There's a big difference between applying tools to solve a problem (engineering) and developing those tools from observation of existing systems (science). Someone should remind Andy that the entire information technology industry is still based on understandings of electromagnetism and optics that date back more than 100 years. In contrast, we only learned about DNA about 50 years ago.
Imagine trying to learn about computers by starting from scratch with a Core 2 Duo chip. Now multiply that by 1,000 and you have the human genome. And that doesn't even get into the more complex firmware, software, viruses, etc. of biological systems.
A crucial step that politicians and marketers take, that the story poster did not, is to identify your target audience and make sure your feedback approximates it. The poster now has an idea of the types of counterarguments he's likely to get from geeks who enjoy participating in the Mechanical Turk program. That does not necessarily mean that his arguments are going to be any more effective when pointed at politicians (for example). There may be whole classes of objections or different ways of framing the argument that he is missing.
There is a reason that market research firms and political consultancies can charge so much money. They are charging for the cost of providing a reliable approximation of your target market, for you to experiment on.
People should not make the mistake of thinking that every argument needs to be universal to be successful. In politics for instance the desire is sometimes to reach and motivate a small group of people to action. Inflammatory speech and seemingly minority positions on a variety of subjects can effectively be combined into a winning strategy. Likewise many businesses choose only certain segments of a market to target, and make sure their communications are targetted to those markets only.
A thing can be serious and important and still be satirized. It's not mutually exclusive--just because something is satirized doesn't mean that it is itself a joke. There are plenty of very funny satires out there about things like Nazis, racism, sexual assault, prison rape, etc--all very terrible and serious things.
Colbert is a professional entertainer and comedian. Watch his serious interviews (where he is being interviewed, I mean), and he is very upfront about what he's trying to do. He doesn't particularly care about his effect on politics; that's not why he does what he does. He cares about being funny and being entertaining, and has just picked politics as his fodder. So don't get the idea that he is a crusader--he's not and never claimed to be. If the satire is good, he wants it to reflect more on his skill than on the subject matter.
It's far easier to write a list of points than it is to carefully incorporate the information into prose. We don't want to encourage that sort of thing. I've been editing Web sites professionally for almost 10 years now and have a question about that. Writing for the Web is most effective when the information is chunked finely and laid out in a way that reflects the semantic structure. If the nature of the content is sequentially narrative (e.g. a story, an essay), then the chunks would be sequential paragraphs.
However if the nature of the content is informative or asynchronous, then often lists or tables ARE the most digestible and effective way to structure it on the page.
Wikipedia articles should be structured according to nature of the content, varying within an article as needed. But for some reason a cabal has decided that sequential paragraphs are the only valid form of writing on a Web site (which I must point out contradicts many best practices). If content exists as a list or table, in many case editors and admins attempt to shove it into narrative paragraphs. Sometimes they make it work, but most of the time what results is a wordy gray mess instead of clear organization. And when it clearly doesn't work, they simply delete the information instead of leaving it in list form.
I have no idea where this obsession with paragraphs comes from. Perhaps from comparison against print encyclopedias, which seems to be a larger obsession of the admins and leaders of Wikipedia. IMO that is stupid because Wikipedia is so obviously superior in concept and implementation. Trying to turn it into a "real" encyclopedia is counterproductive and ignorant of the core value of the product.
It's far more likely that Google, rather than imitate Comcast's packets, would instead alter some subset of their traffic in a way that would make it more likely it would trigger Comcast's filtering. No need to fake the interference--it's actually there. Just figure out how to trigger it and you have your talking point.
OS X isn't significantly more stable than Linux and the BSDs (or even Windows NT) Depends on what you're doing with it. For things that tightly marry hardware, firmware, and the OS, Apple does very well. For instance I can shut the lid of my iBook and no matter what it is doing, it stops instantly and sleeps. When I open it up it starts right where it left off. That even includes things like logging into or out of my user account. I have done this regularly for years and experienced no performance penalty or instability. Whereas I do not know anyone with a Windows or Linux laptop who gets the same performance and reliability out of that one simple action.
The most free society is a state of anarchy. Lions and antelope live free. But before you wish for that, ask yourself realistically whether you would be an antelope or a lion.
Governments exist to create security, not freedom. Security in the nation, but also, in the case of a republic, security in person. Some of what people consider "freedom" is actually a form of security, for example the freedom to own property and live there as you wish. Well for most people this "freedom" would be impossible without the security provided by an orderly republic state. Without that, someone better armed would just exercise their freedom to take it.
Pure democracy is actually not a great system of government for security in person. It can easily tip into mob rule. Luckily what we have is a constitutional democratic republic. I know that's not as a good a soundbite, but I think it helps to be accurate when we're talking about something as important to us as government.
Seriously. They run carbureted V8 engines (no fuel injection, no electronic control). They have tubular steel frames. They have mechanical-linkage sequential shifting. They have your most basic independent suspension. They run stock-profile, sheet metal bodies, and it's big news when they're finally allowed to add an actual aerofoil to the back of the car instead of just a spoiler.
It's reflected in the costs...$125,000 is incredibly cheap for a race car. Good thing too since they can expect to wreck several each season. Compare to IndyCar or Formual 1 where just a chassis can cost over $500,000. If you want to see cutting edge car technology, the type of thing that trickles down to your car, that's where to look. Not NASCAR, where guys still shape cylinder heads with Dremel tools.
I wonder just how well Munster understands the carrier business if he thinks AT&T is sending Apple a percentage of service revenues every month. In the carrier world those revenues are typically sacrosanct. I think it's more likely is that AT&T is sending Apple a single check upon activation, and Apple is reporting that revenue over time--since they are reporting ALL iPhone revenue (including retail sales) over 24 months, to allow them to push OS and application updates without charging.
AT&T is subsidizing the cost of phones, just like they do for other phones. The difference is that the subsidy passes through Apple first, rather than directly to the consumer. Unlike other phone makers, Apple understands the marketing power of price and demanded absolute control over it.
The big price drop is pretty transparent proof of that. The $600 price set the value of the iPhone upon launch--it marked it as a high-end, aspirational product. The new price walks it down the price curve to within reach of a much wider market, but how did Apple afford a 33% price cut? That's about the entire gross margin one would expect on such a device. The answer is the AT&T subsidy.
I would not get so excited about these numbers. Since Apple controls price, I would expect that AT&T's subsidy is calculated on a percentage rather than a dollar basis per phone. Thus with the price cut the revenue from AT&T per phone has probably already fallen quite a bit. Remember: financial reports are trailing indicators.
I know the excuse, that "science is under attack in America." If it is under attack, it is under attack by many things, not just religion. Just take a serious look at how Watson is being treated over his comments about race and genetics. Thanks for the example of how science is misunderstood. While Watson is a scientist, his comments were not science, they were opinion.
That's one crucial difference between science and religion: everything the Pope says is religiously significant, whereas a scientist's statements only matter to the degree to which they can be tested and supported.
Even most scientists are unwilling to consider the possibility that *gasp* if evolution be true, not all races are created equal, and that some might be statistically inferior to others. Scientists are quite willing to believe all sorts of things, provided they can be objectively proven. They're just not willing to take someone's word for it.
An often-overlooked aspect of the "selection" part of the theory is that the only mutations which will matter are expressly those which will "mean the difference between life and death". Immaterial mutations don't count. First of all, the key is not whether genes mean life and death, the key is whether the genes are passed on to the next generation. Obviously the organism has to survive to mate, but just surviving does not imply that it will mate, or mate in the same quantity and with the same success. Likewise, dying after mating or reproduction does not harm the gene's persistence.
Sexual selection is a very important pressure. Ostriches are a good example of an organism whose evolution has been driven more by sexual selection than by predation. So, the first point is that a mutation that is not deleterious can still be selected for or against by the mating process. And conversely, a harmful mutation can persist in the gene pool so long as it is not too harmful to prevent mating and reproduction.
Another aspect of this is that a mutation that is initially neutral or even positive can end up being harmful, or vice versa. This can occur due to changing external conditions, but it can also happen because of other changes to the genome over time. These types of traits might be called exaptations, cooptions, etc.
But the rapidity of the changes create quite a difficulty about random mutations as the source of raw material for selection. I am no biologist, but nothing I've heard our read about the frequency of random mutations indicates that 40 years is enough time for mutations to account for the timing. It seems more likely that the ability of the light-colored moths to increase was already inherent in the population. The second key point is that genetics is far more complex than a series of yes/no gene instances. The potential interactions between genes can mean that some are more rarely expressed than others (you may have heard of dominant and recessive genes). Thus what can happen is that a wide variety of physical variations are present from generation to generation. Changes in the genome result in differing rates of occurrence, and then on top of that differing external conditions produce different adult populations. It's certain that over the last 40 years each generation of moths has produced both white and dark moths. But because of differing external conditions, more of the dark ones made it to adulthood 30 years ago than do today.
Of course it's even more complex than that, because those changes in adult populations will of course lead to changes in the gene pool. But the key point is that evolution is not a yes/no process at the gene level. Just because a gene is selected against, does not mean it will disappear and then have to be re-created by a fresh mutation. More often it is a question of varying rates of expression.
If the staff/programmers can be bought, it would be much cheaper to simply pay the $1m upfront to a few key developers and hire them away from the open source company, rather than go through the process of acquiring the company for a price, and then paying the $1m bonus on top of that.
I think the key question is simply whether the key OSS people can be bought by Microsoft. If they can, the mechanics shouldn't matter much. If they can't, no amount of money is going to make an acquisition work. I think Ballmer is just talking about this to keep the stock price up.
I think the reason is simply that many people cannot intuitively comprehend the vastness of time, or at least they don't dedicate the time to really try. My own personal opinion is that for many people the concept for God is simply a placeholder for this line of thinking. Viewed from a typical human's perspective, the time that evolution has taken to produce life as we know it today, is functionally the same as pure infinity. To them infinity is associated with God. Talking to them about "change over time" doesn't make sense, because in their intuitive understanding of time, the time of kings and knights in Europe was extremely long ago. And everyone knows that animals and people were basically the same back then.
To stretch this line of thinking--I sometimes wonder if the United States is not hampered by its relative youth. The entire history of the white culture of this nation fits into about 500 years. Whereas for the rest of the world, 500 years is not that long ago in their history. In places, people are still fighting over things that happened more than 500 years ago.
Asimov was a fiction writer who, in real life, was no more adept than others at predicting the immediate future. His accuracy in the far future remains to be seen.
Despite your rather vague analytical analysis, the fact remains that the details of even subsets of human endeavour remain strikingly unpredictable over a wide range of scales.
Can we predict things in a highly imprecise way? Yes, probably. I could say that the United States would still be an operating and autonomous nation-state 10 years from now, and I would probably not be wrong. I could even predict that the President 10 years from now would be either a Democrat or a Republican, and would probably not be wrong.
But are these predictions actionable in any real way? Not really. In the same way I can predict that it will be raining somewhere on November 2, 2008 (U.S. election day). Almost certainly true, but of course it doesn't really answer the question of who, specifically, needs to bring an umbrella to the polls that day.
In politics and finance there are ample opportunities for those who can prove success in detailed, accurate predictions. A man who can predict the future of even an individual stock one day in advance, reliably, can become very rich. Yet, there are very few who actually succeed at that sort of thing, especially over a long term.
SEO companies would love nothing more than for people to believe that the only way Web sites get found anymore is big, bad, mean bully Google. They pump Google as the ultimate Web bad cop, then offer to come in and save the day with their SEO tactics.
The truth is that there are plenty of ways to be found and known and to be successful on the Web besides the search engines. You won't hear that from SEOs though.
It was the cover story of Fast Company in April. Also an interesting profile of Jimmy Wales, who apparently would like to be considered among the top innovative tycoons like Jobs, Gates, Branson, Sergei and Larry, etc.
If you contribute to carbon fixing then that offsets from the carbon you release, reducing the net product. By your argument maybe we should judge companies just by their revenue and ignore their expenses and investments?
Neil Stephenson's book The Diamond Age had a great passage about hypocrisy, which unfortunately I don't have at hand. The one-sentence summary is that the Victorians should be admired because knew they were hypocritical but they tried to better themselves and their society anyway.
People fixate on the hypocrisy of Gore because it is an easy attack. But while you can tear a man down, if his message is right then it will survive and grow. People used to kill the messenger all the time if they didn't like the message. The cliched admonition against it reflects its ultimate impact--close to none. It's satisfying but a waste of time.
Or let's look at his co-recipient this way--each IPCC report is thousands of pages long. Just printing the new version every couple years fixes quite a bit of atmospheric carbon.:-)
Which is mostly duplicative of your post? Why not link Dr. Mackay's abstract itself?
Perhaps you missed the last few sentences:
During the last 1000 years, snow cover on Lake Baikal has been inferred from past diatom assemblages, and is closely linked to weakening of the North Atlantic Oscillation, allowing increasing intensity of the Siberian High to develop and during the 17th and 18th centuries. In the last 150 years, diatom species have been shown to be sensitive indicators of recent warming. However, impacts from future global warming will be complex, and are likely to impact not only on the balance between endemic and cosmopolitan diatoms throughout the lake, but on the balance between siliceous and non-siliceous algae, and sources of primary productivity. What I did not see is any reference to or debunking of human-generated carbon dioxide as a current forcing. That angle was helpfully added by the DailyTech writer you link from your journal entry.
The existense of a number of naturally-driven cycles is well known and well supported. But their existence does not supplant anthropogenic carbon as a forcing--rather, they interact with it. Natural cycles and carbon dioxide impacts are operating simultaneously, and understanding their interactions is one of the goals of computer modelling.
It is to push content and traffic to Wikia
on
Has Wikipedia Peaked?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I only half-believe this and have not done the detailed digging needed to really validate it. But I'll throw it out there for discussion:
Wikia is a service that allows any niche group to create their own sort of "wikipedia" for their topic. And unlike Wikipedia, it is for-profit, and clearly belongs to Jimmy Wales.
Wales seeded the admin system on Wikipedia and continues to be influential in its direction. It is in his direct interest if Wikipedia takes the "notability" route to its logical conclusion--pushing out all sub-topics or verticals that are not popularly or widely known. The associated interest groups are then welcome to come to Wikia to set up their knowledge base. Only now it will generate profit and fame for Jimmy Wales, instead of the Wikipedia Foundation. Plus, these types of small, focused, not-widely-known areas of knowledge are ideal points of attack against Google's search results. Getting them into the Wikia fold helps feed the new "Google killer" search engine project.
In all seriousness, Sony's board should take a long hard look at the legal advice the company is receiving.
From a legal standpoint, this an incorrect statement on a subject that not only has a Supreme-Court-level case precedent, but which was decided by an argument that Sony themselves advanced.
From a practical standpoint, Sony makes quite a bit of money from electronic devices that do the very things to which Jennifer is referring. It is not good business to level accusations against broad swaths of your own customers.
From an investing standpoint, her statement under oath, as head of litigation for the music unit, could easily be construed as a warning that in the future, Sony will consider litigating against their own customers for using Sony products in the way they were designed. She is in a position of management and her statement has forward-looking implications.
I'm being serious. I don't see how it is inconsistent to say that security is a concern on cell phones, and that the signing model is not a good solution to that problem. The former is true, and the latter is just an opinion. You might disagree with that opinion but I don't see how that automatically makes someone else a hypocrite.
Apple makes the software on the iPhone. The hardware is not harmed by either the unlocking process or the Apple update. It is a software problem and IMO analogous to mucking around in the registry and then complaining to Microsoft when Windows stops functioning.
I absolutely believe people should have the right to hack their products, and they do. I'm a little less sympathetic when they also want to be immunized from the consequences of their missteps. With power comes responsibility, etc.
As far as I know, if your Dell or Sony PC (for example) dies on you and you haven't gone out of your way to use it in any way in which it was not intended for, then the warranty would cover repairing it. Emphasis mine. Since before it was released, Apple has been crystal clear that the iPhone is not intended to run 3rd party native apps. If you overclock your Dell, they're not going to honor the warranty. If you hack around in your iPhone's firmware, I don't see how it's Apple responsibility to troubleshoot your home-brew.
You're legally entitled and more than welcome to do whatever hacking you desire. But, that does not imply that Apple is under any duty or obligation to accomodate that in their (free, optional) software updates. In fact they went out of their way to mention that there might be problems, so people could choose what to do. The update is optional and can be refused.
The whole thing is completely blown out of proportion. Apple issues a warning and it's attacked instead of appreciated. But there was absolutely no malicious reason for them to say anything--they gained nothing by it. If they really wanted to brick iPhones they could have just sent out the update silently.
Look back at the history of hacking satellite TV boxes. Has DirectTV or Dish Network EVER issued a warning to their hackers or even acknowledged they exist at all? No, they just send down the next killer update to try to get as many as possible. That's not what happened here though. People were given plenty of warning.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a big difference between applying tools to solve a problem (engineering) and developing those tools from observation of existing systems (science). Someone should remind Andy that the entire information technology industry is still based on understandings of electromagnetism and optics that date back more than 100 years. In contrast, we only learned about DNA about 50 years ago.
Imagine trying to learn about computers by starting from scratch with a Core 2 Duo chip. Now multiply that by 1,000 and you have the human genome. And that doesn't even get into the more complex firmware, software, viruses, etc. of biological systems.
A crucial step that politicians and marketers take, that the story poster did not, is to identify your target audience and make sure your feedback approximates it. The poster now has an idea of the types of counterarguments he's likely to get from geeks who enjoy participating in the Mechanical Turk program. That does not necessarily mean that his arguments are going to be any more effective when pointed at politicians (for example). There may be whole classes of objections or different ways of framing the argument that he is missing.
There is a reason that market research firms and political consultancies can charge so much money. They are charging for the cost of providing a reliable approximation of your target market, for you to experiment on.
People should not make the mistake of thinking that every argument needs to be universal to be successful. In politics for instance the desire is sometimes to reach and motivate a small group of people to action. Inflammatory speech and seemingly minority positions on a variety of subjects can effectively be combined into a winning strategy. Likewise many businesses choose only certain segments of a market to target, and make sure their communications are targetted to those markets only.
A thing can be serious and important and still be satirized. It's not mutually exclusive--just because something is satirized doesn't mean that it is itself a joke. There are plenty of very funny satires out there about things like Nazis, racism, sexual assault, prison rape, etc--all very terrible and serious things.
Colbert is a professional entertainer and comedian. Watch his serious interviews (where he is being interviewed, I mean), and he is very upfront about what he's trying to do. He doesn't particularly care about his effect on politics; that's not why he does what he does. He cares about being funny and being entertaining, and has just picked politics as his fodder. So don't get the idea that he is a crusader--he's not and never claimed to be. If the satire is good, he wants it to reflect more on his skill than on the subject matter.
However if the nature of the content is informative or asynchronous, then often lists or tables ARE the most digestible and effective way to structure it on the page.
Wikipedia articles should be structured according to nature of the content, varying within an article as needed. But for some reason a cabal has decided that sequential paragraphs are the only valid form of writing on a Web site (which I must point out contradicts many best practices). If content exists as a list or table, in many case editors and admins attempt to shove it into narrative paragraphs. Sometimes they make it work, but most of the time what results is a wordy gray mess instead of clear organization. And when it clearly doesn't work, they simply delete the information instead of leaving it in list form.
I have no idea where this obsession with paragraphs comes from. Perhaps from comparison against print encyclopedias, which seems to be a larger obsession of the admins and leaders of Wikipedia. IMO that is stupid because Wikipedia is so obviously superior in concept and implementation. Trying to turn it into a "real" encyclopedia is counterproductive and ignorant of the core value of the product.
It's far more likely that Google, rather than imitate Comcast's packets, would instead alter some subset of their traffic in a way that would make it more likely it would trigger Comcast's filtering. No need to fake the interference--it's actually there. Just figure out how to trigger it and you have your talking point.
The most free society is a state of anarchy. Lions and antelope live free. But before you wish for that, ask yourself realistically whether you would be an antelope or a lion.
Governments exist to create security, not freedom. Security in the nation, but also, in the case of a republic, security in person. Some of what people consider "freedom" is actually a form of security, for example the freedom to own property and live there as you wish. Well for most people this "freedom" would be impossible without the security provided by an orderly republic state. Without that, someone better armed would just exercise their freedom to take it.
Pure democracy is actually not a great system of government for security in person. It can easily tip into mob rule. Luckily what we have is a constitutional democratic republic. I know that's not as a good a soundbite, but I think it helps to be accurate when we're talking about something as important to us as government.
Seriously. They run carbureted V8 engines (no fuel injection, no electronic control). They have tubular steel frames. They have mechanical-linkage sequential shifting. They have your most basic independent suspension. They run stock-profile, sheet metal bodies, and it's big news when they're finally allowed to add an actual aerofoil to the back of the car instead of just a spoiler.
It's reflected in the costs...$125,000 is incredibly cheap for a race car. Good thing too since they can expect to wreck several each season. Compare to IndyCar or Formual 1 where just a chassis can cost over $500,000. If you want to see cutting edge car technology, the type of thing that trickles down to your car, that's where to look. Not NASCAR, where guys still shape cylinder heads with Dremel tools.
I wonder just how well Munster understands the carrier business if he thinks AT&T is sending Apple a percentage of service revenues every month. In the carrier world those revenues are typically sacrosanct. I think it's more likely is that AT&T is sending Apple a single check upon activation, and Apple is reporting that revenue over time--since they are reporting ALL iPhone revenue (including retail sales) over 24 months, to allow them to push OS and application updates without charging.
AT&T is subsidizing the cost of phones, just like they do for other phones. The difference is that the subsidy passes through Apple first, rather than directly to the consumer. Unlike other phone makers, Apple understands the marketing power of price and demanded absolute control over it.
The big price drop is pretty transparent proof of that. The $600 price set the value of the iPhone upon launch--it marked it as a high-end, aspirational product. The new price walks it down the price curve to within reach of a much wider market, but how did Apple afford a 33% price cut? That's about the entire gross margin one would expect on such a device. The answer is the AT&T subsidy.
I would not get so excited about these numbers. Since Apple controls price, I would expect that AT&T's subsidy is calculated on a percentage rather than a dollar basis per phone. Thus with the price cut the revenue from AT&T per phone has probably already fallen quite a bit. Remember: financial reports are trailing indicators.
That's one crucial difference between science and religion: everything the Pope says is religiously significant, whereas a scientist's statements only matter to the degree to which they can be tested and supported. Even most scientists are unwilling to consider the possibility that *gasp* if evolution be true, not all races are created equal, and that some might be statistically inferior to others. Scientists are quite willing to believe all sorts of things, provided they can be objectively proven. They're just not willing to take someone's word for it.
Sexual selection is a very important pressure. Ostriches are a good example of an organism whose evolution has been driven more by sexual selection than by predation. So, the first point is that a mutation that is not deleterious can still be selected for or against by the mating process. And conversely, a harmful mutation can persist in the gene pool so long as it is not too harmful to prevent mating and reproduction.
Another aspect of this is that a mutation that is initially neutral or even positive can end up being harmful, or vice versa. This can occur due to changing external conditions, but it can also happen because of other changes to the genome over time. These types of traits might be called exaptations, cooptions, etc. But the rapidity of the changes create quite a difficulty about random mutations as the source of raw material for selection. I am no biologist, but nothing I've heard our read about the frequency of random mutations indicates that 40 years is enough time for mutations to account for the timing. It seems more likely that the ability of the light-colored moths to increase was already inherent in the population. The second key point is that genetics is far more complex than a series of yes/no gene instances. The potential interactions between genes can mean that some are more rarely expressed than others (you may have heard of dominant and recessive genes). Thus what can happen is that a wide variety of physical variations are present from generation to generation. Changes in the genome result in differing rates of occurrence, and then on top of that differing external conditions produce different adult populations. It's certain that over the last 40 years each generation of moths has produced both white and dark moths. But because of differing external conditions, more of the dark ones made it to adulthood 30 years ago than do today.
Of course it's even more complex than that, because those changes in adult populations will of course lead to changes in the gene pool. But the key point is that evolution is not a yes/no process at the gene level. Just because a gene is selected against, does not mean it will disappear and then have to be re-created by a fresh mutation. More often it is a question of varying rates of expression.
If the staff/programmers can be bought, it would be much cheaper to simply pay the $1m upfront to a few key developers and hire them away from the open source company, rather than go through the process of acquiring the company for a price, and then paying the $1m bonus on top of that.
I think the key question is simply whether the key OSS people can be bought by Microsoft. If they can, the mechanics shouldn't matter much. If they can't, no amount of money is going to make an acquisition work. I think Ballmer is just talking about this to keep the stock price up.
I think the reason is simply that many people cannot intuitively comprehend the vastness of time, or at least they don't dedicate the time to really try. My own personal opinion is that for many people the concept for God is simply a placeholder for this line of thinking. Viewed from a typical human's perspective, the time that evolution has taken to produce life as we know it today, is functionally the same as pure infinity. To them infinity is associated with God. Talking to them about "change over time" doesn't make sense, because in their intuitive understanding of time, the time of kings and knights in Europe was extremely long ago. And everyone knows that animals and people were basically the same back then.
To stretch this line of thinking--I sometimes wonder if the United States is not hampered by its relative youth. The entire history of the white culture of this nation fits into about 500 years. Whereas for the rest of the world, 500 years is not that long ago in their history. In places, people are still fighting over things that happened more than 500 years ago.
Asimov was a fiction writer who, in real life, was no more adept than others at predicting the immediate future. His accuracy in the far future remains to be seen.
Despite your rather vague analytical analysis, the fact remains that the details of even subsets of human endeavour remain strikingly unpredictable over a wide range of scales.
Can we predict things in a highly imprecise way? Yes, probably. I could say that the United States would still be an operating and autonomous nation-state 10 years from now, and I would probably not be wrong. I could even predict that the President 10 years from now would be either a Democrat or a Republican, and would probably not be wrong.
But are these predictions actionable in any real way? Not really. In the same way I can predict that it will be raining somewhere on November 2, 2008 (U.S. election day). Almost certainly true, but of course it doesn't really answer the question of who, specifically, needs to bring an umbrella to the polls that day.
In politics and finance there are ample opportunities for those who can prove success in detailed, accurate predictions. A man who can predict the future of even an individual stock one day in advance, reliably, can become very rich. Yet, there are very few who actually succeed at that sort of thing, especially over a long term.
SEO companies would love nothing more than for people to believe that the only way Web sites get found anymore is big, bad, mean bully Google. They pump Google as the ultimate Web bad cop, then offer to come in and save the day with their SEO tactics.
The truth is that there are plenty of ways to be found and known and to be successful on the Web besides the search engines. You won't hear that from SEOs though.
It was the cover story of Fast Company in April. Also an interesting profile of Jimmy Wales, who apparently would like to be considered among the top innovative tycoons like Jobs, Gates, Branson, Sergei and Larry, etc.
If you contribute to carbon fixing then that offsets from the carbon you release, reducing the net product. By your argument maybe we should judge companies just by their revenue and ignore their expenses and investments?
Neil Stephenson's book The Diamond Age had a great passage about hypocrisy, which unfortunately I don't have at hand. The one-sentence summary is that the Victorians should be admired because knew they were hypocritical but they tried to better themselves and their society anyway.
:-)
People fixate on the hypocrisy of Gore because it is an easy attack. But while you can tear a man down, if his message is right then it will survive and grow. People used to kill the messenger all the time if they didn't like the message. The cliched admonition against it reflects its ultimate impact--close to none. It's satisfying but a waste of time.
Or let's look at his co-recipient this way--each IPCC report is thousands of pages long. Just printing the new version every couple years fixes quite a bit of atmospheric carbon.
Perhaps you missed the last few sentences: During the last 1000 years, snow cover on Lake Baikal has been inferred from past diatom assemblages, and is closely linked to weakening of the North Atlantic Oscillation, allowing increasing intensity of the Siberian High to develop and during the 17th and 18th centuries. In the last 150 years, diatom species have been shown to be sensitive indicators of recent warming. However, impacts from future global warming will be complex, and are likely to impact not only on the balance between endemic and cosmopolitan diatoms throughout the lake, but on the balance between siliceous and non-siliceous algae, and sources of primary productivity. What I did not see is any reference to or debunking of human-generated carbon dioxide as a current forcing. That angle was helpfully added by the DailyTech writer you link from your journal entry.
The existense of a number of naturally-driven cycles is well known and well supported. But their existence does not supplant anthropogenic carbon as a forcing--rather, they interact with it. Natural cycles and carbon dioxide impacts are operating simultaneously, and understanding their interactions is one of the goals of computer modelling.
I only half-believe this and have not done the detailed digging needed to really validate it. But I'll throw it out there for discussion:
Wikia is a service that allows any niche group to create their own sort of "wikipedia" for their topic. And unlike Wikipedia, it is for-profit, and clearly belongs to Jimmy Wales.
Wales seeded the admin system on Wikipedia and continues to be influential in its direction. It is in his direct interest if Wikipedia takes the "notability" route to its logical conclusion--pushing out all sub-topics or verticals that are not popularly or widely known. The associated interest groups are then welcome to come to Wikia to set up their knowledge base. Only now it will generate profit and fame for Jimmy Wales, instead of the Wikipedia Foundation. Plus, these types of small, focused, not-widely-known areas of knowledge are ideal points of attack against Google's search results. Getting them into the Wikia fold helps feed the new "Google killer" search engine project.
It would be really scary if the waveform collapsed into the "zombie Einstein" state.
In all seriousness, Sony's board should take a long hard look at the legal advice the company is receiving.
From a legal standpoint, this an incorrect statement on a subject that not only has a Supreme-Court-level case precedent, but which was decided by an argument that Sony themselves advanced.
From a practical standpoint, Sony makes quite a bit of money from electronic devices that do the very things to which Jennifer is referring. It is not good business to level accusations against broad swaths of your own customers.
From an investing standpoint, her statement under oath, as head of litigation for the music unit, could easily be construed as a warning that in the future, Sony will consider litigating against their own customers for using Sony products in the way they were designed. She is in a position of management and her statement has forward-looking implications.
I'm being serious. I don't see how it is inconsistent to say that security is a concern on cell phones, and that the signing model is not a good solution to that problem. The former is true, and the latter is just an opinion. You might disagree with that opinion but I don't see how that automatically makes someone else a hypocrite.
I absolutely believe people should have the right to hack their products, and they do. I'm a little less sympathetic when they also want to be immunized from the consequences of their missteps. With power comes responsibility, etc. As far as I know, if your Dell or Sony PC (for example) dies on you and you haven't gone out of your way to use it in any way in which it was not intended for, then the warranty would cover repairing it. Emphasis mine. Since before it was released, Apple has been crystal clear that the iPhone is not intended to run 3rd party native apps. If you overclock your Dell, they're not going to honor the warranty. If you hack around in your iPhone's firmware, I don't see how it's Apple responsibility to troubleshoot your home-brew.
You're legally entitled and more than welcome to do whatever hacking you desire. But, that does not imply that Apple is under any duty or obligation to accomodate that in their (free, optional) software updates. In fact they went out of their way to mention that there might be problems, so people could choose what to do. The update is optional and can be refused.
The whole thing is completely blown out of proportion. Apple issues a warning and it's attacked instead of appreciated. But there was absolutely no malicious reason for them to say anything--they gained nothing by it. If they really wanted to brick iPhones they could have just sent out the update silently.
Look back at the history of hacking satellite TV boxes. Has DirectTV or Dish Network EVER issued a warning to their hackers or even acknowledged they exist at all? No, they just send down the next killer update to try to get as many as possible. That's not what happened here though. People were given plenty of warning.