The new SDK will allow developers to control accessories attached to the dock adapter. I'm really hopeful someone will make a card reader...it would so nice to bring a 32GB iPod touch on trips instead of a MacBook Pro.
This is actually a really insightful post--the best place for a quirky, brilliant asshole is in an early-stage startup, preferably their own. There's a much higher premium placed on quick coding and clever solutions, and a much lower premium placed on documentation and management. And when you're the company founder you can dress however you like and be a jerk to someone if you want (see: Steve Jobs).
The problem is when someone thinks they should get these perks as the employee of a mature corporation with a steady salary, health benefits, sick days, paid vacations, etc. Sorry, you have to trade something for security and yes, it is freedom and immaturity. If you want the benefits of playing for a solid team you need to be a solid team player.
So geniuses: put your money where your mouth is. Start the next Google or Yahoo and I guarantee people will line up to kiss your unwashed feet.
Money needs to be an economic good in order to be used as money. In other words, it has to have value as used as something *other* than money. Because it is a medium of indirect exchange.
This is not really true. Using an economic good for money is simply a form of direct barter--I have gold, you have cows, let's trade. You can substitute any kinds of goods (salt, pepper, etc) into that sentence and it will still work. Direct barter works just fine when parties are free to negotiate the terms of the barter. This would be relevant to your argument if you were arguing for using actual weights of gold for money.
A currency is an entirely different animal. It simply provides a standardized unit conversion for the negotiation of a barter. So instead of talking about ounces of gold vs. pounds of cow, we convert the value of those ounces or pounds into dollars first and then try to agree on a number of dollars to represent the exchange. The obvious advantage to this is that it allows separation of the two sides of the barter--I can sell my gold to you now for dollars, and then use those dollars to buy cows from someone else a month from now.
Note that this is different from using a tangible good, which would be a direct barter. The essential difference is that a currency has no intrinsic value of its own; it is simply a marker of value that resides somewhere else. This is what makes it a currency transaction and not a barter. A currency has more in common with the concept of a check or IOU than it does a piece of gold. In fact a dollar bill is literally a piece of debt--by law it is an obligation of the U.S. Treasury.
The gold standard is unstable because it locks the value of that IOU to one single tangible good, whose intrinsic value can change. In addition to random inflation or deflation that would be caused by natural fluctuations in the gold supply or demand, it opens up the currency to more easy manipulation. And it does absolutely nothing to prevent government manipulation of the money supply since the government could just re-price the gold standard as easily as it can change the discount rate or conduct open-market operations today.
The fundamental basis for the value of any currency is society's trust in the government to fulfill its promises. The gold standard does not change that.
The US dollar is worth about 3 or 4 cents compared to what it was in 1913, when the Federal Reserve was created. Giving a central authority, even if it's the government, complete control over the creation of money always results in runaway inflation. Every single country in world history that has tried paper money has run it into the ground. Every single one.
To start with, almost every nation on Earth today uses a fiat currency, and most of them have economies that continue to function, even in a severe recession. The day when you can't buy gas with dollar bills anymore is the day I'll start to take statements like this seriously. As it stands today, fiat currency has not stopped standards of living from rising for decades throughout the world.
Your comment seems to imply that you think that currency should hold value over the long term. But that is silly; everyone knows that it is dumb to stuff your mattress with $100 bills. Currency is never a reliable store of value, gold standard or not. Currency is used to complete transactions in the short-term and it only needs to hold its value over the short term. Over the long term, inflation just needs to be kept at or under the rate of economic growth. Since 1913 the United States has seen tremendous growth in wealth and standards of living.
And your position is like the anti-Communist witch-hunting that pursued anyone who was not as strident in their positions as the hunters thought they should be. There's a vast middle ground between apologists saying everything is great and zealots calling everything the end of the world. Most people just don't give a shit about B2B supplier contract issues like this.
The EFF is foolish to waste time on this when (for example) the entire end-user online video experience remains horribly laden with real actual Digital Rights Management schemes. A propriety part in a hardware accessory is NOT DRM. The EFF of all people should know better.
"A person is guilty of an offence if at the time when he does the act he has the requisite intent and the requisite knowledge to cause a modification of the contents of any computer and by so doing impair the operation of any such program or the reliability of any such data."
So you would need to prove that not only did the BBC access the botnet, but also that they did so with the intent to wreck software or data on those computers. It might be tough to prove as the BBC could argue that their intent was a non-destructive demonstration in the service of the public good. I think that is a common argument for journalists.
a lack of criminal intent does not mitigate or extenuate criminal action.
Not always true. For many actions intent does in fact matter in whether it is considered a crime (for example in the U.S., showing someone a gun). However you are correct that some crimes are simply a matter of action regardless of intent, and in those cases intent can mitigate the punishment. I don't know how the U.K. treats this sort of computer crime but I would not just assume that it is a strict liability.
This post explains the concept in far greater detail than I could have.
It ended up that the computer was programmed to pass the turing test and nothing else: it searched through possible responses until it found one that was statistically shown in conversation to be appropriate. It never actually understood the interactions taking place, it simply found an optimal response.
This is what AI chat bots do now. However if you use enough pronouns, it becomes obvious pretty quickly that they cannot hold a thread of conversation like a human can. As a human conversation progresses, the language tends to become more abstract as the shared knowledge accumulates between the people conversing.
It's theoretically possible that a computer could search all possible responses INCLUDING those that indicate an ongoing thread of conversation. But the question then is by what criteria the computer chooses the best response. At some point that criteria would have to get so complex that the line between thought and simulation would get blurry.
Not an issue anytime soon, because the data set and processing resources for that would be way larger than computers can handle now. Sort of like why computers can beat the best humans at chess (barely), but not Go. The data set is just too large to search quickly.
This whole question was answered decades ago (1970s) with the "foreigner in a sealed room" turing thought experiment. It showed that the person in the sealed room doesn't have to understand english, or even know the answer to questions, provided they are given some simple rules to link words together in a response depending on what words are in the original statement.
That's not quite correct--the Chinese Room thought experiment does not depend on "simple rules"--it imagines a Turing-Test-passing program converted to book form, which is then run manually by an English speaker, responding to Chinese inputs. But there's nothing in it that implies that the Turing-Test-passing routine is simple.
In fact there's nothing that says such a routine is even possible. The Chinese Room thought experiment has always struck me as begging the question. It starts by assuming that a routine exists that has passed the Turing Test, then shows that a machine running such a routine need not demonstrate actual thought. But it is entirely possible (IMO likely) that the Turing Test cannot be passed without actual thought, which would render the first assumption void.
"Steal" is not a word whose definition has changed all that much through time. I think you're missing Picasso's point. He's not just advocating the reuse of old works. By referencing a criminal act he was making the point that great artists do not submit themselves to society's conventions in the first place. They do not pay attention to the cultural restrictions of today because they are defining the culture of tomorrow.
I do not worry about DRM limiting artistic expression. Great artists don't give a shit about laws and do what they want anyway. They might pay a price in the short term but in the long run they are vindicated. There are plenty of technological tools available to defeat DRM if you really want to. And one thing that all great artists have in common is that they really want to do what they are doing.
DRM is far more of a problem for the mass consumer, who is slowly losing their property rights. They are the frog in the hot water, losing control over their computer, TV, radio, etc. But this is more of a legal issue than an art issue. Again--for people who really want to, it is not hard to make, distribute, and consume "illegal" art. In fact it is probably easier today than ever before. A great example is Danger Mouse's Grey Album.
I've previously asked here for feedback on Joomla, and got some comments that gave me pause. I'd love to hear more from people who like Joomla (are you out there??). One complaint was that Joomla extensions often cost money, but I don't mind spending money if it will do what we need. So set cost aside please.
I need a CMS because many in my organization are not tech-savvy but need to update page content--and we've got thousands of pages. I do not want to code up my own CMS--too slow and costly. I'd much prefer to start with an OSS platform and customize. We have a site going up on Joomla now that will act as a test. We're also planning to test out Drupal, and maybe Plone (tougher due to Zope/Python learning curve?).
The site will be almost entirely content. It will need to be updated by non-technical staff, specifically uploading PDFs, creating new pages, and applying tags from multiple fixed taxonomies. It will need to handle user accounts and control editing permissions down to the page level. We do our own design so theming should be too hard, and the more flexible in content placement the better.
Was Slumdog the co-creation of an Indian director who is not getting sufficient credit? Or is it a Western director degrading India for profit? Both criticisms cannot be simultaneously true.
The idea that Slumdog Millionaire "degrades" India is offensive. It implies that any movie that shows the negative aspects of a society is inherently degrading. Thoughts like that come from a perspective that we have to treat some countries like "special" children--keep them from all harm and make sure they wear their helmet and kneepads all the time. Give me a break. No one would be complaining if this exact same movie was set in the U.S., where there are plenty of slums and gangsters and game shows. That betrays a subtle racism of low expectations toward India. In comparison I do not recall similar outcry when Western filmmakers began to use Hong Kong cast, crew, and concepts to make movies.
India has slums and violence, as many, many Indian movies have portrayed. Note that much of the production and acting crew of SM come directly from the Indian film industry, and are happy about their work in the movie. Including the Indian co-director.
you could buy an equivalent Dell server for $2100, running the exact same Apache and MySQL, and get a next-day and on-site service contract?
The guy who shows up in his truck to fix your Dell almost certainly does not work for Dell. They contract out their repair service. Near sizable urban areas it's possible to find contractors who will provide the same level of service for Macs. The inconvenient part is that you have to find them yourself rather than pay Apple to find them for you.
I'm in DC and we're not even running xserves, just some Mac Pros for our graphic designers. We can have tech support here within a couple hours if needed. We found the company, and we'll pay for it, but the professional support is available.
If someone wants to offer a professional opinion on GCM's they certainly need a computational physics background, and if they want to offer a professional opinion on climate data they certainly need an experimental physics background.
Exactly. People qualified to comment knowledgeably on GCMs are also in a position to complete rigorous studies and publish their results in peer-reviewed journals. This is the definition of "professional scrutiny" in scientific fields. And yet I have not seen a groundswell of such papers offering a more accurate or scientifically sound approach than GCMs.
On top of that is the question of just what GCMs are testing in the first place. Trends in atmospheric carbon dioxide, air and sea temperatures, and insolation are all directly measurable, and the "greenhouse effect" of CO2 is independently proven. Given a 30-year data set with rising CO2, rising temps, and flat insolation, what is a reasonable null hypothesis for further studies?
If GCMs were abolished tomorrow I would still be concerned about global warming based on nothing more than our rate of burning fossil fuels. Increasing gaseous CO2 will always cause warming in a simplified climate model unless a separate forcing or feedback counteracts it. GCMs are used in part to look for such counteractions.
I feel the same way about pouring old paint into the creek in my backyard. Who the hell are these scientists to tell me it's bad for the Chesapeake Bay??
We're fucking sick of posting the same links over and over, refuting the same tired points over and over, and in general we're sick of people with no scientific training asking the same simplistic questions over and over and over again. Basically we're sick of getting trolled.
People: if you know more about the climate than the scientists do, publish your findings and get rich and famous. Best of luck!
How do scientists advance their career and secure grant money? By proving other scientists wrong.
Individual scientists may be flawed but the system of science is highly competitive and produces a good result. There are huge incentives to show that data was incomplete, conclusions unsupported, or anything outright faked. Huge. If you were the scientist who showed conclusively that Einstein was wrong about gravity, you would become the next Einstein.
If you proved, objectively and conclusively, that humans are not causing the climate to warm, you don't think there would be fame and financial reward? But the fact is that no one has done that yet, because it is really really hard to do.
And unless you have kids yourself, you'll never understand why we need to filter porn on the Internet.
Look I agree with you on the limited use of DDT for disease control. And unlike the grandparent post, I know that such use is still allowed.
I'm not a big fan of emotional manipulation though. My wife barely survived a bout with malaria in Madagascar (plus 2 relapses). But I know that doesn't make me informed on all the various aspects of DDT regulation.
I'm not a physicist. But I know that the Tevatron, since it is lower-energy than the LHC, relies on aggregating the data from many collisions to produce a data set in which to look for proof of the Higgs. In the article they said that they already have 8 collision events which seem to provide good hints that the Higgs does exist. Presumably they will need many more good hints and/or a lucky collision that produces direct proof.
There is not unlimited time--the actual quote was a 50% to 96% chance of finding the Higgs FIRST (before the LHC). It seems like this could be calculated by estimating (based on performance so far) how many tries it takes to produce an adequate data set and how long each try takes. Divide into the amount of time left until the LHC begins operating at full capacity and searching for the Higgs (The article says about two years).
Of course if the Higgs does not exist then neither cyclotron will find it and all bets are off.
I'm not apologizing, I'm pointing out that you have a skewed view of what average consumers want out of a computer. Expansion slots, really? How high do you think this is on most people's list of features and benefits?
Besides, if cheap PC's are good enough for people, why do you keep getting paid to do all those upgrades?
Hell look up some of old Steve Jobs past speeches. He makes it pretty clear that he doesn't WANT the Windows users.
Right, that's why Apple spends millions on "Get a Mac" commercials that specifically target Windows. That's why they've built out a retail strategy that sells about half its computers to people who do not currently own Macs. Clearly they don't want Windows users.
Life can be thought of as a localized reversal of entropy. A mule is a more complex thing--it contains more information--than what it consumes to continue. The same cannot be said of fire.
Yes, because the average consumer can afford $1000 for a laptop and...what $2500 for a desktop that actually has an expansion slot?
Yes, because the average consumer has so much need for an expansion slot.
Let's just say it's no surprise a professional PC repairman doesn't understand why Macs are appealing. This amateur PC repairman is very happy that most of his friends and family have move to Apple though.
Slashdot Mirror
The new SDK will allow developers to control accessories attached to the dock adapter. I'm really hopeful someone will make a card reader...it would so nice to bring a 32GB iPod touch on trips instead of a MacBook Pro.
This is actually a really insightful post--the best place for a quirky, brilliant asshole is in an early-stage startup, preferably their own. There's a much higher premium placed on quick coding and clever solutions, and a much lower premium placed on documentation and management. And when you're the company founder you can dress however you like and be a jerk to someone if you want (see: Steve Jobs).
The problem is when someone thinks they should get these perks as the employee of a mature corporation with a steady salary, health benefits, sick days, paid vacations, etc. Sorry, you have to trade something for security and yes, it is freedom and immaturity. If you want the benefits of playing for a solid team you need to be a solid team player.
So geniuses: put your money where your mouth is. Start the next Google or Yahoo and I guarantee people will line up to kiss your unwashed feet.
Money needs to be an economic good in order to be used as money. In other words, it has to have value as used as something *other* than money. Because it is a medium of indirect exchange.
This is not really true. Using an economic good for money is simply a form of direct barter--I have gold, you have cows, let's trade. You can substitute any kinds of goods (salt, pepper, etc) into that sentence and it will still work. Direct barter works just fine when parties are free to negotiate the terms of the barter. This would be relevant to your argument if you were arguing for using actual weights of gold for money.
A currency is an entirely different animal. It simply provides a standardized unit conversion for the negotiation of a barter. So instead of talking about ounces of gold vs. pounds of cow, we convert the value of those ounces or pounds into dollars first and then try to agree on a number of dollars to represent the exchange. The obvious advantage to this is that it allows separation of the two sides of the barter--I can sell my gold to you now for dollars, and then use those dollars to buy cows from someone else a month from now.
Note that this is different from using a tangible good, which would be a direct barter. The essential difference is that a currency has no intrinsic value of its own; it is simply a marker of value that resides somewhere else. This is what makes it a currency transaction and not a barter. A currency has more in common with the concept of a check or IOU than it does a piece of gold. In fact a dollar bill is literally a piece of debt--by law it is an obligation of the U.S. Treasury.
The gold standard is unstable because it locks the value of that IOU to one single tangible good, whose intrinsic value can change. In addition to random inflation or deflation that would be caused by natural fluctuations in the gold supply or demand, it opens up the currency to more easy manipulation. And it does absolutely nothing to prevent government manipulation of the money supply since the government could just re-price the gold standard as easily as it can change the discount rate or conduct open-market operations today.
The fundamental basis for the value of any currency is society's trust in the government to fulfill its promises. The gold standard does not change that.
The US dollar is worth about 3 or 4 cents compared to what it was in 1913, when the Federal Reserve was created. Giving a central authority, even if it's the government, complete control over the creation of money always results in runaway inflation. Every single country in world history that has tried paper money has run it into the ground. Every single one.
To start with, almost every nation on Earth today uses a fiat currency, and most of them have economies that continue to function, even in a severe recession. The day when you can't buy gas with dollar bills anymore is the day I'll start to take statements like this seriously. As it stands today, fiat currency has not stopped standards of living from rising for decades throughout the world.
Your comment seems to imply that you think that currency should hold value over the long term. But that is silly; everyone knows that it is dumb to stuff your mattress with $100 bills. Currency is never a reliable store of value, gold standard or not. Currency is used to complete transactions in the short-term and it only needs to hold its value over the short term. Over the long term, inflation just needs to be kept at or under the rate of economic growth. Since 1913 the United States has seen tremendous growth in wealth and standards of living.
And your position is like the anti-Communist witch-hunting that pursued anyone who was not as strident in their positions as the hunters thought they should be. There's a vast middle ground between apologists saying everything is great and zealots calling everything the end of the world. Most people just don't give a shit about B2B supplier contract issues like this.
The EFF is foolish to waste time on this when (for example) the entire end-user online video experience remains horribly laden with real actual Digital Rights Management schemes. A propriety part in a hardware accessory is NOT DRM. The EFF of all people should know better.
The wiggle room is in bold:
"A person is guilty of an offence if at the time when he does the act he has the requisite intent and the requisite knowledge to cause a modification of the contents of any computer and by so doing impair the operation of any such program or the reliability of any such data."
So you would need to prove that not only did the BBC access the botnet, but also that they did so with the intent to wreck software or data on those computers. It might be tough to prove as the BBC could argue that their intent was a non-destructive demonstration in the service of the public good. I think that is a common argument for journalists.
By definition, e-mail you send to yourself is not spam. (Unless you have multiple personalities maybe.)
a lack of criminal intent does not mitigate or extenuate criminal action.
Not always true. For many actions intent does in fact matter in whether it is considered a crime (for example in the U.S., showing someone a gun). However you are correct that some crimes are simply a matter of action regardless of intent, and in those cases intent can mitigate the punishment. I don't know how the U.K. treats this sort of computer crime but I would not just assume that it is a strict liability.
This post explains the concept in far greater detail than I could have.
It ended up that the computer was programmed to pass the turing test and nothing else: it searched through possible responses until it found one that was statistically shown in conversation to be appropriate. It never actually understood the interactions taking place, it simply found an optimal response.
This is what AI chat bots do now. However if you use enough pronouns, it becomes obvious pretty quickly that they cannot hold a thread of conversation like a human can. As a human conversation progresses, the language tends to become more abstract as the shared knowledge accumulates between the people conversing.
It's theoretically possible that a computer could search all possible responses INCLUDING those that indicate an ongoing thread of conversation. But the question then is by what criteria the computer chooses the best response. At some point that criteria would have to get so complex that the line between thought and simulation would get blurry.
Not an issue anytime soon, because the data set and processing resources for that would be way larger than computers can handle now. Sort of like why computers can beat the best humans at chess (barely), but not Go. The data set is just too large to search quickly.
This whole question was answered decades ago (1970s) with the "foreigner in a sealed room" turing thought experiment. It showed that the person in the sealed room doesn't have to understand english, or even know the answer to questions, provided they are given some simple rules to link words together in a response depending on what words are in the original statement.
That's not quite correct--the Chinese Room thought experiment does not depend on "simple rules"--it imagines a Turing-Test-passing program converted to book form, which is then run manually by an English speaker, responding to Chinese inputs. But there's nothing in it that implies that the Turing-Test-passing routine is simple.
In fact there's nothing that says such a routine is even possible. The Chinese Room thought experiment has always struck me as begging the question. It starts by assuming that a routine exists that has passed the Turing Test, then shows that a machine running such a routine need not demonstrate actual thought. But it is entirely possible (IMO likely) that the Turing Test cannot be passed without actual thought, which would render the first assumption void.
"Steal" is not a word whose definition has changed all that much through time. I think you're missing Picasso's point. He's not just advocating the reuse of old works. By referencing a criminal act he was making the point that great artists do not submit themselves to society's conventions in the first place. They do not pay attention to the cultural restrictions of today because they are defining the culture of tomorrow.
I do not worry about DRM limiting artistic expression. Great artists don't give a shit about laws and do what they want anyway. They might pay a price in the short term but in the long run they are vindicated. There are plenty of technological tools available to defeat DRM if you really want to. And one thing that all great artists have in common is that they really want to do what they are doing.
DRM is far more of a problem for the mass consumer, who is slowly losing their property rights. They are the frog in the hot water, losing control over their computer, TV, radio, etc. But this is more of a legal issue than an art issue. Again--for people who really want to, it is not hard to make, distribute, and consume "illegal" art. In fact it is probably easier today than ever before. A great example is Danger Mouse's Grey Album.
The movie is based on an Indian novel and was made by a British director working closely with Indian filmmakers and actors.
What specifically do you not like about Drupal? Thanks.
I've previously asked here for feedback on Joomla, and got some comments that gave me pause. I'd love to hear more from people who like Joomla (are you out there??). One complaint was that Joomla extensions often cost money, but I don't mind spending money if it will do what we need. So set cost aside please.
I need a CMS because many in my organization are not tech-savvy but need to update page content--and we've got thousands of pages. I do not want to code up my own CMS--too slow and costly. I'd much prefer to start with an OSS platform and customize. We have a site going up on Joomla now that will act as a test. We're also planning to test out Drupal, and maybe Plone (tougher due to Zope/Python learning curve?).
The site will be almost entirely content. It will need to be updated by non-technical staff, specifically uploading PDFs, creating new pages, and applying tags from multiple fixed taxonomies. It will need to handle user accounts and control editing permissions down to the page level. We do our own design so theming should be too hard, and the more flexible in content placement the better.
Thanks in advance.
Was Slumdog the co-creation of an Indian director who is not getting sufficient credit? Or is it a Western director degrading India for profit? Both criticisms cannot be simultaneously true.
The idea that Slumdog Millionaire "degrades" India is offensive. It implies that any movie that shows the negative aspects of a society is inherently degrading. Thoughts like that come from a perspective that we have to treat some countries like "special" children--keep them from all harm and make sure they wear their helmet and kneepads all the time. Give me a break. No one would be complaining if this exact same movie was set in the U.S., where there are plenty of slums and gangsters and game shows. That betrays a subtle racism of low expectations toward India. In comparison I do not recall similar outcry when Western filmmakers began to use Hong Kong cast, crew, and concepts to make movies.
India has slums and violence, as many, many Indian movies have portrayed. Note that much of the production and acting crew of SM come directly from the Indian film industry, and are happy about their work in the movie. Including the Indian co-director.
you could buy an equivalent Dell server for $2100, running the exact same Apache and MySQL, and get a next-day and on-site service contract?
The guy who shows up in his truck to fix your Dell almost certainly does not work for Dell. They contract out their repair service. Near sizable urban areas it's possible to find contractors who will provide the same level of service for Macs. The inconvenient part is that you have to find them yourself rather than pay Apple to find them for you.
I'm in DC and we're not even running xserves, just some Mac Pros for our graphic designers. We can have tech support here within a couple hours if needed. We found the company, and we'll pay for it, but the professional support is available.
If someone wants to offer a professional opinion on GCM's they certainly need a computational physics background, and if they want to offer a professional opinion on climate data they certainly need an experimental physics background.
Exactly. People qualified to comment knowledgeably on GCMs are also in a position to complete rigorous studies and publish their results in peer-reviewed journals. This is the definition of "professional scrutiny" in scientific fields. And yet I have not seen a groundswell of such papers offering a more accurate or scientifically sound approach than GCMs.
On top of that is the question of just what GCMs are testing in the first place. Trends in atmospheric carbon dioxide, air and sea temperatures, and insolation are all directly measurable, and the "greenhouse effect" of CO2 is independently proven. Given a 30-year data set with rising CO2, rising temps, and flat insolation, what is a reasonable null hypothesis for further studies?
If GCMs were abolished tomorrow I would still be concerned about global warming based on nothing more than our rate of burning fossil fuels. Increasing gaseous CO2 will always cause warming in a simplified climate model unless a separate forcing or feedback counteracts it. GCMs are used in part to look for such counteractions.
I feel the same way about pouring old paint into the creek in my backyard. Who the hell are these scientists to tell me it's bad for the Chesapeake Bay??
What I found was that neither the data nor especially the models stood up to professional scrutiny.
I would be interested to know the criteria and qualifications you use to define "professional scrutiny" in this context.
We're fucking sick of posting the same links over and over, refuting the same tired points over and over, and in general we're sick of people with no scientific training asking the same simplistic questions over and over and over again. Basically we're sick of getting trolled.
People: if you know more about the climate than the scientists do, publish your findings and get rich and famous. Best of luck!
How do scientists advance their career and secure grant money? By proving other scientists wrong.
Individual scientists may be flawed but the system of science is highly competitive and produces a good result. There are huge incentives to show that data was incomplete, conclusions unsupported, or anything outright faked. Huge. If you were the scientist who showed conclusively that Einstein was wrong about gravity, you would become the next Einstein.
If you proved, objectively and conclusively, that humans are not causing the climate to warm, you don't think there would be fame and financial reward? But the fact is that no one has done that yet, because it is really really hard to do.
And unless you have kids yourself, you'll never understand why we need to filter porn on the Internet.
Look I agree with you on the limited use of DDT for disease control. And unlike the grandparent post, I know that such use is still allowed.
I'm not a big fan of emotional manipulation though. My wife barely survived a bout with malaria in Madagascar (plus 2 relapses). But I know that doesn't make me informed on all the various aspects of DDT regulation.
I'm not a physicist. But I know that the Tevatron, since it is lower-energy than the LHC, relies on aggregating the data from many collisions to produce a data set in which to look for proof of the Higgs. In the article they said that they already have 8 collision events which seem to provide good hints that the Higgs does exist. Presumably they will need many more good hints and/or a lucky collision that produces direct proof.
There is not unlimited time--the actual quote was a 50% to 96% chance of finding the Higgs FIRST (before the LHC). It seems like this could be calculated by estimating (based on performance so far) how many tries it takes to produce an adequate data set and how long each try takes. Divide into the amount of time left until the LHC begins operating at full capacity and searching for the Higgs (The article says about two years).
Of course if the Higgs does not exist then neither cyclotron will find it and all bets are off.
I'm not apologizing, I'm pointing out that you have a skewed view of what average consumers want out of a computer. Expansion slots, really? How high do you think this is on most people's list of features and benefits?
Besides, if cheap PC's are good enough for people, why do you keep getting paid to do all those upgrades?
Hell look up some of old Steve Jobs past speeches. He makes it pretty clear that he doesn't WANT the Windows users.
Right, that's why Apple spends millions on "Get a Mac" commercials that specifically target Windows. That's why they've built out a retail strategy that sells about half its computers to people who do not currently own Macs. Clearly they don't want Windows users.
Life can be thought of as a localized reversal of entropy. A mule is a more complex thing--it contains more information--than what it consumes to continue. The same cannot be said of fire.
Yes, because the average consumer can afford $1000 for a laptop and...what $2500 for a desktop that actually has an expansion slot?
Yes, because the average consumer has so much need for an expansion slot.
Let's just say it's no surprise a professional PC repairman doesn't understand why Macs are appealing. This amateur PC repairman is very happy that most of his friends and family have move to Apple though.