Is a bunch of people trying to hack on physics to bridge GR and QM. There are a couple different ways to do this. Strings are one, loop quantum gravity is another.

Right now, everyone is still in pre-release debugging, not even beta-testing. It's ALL VAPORWARE. Complicating things, as always is money - grants, funding, publication, as well as ego and rep - appointments, tenure, etc. The truth will out eventually - the theories WILL mature and develop; testable, falsifiable hypotheses will be formulated - patience, grasshopper.

What I'd like to know, now, is who's the "Home Brew Computing Club" of this mess and who is the "Bill Gates writing bitchy whiny letters complaining about shit"?

Witten and Greene I've heard of. String theory and string theoreticians are carrying the day (in political / "marketing" terms) in the academy. Who is losing and bitching? Apart from their economic incentive to bitch, should they be?

Excuse me. Corporations release crap products that cause problems and then refuse to man up and take responsibility for fixing them. Not exactly news, no.

  But when corporations behave with the ethical and moral standards of petulant spoiled children - like Microsoft consistently, persistently does - then they have earned exactly what they get, including pretty much any and all guerilla tactics to smack them into behaving.

is the color blaze orange with concentric circles on the back?

A good manager has godlike omnipotent powers to handle all externalities and all incidents and occurences of Murphy's Law etc.....

Unplanned overtime happens because sometimes, sh*t happens, even in the best run organization. The best manager is still not responsible or able to control what sales promised the customer nor what legal said were restrictions on the code, nor the schedule changes the customer asked for.

ERP Systems fail (and this is by no means an exhaustive list, just what I have seen myself) ...because the sales pitch is to the board of directors and the implementation is at the user level. ...because I (financial analyst that I am) have a job to do. Your system helps or it doesn't, but I've got to get my job done.

The common theme here is that ERP implementations lack humility and respect for the existing business and the people who actually run it. In pursuit of relatively nebulous "strategic" advantages, an inflexible, underdocumented, undersupported system is shoved down everyone's throat.

A few years down the road what happens? The planning guy (me) and the accounting guy had EACH separately reimplemented Access databases to provide the information we need to do our jobs, despite the fact that a module exists in the ERP system to do exactly what we need to do.

Except that, of course, it's been configured in such a way that it doesn't do any such thing, and we can't change it. Hell it took me 3 months (not full time) grovelling through help screens to even understand it. No, there's no budget for training. Or user support. And changing things? Get in line.

It also is not "cheap" in terms of energy expended for the defensive team, and has a certain level of risk -- if the offense breaks the press and gets across halfcourt, the odds are pretty good they'll be able to get a quick and easy basket. It's a worthwhile strategy when used when necessary or as a non-routine variation that forces the other team to adapt. Do it all the time and the other team will adapt tactics (and personnel) to counter.

But these works are not works-for-hire and plaintiffs are not natural persons, so the entities suing are not necessarily the originators of the appropriate copyrights. They should be the assignees (that's what royalties are all about) but that's not the same thing and is NOT an unfair question to ask them to prove that they have the appropriate assignments of copyright from the original creators.

To file a motion to bar objections on something that hasn't been the subject of exhaustive motion and discovery practice?

Correct me if I'm wrong (IANAL) you file a motion like that when the other side has been relentlessly arguing a point beyond all sense and reason and you are just trying to get them to knock it off and acknowledge - a la a request for admissions, that reality is what it is. Or perhaps you are asking the judge to compel them to acknowledge that reality is real.

In any event, you don't file this cold on something that hasn't been a bone of contention. That's just painting a target on it, right?

Counsel for Ms Thomas: "Oh wait? you don't want me to ask about your copyright registrations? really? oh? Your Honor, I'd like to see proof that the parties are actual the valid holders of the copyrights at issue in this lawsuit."

Judge: "So ordered"

RIAA counsel: "How could a 7 foot Wookie live on Endor? That... does not make sense. I... do not make sense."

NY Country Lawyer: "Oh no, they're using the Chewbacca defense again!"

You're not wrong, but I think the author referenced in the original post and you are addressed different parts of the whole problem of financial markets. The willingness of financial services salespeople - mortgage brokers, stock brokers, etc - to basically lie their asses off because there's so much money on the line is one problem.

"Quant" analysis of financial markets is, really, another, related problem. The same moral hazard of too much money to make cutting corners worth it exists, but the basic problem here is that many "quant" models are bullshit. Quantitive models for derivative securities can be realistically valued -- if and only if the risk of the underlying primary asset has been properly assessed (along with several other critical assumptions about the marketplace for the security -- but that's the JUDGMENTAL assumption fundamentally inherent in the models.)

Risk assessment is not actually that difficult -- insurance is built on the ability to do risk assessment. The real problem with the current financial problems were that NO ONE KNEW WHAT THE UNDERLYING PRIMARY ASSETS WERE and everyone operated on the belief that Nothing Could Ever Possibly Go Wrong (because no one could prove otherwise, because no one knew what the hell was actually going on).

This is and was every bit as monumentally stupid an assumption in the financial realm as it is engineering, computer programming, science, or any other real-world discipline.

I think what Wilmott is proposing is the development of models that are more reactive to real-world inputs, models that are much more Bayesian in nature in their ability to refine and revise their predictive nature based on actual events.

Admittedly without reading TFA, that sounds like his point - that what "quants" should be doing is developing good empirically good heuristic models rather than wanking over what are essentially hypothetical analytical ones based on complete SWAG parameters, where the parameters supplied by salesmen will invevitably be optimistic best case ones (and that's putting it charitably).

A piece of standard 25th century technology - the communicator - is sitting in your wallet, or, if you're geek enough, clipped to your belt. It doesn't have enough power to pump a signal to LEO...YET.... so the only golly-gee technology in that sucker is...the battery.

The politics gets dated, the style gets dated - what were passionate issues in the 60's don't translate so well to the opening years of the 21st century.

The reboot was necessary - if you want to tell tales about Kirk and Spock and keep telling new stories aobut the voyages of Enterprise and NOT have every character turn into Wesley Crusher - you're gonna have to allow some creative leeway to back up, refocus on the essential elements of what makes Star Trek worth watching, and begin again.

Wrath of Khan was the best of the movies by far because the emotions of the characters were so complexly developed.