You get diagnosed with cancer and then you freakin' forget ANYTHING about work.... The article is pure sci-fi/fantasy/victim-hood non-sense.
[shrug] Not everyone reacts to cancer, or any other life-changing (and potentially life-ending) event, the same way. When my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, she told the people she thought needed to know, and kept on living her life exactly the same as she had before the diagnosis. She worked right up until the day before her surgery, and was back at work, IIRC, a week afterwards. Now, years later and (fortunately) with no sign of recurrence, she still feels that was the right decision -- that to give up on such a large part of her life (she's one of those lucky people who genuinely loves what they do) would have been tantamount to giving up on her life, if you see what I mean. She also cheerfully acknowledges that there is no one-size-fits-all approach.
As a corporate security guy working in Toronto, I'm not happy to read that Comrade Miller is going to make life that much more difficult for me. Thanks to this initiative, there will be a wireless network running (our building is right downtown) that users can switch to whenever they feel like accessing something that our content filters reject!
Quite right! Employees might also occasionally talk to their families and friends on company phones. They may be engaging in such scurrilous activities as looking out the window in their offices (assuming you don't have them all penned up in cubicles) at non-management-approved activities on the street. Why, they might even be using their brains to think about something not approved under company policy! My God, this must be stopped!
I think it's a matter of perception rather than a strict good-vs.-evil accounting. If your work is praised by a source widely considered to be incompetent and/or corrupt, then people will perceive your work as worse, not better, regardless of its actual merits -- or, for that matter, how justified the praise itself may be.
What do Muslim women lack in citizen rights that men have, in Islam?
In Islam itself, very little. In most Islamic countries, however -- particularly Arab countries, particularly Gulf Arab countries -- damn near everything. Iraq before the war was actually, believe it or not, one of the best places in the Gulf world to be a woman. Now they're headed toward a theocracy that will turn them into literal slaves.
"engaging in the same kinds of torture that the former dictator did"
That's not propaganda?
No, that is an accurate description of what's going on. Certainly we're not doing as much of it as Saddam did -- not quite -- but we are, in fact, using his old torture facilities for exactly the same purposes as he used them. You think Iraqis don't notice this?
Get this through your head: just because we do something, that does not make it okay. "Trust us, we're the good guys" only works as long as we are the good guys.
... that he deliberately conflates business jargon with tech jargon. The latter is for saying as much as possible with as few words as possible. The former is for saying as little as possible with as many words as possible. They are not equivalent.
But why would they ever tool a manufacturing line and build a working demo of every invention *before* having a patent covering the idea?
Because if they want to bring the idea to market, that's one of the hoops they have to jump through.
Even if someone hasn't developed a working demo yet, I can respect that they claimed the idea as their own. Why can't you?
Because coming with an idea is the easy part. I can sit on my ass for an hour and think up a hundred good ideas. But if I'm not willing to do the work to make the ideas into reality, then I have no right to prevent someone else from doing so, or forcing them to pay me when they do.
And why don't you feel that "Joe Inventor" who works in his garage for 20 years trying to find the next big thing should be allowed to make money by documenting cutting edge ideas just because he can't afford to fab circuits, develop code and burn EEPROMS?
This is a red herring -- the kind of patent that requires massive industrial infrastructure to implement isn't being filed by Joe Inventor. It's being filed by IBM.
We can simulate complete chip designs entirely in software.
Only to a point -- the simulations don't always tell you how the real thing is going to behave (which is increasingly the case now that chips, especially, are small enough that quantum effects come into play.) I could probably mock up a SimChip that would do all kinds of fantastic stuff. Unless I can actually build the thing, then it's worthless.
Just what I was thinking -- I'd really like to see the PTO require working models of all "inventions" submitted for patent, and while I'm as pleased to see this frivolous application rejected as I would be any other, I can't help be a bit bothered by the double standard involved. "Silly, unworkable, sci-fi-inspired idea probably filed as a joke? Forget it, pal. Silly, unworkable, b-school-inspired idea layered in suit-speak? No problem!"
The underlying science is pretty trivial, yeah. (Or at least "well-understood.") But having this tool in one place, as a reasonably well-designed Web app, is neat.
On to the bigger question... I think the real thing that bothers me is, why is the biology field so devoid of computer people?!
Stereotyping here -- it's a bit of a culture clash. Until fairly recently, biology (with exceptions for some subfields such as ecology) was, to put it bluntly, the science you went into if you wanted to do science but weren't very good at math. And I think it's fair to say that most "wet-lab" biologists still think more qualitatively than quantitatively. They're very, very good at describing things; they're not so hot at putting those descriptions into numeric or algorithmic terms. And, still stereotyping, CS people tend to be exactly the opposite: "if you can't code it, it doesn't exist," and they're uncomfortable with the inherent, um, gooiness of living systems.
Computers are always supposed to behave predictably. Living things never do. It's really that simple.
You also have the opposite problem, overenthusiasm, which is born out of the same kind of ignorance: biologists who think that they can throw a bunch of random microarray or PCR data at someone's analysis algorithm and get The Answer, and computer scientists and mathematicians who take Bio 101 and think they know enough biology to interpret the answers they get. In both cases, of course, both sides are severly underestimating the complexity of The Other Guy's chunk of the problem.
Don't get me wrong; I do think it's getting better. But even someone like me, who's had one foot in each camp for a number of years now, has to admit that we've got a long way to go before quantitative biology really exists as a unified field.
Okay, I didn't realize that Montgomery County had its own PD, separate from the SD; thanks for the clarification. I think my point still stands (substitute "PD" for "SD" in my previous post.) If there is any significant security threat in the county, the regular cops are going to be far better at dealing with it than these jumped-up wannabes.
(/me is still hoping that intellectualism will someday return to the United States and that we will oust the relgious nutbags and anti-intellectual [dare I say, liberals] from our schools.)
Right, like that well-known liberal cause, getting EVILution out of our schools!
I have to point out that Sagan was also both; he was a working astronomer with a number of significant achievements to his credit before he went the pop-sci route.
Malls yes, apartment building corridors no. My apartment building, like most these days, is a secure building; the outside doors to the building are locked, and the only way to get in (unless you break in) is to have a key, or have someone who lives in the building buzz you in. This is not a public space; it is a place where people live. Sorry if I sound like a bit of a fanatic on this issue, but apartments are routinely dismissed as though they weren't "real" homes -- which implies that apartment dwellers do not have the same rights as homeowners -- and it pisses me off.
In the early days of aviation, there was a phenomenon that we might call today, "air tourism." People would pay pilots money -- a fair amount of money, in fact, by the standards of the time, though not as much as the space-tourism outfits are talking about charging, even adjusted for inflation -- just to get in a plane and ride around for a very short while. Those planes were rickety, dangerous contraptions, and tourists could and did get killed. No doubt most people who observed this were saying, as you did, "I'll just save my money and stay on the ground, where I belong, thanks very much." But there were those who wanted to experience it for themselves, and they probably contributed enough money to help the advancement of aviation as a whole significantly.
Because as several other posters pointed out, these aren't United States Department of Homeland Security personnel. They work for the Montgomery County Department of Homeland Security, which, I strongly suspect, was an organization created for the sole purpose of funneling federal "homeland security" dollars into the county coffers, with perhaps the added benefit (if you see it that way) of providing employment for the type of person who likes to walk around in a uniform and a baseball cap embroidered with something official-looking, telling other people what to do. Almost certainly, any real increase in security would be gained by spending the money on the Montgomery County Sheriff's Department -- but that wouldn't sound as macho and fun, would it?
[sigh] No, it doesn't, and it's time to kill this meme. What Venona shows is that there was, in fact, lots of Soviet spying going on in the US and UK -- well, duh, we knew that already. It does not show that McCarthy and HUAC were right about any particular person or group of people, or that the blacklisting and loyalty oaths and all that nonsense did any good in protecting us against communist infiltration, or that McCarthy's made-up, ever-changing list of names had any connection at all to reality. Stop trying to rehabilitate the guy. He was nothing but a mediocre small-time pol who saw whipping up people's fears as his ticket to fame.
Well, any Microsoft marketing has about the same probability of being true as some random "this e-mail will make you rich!!!" spam that turns up in your inbox, so...
I never had to shot someone, but I know that in a combat situation I would have done it without hesitation.
Oooh, you're so tough. I'm so impressed.
I was a medic in Desert Storm (and a civilian ER tech at a hospital nicknamed "The Knife and Gun Club," which was in many ways a comparable experience) and I can tell you that if you'd ever seen the effect a bullet has on a human body up close and personal, you might not be so sure.
And before that, I was an infantryman, so I went through the same kill-kill-kill training you did, and generations of grunts before us went through it too... but the fact is that in real wars, with real killing, a significant percentage of soldiers still don't shoot at the enemy. And a rather larger percentage do, and suffer for it the rest of their lives.
But that's fine: go ahead and treasure your untested machismo, and hope to God you never have to face the consequences in the real world.
Almost without exception, the more politically repressive a government is, the more puritanical it is as well. Whether the repression is theocratic, communist, or whatever, attempts to control sexuality generally go hand-in-hand with attempts to control political expression. There's just a general mindset that likes telling people what not to do, and people with that mindset tend to come to power in such systems.
That's the peace prize you're talking about. Personally, I think Carter deserved it, regardless of what the N. Koreans did afterwards, but that's kind of beside the point when you're talking about science awards. Can you seriously make the argument that the Nobels in physics, chemistry, or physiology and medicine have become politicized?
Also, yes, Nobel was a munitions maker -- and the whole reason he founded the prize was because he was so horrified at what modern warfare had become that he wanted to put a portion of his money, which he had earned by making stuff to kill people, toward rewarding those who found ways not to kill people. I don't see that as ironic at all.
Slashdot Mirror
You get diagnosed with cancer and then you freakin' forget ANYTHING about work. ... The article is pure sci-fi/fantasy/victim-hood non-sense.
[shrug] Not everyone reacts to cancer, or any other life-changing (and potentially life-ending) event, the same way. When my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, she told the people she thought needed to know, and kept on living her life exactly the same as she had before the diagnosis. She worked right up until the day before her surgery, and was back at work, IIRC, a week afterwards. Now, years later and (fortunately) with no sign of recurrence, she still feels that was the right decision -- that to give up on such a large part of her life (she's one of those lucky people who genuinely loves what they do) would have been tantamount to giving up on her life, if you see what I mean. She also cheerfully acknowledges that there is no one-size-fits-all approach.
As a corporate security guy working in Toronto, I'm not happy to read that Comrade Miller is going to make life that much more difficult for me. Thanks to this initiative, there will be a wireless network running (our building is right downtown) that users can switch to whenever they feel like accessing something that our content filters reject!
Quite right! Employees might also occasionally talk to their families and friends on company phones. They may be engaging in such scurrilous activities as looking out the window in their offices (assuming you don't have them all penned up in cubicles) at non-management-approved activities on the street. Why, they might even be using their brains to think about something not approved under company policy! My God, this must be stopped!
Fuckin' waaah. Deal with it, Agent Smith.
I think it's a matter of perception rather than a strict good-vs.-evil accounting. If your work is praised by a source widely considered to be incompetent and/or corrupt, then people will perceive your work as worse, not better, regardless of its actual merits -- or, for that matter, how justified the praise itself may be.
So, do you also hold that the God of the Christians is different from the God of the Jews? And where exactly does that leave Jesus?
Don't you mean hunted buddies?
No, that was the Assistant Cave Chief, Dick. Harry learned to be very careful when Dick started waving his flint spear around.
What do Muslim women lack in citizen rights that men have, in Islam?
In Islam itself, very little. In most Islamic countries, however -- particularly Arab countries, particularly Gulf Arab countries -- damn near everything. Iraq before the war was actually, believe it or not, one of the best places in the Gulf world to be a woman. Now they're headed toward a theocracy that will turn them into literal slaves.
"engaging in the same kinds of torture that the former dictator did"
That's not propaganda?
No, that is an accurate description of what's going on. Certainly we're not doing as much of it as Saddam did -- not quite -- but we are, in fact, using his old torture facilities for exactly the same purposes as he used them. You think Iraqis don't notice this?
Get this through your head: just because we do something, that does not make it okay. "Trust us, we're the good guys" only works as long as we are the good guys.
... that he deliberately conflates business jargon with tech jargon. The latter is for saying as much as possible with as few words as possible. The former is for saying as little as possible with as many words as possible. They are not equivalent.
But why would they ever tool a manufacturing line and build a working demo of every invention *before* having a patent covering the idea?
Because if they want to bring the idea to market, that's one of the hoops they have to jump through.
Even if someone hasn't developed a working demo yet, I can respect that they claimed the idea as their own. Why can't you?
Because coming with an idea is the easy part. I can sit on my ass for an hour and think up a hundred good ideas. But if I'm not willing to do the work to make the ideas into reality, then I have no right to prevent someone else from doing so, or forcing them to pay me when they do.
And why don't you feel that "Joe Inventor" who works in his garage for 20 years trying to find the next big thing should be allowed to make money by documenting cutting edge ideas just because he can't afford to fab circuits, develop code and burn EEPROMS?
This is a red herring -- the kind of patent that requires massive industrial infrastructure to implement isn't being filed by Joe Inventor. It's being filed by IBM.
We can simulate complete chip designs entirely in software.
Only to a point -- the simulations don't always tell you how the real thing is going to behave (which is increasingly the case now that chips, especially, are small enough that quantum effects come into play.) I could probably mock up a SimChip that would do all kinds of fantastic stuff. Unless I can actually build the thing, then it's worthless.
Just what I was thinking -- I'd really like to see the PTO require working models of all "inventions" submitted for patent, and while I'm as pleased to see this frivolous application rejected as I would be any other, I can't help be a bit bothered by the double standard involved. "Silly, unworkable, sci-fi-inspired idea probably filed as a joke? Forget it, pal. Silly, unworkable, b-school-inspired idea layered in suit-speak? No problem!"
The underlying science is pretty trivial, yeah. (Or at least "well-understood.") But having this tool in one place, as a reasonably well-designed Web app, is neat.
... I think the real thing that bothers me is, why is the biology field so devoid of computer people?!
On to the bigger question
Stereotyping here -- it's a bit of a culture clash. Until fairly recently, biology (with exceptions for some subfields such as ecology) was, to put it bluntly, the science you went into if you wanted to do science but weren't very good at math. And I think it's fair to say that most "wet-lab" biologists still think more qualitatively than quantitatively. They're very, very good at describing things; they're not so hot at putting those descriptions into numeric or algorithmic terms. And, still stereotyping, CS people tend to be exactly the opposite: "if you can't code it, it doesn't exist," and they're uncomfortable with the inherent, um, gooiness of living systems.
Computers are always supposed to behave predictably. Living things never do. It's really that simple.
You also have the opposite problem, overenthusiasm, which is born out of the same kind of ignorance: biologists who think that they can throw a bunch of random microarray or PCR data at someone's analysis algorithm and get The Answer, and computer scientists and mathematicians who take Bio 101 and think they know enough biology to interpret the answers they get. In both cases, of course, both sides are severly underestimating the complexity of The Other Guy's chunk of the problem.
Don't get me wrong; I do think it's getting better. But even someone like me, who's had one foot in each camp for a number of years now, has to admit that we've got a long way to go before quantitative biology really exists as a unified field.
Okay, I didn't realize that Montgomery County had its own PD, separate from the SD; thanks for the clarification. I think my point still stands (substitute "PD" for "SD" in my previous post.) If there is any significant security threat in the county, the regular cops are going to be far better at dealing with it than these jumped-up wannabes.
(/me is still hoping that intellectualism will someday return to the United States and that we will oust the relgious nutbags and anti-intellectual [dare I say, liberals] from our schools.)
Right, like that well-known liberal cause, getting EVILution out of our schools!
Oh, wait.
Liberals are the anti-intellectuals here? GMAFB.
I have to point out that Sagan was also both; he was a working astronomer with a number of significant achievements to his credit before he went the pop-sci route.
Malls yes, apartment building corridors no. My apartment building, like most these days, is a secure building; the outside doors to the building are locked, and the only way to get in (unless you break in) is to have a key, or have someone who lives in the building buzz you in. This is not a public space; it is a place where people live. Sorry if I sound like a bit of a fanatic on this issue, but apartments are routinely dismissed as though they weren't "real" homes -- which implies that apartment dwellers do not have the same rights as homeowners -- and it pisses me off.
In the early days of aviation, there was a phenomenon that we might call today, "air tourism." People would pay pilots money -- a fair amount of money, in fact, by the standards of the time, though not as much as the space-tourism outfits are talking about charging, even adjusted for inflation -- just to get in a plane and ride around for a very short while. Those planes were rickety, dangerous contraptions, and tourists could and did get killed. No doubt most people who observed this were saying, as you did, "I'll just save my money and stay on the ground, where I belong, thanks very much." But there were those who wanted to experience it for themselves, and they probably contributed enough money to help the advancement of aviation as a whole significantly.
Because as several other posters pointed out, these aren't United States Department of Homeland Security personnel. They work for the Montgomery County Department of Homeland Security, which, I strongly suspect, was an organization created for the sole purpose of funneling federal "homeland security" dollars into the county coffers, with perhaps the added benefit (if you see it that way) of providing employment for the type of person who likes to walk around in a uniform and a baseball cap embroidered with something official-looking, telling other people what to do. Almost certainly, any real increase in security would be gained by spending the money on the Montgomery County Sheriff's Department -- but that wouldn't sound as macho and fun, would it?
[sigh] No, it doesn't, and it's time to kill this meme. What Venona shows is that there was, in fact, lots of Soviet spying going on in the US and UK -- well, duh, we knew that already. It does not show that McCarthy and HUAC were right about any particular person or group of people, or that the blacklisting and loyalty oaths and all that nonsense did any good in protecting us against communist infiltration, or that McCarthy's made-up, ever-changing list of names had any connection at all to reality. Stop trying to rehabilitate the guy. He was nothing but a mediocre small-time pol who saw whipping up people's fears as his ticket to fame.
Well, any Microsoft marketing has about the same probability of being true as some random "this e-mail will make you rich!!!" spam that turns up in your inbox, so ...
I never had to shot someone, but I know that in a combat situation I would have done it without hesitation.
... but the fact is that in real wars, with real killing, a significant percentage of soldiers still don't shoot at the enemy. And a rather larger percentage do, and suffer for it the rest of their lives.
Oooh, you're so tough. I'm so impressed.
I was a medic in Desert Storm (and a civilian ER tech at a hospital nicknamed "The Knife and Gun Club," which was in many ways a comparable experience) and I can tell you that if you'd ever seen the effect a bullet has on a human body up close and personal, you might not be so sure.
And before that, I was an infantryman, so I went through the same kill-kill-kill training you did, and generations of grunts before us went through it too
But that's fine: go ahead and treasure your untested machismo, and hope to God you never have to face the consequences in the real world.
Almost without exception, the more politically repressive a government is, the more puritanical it is as well. Whether the repression is theocratic, communist, or whatever, attempts to control sexuality generally go hand-in-hand with attempts to control political expression. There's just a general mindset that likes telling people what not to do, and people with that mindset tend to come to power in such systems.
Ah, at least one of you recognizes my genius! I shall instruct my minions to be gentle with you when the time comes.
That's the peace prize you're talking about. Personally, I think Carter deserved it, regardless of what the N. Koreans did afterwards, but that's kind of beside the point when you're talking about science awards. Can you seriously make the argument that the Nobels in physics, chemistry, or physiology and medicine have become politicized?
Also, yes, Nobel was a munitions maker -- and the whole reason he founded the prize was because he was so horrified at what modern warfare had become that he wanted to put a portion of his money, which he had earned by making stuff to kill people, toward rewarding those who found ways not to kill people. I don't see that as ironic at all.
... Nobel prizes used to be before they became a political joke
What's your basis for this claim?
I believe the phrase is "keeping up appearances."