I once hit a really old TV at the time (no idea exactly how old, it was half buried in a sink hole) with a bottle and it exploded *really* nicely - it shot glass particles nearly 15 feet. We had earlier in the day been beating it with a hammer trying to get it to break and couldn't - in retrospect it was good it didn't :). This was around 1988 - 1993 as we moved there before I left middle school and this was before I graduated high school - I do recall the TV had vacuum tubes and we busted them afterwords. Since I recognized what a vacuum tube was but didn't know enough about a CRT I would expect early high school, this incident was one of the "interesting" things that pushed me into general technology.

Newer stuff has never been as interesting. Most of it just ... breaks. My father tells of using an old TV he took apart to melt metals. The TV had a small screen and used a glass magnifying glass to make it a "nineteen inch" TV (or whatever the screen size was - it's been a while since I heard the stories of what it could melt). That would have really and truly trumped the Big Implosion that the CRT I hit with a bottle did. New stuff needs those explosives to be neat.

Pfft - I'm making a million billion a year using just that and a little bit more(+).

For free I will tell you how I do it, you just have to agree to a few things*

*you are not guaranteed to make money, your individual results may vary. I will also charge 200 dollars shipping and handling as it takes me A LOT of handling to get the stuff out. If you are a hot female I also need nude photos (in that case it takes handling charges of 25$ extra as it takes more "handling").

+I make a million billion a year in "Luethke Money" - how this relates to American dollars will depend on the current exchange rates, and depending on my current financial status.

That's about as a good a deal as you will get on other infomercials - though truthfully there have been a very very very small handful that were decent.

A good place to start from a programmers perspective is Eric S Raymond:

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1447

Not sure how else to take it.

"But don't an equal number of opportunities exist for the contrary side?"

Sure there is. Thus why a large part of "science" is publishing your data and your methodologies. That removes most of those opportunities from *either* side.

"Wouldn't a researcher who proved AGW was a hoax be bathed in media attention, career opportunities, etc.? With good enough research, couldn't journals be shamed into publishing?"

In this case, no. As it turns out the community is so insular that the very people cooking the numbers (go read some of the published source code and data - whole parts of it are simply made up because they didn't have any raw data) are the gatekeepers of who gets published it is near impossible to publish otherwise. We can clearly see from the e-mails that when something *did* get published - and therefore supposedly made it through even that level of collusion in the peer review process - that group successfully got those editors fired. Nor can one "prove" it either way. Basically the AGW people got there first and won, not through science but through manipulating the system better.

"Anyone foolish enough to think they'll advance their careers with false science will be caught out soon enough."

True enough - see these released papers for that happening. There ought to be some felony cases (FOIA deletions, especially given that they were intentional to avoid them) and it should have a number of careers killed. It would have killed mine to do this type of stuff and I'm was supposedly in one of the "soft sciences" (Computer Science) as far as methodology is concerned.

Sadly the so called wagons are circling - too many have too much riding on the models to be accurate (money, careers, belief system). It is a combination of a failure of our edumacational system (I refuse to call it an educational system) to teach proper research methodologies and the politicization of science. It has become a "belief" instead of going where the research shows. It doesn't even need some insidious plot, I've known some of the people involved here (not the main people but recipients and colleagues at ORNL) and their level of belief was VERY strong (some long stories there, in short an example is one of them decided that Linux was wrong and he was not getting the cache miss rate reported because he had calculated differently - couldn't have been a bug in his code). Of the ones that were not Believers this is the story I got from them about the state of the climatology world, though it has been a lonely world in that knowledge.

These systems should have *never* been allowed to get to where this is a bombshell. The circular reasoning with the reliance on the models as the primary tool for outcomes (that is models trumped raw data - see said e-mails and much of the public raw data for the last 10 or so years), the secrecy of the data and models, and the structured used to peer review articles (you do not even need the e-mails again, though now they offer inside proof of what was obvious from the outside). Further so much of the work outside of this group uses data they did release (along with no ability to research how they arrived at it - from the leaked information we know some of it was simply made up because they didn't have it) and it is all based on garbage.

As is we simply just *do not know* it could be no AGW, it could be *worse*, it could be exactly as they said. You can't put garbage in, process it with bad procedures, and get gold out. Heck you can't even put gold in, improperly process it, and get gold out! None of this takes one to be an expert in climatology - it only takes one to note that the procedures being used are incapable of creating a conclusion with a high degree of likelihood of being correct. That is they used a Garbage in Garbage Out method and said we had Gold Out. You hit it exactly (though I do not think you meant it this way) in that there are equal opportunities to do something similar on the other side - if things were working as they are supposed too that would *not* be the case.

There are a lot of things I am afraid of coming down the line in the next 20 years for both the western countries in specific and the world in general - for me one of the largest is the sever decline in basic science education. Two generations ago you had people who understood and followed a scientific process, the current teachers learned from them but "played the game", and our up and coming scientists have never even really seen good science. They see the scientific method the way I was taught (but later on was lucky enough to be in a group that was a hard stickler for what it *is* both in college and professionally), an outline that if you put stuff in that slot - WIN!! We are building an entire world view on something that probably is incorrect - and sadly AGW isn't even some of the worst cases I've seen of it, it is so endemic in the universities and labs to be disheartening. There are still isolated pockets of really good science going on, but it is getting farther and farther apart. I have to look no further than one of the biggest responses is "Eh, we do it all the time too" - yes and that is how the Cold Fusion scandal at ORNL a few years back made it through so many peer reviews, though at least the openness of the project let it get caught.

The problem isn't so much what is being done, it is how it is being done.

Say, for instance, I am president of a local archery club. We have trouble getting enough workers for some events (all volunteer workers). Many have wanted to have a two tier membership plan - normal dues are 100 dollars a year and non-working dues are and extra 50. If you want to see anger, propose that.

Yet, one can turn around and say that normal membership is 150 dollars and if you work you get a 50 dollar discount and people are happy (unless you start off with the above, then everyone sees you as a hack trying to force what you wanted in the first place). Same thing but instead of getting punished you are getting a deal.

In this case the "Move to India or loose your job" is pretty much the first case - VERY poorly worded. If it had been offered differently I'm sure many more would have taken it - for many that sure beats unemployment.

Then there is also that many people nowadays have unrealistic expectations. There is always thought that they idea that they want is possible - after all look at all the other "impossible" stuff we do today. Sometimes, however, there are no good choices. We will learn that one day - we will do so either early enough that we can recover or it will take basic death.

I know of a number of people in the mid 00's at the worst of the dot com bust that learned it the *really* hard way. But alas, not enough have learned it for the community as a whole. I imagine there are getting ready to be some IBM (or rather ex-IBM employees) getting ready for a really bitter lesson. Hopefully they will all find jobs elsewhere, but at least for the next little bit I wouldn't hold my breath - I would highly imagine in about 6 or so months that India job will look *mighty* tempting to many of them but will be too late.

OTOH I wouldn't of taken it either, but then I generally feel it's a nice move from IBM instead of doing the normal "lay off and hire over there" thing. There was no requirement to even offer it and it is one of the VERY few times I've heard of anyplace doing that.

In this particular case we already know that Chu has experience managing govt labs as he is the director of Lawrence Berkley National Lab and by all measures is doing good.

Indeed, I would be more surprised if he actually did any actual research on this breakthrough than him being a bad manager. Staff at that level are organizers first and VERY rarely, if ever, have time to do more than manage. I can not say "never have time", though I have yet to find even staff at a group leader level do more than chase funding, tell you that you are doing good work, and sign their name on your papers (not that this is wrong - couldn't be there without chasing said funding).

At that level there are also many wanting his name on their paper (it gets both funding and press), it is not uncommon for people in his seat to have had almost *nothing* to do with the projects (including chase funding), simply look at how many projects he heads and number of papers published - they guy would have to be a dynamo, live in a world with 48 hour long days, and never sleep in order to even come close to doing more than having a 2 hour meeting a quarter per project (and then probably given to someone else - I never saw any lab director at any of those meetings I attended).

Of course, they also have to able to do real research, they didn't get to that position through the academic weenie path by not being academics, but the chances of him doing more than reading the paper and giving his thumbs up is slim. Indeed - most research staff in national labs have to go through a decision phase on if they go into management or stay as a researcher (management being the only way to move "up" pay grade scales) - even then a large portion of them more or less guide a number of post-docs and grad students.

Worse? Well, he could appoint Darl McBride as the Secretary of Commerce. Or how about the Rev Wright to the Secretary of Education and Blagojevich to head any Ethics commissions. One can almost always get worse and you do not even have to look hard into his past to find them (nor are the latter two listed even close to the worst in his contact list). Oooh, or how about Dick Cheney as head of the NSA?

Any one who really and truly bought the idea of Change and Hope from a junior Senator who flew the ranks of Chicago Politics (and in one of the more corrupt areas to boot) is crazy. Welcome to the world of being bamboozled by a charismatic speaker - you aren't the first, nor will you be the last, and all thought those on the other side were idiots who couldn't see what you did (well, true to some extent - just we were bigger cynics and the magic didn't work on us).

I will say that, so far, Obama has far exceeded my expectations so I can't say I'm unhappy either. But then when your expectations are "fire, brimstone, and ruination" it isn't really that hard to exceed them either. Of course there is still time for all three of those, and MORE than plenty for just two of them. I'll take a person with no real beliefs that uses associates to gain popular support from those he represents over a hard line extremist any day (though that's sort like saying I would loose a foot over both arms and legs any day - neither one is a good choice yet one is clearly better).

I'll add one more thing to my post - people old enough will remember back in the 70 and early 80's when we thought we were causing a massive cooling and heading towards and ice age. The same arguments about "geoengineering" (though that wasn't the term used) recommended putting massive amounts of greenhouse gasses in the air to stabilize things.

Good thing things like timeOday's thought process was more or less ignored back then. Back to that whole understanding things along with unintended consequences. We better be *damn* sure we know what will happen when we intentionally release more change into the world than what we are trying to fix. I'm certain that any industrial complex that, say, released that much iron into the Indian Ocean would bee called the worst polluter of the century and they would be right - it would be best we totally understand things before intentionally becoming the worst environmental "change" in history (and hope that change is better than what we have now).

Well, we had a real problem in the southeastern US with soil erosion - especially on road embankments as our highway system expanded.

What to do? All sorts of theories were proposed, finally many states decided to import Kudzu as it yielded *great* soil erosion techniques and even looked pretty. Anything that might happen would have to been less worse than the Kudzu.

Well, except that we didn't understand the effect on our environment that the Kudzu would play. Turns out that it wasn't such a hot idea and was SIGNIFICANTLY worse than just letting nature grow plants back on the bare soil (let alone if we had just planted grass - but people felt that would take too long). Many of the same arguments, in fact if you look at pretty much any of those "unintended consequences" you will see VERY similar arguments.

Of course, this time we truly understand things - right? There is a great scientific consensus on the subject so it can not be wrong. We are smarter than that now - nothing we ever do any more does something we didn't intend and that something be very bad for us.

If this has the equivalent impact of the Kudzu we are going to kill the planet faster than Global Warming (even in it's wildest forms) could ever do. Your analogy of medicine can not do that. Heck, in fact as well tested and regulated as medicine is we still have MAJOR unintended consequences - we only have to look towards medicines like Thalidomide for examples of where unintended consequences are quite bad.

Personally when we start playing with things that can sterilize the planet if we do not understand it well enough I get kinda cautious - others, well, CO2 is the Devil and must be eradicated (after all, nothing is ever worse than the Devil). But, alas, like any other religion rational thought isn't what got many to where they are today and rational thought isn't going to get them to a reasonable stance. It will not be recognized as bad until those unintended consequences get bad enough that there is not choice but to see them and then everyone else will be blamed.

"I don't know. Depending on how strict the regime gets, I can easily see things being so risky that people simply don't want to mess with the geek-created tools, even if they exist."

True, few in our "modern" world seem to truly understand this - there are more places in the world where the rule of law is "kill first, ask later". We can easily ban *anything* - your possession is immediate execution. History shows again and again that this works (along with nature pointing out the folly of man)

Sadly there is almost no shortage of those willing to enforce this. Each group always thinks it is justified in doing some draconian measure because the Other Side(TM) did it first (and is almost 100% not true to an outside observer).

Yay - someone on Slashdot at least gets some market information correct (do not know about your ideas outside of this post - I've known people who translate what you said into some strange form of a strong command economy).

I somewhat supported the bailout of the financial industry simply because of how much of our world runs on credit and the issue was mostly industry wide. However I also felt that we needed to re-examine things like out anti-trust laws. There were a few companies in there that were specifically targeted.

That is, I adhere to the following logic: any company that is so large it can not be allowed to fail is too large and need to be broken up. Our normal anti-trust laws adhere to competition, yet I think this is at least as important (and maybe even more so given than that, like some of the Auot manufacturers are talking of doing, they want the money and have no change in their business).

Of course that also leaves industry wide issues - like a decent portion of the financial industry bailout. Were this truly an industry issue instead of the fact that the industry is so dominated by three entities that they can do any stupid thing and expect to be bailed out then I would support said bailout.

This isn't so much an "auto industry bailout" as much as it is a "big three bailout" (well, IIRC Ford, while having problems, isn't taking part of the pie so I guess it is "big two bailout"), the former I support, the latter I do not.

Right now I would eve support a specific companies bailout if we were moving towards breaking them up to prevent this in the future - after all few really saw this coming. If they want bailout money then they are too large and need broken up, if they aren't so large that they can not fail then they can do what all others do - chapter 11 or chapter 7.

If these companies were given that choice I wonder how many would go to the govt teat and instead choose chapter 11 and what it was meant for? Same is true for the Financial industry - I would have *loved* to see that same idea there (even though my retirement was managed by AIG).

It is only "debunked" in the world that really wishes it to be so (for various different reasons). It is the difference between "purchase price" and "total cost of ownership" - myself I care more about TCO than I do about purchase price - however many want purchase price to be the limiting factor.

Overhead *is* part of your salary. Is it take home pay? Nope, not in the least yet still part of what your overall costs are.

Indeed - when one sees the TCO of an employee be more than three times their take home salary they have to realize they are *worse* than the US federal govt (who has between 2 and 2.5 times overhead - at least in the national lab I worked in and that was considered "wasteful" by the bean counters). No company that depends on profits can remotely work in the long term under those conditions, the federal govt isn't even looking in good shape in the past few years and it has a *forced* income from everyone.

The "debunked" cost is fairly close to the way management calculates their cost per employee and how they calculate how many people they can afford to hire (of course a few other costs/income comes into play too). But then there are many that hate management and the above statement means it is "bad".

Is it what they take home? Nope, but then my paltry pay of 30k a year at a govt lab didn't include the roughly 15-20k of computing equipment I got per year either - yet that equipment costs was part of how many we could employee and my cost to the project.

And your point of "but that's because they're competing against nations which benefit from "socialized medicine"" is of the same line - someone somewhere *has* to pay for it. It *is* part of your salary regardless of if it comes out of overhead, take home, and/or take home with benefits. The cost of the retirees, ex-employees, taxes, and other costs are "overhead" and are, therefore, distributed over the working population.

Sadly Factcheck has become so intent on debunking everything that they have become near worthless, they aren't really politically biased as much as they are biased to the point that if they can "debunk" something they go all out. Factcheck almost seems to get this, but then stops short of it. Like it or not, the figure is relatively accurate as far as cost per worker per hour goes and it is WAY off what they can afford. In fact it is way off of what non-union auto manufacturing (say Japanese plants) make.

You know, there have been a few cases of trying to work with some Open Source software that I find the following bit of logic in there:

If (1){
do stuff
}
more stuff

(well, other than any syntax errors - being dyslexic if I write two lines without them then I'm doing good)

And I never could figure out why the whole "if(1)". I always left it in the code because I figured someone somewhere had a reason and who am I to change it? I recall hearing Donald Becker rant about people taking "worthless" code out of his drivers and it being for some specific architecture. Though in this case I have always thought that someone was too lazy to change it initially (after all you had to find the other "}" and everyone else after them had the same idea I did.

Now I know for sure - some AI someplace added in some code that no one else understands and must stay in under their own little world. But then I guess that is something along the lines of Becker's complaint that it didn't hurt other hardware yet was required for some specific vendor.

I'm loath to change working code, even when it has something like the above.

Well, I mean really, there is no other component in your PC that touches everything as much as your PSU does and there is hardly a component that gets less attention (for many the case gets less but that is OK). As such there is a market for cheap PSU's. A bad PSU can ruin *any* component in your PC (including itself), not even your motherboard can boast that.

We know that there can be HUGE differences between top and bottom end if for nothing more than quality of soldering. Next we know that that both skill and time are needed to make high quality joints and skill and time are not cheap. We also know margins have to be kept such that the company turns a profit. Therefore we can pretty much assume that high end PSU's will be expensive and low end ones cheap (though, of course, expensive doesn't necessarily mean high end), especially given that there are places where the high end are are a *requirement* and thus people will spend whatever is needed, that is where margins are made so that the low end stuff can still be sold and mostly work.

*shrug* having been bit once in the past (around 2001 or so) by some cheap PSU's in a small-medium (64 node) computational cluster I know what bad ones can do. We had our server room (halon fire suppression system) call us one day that one of the nodes was smoking and what should they do: "umm that big red button? Push it, then run". It was all nice and melty when I took it apart (halon system didn't deploy thankfully so it was just an amusing story), I used to have a nifty picture of it and the scorch marks but I can't find the picture anymore - however it was obviously it had an actual flame.

Later on when we moved to large clusters then MTB of all the components started to become important. Even then the PSU was one of the higher failure rate parts, I always assumed that this had something to do with the few nodes we had with redundant hardware always had more PSU's than they really should need (other components being just as important yet not having a main and three backups).

In many venues they have what I would call certain signs of death. This is one of them - basically the idea that whoring oneself more will somehow make them viable.

In some cases - those truly a whore - more and more selling of oneself is only a logical conclusion. After all, when you are the "best" (be it a person who can sell their body) one can name their price, but then as you slide you have to be willing to sell for less as your "worth" drops (say, loose your beauty).

There is a difference here - graphics sell to a large extent but there is also the time spent in game that can not be transferred (in the whore analogy, well your own parts transfer in whatever state they were in at the end of the last encounter - however in a MMO you will start out as a total newbie). As such things like this may very will get a boost of last breath revenue and I can not blame them for doing it.

Of course, I would also say at this point the fact that EQ is still alive enough to whore itself out is amazing. I mean, this is like a 140 year old chain smoker alcoholic deciding to whore themselves out for another few years of life.

And, lastly, the game isn't a person so the "whore" analogy fails miserably there and we come back to shareholders stake in the claim. While some will want to say that is a "whore" the rest of us with a 401k realize that this isn't so. Shareholder's worth is an important thing.

I can't say I applaud this decision. Even were I a shareholder I bet there will be more loss than gain in this case. At the point any game is revenue based as to win, those that have no chance to win will quit (and that is 99% of your player base). For the last few months I guess you may maximize profits and I suppose so.