Microsoft has been a strongly visionary company from its inception.
That vision has been to empower the individual by providing him with the computing resources that previously were only available to corporations, institutions, and governments. In the 1980s, this was unquestionably a Good Thing.
Now the challenges that Microsoft's vision addressed have been met: you can easily acquire ownership of more computing power than was available to more than 95% of the corporations and institutions of the 1980s. We have all moved beyond the need for Microsoft's defining vision. Microsoft championed personal empowerment for us, and has won an incredibly important victory, and we now enjoy much better lives for that. Thank you, Microsoft.
The new challenges have to do with how to build collaborative computing systems where individuals move in and out of groups who are working on large, long term problems that are only of short term interest to most of those involved. The average length of employment at any one business has dropped markedly in the last decade; FOSS is built on the concept of contributors coming and going at whim while the project continues to evolve; wikis are using a similar approach in devoloping knowledge systems. Maybe these collaborative endeavors are not always successful, but even the failures are proving to be a better value to the world than what they have replaced, that had been made with the best technologies of the 1980s and 1990s.
So, how can a person's contribution be efficiently packaged so his other collaborators can easily put it to use? How can this be done while preserving the contributor's ownership of his piece, so that he can take that part with him when he leaves the project? How can five people, none of whom share a common native language, construct a technical document in English using Google Docs and web resources, or some similar approach? These are the problems we currently face. They do not revolve around individual empowerment; they revolve around the interface between powerful individuals and long term group efforts.
Microsoft cannot help with this work. Microsoft is at best like a knight of old: highly skilled in the specialized techniques of horse warfare using lance and sword, to champion a cause that was once critically important but is now a part of history. These skills do not transfer to today's problems, any more than the skills of that magnificent knight of old have any value on today's mechanized battlefields.
Whether Microsoft is evil is a question that no longer matters. It is now clear that Microsoft is irrelevant to today's problems. We've seen this kind of thing before, for instance when Netscape's approach to the Internet became irrelevant, the Netscape code base was taken apart and the good parts were put back together into Firefox. Microsoft needs to go through a similar transformation: it needs a new shape, created from a new and relevant vision, and it needs to fit all its good pieces into that new shape.
That will probably use up most of the corporate resources that Microsoft has withheld from its stockholders over the last 30-odd years. But it does have those resources. So it could remake itself, if it can find another visionary as powerful as Bill Gates whose vision is actually relevant to today's challenges.
Well, you are right up to a point. It was more a recognition that one's band needed to live in balance with all of its neighbors of various other species, or the outcome would be unpleasant. "Blending seamlessly with the ecosystem" is a shorthand phrase that most persons understand. Obviously not all of them, though.
There is a need to learn how to take off the European glasses when communicating with persons from other cultures. A failure to recognize one's own cultural biases is extremely limiting when using the Internet. Projecting attributes of your own culture onto persons who live according to very different values is a sure way to fail at developing a broad base of potential collaborators, whether WoW allies or software developers or import/export partners. You might as well just stop using the browser and spend your life playing FPS games.
New crawlers are needed because the web is changing.
The automated cross referencing system on some blogs requires new logic to identify which article is the true search target, and which ones are simply referencing that article.
The increasing use of ajax techniques to update portions of a web page requires a new approach to crawling.
Other new ways of delivering content are also forcing changes, but these two are sufficient to make the point. Teh intarwebs is changing, and teh spiders need to be redesigned to crawl through all them new types of tubes.
Some of these problems will be mitigated by HTML5 (assuming that web developers adopt the new standard-- which is likely for those not married to the Microsoft ecosystem). But even when HTML5 becomes fully mature, there will need to be some big changes in crawler and indexing technology.
Just to extend parent post's most excellent point about Roman roads:
The network of roads that Rome built was initially, and always primarily, for moving armies rapidly on foot. Not for wheeled traffic.
Also, the principle of the wheel was well understood and integral to Native American thought in pre-Columbian times. Cycles were consistently represented by the wheel, and the use of rolling hoops in teaching and spiritual games was common. As parent post points out, in North America, the construction and use of roads was not compatible with cultures that sought to blend seamlessly with the ecosystem. The travois that allowed transport of goods over roadless terrain was a much better, and widely adopted, approach.
Basically the work needed to make effective wheels, and the hassles of keeping them in repair, are a stupid waste for a culture unless you are fortunate enough to inherit a fancy road system from an earlier culture.
The gold from trade was minor. The real economic base for the Renaissance was the Black Death that preceded it. The population of Europe was decimated, but the infrastructure was left intact, so the survivors inherited a wealth of cleared fields and orchards, prepared building materials, draft animals with harness and carts, fishing nets, boats... All the stuff that had been barely adequate for the lives of teeming millions of Europeans was now just laying around gathering dust until someone would see how it could be put to new use.
The up side of a massive die-off from a flu epidemic is similar. If the size of the human population was reduced to 2 billion people, there would be more than enough scrap metal, stored petroleum product, and other goodies at hand that the survivors wouldn't have to do any mining or pump any oil for decades. Theirs would be a very rich inheritance, and that would probably spark a second Renaissance where mankind would really begin to move off Earth, and do all kinds of other wonderful advances.
Just need to off 2 out of every 3 people in some nonviolent way to bring the population down to a sustainable number. Then all kinds of good things can happen.:-)
We need to invent that glowy crap on the back of every spaceship on TV and in the movies. The Millenium Falcon had no trouble landing and taking off from a planet without a fuel tank... you just turn on the glowy crap, and bam you're there. The starship Enterprise just makes the glowy crap flash really bright, and they're going faster than light itself! Even the Stargate uses glowy crap technology to bridge planets.
We just need to invent that glowy crap and everything else will fall into place.
So this is the modern day equivalent of the medieval practice of flagellation: using the pain of whipping oneself as a means to achieve a higher state of piety. There can be an ecstasy in physical pain that is easily confused with the ecstasy of a truly religious experience. Sounds like these persons are looking for the same kind of thing through provoking somewhat saner minds into arguments they are certain to lose.
That explains a lot of fundie behavior. They are not seeking to convert anyone or win any arguments. They are, for twisted and selfish reasons, seeking to provoke others into publicly abusing them.
Seems like this behavior belongs on the same continuum as the suicide bomber, though of course not immediately to the same degree. So more like "infantile fanatical terrorism" rather than the full-blown kind.
I wonder if there is any psychological scale that could be used to determine when a fundie of this type has begun to move far enough toward the extreme to become a risk to others (such as shooting health care personnel at abortion clinics, etc).
I wonder if there is any way to frame a law that would make it a crime to profit from encouraging fundies to become more extreme in their views and behavior?
First thing worth noting: TFA starts with this lead-in paragraph:
ENLIGHTENMENT SPIN: THE GALILEO MYTH
The Washington Times reports a very nice story this morning. Catholic scientists, or scientists who are Catholic, whatever makes you more comfortable, are trying to combat the notion that the Church is anti-science. "The Galileo incident has made the Church a whipping boy," Thomas P. Sheahen of the Catholic Association of Scientists and Engineers told the paper.
Goldberg is playing off of this article: Catholic scientists look to bridge theory, theology: Hope to bring morality into largely atheistic disciplines, written by Larry Witham. I haven't read the article since it requires me to register fro a FREE trial on web site I have no other interest in. The lead in to the article talks about how the Catholic Church has admitted that it screwed Galileo over, and how some Catholics feel that their beliefs are being unfairly persecuted as anti-scientific, when all they really want to do is inject some non-rational qualities into scientific investigations, like "morality".
I've got serious problems with anyone attempting to inject "morality" into scientific inquiry: science has developed its own set of professional ethics, which is quite adequate for science's distinctly limited goal of explaining how things work, without involving itself with why they are the way they are, or whether a thing is good or bad or blessed or evil. Those are important questions, they just are not scientific questions. Trying to bring morality into science is rather like describing the smell of different colors. But that's a general thing, not specific to the question at hand, which is whether the Catholic Church actively persecuted Galileo for his new method of seeking the truth, or whether the Church simply lacked the moral fiber to stand up to members of the academic community who demanded that the Church shut Galileo's mouth.
A real problem with attempting to work with Goldberg's article is his insistence on describing Galileo's contemporaries as "other scientists". That word did not exist in Galileo's time, nor were there any cognates that were remotely close to what we today call a scientist. With the exception of Galileo and a few others who were forging a new form of acquiring knowledge through empirical methods, most knowledge was acquired and transmitted by scholasticism. The appropriate term for Galileo's contemporaries would be "scholastics". They work with authorities, such as Aristotle, and with dogma, to extend accepted belief systems to cover new situations and corner cases. Scholastics are very important in certain fields of knowledge, for example, in the history and use of Tarot, or extending biblical concordances. But they are not scientists.
In Galileo's time, scholasticism dominated higher education, Church training, and the preparation of that day's equivalent of civil service. All of these institutions recognized Galileo's approach to knowledge as a threat, including the Church.
The article, poorly written as it was, does in fact support my understanding of the events of Galileo's life: the Church, as an institution, persecuted him for his empirical approach, despite the fact that he had friends in very high positions within the Church. The Church was right in fearing Galileo's ideas, since his approach questioned the authority that the Church had wielded for centuries, and that brought about the fall of the Church as the dominant political and financial power in Europe, with its replacement by nation states that understood how to implement new technologies and were increasingly oriented to improving the mundane situations of its citizenries.
I once interviewed for a non-profit who asked what my salary requirements were and I said "about $70->$90k" and he immediately shot back "unfortunately we are budgeted for around $55k". With that, we both knew this wasn't gonna work so we didn't bother wasting more time.
That is an excellent example of a successful first interview, and one that a job hunter should be prepared for. A good follow-up would be
"Okay, then, I see we don't have a match on this position, but we do have a few minutes remaining for this interview. Are you aware of any positions that are available either with your institution or through your associations with colleagues in other institutions that match my resume and salary requirements?" That is, be prepared for the interview to terminate early because of an obvious bad fit, and be ready to try to turn it into a networking opportunity. The best outcome would be the interviewer saying that "You might try the Foo Foundation. John Smith-- a fellow in their HR Dept-- and I collaborated on designing this job announcement and a similar one that Foo is about publish. You can use my name in your cover letter and ask John to give me a call. If you give me permission to do so, I can tell him that we interviewed you and might have hired you if we had a larger budget to work with."
The chances of this kind of thing happening are pretty small. But they are zero-- nothing, nada, zip-- if you aren't prepared to shift a dead-ended interview into a networking opportunity.
Pull a stunt like that and you'd strike out if I was interviewing you. To each their own, but fer christ sakes it is an email client not your main development tool!
An interviewer who displays that sort of attitude is a red flag that the corporate culture is sick and probably not something I would want to get involved in. Time to cut my losses, and get on with looking for a decent, or at least acceptable, job.
That is a very interesting new approach to old history! Made me want to crosscheck my decades-old studies of the guy's life against anything new that might turn up on a Google. Didn't find anything to contradict what I had learned of him earlier.
Galileo became an adamant proponent of what we now call the scientific method and condemned the practice of teaching physics by authority that was the accepted approach at the time. The prime authority on physics and many other studies were translations of Aristotle. Galileo became very argumentative against this, pointing out that experiments refuted much of what Aristotle worked out by logic (such as the notion that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones, and that the universe was geocentric). This challenged not only other scholars, but also the underpinnings of the Church's political role in society. Both scholars and the Church attacked Galileo because his new ideas about determining facts by experiment rather than through references to acknowledged authorities was a threat to both.
Galileo's students were also seen as unruly, questioning authority, and basically uncivilized. In later years, Galileo apparently was aware of the parallels between his persecution and Socrates life.
So if you can provide citations for your POV, I would like to see them.
I don't agree with the assertion that tags like <section> or <dialog> are a step backward from CSS. These are finer grained semantic equivalents to existing tags (<div class="chapter">, <dl class="dialog">) that make the intent of the author more clear and can make maintenance of content and style sheets a lot easier. They cut down on the clutter of CSS classes, for one thing.
Microsoft is in a minority position wrt the market that HTML5 addresses. Its old "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy cannot work here, especially as it is now so easy to install HTML5 compliant browsers on Windows machines.
Galileo's scientific discoveries broke medieval Europe free of the shackles of Church doctrine, and over the next hundred years did more to improve the lives of the average European than any redistribution of the Church's tremendous wealth could have done. Not that the Church was going to actually do anything to materially benefit the population: that wealth was after all a necessary part of the greater glory of God. Oh, and also this: every pious person would get their reward in Heaven. You simply had to head out toward Polaris and take the first right after Saturn, then look for the Big Gate. You can't miss it.
The Kepler findings may be of the same sort. Any proof that life has arisen off Earth will have a major impact on fundamentalist belief systems. This would shift all kinds of intractable political arguments based on religious differences to new ground.
The question is not whether we can afford to do science in place of doing more of the same as what we have always done. The question is how can we afford to do more science in ways that will tell us more about our actual place in Reality, and thus lead us increasingly toward the benefits of an ever renewing Age of Reason.
Not that Reason is the be-all and end-all: there is a truth in beauty that has nothing to do with reason. And imagination and creativity are important, but irrational. But at the moment there does appear to be a deficit of reason in mankind's affairs.
I think more to the point, discovery of non-Earth life would have an immediate effect on most people's lives.
A common theme of fundamentalist beliefs is that Man is a particularly special creation who was put on an Earth that in turn is a very special place created for Man's benefit. And that those who recognize these special relationships have an obligation to force everyone else into behaving properly according to their belief system. The politics of these fundamentalist groups impacts just about every adult, from the destructiveness of Al Qaida and the Taliban to local school board arguments over creationism and sex education.
News of the existence of life forms that could not have arisen on Earth would shake some of these fundamentalist belief systems. Any person affected in any way by the political actions of fundamentalist believers would recognize within a matter of hours that such news would be altering the game in some way. Everyone would be concerned with how others are going to respond to the news, and how they themself should respond to the changes the news will bring about.
The above is a reasoned approximation of what most persons would experience in an unreasoned way: presented with news that life existed on an exoplanet, most persons would intuitively recognize that this news would have some kind of effect on the politics within their group, and would therefore regard it as important (without reasoning through the causes of the changes in the group dynamics). It would sensitize them to changes in the group dynamics.
I disagree with the idea of fining the perpetrators.
These are white collar RICO Act violations involving fraud by mail and conspiracies that cross state lines. The individuals involved should be identified by the FBI and charged by the US Attorney General. Each one of them has conspired to defraud healthcare providers and bona fide researchers, in a manner that has caused the deaths of some USA citizens and placed many more at high risk of cancer or other diseases.
There is no way in hell that the USA is going to get decent health care, no matter what Congress does, until these kinds of white collar crimes in the healthcare industry are addressed for what they are: felonies that indirectly cause death and suffering to the general public.
Are criminal proceedings against SCO's officers still a possibility? The SCO corporation may have more assets to work with than are currently in view if it can be shown that its officers have either improperly converted business assets to personal holdings, or contracts with lawyers were illegal and should be voided.
If there is any possibility like that still out there, the best thing for the stockholders and creditors would be to delay conversion to Chapter 7.
You've answered your own question: the change to ribbons required you to purchase all new manuals and retrain your users. Many of whom are probably still seeking replacements for the "best practice" techniques they had developed in earlier MS Office packages to handle some of the details of their work.
On the whole, this is beneficial to Microsoft directly and indirectly.
The direct benefit is that everyone walking by Jimmy's cube would see immediately that he has Got Something New, which would stimulate conversation about the MS Office upgrade. Any marketeer will tell you that even negative comments on the grapevine are better than no comments at all. The change in the interface is a good marketing ploy. It may be lousy ergonomics, but at Microsoft, improved sales trumps everything else.
The indirect benefit is, as you mentioned, that more training and resources are needed to support the change. This increases the amount of cash flowing into the Microsoft ecosystem. That means there is less cash available for captured customers to use to explore non-Microsoft alternatives, and that the other predators in the Microsoft ecology will have more money available for their own advertising programs, which of course mention Microsoft. Less easy to see is that the degree to which a customer becomes a loyal defender of a product depends considerably on how much he has invested in that product. This is good for Microsoft and those who profit from the Microsoft ecosystem; it is at best neutral for customer businesses, and often detrimental to their bottom lines.
Microsoft's change in the interface serves the same purpose as the Detroit automakers' changes in the tail fins of their 1950s cars. That is, none for the consumer, but useful in stimulating sales among persons who already owned adequate vehicles (or computers) but could be enticed to buy replacements through the mechanisms of conspicuous consumption.
I like parent post's concept, but suggest that slashdotters with a little extra pocket change license some RIAA protected lyrics from AP. Then public inform the RIAA and see if we can incite a game of "Let's You And Him Fight".
So if we were really serious about making a dent in oil consumption and CO2, we would be pushing for more fuel-efficient pickup trucks, cargo vans and SUVs instead of this inane (but highly press-friendly!) pursuit of ever-more-efficient small vehicles.
Agreed. But you cannot directly change human behavior through technology. Automotive developers are oriented to exploiting existing unreasoned human behavior (bronx cheer the marketeers), and trying to indirectly change human behavior for the better through them is a waste of resources. Altering the tax structure has a more direct effect on changing habits with fewer unintended consequences (remember that the SUV market was created by automakers as a means to get around the fleet average mpg requirements that were supposed to reduce the number of gas guzzlers on the roads).
We have the technology now to implement a vehicle wastage tax. There are several ways it could be done but here is one possibility:
Design as optional equipment an add-on vehicle computer that would track its vehicle's loaded weight and milage.
Impose a steep annual milage tax on all SUVs and small trucks. Except:
Allow complete exemptions from this tax for proven miles driven at 50% or more of the maximum load for the vehicle.
Those who can demonstrate a need for their gas hogs are unaffected; those who could as easily drive vehicles with a smaller carbon footprint are encouraged through the tax bite to change their habits.
We've acquired a lot of technology for building orbital habitats but we have no technology for building habitations to meet Martian weather conditions. A manned Mars space station is not very different from a manned Earth space station in terms of safety and life support. We really don't know how different a manned station on Mars surface would be from... I've got to guess about the closest equivalent on Earth... maybe an Antarctic outpost?
So, yeah, I can see that NASA's approach would be playing to its current strengths. The manned orbital station controlling robots on the ground would be the best way to use what little knowledge we have about off-Earth environments.
That said, I think NASA's recommendation to do Mars before surveying lunar resources is a crock.. It is going to lead directly to the 'one step forward, three steps back' mode of 'progress' that characterized the design and execution of the Space Shuttle program. (Where is the Space Tug we were promised? Or the rocket plane first stage? What happened to the original vision to use the ISS as a stepping stone to a more permanent installation above LEO?) NASA needs to develop a broader range of strengths first, before it tackles putting humans in Mars space.
The next step is obvious: survey the Moon, looking for resources that can be extracted from its much shallower gravity well for use in Mars and other missions. We don't know yet what we could use from our nearest neighbor-- it could be excellent substrates for fuels or structural materials just waiting to be sifted out of the regolith. What we do know is that moon dust, light gravity, and rapid, wide shifts in surface temperature present similar challenges to habitations as martian conditions: what we would learn in finding ways to build to meet lunar conditions would be directly applicable to actually getting bootprints on Martian soil.
"You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means." [translation into slashdot meme]
Yeah, I agree. What TFA is doing is advancing an argument by redefining the language commonly used to frame the questions. And that's a particularly disgusting form of intellectual masturbation.
AI could really benefit from some seminal thinking right now... but not that kind of seminal thinking.
But I think normal human G.I. flora are much more intelligent than any variety of staph aureus. These colonies have surrounded themselves with incredibly complex biological organisms that actually have the demonstrated the ability to surround themselves with non-biological constructions that have even allowed some of the G.I. colonies to travel off planet.
Now maybe some of you don't buy that line of reasoning. Well, just think about this: All those reports of alien abductions where the humans experienced anal probes? Obviously the aliens are attempting to communicate with the G.I. flora who are the truly dominant species of Earth.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft has been a strongly visionary company from its inception.
That vision has been to empower the individual by providing him with the computing resources that previously were only available to corporations, institutions, and governments. In the 1980s, this was unquestionably a Good Thing.
Now the challenges that Microsoft's vision addressed have been met: you can easily acquire ownership of more computing power than was available to more than 95% of the corporations and institutions of the 1980s. We have all moved beyond the need for Microsoft's defining vision. Microsoft championed personal empowerment for us, and has won an incredibly important victory, and we now enjoy much better lives for that. Thank you, Microsoft.
The new challenges have to do with how to build collaborative computing systems where individuals move in and out of groups who are working on large, long term problems that are only of short term interest to most of those involved. The average length of employment at any one business has dropped markedly in the last decade; FOSS is built on the concept of contributors coming and going at whim while the project continues to evolve; wikis are using a similar approach in devoloping knowledge systems. Maybe these collaborative endeavors are not always successful, but even the failures are proving to be a better value to the world than what they have replaced, that had been made with the best technologies of the 1980s and 1990s.
So, how can a person's contribution be efficiently packaged so his other collaborators can easily put it to use? How can this be done while preserving the contributor's ownership of his piece, so that he can take that part with him when he leaves the project? How can five people, none of whom share a common native language, construct a technical document in English using Google Docs and web resources, or some similar approach? These are the problems we currently face. They do not revolve around individual empowerment; they revolve around the interface between powerful individuals and long term group efforts.
Microsoft cannot help with this work. Microsoft is at best like a knight of old: highly skilled in the specialized techniques of horse warfare using lance and sword, to champion a cause that was once critically important but is now a part of history. These skills do not transfer to today's problems, any more than the skills of that magnificent knight of old have any value on today's mechanized battlefields.
Whether Microsoft is evil is a question that no longer matters. It is now clear that Microsoft is irrelevant to today's problems. We've seen this kind of thing before, for instance when Netscape's approach to the Internet became irrelevant, the Netscape code base was taken apart and the good parts were put back together into Firefox. Microsoft needs to go through a similar transformation: it needs a new shape, created from a new and relevant vision, and it needs to fit all its good pieces into that new shape.
That will probably use up most of the corporate resources that Microsoft has withheld from its stockholders over the last 30-odd years. But it does have those resources. So it could remake itself, if it can find another visionary as powerful as Bill Gates whose vision is actually relevant to today's challenges.
Right.
We need to recognize that ninety-eight percent of the politicians are giving the rest a bad name.
Well, you are right up to a point. It was more a recognition that one's band needed to live in balance with all of its neighbors of various other species, or the outcome would be unpleasant. "Blending seamlessly with the ecosystem" is a shorthand phrase that most persons understand. Obviously not all of them, though.
There is a need to learn how to take off the European glasses when communicating with persons from other cultures. A failure to recognize one's own cultural biases is extremely limiting when using the Internet. Projecting attributes of your own culture onto persons who live according to very different values is a sure way to fail at developing a broad base of potential collaborators, whether WoW allies or software developers or import/export partners. You might as well just stop using the browser and spend your life playing FPS games.
New crawlers are needed because the web is changing.
Some of these problems will be mitigated by HTML5 (assuming that web developers adopt the new standard-- which is likely for those not married to the Microsoft ecosystem). But even when HTML5 becomes fully mature, there will need to be some big changes in crawler and indexing technology.
Just to extend parent post's most excellent point about Roman roads:
The network of roads that Rome built was initially, and always primarily, for moving armies rapidly on foot. Not for wheeled traffic.
Also, the principle of the wheel was well understood and integral to Native American thought in pre-Columbian times. Cycles were consistently represented by the wheel, and the use of rolling hoops in teaching and spiritual games was common. As parent post points out, in North America, the construction and use of roads was not compatible with cultures that sought to blend seamlessly with the ecosystem. The travois that allowed transport of goods over roadless terrain was a much better, and widely adopted, approach.
Basically the work needed to make effective wheels, and the hassles of keeping them in repair, are a stupid waste for a culture unless you are fortunate enough to inherit a fancy road system from an earlier culture.
The gold from trade was minor. The real economic base for the Renaissance was the Black Death that preceded it. The population of Europe was decimated, but the infrastructure was left intact, so the survivors inherited a wealth of cleared fields and orchards, prepared building materials, draft animals with harness and carts, fishing nets, boats... All the stuff that had been barely adequate for the lives of teeming millions of Europeans was now just laying around gathering dust until someone would see how it could be put to new use.
The up side of a massive die-off from a flu epidemic is similar. If the size of the human population was reduced to 2 billion people, there would be more than enough scrap metal, stored petroleum product, and other goodies at hand that the survivors wouldn't have to do any mining or pump any oil for decades. Theirs would be a very rich inheritance, and that would probably spark a second Renaissance where mankind would really begin to move off Earth, and do all kinds of other wonderful advances.
Just need to off 2 out of every 3 people in some nonviolent way to bring the population down to a sustainable number. Then all kinds of good things can happen. :-)
We need to invent that glowy crap on the back of every spaceship on TV and in the movies. The Millenium Falcon had no trouble landing and taking off from a planet without a fuel tank... you just turn on the glowy crap, and bam you're there. The starship Enterprise just makes the glowy crap flash really bright, and they're going faster than light itself! Even the Stargate uses glowy crap technology to bridge planets.
We just need to invent that glowy crap and everything else will fall into place.
So this is the modern day equivalent of the medieval practice of flagellation: using the pain of whipping oneself as a means to achieve a higher state of piety. There can be an ecstasy in physical pain that is easily confused with the ecstasy of a truly religious experience. Sounds like these persons are looking for the same kind of thing through provoking somewhat saner minds into arguments they are certain to lose.
That explains a lot of fundie behavior. They are not seeking to convert anyone or win any arguments. They are, for twisted and selfish reasons, seeking to provoke others into publicly abusing them.
Seems like this behavior belongs on the same continuum as the suicide bomber, though of course not immediately to the same degree. So more like "infantile fanatical terrorism" rather than the full-blown kind.
I wonder if there is any psychological scale that could be used to determine when a fundie of this type has begun to move far enough toward the extreme to become a risk to others (such as shooting health care personnel at abortion clinics, etc).
I wonder if there is any way to frame a law that would make it a crime to profit from encouraging fundies to become more extreme in their views and behavior?
Since the bulk of parent post is lifted in its entirety from National Review Online's "Goldberg File" editorial of May 24, 1999, I will work from that source rather than the parent post.
First thing worth noting: TFA starts with this lead-in paragraph:
ENLIGHTENMENT SPIN: THE GALILEO MYTH
The Washington Times reports a very nice story this morning. Catholic scientists, or scientists who are Catholic, whatever makes you more comfortable, are trying to combat the notion that the Church is anti-science. "The Galileo incident has made the Church a whipping boy," Thomas P. Sheahen of the Catholic Association of Scientists and Engineers told the paper.
Goldberg is playing off of this article: Catholic scientists look to bridge theory, theology: Hope to bring morality into largely atheistic disciplines, written by Larry Witham. I haven't read the article since it requires me to register fro a FREE trial on web site I have no other interest in. The lead in to the article talks about how the Catholic Church has admitted that it screwed Galileo over, and how some Catholics feel that their beliefs are being unfairly persecuted as anti-scientific, when all they really want to do is inject some non-rational qualities into scientific investigations, like "morality".
I've got serious problems with anyone attempting to inject "morality" into scientific inquiry: science has developed its own set of professional ethics, which is quite adequate for science's distinctly limited goal of explaining how things work, without involving itself with why they are the way they are, or whether a thing is good or bad or blessed or evil. Those are important questions, they just are not scientific questions. Trying to bring morality into science is rather like describing the smell of different colors. But that's a general thing, not specific to the question at hand, which is whether the Catholic Church actively persecuted Galileo for his new method of seeking the truth, or whether the Church simply lacked the moral fiber to stand up to members of the academic community who demanded that the Church shut Galileo's mouth.
A real problem with attempting to work with Goldberg's article is his insistence on describing Galileo's contemporaries as "other scientists". That word did not exist in Galileo's time, nor were there any cognates that were remotely close to what we today call a scientist. With the exception of Galileo and a few others who were forging a new form of acquiring knowledge through empirical methods, most knowledge was acquired and transmitted by scholasticism. The appropriate term for Galileo's contemporaries would be "scholastics". They work with authorities, such as Aristotle, and with dogma, to extend accepted belief systems to cover new situations and corner cases. Scholastics are very important in certain fields of knowledge, for example, in the history and use of Tarot, or extending biblical concordances. But they are not scientists.
In Galileo's time, scholasticism dominated higher education, Church training, and the preparation of that day's equivalent of civil service. All of these institutions recognized Galileo's approach to knowledge as a threat, including the Church.
The article, poorly written as it was, does in fact support my understanding of the events of Galileo's life: the Church, as an institution, persecuted him for his empirical approach, despite the fact that he had friends in very high positions within the Church. The Church was right in fearing Galileo's ideas, since his approach questioned the authority that the Church had wielded for centuries, and that brought about the fall of the Church as the dominant political and financial power in Europe, with its replacement by nation states that understood how to implement new technologies and were increasingly oriented to improving the mundane situations of its citizenries.
I once interviewed for a non-profit who asked what my salary requirements were and I said "about $70->$90k" and he immediately shot back "unfortunately we are budgeted for around $55k". With that, we both knew this wasn't gonna work so we didn't bother wasting more time.
That is an excellent example of a successful first interview, and one that a job hunter should be prepared for. A good follow-up would be
"Okay, then, I see we don't have a match on this position, but we do have a few minutes remaining for this interview. Are you aware of any positions that are available either with your institution or through your associations with colleagues in other institutions that match my resume and salary requirements?" That is, be prepared for the interview to terminate early because of an obvious bad fit, and be ready to try to turn it into a networking opportunity. The best outcome would be the interviewer saying that "You might try the Foo Foundation. John Smith-- a fellow in their HR Dept-- and I collaborated on designing this job announcement and a similar one that Foo is about publish. You can use my name in your cover letter and ask John to give me a call. If you give me permission to do so, I can tell him that we interviewed you and might have hired you if we had a larger budget to work with."
The chances of this kind of thing happening are pretty small. But they are zero-- nothing, nada, zip-- if you aren't prepared to shift a dead-ended interview into a networking opportunity.
Pull a stunt like that and you'd strike out if I was interviewing you. To each their own, but fer christ sakes it is an email client not your main development tool!
An interviewer who displays that sort of attitude is a red flag that the corporate culture is sick and probably not something I would want to get involved in. Time to cut my losses, and get on with looking for a decent, or at least acceptable, job.
That is a very interesting new approach to old history! Made me want to crosscheck my decades-old studies of the guy's life against anything new that might turn up on a Google. Didn't find anything to contradict what I had learned of him earlier.
Galileo became an adamant proponent of what we now call the scientific method and condemned the practice of teaching physics by authority that was the accepted approach at the time. The prime authority on physics and many other studies were translations of Aristotle. Galileo became very argumentative against this, pointing out that experiments refuted much of what Aristotle worked out by logic (such as the notion that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones, and that the universe was geocentric). This challenged not only other scholars, but also the underpinnings of the Church's political role in society. Both scholars and the Church attacked Galileo because his new ideas about determining facts by experiment rather than through references to acknowledged authorities was a threat to both.
Galileo's students were also seen as unruly, questioning authority, and basically uncivilized. In later years, Galileo apparently was aware of the parallels between his persecution and Socrates life.
So if you can provide citations for your POV, I would like to see them.
I don't agree with the assertion that tags like <section> or <dialog> are a step backward from CSS. These are finer grained semantic equivalents to existing tags (<div class="chapter">, <dl class="dialog">) that make the intent of the author more clear and can make maintenance of content and style sheets a lot easier. They cut down on the clutter of CSS classes, for one thing.
[MSIE] Still account for at least more than 60% of users, no matter what source of statistics you use.
That is an invalid statistic when discussing new technology web sites. It includes the 25% - 30% that are still using MSIE v6. Some of these users are
Discounting these MSIEv6 users, market share is roughly
Microsoft is in a minority position wrt the market that HTML5 addresses. Its old "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy cannot work here, especially as it is now so easy to install HTML5 compliant browsers on Windows machines.
Galileo's scientific discoveries broke medieval Europe free of the shackles of Church doctrine, and over the next hundred years did more to improve the lives of the average European than any redistribution of the Church's tremendous wealth could have done. Not that the Church was going to actually do anything to materially benefit the population: that wealth was after all a necessary part of the greater glory of God. Oh, and also this: every pious person would get their reward in Heaven. You simply had to head out toward Polaris and take the first right after Saturn, then look for the Big Gate. You can't miss it.
The Kepler findings may be of the same sort. Any proof that life has arisen off Earth will have a major impact on fundamentalist belief systems. This would shift all kinds of intractable political arguments based on religious differences to new ground.
The question is not whether we can afford to do science in place of doing more of the same as what we have always done. The question is how can we afford to do more science in ways that will tell us more about our actual place in Reality, and thus lead us increasingly toward the benefits of an ever renewing Age of Reason.
Not that Reason is the be-all and end-all: there is a truth in beauty that has nothing to do with reason. And imagination and creativity are important, but irrational. But at the moment there does appear to be a deficit of reason in mankind's affairs.
I think more to the point, discovery of non-Earth life would have an immediate effect on most people's lives.
A common theme of fundamentalist beliefs is that Man is a particularly special creation who was put on an Earth that in turn is a very special place created for Man's benefit. And that those who recognize these special relationships have an obligation to force everyone else into behaving properly according to their belief system. The politics of these fundamentalist groups impacts just about every adult, from the destructiveness of Al Qaida and the Taliban to local school board arguments over creationism and sex education.
News of the existence of life forms that could not have arisen on Earth would shake some of these fundamentalist belief systems. Any person affected in any way by the political actions of fundamentalist believers would recognize within a matter of hours that such news would be altering the game in some way. Everyone would be concerned with how others are going to respond to the news, and how they themself should respond to the changes the news will bring about.
The above is a reasoned approximation of what most persons would experience in an unreasoned way: presented with news that life existed on an exoplanet, most persons would intuitively recognize that this news would have some kind of effect on the politics within their group, and would therefore regard it as important (without reasoning through the causes of the changes in the group dynamics). It would sensitize them to changes in the group dynamics.
I disagree with the idea of fining the perpetrators.
These are white collar RICO Act violations involving fraud by mail and conspiracies that cross state lines. The individuals involved should be identified by the FBI and charged by the US Attorney General. Each one of them has conspired to defraud healthcare providers and bona fide researchers, in a manner that has caused the deaths of some USA citizens and placed many more at high risk of cancer or other diseases.
There is no way in hell that the USA is going to get decent health care, no matter what Congress does, until these kinds of white collar crimes in the healthcare industry are addressed for what they are: felonies that indirectly cause death and suffering to the general public.
Are criminal proceedings against SCO's officers still a possibility? The SCO corporation may have more assets to work with than are currently in view if it can be shown that its officers have either improperly converted business assets to personal holdings, or contracts with lawyers were illegal and should be voided.
If there is any possibility like that still out there, the best thing for the stockholders and creditors would be to delay conversion to Chapter 7.
I'm guessing here, but I think you mean:
An office without Microsoft Office is like ice cream without ketchup
You've answered your own question: the change to ribbons required you to purchase all new manuals and retrain your users. Many of whom are probably still seeking replacements for the "best practice" techniques they had developed in earlier MS Office packages to handle some of the details of their work.
On the whole, this is beneficial to Microsoft directly and indirectly.
Microsoft's change in the interface serves the same purpose as the Detroit automakers' changes in the tail fins of their 1950s cars. That is, none for the consumer, but useful in stimulating sales among persons who already owned adequate vehicles (or computers) but could be enticed to buy replacements through the mechanisms of conspicuous consumption.
I like parent post's concept, but suggest that slashdotters with a little extra pocket change license some RIAA protected lyrics from AP. Then public inform the RIAA and see if we can incite a game of "Let's You And Him Fight".
Could be amusing...
So if we were really serious about making a dent in oil consumption and CO2, we would be pushing for more fuel-efficient pickup trucks, cargo vans and SUVs instead of this inane (but highly press-friendly!) pursuit of ever-more-efficient small vehicles.
Agreed. But you cannot directly change human behavior through technology. Automotive developers are oriented to exploiting existing unreasoned human behavior (bronx cheer the marketeers), and trying to indirectly change human behavior for the better through them is a waste of resources. Altering the tax structure has a more direct effect on changing habits with fewer unintended consequences (remember that the SUV market was created by automakers as a means to get around the fleet average mpg requirements that were supposed to reduce the number of gas guzzlers on the roads).
We have the technology now to implement a vehicle wastage tax. There are several ways it could be done but here is one possibility:
Those who can demonstrate a need for their gas hogs are unaffected; those who could as easily drive vehicles with a smaller carbon footprint are encouraged through the tax bite to change their habits.
I disagree,
We've acquired a lot of technology for building orbital habitats but we have no technology for building habitations to meet Martian weather conditions. A manned Mars space station is not very different from a manned Earth space station in terms of safety and life support. We really don't know how different a manned station on Mars surface would be from... I've got to guess about the closest equivalent on Earth... maybe an Antarctic outpost?
So, yeah, I can see that NASA's approach would be playing to its current strengths. The manned orbital station controlling robots on the ground would be the best way to use what little knowledge we have about off-Earth environments.
That said, I think NASA's recommendation to do Mars before surveying lunar resources is a crock.. It is going to lead directly to the 'one step forward, three steps back' mode of 'progress' that characterized the design and execution of the Space Shuttle program. (Where is the Space Tug we were promised? Or the rocket plane first stage? What happened to the original vision to use the ISS as a stepping stone to a more permanent installation above LEO?) NASA needs to develop a broader range of strengths first, before it tackles putting humans in Mars space.
The next step is obvious: survey the Moon, looking for resources that can be extracted from its much shallower gravity well for use in Mars and other missions. We don't know yet what we could use from our nearest neighbor-- it could be excellent substrates for fuels or structural materials just waiting to be sifted out of the regolith. What we do know is that moon dust, light gravity, and rapid, wide shifts in surface temperature present similar challenges to habitations as martian conditions: what we would learn in finding ways to build to meet lunar conditions would be directly applicable to actually getting bootprints on Martian soil.
So basically you are arguing:
"You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means." [translation into slashdot meme]
Yeah, I agree. What TFA is doing is advancing an argument by redefining the language commonly used to frame the questions. And that's a particularly disgusting form of intellectual masturbation.
AI could really benefit from some seminal thinking right now... but not that kind of seminal thinking.
MRSA. That's an interesting thought.
But I think normal human G.I. flora are much more intelligent than any variety of staph aureus. These colonies have surrounded themselves with incredibly complex biological organisms that actually have the demonstrated the ability to surround themselves with non-biological constructions that have even allowed some of the G.I. colonies to travel off planet.
Now maybe some of you don't buy that line of reasoning. Well, just think about this: All those reports of alien abductions where the humans experienced anal probes? Obviously the aliens are attempting to communicate with the G.I. flora who are the truly dominant species of Earth.