The paper you cite raises the idea that while West Antarctica is losing ice fast, East Antarctica is gaining mass. However, a couple caveats.
1. That result hasn't been reproduced, and there is some healthy skepticism that they're measuring right since they used satellites to estimate snowfall and then estimate how much of that turned to ice (a surprisingly complicated process). Plus, it used old data (8 years old, and we know that ice loss has increased dramatically since then). So, the short version is, the paper you linked may end up being right, but the consensus view among scientists is still that Antarctica is losing ice.
2. Even if it turns out to be true, the authors of the very paper you cite say that Antarctic ice loss is accelerating as the snowfall remains pretty confident, and their opinion is that within a few years, ice will loss will outpace gain.
It doesn't matter, on average. Let's say we know thermometers are off +/- 1 degrees. Maybe because the thermometer, maybe because of human error eyeballing the mercury, whatever. However, assuming it's as likely to be over as under (and there's been extensive research on that as well), the bad readings will more or less cancel each other out.
If you only had one reading, for instance, you could really only say what the temperature was +/- 1 degrees. If you have a million, you could say you know almost for certain (just like the more times you flip a coin, the closer your distribution is likely to be 50/50). The reality is somewhere in between, so there are error bars, but they're known quantities. And as a previous poster mentioned, the thermometers of the time were surprisingly accurate anyway.
Economics 101 is that when faced with fierce competition in the job market, wages will rise. They haven't been rising for software developers. Ergo, while the job market is certainly better for us than many other professions, the "job shortage" is a fiction.
What businesses *do* see is we're not as desperate for a job. They're so used to having a hundred people apply for one job mopping floors that they think that's normal, and the way things should be.
I worked for a 3PL (third party logistics) company. Years ago, they'd decided they were going to make $$$ with SaaS, basically selling our services to others. A huge undertaking had been embarked upon to make our system usable for other companies. They got a grand total of one client.
A few years later I was working there, and we got a second client! Bad news was, literally no one was still working there that had been when the first SaaS client had been set up. So there was a lot of guesswork trying to recreate it. I was a Junior Developer at the time, and was tracking down why some data loading wasn't working right. I knew the issue was almost definitely a trigger in the database, so that day I made some changes, loaded the days's data import into the Test DB, and checked if my fixed worked. It didn't, so I cleared out the load, made another change, and did it again. OK, now it was kind of fixed, but there was a problem somewhere else. Wash, rinse repeat.
I'm sure you see where things went wrong.
About the sixth or seventh time I did this, I accidentally ran it against production. I distinctly remember the panic that gripped me the moment I hit the F5 key to execute that SQL statement - I realized what I'd done immediately. The drivers (this was a logistics company, remember?) had been out on the road for about two hours at this point, and all the sudden all their handheld devices just stopped working. Where's the next stop? As far as their handheld was concerned they didn't even have a route, much less anything on the truck. This happened for all of the Office Depot drivers in Florida. And we couldn't just reload the day either. After the initial import happened at around 1:00 am a lot of virtual paperwork was done by humans to optimize routes and such, work that couldn't be easily duplicated.
I spun around in my cubicle and told him what I'd done immediately (I was told later I looked white as a sheet) and he assured me it'd be OK. An hourly snapshot was taken by the database. We'd lose a bit of data, but it wasn't the end of the world. He went to talk to the DB Admin.
Those snapshots? It turned out six weeks ago they'd just stopped running. Why? I don't think we ever figured out for sure, but either way they weren't there. Now everyone was panicking a bit. This was a new client we'd just picked up and we didn't want to screw the pooch. In the end, they ended up doing an emergency purchase of some software that allowed them to roll the database back using the transaction logs. Fun times.
I'm OK with actually secure security questions. What High School did I go to? Well, I live in Smalltown, NC so it turns out to be Smalltown High. That's a dumb one. Who was my first grade teacher? That's a lot harder info to track down.
As someone who has a fiber line running in front of their house (literally, there's a "Do Not Dig Here, Fiber" post at the bottom of my driveway), but has access to only DSL, I can't say it isn't tempting.
This is why when Microsoft open sourced the new.NET framework recently, they also included a "Covenant not the Sue" document saying you were free to re-implement the.NET API with your own code. Basically, promising not to pull an Oracle. The upshot is.NET is now more free-as-in-freedom than Java. It's enough to make your head explode.
I used to work as a field tech, back in the day. The nice thing is, there's no clock and no one is checking up on you. If they gave me an assignment that they expected to take 3 hours, and I did it in 30 minutes... well, I didn't tell them that. I went home early and got paid. Seriously, I regularly worked about 4 hours a day and got paid for 8. Granted, the pay was shit, but there you go.
OK, let me explain. Fifty years ago, the largest employer in America was General Motors, and they paid their workers an inflation-adjusted average of about $50/hr. They were also taxed about twice as much as we are now. That average person would pay 25% of their income in taxes. In the end, you'd take home about $75k/yr in income (again, adjusted for inflation).
Today, the largest employer is Wal-Mart, and they pay $11/hr on average. This person makes 22k per year if they manage to work 40 hours a week, and get taxed at 15% and thus brings home about 19K/yr.
75k vs 19k. It's not the taxes. Seriously. In fact, taxes are good when well-utilized by the government. Not only do they pay for the kinds of things that lift all boats (roads, education, etc), but they serve as a way to keep wealth from collecting at the top. In 1965, the top marginal tax rate was 70%. That's right 70%. That's how much the Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerburgs paid in taxes every year back then. You know who benefited from that massive tax on the wealthy? The middle class, because the government spent money on crazy things like going to space or public works projects the employed millions and fueled the economy.
You're an idiot. The middle class isn't being drained via taxation. Taxes are lower right now than at any point in the last century. It's the stagnation of wages that's causing the middle class to have problems. It's amazing how people will assert something as true that can be debunked with five seconds of Google searching.
And hey, we shouldn't worry about meteor impacts because all life on Earth now is descending from life that survived the one that killed the dinosaurs! Bring on the meteors! Also, did you know that many people in Japan are descending from people that survived having nuclear bombs dropped on them, thus rendering them immune to radiation?
I notice TFA doesn't mention competing theories, like the ocean acidificaiton is being caused by the natural cycle of sunspots. This is a serious theory, put forth by me the other day when I was looking up at the sun and thinking that no one probably has done any research into how sunspots could affect ocean acidity. This is just anther example of the mainstream media not giving equal time to competing theories! Instead, they just focus on those that come from scientists doing studies!
And if it's not sunspots, it's probably volcanoes or something. I'll figure that out if someone disproved my first theory.
Because no super-volcanoes have gone off in the last century (we'd have noticed!) and that's not what's driving the rapid carbon increase in the atmosphere.
Ocean acidification is a huge deal to environmentalists - I'm not sure where you're getting your information. And as it's driven by the same thing that causes Global Warming, dealing with carbon in the atmosphere is a twofer.
Oh, come on. This is the good kind of April Fools story. The stories that could be true are pretty annoying when they come from real news sources, but this is firmly tongue-in-cheek.
And it's way more generous than Java. Microsoft is promising it won't sue for anything developed on a.NET runtime. Not their.NET runtime. Any.NET runtime, even those not developed by Microsoft.
".NET Runtime" means any compliant implementation in software of (a) all of
the required parts of the mandatory provisions of Standard ECMA-335 – Common
Language Infrastructure (CLI); and (b) if implemented, any additional
functionality in Microsoft's.NET Framework, as described in Microsoft's API
documentation on its MSDN website. For example,.NET Runtimes include
Microsoft's.NET Framework and those portions of the Mono Project compliant
with (a) and (b).
So, basically, they're explicitly promising not to pull the shit that Oracle pulled with Google over Java. But because Microsoft killed their Pappy some people are developing elaborate conspiracy theories over how, really, their promise not to sue is somehow a bad thing.
I can't control it. It's "flipped" for me three times. I've tried to do different tricks like viewing angles or imagining it one way before I look, but nothing works.
Blue and black. I don't know why it doesn't trick me, I usually fall for optical illusions. It's not like I have particularly good color perception or anything.
It's not just that. It flipped for me. I saw it Friday morning abd, saved the pic to my PC so I could open it up and use a color picker to see it was actually blue when it looked white/gold to me. Later that day, I was going to show it to a co-worker so I opened it up again. But now it was blue/black. It'd flipped twice more for me since then.
Curiously, the xkcd comic doesn't fool my eyes at all.
I mean, even without this, they were performing man-in-the-middle attacks on their customers. Doesn't something like the DMCA apply when you're hijacking banking websites?
Slashdot Mirror
The paper you cite raises the idea that while West Antarctica is losing ice fast, East Antarctica is gaining mass. However, a couple caveats.
1. That result hasn't been reproduced, and there is some healthy skepticism that they're measuring right since they used satellites to estimate snowfall and then estimate how much of that turned to ice (a surprisingly complicated process). Plus, it used old data (8 years old, and we know that ice loss has increased dramatically since then). So, the short version is, the paper you linked may end up being right, but the consensus view among scientists is still that Antarctica is losing ice.
2. Even if it turns out to be true, the authors of the very paper you cite say that Antarctic ice loss is accelerating as the snowfall remains pretty confident, and their opinion is that within a few years, ice will loss will outpace gain.
It doesn't matter, on average. Let's say we know thermometers are off +/- 1 degrees. Maybe because the thermometer, maybe because of human error eyeballing the mercury, whatever. However, assuming it's as likely to be over as under (and there's been extensive research on that as well), the bad readings will more or less cancel each other out.
If you only had one reading, for instance, you could really only say what the temperature was +/- 1 degrees. If you have a million, you could say you know almost for certain (just like the more times you flip a coin, the closer your distribution is likely to be 50/50). The reality is somewhere in between, so there are error bars, but they're known quantities. And as a previous poster mentioned, the thermometers of the time were surprisingly accurate anyway.
Economics 101 is that when faced with fierce competition in the job market, wages will rise. They haven't been rising for software developers. Ergo, while the job market is certainly better for us than many other professions, the "job shortage" is a fiction.
What businesses *do* see is we're not as desperate for a job. They're so used to having a hundred people apply for one job mopping floors that they think that's normal, and the way things should be.
Google wants to make money off advertising. Plus, if they can become the standard in a huge emerging market, that's playing the long game.
To sue a company, it has to have broke a law (passed by Congress) in the courts (a branch of government).
I worked for a 3PL (third party logistics) company. Years ago, they'd decided they were going to make $$$ with SaaS, basically selling our services to others. A huge undertaking had been embarked upon to make our system usable for other companies. They got a grand total of one client.
A few years later I was working there, and we got a second client! Bad news was, literally no one was still working there that had been when the first SaaS client had been set up. So there was a lot of guesswork trying to recreate it. I was a Junior Developer at the time, and was tracking down why some data loading wasn't working right. I knew the issue was almost definitely a trigger in the database, so that day I made some changes, loaded the days's data import into the Test DB, and checked if my fixed worked. It didn't, so I cleared out the load, made another change, and did it again. OK, now it was kind of fixed, but there was a problem somewhere else. Wash, rinse repeat.
I'm sure you see where things went wrong.
About the sixth or seventh time I did this, I accidentally ran it against production. I distinctly remember the panic that gripped me the moment I hit the F5 key to execute that SQL statement - I realized what I'd done immediately. The drivers (this was a logistics company, remember?) had been out on the road for about two hours at this point, and all the sudden all their handheld devices just stopped working. Where's the next stop? As far as their handheld was concerned they didn't even have a route, much less anything on the truck. This happened for all of the Office Depot drivers in Florida. And we couldn't just reload the day either. After the initial import happened at around 1:00 am a lot of virtual paperwork was done by humans to optimize routes and such, work that couldn't be easily duplicated.
I spun around in my cubicle and told him what I'd done immediately (I was told later I looked white as a sheet) and he assured me it'd be OK. An hourly snapshot was taken by the database. We'd lose a bit of data, but it wasn't the end of the world. He went to talk to the DB Admin.
Those snapshots? It turned out six weeks ago they'd just stopped running. Why? I don't think we ever figured out for sure, but either way they weren't there. Now everyone was panicking a bit. This was a new client we'd just picked up and we didn't want to screw the pooch. In the end, they ended up doing an emergency purchase of some software that allowed them to roll the database back using the transaction logs. Fun times.
I'm OK with actually secure security questions. What High School did I go to? Well, I live in Smalltown, NC so it turns out to be Smalltown High. That's a dumb one. Who was my first grade teacher? That's a lot harder info to track down.
As someone who has a fiber line running in front of their house (literally, there's a "Do Not Dig Here, Fiber" post at the bottom of my driveway), but has access to only DSL, I can't say it isn't tempting.
This is why when Microsoft open sourced the new .NET framework recently, they also included a "Covenant not the Sue" document saying you were free to re-implement the .NET API with your own code. Basically, promising not to pull an Oracle. The upshot is .NET is now more free-as-in-freedom than Java. It's enough to make your head explode.
I used to work as a field tech, back in the day. The nice thing is, there's no clock and no one is checking up on you. If they gave me an assignment that they expected to take 3 hours, and I did it in 30 minutes... well, I didn't tell them that. I went home early and got paid. Seriously, I regularly worked about 4 hours a day and got paid for 8. Granted, the pay was shit, but there you go.
True. These companies are "ridesharing" like hiring a carpenter is "hammersharing."
OK, let me explain. Fifty years ago, the largest employer in America was General Motors, and they paid their workers an inflation-adjusted average of about $50/hr. They were also taxed about twice as much as we are now. That average person would pay 25% of their income in taxes. In the end, you'd take home about $75k/yr in income (again, adjusted for inflation).
Today, the largest employer is Wal-Mart, and they pay $11/hr on average. This person makes 22k per year if they manage to work 40 hours a week, and get taxed at 15% and thus brings home about 19K/yr.
75k vs 19k. It's not the taxes. Seriously. In fact, taxes are good when well-utilized by the government. Not only do they pay for the kinds of things that lift all boats (roads, education, etc), but they serve as a way to keep wealth from collecting at the top. In 1965, the top marginal tax rate was 70%. That's right 70%. That's how much the Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerburgs paid in taxes every year back then. You know who benefited from that massive tax on the wealthy? The middle class, because the government spent money on crazy things like going to space or public works projects the employed millions and fueled the economy.
You're an idiot. The middle class isn't being drained via taxation. Taxes are lower right now than at any point in the last century. It's the stagnation of wages that's causing the middle class to have problems. It's amazing how people will assert something as true that can be debunked with five seconds of Google searching.
The Siberian Traps were supervolcanoes. They paved over an area the size of Europe with molten lava. Nothing today compares.
And hey, we shouldn't worry about meteor impacts because all life on Earth now is descending from life that survived the one that killed the dinosaurs! Bring on the meteors! Also, did you know that many people in Japan are descending from people that survived having nuclear bombs dropped on them, thus rendering them immune to radiation?
I notice TFA doesn't mention competing theories, like the ocean acidificaiton is being caused by the natural cycle of sunspots. This is a serious theory, put forth by me the other day when I was looking up at the sun and thinking that no one probably has done any research into how sunspots could affect ocean acidity. This is just anther example of the mainstream media not giving equal time to competing theories! Instead, they just focus on those that come from scientists doing studies!
And if it's not sunspots, it's probably volcanoes or something. I'll figure that out if someone disproved my first theory.
Because no super-volcanoes have gone off in the last century (we'd have noticed!) and that's not what's driving the rapid carbon increase in the atmosphere.
Ocean acidification is a huge deal to environmentalists - I'm not sure where you're getting your information. And as it's driven by the same thing that causes Global Warming, dealing with carbon in the atmosphere is a twofer.
Oh, come on. This is the good kind of April Fools story. The stories that could be true are pretty annoying when they come from real news sources, but this is firmly tongue-in-cheek.
And it's way more generous than Java. Microsoft is promising it won't sue for anything developed on a .NET runtime. Not their .NET runtime. Any .NET runtime, even those not developed by Microsoft.
.NET Framework, as described in Microsoft's API
documentation on its MSDN website. For example, .NET Runtimes include
Microsoft's .NET Framework and those portions of the Mono Project compliant
with (a) and (b).
".NET Runtime" means any compliant implementation in software of (a) all of the required parts of the mandatory provisions of Standard ECMA-335 – Common Language Infrastructure (CLI); and (b) if implemented, any additional functionality in Microsoft's
So, basically, they're explicitly promising not to pull the shit that Oracle pulled with Google over Java. But because Microsoft killed their Pappy some people are developing elaborate conspiracy theories over how, really, their promise not to sue is somehow a bad thing.
http://pastebin.com/wJuWeAiN
.1 seconds. .4 seconds.
In-Memory takes
Writing to Disk takes
I can't control it. It's "flipped" for me three times. I've tried to do different tricks like viewing angles or imagining it one way before I look, but nothing works.
Blue and black. I don't know why it doesn't trick me, I usually fall for optical illusions. It's not like I have particularly good color perception or anything.
It's not just that. It flipped for me. I saw it Friday morning abd, saved the pic to my PC so I could open it up and use a color picker to see it was actually blue when it looked white/gold to me. Later that day, I was going to show it to a co-worker so I opened it up again. But now it was blue/black. It'd flipped twice more for me since then.
Curiously, the xkcd comic doesn't fool my eyes at all.
I mean, even without this, they were performing man-in-the-middle attacks on their customers. Doesn't something like the DMCA apply when you're hijacking banking websites?