I find it quite interesting comparing the UK to the US in this respect - they are quite the opposite of eachother.
In the UK we have the Labour party (the mainstream left wing party) tearing itself apart over doctrinal and ideological disagreements (symbolised by its current leader who is fighting for his survival this evening, but running much deeper, and largely going back to the days of Tony Blair), whereas the Conservatives have had their leader, PM Cameron, resign and they have reasonably quietly and peacefully selected a new leader behind which the whole party has unified without much noticeable dissent.
In 1915 when he publish GR there was no QM. There was his explanation of the photoelectric effect, which suggested that light was absorbed in discreet quanta when being shone on a metal, and there were some early theories of wave-particle duality, but there was no proper theory that he could incorporate into his GR.
He published GR a year before Bohr publish his quantised model of the electron in the atom, and 10 years before Heisenberg and Shrodinger published their respective QM theories.
I've been tracking the GBP EUR rate all day - and it is only a few percent down at the end of the day from where it was a couple of weeks ago. It was up most of this week compared to the past three month average (it pushed as high as £1 = €1.31 at one point, which is much higher than it has been all year).
It has been hovering around £1 = €1.27 for months, and today it was around £1 = €1.24. Hardly a collapse.
It is worse against the dollar, but again barely more than the sort of movement you see month to month.
Similarly, the FTSE 100 hardly collapsed as reported. It dropped around 600 points as trading opened, but by the end of the day it was only around 2-3% down, and was therefore back to the level it was at around 3 weeks ago.
The Lords can veto any act of Parliament, but them Parliament can just use the Parliament Act to force the legislation through anyway. both houses know this, and so the HoL really is just an advisory body.
In practice, their main purpose is really sending legislation back to the Commons for another reading, and causing PR trouble for the government in doing so (e.g. the Tax Credits issue, where is got through the Commons due to the Labour party's neutral position, but the Lords sent it back and causes such a press scandal that the Govt. dropped it).
Here's the thing I don't get about breaking the encryption on messages.... How do you recognise that you have done it?
Let's say that I take my message, which is written in English in ASCII. I then encrypt this. So to an observer it looks like random noise. I then encrypt this a second time.
Anyone breaking the second, exterior encryption, even if they do it perfectly, all they see is the random noise of the first, interior encryption.
How do they know they have successfully broken the encryption?
If they force this to become abandonware, or remove the need from a license, then you are setting the company's old software up in direct competition to their new software. Many people who would otherwise have paid good money for their new software (presumably seeing that the benefit it gives them is greater than the purchase costs) might now choose to make do with the older software which they can now get for free.
It is not fair to force the company into this position, but more importantly it will cause some companies to reconsider their decision to invest time and money in creating such types of software at all, if the risk is that they end up forced into competition with themselves.
It might be that you are happy with this trade-off, but one should be aware of the costs of such a decision.
Thanks for the reply David. So that I understand correctly, is it also the case that you have a choice of providers to purchase your electricity from, at a range of service levels and prices?
The argument I was trying to make is that natural monopolies (such as internet provision) can be sometimes overcome by separating the infrastructure from the provision of service on that infrastructure. I'm not sure I am smart enough to see how this works for electricity provision.
I don't necessarily blame the politicians. Ultimately their job is to keep winning elections. I don't mean to be cynical by saying that, but fundamentally they can have all the ethics and principles they want but if they don't win elections they are out.
Voting against a bill like this leaves them very exposed to attack from the 'law and order' contingent. Voting for it does not leave them very exposed - in the UK and the USA the online freedoms argument does not poll highly in either raw numbers or intensity.
Fundamentally they know that voting against this is likely to lose them more votes than it wins. For most of them this isn't a matter of life or death or a matter of principle, so the electoral argument wins.
I like the basic idea of having an independent house to scrutinise and approve/reject legislation from the commons. It is the same idea as he US senate, except the Senate to a certain extent has the same motives and incentives as the House.
I would largely opposed to an elected HoL. As far as I can imagine it would, after the first couple of elections, reform along party lines and become a copy of the Commons and thus lose all of its independence.
I find the appointment system to the Lords to be problematic, and I think a better system for entering the house should be thought up, but whatever that system it should be completely different from the party political electoral system used in the commons.
Sounds like a reasonable way to deal with the natural monopoly problem.
I worry though that US politics being what it is, it would be hard to fully regulate the Physical Network company. To overcome the monopoly issue, it really has to sell the bandwidth at an equal deal to all buyers. If they start doing high volume deals to larger buyers, for example, or tie-ins with other services that only large companies can finance, then the natural monopoly problem is not solved.
Forgive my ignorance of US politics - it feels to me like this would not be possible on the federal level, but how likely is it on the state level?
For comparison, the UK has a system whereby the infrastructure is owned by a single company - in our case Openreach, which is a division of British Telecom (who used to be the nationalised public telecoms company, but are a private company for a couple of decades now). Openreach are highly regulated and must offer access to the infrastructure to any company that wants it at regulated prices.
Then, any old private company can offer internet access on this public infrastructure without having to provide their own cables, They are free to do so if they want - I think Sky and Virgin do their own infrastructure in part.
This seems to allow access enough to allow lots of competition at both a national and local level - I get my internet from a local company who operate in my city only (it's a lot more expensive, but they have better service and no caps and allow me to run servers on my DSL line) and it goes down exactly the same cables as if I bought it from Sky or BT.
Productivity is not a measure of how hard someone works.
It is a measure of how much value their work generates (usually measured in units of currency) in a given time period.
If someone works in a factory making those infamous widgets, and they use crappy tools to do so they might not make many widgets per hours, or the widgets they do make might be low quality and so fetch a low price.
Give the person better tools (or alternatively, more and better training) and they can produce more or better widgets, and so produce more value per hour worked.
People in the poorest countries of the world tend to work very hard, but their labour does not tend to produce results that are valued very high (again, in monetary terms).
If we want them to be better off, then finding ways of making them more productive is essential.
It really isn't a question of training or intelligence.
If they (and by they I mean the various jihadist organistations who are taken to threaten the western world) wanted to attack us it would be trivially easy. Attacks similar to the Paris attacks of November last year take almost no planning or technology or organisation, all they take is a few (relatively) easy to acquire weapons and people willing to die.
If it is true that there are scores of terrorists ready to attack the west then we would see these types of attacks regularly. Anyone with even a basic understanding of human psychology would have launch a second Paris or Brussels attacks a few days after the first, to maximise the fear and the reaction.
But this doesn't happen. The idea that terrorism is threat to any country in Europe or North America does not make sense. It is not hard for them to hit us, yet they don't.
Clearly this argument does not hold true in various other parts of the world (middle east, south-east Asia, etc.) where non-military conflict is a regular occurrence, but the flavour of those tend to be different (often between different religious sects, rather than between different political organisations).
Sugar in the UK (my motherland) is typically sold in bags of a kilogram, approx. 2 pounds. You can also buy larger and smaller packs, but most converge around 1kg.
Coffee (ground, for machines, not instant) tends to be sold in smaller packs, maybe 1 pound or so. I have never seen a 5 pound (2.5kg) pack of coffee for sale in Britain.
I suspect that part of the observed trend in smaller sizes is that people tend to shop more often and buy less each time. There are more shops, more accessible to people, and so they don't so much do the big fortnightly shop, but do a few smaller trips each week.
I wonder if this is also true of the USA, given the huge geography involved in a lot of it?
In south east England, I pay at home around £40 per month (approx. $55 USD) for a 12mbps DSL line (this includes the phone line).
At work I pay around £60 (~$85 USD) for a 80mbps fibre optic line (not available at home, even though I live in a city centre and work is in the suburbs).
(both lines are uncapped, and no ports are filtered - I can and do run my own servers on them)
The USA internet market sound terrible. But then I suppose the US is quite big compared to Britain, and the investment costs are not comparable. I know that were you in northern Scotland you might have reason to complain.
What sort of numbers or records or documents could there possibly be, given the nature of the claims being made? You're not making a realistic claim.
The nature of the claims being made are, almost by definition, anecdotal - that people who were around at the time saw these things happening: that a site which was host to several thousand of influential tech insiders were influential in promoting a new browser and associated technologies.
The notion that you can discredit any claim by shouting "show me a link that proves it" is foolish.
All of what you say is fine, and I don't want to argue against it. But it does lead to a philosophical issue, specifically one of epistemology:
It is generally accepted that for something to be scientific it should propose a model for how a particular physical system works (or set of related systems), and this model should make unique predictions about future events, and these events can be tested by experiment.
This is clearly true for physics and chemistry.
It is basically true for biology - not every detail can be predicted, but a model can be made and unique predictions derived and these predictions can be tested.
Social sciences have a much looser claim - economics makes some claims that can be tested experimentally (NAIRU, etc.) as do psychology, but we are not so certain here.
The parent poster to whom you are replying is making the argument that climate science is making an illegitimate claim to being a science - it does not make claims that can be tested.
This means that its predictive power is less, and hence it is less useful for policy planning, but more importantly for this post it means that it is not subject the basic requirement of the scientific method - i.e. falsifiability via reproducible experimental test.
None of this says the facts of climate change are necessarily wrong, but to claim they are a science is a matter of debate.
My country, Britain, is currently having a debate about its membership of the EU, as our government has set a referendum on the subject for June this year.
The argument made above is one that is often made here in favour of staying in the EU - that only by staying within the supranational structure of the EU can Britain hope to exercise control and taxation power over global corporations.
I have followed a lot of this debate in Britain and Europe. I am interested in how the argument plays out in the US. Does anyone have any opinions on this?
Slashdot Mirror
You're out by a factor of ten.
$4 trillion (4,000,000,000,000) / ~ 400 million Americans (400,000,000) = ~ $10,000
Cogito ergo sum
I find it quite interesting comparing the UK to the US in this respect - they are quite the opposite of eachother.
In the UK we have the Labour party (the mainstream left wing party) tearing itself apart over doctrinal and ideological disagreements (symbolised by its current leader who is fighting for his survival this evening, but running much deeper, and largely going back to the days of Tony Blair), whereas the Conservatives have had their leader, PM Cameron, resign and they have reasonably quietly and peacefully selected a new leader behind which the whole party has unified without much noticeable dissent.
In 1915 when he publish GR there was no QM. There was his explanation of the photoelectric effect, which suggested that light was absorbed in discreet quanta when being shone on a metal, and there were some early theories of wave-particle duality, but there was no proper theory that he could incorporate into his GR.
He published GR a year before Bohr publish his quantised model of the electron in the atom, and 10 years before Heisenberg and Shrodinger published their respective QM theories.
I've been tracking the GBP EUR rate all day - and it is only a few percent down at the end of the day from where it was a couple of weeks ago. It was up most of this week compared to the past three month average (it pushed as high as £1 = €1.31 at one point, which is much higher than it has been all year).
It has been hovering around £1 = €1.27 for months, and today it was around £1 = €1.24. Hardly a collapse.
It is worse against the dollar, but again barely more than the sort of movement you see month to month.
Similarly, the FTSE 100 hardly collapsed as reported. It dropped around 600 points as trading opened, but by the end of the day it was only around 2-3% down, and was therefore back to the level it was at around 3 weeks ago.
The Lords can veto any act of Parliament, but them Parliament can just use the Parliament Act to force the legislation through anyway. both houses know this, and so the HoL really is just an advisory body.
In practice, their main purpose is really sending legislation back to the Commons for another reading, and causing PR trouble for the government in doing so (e.g. the Tax Credits issue, where is got through the Commons due to the Labour party's neutral position, but the Lords sent it back and causes such a press scandal that the Govt. dropped it).
If you think the people are too stupid to make decisions, then why do you put any premium on whether the UK is democratic or not?
The Spanish wouldn't allow Scotland to join, because of the precedent it would set.
Here's the thing I don't get about breaking the encryption on messages.... How do you recognise that you have done it?
Let's say that I take my message, which is written in English in ASCII. I then encrypt this. So to an observer it looks like random noise. I then encrypt this a second time.
Anyone breaking the second, exterior encryption, even if they do it perfectly, all they see is the random noise of the first, interior encryption.
How do they know they have successfully broken the encryption?
But they ought to be careful about doing so.
If they force this to become abandonware, or remove the need from a license, then you are setting the company's old software up in direct competition to their new software. Many people who would otherwise have paid good money for their new software (presumably seeing that the benefit it gives them is greater than the purchase costs) might now choose to make do with the older software which they can now get for free.
It is not fair to force the company into this position, but more importantly it will cause some companies to reconsider their decision to invest time and money in creating such types of software at all, if the risk is that they end up forced into competition with themselves.
It might be that you are happy with this trade-off, but one should be aware of the costs of such a decision.
Thanks for the reply David. So that I understand correctly, is it also the case that you have a choice of providers to purchase your electricity from, at a range of service levels and prices?
The argument I was trying to make is that natural monopolies (such as internet provision) can be sometimes overcome by separating the infrastructure from the provision of service on that infrastructure. I'm not sure I am smart enough to see how this works for electricity provision.
I don't necessarily blame the politicians. Ultimately their job is to keep winning elections. I don't mean to be cynical by saying that, but fundamentally they can have all the ethics and principles they want but if they don't win elections they are out.
Voting against a bill like this leaves them very exposed to attack from the 'law and order' contingent. Voting for it does not leave them very exposed - in the UK and the USA the online freedoms argument does not poll highly in either raw numbers or intensity.
Fundamentally they know that voting against this is likely to lose them more votes than it wins. For most of them this isn't a matter of life or death or a matter of principle, so the electoral argument wins.
I like the basic idea of having an independent house to scrutinise and approve/reject legislation from the commons. It is the same idea as he US senate, except the Senate to a certain extent has the same motives and incentives as the House.
I would largely opposed to an elected HoL. As far as I can imagine it would, after the first couple of elections, reform along party lines and become a copy of the Commons and thus lose all of its independence.
I find the appointment system to the Lords to be problematic, and I think a better system for entering the house should be thought up, but whatever that system it should be completely different from the party political electoral system used in the commons.
Sounds like a reasonable way to deal with the natural monopoly problem.
I worry though that US politics being what it is, it would be hard to fully regulate the Physical Network company. To overcome the monopoly issue, it really has to sell the bandwidth at an equal deal to all buyers. If they start doing high volume deals to larger buyers, for example, or tie-ins with other services that only large companies can finance, then the natural monopoly problem is not solved.
Forgive my ignorance of US politics - it feels to me like this would not be possible on the federal level, but how likely is it on the state level?
For comparison, the UK has a system whereby the infrastructure is owned by a single company - in our case Openreach, which is a division of British Telecom (who used to be the nationalised public telecoms company, but are a private company for a couple of decades now). Openreach are highly regulated and must offer access to the infrastructure to any company that wants it at regulated prices.
Then, any old private company can offer internet access on this public infrastructure without having to provide their own cables, They are free to do so if they want - I think Sky and Virgin do their own infrastructure in part.
This seems to allow access enough to allow lots of competition at both a national and local level - I get my internet from a local company who operate in my city only (it's a lot more expensive, but they have better service and no caps and allow me to run servers on my DSL line) and it goes down exactly the same cables as if I bought it from Sky or BT.
"In the same way that an oil company not having to pay taxes is getting a subsidy"
Or just getting punished slightly less.
Productivity is not a measure of how hard someone works.
It is a measure of how much value their work generates (usually measured in units of currency) in a given time period.
If someone works in a factory making those infamous widgets, and they use crappy tools to do so they might not make many widgets per hours, or the widgets they do make might be low quality and so fetch a low price.
Give the person better tools (or alternatively, more and better training) and they can produce more or better widgets, and so produce more value per hour worked.
People in the poorest countries of the world tend to work very hard, but their labour does not tend to produce results that are valued very high (again, in monetary terms).
If we want them to be better off, then finding ways of making them more productive is essential.
It really isn't a question of training or intelligence.
If they (and by they I mean the various jihadist organistations who are taken to threaten the western world) wanted to attack us it would be trivially easy. Attacks similar to the Paris attacks of November last year take almost no planning or technology or organisation, all they take is a few (relatively) easy to acquire weapons and people willing to die.
If it is true that there are scores of terrorists ready to attack the west then we would see these types of attacks regularly. Anyone with even a basic understanding of human psychology would have launch a second Paris or Brussels attacks a few days after the first, to maximise the fear and the reaction.
But this doesn't happen. The idea that terrorism is threat to any country in Europe or North America does not make sense. It is not hard for them to hit us, yet they don't.
Clearly this argument does not hold true in various other parts of the world (middle east, south-east Asia, etc.) where non-military conflict is a regular occurrence, but the flavour of those tend to be different (often between different religious sects, rather than between different political organisations).
Sugar in the UK (my motherland) is typically sold in bags of a kilogram, approx. 2 pounds. You can also buy larger and smaller packs, but most converge around 1kg.
Coffee (ground, for machines, not instant) tends to be sold in smaller packs, maybe 1 pound or so. I have never seen a 5 pound (2.5kg) pack of coffee for sale in Britain.
I suspect that part of the observed trend in smaller sizes is that people tend to shop more often and buy less each time. There are more shops, more accessible to people, and so they don't so much do the big fortnightly shop, but do a few smaller trips each week.
I wonder if this is also true of the USA, given the huge geography involved in a lot of it?
In south east England, I pay at home around £40 per month (approx. $55 USD) for a 12mbps DSL line (this includes the phone line).
At work I pay around £60 (~$85 USD) for a 80mbps fibre optic line (not available at home, even though I live in a city centre and work is in the suburbs).
(both lines are uncapped, and no ports are filtered - I can and do run my own servers on them)
The USA internet market sound terrible. But then I suppose the US is quite big compared to Britain, and the investment costs are not comparable. I know that were you in northern Scotland you might have reason to complain.
What sort of numbers or records or documents could there possibly be, given the nature of the claims being made? You're not making a realistic claim.
The nature of the claims being made are, almost by definition, anecdotal - that people who were around at the time saw these things happening: that a site which was host to several thousand of influential tech insiders were influential in promoting a new browser and associated technologies.
The notion that you can discredit any claim by shouting "show me a link that proves it" is foolish.
I don't necessarily disagree with what you say, but people shouldn't therefore claim that it is a proven science.
Claim that they think it is true, claim that it is necessary to act on it due to the threat implied.
My only point is that it is not science as we understand the term.
All of what you say is fine, and I don't want to argue against it. But it does lead to a philosophical issue, specifically one of epistemology:
It is generally accepted that for something to be scientific it should propose a model for how a particular physical system works (or set of related systems), and this model should make unique predictions about future events, and these events can be tested by experiment.
This is clearly true for physics and chemistry.
It is basically true for biology - not every detail can be predicted, but a model can be made and unique predictions derived and these predictions can be tested.
Social sciences have a much looser claim - economics makes some claims that can be tested experimentally (NAIRU, etc.) as do psychology, but we are not so certain here.
The parent poster to whom you are replying is making the argument that climate science is making an illegitimate claim to being a science - it does not make claims that can be tested.
This means that its predictive power is less, and hence it is less useful for policy planning, but more importantly for this post it means that it is not subject the basic requirement of the scientific method - i.e. falsifiability via reproducible experimental test.
None of this says the facts of climate change are necessarily wrong, but to claim they are a science is a matter of debate.
That isn't what mod points are for. How was the text you have quoted informative? All it did was express an opinion with which you agree.
My country, Britain, is currently having a debate about its membership of the EU, as our government has set a referendum on the subject for June this year.
The argument made above is one that is often made here in favour of staying in the EU - that only by staying within the supranational structure of the EU can Britain hope to exercise control and taxation power over global corporations.
I have followed a lot of this debate in Britain and Europe. I am interested in how the argument plays out in the US. Does anyone have any opinions on this?