I fail to see how the inability to create suns and planets has hampered Astronomy's claim to be a science. A science (go back and read your definitions) has a more or less formal theory and can make verifiable predictions. It is not predicated on conducting controlled experiments where we get to control every thing. They call it a natural science for a reason. Biology is similar, we cannot control for all the variables, and it isn't not a science just because we cannot create our own living cells.
In recognition of this "politics in science", the U.S. created NSF, NASA, DARPA, and NIH. That pretty much stopped politics in science, at least until Congress-Creatures decided they knew more than the scientists and found they could earmark for science projects.
Policy decisions are never science. In addition, science is never 100%. There's always a bit of grey area, just enough for the opponents of any policy to say the science isn't complete yet. And, here's a hint, once the coastline starts disappearing, it is too late. This is a result of opponents of science generally being those who want to "let the market decide". Well, the market for drugs doesn't decide, if it did, we'd wait until the required number of dead bodies stacked up before we pulled a drug. Acid rain is another example, we waited until lakes started dying before attempting any sort of fix. The fix involved very expensive retro fitting of power plants that would never have been build had we acted sooner. How about air pollution, which market forces are going to reduce it? The car companies don't care, the petro companies do not care. How many old and young folks had to die before government stepped in.
Keeping health care in the back pocket of insurance companies which cherry pick only healthy people to insure, I'd call that doing away with health care. Attempting to turn Social Security over to the private sector (that'd be the one that gave us the current economic crisis), that's simply attempting to hand more of the economy over to Wall Street..that's just anti-people. Cutting the budgets of NIH and NSF, that's anti-science. On a local level, attempting to get Creation "Science" taught as if it were somehow equal in theoretical prowess as Evolution, that's anti-science. A basic problem with the current Republican "Leadership" is that they do not believe humans can affect the planet. They appear to have no problems with pollution, overfishing the oceans, destroying habitat for critters, uninsured poor people, poor people, etc. The result of this will be an America that is too busy putting out fires caused by their incompetence to compete in the world economy.
Sure they aren't attempting to do away with ALL science and health care, just the parts they some how have a "philosophical" (read: monetary) disagreement with. It used to be we could trust the Republicans, I consider myself a conservative Republican of the Bill Buckley mold. However, the current crop of scientific and fiscal illiterates (Ron Paul, Rick Perry, Michele (I've talked to Jesus) Bachmann) reads like a cast from some perverted version of the Rocky Horror Picture show. Can't they all just go the hell away and leave us some decent candidates?
Well, to be fair, they are doing it because science is in a vast conspiracy to destroy Christian values, capitalism's propensity to not put a value on the environment thus making it harder for Republican's to get elected on "jobs", and naughty thinking of SOME economists pointing out fallacies in Republo-Econ 101 theory as what's spewed during Republican debates (i.e., just about any of Ron Paul's ideas). Now if Scientists would just come clean and reveal the inner workings of this conspiracy, then we could have an honest debate over it. Well, it would be honest except the last thing the Republicans want is an honest debate over Science.
You mean the Japanese public strongly supports Japan hiding behind the U.S. conventional and nuclear umbrella. The best thing the U.S. can do for Japan is cut it loose. Any country unwilling to defend itself cannot be defended.
Go back and look at the original patent legislation Congress passed, it is full of these kinds of phrases. But don't let that stop your post-modern funk from shading your eyes.
Drugs. It takes about 8-10 years to get a drug from raw materials some scientist thinks might be effective in some way to an actual drug that you can take with some reasonable assurance it won't kill you. Most drugs take several billion dollars to produce. I tend to think you are not going to invest your $1billion on a promising drug only to have some generic knockoff kill your market before you get any chance of recovering your $1billion + some profit. And less than 1% of promising starts make it to the final phase of drug production.
And if you want to see what no patent protection does to industry, look at China. Nothing new ever comes out of China because no one (except the government) is going to ante up for a chance at getting skinned by one's countrymen.
It is easy to break that within the rule of free markets. The producers gang together and merely agree on which price all their products will be sold at. They they go further and agree to merge. Now they have an economy of scale (which is also what makes you free market notion vacuous) and able to undercut any new entrant into the market. What's that? They created a barrier to entry you say? I'm shocked!!
Ditto. There's another headwind working against HP. Hardware is becoming comoditized, so without their own tablet, they cannot license WebOS for very much because otherwise it would swamp the price of the machine. MS is already running into this. If they do make their own tablet, they get small return because they are competing against everyone who isn't Apple. Apple seems to be the only company able to command a decent return on investment.
HP's problem can be seen in their printers right now. We recently bought an HP - P4515. Feels and looks like a flimsy piece of shit. We moved our old HP 8150 to my boss's office for her personal printer. The thing is built like tank, built to last. It has to be well over 10 years old, I doubt the P4515 will make it beyond 5. And there's the problem, they are now building crap to compete with every low cost printer out there, yet if they build something of quality, it never dies. Printers are not like PCs where new features can still drive the upgrade cycle.
Given the limited functions of pads that customers seem to care about, there's not going to be much of an upgrade cycle. Ma and Pa Kettle might buy a new pad, but they are not going to buy one every 3 years. So even Apple will have to invent a new high growth market. The only out I see is if business decides it wants a more capable pad, but then most of us big machines already and a pad does not solve any problem we have.
Where's the return on investment for WebOS being a thin UI layer? The UI layer is the layer the customer sees, that's why Apple and MS insist on their own. Why would any company want to turn the UI over someone else unless they were a blackbox maker like Dell. HP presumably wants out of the PC business because the return on investment sucks.
I do not believe animations are particularly useful for complicated things. Animations are abstractions, they abstract away from the situation and if it a complicated situation, they probably do not include all the information in the situation (hence the word 'complicated').
Currently, I'm trying understand topos models for intuitionistic type theories with modalities. There is no animation that will teach me that, there are way too many details. The only way I will understand it by painstakingly solving small problems and then large problems in the area. It's your basic blood, sweat, and tears approach to learning, and there is no substitute.
The problem is that few schools have the balls to tell Johnny (and his parents) to suck it up and put in the time at home to learn the material. Your examples of computers in education are merely information delivery machines. Information delivery is not learning. A teacher cannot make you learn. No one can make you learn except you yourself...with whatever form of information delivery you have available. If Johnny has to spend a week learning how to construct an internal representation of a difficult concept, it is week well spent. If he gets an answer he doesn't understand delivered to him as information, he's dumber than when he started because he thinks he's learned.
I think you have a distorted view of success. You seem to feel that one can only win in the marketplace if one dominates all the competition. That's silly as Apple's footprint and policies in the PC market show. They are quite happy being back where they are. They didn't go into the pad market because they knew they'd lose their lead in smartphones. Last I checked, their income from smartphones was increasing nicely and they seem fine with that. They entered the pad market because they realized (1) they could finally make a pad others wanted due to the availability of powerful enough processors that didn't suck energy, (2) had a deep background in a proper interface for one, (3) having learned how not to do it via the Newton, (4) a unique idea for selling software so that it didn't become a virus/trojan ridden pile of malware. The latter was necessary because Apple has always targeted the consumer market and knows these people have no idea how to keep a machine safe. They also figured out most people have simple needs and do not need nor want a PC.
You were a boy scout leader and were also a brownie scout leader? Brownie scouts are girls' troops. Boy scouts are, well, boys' troops. That's one amazing resume you have there...if indeed we are to believe it is true.
More to the point, LISP is dynamically scoped and Scheme is statically scoped. And if you do not understand the difference, then you are much too young.
Just for the record, from wikipedia: Pixar began in 1979 as the Graphics Group, part of the Computer Division of Lucasfilm before it was acquired by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs in 1986. The Walt Disney Company bought Pixar in 2006 at a valuation of $7.4 billion; the transaction made Jobs the largest shareholder in Disney.
What Job's did was help run it and somehow failed to screw it up like so many CEOs do with new companies. In other words, he didn't buy it to rape it, he bought it because he thought he could make it successful according to his standards. Disney bought it after And the result is possibly THE best animation organization out there. My guess is that sooner or later, Disney will screw it up.
There's an easy answer to that, there's no profit in making PCs. Margins in that business are particularly low (Apple excluded). So the board of directors looks at the capital invested in making PCs and the return on investment and decides they can do better elsewhere. I don't think going into software is the answer for them, not because of the return on investment (which is supposed to be good) but rather HP has no experience in that area. A CEO from a software house doesn't make them experienced, he was probably the dullest knife in SAP's drawer. Going up against Oracle won't be easy, Uncle Larry plays dirty so unless they are willing to get really slimy, he'll have them covered in pig s--t before they'll recognize any significant return.
You fail to consider that G-d is a sneaky G-d. He simply put the oil where it should be given the usual conditions for producing it. In fact, the entire Universe is kind of a Potemkin Village except that, weirdly enough, everything is as it ought for a significantly older universe.
There, you see. All better now...I like the yellow pills the best...
I bought a Sears lawn mower over 20 years ago. Last year, the plastic spokes on the rear wheels started cracking, the friendly Sears parts and service on-line had replacement wheels. I bought those wheels rather than a new mower because I cannot buy a new mower with such large rear wheels any longer (at least in the U.S.). The large rear wheels allow one roll over mole holes and such. I just recently stumped for a new engine for my trusty lawn mower, again Sears on-line had it.
That sort of service from Sears has got to be expensive, I will sorely miss Sears when it goes the way of the dodo because Americans cannot be arsed to fix a quality piece of equipment rather than buying some cheap foreign replacement.
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I fail to see how the inability to create suns and planets has hampered Astronomy's claim to be a science. A science (go back and read your definitions) has a more or less formal theory and can make verifiable predictions. It is not predicated on conducting controlled experiments where we get to control every thing. They call it a natural science for a reason. Biology is similar, we cannot control for all the variables, and it isn't not a science just because we cannot create our own living cells.
In recognition of this "politics in science", the U.S. created NSF, NASA, DARPA, and NIH. That pretty much stopped politics in science, at least until Congress-Creatures decided they knew more than the scientists and found they could earmark for science projects.
Policy decisions are never science. In addition, science is never 100%. There's always a bit of grey area, just enough for the opponents of any policy to say the science isn't complete yet. And, here's a hint, once the coastline starts disappearing, it is too late. This is a result of opponents of science generally being those who want to "let the market decide". Well, the market for drugs doesn't decide, if it did, we'd wait until the required number of dead bodies stacked up before we pulled a drug. Acid rain is another example, we waited until lakes started dying before attempting any sort of fix. The fix involved very expensive retro fitting of power plants that would never have been build had we acted sooner. How about air pollution, which market forces are going to reduce it? The car companies don't care, the petro companies do not care. How many old and young folks had to die before government stepped in.
Keeping health care in the back pocket of insurance companies which cherry pick only healthy people to insure, I'd call that doing away with health care. Attempting to turn Social Security over to the private sector (that'd be the one that gave us the current economic crisis), that's simply attempting to hand more of the economy over to Wall Street..that's just anti-people. Cutting the budgets of NIH and NSF, that's anti-science. On a local level, attempting to get Creation "Science" taught as if it were somehow equal in theoretical prowess as Evolution, that's anti-science. A basic problem with the current Republican "Leadership" is that they do not believe humans can affect the planet. They appear to have no problems with pollution, overfishing the oceans, destroying habitat for critters, uninsured poor people, poor people, etc. The result of this will be an America that is too busy putting out fires caused by their incompetence to compete in the world economy.
Sure they aren't attempting to do away with ALL science and health care, just the parts they some how have a "philosophical" (read: monetary) disagreement with. It used to be we could trust the Republicans, I consider myself a conservative Republican of the Bill Buckley mold. However, the current crop of scientific and fiscal illiterates (Ron Paul, Rick Perry, Michele (I've talked to Jesus) Bachmann) reads like a cast from some perverted version of the Rocky Horror Picture show. Can't they all just go the hell away and leave us some decent candidates?
Well, to be fair, they are doing it because science is in a vast conspiracy to destroy Christian values, capitalism's propensity to not put a value on the environment thus making it harder for Republican's to get elected on "jobs", and naughty thinking of SOME economists pointing out fallacies in Republo-Econ 101 theory as what's spewed during Republican debates (i.e., just about any of Ron Paul's ideas). Now if Scientists would just come clean and reveal the inner workings of this conspiracy, then we could have an honest debate over it. Well, it would be honest except the last thing the Republicans want is an honest debate over Science.
C'mon, it isn't that high. Dr. Bob's more on the level of Creation Science....ack, gag me with a spoon....
You mean the Japanese public strongly supports Japan hiding behind the U.S. conventional and nuclear umbrella. The best thing the U.S. can do for Japan is cut it loose. Any country unwilling to defend itself cannot be defended.
Go back and look at the original patent legislation Congress passed, it is full of these kinds of phrases. But don't let that stop your post-modern funk from shading your eyes.
Drugs. It takes about 8-10 years to get a drug from raw materials some scientist thinks might be effective in some way to an actual drug that you can take with some reasonable assurance it won't kill you. Most drugs take several billion dollars to produce. I tend to think you are not going to invest your $1billion on a promising drug only to have some generic knockoff kill your market before you get any chance of recovering your $1billion + some profit. And less than 1% of promising starts make it to the final phase of drug production.
And if you want to see what no patent protection does to industry, look at China. Nothing new ever comes out of China because no one (except the government) is going to ante up for a chance at getting skinned by one's countrymen.
It is easy to break that within the rule of free markets. The producers gang together and merely agree on which price all their products will be sold at. They they go further and agree to merge. Now they have an economy of scale (which is also what makes you free market notion vacuous) and able to undercut any new entrant into the market. What's that? They created a barrier to entry you say? I'm shocked!!
Ditto. There's another headwind working against HP. Hardware is becoming comoditized, so without their own tablet, they cannot license WebOS for very much because otherwise it would swamp the price of the machine. MS is already running into this. If they do make their own tablet, they get small return because they are competing against everyone who isn't Apple. Apple seems to be the only company able to command a decent return on investment.
HP's problem can be seen in their printers right now. We recently bought an HP - P4515. Feels and looks like a flimsy piece of shit. We moved our old HP 8150 to my boss's office for her personal printer. The thing is built like tank, built to last. It has to be well over 10 years old, I doubt the P4515 will make it beyond 5. And there's the problem, they are now building crap to compete with every low cost printer out there, yet if they build something of quality, it never dies. Printers are not like PCs where new features can still drive the upgrade cycle.
Given the limited functions of pads that customers seem to care about, there's not going to be much of an upgrade cycle. Ma and Pa Kettle might buy a new pad, but they are not going to buy one every 3 years. So even Apple will have to invent a new high growth market. The only out I see is if business decides it wants a more capable pad, but then most of us big machines already and a pad does not solve any problem we have.
Where's the return on investment for WebOS being a thin UI layer? The UI layer is the layer the customer sees, that's why Apple and MS insist on their own. Why would any company want to turn the UI over someone else unless they were a blackbox maker like Dell. HP presumably wants out of the PC business because the return on investment sucks.
Rock star sacks of money? Rock stars never made near what big shot CEO's a bringing down.
I do not believe animations are particularly useful for complicated things. Animations are abstractions, they abstract away from the situation and if it a complicated situation, they probably do not include all the information in the situation (hence the word 'complicated').
Currently, I'm trying understand topos models for intuitionistic type theories with modalities. There is no animation that will teach me that, there are way too many details. The only way I will understand it by painstakingly solving small problems and then large problems in the area. It's your basic blood, sweat, and tears approach to learning, and there is no substitute.
The problem is that few schools have the balls to tell Johnny (and his parents) to suck it up and put in the time at home to learn the material. Your examples of computers in education are merely information delivery machines. Information delivery is not learning. A teacher cannot make you learn. No one can make you learn except you yourself...with whatever form of information delivery you have available. If Johnny has to spend a week learning how to construct an internal representation of a difficult concept, it is week well spent. If he gets an answer he doesn't understand delivered to him as information, he's dumber than when he started because he thinks he's learned.
I think you have a distorted view of success. You seem to feel that one can only win in the marketplace if one dominates all the competition. That's silly as Apple's footprint and policies in the PC market show. They are quite happy being back where they are. They didn't go into the pad market because they knew they'd lose their lead in smartphones. Last I checked, their income from smartphones was increasing nicely and they seem fine with that. They entered the pad market because they realized (1) they could finally make a pad others wanted due to the availability of powerful enough processors that didn't suck energy, (2) had a deep background in a proper interface for one, (3) having learned how not to do it via the Newton, (4) a unique idea for selling software so that it didn't become a virus/trojan ridden pile of malware. The latter was necessary because Apple has always targeted the consumer market and knows these people have no idea how to keep a machine safe. They also figured out most people have simple needs and do not need nor want a PC.
Ding, ding, ding!! We have a winner! The only truthful comment on this whole psuedo-issue.
You were a boy scout leader and were also a brownie scout leader? Brownie scouts are girls' troops. Boy scouts are, well, boys' troops. That's one amazing resume you have there...if indeed we are to believe it is true.
More to the point, LISP is dynamically scoped and Scheme is statically scoped. And if you do not understand the difference, then you are much too young.
There is a moral imperative for a media figure to shut one's f--king mouth about stuff it takes an MD degree to properly understand.
To the folks on this thread unable to tell if the parent is joking, do the words "voodoo, bad mojo" mean anything to you?
At least they aren't bored with straight politics.
Just for the record, from wikipedia: Pixar began in 1979 as the Graphics Group, part of the Computer Division of Lucasfilm before it was acquired by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs in 1986. The Walt Disney Company bought Pixar in 2006 at a valuation of $7.4 billion; the transaction made Jobs the largest shareholder in Disney.
What Job's did was help run it and somehow failed to screw it up like so many CEOs do with new companies. In other words, he didn't buy it to rape it, he bought it because he thought he could make it successful according to his standards. Disney bought it after And the result is possibly THE best animation organization out there. My guess is that sooner or later, Disney will screw it up.
There's an easy answer to that, there's no profit in making PCs. Margins in that business are particularly low (Apple excluded). So the board of directors looks at the capital invested in making PCs and the return on investment and decides they can do better elsewhere. I don't think going into software is the answer for them, not because of the return on investment (which is supposed to be good) but rather HP has no experience in that area. A CEO from a software house doesn't make them experienced, he was probably the dullest knife in SAP's drawer. Going up against Oracle won't be easy, Uncle Larry plays dirty so unless they are willing to get really slimy, he'll have them covered in pig s--t before they'll recognize any significant return.
You fail to consider that G-d is a sneaky G-d. He simply put the oil where it should be given the usual conditions for producing it. In fact, the entire Universe is kind of a Potemkin Village except that, weirdly enough, everything is as it ought for a significantly older universe.
There, you see. All better now...I like the yellow pills the best...
I bought a Sears lawn mower over 20 years ago. Last year, the plastic spokes on the rear wheels started cracking, the friendly Sears parts and service on-line had replacement wheels. I bought those wheels rather than a new mower because I cannot buy a new mower with such large rear wheels any longer (at least in the U.S.).
The large rear wheels allow one roll over mole holes and such. I just recently stumped for a new engine for my trusty lawn mower, again Sears on-line had it.
That sort of service from Sears has got to be expensive, I will sorely miss Sears when it goes the way of the dodo because Americans cannot be arsed to fix a quality piece of equipment rather than buying some cheap foreign replacement.