IAAPhysicist, an experimental high energy physicist to be more precise, and I don't like string theory much. I am not opposed to its study, I do not campaign to have funding removed from its proponents, in short, I do not hate it. I just don't care for it, and rather hope that it turns out to be wrong. OTOH, I don't really like the Standard Model (and extensions to it) much either. I think that something different from either is what is needed. Not being a theorist, I am not working on an alternative myself, but I have seen one or two things at various conferences, and thought (just gut reaction) that they looked very promising. One in particular that I found myself unaccountably fond of was a neat little statistical approach from a guy at tamu.
Anyway, my reason for disliking string theory is not at all that I find it "too elegant" or "too cute". You have most of the experimental hep people I know, including myself, pegged quite wrong there. In my opinion, and that of most of my colleagues that I have discussed it with (not a large percentage of all my colleagues), the problem with string theory is that it is not as cute or elegant as it thinks it is. It has precious few free parameters (contrast the standard model), and its first principles are strikingly simple. That ought to be elegance. However, the fact remains, as the GP said, that getting our observable (3,1) universe to appear, even just at low energies, from string theory is quite difficult. Why is this? Primarily because string theory does not tell us how the small extra dimensions are wrapped up around each other. The topology of space presents a huge theory space to search around in.
The standard model is criticised because it does not nail down the values of its free parameters (tautology), and if you don't have the right values of those parameters, then the theory does not describe our universe. However, we can perform experiments which measure various values which depend upon those parameters, and by so doing, obtain values for those parameters with ever increasing precision. Thus, we can find the values such that the standard model describes our universe. Furthermore, the standard model is not chaotic. If you are just a little bit off in the values of your parameters, then your theory describes a universe which is very like ours.
Now, take string theory. The topology of space winds up acting very much like free parameters. However, we can't do experiments to measure the "value" of the topology of space, so finding the right topology is, as I understand it, a huge trial and error process. Furthermore, as I understand it, even if you managed to define some notion of "closeness" to the correct topology, one topology which was "closer" to right than another one would not produce a universe which was necessarily any "closer" in its various properties to correct than the other one. In that sense, string theory is chaotic. So, for all its apparent elegance, it seems to me that string theory is a great deal uglier in the end that QFT and the standard model. This is why I and many others do not like string theory.
Really? I can reshape my body at will? Great news! I've always wanted to be about 20 pounds heavier than I am. Actually, my doctors want me to gain some weight too. I've tried everything that I can think of, and I've also tried everything that my doctors can think of. High-fat diets, high protein, protein supplements, high carb, high all of the above, no exercise, weightlifting, running, etc, etc, etc. And all of the above in various combinations as well. Nothing works. My body stubbornly refuses to gain more than a couple of pounds, and if I don't keep working very very hard at it, promptly loses them again. And I have always lived in suburban sprawl. Bone structure has a very small amount to do with it, but I am not only small boned (but tall), there is not much more than skin on those bones anyway. Good to know that these technologies of diet and physical fitness are now advanced enough to help me gain a little bit of weight.
You present your points fairly eloquently, but you do not defend them at all. This might be a sign that you are trolling. If you are, well, good job. I bit. Can you, in fact, demonstrate that the American Republic and private property have "failed so miserably"? Do you know what you actually want "post-state", or is it just a nice revolutionary sounding phrase? Would you care to tell us exactly why you think "libertarian ideology" is misguided? Could you please explain why you think that the "common men" who support the right wing must die? Oh wait, that one can probably be chalked up to a minor mishandling of grammar. Would you mind informing us of what these "alternatives" are? What are the characteristics of "19th century thinking", and in what ways does left wing thought differ from "19th century thinking"? Furthermore, in what ways is non-left-wing thought "19th century thinking"? What does "the common man" have in common with his "borthers on the left"? Also, how does "the common man" differ from "the elites"? And finally, what on earth does religion have to do with this?
Your rhetoric sounds quite reminiscent of Marxist rhetoric. Is this (Marxism) the position you are advocating? If so, I'm afraid that I would have to contend that a Marxist society is much more easily corrupted, because much more is under central control. If you can gain control of that center (and Marxism presents no real defenses against this, although defenses could certainly be created), then you have gained control over nearly everything. Whereas with a capitalist economy, gaining control of whatever center there may be (government, in the case of the US) does not automatically grant you control over much. You may be able to use the powers of government to gain control over more, but certainly with a free economy, corruption is more difficult than with a command economy. Furthermore, I am not aware that there are alternatives to these two (other than linear combinations of them, of course). So, your claim that we need something which is not capitalist economics and which is less easily corrupted appears at face value to present a contradiction (the universe explodes).
Hmm. You must mean the kind of society where whoever has the most guns, makes the rules.
Oh, wait, we already have that.
That is the case, and it has always been the case, and it will always be the case. Might does in fact make right, at least insofar as right means making the decisions. What makes a liberal (old sense of the word) government special is that might has decided to restrain itself and delegate the decision making. Doesn't change might makes right at all. Not even a little bit. Just puts a veneer of civility on top of it. A very very important veneer, mind you, but a thin one nonetheless.
IIRC, none of the sites I mentioned except for google calendar originated with a big company. All the rest started small, and built a success on the prettiness and smoothness of use that AJAX and friends give, and/or on that other main piece of web 2.0, user contribution. AJAX is not all there is to web 2.0, as you would know if you had read the page I found for you, and all but one of the sites I mentioned were web 2.0 sites long before they were high-volume, big boy sites. Do you think that they would have made it big if they hadn't used web 2.0 concepts?
Also, as I understand it, AJAX has never been about reducing server side loads. It has always been about reducing latency for the user. As I'm sure you know, server-side code requires a page reload whenever something changes. This takes a long time, and is ugly. Client side scripting, even with all of its myriad flaws, eliminates this problem, and thus makes the end result much more usable. I could not have stood to use an online calendar before AJAX, because the crappiness of the user experience just bugs the hell out of me, but now I use google calendar quite a bit. I always passionately hated webmail interfaces; I found them virtually unusable. I still don't use webmail, but I think that I could now, provided the client were AJAXified.
Furthermore, although I do not do web programming myself (scientific programming is my thing), I have gathered that AJAX isn't all that much more difficult to do that server side code. Sure, if you want to work from scratch, it would be. But why reinvent the wheel, when you've got things like Ruby on Rails and friends around already. Perhaps this is incorrect, but from all the happy raving I hear about Rails all the time, I've kind of gotten the impression that many people would rather do Rails programming than say PHP.
So, lets see, we've covered the assertion that all web 2.0 sites are high-volume, big boy sites (some are, but even most of those that are weren't always), and as a corollary the idea that no small site ever needs web 2.0 stuff. We've also covered the apparent idea that AJAX is the same thing as web 2.0 (it isn't). There's also the idea that AJAX is about reducing server side loads (really, it is more about reducing client latency). And finally, the idea that AJAX pushes up development costs extraordinarily (I'm not inclined to think that it does, although I'm much less certain about this point than the others). Did you have anything else you wanted to talk about?
I'd trust that more than edits made by the PR people.
I would too, if he weren't taking MS's check. Money has this curious way of interfering with most people's thoughts and consciences. I don't know the man personally, so I don't know that he wouldn't be affected by this. The truly honest thing for him to have done would be to refuse MS's money, but make the corrections he thought were best anyway. That is, he ought to have treated MS's offer as a bit of information that something was wrong and in his power to fix. The fact that he didn't means that he isn't perfectly ethical to start with (of course, who is?), and since I don't know how ethical he is other than not perfectly, I don't trust him any more than MS's PR department.
I have occasionally made corrections to articles in my own area of expertise. Those who pay me don't have any real reason to be biased one way or another on those matters, unlike MS paying this chap. However, also unlike this guy, those who pay me neither care nor know that I infrequently contribute to wikipedia. Really a very big difference.
This isn't some random anonymous goofball being paid to insert text Microsoft gives him; he's an (apparently) recognized figure, not especially MS-friendly
It doesn't sound like you have ever heard of him either. He claims not to be MS-friendly in his article; he manages to suggest that his reputation is on the line; he appears surprised that MS approached him. However, in true conspiracy theory form, this is exactly what he would claim, suggest, and appear if he really were some goon born and raised in Redmond. He probably isn't. But why should I trust him any more than anyone else? (Naturally, somebody who has heard of him, or knows him, could give plenty of good reasons one way or the other. But from what you've said, I would infer that you cannot.)
the write-up here is completely dishonest.
Yes. It is. Still does not imply that the original article is not also dishonest.
What? You haven't seen anything web 2.0 yet? Try visiting flickr, wikipedia, google calendar, last.fm, even slashdot itself. All of these are, in some way or another, web 2.0. But you don't have to take my word for it. Ask Tim O'Reilly, the coiner (coinant?) of the bleeding buzzword.
So, string theory and SM are really more or less (pending better equipment and experiments) on the same footing as regards predictions and available evidence. Thus, to choose between them, we have to look at other things. For instance, how easy is it to make string theory predictions versus the same predictions from SM? How much information purely from experiment is needed in order to make predictions? That is, how many degrees of freedom does the theory have? What precisions can we get from SM vs from string theory?
The fact that string theory makes no predictions which are testable today which are different from the standard model is often raised as an objection to string theory. However, if that is strictly true, then it simply means that the two theories are on precisely equal footing in that regard. So, "string theory doesn't make any new predictions" should not be considered to be a strike against it.
IMO, there are plenty of strikes against string theory (it is harder and while purporting to be "parameterless", really has a much nastier situation re parameters), and we don't need to go around making up ones that don't really exist.
Single exemplars do not a proof make. I did not miss your evidence, I just didn't actually believe that you thought that would convince anyone. After all, I can think of a single exemplar, without much effort, which supports a completely opposite position to yours. Try the following on for size:
Now let's look at probabilities and some history. Lots of other professional bodies that discouraged women have discovered that letting women do traditionally male work has ended up with the men still doing the traditional male work. I can't think of any where allowing women actually made much of a difference. Most of our best construction companies started off explicitly not allowing women; now all of the major contractors encourage women to work for them, but 99% of their employee base is still male. The older generation had a big problem with letting women in; the current set of workers don't have a problem with it, but they still don't see very many women working alongside them. In the heavy industries in general, women are a steady very low constant percent of the workers, except for arts and crafts, where the percentage has always been very high.
I am explicitly pointing to history (In the past, people with the idea that women "want to do everything that men want to do" are generally wrong) and to current practice (women are not flooding into every job field which is open to them, only to a fairly select set of them; what's the chance that we have a "desired field" versus "they just don't care to"?).
Just as sound of an argument as yours. And I'm not merely presenting this for the sake of being nitpicky. Construction really is one field which is certainly open to women, but they just aren't interested. Women also do not clamor to be registered for Selective Services. Women are severely underrepresented among truck drivers. Face it buddy, there are some things which women in general just don't want to do. Now, that's not to say that a decent argument couldn't be made to say that women do want to work in IT. But you are a long way from making such an argument.
As far as questioning both the immorality and the need for fixing, I was doing just that, questioning both of them. I first questioned your claim that it was immoral, and I second questioned your claim that it needed fixing. Quite independent. I was not declaring anything, much less that something immoral ought to be changed. Perhaps your parsing skills need work.
Oh, and BTW, computer science, despite the name, is not a science. Nor is IT. Computer science is properly a branch of mathematics. Programming is maybe closer to engineering than anything else. IT work is at one end of the spectrum no different from working the call lines for prudential healthcare, and at the other end somewhere between janitorial work (mindless, repetitive, cleaning up after people) and programming. Not science at all. Nor is engineering science, and people who have some understanding of both fields do not lump them together.
But if the defense lawyers just say "Well, you had no plans to develop it yourself, and besides, once it is developed, we are handing out the blueprint for free.", then the patent-funded lawyers ought to have no case. Whether or not they do have a case is a matter of what the laws on the books are, and I don't know that. But, if the laws on the books say they do have a case, then those laws have become a problem and need to be changed. The lobbyists might be more of a problem, which perhaps merely indicates that we need more restrictions on corporate lobbying.
What I'm saying is that is most likely wrong (and if it is wrong, it's immoral and should be fixed).
What you aren't saying is why you think it is most likely wrong. Furthermore, even if it is wrong, how or why is it immoral, and why should it be fixed?
I can say the sky is orange till I'm blue in the face. That neither makes it so nor makes anyone believe me. Now I also might say the sky is blue until I'm blue in the face. That also neither makes it so nor makes anyone believe me. OTOH, if I say the sky is blue while pointing at the bloody thing, then people will look up. Still doesn't make it so, but it will tend to make people believe me.
Right. I really should read more carefully before I post. I didn't reply to you very well a minute ago, more of a reply to what I thought you said after a cursory scanning.
We can't see quarks directly, not even with instruments. We can see particular phenomena that are well explained by a model involving these hypothetical constructs called quarks. But our model predicts that we will never ever ever see quarks directly, not even only as well as we can see atoms with an STM. So are they real? Well, the theory works quite well, so maybe it makes sense to say that they are real.
String theory (if we could ever find the *right* string theory) works just as well as the Standard Model. In fact, with better instruments (higher energies) it might well turn out to work better than SM. Or it might not. If it works just as well (or better), then why not say that strings are real? We would have just as much evidence of their reality as we do of quarks' reality today. In fact, as I understand string theory (I am an experimentalist, not a theorist), all the fundamental particles are actually special cases of strings. So, when we "observe" fundamental particles, we might just as well say that we are "observing" strings.
Yes. And I was pointing out that with many things in the past, such as atoms, there have been many physicists who didn't like them because they were undetectable by current instruments. Many even claimed that they did not exist (Ernst Mach). And yet, technology moved on, and we got better (unimaginable previously) instruments, and observed atoms. So my claim (and I don't speak for all physicists here, of course) is that saying superstrings are not "real" is a little bit silly given history.
There has not been any experiment carried out yet to test string theory in the same way because we don't have accelerators with enough energy to see down to Planck length scales. I don't think that our own lack of sufficient technology, particularly when sufficient technology is within the reach of our imaginations, should be a barrier to a theory. As I said, I have other reasons for not liking string theory. "Superstrings aren't real" is not and should not be one of them.
No. Not at all. I'm saying that the arguments for superstrings not being "real" are strikingly similar to arguments made for any number of other things (like atoms) not being "real", and yet we later figured out that we could observe these things (like atoms). And so, I would advise a great deal of caution in declaring that superstrings are not "real" (assuming of course that string theory turns out to have any merit in the end). If the theory works, history would strongly suggest that superstrings are as "real" as atoms or electrons or quarks or neutrinos.
Neutrinos were even worse than strings when they were first postulated. Pauli said in his letter proposing them that they were undetectable. Superstrings are only undetectable given current accelerators (that is, ones with insufficient energy to probe the planck length).
Not only is there a complete lack of evidence for this, but it is somewhat nonsensical as well. It only makes sense to talk about natural selection if there is some form of continuity of characteristics from one entity to its daughters. This is why microspheres are not alive. They do all kinds of things, like reproduce, metabolize, die, etc. But, their descendants do not necessarily share any characteristics with them, so there is no natural selection taking place. Unless he is also proposing that the daughter universes shared some characteristics of their parents, natural selection is a nonsense term.
What do you mean real? Call me back when you see a real electron. Or better yet, when you see a real quark. Superstrings are just as real as either of these. In fact, unless I misunderstand, electrons and quarks would merely be a special case of strings, that is, strings carrying particular vibrational modes.
Ernst Mach raised precisely this objection against atomic theory. He said that atoms were not real because we could not, and would never be able to, see them. They were just a convenient mathematical model which happened to make reasonable predictions, but they were not actually real. Well, as it turns out, theories which utilize these "unobservable, unreal, mathematical constructs" are often very successful, and, where they have been successful, we have later found ways to observe precisely the objects described.
So, I would say that strings, if the theory turns out to produce useful, accurate, precise results, are just as real as photons, atoms, rocks, and stars.
That's not to say I like string theory. I hope string theory doesn't win. I think that it would put us in actually a worse position than the Standard Model has us in right now. The standard model has umpteen different parameters which must be fine tuned by experiment. This is generally regarded as a serious shortcoming, as the values of those parameters ought to be predicted by a good theory. String theory is "parameterless". This is a wonderful thing, until you consider that those extra spacial dimensions can be wrapped up around each other in an enormous number of ways, and each way produces a completely different set of particles and natural laws. So now, rather than measuring a few values, we must instead investigate every possible way of wrapping up the extra dimensions, until we find one which matches our own universe. So, in short, the topology of space is the parameters of string theory, and a much nastier parameter space than for the standard model it is.
That might explain the case of the "caveman", but only if it were true that he put a single ounce of effort into teaching anyone. To put it flatly, he didn't. According to my father, his primary concern every day was that all of the desks should line up with their left front leg exactly at the correct intersection of four tiles.
Also, it is definitely worth mentioning that the number of women both entering and graduating from college has exceeded (by a significant amount) the number of men doing each activity for some time now. That's a sure sign of discrimination against women, isn't it?
I'm not saying that such discrimination doesn't exist, or isn't a problem. Nor am I claiming that discrimination in the other direction is equally a problem. However, I do think that we need to be very very careful that our zeal for compensating for discrimination doesn't become inequity in the other direction.
stop pretending like companies succeed or fail based on whether or not they show up to work.
Right, so when the janitors go on strike, and the company gradually ceases to be able to use the building (what? ALL of the toilets are clogged? I have to go the next building over to use the bathroom?), then the company will still succeed or fail exactly as they would have before...
Or, when the IT staff go on strike, and the CEO can't call someone to attach a word document to an email, then the company will still succeed or fail exactly as they would have before...
IF people in the company would pay attention and try to learn something, then yes, the IT staff would be just as important as the janitorial staff. However, the CEO does not have to call the janitor every time he needs to throw something away ("now I've got this piece of paper, and I don't want it anymore. What do I do with it?" "Look to your left. There is a little round metal can sitting there, with a thin plastic liner. Put the piece of paper in the can.") or use the restroom ("now look, sir, you just need to direct the stream at this ceramic receptacle on the wall. I wish I didn't have to keep telling you that"). If people in the company can learn how to use trashcans and toilets, then all the janitor needs to do is empty the trash, fix the actual equipment when it fails, and sterilize things. If people in the company could just learn how to use their computers, then all the IT staff would need to do is maintain backups, apply occasional patches, and fix hardware failures.
Fact is, most companies, due to non-IT people's willful and prideful ignorance, DO depend much more heavily upon the immediate and constant services of their IT staff than they do upon their janitorial staff.
Also, most people do have some idea of how to do janitorial work. They have acquired the necessary knowledge one way or another to do the work of the janitorial staff. They do not, however, have the necessary (and enormously more extensive) knowledge required to do the IT staff's work. Usually, in today's culture, the acquisition of knowledge is equivalent to the acquisition of respect. However, for IT staff, frequently the acquisition of knowledge is equivalent to the acquisition of derision.
Non-IT people in a company tend to treat their IT staff the way some asshat french noble from the sixteenth century treated his household staff. (not that all 16th century french nobles were asshats, but I'm sure you're familiar with the stereotype.) The staff had acquired specialized knowledge (say... cooking) quite independently of any effort by the nobleman, and this specialized knowledge was quite frequently required by the nobleman in order for his noble life to continue without hiccups, yet the nobleman looked down his nose at them precisely because they knew how to make his life comfortable and because they did make his life comfortable. True, they did get paid (well, lets say they did for the sake of argument anyway), and apparently in your view, that gives the noble the right to treat them however he likes, but it also means that the servants must never ever speak ill of their master.
The whole feudalism thing went away for some very good reasons. We don't need to return to it in a new form now.
Sounds like my dad's high school physics course in the early 70s. The teacher walked in on the first day of class (they called him the "caveman", btw) and told them that all the girls were good little girls who went home after school and helped their mothers around the house, so they would get As, but that all the boys were bad little boys who went out behind the pool hall after class and smoked, so they would get Bs. And sure enough he stuck to his guns when grade time came.
Newsflash: swords cut both ways.
Re:I use Common Lisp because of its 'white hot' sp
on
Lisp and Ruby
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Interpreted is still slower than Compiled. Always will be. However, the reason that that problem has *somewhat* gone away is that machines are fast enough now that for *most* situations (UIs being one example), that is not a problem. However, for some problem domains (eg scientific programming), speed will never cease to be an issue. The faster the machines we have, the more we will throw at them. Lattice calculations work better with a smaller lattice spacing, and a faster machine allows a smaller spacing.
However, most of the interpreted languages which have appeared to resolve their speed issues have done so by some form of on the fly compilation. So yes, ruby could move up to even with the lisps in that way.
Re:Performance, anyone?
on
Lisp and Ruby
·
· Score: 1
A decent implementation of common lisp tends to perform about as well or better than optimized compiled C. And most of the big implementations are decent in that regard.
Slashdot Mirror
IAAPhysicist, an experimental high energy physicist to be more precise, and I don't like string theory much. I am not opposed to its study, I do not campaign to have funding removed from its proponents, in short, I do not hate it. I just don't care for it, and rather hope that it turns out to be wrong. OTOH, I don't really like the Standard Model (and extensions to it) much either. I think that something different from either is what is needed. Not being a theorist, I am not working on an alternative myself, but I have seen one or two things at various conferences, and thought (just gut reaction) that they looked very promising. One in particular that I found myself unaccountably fond of was a neat little statistical approach from a guy at tamu.
Anyway, my reason for disliking string theory is not at all that I find it "too elegant" or "too cute". You have most of the experimental hep people I know, including myself, pegged quite wrong there. In my opinion, and that of most of my colleagues that I have discussed it with (not a large percentage of all my colleagues), the problem with string theory is that it is not as cute or elegant as it thinks it is. It has precious few free parameters (contrast the standard model), and its first principles are strikingly simple. That ought to be elegance. However, the fact remains, as the GP said, that getting our observable (3,1) universe to appear, even just at low energies, from string theory is quite difficult. Why is this? Primarily because string theory does not tell us how the small extra dimensions are wrapped up around each other. The topology of space presents a huge theory space to search around in.
The standard model is criticised because it does not nail down the values of its free parameters (tautology), and if you don't have the right values of those parameters, then the theory does not describe our universe. However, we can perform experiments which measure various values which depend upon those parameters, and by so doing, obtain values for those parameters with ever increasing precision. Thus, we can find the values such that the standard model describes our universe. Furthermore, the standard model is not chaotic. If you are just a little bit off in the values of your parameters, then your theory describes a universe which is very like ours.
Now, take string theory. The topology of space winds up acting very much like free parameters. However, we can't do experiments to measure the "value" of the topology of space, so finding the right topology is, as I understand it, a huge trial and error process. Furthermore, as I understand it, even if you managed to define some notion of "closeness" to the correct topology, one topology which was "closer" to right than another one would not produce a universe which was necessarily any "closer" in its various properties to correct than the other one. In that sense, string theory is chaotic. So, for all its apparent elegance, it seems to me that string theory is a great deal uglier in the end that QFT and the standard model. This is why I and many others do not like string theory.
Really? I can reshape my body at will? Great news! I've always wanted to be about 20 pounds heavier than I am. Actually, my doctors want me to gain some weight too. I've tried everything that I can think of, and I've also tried everything that my doctors can think of. High-fat diets, high protein, protein supplements, high carb, high all of the above, no exercise, weightlifting, running, etc, etc, etc. And all of the above in various combinations as well. Nothing works. My body stubbornly refuses to gain more than a couple of pounds, and if I don't keep working very very hard at it, promptly loses them again. And I have always lived in suburban sprawl. Bone structure has a very small amount to do with it, but I am not only small boned (but tall), there is not much more than skin on those bones anyway. Good to know that these technologies of diet and physical fitness are now advanced enough to help me gain a little bit of weight.
You present your points fairly eloquently, but you do not defend them at all. This might be a sign that you are trolling. If you are, well, good job. I bit. Can you, in fact, demonstrate that the American Republic and private property have "failed so miserably"? Do you know what you actually want "post-state", or is it just a nice revolutionary sounding phrase? Would you care to tell us exactly why you think "libertarian ideology" is misguided? Could you please explain why you think that the "common men" who support the right wing must die? Oh wait, that one can probably be chalked up to a minor mishandling of grammar. Would you mind informing us of what these "alternatives" are? What are the characteristics of "19th century thinking", and in what ways does left wing thought differ from "19th century thinking"? Furthermore, in what ways is non-left-wing thought "19th century thinking"? What does "the common man" have in common with his "borthers on the left"? Also, how does "the common man" differ from "the elites"? And finally, what on earth does religion have to do with this?
Your rhetoric sounds quite reminiscent of Marxist rhetoric. Is this (Marxism) the position you are advocating? If so, I'm afraid that I would have to contend that a Marxist society is much more easily corrupted, because much more is under central control. If you can gain control of that center (and Marxism presents no real defenses against this, although defenses could certainly be created), then you have gained control over nearly everything. Whereas with a capitalist economy, gaining control of whatever center there may be (government, in the case of the US) does not automatically grant you control over much. You may be able to use the powers of government to gain control over more, but certainly with a free economy, corruption is more difficult than with a command economy. Furthermore, I am not aware that there are alternatives to these two (other than linear combinations of them, of course). So, your claim that we need something which is not capitalist economics and which is less easily corrupted appears at face value to present a contradiction (the universe explodes).
Well that's good, but I'll still opt for building my own.
IIRC, none of the sites I mentioned except for google calendar originated with a big company. All the rest started small, and built a success on the prettiness and smoothness of use that AJAX and friends give, and/or on that other main piece of web 2.0, user contribution. AJAX is not all there is to web 2.0, as you would know if you had read the page I found for you, and all but one of the sites I mentioned were web 2.0 sites long before they were high-volume, big boy sites. Do you think that they would have made it big if they hadn't used web 2.0 concepts?
Also, as I understand it, AJAX has never been about reducing server side loads. It has always been about reducing latency for the user. As I'm sure you know, server-side code requires a page reload whenever something changes. This takes a long time, and is ugly. Client side scripting, even with all of its myriad flaws, eliminates this problem, and thus makes the end result much more usable. I could not have stood to use an online calendar before AJAX, because the crappiness of the user experience just bugs the hell out of me, but now I use google calendar quite a bit. I always passionately hated webmail interfaces; I found them virtually unusable. I still don't use webmail, but I think that I could now, provided the client were AJAXified.
Furthermore, although I do not do web programming myself (scientific programming is my thing), I have gathered that AJAX isn't all that much more difficult to do that server side code. Sure, if you want to work from scratch, it would be. But why reinvent the wheel, when you've got things like Ruby on Rails and friends around already. Perhaps this is incorrect, but from all the happy raving I hear about Rails all the time, I've kind of gotten the impression that many people would rather do Rails programming than say PHP.
So, lets see, we've covered the assertion that all web 2.0 sites are high-volume, big boy sites (some are, but even most of those that are weren't always), and as a corollary the idea that no small site ever needs web 2.0 stuff. We've also covered the apparent idea that AJAX is the same thing as web 2.0 (it isn't). There's also the idea that AJAX is about reducing server side loads (really, it is more about reducing client latency). And finally, the idea that AJAX pushes up development costs extraordinarily (I'm not inclined to think that it does, although I'm much less certain about this point than the others). Did you have anything else you wanted to talk about?
I have occasionally made corrections to articles in my own area of expertise. Those who pay me don't have any real reason to be biased one way or another on those matters, unlike MS paying this chap. However, also unlike this guy, those who pay me neither care nor know that I infrequently contribute to wikipedia. Really a very big difference.
It doesn't sound like you have ever heard of him either. He claims not to be MS-friendly in his article; he manages to suggest that his reputation is on the line; he appears surprised that MS approached him. However, in true conspiracy theory form, this is exactly what he would claim, suggest, and appear if he really were some goon born and raised in Redmond. He probably isn't. But why should I trust him any more than anyone else? (Naturally, somebody who has heard of him, or knows him, could give plenty of good reasons one way or the other. But from what you've said, I would infer that you cannot.)
Yes. It is. Still does not imply that the original article is not also dishonest.
Right.
So, string theory and SM are really more or less (pending better equipment and experiments) on the same footing as regards predictions and available evidence. Thus, to choose between them, we have to look at other things. For instance, how easy is it to make string theory predictions versus the same predictions from SM? How much information purely from experiment is needed in order to make predictions? That is, how many degrees of freedom does the theory have? What precisions can we get from SM vs from string theory?
The fact that string theory makes no predictions which are testable today which are different from the standard model is often raised as an objection to string theory. However, if that is strictly true, then it simply means that the two theories are on precisely equal footing in that regard. So, "string theory doesn't make any new predictions" should not be considered to be a strike against it.
IMO, there are plenty of strikes against string theory (it is harder and while purporting to be "parameterless", really has a much nastier situation re parameters), and we don't need to go around making up ones that don't really exist.
Single exemplars do not a proof make. I did not miss your evidence, I just didn't actually believe that you thought that would convince anyone. After all, I can think of a single exemplar, without much effort, which supports a completely opposite position to yours. Try the following on for size:
Now let's look at probabilities and some history. Lots of other professional bodies that discouraged women have discovered that letting women do traditionally male work has ended up with the men still doing the traditional male work. I can't think of any where allowing women actually made much of a difference. Most of our best construction companies started off explicitly not allowing women; now all of the major contractors encourage women to work for them, but 99% of their employee base is still male. The older generation had a big problem with letting women in; the current set of workers don't have a problem with it, but they still don't see very many women working alongside them. In the heavy industries in general, women are a steady very low constant percent of the workers, except for arts and crafts, where the percentage has always been very high.
I am explicitly pointing to history (In the past, people with the idea that women "want to do everything that men want to do" are generally wrong) and to current practice (women are not flooding into every job field which is open to them, only to a fairly select set of them; what's the chance that we have a "desired field" versus "they just don't care to"?).
Just as sound of an argument as yours. And I'm not merely presenting this for the sake of being nitpicky. Construction really is one field which is certainly open to women, but they just aren't interested. Women also do not clamor to be registered for Selective Services. Women are severely underrepresented among truck drivers. Face it buddy, there are some things which women in general just don't want to do. Now, that's not to say that a decent argument couldn't be made to say that women do want to work in IT. But you are a long way from making such an argument.
As far as questioning both the immorality and the need for fixing, I was doing just that, questioning both of them. I first questioned your claim that it was immoral, and I second questioned your claim that it needed fixing. Quite independent. I was not declaring anything, much less that something immoral ought to be changed. Perhaps your parsing skills need work.
Oh, and BTW, computer science, despite the name, is not a science. Nor is IT. Computer science is properly a branch of mathematics. Programming is maybe closer to engineering than anything else. IT work is at one end of the spectrum no different from working the call lines for prudential healthcare, and at the other end somewhere between janitorial work (mindless, repetitive, cleaning up after people) and programming. Not science at all. Nor is engineering science, and people who have some understanding of both fields do not lump them together.
But if the defense lawyers just say "Well, you had no plans to develop it yourself, and besides, once it is developed, we are handing out the blueprint for free.", then the patent-funded lawyers ought to have no case. Whether or not they do have a case is a matter of what the laws on the books are, and I don't know that. But, if the laws on the books say they do have a case, then those laws have become a problem and need to be changed. The lobbyists might be more of a problem, which perhaps merely indicates that we need more restrictions on corporate lobbying.
I can say the sky is orange till I'm blue in the face. That neither makes it so nor makes anyone believe me. Now I also might say the sky is blue until I'm blue in the face. That also neither makes it so nor makes anyone believe me. OTOH, if I say the sky is blue while pointing at the bloody thing, then people will look up. Still doesn't make it so, but it will tend to make people believe me.
Right. I really should read more carefully before I post. I didn't reply to you very well a minute ago, more of a reply to what I thought you said after a cursory scanning.
We can't see quarks directly, not even with instruments. We can see particular phenomena that are well explained by a model involving these hypothetical constructs called quarks. But our model predicts that we will never ever ever see quarks directly, not even only as well as we can see atoms with an STM. So are they real? Well, the theory works quite well, so maybe it makes sense to say that they are real.
String theory (if we could ever find the *right* string theory) works just as well as the Standard Model. In fact, with better instruments (higher energies) it might well turn out to work better than SM. Or it might not. If it works just as well (or better), then why not say that strings are real? We would have just as much evidence of their reality as we do of quarks' reality today. In fact, as I understand string theory (I am an experimentalist, not a theorist), all the fundamental particles are actually special cases of strings. So, when we "observe" fundamental particles, we might just as well say that we are "observing" strings.
Yes. And I was pointing out that with many things in the past, such as atoms, there have been many physicists who didn't like them because they were undetectable by current instruments. Many even claimed that they did not exist (Ernst Mach). And yet, technology moved on, and we got better (unimaginable previously) instruments, and observed atoms. So my claim (and I don't speak for all physicists here, of course) is that saying superstrings are not "real" is a little bit silly given history.
There has not been any experiment carried out yet to test string theory in the same way because we don't have accelerators with enough energy to see down to Planck length scales. I don't think that our own lack of sufficient technology, particularly when sufficient technology is within the reach of our imaginations, should be a barrier to a theory. As I said, I have other reasons for not liking string theory. "Superstrings aren't real" is not and should not be one of them.
No. Not at all. I'm saying that the arguments for superstrings not being "real" are strikingly similar to arguments made for any number of other things (like atoms) not being "real", and yet we later figured out that we could observe these things (like atoms). And so, I would advise a great deal of caution in declaring that superstrings are not "real" (assuming of course that string theory turns out to have any merit in the end). If the theory works, history would strongly suggest that superstrings are as "real" as atoms or electrons or quarks or neutrinos.
Neutrinos were even worse than strings when they were first postulated. Pauli said in his letter proposing them that they were undetectable. Superstrings are only undetectable given current accelerators (that is, ones with insufficient energy to probe the planck length).
Not only is there a complete lack of evidence for this, but it is somewhat nonsensical as well. It only makes sense to talk about natural selection if there is some form of continuity of characteristics from one entity to its daughters. This is why microspheres are not alive. They do all kinds of things, like reproduce, metabolize, die, etc. But, their descendants do not necessarily share any characteristics with them, so there is no natural selection taking place. Unless he is also proposing that the daughter universes shared some characteristics of their parents, natural selection is a nonsense term.
What do you mean real? Call me back when you see a real electron. Or better yet, when you see a real quark. Superstrings are just as real as either of these. In fact, unless I misunderstand, electrons and quarks would merely be a special case of strings, that is, strings carrying particular vibrational modes.
Ernst Mach raised precisely this objection against atomic theory. He said that atoms were not real because we could not, and would never be able to, see them. They were just a convenient mathematical model which happened to make reasonable predictions, but they were not actually real. Well, as it turns out, theories which utilize these "unobservable, unreal, mathematical constructs" are often very successful, and, where they have been successful, we have later found ways to observe precisely the objects described.
So, I would say that strings, if the theory turns out to produce useful, accurate, precise results, are just as real as photons, atoms, rocks, and stars.
That's not to say I like string theory. I hope string theory doesn't win. I think that it would put us in actually a worse position than the Standard Model has us in right now. The standard model has umpteen different parameters which must be fine tuned by experiment. This is generally regarded as a serious shortcoming, as the values of those parameters ought to be predicted by a good theory. String theory is "parameterless". This is a wonderful thing, until you consider that those extra spacial dimensions can be wrapped up around each other in an enormous number of ways, and each way produces a completely different set of particles and natural laws. So now, rather than measuring a few values, we must instead investigate every possible way of wrapping up the extra dimensions, until we find one which matches our own universe. So, in short, the topology of space is the parameters of string theory, and a much nastier parameter space than for the standard model it is.
That might explain the case of the "caveman", but only if it were true that he put a single ounce of effort into teaching anyone. To put it flatly, he didn't. According to my father, his primary concern every day was that all of the desks should line up with their left front leg exactly at the correct intersection of four tiles.
Also, it is definitely worth mentioning that the number of women both entering and graduating from college has exceeded (by a significant amount) the number of men doing each activity for some time now. That's a sure sign of discrimination against women, isn't it?
I'm not saying that such discrimination doesn't exist, or isn't a problem. Nor am I claiming that discrimination in the other direction is equally a problem. However, I do think that we need to be very very careful that our zeal for compensating for discrimination doesn't become inequity in the other direction.
BTW, silicone and silicon are not the same thing.
Or, when the IT staff go on strike, and the CEO can't call someone to attach a word document to an email, then the company will still succeed or fail exactly as they would have before...
IF people in the company would pay attention and try to learn something, then yes, the IT staff would be just as important as the janitorial staff. However, the CEO does not have to call the janitor every time he needs to throw something away ("now I've got this piece of paper, and I don't want it anymore. What do I do with it?" "Look to your left. There is a little round metal can sitting there, with a thin plastic liner. Put the piece of paper in the can.") or use the restroom ("now look, sir, you just need to direct the stream at this ceramic receptacle on the wall. I wish I didn't have to keep telling you that"). If people in the company can learn how to use trashcans and toilets, then all the janitor needs to do is empty the trash, fix the actual equipment when it fails, and sterilize things. If people in the company could just learn how to use their computers, then all the IT staff would need to do is maintain backups, apply occasional patches, and fix hardware failures.
Fact is, most companies, due to non-IT people's willful and prideful ignorance, DO depend much more heavily upon the immediate and constant services of their IT staff than they do upon their janitorial staff.
Also, most people do have some idea of how to do janitorial work. They have acquired the necessary knowledge one way or another to do the work of the janitorial staff. They do not, however, have the necessary (and enormously more extensive) knowledge required to do the IT staff's work. Usually, in today's culture, the acquisition of knowledge is equivalent to the acquisition of respect. However, for IT staff, frequently the acquisition of knowledge is equivalent to the acquisition of derision.
Non-IT people in a company tend to treat their IT staff the way some asshat french noble from the sixteenth century treated his household staff. (not that all 16th century french nobles were asshats, but I'm sure you're familiar with the stereotype.) The staff had acquired specialized knowledge (say... cooking) quite independently of any effort by the nobleman, and this specialized knowledge was quite frequently required by the nobleman in order for his noble life to continue without hiccups, yet the nobleman looked down his nose at them precisely because they knew how to make his life comfortable and because they did make his life comfortable. True, they did get paid (well, lets say they did for the sake of argument anyway), and apparently in your view, that gives the noble the right to treat them however he likes, but it also means that the servants must never ever speak ill of their master.
The whole feudalism thing went away for some very good reasons. We don't need to return to it in a new form now.
Sounds like my dad's high school physics course in the early 70s. The teacher walked in on the first day of class (they called him the "caveman", btw) and told them that all the girls were good little girls who went home after school and helped their mothers around the house, so they would get As, but that all the boys were bad little boys who went out behind the pool hall after class and smoked, so they would get Bs. And sure enough he stuck to his guns when grade time came.
Newsflash: swords cut both ways.
Interpreted is still slower than Compiled. Always will be. However, the reason that that problem has *somewhat* gone away is that machines are fast enough now that for *most* situations (UIs being one example), that is not a problem. However, for some problem domains (eg scientific programming), speed will never cease to be an issue. The faster the machines we have, the more we will throw at them. Lattice calculations work better with a smaller lattice spacing, and a faster machine allows a smaller spacing.
However, most of the interpreted languages which have appeared to resolve their speed issues have done so by some form of on the fly compilation. So yes, ruby could move up to even with the lisps in that way.
A decent implementation of common lisp tends to perform about as well or better than optimized compiled C. And most of the big implementations are decent in that regard.