How about the case of Women's Suffrage in the US? While there were many courageous men and women who campaigned for that right, it was through a free and open vote of men that it was passed. This was not a case of women forcing men to give them the right to vote, but of men deciding that women should have that right. There may have been persuasion, but you can't really call it forced.
Please tell me how I can test if you are self aware? Your assertion that because people seem like you, and you know you are self aware means that other people are self aware is not really a useful statement because you have not defined how similar they must be in order to be considered self aware (I could find similarities between you and a lamp, but I am not going to make assumptions based on that). And you are making a pretty huge assumption that similarity of one type means similarity of another, and that differences of one type exclude similarity of another.
So we are right back to the status of having no good test for self awareness (nor even a good definition of it).
I do agree that Scientific American is not what I remember from my childhood, but it is still a lot better than Popular Science. I subscribe to both (PopSci more as a filler magazine). The January issue is still waiting for me to make the time for it, but I do think that Bill Gates is the wrong author for a generalized article.
But I do think you are looking at the wrong magazine if you are looking for peer-reviewed articles in SciAm. Even in their heyday they were not a peer-reviewed place. Instead they are a place where experts from different scientific disciplines write articles that people outside their disciplines can read. Usually there is a good attempt to make those articles reflect more than just the authors bent on that discipline, but that has never been a focus (look at the String Theory articles as evidence of that). If you are looking for peer-reviewed rigor, then go to one of the specialized journals.
Even given that, SciAm is a long way from being advertisements. These are specialists writing articles that will never go on their CV's, and at best will help them sell general-reading books if they ever write them. These people deserve more respect than you are showing their work.
Have you ever been in a bio-lab? Over half of the biology researchers that I know are women. And I worked at a Veterinary school (mostly researchers with a little bit of teaching tacked on the side) until recently, so I know quite a number of researchers.
For print production Macintosh still has a large advantage: color correction. Adobe has tried mighily to get Windows close, but it is still far simpler and more reliable on Macs. Color accuracy is not a big deal in video production because your end-consumer has nothing color corrected.
And recently Apple has made large inroads in TV productions (an area they traditionally have not had a large following) with FinalCut Pro, especially where editors want to do their work in the field. The leader on this has been evening news shows.
It is not even a mater of having the right version, you also have to have the right version of the fonts installed. If you install other applications from Microsoft after you install the version of Word that you want there is a good chance that the new install will overwrite at least some of the default fonts, and the new version will have slightly different metrics (sizes of the characters). For most people's uses this is not a big deal, but for page layout it is a killer.
Font versions is the reason you always go to PDF before publication and embed the fonts you are using.
Actually, if you are using UFS on any platform for "compatibility", then "sucks to be you". NeXT's/Apple's version may be a little farther out than other implementations, but UFS in general suffers from many mutually incompatible variants. In fact it is better to assume that any compatibility is purely accidental, you will have a better expectation level that way.
You are missing the point. RAM is orders of magnitude faster than USB flash disks, both in sustained reads and random access reads (and the gap is even wider for writes). The argument is that if you add a bit more RAM and use it to do the same thing you are using the USB drive to do then you will get even more benefit without all the added complexity. Windows has traditionally used memory fairly inefficiently in this way, marking things as stale and getting rid of them.
Now there is a real counter-argument for this, and that is you can get a lot more storage space for $20 in flash memory rather than RAM. So where the cost/benifit analysis comes down is a bit more complicated. Oh, and you do have to add in the fairly high processor usage cost for going through USB to this.
It is the "graven images" one... I never understood that until I started to look at other translations (German specifically). It is a much more metaphorical statement than is implied by the common English translation.
This is not a right-wrong thing. It is a how-does-it-work-for-you thing. I am primarily Mac user and get very frustrated with the windows behavior because it wastes too much space. I am used to having a lot of windows open, and find that it is difficult to multitask in Windows because the predominant assumption there is that you are using one application at a time.
I use drag-and-drop as my main way of moving things around (as opposed cut-and-paste which is the main model on Windows), and I find myself constantly frustrated on Windows because it is just less setup with this in mind.
I hear a lot of Windows users just assume that the Windows model is always the right one, and have to say that this is not necessarily the case.
Actually, the document that we call the Bible did not appear in a coherent form until the Council of Trent which ended in 1563. I know that the Catholic Church loves to trace itself back as a constantly in-place organization since the days of Jesus (and remember, according to scripture he did not do any real teaching until his early 30's... so we would still be 20 some years under 2000 years), but the reality of it is that there was no single "Christianity" until they started to organize under the Roman empire. And the vast majority of what we now associate with Christianity is from the last 500-700 years or so.
And you are right in that there are not hundreds of versions of the Bible... there are thousands. There is only one recognized by "the Church" (presumably you are referring to the Roman Catholic Church)... for each language... and in many cases there are slight differences for the sects within those languages. And then there are all of the many translations, and then all of the very many for other sects of Christianity... and then all of the many versions over the years.
It is absolutely silly to think that there has only ever been one version of the bible, or that the English version is anything like authoritarian. The oldest versions that exist today are in Ancient Greek, not even the Aramaic that Jesus would have spoken.
So is the Old Testament the "Word of God" or not? Or can you pick and choose what you would like out of the Old Testament? Or is it that the Old Testament is the gospel, except when contradicted by the new testament? Or is it more of "you should believe the parts we tell you to believe"?
Remember, the Old Testament is a very bloody document including God punishing his true people because they did not kill all of the the women and children of a people he commanded them to slaughter.
I know that one of the commandments says that we are not supposed to think we can understand the mind of God, but it seems to me that all religion is attempting to do that, and that the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament have fundamentally different ways of doing things.
I agree with you in general principal, but options but a lot of head scratching into what the value is. Here is the basic problem:
When a company grants someone an option, they are giving that person the right to purchase a set amount of stock (from the stock that the company still owns) at a set price (usually tied to the the price of the stock at the close of the market on the day that the option is granted). There are usually then rules associated with the option about when they can exercise the option (use the option to buy stock), and how long they have to hold the stock after purchase before selling it (making money with it).
So if Company A grants 100 options to Bob Smith at $5 less than today's price (lets say $45) without any restrictions, then Bob can instantly pay $4,000 of his own money to buy all of the options he is entitled to, and then turn around and sell the stock to someone else for $4,500 (market value). In this case Bob has gotten $500 extra out of the deal (minus short-term capital investment taxes), and the company has traded $4,500 worth of stock for $4,000 of Bob's money. The $500 that seems to be missing from this equation comes from whomever buys the stock from Bob. In this case it is fairly clear that the company should expense $500, since they got $500 less from selling to Bob then they would have on the regular market.
If we look at the same example, but say that the option had a one month holding time (meaning that Bob has to hold the stock for one month before selling it), and during that month the stock goes to $80 a share, and Bob immediately sells, then the math is a bit less sure. Should the company expense the $500 that it could have made at the beginning, or the $4,000 that Bob has made out of the deal?
And in a third example: what if Bob does not instantly cash in the option, but waits and in that time the stock drops to $35 a share. In this case it does not make any sense for Bob to spend $40 a share to get what he can get for $35 a share elsewhere, so he never uses the option. Should the company have some sort of expense for this? Remember, nothing but a promise to offer to sell at a specific price has ever changed hands. In this case Bob neither gains nor looses money.
And there are a lot more examples, and we have not even brought up the subject of back-dataing, which opens things up wide for abuse. (note: back-dataing has a few places where it is relevant, such as when a company promises options, but then does not get around to the actual granting for a while... this is a grey area).
The reason the corporations have been blocking it is that it breaks many web apps, including ones based on some of the larger vendors' platforms (Oracle, SAP, etc...). At the university where I work they have blocked it because it breaks with our purchasing system.
You are misusing the word "scientifically". I am fairly sure that you really wanted the word "rationally" or possibly "impartially", not that you wanted them to use the scientific method to conduct experiments on the formats.
While others have already brought up that the poster was only talking about a small part of Marx's work, your point is also invalid because you seem to be assuming that the Soviet Union caried thourgh on his ideas. But in fact they sort of missed the whole point.
Marx said that Capitalism would run its course and come to a point where it was no longer workable. That so much of the wealth would be concentrated in a small group while the rest of the masses (the workers, or proletariat in his parlayence) would become more and more poor and oppressed. He then postulated that a revolution would then occur and the workers unite forming a workers paradise.
What the Soviet Union had was Marxist Leninism, because Lenin came along and said "why wait, we can have that paradise in our lifetimes", and started a revolution that he declared to be the revolution that Marx had envisioned. The big problem with this is that Russia at the time was not especially Capitalist (it was still a Monarchy), and Capitalism in the West was far from running its course (I think that it still is, but is starting to show a few cracks).
Of course, there are a few things that people at that point could not have known: the power of the media to keep people who would be otherwise discontent in check, the enormous productivity increases that have happened (suddenly it is much harder to starve... in comparison), and the push towards a service economy (servants for hire). All of these things set back Marx's ideas quite a bit.
2) If you are talking about human recorded temprature mesurements from those periods then we agree. And so scientists generally try and use non-human recordings, such as effects on tree rings, the growth of coral (very temprature dependant, and in the middle of a huge heat sink), etc... So there is a lot of data that can be distilled into good records.
3) If you took engineering then you should know about the laws of thermodynamics, and thus know that you are mearly playing with where the energy is absorbed or reflected, not changing those ratios. You should also know that most of the suns energy output that is absorbed by the earth is not in particales that are affected in any real way by magnetic fields.
4) Your source does not say that Jupiter as a whole is warming up... only that certain spots seem to be. There is a huge difference in those two statements.
5) We don't know enough about Mar's climate to be able to take any lessons out of it. In fact your article states this repeatedly.
6) The answers to many of the rest of your questions are avalible from a lot of sites. A lot of them do examin cyclical effects, and look for the causes. But the very people who are doing those studies and are the best informed about these things are the ones who are very loudly sounding the alarm.
The better question is why do people keep listening more intently to politicions and businessmen who have a vested interest in the status quo, as opposed to the scientists who have dedicated their lives to studying these things and have no vested interests (or at least not as big an interest).
Actually, there are examples of places where government is much more efficent than private industry. Two examples:
Medicare spends about 3% of the money it gets for non-medical expensies. That includes paying all of its employees paying for its buildings, etc... In comparison the big HMO's spend at least 13% of their revenues on "overhead". Google "HMO overhead" for numberous studies on this. And I am using the conservative numbers... others cite 2.1% for Medicare and 20% for HMOs.
The second is all of the convoy drivers in Iraq. It used to be that military convoys had military drivers. But since Cheny's "Transformation" process began they have been cutting anything that wasn't a military "core competency" out of the military and privaising it. So one of the many positions put out for contract is convoy drivers. Well... since it is tough to get civilians to accept the fact that people are shooting at them, they are paying those drivers $350+ a day to drive those trucks. And remember, that is what the company is paying its employees, just imagine what the company is charging the government.
So for the same work you could pay a private $30,000 a year to do, we (the taxpayers) are paying many times that for a private company to do so.
So, please think about this before you buy into the myth that companies do things for cheaper by definition.
While I don't know anything about how Vista actually uses RAM, it may be that Vista is starting to use the same philosophy that *nix does in this regard: unused RAM is wasted RAM. In the *nix philosophy you keep eveything that you could ever use again in RAM and only release it when something else is going to use it. I am over-simplifying it a bit, but that is not far off the mark.
So, it could be that the memeory useage you are seeing is not the OS "hogging" memory, but rather that it is simply trying to use it a bit better. So when you launch that memory-intensive game it will give way for the game.
This is all said without any real knowledge of the inner working of Vista memory management.
Actually, it has been anounced that Apollo will be based on WebKit, the framework that is behind Apple's Safari. They will be using the open source version rather than Apple's internal version, but the differences are minor.
You missed the point that the creation of the report (costs of writing it) might not have been completly covered by the grant. In fact it was probably put forward as a proposal this way: the govenment agency wanted a study done, and rather than paying a company the full price to do the work, they payed them half (or some other fraction), but at the end of the job the company gets to re-sell the report.
For the govenment department it costs less for the report they wanted. So they saved the taxpayers money.
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How about the case of Women's Suffrage in the US? While there were many courageous men and women who campaigned for that right, it was through a free and open vote of men that it was passed. This was not a case of women forcing men to give them the right to vote, but of men deciding that women should have that right. There may have been persuasion, but you can't really call it forced.
Please tell me how I can test if you are self aware? Your assertion that because people seem like you, and you know you are self aware means that other people are self aware is not really a useful statement because you have not defined how similar they must be in order to be considered self aware (I could find similarities between you and a lamp, but I am not going to make assumptions based on that). And you are making a pretty huge assumption that similarity of one type means similarity of another, and that differences of one type exclude similarity of another.
So we are right back to the status of having no good test for self awareness (nor even a good definition of it).
I do agree that Scientific American is not what I remember from my childhood, but it is still a lot better than Popular Science. I subscribe to both (PopSci more as a filler magazine). The January issue is still waiting for me to make the time for it, but I do think that Bill Gates is the wrong author for a generalized article.
But I do think you are looking at the wrong magazine if you are looking for peer-reviewed articles in SciAm. Even in their heyday they were not a peer-reviewed place. Instead they are a place where experts from different scientific disciplines write articles that people outside their disciplines can read. Usually there is a good attempt to make those articles reflect more than just the authors bent on that discipline, but that has never been a focus (look at the String Theory articles as evidence of that). If you are looking for peer-reviewed rigor, then go to one of the specialized journals.
Even given that, SciAm is a long way from being advertisements. These are specialists writing articles that will never go on their CV's, and at best will help them sell general-reading books if they ever write them. These people deserve more respect than you are showing their work.
Have you ever been in a bio-lab? Over half of the biology researchers that I know are women. And I worked at a Veterinary school (mostly researchers with a little bit of teaching tacked on the side) until recently, so I know quite a number of researchers.
I don't know how they missed the idea of new versions of iLife and iWork coming out, those are almost givens.
For print production Macintosh still has a large advantage: color correction. Adobe has tried mighily to get Windows close, but it is still far simpler and more reliable on Macs. Color accuracy is not a big deal in video production because your end-consumer has nothing color corrected.
And recently Apple has made large inroads in TV productions (an area they traditionally have not had a large following) with FinalCut Pro, especially where editors want to do their work in the field. The leader on this has been evening news shows.
Porn sites are not exactly "socializing sites".
It is not even a mater of having the right version, you also have to have the right version of the fonts installed. If you install other applications from Microsoft after you install the version of Word that you want there is a good chance that the new install will overwrite at least some of the default fonts, and the new version will have slightly different metrics (sizes of the characters). For most people's uses this is not a big deal, but for page layout it is a killer.
Font versions is the reason you always go to PDF before publication and embed the fonts you are using.
Actually, if you are using UFS on any platform for "compatibility", then "sucks to be you". NeXT's/Apple's version may be a little farther out than other implementations, but UFS in general suffers from many mutually incompatible variants. In fact it is better to assume that any compatibility is purely accidental, you will have a better expectation level that way.
You are missing the point. RAM is orders of magnitude faster than USB flash disks, both in sustained reads and random access reads (and the gap is even wider for writes). The argument is that if you add a bit more RAM and use it to do the same thing you are using the USB drive to do then you will get even more benefit without all the added complexity. Windows has traditionally used memory fairly inefficiently in this way, marking things as stale and getting rid of them.
Now there is a real counter-argument for this, and that is you can get a lot more storage space for $20 in flash memory rather than RAM. So where the cost/benifit analysis comes down is a bit more complicated. Oh, and you do have to add in the fairly high processor usage cost for going through USB to this.
It is the "graven images" one... I never understood that until I started to look at other translations (German specifically). It is a much more metaphorical statement than is implied by the common English translation.
This is not a right-wrong thing. It is a how-does-it-work-for-you thing. I am primarily Mac user and get very frustrated with the windows behavior because it wastes too much space. I am used to having a lot of windows open, and find that it is difficult to multitask in Windows because the predominant assumption there is that you are using one application at a time.
I use drag-and-drop as my main way of moving things around (as opposed cut-and-paste which is the main model on Windows), and I find myself constantly frustrated on Windows because it is just less setup with this in mind.
I hear a lot of Windows users just assume that the Windows model is always the right one, and have to say that this is not necessarily the case.
Actually, the document that we call the Bible did not appear in a coherent form until the Council of Trent which ended in 1563. I know that the Catholic Church loves to trace itself back as a constantly in-place organization since the days of Jesus (and remember, according to scripture he did not do any real teaching until his early 30's... so we would still be 20 some years under 2000 years), but the reality of it is that there was no single "Christianity" until they started to organize under the Roman empire. And the vast majority of what we now associate with Christianity is from the last 500-700 years or so.
... for each language... and in many cases there are slight differences for the sects within those languages. And then there are all of the many translations, and then all of the very many for other sects of Christianity... and then all of the many versions over the years.
And you are right in that there are not hundreds of versions of the Bible... there are thousands. There is only one recognized by "the Church" (presumably you are referring to the Roman Catholic Church)
It is absolutely silly to think that there has only ever been one version of the bible, or that the English version is anything like authoritarian. The oldest versions that exist today are in Ancient Greek, not even the Aramaic that Jesus would have spoken.
So is the Old Testament the "Word of God" or not? Or can you pick and choose what you would like out of the Old Testament? Or is it that the Old Testament is the gospel, except when contradicted by the new testament? Or is it more of "you should believe the parts we tell you to believe"?
Remember, the Old Testament is a very bloody document including God punishing his true people because they did not kill all of the the women and children of a people he commanded them to slaughter.
I know that one of the commandments says that we are not supposed to think we can understand the mind of God, but it seems to me that all religion is attempting to do that, and that the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament have fundamentally different ways of doing things.
I agree with you in general principal, but options but a lot of head scratching into what the value is. Here is the basic problem:
When a company grants someone an option, they are giving that person the right to purchase a set amount of stock (from the stock that the company still owns) at a set price (usually tied to the the price of the stock at the close of the market on the day that the option is granted). There are usually then rules associated with the option about when they can exercise the option (use the option to buy stock), and how long they have to hold the stock after purchase before selling it (making money with it).
So if Company A grants 100 options to Bob Smith at $5 less than today's price (lets say $45) without any restrictions, then Bob can instantly pay $4,000 of his own money to buy all of the options he is entitled to, and then turn around and sell the stock to someone else for $4,500 (market value). In this case Bob has gotten $500 extra out of the deal (minus short-term capital investment taxes), and the company has traded $4,500 worth of stock for $4,000 of Bob's money. The $500 that seems to be missing from this equation comes from whomever buys the stock from Bob. In this case it is fairly clear that the company should expense $500, since they got $500 less from selling to Bob then they would have on the regular market.
If we look at the same example, but say that the option had a one month holding time (meaning that Bob has to hold the stock for one month before selling it), and during that month the stock goes to $80 a share, and Bob immediately sells, then the math is a bit less sure. Should the company expense the $500 that it could have made at the beginning, or the $4,000 that Bob has made out of the deal?
And in a third example: what if Bob does not instantly cash in the option, but waits and in that time the stock drops to $35 a share. In this case it does not make any sense for Bob to spend $40 a share to get what he can get for $35 a share elsewhere, so he never uses the option. Should the company have some sort of expense for this? Remember, nothing but a promise to offer to sell at a specific price has ever changed hands. In this case Bob neither gains nor looses money.
And there are a lot more examples, and we have not even brought up the subject of back-dataing, which opens things up wide for abuse. (note: back-dataing has a few places where it is relevant, such as when a company promises options, but then does not get around to the actual granting for a while... this is a grey area).
The reason the corporations have been blocking it is that it breaks many web apps, including ones based on some of the larger vendors' platforms (Oracle, SAP, etc...). At the university where I work they have blocked it because it breaks with our purchasing system.
I think that the credit for the discovery quantized nature of light should go to Max Plank, not Albert Einstein.
You are misusing the word "scientifically". I am fairly sure that you really wanted the word "rationally" or possibly "impartially", not that you wanted them to use the scientific method to conduct experiments on the formats.
While others have already brought up that the poster was only talking about a small part of Marx's work, your point is also invalid because you seem to be assuming that the Soviet Union caried thourgh on his ideas. But in fact they sort of missed the whole point.
Marx said that Capitalism would run its course and come to a point where it was no longer workable. That so much of the wealth would be concentrated in a small group while the rest of the masses (the workers, or proletariat in his parlayence) would become more and more poor and oppressed. He then postulated that a revolution would then occur and the workers unite forming a workers paradise.
What the Soviet Union had was Marxist Leninism, because Lenin came along and said "why wait, we can have that paradise in our lifetimes", and started a revolution that he declared to be the revolution that Marx had envisioned. The big problem with this is that Russia at the time was not especially Capitalist (it was still a Monarchy), and Capitalism in the West was far from running its course (I think that it still is, but is starting to show a few cracks).
Of course, there are a few things that people at that point could not have known: the power of the media to keep people who would be otherwise discontent in check, the enormous productivity increases that have happened (suddenly it is much harder to starve... in comparison), and the push towards a service economy (servants for hire). All of these things set back Marx's ideas quite a bit.
1) Yep.. lots of scientific consesnsus on that.
2) If you are talking about human recorded temprature mesurements from those periods then we agree. And so scientists generally try and use non-human recordings, such as effects on tree rings, the growth of coral (very temprature dependant, and in the middle of a huge heat sink), etc... So there is a lot of data that can be distilled into good records.
3) If you took engineering then you should know about the laws of thermodynamics, and thus know that you are mearly playing with where the energy is absorbed or reflected, not changing those ratios. You should also know that most of the suns energy output that is absorbed by the earth is not in particales that are affected in any real way by magnetic fields.
4) Your source does not say that Jupiter as a whole is warming up... only that certain spots seem to be. There is a huge difference in those two statements.
5) We don't know enough about Mar's climate to be able to take any lessons out of it. In fact your article states this repeatedly.
6) The answers to many of the rest of your questions are avalible from a lot of sites. A lot of them do examin cyclical effects, and look for the causes. But the very people who are doing those studies and are the best informed about these things are the ones who are very loudly sounding the alarm.
The better question is why do people keep listening more intently to politicions and businessmen who have a vested interest in the status quo, as opposed to the scientists who have dedicated their lives to studying these things and have no vested interests (or at least not as big an interest).
That is the whole point of having multiprocessor systems.
Actually, there are examples of places where government is much more efficent than private industry. Two examples:
Medicare spends about 3% of the money it gets for non-medical expensies. That includes paying all of its employees paying for its buildings, etc... In comparison the big HMO's spend at least 13% of their revenues on "overhead". Google "HMO overhead" for numberous studies on this. And I am using the conservative numbers... others cite 2.1% for Medicare and 20% for HMOs.
The second is all of the convoy drivers in Iraq. It used to be that military convoys had military drivers. But since Cheny's "Transformation" process began they have been cutting anything that wasn't a military "core competency" out of the military and privaising it. So one of the many positions put out for contract is convoy drivers. Well... since it is tough to get civilians to accept the fact that people are shooting at them, they are paying those drivers $350+ a day to drive those trucks. And remember, that is what the company is paying its employees, just imagine what the company is charging the government.
So for the same work you could pay a private $30,000 a year to do, we (the taxpayers) are paying many times that for a private company to do so.
So, please think about this before you buy into the myth that companies do things for cheaper by definition.
While I don't know anything about how Vista actually uses RAM, it may be that Vista is starting to use the same philosophy that *nix does in this regard: unused RAM is wasted RAM. In the *nix philosophy you keep eveything that you could ever use again in RAM and only release it when something else is going to use it. I am over-simplifying it a bit, but that is not far off the mark.
So, it could be that the memeory useage you are seeing is not the OS "hogging" memory, but rather that it is simply trying to use it a bit better. So when you launch that memory-intensive game it will give way for the game.
This is all said without any real knowledge of the inner working of Vista memory management.
Actually, it has been anounced that Apollo will be based on WebKit, the framework that is behind Apple's Safari. They will be using the open source version rather than Apple's internal version, but the differences are minor.
You missed the point that the creation of the report (costs of writing it) might not have been completly covered by the grant. In fact it was probably put forward as a proposal this way: the govenment agency wanted a study done, and rather than paying a company the full price to do the work, they payed them half (or some other fraction), but at the end of the job the company gets to re-sell the report.
For the govenment department it costs less for the report they wanted. So they saved the taxpayers money.