"I honestly think that "green" technologies will always be significantly more expensive to run and maintain than traditional ones like gas/coal/oil"
This is only because the likes of coal and oil have their actual costs hidden. The health impacts of burning coal are paid for by tax payers in their national insurance tax used to fund the NHS so coal and oil get these defacto tax payer subsidies to max their true cost impact.
Like for like, green power is often cheaper, but it has no ability to mask a large proportion of it's costs and have that masked bill footed by the tax payer.
If government shifted the burden of coal/oil damage onto the companies producing power this way and off of the backs of tax paying citizens we'd already be a nearly wholly green powered country because the true costs of coal/oil generation would make it impossible for power firms to stay in business by generating power using those techniques. They simply cannot survive without tax payer subsidy to pay for their negative consequences.
This is FWIW why nuclear is more expensive than coal and oil too - the stigma around nuclear waste means nuclear power is forced to factor in whole costs. If nuclear could just dump it's waste into the environment as coal and oil do and leave the health effects of that to the tax payer to deal with then it'd be by far the cheapest power generation method.
If you want to find corruption in government funded projects, look to HS2.
It's going to cost 1.5 times as much to build a 300 mile railway and buy a handful of trains as it did to wage every aspect of a 13 year war in Afghanistan performed by UK forces including every soldier transported to and from, every bullet fired, every bomb dropped, every aircraft sortie flown, the running of a base the size of the entire city of Reading in the UK for the entire time, every soldier fed, every firebase built, every road built, ever IED cleared, every project carried out for locals, every medical operation performed, every minute of training of ANA soldiers carried out.
Most public sector projects including this lagoon, including the two new aircraft carriers, including our new nuclear plant, including our wars and so forth look like an absolute bargain in comparison to HS2. The trains alone are going to cost 1.5x as much as a multi-acre aircraft carrier and all it's equipment - HS2 is going to cost 2.5x as much as development and production of a whole new fleet of ICBM wielding nuclear submarines and the ICBMs and warheads to go with them.
Using HS2 as a reference this lagoon project looks basically bribe free judging by the costs put forward.
"First off, you can't shut down a coal power plant and restart it in only five hours. And it will operate at considerably (for values of "considerably" that vary from 10% to 30%) reduced efficiency for some hours after startup"
Why assume we only have one coal plant to handle this in the UK? If you stagger it across plants your point becomes irrelevant. We have a national grid for a reason.
"Secondly, pollution from coal plants are 30%-50% (or so, depending on type of pollutant) higher during the 24 (or so) hours immediately after startup. "
Why even assume we're talking about combining this with dirty old style plants? Why do you think it's not possible to instead combine this with gas? nuclear? even if coal, why not carbon captured coal?
"In other words, that won't work."
Or in other words you've decided to find a few arbitrary excuses why you don't like this idea, without even properly thinking it through or giving it a chance, because new ideas are bad and change is painful. Or something.
Why the fuck do so many people on Slashdot think they're smarter than the actual professionals who create these designs for a living and have already thought through and solved all these problems? Do you think environmentalists would be in favour if it upped pollution and harmed nature? do you think it would have been unveiled if it "wont work"?
I'm sure there are plenty of good reasons why this plan is far from perfect, but you're not providing any.
"Not to mention the environmental impact of this."
Which is?
There's a reason the environmentalists are broadly on side on this one. The reef effect means this is like a newly created marine reserve area and a power plant all rolled into one.
Personally my only real concern with this is that which is coupled with wind power - we seem to be putting more and more of our power generation out to sea. That makes it far more vulnerable to sabotage, and far easier to sabotage. If we ever ended up at war, or if terrorists ever wanted to scupper increasingly large amounts of UK power generation then it's not terribly hard for them to do so.
I think the odds of this are incredibly low, but then, it was only 10 to 20 years ago we all thought in Europe that relying on Russia gas was a perfectly fine thing to do in terms of energy security and now countries like Germany are hamstrung, unable to deal with an aggressor financially because they've made themselves so dependent on them. Obviously things change, so it's worthy of consideration.
Yes, but to be fair the people with concern about fish spawning sites seem to be entirely the angling community.
Now, as much as I respect their enjoyment of the sport, I'm not overly convinced that "Don't do that project, it might kill fish and we want to kill them instead" is really the greatest argument not to do something.
Let's be honest, if even the environmentalist, commercial, and political lobbies are all on side then this is about as good as it gets in terms of agreement. Those anglers are just going to have to go and angle elsewhere.
You're always going to find people who will disagree with any power generation scheme, but the handful of people disagreeing in this case have probably one of the least convincing arguments I've ever seen. Certainly their argument pales compared to the nuclear waste, oil spill, gas explosion, groundwater contamination arguments that all are a little more serious than "We want to be the ones that kill the fish". In fact, I think I'd probably even give more weight to the "wind turbines are a blot on the landscape" argument than that.
If there was a fair argument about endangering fish stocks by the environmentalists putting the populations at risk of being wiped out and hence subsequently destroying the local river ecosystems, I'd have concern, but that's not even the argument here. It's entirely just that anglers believe it's going to be a little harder for them to catch fish, which in itself is merely just an unproven theory they've cooked up amongst themselves.
Because it'll create a reef, the actual natural impact is going to be a massive net benefit, and that's why the environmentalists don't take issue with it.
Yes I'm defending the chip and pin rollout because all evidenec shows that it reduced fraud. The fact that fraud still exists and some luddite grandma on the news was a victim is neither here nor there, she was a victim whatever the system because some people just can't be helped, but most people have seen safer banking because of it, so it's a good thing.
If it showed a matched increase in fraud I'd be with you, but individual anecdotes make good news stories for luddite baby boomers and not much else.
"if it 's bad for the companies to profit off a legal product, it's just as bad for the government to profit off it."
No it's not, because government has to pick up the pieces, the private company doesn't.
Private companies aren't funding the police to deal with alcohol related crime.
Private companies aren't paying for the healthcare of people with lung cancer that are also too poor to pay for it themselves.
The government is, that means as a taxpayer, you are. If the government decides to tax a private company to instead make them pay for the cost of their damage out of their profits, rather than you the citizen pay for their damage out of your hard work, then that's a good thing.
People should be responsible for their actions, that goes for the alcoholic themselves as much as the guy that got rich off of helping them be an alcoholic. The rich business owner shouldn't get to hide behind the shield of his company and reap the benefits whilst shirking the responsibilities. Why should government and tax payers subsidise industries and their owners like that? What have they done to deserve such state aid in getting and staying rich through contributing to problems and expecting everyone else other than themselves to pay for the cleanup of those problems?
And is there any evidence that there was an actual increase in fraud here or are we talking a few anecdotes? because all the evidence I've seen has shown nothing but a marked decrease in fraud.
It sounds more like a story cooked up by whining pensioners who can't deal with change and like to vote UKIP to prove it. I'm sure UKIP would undo chip and pin and take us back to the dark ages of banking. Because things were better back then. Or something.
No Britain hasn't. The transition has been wholly transparent, card fraud has dropped, and consumer protection against credit fraud is as strong as ever - the principle here in the UK is that the whole point of a bank is to keep your money safe, and if the facilities they give you to access your money fail regardless of the reason then they failed in their job.
The only time they can shift the burden onto you is if they can prove you were entirely negligent, and that's been the same whether you were signing or entering a pin. There's no increase in the amount of burden pushed onto the consumer. This remains true even with the drastic increase in the use of contactless we've seen in the last couple of years too, in fact, so much so that the maximum contactless amount per transaction is being increased from £20 to £30. Consumers haven't seen a worrying rise in fraud as a result of it, and the banks haven't either. Everyone seems happy to keep expanding the scheme.
What problems did you think we'd had here in the UK exactly?
So you make a comment, you completely fail to back it up, and you call someone else pathetic?
You know it's probably easier to just admit you made a comment you didn't think through and that was wrong rather than to continuously try and avoid what's obvious to anyone reading - that you can't back up your point - by playing the victim and throwing random and seemingly arbitrary insults (do you actually know what dyslexia is? it would appear not).
Those "prominent" people are also people who have no relation to the field of technology which is where data science has it's focus (precisely because the volumes of data that require new scientific effort can only be handled by computers).
Most journalists couldn't tell you the difference between a neurologist and neurosurgeon either, but it doesn't mean that they're not distinct roles.
A handful of journalists and an old school medical statistician still doesn't exactly provide a compelling list of weight to counter the who's who of technology business and academia. We're talking literally thousands of the best minds in the businesses against a bunch of people in a wholly different business and a tiny handful of dissenters.
Data science is multidisciplinary, it requires you to be a polymath. Any statistician who believes they're a data scientist needs to show they have the pre-requisite knowledge outside of statistics coming from computer science and non-statistical mathematics (i.e. graph theory). Statistics is obviously a key discipline in data science, but it's most definitely not the only discipline (even gweihir recognised this with his mention of CS).
A statistician can analyse a dataset and pull information from it, but they cannot deal with a dataset so large that anything other than bespoke hardware and software setups can handle it (i.e. the petabytes of data CERN produces), to do that, you need data scientists. You may find that data scientists then pass on subsets of that data, or data they have resolved from that data to statisticians to work on, but the statisticians themselves wont have that knowledge to handle the data set, and if they do then they can start calling themselves data scientists because they know more than just statistics, they know statistics and a bunch of other disciplines in enough depth to be actual data scientists.
Long story short, you can be a statistician without being a data scientist, but a data scientist will need statistics and a whole bunch of other things, at that point why is a data scientist just a statistician rather than just a computer scientist, or just a mathematician, or just a low end physicist? You can't just pick one of these fields arbitrarily, they're all as important to the role hence why you need a new term to encompass the required knowledge.
Well that's one of the unfortunate things about being the sort of person who thinks they know better than just about everyone that matters in the industry, you generally wont find arguments in anything you read because you've already decided that you're right and the whole world is wrong. You can't see what's right in front of your eyes because you don't want to.
Instead you now play the victim, and keep deflecting away from the inconvenient fact that you seem unable to expand on why you arbitrarily think sometimes it's okay to call a specialisation a new role, but not other times. I'm willing to accept that you may be right, that maybe you have a good argument, but when you're not willing to explain the conflicts your own comments create then what am I to think other than that you're avoiding doing so simply because you can't do so?
If you have a good justification as to why it's okay to say, separate statisticians from mathematicians, but not data scientists from computer scientists, then I'd genuinely really love to hear it. Similarly I'd really love to hear what you feel the benefits are in going for generic and non-descriptive job titles over job titles that better describe a role, I'd like to know what the benefits are, so please, if you really think I've been unfair on you then go ahead and explain your points further so we can iron out those inconsistencies in your original arguments.
Right, except there's a problem, everywhere and everyone that matters in the world of technology disagrees with you from IBM to Apple, from Facebook to Google, from Microsoft to Oracle, from MIT to Cambridge, from Harvard to Berkley, from Tim Berners Lee to Mark Zuckerberg, from Sandy Pentland to Bill Gates, from Peter Norvig to Larry Page.
So on one hand we have some random guy on Slashdot claiming it doesn't exist, and on the other we have the who's who of technology companies, universities, technologists, professors saying it does.
You'll have to excuse me therefore if I can't help but think that what you're actually saying is "I've no idea what the fuck data science is, so I'm going to pretend it doesn't exist and that it's stupid". Your argument doesn't even make sense, you recognise statistics is a specialisation of mathematics and claim that's okay, but specialisations of other subjects are apparently not, yet you can't elaborate why, or even where or how you drawn the line. You claim it's just statistics, but then statistics doesn't tell us how to gather, store, manage, and work with massive data sets, data sets so large we're on the cutting edge of figuring out how to deal with them, something that requires research, you know, like science.
Well, good luck with that but if you hadn't noticed there's a lot of people making use of it in both positive and negative ways, from large scale healthcare research, to selling us as products, to the NSA profiling us on our data. It's probably not something that you should pretend just doesn't exist, because it kind of has profound implications for our lives today, and going forward.
"On the CS side, Computer Science has not yet started to specialize this strongly."
So where is your arbitrary line drawn out of interest? What would be required for a data scientist to be a data scientist? That's assuming all data involved even has any relevance to comp. sci. What if they're using data collected non-computationally also?
The problem is you obviously like incredibly generic names, and that's great for you, but it makes it much harder for people wanting to advertise for specific roles, or to pay specific salaries.
If someone advertises for a "Developer", I've no idea if they're paying £10k for a minimum wage intern, or £200k for a top of their field specialist. At least with Software Architect or similar I know they're after someone with strong architecture skills and the salary is going to be in the £60k+ range. Sometimes there just isn't room (and most definitely isn't a need) to write out a whole sentence for a job title or skill requirement.
Descriptive job titles are useful, I really just don't see what's wrong with them unless they're so over inflated as to be useless, which again, Data Scientist isn't because it's minimal and wholly descriptive of the skills involved.
I really don't see what problem is being solved in trying to kill of a perfectly correct and perfectly useful job title. The job involves doing science with data, why muddy the waters with terms that are not wholly relevant and describe other things as well?
I'm just struggling to see what the benefit of losing information is by pushing jobs into overly generic undescriptive or only partially descriptive boxes. What's gained by this? why is it a good thing?
But isn't that the same for many other sciences especially relating to medicine for example whereby nearly all of their work is based on statistical analysis of data? I suspect given increased complexity of data sets that we could apply the same logic to many professions. Hell, even the folks at CERN are using wholly statistical methods to determine the likelihood whether their findings really were the Higgs or not, does this mean those physicists are actually just statisticians too?
I think it's naive to think that as humans progress, that new jobs, and hence new titles aren't created. Sure some people are wholly undeserving of such titles and simply use them to over-inflate their egos, but I don't think such a title is invalid. If someone is doing genuine research into large data sets using the scientific method then what exactly is wrong with the description of Data Scientist?
Calling him a Computer Scientist ignores his use of statistics, and calling him a Statistician ignores his knowledge of computing. If we're going to dumb down job titles to be less descriptive we in the technology sector might as well all just be typists. That's a lot of what we do right?
I'm completely against overinflated job titles (like renaming bin men to Waste Disposal Technicians), but in this particular case the whining seems to be wholly unfounded as the job title minimally describes the actual role. It's the simplest yet most descriptive title for the role in question, so what's the problem?
I don't think it's fair to instantly jump to the conclusion that any new technology term or job title is instantly bullshit. This is one of those circumstances where it's a perfectly sensible title describing an increasingly common role in a world where large data sets and analysis of that data has become ever more important to companies in growing their bottom line.
I never used to but they've grown on me in recent years. I think I had to just step back and re-approach it all with a neutral view and a will to give it a chance. Having done that I've found I view them like any other movie now, some are good, some are bad. I loved Avengers Assemble, but thought Winter Soldier was dull. Loved Green Lantern but found Man of Steel a bit boring. Some, like Guardians of the Galaxy you can just enjoy standalone, I enjoyed it because it frankly shared an awful lot of the traits that made the original Star Wars trilogy great.
I've always felt as you do towards super heroes the same towards Star Trek, and Doctor Who also. Given time maybe I'll start to appreciate these too, but whilst I find Star Trek watchable it's never overly excited me because it always felt as you say, once you've seen one episode you've seen them all. Also, as someone who grew up with some of the older iterations of Doctor Who, the modern reincarnation just feels awful in comparison.
But as I discovered with super heroes films, opinions and feelings change. When I came back and started to give them a try again I ended watching pretty much the last 15 years worth of super heroes films in the last 2 years and was kicking myself a bit that I hadn't seen some of them earlier.
So if it's not for you right now, then don't write it off, give it a go now and then when you have time and maybe you'll find they grow on you too and you start to appreciate them, again, maybe I'll find the same with the newest runs of Doctor Who and with Star Trek. I missed Firefly when it came out and never liked Serenity as a result, but having finally watched Firefly last year and Serenity again afterwards I can see why there was so much love for it, in the context of having watched the series the film made far more sense and was far more enjoyable. I'm going to give Battlestar Galactica a go soon and see how I feel about that nowadays.
No, I just fully believe in the phrase "Don't argue with an idiot, they'll just bring you down to their level and win".
The only way to win, is hence not to play.
But just on the rare off chance you are salvageable, I'll leave you with a hint as to why your whole argument is stupid. You reel off indiscretions such as US incursions into Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and so forth as unjustified examples of imperialism. Yet you write off outright annexation of part of a foreign sovereign state (Crimea), military invasion of Eastern Ukraine, Russian incursions into Moldova, Azerbaijan, Syria, Latvia, Estonia, Japan, and Sweden as what, "humanitarian"? Russia just being the good guy?
Hell, just a couple of weeks ago Russia flew a pair of nuclear bombers only a few miles off the coast around almost the entirety of Britain and Ireland with transponders off and no communications. When do you think the last time the UK flew a silent nuclear bomber off the coast of Russia was?
If you can't see the hypocrisy in the entirety of your argument with your desperate primarily US focus then you're beyond hope. You've fallen so far into Putin's propaganda machine that you wouldn't know the truth if it hit you in the face in the form of an aggressive Russian invasion.
Yes, this is really the problem nuclear faces, it suffers from having had successful lobbying hold it to much higher standards that other power sources grossly inflating the costs.
Which wouldn't be a bad thing, if it weren't for the fact that other power sources aren't held to the same standards.
If someone catches cancer because of a nuclear power plant it becomes international headline news and the plant is forced to pay millions for cancer care and in compensation to that person. If someone dies from cancer due to the chemical emissions of coal power plants, well, no one cares, because it happens thousands of times every day across the globe and you have to pay your own treatment costs (or the rest of the tax payers do if you have a socialised healthcare system).
Whilst full costs of everything are born by nuclear, whilst few adverse costs are paid by coal, nuclear can't ever hope to compete. If full externalities were paid in production of coal it'd be one of the least cost effective forms of power generation we have, and would have died off long ago. Nuclear would be cheap in comparison.
The argument is that no one could then afford power, but this is nonsense because we wouldn't have to be paying as much for healthcare (either directly through insurance, or through taxes depending on your nations health regime) because there'd be far fewer cases of fossil fuel burning induced cancer, asthma and so forth racking up the costs of healthcare. The money we saved on healthcare would simply pay for power, with a little left over in our pockets afterwards because nuclear would be net slightly cheaper if compared to cost of coal + full externalities.
So whilst you're right that cost is not currently a good argument for nuclear, that's only because years of lobbying and fear mongering have stacked the odds unfairly against it. Nuclear is cheaper than the likes of coal if you compare like for like in terms of standards that such power generation is held to.
Start making coal burners pay full costs rather than being subsidised by the general public who currently pay all their external costs, which isn't true of nuclear, and nuclear becomes much more cost viable. It's not a coincidence that when nuclear plants are built (such as the UK's new planned plant) that they have to be given tax payer subsidy to compete with the inherent tax payer subsidy that coal gets through avoiding externalities.
Yeah, they also promised not to harm Ukrainian territorial integrity if Ukraine gave up it's nuclear arsenal too.
It turns out that nothing that comes out of the Russian government's mouths is trustworthy.
"my view is not one-sided"
Except it is. Your anti-US rhetoric makes that pretty clear.
Is there a lot the US did wrong last decade? Fuck yes. Has it learnt lessons? Most definitely. Is it still the biggest problem this decade? Definitely not - Russia is clearly the biggest threat to world peace this decade and you're still harping on about last decade's fuck-ups.
"Which is fine, except that now any thief with some cheap equipment can break into keyless cars, clone a key fob within a minute and drive away with it."
Are you sure that's actually true given that car crime has seen massive decline in recent years? Even if true it's obviously not having any negative impact in practice.
I can't tell if you're ignorant, or just Russian, but what? -
"Regarding Crimea, and after looking at what is happening in the east, I fully support Russia's sending in of troops to avert the coup-powers treating the Crimean peoples as "subhumans"."
You realise that's exactly how Russia has treated that Tatars there right by marking crosses on their doors and gates, and disappearing them in the night much like Russia used to do when it ran the USSR?
"Crimea (and Sevastopol) was an autonomous region of Ukraine with a predominantly Russian population (which has been so since Catherine the Great). They chose to secede."
No it hasn't, it's was a primarily Tatar population until post-World War II when the USSR ethnically cleansed them from the region.
When even Chinese media, much more a friend of Russia then the West is even criticising the Russian annexation of Crimea you know it's a fact that it was wholly unjustified. The fact you're trying to justify it tells us one thing, that you only support the Russian point of view, and are wholly against the view of almost the entirety of the rest of the world. That's not balanced or rational, that's called being a Russian puppet. Even Russia's closest allies like Belarus fell strangely silent refusing to fully support Russia's actions despite being wholly dependent on Russian for the existence of the regimes running them. If that isn't a message I don't know what is, how can you have such a naive one sided view unless you only believe Russian media which is wholly contrary to what you're claiming?
"First, you don't hit the target with the EMP device. You detonate the device overhead and let the EMP hit the target."
It makes no difference, you don't need to go for direct hits with shells, landing a nuke a few metres from them is still going to be just as effective as blasting an EMP above them, bonus points for using cluster munitions. In fact, this is exactly the road the Chinese have gone down with their carrier killers - multi-warhead high blast weapons that don't need the precise aim of a shell but offer ample ferocity to take a ship out of battle.
"Third, the goal of winning a battle is to win the battle, not rack up the highest kill count. Disabling your opponents ships takes them out of the battle just as effectively as singing them."
You inadvertently covered why this wasn't really true, hardening on ships regardless of how effective or ineffective means any impact of an EMP is going to still leave a ship largely repairable in relatively short order. That leaves them far more potential to come back and fight (everyone on board is still armed to the teeth and capable) than outright sinking the ship making it unrecoverable, and leaving it's crew clinging on in the sea for dear life, injured, and/or dead.
EMP has become some magical fantasy weapon because too many geeks have seen it sold as such in sci-fi, but in practice there are far cheaper and far easier ways of achieving the same goal more effectively. It has it's niche, as I say, when you want to keep non-electronic infrastructure and the populace largely intact, but for taking a ship out of battle? why when good old explosives do a way better job?
Slashdot Mirror
"I honestly think that "green" technologies will always be significantly more expensive to run and maintain than traditional ones like gas/coal/oil"
This is only because the likes of coal and oil have their actual costs hidden. The health impacts of burning coal are paid for by tax payers in their national insurance tax used to fund the NHS so coal and oil get these defacto tax payer subsidies to max their true cost impact.
Like for like, green power is often cheaper, but it has no ability to mask a large proportion of it's costs and have that masked bill footed by the tax payer.
If government shifted the burden of coal/oil damage onto the companies producing power this way and off of the backs of tax paying citizens we'd already be a nearly wholly green powered country because the true costs of coal/oil generation would make it impossible for power firms to stay in business by generating power using those techniques. They simply cannot survive without tax payer subsidy to pay for their negative consequences.
This is FWIW why nuclear is more expensive than coal and oil too - the stigma around nuclear waste means nuclear power is forced to factor in whole costs. If nuclear could just dump it's waste into the environment as coal and oil do and leave the health effects of that to the tax payer to deal with then it'd be by far the cheapest power generation method.
If you want to find corruption in government funded projects, look to HS2.
It's going to cost 1.5 times as much to build a 300 mile railway and buy a handful of trains as it did to wage every aspect of a 13 year war in Afghanistan performed by UK forces including every soldier transported to and from, every bullet fired, every bomb dropped, every aircraft sortie flown, the running of a base the size of the entire city of Reading in the UK for the entire time, every soldier fed, every firebase built, every road built, ever IED cleared, every project carried out for locals, every medical operation performed, every minute of training of ANA soldiers carried out.
Most public sector projects including this lagoon, including the two new aircraft carriers, including our new nuclear plant, including our wars and so forth look like an absolute bargain in comparison to HS2. The trains alone are going to cost 1.5x as much as a multi-acre aircraft carrier and all it's equipment - HS2 is going to cost 2.5x as much as development and production of a whole new fleet of ICBM wielding nuclear submarines and the ICBMs and warheads to go with them.
Using HS2 as a reference this lagoon project looks basically bribe free judging by the costs put forward.
"First off, you can't shut down a coal power plant and restart it in only five hours. And it will operate at considerably (for values of "considerably" that vary from 10% to 30%) reduced efficiency for some hours after startup"
Why assume we only have one coal plant to handle this in the UK? If you stagger it across plants your point becomes irrelevant. We have a national grid for a reason.
"Secondly, pollution from coal plants are 30%-50% (or so, depending on type of pollutant) higher during the 24 (or so) hours immediately after startup. "
Why even assume we're talking about combining this with dirty old style plants? Why do you think it's not possible to instead combine this with gas? nuclear? even if coal, why not carbon captured coal?
"In other words, that won't work."
Or in other words you've decided to find a few arbitrary excuses why you don't like this idea, without even properly thinking it through or giving it a chance, because new ideas are bad and change is painful. Or something.
Why the fuck do so many people on Slashdot think they're smarter than the actual professionals who create these designs for a living and have already thought through and solved all these problems? Do you think environmentalists would be in favour if it upped pollution and harmed nature? do you think it would have been unveiled if it "wont work"?
I'm sure there are plenty of good reasons why this plan is far from perfect, but you're not providing any.
"Not to mention the environmental impact of this."
Which is?
There's a reason the environmentalists are broadly on side on this one. The reef effect means this is like a newly created marine reserve area and a power plant all rolled into one.
Personally my only real concern with this is that which is coupled with wind power - we seem to be putting more and more of our power generation out to sea. That makes it far more vulnerable to sabotage, and far easier to sabotage. If we ever ended up at war, or if terrorists ever wanted to scupper increasingly large amounts of UK power generation then it's not terribly hard for them to do so.
I think the odds of this are incredibly low, but then, it was only 10 to 20 years ago we all thought in Europe that relying on Russia gas was a perfectly fine thing to do in terms of energy security and now countries like Germany are hamstrung, unable to deal with an aggressor financially because they've made themselves so dependent on them. Obviously things change, so it's worthy of consideration.
Yes, but to be fair the people with concern about fish spawning sites seem to be entirely the angling community.
Now, as much as I respect their enjoyment of the sport, I'm not overly convinced that "Don't do that project, it might kill fish and we want to kill them instead" is really the greatest argument not to do something.
Let's be honest, if even the environmentalist, commercial, and political lobbies are all on side then this is about as good as it gets in terms of agreement. Those anglers are just going to have to go and angle elsewhere.
You're always going to find people who will disagree with any power generation scheme, but the handful of people disagreeing in this case have probably one of the least convincing arguments I've ever seen. Certainly their argument pales compared to the nuclear waste, oil spill, gas explosion, groundwater contamination arguments that all are a little more serious than "We want to be the ones that kill the fish". In fact, I think I'd probably even give more weight to the "wind turbines are a blot on the landscape" argument than that.
If there was a fair argument about endangering fish stocks by the environmentalists putting the populations at risk of being wiped out and hence subsequently destroying the local river ecosystems, I'd have concern, but that's not even the argument here. It's entirely just that anglers believe it's going to be a little harder for them to catch fish, which in itself is merely just an unproven theory they've cooked up amongst themselves.
Because it'll create a reef, the actual natural impact is going to be a massive net benefit, and that's why the environmentalists don't take issue with it.
Yes I'm defending the chip and pin rollout because all evidenec shows that it reduced fraud. The fact that fraud still exists and some luddite grandma on the news was a victim is neither here nor there, she was a victim whatever the system because some people just can't be helped, but most people have seen safer banking because of it, so it's a good thing.
If it showed a matched increase in fraud I'd be with you, but individual anecdotes make good news stories for luddite baby boomers and not much else.
"if it 's bad for the companies to profit off a legal product, it's just as bad for the government to profit off it."
No it's not, because government has to pick up the pieces, the private company doesn't.
Private companies aren't funding the police to deal with alcohol related crime.
Private companies aren't paying for the healthcare of people with lung cancer that are also too poor to pay for it themselves.
The government is, that means as a taxpayer, you are. If the government decides to tax a private company to instead make them pay for the cost of their damage out of their profits, rather than you the citizen pay for their damage out of your hard work, then that's a good thing.
People should be responsible for their actions, that goes for the alcoholic themselves as much as the guy that got rich off of helping them be an alcoholic. The rich business owner shouldn't get to hide behind the shield of his company and reap the benefits whilst shirking the responsibilities. Why should government and tax payers subsidise industries and their owners like that? What have they done to deserve such state aid in getting and staying rich through contributing to problems and expecting everyone else other than themselves to pay for the cleanup of those problems?
And is there any evidence that there was an actual increase in fraud here or are we talking a few anecdotes? because all the evidence I've seen has shown nothing but a marked decrease in fraud.
It sounds more like a story cooked up by whining pensioners who can't deal with change and like to vote UKIP to prove it. I'm sure UKIP would undo chip and pin and take us back to the dark ages of banking. Because things were better back then. Or something.
No Britain hasn't. The transition has been wholly transparent, card fraud has dropped, and consumer protection against credit fraud is as strong as ever - the principle here in the UK is that the whole point of a bank is to keep your money safe, and if the facilities they give you to access your money fail regardless of the reason then they failed in their job.
The only time they can shift the burden onto you is if they can prove you were entirely negligent, and that's been the same whether you were signing or entering a pin. There's no increase in the amount of burden pushed onto the consumer. This remains true even with the drastic increase in the use of contactless we've seen in the last couple of years too, in fact, so much so that the maximum contactless amount per transaction is being increased from £20 to £30. Consumers haven't seen a worrying rise in fraud as a result of it, and the banks haven't either. Everyone seems happy to keep expanding the scheme.
What problems did you think we'd had here in the UK exactly?
So you make a comment, you completely fail to back it up, and you call someone else pathetic?
You know it's probably easier to just admit you made a comment you didn't think through and that was wrong rather than to continuously try and avoid what's obvious to anyone reading - that you can't back up your point - by playing the victim and throwing random and seemingly arbitrary insults (do you actually know what dyslexia is? it would appear not).
I really pity you.
Those "prominent" people are also people who have no relation to the field of technology which is where data science has it's focus (precisely because the volumes of data that require new scientific effort can only be handled by computers).
Most journalists couldn't tell you the difference between a neurologist and neurosurgeon either, but it doesn't mean that they're not distinct roles.
A handful of journalists and an old school medical statistician still doesn't exactly provide a compelling list of weight to counter the who's who of technology business and academia. We're talking literally thousands of the best minds in the businesses against a bunch of people in a wholly different business and a tiny handful of dissenters.
Data science is multidisciplinary, it requires you to be a polymath. Any statistician who believes they're a data scientist needs to show they have the pre-requisite knowledge outside of statistics coming from computer science and non-statistical mathematics (i.e. graph theory). Statistics is obviously a key discipline in data science, but it's most definitely not the only discipline (even gweihir recognised this with his mention of CS).
A statistician can analyse a dataset and pull information from it, but they cannot deal with a dataset so large that anything other than bespoke hardware and software setups can handle it (i.e. the petabytes of data CERN produces), to do that, you need data scientists. You may find that data scientists then pass on subsets of that data, or data they have resolved from that data to statisticians to work on, but the statisticians themselves wont have that knowledge to handle the data set, and if they do then they can start calling themselves data scientists because they know more than just statistics, they know statistics and a bunch of other disciplines in enough depth to be actual data scientists.
Long story short, you can be a statistician without being a data scientist, but a data scientist will need statistics and a whole bunch of other things, at that point why is a data scientist just a statistician rather than just a computer scientist, or just a mathematician, or just a low end physicist? You can't just pick one of these fields arbitrarily, they're all as important to the role hence why you need a new term to encompass the required knowledge.
Well that's one of the unfortunate things about being the sort of person who thinks they know better than just about everyone that matters in the industry, you generally wont find arguments in anything you read because you've already decided that you're right and the whole world is wrong. You can't see what's right in front of your eyes because you don't want to.
Instead you now play the victim, and keep deflecting away from the inconvenient fact that you seem unable to expand on why you arbitrarily think sometimes it's okay to call a specialisation a new role, but not other times. I'm willing to accept that you may be right, that maybe you have a good argument, but when you're not willing to explain the conflicts your own comments create then what am I to think other than that you're avoiding doing so simply because you can't do so?
If you have a good justification as to why it's okay to say, separate statisticians from mathematicians, but not data scientists from computer scientists, then I'd genuinely really love to hear it. Similarly I'd really love to hear what you feel the benefits are in going for generic and non-descriptive job titles over job titles that better describe a role, I'd like to know what the benefits are, so please, if you really think I've been unfair on you then go ahead and explain your points further so we can iron out those inconsistencies in your original arguments.
Right, except there's a problem, everywhere and everyone that matters in the world of technology disagrees with you from IBM to Apple, from Facebook to Google, from Microsoft to Oracle, from MIT to Cambridge, from Harvard to Berkley, from Tim Berners Lee to Mark Zuckerberg, from Sandy Pentland to Bill Gates, from Peter Norvig to Larry Page.
So on one hand we have some random guy on Slashdot claiming it doesn't exist, and on the other we have the who's who of technology companies, universities, technologists, professors saying it does.
You'll have to excuse me therefore if I can't help but think that what you're actually saying is "I've no idea what the fuck data science is, so I'm going to pretend it doesn't exist and that it's stupid". Your argument doesn't even make sense, you recognise statistics is a specialisation of mathematics and claim that's okay, but specialisations of other subjects are apparently not, yet you can't elaborate why, or even where or how you drawn the line. You claim it's just statistics, but then statistics doesn't tell us how to gather, store, manage, and work with massive data sets, data sets so large we're on the cutting edge of figuring out how to deal with them, something that requires research, you know, like science.
Well, good luck with that but if you hadn't noticed there's a lot of people making use of it in both positive and negative ways, from large scale healthcare research, to selling us as products, to the NSA profiling us on our data. It's probably not something that you should pretend just doesn't exist, because it kind of has profound implications for our lives today, and going forward.
"On the CS side, Computer Science has not yet started to specialize this strongly."
So where is your arbitrary line drawn out of interest? What would be required for a data scientist to be a data scientist? That's assuming all data involved even has any relevance to comp. sci. What if they're using data collected non-computationally also?
The problem is you obviously like incredibly generic names, and that's great for you, but it makes it much harder for people wanting to advertise for specific roles, or to pay specific salaries.
If someone advertises for a "Developer", I've no idea if they're paying £10k for a minimum wage intern, or £200k for a top of their field specialist. At least with Software Architect or similar I know they're after someone with strong architecture skills and the salary is going to be in the £60k+ range. Sometimes there just isn't room (and most definitely isn't a need) to write out a whole sentence for a job title or skill requirement.
Descriptive job titles are useful, I really just don't see what's wrong with them unless they're so over inflated as to be useless, which again, Data Scientist isn't because it's minimal and wholly descriptive of the skills involved.
I really don't see what problem is being solved in trying to kill of a perfectly correct and perfectly useful job title. The job involves doing science with data, why muddy the waters with terms that are not wholly relevant and describe other things as well?
I'm just struggling to see what the benefit of losing information is by pushing jobs into overly generic undescriptive or only partially descriptive boxes. What's gained by this? why is it a good thing?
But isn't that the same for many other sciences especially relating to medicine for example whereby nearly all of their work is based on statistical analysis of data? I suspect given increased complexity of data sets that we could apply the same logic to many professions. Hell, even the folks at CERN are using wholly statistical methods to determine the likelihood whether their findings really were the Higgs or not, does this mean those physicists are actually just statisticians too?
I think it's naive to think that as humans progress, that new jobs, and hence new titles aren't created. Sure some people are wholly undeserving of such titles and simply use them to over-inflate their egos, but I don't think such a title is invalid. If someone is doing genuine research into large data sets using the scientific method then what exactly is wrong with the description of Data Scientist?
Calling him a Computer Scientist ignores his use of statistics, and calling him a Statistician ignores his knowledge of computing. If we're going to dumb down job titles to be less descriptive we in the technology sector might as well all just be typists. That's a lot of what we do right?
I'm completely against overinflated job titles (like renaming bin men to Waste Disposal Technicians), but in this particular case the whining seems to be wholly unfounded as the job title minimally describes the actual role. It's the simplest yet most descriptive title for the role in question, so what's the problem?
I don't think it's fair to instantly jump to the conclusion that any new technology term or job title is instantly bullshit. This is one of those circumstances where it's a perfectly sensible title describing an increasingly common role in a world where large data sets and analysis of that data has become ever more important to companies in growing their bottom line.
I never used to but they've grown on me in recent years. I think I had to just step back and re-approach it all with a neutral view and a will to give it a chance. Having done that I've found I view them like any other movie now, some are good, some are bad. I loved Avengers Assemble, but thought Winter Soldier was dull. Loved Green Lantern but found Man of Steel a bit boring. Some, like Guardians of the Galaxy you can just enjoy standalone, I enjoyed it because it frankly shared an awful lot of the traits that made the original Star Wars trilogy great.
I've always felt as you do towards super heroes the same towards Star Trek, and Doctor Who also. Given time maybe I'll start to appreciate these too, but whilst I find Star Trek watchable it's never overly excited me because it always felt as you say, once you've seen one episode you've seen them all. Also, as someone who grew up with some of the older iterations of Doctor Who, the modern reincarnation just feels awful in comparison.
But as I discovered with super heroes films, opinions and feelings change. When I came back and started to give them a try again I ended watching pretty much the last 15 years worth of super heroes films in the last 2 years and was kicking myself a bit that I hadn't seen some of them earlier.
So if it's not for you right now, then don't write it off, give it a go now and then when you have time and maybe you'll find they grow on you too and you start to appreciate them, again, maybe I'll find the same with the newest runs of Doctor Who and with Star Trek. I missed Firefly when it came out and never liked Serenity as a result, but having finally watched Firefly last year and Serenity again afterwards I can see why there was so much love for it, in the context of having watched the series the film made far more sense and was far more enjoyable. I'm going to give Battlestar Galactica a go soon and see how I feel about that nowadays.
No, I just fully believe in the phrase "Don't argue with an idiot, they'll just bring you down to their level and win".
The only way to win, is hence not to play.
But just on the rare off chance you are salvageable, I'll leave you with a hint as to why your whole argument is stupid. You reel off indiscretions such as US incursions into Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and so forth as unjustified examples of imperialism. Yet you write off outright annexation of part of a foreign sovereign state (Crimea), military invasion of Eastern Ukraine, Russian incursions into Moldova, Azerbaijan, Syria, Latvia, Estonia, Japan, and Sweden as what, "humanitarian"? Russia just being the good guy?
Hell, just a couple of weeks ago Russia flew a pair of nuclear bombers only a few miles off the coast around almost the entirety of Britain and Ireland with transponders off and no communications. When do you think the last time the UK flew a silent nuclear bomber off the coast of Russia was?
If you can't see the hypocrisy in the entirety of your argument with your desperate primarily US focus then you're beyond hope. You've fallen so far into Putin's propaganda machine that you wouldn't know the truth if it hit you in the face in the form of an aggressive Russian invasion.
Yes, this is really the problem nuclear faces, it suffers from having had successful lobbying hold it to much higher standards that other power sources grossly inflating the costs.
Which wouldn't be a bad thing, if it weren't for the fact that other power sources aren't held to the same standards.
If someone catches cancer because of a nuclear power plant it becomes international headline news and the plant is forced to pay millions for cancer care and in compensation to that person. If someone dies from cancer due to the chemical emissions of coal power plants, well, no one cares, because it happens thousands of times every day across the globe and you have to pay your own treatment costs (or the rest of the tax payers do if you have a socialised healthcare system).
Whilst full costs of everything are born by nuclear, whilst few adverse costs are paid by coal, nuclear can't ever hope to compete. If full externalities were paid in production of coal it'd be one of the least cost effective forms of power generation we have, and would have died off long ago. Nuclear would be cheap in comparison.
The argument is that no one could then afford power, but this is nonsense because we wouldn't have to be paying as much for healthcare (either directly through insurance, or through taxes depending on your nations health regime) because there'd be far fewer cases of fossil fuel burning induced cancer, asthma and so forth racking up the costs of healthcare. The money we saved on healthcare would simply pay for power, with a little left over in our pockets afterwards because nuclear would be net slightly cheaper if compared to cost of coal + full externalities.
So whilst you're right that cost is not currently a good argument for nuclear, that's only because years of lobbying and fear mongering have stacked the odds unfairly against it. Nuclear is cheaper than the likes of coal if you compare like for like in terms of standards that such power generation is held to.
Start making coal burners pay full costs rather than being subsidised by the general public who currently pay all their external costs, which isn't true of nuclear, and nuclear becomes much more cost viable. It's not a coincidence that when nuclear plants are built (such as the UK's new planned plant) that they have to be given tax payer subsidy to compete with the inherent tax payer subsidy that coal gets through avoiding externalities.
Alright Putin, calm down. It's pretty obvious you've been reading too much RT.
"You do realize that the USSR apologized?"
Yeah, they also promised not to harm Ukrainian territorial integrity if Ukraine gave up it's nuclear arsenal too.
It turns out that nothing that comes out of the Russian government's mouths is trustworthy.
"my view is not one-sided"
Except it is. Your anti-US rhetoric makes that pretty clear.
Is there a lot the US did wrong last decade? Fuck yes. Has it learnt lessons? Most definitely. Is it still the biggest problem this decade? Definitely not - Russia is clearly the biggest threat to world peace this decade and you're still harping on about last decade's fuck-ups.
"Which is fine, except that now any thief with some cheap equipment can break into keyless cars, clone a key fob within a minute and drive away with it."
Are you sure that's actually true given that car crime has seen massive decline in recent years? Even if true it's obviously not having any negative impact in practice.
I can't tell if you're ignorant, or just Russian, but what? -
"Regarding Crimea, and after looking at what is happening in the east, I fully support Russia's sending in of troops to avert the coup-powers treating the Crimean peoples as "subhumans"."
You realise that's exactly how Russia has treated that Tatars there right by marking crosses on their doors and gates, and disappearing them in the night much like Russia used to do when it ran the USSR?
"Crimea (and Sevastopol) was an autonomous region of Ukraine with a predominantly Russian population (which has been so since Catherine the Great). They chose to secede."
No it hasn't, it's was a primarily Tatar population until post-World War II when the USSR ethnically cleansed them from the region.
When even Chinese media, much more a friend of Russia then the West is even criticising the Russian annexation of Crimea you know it's a fact that it was wholly unjustified. The fact you're trying to justify it tells us one thing, that you only support the Russian point of view, and are wholly against the view of almost the entirety of the rest of the world. That's not balanced or rational, that's called being a Russian puppet. Even Russia's closest allies like Belarus fell strangely silent refusing to fully support Russia's actions despite being wholly dependent on Russian for the existence of the regimes running them. If that isn't a message I don't know what is, how can you have such a naive one sided view unless you only believe Russian media which is wholly contrary to what you're claiming?
Right, and I want a Unicorn, but thankfully we can't have all the things we want.
Oh god, I'm going to have to stop typing on my phone today, that's two embarassing auto correct fails in the space of as many hours :)
"First, you don't hit the target with the EMP device. You detonate the device overhead and let the EMP hit the target."
It makes no difference, you don't need to go for direct hits with shells, landing a nuke a few metres from them is still going to be just as effective as blasting an EMP above them, bonus points for using cluster munitions. In fact, this is exactly the road the Chinese have gone down with their carrier killers - multi-warhead high blast weapons that don't need the precise aim of a shell but offer ample ferocity to take a ship out of battle.
"Third, the goal of winning a battle is to win the battle, not rack up the highest kill count. Disabling your opponents ships takes them out of the battle just as effectively as singing them."
You inadvertently covered why this wasn't really true, hardening on ships regardless of how effective or ineffective means any impact of an EMP is going to still leave a ship largely repairable in relatively short order. That leaves them far more potential to come back and fight (everyone on board is still armed to the teeth and capable) than outright sinking the ship making it unrecoverable, and leaving it's crew clinging on in the sea for dear life, injured, and/or dead.
EMP has become some magical fantasy weapon because too many geeks have seen it sold as such in sci-fi, but in practice there are far cheaper and far easier ways of achieving the same goal more effectively. It has it's niche, as I say, when you want to keep non-electronic infrastructure and the populace largely intact, but for taking a ship out of battle? why when good old explosives do a way better job?