Condemning hypocrisy over all other sins neatly optimizes the power of the media. I find media fondness for this meme unsurprising -- and correspondingly easier to discount.
The Davy Crockett nuclear-tipped RPG (efffectively) was man-portable and had a yield of about 0.044 kT. It was _said_ to be more dangerous to the enemy than to the operator.
The committed effective doses[9] and the increased probability of cancer death resulting from them have been studied extensively, as outlined in Appendix A. The estimated cancer fatality risk associated with exposure to weapons-grade plutonium is 12 cancer deaths per milligram inhaled, or 1 per 0.08 milligrams inhaled; and it is 0.0021 cancer deaths per milligram ingested,[10] or 1 per 480 milligrams ingested.[11] For perspective, an inhaled mass of about 0.0001 milligram would increase the cancer mortality from about 200 in 1000 (the risk of cancer mortality from all causes) to about 201.2 in 1000. This risk increase corresponds to a decrease in life expectancy of about 15 days; for comparison, smoking a pack of cigarettes a day reduces life expectancy by about 2250 days (more than six years).[12]
Tell ya what. I won't make up any exquisitely unfalsifiable stories about my imaginary friends, and the Pope can shut the fuck up about politics and economics. Deal?
"Respect must be earned". There is a sense in which this is irrefutable. In this sense I respect, for example, Gandhi.
But what then are we to call that consideration we owe to other people as unique autonomous individuals, with an inherent right to seek their own happiness? It was in this sense that Gandhi demanded the British "respect" the people of India.
And it is I believe in this sense that grandparent used the term.
Call me a crazy optimist but I have doubts about a business model based on anesthetizing your customer base. What happens when they _do_ notice they're being screwed? Oh. More Brittany cooters. Never mind, I get it now.
Until the consumer-perceived value of bulky traffic is balanced (by the consumer) against the cost of receiving it there can be no market-driven innovation, and the vendors will continue to harvest the herd scientifically.
In places like Korea where government intervention subsidizes urbanites' Gbps with rice farmer's won, the pain of this may be diffused and invisible. For a while.
On the service provider's side of the coin, any pricing solution will be gamed. If your pricing doesn't have a viable relationship to the cost of providing the service this gaming will put you at a competitive disadvantage.
After a while this will converge to some combination of account fee, connection fee + usage charges, same as it ever was. Only bundles with usage caps can be free of usage charges, which in that case will be cross subsidized from the account & connection fees.
Somebody's got to pay for the actual costs. The globally optimal payer is... you.
Agree as to the not-so-horrendous nature of RT-11. The details of command line parsing are not a particularly good index of similarity. I worked with both operating systems, and the design of CP/M definitely owed a debt to that of RT-11. -- phunctor
Competitive bluffing is somewhat like playing the stock market, in that strenuous efforts have been made by others to extract all the information from your data stream, leaving you with the unrewarding task of integrating white noise.
A renormalized model must include each player's beliefs about all the other players' beliefs, logically if not practically including the infinite regress of beliefs (about beliefs)*.
I'm not sure that teaching computers how to deceive us is a good idea...
Importing talent also helps to hide the devastation of our own talent produced by our own education system. My daughter, 16, just enrolled in a high school embedded in a junior college, where over the next two years she will "complete" her high school "studies", while at the same time earning an AA degree. It sounds good until you realize that it's an admission by the system that the last two years of high school are *completely worthless*.
True story: I know of two California students, one just got an A in 11th grade chemistry, the other just did 11th grade AP chemistry. Both of them learned "compost is good for agriculture". Neither of them heard, or at least remembered, any mention of nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, or *any* actual _chemicals_. When I did 11th grade chemistry it was all about the periodic table, valence and stoichiometry.
CA has created the perfect curriculum. It is guaranteed that no group will perform better than any other group. The content has been removed, but hey, who _really_ cares. First things first.
In a few decades chemistry will be replaced by subjects more suitable, such as advanced groveling, servile-mode Mandarin, etc. Someone on./ will post "I for one welcome our new, educated, Masters".
Thanks, that's an interesting take, although it responded more to what I actually wrote than to what I wanted you to read. I guess I'll eschew the use of hyperbole henceforth.
However, I'll maintain my position that "don't know" is a vitally important category. Conscious ignorance is the prerequisite for education.
What you *really* want to do is assess someone's health accurately enough so that you can offer them insurance at closer to the actuarially right price than any of your competitors. Plus a sliver of profit.
Those who charge more for assuming these risks will lose customers to you. Those who charge significantly less will go broke. Life is good.
Or, you can do what Nixon did for the first oil crisis, and fix prices.
Lots of y'all actually understand systems. For reasons that escape me the positive feedback loop embodied in politically driven wealth redistribution doesn't terrify you. Why not?
I mean, I know that *you* would never vote yourself unearned goodies, but one, maybe two, of your fellow citizens could, maybe. Now, how *much* unearned goodies do you think those guys think is enough?
Nitrous oxide, N20, is the only nitrogen oxide which is a significant greenhouse driver. Nasty stuff, residence time ~100 years, 310 times stronger driver than C02.
Ironically, the bulk of it appears to be produced by... catalytic converters.
To say that an improved converter produces *less* of it is kind of like "Now 7% less lethal! New, improved, Bubonic Plague 3.0!"
Would that such logical suppleness were in evidence in pro-AGW responses to the global warming of ~1000 years ago, which could scarecely have been anthropogenic. But there are no such responses. Talk about inconvenient truths!
I investigated the possible significance of auto exhaust hydrocarbons as greenhouse drivers. The hydrocarbon methane, CH4, is a significant greenhouse driver. No others turned up in my search. Methane's residence time is 12 years, while C02's is 100 years. It seems that a carbon atom in CH4 would have to be eight times as effective at driving the greenhouse effect as the same carbon atom in C02 for the stragtegy of oxidizing exhaust stream CH4 to C02 to be a winner. This of course begs the question of whether there *is* any significant amount of CH4 in auto exhaust, with or without any or improved catalytic converters.
So, do you have a cite that auto exhausts contain significant amounts of methane? And one for the time-normed efficiency of of methane versus C02 as a greenhouse driver? I'm willing to be convinced. All it takes is facts.
Lest y'all think this is a picayune argument, I think not. The specific details aren't in fact important. What is important is the attitude that the cause is so important that facts can be what they are said to be, that claims don't need supporting evidence, in toto that the AGW enthusiasts are our moral betters and we should be ashamed to disagree with them.
"... and improvement of (legally required) catalytic converters on cars, are contributors,... All of those efforts have CO2 emissions reduction as a side effect."
You're welcome to whatever moonbat opinions make you feel good, but when you speak ex cathedra, get your facts straight.
Let's pick apart the most egregious of your authoritatively delivered factually challenged talking points, shall we?
Catalytic converters on cars have NO effect on carbon emission, except to slightly INCREASE (by catalyzing the oxidation of CO) the proportion of exhaust stream carbon which escapes as C02.
Unless of course you're using a fusion reaction in your catalytic converter. That might be up to the transmutation required to in any way affect the amount of carbon in the exhaust stream. Call me from Stockholm when you get your Nobel.
-- phunctor "Do not approach. Suffers from malignant snarkoma"
Unfortunately, my quip included everything I know about category theory. I want to fix that. Do you have any suggestions where to find / how to construct a self-study course suitable for retreading a 40-years-stale math BS? -- phunctor vorticitykappa@yahoo.com
"If the people that like C can't use C they'll probably use assembler before they use one of those "dirty" functional languages that aren't close to the metal."
Got to disagree. 8, 16, 32, 64... core processors will be here in the blink of an eye, and any language which forces the first level of the program to be about the *means* to exploit these resources is going to feel like coding in assembler compared to one that lets you pursue your computational *ends*.
I've still got my first edition of K&R, but these days I'm boning up on Erlang and OCAML (and walking around Haskell saying "???". Time for some serious math retreading here...).
In about 1976 I was working at an IT installation where COBOL was the mandated only language. It so happened I needed a "diff" program, so I wrote one, in recursive COBOL. Of course, I had to manage the "call stack" myself.
Slashdot Mirror
Condemning hypocrisy over all other sins neatly optimizes the power of the media. I find media fondness for this meme unsurprising -- and correspondingly easier to discount.
--
phunctor
Nomads & herders are ALWAYS in conflict with farmers. It's called 'civilization'.
--
phunctor
The Davy Crockett nuclear-tipped RPG (efffectively) was man-portable and had a yield of about 0.044 kT. It was _said_ to be more dangerous to the enemy than to the operator.
--
phunctor
The potential microgram lethality of Pu is similar to the 1-gallon lethality of H20. Possible, but not inevitable.
(From http://www.llnl.gov/csts/publications/sutcliffe/)
The committed effective doses[9] and the increased probability of cancer death resulting from them have been studied extensively, as outlined in Appendix A. The estimated cancer fatality risk associated with exposure to weapons-grade plutonium is 12 cancer deaths per milligram inhaled, or 1 per 0.08 milligrams inhaled; and it is 0.0021 cancer deaths per milligram ingested,[10] or 1 per 480 milligrams ingested.[11] For perspective, an inhaled mass of about 0.0001 milligram would increase the cancer mortality from about 200 in 1000 (the risk of cancer mortality from all causes) to about 201.2 in 1000. This risk increase corresponds to a decrease in life expectancy of about 15 days; for comparison, smoking a pack of cigarettes a day reduces life expectancy by about 2250 days (more than six years).[12]
--
phunctor
Tell ya what. I won't make up any exquisitely unfalsifiable stories about my imaginary friends, and the Pope can shut the fuck up about politics and economics. Deal?
--
phunctor
Sounds GRRRREAT! So I download the latest Europa, fire it up. Hmm, it comes with a "hello world" project preloaded. Fire it up!
Oho! Syntax errors! Clever demo, must use editor. Editor works, build again.
Launching helloWorld.... java.lang.NullPointerException...
And this.. is the demo.
Clue me in somebody, please, humbly. What am I missing here?
--
phunctor
"Respect must be earned". There is a sense in which this is irrefutable. In this sense I respect, for example, Gandhi.
But what then are we to call that consideration we owe to other people as unique autonomous individuals, with an inherent right to seek their own happiness? It was in this sense that Gandhi demanded the British "respect" the people of India.
And it is I believe in this sense that grandparent used the term.
I'm just saying.
--
phunctor
Call me a crazy optimist but I have doubts about a business model based on anesthetizing your customer base. What happens when they _do_ notice they're being screwed? Oh. More Brittany cooters. Never mind, I get it now.
--
phunctor
Until the consumer-perceived value of bulky traffic is balanced (by the consumer) against the cost of receiving it there can be no market-driven innovation, and the vendors will continue to harvest the herd scientifically.
In places like Korea where government intervention subsidizes urbanites' Gbps with rice farmer's won, the pain of this may be diffused and invisible. For a while.
On the service provider's side of the coin, any pricing solution will be gamed. If your pricing doesn't have a viable relationship to the cost of providing the service this gaming will put you at a competitive disadvantage.
After a while this will converge to some combination of account fee, connection fee + usage charges, same as it ever was. Only bundles with usage caps can be free of usage charges, which in that case will be cross subsidized from the account & connection fees.
Somebody's got to pay for the actual costs. The globally optimal payer is... you.
--
phunctor
but fortunately I had the source.
--
phunctor
Agree as to the not-so-horrendous nature of RT-11. The details of command line parsing are not a particularly good index of similarity. I worked with both operating systems, and the design of CP/M definitely owed a debt to that of RT-11.
--
phunctor
You never want to hit the mark with something so unlikely he'll start thinking outside of the box. As in "is this game honest?"....
--
phunctor
I = -log2(W)
Competitive bluffing is somewhat like playing the stock market, in that strenuous efforts have been made by others to extract all the information from your data stream, leaving you with the unrewarding task of integrating white noise.
A renormalized model must include each player's beliefs about all the other players' beliefs, logically if not practically including the infinite regress of beliefs (about beliefs)*.
I'm not sure that teaching computers how to deceive us is a good idea...
--
phunctor
Importing talent also helps to hide the devastation of our own talent produced by our own education system. My daughter, 16, just enrolled in a high school embedded in a junior college, where over the next two years she will "complete" her high school "studies", while at the same time earning an AA degree. It sounds good until you realize that it's an admission by the system that the last two years of high school are *completely worthless*.
./ will post "I for one welcome our new, educated, Masters".
True story: I know of two California students, one just got an A in 11th grade chemistry, the other just did 11th grade AP chemistry. Both of them learned "compost is good for agriculture". Neither of them heard, or at least remembered, any mention of nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, or *any* actual _chemicals_. When I did 11th grade chemistry it was all about the periodic table, valence and stoichiometry.
CA has created the perfect curriculum. It is guaranteed that no group will perform better than any other group. The content has been removed, but hey, who _really_ cares. First things first.
In a few decades chemistry will be replaced by subjects more suitable, such as advanced groveling, servile-mode Mandarin, etc. Someone on
--
phunctor
"bah!"
Thanks, that's an interesting take, although it responded more to what I actually wrote than to what I wanted you to read. I guess I'll eschew the use of hyperbole henceforth.
However, I'll maintain my position that "don't know" is a vitally important category. Conscious ignorance is the prerequisite for education.
--
phunctor
For a medical specialist wouldn't:
+1 for right (patient lives)
0 for no answer (she knows she doesn't know and maybe consults with a colleague),
-1e38 for wrong (patient dies)
be more appropriate weightings?
Many medical specialists could use a tuneup on the difference between confidence and arrogance...
--
phunctor
What you *really* want to do is assess someone's health accurately enough so that you can offer them insurance at closer to the actuarially right price than any of your competitors. Plus a sliver of profit.
Those who charge more for assuming these risks will lose customers to you. Those who charge significantly less will go broke. Life is good.
Or, you can do what Nixon did for the first oil crisis, and fix prices.
Lots of y'all actually understand systems. For reasons that escape me the positive feedback loop embodied in politically driven wealth redistribution doesn't terrify you. Why not?
I mean, I know that *you* would never vote yourself unearned goodies, but one, maybe two, of your fellow citizens could, maybe. Now, how *much* unearned goodies do you think those guys think is enough?
--
phunctor
...pigs and turkeys are raised on farms where they don't play a role in the surrounding ecosystem...
Uh, dude? *We* *are* the surrounding ecosystem!
--
phunctor
Nitrous oxide, N20, is the only nitrogen oxide which is a significant greenhouse driver. Nasty stuff, residence time ~100 years, 310 times stronger driver than C02.
Ironically, the bulk of it appears to be produced by... catalytic converters.
To say that an improved converter produces *less* of it is kind of like "Now 7% less lethal! New, improved, Bubonic Plague 3.0!"
--
phunctor
Save the planet! Bring back smog!
Would that such logical suppleness were in evidence in pro-AGW responses to the global warming of ~1000 years ago, which could scarecely have been anthropogenic. But there are no such responses. Talk about inconvenient truths!
I investigated the possible significance of auto exhaust hydrocarbons as greenhouse drivers. The hydrocarbon methane, CH4, is a significant greenhouse driver. No others turned up in my search. Methane's residence time is 12 years, while C02's is 100 years. It seems that a carbon atom in CH4 would have to be eight times as effective at driving the greenhouse effect as the same carbon atom in C02 for the stragtegy of oxidizing exhaust stream CH4 to C02 to be a winner. This of course begs the question of whether there *is* any significant amount of CH4 in auto exhaust, with or without any or improved catalytic converters.
So, do you have a cite that auto exhausts contain significant amounts of methane? And one for the time-normed efficiency of of methane versus C02 as a greenhouse driver? I'm willing to be convinced. All it takes is facts.
Lest y'all think this is a picayune argument, I think not. The specific details aren't in fact important. What is important is the attitude that the cause is so important that facts can be what they are said to be, that claims don't need supporting evidence, in toto that the AGW enthusiasts are our moral betters and we should be ashamed to disagree with them.
--
phunctor
"... and improvement of (legally required) catalytic converters on cars, are contributors, ... All of those efforts have CO2 emissions reduction as a side effect."
You're welcome to whatever moonbat opinions make you feel good, but when you speak ex cathedra, get your facts straight.
Let's pick apart the most egregious of your authoritatively delivered factually challenged talking points, shall we?
Catalytic converters on cars have NO effect on carbon emission, except to slightly INCREASE (by catalyzing the oxidation of CO) the proportion of exhaust stream carbon which escapes as C02.
Unless of course you're using a fusion reaction in your catalytic converter. That might be up to the transmutation required to in any way affect the amount of carbon in the exhaust stream. Call me from Stockholm when you get your Nobel.
--
phunctor
"Do not approach. Suffers from malignant snarkoma"
Unfortunately, my quip included everything I know about category theory. I want to fix that. Do you have any suggestions where to find / how to construct a self-study course suitable for retreading a 40-years-stale math BS?
--
phunctor
vorticitykappa@yahoo.com
What is this, generalized abstract nonsense?
--
phunctor
"If the people that like C can't use C they'll probably use assembler before they use one of those "dirty" functional languages that aren't close to the metal."
Got to disagree. 8, 16, 32, 64... core processors will be here in the blink of an eye, and any language which forces the first level of the program to be about the *means* to exploit these resources is going to feel like coding in assembler compared to one that lets you pursue your computational *ends*.
I've still got my first edition of K&R, but these days I'm boning up on Erlang and OCAML (and walking around Haskell saying "???". Time for some serious math retreading here...).
--
phunctor
In about 1976 I was working at an IT installation where COBOL was the mandated only language. It so happened I needed a "diff" program, so I wrote one, in recursive COBOL. Of course, I had to manage the "call stack" myself.
So, COBOL *can* be a "system" language.
--
phunctor