Consider the lack of critical thought in designating Facebook-use as an activity protected by the First Amendment.
I would be fascinated to know the thought process by which you determine that using Facebook is not speech, and therefore protected. Snarks like "consider the lack of critical thought" don't do much to explain this.
The insurgents will never defeat us by planting bombs and killing US soldiers 3 or 4 at a time, all they can do is make us want to leave.
That is the definition of defeat. Hardly any army in history has fought to the last man; wars end when one side or another decides that the cost of continuing to fight is no longer worth any benefit from doing so.
I think you're absolutely right, about the value of manned space exploration, but I also think that right now NASA is dithering; they're not spending enough time and money on either the things that already work (e.g., Hubble) or on things that will only work if we put a ton of effort into them (e.g., a human return to the Moon, and then on to Mars.) Without a massive increase in their budget -- which I'd love to see, but I'm not holding my breath -- the current situation boils down to "jack of all trades, master of none."
And yes, I think the White House is largely responsible for this situation. When Bush first started talking big about manned space flight, I honestly thought that this was the one thing he might do to turn his administration from an unqualified disaster into a major success; long after stupidities like the Iraq war have faded into history, a thriving human presence in space would be a great legacy. But nope, it was just election-year hype. As usual.
These dogs are stupid. REALLY stupid. I remember a BBC documentary about AI and robots and they flipped the dog over and put it upside down in their back lawn. The dog tried to get on its feet and after failing several times said something like "I need help".
How is that stupid? Getting up is a pretty complex process; we think it's easy beacuse we do it a lot, but have you ever watched a little kid trying to learn to walk? The "dog" tried to figure out something it couldn't do, realized that it couldn't figure it out on its own, and asked for help -- hell, that's a lot smarter than a lot of humans.
Either you were in many, many moons ago, or you've fallen for the propaganda. I was a USAF medic 1989-1997, then worked as a civilian EMT and ER tech for a couple of years after getting out, and I feel very confident in saying that the standard of care in the military (at least the AF) is as good as or better than the standard on the civilian side. Doctors, nurses, medics, specialty technicians (e.g. lab and x-ray tech) all got away with sloppiness in the civilian medical world that I found shocking, and which would never have been tolerated in the service.
I'd really like to see an end to the "X should not be called a Y" argument. "MySQL shouldn't be called a database!" "PHP shouldn't be called a programming language!" "Wikipedia shouldn't be called an encyclopedia!" Etc. Folks, this kind of argument is just plain dumb. You can argue all day about whether MySQL, PHP, Wikipedia, or anything else are good implementations of their respective types, but clearly they are these things by any reasonable definition of these words. In general, I get awfully damn tired of people trying to redefine words to suit their own ends.
Well, yeah; I've had similar arguments with lawyers about other subjects. What it comes down to is that lawyers clearly have greater knowledge of the law than the rest of us, and that knowledge should be respected -- they certainly work hard enough to gain it -- but as long as the law applies to and ideally serves all of us (that whole "we the people thing, y'know?) they do not have any greater authority on the subject. And I think the assumption of authority is a big part of the reason so many people have this kind of free-floating dislike for all lawyers, even the ones (of whom there are many) who don't deserve it.
You cannot sit back and watch someone build an empire from your patent without doing anything, bringing it to their attention, etc. and expect to cash in six or seven years down the road.
Except that, in fact, people (okay, more often corporations, which aren't people no matter what boneheaded decision the Supreme Court may have handed down 120 years ago) are still doing just that.
I swear, Slashdot should stick to technology and leave the legal commentary to people who know better.
Tell you what, the techies will stop bitching about the law when the lawyers stop trying to control the tech. Don't hold your breath.
Maybe because Iraq was invaded because it was suspsected of having WMD.
No, at this point it's eminently clear that Iraq was invaded because we knew they didn't have WMD's. If they'd had nukes (not sure if chemicals or biologicals would have stopped us, although they sure could have made things rough) we'd still be saber-rattling.
It seems to me that it's designed to fit experiments into a framework which might not allow for much innovation. The truly great experiments (e.g., Michelson-Morley, Avery-McLeod-McCarty) required new experimental techniques as well as new hypotheses and tests. We should be very careful not to impose a standard which would limit such experiments (or, more to the point, the ability of the experimenters to get published) in the future.
Basically what I'd be worried about is the tendency of the tool to become the task. This is something of a problem in my field (biostats) because SAS is so ubiquitous -- often the question becomes "what can SAS tell us about this data set" rather than "what do we want to know from this data set, and what tool should we use to find out?" Fortunately other, more flexible analysis tools (particularly R, which encourages real programming rather than running a set of canned tests) are becoming more common in the field, and so this is starting to change, but it's still a problem.
It's also a problem that every techie is familiar with -- "We want to do this in $LANGUAGE on $PLATFORM," even when that particular language and platform may be an absolutely terrible choice for the task at hand.
That being said, it's certainly a potentially useful tool, and I'll be interested to see where it goes. It's just that when I read lines like "Journals could also insist that researchers submit papers in EXPO as well as written normally," I get twitchy.
As a fellow Desert Shield/Desert Storm vet, I would ask you to remember that disdain for the amazing variety ways the Pentagon and the VA have managed to come up with to shaft the troops lately is not the same thing at all as "a general disdain for servicemen and women." In fact, it's very nearly the opposite.
Remember that McCarthy exposed quite a few soviet spies.
No, in fact he didn't. This revisionist meme has become popular with the right wing in its attempt to rehabilitate that repulsive un-American sack of shit, but it's still shit.
All the Wal-Mart jokes aside, I suggest you Google on "US prison labor" and spend a while reading what comes up. It's not as bad as China... (yet)... but it's pretty grim.
Well, for one thing, it's private parties doing it, not the government.
So in other words, America is where you worry about a totalitarian, monolithic government prying into every detail of your private life (and possibly using what it turns up as an excuse to ship you off to a secret prison) and China is where you worry about vigilantes and lynch-mob frontier justice. We really are living in Bizarro World.
You hear calls for vigilante activity a lot, on the net and in the real world. And it's got lots of emotional appeal. But it always turns into mob rule, with absolutely no mechanism for protecting the innocent.
Experience and caring are not the same thing, okay? Like I said above, anyone who was at the controls of an airliner that was about to crash would care very much about what happened to the plane, but that would have nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not they could keep it from crashing.
I just knew someone was going to come back with a comment like that.
Look, code quality and hardware reliability are perfectly valid concerns, but they have nothing to do with caring. What I was objecting to was not the legitimate worry that the computer might not be as good or as reliable as a human pilot, but the absurd idea that because a pilot "cares," he might for that reason magically be able to come up with a way out of a problem that the computer couldn't.
A computer cares about what it's programmed to do, and that's all it cares about. A computer doesn't care about how tired it is, or the problems it's having with its marriage, or how it doesn't think it gets paid enough. A computer cares about one thing: executing code. And if that code tells it to fly the plane without crashing, then it cares about flying the plane without crashing more than any human possibly can.
In other words, "caring" is great, but it doesn't fly planes. If you or I found myself at the controls of an airliner, we'd care a great deal about not crashing it, but odds are we'd still end up making a big smoking hole in the ground. The idea that a flight computer (or an android, for that matter) will do a worse job than a human because it "doesn't care as much" is ridiculous.
You know what? People should be able to smoke. And drink. And use whatever other drugs they want. And eat crappy food. And not exercise unless they enjoy it. And have sex with as many partners as they please. And do all the other currently life-shortening things they enjoy, and not have it be a death sentence. Keeping people alive after a lifetime of doing the things that make them happy is one of the noblest goals of science.
The result you got is just plain wrong; it's 17.36 x 10^-3 m^3/mol, not 10^-6. Thus 1 mol of oxygen at STP ~= 17.36 liters. Now, as for that being enough to breathe, take a look at the specifications for SCUBA gear, and remember that the NASA experiment was done with a very small amount of material. If the process scales up, it would be trivial to generate enough oxygen to support a fair number of people.
Australians are white Christians. Iranians are brown Muslims. Therefore, Australian enriched uranium can only be used peacefully for nuclear power generation, while Iranian enriched uranium can only be used in nuclear weapons for terrorists. Hope this clears things up.
You're right, but I'm more inclined to believe some claims than others. There are a lot of nuclear physicists in the world, and it's not unbelievable at all that one of those who worked on this particular project would be posting on/. Ninjas, SEALs, and the like, OTOH, are usually too busy totally flipping out and killing people to waste their time on such nerdly pursuits.;)
Slashdot Mirror
Consider the lack of critical thought in designating Facebook-use as an activity protected by the First Amendment.
I would be fascinated to know the thought process by which you determine that using Facebook is not speech, and therefore protected. Snarks like "consider the lack of critical thought" don't do much to explain this.
The insurgents will never defeat us by planting bombs and killing US soldiers 3 or 4 at a time, all they can do is make us want to leave.
That is the definition of defeat. Hardly any army in history has fought to the last man; wars end when one side or another decides that the cost of continuing to fight is no longer worth any benefit from doing so.
I think you're absolutely right, about the value of manned space exploration, but I also think that right now NASA is dithering; they're not spending enough time and money on either the things that already work (e.g., Hubble) or on things that will only work if we put a ton of effort into them (e.g., a human return to the Moon, and then on to Mars.) Without a massive increase in their budget -- which I'd love to see, but I'm not holding my breath -- the current situation boils down to "jack of all trades, master of none."
And yes, I think the White House is largely responsible for this situation. When Bush first started talking big about manned space flight, I honestly thought that this was the one thing he might do to turn his administration from an unqualified disaster into a major success; long after stupidities like the Iraq war have faded into history, a thriving human presence in space would be a great legacy. But nope, it was just election-year hype. As usual.
These dogs are stupid. REALLY stupid. I remember a BBC documentary about AI and robots and they flipped the dog over and put it upside down in their back lawn. The dog tried to get on its feet and after failing several times said something like "I need help".
How is that stupid? Getting up is a pretty complex process; we think it's easy beacuse we do it a lot, but have you ever watched a little kid trying to learn to walk? The "dog" tried to figure out something it couldn't do, realized that it couldn't figure it out on its own, and asked for help -- hell, that's a lot smarter than a lot of humans.
Man, can you imagine a beowulf cluster of these?
I think that would be a Beowoof cluster.
Either you were in many, many moons ago, or you've fallen for the propaganda. I was a USAF medic 1989-1997, then worked as a civilian EMT and ER tech for a couple of years after getting out, and I feel very confident in saying that the standard of care in the military (at least the AF) is as good as or better than the standard on the civilian side. Doctors, nurses, medics, specialty technicians (e.g. lab and x-ray tech) all got away with sloppiness in the civilian medical world that I found shocking, and which would never have been tolerated in the service.
My guys. My friends. My paisans. They're very smart guys. Wise, even. You could call them my wiseguys.
Now, Don Stallman, he's a very smart guy too. And you know, me and my guys, we got respect for him and his guys. Cause you gotta have respect.
I'd really like to see an end to the "X should not be called a Y" argument. "MySQL shouldn't be called a database!" "PHP shouldn't be called a programming language!" "Wikipedia shouldn't be called an encyclopedia!" Etc. Folks, this kind of argument is just plain dumb. You can argue all day about whether MySQL, PHP, Wikipedia, or anything else are good implementations of their respective types, but clearly they are these things by any reasonable definition of these words. In general, I get awfully damn tired of people trying to redefine words to suit their own ends.
Well, yeah; I've had similar arguments with lawyers about other subjects. What it comes down to is that lawyers clearly have greater knowledge of the law than the rest of us, and that knowledge should be respected -- they certainly work hard enough to gain it -- but as long as the law applies to and ideally serves all of us (that whole "we the people thing, y'know?) they do not have any greater authority on the subject. And I think the assumption of authority is a big part of the reason so many people have this kind of free-floating dislike for all lawyers, even the ones (of whom there are many) who don't deserve it.
You cannot sit back and watch someone build an empire from your patent without doing anything, bringing it to their attention, etc. and expect to cash in six or seven years down the road.
Except that, in fact, people (okay, more often corporations, which aren't people no matter what boneheaded decision the Supreme Court may have handed down 120 years ago) are still doing just that.
I swear, Slashdot should stick to technology and leave the legal commentary to people who know better.
Tell you what, the techies will stop bitching about the law when the lawyers stop trying to control the tech. Don't hold your breath.
Maybe because Iraq was invaded because it was suspsected of having WMD.
No, at this point it's eminently clear that Iraq was invaded because we knew they didn't have WMD's. If they'd had nukes (not sure if chemicals or biologicals would have stopped us, although they sure could have made things rough) we'd still be saber-rattling.
It seems to me that it's designed to fit experiments into a framework which might not allow for much innovation. The truly great experiments (e.g., Michelson-Morley, Avery-McLeod-McCarty) required new experimental techniques as well as new hypotheses and tests. We should be very careful not to impose a standard which would limit such experiments (or, more to the point, the ability of the experimenters to get published) in the future.
Basically what I'd be worried about is the tendency of the tool to become the task. This is something of a problem in my field (biostats) because SAS is so ubiquitous -- often the question becomes "what can SAS tell us about this data set" rather than "what do we want to know from this data set, and what tool should we use to find out?" Fortunately other, more flexible analysis tools (particularly R, which encourages real programming rather than running a set of canned tests) are becoming more common in the field, and so this is starting to change, but it's still a problem.
It's also a problem that every techie is familiar with -- "We want to do this in $LANGUAGE on $PLATFORM," even when that particular language and platform may be an absolutely terrible choice for the task at hand.
That being said, it's certainly a potentially useful tool, and I'll be interested to see where it goes. It's just that when I read lines like "Journals could also insist that researchers submit papers in EXPO as well as written normally," I get twitchy.
As a fellow Desert Shield/Desert Storm vet, I would ask you to remember that disdain for the amazing variety ways the Pentagon and the VA have managed to come up with to shaft the troops lately is not the same thing at all as "a general disdain for servicemen and women." In fact, it's very nearly the opposite.
Remember that McCarthy exposed quite a few soviet spies.
No, in fact he didn't. This revisionist meme has become popular with the right wing in its attempt to rehabilitate that repulsive un-American sack of shit, but it's still shit.
All the Wal-Mart jokes aside, I suggest you Google on "US prison labor" and spend a while reading what comes up. It's not as bad as China ... (yet) ... but it's pretty grim.
Well, for one thing, it's private parties doing it, not the government.
So in other words, America is where you worry about a totalitarian, monolithic government prying into every detail of your private life (and possibly using what it turns up as an excuse to ship you off to a secret prison) and China is where you worry about vigilantes and lynch-mob frontier justice. We really are living in Bizarro World.
... vigilantism is a bad idea.
You hear calls for vigilante activity a lot, on the net and in the real world. And it's got lots of emotional appeal. But it always turns into mob rule, with absolutely no mechanism for protecting the innocent.
Experience and caring are not the same thing, okay? Like I said above, anyone who was at the controls of an airliner that was about to crash would care very much about what happened to the plane, but that would have nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not they could keep it from crashing.
I just knew someone was going to come back with a comment like that.
Look, code quality and hardware reliability are perfectly valid concerns, but they have nothing to do with caring. What I was objecting to was not the legitimate worry that the computer might not be as good or as reliable as a human pilot, but the absurd idea that because a pilot "cares," he might for that reason magically be able to come up with a way out of a problem that the computer couldn't.
A computer cares about what it's programmed to do, and that's all it cares about. A computer doesn't care about how tired it is, or the problems it's having with its marriage, or how it doesn't think it gets paid enough. A computer cares about one thing: executing code. And if that code tells it to fly the plane without crashing, then it cares about flying the plane without crashing more than any human possibly can.
In other words, "caring" is great, but it doesn't fly planes. If you or I found myself at the controls of an airliner, we'd care a great deal about not crashing it, but odds are we'd still end up making a big smoking hole in the ground. The idea that a flight computer (or an android, for that matter) will do a worse job than a human because it "doesn't care as much" is ridiculous.
You know what? People should be able to smoke. And drink. And use whatever other drugs they want. And eat crappy food. And not exercise unless they enjoy it. And have sex with as many partners as they please. And do all the other currently life-shortening things they enjoy, and not have it be a death sentence. Keeping people alive after a lifetime of doing the things that make them happy is one of the noblest goals of science.
No, I'm not kidding.
The result you got is just plain wrong; it's 17.36 x 10^-3 m^3/mol, not 10^-6. Thus 1 mol of oxygen at STP ~= 17.36 liters. Now, as for that being enough to breathe, take a look at the specifications for SCUBA gear, and remember that the NASA experiment was done with a very small amount of material. If the process scales up, it would be trivial to generate enough oxygen to support a fair number of people.
Australians are white Christians. Iranians are brown Muslims. Therefore, Australian enriched uranium can only be used peacefully for nuclear power generation, while Iranian enriched uranium can only be used in nuclear weapons for terrorists. Hope this clears things up.
You're right, but I'm more inclined to believe some claims than others. There are a lot of nuclear physicists in the world, and it's not unbelievable at all that one of those who worked on this particular project would be posting on /. Ninjas, SEALs, and the like, OTOH, are usually too busy totally flipping out and killing people to waste their time on such nerdly pursuits. ;)
No, facts are facts; they're neither stupid nor intelligent.
What's stupid is how good people like Crichton are at ignoring them.