Developing long-term treatments isn't really sustainable either by this logic, since once your patent runs out and the generics come on the market your profits will decline dramatically. That's going to be true even if nobody else develops a cure; if they do, then the value of your treatment will drop all the way to zero.
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The fact is that pharmaceuticals are a tough business; you have to keep moving and developing new products; you can't just sit on your hands and milk the profits, or someone else will eat your lunch.
I had the same thought - there's some reason to think that micrometeorites would get swept up by the gravity wells of the inner planets (Mercury through Mars) and would be gradually decreasing over time. Still, a factor of three in the incidence of micrometeorites would be rather a lot, but it might be possible. Certainly there would also be possibilities of perturbations of the outer solar system by passing stars that would disturb the orbits of objects in the Oort Cloud or farther-out asteroids, and it might be hard to distinguish the cases.
That depends on the nature of the eruptions - not all of them are explosive eruptions like the famous ones at Mt. Vesuvius or Mt. St. Helens; some are long-term eruptions such as are often typical on Hawaii or Iceland, where the eruptions often go on for many years or even decades. This would be much harder to distinguish from low-level industrialization such as was typical through about the end of the 19th Century. It probably wouldn't be completely convincing until you observed radio waves such as began to be produced about the beginning of the 20th Century.
A few of the effects of our civilization might have been detectable, but it would have been hard to detect direct evidence of it until quite recently. Before the Industrial Revolution, agricultural cultivation just wouldn't have been very different from other changes in Earth's climate (which have been quite common over geologic time). Even after the Industrial Revolution, it was still over a century before we started producing radio waves; a little bit of extra carbon in the atmosphere would hardly have been very different from events like large volcanic eruptions. Certainly before that, you might be able to infer a developing civilization from very close, but likely not from very many light-years away.
Accelerating such a large object to relativistic speeds and then slowing it down again (since this wasn't moving very fast when it came through our solar system) would be highly inefficient unless the aliens were planning for the probe to stay here for a while - which it didn't. Besides, why send such an enormous object for a mere flyby when you could send a nanoprobe that weighed only a few grams or even several kilograms? It doesn't make any sense. ..
I think the more likely answer is that it's simply an unusual natural object, though I'll admit that it's hard to prove that it wasn't an alien probe.
Even if this is moving too slowly to be a natural object from a neighboring star system, why couldn't it have been ejected from one much farther away? ..
But on the other hand, our civilization has only been very visible to other star systems for about 100 years at most - so even if an alien civilization immediately built a probe and sent it in our direction at the speed of light (highly unlikely given what we know of physics, but let's ignore that for now), they must be no more than 50 light-years away for the signal to reach them and their probe to return here. More likely less than 10 light-years, but even that would require that the probe traveled here at around 10% of the speed of light. But since this "probe" was moving so slowly, that would indicate that it must also have decelerated from that speed - but why waste all that energy if you're not going to stick around but just doing a quick flyby? ..
Alternatively, perhaps an advanced alien civilization is sending out millions of these things to every star in the galaxy before they detect any signals at all - but for one to show up at this particular moment would imply that these things must be fairly common on a cosmic scale. It seems like an inefficient way to explore the Universe, but who knows. ..
It would be really cool if it were an alien probe, but it's just not convincing. None of its anomalous movement requires either unnatural means of propulsion or intelligent control; more likely it's just some type of natural object that we just haven't observed very often yet.
It's not obvious whether they've corrected for the fact that retirees naturally have more free time to waste sharing links on Facebook; and of course, sharing more links makes it more likely that at least one of them will be 'fake news'. As noted, some fake news sites can appear to be extremely convincing, masquerading as well-known publications but with a different URL or a slightly different name, and if you're not attentive it can be easy to be taken in - which can happen to just about anybody. I'm sure that for some seniors, cognitive decline enters into the picture, but I suspect that a lot of it may be just that they do more sharing period.
Never said that it couldn't be addressed, but eventually you reach the point of diminishing returns in terms of cost, complexity, and the amount of space required for whatever cooling mechanism is used. We might even be able to get, say, up to around 3-4 generations or even more out of 3d, but I have a hard time imagining how we'd manage another 20 or more like we already have with 2d silicon. 4 generations achieved by increasing the depth would create chips whose components were roughly 16 times the thickness of a 2d design using similar-sized components, 8 generations would be 256 times the depth, etc. It gets out of hand very quickly, and the amount of heat produced will roughly double with every generation (unlike the current situation where the heat increases more slowly than that because the smaller structures can use less current).
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Long-term, we'll need to move away from silicon, which was the point. But Holloway is seemingly unable to imagine that any of these (innovative silicon architectures like 3d, or non-silicon alternatives) is even possible - which is a dead giveaway that he probably has an axe to grind.
We already have several successor technologies, gallium-arsenid as replacement for silicon, optical computing and in the 1990s jap. companies experimented with supra conducting transistors.
No argument that these are all serious candidates for a viable successor technology, but the question is which one(s) will win out for headroom, life of the components, cost of production, and so forth. Holloway is an idiot if he thinks that the death of silicon means the end of progress.
Other techniques will suffer from the same principle constraint.
Or other constraints that we can't even imagine at present. Of course any alternative technologies will also be exhausted at some point, but we have no reason to think that we've already reached the end of what's possible.
You are right, but the problem with 3-d silicon is that it generates correspondingly more heat - which is already a problem even with current designs. I think that such technologies will keep us moving forward for a while even after we get to the smallest practical transistor size, but there will still be limits.
Longer-term, there's more hope for non-silicon based models - but that's a whole different subject that might not be subject to the familiar Moore's Law, which was never more than an observation about how quickly silicon semiconductor was progressing during the 1970's and 1980's; other technologies may progress either faster or slower, and may not have as much headroom as silicon had back in 1970.
Moore's Law, strictly speaking, only applies to silicon semiconductor technology, not to computational technology as a whole. As such, it will eventually exhaust its possibilities, and we're not too far from doing that now. You are correct that most technologies do follow a sigmoid function and that few if any can ever be expected to follow an exponential curve.
But Kurzweil was not quite so naive as to claim that silicon semiconductor technology would continue forever. Rather, he claimed that successor technologies would be found to continue the upward ascent. This is probably true as far as it goes, but we have no guarantee that such successor technologies will seamlessly follow the demise of silicon; rather, it's likely that there may be gaps while the new technologies are developed and perfected before progress can renew. We also have no guarantee that they will follow the same growth curve as silicon (ie, doubling every 18-24 months); they might be either faster or slower. Kurzweil's belief that such successor technologies will follow each other seamlessly is based on little more than faith.
We also have no guarantee that continued upward progress is even possible over extended periods of time. Even if we don't reach any physical limits, we're likely to hit limits of power consumption, resource availability, or the simple economic viability of constructing the factories or the chips themselves. Even in the case of silicon, all of this is starting to happen: We have not quite yet reached the physical limits of the medium, but are in danger of running out of either resources (think rare earths), electrical power (think tasks like cryptocurrency mining), or even capital (the ever-increasing costs of building the foundries), any or all of which may turn out to form an effective barrier to reaching the physical end-point of silicon.
For these reasons I do not think that a Kurzweil-style singularity is in our (near) future, although computational progress should continue, possibly with more choppy and unpredictable breakthroughs than has been the case in recent history.
But if Kurzweil is too optimistic, Holloway is much too pessimistic: He completely discounts any successor technologies to silicon. This is already flying in the face of history, since we've had at least three major transitions in computational technology already (from purely mechanical to electro-mechanical to vacuum tubes to semiconductors), and it is foolish to claim that we have already found the best technology possible. Even now there are candidate technologies waiting in the wings, such as quantum computing and various alternatives to silicon that retain traditional computational models.
In other words, the death of Moore's Law (for which read: the progress of silicon technology) marks a transition period, not an endpoint.
To follow up on my previous comment, another group that is often at odds with modern medicine is Christian Science - but you can find a pretty wide range of views on various medical topics among them, and blood transfusions are not forbidden by Christian Science doctrine (unlike the Jehovah's Witnesses).
As Ocker3 says, 7th Day Adventists are not, in general, against blood transfusions (I'm sure some are, just as you can find a few people with such ideas in any other group).
The group I think you've confused them with is the Jehovah's Witnesses, who are definitely against blood transfusions.
I've got news for you - that wasn't considered "good style" back in the day, either, except perhaps for a few cases that involved lots of complex mathematics that were hard to break down with any efficiency. Outside of the modeling community, this has been considered detrimental for something like 50 years - you'd have to go back to the 60's to find a time when it was acceptable.
Not that it wasn't often done - but then on the other hand one can find pretty ugly modern "object oriented" designs as well.
"Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone."
No correlation to cancer? That's not what studies [sciencedaily.com] are showing. I've also read that cell phones sitting in pockets have been connected to reduced sperm count.
The problem (as you note later when you say that "There's no reason why one study should be inherently more valid than the other" - actually this is false; many studies have methodological errors that invalidate them - but your basic idea is correct: that the results of any single study are inherently unreliable) is that a single study (or even several studies) is not enough to be any more than suggestive.
As you quickly learn in Statistics 101, "The improbable thing will happen with exactly that probability". Let's assume that there really is no correlation between cancer and cell phones - then we should expect that at least 1 in 20 studies will show that there is an increased risk of cancer associated with cell phone use (This is assuming that there are no methodological errors that might increase that number). If this is not immediately obvious to you, then you need to review Statistics 101: The "1 in 20" criterion is that there is a 19 out of 20 chance (95% probability) that the conclusions of the study are correct. Sometimes the dice just don't fall your way, and your study reaches the wrong conclusion.
Sorry to be so pedantic, but it seems there is a great deal of misunderstanding of the nature of statistical studies, even amongst people who ought to know better (I have plenty of horror stories from researchers in major Universities, but that's another topic altogether). A single study proves little, other than perhaps to suggest the need for further verification. That's why there is such a great deal of emphasis placed on reproducibility - not simply to reduce methodological errors, but also to reduce sampling error.
Also, it may not be vulnerable to humidity in a controlled environment, but in the outdoors, a few seasons of freezing/melting and it'll be shot. Water beats rock every time.
I really don't care if my archival storage can stand being left outside for several years, because I don't intend to do that. I'd be quite happy if it were at least as durable as a book, which if well made and with reasonable care can last at least a couple hundred years, possibly over 1000 under ideal conditions. So what if it can get ruined if it's left in the rain? If I care enough about the data, I just make a few copies and put them in different places and hopefully if I've chosen well at least one will survive. Right now it's not at all clear that typical CD's and DVD's are even as durable as cheap pulp paperbacks.
This is a good point. I certainly don't have a problem in principle with taking tests (in fact I usually do fairly well on them if I have some knowledge of the subject - in high school I was on the math team, and I would routinely place well above other kids who were just as smart as I was but who just weren't as good at taking tests), but it does seem reminiscent of the typing pool: Your value as an employee is directly related to how many words/min you can type. If the position has even a whiff of being essentially like the typing pool, it's probably a low-level or even entry-level job.
Testing isn't necessarily a bad idea, but it can create problems as well as solve them. In most software development environments, any testing should usually be used to weed out unsuitable candidates rather than to produce a single number that will be used as the primary hiring guide. Other things like interpersonal dynamics can also be important, for example. Multiple-choice tests are probably the least useful, because they test specific bits of knowledge rather than broader concepts; that may be useful in a classroom where you're testing the student's knowledge of a specific curriculum, but most real-world software development positions (other than perhaps the very most entry-level jobs) are more about design and problem solving and not so much about things like the details of a specific computer language. Essay tests of whatever sort would usually be the most useful, but also the hardest to design and grade.
Even worse, if you aren't careful, in many places and depending on whether you are a public or a private entity, you can potentially open yourself up to things like discrimination lawsuits if you don't end up hiring whatever person received the highest score on the test even if they don't fit some of your other criteria very well.
I would certainly not want to give a test that wasn't in person - there are far too many ways to get scammed: For example I've had someone ask if I could "help them out" with an online employment test - not just asking me for one or two bits of information, but essentially asking me to take the whole test for them! If you are doing a "worldwide" search, that creates problems for a small software group - the cost of flying a number of candidates to your location can be astronomical.
25,000 square miles is a lot of land to give up, even if it's desert.
A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that 25,000 square miles is about 9.4 million lane-miles, or about 2.4 million miles of 4-lane roadway. This sounds suspiciously close to our total inventory of highway miles of all sorts, everything from Interstates down to country roads, so I suspect that that's where that number came from. I would certainly have a great deal of concern about the issue of wear-and-tear on major highways built using this technology; dealing with that would have to cost more than making normal solar panels, and all they have to do is just sit out there in the sun.
It would seem that there are lots of other places you could put that many solar panels that wouldn't have quite as much of the wear-and-tear issues: roofs of all sorts, for example. Since you don't really need 25,000 square miles of solar panels given current solar panel efficiency and current power needs, that would appear to be a better place to site them first. If it isn't cost-effective there, it won't be cost-effective anywhere.
Where did you get that idea? I see no grounds for requiring increasing complexity for evolution, and indeed, since the overwhelming majority of life on this planet is microbial, as it always has been, there is fair evidence against such a claim.
"Complexity" in this context should be understood to say little or nothing about the physical size of the organisms or their multi- or unicellular nature. It is, rather, a comment about the size of the potential gene space for the organisms. Humans tend to think of "complexity" in very anthropomorphic terms, but even modern prokaryotes are still pretty complex organisms and have an enormous potential gene space. If the biochemistry of the life-forms does not allow for very much diversity (remember we're talking about life that presumably does not use DNA or RNA and possibly not even any of our amino acids), there is very little for evolution to work with. It's not hard to imagine a situation where such organisms might relatively quickly reach their maximum potential and evolution - even microbial evolution - effectively stops.
Since this is a "4% tax" it sounds like they must be planning to levy it as a sales tax to be collected by any vendors who have to collect New York sales tax for transactions within the state; otherwise it doesn't make any sense to talk about "4%". One alternative would perhaps be that it could be a bandwidth tax to be collected by all of the New York ISP's - which would be more collectible: in most cases, your ISP certainly knows where you live even if (as in the case of wireless) it's only where you receive your bill.
But if it's going to be a standard sales tax, that raises all sorts of other problems. Most obviously, it provides a significant disincentive for companies selling downloads to locate in New York; it would be hard for them to collect tax from some company based in Canada, for example. But it also raises the question of how a company knows who they're dealing with; with many payment options, the customer's location need not be given, and since this is an Internet download if the company does ask for an address it would be easy enough for the customer to enter an out-of-state address to avoid paying the tax, and the company would never be the wiser. If the state requires them to use IP addresses to determine the customer's tax liability, it can often be difficult to determine the exact state for an IP address in a border area or in many other situations, and doesn't even address the problem of proxy servers that might be used deliberately or otherwise to avoid paying the tax.
Since the TFA is rather short on specifics, it's hard to tell how unworkable this might be, though whenever the Legislature - any Legislature - is in session, hare-brained schemes abound. It does sound like they're trying to see just how many people they can annoy with this kind of law.
Can a given chemistry lead to increasing complexity, or is it just a dead end?
Why is "increasing complexity" a requirement for life? It's clearly a requirement for evolution, but I don't see any reason why something "lifelike" but alien might not have a very simple "maximum complexity" compared to standard carbon-based earthly life forms.
I don't know what the original article said (the site is thoroughly slashdotted), but finding life based on alternative chemistry won't "alter the odds" - it will just alter our computation of the odds. That immediately raises my suspicions since it suggests that the article was written by a journalist rather than a scientist, and consequently that it might be severely distorted.
Having said that, there are a lot of possible alternative chemistries that don't involve non-carbon-based life: substituting arsenic for phosphorus as mentioned here need not also substitute something else for carbon, so the most likely possibility is that such life would be carbon based but still "alien." As far as we know now, at Earthly temperatures and pressures carbon is a far more plausible basis for life than anything else, and so far we haven't even found much that's very promising at other temperatures and pressures. But I'm not at all sure that we have sufficiently explored alternative temperatures and pressures to rule them out as possible habitats.
There might well be a few fragments of several kilograms, but the fragments most likely to have a sufficient change in momentum to be able to deorbit that quickly could hardly be very large: The total sum of the momentum of all of the pieces before and after the event needs to remain constant; most of that debris is still going to be traveling at orbital velocities.
This event was visible in broad daylight, at 11:00 in the morning. Whatever it was, it must have been a pretty good-sized object.
This is a standard result of classical epistemology - it's certainly not original with Dawkins, it was already ancient generations before he was born. Proving a negative (any negative) is very difficult and usually impossible in just about any subject other than mathematics and logic and the like. Similarly we can't prove that flying saucers don't exist - but if anyone were to exhibit an example of any of these things, then that's all that's needed to prove that it does exist.
It's an amusing coincidence that you were reading that at the same time but I'm not quite sure what it's supposed to prove.
Slashdot Mirror
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The fact is that pharmaceuticals are a tough business; you have to keep moving and developing new products; you can't just sit on your hands and milk the profits, or someone else will eat your lunch.
I had the same thought - there's some reason to think that micrometeorites would get swept up by the gravity wells of the inner planets (Mercury through Mars) and would be gradually decreasing over time. Still, a factor of three in the incidence of micrometeorites would be rather a lot, but it might be possible. Certainly there would also be possibilities of perturbations of the outer solar system by passing stars that would disturb the orbits of objects in the Oort Cloud or farther-out asteroids, and it might be hard to distinguish the cases.
That depends on the nature of the eruptions - not all of them are explosive eruptions like the famous ones at Mt. Vesuvius or Mt. St. Helens; some are long-term eruptions such as are often typical on Hawaii or Iceland, where the eruptions often go on for many years or even decades. This would be much harder to distinguish from low-level industrialization such as was typical through about the end of the 19th Century. It probably wouldn't be completely convincing until you observed radio waves such as began to be produced about the beginning of the 20th Century.
A few of the effects of our civilization might have been detectable, but it would have been hard to detect direct evidence of it until quite recently. Before the Industrial Revolution, agricultural cultivation just wouldn't have been very different from other changes in Earth's climate (which have been quite common over geologic time). Even after the Industrial Revolution, it was still over a century before we started producing radio waves; a little bit of extra carbon in the atmosphere would hardly have been very different from events like large volcanic eruptions. Certainly before that, you might be able to infer a developing civilization from very close, but likely not from very many light-years away.
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I think the more likely answer is that it's simply an unusual natural object, though I'll admit that it's hard to prove that it wasn't an alien probe.
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But on the other hand, our civilization has only been very visible to other star systems for about 100 years at most - so even if an alien civilization immediately built a probe and sent it in our direction at the speed of light (highly unlikely given what we know of physics, but let's ignore that for now), they must be no more than 50 light-years away for the signal to reach them and their probe to return here. More likely less than 10 light-years, but even that would require that the probe traveled here at around 10% of the speed of light. But since this "probe" was moving so slowly, that would indicate that it must also have decelerated from that speed - but why waste all that energy if you're not going to stick around but just doing a quick flyby?
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Alternatively, perhaps an advanced alien civilization is sending out millions of these things to every star in the galaxy before they detect any signals at all - but for one to show up at this particular moment would imply that these things must be fairly common on a cosmic scale. It seems like an inefficient way to explore the Universe, but who knows.
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It would be really cool if it were an alien probe, but it's just not convincing. None of its anomalous movement requires either unnatural means of propulsion or intelligent control; more likely it's just some type of natural object that we just haven't observed very often yet.
It's not obvious whether they've corrected for the fact that retirees naturally have more free time to waste sharing links on Facebook; and of course, sharing more links makes it more likely that at least one of them will be 'fake news'. As noted, some fake news sites can appear to be extremely convincing, masquerading as well-known publications but with a different URL or a slightly different name, and if you're not attentive it can be easy to be taken in - which can happen to just about anybody. I'm sure that for some seniors, cognitive decline enters into the picture, but I suspect that a lot of it may be just that they do more sharing period.
Long-term, we'll need to move away from silicon, which was the point. But Holloway is seemingly unable to imagine that any of these (innovative silicon architectures like 3d, or non-silicon alternatives) is even possible - which is a dead giveaway that he probably has an axe to grind.
No argument that these are all serious candidates for a viable successor technology, but the question is which one(s) will win out for headroom, life of the components, cost of production, and so forth. Holloway is an idiot if he thinks that the death of silicon means the end of progress.
Other techniques will suffer from the same principle constraint.
Or other constraints that we can't even imagine at present. Of course any alternative technologies will also be exhausted at some point, but we have no reason to think that we've already reached the end of what's possible.
I think we're pretty much in agreement.
You are right, but the problem with 3-d silicon is that it generates correspondingly more heat - which is already a problem even with current designs. I think that such technologies will keep us moving forward for a while even after we get to the smallest practical transistor size, but there will still be limits.
Longer-term, there's more hope for non-silicon based models - but that's a whole different subject that might not be subject to the familiar Moore's Law, which was never more than an observation about how quickly silicon semiconductor was progressing during the 1970's and 1980's; other technologies may progress either faster or slower, and may not have as much headroom as silicon had back in 1970.
Moore's Law, strictly speaking, only applies to silicon semiconductor technology, not to computational technology as a whole. As such, it will eventually exhaust its possibilities, and we're not too far from doing that now. You are correct that most technologies do follow a sigmoid function and that few if any can ever be expected to follow an exponential curve.
But Kurzweil was not quite so naive as to claim that silicon semiconductor technology would continue forever. Rather, he claimed that successor technologies would be found to continue the upward ascent. This is probably true as far as it goes, but we have no guarantee that such successor technologies will seamlessly follow the demise of silicon; rather, it's likely that there may be gaps while the new technologies are developed and perfected before progress can renew. We also have no guarantee that they will follow the same growth curve as silicon (ie, doubling every 18-24 months); they might be either faster or slower. Kurzweil's belief that such successor technologies will follow each other seamlessly is based on little more than faith.
We also have no guarantee that continued upward progress is even possible over extended periods of time. Even if we don't reach any physical limits, we're likely to hit limits of power consumption, resource availability, or the simple economic viability of constructing the factories or the chips themselves. Even in the case of silicon, all of this is starting to happen: We have not quite yet reached the physical limits of the medium, but are in danger of running out of either resources (think rare earths), electrical power (think tasks like cryptocurrency mining), or even capital (the ever-increasing costs of building the foundries), any or all of which may turn out to form an effective barrier to reaching the physical end-point of silicon.
For these reasons I do not think that a Kurzweil-style singularity is in our (near) future, although computational progress should continue, possibly with more choppy and unpredictable breakthroughs than has been the case in recent history.
But if Kurzweil is too optimistic, Holloway is much too pessimistic: He completely discounts any successor technologies to silicon. This is already flying in the face of history, since we've had at least three major transitions in computational technology already (from purely mechanical to electro-mechanical to vacuum tubes to semiconductors), and it is foolish to claim that we have already found the best technology possible. Even now there are candidate technologies waiting in the wings, such as quantum computing and various alternatives to silicon that retain traditional computational models.
In other words, the death of Moore's Law (for which read: the progress of silicon technology) marks a transition period, not an endpoint.
To follow up on my previous comment, another group that is often at odds with modern medicine is Christian Science - but you can find a pretty wide range of views on various medical topics among them, and blood transfusions are not forbidden by Christian Science doctrine (unlike the Jehovah's Witnesses).
As Ocker3 says, 7th Day Adventists are not, in general, against blood transfusions (I'm sure some are, just as you can find a few people with such ideas in any other group). The group I think you've confused them with is the Jehovah's Witnesses, who are definitely against blood transfusions.
I've got news for you - that wasn't considered "good style" back in the day, either, except perhaps for a few cases that involved lots of complex mathematics that were hard to break down with any efficiency. Outside of the modeling community, this has been considered detrimental for something like 50 years - you'd have to go back to the 60's to find a time when it was acceptable.
Not that it wasn't often done - but then on the other hand one can find pretty ugly modern "object oriented" designs as well.
"Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone."
No correlation to cancer? That's not what studies [sciencedaily.com] are showing. I've also read that cell phones sitting in pockets have been connected to reduced sperm count.
The problem (as you note later when you say that "There's no reason why one study should be inherently more valid than the other" - actually this is false; many studies have methodological errors that invalidate them - but your basic idea is correct: that the results of any single study are inherently unreliable) is that a single study (or even several studies) is not enough to be any more than suggestive.
As you quickly learn in Statistics 101, "The improbable thing will happen with exactly that probability". Let's assume that there really is no correlation between cancer and cell phones - then we should expect that at least 1 in 20 studies will show that there is an increased risk of cancer associated with cell phone use (This is assuming that there are no methodological errors that might increase that number). If this is not immediately obvious to you, then you need to review Statistics 101: The "1 in 20" criterion is that there is a 19 out of 20 chance (95% probability) that the conclusions of the study are correct. Sometimes the dice just don't fall your way, and your study reaches the wrong conclusion.
Sorry to be so pedantic, but it seems there is a great deal of misunderstanding of the nature of statistical studies, even amongst people who ought to know better (I have plenty of horror stories from researchers in major Universities, but that's another topic altogether). A single study proves little, other than perhaps to suggest the need for further verification. That's why there is such a great deal of emphasis placed on reproducibility - not simply to reduce methodological errors, but also to reduce sampling error.
Also, it may not be vulnerable to humidity in a controlled environment, but in the outdoors, a few seasons of freezing/melting and it'll be shot. Water beats rock every time.
I really don't care if my archival storage can stand being left outside for several years, because I don't intend to do that. I'd be quite happy if it were at least as durable as a book, which if well made and with reasonable care can last at least a couple hundred years, possibly over 1000 under ideal conditions. So what if it can get ruined if it's left in the rain? If I care enough about the data, I just make a few copies and put them in different places and hopefully if I've chosen well at least one will survive. Right now it's not at all clear that typical CD's and DVD's are even as durable as cheap pulp paperbacks.
This is a good point. I certainly don't have a problem in principle with taking tests (in fact I usually do fairly well on them if I have some knowledge of the subject - in high school I was on the math team, and I would routinely place well above other kids who were just as smart as I was but who just weren't as good at taking tests), but it does seem reminiscent of the typing pool: Your value as an employee is directly related to how many words/min you can type. If the position has even a whiff of being essentially like the typing pool, it's probably a low-level or even entry-level job.
Testing isn't necessarily a bad idea, but it can create problems as well as solve them. In most software development environments, any testing should usually be used to weed out unsuitable candidates rather than to produce a single number that will be used as the primary hiring guide. Other things like interpersonal dynamics can also be important, for example. Multiple-choice tests are probably the least useful, because they test specific bits of knowledge rather than broader concepts; that may be useful in a classroom where you're testing the student's knowledge of a specific curriculum, but most real-world software development positions (other than perhaps the very most entry-level jobs) are more about design and problem solving and not so much about things like the details of a specific computer language. Essay tests of whatever sort would usually be the most useful, but also the hardest to design and grade.
Even worse, if you aren't careful, in many places and depending on whether you are a public or a private entity, you can potentially open yourself up to things like discrimination lawsuits if you don't end up hiring whatever person received the highest score on the test even if they don't fit some of your other criteria very well.
I would certainly not want to give a test that wasn't in person - there are far too many ways to get scammed: For example I've had someone ask if I could "help them out" with an online employment test - not just asking me for one or two bits of information, but essentially asking me to take the whole test for them! If you are doing a "worldwide" search, that creates problems for a small software group - the cost of flying a number of candidates to your location can be astronomical.
FWIW.
25,000 square miles is a lot of land to give up, even if it's desert.
A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that 25,000 square miles is about 9.4 million lane-miles, or about 2.4 million miles of 4-lane roadway. This sounds suspiciously close to our total inventory of highway miles of all sorts, everything from Interstates down to country roads, so I suspect that that's where that number came from. I would certainly have a great deal of concern about the issue of wear-and-tear on major highways built using this technology; dealing with that would have to cost more than making normal solar panels, and all they have to do is just sit out there in the sun.
It would seem that there are lots of other places you could put that many solar panels that wouldn't have quite as much of the wear-and-tear issues: roofs of all sorts, for example. Since you don't really need 25,000 square miles of solar panels given current solar panel efficiency and current power needs, that would appear to be a better place to site them first. If it isn't cost-effective there, it won't be cost-effective anywhere.
Where did you get that idea? I see no grounds for requiring increasing complexity for evolution, and indeed, since the overwhelming majority of life on this planet is microbial, as it always has been, there is fair evidence against such a claim.
"Complexity" in this context should be understood to say little or nothing about the physical size of the organisms or their multi- or unicellular nature. It is, rather, a comment about the size of the potential gene space for the organisms. Humans tend to think of "complexity" in very anthropomorphic terms, but even modern prokaryotes are still pretty complex organisms and have an enormous potential gene space. If the biochemistry of the life-forms does not allow for very much diversity (remember we're talking about life that presumably does not use DNA or RNA and possibly not even any of our amino acids), there is very little for evolution to work with. It's not hard to imagine a situation where such organisms might relatively quickly reach their maximum potential and evolution - even microbial evolution - effectively stops.
Since this is a "4% tax" it sounds like they must be planning to levy it as a sales tax to be collected by any vendors who have to collect New York sales tax for transactions within the state; otherwise it doesn't make any sense to talk about "4%". One alternative would perhaps be that it could be a bandwidth tax to be collected by all of the New York ISP's - which would be more collectible: in most cases, your ISP certainly knows where you live even if (as in the case of wireless) it's only where you receive your bill.
But if it's going to be a standard sales tax, that raises all sorts of other problems. Most obviously, it provides a significant disincentive for companies selling downloads to locate in New York; it would be hard for them to collect tax from some company based in Canada, for example. But it also raises the question of how a company knows who they're dealing with; with many payment options, the customer's location need not be given, and since this is an Internet download if the company does ask for an address it would be easy enough for the customer to enter an out-of-state address to avoid paying the tax, and the company would never be the wiser. If the state requires them to use IP addresses to determine the customer's tax liability, it can often be difficult to determine the exact state for an IP address in a border area or in many other situations, and doesn't even address the problem of proxy servers that might be used deliberately or otherwise to avoid paying the tax.
Since the TFA is rather short on specifics, it's hard to tell how unworkable this might be, though whenever the Legislature - any Legislature - is in session, hare-brained schemes abound. It does sound like they're trying to see just how many people they can annoy with this kind of law.
Can a given chemistry lead to increasing complexity, or is it just a dead end?
Why is "increasing complexity" a requirement for life? It's clearly a requirement for evolution, but I don't see any reason why something "lifelike" but alien might not have a very simple "maximum complexity" compared to standard carbon-based earthly life forms.
I don't know what the original article said (the site is thoroughly slashdotted), but finding life based on alternative chemistry won't "alter the odds" - it will just alter our computation of the odds. That immediately raises my suspicions since it suggests that the article was written by a journalist rather than a scientist, and consequently that it might be severely distorted.
Having said that, there are a lot of possible alternative chemistries that don't involve non-carbon-based life: substituting arsenic for phosphorus as mentioned here need not also substitute something else for carbon, so the most likely possibility is that such life would be carbon based but still "alien." As far as we know now, at Earthly temperatures and pressures carbon is a far more plausible basis for life than anything else, and so far we haven't even found much that's very promising at other temperatures and pressures. But I'm not at all sure that we have sufficiently explored alternative temperatures and pressures to rule them out as possible habitats.
There might well be a few fragments of several kilograms, but the fragments most likely to have a sufficient change in momentum to be able to deorbit that quickly could hardly be very large: The total sum of the momentum of all of the pieces before and after the event needs to remain constant; most of that debris is still going to be traveling at orbital velocities.
This event was visible in broad daylight, at 11:00 in the morning. Whatever it was, it must have been a pretty good-sized object.
This is a standard result of classical epistemology - it's certainly not original with Dawkins, it was already ancient generations before he was born. Proving a negative (any negative) is very difficult and usually impossible in just about any subject other than mathematics and logic and the like. Similarly we can't prove that flying saucers don't exist - but if anyone were to exhibit an example of any of these things, then that's all that's needed to prove that it does exist.
It's an amusing coincidence that you were reading that at the same time but I'm not quite sure what it's supposed to prove.