Dr Muller was never a climate sceptic. He did criticise some of the orthodox practices described in the climategate emails, but he never claimed any reservations about the existence of global warming.
Dr Muller's latest paper, the subject of his recent publicity, was rejected by the journal to which it was submitted, Journal of Geophysical Research. See http://www.rossmckitrick.com/.
Lots of hot air. Mostly complaining about things that don't exist.
The Watts, et.al. paper is a pre-release version that Mr Watts has made available for review purposes. The plan is that internet readers will find errors that can then be fixed before submission to a journal.
If the paper is garbage, then pop over to http://wattsupwiththat.com/ and explain, in detail, what is wrong with it. Mr Watts will be grateful for the help.
Please also note that Mr Watts is not "denying" global warming (or anything else). He's trying to measure it. Sounds to me like a positive contribution.
The "science" is not settled. You're thinking of "history".
Isn't jargon wonderful. If you read the Republican policy document (http://s3.amazonaws.com/texasgop_pre/assets/original/2012-Platform-Final.pdf) you see that terms like "Higher Order Thinking Skills" and "Outcome-Based Education" are capitalised. These are not general concepts, but specific programs in educational theory and the names could have come straight from George Orwell.
"Higher Order Thinking Skills" (capitalised) rejects students spending time on acquiring basic skills such as spelling or simple arithmetic, but launches straight into "higher order" thinking without giving the kids the tools to do anything useful.
"Outcome-Based Education" actually opposes things like testing. An "outcome" might be "reading a book". If you complete the book, you get credit for it. Nobody bothers checking of you actually understood its contents, that wasn't the "outcome".
No sensible person could oppose teaching higher order thinking skills (un-capitalised) to students. But sensible people could certainly oppose the avoidance of teaching basic skills.
= = = = =
The "Controversial Theories" paragraph is likely to generate a lot of anxiety, but I don't see a problem. Undoubtedly this will include subjects like creationism, but so what? We teach students about Thomson's and Bohr's models of the atom, even though we know both are wrong. They are part of the journey we took to our current knowledge and help us understand later, more correct theories. We need to teach Darwin, but to be honest about its strengths and weaknesses. We also need to teach Lamark and to explain why it is wrong. In that context, it is silly to pretend that creationism doesn't exist. There are many people who believe it. Of course, in teaching it we need to teach its problems. The fossil evidence, the age of the earth and other things that contradict it.
Good science can stand against lesser theories and students need to understand what is wrong in order to really understand what is right.
There will inevitably be students in a science class who do not believe in Darwinism. That's OK. Tell them "This exam is on Darwin. You can believe what you like, but of you want to pass this test, you had better tell us what Darwin says".
= = = = =
I'm not a Republican and I'll criticise them on many policies. However in this case, the criticism is unwarranted. Except, perhaps, that they should have been less ambiguous, allowing people to misunderstand them.
I don't think it is feasible to swap out everything from memory. If an interrupt occurs and the handler is not in memory, Windows will blue-screen. The scanner would need certain O/S functions to perform the scan, not to mention to write/read the swapped RAM to/from disk.
Am I the only one who found that article hilarious?
A 6'2" "Good Looking" graduate who's extensive research in programmers has discovered that all males are inumerate neanderthals and only women really understand him.
Sigh. He's so sensitive.:-)
If only there was some other profession where people were trained in test coverage and such. We could call them "testers". Maybe I'll patent that idea.
> So, what, quantum mechanics is just "magic"? How about higher mathematics? > Computing science? Law? Medicine?
In most fields, explaining the "what" is generally not too hard, but sometimes the "why" gets tricky.
> Because all of these fields have a specialized language of their own, and > contain within them concepts that will simply be incomprehensible to a layman.
Not necessarily a "laymen", but they should probably be comprehensible to an educated man (or woman) with a reasonable understanding of science and maths but no specific expertise in that field.
I have a B.Sc. in Computer Science and Maths (from 20 years ago). I haven't tried to understand string theory (it doesn't interest me) but I have a working grasp of most of Einstein and Newton. I have a fair grasp of basic anatomy and chemistry and my doctors have never had trouble explaining my (many) medical problems.
Maybe if people tried to explain AGW instead of just saying "trust us" I'd be happier to ruin the economy to prevent it.
Whether you agree or disagree with AGW, there seems to be little debate, just name-calling. From my own (probably biased) view, I'd say the pro-AGW crowd have done a rotten job at explaining their side of the argument. At least the anti-AGW crowd seem to be prepared for a bit of transparency. The pro-AGW might well turn out to be right, but when issues are raised they tend to take offence rather than defending their position.
Problem one is that we are talking about data gathered in various ways from various sources. There must, of course, be some numerical filtering to try to compare data from different sources. However much of the filtering appears (from the outside) to be poorly explained. We are estimating temperature from tree-rings, ice cores and antique thermometers and making decisions on variations of a couple of degrees or sometimes much less. In a day when it might be 50 degrees Celsius in outback Australia 20C in Tasmania and -120C in Canada, we try to produce an average.
Now this data may be accurate enough to support the analysis, but it doesn't look that way to the uninitiated. Somebody needs to convince us.
Second, much of the (mass-media) published information derives from Drs Jones and Mann and their colleagues. The recent revelations have raised *serious* doubts about their data integrity. Never mind the emails, the widely discussed "harry-readme" file chronicles the efforts of a researcher to identify correct data and understand the filtering source code. It tells a tale of confusion and some suspected sharp practises. Perhaps "Harry" is out of his depth and Dr Jones et. al. have immaculate data and source code. However Dr Jones' refusal to honour Freedom of Information requests leave us all with great suspicions. If we cannot trust Dr Jones and Dr Mann, can we trust any of the IPCC and related material? Maybe, but it has not been well explained.
Third and perhaps worst is the number of morons who trumpet AGW concerns without any understanding what they mean. Mr Gore, for example, consistently makes impossible claims. It is too easy to look at these stumbling fools and think that their silly words represent the "scientific" view. When they are shown to lack credibility, by association the science seems to lose credibility. Why have serious scientists never told the buffoons to "sit down and be quiet"? Or have they? The media have seldom reported such.
I don't know if AGW is real. I do know that most of what I hear about is gobbledegook. I'd like to be treated like a "grown up" and have the science explained in clear terms, without the black magic and the "oh, you couldn't understand this". I'd particularly like this before we destroy the world economy implementing schemes that probably won't even fix the problem, if AGW is real.
There are two main problems in having a sensible discussion on Darwinism.
1. The blind religious faith of its opponents.
2. The blind religious faith of its supporters.
Darwin-based evolution is a big and complex theory. Some parts have very good evidence to support them. In some parts, it is near impossible to obtain evidence one way or the other.
The first stage of evolution involves some simple form of life being generated out of a complex chemical/physical environment. How do you prove that? What did the environment consist of? Can we reproduce it in a lab?
There are many plausible theories as to the exact circumstances -- and one may well be correct. But how do you prove it?
The theory of Intelligent Design can be vastly oversimplified as "evolution happened, but some supreme being helped it along a bit".
This differs from some of the more traditional creation science theories in that it more readily accepts the physical evidence.
This denial of evidence made the older Creation theories offensive to many scientists. Personally, I find it surprising that the newer "intelligent design" theories seem to generate the same amount of offence. It seems to be a realistic attempt to reconcile a theory (some deity created the world) with the observed evidence. However it certainly does create offence -- as can be observed in this thread.
I suggest that any modern curriculum that claims to be balanced should include the following:
1. A good history of the development of darwinian theories. 2. A good coverage of the state of the art in darwinian evolutionary research. 3. A balanced look at some of the problems with evolution -- including places where some theorists differ. 4. A mention of intelligent design in the context of "some people believe this, you make up your own mind"
Well, that's my 2 cents worth. Cheap at half the price.:-)
> This is a good example of why "IE only looks bad > because it has the most market share" is at best > dubious.
Yes and no.
The market share is certainly not the whole problem, but it is definitely part of it.
1. In retrospect, trying to bind IE so tightly into the OS was a big mistake.
2. The security model chosen for IE was poorly thought out, and is probably the single biggest cause of problems. However, because so much 3rd party software relies on IE behaviour, changing the security model will be a nightmare.
3. The quality of coding and of testing was very poor. MS have done a *lot* to improve that, but they are still crippled by poor legacy design.
Notwithstanding the above, if (when?) Firefox captures enough market share (40-60%) to gain the broad interest of the bad guys, I will be surprised if we don't see a large number of problems.
Firefox, being much newer, seems to have much better design. We've seen some of IE's worst mistakes and avoided them. It remains, however, to be seen if we have created some whole new classes of mistakes.
Don't mistake my intention: I use Firefox and recommend it to anybody. I hope I'm wrong and it proves completely bullet-proof. However long experience in software projects makes me tend to the pessimistic side.:-)
The general tone fo responses to this article is somewhat alarming. It mostly consists of "how dare they criticize us?".
Let's make no mistake: IE is a mess and does a lot of things wrong. Firefox makes a fairly good attempt at avoiding IE's errors. However that doesn't mean that it can't be making other mistakes.
The original article is by a MS employee, and there is no doubt that he has his own agenda. Notwithstanding that, he's made some valid criticisms and to ignore them would be downright stupid.
I guess that the use of mirrors is unavoidable. Given the demand for Firefox, it could not be hosted in a single place. However it does create a possible security problem. How does a (possibly non-technical) user know that a mirror is safe? This is particularly troublesome if the mirror has only a numeric address (like 207.126.111.202).
If any mirror is untrustworthy, they could easily produce a hacked version of Firefox and distribute it widely.
There are many possible approaches to this problem, but it is certainly worth some research. Users need to know that they are getting a safe version of the software.
The dodgy dialogs sound like bugs. Rather than getting offended, it would be better to contact the author and try to repro the bugs. Maybe the bugs are in IE or in Virtual PC, but they might be in Firefox. It would be foolish to say that Firefox has no bugs.
One of the biggest criticisms of MS is their arrogant (lack of) response to user feedback.
Unfortunately the Google cache is hard to read as it only caches the text and tries (unsuccessfully) to load the images from the original site.
Archive.org caches it properly, but it hasn't been updated since June.
I had no interest in reading Mr Bush's site before it was blocked, so I don't feel particularly deprived. However it is most curious that they bothered to block it. I cannot think of what they hope to gain.
I've been involved with projects where the source was put into eschrow, and it seems to work well.
Consider a small company "us" with 200 staff trying to sell a product to a very big customer (them) to run on each of their 10,000 servers.
"them" have done a dilligence test and the product is suitable. However they want to guarantee future support. They need to know that, if they find a critical bug in two years time, they can get it fixed.
The eschrow includes all build tools, plus documentation showing OS versions, procedures etc. On an agreed day, a staff member from "us" and another from "them" meet at the eschrow place.
Insert CD #1 and click install, and everything installs cleanly.
Type "make myproduct" and it builds with no compiler warnings.
Run through some tests to validate that it is the correct product and everyone is happy.
If, in a few years time, "us" go bankrupt or are bought out by somebody who is not interested in giving support, "them" take posession of the source and it is their responsibility to find some contractors that can do the maintenance work.
It is not as good as an open source product, but where trade secrets prevent open source release, it is a pretty good compromise.
> The cost of a bug isn't in cash per se. Whether
a programmer is in-house or a contractor,
> they're going to be at your shop for the
standard work-week at least, right? So they're
> either fixing your bug or they're browsing
slashdot. You pay the same either way.
That's not really true, in my experience. When people complete their work on a project, I either transfer them to another project, or start them working on features for the next version. Even as a version of software goes into system testing, I already have customer's "wish lists" that didn't make the cut into that version.
Notwithstanding that, I don't generally think of the cost of bugs in dollar terms. As crazyphilman proposes, bugs that cause schedule slippage are of very high concern.
Another cost that is important is "increased risk". Every time you change something, you risk breaking it or something that depends on it. The bigger the change, the bigger the risk.
When a product is nearing release, my team reviews every bug found. We weigh the cost (in customer dissatisfaction) of "release noting" the bug and shipping with it, against the cost (in increased risk and slippage) of fixing the bug.
If the bug affects a small number of users, and/or has a reasonable work-around, it is often preferable to ship with the bug, and promise to fix it in the next version. If it has severe effects, then shipping it may not be feasible.
It would be nice to say that we ship bug-free software, but for large projects that is virtually impossible.
I say "virtually" impossible. It is possible, but prohibitively expensive for most projects. It becomes reasonable when bugs are unacceptable (e.g. aircraft navigation system: bug=risk of death) but the cost of the system rises astronomically. Most customers would rather have a few small bugs that pay 1000 times as much for the software.
Coding bugs are generally not to tough to fix (though sometimes hard to find).
Design bugs are the killer. If you discover a design bug after implementation, you might need to change or even rewrite big slabs of code.
The logarythmic estimate is probably a worst case analysis, not an average case. But without a doubt, design bugs that make it into production are bad stuff.
That's why sofwtare engineers are either grey-headed or bald.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Lots of hot air. Mostly complaining about things that don't exist.
The Watts, et.al. paper is a pre-release version that Mr Watts has made available for review purposes. The plan is that internet readers will find errors that can then be fixed before submission to a journal.
If the paper is garbage, then pop over to http://wattsupwiththat.com/ and explain, in detail, what is wrong with it. Mr Watts will be grateful for the help.
Insults and attacks on the paper or its author should be forwarded to http://127.0.0.1/dev/null.
Please also note that Mr Watts is not "denying" global warming (or anything else). He's trying to measure it. Sounds to me like a positive contribution.
The "science" is not settled. You're thinking of "history".
Isn't jargon wonderful. If you read the Republican policy document (http://s3.amazonaws.com/texasgop_pre/assets/original/2012-Platform-Final.pdf) you see that terms like "Higher Order Thinking Skills" and "Outcome-Based Education" are capitalised. These are not general concepts, but specific programs in educational theory and the names could have come straight from George Orwell.
"Higher Order Thinking Skills" (capitalised) rejects students spending time on acquiring basic skills such as spelling or simple arithmetic, but launches straight into "higher order" thinking without giving the kids the tools to do anything useful.
"Outcome-Based Education" actually opposes things like testing. An "outcome" might be "reading a book". If you complete the book, you get credit for it. Nobody bothers checking of you actually understood its contents, that wasn't the "outcome".
No sensible person could oppose teaching higher order thinking skills (un-capitalised) to students. But sensible people could certainly oppose the avoidance of teaching basic skills.
= = = = =
The "Controversial Theories" paragraph is likely to generate a lot of anxiety, but I don't see a problem. Undoubtedly this will include subjects like creationism, but so what? We teach students about Thomson's and Bohr's models of the atom, even though we know both are wrong. They are part of the journey we took to our current knowledge and help us understand later, more correct theories. We need to teach Darwin, but to be honest about its strengths and weaknesses. We also need to teach Lamark and to explain why it is wrong. In that context, it is silly to pretend that creationism doesn't exist. There are many people who believe it. Of course, in teaching it we need to teach its problems. The fossil evidence, the age of the earth and other things that contradict it.
Good science can stand against lesser theories and students need to understand what is wrong in order to really understand what is right.
There will inevitably be students in a science class who do not believe in Darwinism. That's OK. Tell them "This exam is on Darwin. You can believe what you like, but of you want to pass this test, you had better tell us what Darwin says".
= = = = =
I'm not a Republican and I'll criticise them on many policies. However in this case, the criticism is unwarranted. Except, perhaps, that they should have been less ambiguous, allowing people to misunderstand them.
Michael J
I don't think it is feasible to swap out everything from memory. If an interrupt occurs and the handler is not in memory, Windows will blue-screen. The scanner would need certain O/S functions to perform the scan, not to mention to write/read the swapped RAM to/from disk.
Am I the only one who found that article hilarious?
A 6'2" "Good Looking" graduate who's extensive research in programmers has discovered that all males are inumerate neanderthals and only women really understand him.
Sigh. He's so sensitive. :-)
If only there was some other profession where people were trained in test coverage and such. We could call them "testers". Maybe I'll patent that idea.
> So, what, quantum mechanics is just "magic"? How about higher mathematics?
> Computing science? Law? Medicine?
In most fields, explaining the "what" is generally not too hard, but sometimes the "why" gets tricky.
> Because all of these fields have a specialized language of their own, and
> contain within them concepts that will simply be incomprehensible to a layman.
Not necessarily a "laymen", but they should probably be comprehensible to an educated man (or woman) with a reasonable understanding of science and maths but no specific expertise in that field.
I have a B.Sc. in Computer Science and Maths (from 20 years ago). I haven't tried to understand string theory (it doesn't interest me) but I have a working grasp of most of Einstein and Newton. I have a fair grasp of basic anatomy and chemistry and my doctors have never had trouble explaining my (many) medical problems.
Maybe if people tried to explain AGW instead of just saying "trust us" I'd be happier to ruin the economy to prevent it.
Michael J Smith
Whether you agree or disagree with AGW, there seems to be little debate, just name-calling. From my own (probably biased) view, I'd say the pro-AGW crowd have done a rotten job at explaining their side of the argument. At least the anti-AGW crowd seem to be prepared for a bit of transparency. The pro-AGW might well turn out to be right, but when issues are raised they tend to take offence rather than defending their position.
Problem one is that we are talking about data gathered in various ways from various sources. There must, of course, be some numerical filtering to try to compare data from different sources. However much of the filtering appears (from the outside) to be poorly explained. We are estimating temperature from tree-rings, ice cores and antique thermometers and making decisions on variations of a couple of degrees or sometimes much less. In a day when it might be 50 degrees Celsius in outback Australia 20C in Tasmania and -120C in Canada, we try to produce an average.
Now this data may be accurate enough to support the analysis, but it doesn't look that way to the uninitiated. Somebody needs to convince us.
Second, much of the (mass-media) published information derives from Drs Jones and Mann and their colleagues. The recent revelations have raised *serious* doubts about their data integrity. Never mind the emails, the widely discussed "harry-readme" file chronicles the efforts of a researcher to identify correct data and understand the filtering source code. It tells a tale of confusion and some suspected sharp practises. Perhaps "Harry" is out of his depth and Dr Jones et. al. have immaculate data and source code. However Dr Jones' refusal to honour Freedom of Information requests leave us all with great suspicions. If we cannot trust Dr Jones and Dr Mann, can we trust any of the IPCC and related material? Maybe, but it has not been well explained.
Third and perhaps worst is the number of morons who trumpet AGW concerns without any understanding what they mean. Mr Gore, for example, consistently makes impossible claims. It is too easy to look at these stumbling fools and think that their silly words represent the "scientific" view. When they are shown to lack credibility, by association the science seems to lose credibility. Why have serious scientists never told the buffoons to "sit down and be quiet"? Or have they? The media have seldom reported such.
I don't know if AGW is real. I do know that most of what I hear about is gobbledegook. I'd like to be treated like a "grown up" and have the science explained in clear terms, without the black magic and the "oh, you couldn't understand this". I'd particularly like this before we destroy the world economy implementing schemes that probably won't even fix the problem, if AGW is real.
OK, flame away.
Michael J Smith
There are two main problems in having a sensible discussion on Darwinism.
:-)
1. The blind religious faith of its opponents.
2. The blind religious faith of its supporters.
Darwin-based evolution is a big and complex theory. Some parts have very good evidence to support them. In some parts, it is near impossible to obtain evidence one way or the other.
The first stage of evolution involves some simple form of life being generated out of a complex chemical/physical environment. How do you prove that? What did the environment consist of? Can we reproduce it in a lab?
There are many plausible theories as to the exact circumstances -- and one may well be correct. But how do you prove it?
The theory of Intelligent Design can be vastly oversimplified as "evolution happened, but some supreme being helped it along a bit".
This differs from some of the more traditional creation science theories in that it more readily accepts the physical evidence.
This denial of evidence made the older Creation theories offensive to many scientists. Personally, I find it surprising that the newer "intelligent design" theories seem to generate the same amount of offence. It seems to be a realistic attempt to reconcile a theory (some deity created the world) with the observed evidence. However it certainly does create offence -- as can be observed in this thread.
I suggest that any modern curriculum that claims to be balanced should include the following:
1. A good history of the development of darwinian theories.
2. A good coverage of the state of the art in darwinian evolutionary research.
3. A balanced look at some of the problems with evolution -- including places where some theorists differ.
4. A mention of intelligent design in the context of "some people believe this, you make up your own mind"
Well, that's my 2 cents worth. Cheap at half the price.
> This is a good example of why "IE only looks bad
:-)
> because it has the most market share" is at best
> dubious.
Yes and no.
The market share is certainly not the whole problem, but it is definitely part of it.
1. In retrospect, trying to bind IE so tightly into the OS was a big mistake.
2. The security model chosen for IE was poorly thought out, and is probably the single biggest cause of problems. However, because so much 3rd party software relies on IE behaviour, changing the security model will be a nightmare.
3. The quality of coding and of testing was very poor. MS have done a *lot* to improve that, but they are still crippled by poor legacy design.
Notwithstanding the above, if (when?) Firefox captures enough market share (40-60%) to gain the broad interest of the bad guys, I will be surprised if we don't see a large number of problems.
Firefox, being much newer, seems to have much better design. We've seen some of IE's worst mistakes and avoided them. It remains, however, to be seen if we have created some whole new classes of mistakes.
Don't mistake my intention: I use Firefox and recommend it to anybody. I hope I'm wrong and it proves completely bullet-proof. However long experience in software projects makes me tend to the pessimistic side.
The general tone fo responses to this article is somewhat alarming. It mostly consists of "how dare they criticize us?".
Let's make no mistake: IE is a mess and does a lot of things wrong. Firefox makes a fairly good attempt at avoiding IE's errors. However that doesn't mean that it can't be making other mistakes.
The original article is by a MS employee, and there is no doubt that he has his own agenda. Notwithstanding that, he's made some valid criticisms and to ignore them would be downright stupid.
I guess that the use of mirrors is unavoidable. Given the demand for Firefox, it could not be hosted in a single place. However it does create a possible security problem. How does a (possibly non-technical) user know that a mirror is safe? This is particularly troublesome if the mirror has only a numeric address (like 207.126.111.202).
If any mirror is untrustworthy, they could easily produce a hacked version of Firefox and distribute it widely.
There are many possible approaches to this problem, but it is certainly worth some research. Users need to know that they are getting a safe version of the software.
The dodgy dialogs sound like bugs. Rather than getting offended, it would be better to contact the author and try to repro the bugs. Maybe the bugs are in IE or in Virtual PC, but they might be in Firefox. It would be foolish to say that Firefox has no bugs.
One of the biggest criticisms of MS is their arrogant (lack of) response to user feedback.
Let's not be like them.
Unfortunately the Google cache is hard to read as it only caches the text and tries (unsuccessfully) to load the images from the original site.
Archive.org caches it properly, but it hasn't been updated since June.
I had no interest in reading Mr Bush's site before it was blocked, so I don't feel particularly deprived. However it is most curious that they bothered to block it. I cannot think of what they hope to gain.
You won't eliminate all zombies, but you'll get the great majority.
DDOS attacks are generally conducted using zombie PCs. How do we reduce the availability of zombies?
- Make ISPs legally liable for criminal acts performed by zombies on their networks.
- ISPs will then start regularly scanning their networks for zombies and will place a rocket under the zombies' owners.
This will have the added bonus of reducing virus/worm propagation.I've been involved with projects where the source was put into eschrow, and it seems to work well.
Consider a small company "us" with 200 staff trying to sell a product to a very big customer (them) to run on each of their 10,000 servers.
"them" have done a dilligence test and the product is suitable. However they want to guarantee future support. They need to know that, if they find a critical bug in two years time, they can get it fixed.
The eschrow includes all build tools, plus documentation showing OS versions, procedures etc. On an agreed day, a staff member from "us" and another from "them" meet at the eschrow place.
Insert CD #1 and click install, and everything installs cleanly.
Type "make myproduct" and it builds with no compiler warnings.
Run through some tests to validate that it is the correct product and everyone is happy.
If, in a few years time, "us" go bankrupt or are bought out by somebody who is not interested in giving support, "them" take posession of the source and it is their responsibility to find some contractors that can do the maintenance work.
It is not as good as an open source product, but where trade secrets prevent open source release, it is a pretty good compromise.
Notwithstanding that, I don't generally think of the cost of bugs in dollar terms. As crazyphilman proposes, bugs that cause schedule slippage are of very high concern.
Another cost that is important is "increased risk". Every time you change something, you risk breaking it or something that depends on it. The bigger the change, the bigger the risk.
When a product is nearing release, my team reviews every bug found. We weigh the cost (in customer dissatisfaction) of "release noting" the bug and shipping with it, against the cost (in increased risk and slippage) of fixing the bug.
If the bug affects a small number of users, and/or has a reasonable work-around, it is often preferable to ship with the bug, and promise to fix it in the next version. If it has severe effects, then shipping it may not be feasible.
It would be nice to say that we ship bug-free software, but for large projects that is virtually impossible.
I say "virtually" impossible. It is possible, but prohibitively expensive for most projects. It becomes reasonable when bugs are unacceptable (e.g. aircraft navigation system: bug=risk of death) but the cost of the system rises astronomically. Most customers would rather have a few small bugs that pay 1000 times as much for the software.
Coding bugs are generally not to tough to fix (though sometimes hard to find). Design bugs are the killer. If you discover a design bug after implementation, you might need to change or even rewrite big slabs of code. The logarythmic estimate is probably a worst case analysis, not an average case. But without a doubt, design bugs that make it into production are bad stuff. That's why sofwtare engineers are either grey-headed or bald. :-)