I think the bailouts of the auto companies were worthwhile in principle, if not in detail. Creating an industrial supply chain with diverse technological inputs takes decades, and it was on the verge of collapsing.
By contrast, it's easy to create more banks, so there's no particular need to keep any existing ones.
The US Government got a big chunk of ownership, more than with the banks, and didn't have the automakers come back to Washington to boss around the government shamelessly.
"Wow, so you are now claiming that "technology" decreased the cost of production of kerosene by 99% in 30 years? AMAZING."
Yes, of course. Chemical engineering was just getting started. Technology was rapidly improving, and demand was rapidly increasing (because people invented devices to consume refined petroleum products) and there were no fundamental physical barriers to getting better at refining (a fancy version of what whiskey makers had been doing by the seat of their pants for generations), so it's not surprising in the slightest.
The price of aluminium also rapidly decreased from its original discovery to industrial commodity. The Washington Monument was topped by it, in its day, the refined metal was rare and expensive. There was no Standard Aluminium monopoly, and no apologists either.
"Next, tell me why no-one else used these amazing technological breakthroughs to make kerosene for 98% cheaper? Or 95%? Or even 91%?"
They did, but they were squashed by Standard Oil, doing things like bribing/threatening railroads to not take their competitors shipments, among the least objectionable practices.
Oh, and yes, Standard Oil didn't exist in other developed nations, and yet oil companies in those companies also got economies of scale and technology similar to Standard Oil's.
"The point is that free market monopolies DON'T RAISE PRICES, because there is always market pressure from POTENTIAL competitors, who are waiting in the wings for the monopoly to slip up either in terms of slow technological progress, poor customer service, or prices that are too high."
Econ 101 fail.
Just because there is an equilibrium price with a monopoly doesn't meant the world (other than the monopolist) would be better off if there were competition.
Why be such a suckup to powerful scum, even dead ones?
"Lehman with unlimited liabilities would have behaved essentially exactly the same way." Empirical evidence shows otherwise. Back when investment banks were partnerships, risktaking was less, and less concentrated.
There is a simple solution to the problems: return to 1975. Screw the pettifoggery of Dodd-Frank. Don't apply a thousand cuts when two swift clubs will do.
* Investment banks used to be unlimited liability partnerships, not limited liability corporations. The partners, who were the top management, had their own lifetime earnings on the line (most of it being the partnership share of the bank). Losses were real to them personally, as in they could lose their house and wife.
* Bring back Glass-Steagall act. Divorce regulated commercial & deposit banking (backed by FDIC) which was forced to be boring and low-risk, from riskier investment banking. Then see #1 for regulating those.
Re:Affordable replacement for something paid for
on
The F-35 Story
·
· Score: 1
I " guess that the point that the GP is making is that the rest of the world has understood that big war confrontation with the US is not winnable and therefore have chosen other roads, as illustrated by the complete lack of efficiency the US have against the current crop of terrorist."
Actually, since 2006 (when Bush fired Rumsfeld, put Cheney in a box, and started listening to his father) the US has been quite effective against this current crop of terrorist, probably second only to the Mossad in the 1960's/1970's.
Re:Only "troubled" if you're not Lockheed Martin
on
The F-35 Story
·
· Score: 1
"The F-35 is a strike fighter. Its job is to blow up various ground targets, and it does this better than the F-22. Again, that is its mission and what it was built to do."
If you can take off from a paved airfield, the F-22 is better at blowing up ground targets than the F-35. Most prominently it has so much more powerful engines that it can supercruise (F-35 can't) and go there, bomb and back, with a substantially smaller turnaround time than the F-35. And while on the way it's way better at evading SAM and air threats.
"The people creating those models can be biased in their beliefs and in analysis of the data the models are based on."
It's biased by things like the heat capacity of the ocean, for example.
"The models don't indicate that there is supposed to be lag, the models were/programmed/ to/assume/ that there will be lag, that's how computer models work."
The models are not arbitrary statistical models, they are models of known physics and observed facts of the world.
"The fact that there's basically no real demand for tablets is exactly why no other company besides Apple has been able to produce a successful competitor. There are many other tablets out there that are technically equivalent or superior to Apple's tablets, but nobody wants to use them, leading to situations like the one with HP where they liquidated their stock an unprofitable prices."
WTF?
There's so little demand for tablets that two of my family members bought them within the last few months. Both iPads of course. And when the HP tablets were really cheap there was so "little demand" that they were sold out.
Maybe the reason that no other company has been able to produce a successful competitor is that no other company has produced a successful competitor at the right price?
And maybe the other tablets are not at all technically equivalent or superior to Apple's tablets for the purposes the buyers want? If they are at best equivalent for the same price, why even bother with the non-iPad still? In most cities you can find somebody who will answer iPad questions or diagnose them in person.
"IQ tests aren't crap. The idea, that the whole range of cognitive abilities can be expressed in a number is crap. And the idea that this number could is a usefull metric for anything is right out stupid."
So sure you are, young padawan?
"The best definition of intelligence I ever heard is: Intelligence is what you can measure with intelligence tests.
So if you slap together a test that tries to measure intelligence by testing language. concentration, logic and 3D-thinking, you'll get an accurate test that measures exactly that."
Just because you're smart doesn't mean that you know everything.
Now I'm not a researcher in the field, but there is indeed something more to IQ than the commonly believed and superficial dismissal.
Suppose you do just this: "slap together a test that tries to measure intelligence by testing language. concentration, logic and 3D-thinking"
and you look at the results. Say normalize the subscores within each category with the usual z transform (x-mean(x))/std(x).
Do this for thousands of people and do a principal components analysis. What do you find? The distribution is not a spherically symmetric Gaussian---there is one clear and statistically robust principal axis which explains a large fraction of the variance. This means that people who are good at some categories in the IQ test, also tend to be good at others. This is the meaning of 'generalized intelligence' and it is a non-trivial, empirical fact of humans.
It didn't have to be this way: outside of clear disease or disfunction, the performance on various apparently different test categories could have been uncorrelated on average.
The very categories in the IQ test are of course the ones which exhibit this phenomenon the most clearly---if other tasks were something like "sing on tune" or "catch a baseball" were included they would have a much lower correlation. There are unusual psychological tests involving immediate 'stimulus-response' of pressing the right button when the right or wrong words/figures appear on the screen, and results on some of them (e.g. counting milliseconds) can be in fact quite well correlated with IQ measured using traditional cognitive problems.
In sum, people's typical snarky dismissal of IQ measurement is ignorant. This is a frequent occurrence, especially on slashdot (snarky, but wrong) when otherwise smart people think their 15 seconds of "Blink" or nice social prejudice or their talk show host knows more than people who have done professional research in the field for decades.
north and south in the results are obviously not in the Earth's coordinate system, they used the galactic coordinate system.
There are previous results of things which people thought to be ought to be homogeneous which turn out not to be so. The cosmic microwave background turns out to have a peculiar dipole asymmetry, and then there is the related but newer "axis of evil", which shows peculiar polarization asymmetry and even the apparent "spins" of galaxies are inhomogenously distributed.
This, dark matter, dark energy & inhomogeneity in \alpha show mean that cosmology is coming up with a big huge WTF.
Then there's the (disputed?) variation of pendulum periods during a solar eclipse.
"it is simply a number which we have determined appropriately models the physics we are able to explore and understand to some degree."
as an essential and elementary free parameter of the quantum theory, I'd say that counts as much as anything else as "control something about the physical universe".
"The problem is that there is a lot of data that is perfectly consistent with \alpha being constant. There is a nearly complete lack of data suggesting otherwise."
Until now. And yes, the point is that if you look at stars inside the galaxy and many others \alpha is constant---only with a systematic search on the most distant quasars literally on the other side of the universe do you see an effect which is a relative 0.5 * 10^(-5) deviation.
It's just like the fact that space is nearly exactly flat everywhere where we measure in practical terms, only when you look at distant galaxies (gravitational lensing) do you see clearly non-Euclidean results without high-precision measurements.
The 'fast neutrino' story is not obviously a math error. Some people attempted to come up with explanations (there are at least 50 preprints from various people) but one of the more prominent ones ("you didn't do GPS/relativity calibration right") is strongly disputed by the original team who said in essence "yes we certainly did, you don't understand our work well enough, and we have done lots of analysis which hasn't yet been published yet"
This is not entirely implausible. People can always make mistakes but you have dozens of scientists working on the problem for years vs one guy who thought about it for a couple of weeks.
Of course there could be systematic error, but the source must be pretty subtle. The authors have done a pretty large study (in two "two be published" papers).
The implied fine structure constant is derived from relationships among various spectral lines not some large overall effect. The paper mentions that there are 6 quasars which have observations at both telescopes, and they used these data to do some reasonably sophisticated statistical checks.
The best fit to the systematic error corrections between the VLT and Keck appears to statistically insignificant, and the authors also comment that the trend is "different in magnitude and sign for each quasar pair, implying that these effects are likely to average out for an ensemble of observations".
As far as they've seen, search for internal systematics gives a null result, and the fit to a spatial dipole is at 4.2 standard deviations. Each of the two data sets has an internal consistency and the directions of the dipoles (in say galactic coordinates, not local coordinates) from each independently and the combine set agrees.
The authors finish with:
"Qualitatively, our results could violate the equivalence principle and infer a very large or innite universe, within which our `local' Hubble volume represents a tiny fraction, with correspondingly small variations in the physical constants."
That's their application to the Nobel Committee.
The result is so important that it will need substantially more experimental evidence. I think that this deserves a dedicated spacecraft mission, the way the COBE/WMAP/Planck spacecraft drove the cosmic background analysis.
"Yet people (and on THIS site!) argue that technology is almost supposed to push medical costs higher. This is absolute nonsense."
Nonsense or not, this counterintuitive result it is backed by empirical evidence in the USA.
"When this new algorithm makes it into the MRI machines, do you suppose the costs of using the machines will go or down."
When you get a MRI how much money pays for (a) the MRI machine (b) the R&D for the MRI machine (c) the hospital or facility which owns it (d) the radiologist
(c) + (d) >> (a) + (b)
In the USA the new algorithm will make it into the next MRI machine generation which GE Healthcare will sell for $$$$$$$$$$ in the USA (and a near clone for $ in 'developing' world), the operating firm will buy it and jack up their billing cost, just like everybody else doing the same thing, the radiology group will increase their fees accordingly. Blue cross will increase their payment as being "typical" for the region, and jack up their rates.
If a scan really can take less time, the medical groups will be strongly 'encouraged' to refer more patients to the MRI clinic. this works well when they have ownership in the MRI clinic as well.
This has happened consistently for 25-30 years now throughout technological changes. What will make it different now?
Go with CentOS as the CIO asks, and suggest one additional action: a modest donation to the CentOS team (less than RedHat support of course).
The real motivation is to get on the good graces of the primary CentOS developers/packagers, and develop a relationship so that if the company runs into something very difficult that they can't solve at once, they will pay for some direct one-on-one consulting from these developers as needed, and not as an ongoing expense.
"But if M$ had bought Netscape in 1994, by the late 1990s the same people in and around Netscape would have been inspired to start a free, competing project like Mozilla - which would have produced something like Firefox as Mozilla did."
If MS bought Netscape to shut it down/assimilate it into the Windows empire (actually more likely Office---they'd want to sell it as an app at first) then there would be some crazy dot-com funding in the mide-late 1990's to make a new commercial NuevoNetscape in Silicon Valley, salted with most of the same people as Netscape.
Microsoft would then have to lower the price to zero and cut off NN's air supply. NuevoNetscape finds that they can't compete against free, the company goes under and then some alumni found Mozilla.
In the end the only difference is that Microsoft Netscape was a paid product for a few years before it got integrated into the OS and stagnated.
"Carter had initially used arbitrary parameters in his perfect model to generate perfect data, but now, in order to assess his model in a realistic way, he threw those parameters out and used standard calibration techniques to match his perfect model to his perfect data. It was supposed to be a formality--he assumed, reasonably, that the process would simply produce the same parameters that had been used to produce the data in the first place. But it didn't. It turned out that there were many different sets of parameters that seemed to fit the historical data. And that made sense, he realized--given a mathematical expression with many terms and parameters in it, and thus many different ways to add up to the same single result, you'd expect there to be different ways to tweak the parameters so that they can produce similar sets of data over some limited time period."
Wow, you mean the maximum-likelihood plug-in estimator is NOT always a good representation of future variation? OMG! Hoocoodanode! http://hoocoodanode.org/
Seriously, this should be known to everybody. For good results you don't estimate a single parameter vector, you estimate the posterior distribution and then resimulate outcomes from that distribution if you want to include estimation uncertainty.
No "chaos theory" involved, just a little bit of statistical experience known for decades.
Remember, there were many models whose job was NOT to make a truly honest prediction---the models were adjuncts to the sales force. They were there to make a simulacrum of an objective analysis but one whose outcome could be tweaked to give the profitable result needed by the salesman trying to offload the CDO full of turd.
Many, many, many people saw the economic collapse.
I was reading plenty of blogs on the housing bubble, housingpanic.com, et etc, describing the preposterousness of "liar loans", subprime this, and idiocy that, and the crazy valuations.
The New York Times even had a plot of the inflation-adjusted Case-Schiller price index which was enormously above any prior peak. During 2006 and 2007 and 2008.
The notion that "nobody" saw it is simply propagandistic truthiness baloney. I personally didn't profit, because I was much too early shorting the mortgage companies & home builders and got stopped out---the bubble was too powerful.
The real crime is that a small number of very powerful people had an exceptionally lucrative interest in NOT stopping it, because they were getting ginormous paychecks from the continuation of the bubble. And now the notion that nobody could see it is used as excuses for the powerful to excuse themselves from responsibility from fraud and crime.
Down in the guts of banks, there were both risk modeling quants in the fancy banks, and the traditional "ladies with a bun" in the retail banks who processed the paperwork who saw how much outright fraud and insanity there was. Their jobs were threatened when they attempted to speak up and stop the madness, because the business side executives were making shitloads of shekels on volume.
"engineers on the rig, some of whom died in the explosion and fire. They made decisions based on hope, not policy, and died as a result."
I think it's pretty likely the risky decisions were made by the BP project managers who were under pressure from the business because the well was already running late and very much over budget, and not the well hands who would be the first ones to be horribly burned in a gas blowout.
"Experts calculate that perhaps as much as 1.6 tonnes of wreckage - more than half the spacecraft's launch mass - could ride out the destructive forces of re-entry and hit the planet."
Freaking German engineering. Do they do that just to show off? Thank god for that land war in winter.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the bailouts of the auto companies were worthwhile in principle, if not in detail. Creating an industrial supply chain with diverse technological inputs takes decades, and it was on the verge of collapsing.
By contrast, it's easy to create more banks, so there's no particular need to keep any existing ones.
The US Government got a big chunk of ownership, more than with the banks, and didn't have the automakers come back to Washington to boss around the government shamelessly.
"Wow, so you are now claiming that "technology" decreased the cost of production of kerosene by 99% in 30 years? AMAZING."
Yes, of course. Chemical engineering was just getting started. Technology was rapidly improving, and demand was rapidly increasing (because people invented devices to consume refined petroleum products) and there were no fundamental physical barriers to getting better at refining (a fancy version of what whiskey makers had been doing by the seat of their pants for generations), so it's not surprising in the slightest.
The price of aluminium also rapidly decreased from its original discovery to industrial commodity. The Washington Monument was topped by it, in its day, the refined metal was rare and expensive. There was no Standard Aluminium monopoly, and no apologists either.
"Next, tell me why no-one else used these amazing technological breakthroughs to make kerosene for 98% cheaper? Or 95%? Or even 91%?"
They did, but they were squashed by Standard Oil, doing things like bribing/threatening railroads to not take their competitors shipments, among the least objectionable practices.
Oh, and yes, Standard Oil didn't exist in other developed nations, and yet oil companies in those companies also got economies of scale and technology similar to Standard Oil's.
"The point is that free market monopolies DON'T RAISE PRICES, because there is always market pressure from POTENTIAL competitors, who are waiting in the wings for the monopoly to slip up either in terms of slow technological progress, poor customer service, or prices that are too high."
Econ 101 fail.
Just because there is an equilibrium price with a monopoly doesn't meant the world (other than the monopolist) would be better off if there were competition.
Why be such a suckup to powerful scum, even dead ones?
"Lehman with unlimited liabilities would have behaved essentially exactly the same way." Empirical evidence shows otherwise. Back when investment banks were partnerships, risktaking was less, and less concentrated.
There is a simple solution to the problems: return to 1975. Screw the pettifoggery of Dodd-Frank. Don't apply a thousand cuts when two swift clubs will do.
* Investment banks used to be unlimited liability partnerships, not limited liability corporations. The partners, who were the top management, had their own lifetime earnings on the line (most of it being the partnership share of the bank). Losses were real to them personally, as in they could lose their house and wife.
* Bring back Glass-Steagall act. Divorce regulated commercial & deposit banking (backed by FDIC) which was forced to be boring and low-risk, from riskier investment banking. Then see #1 for regulating those.
I
" guess that the point that the GP is making is that the rest of the world has understood that big war confrontation with the US is not winnable and therefore have chosen other roads, as illustrated by the complete lack of efficiency the US have against the current crop of terrorist."
Actually, since 2006 (when Bush fired Rumsfeld, put Cheney in a box, and started listening to his father) the US has been quite effective against this current crop of terrorist, probably second only to the Mossad in the 1960's/1970's.
"The F-35 is a strike fighter. Its job is to blow up various ground targets, and it does this better than the F-22. Again, that is its mission and what it was built to do."
If you can take off from a paved airfield, the F-22 is better at blowing up ground targets than the F-35. Most prominently it has so much more powerful engines that it can supercruise (F-35 can't) and go there, bomb and back, with a substantially smaller turnaround time than the F-35. And while on the way it's way better at evading SAM and air threats.
"The people creating those models can be biased in their beliefs and in analysis of the data the models are based on."
It's biased by things like the heat capacity of the ocean, for example.
"The models don't indicate that there is supposed to be lag, the models were /programmed/ to /assume/ that there will be lag, that's how computer models work."
The models are not arbitrary statistical models, they are models of known physics and observed facts of the world.
Delivering Managed Freedoms Across The Enterprise(tm)
Fascism is indistinguishable from any parody thereof.
"The fact that there's basically no real demand for tablets is exactly why no other company besides Apple has been able to produce a successful competitor. There are many other tablets out there that are technically equivalent or superior to Apple's tablets, but nobody wants to use them, leading to situations like the one with HP where they liquidated their stock an unprofitable prices."
WTF?
There's so little demand for tablets that two of my family members bought them within the last few months. Both iPads of course. And when the HP tablets were really cheap there was so "little demand" that they were sold out.
Maybe the reason that no other company has been able to produce a successful competitor is that no other company has produced a successful competitor at the right price?
And maybe the other tablets are not at all technically equivalent or superior to Apple's tablets for the purposes the buyers want? If they are at best equivalent for the same price, why even bother with the non-iPad still? In most cities you can find somebody who will answer iPad questions or diagnose them in person.
"IQ tests aren't crap. The idea, that the whole range of cognitive abilities can be expressed in a number is crap. And the idea that this number could is a usefull metric for anything is right out stupid."
So sure you are, young padawan?
"The best definition of intelligence I ever heard is: Intelligence is what you can measure with intelligence tests.
So if you slap together a test that tries to measure intelligence by testing language. concentration, logic and 3D-thinking, you'll get an accurate test that measures exactly that."
Just because you're smart doesn't mean that you know everything.
Now I'm not a researcher in the field, but there is indeed something more to IQ than the commonly believed and superficial dismissal.
Suppose you do just this: "slap together a test that tries to measure intelligence by testing language. concentration, logic and 3D-thinking"
and you look at the results. Say normalize the subscores within each category with the usual z transform (x-mean(x))/std(x).
Do this for thousands of people and do a principal components analysis. What do you find? The distribution is not a spherically symmetric Gaussian---there is one clear and statistically robust principal axis which explains a large fraction of the variance. This means that people who are good at some categories in the IQ test, also tend to be good at others. This is the meaning of 'generalized intelligence' and it is a non-trivial, empirical fact of humans.
It didn't have to be this way: outside of clear disease or disfunction, the performance on various apparently different test categories could have been uncorrelated on average.
The very categories in the IQ test are of course the ones which exhibit this phenomenon the most clearly---if other tasks were something like "sing on tune" or "catch a baseball" were included they would have a much lower correlation. There are unusual psychological tests involving immediate 'stimulus-response' of pressing the right button when the right or wrong words/figures appear on the screen, and results on some of them (e.g. counting milliseconds) can be in fact quite well correlated with IQ measured using traditional cognitive problems.
In sum, people's typical snarky dismissal of IQ measurement is ignorant. This is a frequent occurrence, especially on slashdot (snarky, but wrong) when otherwise smart people think their 15 seconds of "Blink" or nice social prejudice or their talk show host knows more than people who have done professional research in the field for decades.
north and south in the results are obviously not in the Earth's coordinate system, they used the galactic coordinate system.
There are previous results of things which people thought to be ought to be homogeneous which turn out not to be so. The cosmic microwave background turns out to have a peculiar dipole asymmetry, and then there is the related but newer "axis of evil", which shows peculiar polarization asymmetry and even the apparent "spins" of galaxies are inhomogenously distributed.
This, dark matter, dark energy & inhomogeneity in \alpha show mean that cosmology is coming up with a big huge WTF.
Then there's the (disputed?) variation of pendulum periods during a solar eclipse.
"it is simply a number which we have determined appropriately models the physics we are able to explore and understand to some degree."
as an essential and elementary free parameter of the quantum theory, I'd say that counts as much as anything else as "control something about the physical universe".
"The problem is that there is a lot of data that is perfectly consistent with \alpha being constant. There is a nearly complete lack of data suggesting otherwise."
Until now. And yes, the point is that if you look at stars inside the galaxy and many others \alpha is constant---only with a systematic search on the most distant quasars literally on the other side of the universe do you see an effect which is a relative 0.5 * 10^(-5) deviation.
It's just like the fact that space is nearly exactly flat everywhere where we measure in practical terms, only when you look at distant galaxies (gravitational lensing) do you see clearly non-Euclidean results without high-precision measurements.
The 'fast neutrino' story is not obviously a math error. Some people attempted to come up with explanations (there are at least 50 preprints from various people) but one of the more prominent ones ("you didn't do GPS/relativity calibration right") is strongly disputed by the original team who said in essence "yes we certainly did, you don't understand our work well enough, and we have done lots of analysis which hasn't yet been published yet"
This is not entirely implausible. People can always make mistakes but you have dozens of scientists working on the problem for years vs one guy who thought about it for a couple of weeks.
Of course there could be systematic error, but the source must be pretty subtle. The authors have done a pretty large study (in two "two be published" papers).
The implied fine structure constant is derived from relationships among various spectral lines not some large overall effect. The paper mentions that there are 6 quasars which have observations at both telescopes, and they used these data to do some reasonably sophisticated statistical checks.
The best fit to the systematic error corrections between the VLT and Keck appears to statistically insignificant, and the authors also comment that the trend is "different in magnitude and sign for each quasar pair, implying that these effects are likely to average out for an ensemble of observations".
As far as they've seen, search for internal systematics gives a null result, and the fit to a spatial dipole is at 4.2 standard deviations. Each of the two data sets has an internal consistency and the directions of the dipoles (in say galactic coordinates, not local coordinates) from each independently and the combine set agrees.
The authors finish with:
"Qualitatively, our results could violate the equivalence principle and infer a very large or innite universe, within
which our `local' Hubble volume represents a tiny fraction, with correspondingly small variations in the physical constants."
That's their application to the Nobel Committee.
The result is so important that it will need substantially more experimental evidence. I think that this deserves a dedicated spacecraft mission, the way the COBE/WMAP/Planck spacecraft drove the cosmic background analysis.
"Yet people (and on THIS site!) argue that technology is almost supposed to push medical costs higher. This is absolute nonsense."
Nonsense or not, this counterintuitive result it is backed by empirical evidence in the USA.
"When this new algorithm makes it into the MRI machines, do you suppose the costs of using the machines will go or down."
When you get a MRI how much money pays for
(a) the MRI machine
(b) the R&D for the MRI machine
(c) the hospital or facility which owns it
(d) the radiologist
(c) + (d) >> (a) + (b)
In the USA the new algorithm will make it into the next MRI machine generation which GE Healthcare will sell for $$$$$$$$$$ in the USA (and a near clone for $ in 'developing' world), the operating firm will buy it and jack up their billing cost, just like everybody else doing the same thing, the radiology group will increase their fees accordingly. Blue cross will increase their payment as being "typical" for the region, and jack up their rates.
If a scan really can take less time, the medical groups will be strongly 'encouraged' to refer more patients to the MRI clinic. this works well when they have ownership in the MRI clinic as well.
This has happened consistently for 25-30 years now throughout technological changes. What will make it different now?
yes.
Even better response: turn the two volume up down buttons into one clicky wheel. somehow merge channel & guide functions.
Go with CentOS as the CIO asks, and suggest one additional action: a modest donation to the CentOS team (less than RedHat support of course).
The real motivation is to get on the good graces of the primary CentOS developers/packagers, and develop a relationship so that if the company runs into something very difficult that they can't solve at once, they will pay for some direct one-on-one consulting from these developers as needed, and not as an ongoing expense.
"But if M$ had bought Netscape in 1994, by the late 1990s the same people in and around Netscape would have been inspired to start a free, competing project like Mozilla - which would have produced something like Firefox as Mozilla did."
If MS bought Netscape to shut it down/assimilate it into the Windows empire (actually more likely Office---they'd want to sell it as an app at first) then there would be some crazy dot-com funding in the mide-late 1990's to make a new commercial NuevoNetscape in Silicon Valley, salted with most of the same people as Netscape.
Microsoft would then have to lower the price to zero and cut off NN's air supply. NuevoNetscape finds that they can't compete against free, the company goes under and then some alumni found Mozilla.
In the end the only difference is that Microsoft Netscape was a paid product for a few years before it got integrated into the OS and stagnated.
me: My hovercraft (pantomimes puffing a cigarette)... is full of eels (pretends to strike a match).
them: Ahh, matches!
me: Ya! Ya! Ya! Ya! Do you waaaaant... do you waaaaaant... to come back to my place, bouncy bouncy?
Right any language which makes the following different
condition = iandj
condition = i and j
deserves to die?
http://xkcd.com/538/
Sorry for self-responding.
I read the original linked article.
"Carter had initially used arbitrary parameters in his perfect model to generate perfect data, but now, in order to assess his model in a realistic way, he threw those parameters out and used standard calibration techniques to match his perfect model to his perfect data. It was supposed to be a formality--he assumed, reasonably, that the process would simply produce the same parameters that had been used to produce the data in the first place. But it didn't. It turned out that there were many different sets of parameters that seemed to fit the historical data. And that made sense, he realized--given a mathematical expression with many terms and parameters in it, and thus many different ways to add up to the same single result, you'd expect there to be different ways to tweak the parameters so that they can produce similar sets of data over some limited time period."
Wow, you mean the maximum-likelihood plug-in estimator is NOT always a good representation of future variation? OMG! Hoocoodanode! http://hoocoodanode.org/
Seriously, this should be known to everybody. For good results you don't estimate a single parameter vector, you estimate the posterior distribution and then resimulate outcomes from that distribution if you want to include estimation uncertainty.
No "chaos theory" involved, just a little bit of statistical experience known for decades.
Remember, there were many models whose job was NOT to make a truly honest prediction---the models were adjuncts to the sales force. They were there to make a simulacrum of an objective analysis but one whose outcome could be tweaked to give the profitable result needed by the salesman trying to offload the CDO full of turd.
Many, many, many people saw the economic collapse.
I was reading plenty of blogs on the housing bubble, housingpanic.com, et etc, describing the preposterousness of "liar loans", subprime this, and idiocy that, and the crazy valuations.
The New York Times even had a plot of the inflation-adjusted Case-Schiller price index which was enormously above any prior peak. During 2006 and 2007 and 2008.
The notion that "nobody" saw it is simply propagandistic truthiness baloney. I personally didn't profit, because I was much too early shorting the mortgage companies & home builders and got stopped out---the bubble was too powerful.
The real crime is that a small number of very powerful people had an exceptionally lucrative interest in NOT stopping it, because they were getting ginormous paychecks from the continuation of the bubble. And now the notion that nobody could see it is used as excuses for the powerful to excuse themselves from responsibility from fraud and crime.
Down in the guts of banks, there were both risk modeling quants in the fancy banks, and the traditional "ladies with a bun" in the retail banks who processed the paperwork who saw how much outright fraud and insanity there was. Their jobs were threatened when they attempted to speak up and stop the madness, because the business side executives were making shitloads of shekels on volume.
"engineers on the rig, some of whom died in the explosion and fire. They made decisions based on hope, not policy, and died as a result."
I think it's pretty likely the risky decisions were made by the BP project managers who were under pressure from the business because the well was already running late and very much over budget, and not the well hands who would be the first ones to be horribly burned in a gas blowout.
"Experts calculate that perhaps as much as 1.6 tonnes of wreckage - more than half the spacecraft's launch mass - could ride out the destructive forces of re-entry and hit the planet."
Freaking German engineering. Do they do that just to show off? Thank god for that land war in winter.