The "conservatives" believe in letting powerful people do whatever they want even if---especially if---it results in a less free market.
Free market requires pricing transparency and low-friction competitive substitutability.
At its core, the ideology is simple: they believe in wielding government power for the benefit of the powerful and against wielding government power for the benefit of the less powerful.
Indeed. All surface ships are vulnerable to modern non-improvised weapons.
Naturally the Chinese surface Navy has no answer to being sunk by B-2's. In a significant conflict China could successfully deter/eliminate US surface fleet a significant distance, and the US could deter/eliminate Chinese surface fleet at any distance.
The biggest danger to carriers---any surface vessel in fact---is attack submarines.
In nearly all 'unrestricted' exercises among allies (meaning the submarine's capabilities and tactics were not nerfed a priori) the submarines almost always get many hits with almost no sub losses or detection.
They don't talk about this in public much, but it's true. Modern torpedoes have excellent guidance and are very hard to detect. They can be launched dozens of kilometers away, and the submarine has half an hour to an hour to keep on moving. Ever go on the ocean and look out in all directions for 30 miles? And try to find something very quiet underwater?
A single hit sinks a destroyer in 20 seconds. They're designed to detonate under the keel area for maximum damage---where the nuclear reactors are in a carrier. Carrier and submarine nuclear reactors run on nearly weapons-grade uranium. It's a very large amount compared to weapons as well, of course since it runs for many years. Just some anomalous water getting in there, say from having thousand pound explosives, changes neutron reflection geometry and you could get a criticality accident/detonation as well.
When the Soviet Union sank, the US military-industrial establishment declined in size significantly. The Russian one of course collapsed but is coming back, of course to a lower level than before.
"Then we tore up the ABM treaty and put anti-missile bases in Eastern Europe claiming we were doing that because of Iran. The Russians didn't find that laughable claim one bit funny and understood that the west was seeking to negate their nuclear deterrence."
In truth that position is actually laughable. The anti-missile bases and technology are quantitatively and qualitatively utterly inadequate to make a flyspeck of a difference. Russia knows this.
Consider that after the breakup of the USSR, Russia has engineered and deployed substantial new nuclear weapons and delivery systems. The US has not. The nuclear weapons production & engineering ceased completely. No missiles have been designed and built, and the USA dismantled the only contemporary 80's ones (Pershing & MX).
Is it the US who is really the only problem here? What does Russia do with fundamentalist terrorists/separatists differently than USA?
Make a desktop interface which is optimized for the desktop and is substantially better than anything that exists now. Look at all the academic research, and take years to adopt and polish it. Demand excellence internally and never believe your own BS.
Heck, even NextSTEP from 1990 is a better zeroth-order start.
In a nutshell: work on something truly great for your customers. Not for your delusional marketing requirements or internal power point power plays, e.g. "mobile and tablets are the future, and so we need to privilege their interface everywhere because we want Windows Everywhere."
Steve Jobs wasn't stupid enough to put a little microscopic Mac on the iPhone. The previous horrifying Windows Mobile 5 made that mistake, a miniature XP with a stylus on the phone. Microsoft still didn't learn!
"suffering the inconveniences of public transportation, which makes a two tiered system of those who work for a deep pocket tech companies and those who don't."
So if SF public transportation is inconvenient, then everybody should be inconvenienced?
What about this angle: Google's busses are clearing up traffic of 20 cars.
to overthrow the tyranny of the evil payment and banking system, we will adopt a, uh, payment and banking system.
But since the code and infrastructure is less than 6 months old and depends on companies with less cash flow than lolcats.com instead of being crufty 25 year old code from evil companies with billions of evil fiat currency tokens, it's sure to be an awesome libertarian world changer!
| Tell that to a black man in Mississippi circa 1964. There are a few that might tell you how the only thing that stood between their home and family, and a dozen angry klansmen with torches, was a 12ga shotgun and the will to use it.
Are you nuts? What do you think would happen one minute after a black man threatened a white man with a weapon in 1964 in Mississippi? Hundreds of men with guns would invade the black neighborhood, backed up by the local and state police.
The only thing that might stand in 1964 between their family and a few dozen klansmen with torches and GUNS was the willingness of the Federal government to intervene with force.
Banks make loans in dollars. Banks are supported by the central bank in dollars. Banks are regulated in dollars and are given reserve ratios in dollars.
The problem with Bitcoin as a currency isn't that you don't pay taxes in it, but that there's no functioning debt and bond market in it. A medium of exchange from one good to another is necessary but exchange from now and the future is critical.
That's what really makes it a problem. It will never be a currency. Bitcoin is more like a commodity like Rembrandts, without the advantage of looking good, and with the advantage of being useful to evade laws against contraband.
IPCC scientists are occasionally under political pressure. The pressure has always been to "tone down" their predictions of the future and consequences of global warming.
"If I should only be talking about climate and not weather, then why do all of the alarmists tout about extreme weather?"
To preserve my blood pressure, I will assume that you are actually well meaning, and honestly want to learn and you are just temporarily ignorant.
Weather is the consequence of climate. Weather in North Dakota in the winter is measurably different than summer in Miami because they have differing climates. The specific weather on any one day changes with timescales related to the atmospheric circulation, which is a few weeks. Weather modeling has different purposes than climate modeling---weather takes certain observations as inputs and assumptions and boundary conditions, whereas climate modeling attempts to predict the long-term evolution of underlying physical parameters.
The inability to predict weather more than 2 or 3 weeks in advance is a known phenomenon coming from positive Lyapunov exponents in the evolution of the physical fields representing weather. This doesn't mean that climate is unpredictable because what is intended to be predicted in climate is the basic boundary conditions and inputs to weather models. It is simple to predict that winter in North Dakota will on average be much colder than summer in Miami, because the physics of the Sun and Earth show that less electromagnetic radiation reaches the ground in one case than the other.
Global warming from human activity arises because human-induced changes in the atmosphere resultsin increased emission of electromagnetic energy from the atmosphere which hits the surface. (This is not only a hypothesis, it is an experimentally validated fact). Climate models deal with the complex consequences of this change in physics. Weather models take certain inputs directly from current observations and predict the short-term evolution. They are operationally and structurally distinct.
"The models are failing, they didn't even account for the dominant greenhouse gas on earth, which is water and which is far too complicated to model with current technology. "
The shameless ignorance is strong with this one.
Do you really believe that climatologists have IGNORED water for 50 years? Oh, "oops we forgot it again"? WTF? It's like asserting that the entire profession of internal medicine forgetting that kidneys exist because they're "too complicated to model" and assume animals are all kidney and urine free.
The very paper from the original article, peer reviewed and published in the top journal on the planet, is exactly about this very problem of testing which of the many climate models best deal with the complex feedback and feedforwards with water and clouds by using experimental data.
Here's a hint. The people who do this for a living know much much much much more than you and I do about it. I have a modest idea how much more the pros know about it (I have a PhD in physics and am acquainted with the author) and I also have the feeling that in fact however much more I think they understand, they are probably even beyond that.
Much of the very modest discrepancy has been located. It isn't in the models or the physics, but in the completeness and comprehensiveness of the data sets and the data reduction.
OK, what are the expected sizes of decadal-level fluctuations around those predictions?
Furthermore. The measurements of surface which are prlotted are now known to have problems, in particular, underestimating the polar regions which have sparse data and more heating, and heat going into the deeper ocean. A number of peer-reviewed recent analyses and data has shown that the polar heating has been underestimated, as has the heat going to deeper ocean. There is no mystery or problem.
There are zillions of predictions which have been validated.
Complete triviality. Any targeted device gets updates routed somewhere else.
All of Snowden's evidence of those complex cracks make it much less probable that there was any general manufacturer supported backdoor. I think Apple's being truthful.
Besides, what did you expect the NSA did? Do you think the Russians and Chinese have worse cracks? Certainly not.
"However, for every professional there are 100 amateurs. Even if the amateurs are 1/10 as productive, their sheer numbers make them a significant force."
I don't see this at all. In top level science for every 1000 professionals there might be 1 or 2 amateurs.
I am interested in those areas where "doing it for a living" does not, overall, result in the highest skill compared to those who do not. Look especially at difficult areas of endeavor.
Getting good at science---or any other rigorous profession---requires both underlying talent, and long-term motivation to study and practice for at least a decade as an adult.
The professional side, meaning that people get paid to do work, also comes with a substantial initial filter on knowledge and talent, because people who pay others to do work want to get the most from their money.
The obvious other example is in sports---is there any sport which has a professional league where a substantial number of amateurs are seriously competitive? I'm unaware of any. In fact, professional sports teams are enormously better than even the best amateur clubs.
Amateurism won't achieve this other than exceptionally rare and globally insignificant individuals. The intersection of a) sufficiently self-funded b) sufficiently talented and c) sufficiently motivated to work intensely at one thing for a long time is very small. Generally people with enough money to be (a) won't want to bother with (c). Why should they, when they can do whatever they want? If they have to work for a living like most people, they may not be sufficiently talented, but more importantly they don't have the time to devote to it.
It also helps to learn the core ideas between age 18 and 30.
What does work is for billionaires to set up companies and foundations in areas that they are particularly interested, for example Craig Venter or Fred Kavli. The billionaire may close enough to the science to understand it, but not able to advance it more than the people he hires.
| How does Octave or any other open source tool hold up against something with so many resources behind it?
It's enormously cheaper. I'm now at a commercial analytic software company which could use MATLAB productively, but it isn't completely essential. Just one machine-locked license with a small array of basic toolboxes was $35,000 with a substantial yearly fee. Mathworks obviously didn't want our business. The attitude from management was that they pay money to hire smart people who know how to figure out things and we can use R or python or octave for free on all of our servers and PC clients. At $500 they might have had a sale.
I compiled it from source and use octave, and yes commercial MATLAB is certainly a better and more comprehensive product.
"Or are we perhaps pointing fingers in the wrong direction and one of the culprits from the past is to blame and history is repeating itself?"
If it is, where is the experimental evidence?
Do you imagine that people who do this science for a living have never ever once thought about this in the decades that they've worked? Your question is presupposing a scientific capability somewhere near Aristotle.
One of the culprits from the past, present and future is the greenhouse effect. On this, the extra gases emitted by humans increase the magnitude of the existing, natural effect, and this is validated by direct experimental measurements.
"one volcano pumps 5-10x the amount of CO_2 into the atmosphere as people do in a decade. "
This is factually false. There is NO EVIDENCE for that whatsoever, unless you're talking about something literally on another planet.
In fact the amount of CO2 emitted by humans over a few years is larger than the size of the fluctuations from the yearly seasonal cycle of northern hemisphere vs southern hemisphere growth of the PLANETARY BIOSPHERE.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeling_Curve
Look at the size of the yearly oscillations. Look at the size of the trend. Look at the non-existent influence from those invisible super volcanoes erupting stochastcially.
There are "factoid lies" which are so profoundly stupid that scientists even in 1970 wouldn't remotely entertain. This is one of them.
Slashdot Mirror
The "conservatives" believe in letting powerful people do whatever they want even if---especially if---it results in a less free market.
Free market requires pricing transparency and low-friction competitive substitutability.
At its core, the ideology is simple: they believe in wielding government power for the benefit of the powerful and against wielding government power for the benefit of the less powerful.
Indeed. All surface ships are vulnerable to modern non-improvised weapons.
Naturally the Chinese surface Navy has no answer to being sunk by B-2's. In a significant conflict China could successfully deter/eliminate US surface fleet a significant distance, and the US could deter/eliminate Chinese surface fleet at any distance.
Aircraft, missiles and subs win.
The biggest danger to carriers---any surface vessel in fact---is attack submarines.
In nearly all 'unrestricted' exercises among allies (meaning the submarine's capabilities and tactics were not nerfed a priori) the submarines almost always get many hits with almost no sub losses or detection.
They don't talk about this in public much, but it's true. Modern torpedoes have excellent guidance and are very hard to detect. They can be launched dozens of kilometers away, and the submarine has half an hour to an hour to keep on moving. Ever go on the ocean and look out in all directions for 30 miles? And try to find something very quiet underwater?
A single hit sinks a destroyer in 20 seconds. They're designed to detonate under the keel area for maximum damage---where the nuclear reactors are in a carrier. Carrier and submarine nuclear reactors run on nearly weapons-grade uranium. It's a very large amount compared to weapons as well, of course since it runs for many years. Just some anomalous water getting in there, say from having thousand pound explosives, changes neutron reflection geometry and you could get a criticality accident/detonation as well.
When the Soviet Union sank, the US military-industrial establishment declined in size significantly. The Russian one of course collapsed but is coming back, of course to a lower level than before.
"Then we tore up the ABM treaty and put anti-missile bases in Eastern Europe claiming we were doing that because of Iran. The Russians didn't find that laughable claim one bit funny and understood that the west was seeking to negate their nuclear deterrence."
In truth that position is actually laughable. The anti-missile bases and technology are quantitatively and qualitatively utterly inadequate to make a flyspeck of a difference. Russia knows this.
Consider that after the breakup of the USSR, Russia has engineered and deployed substantial new nuclear weapons and delivery systems. The US has not. The nuclear weapons production & engineering ceased completely. No missiles have been designed and built, and the USA dismantled the only contemporary 80's ones (Pershing & MX).
Is it the US who is really the only problem here? What does Russia do with fundamentalist terrorists/separatists differently than USA?
Make a desktop interface which is optimized for the desktop and is substantially better than anything that exists now. Look at all the academic research, and take years to adopt and polish it. Demand excellence internally and never believe your own BS.
Heck, even NextSTEP from 1990 is a better zeroth-order start.
In a nutshell: work on something truly great for your customers. Not for your delusional marketing requirements or internal power point power plays, e.g. "mobile and tablets are the future, and so we need to privilege their interface everywhere because we want Windows Everywhere."
Steve Jobs wasn't stupid enough to put a little microscopic Mac on the iPhone. The previous horrifying Windows Mobile 5 made that mistake, a miniature XP with a stylus on the phone. Microsoft still didn't learn!
"suffering the inconveniences of public transportation, which makes a two tiered system of those who work for a deep pocket tech companies and those who don't."
So if SF public transportation is inconvenient, then everybody should be inconvenienced?
What about this angle: Google's busses are clearing up traffic of 20 cars.
to overthrow the tyranny of the evil payment and banking system, we will adopt a, uh, payment and banking system.
But since the code and infrastructure is less than 6 months old and depends on companies with less cash flow than lolcats.com instead of being crufty 25 year old code from evil companies with billions of evil fiat currency tokens, it's sure to be an awesome libertarian world changer!
| Tell that to a black man in Mississippi circa 1964. There are a few that might tell you how the only thing that stood between their home and family, and a dozen angry klansmen with torches, was a 12ga shotgun and the will to use it.
Are you nuts? What do you think would happen one minute after a black man threatened a white man with a weapon in 1964 in Mississippi? Hundreds of men with guns would invade the black neighborhood, backed up by the local and state police.
The only thing that might stand in 1964 between their family and a few dozen klansmen with torches and GUNS was the willingness of the Federal government to intervene with force.
"What cryptocurrencies really highlight are some fallacies of money and our Modern institutions."
What's that? There's a sucker bitmined every minute?
Banks make loans in dollars. Banks are supported by the central bank in dollars. Banks are regulated in dollars and are given reserve ratios in dollars.
The problem with Bitcoin as a currency isn't that you don't pay taxes in it, but that there's no functioning debt and bond market in it. A medium of exchange from one good to another is necessary but exchange from now and the future is critical.
That's what really makes it a problem. It will never be a currency. Bitcoin is more like a commodity like Rembrandts, without the advantage of looking good, and with the advantage of being useful to evade laws against contraband.
IPCC scientists are occasionally under political pressure. The pressure has always been to "tone down" their predictions of the future and consequences of global warming.
"If I should only be talking about climate and not weather, then why do all of the alarmists tout about extreme weather?"
To preserve my blood pressure, I will assume that you are actually well meaning, and honestly want to learn and you are just temporarily ignorant.
Weather is the consequence of climate. Weather in North Dakota in the winter is measurably different than summer in Miami because they have differing climates. The specific weather on any one day changes with timescales related to the atmospheric circulation, which is a few weeks. Weather modeling has different purposes than climate modeling---weather takes certain observations as inputs and assumptions and boundary conditions, whereas climate modeling attempts to predict the long-term evolution of underlying physical parameters.
The inability to predict weather more than 2 or 3 weeks in advance is a known phenomenon coming from positive Lyapunov exponents in the evolution of the physical fields representing weather. This doesn't mean that climate is unpredictable because what is intended to be predicted in climate is the basic boundary conditions and inputs to weather models. It is simple to predict that winter in North Dakota will on average be much colder than summer in Miami, because the physics of the Sun and Earth show that less electromagnetic radiation reaches the ground in one case than the other.
Global warming from human activity arises because human-induced changes in the atmosphere resultsin increased emission of electromagnetic energy from the atmosphere which hits the surface. (This is not only a hypothesis, it is an experimentally validated fact). Climate models deal with the complex consequences of this change in physics. Weather models take certain inputs directly from current observations and predict the short-term evolution. They are operationally and structurally distinct.
":-- and those that don't are said to be in denial."
which is entirely correct given the experimental data and known facts of physics.
"The models are failing, they didn't even account for the dominant greenhouse gas on earth, which is water and which is far too complicated to model with current technology. "
The shameless ignorance is strong with this one.
Do you really believe that climatologists have IGNORED water for 50 years? Oh, "oops we forgot it again"? WTF? It's like asserting that the entire profession of internal medicine forgetting that kidneys exist because they're "too complicated to model" and assume animals are all kidney and urine free.
The very paper from the original article, peer reviewed and published in the top journal on the planet, is exactly about this very problem of testing which of the many climate models best deal with the complex feedback and feedforwards with water and clouds by using experimental data.
Here's a hint. The people who do this for a living know much much much much more than you and I do about it. I have a modest idea how much more the pros know about it (I have a PhD in physics and am acquainted with the author) and I also have the feeling that in fact however much more I think they understand, they are probably even beyond that.
Much of the very modest discrepancy has been located. It isn't in the models or the physics, but in the completeness and comprehensiveness of the data sets and the data reduction.
OK, what are the expected sizes of decadal-level fluctuations around those predictions?
Furthermore. The measurements of surface which are prlotted are now known to have problems, in particular, underestimating the polar regions which have sparse data and more heating, and heat going into the deeper ocean. A number of peer-reviewed recent analyses and data has shown that the polar heating has been underestimated, as has the heat going to deeper ocean. There is no mystery or problem.
There are zillions of predictions which have been validated.
How would an official backdoor work?
a) Windows Update
b) App Store Update
Complete triviality. Any targeted device gets updates routed somewhere else.
All of Snowden's evidence of those complex cracks make it much less probable that there was any general manufacturer supported backdoor. I think Apple's being truthful.
Besides, what did you expect the NSA did? Do you think the Russians and Chinese have worse cracks? Certainly not.
"It is the digital equivalent of a drone firing a hellfire missle on you."
Other than the dismemberment, arson and homicide?
"In the not too distant past, most science was amateur. "
When was that? Ancient Greeks?
Isaac Newton had a paying job. What major scientific achievement in the last 10 years was driven by an amateur scientist?
"However, for every professional there are 100 amateurs. Even if the amateurs are 1/10 as productive, their sheer numbers make them a significant force."
I don't see this at all. In top level science for every 1000 professionals there might be 1 or 2 amateurs.
I am interested in those areas where "doing it for a living" does not, overall, result in the highest skill compared to those who do not. Look especially at difficult areas of endeavor.
Getting good at science---or any other rigorous profession---requires both underlying talent, and long-term motivation to study and practice for at least a decade as an adult.
The professional side, meaning that people get paid to do work, also comes with a substantial initial filter on knowledge and talent, because people who pay others to do work want to get the most from their money.
The obvious other example is in sports---is there any sport which has a professional league where a substantial number of amateurs are seriously competitive? I'm unaware of any. In fact, professional sports teams are enormously better than even the best amateur clubs.
Amateurism won't achieve this other than exceptionally rare and globally insignificant individuals. The intersection of a) sufficiently self-funded b) sufficiently talented and c) sufficiently motivated to work intensely at one thing for a long time is very small. Generally people with enough money to be (a) won't want to bother with (c). Why should they, when they can do whatever they want? If they have to work for a living like most people, they may not be sufficiently talented, but more importantly they don't have the time to devote to it.
It also helps to learn the core ideas between age 18 and 30.
What does work is for billionaires to set up companies and foundations in areas that they are particularly interested, for example Craig Venter or Fred Kavli. The billionaire may close enough to the science to understand it, but not able to advance it more than the people he hires.
| How does Octave or any other open source tool hold up against something with so many resources behind it?
It's enormously cheaper. I'm now at a commercial analytic software company which could use MATLAB productively, but it isn't completely essential. Just one machine-locked license with a small array of basic toolboxes was $35,000 with a substantial yearly fee. Mathworks obviously didn't want our business. The attitude from management was that they pay money to hire smart people who know how to figure out things and we can use R or python or octave for free on all of our servers and PC clients. At $500 they might have had a sale.
I compiled it from source and use octave, and yes commercial MATLAB is certainly a better and more comprehensive product.
In actual fact, Chinese today are generally highly supportive of their central government, and much less so of their local governments.
"Or are we perhaps pointing fingers in the wrong direction and one of the culprits from the past is to blame and history is repeating itself?"
If it is, where is the experimental evidence?
Do you imagine that people who do this science for a living have never ever once thought about this in the decades that they've worked? Your question is presupposing a scientific capability somewhere near Aristotle.
One of the culprits from the past, present and future is the greenhouse effect. On this, the extra gases emitted by humans increase the magnitude of the existing, natural effect, and this is validated by direct experimental measurements.
"one volcano pumps 5-10x the amount of CO_2 into the atmosphere as people do in a decade. "
This is factually false. There is NO EVIDENCE for that whatsoever, unless you're talking about something literally on another planet.
In fact the amount of CO2 emitted by humans over a few years is larger than the size of the fluctuations from the yearly seasonal cycle of northern hemisphere vs southern hemisphere growth of the PLANETARY BIOSPHERE.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeling_Curve
Look at the size of the yearly oscillations. Look at the size of the trend. Look at the non-existent influence from those invisible super volcanoes erupting stochastcially.
There are "factoid lies" which are so profoundly stupid that scientists even in 1970 wouldn't remotely entertain. This is one of them.