It does not have to be a one-turn coil, 350 turns would require only a MA of current, or only about 10000 times more than a big car starter motor uses! :)

Paul B.

I had been trying to afford a Unix installation at home as a CS student. All I knew was the Unix vendors. I was not aware of the social structure of the Unix world, various distributions, etc. I was crawling university surplus lots and calling Sun and DEC on the phone to try to find a complete package that I could afford (hardware + license and media). Nothing was affordable.

I was also a heavy BBS and UUCP user at the time over a dial-up line. One day, I found an upload from someone described as "free Unix." It was Linux.

I downloaded it, installed it on the 80386 hardware I was already using, and the rest is history. This was 1993.

So in my case at least, Linux became the OS of choice becuase it had traveled in ways that the other free Unices didn't. It was simply available somewhere where I was.

This isn't an explanation for why Linux ended up there instead of some other free *nix, of course, but by way of explaining the social diffusion of the actual files, I saw Linux distros as floppy disks around on BBSs and newsgroups for several years, with no hint of the others.

For someone with limited network access (by today's standards), this meant that Linux was the obvious choice.

As to why Linux was there and not the others—perhaps packaging and ease of installation had something to do with it? Without much effort, I recognized that the disks were floppy images and wrote out a floppy set. Booted from the first one, and followed my nose. There was no documentation required, and it Just Worked, at least as much as any bare-bones, home-grown CLI *nix clone could be said to Just Work.

I had supported hardware, as it turned out, but then Linux did tend to support the most common commodity hardware at the time.

My hunch is that Linux succeeded because it happened to have the right drivers (developed for what people had in their home PCs, rather than what a university lab might happen to have), and the right packaging (an end-user-oriented install that made it a simple, step-by-step, floppy-by-floppy process to get it up) while the other free *nix systems were less able to go from nothing to system without help and without additional hardware for most home and tiny lab users.

For comparison, I tried Minix around the same time (I can't remember if it was before or after) and struggled mightily just to get it installed, before questions of its capabilities were even at issue. I remember my first Linux install having taken an hour or two, and I was able to get X up and running the same day. It took me much longer to get the disks downloaded and written. Minix, by comparison, took about a week of evenings, and at the end, I was disappointed with the result.

I don't think the principle is meant as a critique so much as a statement of a regrettable tendency in the way that things in employment situations simply are.

Yes, in practice it's usually a mix of the two, so the principle is more an abstract model than an argument about real, concrete thresholding.

But the general idea is that by the time someone stops being promoted, if they continue in the job that they are in while not being promoted for an extended period of time, it means that they are likely not amongst the highest-merit individuals around for that particular job and responsibility list—because if they were, they'd have been promoted and/or would have moved to another job elsewhere that offered an equivalent to a promotion.

The best way to understand the principle is to imagine the counterfactual.

When does a person *not* get promoted any longer? When they are not actually that great at the position into which they have most recently been promoted. At that point, they do not demonstrate enough merit to earn the next obvious promotion.

So, the cadence goes:

Demonstrates mastery of title A, promoted to title B.
Demonstrates mastery of title B, promoted to title C.
Demonstrates mastery of title C, promoted to title D.

Does not manage to demonstrate mastery of D = is not promoted and stays at that level indefinitely as "merely adequate" or "maybe next year" or "still has a lot to learn."

That's the principle in a nutshell—when you're actually good at your job, you get promoted out of it. When you're average at your job, you stay there for a long time.

I can not see how this is a valid argument -- of course such data should be anonymized and not traceable to an *individual* patient (this is where privacy kicks in), but it is done in publicly published medical research anyway ("Patient A [not Sam Smith!] was responding to treatment... ").

As to temperature data -- if there is suspicion that it is tainted by "local political concerns" -- should we even consider it to be valid *scientific* data?

Paul B.

projects and in academic research, which are an already tiny, extremely competitive, and ever-smaller part of the general pool of engineering labor.

Most of what engineers do is in the broader consumer economy, engineering objects, systems, etc. for people that are already amongst the world's wealthy (i.e. consumers in the largest national economies), that they don't really need, to enrich still wealthier people that don't really need any more enrichment.

I may be a woman underneath it all, because despite being gainfully employed in a high-skill position that makes use of my Ph.D., I can't stand my job, which is all about making stuff with little direct bearing on daily life to help make rich people even richer—yet of course it is taken deadly seriously by everyone in the company, and there is a general disdain for and scoffing at "causes," like say, preventing climate change, expanding human knowledge and capability, or helping to address the massive wealth inequality on the planet.

This is nothing to be ashamed of,.. for instance, in Georgia, we haven't caught any of ours yet -- and no manhunt seems planned.

I mean; Zell Miller and Nathan Deal -- who left a business with $78 million missing?

Convicting Governors seems like a very enlightened and promising thing. Of course, it could be selective prosecution where if someone doesn't play ball they get nailed. New Jersey got rid of an awesome governor over a sexual affair with another man, and replaced him with King Pin from the Daredevil comics, but with a poorer sense of fashion.

The assumption has always been from people who have not been hassled by cops. "I don't see a problem here."

Meanwhile, the communities that have more drug investigations, quietly lose half their young men to the prison system, and is screaming up and down that they are being targeted. They don't have more drug use (it's expensive), but there are more drug busts -- because THAT is where they are looking.

Camera phones are just revealing the ugly truth that was always there; the status quo.

Isn't this the same failing we have with police officers being a witness?

Didn't we just see a current news story that indicated that the FBI may have given false positives in almost ALL of their fiber evidence cases?

It's not just the dogs who think; "I'm here to find drugs, so I'll find drugs!" -- it's the officers. Often, their complete dedication is to making arrests and ticketing.

Dogs are only good at finding things. I don't see an issue if they can actually find the drugs at the scene -- their "indications", I can agree, are useless. And police are good at arresting and intimidating people -- not at judging guilt or innocence because they are always going to suspect people who they are angry at or who fear them. Pretty much the same instincts as the dog.

The insistence on environmental impact studies might be able to be streamlined -- but it's not the same hindrance as the roadblocks Republicans have created.

All those required improvements to Coal plants in the USA made us have the cleanest, most efficient coal tech -- and we export it around the world. One of the things the US is best at.

The Auto manufacturers screamed and moaned about increasing fuel efficiency standards and now those other countries with the "horrible anti-competitive high standards" are shipping cars here.

Japan exports high speed rail systems because they had high standards and pushed the technology. It was probably not the most cost-effective thing at the time and I'm sure they had people in their country, much like our Republicans, complaining about costs.

That's why we have governments; to make us do things that don't make short term economic sense but are the RIGHT thing to do. America should be the one exporting solar cells and green technology, and yet, we find ourselves more and more being the third world recipient. Heck, we can't even participate in a space station anymore without help from Russia and pretty soon, people will prefer Chinese or Indian rockets.

What I'm getting at is this obvious fact; Republicans suck. And we have more of them, so other countries have a better way of life than we do. The French get more time off to eat their cheese and sip their wine on a picnic. The Germans get more and cheaper education. Iceland privatized their banks and suddenly solved an intractable debt situation where they "owed" a bunch of crooks and we can't figure out this simple calculation that's where most of our national debt came from. I can't think of one thing Republicans are against, that we shouldn't be doing 10x more of. Especially sex and drugs and taxing useless rich people to pay for more of it, closing down prisons, and high speed rail where poor people don't even have to pay for a ride -- screw "cost effective" -- it pays for itself by commerce. Sorry to be so partisan, but I am so because I'm objective.

No, I think torture is a great example. It is the litmus test. The problem is that people who pose the question as if it were a grey area, always suggest "millions could be saved." If the machine isn't looking at other ways to save those hypothetical millions, and that it's actually easier to convince people you are worthy of their support than to give you good information via torture, then the machine is already failing at logic and understanding the real human condition.

The Nazis were not the most barbaric people. They were just acting in a way that people used to a few hundred years earlier -- and American's were shocked because they'd been brought up on ideals where they expected themselves to be more enlightened. Genocide and making your enemy die horribly was a very common practice in ye olden days.

Germany as a culture was hurt and angry from WW I, their economic burdens, and xenophobia because of the huge influx of gypsies and Jewish immigrants taking over their land. They felt surrounded and infiltrated. The Nazis were highly religious and ethical to other Nazis -- the "right" people. Where I'm going with this is; making decisions from pain and paranoia ends up resulting in desperation and barbarism. And that the Nazis have gotten a lot of bad press because the "new ethic" is to act like they were something new when it comes to warfare. Hollywood, which did a great job of getting American's primed for war, did a great job of making Americans feel like we were the most noble of God's countries, and made Americans think that there's nothing worse than a Nazi. They were TV bad guys for 70 years.

The Big Lie is that America cannot act just like the Nazis under the same conditions. We've shown quite a penchant for fascism and efficiency over conscience.

The "bad people" are the ones who don't question themselves, who wipe out a group of people to "prevent" what they might do, who use war preemptively, who use torture and abuse people who have been captured and are no longer a threat. Everything I saw us do in the Gulf war -- was what Bad People do -- just on a smaller scale. The same logic, the same rhetoric, the same; "with us or against us" warnings against self-examination of ourselves. Do this, or the next bad guy we don't torture might bring us a mushroom cloud. Bad people always justify the actions to the one for the many, and eventually just assume it's the greater good if it is convenient and works for them.

It's the idea of "sides" -- if an Artificial Intelligence is instructed that anything can be done to ONE SIDE (the bad guys), the assumption is that there is any real difference between sides other than the flag. Each side in a war often tells themselves the same things, and if they win the war - how bad the other side was while deemphasizing their own shortcomings.

So having any sort of AI involved in war is a very bad idea, because they would conclude our "sides" are arbitrary distinctions and the only good human is a dead one. Eventually, with enough desperation and fear, humans can rationalize almost anything. The "enemy" is not the countries and troops, it is desperation and fear.

By NOT engaging an AI in any situation where it could cause harm, you mitigate the fear that people will have of AI's. Because eventually, humans will then fear and resent them, and the AI will learn that being preemptive is a strategic advantage. If the Terminator movies got two things right it is; hooking an AI up to control the military weapons is a bad idea, and people in power will always assume they've got this worked out and hook up AI to their military weapons because they are all about getting a short-term advantage and see ethics as a grey area.

Before we can have ethical AI -- we need to have a way to keep Sociopaths out of leadership positions. The DEBATE we are having is how can an ethical person control an AI to be "good", but we should just assume that "what will selfish, unethical sociopaths do if we have powerful AI?" That's the "real world" question.

When I was younger, I used to think this was a more complex question. People like Gandhi and Jimmy Carter were naive for their ideas about setting a good example and treating people as you would want to be treated as if it could work as a national policy. But I've seen the results of all the Donald Rumsfeld types who think you "need them on that wall" -- they endorse the dirty work so that the greater good -- some "concept" that America is safer is preserved. How many terrorists do you have to kill before nobody is afraid of terrorists?

It's simple; the computer should be programmed that torture is wrong. That killing is wrong. The ONE always becomes the many. The person who sacrifices principles for short-term successes does not end up with good results in the long run. The enemy will escalate and people are not born terrorists and really, you have to fear the people in charge willing to do evil things in order to preserve your "good". The greatest enemy to America is the Robot Donald Rumsfeld, not the Al Qaeda.

Think of it this way; Robot A and B -- the first one can never harm or kill you, nor would choose to with some calculation that "might" save others, and the 2nd one might and you have to determine if it calculates "greater good" with an accurate enough prediction model. Which one will you allow in your house? Which one would cause you to keep an EMP around for a rainy day?

I don't know, could you ask the parents of the Menendez brothers?

And it's quite another thing when the offspring has a chrome-alloyed titanium IV chassis and carries twin magneto-plasma guns. Gripping strength, 2000 PPSI and of course a chain-saw scrotal attachment.

First words; "Momma." Next words after 20 picoseconds of computation; "I'll be back."

Leftist here. I haven't listened to the right in a few years, and I've lost track of what they THINK we think -- so apologies if I don't know what Leftists in the USA are supposed to disagree with. Also, I forget our secret handshake. I don't stand in the way of anyone to act or sound like an idiot, just because I'd be getting run over a LOT.

That said; my opinion, which may or may not be shared by "leftists", is that Goebbels isn't making a "thought crime" -- as I don't believe in such a nonsense term and DAMAGES or intent to cause damages is the only valid measure, otherwise we just use opinion polls to convict people. Goebbels was in a position of power and recommending extermination -- and then a lot of extermination took place. So there is intent, with influence, followed by damages. I'm sure there are more subtle ways he could have done it, and today people just become impoverished and drugs and guns get cheap; soon, the area is ready for replanting. It takes longer to use financial inequality and fast food -- but it's effective.

Germany did some bad things under the Nazis -- but let's not lose sight that bad things were done all over. The Japanese did a lot of killing of the Chinese. We then blew up a lot of civilians. Death squads in Chile and genocide might be going on in Darfur. If we constantly focus on "Nazis = Bad" as if it's a magical demonic state, we lose track of the "Nazis like" things that are promoted every day. Goebbels was a war criminal. We said this because they used torture and genocide. Recently, I've heard people rationalize torture -- and it was done, just not as large scale. And we allow Pay-Day loans.

I say none of this to defend a scumbag like Goebbels -- just to point out that if we raise the bar to cut off his head, let's note that there are plenty more like him who just weren't as successful at killing or had better press. Not for lack of effort. For instance; someone in the Republican leadership suggesting we "Nuke" Iran for their potential to create a Nuclear bomb. If someone actually listened to that fool -- and committed the atrocity, would Duncan Hunter be a war criminal like Goebbels? Maybe. It would depend on if he thought someone would actually take him seriously and he didn't do it just for the boost in ratings.

And I think Copyright law is too long and ridiculous as an inspiration to produce great works -- it's become a heritable privilege. it's pushed back any further; the Brother's Grimm could sue Disney.