Most probably beryllium-copper, as APP mentioned. Costs will also be higher because Beryllium is highly toxic, and so requires special handling throughout the process. We used to have BeCu tools scattered around for use with superconducting magnets. We always worried about the dust you'd get from using a BeCu whisk-broom on a BeCu dustpan.
(for those curious, type 'beryllium toxicity' into pubmedcentral.nih.gov for a number of fun reads)
Actually, Americans have to be convinced to go *do* research. I have a horde of juniors in what should be a course designed for majors only, who believe they're all going to be doctors. Their argument is that if they're going to work the hours of a research professor/industrial researcher, they want to be paid for it and have a stable job. If they want my salary, they're going to be a pharmacist from 9 to 5. (and they'll actually probably still be better paid). Most of them, either native born or immigrants, have a story about a close relative (parent, often) who worked at somewhere like Bell Labs, Exxon R&D, Honeywell, etc, who was axed during some cost-cutting binge during a slack period. I have stories like this from my time in the Real World, which is why I'm hiding in academia. We need jobs for these people on the other end, as creating more just drives the price down (which is probably really the point).
So, you can try to improve the quality going in, but the real issue is that they've noticed their chances of being stabily employed coming out. America's "next quarter's numbers or bust" mentality is what needs to be fixed first.
That's funny, as up here (NY State) "...in the private sector..." is read as, "in the private sector, we could hire competent admins/network admins/technical support, but at state wages..." Translation: don't do anything with a computer unless (a) you can maintain it yourself, and (b) you can maintain a ball-bat to keep our admins away from your computers.
Pardon me while I go back to electrifying my ball-bat.
And some of us would be happy if they only marginally bumped up the capacity, but worked on the latency issues instead. Something with Gigabit to 10Gigabit speed, but with less than 10 usec of latency would be a good start. Myrinet for everyone, since some of us use Beowulf-type clusters for work, rather than humor.
My experience is on both I-70 and I-80, where the terrain doesn't become interesting until around Youngstown. Before that, yes, there are signs that there are cities somewhere over the horizon, but my memory of 10 years of I-80, Illinois-NJ, and of first moving out there, where at Dawn I stopped at a Denny's somewhere along I-70, only because it was the only sign of anything that I'd seen in a couple of hours. I remember seeing the dawn breaking over the flat to the east, and the featureless dark to the west, with the only sign of habitation being that Denny's and gas station, and my truck, which had to have come from somewhere.
I'm sure that the inhabited parts of Ohio are very nice, but the transition from Indiana to it is pretty seamless.
And if you've driven through them, you'll realize the difference is moot. We could save a lot of effort by channeling the Bruces sketch in the Midwest. "This is Ohio where we grow soybeans, Ohio where we grow wheat, Ohio where we grow corn, and Ohio where we play Big-10 Football and also schedule our major flooding".
A very strange sound. I heard something that was close at the Shedd Aquarium once, but it's hard to describe the flapping of stubby wings and stamping of webbed feet on short legs when they do it. I do remember there being fresh fish involved, though.
Now is the time to acquire the actual paper stock certificate. In a year or so, when the dust has settled and SCO is history, that certificate will be a collector's item. Or, you can keep it yourself, frame it, and hang it right next to the framed Richard Nixon stamps. Gone, not forgotten, but not missed.
1982 or so, the DecPro350. WYSIWYGish (bold, italics, embedded charts) word processor, on top of an unfortunately overly screwed down OS called P/OS. (and aptly named, may I add). Later models would run RT-11. However, overpriced, undermarketed, and gone. Had something been done differently, everyone could have been running MicroPDP-11s under their desks, instead of 8088s.
>>(If I were an insecure jerk, I'd accuse you of looking for an excuse to get more control over others through inflated catastrophic scenarios. But I'm above that.)
Given that I'm a chemist, and therefore barely have control over my graduate students, thank you.
Remember as well that the circuit density and simple component density in that old XT was very low compared to today's equivalent. The XT, of course, was a model of consolidation compared with the minicomputers of a few years before. (ever pulled an old Q-Bus card, held it up to the light, and noticed both the pencil-sized traces and great swaths of empty space)? Of course, it was pretty cheap construction compared with the DEC Rainbow, which had everything carefully isolated from each other, with shielded cable connecting the various components.
So, high costs, low component density, and low performance allow you to build a long-lasting device. If you felt sufficiently motivated, you could probably convince IBM/FreeScale (whichever one made them) to sell you a 25 MHz PPC-type processor, radiation hardened, such as is used by NASA for space probes. Put it in an appropriate machine, then try to run iTunes under OSX on it and see whether faster but more ephemeral is a reasonable trade-off in your life. I would have mentioned the current MMORPG as a benchmark, but that combination would have a hard enough time running NetHack at reasonable speeds. The candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long. (with apologies to Edna St. Vincent Milay and Roy)
The only thing I am really sorry to see significantly cheapened is keyboards. I want the old IBM AT/RS6K, spring-loaded, clicking, cast-iron keyboards back. I'd really like one of the PC/3270 keyboards to use on my MacMini, just to get enough extra programmable keys.
Interesting, and nice to see a response from a modeler. Point taken. You'll note in my previous reply, I have no real interest in various CO2 reduction schemes, but do in flood-prevention of economically important population centers. This may be a personality defect caused by hurricane Agnes when I was very young (but old enough to remember going through it), but is also based on the extent to which I trust the confidence intervals. I trust them far enough to say, "we ought to consider flood-gates such as London has or Venice is considering for NY Harbor and possibly D.C.". (though other than the museums, I'm not sure what in DC couldn't be more easily moved uphill into West Virginia, Northern Virginia, and inland Maryland) I don't trust them enough to say, "we ought to turn off the lights and live in mud huts so we quit ruining the planet".
On the other hand, I am empirically observing that where I currently live (Upstate NY at about 42 degrees N), has far longer and warmer falls that when I was a kid 30 years ago (and I have photographs from about 25 that demonstrate this), so there is some change occurring. It used to reliably hard frost by second week in September, but now often waits until early to mid November. Friends who have kids corrroborate that while we used to often get snow (or at least freeze; those extra chocolate calories were good for something) while Trick-or-Treating, they haven't been out when it was below freezing yet. What can we do about this, I don't know. On the other hand, crops that require a hard winter (sugar maple and spruce come to mind), are probably not ones that one should invest much in unless you're moving up in altitude or farther north latitude-wise. I realize that these are ancedotes until we get enough examples with some real data together. One of my neighbors was a weather freak, and reliably recorded temperature, humidity, etc every day at the same time. The records of people like him and with local records from official sources would help confirm our minimally verified observations.
I suppose the other problem is the language of "reproduces well". Do they mean, "within a few percent", or "we predict that it will be cold in january most years"?
No, my argument is how well do our models reproduce reality. Models that fail that test are discarded. White-earth models of the 70s were the result of not enough factors and too large of grids. Current models with smaller cell sizes, better hydrodynamic codes, and more atmospheric factors included (reflective aerosols, additional greenhouse gases, etc) can reproduce climate trends, within certain error ranges, rather well. If you read the primary literature, you will see that given a suitable start point (parameters chosen from historical data, ice cores, tree growth patterns, etc.), you can reproduce climate trends leading to now rather well. That data is being presented, those models are out there and validated, and the skeptics are hiding behind, "well, you haven't sat around watching first-hand for a few thousand years, so your model is untrustworthy." If you read the primary literature (or you've spent any time doing simulations in physical science), you'll know that these results come both with error bars, and with internal checks and validations. Again, from chemistry, using a variety of codes based upon different numerical approximations to the underlying physics, if you want molecular structures or vibrational frequencies, we can get those within a percent or less. Relative energetics, about 4-12 KJ/mol, if we are willing to spend the time, farther away but with a known error range if not. We can also compare them with real-world data from a variety of sources, which demonstrates the generality of the models, as models based upon widely differing approximations (plane-wave DFT, localized orbital post-Hartree-Fock perturbation theory, etc) converge to results which agree with each other and the available experimental data to within measured precision. Once again, science is a process, and it deals in probabilities. There is some percent chance (large by current estimates), that we are contributing to global climate change, and one of the results will be a rise in sea levels. There is some chance (small) that there is a teapot orbiting Neptune (with apologies to P. W. Atkins for stealing his example). Therefore, policy-wise, I would worry about preventing flooding in coastal cities, but not necessarily worry about whether to take Earl Grey or Darjeeling on a trip to Neptune.
There are two issues: what do we accept as close enough to correct to believe and use to make further predictions or policy recommendations, and to what extent do we act? The issue becomes, do we do nothing, or do we take reasonable (i.e. presuming the results in the range of greatest confidence) action? Shutting down all carbon emissions is extreme, especially in light of the role played by methane and other gases. On the other hand, preparing coastal cities at very low elevations for raised sea-levels and increased storm-surges is not. You may say that it's only computer fictions reproducing historical results (from a starting configuration, may we add, not from adjustments along the way), but that will be cold comfort to the bankers on Wall Street who get to pump out their offices from the storm surge the simulations predicted 40 years before, but you wouldn't act on because "the models only reproduced historical trends, not current events".
Again, these simulations are based on the same physics used to predict wind-resistance in cars, aerodynamics of new airplanes, stresses that bridges can withstand, and behaviour of new microchips. You will notice how many events such as that on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge have occurred since finite-element modeling came into widespread use by civil engineers. The models aren't perfect, but they reproduce reality to a sufficient extent to use them to make predictions, with those predictions having confidence ranges associated with them. Unfortunately, what gets reported in the general press lacks those ranges, and only reports what is most sensational and will sell the most media. Spend some time looking at how any of these simulations (climate, hydrodynamic, q
We do what we've always done; use indirect measures and accumulated evidence to reduce our uncertainty, then make extrapolations based upon the reproducible data. Go to your nearest university library and look up Tom Ray's work on the Tierra simulator, or read a few physics journals to find out what goes into those climate models that you're implicitly rejecting. (hint: lots of physics, parameters derived from measurements as appropriate, and endless validation runs) Other people are free to use the same equations, write their own simulation, and if they aren't deliberately feeding the models misinformation, will converge to a result within some confidence interval similar to yours, presuming you did your job correctly as well.
I make my living as a computational chemist, and while I know that we're neglecting many terms in our solutions, reproducible results come back, that agree to varying degrees of confidence to experimental results. Furthermore, we understand how to improve those results, and make rational time/accuracy/resource trade-offs to get the answers we need to the precision required.
In short, while I've never directly observed an oxygen molecule, accumulated indirect evidence has caused me to believe in them. It has also led to the conclusion that removing them from my immediate environment is bad. Same for your examples. Come up with a reasoned set of arguments that explain why a couple thousand physicists or biologists are all wrong, send out some papers and get yourself slotted into a presentation at a conference, and have at. You're free to try, and that's what the process is all about.
Maybe we should start using Go metaphors instead. I suppose that's what terms like "mindshare" apply to (my desktop board is 60% Mac, 20% Windows, 20% Gnome, but the Mac portion has good aji and the other two are caught in a seki position). Just doesn't have the same resonance as, "we're gonna F* bury them!"
However, it would be a good start. Image Steve B. coming out for press conference, dressed in an orange robe, calmly announcing that he Microsoft is no longer going to speak of killing competitors, but merely seeking oneness with them.
We actually worried about the terrorism angle when I lived in Chicago. We were worried because after 9/11 showed the advantage of the wet-ware guided winged bomb, someone realized that Microsoft Flight Simulator teaches you how to take off at Meigs Field, and head straight for the Sears Tower. Until Daley sent the bulldozers just before rush hour to Meigs to forcibly convert it to a park, that would have been a risk since it would have been take off, level off, count to 60, say Hello to the Afterlife.
Besides, have you ever listened to him or read his column in the paper? I would really hate to be part of his reality, given the utter social collapse and hordes of barbarians at the gates. He sounds like he's living in some combination of "Mad Max" and "Brave New World".
Because if your leadership spent its college days as a dissolute frat-rat, they decide that when it comes to spending large amounts of money, it's much more fun to try to throw an underweight, third-world, opponent up against the wall to show their machismo, rather than fund people who warm their coffee by holding the cups to their forehead and think of fusion.
Translation: fusion is hard to explain to politicians, and wouldn't go towards satisfying our Fearless Leader's Oedipus complex.
And yes, this is the grouchy bitterness when thinking that we could have built an ITER a year, properly funded Afghani reconstruction and pacification, paid off some debt, and not horrified the rest of civilization with our belligerence coupled with incompetence.
Maybe it's time for more spirituality, and less religion. Some combination of Buddhist practice and Greek Stoicism. (which at 9 in the morning I would read as, "life means suffering, the origin of suffering is attachment, so suck it up".)
That's the problem. You'd like to believe that this will look like the opening of LoTR, with lawyers from Microsoft being filled with arrows by lawyers from IBM, who are in their turn hacked by the Softies. (The image of IBM's CEO giving a good and final spearing to Steve B. does generate a warm and fuzzy feeling) Unfortunately, what will happen is a lot of tassled loafers will be purchased, and aspiring young plutocrats inspired to go to Law School or seek careers as Middle Managers (cf Lion Food). If they only allowed law schools to be located places like Thule, Greenland, or the malarial swamps of New Guinea, then it might be a reasonable trade for the rest of society, or at least provide entertainment value.
The standard arguments of the outcome of doing this are:
(1) It won't matter, as you'll just cause a split into two universes, one where your message was sent, and one where it wasn't (the many universe hypothesis.
(2) You won't send that message because you didn't. The present we have is a direct product of both what has gone before (the past) and what will happen that directly affects now. In this scenario, someone already called from 2026 to warn about the 9/11 hijackers, and their warning has been filed, in triplicate, somewhere in a cabinet in the FBI. They'll probably find it while doing a house-cleaning in 2052, so while the future did affect the present, the nothing changed, as the outcome was the same (some bureaucrat had to type that message up in triplicate and file it).
I've argued for years that time-travel probably won't exist because I never showed up to whack myself with a clue-bat a few times before certain less than ideal decisions.
They have done terrible things in the past. I've still not quite forgiven them for continuing to ship DOS when the 80386 (the original, not the standard), with its 32-bit, flat-memory, model became available. Just a *touch* of vision, and they could have had a 32-bit Xenix (which they owned) running on those machines, and I could have retired some refrigerator-sized VAXes much sooner. This was in 1987, so years and years before NT became an option. They could have done what NeXT/Apple did, and put a nice graphical shell on top of a Unix underpinning, but instead they put an unstable graphical shell on top of 8-bit, single-tasking DOS, and it took them until around 1991 to do that.
A former boss of mine, who had dealt with the Microsoft of the 80s once said, "the issue is that Bill has a Vision. One vision, and that vision is frozen in the 1970s".
On the other hand, I find that I am less and less interested in the political fights, and more and more interested in getting work done. So, I use a mix of proprietary, but highly-functional, desktop apps under a mostly proprietary, but highly functional, operating system, and rely on Free software (of one sort or the other), for specialized tools, compilers, and things that the Free community has taken a real interest in. (except for the 9-billion IRC clients. One for each name of God.) So, if uSoft cares to offer cross-platform development tools, less annoyingly licensed operating systems, etc, I'll talk to them. Otherwise not, but it's a decision these days made mainly on suitability to the tasks at hand. This being said, all they make that I use is Word, and that's because it interfaces to my reference manager. However, that decision is a technical, not emotional or political decision. Some time spent by the FSF making their software more functional would convert far more people to their side than all of the songs in favor of Software Libre ever will.
That way when someone joins a project, you can look up his profile and read, "thinks that orange on neon green is an acceptable combination for user interfaces", and know to only let him work on the back-end of a project.
Frankly, some of those interfaces out there in FS/OS land are at least a misdemeanor. This project is long overdue.
Didn't your mom every tell you, "You'll nuke your eye out with that"? Just remember, It's all fun and games until someone loses a country.
Of course, they could be planning on generating electricity, using the byproducts to make bombs, and sell both the bombs and the oil on world markets. If so, they're demonstrating they've learned capitalism, but not the American type as they're still manufacturing a product, rather than just shuffling money through stockbrokers and lawyers.
On the other hand, maybe they're going to make sneakers at those secrets sites, and can't pronounce "Nike" correctly.
Slashdot Mirror
Most probably beryllium-copper, as APP mentioned. Costs will also be higher because Beryllium is highly toxic, and so requires special handling throughout the process. We used to have BeCu tools scattered around for use with superconducting magnets. We always worried about the dust you'd get from using a BeCu whisk-broom on a BeCu dustpan.
(for those curious, type 'beryllium toxicity' into pubmedcentral.nih.gov for a number of fun reads)
Actually, Americans have to be convinced to go *do* research. I have a horde of juniors in what should be a course designed for majors only, who believe they're all going to be doctors. Their argument is that if they're going to work the hours of a research professor/industrial researcher, they want to be paid for it and have a stable job. If they want my salary, they're going to be a pharmacist from 9 to 5. (and they'll actually probably still be better paid). Most of them, either native born or immigrants, have a story about a close relative (parent, often) who worked at somewhere like Bell Labs, Exxon R&D, Honeywell, etc, who was axed during some cost-cutting binge during a slack period. I have stories like this from my time in the Real World, which is why I'm hiding in academia. We need jobs for these people on the other end, as creating more just drives the price down (which is probably really the point).
So, you can try to improve the quality going in, but the real issue is that they've noticed their chances of being stabily employed coming out. America's "next quarter's numbers or bust" mentality is what needs to be fixed first.
That's funny, as up here (NY State) "...in the private sector..." is read as, "in the private sector, we could hire competent admins/network admins/technical support, but at state wages..." Translation: don't do anything with a computer unless (a) you can maintain it yourself, and (b) you can maintain a ball-bat to keep our admins away from your computers.
Pardon me while I go back to electrifying my ball-bat.
And some of us would be happy if they only marginally bumped up the capacity, but worked on the latency issues instead. Something with Gigabit to 10Gigabit speed, but with less than 10 usec of latency would be a good start. Myrinet for everyone, since some of us use Beowulf-type clusters for work, rather than humor.
My experience is on both I-70 and I-80, where the terrain doesn't become interesting until around Youngstown. Before that, yes, there are signs that there are cities somewhere over the horizon, but my memory of 10 years of I-80, Illinois-NJ, and of first moving out there, where at Dawn I stopped at a Denny's somewhere along I-70, only because it was the only sign of anything that I'd seen in a couple of hours. I remember seeing the dawn breaking over the flat to the east, and the featureless dark to the west, with the only sign of habitation being that Denny's and gas station, and my truck, which had to have come from somewhere.
I'm sure that the inhabited parts of Ohio are very nice, but the transition from Indiana to it is pretty seamless.
And if you've driven through them, you'll realize the difference is moot. We could save a lot of effort by channeling the Bruces sketch in the Midwest. "This is Ohio where we grow soybeans, Ohio where we grow wheat, Ohio where we grow corn, and Ohio where we play Big-10 Football and also schedule our major flooding".
A very strange sound. I heard something that was close at the Shedd Aquarium once, but it's hard to describe the flapping of stubby wings and stamping of webbed feet on short legs when they do it. I do remember there being fresh fish involved, though.
Now is the time to acquire the actual paper stock certificate. In a year or so, when the dust has settled and SCO is history, that certificate will be a collector's item. Or, you can keep it yourself, frame it, and hang it right next to the framed Richard Nixon stamps. Gone, not forgotten, but not missed.
1982 or so, the DecPro350. WYSIWYGish (bold, italics, embedded charts) word processor, on top of an unfortunately overly screwed down OS called P/OS. (and aptly named, may I add). Later models would run RT-11. However, overpriced, undermarketed, and gone. Had something been done differently, everyone could have been running MicroPDP-11s under their desks, instead of 8088s.
>>(If I were an insecure jerk, I'd accuse you of looking for an excuse to get more control over others through inflated catastrophic scenarios. But I'm above that.)
Given that I'm a chemist, and therefore barely have control over my graduate students, thank you.
Remember as well that the circuit density and simple component density in that old XT was very low compared to today's equivalent. The XT, of course, was a model of consolidation compared with the minicomputers of a few years before. (ever pulled an old Q-Bus card, held it up to the light, and noticed both the pencil-sized traces and great swaths of empty space)? Of course, it was pretty cheap construction compared with the DEC Rainbow, which had everything carefully isolated from each other, with shielded cable connecting the various components.
So, high costs, low component density, and low performance allow you to build a long-lasting device. If you felt sufficiently motivated, you could probably convince IBM/FreeScale (whichever one made them) to sell you a 25 MHz PPC-type processor, radiation hardened, such as is used by NASA for space probes. Put it in an appropriate machine, then try to run iTunes under OSX on it and see whether faster but more ephemeral is a reasonable trade-off in your life. I would have mentioned the current MMORPG as a benchmark, but that combination would have a hard enough time running NetHack at reasonable speeds. The candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long. (with apologies to Edna St. Vincent Milay and Roy)
The only thing I am really sorry to see significantly cheapened is keyboards. I want the old IBM AT/RS6K, spring-loaded, clicking, cast-iron keyboards back. I'd really like one of the PC/3270 keyboards to use on my MacMini, just to get enough extra programmable keys.
Interesting, and nice to see a response from a modeler. Point taken. You'll note in my previous reply, I have no real interest in various CO2 reduction schemes, but do in flood-prevention of economically important population centers. This may be a personality defect caused by hurricane Agnes when I was very young (but old enough to remember going through it), but is also based on the extent to which I trust the confidence intervals. I trust them far enough to say, "we ought to consider flood-gates such as London has or Venice is considering for NY Harbor and possibly D.C.". (though other than the museums, I'm not sure what in DC couldn't be more easily moved uphill into West Virginia, Northern Virginia, and inland Maryland) I don't trust them enough to say, "we ought to turn off the lights and live in mud huts so we quit ruining the planet".
On the other hand, I am empirically observing that where I currently live (Upstate NY at about 42 degrees N), has far longer and warmer falls that when I was a kid 30 years ago (and I have photographs from about 25 that demonstrate this), so there is some change occurring. It used to reliably hard frost by second week in September, but now often waits until early to mid November. Friends who have kids corrroborate that while we used to often get snow (or at least freeze; those extra chocolate calories were good for something) while Trick-or-Treating, they haven't been out when it was below freezing yet. What can we do about this, I don't know. On the other hand, crops that require a hard winter (sugar maple and spruce come to mind), are probably not ones that one should invest much in unless you're moving up in altitude or farther north latitude-wise. I realize that these are ancedotes until we get enough examples with some real data together. One of my neighbors was a weather freak, and reliably recorded temperature, humidity, etc every day at the same time. The records of people like him and with local records from official sources would help confirm our minimally verified observations.
I suppose the other problem is the language of "reproduces well". Do they mean, "within a few percent", or "we predict that it will be cold in january most years"?
No, my argument is how well do our models reproduce reality. Models that fail that test are discarded. White-earth models of the 70s were the result of not enough factors and too large of grids. Current models with smaller cell sizes, better hydrodynamic codes, and more atmospheric factors included (reflective aerosols, additional greenhouse gases, etc) can reproduce climate trends, within certain error ranges, rather well. If you read the primary literature, you will see that given a suitable start point (parameters chosen from historical data, ice cores, tree growth patterns, etc.), you can reproduce climate trends leading to now rather well. That data is being presented, those models are out there and validated, and the skeptics are hiding behind, "well, you haven't sat around watching first-hand for a few thousand years, so your model is untrustworthy." If you read the primary literature (or you've spent any time doing simulations in physical science), you'll know that these results come both with error bars, and with internal checks and validations. Again, from chemistry, using a variety of codes based upon different numerical approximations to the underlying physics, if you want molecular structures or vibrational frequencies, we can get those within a percent or less. Relative energetics, about 4-12 KJ/mol, if we are willing to spend the time, farther away but with a known error range if not. We can also compare them with real-world data from a variety of sources, which demonstrates the generality of the models, as models based upon widely differing approximations (plane-wave DFT, localized orbital post-Hartree-Fock perturbation theory, etc) converge to results which agree with each other and the available experimental data to within measured precision. Once again, science is a process, and it deals in probabilities. There is some percent chance (large by current estimates), that we are contributing to global climate change, and one of the results will be a rise in sea levels. There is some chance (small) that there is a teapot orbiting Neptune (with apologies to P. W. Atkins for stealing his example). Therefore, policy-wise, I would worry about preventing flooding in coastal cities, but not necessarily worry about whether to take Earl Grey or Darjeeling on a trip to Neptune.
There are two issues: what do we accept as close enough to correct to believe and use to make further predictions or policy recommendations, and to what extent do we act? The issue becomes, do we do nothing, or do we take reasonable (i.e. presuming the results in the range of greatest confidence) action? Shutting down all carbon emissions is extreme, especially in light of the role played by methane and other gases. On the other hand, preparing coastal cities at very low elevations for raised sea-levels and increased storm-surges is not. You may say that it's only computer fictions reproducing historical results (from a starting configuration, may we add, not from adjustments along the way), but that will be cold comfort to the bankers on Wall Street who get to pump out their offices from the storm surge the simulations predicted 40 years before, but you wouldn't act on because "the models only reproduced historical trends, not current events".
Again, these simulations are based on the same physics used to predict wind-resistance in cars, aerodynamics of new airplanes, stresses that bridges can withstand, and behaviour of new microchips. You will notice how many events such as that on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge have occurred since finite-element modeling came into widespread use by civil engineers. The models aren't perfect, but they reproduce reality to a sufficient extent to use them to make predictions, with those predictions having confidence ranges associated with them. Unfortunately, what gets reported in the general press lacks those ranges, and only reports what is most sensational and will sell the most media. Spend some time looking at how any of these simulations (climate, hydrodynamic, q
We do what we've always done; use indirect measures and accumulated evidence to reduce our uncertainty, then make extrapolations based upon the reproducible data. Go to your nearest university library and look up Tom Ray's work on the Tierra simulator, or read a few physics journals to find out what goes into those climate models that you're implicitly rejecting. (hint: lots of physics, parameters derived from measurements as appropriate, and endless validation runs) Other people are free to use the same equations, write their own simulation, and if they aren't deliberately feeding the models misinformation, will converge to a result within some confidence interval similar to yours, presuming you did your job correctly as well.
I make my living as a computational chemist, and while I know that we're neglecting many terms in our solutions, reproducible results come back, that agree to varying degrees of confidence to experimental results. Furthermore, we understand how to improve those results, and make rational time/accuracy/resource trade-offs to get the answers we need to the precision required.
In short, while I've never directly observed an oxygen molecule, accumulated indirect evidence has caused me to believe in them. It has also led to the conclusion that removing them from my immediate environment is bad. Same for your examples. Come up with a reasoned set of arguments that explain why a couple thousand physicists or biologists are all wrong, send out some papers and get yourself slotted into a presentation at a conference, and have at. You're free to try, and that's what the process is all about.
The best part of this suggestion is that it will let you use your BeeGees 8-tracks again.
..and yes, I'm only marginally younger than you, (though thankfully BeeGeeFree).
Maybe we should start using Go metaphors instead. I suppose that's what terms like "mindshare" apply to (my desktop board is 60% Mac, 20% Windows, 20% Gnome, but the Mac portion has good aji and the other two are caught in a seki position). Just doesn't have the same resonance as, "we're gonna F* bury them!"
However, it would be a good start. Image Steve B. coming out for press conference, dressed in an orange robe, calmly announcing that he Microsoft is no longer going to speak of killing competitors, but merely seeking oneness with them.
We actually worried about the terrorism angle when I lived in Chicago. We were worried because after 9/11 showed the advantage of the wet-ware guided winged bomb, someone realized that Microsoft Flight Simulator teaches you how to take off at Meigs Field, and head straight for the Sears Tower. Until Daley sent the bulldozers just before rush hour to Meigs to forcibly convert it to a park, that would have been a risk since it would have been take off, level off, count to 60, say Hello to the Afterlife.
Besides, have you ever listened to him or read his column in the paper? I would really hate to be part of his reality, given the utter social collapse and hordes of barbarians at the gates. He sounds like he's living in some combination of "Mad Max" and "Brave New World".
Because if your leadership spent its college days as a dissolute frat-rat, they decide that when it comes to spending large amounts of money, it's much more fun to try to throw an underweight, third-world, opponent up against the wall to show their machismo, rather than fund people who warm their coffee by holding the cups to their forehead and think of fusion.
Translation: fusion is hard to explain to politicians, and wouldn't go towards satisfying our Fearless Leader's Oedipus complex.
And yes, this is the grouchy bitterness when thinking that we could have built an ITER a year, properly funded Afghani reconstruction and pacification, paid off some debt, and not horrified the rest of civilization with our belligerence coupled with incompetence.
Maybe it's time for more spirituality, and less religion. Some combination of Buddhist practice and Greek Stoicism. (which at 9 in the morning I would read as, "life means suffering, the origin of suffering is attachment, so suck it up".)
Much more likely to end up as Iraq-ME, with the shiny, new, Iraq-Bob interface on top. Maybe we can get a rebate if we buy before Jan 20,2009.
That's the problem. You'd like to believe that this will look like the opening of LoTR, with lawyers from Microsoft being filled with arrows by lawyers from IBM, who are in their turn hacked by the Softies. (The image of IBM's CEO giving a good and final spearing to Steve B. does generate a warm and fuzzy feeling) Unfortunately, what will happen is a lot of tassled loafers will be purchased, and aspiring young plutocrats inspired to go to Law School or seek careers as Middle Managers (cf Lion Food). If they only allowed law schools to be located places like Thule, Greenland, or the malarial swamps of New Guinea, then it might be a reasonable trade for the rest of society, or at least provide entertainment value.
The standard arguments of the outcome of doing this are:
(1) It won't matter, as you'll just cause a split into two universes, one where your message was sent, and one where it wasn't (the many universe hypothesis.
(2) You won't send that message because you didn't. The present we have is a direct product of both what has gone before (the past) and what will happen that directly affects now. In this scenario, someone already called from 2026 to warn about the 9/11 hijackers, and their warning has been filed, in triplicate, somewhere in a cabinet in the FBI. They'll probably find it while doing a house-cleaning in 2052, so while the future did affect the present, the nothing changed, as the outcome was the same (some bureaucrat had to type that message up in triplicate and file it).
I've argued for years that time-travel probably won't exist because I never showed up to whack myself with a clue-bat a few times before certain less than ideal decisions.
They have done terrible things in the past. I've still not quite forgiven them for continuing to ship DOS when the 80386 (the original, not the standard), with its 32-bit, flat-memory, model became available. Just a *touch* of vision, and they could have had a 32-bit Xenix (which they owned) running on those machines, and I could have retired some refrigerator-sized VAXes much sooner. This was in 1987, so years and years before NT became an option. They could have done what NeXT/Apple did, and put a nice graphical shell on top of a Unix underpinning, but instead they put an unstable graphical shell on top of 8-bit, single-tasking DOS, and it took them until around 1991 to do that.
A former boss of mine, who had dealt with the Microsoft of the 80s once said, "the issue is that Bill has a Vision. One vision, and that vision is frozen in the 1970s".
On the other hand, I find that I am less and less interested in the political fights, and more and more interested in getting work done. So, I use a mix of proprietary, but highly-functional, desktop apps under a mostly proprietary, but highly functional, operating system, and rely on Free software (of one sort or the other), for specialized tools, compilers, and things that the Free community has taken a real interest in. (except for the 9-billion IRC clients. One for each name of God.) So, if uSoft cares to offer cross-platform development tools, less annoyingly licensed operating systems, etc, I'll talk to them. Otherwise not, but it's a decision these days made mainly on suitability to the tasks at hand. This being said, all they make that I use is Word, and that's because it interfaces to my reference manager. However, that decision is a technical, not emotional or political decision. Some time spent by the FSF making their software more functional would convert far more people to their side than all of the songs in favor of Software Libre ever will.
That way when someone joins a project, you can look up his profile and read, "thinks that orange on neon green is an acceptable combination for user interfaces", and know to only let him work on the back-end of a project.
Frankly, some of those interfaces out there in FS/OS land are at least a misdemeanor. This project is long overdue.
Didn't your mom every tell you, "You'll nuke your eye out with that"? Just remember, It's all fun and games until someone loses a country.
Of course, they could be planning on generating electricity, using the byproducts to make bombs, and sell both the bombs and the oil on world markets. If so, they're demonstrating they've learned capitalism, but not the American type as they're still manufacturing a product, rather than just shuffling money through stockbrokers and lawyers.
On the other hand, maybe they're going to make sneakers at those secrets sites, and can't pronounce "Nike" correctly.