fixedd

Simply put, what is the cost involved and relative productivity gained/lost from each layout design. What about experimental designs? Without this type of information, it is difficult to convince a decision maker to improve these conditions. Those metrics need to be quantifiable, not anecdotal (I get more work when there aren't conversations around me vs. I resolved 10 bugs in the open office environment and 25 equivalent bugs in a cubicle).

This has been well documented since the early 2000s. Programmers are statistically and significantly more productive if they have enclosed offices with closing doors. And decision makers that care have been acting on it for just as long (see Joel on Software, I'm not a huge fan, but this has been a harping point of his, as an owner of a software company, for years).

Any company that forces programmers to work in open-plan environments is either ignorant, or just doesn't care.

Is he multi-engine rotorcraft rated? ;)

The FAA never has anything out "soon". They're currently in violation of a direct order from Congress because they're so slow.

Recently, I've been wondering why we use exhaust fans in bathrooms and not dehumidifiers. I might be way off base here, but it seems like taking conditioned air that's a little moist and dumping it outside and replacing it with drier unconditioned air would be less efficient than just removing the moisture from the already-conditioned air.

I imagine it isn't one of those things where it's "always cheaper to do X", but there's probably a break-even point. Does anyone know how to do the math to draw that chart?

I only take cabs 5-10 times a year anymore, and never in Boston, but I've never been in a cab that pestered me with advertisements. If I found myself in one, it'd be the last ride I took with that company.

On the last flight I took with Delta Airlines they had all the TVs drop down and they played five minutes worth of advertisements on the screens and through the loudspeakers. I just refuse to deal with companies that are hostile to their customers.

Tried this, didn't work... no Linux support.

Other than friends-and-family, are there really people that invest without a hope of return?

The asteroid belt, which is positively TEEMING with possible collisions... billions of objects... yeah, we don't even bother. Ninety-nine (point nine nine nine...) times out of a hundred you won't hit anything. Space is big.

Agreed, but I could drop a couple K on SpaceX and it wouldn't hurt me if it disappears.... but I'm not allowed to.

Can you give some examples of places where it might be currently being unethically used?

...I think it would be kind of embarassing for a town if they couldn't get a robust all terrain vehicle to some location within a reasonable timeframe.

When I went to high school in this general area (15+ years ago) they used run-of-the-mill SUVs just fine.

*shoplifting

But New London police interviewed only candidates who scored 20 to 27, on the theory that those who scored too high could get bored with police work and leave soon after undergoing costly training.

Yeah... you solve that with employment contracts, not discriminatory hiring practices.

I really don't see how saying "smart people will get bored and quit" is any different from saying "African-Americans are lazy and will eventually stop showing up on time", or some other nonsense.

There's 2.5k people in my town and it's news here (literally) when someone is arrested shopping at the local Wal-Mart. The police have two miltary-issue Humvees, for some reason.

I didn't RTFA, so it may have been mentioned, but I recently listened to a year-old episode of RadioLab where they were talking about an apple-growing region in central China where in the 90s the bees just disappeared (probably due to pesticides). Being China, with the associated labor costs, the farmers paid people to go out on ladders and carefully pollinate all of the flowers on the apple trees by hand.

Long story short, the humans were WAY better at it than the bees (I forget the % increase, but it was significant), but it was so tedious that the labor costs still drove the end-user cost of the apples above what the market was willing to pay.

I don't really buy that a world where all the work is done by robots will be an issue at all, unless it's only going to benefit the rich.

I imagine it will allow people to work on what they want to work on, instead of what they have to work on. I, for one, would stop spending ~40 hours a week building software for others and build myself an airplane instead. Next? Maybe a sailboat. Sure, the robots could do it better and more efficiently, but I enjoy doing that sort of "work".

But what do I know, maybe not everyone is like me. Maybe it'll turn into Wall-E, or everyone just ends up sitting around watching Friends reruns, or most people would form street gangs and battle it out out of boredom.

No kidding. I'm reasonably certain I played it on a 33MHz 386 with a couple megabytes of ram.

How about this: just by a system with all Intel chipsets and you'll probably be fine.

I had (well, still have, but don't use) a w510. It worked just as well as the t61 before it (which was to say, they both did great under Linux), but it didn't have hybrid graphics... it was Nvidia all the time. The only reason I've replaced it was that it had absolutely abysmal battery life. Old job bought me a comparable ultrabook that weighs 20 pounds less and has 3x the battery life and I couldn't be happier.

Same for Ubuntu Gnome. There's a few addons (or plugins, or whatever they call them) that I install to suite my preferences, but I can do a clean install + additional packages + tweak to my needs in under an hour. If you don't know the package names you'll want, maybe double that. The past few upgrades have also worked flawlessly for me, which makes it even easier.

That said, I intentionally purchase hardware that's known to work well with Linux (if you buy a system with all Intel chipsets, you'll probably be fine). Also, the power management is still abysmal. I still have to tinker with powertop to get battery life comparable to other OS's.

You can't just slap any old device into an aircraft and call it done. There's huge amounts of money + time that must be invested to get it certified, and it has to be done for each aircraft type. I haven't looked it up, but I'd wager an Iridium transmitter for transport aircraft would be in the 10s of thousands of dollars, minimum.

kiba said "in a liberal society" not "about a liberal society".

I've written about this elsewhere, but I'll chime in here too.

The largest radio telescope we have (the 305 meter diameter Arecibo) would need to have it's sensitivity increased by around two orders of magnitude JUST to pick up our TV/FM/AM signals from outside the solar system. If we move into the narrowband signals then, depending on the source-strength, it could pick up signals at up to a few thousand light years... if it happened to be pointed in exactly the right direction at exactly the right time.

You'd have to build an absolutely monstrous dish to be able to detect any of our signals at even the center of our own galaxy (much less at the other end)... I haven't run the numbers on it, but I doubt it's physically possible to build a receiver large enough. Add to that that they're highly directional devices and I think you'll find the "N" in your scenario is actually a startlingly small number.

Declining birth rates only lead to shrinking populations when the birth rate was stable to begin with.

--

Date 1: Every two people produce four offspring.

Date 2: Every two people produce three offspring.

Between Date 1 and Date 2 the birthrate declined by 25%, but the total rate is still positive.

Life, or intelligent life?

We can infer life based on atmospheric compositions NOW, but only if that planet fits an extremely narrow margin... meaning, Earth. Earth three and a half billion years ago had life on it, but you'd be hard-pressed to tell it from orbit.

If you want to move to unambiguous (intelligent) life then.......

The largest radio telescope we have (the 305 meter diameter Arecibo) would need to have it's sensitivity increased by around two orders of magnitude JUST to pick up our TV/FM/AM signals from outside the solar system. So, the crap we pump out the most couldn't even be detected by Voyager 2, if we had strapped a giant dish to it.

If we move into the narrowband signals then, depending on the source-strength, Arecibo could potentially pick up signals at up to a few thousand light years... if it happened to be pointed in exactly the right direction at exactly the right time.

So, our most sensitive instrument is only capable of measuring a fraction of a percent of the spectrum in a fraction of a percent of the possible-directions-it-could-be-pointed if the point source happened to be sending a strong enough signal (aimed at us) at exactly the right time (which would be anywhere between 2 and a few thousand years ago).

I haven't done the math, but I suspect that regardless of the frequency and amount of energy we dump into sending out a signal (within the realms of not being scifi, anyhow), it would be impossible for anyone to detect us a thousand or two lightyears out (using EM radiation) without knowing when/where to look. They also wouldn't be able to "see" that for quite a long time yet. I couldn't find a list of "when did we start sending out signals at X frequency" (and I suspect it doesn't exist), but if we take 50 years ago as a guess and we assume we pumped out noise at a frequency that could make the distance at a power level sufficient to be noticeable and that there wasn't anything to get in the way of the signal then we're only looking at something like 2000 star-systems.

I guess it depends on where you draw the line on fundamentalism. I live in the Bible Belt and I'd argue that, at least, the Southern Baptists should be seen as a Fundamentalist organization. That locks down the majority of the people in the SE-quadrant of the continental US.

Also depending on how you draw your lines, the Catholics aren't even remotely close to #1 status. About 24% of Americans are Catholic while about 51% are Protestants. I'll agree that it's a little iffy, but I'm willing to count the Protestants as a singular group.

Perhaps I'm just jaded because I live in the land of "lets turn the US into a Christian theocracy".

Please cite an "even more horrible thing done in the name of atheistic philosophies" (I'm actually curious about this, even though I'm going to argue with you in a sec...).

--

The premise that religiosity in any way influences morality (or "self control") is a joke. We live in a world where religious people are performing (or attempting to perform) genocides, who rape children (and adults), and who are subjugating the current out-group. We also live in a world where non-religious people are providing healthcare to the poor, counselling to the abused, and food to the needy. There are, of course, plenty of counterexamples where religious people are acting morally, and non-religious are acting amorally... all this just goes to show that there are moral people and those who are not moral, not that religion has any influence over that morality.

To further the point, the vast majority of religious people (at least in the "Western Religion" sense) go out of their way to cherry pick which of their holy book's rules to adhere to. This is because they have decided to act in a way that they, and their society, have deemed moral; despite what the book has told them was.

Pinker uses the phrase as a metaphor for four human motivations that, he writes, can "orient us away from violence and towards cooperation and altruism,"[2] namely: empathy, self-control, the "moral sense," and reason.

All of which are contrary to religious fundamentalism... which worries me as a US citizen.

Anecdote: My second grader's teacher sent home school work last week where she "corrected" his correct answer on a spelling test to something that wasn't even a word. She also accidentally a word in her little "good job" blurb at the top.

People make mistakes.

It's impossible to judge what one might find valuable. Preserving life as "a thing" might be just as important to future-wealthyperson as fighting Malaria is to a current one.