From the summary: "the USPTO unveiled a new plan to reduce backlog in its system by offering pending patents special examiner status if the holder abandons another co-pending unexamined application."
Dumb!
They're basically saying, if you want your patent examined fast, submit some other "dummy" patent applications that you can then abandon as needed to get special status. They don't understand that telling people to submit more patent applications if they want faster service will result in more work, not less??
He presents it as a paradox that, on the average, people believe that their mothers were less intelligent than their fathers, and their grandmothers less intelligent than their grandfathers.
However, it is no paradox for men to be more intelligent than the women they marry (on the average), even though men and women have the same average intelligence. This merely requires that women tend to marry men more intelligent than they are, while men tend to marry women less intelligent than they are.
Of course, this give problems at each end of the scale-- men at the low-intelligence end of the scale and women at the high intelligence end of the scale both will tend to be unmarried. I'm not sure that this isn't the case, though!)
(Actualy, since the survey was of the children, not the actual couples, the statistics quoted will still be reasonable if, on the average, when a higher-intelligence women marries a lower-intelligence man they have fewer children than when a lower-intelligence woman marries a higher-intelligence man.)
Dear Geoffrey,
While I appreciate idealism as the other bloke, your argument leads to a rapid slippery slope.
I know. Good God, what if other people became idealistic, and believed in promulgating truth, instead of convenient deceits? It would surely be a disaster!
... What you are saying is that by choosing a side and operating in a manner that helps that side -- in this case, the opposition forces in Iran,
You're not listening. It doesn't help the opposition. The opposition is served by giving Iranians access to truthful information. Anything that damages the credibility of truthful information harms the opposition.
If you like the current regime, and want to strengthen it and give ammunition to the hard-liners while simultaneously weakening the ability of Iranians to trust the internet as a source of reliable information, I can't think of anything better you could do to achieve that goal than the plan set forth of publishing deliberately altered images.
Actually, for my own curiosity I'd be interested in the recommendations for alternate search engines that slashdotters think are good one to use, other than google. (Probably this has been covered as a slashdot topic before; so a link would be ok.)
We should find photos relating to the current leadership and their families, photoshop them to be pro Green Movement, then add them to any fake profiles created. I'm sure the bastards have bought facial recognition software by now and I feel it should be given a good workout.
I suppose that this is meant to be funny. I assume that it should be obvious that actually doing this would be seen as evidence for all the things that the current regime is saying? that non-Iranians are planting false evidence on the internet, and thus, by inference, everything they say is true: the rebellion is being done by non-Iranians, that they are deceitful, and that the internet is being used to spread lies about Iran.
I hate to keep saying things that make people accuse me of being an idealist, but, as a general thing, it is desirable to counter falsehood, deceit, and manipulation with truth, not with falsehood, deceit and manipulation.
many shipboard radar operators were permanently sterilized by RF leakage. Don't think of it as radio waves, think of it as radiation.
No!
Think of it as heat.
The tissue burn is almost the same.
No, it's not. Radiation damages you even though you don't feel it and it doesn't burn. Microwaves heat things up, but are not ionizing. In terms of damage, they are a heat source-- they can damage because they heat you up, but they most particularly do not damage the way radiation does.
(by the way, people in the US usually think of the word "radiation" as meaning "ionizing radiation", which microwaves aren't. I'm assuming you meant it this way.)
Whether I "try" my Accord or Lumina's acceleration or not, both will still get me from one end of my state to the other on one tank. No one is going to appreciate babying their electric to make it 50 miles to work and back like they have to baby their Accord after crossing Nebraska and entering Wyoming at 2 a.m....
Make it usable and make it cost effective without artificially boosting the price of gas to make the ripoff that is electric cars appear viable. And quit trying to dupe the masses.
But I don't drive fifty miles to work and back. Frankly, an electric car that got only twenty miles per charge would be fine with me-- we're a two car family, and if I want to drive a thousand miles cross country, that's fine, we've got a nice roomy car that can do that, we don't need two. I'd love a little electric runabout that I can use to commute with, drive to the grocery store and around town.
What's a "rip-off" to one person can be a perfectly fine car to one million other people. Not every car has to fill every niche.
it's always harder to identify the bad guys in the real world than it is in the movies.
If they are shooting at you, that pretty much identifies them as pirates. Kill the supid SOBs.
I should have mentioned, I suppose-- I thought it was obvious, so I didn't bother to point it out-- that once they have their guns out and pointed at you, it's too late.
Another one of those things that's different in the real world from the way it is in movies.
It's always easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys in the movies. Just look at who the camera follows. It's never ambiguous.
In the real world, this is not the case.
Trust me on this-- I've actually been to the real world (unlike many slashdoters, apparently), and "uncertainty" is a real phenomenon (also unlike many slashdotters, apparently, who have no idea what this word "uncertainty" means.)
it's always harder to identify the bad guys in the real world than it is in the movies.
Easy way to become 100% accurate is to shoot back.
Good point. The premise is the boats that aren't pirate boats should be heavily armed, and should shoot at the first sign of danger.
So in the scenario that your method of identifying pirates is "shoot at them" and see what happens, you're likely to get a fatal surprise.
Just shoot the fuckers already. Pretty soon there won't be any more of them.
If it's always clear weather, and daytime, and all the boats have transponders so that you never make errors in identifying which boats are pirate and which aren't, that might be reasonable.
If you are, say, reliable 99% of the time... and, say, one boat out of two hundred is a pirate-- you'll be shooting two innocent fishermen for every pirate.
And it's always harder to identify the bad guys in the real world than it is in the movies.
On the other hand, suppose that global warming is real and is caused by human activities. Then, who shall be responsible for the oceans flooding nations like Great Britain and Japan, shrinking their territories to one-tenth of the original size?
Well, that's exaggeration. Neither Great Britain nor Japan are about to shrink to "one-tenth their original size".
Please, exaggeration isn't helping-- try to stick to the real world.
you sir, are a major idiot. go, "buy" energy. from god, i suppose. with dollars.
and stop spreading school knowledge you obviously are missing the context to understand.
Nice to get a clearly explained, rational rebuttal.
Correlation is not causation.
A fundamental effect in real economics, as opposed to the toy economics model above, is that commodities can be traded off-- manufacturing processes adapt to the commodities that are available. If energy usage for some reason were to be reduced by a factor of two, that doesn't mean that real wealth will drop by a factor of two (as his linear model predicts)-- it would simply mean that manufacturing would shift to different, less energy-intensive processes to optimize for the increased cost (due to decreased availability). This is known as "resource substitution." It's not theoretical, it's a well observed effect that happens all the time.
Sorry, but his linear model is frankly idiotic. He has confused correlation with causation.
This fits with an observation by insurance companies (or at least mine, USAA) that building safer cars results in people continuing to drive them to their preferred safety margin. We still end up with about as many crashes (but injuries are less).
That was predicted by sociologists, but turns out not to be the case.
The mileage-adjusted accident death rate of automobiles has dropped significantly with the added safety features.
Even in the last 30 years there has been a recognition that high standards of living reduce fertility.
I think I saw an article fairly recently that suggested that as the standard of living increases past some point, this reverses itself and fertility rates start to go back up.
Yes, that was in the news, but when you actually look at the data, the evidence for an upturn in fertility at very high affluence levels is not statistically significant.
[Garrett discovered that] Throughout history, a simple physical constant... links global energy use to the world's accumulated economic productivity, adjusted for inflation.
No.
Data also shows that there is a correlation between the number of teddy bears that children own and how wealthy their parents are. Does owning teddy bears cause a child's parents to be wealthy?
The more prosperous an economy is, the more things that the people buy. Including energy. This is not news. The correlation is that being wealthy means buying more energy, not vice versa!
Come on, everybody knows the Earth is round - like a circle. The Bible clearly states that. Now if you want to try to argue that the Earth is spherical, that a different matter.
1. Yes, nuclear plants are taken offline for maintenance and refueling, but no nearly as often as coal-fired plants.
And if that's what you'd posted, I wouldn't have needed to reply. Instead, however, you pointed out that fossil-fuel plants need to be taken offline without bothering to mention that nuclear plants do, too.
but by and large, they are at 100% power.
If by "100%" you mean "90%", I won't disagree with you.
2. Taking a nuclear plant offline and bringing it back online is a time-consuming process which simply cannot be done fast enough to track peak power demands. That is partially why it is considered a base-load source, left to run at 100% power all the time.
Phrasing this a slightly different way, it's so hard to ramp up and down the output of a nuclear plant, that for the most part they keep on generating even at times when nobody's buying power.
3. If you can take all nuclear plants offline and half the fossil plants offline at night as you so state, why would you shut down the cheapest power source in favor of the more expensive one?
For the most part, nobody's buying power at night. It doesn't really matter which plants you idle, because nobody's buying power. My actual point was that if you took off the nuclear plants, there still would be plenty of power at night. However, in terms of economics, those coal plants are idling, too-- the fixed cost is still there whether you use them or not. If there were a demand for electricity at night, and you did spin them up-- they'd be generating at a profit.
I toured a coal-fired plant once (and currently work at a nuclear one) and even the operators at a coal-fired plant will tell you that the nuclear plants produce power that is by far the cheapest per kilowatt-hour.
I'm not sure that I disagree-- but that wasn't the point being made.
And as you state, base load power is cheap, because it comes from a nuclear plant.
No, it's cheap at night because prices come from the interaction of supply and demand, and at night there's almost no demand.
IAAEA (I am an energy analyst with one of the larger energy companies in the US), and I'd argue your math there. Nuclear is base-load power, meaning it's always there. Coal plants, natural gas plants, and the like have to be taken on and off line for maintenance and such pretty frequently.
True. And, you know what? Nuclear plants have to be taken on and off line for maintenance, fueling, "and such," too.
If you live in the PJM footprint of the Northeast,
In response to a post about energy in the US, you respond with statistics about energy in the PJM. This does not in any way contradict the statistics quoted.
it's very likely that the only plant(s) providing off-peak, nighttime power to your house is a nuclear reactor.
And since off-peak, baseload power at night is a load that's less than a quarter of the capacity-- in many places, much less-- even by your numbers, you could take off-line all of the nuclear plants, and for that matter half of the fossil-fuel plants as well, and still have plenty of capacity for off-peak nighttime power.
Baseload power is cheap. Peaking power is the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
From the summary: "the USPTO unveiled a new plan to reduce backlog in its system by offering pending patents special examiner status if the holder abandons another co-pending unexamined application."
Dumb!
They're basically saying, if you want your patent examined fast, submit some other "dummy" patent applications that you can then abandon as needed to get special status. They don't understand that telling people to submit more patent applications if they want faster service will result in more work, not less??
He presents it as a paradox that, on the average, people believe that their mothers were less intelligent than their fathers, and their grandmothers less intelligent than their grandfathers.
However, it is no paradox for men to be more intelligent than the women they marry (on the average), even though men and women have the same average intelligence. This merely requires that women tend to marry men more intelligent than they are, while men tend to marry women less intelligent than they are.
Of course, this give problems at each end of the scale-- men at the low-intelligence end of the scale and women at the high intelligence end of the scale both will tend to be unmarried. I'm not sure that this isn't the case, though!)
(Actualy, since the survey was of the children, not the actual couples, the statistics quoted will still be reasonable if, on the average, when a higher-intelligence women marries a lower-intelligence man they have fewer children than when a lower-intelligence woman marries a higher-intelligence man.)
Dear Geoffrey, While I appreciate idealism as the other bloke, your argument leads to a rapid slippery slope.
I know. Good God, what if other people became idealistic, and believed in promulgating truth, instead of convenient deceits? It would surely be a disaster!
... What you are saying is that by choosing a side and operating in a manner that helps that side -- in this case, the opposition forces in Iran,
You're not listening. It doesn't help the opposition. The opposition is served by giving Iranians access to truthful information. Anything that damages the credibility of truthful information harms the opposition.
If you like the current regime, and want to strengthen it and give ammunition to the hard-liners while simultaneously weakening the ability of Iranians to trust the internet as a source of reliable information, I can't think of anything better you could do to achieve that goal than the plan set forth of publishing deliberately altered images.
(I can already find this one http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines thanks)
> ...the courts already declared that email stored on a third party server is
> not covered by the 4th amendment.
They have done no such thing.
c.f. Email Privacy Rights
Stored Communications Act
but also http://cyb3rcrim3.blogspot.com/2009/11/cioffi-email-search-warrant-residual.html
We should find photos relating to the current leadership and their families, photoshop them to be pro Green Movement, then add them to any fake profiles created. I'm sure the bastards have bought facial recognition software by now and I feel it should be given a good workout.
I suppose that this is meant to be funny. I assume that it should be obvious that actually doing this would be seen as evidence for all the things that the current regime is saying? that non-Iranians are planting false evidence on the internet, and thus, by inference, everything they say is true: the rebellion is being done by non-Iranians, that they are deceitful, and that the internet is being used to spread lies about Iran.
I hate to keep saying things that make people accuse me of being an idealist, but, as a general thing, it is desirable to counter falsehood, deceit, and manipulation with truth, not with falsehood, deceit and manipulation.
In WWII,
[apocryphal stories were told of]
many shipboard radar operators were permanently sterilized by RF leakage. Don't think of it as radio waves, think of it as radiation.
No!
Think of it as heat.
The tissue burn is almost the same.
No, it's not. Radiation damages you even though you don't feel it and it doesn't burn. Microwaves heat things up, but are not ionizing. In terms of damage, they are a heat source-- they can damage because they heat you up, but they most particularly do not damage the way radiation does.
(by the way, people in the US usually think of the word "radiation" as meaning "ionizing radiation", which microwaves aren't. I'm assuming you meant it this way.)
Wikipedia editions are not anonymous
Huh? They are if they want to be. They don't have any certification process-- anybody can register under any name.
Which is, in fact, the case in America today.
e.g., "Many two car families could replace one of the two with this. It boils down to cost effectiveness. "
Whether I "try" my Accord or Lumina's acceleration or not, both will still get me from one end of my state to the other on one tank. No one is going to appreciate babying their electric to make it 50 miles to work and back like they have to baby their Accord after crossing Nebraska and entering Wyoming at 2 a.m. ...
Make it usable and make it cost effective without artificially boosting the price of gas to make the ripoff that is electric cars appear viable. And quit trying to dupe the masses.
But I don't drive fifty miles to work and back. Frankly, an electric car that got only twenty miles per charge would be fine with me-- we're a two car family, and if I want to drive a thousand miles cross country, that's fine, we've got a nice roomy car that can do that, we don't need two. I'd love a little electric runabout that I can use to commute with, drive to the grocery store and around town.
What's a "rip-off" to one person can be a perfectly fine car to one million other people. Not every car has to fill every niche.
Why??
his machine? Nothing.
... because Neil Stephenson writes with a fountain pen.
it's always harder to identify the bad guys in the real world than it is in the movies.
If they are shooting at you, that pretty much identifies them as pirates. Kill the supid SOBs.
I should have mentioned, I suppose-- I thought it was obvious, so I didn't bother to point it out-- that once they have their guns out and pointed at you, it's too late.
Another one of those things that's different in the real world from the way it is in movies.
Shall I repeat what I said?
It's always easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys in the movies. Just look at who the camera follows. It's never ambiguous.
In the real world, this is not the case.
Trust me on this-- I've actually been to the real world (unlike many slashdoters, apparently), and "uncertainty" is a real phenomenon (also unlike many slashdotters, apparently, who have no idea what this word "uncertainty" means.)
it's always harder to identify the bad guys in the real world than it is in the movies.
Easy way to become 100% accurate is to shoot back.
Good point. The premise is the boats that aren't pirate boats should be heavily armed, and should shoot at the first sign of danger. So in the scenario that your method of identifying pirates is "shoot at them" and see what happens, you're likely to get a fatal surprise.
Just shoot the fuckers already. Pretty soon there won't be any more of them.
If it's always clear weather, and daytime, and all the boats have transponders so that you never make errors in identifying which boats are pirate and which aren't, that might be reasonable.
If you are, say, reliable 99% of the time... and, say, one boat out of two hundred is a pirate-- you'll be shooting two innocent fishermen for every pirate.
And it's always harder to identify the bad guys in the real world than it is in the movies.
On the other hand, suppose that global warming is real and is caused by human activities. Then, who shall be responsible for the oceans flooding nations like Great Britain and Japan, shrinking their territories to one-tenth of the original size?
Well, that's exaggeration. Neither Great Britain nor Japan are about to shrink to "one-tenth their original size".
Please, exaggeration isn't helping-- try to stick to the real world.
you sir, are a major idiot. go, "buy" energy. from god, i suppose. with dollars. and stop spreading school knowledge you obviously are missing the context to understand.
Nice to get a clearly explained, rational rebuttal.
Correlation is not causation.
A fundamental effect in real economics, as opposed to the toy economics model above, is that commodities can be traded off-- manufacturing processes adapt to the commodities that are available. If energy usage for some reason were to be reduced by a factor of two, that doesn't mean that real wealth will drop by a factor of two (as his linear model predicts)-- it would simply mean that manufacturing would shift to different, less energy-intensive processes to optimize for the increased cost (due to decreased availability). This is known as "resource substitution." It's not theoretical, it's a well observed effect that happens all the time.
Sorry, but his linear model is frankly idiotic. He has confused correlation with causation.
This fits with an observation by insurance companies (or at least mine, USAA) that building safer cars results in people continuing to drive them to their preferred safety margin. We still end up with about as many crashes (but injuries are less).
That was predicted by sociologists, but turns out not to be the case.
The mileage-adjusted accident death rate of automobiles has dropped significantly with the added safety features.
Even in the last 30 years there has been a recognition that high standards of living reduce fertility.
I think I saw an article fairly recently that suggested that as the standard of living increases past some point, this reverses itself and fertility rates start to go back up.
Yes, that was in the news, but when you actually look at the data, the evidence for an upturn in fertility at very high affluence levels is not statistically significant.
[Garrett discovered that] Throughout history, a simple physical constant... links global energy use to the world's accumulated economic productivity, adjusted for inflation.
No.
Data also shows that there is a correlation between the number of teddy bears that children own and how wealthy their parents are. Does owning teddy bears cause a child's parents to be wealthy?
The more prosperous an economy is, the more things that the people buy. Including energy. This is not news. The correlation is that being wealthy means buying more energy, not vice versa!
Correlation is not causation.
Come on, everybody knows the Earth is round - like a circle. The Bible clearly states that. Now if you want to try to argue that the Earth is spherical, that a different matter.
It may be round, but it's a circle with corners
Chernobyl was a vigorous demonstration of the failure to apply Montemerlo's Law: "Don't do nuthin' dumb."
1. Yes, nuclear plants are taken offline for maintenance and refueling, but no nearly as often as coal-fired plants.
And if that's what you'd posted, I wouldn't have needed to reply. Instead, however, you pointed out that fossil-fuel plants need to be taken offline without bothering to mention that nuclear plants do, too.
but by and large, they are at 100% power.
If by "100%" you mean "90%", I won't disagree with you.
2. Taking a nuclear plant offline and bringing it back online is a time-consuming process which simply cannot be done fast enough to track peak power demands. That is partially why it is considered a base-load source, left to run at 100% power all the time.
Phrasing this a slightly different way, it's so hard to ramp up and down the output of a nuclear plant, that for the most part they keep on generating even at times when nobody's buying power.
3. If you can take all nuclear plants offline and half the fossil plants offline at night as you so state, why would you shut down the cheapest power source in favor of the more expensive one?
For the most part, nobody's buying power at night. It doesn't really matter which plants you idle, because nobody's buying power. My actual point was that if you took off the nuclear plants, there still would be plenty of power at night. However, in terms of economics, those coal plants are idling, too-- the fixed cost is still there whether you use them or not. If there were a demand for electricity at night, and you did spin them up-- they'd be generating at a profit.
I toured a coal-fired plant once (and currently work at a nuclear one) and even the operators at a coal-fired plant will tell you that the nuclear plants produce power that is by far the cheapest per kilowatt-hour.
I'm not sure that I disagree-- but that wasn't the point being made.
And as you state, base load power is cheap, because it comes from a nuclear plant.
No, it's cheap at night because prices come from the interaction of supply and demand, and at night there's almost no demand.
IAAEA (I am an energy analyst with one of the larger energy companies in the US), and I'd argue your math there. Nuclear is base-load power, meaning it's always there. Coal plants, natural gas plants, and the like have to be taken on and off line for maintenance and such pretty frequently.
True. And, you know what? Nuclear plants have to be taken on and off line for maintenance, fueling, "and such," too.
If you live in the PJM footprint of the Northeast,
In response to a post about energy in the US, you respond with statistics about energy in the PJM. This does not in any way contradict the statistics quoted.
it's very likely that the only plant(s) providing off-peak, nighttime power to your house is a nuclear reactor.
And since off-peak, baseload power at night is a load that's less than a quarter of the capacity-- in many places, much less-- even by your numbers, you could take off-line all of the nuclear plants, and for that matter half of the fossil-fuel plants as well, and still have plenty of capacity for off-peak nighttime power.
Baseload power is cheap. Peaking power is the problem.