The city says its goal is bringing high-speed data access to low income areas to break the poverty cycle, stating a link between broadband access and education and employment.
I don't have any problem with cities putting in a public network, if the voters think it makes sense. But do we need to break out the golden shovel here? The correlation between net access and income/education is there because people with higher incomes don't have to choose between new shoes for the kids and internet service. I'll bet you can also find a correlation between internet use and expensive cars, clothes, and Tivo. As many have pointed out on/. before, correlation != causation. Let's face it, the internet today is used mostly to stream porn.
In fact, the research suggests a pretty strong negative correlation between internet use in the schools and basic (reading, writing, and math) skills. Your kids are better off cracking a book and leaving the computer off until they need to write term papers. Cliff Stoll wrote a pretty good book on this subject.
But I guess you don't have to make logical arguments for anything as long as you add "think of the children" to your proposals.
Why? Dialup is available throughout the entire country. While it's more convenient to surf the web at broadband speeds, this isn't a food/shelter issue.
The reality is you choose where you want to live in the US if you're a citizen. If you live somewhere without broadband, and it's important to you, then move. There are lots of reasons to live in "the country" - infrastructure isn't one of them.
If broadband is a right for country people, when do I get my cheap land in the San Francisco bay area. Shouldn't that be a right too? How about crystal-clear air and "peace and quiet"?
The idea that the invention of androids has been driven by xenophobia and racism, so the Japanese don't have to live with what they consider to be inferior races or to give them living wages, is disgusting.
Disgusting to you, maybe. But that just reinforces their logic. They don't think like you. And they don't want to. Why do you begrudge them their own culture? And why do you consider them racist for wanting to speak Japanese and observe Japanese customs in Japan? Interfacing with new and strange cultures is new and exiting when you're twenty. It's a whole different matter when you're seventy.
Oh, please. This is the same kind of pathological crap that comes from every racist. Racists lack the self-esteem to stand up as individuals, so they identify themselves with the collective culture in which they are embedded to dissociate themselves from their insecurity and self-loathing. When insiders come in and threaten to change the dynamic, they view it as a threat to the identity they adopted -- because they lack any identity of their own.
Good God! Is this steaming dungheap what passes for logic at universities these days? Gee, Freud, did it ever occur to you they might be satisfying the basic human urge to associate with people like themselves?
Individual creativity grows in direct proportion to the extent culture fades away as a social force. Hardly any of us could be doing what we are doing now, pursuing individual dreams, if our historical cultures had not been largely obliterated by successive waves of immigration. Each new arrival further weakens the hold that brainless tradition holds over each of us.
That's a profoundly ignorant thing to say. In fact the freedoms we have in the US are fewer than our fathers', and their freedoms were based on cultural norms inherited from a group of Scottish philosophers, who were in turn building on their own traditions. You want to see what happens to freedom when one's own culture is discarded in the name of tolerance? Look no further than the UK at the present, with cameras on every streetcorner and laws prohibiting speech other people might find insulting. As George Mosse said "tolerance is its own tyrany." Your culture is what allows your society to function without devolving into a police state.
Fuck culture, nationality, race, and every other cowardly mob refuge for failed individuals. They're all imaginary constructs. People are real. People who can't get jobs because the xenophobes in Tokyo close the borders and replace them with robots suffer real hunger and privation. Cultures don't suffer, feel pain, go hungry, or do anything at all -- except exist in the imaginations of individual people.
You have to be from a wealthy country to even think like that. Poeple always exist in the context of a group whether they like it or not. Incidentally, people in Japan are under no legal or moral obligation to provide jobs or anything else to surrounding countries.
I've always had a great fondness for Japanese culture, and I'd hat to see it destroyed in the same way western European cultures are being destroyed - by unrestricted immigration. Twenty years ago France was worried about the declining numbers of French speakers throughout the world. In another fifty years French won't be spoken in France. Do you think that will make the elderly French of 2054 happy?
Europe is facing the same problem, and they're dealing with it via gastarbeiters. Apparently, Japan is going to deal with it using robots.
The rejection of guest workers is a carefully considered policy in Japan. There are some disadvantages to losing a common culture, as the Dutch, the Germans, and the French are discovering. Can't say I blame the aging Japanese for not wanting to deal with cultural strife or learn Tagolog or Mandarin in their dotage. But pardon me, I'm off to my Spanish class...
Remember during the anti-monopoly tials MS said they couldn't disentangle IE, then someone came up with a program called Win98Lite (or something like that) that stripped IE out of 98?
I don't remember Win98Lite. As I mentioned in my response to another comment above, the integration of browser and OS had to have started before the "anti-monopoly" trials, as you call them. Most people use "antitrust".
Have you ever worked on a large commercial software project? Why do you ascribe malice in a situation where incompetence is the most likely explaination? Are you still in school?
I smell astroturfer.
You better not make me mad or I'll come over in my black helicopter and hit you with a mind control ray. Our new ray can penetrate tinfoil, you know.
you set up and TEST a digital recording system attached to the playback deck, and get the levels as close to perfect as you can, but let it peak around -3dB. Make sure you record it at some insane sampling rate and bit depth. 192kHz at 24bit is pretty good. Why? The bit depth is really important - this way when you process the audio through your restoration software, you have the bit depth to handle stuff like reverb tailings and other audio nuances.
Heh heh. It wasn't audio data, it was 0-4Mhz analog signal data. Times 14 tracks. The drives were bigger than refrigerators, cost more than $300,000, and would move tape at variable speeds up to 240 inches/sec.
And yeah, we only got one playback (sweaty palms time). We dubbed it onto another deck.
Yep. I used to work for a government agency that recorded missile telemetry on 1" 14 track analog tapes. If you stored them in a tightly controlled temperature/humidity environment they'd last a long time. The problem is that's relatively expensive, and it's not always clear what you most important reels are. We were asked to retrieve some data from a tape that was only about ten years old and it came off the reel like masking tape. We were able to restore them to a certain degree, but if it were audio it would have sounded like crap even after we were done. I had to clean the tape heads every 100' or so...
Nonsense, nothing of the sort was ever proven in court. The court ruled Microsoft was a monopoly and was abusing its monopoly position by (among other things irrelevant to this discussion) bundling the browser with the operating system. But that would have been true even if the browser wasn't integrated. They were in trouble for providing the browser for free.
The browser integration issue came up when Microsoft claimed (somewhat weakly) it couldn't separate the OS and browser. But that doesn't have any relevance to design decisions made years earlier. Do you really think the lawyers were involved in the design?
I'm sure the more elegant solution would have been to separate out the browser, but I can see a certain logic in trying to avoid two distict presentation layers.
Also, have done some WinAPI programming myself, I can tell you the obvious, elegant solutions aren't the easiest in most cases. That API is crap compared to POSIX. It always amazed me they could come out with an API years after POSIX that was far worse. Don't they read books? The very crappiness of the API lends support to my contention this is probably more a result of incompetance than malice. Microsoft had missed the internet boat and they were determined to get back on board, elegance be damned.
I'm willing to bet a lot of people at the CIA, Pentagon and NSA, George Tenet in particular, are kicking themselves that they let traditional intelligence methodologies(i.e. spys) wither away in favor of spy satellites.
OK, you're halfway there...
Forget the NSA and Pentagon in this discussion - it isn't their job to place agents in foreign organizations. The NSA does electronics, and the Pentagon's intelligence gathering is supposed to be related to the conduct of military operations. This is entirely in the CIA's purview.
The question you have to ask is "why doesn't the CIA have any usefull covert capabilities anymore?" The best article I've ever seen on the subject is here. In a nutshell, it's not a money problem. It's a political problem and an organizational problem that's been steadily getting worse for 30 years.
While spy satellites could spot Soviet tank divisions and missile silos, they can't pinpoint terrorists in caves
I'm not sure why so many people "spy satellites" are just for taking visible spectrum pictures. You can, in fact, tell whether someone's living in a cave through an infrared signature (providing they're keeping warm somehow). More importantly, you can use satellites to eavesdrop on phone and radio conversations, as well as locate people who are generating any sort of EM radiation.
Also, you can do more active things, like change cruise missile's programming in-flight or control a drone aircraft.
We need to be able to do this stuff to fight the kind of war we're in. In fact we would have nailed Osama by now if some loose-lipped idiot hadn't bragged about tapping his satellite phone to a reporter.
There was no logical reason to integrate the entire browser into the OS like it was in Windows 9x
I'm not sure you can ascribe this to malice - it probably has more to do with the historical context. Windows 95 would have been blocked out, when, '92 or so? That was long before the first release of Mosaic (Nov, '93). By '95 browsers were the next big thing. I suspect the design changed pretty radically mid-project, and the only way to make it happen without starting over was to integrate the OS and browser.
And you have to consider the effect of academic literature (especially in a company that prides itself in its PhD density). At the time, some academics considered the browser sort of the next evolution in computing, and they were trying to shove the paradigm into lots of solutions that didn't really fit the problem. The idea was popular in the literature. If they were following the trend, they would have thought "let's integrate Windows into the browser!"
In any event it's hard to do anything right the first time. It's easy to say what the logical design is now, a decade later.
You are proceeding from a false assumption. The shuttle program exists to create jobs, nothing more, and it does that exceedingly well (more than 20,000).
It's not really fair to compare it to a program like Soyuz, which was actually designed to take people into space.
Hint to the current and future US Presidents: you may be the elected leader of a technological powerhouse, but you can't go it alone.
Hint to you: Read the Constitution. The president doesn't have the authority to levy taxes or spend money. None of this is ever going to work until Congress stops treating NASA like a jobs welfare program for commitee chairmen.
In the beginning, the ISS was supposed to be a great international effort to promote science in orbit, among other things.
Actually, in the beginning it was supposed to be an American space station. Then when it was clear the taxpayers didn't want to pay for it the Russians were enticed to join the effort as a way to tap their supply systems and also to keep Russian engineers from moving to the Middle East and building guided missles. Then the Europeans were pushed into adding their tax dollars (for no reason I can see, from the European point of view).
And no they aren't doing any usefull science. But then they wouldn't have with a seven man crew. What usefull science would you expect to get out of a manned space project in LEO anyway? The Russians did all the usefull human biology stuff decades ago, so I think what we'll see is more of the same old worthless stuff they did on the shuttle: high-school science projects and more space crystals that could have been grown more cheaply on the ground.
The world "liberal" is at once a swear word, an epithet, and a discredited political philosophy.
Now that that's out of the way, if you read the article you will see the thing's gonna be built with private money, which any fiscal conservative (like me) can appreciate.
The headaches start because GPL'd "Free Software" is rather antagonistic to those that want to make a living selling software. It's hard to profit when anyone can copy your product and sell it for half price.
It's not a headache for me as a GPL'd code developer. If somebody wants to make money selling software, let him write the software he wants to sell and not include the fruits of my labor. I don't give my code away with no strings for the same reason the Secret Santa exchange won't work if you can participate without bringing a gift.
I have no problem with someone packaging the software and selling it, but the value he's adding is in the packaging, and the reward should be commensurate.
Yes. This guy was equipped and paid by a company that never would have done so if it didn't get control of his inventions.
The system isn't set up so much to reward people for ideas as much as it is to entice companies to pay the salaries of people like this. And that's as it should be - otherwise he might be working at the local hardware store.
I was with you until you started quoting Chomsky. I find it interesting people on the left like to talk about corporate welfare, while at the same time complaining about government's unwillingness to do anything to stop job losses in tech and manufacturing. Well, which is it? Should the government do anything to protect jobs, or should it stand back and allow "creative destruction" to take place?
I really wish that he would have said "It would mean more to the American people if we sent missions to the outer planets and Kupiter belt, had larger space telescopes, and more hard science missions like gavity B, and save the trillion dollars mars would take to pay down the debt."
Heinlein used to remark of Carl Sagan "every time he convinces someone manned space projects don't make any sense we lose a supporter of the space program." NASA's in a tough spot - if they do the thing that makes the most sense for science, they'll get huge budget cuts, because J. Q. Public just won't care anymore. I can see the rationalle, from NASA's point of view, of ISS and the floundering shuttle program.
Unfortunately, it's all coming to a head in the next couple of years. The only reason NASA survives at this point is it's a great way to dole out jobs in the right district (why do we have ten space centers?). But the public is waking up to the fact that their 16 billion dollar investment is mostly wasted. I hope the projects you've identified survive that realization.
One thing that is pretty clear in recent years is academia has become a vast echo chamber where only people who agree with each other are allowed in the club. Anyone who disagrees is simply labeled a crackpot and dismissed. You don't hear about contrary ideas because even if the science is good, papers that disagree with THE CONSENSUS simply aren't published. The fact that they could or did pass peer review is irrelevant.
I believe the reason people are closing ranks on global warming is they perceive the need to do something now, without waiting for a firmer foundation in the science. I think that's a mistake, though. They lose credability for everything if they turn out to be wrong on anything when they have so few facts to work with. Also, they could very well be wrong. How many times has the consensus on infinitely expanding vs. collapsing universe flip-flopped in Cosmology?
I'm disinclined to support major government-mandated structural changes in society without some kind of proof. The science on this is considerably muddier than the article implies, and until the theory is better supported I don't think it's prudent to make the kind of changes the activist community is seeking.
I've been hearing that "less brittle" garbage for twenty years. By now we were supposed to have self healing networks. Where are they? Look, as more and more systems get tied together, the entire mousetrap becomes more brittle.
I've dealt with these Gartner idiots before (they'll come out with whatever report you want if you sell it to your customers). The time to worry is when they say your job will be around forever.
Funny you should mention that. Back when I was designing circuit boards, I remember reading in EE Times that you could etch tubes out of silicon wafers just like transistors. We might still have had integrated circuits, but they wouldn't have the same density or power profile.
You'd probably be able to buy chips for control circuits, but we might be using analog computers for scientific work.
Your professor isn't an electrical engineer, is he? 'Cause I really don't see any difference between talking about vacuum "leaking out" and say, hole mobility.
Yes, but IBM spends quite a bit of money on research. I don't fault a company for patenting honest-to-God inventions. That's why they wrote it into the constitution. The problem is those little companies that patent obvious things which don't require any research (or even thought, for that matter).
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I don't have any problem with cities putting in a public network, if the voters think it makes sense. But do we need to break out the golden shovel here? The correlation between net access and income/education is there because people with higher incomes don't have to choose between new shoes for the kids and internet service. I'll bet you can also find a correlation between internet use and expensive cars, clothes, and Tivo. As many have pointed out on /. before, correlation != causation. Let's face it, the internet today is used mostly to stream porn.
In fact, the research suggests a pretty strong negative correlation between internet use in the schools and basic (reading, writing, and math) skills. Your kids are better off cracking a book and leaving the computer off until they need to write term papers. Cliff Stoll wrote a pretty good book on this subject.
But I guess you don't have to make logical arguments for anything as long as you add "think of the children" to your proposals.
Why? Dialup is available throughout the entire country. While it's more convenient to surf the web at broadband speeds, this isn't a food/shelter issue.
The reality is you choose where you want to live in the US if you're a citizen. If you live somewhere without broadband, and it's important to you, then move. There are lots of reasons to live in "the country" - infrastructure isn't one of them.
If broadband is a right for country people, when do I get my cheap land in the San Francisco bay area. Shouldn't that be a right too? How about crystal-clear air and "peace and quiet"?
Bah.
Disgusting to you, maybe. But that just reinforces their logic. They don't think like you. And they don't want to. Why do you begrudge them their own culture? And why do you consider them racist for wanting to speak Japanese and observe Japanese customs in Japan? Interfacing with new and strange cultures is new and exiting when you're twenty. It's a whole different matter when you're seventy.
Oh, please. This is the same kind of pathological crap that comes from every racist. Racists lack the self-esteem to stand up as individuals, so they identify themselves with the collective culture in which they are embedded to dissociate themselves from their insecurity and self-loathing. When insiders come in and threaten to change the dynamic, they view it as a threat to the identity they adopted -- because they lack any identity of their own.
Good God! Is this steaming dungheap what passes for logic at universities these days? Gee, Freud, did it ever occur to you they might be satisfying the basic human urge to associate with people like themselves?
Individual creativity grows in direct proportion to the extent culture fades away as a social force. Hardly any of us could be doing what we are doing now, pursuing individual dreams, if our historical cultures had not been largely obliterated by successive waves of immigration. Each new arrival further weakens the hold that brainless tradition holds over each of us.
That's a profoundly ignorant thing to say. In fact the freedoms we have in the US are fewer than our fathers', and their freedoms were based on cultural norms inherited from a group of Scottish philosophers, who were in turn building on their own traditions. You want to see what happens to freedom when one's own culture is discarded in the name of tolerance? Look no further than the UK at the present, with cameras on every streetcorner and laws prohibiting speech other people might find insulting. As George Mosse said "tolerance is its own tyrany." Your culture is what allows your society to function without devolving into a police state.
Fuck culture, nationality, race, and every other cowardly mob refuge for failed individuals. They're all imaginary constructs. People are real. People who can't get jobs because the xenophobes in Tokyo close the borders and replace them with robots suffer real hunger and privation. Cultures don't suffer, feel pain, go hungry, or do anything at all -- except exist in the imaginations of individual people.
You have to be from a wealthy country to even think like that. Poeple always exist in the context of a group whether they like it or not. Incidentally, people in Japan are under no legal or moral obligation to provide jobs or anything else to surrounding countries.
I've always had a great fondness for Japanese culture, and I'd hat to see it destroyed in the same way western European cultures are being destroyed - by unrestricted immigration. Twenty years ago France was worried about the declining numbers of French speakers throughout the world. In another fifty years French won't be spoken in France. Do you think that will make the elderly French of 2054 happy?
The rejection of guest workers is a carefully considered policy in Japan. There are some disadvantages to losing a common culture, as the Dutch, the Germans, and the French are discovering. Can't say I blame the aging Japanese for not wanting to deal with cultural strife or learn Tagolog or Mandarin in their dotage. But pardon me, I'm off to my Spanish class...
Sigh. That is a stupid statement.
Remember during the anti-monopoly tials MS said they couldn't disentangle IE, then someone came up with a program called Win98Lite (or something like that) that stripped IE out of 98?
I don't remember Win98Lite. As I mentioned in my response to another comment above, the integration of browser and OS had to have started before the "anti-monopoly" trials, as you call them. Most people use "antitrust".
Have you ever worked on a large commercial software project? Why do you ascribe malice in a situation where incompetence is the most likely explaination? Are you still in school?
I smell astroturfer.
You better not make me mad or I'll come over in my black helicopter and hit you with a mind control ray. Our new ray can penetrate tinfoil, you know.
That's what we did.
you set up and TEST a digital recording system attached to the playback deck, and get the levels as close to perfect as you can, but let it peak around -3dB. Make sure you record it at some insane sampling rate and bit depth. 192kHz at 24bit is pretty good. Why? The bit depth is really important - this way when you process the audio through your restoration software, you have the bit depth to handle stuff like reverb tailings and other audio nuances.
Heh heh. It wasn't audio data, it was 0-4Mhz analog signal data. Times 14 tracks. The drives were bigger than refrigerators, cost more than $300,000, and would move tape at variable speeds up to 240 inches/sec.
And yeah, we only got one playback (sweaty palms time). We dubbed it onto another deck.
Yep. I used to work for a government agency that recorded missile telemetry on 1" 14 track analog tapes. If you stored them in a tightly controlled temperature/humidity environment they'd last a long time. The problem is that's relatively expensive, and it's not always clear what you most important reels are. We were asked to retrieve some data from a tape that was only about ten years old and it came off the reel like masking tape. We were able to restore them to a certain degree, but if it were audio it would have sounded like crap even after we were done. I had to clean the tape heads every 100' or so...
Nonsense, nothing of the sort was ever proven in court. The court ruled Microsoft was a monopoly and was abusing its monopoly position by (among other things irrelevant to this discussion) bundling the browser with the operating system. But that would have been true even if the browser wasn't integrated. They were in trouble for providing the browser for free.
The browser integration issue came up when Microsoft claimed (somewhat weakly) it couldn't separate the OS and browser. But that doesn't have any relevance to design decisions made years earlier. Do you really think the lawyers were involved in the design?
I'm sure the more elegant solution would have been to separate out the browser, but I can see a certain logic in trying to avoid two distict presentation layers.
Also, have done some WinAPI programming myself, I can tell you the obvious, elegant solutions aren't the easiest in most cases. That API is crap compared to POSIX. It always amazed me they could come out with an API years after POSIX that was far worse. Don't they read books? The very crappiness of the API lends support to my contention this is probably more a result of incompetance than malice. Microsoft had missed the internet boat and they were determined to get back on board, elegance be damned.
OK, you're halfway there...
Forget the NSA and Pentagon in this discussion - it isn't their job to place agents in foreign organizations. The NSA does electronics, and the Pentagon's intelligence gathering is supposed to be related to the conduct of military operations. This is entirely in the CIA's purview.
The question you have to ask is "why doesn't the CIA have any usefull covert capabilities anymore?" The best article I've ever seen on the subject is here. In a nutshell, it's not a money problem. It's a political problem and an organizational problem that's been steadily getting worse for 30 years.
I'm not sure why so many people "spy satellites" are just for taking visible spectrum pictures. You can, in fact, tell whether someone's living in a cave through an infrared signature (providing they're keeping warm somehow). More importantly, you can use satellites to eavesdrop on phone and radio conversations, as well as locate people who are generating any sort of EM radiation.
Also, you can do more active things, like change cruise missile's programming in-flight or control a drone aircraft.
We need to be able to do this stuff to fight the kind of war we're in. In fact we would have nailed Osama by now if some loose-lipped idiot hadn't bragged about tapping his satellite phone to a reporter.
I'm not sure you can ascribe this to malice - it probably has more to do with the historical context. Windows 95 would have been blocked out, when, '92 or so? That was long before the first release of Mosaic (Nov, '93). By '95 browsers were the next big thing. I suspect the design changed pretty radically mid-project, and the only way to make it happen without starting over was to integrate the OS and browser.
And you have to consider the effect of academic literature (especially in a company that prides itself in its PhD density). At the time, some academics considered the browser sort of the next evolution in computing, and they were trying to shove the paradigm into lots of solutions that didn't really fit the problem. The idea was popular in the literature. If they were following the trend, they would have thought "let's integrate Windows into the browser!"
In any event it's hard to do anything right the first time. It's easy to say what the logical design is now, a decade later.
It's not really fair to compare it to a program like Soyuz, which was actually designed to take people into space.
Hint to you: Read the Constitution. The president doesn't have the authority to levy taxes or spend money. None of this is ever going to work until Congress stops treating NASA like a jobs welfare program for commitee chairmen.
Actually, in the beginning it was supposed to be an American space station. Then when it was clear the taxpayers didn't want to pay for it the Russians were enticed to join the effort as a way to tap their supply systems and also to keep Russian engineers from moving to the Middle East and building guided missles. Then the Europeans were pushed into adding their tax dollars (for no reason I can see, from the European point of view).
And no they aren't doing any usefull science. But then they wouldn't have with a seven man crew. What usefull science would you expect to get out of a manned space project in LEO anyway? The Russians did all the usefull human biology stuff decades ago, so I think what we'll see is more of the same old worthless stuff they did on the shuttle: high-school science projects and more space crystals that could have been grown more cheaply on the ground.
Now that that's out of the way, if you read the article you will see the thing's gonna be built with private money, which any fiscal conservative (like me) can appreciate.
It's not a headache for me as a GPL'd code developer. If somebody wants to make money selling software, let him write the software he wants to sell and not include the fruits of my labor. I don't give my code away with no strings for the same reason the Secret Santa exchange won't work if you can participate without bringing a gift.
I have no problem with someone packaging the software and selling it, but the value he's adding is in the packaging, and the reward should be commensurate.
The system isn't set up so much to reward people for ideas as much as it is to entice companies to pay the salaries of people like this. And that's as it should be - otherwise he might be working at the local hardware store.
I was with you until you started quoting Chomsky. I find it interesting people on the left like to talk about corporate welfare, while at the same time complaining about government's unwillingness to do anything to stop job losses in tech and manufacturing. Well, which is it? Should the government do anything to protect jobs, or should it stand back and allow "creative destruction" to take place?
Heinlein used to remark of Carl Sagan "every time he convinces someone manned space projects don't make any sense we lose a supporter of the space program." NASA's in a tough spot - if they do the thing that makes the most sense for science, they'll get huge budget cuts, because J. Q. Public just won't care anymore. I can see the rationalle, from NASA's point of view, of ISS and the floundering shuttle program.
Unfortunately, it's all coming to a head in the next couple of years. The only reason NASA survives at this point is it's a great way to dole out jobs in the right district (why do we have ten space centers?). But the public is waking up to the fact that their 16 billion dollar investment is mostly wasted. I hope the projects you've identified survive that realization.
One thing that is pretty clear in recent years is academia has become a vast echo chamber where only people who agree with each other are allowed in the club. Anyone who disagrees is simply labeled a crackpot and dismissed. You don't hear about contrary ideas because even if the science is good, papers that disagree with THE CONSENSUS simply aren't published. The fact that they could or did pass peer review is irrelevant.
I believe the reason people are closing ranks on global warming is they perceive the need to do something now, without waiting for a firmer foundation in the science. I think that's a mistake, though. They lose credability for everything if they turn out to be wrong on anything when they have so few facts to work with. Also, they could very well be wrong. How many times has the consensus on infinitely expanding vs. collapsing universe flip-flopped in Cosmology?
I'm disinclined to support major government-mandated structural changes in society without some kind of proof. The science on this is considerably muddier than the article implies, and until the theory is better supported I don't think it's prudent to make the kind of changes the activist community is seeking.
Yeah, that's what I thought. These things remind me of concept cars from GM - they look fabulous, but they never actually get to the showroom.
I've dealt with these Gartner idiots before (they'll come out with whatever report you want if you sell it to your customers). The time to worry is when they say your job will be around forever.
You'd probably be able to buy chips for control circuits, but we might be using analog computers for scientific work.
Your professor isn't an electrical engineer, is he? 'Cause I really don't see any difference between talking about vacuum "leaking out" and say, hole mobility.
Yes, but IBM spends quite a bit of money on research. I don't fault a company for patenting honest-to-God inventions. That's why they wrote it into the constitution. The problem is those little companies that patent obvious things which don't require any research (or even thought, for that matter).