"Today, we celebrate the fourth glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created for the first time in all telecommunication history, a garden of pure ideology. Where each developer may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths. Our Unification of iThoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or Android army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!"
"Are there any modern Kremlinologists (the name for people who tried to divine the intent and inner workings of the former USSR) who have insight into the current resource strategy of the Chinese government and its origins?"
I'm no CIA expert but the strategy seems to be this
1) CCP win. 2) You lose. 3) Profit.
Hokey religions and ancient political ideologies are no match for a mercantalist blaster at your side, kid.
"There's a few typos in there that we'll fix soon enough, but putting that aside, you really get to the heart of what's driving Gosling and what he hopes for the future of Java."
I didn't get any of that.
All I got is: a) the future of Java is controlled by Wicked Larry Ellison. b) Jim Gosling wishes the future of Java were not controlled by Wicked Larry Ellison, but it is.
Can anybody answer: What is driving Gosling? And what is the future of Java?
"I suspect what he means is companies providing web-based SaaS solutions may wish to pay so that data relating to their service is prioritised, making their product faster."
Or may """wish"""" to pay so that the data relating to their service doesn't have a sudden increase in ""accidental"" packet drops. Especially after their competitor was rumored to pay the network.
There is a difference. One party is often controlled by interests of corporatists against the general welfare. The other is always controlled by interests of corporatists against the general welfare.
He owns a boatload of Microsoft stock and didn't want to sue himself AND he owns a boatload of Microsoft stock and wants to sue Microsoft's competitors.
Seems that Simple and 'convoluted' evil can exist at the same time.
You know, like shooting somebody after the sharks with laser beams.
"Yes Mom. I know I haven't been going to the lectures; I feel physically sick in them. No mom, I didn't have a problem in high school. I think it must be the low oxygen levels in the large lecture halls. Maybe I'm really sensitive to flickering florescent lighting. Oh hi Dad. You don't think so? No I totally swear it's NOT a hangover! Really, my afternoon classes are just fine. I know what it sounds like, but college isn't as fun as back in your day. Yes I know its definitely not as fun for you when you send in the tuition check either, youve told me only about fifty times. What? can't hear you. oh by, my bros are coming over and we're gonna go down to the row and....review multi-phase fluid mechanics. bye, yes I'm sure it will pass mom. tell dad I need a bit more money again. Calculator broke twice."
Yes. They arose in a lucrative and increasingly deregulated industry.
Amazingly enough, all of the funded proponents of "free markets" who have any substantial influence actually want deregulated markets where that deregulation will turn out to be massively profitable for some, and occasionally (or frequently) very dangerous for the public at large.
That's right. Run for Congress yourself because you got screwed by your ISP.
But wait, once you get in Congress you'll be besieged by powerful interests who stand to make lots of $$$ bearing paid-for specious libertarian arguments! Just Like Today.
Why not skip the intermediate step and use arguments & power to convince the Congressdroids we have today?
"Thus what we need is network transparency: ISPs must disclose what their policies are: how they shape and manipulate traffic in ways that may benefit or may damage users. And we need active verification of such policies, because although most ISPs will be honest, some won't be."
Yes, there's this prominent neo-liberal idea that ever longer tracts of fine print are the preferred substitute for actual good policy.
That the theoretical outcomes which hypothetically might emerge from the vacuum in some ultrarelativistic limit of Adam Smith corpse-spinning matter just as much as What Actually Happens.
Funny that the New Taliban is a violent organized and political movement in Afghanistan with identical ideology, goals and activities as the Old Taliban, except they now think that narcotics trafficing is A-OK.
[quote]Military contractors don't have that much power. If they did, they wouldn't keep getting fined BY the government for various illegal activities (like mischarging of employee time).[/quote]
Yes they DO have that much power. If they didn't have power, they wouldn't keep getting very lucrative contracts after getting fined by the the government.
In practice, it is quite hard to steal $10,000 from of the government. It is much easier to steal $100,000,000.
Apologies for the self-reply, I already submitted it.
There is something else to consider: the average biologist is a much worse programmer & mathemetician than the average physical oceanographer/geophysicist, and hence biologists need (or more specifically know they need) professional software & computational scientists much more than physical scientists do.
Get a MS in bioinformatics and instead of concentrating on the computer science which you'll find easy at the moment, learn all the relevant biology. And then go back to the national lab.
Or, try physical oceanography/geophysics/atmospheric physics; there is substantial data analysis & software.
But, think about your career path after your degree program.
The problem is that you start to do all the real research after the masters, and everybody else is a PhD student/postdoc. And unless you want to get paid like a PhD student (unlikely since you're at a national lab and making much more $) it would be very hard for a research group to afford you. If they do have the money for a professional programmer (very few do these days) they'll want you to do the programming stuff that the grad students don't want to do (or don't have time/expertise). Even if you can program better than the grad students, you won't be appreciated in an individual research group because the essential purpose is scientific creation and the valued artifact is publishable scientific results, not an enduring software system.
You wouldn't be valued for your scientific skills much unless you are on the science track which is PhD, and if you want to do science for real that's what you need.
If you can get the job you could try to be a scientific programmer for the very large climate model codes on supercomputers which present substantial software problems beyond what a typical grad student or postdoc can accomplish on their own; that's a reasonable, though difficult career path. That's an application where the software itself is considered valuable enough to be worth maintaining professionally. Problem with this is that it is 100% dependent on Federal funding, and as it looks like Republicans are going to win the next elections and likely eviscerate climate research it may not be a large opportunity.
Are you doing this for your own personal enjoyment or do you want to make scientific contributions (i.e. publish papers in journals and contribute to core ideas). If it's the 2nd there isn't any substitute for PhD.
Banks do take liability for credit card fraud unless they can prove merchants did not obey the security precautions mandated by the acquiring bank's or card association's agreement.
As far as our particle accelerators & theory can tell, electrons, muons and quarks are all elementary particles with no internal structure. Internal structure is not necessary for particle decay---particle decay isn't really inside-parts spewing out, it is energy in one form of matter being allowed by laws of physics & quantum mechanics to transform into another state.
It would be extremely unlikely if muons had internal structure and electrons didn't.
The most likely scenario is (unfortunately) that there are some effects which actually are part of Standard Model physics, but they weren't included in the theoretical calculations. The theoretical calculations can get quite hairy and complex; perhaps something was approximated in a way that isn't actually as valid as originally believed or some other interaction which is hard to compute was ignored.
Too often scientists and engineers make the mistake of assuming that "because you don't understand my field of expertise, you must be an idiot." There are plenty of very smart people who simply aren't expert at physics, or computer science, or chemistry, or biology. Talking to them with the presumption that they are intelligent and capable of understanding does not mean you have to lie, or be inaccurate in your statements.
I don't encounter that often at all. They know that plenty of people don't understand their field of expertise because they know how hard it was to gain that level of expertise---and how much they have to learn when hearing about other scientific results.
What does happen us that they assume that "because you don't understand my field of expertise, your opinions about scientific results in this field are infrequently accurate."
Which is undoubtably true.
Some of the worst crap you can see say on slashdot where you have lots of high-IQ people making apparently clever but often very wrong and misleading howlers about climate (I hypothesize, because the consequences don't agree with their political or social preferences.) The smarter the non-expert is, the worse.
For example: physicians are apparently very heavily targeted by financial con-men; the doctors think they're so smart in doctoring that they're smart in other areas, but they often aren't.
Actually as far as I know the Higgs field doesn't help say anything about actual gravitation, whether passive (inertia) or active (causing space-time warping), since the Standard Model has no gravitation in it. It's more something which defines the relationships of rest masses of particles.
The actual particle physics of gravitation could be something else entirely.
"There were patrons, who sponsored commission on a work. Afterwards, the patron owned the work, but the rest of the world got to appreciate it. In other words, the patron could use it for whatever purpose they wanted, but the rest of the world could only use it for viewing (modern equivalent of non-commercial purposes imo)"
The most famous work (Las Meninas) by Spain's best painter (Velasquez) happened to stay in the monarch's bedroom for a few hundred years before it moved to the museum. The rest of the world definitely did not get to appreciate it.
Slashdot Mirror
Behold the apotheosis of the Libertarian Utopia
Well, I guess you can always play with your guns.
"Today, we celebrate the fourth glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created for the first time in all telecommunication history, a garden of pure ideology. Where each developer may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths. Our Unification of iThoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or Android army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!"
"Are there any modern Kremlinologists (the name for people who tried to divine the intent and inner workings of the former USSR) who have insight into the current resource strategy of the Chinese government and its origins?"
I'm no CIA expert but the strategy seems to be this
1) CCP win.
2) You lose.
3) Profit.
Hokey religions and ancient political ideologies are no match for a mercantalist blaster at your side, kid.
"There's a few typos in there that we'll fix soon enough, but putting that aside, you really get to the heart of what's driving Gosling and what he hopes for the future of Java."
I didn't get any of that.
All I got is:
a) the future of Java is controlled by Wicked Larry Ellison.
b) Jim Gosling wishes the future of Java were not controlled by Wicked Larry Ellison, but it is.
Can anybody answer: What is driving Gosling? And what is the future of Java?
"I suspect what he means is companies providing web-based SaaS solutions may wish to pay so that data relating to their service is prioritised, making their product faster."
Or may """wish"""" to pay so that the data relating to their service doesn't have a sudden increase in ""accidental"" packet drops. Especially after their competitor was rumored to pay the network.
There is a difference. One party is often controlled by interests of corporatists against the general welfare. The other is always controlled by interests of corporatists against the general welfare.
He owns a boatload of Microsoft stock and didn't want to sue himself AND he owns a boatload of Microsoft stock and wants to sue Microsoft's competitors.
Seems that Simple and 'convoluted' evil can exist at the same time.
You know, like shooting somebody after the sharks with laser beams.
"Yes Mom. I know I haven't been going to the lectures; I feel physically sick in them. No mom, I didn't have a problem in high school. I think it must be the low oxygen levels in the large lecture halls. Maybe I'm really sensitive to flickering florescent lighting. Oh hi Dad. You don't think so? No I totally swear it's NOT a hangover! Really, my afternoon classes are just fine. I know what it sounds like, but college isn't as fun as back in your day. Yes I know its definitely not as fun for you when you send in the tuition check either, youve told me only about fifty times. What? can't hear you. oh by, my bros are coming over and we're gonna go down to the row and....review multi-phase fluid mechanics. bye, yes I'm sure it will pass mom. tell dad I need a bit more money again. Calculator broke twice."
Yes. They arose in a lucrative and increasingly deregulated industry.
Amazingly enough, all of the funded proponents of "free markets" who have any substantial influence actually want deregulated markets where that deregulation will turn out to be massively profitable for some, and occasionally (or frequently) very dangerous for the public at large.
That's right. Run for Congress yourself because you got screwed by your ISP.
But wait, once you get in Congress you'll be besieged by powerful interests who stand to make lots of $$$ bearing paid-for specious libertarian arguments!
Just Like Today.
Why not skip the intermediate step and use arguments & power to convince the Congressdroids we have today?
"Thus what we need is network transparency: ISPs must disclose what their policies are: how they shape and manipulate traffic in ways that may benefit or may damage users. And we need active verification of such policies, because although most ISPs will be honest, some won't be."
Yes, there's this prominent neo-liberal idea that ever longer tracts of fine print are the preferred substitute for actual good policy.
That the theoretical outcomes which hypothetically might emerge from the vacuum in some ultrarelativistic limit of Adam Smith corpse-spinning matter just as much as What Actually Happens.
Funny that the New Taliban is a violent organized and political movement in Afghanistan with identical ideology, goals and activities as the Old Taliban, except they now think that narcotics trafficing is A-OK.
[quote]Military contractors don't have that much power. If they did, they wouldn't keep getting fined BY the government for various illegal activities (like mischarging of employee time).[/quote]
Yes they DO have that much power. If they didn't have power, they wouldn't keep getting very lucrative contracts after getting fined by the the government.
In practice, it is quite hard to steal $10,000 from of the government. It is much easier to steal $100,000,000.
Apologies for the self-reply, I already submitted it.
There is something else to consider: the average biologist is a much worse programmer & mathemetician than the average physical oceanographer/geophysicist, and hence biologists need (or more specifically know they need) professional software & computational scientists much more than physical scientists do.
Get a MS in bioinformatics and instead of concentrating on the computer science which you'll find easy at the moment, learn all the relevant biology. And then go back to the national lab.
Or, try physical oceanography/geophysics/atmospheric physics; there is substantial data analysis & software.
But, think about your career path after your degree program.
The problem is that you start to do all the real research after the masters, and everybody else is a PhD student/postdoc. And unless you want to get paid like a PhD student (unlikely since you're at a national lab and making much more $) it would be very hard for a research group to afford you. If they do have the money for a professional programmer (very few do these days) they'll want you to do the programming stuff that the grad students don't want to do (or don't have time/expertise). Even if you can program better than the grad students, you won't be appreciated in an individual research group because the essential purpose is scientific creation and the valued artifact is publishable scientific results, not an enduring software system.
You wouldn't be valued for your scientific skills much unless you are on the science track which is PhD, and if you want to do science for real that's what you need.
If you can get the job you could try to be a scientific programmer for the very large climate model codes on supercomputers which present substantial software problems beyond what a typical grad student or postdoc can accomplish on their own; that's a reasonable, though difficult career path. That's an application where the software itself is considered valuable enough to be worth maintaining professionally. Problem with this is that it is 100% dependent on Federal funding, and as it looks like Republicans are going to win the next elections and likely eviscerate climate research it may not be a large opportunity.
Are you doing this for your own personal enjoyment or do you want to make scientific contributions (i.e. publish papers in journals and contribute to core ideas). If it's the 2nd there isn't any substitute for PhD.
Banks do take liability for credit card fraud unless they can prove merchants did not obey the security precautions mandated by the acquiring bank's or card association's agreement.
As far as our particle accelerators & theory can tell, electrons, muons and quarks are all elementary particles with no internal structure. Internal structure is not necessary for particle decay---particle decay isn't really inside-parts spewing out, it is energy in one form of matter being allowed by laws of physics & quantum mechanics to transform into another state.
It would be extremely unlikely if muons had internal structure and electrons didn't.
The most likely scenario is (unfortunately) that there are some effects which actually are part of Standard Model physics, but they weren't included in the theoretical calculations. The theoretical calculations can get quite hairy and complex; perhaps something was approximated in a way that isn't actually as valid as originally believed or some other interaction which is hard to compute was ignored.
China's loser mercanitlist socialist government-controlled industrial policy is giving 10% GDP growth and immense leaps in technical leadership.
I'd like to lose like them.
The U.S. has plenty good technical education where it matters for technological production: top 1%.
The "education" issue is 100% bovine scatology.
The economics & ideology issue really is the problem.
Too often scientists and engineers make the mistake of assuming that "because you don't understand my field of expertise, you must be an idiot." There are plenty of very smart people who simply aren't expert at physics, or computer science, or chemistry, or biology. Talking to them with the presumption that they are intelligent and capable of understanding does not mean you have to lie, or be inaccurate in your statements.
I don't encounter that often at all. They know that plenty of people don't understand their field of expertise because they know how hard it was to gain that level of expertise---and how much they have to learn when hearing about other scientific results.
What does happen us that they assume that "because you don't understand my field of expertise, your opinions about scientific results in this field are infrequently accurate."
Which is undoubtably true.
Some of the worst crap you can see say on slashdot where you have lots of high-IQ people making apparently clever but often very wrong and misleading howlers about climate (I hypothesize, because the consequences don't agree with their political or social preferences.) The smarter the non-expert is, the worse.
For example: physicians are apparently very heavily targeted by financial con-men; the doctors think they're so smart in doctoring that they're smart in other areas, but they often aren't.
The internet treats blasphemy as content, and pirates it.
Intermediate vector bosons are also charged, but there is still no practical way to engineer weak force.
Then again, maybe there's no reason to.
Actually as far as I know the Higgs field doesn't help say anything about actual gravitation, whether passive (inertia) or active (causing space-time warping), since the Standard Model has no gravitation in it. It's more something which defines the relationships of rest masses of particles.
The actual particle physics of gravitation could be something else entirely.
So, no gravity gun for you.
not the portentious/pretentious "God Particle".
Leon Lederman called it The Goddamn Particle because finding it---or them---is so vexatious.
His editor changed the title of the book, removing the -damn, to make it more commercially successful.
quoth Peter Higgs: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/jun/30/higgs.boson.cern
Shall y'all moderate this "Informative" or "Funny"?
"There were patrons, who sponsored commission on a work. Afterwards, the patron owned the work, but the rest of the world got to appreciate it. In other words, the patron could use it for whatever purpose they wanted, but the rest of the world could only use it for viewing (modern equivalent of non-commercial purposes imo)"
The most famous work (Las Meninas) by Spain's best painter (Velasquez) happened to stay in the monarch's bedroom for a few hundred years before it moved to the museum. The rest of the world definitely did not get to appreciate it.