You are correct. And the concept of a warrant no longer offers protection - of what use is a warrant to eavesdrop when you can't understand the conversation? In order for "listening" warrants to be effective there can be no effective encryption in use by the public. India is just being ham-handed about it - all countries will do the same sooner or later.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
I believe the original is:
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
- George Bernard Shaw
That is pretty damn specific, amazing so simple an organism can induce behavior that complex in an ant.
Not really - that's how evolution works. Those conditions are almost certainly what is optimal for reproduction of the fungus. Fungii that made the ants go 50cm high or on the southern side of the plant etc. wouldn't have had as successful a rate of reproduction and would rapidly have lost evolutionary space to the "better" fungii. Millions of years of random trial and error provide lots of opportunity to produce behaviours that appear complex or even intentional (but aren't).
Please tell us what college/university required a "diversity sensitivity" class? I don't doubt you (I realize it might have sounded like that) - I just want to know...
Except for one sentence the article gives no clue as to whether there is sexual bias at work in the selection of the little victims here.
"If a child is behaving poorly, if he's inattentive, if he can't sit still, it may simply be because he's 5 and the other kids are 6," said Elder, assistant professor of economics.
I've read many press reports about ADHD over the years and it seems clear that it is overwhelmingly boys who are diagnosed and that normal young male behaviour is being treated as pathological.
Yup my Dad had that done and he said it was the most painful thing he'd ever had happen... and this was a guy who grew up on a farm (a great source of pain), served years in combat during WWII and so on and so, on without ever raising a complaint.
The next time he had to go in was because of a disc problem and they essentially injected his spine with meat tenderizer to dissolve the ruptured disk away. He said compared to the spinal tap that didn't hurt at all (except for the nurse yanking his boxers off without first checking for protrusions - yikes!).
but that's not really my concern as an American.....
Actually it is... because when your country wants to do it to you they will help justify it to the public with the existence of other places that have already done what they want to do. "See, [other place/person/group/entity] does it, it's completely normal!"
I've made some general comments about human nature and people seem to want to debate the minutiae of it to death so I"m not going to put any more into this sub-thread after this. If anyone feels the need to have the last word go right ahead.
Work for companies instead of the university? Sure some scientists do that. Most seem to prefer tenure, not having a boss and so on and it's not too hard to see why if you've spent much time in and around university departments. Lots of people trade money for the relative personal freedom of academia - even little things like being able to decide what time you're going to show up for work mean a lot to some people. And job security.
Have to believe in their research because getting to do it is their only reward? Unfortunately lots of guys work their asses off to get tenure and then once they get it poof that's the end of all the intense effort or they just slowly decline... in many cases I think they just didn't have that much in them to begin with, just enough to get tenure and then it's all gone... maybe they'll find some bright grad students to provide ideas and effort but over the long haul they are just turning into deadwood. For not doing much more than keeping their heads low and going with the flow their reward is a steady pay-check, some societal respect, and then a pension. I've seen it waaaay too many times... if I could think of a better system to achieve what tenure is supposed to achieve I'd campaign for the end of tenure.
Follow the chain of postings back to my first comments and you'll see "what I think" - it's really quite clearly stated - then you won't need to guess.
You know the problem with so many of the "arguments" put forward by both camps - particularly here on/. - is that everything is put in an either/or context. I guess it's no big surprise that binary thinking is popular here. For example it either has to be a grand conspiracy or everything has to be above reproach. That isn't how people are, especially in large groups; and the group members don't have to be in physical proximity to each other. Strangely enough not only do conspiracies not have to be intentional but they don't even require that members of a group actually know what other members are doing in order for a conspiracy to exist - IIRC the legal profession has recognized this for a long time.
You're right the grants go to doing research (mostly;)...assuming you need equipment and/or staff to do the research then the anonymous grant application evaluation committee gets to decide if you get to keep doing research. No research => no publications => no merit increase. And if you don't have tenure then no research => no job.
My experience has been that there are lots of scientists that like driving nice cars and having a nice house etc. etc. especially so when they get married and have children. And they all want to keep the rent/mortgage paid, food on the table, clothes on their backs etc. etc. - just like every other human being.
I remember reading a couple of Frank Herbert books many years ago where the social system had a formalized organization that acted to prevent the government from wielding too much power... I think they called it the "Bureau of Sabotage".
I have to disagree - that's not how academic funding works anywhere I've been. Academia is a hotbed of politics, in fact it's one of the worst environments for that I've ever come across. Yes, once you get tenure you can pretty much say whatever you want. You can also not get merit increases in your salary, not get approved for sabbatical, not get approved by the anonymous committees adjudicating grant applications and publication submissions etc. And if you are a post-doc or non-tenured in some other capacity you have to be very careful if you want to keep that pay-check rolling in at all.
Sadly you can't just rely on "facts" either - they don't really "speak for themselves" - facts always have to be interpreted by human beings and that's where the problems start.
Yeah, maybe. OTOH the damn blackberry bushes and ivy that, despite my best efforts, have been infesting my property for years keep reminding me that nature is often far more powerful than man. Being out on the open seas in a small sail-boat gives me a similar feeling. Not to mention driving 300 miles to get somewhere that is only 100 miles away because we can't just cut straight through mountains like butter.
Fear of hubris is for barbarians. We're better than that now.
Yup, fear of human nature should be our main concern now. It has been for me ever since I grew up three blocks from a bomb shelter lot (think car dealer's lot but for bomb shelters).
- those who believe climate change is occurring and the cause is a mix of anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic
- those who are undecided if significant long term climate change is occurring
Absolutely true. To mix metaphors it's also a phenomenon that cuts both ways. Its effect is made worse when one group of people insist that it's a phenomenon that only applies to "the other guys".
You don't have to ascribe anything as provocative as malevolence. Just plain old human nature. The desire to keep being paid, the desire to keep funding flowing in, the desire to fit in etc. And that last leads to the fact that people behave differently when alone than when in groups... I don't think that phenomenon is necessarily limited to physical groups. Reasonable people can accept disagreement with their beliefs... in fact that is pretty much necessary to the existence of science. People who insult, shout and scream and launch assaults in response to being disagreed with are not furthering the goals of science, in fact they probably have no genuine appreciation of what science has done for the human race.
This is why I hate commenting on this shit. It upsets me, it makes me swear and lash out at complete strangers who don't have the time to read the material they are commenting on.
Ummm, well if you can't control yourself enough to stop swearing and lashing out then maybe you could control yourself enough to just not post.
I agree - I started developing my own B&W film and contact prints by the age of 12. By 15 I had an enlarger I would set up in the bathroom. I wasn't rich I just had the usual jobs teenagers got at the time - mowing lawns, shovelling walks etc. Was it cheap? No, but it wasn't enormously expensive either. By 20 I had built a proper darkroom and by 21 a darkroom capable of tray processing colour prints. A couple of years later I had one of the first reasonably priced colour print processors. I was a university undergrad at the time with the typical undergrad income. Along the way I tried processing my own slide film but unlike B&W film and B&W and colour prints there wasn't really much to be gained over letting a lab do it so I stopped processing slide film myself. Buying a bulk loader and rolling your own 35mm film reduced costs considerably.
Yes it was more expensive than digital but as the parent points out we took a lot more care in composing and taking our shots. At the time pro's would usually say they got about 3 usable shots out of every 100 - they also had incredibly high standards (you had to have if you wanted to get in Nat. Geo. or Time) and frequently used motor drives. The number of good shots depended somewhat on whether they were shooting slide or negative with negative being a lot more forgiving of exposure problems than slide but not having some other good qualities of slide such as saturated colours.
I'm not sure which is better - having to limit your shots and thus learn careful composition or being able to cheaply take 1000's of shots and, at least potentially, learn through lots of mistakes. I think perhaps both. My wife learned through digital photography long after film became a rarity but I also encouraged her to use one of my old 35's partly to learn to have to compose carefully (and to remember to turn off the motor drive:) but also to see what it was like to have the much wider gamut of colours and to see what it was like to be using a good lens - even if it is old a good fast prime still beats most if not all of the lenses sold on consumer digital cameras today including the DSLR kit lenses - that's one reason you see 4/3 format digital camera owners snapping up Hexanon lenses for peanuts the last 2-3 years, they convert the mounting to use the lenses on their digital cameras.
And for resolution film can still beat out all but exotic digital cameras. A drum scanner will easily give you 40MB of good data from a 35mm slide or neg. And medium format, e.g. 120 film (about 2 1/4 by 2 1/4) would give you over 100MB. Large format (4x5 and up) can get you up into GB's of data. I have hundreds of B&W 120 negatives my Dad shot many decades ago - they are still in good shape and would probably still beat the output of most digital cameras today for resolution and probably density range too.
Let me offer a different perspective to this. I have commercial clients and I have academic clients. For the most part the commercial clients understand that "you get what you pay for" but the academic clients have a harder time with that. They are surrounded by undergrad and grad students willing to "do the same thing" for much less money than I would charge.
Then for one reason or another, e.g. original author has left, they find they can't do something they want to do. Eventually I end up looking at it for them and have to explain why the existing code is a hopeless mess that would be expensive or even impossible to modify the way they want. Atrocious code written by inexperienced people who often have agreed to write it for a fixed price - so little things like documentation and code comments are an unnecessary frill. Or the other frequent problem - the code is unstable, crashes a lot or has unexpected and unrepeatable behaviours, mungs data in ways not discovered for months or years, performs calculations incorrectly but not so incorrectly that it is spotted immediately and so on and so on.
So I get paid to fix things. Often I'm able to talk them into "doing things right". They usually choke at the bill they get and aren't happy until about a year or two have passed and they realize that none of the old annoying problems have shown up again, the application doesn't crash anymore, changes to the code are relatively easy and cheap and having documentation helps the staff (students, post docs etc.). All of which means they are working more efficiently.
Then they are happy with what they paid. Unfortunately academic funding being what it is the next time a project comes up most of them slip back into their old habits and the cycle repeats.
Crowd sourcing is a race to the bottom, which sooner or later is no good for anybody, including those not directly involved. But the real problem with crowd sourcing is that you have 100 people using up their time and energy and only one person being paid for it. It is a tremendous waste of human capacity that otherwise would largely be being put to some use that would be at least moderately productive.
Slashdot Mirror
You are correct. And the concept of a warrant no longer offers protection - of what use is a warrant to eavesdrop when you can't understand the conversation? In order for "listening" warrants to be effective there can be no effective encryption in use by the public. India is just being ham-handed about it - all countries will do the same sooner or later.
I believe the original is:
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
- George Bernard Shaw
Not really - that's how evolution works. Those conditions are almost certainly what is optimal for reproduction of the fungus. Fungii that made the ants go 50cm high or on the southern side of the plant etc. wouldn't have had as successful a rate of reproduction and would rapidly have lost evolutionary space to the "better" fungii. Millions of years of random trial and error provide lots of opportunity to produce behaviours that appear complex or even intentional (but aren't).
He said calls from two party states not calls to two party states.
Please tell us what college/university required a "diversity sensitivity" class? I don't doubt you (I realize it might have sounded like that) - I just want to know...
Except for one sentence the article gives no clue as to whether there is sexual bias at work in the selection of the little victims here.
I've read many press reports about ADHD over the years and it seems clear that it is overwhelmingly boys who are diagnosed and that normal young male behaviour is being treated as pathological.
Yup my Dad had that done and he said it was the most painful thing he'd ever had happen... and this was a guy who grew up on a farm (a great source of pain), served years in combat during WWII and so on and so, on without ever raising a complaint.
The next time he had to go in was because of a disc problem and they essentially injected his spine with meat tenderizer to dissolve the ruptured disk away. He said compared to the spinal tap that didn't hurt at all (except for the nurse yanking his boxers off without first checking for protrusions - yikes!).
What's that? What are all those planes in the sky heading this way???
You mean America hasn't had a big increase in surveillance cams, no warrant eavesdropping etc.?
Actually it is... because when your country wants to do it to you they will help justify it to the public with the existence of other places that have already done what they want to do. "See, [other place/person/group/entity] does it, it's completely normal!"
What I've observed is very different than what you are saying you have observed.
I've made some general comments about human nature and people seem to want to debate the minutiae of it to death so I"m not going to put any more into this sub-thread after this. If anyone feels the need to have the last word go right ahead.
Work for companies instead of the university? Sure some scientists do that. Most seem to prefer tenure, not having a boss and so on and it's not too hard to see why if you've spent much time in and around university departments. Lots of people trade money for the relative personal freedom of academia - even little things like being able to decide what time you're going to show up for work mean a lot to some people. And job security.
Have to believe in their research because getting to do it is their only reward? Unfortunately lots of guys work their asses off to get tenure and then once they get it poof that's the end of all the intense effort or they just slowly decline... in many cases I think they just didn't have that much in them to begin with, just enough to get tenure and then it's all gone... maybe they'll find some bright grad students to provide ideas and effort but over the long haul they are just turning into deadwood. For not doing much more than keeping their heads low and going with the flow their reward is a steady pay-check, some societal respect, and then a pension. I've seen it waaaay too many times... if I could think of a better system to achieve what tenure is supposed to achieve I'd campaign for the end of tenure.
Follow the chain of postings back to my first comments and you'll see "what I think" - it's really quite clearly stated - then you won't need to guess.
You know the problem with so many of the "arguments" put forward by both camps - particularly here on /. - is that everything is put in an either/or context. I guess it's no big surprise that binary thinking is popular here. For example it either has to be a grand conspiracy or everything has to be above reproach. That isn't how people are, especially in large groups; and the group members don't have to be in physical proximity to each other. Strangely enough not only do conspiracies not have to be intentional but they don't even require that members of a group actually know what other members are doing in order for a conspiracy to exist - IIRC the legal profession has recognized this for a long time.
You're right the grants go to doing research (mostly ;)...assuming you need equipment and/or staff to do the research then the anonymous grant application evaluation committee gets to decide if you get to keep doing research. No research => no publications => no merit increase. And if you don't have tenure then no research => no job.
My experience has been that there are lots of scientists that like driving nice cars and having a nice house etc. etc. especially so when they get married and have children. And they all want to keep the rent/mortgage paid, food on the table, clothes on their backs etc. etc. - just like every other human being.
I remember reading a couple of Frank Herbert books many years ago where the social system had a formalized organization that acted to prevent the government from wielding too much power... I think they called it the "Bureau of Sabotage".
I have to disagree - that's not how academic funding works anywhere I've been. Academia is a hotbed of politics, in fact it's one of the worst environments for that I've ever come across. Yes, once you get tenure you can pretty much say whatever you want. You can also not get merit increases in your salary, not get approved for sabbatical, not get approved by the anonymous committees adjudicating grant applications and publication submissions etc. And if you are a post-doc or non-tenured in some other capacity you have to be very careful if you want to keep that pay-check rolling in at all.
Sadly you can't just rely on "facts" either - they don't really "speak for themselves" - facts always have to be interpreted by human beings and that's where the problems start.
Yeah, maybe. OTOH the damn blackberry bushes and ivy that, despite my best efforts, have been infesting my property for years keep reminding me that nature is often far more powerful than man. Being out on the open seas in a small sail-boat gives me a similar feeling. Not to mention driving 300 miles to get somewhere that is only 100 miles away because we can't just cut straight through mountains like butter.
Yup, fear of human nature should be our main concern now. It has been for me ever since I grew up three blocks from a bomb shelter lot (think car dealer's lot but for bomb shelters).
I think you need another camp or two in there:
- those who believe climate change is occurring and the cause is a mix of anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic
- those who are undecided if significant long term climate change is occurring
Absolutely true. To mix metaphors it's also a phenomenon that cuts both ways. Its effect is made worse when one group of people insist that it's a phenomenon that only applies to "the other guys".
You don't have to ascribe anything as provocative as malevolence. Just plain old human nature. The desire to keep being paid, the desire to keep funding flowing in, the desire to fit in etc. And that last leads to the fact that people behave differently when alone than when in groups... I don't think that phenomenon is necessarily limited to physical groups. Reasonable people can accept disagreement with their beliefs... in fact that is pretty much necessary to the existence of science. People who insult, shout and scream and launch assaults in response to being disagreed with are not furthering the goals of science, in fact they probably have no genuine appreciation of what science has done for the human race.
Ummm, well if you can't control yourself enough to stop swearing and lashing out then maybe you could control yourself enough to just not post.
I agree - I started developing my own B&W film and contact prints by the age of 12. By 15 I had an enlarger I would set up in the bathroom. I wasn't rich I just had the usual jobs teenagers got at the time - mowing lawns, shovelling walks etc. Was it cheap? No, but it wasn't enormously expensive either. By 20 I had built a proper darkroom and by 21 a darkroom capable of tray processing colour prints. A couple of years later I had one of the first reasonably priced colour print processors. I was a university undergrad at the time with the typical undergrad income. Along the way I tried processing my own slide film but unlike B&W film and B&W and colour prints there wasn't really much to be gained over letting a lab do it so I stopped processing slide film myself. Buying a bulk loader and rolling your own 35mm film reduced costs considerably.
Yes it was more expensive than digital but as the parent points out we took a lot more care in composing and taking our shots. At the time pro's would usually say they got about 3 usable shots out of every 100 - they also had incredibly high standards (you had to have if you wanted to get in Nat. Geo. or Time) and frequently used motor drives. The number of good shots depended somewhat on whether they were shooting slide or negative with negative being a lot more forgiving of exposure problems than slide but not having some other good qualities of slide such as saturated colours.
I'm not sure which is better - having to limit your shots and thus learn careful composition or being able to cheaply take 1000's of shots and, at least potentially, learn through lots of mistakes. I think perhaps both. My wife learned through digital photography long after film became a rarity but I also encouraged her to use one of my old 35's partly to learn to have to compose carefully (and to remember to turn off the motor drive :) but also to see what it was like to have the much wider gamut of colours and to see what it was like to be using a good lens - even if it is old a good fast prime still beats most if not all of the lenses sold on consumer digital cameras today including the DSLR kit lenses - that's one reason you see 4/3 format digital camera owners snapping up Hexanon lenses for peanuts the last 2-3 years, they convert the mounting to use the lenses on their digital cameras.
And for resolution film can still beat out all but exotic digital cameras. A drum scanner will easily give you 40MB of good data from a 35mm slide or neg. And medium format, e.g. 120 film (about 2 1/4 by 2 1/4) would give you over 100MB. Large format (4x5 and up) can get you up into GB's of data. I have hundreds of B&W 120 negatives my Dad shot many decades ago - they are still in good shape and would probably still beat the output of most digital cameras today for resolution and probably density range too.
Let me offer a different perspective to this. I have commercial clients and I have academic clients. For the most part the commercial clients understand that "you get what you pay for" but the academic clients have a harder time with that. They are surrounded by undergrad and grad students willing to "do the same thing" for much less money than I would charge.
Then for one reason or another, e.g. original author has left, they find they can't do something they want to do. Eventually I end up looking at it for them and have to explain why the existing code is a hopeless mess that would be expensive or even impossible to modify the way they want. Atrocious code written by inexperienced people who often have agreed to write it for a fixed price - so little things like documentation and code comments are an unnecessary frill. Or the other frequent problem - the code is unstable, crashes a lot or has unexpected and unrepeatable behaviours, mungs data in ways not discovered for months or years, performs calculations incorrectly but not so incorrectly that it is spotted immediately and so on and so on.
So I get paid to fix things. Often I'm able to talk them into "doing things right". They usually choke at the bill they get and aren't happy until about a year or two have passed and they realize that none of the old annoying problems have shown up again, the application doesn't crash anymore, changes to the code are relatively easy and cheap and having documentation helps the staff (students, post docs etc.). All of which means they are working more efficiently.
Then they are happy with what they paid. Unfortunately academic funding being what it is the next time a project comes up most of them slip back into their old habits and the cycle repeats.
Crowd sourcing is a race to the bottom, which sooner or later is no good for anybody, including those not directly involved. But the real problem with crowd sourcing is that you have 100 people using up their time and energy and only one person being paid for it. It is a tremendous waste of human capacity that otherwise would largely be being put to some use that would be at least moderately productive.