The song in question is I Wanna Be Your Man, written by Lennon and McCartney. The Rolling Stones released it as a single in 1963, before the Beatles did. It was their second single, reaching number 12 on the UK charts. The Stones' first single reached number 21, so I Wanna Be Your Man could be considered their first "hit" if you think of "hit" as meaning "top 20". The song was also the B side of the first single the Stones released in the USA.
Germany has one of the most complicated voting systems in the world
Please say more! Americans often say they need machines to do the counting because they directly elect so many officials -- not just the President but senators, sheriffs, judges, and more -- which makes the counting process very complicated. How complicated is it in Germany?
When it finally happens it will be just another argument for the electronic chip identity cards that the UK government has been wanting to introduce.
The government, and businesses, will say: it would be so much simpler and more efficient if we had a unified ID standard. After all, you need to show ID to get a phone <strawman>(and Internet access, and airline, train, and coach tickets, and to vote, and to get health care or buy medicines at a pharmacy, and to stay at a hotel)</strawman> and everyone needs that!
The first people to get these ID cards, starting next month, will be foreign students and foreign spouses. Gradually they will be rolled out to more categories of foreigners.
No. The term "British subject" is pretty much obsolete in law since 1983. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_subject)
(There are a few small exceptions for some classes of people who used to be British subjects and are entitled to keep that status if they hold no citizenship of any country, but no-one can now become a subject, so once the people who still fall in this category are gone, there will be no more subjects.)
Feynman was a pain in the ass to administrators and bureaucrats, I can certainly imagine petty bureaucrats passing up a student potential-Feynman in order to make their own lives easier. (Before Nobel-worthiness is proven, of course. Once you're a proven genius then you can be as eccentric as you want and people will make allowances. They couldn't kick Feynman out of Los Alamos for safe-cracking, but a non-famous student picking the lock on the Dean's office...?)
> uses phrases like "very high confidence" and "very likely".
No it doesn't. It states definitely and unambiguously (at least in the summary): "...have increased markedly...".
I guess you are quoting from page 5. On that same page you will also find, for example, "There is very high confidence that the net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming." (Italics in the original) So yes, the Summary for Policymakers contains that sort of language.
Regarding the availability of supporting facts and data, remember that when you are reading the Summary for Policymakers, you're just reading a summary. It's like reading the abstract of a journal article: you don't read an abstract and think, these guys have no data, you go on to read the paper if you want the details. Or to follow up on the code analogy, if all you look at are the use cases, you shouldn't be surprised if what you read doesn't compile. The SPM is a summary for politicians who don't want all of the data. If you want all of the data and the reasoning, you can go beyond the Summary to read the working group reports. The working group reports do include complete references in exactly the form that you are expecting; the references include refereed journals and other reputable sources.
The appendices of the synthesis report and the working group reports list the authors, contributors, and reviewers, with their nationalities and organizational affiliations. Authors, contributors, and reviewers are also named at the beginnings of the chapters of the working group reports. So it's easy to at least see who contributed to what parts of the reports.
The IPCC is an independent scientific panel with hundreds of experts in the relevant sciences, organised as an international project by governments to investigate the phenomenon of climate change. They have sometimes been accused of watering down their findings and presenting less severe consequences than the evidence suggests because of pressures from governments, but that's the only serious charge of bias that I am aware of that has ever been brought. Most of the scientists who have examined their work -- and their work undergoes *intense* scrutiny -- thinks that their analysis is good. That includes the Nobel Prize committee. What bias do *you* think they have?
No, the IPCC defines those terms carefully. They use everyday language like "very likely" so that their reports can be read and understood by non-statisticians, but they have defined specific confidence intervals for these terms. Details are given in the working group reports but for example "the following likelihood ranges are used to express the assessed probability of occurrence: virtually certain >99%; extremely likely >95%; very likely >90%; likely >66%; more likely than not > 50%; about as likely as not 33% to 66%; unlikely 33%; very unlikely 10%; extremely unlikely 5%; exceptionally unlikely 1%." (http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr.pdf, p. 27)
They use phrases like "it suggests", and "gives support to" rather than phrases like "statistically significant".
Actually, the Fourth Assessment Report produced in 2007 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a report with several hundred scientific contributors and co-authors, uses phrases like "very high confidence" and "very likely".
"There is very high confidence that the global average net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming" (p. 37)
"Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG concentrations" (p. 39)
That's like saying you locked your buddy alone in a room for a while and he came out fine, so solitary confinement isn't so bad.
I suspect you probably didn't do it right (where did you learn torture techniques?) but even if you did, there is a world of difference between what you did -- or what soldiers do when they train each other in how to resist torture by doing this to each other -- and a real torture situation. In your case, or in training, you did this with close, trusted buddies, you did it once, and you were certain that your buddies were not in fact trying to kill you. In real torture, people are tortured by sworn and brutal enemies, repeatedly and unendingly in many different ways, with plenty of softening-up beforehand, and most importantly, they know that they could in fact be killed at any moment and no-one in the outside world would know. The victim of waterboarding both knows that he could die at any moment, and feels as if he is about to die.
If you read the fine article you will discover that the helium in this airship exactly compensates for the weight of the vehicle, i.e. the tare weight, and uses propellers to lift the cargo (and to provide thrust). For most vehicles (anything bigger than a bicycle, I guess) the vehicle weighs more than the payload and most of the output of the engine has to go towards moving the vehicle rather than the payload. Here, the vehicle effectively weighs nothing and the entire output of the engine can be used to lift the payload.
The problem you've identified is similar to the spam problem: I could not only annoy people, but cost them money by sending them large unsolicited emails.
A solution for this would be to charge for traffic, but charge the broadcasters, not the consumers. Home users would pay nothing for bytes received, but would be charged for every byte they send -- which is negligible for most home users but would cost prolific file-sharers and people running web sites on their home machines. (As a side effect, this would tend to discourage home file sharing.)
Large web-based businesses would see their costs go up, and those costs would be passed on to the consumer -- the price of downloading music from iTunes would increase, and Apple would pay their ISP, which would use that money to keep their network up, instead of home users paying the ISP themselves.
Interesting comment. I think I know part of the answer: sexual reproduction allows mixing of genes in different combinations and produces much greater variability than just copying the same set of genes and waiting for a random mutation, and it is known that a a result sexually-reproducing species evolve faster than asexually-reproducing species like bateria. So what takes 50,000 generations of bacteria might be expected to happen a lot more quickly in mammals. Consider how many traits you can readily see that are different between a human and its offspring in only *one* generation!
Another part of the answer is that trying the experiment 12 times doesn't mean it takes 12 times as long. The experimental bacteria tried the experiment 12 times in parallel by breeding in dish number 1, dish number 2, dish number 3, and so on. The primates that you're thinking of also tried the experiment multiple times in parallel: one group living in valley number 1, another group in valley number 2, another in valley number 3, and so on.
All of you who are advising kdawson to say no, pause for a moment and think of it from the other point of view. What if *you* were the customer, and you had hired a company to provide some data management service for you? Wouldn't you feel justified in demanding full and unrestricted access to your own data? If your service provider refused, how long would it take you to start getting quotes from competing providers?
The customer owns the data and should have whatever level of access they want. Your job as custodian and manager of that data is to make that happen, using whatever reasonable means are necessary to enable access while ensuring that there is no risk of damaging the service, including training the customer if necessary as well as the other technical solutions people have suggested. But don't say no.
(I am in this situation personally, as the customer, and the service provider in my case would have lost us as a customer long ago if it weren't for some higher-level business alliance factors that keep us locked in.)
Oh, I agree it's beancounter nonsense. Unfortunately when the measure of corporate success is stock market valuation, it's the beancounters who are the judges.
Unfortunately, selling services is hard work (much harder than selling packaged products) so to make money doing that you have to keep putting out continuous effort to provide those services. To make money selling proprietary software, you put in all the work up front in the development stage, then coast along (relatively speaking) with much less continuous effort. I suspect that over the long term, the second model is more profitable for the investor. Also, the proprietary-software model has the bookkeeping advantage of creating a more substantial asset on the balance sheet (inventory is worth more than a customer list).
Jesus doesn't appear in Hindu scriptures, but many Hindus are quite happy to accept Jesus as a divine avatar or incarnation of Vishnu -- one of many such avatars, of course.
But all domesticated animals that we see today are not "natural", they have been selected for characteristics that humans want. The ancestor of the sheep had a sensible (from the sheep's perspective) amount of wool on it before humans domesticated them and started breeding them to be more woolly. (Similarly, wild ancestors of cows had reasonable-sized udders sufficient to feed their calves, but modern milk cows produce huge amounts of milk, and need to be milked at least twice a day.)
So what you're saying is that instead of the headline saying "Open Source Software Costing Vendors $60 Billion", it should say, "Open Source Software Increasing Profits by $60 Billion Across a Wide Range of Industries"
Slashdot Mirror
The song in question is I Wanna Be Your Man, written by Lennon and McCartney. The Rolling Stones released it as a single in 1963, before the Beatles did. It was their second single, reaching number 12 on the UK charts. The Stones' first single reached number 21, so I Wanna Be Your Man could be considered their first "hit" if you think of "hit" as meaning "top 20". The song was also the B side of the first single the Stones released in the USA.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rolling_Stones_discography#Singles for more music trivia.
Germany has one of the most complicated voting systems in the world
Please say more! Americans often say they need machines to do the counting because they directly elect so many officials -- not just the President but senators, sheriffs, judges, and more -- which makes the counting process very complicated. How complicated is it in Germany?
a company like McDonalds will now be forced to register "mcdonalds.[every possible alphanumeric string]"
I suspect this will actually force them to register "*.mcdonalds" as a TLD. And likewise with other big companies.
When it finally happens it will be just another argument for the electronic chip identity cards that the UK government has been wanting to introduce.
The government, and businesses, will say: it would be so much simpler and more efficient if we had a unified ID standard. After all, you need to show ID to get a phone <strawman>(and Internet access, and airline, train, and coach tickets, and to vote, and to get health care or buy medicines at a pharmacy, and to stay at a hotel)</strawman> and everyone needs that!
The first people to get these ID cards, starting next month, will be foreign students and foreign spouses. Gradually they will be rolled out to more categories of foreigners.
Plus, people keep insisting on having windows to look out of.
No. The term "British subject" is pretty much obsolete in law since 1983. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_subject)
(There are a few small exceptions for some classes of people who used to be British subjects and are entitled to keep that status if they hold no citizenship of any country, but no-one can now become a subject, so once the people who still fall in this category are gone, there will be no more subjects.)
I want to know what a limited-time strike is supposed to achieve.
It's supposed to attract news media attention and publicize the issue. I imagine this worked better than a dull press release about patent reform.
Feynman was a pain in the ass to administrators and bureaucrats, I can certainly imagine petty bureaucrats passing up a student potential-Feynman in order to make their own lives easier. (Before Nobel-worthiness is proven, of course. Once you're a proven genius then you can be as eccentric as you want and people will make allowances. They couldn't kick Feynman out of Los Alamos for safe-cracking, but a non-famous student picking the lock on the Dean's office...?)
Read the news, folks! Not only is it far from proven, there are other theories that are a lot more likely.
[citation needed]
> uses phrases like "very high confidence" and "very likely".
No it doesn't. It states definitely and unambiguously (at least in the summary): "...have increased markedly...".
I guess you are quoting from page 5. On that same page you will also find, for example, "There is very high confidence that the net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming." (Italics in the original) So yes, the Summary for Policymakers contains that sort of language.
Regarding the availability of supporting facts and data, remember that when you are reading the Summary for Policymakers, you're just reading a summary. It's like reading the abstract of a journal article: you don't read an abstract and think, these guys have no data, you go on to read the paper if you want the details. Or to follow up on the code analogy, if all you look at are the use cases, you shouldn't be surprised if what you read doesn't compile. The SPM is a summary for politicians who don't want all of the data. If you want all of the data and the reasoning, you can go beyond the Summary to read the working group reports. The working group reports do include complete references in exactly the form that you are expecting; the references include refereed journals and other reputable sources.
The appendices of the synthesis report and the working group reports list the authors, contributors, and reviewers, with their nationalities and organizational affiliations. Authors, contributors, and reviewers are also named at the beginnings of the chapters of the working group reports. So it's easy to at least see who contributed to what parts of the reports.
The IPCC is an independent scientific panel with hundreds of experts in the relevant sciences, organised as an international project by governments to investigate the phenomenon of climate change. They have sometimes been accused of watering down their findings and presenting less severe consequences than the evidence suggests because of pressures from governments, but that's the only serious charge of bias that I am aware of that has ever been brought. Most of the scientists who have examined their work -- and their work undergoes *intense* scrutiny -- thinks that their analysis is good. That includes the Nobel Prize committee. What bias do *you* think they have?
No, the IPCC defines those terms carefully. They use everyday language like "very likely" so that their reports can be read and understood by non-statisticians, but they have defined specific confidence intervals for these terms. Details are given in the working group reports but for example "the following likelihood ranges are used to express the assessed probability of occurrence: virtually certain >99%; extremely likely >95%; very likely >90%; likely >66%; more likely than not > 50%; about as likely as not 33% to 66%; unlikely 33%; very unlikely 10%; extremely unlikely 5%; exceptionally unlikely 1%." (http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr.pdf, p. 27)
They use phrases like "it suggests", and "gives support to" rather than phrases like "statistically significant".
Actually, the Fourth Assessment Report produced in 2007 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a report with several hundred scientific contributors and co-authors, uses phrases like "very high confidence" and "very likely".
"There is very high confidence that the global average net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming" (p. 37)
"Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG concentrations" (p. 39)
Are you sure it's an *unintended* consequence?
That's like saying you locked your buddy alone in a room for a while and he came out fine, so solitary confinement isn't so bad.
I suspect you probably didn't do it right (where did you learn torture techniques?) but even if you did, there is a world of difference between what you did -- or what soldiers do when they train each other in how to resist torture by doing this to each other -- and a real torture situation. In your case, or in training, you did this with close, trusted buddies, you did it once, and you were certain that your buddies were not in fact trying to kill you. In real torture, people are tortured by sworn and brutal enemies, repeatedly and unendingly in many different ways, with plenty of softening-up beforehand, and most importantly, they know that they could in fact be killed at any moment and no-one in the outside world would know. The victim of waterboarding both knows that he could die at any moment, and feels as if he is about to die.
If you read the fine article you will discover that the helium in this airship exactly compensates for the weight of the vehicle, i.e. the tare weight, and uses propellers to lift the cargo (and to provide thrust). For most vehicles (anything bigger than a bicycle, I guess) the vehicle weighs more than the payload and most of the output of the engine has to go towards moving the vehicle rather than the payload. Here, the vehicle effectively weighs nothing and the entire output of the engine can be used to lift the payload.
The problem you've identified is similar to the spam problem: I could not only annoy people, but cost them money by sending them large unsolicited emails.
A solution for this would be to charge for traffic, but charge the broadcasters, not the consumers. Home users would pay nothing for bytes received, but would be charged for every byte they send -- which is negligible for most home users but would cost prolific file-sharers and people running web sites on their home machines. (As a side effect, this would tend to discourage home file sharing.)
Large web-based businesses would see their costs go up, and those costs would be passed on to the consumer -- the price of downloading music from iTunes would increase, and Apple would pay their ISP, which would use that money to keep their network up, instead of home users paying the ISP themselves.
Interesting comment. I think I know part of the answer: sexual reproduction allows mixing of genes in different combinations and produces much greater variability than just copying the same set of genes and waiting for a random mutation, and it is known that a a result sexually-reproducing species evolve faster than asexually-reproducing species like bateria. So what takes 50,000 generations of bacteria might be expected to happen a lot more quickly in mammals. Consider how many traits you can readily see that are different between a human and its offspring in only *one* generation!
Another part of the answer is that trying the experiment 12 times doesn't mean it takes 12 times as long. The experimental bacteria tried the experiment 12 times in parallel by breeding in dish number 1, dish number 2, dish number 3, and so on. The primates that you're thinking of also tried the experiment multiple times in parallel: one group living in valley number 1, another group in valley number 2, another in valley number 3, and so on.
All of you who are advising kdawson to say no, pause for a moment and think of it from the other point of view. What if *you* were the customer, and you had hired a company to provide some data management service for you? Wouldn't you feel justified in demanding full and unrestricted access to your own data? If your service provider refused, how long would it take you to start getting quotes from competing providers?
The customer owns the data and should have whatever level of access they want. Your job as custodian and manager of that data is to make that happen, using whatever reasonable means are necessary to enable access while ensuring that there is no risk of damaging the service, including training the customer if necessary as well as the other technical solutions people have suggested. But don't say no.
(I am in this situation personally, as the customer, and the service provider in my case would have lost us as a customer long ago if it weren't for some higher-level business alliance factors that keep us locked in.)
"Solve the IRA problem by replacing it with a problem in the middle east".
Ah, is there anything outsourcing can't fix?
Oh, I agree it's beancounter nonsense. Unfortunately when the measure of corporate success is stock market valuation, it's the beancounters who are the judges.
Unfortunately, selling services is hard work (much harder than selling packaged products) so to make money doing that you have to keep putting out continuous effort to provide those services. To make money selling proprietary software, you put in all the work up front in the development stage, then coast along (relatively speaking) with much less continuous effort. I suspect that over the long term, the second model is more profitable for the investor. Also, the proprietary-software model has the bookkeeping advantage of creating a more substantial asset on the balance sheet (inventory is worth more than a customer list).
Jesus doesn't appear in Hindu scriptures, but many Hindus are quite happy to accept Jesus as a divine avatar or incarnation of Vishnu -- one of many such avatars, of course.
But all domesticated animals that we see today are not "natural", they have been selected for characteristics that humans want. The ancestor of the sheep had a sensible (from the sheep's perspective) amount of wool on it before humans domesticated them and started breeding them to be more woolly. (Similarly, wild ancestors of cows had reasonable-sized udders sufficient to feed their calves, but modern milk cows produce huge amounts of milk, and need to be milked at least twice a day.)
So what you're saying is that instead of the headline saying "Open Source Software Costing Vendors $60 Billion", it should say, "Open Source Software Increasing Profits by $60 Billion Across a Wide Range of Industries"