilian equivalents or certainly can compare in terms of general types that might get you into the major carriers after flying for the military for 20 years (necessary for retirement benefits), but not everybody can or cares to go that route either.
Airlines have also been gradually cutting salaries on their pilots and doing so in a variety of ways... with many of the airlines that paid the highest salaries simply going bankrupt (like Pan-Am... to name one airline in particular). I agree that life isn't nearly so bad as is sometimes claimed and a pilot who has been flying for 30 years can expect to be earning a pretty decent salary, but that is the end of their career, not the beginning.
The A-10 also led to the U.S. Army willing to take them on after the USAF decided to retire that aircraft. The problem was that the Army Air Corps was also going to be re-created.... and the USAF could have none of that.
It didn't help that the original schedule retirement was right around the time of the Gulf War, where the A-10 proved to be an essential part of that war.
You aren't in a position to be dictating the conditions of the conversation to others. You are, after all, trying to convince the scientific community and the public at large of a vast conspiracy stretching back 150 years and that independent observations of climate are being systematically altered by processes you can't describe for reasons you can't explain.
How independent are these observations, and what kind of observational parameters have changed from 150 years ago to today that might have some interesting consequences to what was measured, how that data was recorded, and the integrity of the data set?
It isn't quite so independent as you would suggest, as many of these observations you are talking about have been collected by just a handful of repositories, and furthermore the data has been manipulated in many cases.... sometimes legitimately but sometimes not as well. Some through human error, but there definitely have been some observational changes as well that sometimes aren't correlated into the data. Even the instruments being used today are different than was being used 150 years ago, and certainly the accuracy of the equipment being used 150 years ago doesn't match that which is being used today.
None of this really requires a vast conspiracy (the ultimate of a strawman argument anyway), but it is something that is usually glossed over and ignored unless it furthers your particular viewpoint.
I still don't know how measurements of climate change can be done in fractions of a degree with the base measurements are done with margins of error sometimes as much as 5-10 degrees. Accumulations of rounding errors alone would seem to indicate that reports should have much larger margins of error on computed values. That is but one of many problems with current observations in climatology.
The issue here is with those who claim the title of "climate scientist", or more correctly "climatologist", and if they are indeed following the scientific method or are instead engaging more in political activity than actual science.
I have no doubt that there are a great many scientific disciplines where it is in the culture to do just as you have said, where politics, academic ranks, and prestige in the greater world really don't matter in terms of your ability to criticize or to be able to make meaningful contributions. That is one of the reasons why science is still progressing (thank goodness) and that new discoveries are being made.
Unfortunately in this particular field, there is so much money tied up with trying to prove a particular hypothesis and so much political capital on the line that I think it is reasonable to question the messengers even, much less the quality of the science that is being produced as well as to question the motives of those who are involved. Mind you, the researchers themselves are likely not going to be getting much money, but the major power players in terms of government agencies, bureaucrats, and some people trying to earn favor with those politicians as well as earn favor with the constituents of those politicians certainly make a difference and that adds up to huge amounts of money... of the sort where "a billion here and a billion there soon add up to real money".
Climatology is also one of those disciplines where repeating an experiment is hard to do, and the data collection efforts can be easily manipulated without much oversight as to what the real numbers ought to be. I'm speaking with first hand knowledge of this particular issue, as I have been involved with digitization efforts of climate data and have seen the climate data manipulated in sometimes a manner that certainly should raise some flags and questions in terms of its integrity. Once a data set has been digitized, it is usually cost prohibitive to re-enter the data from original sources (assuming that those original paper sources even still exist). Even statistical samples trying to verify a data set can be incredibly expensive and usually aren't seen as worthy. Among the worst problems is that sometimes manipulated data (even when there is legitimate manipulation that is spelled out as a part of the methodology) deliberately throws away the original raw data set.... something that would be seen in other disciplines as reasons to refuse publication or at least question the validity of the results in a given paper. In climatology such things are common and aren't even questioned.
I know there are hard core advocates in climatology who will do anything including manipulation of the raw data to further their political goals. They've sometimes been identified, but they aren't always. I'll also say that includes both people who want to press forward the hypothesis or rather in some cases just a conjecture about "global warming" and those who want to refute such claims so it isn't just isolated to one camp in the debate either. Regardless, it is this quest to prove a hypothesis that warps the debate to the point you can't even find real science any more.
In many ways, I would look upon climatologists more as historians than actual scientists. You can and do find people who look upon events like the Battle of Waterloo or Gettysburg and debate about how different changes in minor parts of those battles could have had significant global changes. It is sometimes the same thing in terms of claiming what minor tweaks in the atmosphere might have done to change historical events like Hurricane Katrina, not to mention what they predict might be the climate 10 or 50 years from now. Is there much of a difference?
The Fisker business plan was doomed from the beginning because they could only make a profit assuming they would get the tax credits in the first place. Tesla planned on having the tax credits go away some time before the vehicles got into production and treated the tax credits as potential additional profit, but not necessary to get into the black. While I'd agree that Fisker had private investors, suggesting that the government money didn't have a negative impact upon the company is patently false.
Having seen the latest annual report for Tesla, most of the reason they are still in the red right now is because of massive amounts of R&D spending. That tends to in the long run result in much more revenue.... sort of the point of why you invest in an enterprise of that nature. The Tesla manufacturing plant itself is incredibly profitable right now.
The graveyard of automobile manufacturing companies is vast and contains a large number of names. The amazing thing is when anybody breaks past producing something for more than a couple of years as making automobiles in mass production is very, very hard to do.
but good luck building more
You build a smart grid that charges the cars between 1AM and 5AM and you don't need to build more.
There has been a steady increase in electrical power demand... per person and overall combined... for quite some time. Conservation is not going to change that equation. While I'm not against more efficient use of what energy is being produced when practical, you can't conserve you way out of growth. There is simply this little thing called "physics" that sort of gets in the way.
At some point, the only way to "conserve" more energy is to either commit genocide or force people in large groups into poverty (essentially another form of genocide... just done more slowly and over several generations instead of at once). If you think that is an acceptable government policy, I will show you a government not worth existing and a society in decay that will not exist in a couple generations at all.
What progress of useful science or "the arts" (meaning further research into new ideas) happens with patents? I agree that is supposedly the reason why Congress was given the authority to be able to grant patents in the first place, but the rationale given by members of Congress as to why they pass certain pieces of legislation is to give the "little guy" protection.
I'm certainly not worried about the big guys, as they will clearly make money even without patents or even under a communist government and especially under a fascist government. The question is if patents will grind down individuals from making society a better place or will they prevent innovation from happening.... thus being counter to that process of trying to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts"?
A good point, but that doesn't seem to be the point of a patent as currently constituted under the United States Code, Title 35. That may make the entire code technically unconstitutional, but since when does Congress or for that matter anybody else in the federal government care about the U.S. Constitution?
The purpose of patents, supposedly, is to help protect the garage tinkerer that comes up with a really cool idea to have exclusive rights over that invention.
I've asked this question repeatedly on Slashdot and elsewhere, and I fail to get any sort of realistic reply:
Do you personally know somebody (aka a close blood relative, somebody you knew in your youth and considered a "best friend", somebody who would be at your bedside in a hospital if you got into a serious accident merely by hearing you by name were hurt) who has ever earned more than the patent filing fees on any patent they've developed?
I know personally (including my grandfather... who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in patent attorney fees over the course of many years) several people who have earned a patent, and many others who have invented some pretty interesting devices that definitely are worthy of patents. I also know of several people personally who have filed for patents due to work they've done for companies they worked for. Note: If you are an employee as an engineer, it is a standard contract that you will turn patentable inventions over to that company... often even if you come up with the idea outside of work. Certainly for stuff you invent "on the job". Some companies offer royalties on those inventions, but most companies simply assume your salary is compensation for those inventions.
I do know some people personally who have earned money from copyrighted content (mainly books, although some movies). I don't know a single person who has even earned "pizza money" (aka a few bucks "profit" to buy a pizza or something very cheap.) above and beyond even the filing fees from patents. I also know of several very prominent people (notably Philo Farnsworth and Nikola Tesla, not to mention the Wright Brothers) who spent an insane amount of time in courtrooms trying to defend their patents, often without effect, and in the mean time these incredibly prolific inventors wasted literally decades of their life in a fruitless attempt to earn money off of ideas that "the system" said they deserved.
The Robber Barons were only a problem because the government was still stepping in when it wasn't needed, and not stepping in when it was. Most of J. P. Getty's monopoly was enforced simply through thug tactics really no different than a street gang or even the cartels of Mexico.... and often even involved the "Mafia" where appropriate, including burning down structures of competitors, killing people, and making death threats when they didn't have to kill. That has never in American history every been legal, nor has it needed regulation. Of course the problem was that those who ordered that to happen weren't held liable or responsible for those actions. They can and should have had their wealth stripped from them and imprisoned for engaging in those actions.
Otherwise, most of U.S. history shows that small businesses in competition with each other tends to do a better job of making most things that we need, and that when we compete against each other in a genuine free market... free from tyranny and oppression from thugs and the power hungry who resort to physical violence to achieve their ends... will tend to resolve other problems without piles of government regulation. Yes, that may be a utopian fantasy for such a free market to exist, but it at least can be something to try for.
I completely disagree with the standard characterization of the "Robber Baron Era", and certainly for most typical Americans the progress out of poverty was substantially better then than it is today. Scientific progress, economic progress, and even cultural progress was all better when the government did its best to get out of the way other than to keep us from killing each other and maintain peace in a civil society. I'm not an anarchist, as I do think there is a role for a government to be around, but that role ought to be limited. I also understand the tragedy of the commons as well, but that can be addressed in several ways.
Enron was allowed to do the things it did precisely because the government kept potential competitors from being able to compete against them.
You can't get rid of it all - reprocessing actually generates more waste than you start off with - but you can at least get the really hot stuff out of the waste and make it easier to store what's left over and the now radioactive consumables you've used to get that far. People forget that Uranium has a high melting point and is very strong which makes it difficult to cut up fuel rods, which has made most reprocessing not much more than a proof of concept. It's all got to be done by robots due to how radioactive the fuel rods are.
One promising alternative is liquid reactors where expired fuel rods and expired weapon material can be thrown into the molten fuel instead of the incredibly expensive and messy operation of reprocessing. The US had a couple of thorium based reactors along those lines but lobbying from the uranium dependant US nuclear lobby let to that work being shut down. The US nuclear industry has eaten it's own children in that way so expect advances to come from elsewhere.
The Idaho National Laboratory developed a pretty effective method of reprocessing radioactive waste without much extra waste.... and the stuff that was left over was pretty much low level radiation stuff that could be handled in some of the existing repositories designed for that low-level waste. It does take operating breeder reactors, and the #1 problem with the technology is that it in theory could be used to create bomb-grade material out of the waste products in the same facility. The major concern is that if the technology was perfected in the manner that has been suggested and became commonly known to countries like Iran and North Korea, that they would have a much easier time building nukes.
I'm still undecided if that is an acceptable trade-off, and there may be some wise reasons for not going down that technology path. It should at least be a part of the conversation about nuclear reactors. If that really is the reason why the major governments of the world don't build those kind of reactors and waste reprocessing plants, I wish they would be a little honest too.
Of course it is by design. That is where those who want to see more government regulations "to help protect the little guy" end up being mere pawns in the grand games of these big companies and end up screwing "the little guy" far more than if they simply kept their trap shut.
The best way to cut down on bribery is to simply make the situation so elected officials can't do anything... because the government can't do anything. Nobody cares to lobby a government official who is on a committee with no responsibilities.... or at least only in charge of a budget so small that the lobbying amounts to be nothing more than advertisements in the Sunday newspaper. The problem is when you have officials in charge of trillion dollar budgets, spending a couple hundred million is just pocket change on any project you might be working on.
It was screwy half-hearted deregulation where in many ways the worst parts were deregulated but the parts that really would spur on competition were kept heavily in regulations. It still is near impossible for a neighborhood to build a bunch of solar cell panels and small wind turbines as a neighborhood power co-op and sell the excess power on the grid (possible, but very difficult and full of regulations). That is the kind of thing that needs to happen.
It really is so weird that to go through the California regulations on power needs a full time team of lawyers (not just a single lawyer) even for a small neighborhood group, much less a private individual. The big power companies have those teams, which is why those kind of regulations stay in place. The de-regulation was simply that once the lawyers figured out how to weasel their way through the regulations and required forms, that the state couldn't stop them from any subsequent actions.