> As an example, if you've been coding in COBOL for 20 years, > Java can be an awkward language to learn
Where did you get that idea? Been there, tried that?
The OO paradigm is just a way to organize code. You can implement an OO design in COBOL or Assembly or C or Perl.
Programming languages are - like a car. They get you from point A to point B. For a particular job, some cars may be better than others. But if you're a good driver in a pickup truck, you'll probably still be a good driver in a mini Cooper, even if you might need to refer to the Owner's Manual sometimes.
By "I'd expect" do you mean "I'd want/demand"? Fighting for jobs is well and good, but why not demand jobs that are non-porkish? Why not fund jobs re-building crumbling infrastructure, or new energy tech, or space programs NASA actually wants?
Are you an employee? In most corporations, you have about as much control over company policy as you do whether you'll survive the next round of layoffs.
Which is to say, you'll be as much a part of congress as the average citizen is today.
I hearitly agree with what you're saying, except for the "MUCH expanded Bill of Rights". The Constitution was not intended to be a blacklist of things the government can't do; it's a whitelist of things they can do. If it's not in the whitelist, they can't do it.
So counter-intuitive though it may seem, if any list needs to be expanded it's the whitelist of things they can do, along with a generous helping of pounding it into their heads that if it's not enumerated as one of their powers, and they try it anyway, they will face an empowered and unsympathetic justice system, be they subcontracted goons or Presidents.
> Arguments of the form "X is extremist or fundamenalist so X is wrong" simply don't hold water. You're right of course, as far as rigorous logic goes. If only society respected logic more than conformity...
> the vast resources we'd need to put a radio telescope > on the far side of the moon would probably better be > devoted to making sure that the Earth remains habitable
I think you're right, but R&D must go on.
Why is it that we (even slashdotters) tend to pit funding space exploration against funding wholesome projects like feeding the hungry or saving the environment? Why don't we argue that it would be better to spend money on space exploration than to, say, wage elective wars, or bail out failing mega corporations?
in 1978 an average person might reasonably object to being "filmed" in a public place without their knowledge. It's no longer reasonable today, or we'd all be de-facto criminals...
surveillance is different. Sitting outside your house and watching you come and go is not breaking-and-entering. Someone watching, even listening, to you in public is not the same as someone breaking into your home. They are different things with different rules and expectations.
You're conflating two very different groups. This isn't about what citizens are allowed to do, it's about what the government is allowed to do.
4th Amendment says:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
"Unreasonable" is not synonymous with "expensive" or "rare". "Unreasonable" is when they have insufficient basis to request a warrant, but they nonetheless direct their resources at searching a specific person or house or "effects".
> Given that he has several books on security, his opinion carries some weight.
One would hope that experts be judged by quality rather than quantity.
Bruce Schneier has earned street cred in the industry over many years of work. He knows security top-to-bottom, cryptography to psychology to economy.
Once in a while some media outlets decide to air an actual competent professional instead of a fud-mongering buffoon, and people in the industry send them to Bruce.
methods that allow a user to download pre-programmed episodic media like audio files or video files from a remote publisher, with the download occurring after the user subscribes to the episodes, and with the user continuing to automatically receive new episodes
Well, starting in 1977 users who wanted to watch a pre-programmed episodic audio/video stream called "Inside the NFL" could subscribe to the cable TV HBO/Showtime channel, and after subscribing would continue to automatically receive new episodes. Does that count?
renewable power sources... can only supply a low percentage of the total power because their unpredictability can destabilize the grid.
As much as I'd like to see more renewable energy, this counter-example probably doesn't help. Spain has a somewhat modern and well maintained power grid. In this year's "Infrastructure Report Card", The American Society of Civil Engineers rated the USA's power grid "D+". (Unfortunately their website is down; here's google's cache. Talk about failing infrastructure...)
That reminds me of an associate's code-writing philosophy. If he finds a bug in his software, he mentally flags it to be fixed. But if he finds a second bug nearby, he figures that second bug will probably counteract the first, and checks the code in.
> When they start defending the right to buy firearms > online, I might throw some money their way.
I'm not familiar with the Constitution's online firearms purchase clause, but I'm sure that if anybody tries to stop you from bearing arms in WoW, the EFF will back you up.
And if you happen to be a radical islamic terrorist in a committed gay relationship, do let them know - I'm sure they'd love to hear all about it.
> create an androgynous pseudonym And if people harass them offline, should they just cross-dress as men, or should women go get sex-reassignment surgery?
> It's certainly not what he intended to claim! In Science we try to communicate in the most precise and least ambiguous manner possible. Journalists don't have a reputation for that. We all see misleading headlines everytime we look at the news. So maybe putting a little more care into their words would pre-empt wild misinterpretations.
> Singh has been required to prove...that chiropractors as a group are intentionally deceitful
"The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, even though there is not a jot of evidence. This organisation is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments."
It doesn't seem like that big a leap to go from "[BCA] happily promotes bogus treatments" to "chiropractors as a group are intentionally deceitful"
What if he wrote what I substitute here in bold?
"The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, but they have not provided verifiable proof for any of these claims. This organisation is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes scientifically unfounded treatments."
> the law hasn't been described well enough. That may well be. I don't see a link to the law, so I don't know how to verify this directly. Bad laws are written all the time, and this is probably one of them. But the complaints I've seen so far don't really sound hostile to scientific journalism.
You interview me and publish a story, "AC thinks he has an invisible dragon in his garage, but it isn't really there".
What if I publish a story, "AC claims to have invisible dragon; ACME labs tests show AC's purported dragon scales are Tiddlywinks, and purported feces are Oreo cookies"?
any statement made is assumed to be false unless you prove it's true. Journalist are running scared.
The concept of journalists having to support their claims should frighten only journalists who can't support their claims. Limiting news organizations to printing only verifiable facts sounds like a good thing.
Ironic that the poster casts regulations against printing unverifiable journalistic claims to be regulations against debunking unverifiable scientific claims. The law as described here sounds very much on the side of good science.
"Enviro-Nazis"? The most radical environmentalists I have ever heard of would be the Earth First sort of folks. Conceivably tree-spiking sort of activities have created some manslaughterers, or even murderers, but I've never heard of them trying to conquer foreign countries or exterminate a human race. So let's ratchet back the rhetoric just a bit.
> We can't use nuclear, we can't use coal, we can't use natural gas, we can't build more hydro This "enviro-nazi" stereotype you propagate seems to be some one-sided aggregation of the opinions of every environmentalist you've ever heard of. Pick an actual individual person or organization, and you'll likely find more reasonable and coherent views.
> The environmentalist movement really shot themselves in the foot with that one It wouldn't really be fair to blame the reduce-reuse-recycle, bicycle-instead-of-drive, turn-off-your-lights crowd for global warming. If they had known in advance they'd lose the live-sustainably fight, maybe they could have fought fossil fuel instead of nuclear, rather than fighting both and ending up with the worse of the two.
Sit smugly in your armchair and mock if you want, but crediting bleeding-heart environmentalists for the global warming the rest of us caused takes a pretty twisted sort of self-righteousness.
> If they want to raise the price, Who do you mean by "they"?
This proposed fee isn't coming from CD-R manufacturers. It's a charge on top of the retail price, that would go to pay purported representatives of uninvolved third parties, under the pretext of presumed future copying of the third parties' work onto the purchasers' CD-Rs.
This isn't good-old-fashioned libertarian capitalism, it's good-old-fashioned highway robbery underneath a thin facade of sanctimonious sophistry.
Slashdot Mirror
> Schools can dump all the expensive advanced placement courses
Perhaps you intended to be ironic, but the whole point of AP courses is to teach college material to high school-aged students.
One can imagine a certain efficiency in having students take college courses at a college.
"Cutting education costs" is not necessarily an evil thing.
> We don't know how it got into our system... We speculate...
As long as we're speculating, may I nominate last week's "Operation Cyber Storm" (http://www.dhs.gov/xnews/releases/press_release_0853.shtm).
> As an example, if you've been coding in COBOL for 20 years,
> Java can be an awkward language to learn
Where did you get that idea? Been there, tried that?
The OO paradigm is just a way to organize code. You can implement an OO design in COBOL or Assembly or C or Perl.
Programming languages are - like a car. They get you from point A to point B. For a particular job, some cars may be better than others. But if you're a good driver in a pickup truck, you'll probably still be a good driver in a mini Cooper, even if you might need to refer to the Owner's Manual sometimes.
By "I'd expect" do you mean "I'd want/demand"? Fighting for jobs is well and good, but why not demand jobs that are non-porkish?
Why not fund jobs re-building crumbling infrastructure, or new energy tech, or space programs NASA actually wants?
Are you an employee? In most corporations, you have about as much control over company policy as you do whether you'll survive the next round of layoffs.
Which is to say, you'll be as much a part of congress as the average citizen is today.
I hearitly agree with what you're saying, except for the "MUCH expanded Bill of Rights". The Constitution was not intended to be a blacklist of things the government can't do; it's a whitelist of things they can do. If it's not in the whitelist, they can't do it.
So counter-intuitive though it may seem, if any list needs to be expanded it's the whitelist of things they can do, along with a generous helping of pounding it into their heads that if it's not enumerated as one of their powers, and they try it anyway, they will face an empowered and unsympathetic justice system, be they subcontracted goons or Presidents.
> Arguments of the form "X is extremist or fundamenalist so X is wrong" simply don't hold water.
You're right of course, as far as rigorous logic goes. If only society respected logic more than conformity...
> the vast resources we'd need to put a radio telescope
> on the far side of the moon would probably better be
> devoted to making sure that the Earth remains habitable
I think you're right, but R&D must go on.
Why is it that we (even slashdotters) tend to pit funding space exploration against funding wholesome projects like feeding the hungry or saving the environment? Why don't we argue that it would be better to spend money on space exploration than to, say, wage elective wars, or bail out failing mega corporations?
The article is about protein folding and manipulating DNA. It has nothing to do with a robot that picks up atoms and places them somewhere else.
in 1978 an average person might reasonably object to being "filmed" in a public place without their knowledge. It's no longer reasonable today, or we'd all be de-facto criminals...
surveillance is different. Sitting outside your house and watching you come and go is not breaking-and-entering. Someone watching, even listening, to you in public is not the same as someone breaking into your home. They are different things with different rules and expectations.
You're conflating two very different groups. This isn't about what citizens are allowed to do, it's about what the government is allowed to do.
4th Amendment says:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
"Unreasonable" is not synonymous with "expensive" or "rare". "Unreasonable" is when they have insufficient basis to request a warrant, but they nonetheless direct their resources at searching a specific person or house or "effects".
> Given that he has several books on security, his opinion carries some weight.
One would hope that experts be judged by quality rather than quantity.
Bruce Schneier has earned street cred in the industry over many years of work. He knows security top-to-bottom, cryptography to psychology to economy.
Once in a while some media outlets decide to air an actual competent professional instead of a fud-mongering buffoon, and people in the industry send them to Bruce.
methods that allow a user to download pre-programmed episodic media like audio files or video files from a remote publisher, with the download occurring after the user subscribes to the episodes, and with the user continuing to automatically receive new episodes
Well, starting in 1977 users who wanted to watch a pre-programmed episodic audio/video stream called "Inside the NFL" could subscribe to the cable TV HBO/Showtime channel, and after subscribing would continue to automatically receive new episodes. Does that count?
I once worked at a machine shop where we made components for ballistic missiles and wheelchairs.
renewable power sources ... can only supply a low percentage of the total power because their unpredictability can destabilize the grid.
As much as I'd like to see more renewable energy, this counter-example probably doesn't help. Spain has a somewhat modern and well maintained power grid. In this year's "Infrastructure Report Card", The American Society of Civil Engineers rated the USA's power grid "D+". (Unfortunately their website is down; here's google's cache. Talk about failing infrastructure...)
Hey, that was my idea.
> they need an attitude adjustment
Yup. I told them to fix their attitudes too.
Some got the idea but declined.
Some didn't seem to hear what I was saying.
Some appeared just to be rude.
That reminds me of an associate's code-writing philosophy. If he finds a bug in his software, he mentally flags it to be fixed. But if he finds a second bug nearby, he figures that second bug will probably counteract the first, and checks the code in.
These two posts contain the most robust code I've seen all day. But still,
"A computer's attention span is no longer than it's power cord."
> When they start defending the right to buy firearms
> online, I might throw some money their way.
I'm not familiar with the Constitution's online firearms purchase clause, but I'm sure that if anybody tries to stop you from bearing arms in WoW, the EFF will back you up.
And if you happen to be a radical islamic terrorist in a committed gay relationship, do let them know - I'm sure they'd love to hear all about it.
> create an androgynous pseudonym
And if people harass them offline, should they just cross-dress as men, or should women go get sex-reassignment surgery?
> It's certainly not what he intended to claim!
In Science we try to communicate in the most precise and least ambiguous manner possible. Journalists don't have a reputation for that. We all see misleading headlines everytime we look at the news. So maybe putting a little more care into their words would pre-empt wild misinterpretations.
> Singh has been required to prove ...that chiropractors as a group are intentionally deceitful
"The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, even though there is not a jot of evidence. This organisation is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments."
It doesn't seem like that big a leap to go from "[BCA] happily promotes bogus treatments" to "chiropractors as a group are intentionally deceitful"
What if he wrote what I substitute here in bold?
"The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, but they have not provided verifiable proof for any of these claims. This organisation is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes scientifically unfounded treatments."
> the law hasn't been described well enough.
That may well be. I don't see a link to the law, so I don't know how to verify this directly. Bad laws are written all the time, and this is probably one of them. But the complaints I've seen so far don't really sound hostile to scientific journalism.
You interview me and publish a story, "AC thinks he has an invisible dragon in his garage, but it isn't really there".
What if I publish a story, "AC claims to have invisible dragon; ACME labs tests show AC's purported dragon scales are Tiddlywinks, and purported feces are Oreo cookies"?
any statement made is assumed to be false unless you prove it's true. Journalist are running scared.
The concept of journalists having to support their claims should frighten only journalists who can't support their claims. Limiting news organizations to printing only verifiable facts sounds like a good thing.
Ironic that the poster casts regulations against printing unverifiable journalistic claims to be regulations against debunking unverifiable scientific claims. The law as described here sounds very much on the side of good science.
"Enviro-Nazis"? The most radical environmentalists I have ever heard of would be the Earth First sort of folks. Conceivably tree-spiking sort of activities have created some manslaughterers, or even murderers, but I've never heard of them trying to conquer foreign countries or exterminate a human race. So let's ratchet back the rhetoric just a bit.
> We can't use nuclear, we can't use coal, we can't use natural gas, we can't build more hydro
This "enviro-nazi" stereotype you propagate seems to be some one-sided aggregation of the opinions of every environmentalist you've ever heard of. Pick an actual individual person or organization, and you'll likely find more reasonable and coherent views.
> The environmentalist movement really shot themselves in the foot with that one
It wouldn't really be fair to blame the reduce-reuse-recycle, bicycle-instead-of-drive, turn-off-your-lights crowd for global warming. If they had known in advance they'd lose the live-sustainably fight, maybe they could have fought fossil fuel instead of nuclear, rather than fighting both and ending up with the worse of the two.
Sit smugly in your armchair and mock if you want, but crediting bleeding-heart environmentalists for the global warming the rest of us caused takes a pretty twisted sort of self-righteousness.
> If they want to raise the price,
Who do you mean by "they"?
This proposed fee isn't coming from CD-R manufacturers. It's a charge on top of the retail price, that would go to pay purported representatives of uninvolved third parties, under the pretext of presumed future copying of the third parties' work onto the purchasers' CD-Rs.
This isn't good-old-fashioned libertarian capitalism, it's good-old-fashioned highway robbery underneath a thin facade of sanctimonious sophistry.