Actually it is. Star Wars is two parts opera plus one part conservative liberation fantasy.
Love with subverted or mistaken identities (e.g. Titania falling in love with the donkey, Cosi fan Tutte, etc etc) is typical.
Then there's the War part, you know where the Good Salt Of the Earth Conservative Force-Fearing People rise up against the Modern Mechanized Industrial Empire whose technological terrors, of course, killed all the priests who maintained the Old "Republic" centered on royalty, mysticism, and essentialist blood-line inheritance.
The Imperial Academy of Sciences long ago debunked midichlorians as complete Jedi hokum, a big money making scam for their greedy abbey-based network of chiropractic "clinics". Their meditation practices are nothing but expensive quack "cures" compared to scientific evidence-based medicine from legitimate, licensed neurostim physiciandroids.
Alderaan == Versailles House of Organa == Bourbons
"Nobody is saying "he meant it in a good way," but there's quite a difference in what he actually said and people interpreting it as a sign of genocidal intent."
It is reasonable to suppose that the interpretation of genocidal intent might be reasonable given the throngs of thousands chanting "Death To Israel" many weeks per year for for 32 years, and the support for Hezbollah which has an explicitly exterminationist policy.
If the interpretation was "we want Israel to change its policies to have a much more satisfactory resolution so that Jews and Arabs will live peaceably", that clarification could have been offered.
But as far as I am aware, the ratio of that vs "Death To Israel" is something like zero to 30,000.
"Most consumer's minds?? Say what? Most consumers just assume Windows and Microsoft is everything and nothing else matters. They are totally indifferent to the problems, and don't even care about options."
Really?
My non-technical wife is at least as Microsoft-phobic than a Linux fanboy.
She considers Microsoft-anything to be an "infection" and was very disappointed when she had to install Excel for a class (some add on package didn't exist for OpenOffice) on her Mac.
And yes she had Windows computers for 10 years previously.
Funny I'm less anti-Microsoft than I used to be; because (a) their evil has been tempered by their humiliation and loss of power, and (b) Windows 7 is OK.
"I disagree with Steve Jobs' implication that a reduction of choice is a good thing. Just because Steve Jobs thinks it's crap doesn't mean the rest of the world won't want to buy it.:
That may not be Steve Jobs' point.
Steve says "This stuff is crap, we're not doing it."
Steve's point is that at some of the other places, there isn't anybody who says, "This other stuff is also crap, we're not doing it".
Even if their idea of crap isn't the same as in Steve's Reality Distortion Field, at least somebody should be thinking hard about junking crap and making good into great.
"eyeballs" aren't revenue unless you're in the cornea business.
And they don't have "control" of the living room, they just have alot of video game consoles which seem to be made at a loss. What exactly is the X360 doing for Microsoft?
It's not like everybody is using the Microsoft Video Store, and getting all their TV from the Ballmer Network, and Microsoft isn't getting money for every TV program they watch. (And neither is Google or Apple, despite their desire---the most successful is NetFlix, because they offer a simpler product and are good at it).
What phone "tie" to X360 is there and would make sense? The hardware & software is completely different.
Why do you want to access your video game remotely from your phone?
The best upside is that by working with Nokia they'll make Windows Phone 7 better as it will have better software design for real hardware.
Instead of grandiose "control of eyeballs", let's have Microsoft make a phone which doesn't really suck. That's plenty hard for them already.
"whats stopping UAV's from being able to literally dodge incoming fire (RPG's, missles etc)?"
A RPG isn't going to hit a UAV. A purpose-designed anti-aircraft missile has a very high thrust to weight ratio, higher than any jet-propelled aircraft. It will always be more maneuverable, though with limited range. It's not clear that a very tight turn radius is going to help tremendously.
Actual anti-aircraft missiles don't have to physically touch the aircraft to detonate, unlike a video game. In fact, they work better if they go up to the sides of the aircraft and blow up there, disabling propulsion and control (i.e. pilot).
Increased maneuverability of UAV's could give them an advantage in some cases, but experience and awareness of a pilot is also an advantage.
The primary advantage would be the UAV's smaller mass to payload ratio and anything else which gives a lower radar return.
Soon, the managers are going to ask whether the Microsoft systems are sufficiently compatible with the iPad ecosystem and management tools.
When the IT people start bringing up all sorts of complex reasons why there are problems, the next question will be "So, honestly, are those all problems a consequence of stuff the Windows way on the Windows side of things or the iPad way on the iPad side of things?"
The psychological assumption of Microsoft's implicit invicibility and centrality has been broken.
The avalanche has started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.
"We create our own A4 chip, our own software, our own battery chemistry, our own enclosure, our own everything."
Back (say 1990's) when Apple was a complete system integrator, and so was Sun, and DEC, and NeXT and MIPS and SGI and Apollo---they couldn't come close to the pricing of 'generic' PC's assembled from a competitive market. This is often the case in manufacturing industries (scaling up intense specialization and works better than trying to be good at many different things).
What changed?
Will it change again---in 5 years will there be an Armdroid de-facto reference hardware platform with roughly interchangable parts and Taiwanese/Chinese manufacturers cutting hardware margins to the bone? Or is there something fundamentally different.
"But that question isn't answered with direct photographic evidence.
Instead, we are offered fudge FUDD articles like this one, (widely quoted), based on squishy, confusing math."
Photos don't tell you how thick the ice is.
"Well, here's an idea which doesn't require hysteria: The Earth's spin has slowed lately."
Direct precise observations conradicts this idea. We'd know it right away from GPS. People have already looked into it and the rotation of the Earth is proceeding as expected.
So I'm supposed the buy the idea that there is no anthropogenic global warming despite massive physical evidence----but there is some mystical planetary changes because of a "dark star" despite the total lack of any physical evidence.
"The assumption that CO2 is significant flies in the face of our knowledge of greenhouse gases where water vapour accounts for over 90% of the effect."
Water vapor is about 50-60% of the effect and all the climatologists have known this for, oh since the beginning of the field.
However, since water vapor in the atmosphere is in statistical equilibrium with the oceans and has a residence time of a couple of weeks, as opposed to centuries or millenia with CO2, the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere will pretty much depend on the temperature. And humans can alter the second part by digging up and burning coal. And the amount is significant when you actually do quantitative computations like climate scientists have been doing for 50 years.
"You also ignore that the climate is a chaotic system with literally thousands of factors that can drive temperatures up or down. Pointing at a single factor and ignoring the others is ridiculous and unscientific in the extreme."
That's what physics is for. Actually even in chaotic systems the fundamental physics on the boundary conditions still really matter. (Yes I am a physicist).
Even though you can't predict the weather with much skill one year out, it's pretty damn certain that any January day in Miami will be a whole bunch warmer than in Minneapolis. Why? Because there is more electromagnetic radiation hitting the surface in the area near Miami than in Minneapolis.
An increase in the greenhouse effect by changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere results in more electromagnetic radiation hitting the surface of the planet.
"Tedesco said if the variability were random, then over a 30-year period one would expect the record years to be evenly distributed."
"What absolute rubbish from yet another climate scientist who fails to understand random numbers."
What absolute rubbish from yet another blogger who fails to understand actual climate scientists and the level of work that goes into actual professional level research.
The actual scientific content is something like "under the null hypothesis that the yearly temperature anomalies had no trend and were distributed iid, the observed data shows a test statistic of trend which violates the null at the p0.001 level"
Or, perhaps "Using the Wally-Dilbert Bayesian estimator of trend, the lower confidence interval at 99.9% is above zero"
Or, perhaps "using a bootstrap randomization test with heteroskedastic correction according to blah blah blah the hypothesis of no trend is rejected by...."
And these are what get published in the actual professional papers.
Furthermore, the description that "then over a 30-year period one would expect the record years to be evenly distributed" is actually a good intuitive explanation of the null hypothesis implicit or explicit in the various statistical test procedures.
"Look at the stock market with it's bull runs and bear markets - yet many claim that it's a totally random phenomenon despite this, and tests for randomness support this idea." Actually there is serial autocorrelation in stock markets shown by statistical tests.
"just because we see a changing in a cycle doesn't mean we are causing it."
That's true.
But when you have a comprehensive mechanistic physical explanatory theory based on 50-100 years of lab-verified quantum mechanics, radiative transfer, backed up by decades of global observational evidence
AND
there are no other feasible explanations for the mystical "natural cycle" which somehow happens to replicate the features of greenhouse-induced global warming, and simultaneously supplant the known and exceptionally well proven basic physics, and there are no feasible even experimental programs to find this Mystical Natural Cycle But Definitely Not At All Any Fossil Fuel theory of planetary physics
what should you go with as "Most Likely To Be Actually True"?
Global warming is not a statistical correlation---it is physics.
Goldman Sachs sure as heck got a "bailout"----they got full value of their OTC contracts they had with AIG, when AIG was bailed out.
In most usual circumstances they would have been creditors and gotten only a fraction of what they were due---like all other creditors.
GM's restructuring sure imposed pain on creditors and shareholders, Lehman's did, and AIG's did---unless you happened to be very long those kind of instruments that GS was.
Maybe those hundreds of millions of dollars to academic and government research institutions in robotics and machine learning had a wee bit to do with the success of the teams who entered the competitions.
"For example, we have a toy robot on a billiard table that either has a LED lit or unlit at any particular time interval. Via the simulate() function, we can determine if the robot will have the LED lit or not for any time interval T > T0.
PF3: The robot also runs the simulate() function, and sets the LED to be the opposite of the returned result for the given time interval. (LED = !simulate(U0))"
There's a problem:
This assumes that the robot's internal simulation operates in an implementation universe distinct from that covered by simulate(), but in truth it does not.
Read the above very very carefully. This is superb government misdirection.
The reader is encouraged to infer that the exceptional performance made them nervous. That is not what he claimed.
I suspect (without insider knowledge) that forthcoming statement would be:
"We preferred to be conservative about security, and in some cases did not select algorithms with exceptional performance, largely because an attack and theory known to government scientists but not to the public can crack a variant or limited case. Even though we knew of no clear attack against the full algorithm we did have suspicions of potential strategies in the future based on this knowledge that I know that you don't. "
Probably because they didn't have enough time to reorganize the whole exercise.
That was 2002. There's no doubt every naval captain in the world has heard about the results of that exercise, and there have been more since then.
What would they do now in similar circumstances? Send out attack helicopters and F-18's first.
Do Iranian suicide speedboats have high infrared contrast against sea surface? You betcha. How well do Iranian suicide speedboats hold up against attack helicopters with guided missiles? Very poorly.
In order to preclude operations of U.S. attack helicopters, they'd have to have substantial air superiority with fighter planes and long range SAM's. Is that going to be likely in a conflict?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually it is. Star Wars is two parts opera plus one part conservative liberation fantasy.
Love with subverted or mistaken identities (e.g. Titania falling in love with the donkey, Cosi fan Tutte, etc etc) is typical.
Then there's the War part, you know where the Good Salt Of the Earth Conservative Force-Fearing People rise up against the Modern Mechanized Industrial Empire whose technological terrors, of course, killed all the priests who maintained the Old "Republic" centered on royalty, mysticism, and essentialist blood-line inheritance.
The Imperial Academy of Sciences long ago debunked midichlorians as complete Jedi hokum, a big money making scam for their greedy abbey-based network of chiropractic "clinics". Their meditation practices are nothing but expensive quack "cures" compared to scientific evidence-based medicine from legitimate, licensed neurostim physiciandroids.
Alderaan == Versailles
House of Organa == Bourbons
Alderaan had it coming.
"Nobody is saying "he meant it in a good way," but there's quite a difference in what he actually said and people interpreting it as a sign of genocidal intent."
It is reasonable to suppose that the interpretation of genocidal intent might be reasonable given the throngs of thousands chanting "Death To Israel" many weeks per year for for 32 years, and the support for Hezbollah which has an explicitly exterminationist policy.
If the interpretation was "we want Israel to change its policies to have a much more satisfactory resolution so that Jews and Arabs will live peaceably", that clarification could have been offered.
But as far as I am aware, the ratio of that vs "Death To Israel" is something like zero to 30,000.
"Most consumer's minds?? Say what? Most consumers just assume Windows and Microsoft is everything and nothing else matters. They are totally indifferent to the problems, and don't even care about options."
Really?
My non-technical wife is at least as Microsoft-phobic than a Linux fanboy.
She considers Microsoft-anything to be an "infection" and was very disappointed when she had to install Excel for a class (some add on package didn't exist for OpenOffice) on her Mac.
And yes she had Windows computers for 10 years previously.
Funny I'm less anti-Microsoft than I used to be; because (a) their evil has been tempered by their humiliation and loss of power, and (b) Windows 7 is OK.
"I disagree with Steve Jobs' implication that a reduction of choice is a good thing. Just because Steve Jobs thinks it's crap doesn't mean the rest of the world won't want to buy it.:
That may not be Steve Jobs' point.
Steve says "This stuff is crap, we're not doing it."
Steve's point is that at some of the other places, there isn't anybody who says, "This other stuff is also crap, we're not doing it".
Even if their idea of crap isn't the same as in Steve's Reality Distortion Field, at least somebody should be thinking hard about junking crap and making good into great.
"eyeballs" aren't revenue unless you're in the cornea business.
And they don't have "control" of the living room, they just have alot of video game consoles which seem to be made at a loss. What exactly is the X360 doing for Microsoft?
It's not like everybody is using the Microsoft Video Store, and getting all their TV from the Ballmer Network, and Microsoft isn't getting money for every TV program they watch. (And neither is Google or Apple, despite their desire---the most successful is NetFlix, because they offer a simpler product and are good at it).
What phone "tie" to X360 is there and would make sense? The hardware & software is completely different.
Why do you want to access your video game remotely from your phone?
The best upside is that by working with Nokia they'll make Windows Phone 7 better as it will have better software design for real hardware.
Instead of grandiose "control of eyeballs", let's have Microsoft make a phone which doesn't really suck. That's plenty hard for them already.
Are you kidding?
For them, it's Penny-Wise, Billion-Dollar-Wise assuming they own oil wells and Wealthy Friends who own oil companies.
"whats stopping UAV's from being able to literally dodge incoming fire (RPG's, missles etc)?"
A RPG isn't going to hit a UAV. A purpose-designed anti-aircraft missile has a very high thrust to weight ratio, higher than any jet-propelled aircraft. It will always be more maneuverable, though with limited range. It's not clear that a very tight turn radius is going to help tremendously.
Actual anti-aircraft missiles don't have to physically touch the aircraft to detonate, unlike a video game. In fact, they work better if they go up to the sides of the aircraft and blow up there, disabling propulsion and control (i.e. pilot).
Increased maneuverability of UAV's could give them an advantage in some cases, but experience and awareness of a pilot is also an advantage.
The primary advantage would be the UAV's smaller mass to payload ratio and anything else which gives a lower radar return.
"so there really doesn't seem to be much of a reason for Astrium"
There certainly is, for Republican Senators from Utah.
"How does Ballmer still have a job? THAT is my question".
Bill Gates is Chairman of the Board and the biggest stockholder, and he doesn't give a crap any more.
It's not going to work like that.
Soon, the managers are going to ask whether the Microsoft systems are sufficiently compatible with the iPad ecosystem and management tools.
When the IT people start bringing up all sorts of complex reasons why there are problems, the next question will be "So, honestly, are those all problems a consequence of stuff the Windows way on the Windows side of things or the iPad way on the iPad side of things?"
The psychological assumption of Microsoft's implicit invicibility and centrality has been broken.
The avalanche has started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.
"We create our own A4 chip, our own software, our own battery chemistry, our own enclosure, our own everything."
Back (say 1990's) when Apple was a complete system integrator, and so was Sun, and DEC, and NeXT and MIPS and SGI and Apollo---they couldn't come close to the pricing of 'generic' PC's assembled from a competitive market. This is often the case in manufacturing industries (scaling up intense specialization and works better than trying to be good at many different things).
What changed?
Will it change again---in 5 years will there be an Armdroid de-facto reference hardware platform with roughly interchangable parts and Taiwanese/Chinese manufacturers cutting hardware margins to the bone? Or is there something fundamentally different.
"But that question isn't answered with direct photographic evidence.
Instead, we are offered fudge FUDD articles like this one, (widely quoted), based on squishy, confusing math."
Photos don't tell you how thick the ice is.
"Well, here's an idea which doesn't require hysteria: The Earth's spin has slowed lately."
Direct precise observations conradicts this idea. We'd know it right away from GPS. People have already looked into it and the rotation of the Earth is proceeding as expected.
So I'm supposed the buy the idea that there is no anthropogenic global warming despite massive physical evidence----but there is some mystical planetary changes because of a "dark star" despite the total lack of any physical evidence.
"The assumption that CO2 is significant flies in the face of our knowledge of greenhouse gases where water vapour accounts for over 90% of the effect."
Water vapor is about 50-60% of the effect and all the climatologists have known this for, oh since the beginning of the field.
However, since water vapor in the atmosphere is in statistical equilibrium with the oceans and has a residence time of a couple of weeks, as opposed to centuries or millenia with CO2, the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere will pretty much depend on the temperature. And humans can alter the second part by digging up and burning coal. And the amount is significant when you actually do quantitative computations like climate scientists have been doing for 50 years.
"You also ignore that the climate is a chaotic system with literally thousands of factors that can drive temperatures up or down. Pointing at a single factor and ignoring the others is ridiculous and unscientific in the extreme."
That's what physics is for. Actually even in chaotic systems the fundamental physics on the boundary conditions still really matter. (Yes I am a physicist).
Even though you can't predict the weather with much skill one year out, it's pretty damn certain that any January day in Miami will be a whole bunch warmer than in Minneapolis. Why? Because there is more electromagnetic radiation hitting the surface in the area near Miami than in Minneapolis.
An increase in the greenhouse effect by changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere results in more electromagnetic radiation hitting the surface of the planet.
"Tedesco said if the variability were random, then over a 30-year period one would expect the record years to be evenly distributed."
"What absolute rubbish from yet another climate scientist who fails to understand random numbers."
What absolute rubbish from yet another blogger who fails to understand actual climate scientists and the level of work that goes into actual professional level research.
The actual scientific content is something like "under the null hypothesis that the yearly temperature anomalies had no trend and were distributed iid, the observed data shows a test statistic of trend which violates the null at the p0.001 level"
Or, perhaps "Using the Wally-Dilbert Bayesian estimator of trend, the lower confidence interval at 99.9% is above zero"
Or, perhaps "using a bootstrap randomization test with heteroskedastic correction according to blah blah blah the hypothesis of no trend is rejected by ...."
And these are what get published in the actual professional papers.
Furthermore, the description that "then over a 30-year period one would expect the record years to be evenly distributed" is actually a good intuitive explanation of the null hypothesis implicit or explicit in the various statistical test procedures.
"Look at the stock market with it's bull runs and bear markets - yet many claim that it's a totally random phenomenon despite this, and tests for randomness support this idea." Actually there is serial autocorrelation in stock markets shown by statistical tests.
"just because we see a changing in a cycle doesn't mean we are causing it."
That's true.
But when you have a comprehensive mechanistic physical explanatory theory based on 50-100 years of lab-verified quantum mechanics, radiative transfer, backed up by decades of global observational evidence
AND
there are no other feasible explanations for the mystical "natural cycle" which somehow happens to replicate the features of greenhouse-induced global warming, and simultaneously supplant the known and exceptionally well proven basic physics, and there are no feasible even experimental programs to find this Mystical Natural Cycle But Definitely Not At All Any Fossil Fuel theory of planetary physics
what should you go with as "Most Likely To Be Actually True"?
Global warming is not a statistical correlation---it is physics.
Goldman Sachs sure as heck got a "bailout"----they got full value of their OTC contracts they had with AIG, when AIG was bailed out.
In most usual circumstances they would have been creditors and gotten only a fraction of what they were due---like all other creditors.
GM's restructuring sure imposed pain on creditors and shareholders, Lehman's did, and AIG's did---unless you happened to be very long those kind of instruments that GS was.
It's the ultimate endpoint: Leninism-Capitalism.
"someone has to fix the offshore teams' fuckups."
Not quite There often ought to be somebody fixing the offshore teams' fuckups but that doesn't mean there will be paid employment to do so.
Maybe those hundreds of millions of dollars to academic and government research institutions in robotics and machine learning had a wee bit to do with the success of the teams who entered the competitions.
"For example, we have a toy robot on a billiard table that either has a LED lit or unlit at any particular time interval. Via the simulate() function, we can determine if the robot will have the LED lit or not for any time interval T > T0.
PF3: The robot also runs the simulate() function, and sets the LED to be the opposite of the returned result for the given time interval. (LED = !simulate(U0))"
There's a problem:
This assumes that the robot's internal simulation operates in an implementation universe distinct from that covered by simulate(), but in truth it does not.
More usefully the
No, they're not terrorists. Terrorists want public, indiscriminate carnage for political purposes.
And they're not criminals. Criminals have distinct motives.
The people who made Stuxnet are military saboteurs.
He's like Vladimir Putin, except he's still dumb enough to believe in that commie crap.
Read the above very very carefully. This is superb government misdirection.
The reader is encouraged to infer that the exceptional performance made them nervous. That is not what he claimed.
I suspect (without insider knowledge) that forthcoming statement would be:
"We preferred to be conservative about security, and in some cases did not select algorithms with exceptional performance, largely because an attack and theory known to government scientists but not to the public can crack a variant or limited case. Even though we knew of no clear attack against the full algorithm we did have suspicions of potential strategies in the future based on this knowledge that I know that you don't. "
Probably because they didn't have enough time to reorganize the whole exercise.
That was 2002. There's no doubt every naval captain in the world has heard about the results of that exercise, and there have been more since then.
What would they do now in similar circumstances? Send out attack helicopters and F-18's first.
Do Iranian suicide speedboats have high infrared contrast against sea surface? You betcha. How well do Iranian suicide speedboats hold up against attack helicopters with guided missiles? Very poorly.
In order to preclude operations of U.S. attack helicopters, they'd have to have substantial air superiority with fighter planes and long range SAM's. Is that going to be likely in a conflict?
"state and federal statues protecting the confidentiality of electronic communications."
Yo! You talking 'bout me? --- Antonin Scalia
Yeah! What he said! --- Clarence Thomas