I agree, Python has developed a respectable object model and it has room for some functional programming.
Python has two^H^H^Hthree additional advantages:
1) Doesn't stand in the way of refactoring and reorganization as a project grows;
2) Balances support of exceptionally rapid development ("batteries included" === GREAT library support)
3) Straightforward mechanisms for binding to C and C++ subsystems: Low level work can be fast where necessary, while still allowing the high level executive integration that Python does so well.
Python's authors are conservative about introducing "new stuff just because they can", while being unafraid to deprecate and eventually drop suboptimal bits from earlier releases. So the language is both competent and predictable.
I agree. However, part of the definition of "recession", and a central part of the definition of "depression" is in particular, There's no savings, no "cushion" to maintain operations during a downturn. Naturally, credit tightens up. (This one reason the Fed loosens the money supply during recessions: Easier credit implies easier borrowing implies business investment in development, equipment, etc.)
I (developer not economist) have always had a problem with one aspect of the way U.S. capitalism is practiced: Companies with significant liquid assets are hostile takeover targets, due in large part to those assets.
The hostile bidders usually claim that they could use those assets more productively. In a way, I believe them: Their definition of "productive" differs from mine. (Their definition: "productive for our pockets", my definition: "productive in support of the business". This also fails to take into consideration that a company's liquid assets are banked or invested in ways that are broadly productive anyway.)
I my opinion, the bottom line is that when recession-trigger events occur, too many companies are unable to do the off-season investing that would prepare them for future growth.
Tough call on the uncorrectable birth defects question. A fetus with uncorrectable birth defects is already present in the world, and his parents have a very difficult dilemma.
Artificially resurrecting a single person or even small group is to "quicken" a life or lives knowing a priori that they face huge challenges.
Simply not analogous.
It is unknown whether neanderthals would be inferior. But I believe there's plenty of historical precedent that shows how miserably humans treat "others" when there's a disparity in their capabilities.
Humans are far too immature, too undisciplined to treat a created person/entity with the respect that the created person deserves.
That's the closest to a humane idea I've seen in this thread. But it doesn't address the question of having a group of essentially people who, unlike human racial minorities, almost certainly are "inferior".
Humans have not developed the wisdom and discipline to behave properly toward those who are different.
Having children, including in the context of being a minority in a society is likely to be difficult but the child is born into a social group that he/she is part of.
The mars society is still a social group, however small.
Of *course* loneliness is a part of the human condition. But the right answer is not to make it worse yet through artificial means.
So far you have not established any analogous situation that nearly approaches the challenges faced by someone who is different, aware of their inferiority, and knows that their existence is entirely someone else's choice.
Yes, many people including the leaders of technology companies themselves have underestimated the effect of the exponential curve.
I seem to recall that Bill Gates made a similar comment once upon a time...:-)
I failed to remember the Nvidia example in responding to the "number of cores" question, by the way: The Nvidia Tesla deskside supercomputer contains a few GPUs, each with 128 cores. So the question is out of date, and we haven't gotten out of the year 2008 yet!
Which is the point of the comment. That exponential curve will continue to surprise everyone, as it has surprised everyone so far.
Such people would be a permanent underclass. We have plenty of history to show what happens when there is a disparity in capabilities between social groups.
Such meetings have a perfect record of causing heartache and pain. Such pain is often shared by both sides in such conflicts, but is concentrated (98 percent?) in the less "advanced" group.
We (humans) are far far too immature to engage in such an experiment. Perhaps in a Star Trek future humans might be able to exercise the required wisdom and discipline. Even then I would doubt it.
Creating a social being who in all likelihood could never be a full member of any existing social group is deeply offensive.
It doesn't matter whether the cloned being has an IQ of 45 or 103, that person would need attention, love and companionship but would still be a unique and lonely person.
Nothing wrong with cloning an animal who could be a member of an existing population, growing up into a normal adult animal, like Dolly the sheep.
A near human or proto-human, would produce someone who would be self-aware, would be intrinsically social, and could never be a full member of any social group. Neanderthals made works of art, made and used tools, buried their dead, etc. It is logical to assume therefore that a cloned neanderthal person would need all of the nurturing, love and companionship that are required by nearly every mammal to grow up healthy.
A cloned neanderthal would likely be the loneliest being on the planet, with no other members in his/her community. Doing that to anyone would be an inexcusable crime against that person. There is no excuse for doing that to anyone, any time, ever.
I wrote a small enhancement to the OS/8 bootloader in our 8/L (RK05) and coded "JMS" (opcode 4) instead of "JMP" (opcode 5) when doing the hand-assembly. It took several weeks to figure out why reboots resulted in system instability...
And you know in 20 years they will be in exactly the same position. Software and hardware will have progressed so much the youngsters will say: "what less than 20 cores?"
When I was in college, I worked on a PDP-8/L on the third floor, when an IBM 370/168 was running in on the (entire) fourth floor. That 370 had an 8 MHz CPU clock, 1 Mbyte core memory, 1 Mbyte of new-fangled MOS memory, and 20 disk drives adding up to about 200 Mbytes.
The Gumstix Verdex Pro has far more resources. Their new Overo Earth is even better equipped while being smaller yet. Low power, low cost, and way more powerful.
Ray Kurzweil writes in The Singularity Is Near: One could argue that the information processing capability of the most advanced life form has an unblemished record of exponential increase from day 1. That record continues today.
I believe that in 20 years, the question won't involve counting cores any more than today's questions involve core.
I am 51 and I've worked on essentially all the machines in Mr Burnet's collection. In college, I would have exchanged my soul for a PDP-11/45, but it (the soul) wasn't valuable enough!:-):-)
Wire wrap worked about a thousand years ago, when we could build semi-credible systems operating at or below 10 MHz. (An example is my homebuilt, wire-wrapped Z-80 on an STD-bus sized board...)
Since then, edge rates have become quick enough that physical design is a priority in all but the slowest of modern designs.
PCI for example, uses additive reflection of signals due to the intentionally unterminated bus.
Of course for PIC, 8051 family or similar low speed systems, wire-wrap would be perfectly fine.
Profit is not a bipolar concept. The telco probably concluded, possibly correctly, that building fiber infrastructure would not provide adequate ROI. That's perfectly within their rights.
The community probably concluded, possibly correctly, that building fiber infrastructure would provide adequate ROI. That's perfectly within their rights.
As soon as the telco decided not to build the network, their participation in the decision was OVER. Their decision not to bother terminated their part of the discussion.
Bringing in the "clamoring for bead, circues, and cheap fat pipes" may be valid argument, but there's no guarantee that just because Government Does Something that it is guaranteed to be inefficient, or have inadequate ROI for the community.
Bringing a suit after the fact is bogus, unless they can show evidence that the community committed fraud during the original discussions about costs and revenue sharing (for example). So I agree with the earlier comments about the suit being unfounded: Absent evidence of governmental shenanigans, the suit bogus.
"Reading... It's fundamental!" -- Try it sometime, you might like it. Or perhaps you are simply attracted as a moth to the light of a burning strawman.
Nobody with a triple digit IQ thinks now, or ever did, think that psychohistory Actually Works. The point to the Foundation trilogy++ and a huge fraction of SF is not "psychohistory" or any of the other magical impossible inventions of the literature but the idea of applying one's life faithfully to the proposition that humanity is worth working for.
Whether
a large portion of the left believes that it possesses the ability to do the sort of micro control today
is a valid proposition whose debate must be left for another day. Personally, I don't see it. In general The Left tend to be castigated for believing that societies can benefit broadly by providing a helping hand to their less fortunate members.
The point of the comment was that the data is encrypted, which the security-theater control freaks like to use as an excuse to claim "probable cause".
1) When I am testing the updated work, I use real data. Sometimes that data is on a machine that differs from my secured workstation.
2) I don't travel much. So when it does happen, I don't usually have time to go searching through every nook and cranny looking for what to get rid of before packing off. This is why it's fucking ENCRYPTED.
3) The last time I put the data on a laptop was about 4 years ago. And when I did, I ran a nice little anonymizer on it.
4) More commonly, I carry various forms of proprietary software source for various clients and users in order to do development, in the various places where the work needs to be done, be it at their office or mine. I am just as committed to their security as my wife's carefully hidden HIPAA data.
I am not really too angry with you, you are some stranger who doesn't let reading comprehension get in the way of a nice little rant. It's a common malady.
In 2005 I allowed my drivers' license to expire on my birthday at the beginning of the month, thinking that I had until the end of the month.
Traveling 3 days after the "official expiration", I flew to California, and what a pain in the ass that was! I was selected for the extra special search-every-bag at every security checkpoint both out and back.
I'm guessing that "probable cause" is whatever niggly-ass detail they want it to be.
Worse yet, my work involves lots of proprietary code, and I support my wife's psychology business accounting work. All that stuff is or should be on an encrypted partition and I can just see that...
Goon: What's on this encrypted partition?
Me: Patient mental health records for my wife's psychology business.
Goon: Decrypt it.
Me: Certainly, as soon as I have a legally binding signed agreement that all observers agree to the HIPAA privacy agreements that are required for medical records.
Goon: Step out of the line and come with me, sir.
< Uh-oh, this is probably not going to work out very well... >
It's closer than you think. I thought I remembered a lawsuit relating to U.S. Berkely admission requirements that students have a demonstrable background in modern science. (No reference to that suit, maybe someone else can find it.)
It seems that IDers were pissed off that Berkely wouldn't admit their students due to a lack of education in the principles of evolution.
Here's a link to an article from the website Answers in Genesis discussing the issue. That particular article doesn't refer to a lawsuit, so my memory may be fuzzy on this.
But your point is well taken, there are already people working that issue. And the real hilarity will ensue when our society fails to compete in the world marketplace due to a lack of depth in current scientific thought...
The GP was not "questioning" anything. Here is the quote that contains not even a hint of questioning, but lots of strongly worded answering:
Deny if you are a con artist. I'm sure you'll always find idiots or other rip-off artists to go along with your lies. I am not one of them and those who think like me are growing in numbers and we vote.
In my observation, the history you cite refers to snake-oil "science" as contrasted against verified, replicated science as it now practiced.
it's not as cut and dried as it's made out to be
Other than those who speak hyperbolically, serious students of climatology don't use phrases like "cut and dried". They use phrases like "After decades of study, we hare becoming increasingly concerned that climate systems are experiencing changes that are unprecedented in recorded history. Our observations of other periods in history are beginning to show us that the evidence points to a set of changes that humanity is unprepared to face."
I do not believe that the climate study community is a bunch of snake-oil salesmen. As I wrote in an earlier post, if the research revealed tomorrow that the climate is stable, that it is self-correcting, etc., then they would need to change research topics to some other atmospheric system research. This is why I contrast their motivations and temptations against those whose multimillion dollar incomes depend on maintaining the status quo.
As an American, I find the idea of reducing dependence on oil (particularly) and extractive industry (generally) somewhat attractive, as I am bloody damn tired of having the political environment poisoned by such powerful entrenched interests.
On the enema question: I assume that you recognize that most health professionals today consider fiber to be a very important part of one's diet, right? Particularly for the purpose of reducing the incidence of colorectal cancer? (I am 51 and waaay too familiar with these topics...:-) )
Perhaps you don't understand the concept of "money making machine" very well. Extractive industries are getting plenty of money right now, and they are funding all sorts of operations intending to convince Voters Like Your Brilliant Self that this is all a money game.
We can compare the motivations of people whose personal incomes are in the tens of millions per year based on continuing the status quo versus the motivations of people whose incomes and reputations depend on the accuracy of their work, some of whom would need to change the particular topic of research if the climate is doing just fine.
Which group has the greater incentive to tilt the results?
1) It won't take a whole lot of sea level rise to cause some serious population migration, considering worldwide population density is highest near shorelines.
2) While climactic variation is the norm on timescales exceeding that of recorded human history, many researchers are beginning to think that once tipped, climate change can happen surprisingly quickly.
With these two points in mind, whatever the probability that the researchers are more correct than those who would preserve the status quo, the costs of rapid change would be staggering both economically and in human lives.
On the other hand, getting going with some creativity relatively soon can reduce the risk dramatically.
I hope you are young enough to see it through. It is likely to be extremely interesting.
Yes, the idea is to establish a classical Trade Guild, in the European sense: Only those groups who have been granted the right to practice some art/craft are permitted, those practicing said art/craft are ready, willing and able to limit the number of practitioners, and those practicing without Guild permission are subjected to occasionally very harsh treatment.
In the current situation, it's the corporations large enough to maintain patent portfolios that they use to prevent competition from small providers (your point is correct and well taken), and to prevent their own financial ruination by the other large companies.
It is very rare for a large organization to come up with genuinely new ideas, approaches or paradigm-breaking inventions. It is very common for large companies to want to control how their industries work, though.
So these patent portfolios are a way to impose either direct elimination of the threat (in some cases), or a substantial tax on real entrepreneurs (in other cases).
My favorite recent example of a patent serving as mechanism for unpredictable taxation is the Research In Motion patent fight.
I read The Mystery of Capital by Hernando DeSoto, in which he explains among other things, how western societies do much better than others in establishing predictable, fungible, legal Property Rights. His examples tend to real estate, but I believe that the proliferation of silly patents exemplifies a failure to allow ordinary people to count on the value of their work.
When "everybody does it", then the likelihood of selective prosecution becomes a real possibility: If you are a big company, you can negotiate a deal where your "violations" can be balanced against their "violations". If you are too small, then the selective prosecution becomes either a big tax or an actual business-terminating event.
It was Intel's clear intention to allow simple, fully automatic translation of assembly code between one generation and the next. So the fact that the transition from each generation to the next is expressed in large steps does not make it a mighty tenuous connection. To exemplify:
(1) The slow speed of the 8008 required hardware acceleration for parity computation, so the 8008 ALU provided a parity bit in the flags register. That bit lasted all the way through the Pentium line. (Could it remain in X86_64? I no longer work in the assembly language world and do not know.)
(2) The original A,B,C,D,E,H/L register configuration with its byte/word weirdness in the 8008 was still plainly visible in the 16-bit X86 line, and hints of those structures lasted right through IA32, though IA32 does have significant improvements in orthogonality. (This is the genesis of the non-orthogonal register sets that compiler writers complained about all the way through IA32, which are fully rectified only with X86_64.)
The connection is not only not tenuous, but (I claim, having worked with every CPU they built from the 8008 to my current Core2duo) clearly connected by an intentional, nearly unblemished record of source-level backward compatibility for the 40 years of its history.
You do have a good point with respect to the way Intel scheduled its generational developments. When my group at AT&T was debating a project based on i486 DX2/66 and i960CA/CF, the Intel FAEs were exceptionally forthcoming with us about the way Intel developed their processor families. One of the more interesting things I learned was that Intel's X86 families were developed using dual teams, each team leapfrogging the other with successive generations. There was constant discussion among the teams, so often ideas from one would slip into the other.
There is no question that each generation was intended to be as large a leap as possible beyond the last, so you do have a good point about the internal architecture of the processor families.
This is the place where some of us note that this administration has exceeded all previous records for classifying documents, for starting what may be the greatest strategic blunder in a century of blunders using (at best) insufficient evidence (or at worst) known false statements; for using every possible excuse to probe into our personal lives; for using "questionable" interrogation methods on people who may not even be guilty of anything; the list goes on ad nauseam.
These guys have earned their place in the bright lights of thorough investigation.
Expected value in probability: compare the effort of investigating thoroughly, and decide:
1) Verify that Ivins is just a lonely loonie (most likely), having spent the investigative resources needed to show merely that labs should be more careful,
vs
2) Don't bother checking more carefully, and discover that there really were war causing assholes who used this loonie to advance their nefarious causes.
I think the lonely loonie hypothesis is correct but I support making sure that's really true.
There are too many people with too much power wielded in secret in our government, especially recently.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree, Python has developed a respectable object model and it has room for some functional programming.
Python has two^H^H^Hthree additional advantages:
1) Doesn't stand in the way of refactoring and reorganization as a project grows;
2) Balances support of exceptionally rapid development ("batteries included" === GREAT library support)
3) Straightforward mechanisms for binding to C and C++ subsystems: Low level work can be fast where necessary, while still allowing the high level executive integration that Python does so well.
Python's authors are conservative about introducing "new stuff just because they can", while being unafraid to deprecate and eventually drop suboptimal bits from earlier releases. So the language is both competent and predictable.
I agree. However, part of the definition of "recession", and a central part of the definition of "depression" is in particular, There's no savings, no "cushion" to maintain operations during a downturn. Naturally, credit tightens up. (This one reason the Fed loosens the money supply during recessions: Easier credit implies easier borrowing implies business investment in development, equipment, etc.)
I (developer not economist) have always had a problem with one aspect of the way U.S. capitalism is practiced: Companies with significant liquid assets are hostile takeover targets, due in large part to those assets.
The hostile bidders usually claim that they could use those assets more productively. In a way, I believe them: Their definition of "productive" differs from mine. (Their definition: "productive for our pockets", my definition: "productive in support of the business". This also fails to take into consideration that a company's liquid assets are banked or invested in ways that are broadly productive anyway.)
I my opinion, the bottom line is that when recession-trigger events occur, too many companies are unable to do the off-season investing that would prepare them for future growth.
Strawman argument.
Tough call on the uncorrectable birth defects question. A fetus with uncorrectable birth defects is already present in the world, and his parents have a very difficult dilemma.
Artificially resurrecting a single person or even small group is to "quicken" a life or lives knowing a priori that they face huge challenges.
Simply not analogous.
It is unknown whether neanderthals would be inferior. But I believe there's plenty of historical precedent that shows how miserably humans treat "others" when there's a disparity in their capabilities.
Humans are far too immature, too undisciplined to treat a created person/entity with the respect that the created person deserves.
That's the closest to a humane idea I've seen in this thread. But it doesn't address the question of having a group of essentially people who, unlike human racial minorities, almost certainly are "inferior".
Humans have not developed the wisdom and discipline to behave properly toward those who are different.
Having children, including in the context of being a minority in a society is likely to be difficult but the child is born into a social group that he/she is part of.
The mars society is still a social group, however small.
Of *course* loneliness is a part of the human condition. But the right answer is not to make it worse yet through artificial means.
So far you have not established any analogous situation that nearly approaches the challenges faced by someone who is different, aware of their inferiority, and knows that their existence is entirely someone else's choice.
Yes, many people including the leaders of technology companies themselves have underestimated the effect of the exponential curve.
I seem to recall that Bill Gates made a similar comment once upon a time... :-)
I failed to remember the Nvidia example in responding to the "number of cores" question, by the way: The Nvidia Tesla deskside supercomputer contains a few GPUs, each with 128 cores. So the question is out of date, and we haven't gotten out of the year 2008 yet!
Which is the point of the comment. That exponential curve will continue to surprise everyone, as it has surprised everyone so far.
Bullshit.
The issue is about how such a person would be able to function in a world where he or she is the only member of an inferior race.
See some of the troll comments in every story on /. right here to see the sort of cruelty that would be visited on such a person.
Making someone who is guaranteed from the outset to be a permanent stranger is a very offensive idea.
It has nothing to do with old books, or supernatural beings, or magical 6-day creations.
It has only to do with raising a child.
Such people would be a permanent underclass. We have plenty of history to show what happens when there is a disparity in capabilities between social groups.
Such meetings have a perfect record of causing heartache and pain. Such pain is often shared by both sides in such conflicts, but is concentrated (98 percent?) in the less "advanced" group.
We (humans) are far far too immature to engage in such an experiment. Perhaps in a Star Trek future humans might be able to exercise the required wisdom and discipline. Even then I would doubt it.
No dividing line necessary.
Creating a social being who in all likelihood could never be a full member of any existing social group is deeply offensive.
It doesn't matter whether the cloned being has an IQ of 45 or 103, that person would need attention, love and companionship but would still be a unique and lonely person.
Nothing wrong with cloning an animal who could be a member of an existing population, growing up into a normal adult animal, like Dolly the sheep.
A near human or proto-human, would produce someone who would be self-aware, would be intrinsically social, and could never be a full member of any social group. Neanderthals made works of art, made and used tools, buried their dead, etc. It is logical to assume therefore that a cloned neanderthal person would need all of the nurturing, love and companionship that are required by nearly every mammal to grow up healthy.
A cloned neanderthal would likely be the loneliest being on the planet, with no other members in his/her community. Doing that to anyone would be an inexcusable crime against that person. There is no excuse for doing that to anyone, any time, ever.
I wrote a small enhancement to the OS/8 bootloader in our 8/L (RK05) and coded "JMS" (opcode 4) instead of "JMP" (opcode 5) when doing the hand-assembly. It took several weeks to figure out why reboots resulted in system instability...
DOH! :-) :-)
And you know in 20 years they will be in exactly the same position. Software and hardware will have progressed so much the youngsters will say: "what less than 20 cores?"
When I was in college, I worked on a PDP-8/L on the third floor, when an IBM 370/168 was running in on the (entire) fourth floor. That 370 had an 8 MHz CPU clock, 1 Mbyte core memory, 1 Mbyte of new-fangled MOS memory, and 20 disk drives adding up to about 200 Mbytes.
The Gumstix Verdex Pro has far more resources. Their new Overo Earth is even better equipped while being smaller yet. Low power, low cost, and way more powerful.
Ray Kurzweil writes in The Singularity Is Near: One could argue that the information processing capability of the most advanced life form has an unblemished record of exponential increase from day 1. That record continues today.
I believe that in 20 years, the question won't involve counting cores any more than today's questions involve core.
I am 51 and I've worked on essentially all the machines in Mr Burnet's collection. In college, I would have exchanged my soul for a PDP-11/45, but it (the soul) wasn't valuable enough! :-) :-)
Wire wrap worked about a thousand years ago, when we could build semi-credible systems operating at or below 10 MHz. (An example is my homebuilt, wire-wrapped Z-80 on an STD-bus sized board...)
Since then, edge rates have become quick enough that physical design is a priority in all but the slowest of modern designs.
PCI for example, uses additive reflection of signals due to the intentionally unterminated bus.
Of course for PIC, 8051 family or similar low speed systems, wire-wrap would be perfectly fine.
Profit is not a bipolar concept. The telco probably concluded, possibly correctly, that building fiber infrastructure would not provide adequate ROI. That's perfectly within their rights.
The community probably concluded, possibly correctly, that building fiber infrastructure would provide adequate ROI. That's perfectly within their rights.
As soon as the telco decided not to build the network, their participation in the decision was OVER. Their decision not to bother terminated their part of the discussion.
Bringing in the "clamoring for bead, circues, and cheap fat pipes" may be valid argument, but there's no guarantee that just because Government Does Something that it is guaranteed to be inefficient, or have inadequate ROI for the community.
Bringing a suit after the fact is bogus, unless they can show evidence that the community committed fraud during the original discussions about costs and revenue sharing (for example). So I agree with the earlier comments about the suit being unfounded: Absent evidence of governmental shenanigans, the suit bogus.
"Reading... It's fundamental!" -- Try it sometime, you might like it. Or perhaps you are simply attracted as a moth to the light of a burning strawman.
Nobody with a triple digit IQ thinks now, or ever did, think that psychohistory Actually Works. The point to the Foundation trilogy++ and a huge fraction of SF is not "psychohistory" or any of the other magical impossible inventions of the literature but the idea of applying one's life faithfully to the proposition that humanity is worth working for.
Whether
is a valid proposition whose debate must be left for another day. Personally, I don't see it. In general The Left tend to be castigated for believing that societies can benefit broadly by providing a helping hand to their less fortunate members.
The point of the comment was that the data is encrypted, which the security-theater control freaks like to use as an excuse to claim "probable cause".
1) When I am testing the updated work, I use real data. Sometimes that data is on a machine that differs from my secured workstation.
2) I don't travel much. So when it does happen, I don't usually have time to go searching through every nook and cranny looking for what to get rid of before packing off. This is why it's fucking ENCRYPTED.
3) The last time I put the data on a laptop was about 4 years ago. And when I did, I ran a nice little anonymizer on it.
4) More commonly, I carry various forms of proprietary software source for various clients and users in order to do development, in the various places where the work needs to be done, be it at their office or mine. I am just as committed to their security as my wife's carefully hidden HIPAA data.
I am not really too angry with you, you are some stranger who doesn't let reading comprehension get in the way of a nice little rant. It's a common malady.
In 2005 I allowed my drivers' license to expire on my birthday at the beginning of the month, thinking that I had until the end of the month.
Traveling 3 days after the "official expiration", I flew to California, and what a pain in the ass that was! I was selected for the extra special search-every-bag at every security checkpoint both out and back.
I'm guessing that "probable cause" is whatever niggly-ass detail they want it to be.
Worse yet, my work involves lots of proprietary code, and I support my wife's psychology business accounting work. All that stuff is or should be on an encrypted partition and I can just see that...
Goon: What's on this encrypted partition?
Me: Patient mental health records for my wife's psychology business.
Goon: Decrypt it.
Me: Certainly, as soon as I have a legally binding signed agreement that all observers agree to the HIPAA privacy agreements that are required for medical records.
Goon: Step out of the line and come with me, sir.
< Uh-oh, this is probably not going to work out very well... >
It's closer than you think. I thought I remembered a lawsuit relating to U.S. Berkely admission requirements that students have a demonstrable background in modern science. (No reference to that suit, maybe someone else can find it.)
It seems that IDers were pissed off that Berkely wouldn't admit their students due to a lack of education in the principles of evolution.
Here's a link to an article from the website Answers in Genesis discussing the issue. That particular article doesn't refer to a lawsuit, so my memory may be fuzzy on this.
But your point is well taken, there are already people working that issue. And the real hilarity will ensue when our society fails to compete in the world marketplace due to a lack of depth in current scientific thought...
The GP was not "questioning" anything. Here is the quote that contains not even a hint of questioning, but lots of strongly worded answering:
In my observation, the history you cite refers to snake-oil "science" as contrasted against verified, replicated science as it now practiced.
Other than those who speak hyperbolically, serious students of climatology don't use phrases like "cut and dried". They use phrases like "After decades of study, we hare becoming increasingly concerned that climate systems are experiencing changes that are unprecedented in recorded history. Our observations of other periods in history are beginning to show us that the evidence points to a set of changes that humanity is unprepared to face."
I do not believe that the climate study community is a bunch of snake-oil salesmen. As I wrote in an earlier post, if the research revealed tomorrow that the climate is stable, that it is self-correcting, etc., then they would need to change research topics to some other atmospheric system research. This is why I contrast their motivations and temptations against those whose multimillion dollar incomes depend on maintaining the status quo.
As an American, I find the idea of reducing dependence on oil (particularly) and extractive industry (generally) somewhat attractive, as I am bloody damn tired of having the political environment poisoned by such powerful entrenched interests.
On the enema question: I assume that you recognize that most health professionals today consider fiber to be a very important part of one's diet, right? Particularly for the purpose of reducing the incidence of colorectal cancer? (I am 51 and waaay too familiar with these topics... :-) )
Perhaps you don't understand the concept of "money making machine" very well. Extractive industries are getting plenty of money right now, and they are funding all sorts of operations intending to convince Voters Like Your Brilliant Self that this is all a money game.
We can compare the motivations of people whose personal incomes are in the tens of millions per year based on continuing the status quo versus the motivations of people whose incomes and reputations depend on the accuracy of their work, some of whom would need to change the particular topic of research if the climate is doing just fine.
Which group has the greater incentive to tilt the results?
1) It won't take a whole lot of sea level rise to cause some serious population migration, considering worldwide population density is highest near shorelines.
2) While climactic variation is the norm on timescales exceeding that of recorded human history, many researchers are beginning to think that once tipped, climate change can happen surprisingly quickly.
With these two points in mind, whatever the probability that the researchers are more correct than those who would preserve the status quo, the costs of rapid change would be staggering both economically and in human lives.
On the other hand, getting going with some creativity relatively soon can reduce the risk dramatically.
I hope you are young enough to see it through. It is likely to be extremely interesting.
Yes, the idea is to establish a classical Trade Guild, in the European sense: Only those groups who have been granted the right to practice some art/craft are permitted, those practicing said art/craft are ready, willing and able to limit the number of practitioners, and those practicing without Guild permission are subjected to occasionally very harsh treatment.
In the current situation, it's the corporations large enough to maintain patent portfolios that they use to prevent competition from small providers (your point is correct and well taken), and to prevent their own financial ruination by the other large companies.
It is very rare for a large organization to come up with genuinely new ideas, approaches or paradigm-breaking inventions. It is very common for large companies to want to control how their industries work, though.
So these patent portfolios are a way to impose either direct elimination of the threat (in some cases), or a substantial tax on real entrepreneurs (in other cases).
My favorite recent example of a patent serving as mechanism for unpredictable taxation is the Research In Motion patent fight.
I read The Mystery of Capital by Hernando DeSoto, in which he explains among other things, how western societies do much better than others in establishing predictable, fungible, legal Property Rights. His examples tend to real estate, but I believe that the proliferation of silly patents exemplifies a failure to allow ordinary people to count on the value of their work.
When "everybody does it", then the likelihood of selective prosecution becomes a real possibility: If you are a big company, you can negotiate a deal where your "violations" can be balanced against their "violations". If you are too small, then the selective prosecution becomes either a big tax or an actual business-terminating event.
It was Intel's clear intention to allow simple, fully automatic translation of assembly code between one generation and the next. So the fact that the transition from each generation to the next is expressed in large steps does not make it a mighty tenuous connection. To exemplify:
(1) The slow speed of the 8008 required hardware acceleration for parity computation, so the 8008 ALU provided a parity bit in the flags register. That bit lasted all the way through the Pentium line. (Could it remain in X86_64? I no longer work in the assembly language world and do not know.)
(2) The original A,B,C,D,E,H/L register configuration with its byte/word weirdness in the 8008 was still plainly visible in the 16-bit X86 line, and hints of those structures lasted right through IA32, though IA32 does have significant improvements in orthogonality. (This is the genesis of the non-orthogonal register sets that compiler writers complained about all the way through IA32, which are fully rectified only with X86_64.)
The connection is not only not tenuous, but (I claim, having worked with every CPU they built from the 8008 to my current Core2duo) clearly connected by an intentional, nearly unblemished record of source-level backward compatibility for the 40 years of its history.
You do have a good point with respect to the way Intel scheduled its generational developments. When my group at AT&T was debating a project based on i486 DX2/66 and i960CA/CF, the Intel FAEs were exceptionally forthcoming with us about the way Intel developed their processor families. One of the more interesting things I learned was that Intel's X86 families were developed using dual teams, each team leapfrogging the other with successive generations. There was constant discussion among the teams, so often ideas from one would slip into the other.
There is no question that each generation was intended to be as large a leap as possible beyond the last, so you do have a good point about the internal architecture of the processor families.
Quoting Saint Ronald:
Trust, but verify.
This is the place where some of us note that this administration has exceeded all previous records for classifying documents, for starting what may be the greatest strategic blunder in a century of blunders using (at best) insufficient evidence (or at worst) known false statements; for using every possible excuse to probe into our personal lives; for using "questionable" interrogation methods on people who may not even be guilty of anything; the list goes on ad nauseam.
These guys have earned their place in the bright lights of thorough investigation.
Expected value in probability: compare the effort of investigating thoroughly, and decide:
1) Verify that Ivins is just a lonely loonie (most likely), having spent the investigative resources needed to show merely that labs should be more careful,
vs
2) Don't bother checking more carefully, and discover that there really were war causing assholes who used this loonie to advance their nefarious causes.
I think the lonely loonie hypothesis is correct but I support making sure that's really true.
There are too many people with too much power wielded in secret in our government, especially recently.