I wouldn't bet on "most people" knowing that CFCs are also greenhouse gases. I consider myself pretty well-read, and that was news to me -- to me the issue with CFCs was always ozone.
But now I know. If I had been a journalist writing the piece, I would have clarified the issue.
At least here in Finland piping hot water into buildings is a common form of heating in the cities, and there are experiments in using the same system for cooling in the summer. There is nothing particularly special in the idea of plugging as server farm as a heat source.
Experimental physics existed before the LHC... However, you were dealing with experiments that were looking at indirect factors to again strengthen "theory". The Direct Observable particles, didn't come until the first particle accelerator came online. Then, and ONLY then, could we formulate experiments that allowed us to DIRECTLY observe the particles in nature we knew we should find in certain circumstances.
This is how it's always worked; you are just drawing an arbitrary line. Experimentalists have always been trying to come up with clever experimental setups to isolate and reveal the explaining factors that someone has theorized. For example, the luminiferous aether didn't show up no matter how hard they tried. With proper experimentation, it could also be shown that phlogiston was bullshit and the better idea was oxygen combining with other materials.
Greeks had the atomic theory already, but we didn't need particle accelerators to get to the "real observable" particles to demonstrate that indeed this is the way things work.
And once we got to the point of "seeing" atoms, we figured out that they are made of smaller components. With your limitless optimism for discovery, what makes you stop now and say that we've got to the "real observable" particles? The Standard Model was a very good theory with strong predictive power but we're going to need something new to get the warp drives you're expecting...
This seems to be an example of some kind of unbounded technological/scientific optimism that disregards the fact that during that history you're using as proof, we have also refined an understanding of physical limits that have not fundamentally changed. Think about laws of thermodynamics or the speed of light as a hard limit, among other things. We are not getting around those any time soon.
Of course if you're counting on a complete revolution of Physics, you're going to need "extraordinary evidence" to overturn a lot of what we already know. This is a tall order; even the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics do not do things like totally overturn Newton's ideas in our everyday life. You can't just expect these kinds of things to happen.
Then there is just some weirdness in the post...
The laws of physics used to be something we could ONLY theorize, as we believed there was no real tangible way to TEST those theories. The LHC and CERN have shown us that this is not so. Same goes for the Photon and Graviton
What? The laws of physics have always had to be testable, otherwise you're just doing math. This is the reason the LHC was built, to be an experimental instrument. I do not understand the point about photons and gravitons; the former is a well-known quantum, the latter is theoretical. So far we haven't been able to quantize gravity.
We simply start thinking in 3 dimensions or in radically new ways that the earth has never seen
Yeah, and time is a cube, eh?
The Limitations of Physics are only limitations, because we do not yet fully understand the forces that created this Universe
No, limitations probably still are limitations, even when you develop a better understanding of what is going on. Stuff will fall down even tomorrow, even if you could demonstrate that you can quantize gravity. Getting around strongly established phenomena by better explanations would mean there is some until now completely non-observed part of the world we could exploit. This rarely happens so that what didn't work today, magically starts working tomorrow.
Nokia had issues a long time before Elop; Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo was a bean counter, not a technology visionary. The Windows Phone gambit at least enabled Nokia to offload the phone business to Microsoft...
I have this impression though that your people are coming to their senses a bit, aren't they? Which would be great, as Sweden is being held as the moral beacon and example for Finland, so we always have to wait for "permission" from you to do things, otherwise the left complains that we are "no longer a civlized Nordic country".
I am not really sure what exactly the "entry-level jobs" would actually be in our economy... there is only so much need for burger-flippers. This is also the reason why I am very skeptical of in particular the less-educated refugees/immigrants ever becoming gainfully employed. If we have issues with nonskilled youngsters of our own, how are we going to employ nonskilled grown-up foreigners?
Norway has had an interesting experience along these lines, by the way. Their own young people pretty much just refuse to do anything, and all have academic degrees... so guess what? Now Norway is concerned that we Finns must learn more Swedish at schools so that we could produce labourers for jobs their own kids refuse to do.
It works in Finland all the same. We got the absurd "civilization being destroyed in Finland due to university budget cuts" story on Slashdot for the exact same reason -- the politically lefty types want to create a negative sentiment abroad that they can then point to, and demand that we must do something to fix our emerging bad reputation. As if we'd been seen as some shining beacon of everything great and good before...
"you go to university and get a Ph.D. at the discretion of the state"
Actually, being a Finn, I see the problem more like being that people hang out at the university at their discretion until they're 30, and they might either get a Ph.D. or not... some cuts may be in order.
The Swedish People's Party did achieve more than they ever wished possible though, with the compulsory Swedish-education starting at sixth grade and having essentially their own programme written as "national language strategy" of the government, with all the loaded language and whatnot.
But that's what they're good at -- providing a convenient extra 10 seats, especially when everyone seemed to want to be in government so that the True Finns wouldn't.
In other words, this is exactly what I expected it to be -- butthurt lefties trying to raise up negative sentiments abroad, even when the UH really doesn't mean anything to your average slashdot reader. The "ooh, look at how we are perceived abroad now!" tactic is typical. In reality, nobody cares, but just might end up with the notion that something awful is happening in Finland.
I am a UH CS dept alumnus just like Torvalds is, but if something's got to give in our current economic situation, something's got to give. As I see it, we already over-educate very average Master's degree holders at mostly average universities. Not everyone actually needs an academic education that tends to last until the person's 30s (we've got very slow students as well). I find that despite having gone to that particular school, I am mostly self-educated in most things, even though I've got the degree diploma. So it is more important to teach people how to teach themselves, than to formally over-educate them.
To make our universities better, we actually might look into raising the bar a bit and doing less but better.
Finland has a revolutionary system with three teachers per class and 20 student caps
I wonder where this three teachers per class idea comes from, I've never heard anything of the sort, and I'm Finnish and have gone through said system. There is one teacher per class, sometimes an assistant, and two teachers per class in cases where the class size is very big. Because of cutbacks, we've had to stuff as many kids into a classroom as we can -- Finland is not doing too well at the moment when it comes to government finances.
But the system does have a lot of strengths, among other things the fact that teachers are well educated and it is a very respected profession with a lot of autonomy. They don't want to screw up the kids' futures a bit like a doctor wouldn't want to kill a patient, because it was competitive to get into teacher education to begin with...
Also, even though our school system does encourage kids to think for themselves, I would offer a somewhat conservative take as to why it works -- it really still is a somewhat traditional, teacher-led system. And of course it helps that Finland is for the time being a rather homogenous society where it is understood that if you are supposed to listen to the teacher, you are supposed to listen to the teacher.
The argument that "business" should not have to do anything with disabled people as they create costs is particularly concerning. It means exclusion from most of the workings of the world as "business" is what is supposed to run the world. Another problem is the rather nasty attitudes about placing blame and the hyperbole about wanting to deny others their ability. It's the sort of paranoia out of Ayn Rand really, and the most aggressive people might actually be able to justify things I'd rather not contemplate, if they come to the conclusion that we're living "undeserved" lives.
It is quite a feat that it's nearly enough to radicalize me, and I'm a guy who is mostly interested in things "working" in general, and am even amenable to arguments that SOMETIMES it MIGHT be true that some of the complaints of the other side may have merit, and that not quite everything is necessary. But then again, I already give up on a lot of things, even though they may not understand it.
Guess what, an even better idea would be to put them into these huge institutions where everything could be centralized so there is not even a need for transporting them anywhere...
And now that the cost center is well defined, the taxpayer can have complete control over the finances!
- Pure market solution would not provide for this - Market solution with "guidance" is wrong as it interferes with the pure market solution - Government solution is wrong because it taxes people, but at least people see how they are being manhandled by government. It is also a worse solution, so we still prefer it because it is.... worse.
Not necessarily. If the majority of people agree that, say, accessibility is desirable, be it whether they pay through taxes or some "hidden" cost, then it remains to decide what is the best way to implement the goal.
If it is then agreed that the best way to get disabled people included in the world is to make sure that competition does not mean accessibility is sacrificed, then they might not be interested in getting this "tax signal" at all.
I am not sure if, if one really seeks a solution that inclusively works in the real world, you can break up these kinds of costs into separate components that you could then just tax people with. They just need to be a part of the big picture in a way that you can't just constantly "re-evaluate" in terms of whether they in particular have now become "too expensive".
Integration into the services on the overall market is just simply more efficient. Certainly the cost is passed on to the consumer, but the providers will just keep on improving how they do whatever they do... this improves the entire service, accessibility included.
The problem with that kind of reasoning is that most services in society actually are provided by private businesses, and rightfully so, as that kind of an arrangement comes with various benefits that you are certainly aware of. Not only is access inclusive, it will, in the long term cause the services to actually improve according to just who happens to do things better. We can of course discuss what the actual market mechanism is that is used to send the appropriate signals -- it does not need to be as ludicrously heavy-handed as some slashdot posters would like to make it sound like.
I fail to see how some separate government arrangement is, in the modern world, any different from shoving disabled people back into bureaucratic institutions -- and at that point it is all too easy to start reducing the so-called "necessary" tax amount to maintain even that.
At least over here in Europe I mostly do not see this kind of concern from businesses or business-minded individuals. The attitude mostly is that this is just something that is taken out of competition by just agreeing to take care of it, if by some kind of agreed upon standards if needed, and that's it.
If you could sell your manufacturing etc capability for $7B and then move back in in a very lightweight way, the answer would probably be "yes". I do not really think Nokia should be going back into phones but if they can license the brand in this way, why not.
The IP was kept by Nokia, it was just licensed to MS. As a shareholder I am quite glad the floundering phone business was offloaded the MS before it sank the company. Currently Nokia has cash, is profitable, and is well-positioned in the networks business... not bad in my view.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't bet on "most people" knowing that CFCs are also greenhouse gases. I consider myself pretty well-read, and that was news to me -- to me the issue with CFCs was always ozone.
But now I know. If I had been a journalist writing the piece, I would have clarified the issue.
The joke was that there is no news in Truth and no truth in News.
At least here in Finland piping hot water into buildings is a common form of heating in the cities, and there are experiments in using the same system for cooling in the summer. There is nothing particularly special in the idea of plugging as server farm as a heat source.
Really, you have nothing but grandstanding.
This is how it's always worked; you are just drawing an arbitrary line. Experimentalists have always been trying to come up with clever experimental setups to isolate and reveal the explaining factors that someone has theorized. For example, the luminiferous aether didn't show up no matter how hard they tried. With proper experimentation, it could also be shown that phlogiston was bullshit and the better idea was oxygen combining with other materials.
Greeks had the atomic theory already, but we didn't need particle accelerators to get to the "real observable" particles to demonstrate that indeed this is the way things work.
And once we got to the point of "seeing" atoms, we figured out that they are made of smaller components. With your limitless optimism for discovery, what makes you stop now and say that we've got to the "real observable" particles? The Standard Model was a very good theory with strong predictive power but we're going to need something new to get the warp drives you're expecting...
This seems to be an example of some kind of unbounded technological/scientific optimism that disregards the fact that during that history you're using as proof, we have also refined an understanding of physical limits that have not fundamentally changed. Think about laws of thermodynamics or the speed of light as a hard limit, among other things. We are not getting around those any time soon.
Of course if you're counting on a complete revolution of Physics, you're going to need "extraordinary evidence" to overturn a lot of what we already know. This is a tall order; even the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics do not do things like totally overturn Newton's ideas in our everyday life. You can't just expect these kinds of things to happen.
Then there is just some weirdness in the post...
What? The laws of physics have always had to be testable, otherwise you're just doing math. This is the reason the LHC was built, to be an experimental instrument. I do not understand the point about photons and gravitons; the former is a well-known quantum, the latter is theoretical. So far we haven't been able to quantize gravity.
Yeah, and time is a cube, eh?
No, limitations probably still are limitations, even when you develop a better understanding of what is going on. Stuff will fall down even tomorrow, even if you could demonstrate that you can quantize gravity. Getting around strongly established phenomena by better explanations would mean there is some until now completely non-observed part of the world we could exploit. This rarely happens so that what didn't work today, magically starts working tomorrow.
Nokia had issues a long time before Elop; Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo was a bean counter, not a technology visionary. The Windows Phone gambit at least enabled Nokia to offload the phone business to Microsoft...
I have this impression though that your people are coming to their senses a bit, aren't they? Which would be great, as Sweden is being held as the moral beacon and example for Finland, so we always have to wait for "permission" from you to do things, otherwise the left complains that we are "no longer a civlized Nordic country".
I am not really sure what exactly the "entry-level jobs" would actually be in our economy... there is only so much need for burger-flippers. This is also the reason why I am very skeptical of in particular the less-educated refugees/immigrants ever becoming gainfully employed. If we have issues with nonskilled youngsters of our own, how are we going to employ nonskilled grown-up foreigners?
Norway has had an interesting experience along these lines, by the way. Their own young people pretty much just refuse to do anything, and all have academic degrees... so guess what? Now Norway is concerned that we Finns must learn more Swedish at schools so that we could produce labourers for jobs their own kids refuse to do.
It works in Finland all the same. We got the absurd "civilization being destroyed in Finland due to university budget cuts" story on Slashdot for the exact same reason -- the politically lefty types want to create a negative sentiment abroad that they can then point to, and demand that we must do something to fix our emerging bad reputation. As if we'd been seen as some shining beacon of everything great and good before...
"you go to university and get a Ph.D. at the discretion of the state"
Actually, being a Finn, I see the problem more like being that people hang out at the university at their discretion until they're 30, and they might either get a Ph.D. or not... some cuts may be in order.
Thank you for selling the long-doomed platform before it was completely driven into the ground.
Yours, happy Finnish Nokia shareholder since about 2012.
The Swedish People's Party did achieve more than they ever wished possible though, with the compulsory Swedish-education starting at sixth grade and having essentially their own programme written as "national language strategy" of the government, with all the loaded language and whatnot.
But that's what they're good at -- providing a convenient extra 10 seats, especially when everyone seemed to want to be in government so that the True Finns wouldn't.
In other words, this is exactly what I expected it to be -- butthurt lefties trying to raise up negative sentiments abroad, even when the UH really doesn't mean anything to your average slashdot reader. The "ooh, look at how we are perceived abroad now!" tactic is typical. In reality, nobody cares, but just might end up with the notion that something awful is happening in Finland.
I am a UH CS dept alumnus just like Torvalds is, but if something's got to give in our current economic situation, something's got to give. As I see it, we already over-educate very average Master's degree holders at mostly average universities. Not everyone actually needs an academic education that tends to last until the person's 30s (we've got very slow students as well). I find that despite having gone to that particular school, I am mostly self-educated in most things, even though I've got the degree diploma. So it is more important to teach people how to teach themselves, than to formally over-educate them.
To make our universities better, we actually might look into raising the bar a bit and doing less but better.
Finland has a revolutionary system with three teachers per class and 20 student caps
I wonder where this three teachers per class idea comes from, I've never heard anything of the sort, and I'm Finnish and have gone through said system. There is one teacher per class, sometimes an assistant, and two teachers per class in cases where the class size is very big. Because of cutbacks, we've had to stuff as many kids into a classroom as we can -- Finland is not doing too well at the moment when it comes to government finances.
But the system does have a lot of strengths, among other things the fact that teachers are well educated and it is a very respected profession with a lot of autonomy. They don't want to screw up the kids' futures a bit like a doctor wouldn't want to kill a patient, because it was competitive to get into teacher education to begin with...
Also, even though our school system does encourage kids to think for themselves, I would offer a somewhat conservative take as to why it works -- it really still is a somewhat traditional, teacher-led system. And of course it helps that Finland is for the time being a rather homogenous society where it is understood that if you are supposed to listen to the teacher, you are supposed to listen to the teacher.
The argument that "business" should not have to do anything with disabled people as they create costs is particularly concerning. It means exclusion from most of the workings of the world as "business" is what is supposed to run the world. Another problem is the rather nasty attitudes about placing blame and the hyperbole about wanting to deny others their ability. It's the sort of paranoia out of Ayn Rand really, and the most aggressive people might actually be able to justify things I'd rather not contemplate, if they come to the conclusion that we're living "undeserved" lives.
It is quite a feat that it's nearly enough to radicalize me, and I'm a guy who is mostly interested in things "working" in general, and am even amenable to arguments that SOMETIMES it MIGHT be true that some of the complaints of the other side may have merit, and that not quite everything is necessary. But then again, I already give up on a lot of things, even though they may not understand it.
Guess what, an even better idea would be to put them into these huge institutions where everything could be centralized so there is not even a need for transporting them anywhere...
And now that the cost center is well defined, the taxpayer can have complete control over the finances!
What would you have done in case of catastrophic illness, or was that just a risk you were willing to take?
There is a logic to it.
- Pure market solution would not provide for this
- Market solution with "guidance" is wrong as it interferes with the pure market solution
- Government solution is wrong because it taxes people, but at least people see how they are being manhandled by government. It is also a worse solution, so we still prefer it because it is.... worse.
Not necessarily. If the majority of people agree that, say, accessibility is desirable, be it whether they pay through taxes or some "hidden" cost, then it remains to decide what is the best way to implement the goal.
If it is then agreed that the best way to get disabled people included in the world is to make sure that competition does not mean accessibility is sacrificed, then they might not be interested in getting this "tax signal" at all.
I am not sure if, if one really seeks a solution that inclusively works in the real world, you can break up these kinds of costs into separate components that you could then just tax people with. They just need to be a part of the big picture in a way that you can't just constantly "re-evaluate" in terms of whether they in particular have now become "too expensive".
Integration into the services on the overall market is just simply more efficient. Certainly the cost is passed on to the consumer, but the providers will just keep on improving how they do whatever they do... this improves the entire service, accessibility included.
The problem with that kind of reasoning is that most services in society actually are provided by private businesses, and rightfully so, as that kind of an arrangement comes with various benefits that you are certainly aware of. Not only is access inclusive, it will, in the long term cause the services to actually improve according to just who happens to do things better. We can of course discuss what the actual market mechanism is that is used to send the appropriate signals -- it does not need to be as ludicrously heavy-handed as some slashdot posters would like to make it sound like.
I fail to see how some separate government arrangement is, in the modern world, any different from shoving disabled people back into bureaucratic institutions -- and at that point it is all too easy to start reducing the so-called "necessary" tax amount to maintain even that.
At least over here in Europe I mostly do not see this kind of concern from businesses or business-minded individuals. The attitude mostly is that this is just something that is taken out of competition by just agreeing to take care of it, if by some kind of agreed upon standards if needed, and that's it.
Ah, very well. But the "essential" stuff is still in Advanced Technologies.
No they didn't. They have licenses to keep making phones, but the IP belongs to Nokia. It was most specifically left out of the deal.
If you could sell your manufacturing etc capability for $7B and then move back in in a very lightweight way, the answer would probably be "yes". I do not really think Nokia should be going back into phones but if they can license the brand in this way, why not.
The IP was kept by Nokia, it was just licensed to MS. As a shareholder I am quite glad the floundering phone business was offloaded the MS before it sank the company. Currently Nokia has cash, is profitable, and is well-positioned in the networks business... not bad in my view.