It's so ridiculous when climate change deniers point out the Antarctic sea ice thing. That is happening despite record temperatures in the high latitudes of the southern hemisphere. There is no doubt that Antarctica is warming at tremendous rates, and if that trend continues the increase in continental ice will obviously be a short-term phenomenon.
That is an incredibly complicated thing to determine, and is certainly not one-sided like you make it seem. In the 20th century, over a billion people died prematurely due to smoking for example. That's about ten times more people than in every 20th century war combined. Approximately two million people die from occupational hazards each year? How much of that is preventable?
They're a mess that had $77.85B in revenue last year ($21.86B net), $68B cash-in-hand, and one of the two or three best brands in the world. It will still be a tall order, but you don't need luck when you have those kind of resources.
Sort of. The Patriot Act is simply too large to have been drafted in the timeframe allotted, so we can start with the obvious truth that whoever really wrote it had it on the shelf awaiting an opportunity. That is chilling, and under-reported, enough.
Well, it is certainly true that the intelligence agencies have always hated FISA and the ECPA, and they used 9/11 as an opportunity to push for changes that would never have been allowed in other political climates.
But they didn't literally have it sitting on the shelf, unless you have some sort of evidence to show otherwise. It was a little over a month between September 11th and when the first draft of the PATRIOT Act. That's a reasonable amount of time to bang out 120 pages of legalese, the majority of which were pretty banal reforms.
The problem of governments using crises to rush anti-democratic legislation is horrible enough without making up conspiracy theories.
I agree with your general argument, but it's also true that for hobbyist programmers the most popular way to license your code is with the GPL (and anecdotally/IMHO the more useful projects almost always are). I'm sure if more small projects were licensed with the BSD, the prevalence of corporations forking the code and not giving back would be much higher.
Again, I'm not so sure that is the worst thing in the world (and the existence of the GPL for those that want that protection makes it moot anyway) but I absolutely understand the sentiment of people who do not want the code they write to be used by for-profit corporations without any protection for the community. If I'm going to write proprietary code for Apple and Google, they damn well better be paying my salary.
Apparently "free" in your mind does not include the millions of dollars a year the city government was losing operating the service. Pretty sure that wasn't monopoly money they were spending.
Residents can still get a 5mbps synchronous connection for free. Schools are still getting free gigabit. It's just the gigabit residential/business that is $70/month, which is what a fair amount of Americans pay for service that is orders of magnitude worse. Provo City is making out like a bandit. I wish the other UTOPIA cities could get on board.
And you can't forget that bleeding-heart liberal Nixon who founded the EPA. It's a shame we've allowed critical governmental functions like making sure the air and water is clean become partisan battlegrounds.
That is not true. The three bloodiest centuries in history were the 20th, 19th, and 18th. The 20th "won" by a large margin.
Even in the last 50 years, you have seen many wars with casualties in the millions: Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iran-Iraq, the Congo, etc. Although they pale in comparison to the World Wars, those are still some of the worst wars in history.
You do have a point to a certain extent. Modern weaponry has, in the last half a century, reduced the likelihood of major superpowers going to war with one another. But as the global population increase puts more pressure on dwindling resources (fossil fuels, water, arable land), I think the possibility of conflict between superpowers is much more likely in the coming decades than it has been recently, and a few regional political conflicts have the potential to explode should thing take a turn for the worse (North/South Korea, Pakistan-India namely).
Nontrivial doesn't necessarily mean large. It just means significant enough that it needs to be accounted for. The actual cost will of course be dependent on the size and complexity of your codebase.
Well the problem is that once you get past a certain time period, you start to run out of sources. Writing was incredibly rare before the 1st millenium BCE and only existed in certain civilizations. It's not a coincidence that we know more about Greece, Egypt, Persia, Babylon, etc. rather than other civilizations. They were the only ones keeping records! Other civilizations only have oral histories, which are certainly interesting but of highly questionable accuracy.
Also the reason why written sources are more numerous and accurate after around, say, the 6th century BC is because that's when people started writing everything down! Although writing existed before then, there was a massive increase in trade during that time period and that's when writing became commonplace. Scholars believe that was the time period in which the Greek legends as well as the first books of the Old Testament were all written. So there is a period ranging around the 6th century BC to the present where we have continuous (and thus accurate) written history being recorded, a written history of the oral traditions of those cultures (that goes back some time but is of questionable accuracy), and then a time of prehistory where we have no information other than what we can put together from archaeological data.
If you look at that wikipedia page you linked, almost all of those dates are based on archaeological data. The way that works is an archaeologist finds a site that looks promising and starts a dig. They find any artifacts in that area, analyze it, date it, compare it to other sites in the region, and extrapolate information based on that. Other scientific fields are also used to help out: chemistry, genetics, linguistics, anthropology, climate science, all of them are used in constructing history. But that's not very precise and extremely dependent on finding good archaeological data, so that's why you have the lack of precision.
Go back 2,000 years and there is quite a bit of archaeological data. Go back 5,000 years and it is is very hard to come by. Go back 10,000 years and it's practically nonexistent. That's why we know so little of prehistoric civilizations. There's literally no other information other than "There were people here, and they left these types of tools" and maybe some bones or cave paintings.
Well, yeah, you have to take that bias into account. You don't just read the Bible and take them at their word for what happened. But you can confirm much of the Bible's historicity via archaeology and referencing contemporary sources.
For example, the Old Testament might say King Johesephus ruled such and such kingdom at such and such time period and he was a terrible, wicked ruler who murdered children and was struck down by God. You can go back and confirm via other methods that there really was a King Johesephus that ruled that kingdom and during that time period. Was he actually as horrible and wicked as described in the Bible? Maybe not. Like you said, the accounts written down in the Bible were from people with a very biased viewpoint so you have to take that into account. But you can confirm or deny a lot of it.
That's what I mean when I say that things in the Bible seem to be fairly accurate after a certain point. Obviously the ancient Jews had their own biases and that has to be taken into account, but we can confirm that many events happened at the same times and places described in the Old Testament. But the further you go back the more inaccurate it gets. The Kingdom of Judah was certainly not the way described in the Old Testament and there is absolutely no evidence for the Jews being enslaved in Egypt, for example.
Compare it to Ancient Greek history. Just because the Illiad is obviously legend doesn't mean the Peloponnesian war didn't happen.
It is a nice bedtime story, but there is nothing to cite to show any of it really happened.
That's not true. Much of the history in the Old Testament (I'm not talking about the fables found in Genesis, but the descriptions of kingdoms and events that have been proven to exist) is severely distorted history at best, but much of it is relevant.
Generally speaking the dividing line is the conquest of Babylon by the Persians. Everything before that is more legend than fact. Everything after that is fairly accurate (but obviously highly biased).
... I see no evidence, quite honestly, that the NSA has the wrong motives.
What about the evidence that the NSA's network is being used for industrial espionage? National security is one thing, but that one's impossible to justify.
Exactly. There's nothing stopping someone from configuring Linux any way they so choose, which includes installing commercial, closed-source software. But the moment you make the distro dependent upon proprietary software you loose the thing which makes FOSS special in the first place.
It's a bit disingenuous to paint RMS and the "FOSSies" as uncompromising radicals when it was their efforts and that ideology that created open source and made it what it is today. If progress were impossible with their ideology, we wouldn't even be sitting here discussing the problems with Linux because it wouldn't exist.
I know RMS can be a twat sometimes, but there is a degree of proof for his ideology present in the success of the GNU project and the freedom it has brought to the world of consumer and commercial computing that is impossible to refute. To call him "mililtant" is entirely missing the point. He's just trying to keep his original vision moving forward and quite frankly *everybody* is a Johnny-Come-Lately compared to RMS. Even when you criticize him you have to at least give him the respect he (and by extension his ideology) deserves.
I know it can be frustrating when you just want the damn thing to work correctly, but you're throwing out the baby with the bathwater by complaining about the 5% that is preventing OSS from dominating OSX and Windows as a commercial force, forgetting the 95% that makes it truly special in the first place.
Right..... those are the only two options: all or none. If you even mention the prospect of raising taxes it's assumed that the goal is a quasi-communist state where no one is allowed to keep any money.
Good post, I would make just one important distinction. The teens were when the progressive side of the Republican party died and the fiscal conservative strain we are so familiar with today became dominant (famously embodied in the Coolidge administration), but the pro-business strain of the GOP existed from the very beginning of the party. In fact that was the major source of strain between Roosevelt's progressivism and the rest of the party, since Roosevelt was so staunchly anti-trust.
To call the Republicans the progressive party is a bit confusing because of all the different connotations the phrases progressive and conservative have gone through since then. In the middle-to-late 19th century murdering natives and Mexicans and giving their land to massive corporations was the height of progressivism, which is a little bit confusing from the modern perspective:)
Oh, please. I graduated from high school ten years ago, and I saw plenty of violence. A girl in my brother's class (middle school age) got her ass kicked by a group of two or three kids, went home and grabbed a baseball bat. She came back and beat them so bad one of the kids ended up with permanent brain damage. How's that for hyper-escalation? One of my friends back then was constantly harassed and bullied, stood up for himself, and got his ass beat nearly every day because of it. This wasn't little kids shoving each other waiting for someone to start something, he got a thorough ass-kicking on a regular basis. Despite it being obvious what was happening, the administration wouldn't give any of the kids responsible more than in-school suspension. Care to guess how successful his education was?
A school is a place of learning. You want to teach a kid how to fight then put them in Krav Maga. School should be a safe haven. Any sort of violence or threatening behavior should warrant a harsh and immediate punishment. There is no place whatsoever for violence or intimidation, and anyone advocating such is completely fucking insane.
Criminal charges are an absolute joke in this situation, but that doesn't mean the kid didn't do anything wrong. He should have been taken aside and informed why what he did was a stupid idea, and possibly given detention or some other sort of mundane punishment. But anyone claiming that schools should be perfectly fine with violence, or (in your case) openly advocating such behavior to "toughen them up" needs to have their head examined. I hope you never have to deal with telling your kid to stand up for himself and then watch him get brutalized.
You are correct that Feynman's books are insufficient to learn introductory physics, but the lectures were only one part of the curriculum. From Feynman's Preface:
"The lectures form only part of the complete course. The whole group of 180 students gathered in a big lecture room twice a week to hear these lectures and then broke up into small groups of 15 to 20 students in recitation sections under the guidance of a teaching assistance. In addition, there was a laboratory section each week...
The reason there are no lectures on how to solve problems is because there were recitation sections. Although I did put three lectures in the first year how to solve problems, they are not included here."
There were also a few lectures that were left out for some reason, which form the basis of the book "Feynman: Tips on Physics."
In the preface, he also writes that he considered the course a failure. Based on examination scores, only about two dozen out of his class of 180 really grasped the subject, but those who did gained "a first-rate background in physics."
I'm currently taking intro physics and I've found Feynman's lectures to be invaluable. It's a much more thorough treatment than my current course, and I think it will hell set me up for more advanced courses. But you're right that by itself it is not sufficient.
Slashdot Mirror
It's so ridiculous when climate change deniers point out the Antarctic sea ice thing. That is happening despite record temperatures in the high latitudes of the southern hemisphere. There is no doubt that Antarctica is warming at tremendous rates, and if that trend continues the increase in continental ice will obviously be a short-term phenomenon.
That is an incredibly complicated thing to determine, and is certainly not one-sided like you make it seem. In the 20th century, over a billion people died prematurely due to smoking for example. That's about ten times more people than in every 20th century war combined. Approximately two million people die from occupational hazards each year? How much of that is preventable?
Pfff... He cited both wikipedia and talk radio. I think he's got a pretty good handle on the situation, Professor Fancy Pants.
They're a mess that had $77.85B in revenue last year ($21.86B net), $68B cash-in-hand, and one of the two or three best brands in the world. It will still be a tall order, but you don't need luck when you have those kind of resources.
Well, it is certainly true that the intelligence agencies have always hated FISA and the ECPA, and they used 9/11 as an opportunity to push for changes that would never have been allowed in other political climates.
But they didn't literally have it sitting on the shelf, unless you have some sort of evidence to show otherwise. It was a little over a month between September 11th and when the first draft of the PATRIOT Act. That's a reasonable amount of time to bang out 120 pages of legalese, the majority of which were pretty banal reforms.
The problem of governments using crises to rush anti-democratic legislation is horrible enough without making up conspiracy theories.
I agree with your general argument, but it's also true that for hobbyist programmers the most popular way to license your code is with the GPL (and anecdotally/IMHO the more useful projects almost always are). I'm sure if more small projects were licensed with the BSD, the prevalence of corporations forking the code and not giving back would be much higher.
Again, I'm not so sure that is the worst thing in the world (and the existence of the GPL for those that want that protection makes it moot anyway) but I absolutely understand the sentiment of people who do not want the code they write to be used by for-profit corporations without any protection for the community. If I'm going to write proprietary code for Apple and Google, they damn well better be paying my salary.
Apparently "free" in your mind does not include the millions of dollars a year the city government was losing operating the service. Pretty sure that wasn't monopoly money they were spending. Residents can still get a 5mbps synchronous connection for free. Schools are still getting free gigabit. It's just the gigabit residential/business that is $70/month, which is what a fair amount of Americans pay for service that is orders of magnitude worse. Provo City is making out like a bandit. I wish the other UTOPIA cities could get on board.
*are clean
And you can't forget that bleeding-heart liberal Nixon who founded the EPA. It's a shame we've allowed critical governmental functions like making sure the air and water is clean become partisan battlegrounds.
That is not true. The three bloodiest centuries in history were the 20th, 19th, and 18th. The 20th "won" by a large margin.
Even in the last 50 years, you have seen many wars with casualties in the millions: Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iran-Iraq, the Congo, etc. Although they pale in comparison to the World Wars, those are still some of the worst wars in history.
You do have a point to a certain extent. Modern weaponry has, in the last half a century, reduced the likelihood of major superpowers going to war with one another. But as the global population increase puts more pressure on dwindling resources (fossil fuels, water, arable land), I think the possibility of conflict between superpowers is much more likely in the coming decades than it has been recently, and a few regional political conflicts have the potential to explode should thing take a turn for the worse (North/South Korea, Pakistan-India namely).
All of those places except Florida have both of those. They are susceptible to drought, but some rather large rivers run through those states.
Nontrivial doesn't necessarily mean large. It just means significant enough that it needs to be accounted for. The actual cost will of course be dependent on the size and complexity of your codebase.
Christian Scientists have been refusing vaccines since their founding in the 19th century. The guy who said stupidity is universal has it right.
Well the problem is that once you get past a certain time period, you start to run out of sources. Writing was incredibly rare before the 1st millenium BCE and only existed in certain civilizations. It's not a coincidence that we know more about Greece, Egypt, Persia, Babylon, etc. rather than other civilizations. They were the only ones keeping records! Other civilizations only have oral histories, which are certainly interesting but of highly questionable accuracy.
Also the reason why written sources are more numerous and accurate after around, say, the 6th century BC is because that's when people started writing everything down! Although writing existed before then, there was a massive increase in trade during that time period and that's when writing became commonplace. Scholars believe that was the time period in which the Greek legends as well as the first books of the Old Testament were all written. So there is a period ranging around the 6th century BC to the present where we have continuous (and thus accurate) written history being recorded, a written history of the oral traditions of those cultures (that goes back some time but is of questionable accuracy), and then a time of prehistory where we have no information other than what we can put together from archaeological data.
If you look at that wikipedia page you linked, almost all of those dates are based on archaeological data. The way that works is an archaeologist finds a site that looks promising and starts a dig. They find any artifacts in that area, analyze it, date it, compare it to other sites in the region, and extrapolate information based on that. Other scientific fields are also used to help out: chemistry, genetics, linguistics, anthropology, climate science, all of them are used in constructing history. But that's not very precise and extremely dependent on finding good archaeological data, so that's why you have the lack of precision.
Go back 2,000 years and there is quite a bit of archaeological data. Go back 5,000 years and it is is very hard to come by. Go back 10,000 years and it's practically nonexistent. That's why we know so little of prehistoric civilizations. There's literally no other information other than "There were people here, and they left these types of tools" and maybe some bones or cave paintings.
Well, yeah, you have to take that bias into account. You don't just read the Bible and take them at their word for what happened. But you can confirm much of the Bible's historicity via archaeology and referencing contemporary sources.
For example, the Old Testament might say King Johesephus ruled such and such kingdom at such and such time period and he was a terrible, wicked ruler who murdered children and was struck down by God. You can go back and confirm via other methods that there really was a King Johesephus that ruled that kingdom and during that time period. Was he actually as horrible and wicked as described in the Bible? Maybe not. Like you said, the accounts written down in the Bible were from people with a very biased viewpoint so you have to take that into account. But you can confirm or deny a lot of it.
That's what I mean when I say that things in the Bible seem to be fairly accurate after a certain point. Obviously the ancient Jews had their own biases and that has to be taken into account, but we can confirm that many events happened at the same times and places described in the Old Testament. But the further you go back the more inaccurate it gets. The Kingdom of Judah was certainly not the way described in the Old Testament and there is absolutely no evidence for the Jews being enslaved in Egypt, for example.
Compare it to Ancient Greek history. Just because the Illiad is obviously legend doesn't mean the Peloponnesian war didn't happen.
That's not true. Much of the history in the Old Testament (I'm not talking about the fables found in Genesis, but the descriptions of kingdoms and events that have been proven to exist) is severely distorted history at best, but much of it is relevant.
Generally speaking the dividing line is the conquest of Babylon by the Persians. Everything before that is more legend than fact. Everything after that is fairly accurate (but obviously highly biased).
What about the evidence that the NSA's network is being used for industrial espionage? National security is one thing, but that one's impossible to justify.
At Mach 6 I imagine it probably *is* a spacecraft. Pretty close at least.
That was an excellent post. Thanks for taking the time to write it.
Exactly. There's nothing stopping someone from configuring Linux any way they so choose, which includes installing commercial, closed-source software. But the moment you make the distro dependent upon proprietary software you loose the thing which makes FOSS special in the first place.
It's a bit disingenuous to paint RMS and the "FOSSies" as uncompromising radicals when it was their efforts and that ideology that created open source and made it what it is today. If progress were impossible with their ideology, we wouldn't even be sitting here discussing the problems with Linux because it wouldn't exist.
I know RMS can be a twat sometimes, but there is a degree of proof for his ideology present in the success of the GNU project and the freedom it has brought to the world of consumer and commercial computing that is impossible to refute. To call him "mililtant" is entirely missing the point. He's just trying to keep his original vision moving forward and quite frankly *everybody* is a Johnny-Come-Lately compared to RMS. Even when you criticize him you have to at least give him the respect he (and by extension his ideology) deserves.
I know it can be frustrating when you just want the damn thing to work correctly, but you're throwing out the baby with the bathwater by complaining about the 5% that is preventing OSS from dominating OSX and Windows as a commercial force, forgetting the 95% that makes it truly special in the first place.
Right..... those are the only two options: all or none. If you even mention the prospect of raising taxes it's assumed that the goal is a quasi-communist state where no one is allowed to keep any money.
Good post, I would make just one important distinction. The teens were when the progressive side of the Republican party died and the fiscal conservative strain we are so familiar with today became dominant (famously embodied in the Coolidge administration), but the pro-business strain of the GOP existed from the very beginning of the party. In fact that was the major source of strain between Roosevelt's progressivism and the rest of the party, since Roosevelt was so staunchly anti-trust.
:)
To call the Republicans the progressive party is a bit confusing because of all the different connotations the phrases progressive and conservative have gone through since then. In the middle-to-late 19th century murdering natives and Mexicans and giving their land to massive corporations was the height of progressivism, which is a little bit confusing from the modern perspective
Oh, please. I graduated from high school ten years ago, and I saw plenty of violence. A girl in my brother's class (middle school age) got her ass kicked by a group of two or three kids, went home and grabbed a baseball bat. She came back and beat them so bad one of the kids ended up with permanent brain damage. How's that for hyper-escalation? One of my friends back then was constantly harassed and bullied, stood up for himself, and got his ass beat nearly every day because of it. This wasn't little kids shoving each other waiting for someone to start something, he got a thorough ass-kicking on a regular basis. Despite it being obvious what was happening, the administration wouldn't give any of the kids responsible more than in-school suspension. Care to guess how successful his education was?
A school is a place of learning. You want to teach a kid how to fight then put them in Krav Maga. School should be a safe haven. Any sort of violence or threatening behavior should warrant a harsh and immediate punishment. There is no place whatsoever for violence or intimidation, and anyone advocating such is completely fucking insane.
Criminal charges are an absolute joke in this situation, but that doesn't mean the kid didn't do anything wrong. He should have been taken aside and informed why what he did was a stupid idea, and possibly given detention or some other sort of mundane punishment. But anyone claiming that schools should be perfectly fine with violence, or (in your case) openly advocating such behavior to "toughen them up" needs to have their head examined. I hope you never have to deal with telling your kid to stand up for himself and then watch him get brutalized.
There were also a few lectures that were left out for some reason, which form the basis of the book "Feynman: Tips on Physics."
In the preface, he also writes that he considered the course a failure. Based on examination scores, only about two dozen out of his class of 180 really grasped the subject, but those who did gained "a first-rate background in physics."
I'm currently taking intro physics and I've found Feynman's lectures to be invaluable. It's a much more thorough treatment than my current course, and I think it will hell set me up for more advanced courses. But you're right that by itself it is not sufficient.