You know what? I'm tired by now of hearing yet again some clueless "unions == communism" falsehood.
I live in a country, you may have heard of it, called Germany. Yeah, the same country you're still getting war movies about. Now let me tell you what happened here _after_ 45, i.e., where those Hollywood movies leave off. Unions here in the private sector aren't just more powerful than anything in your "it's good to be shafted by a sociopathic boss" American culture, but actually a part of some companies' management. And labour laws and wellfare are still at a point you'd probably consider luxury.
Guess what? It doesn't mean tenure, it doesn't mean salaries that don't reflect performance, etc. I still negotiated a salary when getting hired, for example. And getting a pay raise was still based on my doing a good job, or at least the boss being convinced of that. And I've had co-workers which were fired for just making themselves look busy without actually producing anything. And I'm pretty sure that if anyone actually complained that Joe's working hard is making everyone else look bad, they'd find themselves unemployed very fast.
Also, contrary to clueless libertarian trolling, it did _not_ create indifference and apathy on any signifficant scale, it did _not_ ruin the industry, etc. The German economy was going very strong until it absorbed the much weaker East German economy, with an industry that was pretty much obsolete at that point. Yeah, it produced a lot of unemployment in one fell swoop, most of it in the East Germany area. Yeah, you'd get a simmilar dip if you absorbed, say, Ukraine. (No offense to the fine people of Ukraine, it's just picked for being large and less economically developped than the USA.) Also dealing with the integration in EU during most of dealing with that, e.g., unable to do much fiscal policy to peg the inflation-vs-unemployment at its own desired point on that curve, probably also didn't help much. (I'm all for the EU, btw. Just saying that in this particular aspect and in this particular situation it made dealing with it all less flexible. You can't devalue your money to stimulate exports when you're tied to the currency of the whole rest of EWurope, for example.) Nowadays Germany experiences economic growth again.
Morale and apathy are more complex factors, and you can't just make some "unions are bad, being shafted is good for morale" generalization. Because shafting's what happens when unions are not around. Having an incentive to work harder is good and indeed needed, but working in a purely arbitrary environment actually acts as a disincentive. Keeping it fair and transparent, knowing that there's someone on your side keeping an eye on it all, is actually a good thing for the morale. You'll actually work harder for the promotion if you have at least half a hope that someone's keeping it at least half-way objective, than when it's a purely arbitrary thing where being the best could just as well get you fired instead. (See the plenty of examples where someone destroyed a good company, or fired the best workers, just because the magic words "reducing costs" invariably cause the shares to spike on Wall Street, and that's so useful in a pump-and-dump scheme.)
It's also actually good for productivity and morale to know you'll be given a _fair_ pay for your work, and you're not just working to enrich the 1% richest guys even more. There's a reason why historically an economy based on serfs was better than one based on slaves, and why one based on paid workers was better than both: you're actually more motivated and productive when more of your work is for yourself, than when you're just working to make the master richer and you're doing it only because you have no choice.
As a side-effect of it all, may I also point at the much lower crime problem here? If almost no people are pushed into complete poverty and disillusionment, they also don't have as much an incentive to go mug someone. Yeah, it may not be obvious, but that's also an effect of having
Hmm, ok, it's only fair to admit when I'm wrong. I had understood the initial analogy as beer = the earth, insulation = the atmosphere. If we're talking about heating the Earth's core, that's indeed a whole different thing.
The second law of thermodynamics disagrees. Heat moves from hot things to cold things, not the other way. In order for heat to flow from the outside of the beer cooler to the inside, the outside would have to be hotter than the inside. If the inside was hotter, heat would flow out, not in.
No offense, dude, but go take a physics class. That goes for whoever modded _that_ "informative" too.
1. Heat flows from the sun to the earth, and from both to the vast expanses of open space anyway. It's not the outside space that's heating the Earth, but the Sun.
2. The laws of thermodynamics have to do with atom/mollecule movement, and transfer of heat between bodies in contact. The only (ok, vast majority of) energy flowing in or out here has _nothing_ to do with thermodynamics as such, since there are no two bodies in contact exchanging heat (i.e., exchanging mollecule movement by impact.) What is happening there light being absorbed and radiated, and yes that can happen in the opposite direction just as well. There are relevant laws there, e.g., Stefan-Boltzman, but the second law of thermodynamics isn't it.
E.g., you can cut sheet metal with a focused laser beam even though the heated point is basically a hell of a lot hotter than the laser. It will absorb the light anyway. E.g., to address your "inside" and "outside" concerns, you can fry an ant with a magnifying glass even though the ant ends up hotter than the surrounding air. That's because the energy comes from the sun, not from the outside air.
So, sorry, the GP post was right, you are wrong.
But to get back on topic, what's happening is that the earth receives some radiation energy from the sun, and it radiates some back into space. The equilibrium temperature is when the energy radiated equals the incoming energy. Basically if energy E is incoming, then the equilibrium temperature T is when surface times emissivity times Stefan-Boltzmann constant times T to the 4'th power equals E. That's all.
The "insulation" and its non-uniformity across wavelengths messes things a little, but as long as the temperature variations are relatively small, the wavelength don't shift horribly much, so basically the proportionality stays. And a global warming of 1 Celsius (which at least at one point was all the heating Earth had experienced) isn't enough to throw it off the hook. If the Earth's temperature is, say, approximately 300 Kelvin (for the sake of a nice round number), we're talking a third of a percent increase. Since the rest is constants T1^4/T2^4=E1/E2, so it only takes an increase of (1.00333)^4=1.0134, or 1.34 percent increase in incoming energy to fully explain it. Better yet, since Stefan-Boltzman applies to the Sun too, to fully cause it, the Sun would have to experience the same heating the Earth does. A third of a percent heating of the sun creates the extra energy to heat up the Earth by a third of a percent.
So that's basically all the debate here: did our "insulation" change over time, or is it simply that the Sun got slightly hotter? The former wouldn't explain why Mars is heating up too, while the latter fully does.
Funny the things one can learn by paying attention in physics class, really.
Well, yes, they are a money-making bureaucratic organization, but what I'm saying is that not all money-making bureaucratic organizations are created the same. The full spectrum includes not only MS clones, but also IBM, Novell, Red Hat, Google, Apple, Sony, Symantec, debatably even SCO, etc. Some good, some evil, some smart, some stupid, some debatably neither.
Basically just because someone is out to make money, and may even be _ruthless_ in their pursuit of money, doesn't mean they have to be stupid and self damaging in that pursuit. Shaking down your own customers to pay for yet another copy of the same software they already purchased, is stupid and not very productive. MS knows better than to do that overtly.
It has nothing to do with having ethics. You'll notice I never said MS had ethics. It just has to do with not being stupid and self-destructive. Lack of ethics doesn't automatically equal being the blatant cackling villain that runs around kicking peons and tying maidens to railroad tracks. The world isn't neatly divided like that. Some courses of actions are simply not worth pursuing, regardless of whether you have ethics or not.
The most successful unethical people IRL knew when to present a humane face to the masses and maybe even get sympathy. Al Capone opened kitchen soups. Some of the most successful robbers gave a (token) percentage of the loot to local peasants. Etc. You want the masses to think you're a good guy, not the vampire whose castle they should storm with torches and pitchforks.
So, yes, MS is unethical. No, they won't do something as blatantly stupid as shaking down the victims.
And here's another insight, since you speak of their track records: MS (or rather its management) always got their jollies out of killing other _companies_, not out of killing the little guy. They're a nasty predator all right, but their diet is based on a whole other kind of prey. So, yes, Ballmer will want to "fucking kill google", not to fucking kill Joe Random whose key got stolen by a generator/trojan/dishonest-OEM/whatever. What they want from Joe Random is simply to continue being a happy little sheep in their pen, and not mind being fleeced regularly.
The problem of generated keys and conflict with legit keys isn't new, so we already know what happens. The same existed for XP -- plus the added collison of dishonest OEM's selling one legit serial number to 100 different people who bought their computers with XP preinstalled -- and we already know what Microsoft chose: to not annoy the paying customers. What it did try to do was go after the OEM's who did that, but _not_ after the victims. The victim never had to do more than call an (automated) telephone number and get another key. It's always been that simple.
Yes, there have been some fucktards too historically, but MS was sane about it so far. I'm not saying they're saintly or anything, feel free to still be anti-MS if it makes you feel any better. Just that their sane. Even if you want to see them as some kind of super-willain, well, as super-villains go, MS was the _sane_ kind so far. The kind who's read the evil overlord's list, not the random lunatic kind. It knows when _not_ to do something that would damage itself very quickly.
Look, there are plenty of real reasons to whine about MS, no need to invent bullshit FUD scenarios. That kind of going into bullshit fantasy land, just to have something bad to say about MS, just damages the credibility of the real complaints.
I a sense, when you suffer from depression, you're also automatically depressed about something or about a lot of somethings. As I was saying, depression isn't something that stays isolated, like say a bruise or an abcess. It taints your very perception, experiences and expectations of the world and the events around you. It's, if you will, more like being colour blind: everything you see around you is changed by that condition, and different from what a normal person sees. So events and situations which to a normal person would seem anywhere between "who cares" and "ah, shit happens" or "oh well, you have to take the good and the bad", to a depressed person seem like a lot more horrible and personal. The very fact that you seem to get all the bad stuff in the universe (by sheer virtue of perceiving it that way) while everyone around you seems happy or is at least having a lot less problems, makes you question your self-worth, karma, etc. It makes you think about it, think about why all that bad stuff keeps happening to you (without many results, since it's just a perception), think about what you maybe did wrong (without results again, since usually you didn't), in some cases think why some people seem to avoid you (because they don't like hearing your depressing stuff again), etc. It can be sorta like daydreaming, except it's like a perpetual day-nightmare. Briefly, again, there are _lots_ of somethings to be depressed about.
Still, I'm talking from experience. I've been through an episode of depression and demotivation, and I've been known to throw games away in half an hour because I couldn't be arsed to even learn stuff like using the handbrake in an arcade racing game. I can assure you that 30 minutes is _plenty_ to lose motivation in that situation. And 2-3 days is plenty to have your mind occupied with other things, instead of the route you learned yesterday.
Regarding "less mental power", that was maybe the wrong word, but here's what I was trying to say: not that a depressed person is stupid, but that they have other things on their mind. That while a normal person would maybe devote a few more minutes in the evening and some more priority to remembering the route they learned yesterday, a depressed person might go "oh, screw it, it's just another pointless thing that won't work anyway" and retreat back to their own depressing thoughts. So, sure, I'm not surprised that someone would do just as well in a short term task, but worse in a 2-3 days one.
That's what I was wondering too. This whole experiment reminds me of a joke: a scientists puts a flea under on a piece of paper and shouts "JUMP!". The flea jumps. The scientist cuts the flea's legs, puts it back on the same piece of paper and shouts "JUMP!" The flea doesn't jump. The scientist concludes, "When you cut a flea's legs, it become deaf."
And here's why:
1. I'm guessing they didn't take experienced FPS players, but people who had to get past a learning curve. Some probably not even interested in that game, or that kind of game in the first place. I.e., people for whom it was basically work, and who had to learn for that work. I can tell you first hand that being depressed and/or demotivated can impact both work and learning _majorly_.
Sorry, every game has a learning curve, even some you'd think are the most intuitive things and made by the greatest designers. Yet get a non-gamer at the keyboard and you might get an enlightening experience. We've had decades of getting the basic notions and reflexes hammered into our heads, they didn't. Someone else once compared it to a "game grammar". We know it, and even tutorials assume that we already know it. Non-gamers have to learn it from scratch.
I'd expect the problems to be worse in some game designed by psychologists with zero game design background.
So, at any rate, they're asking those people not only to play a game, but likely for most of them it's asking them to learn how to play an experimental game. And it'll be a lot of learning, and a lot of concentration and learning involved. In some cases it will take a lot of willpower to get past that learning curve, if it gets into the frustrating range.
Do I expect someone in their darkest depression to make that effort and muster the concentration? Nope. "Oh, why bother." is pretty much the attitude I'd expect there.
2. It's also worth mentioning that depression isn't just some abstract mood, but brings with it a lot of bad thoughts. It's not just some abstract mood indicator, but a shit-coloured set of glasses that tints (and taints) all perceptions, experiences and expectations. (Including those about the games, but also RL stuff.) So those people are not just abstractly "depressed", but people who've had a heck of a lot of bad and depressing experiences lately, and got disappointed a lot lately, by sheer virtue of that depression tainting their perceptions of it all. They'll tend to think about it a lot.
So if the spatial orientation game requires lots of memorizing routes and such, there'll be inherently less mental power available for that. Where a "normal" person might think "ah-ha, I have to go through the corridor on the left to get back", the depressed one may well be thinking "what a piece of crap, I bet I'll get passed for promotion again, and I bet everyone is gossipping about me behind my back too. Why the heck do I even bother? I might as well kill myself now."
Even if they might take refuge in gaming, they'll require a game that can basically turn off those thoughts, or thinking completely. Something which is simple and captivating, and doesn't require much thinking. Definitely not something which requires complex thought on its own.
3. Or, if you will, 2b: motivation. Remember that we're talking people which are already depressed and tend to perceive everything as worse than it already is, including any goals and rewards in the game, and including the payoff of any long term plan. So if the game isn't immediately rewarding and fun, their motivation will sink much faster than everyone else's. If you make them do something as boring and pointless as just jumping and running through a maze, it will just be perceived as even more boring and pointless. If it requires long term memorizing and planning, the distant reward for it better be extremely worth it, or since it'll be perceived as (A) less of a reward, and (B) as a plan likely to fail anyway. And if that perception drops below a certain point, they'll be too demotivated to try h
While I applaud his nerdyness, check the following: The Wok replaced the dish, which "the same size as a wok, were $80". So, the price of the dish of $80 has been replaced with a cheaper part for $10.
Then: "We have spent a lot of time getting it right -- the first time we installed one we had it up a pole with the handle still on the end of the wok [...]".
So, basically, depending on how much "a lot of time" is, they may have even made a loss? Time literally _is_ money when an employee or two are doing it. You pay salaries for that time. So having someone figure out the focal point, the mounting, build some contraption to hold the LNB in the right place, etc, can end up costing more than $70 quite easily.
Well, not just in this domain, but generally, I've been for a while getting the impression that people just can't deal with large numbers. The intuition just breaks down. Sure, if you're well educated you can do maths with 10^18, but try imagining a really large interval of time, or distance or whatever. Your intuition fails miserably. You just can't really imagine it.
From the intuition point of view, we're not much better than Terry Prattchett's trolls, whose counting IIRC went something like "one, two, many, lots". We're just like that. Past a certain limit it's just the same "many" or "lots" category. A million years doesn't "feel" intuitively much longer than a thousand years, because both are, basically, "lots."
How long is a day? Ok, you know that. You experience that, literally, daily. A month? Sure, you know that too. A year? No problems. Ten years? No problems. A hundred years? Oops. Chances are you haven't lived that long, so no first hand experience. It gets fuzzy. A thousand years? Now it's even fuzzier. You can put some random historical milestones on it, like, "a thousand years ago, was a bit before Hastings", but basically it's already getting to be "lots". Now try a million years. No, seriously, try really imagining a million years interval. Now try ten million years. It's just "lots". You can use the number in maths, because you're a smart guy, but the intuition fails you miserably.
How big is 1 yard or 1m? You know that. A mile? No problem. [...] Now imagine a million miles. Imagine a million light years, for that matter. Bummer, you can't, can you? It's just "lots".
It's not just about evolution. That's why SF works, for example. Our minds just can't comprehend the distances and scales involved, so travelling across the whole flipping galaxy becomes just as "lots" as going over the Atlantic. Intuitively it doesn't "feel" like much more distance.
Or you have settings like Star Wars where basically not that much happened in the Republic for over 20,000 years. And you accept that all right, don't you? In reality that's a mindbogglingly _huge_ interval. In that interval humans went from hitting rocks together to make a crude tool, to lasers and space shuttles. Whole empires raised and fell and completely disappeared in a fraction of that time. But _because_ it's such a huge interval, you intuition fails you utterly there.
Basically, to get back on topic, that's the effect you're seeing there. You're asking people to understand something that happens over millions of years and over billions of specimens. If they're the non-scientific intuitive kind, like most people are, they just can't. You're asking them to imagine something that human imagination just can't accurately deal with.
Sadly, you can't draw a line and build a Berlin Wall between science and the rest of society. Because:
1. As you've said, it's the rest of society who'll have to fund that research. If science is a self-contained isolated entity like the Amish, then, well, don't expect the rest of society to do much for you. But that's actually the least worry.
2. Much more importantly, because scientists aren't created in a test tube or Frankenstein-style. They're recruited from the larger pool of the population. They're the Joe Nerdyguy who preferred to read a physics/chemistry/whatever book instead of being the cool jock in highschool, and Cecilia Nerdygirl who did the same instead of putting up the ever-popular airhead prom-queen act like everyone else.
And every single one of them who grows up thinking that science is just some self-important clique of clowns, and just a bunch of unproven dogmas no better than ID or creationism, is one you've lost from that pool of available recruits. Then they'll go do something more productive than reading up on that "nonsense". Why would you get a passion for any kind of science, if you grew up on thinking it's just a bunch of nonsense spewed by a bunch of arse-clowns?
So managing perceptions is _vital_ to still have a pool of potential recruits in 10 or 20 years.
Terraforming makes for nice fiction, but misses the mark that the planet must _already_ be earth-like enough. Or you must be capable of the godlike feat of increasing its mass a few times, changing its rotation speed, melt its core again, etc. Otherwise the same reasons that shafted its original atmosphere, will shaft whatever atmosphere you create.
E.g., for Mars, it's simply too small and it cooled down too fast. (Well, just right for its size and mass, actually.) So the magnetic field is much too weak to shield it from solar winds, and its low gravity doesn't do much to hold an atmosphere either. So it just escaped and was swept away into space. Any atmosphere you're going to create there while terraforming, is going to just go away too.
The only way to terraform Mars would be to (A) increase its size to something more earth like, _and_ (B) melt its core again, and (C) bring from somewhere all the elements that got swept away in the past, e.g., a metric buttload of hydrogen, and maybe (D) fiddle with its rotation speed too, so that core you just melted generates enough magnetic field. Does it sound like pure SF yet?
Heck, _if_ anyone were to start terraforming anywhere, the easiest start wouldn't be Mars, but Venus. It's about the same size as Earth, about the same density too, it still has a magma core, and it's in the right band to support life too. Why Venus ended up the poisonous wasteland instead of Earth-like? It spins way too slowly. So it pretty much doesn't have any magnetic shielding against the solar winds. The very weak magnetic field it has is mostly due to interaction between solar winds and its atmosphere, rather than an internal dynamo. So without shielding, it pretty much lost all its hydrogen. Whatever water it had evaporated, got ionized sooner or later and the hydrogen was just swept away. So now the atmosphere is almost pure CO2 and some nytrogen.
By now you probably get the idea that terraforming even Venus is just nuts. You'd have to bring a heck of a lot of hydrogen from somewhere else (from where and at what cost?) _and_ give it a good spin (with what energy and just how?) _and_ somehow start some plate tectonics mechanism to get the convection currents going in the planet and start its dynamo (again, how?) _and_ oh, for that matter, get rid of all that carbon in the atmosphere or all the water will just boil off. Pretty tall order, don't you think?:P
So "appears just out of our reach...but only just" must be the understatement of the century. Maybe if by "just" you mean "not in another million years."
The story is actually that someone's finally doing something to defuse, well, what Penny Arcade called the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. (Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad.) There are a lot of people who did just that: took the supposed anonymity of the internet as just an oportunity to harrass, defame, cause grief, etc.
It can be a lot of damage even if you're not an "ImportantPerson(TM)", because we live in an age where bosses google their employees, neighbours google each other, and the village gossip googles the whole freakin' village for some gossip material. We're also in an age where people might glue posters to your door or drive you out of town because they found someone else by the same name rumoured to be a sex offender in some anonymous blog, or as was once the case because they were too stupid to know what "paeditrician" means. (It's a kind of doctor, not a paedophile.) We also live in an age of hypocrisy where someone might hold some rumour against you, not because they believe it, not because they are any better, but because it doesn't fit their bullshit PR corporate image.
So basically carpet bombing the internet, Wikipedia included, with bits of defamation like "JohnTurner admitted in 2007 that he was trying hard to overcome his kiddy porn addiction" or "JohnTurner said he stopped beating his wife nowadays" or "see JohnTurner's guide to surfing for porn undetected at work and using the corporate appserver as a warez site. Excellent reading." can cause a lot of harm even if you're not some celebrity.
E.g., the HR drone for your next job googles you, they don't have the time or the inclination to do a thorough checking. Most of what everyone does at all stages is actually looking for some excuse, any excuse, no matter how lame, to discard as many candidates as possible. It can be just because they didn't like your email provider, or it can be literally by numerology or tarot. (Don't laugh, it's not a joke, there _are_ companies which use numerology or tarot to thin out the candidates pool. Assign a number to each letter in your name, sum them up, sum the digits up until you get a single digit, see if it matches the sum for the company name. If not, your CV goes directly into the garbage bin.) The underlying assumption is that you're just yet another dime-a-dozen peon in a sea of perfectly replaceable and interchangeable peons. PHBs love that assumption. So noone's going to do a thorough checking just for you, see the context, see if such a guide to surfing for porn actually exists anywhere, etc. They'll just google until something bad comes up, then stop.
And it's maybe not a bad thing that someone is suing such a fuckwad and proving once again that anonymity isn't as granted as people think. Sure, noone will bother getting your name out of the ISP if you just posted on Slashdot during work hours, but if you take the step to actively harrass and defame someone, or break any other law, all that anonymity may well be harder to maintain than just being behind a modem. For a lot of people it might just take the essential component out of that greater internet fuckwad recipe. It may even be a good thing.
Well, if anyone ever invented something like what you describe, it would be a very useful thing indeed. However, to the best of my knowledge even that is one thing that quantum computing hasn't (yet) been hyped as capable of doing. Not in the form you describe, anyway. Yes, we'd all love such an insanely parallel machine, but it's not going to happen like that, and not as a quantum computer.
For starters, a set of qubits can hold a lot of information, basically some analog numbers, but it doesn't automatically implement any set of arbitrary constraints at them. Pretty much the only constraint you get, so to speak, for free, is that the sum of all those numbers must be 1. They're probabilities to be in any given state, and the total probability must be 1. That's it.
Second, it really just holds a probability, _not_ all the possible states. Changing the state pretty much means shifting some of the probabilities around. So if you're hoping to actually hold and compute all possible solutions there simultaneously, you'll probably be in for a bit of a disappointment.
Even if you assigned one of those probabilities to one possible solution, it's like saying that you assign every bit in the CPUs registers to whether or not one particular possible solution is correct or not. Just because you can assign some meaning to a bit, doesn't mean you get that for free. You still have to figure out an algorithm that actually changes all those bits to the right values. Or in the case of quantum computers, which shifts the probabilities just right.
Third, the problem anyway would be, basically, implementing those constraints anyway. If you actually wanted to get them for free, you'd have to pretty much design a mollecule which automatically enforces them. To the best of my knowledge, noone ever proposed (seriously) doing that, but if you wanted to, that's what it would mean. For the sieve, you'd have to figure a system where basically if the "bit" for 2 is set, then the "bits" for 4, 6, 8, etc, inherently can't be set. It's a more complicated thing than it sounds.
Fourth, the problem so far is scaling. So far the best anyone ever produced is a 7 qubit mollecule that's just about useful enough to factor 15 into 3*5. But the problems grow through the roof as you want to make systems with more qubits, because it becomes insanely more difficult to set and read the status of all of them, and to design a mollecule which actually acts that way. The problem isn't just having the silicon or budget for an extra bit, like in normal computer, but pretty much involves inventing something completely new that can possibly work like that. It took years to even get the one that factors 15.
Fifth, scaling in the other direction: you have a very short time after which the system goes decoherent. Basically you have to figure out an EM pulse that sets the spin probabilities just right, but the system starts pretty much immediately to goes out of whack on its own. Each mollecule in that solution starts doing its own thing and electrons are randomly flipping on their own. For a very short time it means you just lose a (very) little precision on the analog numbers represented, but any longer and it's as good as a random number. So basically if your whole algorith didn't end in that time, tough shit, you're out of luck. Don't think QC will solve too complex problems for you any time soon.
Sixth, well, just because some mathematicians designed a language for something, doesn't mean by far that it actually exists. Mathematicians are very smart people, and unlike physics maths isn't tied as such to the natural world. You can build a maths theory around anything. A lot of them aren't even supposed to represent an actual body in the real world, but some very particular way to calculate something. E.g., as the most trivial example, there are n-dimensional geometries, but that doesn't mean you'll be able to actually build a 6-dimensional cube in the real world any time soon. Those geometries are supposed to model other kinds
QC is not bullshit from a mathematical perspective; there are well know algorithms(such as the Shor factoring algorithm)..and IBM tested it back in 2001.
IBM is a big entity. They have a lot of pure science research going on, but they also have more PR bullshitters than Saruman had orcs. Are you sure which department you got your info from? So far a lot of other research PR announcements coming from IBM have been, well, certainly not outright lies, but ommited enough context that a layman would be highly likely to jump to a very mis-leading conclusion. E.g., when they tell you that they tested a 100 GHz transistor and hype how useful that would be for future CPUs, they deliberately ommit to tell you that a whole CPU will _never_ run at the speed of an individual transistor.
And so it is with quantum computers too. IBM was actually a lot lighter on the bullshit than usual, I must admit that, but what may not be obvious is that basically they didn't as much create anything even resembling a universal computer, but:
1. The mollecule used is pretty much hard-coded to implement that one algorithm. Their 7 qubits are 7 of the atoms (2x C and 5x F atoms) in that specialized mollecule.
I.e., that for every single problem you'll ever have to solve on this kind of computer, you have to go through years of research just to design the mollecule that solves it. And for all the years of research, the best they've come up with so far is factoring the number 15. So it's a hell of a lot of a mis-leading potential to think that QC is the cure-all replacement for digital computers, like the hypesters claim.
2. Basically it _is_ an analog computer. That's why they used a whole vial of the stuff, and not 1 atom. Getting that complex state out of it, given that the wave form is statistics, needs a big enough sample for the statistics to work.
The problem w/ QC is having enough entangled qubits to get up to useful capacity..and its an insanely difficult engineering challenge. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computing is a good intro to QC.
Trust me, I had read that, and it sounds a lot less impressive if you know at least a little quantum mechanics, than what the PR bullshitters spin it into. Saying that you need N complex numbers to describe the state, and being able to change that whole state in one go, doesn't actually mean you can process N arbitrary complex numbers in any possible way in one go.
And the problems are more complex than that. For starters I've never read about an obvious way to actually get that complex probabilistic state out of it. Schroedinger's cat is only a mixture of dead and alive until you open the lid: then it's either dead or alive, _not_ a mixture of both. Wave shapes are just probabilities, not actually an analog number and not actually something that you can measure on one electron/atom/whatever. That electron's spin is a theoretical probabilistic mixture of up and down only until you measure it: then it's only a 1 or a 0, i.e., a single bit. You _could_ measure the whole analog domain if you had a lot of electrons, but not just one. It's like trying to get the exact probability of a four-leaf clover by picking a single clover. It doesn't work that way.
While I agree that VC's will hype anything, your post is FUD crossed witha bit of 'get off my lawn, young whippersnappers'; its also clear that you didn't spend 5 minutes researching QC before you held forth on it. Yes, it will be specialized and won't replace normal digital computers.
Don't take this personally, but the fact that I can find complete nonsense at 5 insightful is one of the reasons that I don't read slashdot comments much; there is rarely a more misleading source of information available.
Well, I appreciate a good ad-hominem as much as the next guy, but I must say even here you disappoint. You _assume_ tha
No, it's not 'bull'. It's a pretty good description of what's actually going on. Think Schroedinger's cat. There is a single cat, and it's in some pure state, but that state is equal to a mixture of the "alive" state and the "dead" state.
It so happens that that's perfectly useless in practice. Schroedinger's cat is a very useful mental image for an introduction to quantum mechanics, but for any kind of computing theory the deal is that at some point you have to open the lid and see if the cat is dead or not. The uncertainty ends there and then. At that point it all falls back to being just a normal bit, no more. The cat is either dead or not dead.
Ok, quantum wave functions are a bit more complex than that, but saying that it holds all possible states at the same time is still as bullshit as it gets. No it doesn't. You have a wave function, and any useful way of using it, is essentially using that wave functuion, _not_ some nebulous having all states at the same time.
There's a lot of smoke and mirrors in the computing industry as it is, and there's this dangerous "well, everyone else is doing it" precedent we've allowed. The bullshitters and marketters run the show unchecked. And the whole "quantum" deal just gave them a lot more ammo and some defenseless targets to use it on. You can bury a layperson alive in bullshit before they even smell anything wrong. The statement that it holds everything and calculates everything at the same time is just such bullshit. What happens in practice is a lot more complex and a lot more limited.
Perhaps you have not taken a class in quantum mechanics, or perhaps it has been a while.
I could say the same, seeing that you completely ommit the "particle" aspect. The electron isn't just wave, it's both.
Well, here's the deal.
It's not that the electron is located at some particular position, and you can't tell exactly where it is. In actual fact, the electron is not located at a single point. Its position is completely described by a complex-valued function over space. (viz., a 'wavefunction') This function completely describes the electron's momentum as well, which is a neat trick. So what you are calculating is not a 'probability cloud'. The wavefunction is the electron's position.
No, here's the deal: at some point you actually measure it and it _is_ in just one place.
Think the interference experiment again, because it's a very fundamental thing. You have an electron source, you run them through two slits, you get the interference pattern on a CRT-like coated screen. You know it already, right? Well, here's the deal:
1. Yes, the wave aspect is inherent, because you can get an interference pattern even if you emit one electron at a time. You already knew that, obviouly. But
2. For each such electron you get a single blip of light in a very well defined place. You do not get the screen illuminating all over the place, you get a single scintilation in a very well defined place. There is one single atom or mollecule hit by that electron. The wave function may spread all over the place, but what it really tells you is the probability of the electron actually being there. But other than in a metaphoric sense, the electron itself is still only in one place, and hits one single atom, not every single atom intersecting that wave function.
This is not just some theoretical construction. It is very important to the way that atoms and molecules act. They would behave very differently if electrons and nuclei acted in a familiar classical way, like baseballs or planets. Instead, they behave according to the rules of quantum mechanics, which actually work pretty well. The quantum computing guys want to take this interesting behavior and use it to our benefit in making computations.
I wasn't saying that electrons and atoms act like baseballs and planets, far from it. But they're no
Actually, quantum encryption and computing are different things.
Quantum encryption is, well, basically nothing about using quantum mechanics to _encrypt_, but to send the key (and maybe the data too). The idea is that you send single photons. So basically if someone tapped into the line, you can't split the photon and get only a bit of the signal. Either you get it or the endpoint gets it, but not both. It makes man-in-the-middle attacks a bit harder. In fact, it claims to make it outright impossible.
Since the whole idea here is to elliminate the possibility for a man in the middle, intrusion detection is something valuable. Mind you, if the sending single photons was as un-interceptable as originally claimed, intrusion should be simply not possible, so I'm a bit stumped as to why would they want to detect something impossible. Maybe they know something we don't about how impossible it really is? (E.g., come to think of it, a laser kind of device inserted on the line could multiply that original photon thousands of times, all the clones having the exact same phase, polarisation, whatever.)
It may be pie-in-the-sky, I don't know, but at least it's one of those sane ideas that aren't too impossible to understand even for the layman. The only "quantum" thing about it is that you send individual quanta of light, i.e., photons. Since it's only one and it's indivisible, only one endpoint can get it. All simple and sane, IMHO.
Quantum computing, on the other hand, I don't know... there must be some sane researchers out there who know what they're doing, no doubt. But the media and marketting hype has drowned it all in so much bullshit it could fertilize a few acres, so from the layman (even with a decent grasp of physics and computing) point of view, it's hard to even tell what it would _really_ do, how it would work at all, and how would it be useful at all.
I've even seen such bullshit claims like that it basically holds all possible states at the same time, so it can calculate anything instantly, since the solution state is already one it simultaneously holds. Which is blatantly bull. If it simply holds all possible states at the same time, that's as good as saying that it has no state at all, or you can't measure it. To get an answer out of the computer, you need to get out of it a particular state which represents the result of the calculation. By that logic I could give you a CD with all possible 4 million DWORD (4 byte, 32 bit) values, from -2 million to 2 million, one of which is the result to your problem. There you go, any problem that has a DWORD result already has the result on that CD, so it was "calculated" instantly. Isn't it an impressive feat? I don't even know your problem, but that CD already has the result to it. It's also completely freakin' useless, if you don't know which one of them. That CD as such holds no more actual usable information that that it's a 32 bit number, which you knew in the first place.
Not saying that that's what the actual researchers study, but that's the kind of bogus info that you see from the outside. It's damn hard to tell if it's actually something that might work, or just snake oil to get a clueless VC's money. On par with extracting free energy out of water, the Infinium console, and other such fine con schemes that some people actually dumped millions into.
The only sorta working quantum implementations so far, are basically not even as much quantum computers as hyped, as glorified analog computers. The thing about quantum mechanics is that 99% of it are probabilities.
As some trivial examples, you can't tell for example exactly where an electron is in a potential well (e.g., in a CMOS transistor), or in some cases even if it is still in the potential well or it's out of it already, but you can calculate a probability cloud of, basically, what are the chances of it being in this particular point. Or if you do interference with electrons (think the school physics experiment with shining a light through two thin slots, o
The two don't really contradict each other that much. Google's spike is relatively small and it's really a spike in the first 1-3 months. By the 6th month it's basically settled. In this paper half the time they graph in whole year increments, so that kind of a spike would be averaged into the first year. So, no, they don't contradict each other as such. And in at least one of the graphs by month in this paper (HPC1), there is something that looks like a spike in the first month.
More importantly, they don't contradict each other in respect to the rest of the curve. With or without that spike, the curve just doesn't look like the bathtub fairy tale that drive makers try to bullshit us with. You're led into a false sense of security that, basically, if a drive didn't fail within the first couple of months, then it'll be at a (nearly) constant and very small probability to fail for the whole next 5 years, and only then it starts rising again. Basically that if you upgrade your drives every 4 years, whatever didn't fail within 2-3 months, heck, it's very unlikely to fail. And the curve just doesn't look that way. The probability to fail rises continuously, and (again whether that spike actually exists or not) after as little as 1 year you're above the starting height of the "bathtub" already.
In retrospect, I don't even know when and why the "bathtub" myth even started. The bathtub distribution was originally for stuff like electronic components, without moving parts. For something with mechanical wear and tear like a hard drive, who the heck came up with the idea that the same curve must apply? Shouldn't it have been common sense all along that it linearly gets more wear and tear?
Both papers also tell us that the manufacturers' MTBF numbers are, basically, pure bullshit. They're some impressive number put there for the benefit of the marketting department, not because someone at Seagate/Maxtor/whatever actually believes that number.
In retrospect, again, we should have had an alarm signal when the manufacturers lowered there warranty from 3 to 1 year. If indeed there was (1) the MTBF they claim, and more importantly (2) the bathtub curve they claim, the reduction wouldn't have even made too much of a difference. I mean, most drives would have failed withing a couple of months, followed by barely a trickle of deffective drives for the next 5 years straight. Why bother doing the bad-for-marketting thing of lowering the warranty in that scenario? Or did they already know that they lie?
And finally, a very important point is that (again, bullshit marketting claims be damned) there is no difference in reliability between cheap SATA and expensive SCSI and FC. There is this assumption permeating the whole society that if something is expensive, it _must_ automatically be better and more durable than the cheap stuff. That if you buy a big plasma TV, it's automatically better and last longer than an el-cheapo CRT. (Yeah, right. Plasma is actually known for its decay over time.) A whole edifice of consumerism, conspicuous consumption, and SFV (Stupid Fashion Victim) syndrome is based on that bullshit excuse to spend more than you need to spend. "Yeah, but it'll be better and last longer!" Yeah, right.
I've actually met people who wouldn't even _consider_ putting a ATA drive in any kind of server. "What, you're going to put your enterprise data on ATA drives???" (Said with a perplexed look, as if I had proposed flushing it to/dev/nul or something.) Well, now we know they're not actually any worse. If you don't actually need the extra bandwidth or lower latency or a 15,000 RPM drive, then you can just as well drop a SATA drive in that machine. Even for 10,000 RPM, 4.5ms, there are the WD Raptor drives with SATA interface, and they're cheaper than a SCSI or FC drive. For a lot of stuff you don't even need those, a 7200 RPM will do perfectly fine.
Date many porn-addicted men, do you? Didn't think so. So STFU until you try it and see how it makes men act.
On one hand, you have my sympathy. On the other... Sorry to be an asshole, but...
1. "Data" is not the plural of "anecdote". If your expertise is dating 1 or 2 guys who happened to be both, there's a reason why statistics uses bigger samples. Because judging based on 1 or 2 samples can get you all sorts of funny coincidences. It's like making a study of clover based on a single plant, and concluding that all clover has 4 leaves.
2. On the other hand, if you _have_ dated enough men to have an even remotely signifficant sample, and they were porn addicted and aggressive... have you considered that maybe, just maybe, you're just seeing the Biased Sample fallacy in action? I.e., that that's the sample _you_ chose? Maybe it's time to try dating another kind of man? Just a thought.
I know it's every schoolgirl's dream to have the _fashionable_ antisocial jock/thug as a boyfriend, and that Nice Guy (TM) nerds are sooo boring, insecure and unfashionable. Plus (and funnily this doesn't come from a guy, but a female psychologist) there's this strange correlation between girls who grew up on stories like Cinderella and Beauty And The Beast, and women who get beat up by their husband later. Can it be that IRL the Beast does _not_ turn into a gentle, caring prince, no matter how much you nag^H^H^H love him? Could it be that picking the most fashionable beast for a BF isn't really as smart as it sounds at the time?
But at any rate, if you only date X (where X can be anything, including "aggressive male beast" or "heartless bitch" or whatever), it only just says that that't the kind of person _you_ chose to be with. It's like choosing to drive a SUV and then complaining that all cars you drove were gas-guzzlers. Try another kind of car, if that becomes a problem.
Now I'm not arguing that people should surf for porn at work or anything, and I don't do it personally (if nothing else, I'm not stupid enough to risk my job for that anyway), but just a couple of points:
1. This wasn't a porn site, but a chat room. Even _if_ it was sexnet or something, for anyone to get offended, they'd have to go and actively read what's on the guy's screen. Maybe even shuffle windows around (I doubt that he'd not at least minimize it, even if he were stupid enough not to close it.) It's not like having a big picture that anyone can see by just walking at the wrong point in space.
I mean, wtf, at that point whoever is offended, might as well read the guy's emails too. Do we start having policies against emails to one's spouse, then, because some nosy busybody might get offended by those? (I can see how a couple of ultra-feminists could get offended even by asking the wife to have dinner ready at a different hour, or indeed at all. I can see some religious nut-job getting offended by an email mentioning another religion, or in some cases mentioning evolution. Etc.)
Or maybe it would be saner to have "mind your own f-ing business" start being just common sense. If you've been rifling through someone's drawers or their computer, then flippin' understand that you're not a passive bystander being actively harrassed, but someone who shouldn't have been doing that to start with. Someone showing you smut pics or calling you in their office while they have a stack of porn mags on their desk is harrassment, but you finding them while actively looking on their computer isn't harrassment, it's being the one in the wrong. Don't want to be offended by someone's chat logs? Then don't flippin' read them to start with. There we go. Problem solved.
2. Frankly, I don't buy the idea that porn makes people all hostile and aggressive. If that were the case, then most men at work and half the women (you'd be surprised how many of those watch porn too) would be berserking half the time. Even if they only look at porn at home, you'd think you'd notice some effect after years of it. Even if you postulate a very short term effect, surfing for porn at work isn't that horribly uncommon, so you'd notice a lot more hostility in the workplace if that was the case.
It would be a sensible thing for an employer to put a close eye on someone approaching retirement with pension, in the hopes that they screw up enough to justify termination, this saves the company money. This is not necessarily a bad thing
Jeeze, this so makes me glad I'm not in the USA. It may sound like trolling, but I'm just genuinely shocked.
So basically in your world it's not a bad thing to shaft someone of their pension money, just because it saves a multi-billion dollar corporation some money? Jeeze, what a sad little world it must be down there, if people even find it _normal_ to be shafted for the company's benefit. It's not necessarily a bad thing, because some corporation made a few bucks out of it. Right.
That guy worked there for 19 years, for good or bad, and I may add that he couldn't have done that bad a job if they kept him for 19 years. But at least he worked there for 19 years, and the pension was pretty much part of the payment they promised him. Whatever he did at the end that got him fired, let's say maybe even if he loafed a whole flipping 1 year at the end, there's no justice in shafting him out of that payment for the other 18 previous years. The pension is nothing more than someone else handling some savings for you for your old age, so basically it's just like saying "if we fire you, you have to give us back whatever you saved while working for us. Oh, and we'll take your car too, while we're at it, it was bought out of the wage we paid you."
I mean, WTF, in the rest of the world you'd need some civil lawsuit and some serious damage caused by the employee, to just take their money like that. Taking someone's pension just because they were on a chat room before retirement, now that's rich.
Plus, it seems to me an inherently sociopathic thing to go trolling for guys to shaft in their old age, just because it saves the corporation a little money. It's pretty much as close to rock bottom as it gets on any empathy-towards-fellow-humans scale. Having some dignity in the old age is what I'd call close to a human right, not to mention basic courtesy from society to the members on whose work it's based. The moment anyone can look at an old guy or gal and think "let's shaft them out of their pension for some money", we're already established where he ranks on the APD scale.
Makes me damn glad that over here the pensions are handled by the government or by the big insurance firms, so they're completely out of the employer's reach. No matter what else you did, you paid your pension payments, so it's only rightful that you get your pension.
And make no mistake, one way or another this guy did too. Whether it was an actual monthly sum he paid, or just implied. When you're promised X dollars a month pension, it's directly convertible into "how much I'd have to pay per month at some other pension fund for that." As I was saying, one way or the other, it's part of the salary this guy negotiated and planned around. So retroactively shafting him out of a hefty chunk of, well, basically the negotiated salary for 19 years, is not justice by any kind of reckoning. WTH-ever damage that chatting during work hours did, it just doesn't justify awarding the employer that kind of damages. You'd need to blow something up in the rest of the world to end up paying your employer that much in damages, not just open a freaking chat room window. Better yet, in the rest of the world, they'd have to bring you to court to get that kind of damages out of you, not just help themselves to it.
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You know what? I'm tired by now of hearing yet again some clueless "unions == communism" falsehood.
I live in a country, you may have heard of it, called Germany. Yeah, the same country you're still getting war movies about. Now let me tell you what happened here _after_ 45, i.e., where those Hollywood movies leave off. Unions here in the private sector aren't just more powerful than anything in your "it's good to be shafted by a sociopathic boss" American culture, but actually a part of some companies' management. And labour laws and wellfare are still at a point you'd probably consider luxury.
Guess what? It doesn't mean tenure, it doesn't mean salaries that don't reflect performance, etc. I still negotiated a salary when getting hired, for example. And getting a pay raise was still based on my doing a good job, or at least the boss being convinced of that. And I've had co-workers which were fired for just making themselves look busy without actually producing anything. And I'm pretty sure that if anyone actually complained that Joe's working hard is making everyone else look bad, they'd find themselves unemployed very fast.
Also, contrary to clueless libertarian trolling, it did _not_ create indifference and apathy on any signifficant scale, it did _not_ ruin the industry, etc. The German economy was going very strong until it absorbed the much weaker East German economy, with an industry that was pretty much obsolete at that point. Yeah, it produced a lot of unemployment in one fell swoop, most of it in the East Germany area. Yeah, you'd get a simmilar dip if you absorbed, say, Ukraine. (No offense to the fine people of Ukraine, it's just picked for being large and less economically developped than the USA.) Also dealing with the integration in EU during most of dealing with that, e.g., unable to do much fiscal policy to peg the inflation-vs-unemployment at its own desired point on that curve, probably also didn't help much. (I'm all for the EU, btw. Just saying that in this particular aspect and in this particular situation it made dealing with it all less flexible. You can't devalue your money to stimulate exports when you're tied to the currency of the whole rest of EWurope, for example.) Nowadays Germany experiences economic growth again.
Morale and apathy are more complex factors, and you can't just make some "unions are bad, being shafted is good for morale" generalization. Because shafting's what happens when unions are not around. Having an incentive to work harder is good and indeed needed, but working in a purely arbitrary environment actually acts as a disincentive. Keeping it fair and transparent, knowing that there's someone on your side keeping an eye on it all, is actually a good thing for the morale. You'll actually work harder for the promotion if you have at least half a hope that someone's keeping it at least half-way objective, than when it's a purely arbitrary thing where being the best could just as well get you fired instead. (See the plenty of examples where someone destroyed a good company, or fired the best workers, just because the magic words "reducing costs" invariably cause the shares to spike on Wall Street, and that's so useful in a pump-and-dump scheme.)
It's also actually good for productivity and morale to know you'll be given a _fair_ pay for your work, and you're not just working to enrich the 1% richest guys even more. There's a reason why historically an economy based on serfs was better than one based on slaves, and why one based on paid workers was better than both: you're actually more motivated and productive when more of your work is for yourself, than when you're just working to make the master richer and you're doing it only because you have no choice.
As a side-effect of it all, may I also point at the much lower crime problem here? If almost no people are pushed into complete poverty and disillusionment, they also don't have as much an incentive to go mug someone. Yeah, it may not be obvious, but that's also an effect of having
Hmm, ok, it's only fair to admit when I'm wrong. I had understood the initial analogy as beer = the earth, insulation = the atmosphere. If we're talking about heating the Earth's core, that's indeed a whole different thing.
No offense, dude, but go take a physics class. That goes for whoever modded _that_ "informative" too.
1. Heat flows from the sun to the earth, and from both to the vast expanses of open space anyway. It's not the outside space that's heating the Earth, but the Sun.
2. The laws of thermodynamics have to do with atom/mollecule movement, and transfer of heat between bodies in contact. The only (ok, vast majority of) energy flowing in or out here has _nothing_ to do with thermodynamics as such, since there are no two bodies in contact exchanging heat (i.e., exchanging mollecule movement by impact.) What is happening there light being absorbed and radiated, and yes that can happen in the opposite direction just as well. There are relevant laws there, e.g., Stefan-Boltzman, but the second law of thermodynamics isn't it.
E.g., you can cut sheet metal with a focused laser beam even though the heated point is basically a hell of a lot hotter than the laser. It will absorb the light anyway. E.g., to address your "inside" and "outside" concerns, you can fry an ant with a magnifying glass even though the ant ends up hotter than the surrounding air. That's because the energy comes from the sun, not from the outside air.
So, sorry, the GP post was right, you are wrong.
But to get back on topic, what's happening is that the earth receives some radiation energy from the sun, and it radiates some back into space. The equilibrium temperature is when the energy radiated equals the incoming energy. Basically if energy E is incoming, then the equilibrium temperature T is when surface times emissivity times Stefan-Boltzmann constant times T to the 4'th power equals E. That's all.
The "insulation" and its non-uniformity across wavelengths messes things a little, but as long as the temperature variations are relatively small, the wavelength don't shift horribly much, so basically the proportionality stays. And a global warming of 1 Celsius (which at least at one point was all the heating Earth had experienced) isn't enough to throw it off the hook. If the Earth's temperature is, say, approximately 300 Kelvin (for the sake of a nice round number), we're talking a third of a percent increase. Since the rest is constants T1^4/T2^4=E1/E2, so it only takes an increase of (1.00333)^4=1.0134, or 1.34 percent increase in incoming energy to fully explain it. Better yet, since Stefan-Boltzman applies to the Sun too, to fully cause it, the Sun would have to experience the same heating the Earth does. A third of a percent heating of the sun creates the extra energy to heat up the Earth by a third of a percent.
So that's basically all the debate here: did our "insulation" change over time, or is it simply that the Sun got slightly hotter? The former wouldn't explain why Mars is heating up too, while the latter fully does.
Funny the things one can learn by paying attention in physics class, really.
Well, yes, they are a money-making bureaucratic organization, but what I'm saying is that not all money-making bureaucratic organizations are created the same. The full spectrum includes not only MS clones, but also IBM, Novell, Red Hat, Google, Apple, Sony, Symantec, debatably even SCO, etc. Some good, some evil, some smart, some stupid, some debatably neither.
Basically just because someone is out to make money, and may even be _ruthless_ in their pursuit of money, doesn't mean they have to be stupid and self damaging in that pursuit. Shaking down your own customers to pay for yet another copy of the same software they already purchased, is stupid and not very productive. MS knows better than to do that overtly.
It has nothing to do with having ethics. You'll notice I never said MS had ethics. It just has to do with not being stupid and self-destructive. Lack of ethics doesn't automatically equal being the blatant cackling villain that runs around kicking peons and tying maidens to railroad tracks. The world isn't neatly divided like that. Some courses of actions are simply not worth pursuing, regardless of whether you have ethics or not.
The most successful unethical people IRL knew when to present a humane face to the masses and maybe even get sympathy. Al Capone opened kitchen soups. Some of the most successful robbers gave a (token) percentage of the loot to local peasants. Etc. You want the masses to think you're a good guy, not the vampire whose castle they should storm with torches and pitchforks.
So, yes, MS is unethical. No, they won't do something as blatantly stupid as shaking down the victims.
And here's another insight, since you speak of their track records: MS (or rather its management) always got their jollies out of killing other _companies_, not out of killing the little guy. They're a nasty predator all right, but their diet is based on a whole other kind of prey. So, yes, Ballmer will want to "fucking kill google", not to fucking kill Joe Random whose key got stolen by a generator/trojan/dishonest-OEM/whatever. What they want from Joe Random is simply to continue being a happy little sheep in their pen, and not mind being fleeced regularly.
The problem of generated keys and conflict with legit keys isn't new, so we already know what happens. The same existed for XP -- plus the added collison of dishonest OEM's selling one legit serial number to 100 different people who bought their computers with XP preinstalled -- and we already know what Microsoft chose: to not annoy the paying customers. What it did try to do was go after the OEM's who did that, but _not_ after the victims. The victim never had to do more than call an (automated) telephone number and get another key. It's always been that simple.
Yes, there have been some fucktards too historically, but MS was sane about it so far. I'm not saying they're saintly or anything, feel free to still be anti-MS if it makes you feel any better. Just that their sane. Even if you want to see them as some kind of super-willain, well, as super-villains go, MS was the _sane_ kind so far. The kind who's read the evil overlord's list, not the random lunatic kind. It knows when _not_ to do something that would damage itself very quickly.
Look, there are plenty of real reasons to whine about MS, no need to invent bullshit FUD scenarios. That kind of going into bullshit fantasy land, just to have something bad to say about MS, just damages the credibility of the real complaints.
No shit. It's like reading about a strain of flu that cures/prevents AIDS. Where can I get it?
I never would have guessed that so many people are interested in music and games.
I a sense, when you suffer from depression, you're also automatically depressed about something or about a lot of somethings. As I was saying, depression isn't something that stays isolated, like say a bruise or an abcess. It taints your very perception, experiences and expectations of the world and the events around you. It's, if you will, more like being colour blind: everything you see around you is changed by that condition, and different from what a normal person sees. So events and situations which to a normal person would seem anywhere between "who cares" and "ah, shit happens" or "oh well, you have to take the good and the bad", to a depressed person seem like a lot more horrible and personal. The very fact that you seem to get all the bad stuff in the universe (by sheer virtue of perceiving it that way) while everyone around you seems happy or is at least having a lot less problems, makes you question your self-worth, karma, etc. It makes you think about it, think about why all that bad stuff keeps happening to you (without many results, since it's just a perception), think about what you maybe did wrong (without results again, since usually you didn't), in some cases think why some people seem to avoid you (because they don't like hearing your depressing stuff again), etc. It can be sorta like daydreaming, except it's like a perpetual day-nightmare. Briefly, again, there are _lots_ of somethings to be depressed about.
Still, I'm talking from experience. I've been through an episode of depression and demotivation, and I've been known to throw games away in half an hour because I couldn't be arsed to even learn stuff like using the handbrake in an arcade racing game. I can assure you that 30 minutes is _plenty_ to lose motivation in that situation. And 2-3 days is plenty to have your mind occupied with other things, instead of the route you learned yesterday.
Regarding "less mental power", that was maybe the wrong word, but here's what I was trying to say: not that a depressed person is stupid, but that they have other things on their mind. That while a normal person would maybe devote a few more minutes in the evening and some more priority to remembering the route they learned yesterday, a depressed person might go "oh, screw it, it's just another pointless thing that won't work anyway" and retreat back to their own depressing thoughts. So, sure, I'm not surprised that someone would do just as well in a short term task, but worse in a 2-3 days one.
That's what I was wondering too. This whole experiment reminds me of a joke: a scientists puts a flea under on a piece of paper and shouts "JUMP!". The flea jumps. The scientist cuts the flea's legs, puts it back on the same piece of paper and shouts "JUMP!" The flea doesn't jump. The scientist concludes, "When you cut a flea's legs, it become deaf."
And here's why:
1. I'm guessing they didn't take experienced FPS players, but people who had to get past a learning curve. Some probably not even interested in that game, or that kind of game in the first place. I.e., people for whom it was basically work, and who had to learn for that work. I can tell you first hand that being depressed and/or demotivated can impact both work and learning _majorly_.
Sorry, every game has a learning curve, even some you'd think are the most intuitive things and made by the greatest designers. Yet get a non-gamer at the keyboard and you might get an enlightening experience. We've had decades of getting the basic notions and reflexes hammered into our heads, they didn't. Someone else once compared it to a "game grammar". We know it, and even tutorials assume that we already know it. Non-gamers have to learn it from scratch.
I'd expect the problems to be worse in some game designed by psychologists with zero game design background.
So, at any rate, they're asking those people not only to play a game, but likely for most of them it's asking them to learn how to play an experimental game. And it'll be a lot of learning, and a lot of concentration and learning involved. In some cases it will take a lot of willpower to get past that learning curve, if it gets into the frustrating range.
Do I expect someone in their darkest depression to make that effort and muster the concentration? Nope. "Oh, why bother." is pretty much the attitude I'd expect there.
2. It's also worth mentioning that depression isn't just some abstract mood, but brings with it a lot of bad thoughts. It's not just some abstract mood indicator, but a shit-coloured set of glasses that tints (and taints) all perceptions, experiences and expectations. (Including those about the games, but also RL stuff.) So those people are not just abstractly "depressed", but people who've had a heck of a lot of bad and depressing experiences lately, and got disappointed a lot lately, by sheer virtue of that depression tainting their perceptions of it all. They'll tend to think about it a lot.
So if the spatial orientation game requires lots of memorizing routes and such, there'll be inherently less mental power available for that. Where a "normal" person might think "ah-ha, I have to go through the corridor on the left to get back", the depressed one may well be thinking "what a piece of crap, I bet I'll get passed for promotion again, and I bet everyone is gossipping about me behind my back too. Why the heck do I even bother? I might as well kill myself now."
Even if they might take refuge in gaming, they'll require a game that can basically turn off those thoughts, or thinking completely. Something which is simple and captivating, and doesn't require much thinking. Definitely not something which requires complex thought on its own.
3. Or, if you will, 2b: motivation. Remember that we're talking people which are already depressed and tend to perceive everything as worse than it already is, including any goals and rewards in the game, and including the payoff of any long term plan. So if the game isn't immediately rewarding and fun, their motivation will sink much faster than everyone else's. If you make them do something as boring and pointless as just jumping and running through a maze, it will just be perceived as even more boring and pointless. If it requires long term memorizing and planning, the distant reward for it better be extremely worth it, or since it'll be perceived as (A) less of a reward, and (B) as a plan likely to fail anyway. And if that perception drops below a certain point, they'll be too demotivated to try h
So, basically, depending on how much "a lot of time" is, they may have even made a loss? Time literally _is_ money when an employee or two are doing it. You pay salaries for that time. So having someone figure out the focal point, the mounting, build some contraption to hold the LNB in the right place, etc, can end up costing more than $70 quite easily.
Well, not just in this domain, but generally, I've been for a while getting the impression that people just can't deal with large numbers. The intuition just breaks down. Sure, if you're well educated you can do maths with 10^18, but try imagining a really large interval of time, or distance or whatever. Your intuition fails miserably. You just can't really imagine it.
From the intuition point of view, we're not much better than Terry Prattchett's trolls, whose counting IIRC went something like "one, two, many, lots". We're just like that. Past a certain limit it's just the same "many" or "lots" category. A million years doesn't "feel" intuitively much longer than a thousand years, because both are, basically, "lots."
How long is a day? Ok, you know that. You experience that, literally, daily. A month? Sure, you know that too. A year? No problems. Ten years? No problems. A hundred years? Oops. Chances are you haven't lived that long, so no first hand experience. It gets fuzzy. A thousand years? Now it's even fuzzier. You can put some random historical milestones on it, like, "a thousand years ago, was a bit before Hastings", but basically it's already getting to be "lots". Now try a million years. No, seriously, try really imagining a million years interval. Now try ten million years. It's just "lots". You can use the number in maths, because you're a smart guy, but the intuition fails you miserably.
How big is 1 yard or 1m? You know that. A mile? No problem. [...] Now imagine a million miles. Imagine a million light years, for that matter. Bummer, you can't, can you? It's just "lots".
It's not just about evolution. That's why SF works, for example. Our minds just can't comprehend the distances and scales involved, so travelling across the whole flipping galaxy becomes just as "lots" as going over the Atlantic. Intuitively it doesn't "feel" like much more distance.
Or you have settings like Star Wars where basically not that much happened in the Republic for over 20,000 years. And you accept that all right, don't you? In reality that's a mindbogglingly _huge_ interval. In that interval humans went from hitting rocks together to make a crude tool, to lasers and space shuttles. Whole empires raised and fell and completely disappeared in a fraction of that time. But _because_ it's such a huge interval, you intuition fails you utterly there.
Basically, to get back on topic, that's the effect you're seeing there. You're asking people to understand something that happens over millions of years and over billions of specimens. If they're the non-scientific intuitive kind, like most people are, they just can't. You're asking them to imagine something that human imagination just can't accurately deal with.
Sadly, you can't draw a line and build a Berlin Wall between science and the rest of society. Because:
1. As you've said, it's the rest of society who'll have to fund that research. If science is a self-contained isolated entity like the Amish, then, well, don't expect the rest of society to do much for you. But that's actually the least worry.
2. Much more importantly, because scientists aren't created in a test tube or Frankenstein-style. They're recruited from the larger pool of the population. They're the Joe Nerdyguy who preferred to read a physics/chemistry/whatever book instead of being the cool jock in highschool, and Cecilia Nerdygirl who did the same instead of putting up the ever-popular airhead prom-queen act like everyone else.
And every single one of them who grows up thinking that science is just some self-important clique of clowns, and just a bunch of unproven dogmas no better than ID or creationism, is one you've lost from that pool of available recruits. Then they'll go do something more productive than reading up on that "nonsense". Why would you get a passion for any kind of science, if you grew up on thinking it's just a bunch of nonsense spewed by a bunch of arse-clowns?
So managing perceptions is _vital_ to still have a pool of potential recruits in 10 or 20 years.
Terraforming makes for nice fiction, but misses the mark that the planet must _already_ be earth-like enough. Or you must be capable of the godlike feat of increasing its mass a few times, changing its rotation speed, melt its core again, etc. Otherwise the same reasons that shafted its original atmosphere, will shaft whatever atmosphere you create.
:P
E.g., for Mars, it's simply too small and it cooled down too fast. (Well, just right for its size and mass, actually.) So the magnetic field is much too weak to shield it from solar winds, and its low gravity doesn't do much to hold an atmosphere either. So it just escaped and was swept away into space. Any atmosphere you're going to create there while terraforming, is going to just go away too.
The only way to terraform Mars would be to (A) increase its size to something more earth like, _and_ (B) melt its core again, and (C) bring from somewhere all the elements that got swept away in the past, e.g., a metric buttload of hydrogen, and maybe (D) fiddle with its rotation speed too, so that core you just melted generates enough magnetic field. Does it sound like pure SF yet?
Heck, _if_ anyone were to start terraforming anywhere, the easiest start wouldn't be Mars, but Venus. It's about the same size as Earth, about the same density too, it still has a magma core, and it's in the right band to support life too. Why Venus ended up the poisonous wasteland instead of Earth-like? It spins way too slowly. So it pretty much doesn't have any magnetic shielding against the solar winds. The very weak magnetic field it has is mostly due to interaction between solar winds and its atmosphere, rather than an internal dynamo. So without shielding, it pretty much lost all its hydrogen. Whatever water it had evaporated, got ionized sooner or later and the hydrogen was just swept away. So now the atmosphere is almost pure CO2 and some nytrogen.
By now you probably get the idea that terraforming even Venus is just nuts. You'd have to bring a heck of a lot of hydrogen from somewhere else (from where and at what cost?) _and_ give it a good spin (with what energy and just how?) _and_ somehow start some plate tectonics mechanism to get the convection currents going in the planet and start its dynamo (again, how?) _and_ oh, for that matter, get rid of all that carbon in the atmosphere or all the water will just boil off. Pretty tall order, don't you think?
So "appears just out of our reach...but only just" must be the understatement of the century. Maybe if by "just" you mean "not in another million years."
The story is actually that someone's finally doing something to defuse, well, what Penny Arcade called the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. (Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad.) There are a lot of people who did just that: took the supposed anonymity of the internet as just an oportunity to harrass, defame, cause grief, etc.
It can be a lot of damage even if you're not an "ImportantPerson(TM)", because we live in an age where bosses google their employees, neighbours google each other, and the village gossip googles the whole freakin' village for some gossip material. We're also in an age where people might glue posters to your door or drive you out of town because they found someone else by the same name rumoured to be a sex offender in some anonymous blog, or as was once the case because they were too stupid to know what "paeditrician" means. (It's a kind of doctor, not a paedophile.) We also live in an age of hypocrisy where someone might hold some rumour against you, not because they believe it, not because they are any better, but because it doesn't fit their bullshit PR corporate image.
So basically carpet bombing the internet, Wikipedia included, with bits of defamation like "JohnTurner admitted in 2007 that he was trying hard to overcome his kiddy porn addiction" or "JohnTurner said he stopped beating his wife nowadays" or "see JohnTurner's guide to surfing for porn undetected at work and using the corporate appserver as a warez site. Excellent reading." can cause a lot of harm even if you're not some celebrity.
E.g., the HR drone for your next job googles you, they don't have the time or the inclination to do a thorough checking. Most of what everyone does at all stages is actually looking for some excuse, any excuse, no matter how lame, to discard as many candidates as possible. It can be just because they didn't like your email provider, or it can be literally by numerology or tarot. (Don't laugh, it's not a joke, there _are_ companies which use numerology or tarot to thin out the candidates pool. Assign a number to each letter in your name, sum them up, sum the digits up until you get a single digit, see if it matches the sum for the company name. If not, your CV goes directly into the garbage bin.) The underlying assumption is that you're just yet another dime-a-dozen peon in a sea of perfectly replaceable and interchangeable peons. PHBs love that assumption. So noone's going to do a thorough checking just for you, see the context, see if such a guide to surfing for porn actually exists anywhere, etc. They'll just google until something bad comes up, then stop.
And it's maybe not a bad thing that someone is suing such a fuckwad and proving once again that anonymity isn't as granted as people think. Sure, noone will bother getting your name out of the ISP if you just posted on Slashdot during work hours, but if you take the step to actively harrass and defame someone, or break any other law, all that anonymity may well be harder to maintain than just being behind a modem. For a lot of people it might just take the essential component out of that greater internet fuckwad recipe. It may even be a good thing.
Well, if anyone ever invented something like what you describe, it would be a very useful thing indeed. However, to the best of my knowledge even that is one thing that quantum computing hasn't (yet) been hyped as capable of doing. Not in the form you describe, anyway. Yes, we'd all love such an insanely parallel machine, but it's not going to happen like that, and not as a quantum computer.
For starters, a set of qubits can hold a lot of information, basically some analog numbers, but it doesn't automatically implement any set of arbitrary constraints at them. Pretty much the only constraint you get, so to speak, for free, is that the sum of all those numbers must be 1. They're probabilities to be in any given state, and the total probability must be 1. That's it.
Second, it really just holds a probability, _not_ all the possible states. Changing the state pretty much means shifting some of the probabilities around. So if you're hoping to actually hold and compute all possible solutions there simultaneously, you'll probably be in for a bit of a disappointment.
Even if you assigned one of those probabilities to one possible solution, it's like saying that you assign every bit in the CPUs registers to whether or not one particular possible solution is correct or not. Just because you can assign some meaning to a bit, doesn't mean you get that for free. You still have to figure out an algorithm that actually changes all those bits to the right values. Or in the case of quantum computers, which shifts the probabilities just right.
Third, the problem anyway would be, basically, implementing those constraints anyway. If you actually wanted to get them for free, you'd have to pretty much design a mollecule which automatically enforces them. To the best of my knowledge, noone ever proposed (seriously) doing that, but if you wanted to, that's what it would mean. For the sieve, you'd have to figure a system where basically if the "bit" for 2 is set, then the "bits" for 4, 6, 8, etc, inherently can't be set. It's a more complicated thing than it sounds.
Fourth, the problem so far is scaling. So far the best anyone ever produced is a 7 qubit mollecule that's just about useful enough to factor 15 into 3*5. But the problems grow through the roof as you want to make systems with more qubits, because it becomes insanely more difficult to set and read the status of all of them, and to design a mollecule which actually acts that way. The problem isn't just having the silicon or budget for an extra bit, like in normal computer, but pretty much involves inventing something completely new that can possibly work like that. It took years to even get the one that factors 15.
Fifth, scaling in the other direction: you have a very short time after which the system goes decoherent. Basically you have to figure out an EM pulse that sets the spin probabilities just right, but the system starts pretty much immediately to goes out of whack on its own. Each mollecule in that solution starts doing its own thing and electrons are randomly flipping on their own. For a very short time it means you just lose a (very) little precision on the analog numbers represented, but any longer and it's as good as a random number. So basically if your whole algorith didn't end in that time, tough shit, you're out of luck. Don't think QC will solve too complex problems for you any time soon.
Sixth, well, just because some mathematicians designed a language for something, doesn't mean by far that it actually exists. Mathematicians are very smart people, and unlike physics maths isn't tied as such to the natural world. You can build a maths theory around anything. A lot of them aren't even supposed to represent an actual body in the real world, but some very particular way to calculate something. E.g., as the most trivial example, there are n-dimensional geometries, but that doesn't mean you'll be able to actually build a 6-dimensional cube in the real world any time soon. Those geometries are supposed to model other kinds
IBM is a big entity. They have a lot of pure science research going on, but they also have more PR bullshitters than Saruman had orcs. Are you sure which department you got your info from? So far a lot of other research PR announcements coming from IBM have been, well, certainly not outright lies, but ommited enough context that a layman would be highly likely to jump to a very mis-leading conclusion. E.g., when they tell you that they tested a 100 GHz transistor and hype how useful that would be for future CPUs, they deliberately ommit to tell you that a whole CPU will _never_ run at the speed of an individual transistor.
And so it is with quantum computers too. IBM was actually a lot lighter on the bullshit than usual, I must admit that, but what may not be obvious is that basically they didn't as much create anything even resembling a universal computer, but:
1. The mollecule used is pretty much hard-coded to implement that one algorithm. Their 7 qubits are 7 of the atoms (2x C and 5x F atoms) in that specialized mollecule.
I.e., that for every single problem you'll ever have to solve on this kind of computer, you have to go through years of research just to design the mollecule that solves it. And for all the years of research, the best they've come up with so far is factoring the number 15. So it's a hell of a lot of a mis-leading potential to think that QC is the cure-all replacement for digital computers, like the hypesters claim.
2. Basically it _is_ an analog computer. That's why they used a whole vial of the stuff, and not 1 atom. Getting that complex state out of it, given that the wave form is statistics, needs a big enough sample for the statistics to work.
Trust me, I had read that, and it sounds a lot less impressive if you know at least a little quantum mechanics, than what the PR bullshitters spin it into. Saying that you need N complex numbers to describe the state, and being able to change that whole state in one go, doesn't actually mean you can process N arbitrary complex numbers in any possible way in one go.
And the problems are more complex than that. For starters I've never read about an obvious way to actually get that complex probabilistic state out of it. Schroedinger's cat is only a mixture of dead and alive until you open the lid: then it's either dead or alive, _not_ a mixture of both. Wave shapes are just probabilities, not actually an analog number and not actually something that you can measure on one electron/atom/whatever. That electron's spin is a theoretical probabilistic mixture of up and down only until you measure it: then it's only a 1 or a 0, i.e., a single bit. You _could_ measure the whole analog domain if you had a lot of electrons, but not just one. It's like trying to get the exact probability of a four-leaf clover by picking a single clover. It doesn't work that way.
Well, I appreciate a good ad-hominem as much as the next guy, but I must say even here you disappoint. You _assume_ tha
It so happens that that's perfectly useless in practice. Schroedinger's cat is a very useful mental image for an introduction to quantum mechanics, but for any kind of computing theory the deal is that at some point you have to open the lid and see if the cat is dead or not. The uncertainty ends there and then. At that point it all falls back to being just a normal bit, no more. The cat is either dead or not dead.
Ok, quantum wave functions are a bit more complex than that, but saying that it holds all possible states at the same time is still as bullshit as it gets. No it doesn't. You have a wave function, and any useful way of using it, is essentially using that wave functuion, _not_ some nebulous having all states at the same time.
There's a lot of smoke and mirrors in the computing industry as it is, and there's this dangerous "well, everyone else is doing it" precedent we've allowed. The bullshitters and marketters run the show unchecked. And the whole "quantum" deal just gave them a lot more ammo and some defenseless targets to use it on. You can bury a layperson alive in bullshit before they even smell anything wrong. The statement that it holds everything and calculates everything at the same time is just such bullshit. What happens in practice is a lot more complex and a lot more limited.
I could say the same, seeing that you completely ommit the "particle" aspect. The electron isn't just wave, it's both.
No, here's the deal: at some point you actually measure it and it _is_ in just one place.
Think the interference experiment again, because it's a very fundamental thing. You have an electron source, you run them through two slits, you get the interference pattern on a CRT-like coated screen. You know it already, right? Well, here's the deal:
1. Yes, the wave aspect is inherent, because you can get an interference pattern even if you emit one electron at a time. You already knew that, obviouly. But
2. For each such electron you get a single blip of light in a very well defined place. You do not get the screen illuminating all over the place, you get a single scintilation in a very well defined place. There is one single atom or mollecule hit by that electron. The wave function may spread all over the place, but what it really tells you is the probability of the electron actually being there. But other than in a metaphoric sense, the electron itself is still only in one place, and hits one single atom, not every single atom intersecting that wave function.
I wasn't saying that electrons and atoms act like baseballs and planets, far from it. But they're no
Actually, quantum encryption and computing are different things.
Quantum encryption is, well, basically nothing about using quantum mechanics to _encrypt_, but to send the key (and maybe the data too). The idea is that you send single photons. So basically if someone tapped into the line, you can't split the photon and get only a bit of the signal. Either you get it or the endpoint gets it, but not both. It makes man-in-the-middle attacks a bit harder. In fact, it claims to make it outright impossible.
Since the whole idea here is to elliminate the possibility for a man in the middle, intrusion detection is something valuable. Mind you, if the sending single photons was as un-interceptable as originally claimed, intrusion should be simply not possible, so I'm a bit stumped as to why would they want to detect something impossible. Maybe they know something we don't about how impossible it really is? (E.g., come to think of it, a laser kind of device inserted on the line could multiply that original photon thousands of times, all the clones having the exact same phase, polarisation, whatever.)
It may be pie-in-the-sky, I don't know, but at least it's one of those sane ideas that aren't too impossible to understand even for the layman. The only "quantum" thing about it is that you send individual quanta of light, i.e., photons. Since it's only one and it's indivisible, only one endpoint can get it. All simple and sane, IMHO.
Quantum computing, on the other hand, I don't know... there must be some sane researchers out there who know what they're doing, no doubt. But the media and marketting hype has drowned it all in so much bullshit it could fertilize a few acres, so from the layman (even with a decent grasp of physics and computing) point of view, it's hard to even tell what it would _really_ do, how it would work at all, and how would it be useful at all.
I've even seen such bullshit claims like that it basically holds all possible states at the same time, so it can calculate anything instantly, since the solution state is already one it simultaneously holds. Which is blatantly bull. If it simply holds all possible states at the same time, that's as good as saying that it has no state at all, or you can't measure it. To get an answer out of the computer, you need to get out of it a particular state which represents the result of the calculation. By that logic I could give you a CD with all possible 4 million DWORD (4 byte, 32 bit) values, from -2 million to 2 million, one of which is the result to your problem. There you go, any problem that has a DWORD result already has the result on that CD, so it was "calculated" instantly. Isn't it an impressive feat? I don't even know your problem, but that CD already has the result to it. It's also completely freakin' useless, if you don't know which one of them. That CD as such holds no more actual usable information that that it's a 32 bit number, which you knew in the first place.
Not saying that that's what the actual researchers study, but that's the kind of bogus info that you see from the outside. It's damn hard to tell if it's actually something that might work, or just snake oil to get a clueless VC's money. On par with extracting free energy out of water, the Infinium console, and other such fine con schemes that some people actually dumped millions into.
The only sorta working quantum implementations so far, are basically not even as much quantum computers as hyped, as glorified analog computers. The thing about quantum mechanics is that 99% of it are probabilities.
As some trivial examples, you can't tell for example exactly where an electron is in a potential well (e.g., in a CMOS transistor), or in some cases even if it is still in the potential well or it's out of it already, but you can calculate a probability cloud of, basically, what are the chances of it being in this particular point. Or if you do interference with electrons (think the school physics experiment with shining a light through two thin slots, o
The two don't really contradict each other that much. Google's spike is relatively small and it's really a spike in the first 1-3 months. By the 6th month it's basically settled. In this paper half the time they graph in whole year increments, so that kind of a spike would be averaged into the first year. So, no, they don't contradict each other as such. And in at least one of the graphs by month in this paper (HPC1), there is something that looks like a spike in the first month.
/dev/nul or something.) Well, now we know they're not actually any worse. If you don't actually need the extra bandwidth or lower latency or a 15,000 RPM drive, then you can just as well drop a SATA drive in that machine. Even for 10,000 RPM, 4.5ms, there are the WD Raptor drives with SATA interface, and they're cheaper than a SCSI or FC drive. For a lot of stuff you don't even need those, a 7200 RPM will do perfectly fine.
More importantly, they don't contradict each other in respect to the rest of the curve. With or without that spike, the curve just doesn't look like the bathtub fairy tale that drive makers try to bullshit us with. You're led into a false sense of security that, basically, if a drive didn't fail within the first couple of months, then it'll be at a (nearly) constant and very small probability to fail for the whole next 5 years, and only then it starts rising again. Basically that if you upgrade your drives every 4 years, whatever didn't fail within 2-3 months, heck, it's very unlikely to fail. And the curve just doesn't look that way. The probability to fail rises continuously, and (again whether that spike actually exists or not) after as little as 1 year you're above the starting height of the "bathtub" already.
In retrospect, I don't even know when and why the "bathtub" myth even started. The bathtub distribution was originally for stuff like electronic components, without moving parts. For something with mechanical wear and tear like a hard drive, who the heck came up with the idea that the same curve must apply? Shouldn't it have been common sense all along that it linearly gets more wear and tear?
Both papers also tell us that the manufacturers' MTBF numbers are, basically, pure bullshit. They're some impressive number put there for the benefit of the marketting department, not because someone at Seagate/Maxtor/whatever actually believes that number.
In retrospect, again, we should have had an alarm signal when the manufacturers lowered there warranty from 3 to 1 year. If indeed there was (1) the MTBF they claim, and more importantly (2) the bathtub curve they claim, the reduction wouldn't have even made too much of a difference. I mean, most drives would have failed withing a couple of months, followed by barely a trickle of deffective drives for the next 5 years straight. Why bother doing the bad-for-marketting thing of lowering the warranty in that scenario? Or did they already know that they lie?
And finally, a very important point is that (again, bullshit marketting claims be damned) there is no difference in reliability between cheap SATA and expensive SCSI and FC. There is this assumption permeating the whole society that if something is expensive, it _must_ automatically be better and more durable than the cheap stuff. That if you buy a big plasma TV, it's automatically better and last longer than an el-cheapo CRT. (Yeah, right. Plasma is actually known for its decay over time.) A whole edifice of consumerism, conspicuous consumption, and SFV (Stupid Fashion Victim) syndrome is based on that bullshit excuse to spend more than you need to spend. "Yeah, but it'll be better and last longer!" Yeah, right.
I've actually met people who wouldn't even _consider_ putting a ATA drive in any kind of server. "What, you're going to put your enterprise data on ATA drives???" (Said with a perplexed look, as if I had proposed flushing it to
On one hand, you have my sympathy. On the other... Sorry to be an asshole, but...
1. "Data" is not the plural of "anecdote". If your expertise is dating 1 or 2 guys who happened to be both, there's a reason why statistics uses bigger samples. Because judging based on 1 or 2 samples can get you all sorts of funny coincidences. It's like making a study of clover based on a single plant, and concluding that all clover has 4 leaves.
2. On the other hand, if you _have_ dated enough men to have an even remotely signifficant sample, and they were porn addicted and aggressive... have you considered that maybe, just maybe, you're just seeing the Biased Sample fallacy in action? I.e., that that's the sample _you_ chose? Maybe it's time to try dating another kind of man? Just a thought.
I know it's every schoolgirl's dream to have the _fashionable_ antisocial jock/thug as a boyfriend, and that Nice Guy (TM) nerds are sooo boring, insecure and unfashionable. Plus (and funnily this doesn't come from a guy, but a female psychologist) there's this strange correlation between girls who grew up on stories like Cinderella and Beauty And The Beast, and women who get beat up by their husband later. Can it be that IRL the Beast does _not_ turn into a gentle, caring prince, no matter how much you nag^H^H^H love him? Could it be that picking the most fashionable beast for a BF isn't really as smart as it sounds at the time?
But at any rate, if you only date X (where X can be anything, including "aggressive male beast" or "heartless bitch" or whatever), it only just says that that't the kind of person _you_ chose to be with. It's like choosing to drive a SUV and then complaining that all cars you drove were gas-guzzlers. Try another kind of car, if that becomes a problem.
I dunno... maybe it's just me, maybe I still haven't learned my lesson, but I'll take a smart kid over being the father of the school bully any day.
Now I'm not arguing that people should surf for porn at work or anything, and I don't do it personally (if nothing else, I'm not stupid enough to risk my job for that anyway), but just a couple of points:
1. This wasn't a porn site, but a chat room. Even _if_ it was sexnet or something, for anyone to get offended, they'd have to go and actively read what's on the guy's screen. Maybe even shuffle windows around (I doubt that he'd not at least minimize it, even if he were stupid enough not to close it.) It's not like having a big picture that anyone can see by just walking at the wrong point in space.
I mean, wtf, at that point whoever is offended, might as well read the guy's emails too. Do we start having policies against emails to one's spouse, then, because some nosy busybody might get offended by those? (I can see how a couple of ultra-feminists could get offended even by asking the wife to have dinner ready at a different hour, or indeed at all. I can see some religious nut-job getting offended by an email mentioning another religion, or in some cases mentioning evolution. Etc.)
Or maybe it would be saner to have "mind your own f-ing business" start being just common sense. If you've been rifling through someone's drawers or their computer, then flippin' understand that you're not a passive bystander being actively harrassed, but someone who shouldn't have been doing that to start with. Someone showing you smut pics or calling you in their office while they have a stack of porn mags on their desk is harrassment, but you finding them while actively looking on their computer isn't harrassment, it's being the one in the wrong. Don't want to be offended by someone's chat logs? Then don't flippin' read them to start with. There we go. Problem solved.
2. Frankly, I don't buy the idea that porn makes people all hostile and aggressive. If that were the case, then most men at work and half the women (you'd be surprised how many of those watch porn too) would be berserking half the time. Even if they only look at porn at home, you'd think you'd notice some effect after years of it. Even if you postulate a very short term effect, surfing for porn at work isn't that horribly uncommon, so you'd notice a lot more hostility in the workplace if that was the case.
After some of the power trips I've seen, it sounds just about right.
Jeeze, this so makes me glad I'm not in the USA. It may sound like trolling, but I'm just genuinely shocked.
So basically in your world it's not a bad thing to shaft someone of their pension money, just because it saves a multi-billion dollar corporation some money? Jeeze, what a sad little world it must be down there, if people even find it _normal_ to be shafted for the company's benefit. It's not necessarily a bad thing, because some corporation made a few bucks out of it. Right.
That guy worked there for 19 years, for good or bad, and I may add that he couldn't have done that bad a job if they kept him for 19 years. But at least he worked there for 19 years, and the pension was pretty much part of the payment they promised him. Whatever he did at the end that got him fired, let's say maybe even if he loafed a whole flipping 1 year at the end, there's no justice in shafting him out of that payment for the other 18 previous years. The pension is nothing more than someone else handling some savings for you for your old age, so basically it's just like saying "if we fire you, you have to give us back whatever you saved while working for us. Oh, and we'll take your car too, while we're at it, it was bought out of the wage we paid you."
I mean, WTF, in the rest of the world you'd need some civil lawsuit and some serious damage caused by the employee, to just take their money like that. Taking someone's pension just because they were on a chat room before retirement, now that's rich.
Plus, it seems to me an inherently sociopathic thing to go trolling for guys to shaft in their old age, just because it saves the corporation a little money. It's pretty much as close to rock bottom as it gets on any empathy-towards-fellow-humans scale. Having some dignity in the old age is what I'd call close to a human right, not to mention basic courtesy from society to the members on whose work it's based. The moment anyone can look at an old guy or gal and think "let's shaft them out of their pension for some money", we're already established where he ranks on the APD scale.
Makes me damn glad that over here the pensions are handled by the government or by the big insurance firms, so they're completely out of the employer's reach. No matter what else you did, you paid your pension payments, so it's only rightful that you get your pension.
And make no mistake, one way or another this guy did too. Whether it was an actual monthly sum he paid, or just implied. When you're promised X dollars a month pension, it's directly convertible into "how much I'd have to pay per month at some other pension fund for that." As I was saying, one way or the other, it's part of the salary this guy negotiated and planned around. So retroactively shafting him out of a hefty chunk of, well, basically the negotiated salary for 19 years, is not justice by any kind of reckoning. WTH-ever damage that chatting during work hours did, it just doesn't justify awarding the employer that kind of damages. You'd need to blow something up in the rest of the world to end up paying your employer that much in damages, not just open a freaking chat room window. Better yet, in the rest of the world, they'd have to bring you to court to get that kind of damages out of you, not just help themselves to it.