That pretty much says it all, doesn't it? The security-state mindset doesn't care what your actual politics are. It cares what kind of person you are. You're either a Good God-Fearing Christian American, in which case everything you do is Good and Right and Just, or you're an Evil America-Hating/C/om/m/u/n/i/s/t/ Terrorist Sympathizer ("fringe person" for short) in which case everything you do is Wrong and must be Punished. And whatever the GGFCA's do to protect themselves from the EAH/C/TS's is by definition The Right Thing To Do, while any complaints the EAH/C/TS's make about their so-called "rights" can safely be disregarded, because, never forget, They Hate America.
I hope the ethics hammered into the better class of military leaders (and I mean West Point, Annapolis, Air Force Academy graduates) are a part of those leading the group. I don't mean the Gitmo crew, I mean the old school for whom a class in civics is not an elective. People for whom "honor" is not negotiable.
During my years of enlisted service in both the Army and the Air Force, I worked with a lot of academy grads and a lot of officers who got their commissions in other ways (ROTC, OCS/OTS, etc.) and I never saw any difference in quality based on where they came from. There were some very good ones, some bad ones, and as with any large group of people, the majority somewhere in the middle. It's true that the academies have very strong honor codes and try to instill those in their cadets. The downside is that the strong sense of esprit de corps the academies foster in order to get the cadets to take the honor code seriously also can make their graduates see themselves as the Chosen Few, superior to everyone else in the military (officers and enlisted) and they're often arrogant and closed-minded as a result. Also, remember that getting into the academies is essentially a political process -- the most common way is to get a nomination from a Senator or Representative -- so cadets tend to come from well-off, connected families, which can also add to this kind of arrogance.
Balance it all out -- the very good education, intensive training, and constant drumbeat of honor and discipline academy cadets receive, vs. the exposure to the wider world and range of experience those who obtain their commissions by other routes get during their formative years -- and it's pretty much a wash.
And global warming denialists will claim that the volcanoes in the rift are putting out far more C02 than humans are, so why worry about anything? Drill, baby, drill!
Young-earth creationists will find Biblical verses that explain how this process has actually only been going on for 6000 years.
ID'ers will claim that the whole process is irreducibly complex.
The higher court made a finding of fact and then sent the case back to the lower court. This is good, but it's not a clear-cut victory. What really needed to happen, IMNSGDHO, was for the higher court to find unambiguously in Jacobsen's favor and then issue a hardcore smackdown to both Katzer and the lower court judge.
From TFA:
Instead of trying to show that he did not copy Jacobsen's software, Katzer attempted to defend himself by asserting that the terms of Jacobsen's Open Source license were not valid and could not be enforced on Katzer, and that JMRI was essentially in the public domain.... The judge agreed with Katzer.
Katzer is scum, and the judge in question is an incompetent fool. Katzer should be subject to criminal charges, and the judge should be censured if not actually removed from the bench. Anything less than that is not enough to get the point across.
It makes me nervous when people say things like this line from TFA: "Private actors, either nonprofit or commercial, are better suited to deliver government information to citizens..." Uh, no, governments are better suited to deliver information about themselves, and no matter how bureaucratic or obstructionist the US government may be it's still more open and credible, on a dollar-for-dollar basis, than a lot of the "private actors" who would just looove to charge us an arm and a leg for information we've already paid our taxes for.
By all means, the government should make raw data as well as user-friendly aggregations available. And if "private actors" can do a better job of aggregating the raw data than the government can, and they can do it well enough to get people to pay them for it, then good for them. But by no means should the large number of (generally well-laid-out and quite informative) government data aggregation websites be shut down as a benefit for corporations that want to sell our own information back to us, which I strongly suspect is the idea that's being pushed here.
Everything you say is true. The problem is that there is no evidence whatsoever that the RIAA contributes anything toward the ability of musicians to make a living off their music. Given the numerous horror stories about just how much industry parasites suck out of the music buyer's dollar on its journey from the buyer's wallet to the musician's bank account, it's quite reasonable to believe that it is more difficult to make a living as a professional musician with the RIAA around than it would be in the absence of such an organization.
The RIAA is screwed, no matter how you look at it.
As long as they can buy laws, copyright regulations, and even international treaties, they're doing just fine. Sooner or later, their influence will probably wane, but don't hold your breath waiting. They've got a lot of life left in them, sad to say.
Honestly, I think it's a matter of the political realities, and what the money is going for. Communication and transportation (including aerospace) spending is a lot easier to sell politically when it's defense-related, but if it's done right everyone benefits: commercial aviation, the interstate highway system, satellite communications, the internet, and GPS are all fine examples of this sort of spinoff. On the other hand, medicine and basic science do indeed tend to work better on the civilian side. (Not always, at least in the former case: the origin of the modern emergency medical system lies in techniques developed for evacuating wounded soldiers from WW1 through Vietnam.) Speaking as a veteran, I'd rather that the US have a much smaller military and not do nearly so much sticking its nose in other people's business, but I also had a lot of opportunities to see how technology tested on the battlefield can improve people's lives at home once the shooting stops. Speaking as a grad student currently studying for a PhD on an NIH grant, I'm all in favor of funding for civilian research too.;) Mainly I'm a utilitarian on this issue: what I care about is that the research gets done and the technology developed, and that matters much more to me than who's writing the checks.
Uh... most people don't think, when they turn on their in-car nav systems, "Gee, I'm glad my tax dollars went to pay for this system!"
True, but they should. A lot of the bitching about "wasteful government spending" would go away if people realized how much government programs (like this little thing called ARPANet that made a splash a few years ago...) lead to dramatic improvements in their everyday lives.
Very true. It is also true that if you think what someone puts on Facebook and MySpace is relevant to their academic performance, then you shouldn't be in charge of admissions decisions for a good school, or any school. If you think it's relevant to job performance, you shouldn't be making hiring decisions, either.
There. That disposes of the question of what people "shouldn't" be doing. Now, back to the real world.
Few soldiers were in Vietnam for more than 6 months unless they wanted to be.
Where did you get that idea. The "year in the 'Nam" was absolutely standard, and hardly anybody got out earlier than that unless they were dead, wounded, or completely loony.
... but I didn't see the word "iTunes" anywhere in that article.
It is possible to build a profitable, long-lasting, and legal online music business, Mr. Robertson. I'm genuinely sorry you failed to do it, but to pretend that the biggest player in the online music world simply doesn't exist is kind of childish.
A permanent moonbase is like the war in Iraq: Sure, some profit off it but essentially you are throwing money away.
Yeah, just like the war in Iraq, except without the part about, you know, killing people.
The US is still a very rich country (not, granted, as rich relative to the rest of the world as we were in the 1960s, but still) and we can afford to do things that don't show an immediate profit. Speaking as someone who has seen war up close and personal -- and whose father was one of the people who made the moon landings happen -- I'd much rather have us spending money on space exploration than on wars of aggression.
Fair enough, and I admit I'm a bit touchy on the subject.
No doubt there will be a close link, but I think the division will always be a pretty strong one. I'm deeply skeptical about the potential of "DNA computing" and the like (although I'd be happy to be proven wrong!) and I suspect we will mostly be analyzing biological data with computers, rather than doing computational things that produce direct biological results, for quite some time. The fundamental difference, of course, is that biological systems evolved while computational systems are designed...
Biologists discover "flags". Seriously, these guys should just bring a programmer on-staff -- preferably assembly, as decoding the arcane secrets of all Earth life should be a breeze for anyone whose day job involves the x86 instruction set.
[Sigh] Every time a biology story is posted on/. it seems like we get a bunch of posts along the lines of "dumb biologists, any techie would have figured that out a long time ago!"
Please don't confuse the reality with the dumbed-down versions that appear in the popular press or the even more dumbed-down summaries. Bioinformatics, which is what I do, has been an established science for over a decade, and I can assure you that computer scientists have been working with biologists for a lot longer than that. Most of the obvious computational analogies have already been thought of -- and most, unfortunately, have had to be discarded. Despite some of the superficial similarities, genomes are not programs, at least not in the way CS people use the word. They're more like a collection of heuristics, and even that way of thinking about things breaks down when you start looking at the details.
I'm more on the CS/math/stat side of things, and my colleagues on the bio side are often mystified by what I do -- but I'm equally often mystified by what they do. Both CS and biology are tremendously complex fields, and if you think you can arbitrarily apply lessons learned from one field to the other, you will almost always turn out to be wrong. Biologists and computer scientists can learn a lot from working with each other; work in one field very often leads to advances in the other; and by all means (he says, with a healthy dollop of self-interest) the areas of collusion should continue to grow. But thinking that there's some natural equivalence in one field to what you know from the other is simply a mistake.
Okay, it's a neat idea ...
on
The Google Navy
·
· Score: 0, Troll
... but patenting it? WTF?
Sorry, Google, but the patent really doesn't fit with "don't be evil." Do you guys remember that phrase?
That may be one of the most cogent explanations I've ever read of why unionization is a good idea.
As an American who has worked both union and non-union jobs, in and out of IT, I'd like to add that pretty much everything you say applies to the US as well. In particular, don't believe the stereotype that all unions in the US are corrupt and mobbed-up. A few are, yes (the Teamsters got their reputation for a good reason) but most unions are made up entirely of honest working people.
Slashdot Mirror
That pretty much says it all, doesn't it? The security-state mindset doesn't care what your actual politics are. It cares what kind of person you are. You're either a Good God-Fearing Christian American, in which case everything you do is Good and Right and Just, or you're an Evil America-Hating /C/om/m/u/n/i/s/t/ Terrorist Sympathizer ("fringe person" for short) in which case everything you do is Wrong and must be Punished. And whatever the GGFCA's do to protect themselves from the EAH/C/TS's is by definition The Right Thing To Do, while any complaints the EAH/C/TS's make about their so-called "rights" can safely be disregarded, because, never forget, They Hate America.
The number, of course, will be given in hex.
"Cool, I got orders for 3 AF -- I'm going to Europe. Where are you headed?"
"B06C AF."
I hope the ethics hammered into the better class of military leaders (and I mean West Point, Annapolis, Air Force Academy graduates) are a part of those leading the group. I don't mean the Gitmo crew, I mean the old school for whom a class in civics is not an elective. People for whom "honor" is not negotiable.
During my years of enlisted service in both the Army and the Air Force, I worked with a lot of academy grads and a lot of officers who got their commissions in other ways (ROTC, OCS/OTS, etc.) and I never saw any difference in quality based on where they came from. There were some very good ones, some bad ones, and as with any large group of people, the majority somewhere in the middle. It's true that the academies have very strong honor codes and try to instill those in their cadets. The downside is that the strong sense of esprit de corps the academies foster in order to get the cadets to take the honor code seriously also can make their graduates see themselves as the Chosen Few, superior to everyone else in the military (officers and enlisted) and they're often arrogant and closed-minded as a result. Also, remember that getting into the academies is essentially a political process -- the most common way is to get a nomination from a Senator or Representative -- so cadets tend to come from well-off, connected families, which can also add to this kind of arrogance.
Balance it all out -- the very good education, intensive training, and constant drumbeat of honor and discipline academy cadets receive, vs. the exposure to the wider world and range of experience those who obtain their commissions by other routes get during their formative years -- and it's pretty much a wash.
And global warming denialists will claim that the volcanoes in the rift are putting out far more C02 than humans are, so why worry about anything? Drill, baby, drill!
Young-earth creationists will find Biblical verses that explain how this process has actually only been going on for 6000 years.
ID'ers will claim that the whole process is irreducibly complex.
*applause*
The higher court made a finding of fact and then sent the case back to the lower court. This is good, but it's not a clear-cut victory. What really needed to happen, IMNSGDHO, was for the higher court to find unambiguously in Jacobsen's favor and then issue a hardcore smackdown to both Katzer and the lower court judge.
From TFA:
Instead of trying to show that he did not copy Jacobsen's software, Katzer attempted to defend himself by asserting that the terms of Jacobsen's Open Source license were not valid and could not be enforced on Katzer, and that JMRI was essentially in the public domain. ... The judge agreed with Katzer.
Katzer is scum, and the judge in question is an incompetent fool. Katzer should be subject to criminal charges, and the judge should be censured if not actually removed from the bench. Anything less than that is not enough to get the point across.
You're kidding ... but Microsoft isn't.
It makes me nervous when people say things like this line from TFA: "Private actors, either nonprofit or commercial, are better suited to deliver government information to citizens ..." Uh, no, governments are better suited to deliver information about themselves, and no matter how bureaucratic or obstructionist the US government may be it's still more open and credible, on a dollar-for-dollar basis, than a lot of the "private actors" who would just looove to charge us an arm and a leg for information we've already paid our taxes for.
By all means, the government should make raw data as well as user-friendly aggregations available. And if "private actors" can do a better job of aggregating the raw data than the government can, and they can do it well enough to get people to pay them for it, then good for them. But by no means should the large number of (generally well-laid-out and quite informative) government data aggregation websites be shut down as a benefit for corporations that want to sell our own information back to us, which I strongly suspect is the idea that's being pushed here.
It's not Panic's fault. He's only following the orders of General Protection Fault.
Everything you say is true. The problem is that there is no evidence whatsoever that the RIAA contributes anything toward the ability of musicians to make a living off their music. Given the numerous horror stories about just how much industry parasites suck out of the music buyer's dollar on its journey from the buyer's wallet to the musician's bank account, it's quite reasonable to believe that it is more difficult to make a living as a professional musician with the RIAA around than it would be in the absence of such an organization.
The RIAA is screwed, no matter how you look at it.
As long as they can buy laws, copyright regulations, and even international treaties, they're doing just fine. Sooner or later, their influence will probably wane, but don't hold your breath waiting. They've got a lot of life left in them, sad to say.
And Saturn does a better job at keeping rings on than McCain does, too.
Honestly, I think it's a matter of the political realities, and what the money is going for. Communication and transportation (including aerospace) spending is a lot easier to sell politically when it's defense-related, but if it's done right everyone benefits: commercial aviation, the interstate highway system, satellite communications, the internet, and GPS are all fine examples of this sort of spinoff. On the other hand, medicine and basic science do indeed tend to work better on the civilian side. (Not always, at least in the former case: the origin of the modern emergency medical system lies in techniques developed for evacuating wounded soldiers from WW1 through Vietnam.) Speaking as a veteran, I'd rather that the US have a much smaller military and not do nearly so much sticking its nose in other people's business, but I also had a lot of opportunities to see how technology tested on the battlefield can improve people's lives at home once the shooting stops. Speaking as a grad student currently studying for a PhD on an NIH grant, I'm all in favor of funding for civilian research too. ;) Mainly I'm a utilitarian on this issue: what I care about is that the research gets done and the technology developed, and that matters much more to me than who's writing the checks.
Uh... most people don't think, when they turn on their in-car nav systems, "Gee, I'm glad my tax dollars went to pay for this system!"
True, but they should. A lot of the bitching about "wasteful government spending" would go away if people realized how much government programs (like this little thing called ARPANet that made a splash a few years ago ...) lead to dramatic improvements in their everyday lives.
Very true. It is also true that if you think what someone puts on Facebook and MySpace is relevant to their academic performance, then you shouldn't be in charge of admissions decisions for a good school, or any school. If you think it's relevant to job performance, you shouldn't be making hiring decisions, either.
There. That disposes of the question of what people "shouldn't" be doing. Now, back to the real world.
Few soldiers were in Vietnam for more than 6 months unless they wanted to be.
Where did you get that idea. The "year in the 'Nam" was absolutely standard, and hardly anybody got out earlier than that unless they were dead, wounded, or completely loony.
evolution is usually taught as a secular religion
[citation needed]
... but I didn't see the word "iTunes" anywhere in that article.
It is possible to build a profitable, long-lasting, and legal online music business, Mr. Robertson. I'm genuinely sorry you failed to do it, but to pretend that the biggest player in the online music world simply doesn't exist is kind of childish.
A permanent moonbase is like the war in Iraq: Sure, some profit off it but essentially you are throwing money away.
Yeah, just like the war in Iraq, except without the part about, you know, killing people.
The US is still a very rich country (not, granted, as rich relative to the rest of the world as we were in the 1960s, but still) and we can afford to do things that don't show an immediate profit. Speaking as someone who has seen war up close and personal -- and whose father was one of the people who made the moon landings happen -- I'd much rather have us spending money on space exploration than on wars of aggression.
Fair enough, and I admit I'm a bit touchy on the subject.
No doubt there will be a close link, but I think the division will always be a pretty strong one. I'm deeply skeptical about the potential of "DNA computing" and the like (although I'd be happy to be proven wrong!) and I suspect we will mostly be analyzing biological data with computers, rather than doing computational things that produce direct biological results, for quite some time. The fundamental difference, of course, is that biological systems evolved while computational systems are designed ...
You found out what 10% of the brain does (the sensory/motor areas)? The other 90% must not be used for anything.
Find out how to read the DNA code used for a few percent of the genome (the codons to protein via RNA parts)? The rest must be junk.
You'd have a good point ... except that no serious researcher in neuroscience or genetics has ever claimed either of those things.
Biologists discover "flags". Seriously, these guys should just bring a programmer on-staff -- preferably assembly, as decoding the arcane secrets of all Earth life should be a breeze for anyone whose day job involves the x86 instruction set.
[Sigh] Every time a biology story is posted on /. it seems like we get a bunch of posts along the lines of "dumb biologists, any techie would have figured that out a long time ago!"
Please don't confuse the reality with the dumbed-down versions that appear in the popular press or the even more dumbed-down summaries. Bioinformatics, which is what I do, has been an established science for over a decade, and I can assure you that computer scientists have been working with biologists for a lot longer than that. Most of the obvious computational analogies have already been thought of -- and most, unfortunately, have had to be discarded. Despite some of the superficial similarities, genomes are not programs, at least not in the way CS people use the word. They're more like a collection of heuristics, and even that way of thinking about things breaks down when you start looking at the details.
I'm more on the CS/math/stat side of things, and my colleagues on the bio side are often mystified by what I do -- but I'm equally often mystified by what they do. Both CS and biology are tremendously complex fields, and if you think you can arbitrarily apply lessons learned from one field to the other, you will almost always turn out to be wrong. Biologists and computer scientists can learn a lot from working with each other; work in one field very often leads to advances in the other; and by all means (he says, with a healthy dollop of self-interest) the areas of collusion should continue to grow. But thinking that there's some natural equivalence in one field to what you know from the other is simply a mistake.
... but patenting it? WTF?
Sorry, Google, but the patent really doesn't fit with "don't be evil." Do you guys remember that phrase?
Unions here aren't at all as bad as what you hear about US unions.
It's important to note that most of "what you hear about US unions" is pure anti-union propaganda.
That may be one of the most cogent explanations I've ever read of why unionization is a good idea.
As an American who has worked both union and non-union jobs, in and out of IT, I'd like to add that pretty much everything you say applies to the US as well. In particular, don't believe the stereotype that all unions in the US are corrupt and mobbed-up. A few are, yes (the Teamsters got their reputation for a good reason) but most unions are made up entirely of honest working people.
are you on drugs mate? Wtf are you using to run your car.
And plz don't embarrass yourself further by trying to claim it all came from the sun as well...
Oh, my God. Kid, you just embarrassed yourself better than anyone else ever could. And on Slashdot, that's quite a feat.