chton

Is it? People will still feel guilty when taking time off, and it's possible that forcing people to take time off means the vacation time will be even less respected. "I won't bother that person, they'll need the time" vs "they're just making sure they meet the quota".

I definitely agree that people in any form of leadership role serve as an example. They do on many more things than just vacation time. In general, that's one of the ways to influence culture, by being the best example of it. Conversely, if you don't act as an exponent of your own culture, it breeds a "do as I say, not as I do" atmosphere, which is just as negative as not trying to fix your culture.

I also agree that people will look at their colleagues to know what is 'acceptable'. I don't now if that is inevitable. If it is, that makes the example roles all the more important to guide that. If your president would take more vacation time and worked the same hours as everybody else, the pressure on you would be lifted. I realize that might be difficult for her to do, but that is the effect it has.

My problem with forced vacation time isn't the lack of work, it's that I don't need it. I already pay close enough attention to my work/life balance, so when I do take vacation time it's on my own terms. Being forced to meet a quota just means it feels like I'm wasting days that I could be productive doing the things I'm actually being paid for.

Incidentally, since I've become a freelancer my vacation time that I actually want to take has gone up a bit. The situation is far simpler (either I'm working and I get paid, or neither), and not having to go through any official process or multitude of forms, means it's much easier to take the occasional day when I want it.

"We tried something that didn't fit our culture, and it didn't work."

Taking less vacation time is not necessarily a bad thing. For myself, not having to meet a minimum quota means I enjoy the vacations I do take more, since I take them when I need and want instead of mandatory ones. It means, as long as I'm feeling good, I can keep the momentum up.

The bigger problems is that employees didn't respect others' vacation time. Or their own, for that matter. That is a cultural problem, and a change in vacation policy won't help (much). If you want the people in your company to be happier with their time off, work on respecting it.

  "The guilt of taking time off takes over, and you "just check in" or promise to be available if anything comes up."

That is, to me, a sign of an unhealthy culture. Fix that before trying yet another vacation experiment.

I know people with 10 years experience with the language that still use the DSL for simple cases.

There is a lot of discussion about the usage of var, and ultimape's non-usage of it in his example is a personal preference, as well as making sense in an educational post.

And lastly, I think you'll find many developers, young and old alike, use x, y and z as their lambda parameters. I do too. It comes from the mathematical function origin of the syntax. In most early examples when it was introduced, and loads of educational materials now, lambda syntax is still presented akin to a mathematical formula:

x => x+1

In that context, using x makes a lot more sense than p, and has stuck around as a habit. It's a style thing, and everybody has their own style. You don't get to claim superior experience or skill based on a 2 line snippet that doesn't match your style.

And as an aside: you're not being downvoted by "the ignorant masses". You're being downvoted for being confrontational and not contributing to a conversation about the topic, which is Parallel LINQ and not coding style.

That is an excellent point, I didn't even consider that. It's possible they were listening on the correct frequency to receive it, since they knew the redshift was going to happen, but that just leaves more questions as to why they didn't then realize that it definitely couldn't repeat.

It would happen, but for a black hole massive enough, that point would be well inside the event horizon. We don't know how deep they actually went into the black hole, or even whether or not the 4D structure was inside the black hole or somewhere else entirely. Everything inside the event horizon is essentially unknown to us, both as scientists and as movie-goers, but the trip up to that point is survivable.

I'll just link you to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novikov_self-consistency_princ...

It's by far my favorite way to explain time travel system like the one we see in Interstellar, and it's rooted in real science rather than Paradox Philosophy.

ThePhysicist talks about using the bits of information provided in the movie to learn about the basics of some of the physics behind it. That's why he points to the formula for calculating a Scharzschild radius and not the complicated solutions of Einstein's field equation for Kerr (rotating) black holes. As a learning experience, you don't want to dive into the hardest stuff right away. As a you learn, you'll also figure out what was a ball-park number and what wasn't.

Also, the effect is strong, but in all of the formulas you're already guessing factors such as mass of the black hole, which have a far bigger influence on the end result.

I don't know why you're being downvoted, so I'm going to give you a proper reply instead.

Actually, the 2 things you noticed are not that hard to resolve:

- The quantum data was most likely never going to get out of the black hole. They executed the plan on the off chance that TARS was able to figure out how to do it if he had the quantum data. It's not impossible that there is a way to do it, we just don't know it yet.

- Your concern about spaghettification is valid, but the risk of that happening also decreases with the size and mass of the black hole. A stellar mass black hole would rip you apart instantly, but around a supermassive black hole the gravity gradient is a lot gentler. It wouldn't be comfortable per sé, but definitely survivable. You would get ripped apart inside the event horizon, but you could cross it pretty safely.

There is actually a much bigger problem than the spaghettification: every black hole has a shell of light orbiting it at the event horizon. It's light that came in tangentially, and doesn't have enough speed to escape, but is fast enough to keep orbiting. In a black hole of considerable age (like the one in Interstellar), that shell would be very very energetic. I don't know if the ships they were in would be able to survive a blast of radiation that intense, let alone the human and robot inside.

I don't think it's fair to say that they went for emotion over science. They tried to do both, and wanted at least an inclination of accuracy from the start. That's laudable in itself, in a time where most wouldn't bother with that.

I figured the mothership was still orbiting the black hole, in a much wider orbit. They could rendezvous by matching orbits using pretty standard manoeuvres, it would just take more time than if it was moving in a similar orbit as the planet itself.

Calculations about time dilation become enormously more complicated in a system where the black hole is spinning, because you get effects like frame dragging that influence the orbits and time. For the purposes of the parent poster, a ball-park number of distance is enough, they don't need the whole shebang.

They expected a ping every year, if it ever stopped pinging they would write off that planet. It was up to the scientists to keep the ping going, if they considered the planet still a suitable candidate for humanity. The signal they received from the time dilation planet was supposedly "looped around the black hole" and repeated yearly.

Yes, they knew about the relativistic effects. And they could obviously send some data. But somehow they can't figure out that they've been getting a repeat of the same ping for the last 10 years? And even if they couldn't figure that out, how could the person on the planet possibly send a ping every year, if she only spent an hour and half on it according to her frame of reference?

Absolutely, it is possible to claim accuracy, but then you have the hard task of making that actually true. 2001 was better because of that accuracy, but for many movies it's not a good way of doing it. Interstellar could have worked with complete scientific accuracy, or they could simply not have claimed that it was scientific. Either would have been fine.

I agree on the Matrix movies, but they had much more of a free pass already, because the core concepts are so flexible.

That's a possibility, but the special fuel they have would have to have been extremely expensive then. That would have been a fine explanation, and if they had mentioned it in the movie that would be one less point I could make.

But here's another one: They set up this nice system with pings to know what planets might be suitable, but they can't detect when a ping is being repeated instead of actually sent by a person? They couldn't put a timestamp in it, or some minor variation? They couldn't figure out that it's impossible to receive a ping every hour if the relativistic effects mean an hour takes 7 years?

There are other issues like this, I'm sure I could come up with a load more if I had the time :)

Surely Kip Thorne himself has to realize that he's grasping at straws. A lot of the things he mentions are of the type "in this precise, extremely rare situation it is possible, if we ignore all the other side effects". For example, I'm sure his calculations will be correct regarding the planet orbiting a black hole close enough for relativistic effects. What it also means is that the planet would pass through the extremely hot accretion disk twice every orbit, killing everything and evaporating all the water. And considering the speed that a stable orbit would require, that would be a very common occurrence.

The point is: don't claim that you're scientifically accurate. Usually, a good sci-fi movie will set up rules for itself, and follow those rules appropriately. If you make your ruleset "real world physics", you have to be extremely accurate if you still want to make it believable. The rules set up expectations, and breaking your own rules is an instant turn-off for science fiction fans.

The movie shows other cases where it doesn't follow its own rules: they have spaceplanes that can get to orbit from a planet with 1.8 times earth gravity, but not from earth without huge boosters?

For the record: I like Interstellar a lot. It was a great film, and I'll definitely be buying it when it comes out on DVD. I just have my gripes with the lofty claims of accuracy that Hollywood films so love to make.

My beef isn't with the anonymity, my beef is with the supposed objectiveness of the educators they use to give the randomly selected lawmakers the knowledge they need to decide. Those are the people to lobby, those are the people to buy, but they are hidden from the rest of the population. The only way to keep them honest would be to make every bit of information they give to the lawmakers public and freely available, so we can be sure the lawmakers aren't being manipulated. That runs into the same problems the delegate democracy has too: you can't make everything public in a state that still has foreign affairs.

I don't know, but at least I know it's them making the decision. I know they're corruptible, and I know their information can be manipulated and can be incomplete. It's transparent because everybody knows this, that's why we can complain about it. In some cases, we can call out lawmakers for it and get things changed. We know which ones tend to decide badly, and we can vote against them. It's an important balance in the system. If I have no control over who votes, and the whole system is made to look objective, that balance and that transparency is lost.

But it does mean I can't decide to delegate it to my friend who knows a lot about the trade situation with China. All the power would become consolidated in a few people again, and giving your vote to anybody else would be a waste of it unless they pass it on to one of those. Sure, the group could be different for each issue, but in practice it won't be. You'll need to campaign long and hard to be in that top N, and try to get a lot of people to trust you. That leads right back to career politicians and popularity contests.

Sure, many of the decisions in the current system are 'impure' in some way. Everybody has a price, everybody makes mistakes, everybody is uninformed about things. The big difference is the decisions still come from the elected lawmakers. They're often wrong, and even more often just guessing, but in the very least the system is transparent, we know where the power resides.

In the case of a randomized group, that power isn't with the group, it's with the people who educate them on the matters and who frame the issue. There are a million ways to present any matter, and none of them are objective. You're putting the power to influence and even determine a nation's decisions in the hands of the experts that inform them, rather than the randomly selected people. It would become very efficient to buy those people instead of the voters.

The problem of the matter isn't whether it would function worse. The problem is that it would function less transparently. It would ostensibly be a fair and completely unbiased system, but that could be manipulated behind the scenes in far more insidious ways. That's very dangerous. Personally, I would rather have a more unfair but more transparent system.

The problem is not that they would do worse. The problem is that they would be entirely dependent on the information they were provided. Anybody who gives them that information has their own opinion, and whether they want to or not, that opinion informs the way they dispense information. This means the random members of the population aren't deciding based on objective evidence. They can't really form their own opinions if every bit of information is biased one way or another.

That is why I said it was similar to a trial-by-jury. The jury isn't versed in law or in the details of the case, so they get all the information they need to make a decision from the lawyers presenting the case. That leads to situations like one we had in my home country: A woman was sentenced to life in prison for a murder without any evidence. None at all. She had motive and was 'an asshole', and that was enough for the jury to be sure she did it.

If there was a way to objectively give them the facts of the case and the knowledge they need, the system would be perfect, but unfortunately that's not possible. And until it is, i would rather have people making decisions based on their own badly informed opinions than people making decisions based on others' opinions with a veneer of legitimacy.

Any system that isn't a very narrow form of representative democracy requires a massive re-write of the constitution. That is not a reason to not consider them.

In a delegative democracy, decision making is a lot more fluid than in the current system. You can buy or coerce someone for one specific issue, but the impact of that will be lower than buying a Senator. That makes intimidation and bribery less effective from the onset, and it can be mitigated further depending on the exact implementation. Either way, just like in the current system, there can be checks and balances to reduce the likelihood of it happening.

The big problem with Sortition is that the voters are necessarily uninformed. It means you need to teach your randomly selected group a huge amount of background information, even before explaining the specifics of the case. It falls into the same trap as a trial-by-jury: if you need to educate people to make a decision, you're putting the power in the hands of the teachers instead of the people.

That would default back to a representative democracy then, since if my opinion differs from the top N, I have no way to influence the decision.

How would this work with a case like foreign policy? Since everybody needs to able to participate, all the information related to a matter at hand needs to be made public. This is not always a good idea, especially when relating to diplomacy with other nations that don't follow this model, or to military intervention. It would essentially become impossible to hide anything from your enemies.

Aside from my startup (which fills most of my evenings), my side projects never pan out. They're never completed, or end up being too difficult to complete. I consider them learning opportunities more than marketable projects.

Currently, I'm way out of my comfort zone: I'm on the way to build a proof of concept for an optical computer. No simulations, real hardware. My hope is that I can build a few passive logic gates, and go from there. Without a shadow of a doubt, I'll fail. There are a million factors I didn't consider or underestimate, and my knowledge of things like laser physics and optics is marginal at best. But I'm learning a lot from it, which is the main goal. I also just want to see if it can't be done. From what I could gather, there is far too little serious research being done into the whole field. If all else fails, at least I'll know why that is.

And hey, any side project where you get to play with lasers on your kitchen table has got to be a good one, right?

"It is perfectly possible that the NSA really do need to damage human rights in order to fight terrorism"

This is the first sentence of your comment.

"the only answer the government have is to take away even more privacy"

Is in there too.

If the government doesn't have alternative ways readily available, then you are saying violating privacy is the only way to fight terrorism we have right now. This is demonstrably not true, since they do use a lot of better ways. There are many more ways to combat terrorism that they haven't even tried on any scale yet (at least publicly). The very premise that the NSA's actions are justified because the threat mandates it is flawed.

Why would participating in a broken democratic system automatically imply you believe it isn't broken? It's all you can do to have even the tiniest amount of influence. Sure, your vote might not be worth much now, but that influence accumulates. It's literally the only thing you can do that has any impact at all, but you don't want to? Refusing to participate is not going to change anything, it's not going to fix the system.

As to your first point: "I don't vote, because not enough people vote for what I want" is a self-defeating argument. It's a dangerous argument, too, because it just reinforces the status quo even more. If you're unhappy with the current numbers, the very least you can do is make your tiny part of a percentage change.

The internet is a communication method. It's powerful because it's widespread and fast, but it's not a 'tool for terrorism'. The internet doesn't make bombs or create extremism. People do that. Claiming that violating privacy is the only way to fight terrorism is ludicrous. If their goal was to make the US a lesser target of terrorism, they'd be changing foreign policy, monitoring financial flow and looking for equipment and materials. The TSA, for all their paranoia-fuelled craziness, is a much fairer way to stop terrorism than wide-spread monitoring of a communication channel.

As an aside, terrorism as a general thing isn't new. The US was founded with an act of what would now be considered terrorism (the Boston tea party). Americans are so hung up on their constitution, but they don't believe the founding fathers considered these situations when drafting it? Or did 'talking to each other more efficiently' so radically change things in ways they couldn't foresee?

According to http://www.fastcoexist.com/3037899/we-took-ikeas-new-automat..., it isn't being released just yet due to a production problem. It was on the IKEA website a few days ago, so they probably just took it off for now.