Except it isn't exactly easy for me to know exactly who has been responsible for each molecule or particle of pollution that I have been forced to breathe in, and it isn't practical for me to sue each and every person in a traffic jam for exactly their share of responsibility for causing my delay to work.
Whereas it is clear that people running powerplants or industrial chemical plants should have to pay for the right to deprive downwind or downstream people of the clean water and clean air that is used up by their actions.
Markets require the participants to be able to identify one another, to meet to transact, and to be able to control those things which they are buying and selling.
You have a very strange concept of "markets" if people driving vehicles are thereby participating in a market. "member of the market goes out and crashes his trains"? what the fuck kind of gibberish is that? what market? what membership?
In cases where markets cannot exist or cannot function, it is legitimate for people to elect that governments act to enact policies that create or substitute for the actions that hypothetical markets would produce.
Homo erectus was also probably "used to" the idea that most of them didn't live to 30 years of age.
The idea that skin cancer rates, just to pick a totally hypothetical example, might go up tenfold, just to pick a totally made-up factor, would be met by a shrug: "Who the hell ever lived long enough to die of cancer?"
Things could get pretty damn bad in modern terms without creating something that would show up in the million-year-old fossil record. Consider how little direct evidence we see today of the flu pandemic of the early 20th century, or the various Black Death pandemics of the late Middle Ages.
Hmm. Two absolutely moronic statements in one post.
1) "Just write" an emulator. Because, after all, these systems were utter simplicity in architecture, thrown together by a couple engineers in a garage.
Yeah, right. These systems have decades of legacy cruft and decades of feature creep as well as serious engineering to make them stable, robust, and high-throughput. Not a small project to understand all this, much less emulate it bug-for-bug and feature-for-feature.
2) "emulate a mainframe": I suppose all the serious I/O hardware that is filling up the mainframe room can be "emulated" through a PC parallel port, or a USB port? Get real. All of this legacy hardware has its own set of interfaces.
You miss the point of my question. I was specifically excluding the particular nature of the Earth-bound programs in question to eliminate the knee-jerk response of "pinko socialist welfare Democrats".
"Spending on Earth" could just as easily include building Republican bridges to isolated Alaskan islands housing dozens of Republican voters, if that's your desire.
Government spending billions of dollars on government-run space exploration is JUST AS SOCIALIST as government grants toward people eating. Just because the beneficiaries are government-chosen corporations employing lots of space geeks to put together expensive metal packages to hurl into the great beyond does not mean the programs are non-socialist.
Free-market competition driving space exploration at *PRIVATE EXPENSE* would be non-socialist.
Just a question: apart from the political affiliations of particular politicians in the early 1970s, what is more socialist about "spend the money on Earth" vs. "spend the money in space"?
Reliability and safety considerations for cruise missile operation are quite different for civilian aircraft.
A cruise missile decides to make an abrupt change of altitude, or makes a flight into terrain, well, your navigation planner hopefully laid out your path to avoid civilian airways and major friendly population centers, and instead chose an active (or soon-to-be-active) war zone. And, there aren't any passengers to replace. One crashes? Send another one just in case. Two or more bombs are usually as good as or better than one.
Airplanes can land themselves once a conscious pilot gets instruction from a conscious human aircraft controller telling him to start his approach for a specific runway, coming out of a known holding pattern, and throws the switch.
All these pie-in-the-sky features increase software complexity, which increases cost significantly, and also the overall reliability of the software. Having improved safety in the one major accident every few years having to do with loss of cabin pressure hardly compensates for *decreased* safety in the thousands of flights that happen every day.
Auto and health insurance isn't the same as straight gambling.
Without insurance, if I cause an auto accident that injures *you* or damages your property, and I can't repay your $100,000 loss out of my pocket, YOU lose, not me. I just go bankrupt, and you get stuck with the bill, and probably go bankrupt yourself.
The point is, auto insurance is required to drive so that the public can be sure that every nut allowed behind the wheel has a guaranteed ability and liquid reserves to pay the cost of their mistakes.
A bad deal of the cards in Vegas only hurts those with chips on the table, but everyone has to use the roads.
Because the 3200+ machine is 1/4 the size (and 1/2 the power consumption) of 4 800 MHz PCs, you don't need a KVM switch, the AMD box is probably using GBit Enet, instead of 4x100 MBps, has 100s of GB of hard disk, instead of a few GB, and the box is brand new, and under warranty, and not ready to croak.
Typists using Selectrics had a sloped keyboard, elevated above the desk by a few inches. I.e., no resting of the heel of their hands on the desk.
They also had to stop their keyboarding every so often to insert and remove paper. I.e., built-in breaks.
Selectric users also didn't have to deal with control-key gymnastics, and were trained to shift with the opposite hand, as well as to sit up straight.
Widespread distribution of crappy keyboards is also related to the widespread distribution of typing chores to people who did not have the training to type with proper posture.
Re:now before anyone gets started
on
10 Technologies MIA
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The "irrationality" of the belief is not a statement about profit per se. The context is a social one, in which by using a service, the consumer wants to make a fair exchange, not exploit someone's generosity in an unsustainable way. Essentially, one has to force oneself to ignore the fact that "hey, no shipping!" is too good to be true.
It is easier for me to "love" consuming something that a faceless corporation wishes to dispense below cost, but if a human delivery guy is bringing something to my door, I get uncomfortable if I believe that he is working himself into bankruptcy.
Do you "love" it when someone gives you back too much change by mistake?
Well, I'm not a biochemist by any stretch; however, there are several ways this kind of thing could happen, and it is basically the usual method by which evolutionary theory addresses this kind of transition.
1) There is some redundancy in the system, and 2) the system is not totally rigid.
Starting a transcription does not have to rely on one codon alone; it could be sensitive to any number of controlling markers, creating instances where a start codon in a particular genetic or proteomic context is enforced with more or less accuracy. Some of the variations noted in the list, for instance, are used for only a small percentage of the organism's proteins.
Also, we probably don't have all the evidence of transitional forms in present-day organisms. The transcriptases and other enzymes involved in the protein formation process are all undergoing evolution as well. "Sloppy" ancestral versions of these proteins could allow a wide range of coding schemes to coexist for some time, and then diverge as different species come up with more efficient, but different, versions of the original scheme.
In any case, it seems strange to ignore the huge similarities and focus on the slight differences. We're comparing organisms which last had a (putative) common ancestor billions of years ago, and have had totally divergent evolutionary paths. Yet the majority of the coding scheme still agrees.
The alternative is to believe in multiple independent creations of fully elaborated and rigid coding schemes that preserved slight differences (or had convergent evolution to erase major differences) for billions of years. Or do you have a different idea?
Most of the other (slightly) different codes are for mitochondria. If you look at the related taxonomy, you notice first that it only lists exceptions, and is relatively short.
Can you be more specific about what you mean about "multiple DNA codings"?
Every organism uses either DNA or RNA for its genetic material. With the same bases. The great majority of DNA codons code for the same amino acids.
Yes, there are some variations in the transcription of some codons; however, there is also redundancy that would allow this sort of drift to happen without rendering the genome useless.
The amazing thing is that the mechanisms that work for yeast and bacteria also work in a virtually identical fashion for trees and humans. How much more similarity can you expect?
DNA sequencing and analysis, as well as good old-fashioned taxonomy shows that man belongs to the primates.
That and the fossil record lacking humanoid fossils older than a few million years, and having clear primates before that for a few million years, suggests humans are primates who weren't around at the creation of the first primates, but are genetically related to existing primates. *That* suggests common descent.
Darwin's theory explains (or attempts to) how even though we are related by common descent to other primates, we are clearly different species now. I.e. it is a general mechanism, not a specific claim about primate taxonomy.
Now, on the other hand, opponents of Darwin are primarily motivated by opposition to the idea that man was not an instance of special creation. Given the genetic and paleontological evidence, one would think they would carefully describe how God created, by hand, each primitive hominid, and the other primates, and then carefully destroyed each, replacing it with a more modern form, until, one day *shazam* Man was created, and all God's hand tuning could stop, except for sending Christ. Of course, they don't have such a theory. And their theory would ignore all sorts of issues about how human races developed, and how different continents got populated, and how the millions of other species existing and extinct did or did not get modified by the hand of God.
In any case, Darwin does not provide the key to hominid origins. Field and lab work provides lots of facts that need to be explained. Darwininan theory certainly favors a classical taxonomy, that postulates common descent of primates. But it is neither sufficient or necessary. But any biologist who treats humans in the same was as horses or birds or insects would be left with the same conclusion.
It just so happens that Darwin proposed his theory (and wrote Descent of Man) at a time when things like the age of the earth and the fossil record were still being understood, and all the DNA analysis and substantial field work happened afterward. The creationists simply ignore all the biology of the last 150 years, and attack what they perceive as the root of the "problem" but was really just historically early. You could imagine an alternative world, where DNA and modern taxonomy had determined the family tree of primates, and then a 21st century Darwin finally figured out how speciation worked.
The early appearance of Darwinism with only a little bit of the current evidence in some sense demonstrates how natural his ideas are.
They were working on the radar project to do such things as increase the operating frequency to improve resolution, and improve the circuitry used to produce and detect radar signals.
The Radiation Laboratory ended up creating a multi-volume encyclopedia on radio-frequency electronics.
Julian Schwinger, who shared the Nobel with Feynman and Tomonaga, worked on calculations to predict the properties of waveguide structures and antennas, among other things.
There was close collaboration between the British and the U.S. The most prominent British contribution was the magnetron, but much of the early meter-wave radar work had been done independently by the U.K. and the U.S.
Robert Buderi's _The Invention That Changed the World_ is a layman's history, for those who are interested in more information.
Einstein's research had absolutely nothing to do with the development of nuclear energy or weapons.
Furthermore, Einstein *was* on the government payroll as a consultant (to the Navy Bureau of Ordnance) for $25 per day from May 31, 1943 until June 30, 1946.
Although he also handwrote a paper that was auctioned for $6 million toward the war effort, which in some sense could be considered a net contribution.
Look, Godwin's law does not include comparing actual Nazi Germany in the actual historical context A.D. 1933--1945 to Nazi Germany.
Why the fuck do you think Einstein, Fermi, Teller, Szilard, etc., were in the U.S.A., which was basically a backwater in physics at the time? These were all people who would have been perfectly happy staying professors at highly respected institutions of higher learning, teaching their students. They fled Europe because they feared being packed off to a concentration camp.
You claim they sold their morality for a price. Do you have a single scrap of evidence that any major contributor to the Manhattan project joined for financial reasons? Yours is a slanderous accusation, and utterly unfounded.
Your moral argument is bullshit, and a grave insult to many great men.
The physicists involved knew they were in a war against a Nazi regime that had made many of them personally flee their homelands. They didn't work on the Manhattan project for money, they worked on it because they thought it was critical to get a bomb before Heisenberg and his team got one to work. They knew Heisenberg was smart enough to figure it out, and they knew the Nazis would use it if they got it first.
Yes, after the Nazis were defeated, and the bomb was used on Japan, the moral questions were no longer as clear. But the scientists didn't make that decision. And, as a consequence, many of the physicists involved worked *against* nuclear weapons.
If Heisenberg had not made the mistakes he did, and Hitler had used the bomb to end the war on his terms, would you have been proud of all those supposedly highly moral Allied physicists who sat on their hands rather than participate in the Manhattan project?
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Except it isn't exactly easy for me to know exactly who has been responsible for each molecule or particle of pollution that I have been forced to breathe in, and it isn't practical for me to sue each and every person in a traffic jam for exactly their share of responsibility for causing my delay to work.
Whereas it is clear that people running powerplants or industrial chemical plants should have to pay for the right to deprive downwind or downstream people of the clean water and clean air that is used up by their actions.
Markets require the participants to be able to identify one another, to meet to transact, and to be able to control those things which they are buying and selling.
You have a very strange concept of "markets" if people driving vehicles are thereby participating in a market. "member of the market goes out and crashes his trains"? what the fuck kind of gibberish is that? what market? what membership?
In cases where markets cannot exist or cannot function, it is legitimate for people to elect that governments act to enact policies that create or substitute for the actions that hypothetical markets would produce.
"uh, I just kinda noticed that I never turn it off except for sleep mode, and I never have to reboot it... should I, like, reboot it occasionally?"
If your ex is running Software Update regularly, as she should, she probably has had to reboot.
Homo erectus was also probably "used to" the idea that most of them didn't live to 30 years of age.
The idea that skin cancer rates, just to pick a totally hypothetical example, might go up tenfold, just to pick a totally made-up factor, would be met by a shrug: "Who the hell ever lived long enough to die of cancer?"
Things could get pretty damn bad in modern terms without creating something that would show up in the million-year-old fossil record. Consider how little direct evidence we see today of the flu pandemic of the early 20th century, or the various Black Death pandemics of the late Middle Ages.
Hmm. Two absolutely moronic statements in one post.
1) "Just write" an emulator. Because, after all, these systems were utter simplicity in architecture, thrown together by a couple engineers in a garage.
Yeah, right. These systems have decades of legacy cruft and decades of feature creep as well as serious engineering to make them stable, robust, and high-throughput. Not a small project to understand all this, much less emulate it bug-for-bug and feature-for-feature.
2) "emulate a mainframe": I suppose all the serious I/O hardware that is filling up the mainframe room can be "emulated" through a PC parallel port, or a USB port? Get real. All of this legacy hardware has its own set of interfaces.
He should give his granny a break. Maybe she can't afford a new card punch that supports lower case.
You miss the point of my question. I was specifically excluding the particular nature of the Earth-bound programs in question to eliminate the knee-jerk response of "pinko socialist welfare Democrats".
"Spending on Earth" could just as easily include building Republican bridges to isolated Alaskan islands housing dozens of Republican voters, if that's your desire.
Government spending billions of dollars on government-run space exploration is JUST AS SOCIALIST as government grants toward people eating. Just because the beneficiaries are government-chosen corporations employing lots of space geeks to put together expensive metal packages to hurl into the great beyond does not mean the programs are non-socialist.
Free-market competition driving space exploration at *PRIVATE EXPENSE* would be non-socialist.
Just a question: apart from the political affiliations of particular politicians in the early 1970s, what is more socialist about "spend the money on Earth" vs. "spend the money in space"?
Reliability and safety considerations for cruise missile operation are quite different for civilian aircraft.
A cruise missile decides to make an abrupt change of altitude, or makes a flight into terrain, well, your navigation planner hopefully laid out your path to avoid civilian airways and major friendly population centers, and instead chose an active (or soon-to-be-active) war zone. And, there aren't any passengers to replace. One crashes? Send another one just in case. Two or more bombs are usually as good as or better than one.
Airplanes can land themselves once a conscious pilot gets instruction from a conscious human aircraft controller telling him to start his approach for a specific runway, coming out of a known holding pattern, and throws the switch.
All these pie-in-the-sky features increase software complexity, which increases cost significantly, and also the overall reliability of the software. Having improved safety in the one major accident every few years having to do with loss of cabin pressure hardly compensates for *decreased* safety in the thousands of flights that happen every day.
Auto and health insurance isn't the same as straight gambling.
Without insurance, if I cause an auto accident that injures *you* or damages your property, and I can't repay your $100,000 loss out of my pocket, YOU lose, not me. I just go bankrupt, and you get stuck with the bill, and probably go bankrupt yourself.
The point is, auto insurance is required to drive so that the public can be sure that every nut allowed behind the wheel has a guaranteed ability and liquid reserves to pay the cost of their mistakes.
A bad deal of the cards in Vegas only hurts those with chips on the table, but everyone has to use the roads.
I don't know. Feeding an elephant a full tank of gasoline doesn't allow him/her to walk very far at all.
And that really worked out well for Be, now, didn't it?
Because the 3200+ machine is 1/4 the size (and 1/2 the power consumption) of 4 800 MHz PCs, you don't need a KVM switch, the AMD box is probably using GBit Enet, instead of 4x100 MBps, has 100s of GB of hard disk, instead of a few GB, and the box is brand new, and under warranty, and not ready to croak.
He said specifically "enterprise server hardware."
Not Gateway. More like IBM or HP blade servers.
Typists using Selectrics had a sloped keyboard, elevated above the desk by a few inches. I.e., no resting of the heel of their hands on the desk.
They also had to stop their keyboarding every so often to insert and remove paper. I.e., built-in breaks.
Selectric users also didn't have to deal with control-key gymnastics, and were trained to shift with the opposite hand, as well as to sit up straight.
Widespread distribution of crappy keyboards is also related to the widespread distribution of typing chores to people who did not have the training to type with proper posture.
The "irrationality" of the belief is not a statement about profit per se. The context is a social one, in which by using a service, the consumer wants to make a fair exchange, not exploit someone's generosity in an unsustainable way. Essentially, one has to force oneself to ignore the fact that "hey, no shipping!" is too good to be true.
It is easier for me to "love" consuming something that a faceless corporation wishes to dispense below cost, but if a human delivery guy is bringing something to my door, I get uncomfortable if I believe that he is working himself into bankruptcy.
Do you "love" it when someone gives you back too much change by mistake?
Do you mouse with your left hand? Wouldn't you prefer to primary ("left-") click with your index finger?
Never met anyone left-handed?
Well, I'm not a biochemist by any stretch; however, there are several ways this kind of thing could happen, and it is basically the usual method by which evolutionary theory addresses this kind of transition.
1) There is some redundancy in the system, and
2) the system is not totally rigid.
Starting a transcription does not have to rely on one codon alone; it could be sensitive to any number of controlling markers, creating instances where a start codon in a particular genetic or proteomic context is enforced with more or less accuracy. Some of the variations noted in the list, for instance, are used for only a small percentage of the organism's proteins.
Also, we probably don't have all the evidence of transitional forms in present-day organisms. The transcriptases and other enzymes involved in the protein formation process are all undergoing evolution as well. "Sloppy" ancestral versions of these proteins could allow a wide range of coding schemes to coexist for some time, and then diverge as different species come up with more efficient, but different, versions of the original scheme.
In any case, it seems strange to ignore the huge similarities and focus on the slight differences. We're comparing organisms which last had a (putative) common ancestor billions of years ago, and have had totally divergent evolutionary paths. Yet the majority of the coding scheme still agrees.
The alternative is to believe in multiple independent creations of fully elaborated and rigid coding schemes that preserved slight differences (or had convergent evolution to erase major differences) for billions of years. Or do you have a different idea?
And, did you miss entry #1, "The Standard Code"?
Most of the other (slightly) different codes are for mitochondria. If you look at the related taxonomy, you notice first that it only lists exceptions, and is relatively short.
Can you be more specific about what you mean about "multiple DNA codings"?
Every organism uses either DNA or RNA for its genetic material. With the same bases. The great majority of DNA codons code for the same amino acids.
Yes, there are some variations in the transcription of some codons; however, there is also redundancy that would allow this sort of drift to happen without rendering the genome useless.
The amazing thing is that the mechanisms that work for yeast and bacteria also work in a virtually identical fashion for trees and humans. How much more similarity can you expect?
DNA sequencing and analysis, as well as good old-fashioned taxonomy shows that man belongs to the primates.
That and the fossil record lacking humanoid fossils older than a few million years, and having clear primates before that for a few million years, suggests humans are primates who weren't around at the creation of the first primates, but are genetically related to existing primates. *That* suggests common descent.
Darwin's theory explains (or attempts to) how even though we are related by common descent to other primates, we are clearly different species now. I.e. it is a general mechanism, not a specific claim about primate taxonomy.
Now, on the other hand, opponents of Darwin are primarily motivated by opposition to the idea that man was not an instance of special creation. Given the genetic and paleontological evidence, one would think they would carefully describe how God created, by hand, each primitive hominid, and the other primates, and then carefully destroyed each, replacing it with a more modern form, until, one day *shazam* Man was created, and all God's hand tuning could stop, except for sending Christ. Of course, they don't have such a theory. And their theory would ignore all sorts of issues about how human races developed, and how different continents got populated, and how the millions of other species existing and extinct did or did not get modified by the hand of God.
In any case, Darwin does not provide the key to hominid origins. Field and lab work provides lots of facts that need to be explained. Darwininan theory certainly favors a classical taxonomy, that postulates common descent of primates. But it is neither sufficient or necessary. But any biologist who treats humans in the same was as horses or birds or insects would be left with the same conclusion.
It just so happens that Darwin proposed his theory (and wrote Descent of Man) at a time when things like the age of the earth and the fossil record were still being understood, and all the DNA analysis and substantial field work happened afterward. The creationists simply ignore all the biology of the last 150 years, and attack what they perceive as the root of the "problem" but was really just historically early. You could imagine an alternative world, where DNA and modern taxonomy had determined the family tree of primates, and then a 21st century Darwin finally figured out how speciation worked.
The early appearance of Darwinism with only a little bit of the current evidence in some sense demonstrates how natural his ideas are.
They were working on the radar project to do such things as increase the operating frequency to improve resolution, and improve the circuitry used to produce and detect radar signals.
The Radiation Laboratory ended up creating a multi-volume encyclopedia on radio-frequency electronics.
Julian Schwinger, who shared the Nobel with Feynman and Tomonaga, worked on calculations to predict the properties of waveguide structures and antennas, among other things.
There was close collaboration between the British and the U.S. The most prominent British contribution was the magnetron, but much of the early meter-wave radar work had been done independently by the U.K. and the U.S.
Robert Buderi's _The Invention That Changed the World_ is a layman's history, for those who are interested in more information.
Einstein's research had absolutely nothing to do with the development of nuclear energy or weapons.
Furthermore, Einstein *was* on the government payroll as a consultant (to the Navy Bureau of Ordnance) for $25 per day from May 31, 1943 until June 30, 1946.
Although he also handwrote a paper that was auctioned for $6 million toward the war effort, which in some sense could be considered a net contribution.
Look, Godwin's law does not include comparing actual Nazi Germany in the actual historical context A.D. 1933--1945 to Nazi Germany.
Why the fuck do you think Einstein, Fermi, Teller, Szilard, etc., were in the U.S.A., which was basically a backwater in physics at the time? These were all people who would have been perfectly happy staying professors at highly respected institutions of higher learning, teaching their students. They fled Europe because they feared being packed off to a concentration camp.
You claim they sold their morality for a price. Do you have a single scrap of evidence that any major contributor to the Manhattan project joined for financial reasons? Yours is a slanderous accusation, and utterly unfounded.
Your moral argument is bullshit, and a grave insult to many great men.
The physicists involved knew they were in a war against a Nazi regime that had made many of them personally flee their homelands. They didn't work on the Manhattan project for money, they worked on it because they thought it was critical to get a bomb before Heisenberg and his team got one to work. They knew Heisenberg was smart enough to figure it out, and they knew the Nazis would use it if they got it first.
Yes, after the Nazis were defeated, and the bomb was used on Japan, the moral questions were no longer as clear. But the scientists didn't make that decision. And, as a consequence, many of the physicists involved worked *against* nuclear weapons.
If Heisenberg had not made the mistakes he did, and Hitler had used the bomb to end the war on his terms, would you have been proud of all those supposedly highly moral Allied physicists who sat on their hands rather than participate in the Manhattan project?