If we weren't detaining people, tapping their phones, and beating information out of someone, I'd be pissed. I'm paying the government to protect me.
Da, tovarisch! Only bourgeois capitalist running-dog counter-revolutionaries will be detained, phone-tapped, and beaten! We glorious workers and peasants of the new socialist brotherhood of man have nothing to fair from our wise and just leaders! FOR THE MOTHERLAND!
I've juried story submissions, in a rather different context, and I can tell you what any editor, of any type, can tell you: 90+% of submissions are crap. (Yet another example of Sturgeon's Law in action.) They're either subliterate and unreadable, wacko rantings, or just plain boring, often some combination of all three. Crap. The number of people who make submissions that are even worth considering for the first cut is very, very small, and it's not surprising that people who make a lot of successful submissions are (almost tautologically) those who have figured out how to write submissions worth reading.
I agree that it sucks when "[t]he messenger becomes the story." But you know, Slashdot is like Usenet used to be (before Slashdot and various other Web forums largely took over Usenet's role, leaving most newsgroups as purely the domain of spammers and trolls, I mean) in that, while there is a hell of a lot of noise, there is also a lot of signal -- and the noise really isn't that hard to skip over. Most users, it seems to me, can train themselves to scan posts quickly, decide if they're germane to the story or just a bunch of conspiracy-theory nonsense, and page down to the comments with some meat.
The moderation system should make this easier. Now, I'm not a big fan of the "Offtopic" mod -- I don't remember the last time I used it -- but what I do when I have mod points is try to mod up only on-topic comments (as well as comments that are good in other ways, of course: interesting, insightful, etc.) so that, hopefully, those comments and the threads they spawn will rise to the top of the page and leave the trolls and conspiracy theorists and **Beatles-Beatles dissas 'n' Piquepaille-hatas, yo, down at the bottom where they belong.
BTW, the reason I don't like "Offtopic" is because I think it's often abused; many mods will mark a post that way when it's a perfectly legitimate reply to another post which is kinda sorta ontopic. For example, in many science stories (regardless of the type of science in question) you'll see people ranting about how dumb and ignorant scientists are, often including links to creationist/ID propaganda or some bullshit look-how-clever-I-am Michael Crichton speech; and they may (or may not) get modded as "Troll" or "Flamebait," but people who respond to them and try to explain to them how science really works get modded "Offtopic" because the explanation isn't directly relevant to the original story. This is a problem, because these ideas need to be addressed whenever they crop up, IMNSGDHO. See also: rational discussion of the advantages of Mac OS X in response to "L0L M4XZ 5UX0RZ PCZ R0X0RZ" posts, usually in any given Apple story. "Offtopic" isn't a bad mod category in itself, but I think it should be much more carefully used.
This is a weird conversation; it's like you're responding to some set of posts that are only vaguely similar to mine.
I'm sick of people trying to get away with "Well, I didn't SAY that."
Sometimes, yes, people say things with lots of subtext and then try to deny the subtext. Other times -- more often, I think -- they say "I didn't say that" because, you know, they actually didn't say that. The things you seem to think I said, I really didn't say, nor did I mean to imply.
Now shut up...
Wow, that's some sophisticated debate technique you've got going there. I retreat in awe before your stunning display of logic.
(And in case you're wondering, THAT was subtext.)
You're making the assumption that EVERY who believes in science feels the same way as you.
No, I'm really not; again, if you go back and read what I actually wrote, you'll see that I'm very careful to use phrases like "tend to" when I'm talking about personality types and beliefs, on both sides of the argument. I make no claims to absolutes.
Truth is, everyone sees their position as "The Truth", or they wouldn't believe in it. Whether it's science or religion or whatever.
You've just turned yourself into Exhibit A for what I said above: "They caricature scientists as authoritarian because that's the way they think themselves; they honestly can't understand people who genuinely do not think the way they do. In their worldview, everyone has some kind of absolute faith, and if it's not God, it must be Science." No, not everyone sees their position as The Truth. Everyone sees their truth as the truth, true enough, but some of us don't insist on the capital letters. In other words, ideologues (who are, by definition, not scientific) see their view of Truth as eternal, absolute, and universal; in contrast, non-ideologues are willing to modify their view of truth based on new evidence. The ideologue's failure to grasp this distinction is very frustrating for those of us who try to stay grounded in reality.
The scientist simply does not "believe" in science the way the Christian believes in Jesus, or the Communist believes in Marx.
The second you admit that you accept that your "truthes" in science may be completely bogus if the true nature of reality were completely different from what it actually is, I'll let you go.
Of course I "admit" that, and have never denied it. That's what science is: a view of reality based on our observations, which can change as the observations change.
Look, maybe a specific example will help. You wrote in another post, "I accept Jesus as my savior... Bible says that's sufficient for salvation... so what are you trying to accomplish? I'm still going to heaven." Okay, fair enough. Now, I'm guessing that there is absolutely nothing that I, or anyone, could ever do or say that would convince you that this is not the case; that accepting Jesus as your savior is a guarantee of salvation is The Truth in your view, and no evidence against this belief, nor any lack of evidence for it, is going to change your mind. And of course this is True not only for you, but for a great many other Christians.
On the other hand, there are still other Christians for whom Truth is different, who believe, quite as sincerely as you believe in your version of salvation, that salvation requires the observance of certain forms and rituals. Now, you may be right, or they may be right, or you may all be wrong; in any case, there's no way to test these propositions without dying. But you believe your Truth, and they believe theirs, and both parties will almost certainly go on doing so regardless of what you or I or they say.
But there is no belief in science that is like that. Not a single one. Every currently accepted scientific theory was once new, and untested, and many were rejected by the scientific community of the time; every one had to prove itself through repeated obser
Blindly asserting that anti-scientists must dictate claims of universal, absolute, and revealed truth.
Except I didn't say that; please notice the use of the phrase "tend to follow" in my original post.
In the same vein, Christianity in itself does not dictates absolute truth. There are a variety of Christianities out there, and fundamentally they agree on just a few points. There is a God, he had a son named Jesus who died to release us from our sins, and much of our most accepted foundations of faith are recorded in the Bible.
Just because some dictate authority from this position does not mean that all of them do.
Very true, and you'll notice that I never specified Christianity as the ideology in question. Again, please read what I actually wrote.
But I'm not trying to play coy here; obviously there are varieties of Christianity which do insist on their interpretation of the Bible as absolute truth, and I don't think it's a coincidence that people who believe this way tend to be profoundly anti-scientific. They caricature scientists as authoritarian because that's the way they think themselves; they honestly can't understand people who genuinely do not think the way they do. In their worldview, everyone has some kind of absolute faith, and if it's not God, it must be Science. Those are the only people I'm talking about here; unfortunately, as I said in my reply to another one of your posts, there are a lot of them.
Nor do I claim that Christians are the only ones who exhibit this behavior. Luddite hyper-environmentalists whose version of Absolute Truth is "The Environment" are just as bad; so are Randians who reject any government restrictions on industry even when industrial behavior presents a clear and present danger. Also, as I noted in my reply to your other post, Soviet Communism tended to rewrite science when it conflicted with their interpretation of Marx's Holy Writ -- I get the impression Chinese Communism is starting to grow out of this, but it's got a way to go yet.
In short, the problem isn't the ideology; it's the ideologues. The great advantage of science in relation to all the examples I mentioned above is that it's not an ideology at all, and thus ideologues -- the sort of people who need Something to believe in as The Truth, whatever that Something may be -- tend not to be attracted to it in the first place.
Your theology is sophisticated and admirable; unfortunately, it's also not typical of the people who use religion as a blunt instrument to attack science -- and like it or not, there are a lot of those people, and they have significant political power.
Science could indeed be used as a doctrine of control, but if it were, it would of necessity be warped so far that it would no longer be "science" by any reasonable definition of the word. In fact, there are historical examples: Lysenkoism and Intelligent Design spring immediately to mind, and there are probably others. In order to function, um, scientifically, science requires freedom of both thought and action.
Scientists have always admitted that they don't know everything. Various anti-science types like to caricature scientists as claiming to know everything, but this has no relation to reality. It is probably not a coincidence that the anti-scientists tend to follow specific religious and political ideologies in which the claim of universal, absolute, and revealed truth plays a central part.
Of course, this is why politicians have staff. I don't expect my Senator or Representative to understand all the technical issues involved in, say proprietary software vs. F/OSS, or DRM vs. fair use; I do, however, expect him to have someone on his staff who does, and who can help filter out the lobbyists' bullshit from legitimate input. The problem, it seems to me, is the "revolving door" in which staff members and lobbyists are very often the same people, going from one position to another and -- inevitably -- carrying money and biases with them.
Yes, I think it's a fair comparison, because the people making the decisions on which DBMS to use generally don't care about open-source vs. proprietary (or if they care, they care in the wrong way, but that's a whole 'nother discussion.) What they care about is how much the software costs; and MySQL (and Postgres, yes) costs exactly the same as the free proprietary crippleware: $0. So it's a perfectly fair comparison of "value for your non-dollar."
No, "not to start a flamewar" is old-school. These days, the tactic is to say something that you can be reasonably sure will get modded up to +5, but trying to make yourself look rebellious and daring by prefixing it with, "I know I'll get modded down for this, but..."
AFAIK, there's no real advantage to dual-core in a desktop; the whole idea of dual-core is to get, more or less, dual-CPU performance with single-CPU power consumption. For desktops, regular dual CPU's will be a lot cheaper and just as effective for a long time to come.
He's doing well in some areas but -- obviously -- not so well, to put it mildly in others. That's the problem with high-tech censorship; there's no identifiable voting bloc in Congress that's opposed to it. You can pretty much count on the liberals to stand up against press censorship, and the conservatives to stand up against religious censorship, and assorted ad hoc coalitions of left and right to stand up against political censorship; but when it comes to That Weird Geeky Stuff, there are no good guys. Left and right are equally in the *AA's pocket. There are a couple of individual politicians who do seem to have some spine on this issue, but there aren't enough of them to make a difference when the votes are counted.
Outside the government, it's pretty much the same story. The EFF fights the good fight, but they're small potatoes. The really big, influential civil rights groups which should be up in arms -- the ACLU and NRA both come to mind -- apparently don't have any understanding of how technological issues affect their core missions, and so the EFF is left pretty much on its own.
I'd like to believe that one of these days the *AA will just push a little too far, and Joe Sixpack will rise up in revolt... but I'm not optimistic.
The primary determinant for how much energy the bullet receives is how long the bullet stays in the barrel, giving the powder time to burn; this is why, for instance, a carbine has a much higher muzzle velocity than a pistol firing the same round. (On the other side of the coin, you could make a pistol chambered for rifle rounds, but it wouldn't be terribly useful; most of the powder would escape from the muzzle and burn up in the air, creating a hell of a muzzle flash but no extra velocity.) So a lighter bullet will have a higher muzzle velocity, but it probably won't be enough higher (increasing as the square root of 1/mass) to give it equivalent energy to a heavier bullet. Barrel length and powder burn speed are the most important factors. Typical rifle rounds are in the 22 to 30 caliber range, while typical handgun rounds are in the 38 to 45 caliber range, and while the rifle bullets are longer, they still run a bit lighter on average than the handgun bullets -- but they have much, much higher muzzle velocity and energy.
You're right about lighter bullets losing velocity faster, of course, but it's not as much a determinant as you might think -- consider the difference between a 7mm rifle round, which is a mid-sized hunting round, and a.45 pistol round, about the biggest practical pistol caliber for most people, which will usually be about half again its weight. Guess which one hits the target harder?
Now, all that being said, deformation on hitting the target is a good thing. (Er, good from the shooter's POV, not the target's...) One problem with small, fast bullets is that they can go right through the target, leaving a hole almost exactly the size of the bullet*, and not actually doing that much damage. Bullets which deform inside the target dump all their energy right there, and therefore have much more "stopping power." This is one reason, perhaps the primary reason, why the M16, despite having evolved into a pretty reliable weapon over the years since its disastrous first iteration in Vietnam, remains controversial. Many infantrymen, whose lives depend on "one shot, one kill," and medics, who see the results up close and personal (I've been both) believe that our troops would be better served by the older, heavier style of military rifle round. Not necessarily the 7.62 x 51 mm (NATO), which is overkill for anything but a sniper rifle or a machine gun, but say the 7.62 x 39 mm (Warsaw Pact) used in the AK. There's some benefit in being able to carry more ammunition with the smaller rounds... but more benefit in being sure that the guy on the other end of your sights is going to go down when you hit him.
* Forget all that crap you hear about "cavitation" and "small hole going in, big hole coming out." It's a myth, based on studies of firing bullets into blocks of gelatin which do not behave, in the least, like human (or animal) bodies. If you're looking for a weapon for self-defense, you will always be better off with a bigger bullet, as long as you can handle the weapon. Period. And big slow bullets (e.g.,.45 ACP) are about the best single-round choice for self-defense there is, because not only will they take down the target, if you miss they're much less likely to go through three walls and kill your neighbor's toddler. Even better is a short-barreled 16-ga. shotgun.
China isn't meaningfully Communist any more, and hasn't been for some time. It's totalitarian-capitalist -- and as much as those of us who live in (more or less) capitalist (more or less) democracies might like to believe otherwise, totalitarianism and capitalism can get along perfectly well together. The deal is, basically, "We'll let you make money as long as you keep your mouth shut; otherwise we'll have to kill you."
Conclusions about the convergence of China and the US are left as an exercise to the reader.
GMAFB. Every time I see a comment complaining about "groupthink" on Slashdot, whether generally as in this case or about some specific issue (Microsoft supporters, political conservatives, and Intelligent Design believers seem to be the most common whiners about this, but I'm sure I could think of others if I tried) it gets modded up to +5, Insightful -- thus demonstrating that the problem doesn't actually exist.
Are there tendencies on the part of/.ers to think certain ways? Sure; we're mostly young techies, which tends to go along with being anti-Microsoft, politically libertarian, and scientifically minded. But the claim that all or even a large majority of/.ers hold this set of views, and the further claim that opposing viewpoints are mindlessly suppressed, is simply not supported by a scan of any story dealing with any of these issues.
The general principle is that, on bases in the US, civilian laws (local, state, and federal) apply as long as they don't conflict with military law or regulation. So on Minot AFB in North Dakota, where I spent much of my tour, AF personnel could be prosecuted by civilian authorities for violating ND law, on or off base, as long as there wasn't a military law or regulation saying their actions were okay -- such as, e.g., the regulation allowing the base commander to allow people under 21 to drink; for a more extreme example, the base cops and some flightline personnel could shoot to kill anyone who even looked like they were threatening the security of the nuclear weapons stores, which is behavior that is generally illegal on routine civilian guard duty.
In reality, it was very rare for active-duty personnel to be prosecuted by civilian authorities for anything they did on base, since almost everything that's a crime under civilian law is also a crime under military law with much harsher penalties, but theoretically it could happen; off base, it was actually pretty common, particularly when it came to drinking and fighting... And civilians who committed crimes on base had to be turned over to civilian authorities; the base cops could arrest them, but they weren't subject to military law, and the base didn't have any civilian courts.
Overseas it's even more complicated. In friendly countries, such as the UK, where I also spent a fair amount of time, there's an agreement between the US and the host country called a SOFA, or Status Of Forces Agreement, which spells out the degree to which service personnel are or are not subject to local laws. And I do recall a case in which a guy who smuggled an Iraqi AK-47 back from Desert Storm was prosecuted by the British authorities for violation of their firearms laws, which are much stronger than those either in civilian US law or under the UCMJ (Uniform Code of Military Justice). However, it's worth noting that he was arrested by a British cop while trying to sell the weapon off-base; and again, while theoretically the AF could have turned him over to the British authorities for prosecution even if he'd never taken it off-base, they probably wouldn't have.
In unfriendly countries, of course, only military laws apply; no one is going to argue that Cuban law applies at Guantanamo Bay! (Or any other kind of law, apparently, but that's a whole 'nother discussion.)
The usual IANA(M)L disclaimers apply: I had to know something about military law in my roles both as a medic and as an NCO, but all this is off the top of my head, and it was a while ago. But as I remember it all, that's pretty much the way it worked.
> Funny, it's usually the right-wingers who insist you can't have morality without religion.
I've never seen proof of this.
[shrug] I don't know if it's ever been "proved," in the sense of a large-scale study of the correlation between right-wing political beliefs and the belief in religion as the source of morality; I do know that I've seen many, many right-wingers argue this position, and rarely (though not never) seen left-wingers do the same. Actually, that's a study I'd like to see.
> stupid, allegedly "moral" standards which have nothing to do with actual right or wrong tend to arise from religion
Such as?
Such as the idea that there's some inherent danger in mainstream movie theaters showing NC-17 movies.
Also such as: gay people getting married is a threat to straight people's marriages, students should learn creationism in science class, it's an appropriate use of the FBI's time to invesitgate "obscene" material on the internet, et bloody cetera.
In the Air Force, at least, when I was in (1989-1997) it was at the base commander's discretion whether to allow 18-20-year-old airmen to drink (on base only; if you went off base and drank, and violated local laws in the process, you were liable for both civilian and military penalties.) However, over the years I was in, the tendency was to get steadily more restrictive -- when I was under 21, I could drink on almost any base I went to, but by the time I got out (at the age of 27) there were very few bases where under-21 personnel could legally get a drink.
So, of course, they drove off base, got shitfaced, got into accidents, and the whole thing ended up creating enormous amounts of problems that just didn't exist when they could go do their drinking at the NCO club and then stumble home. (And as a medic, working in the base ER, I got to see the results of this up close and personal.) Ditto the situation on college campuses. Treating people like adults with respect to sex, money, and work but like children with respect to alcohol is one of the dumbest ideas society has ever come up with.
Most of the more "leftist" types I see on slashdot always thinks that moral standards in the community on any level is automatically associated with a religious group.
Funny, it's usually the right-wingers who insist you can't have morality without religion.
I think the leftist assumption is not that community moral standards arise from religion, but that stupid, allegedly "moral" standards which have nothing to do with actual right or wrong tend to arise from religion -- and in the US, at least, that assumption is usually correct. Believers and unbelievers alike agree that, e.g., murder, rape, and robbery are wrong, because those cause obvious and direct harm to other people. But it's almost universally believers who try to prevent other people from doing things that don't affect the believers' lives in the slightest.
Can't predict with any degree of certainty wether it will rain or snow a few days from now but they can predict that a crack in the ground now will form an ocean in a million years. In the middle of a desert. Ok.
Idiot.
First of all, this has nothing to do with climatology. But even if it did...
I can't predict with any degree of certainty where, when, or how you're going to die. I can, however, predict with a fair degree of certainty that in a million years, you'll be dead.
How many bugs does Microsoft Office have? Or, more to the point from Joe User's POV, how many irritating behaviors does it have, whether they're technically "bugs" or not? More than OpenOffice? Fewer? About the same?
All I know is, MS Office is almost physically painful to use for anything more complex than the simplest tasks. If OpenOffice can beat this "standard," it's doing well.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I was thinking about that as I wrote it. Hopefully the mods will be kind. ;)
If we weren't detaining people, tapping their phones, and beating information out of someone, I'd be pissed. I'm paying the government to protect me.
Da, tovarisch! Only bourgeois capitalist running-dog counter-revolutionaries will be detained, phone-tapped, and beaten! We glorious workers and peasants of the new socialist brotherhood of man have nothing to fair from our wise and just leaders! FOR THE MOTHERLAND!
I've juried story submissions, in a rather different context, and I can tell you what any editor, of any type, can tell you: 90+% of submissions are crap. (Yet another example of Sturgeon's Law in action.) They're either subliterate and unreadable, wacko rantings, or just plain boring, often some combination of all three. Crap. The number of people who make submissions that are even worth considering for the first cut is very, very small, and it's not surprising that people who make a lot of successful submissions are (almost tautologically) those who have figured out how to write submissions worth reading.
I agree that it sucks when "[t]he messenger becomes the story." But you know, Slashdot is like Usenet used to be (before Slashdot and various other Web forums largely took over Usenet's role, leaving most newsgroups as purely the domain of spammers and trolls, I mean) in that, while there is a hell of a lot of noise, there is also a lot of signal -- and the noise really isn't that hard to skip over. Most users, it seems to me, can train themselves to scan posts quickly, decide if they're germane to the story or just a bunch of conspiracy-theory nonsense, and page down to the comments with some meat.
The moderation system should make this easier. Now, I'm not a big fan of the "Offtopic" mod -- I don't remember the last time I used it -- but what I do when I have mod points is try to mod up only on-topic comments (as well as comments that are good in other ways, of course: interesting, insightful, etc.) so that, hopefully, those comments and the threads they spawn will rise to the top of the page and leave the trolls and conspiracy theorists and **Beatles-Beatles dissas 'n' Piquepaille-hatas, yo, down at the bottom where they belong.
BTW, the reason I don't like "Offtopic" is because I think it's often abused; many mods will mark a post that way when it's a perfectly legitimate reply to another post which is kinda sorta ontopic. For example, in many science stories (regardless of the type of science in question) you'll see people ranting about how dumb and ignorant scientists are, often including links to creationist/ID propaganda or some bullshit look-how-clever-I-am Michael Crichton speech; and they may (or may not) get modded as "Troll" or "Flamebait," but people who respond to them and try to explain to them how science really works get modded "Offtopic" because the explanation isn't directly relevant to the original story. This is a problem, because these ideas need to be addressed whenever they crop up, IMNSGDHO. See also: rational discussion of the advantages of Mac OS X in response to "L0L M4XZ 5UX0RZ PCZ R0X0RZ" posts, usually in any given Apple story. "Offtopic" isn't a bad mod category in itself, but I think it should be much more carefully used.
This is a weird conversation; it's like you're responding to some set of posts that are only vaguely similar to mine.
...
I'm sick of people trying to get away with "Well, I didn't SAY that."
Sometimes, yes, people say things with lots of subtext and then try to deny the subtext. Other times -- more often, I think -- they say "I didn't say that" because, you know, they actually didn't say that. The things you seem to think I said, I really didn't say, nor did I mean to imply.
Now shut up
Wow, that's some sophisticated debate technique you've got going there. I retreat in awe before your stunning display of logic.
(And in case you're wondering, THAT was subtext.)
You're making the assumption that EVERY who believes in science feels the same way as you.
No, I'm really not; again, if you go back and read what I actually wrote, you'll see that I'm very careful to use phrases like "tend to" when I'm talking about personality types and beliefs, on both sides of the argument. I make no claims to absolutes.
Truth is, everyone sees their position as "The Truth", or they wouldn't believe in it. Whether it's science or religion or whatever.
You've just turned yourself into Exhibit A for what I said above: "They caricature scientists as authoritarian because that's the way they think themselves; they honestly can't understand people who genuinely do not think the way they do. In their worldview, everyone has some kind of absolute faith, and if it's not God, it must be Science." No, not everyone sees their position as The Truth. Everyone sees their truth as the truth, true enough, but some of us don't insist on the capital letters. In other words, ideologues (who are, by definition, not scientific) see their view of Truth as eternal, absolute, and universal; in contrast, non-ideologues are willing to modify their view of truth based on new evidence. The ideologue's failure to grasp this distinction is very frustrating for those of us who try to stay grounded in reality.
The scientist simply does not "believe" in science the way the Christian believes in Jesus, or the Communist believes in Marx.
The second you admit that you accept that your "truthes" in science may be completely bogus if the true nature of reality were completely different from what it actually is, I'll let you go.
Of course I "admit" that, and have never denied it. That's what science is: a view of reality based on our observations, which can change as the observations change.
Look, maybe a specific example will help. You wrote in another post, "I accept Jesus as my savior... Bible says that's sufficient for salvation... so what are you trying to accomplish? I'm still going to heaven." Okay, fair enough. Now, I'm guessing that there is absolutely nothing that I, or anyone, could ever do or say that would convince you that this is not the case; that accepting Jesus as your savior is a guarantee of salvation is The Truth in your view, and no evidence against this belief, nor any lack of evidence for it, is going to change your mind. And of course this is True not only for you, but for a great many other Christians.
On the other hand, there are still other Christians for whom Truth is different, who believe, quite as sincerely as you believe in your version of salvation, that salvation requires the observance of certain forms and rituals. Now, you may be right, or they may be right, or you may all be wrong; in any case, there's no way to test these propositions without dying. But you believe your Truth, and they believe theirs, and both parties will almost certainly go on doing so regardless of what you or I or they say.
But there is no belief in science that is like that. Not a single one. Every currently accepted scientific theory was once new, and untested, and many were rejected by the scientific community of the time; every one had to prove itself through repeated obser
Blindly asserting that anti-scientists must dictate claims of universal, absolute, and revealed truth.
Except I didn't say that; please notice the use of the phrase "tend to follow" in my original post.
In the same vein, Christianity in itself does not dictates absolute truth. There are a variety of Christianities out there, and fundamentally they agree on just a few points. There is a God, he had a son named Jesus who died to release us from our sins, and much of our most accepted foundations of faith are recorded in the Bible.
Just because some dictate authority from this position does not mean that all of them do.
Very true, and you'll notice that I never specified Christianity as the ideology in question. Again, please read what I actually wrote.
But I'm not trying to play coy here; obviously there are varieties of Christianity which do insist on their interpretation of the Bible as absolute truth, and I don't think it's a coincidence that people who believe this way tend to be profoundly anti-scientific. They caricature scientists as authoritarian because that's the way they think themselves; they honestly can't understand people who genuinely do not think the way they do. In their worldview, everyone has some kind of absolute faith, and if it's not God, it must be Science. Those are the only people I'm talking about here; unfortunately, as I said in my reply to another one of your posts, there are a lot of them.
Nor do I claim that Christians are the only ones who exhibit this behavior. Luddite hyper-environmentalists whose version of Absolute Truth is "The Environment" are just as bad; so are Randians who reject any government restrictions on industry even when industrial behavior presents a clear and present danger. Also, as I noted in my reply to your other post, Soviet Communism tended to rewrite science when it conflicted with their interpretation of Marx's Holy Writ -- I get the impression Chinese Communism is starting to grow out of this, but it's got a way to go yet.
In short, the problem isn't the ideology; it's the ideologues. The great advantage of science in relation to all the examples I mentioned above is that it's not an ideology at all, and thus ideologues -- the sort of people who need Something to believe in as The Truth, whatever that Something may be -- tend not to be attracted to it in the first place.
Your theology is sophisticated and admirable; unfortunately, it's also not typical of the people who use religion as a blunt instrument to attack science -- and like it or not, there are a lot of those people, and they have significant political power.
Science could indeed be used as a doctrine of control, but if it were, it would of necessity be warped so far that it would no longer be "science" by any reasonable definition of the word. In fact, there are historical examples: Lysenkoism and Intelligent Design spring immediately to mind, and there are probably others. In order to function, um, scientifically, science requires freedom of both thought and action.
Scientists have always admitted that they don't know everything. Various anti-science types like to caricature scientists as claiming to know everything, but this has no relation to reality. It is probably not a coincidence that the anti-scientists tend to follow specific religious and political ideologies in which the claim of universal, absolute, and revealed truth plays a central part.
Of course, this is why politicians have staff. I don't expect my Senator or Representative to understand all the technical issues involved in, say proprietary software vs. F/OSS, or DRM vs. fair use; I do, however, expect him to have someone on his staff who does, and who can help filter out the lobbyists' bullshit from legitimate input. The problem, it seems to me, is the "revolving door" in which staff members and lobbyists are very often the same people, going from one position to another and -- inevitably -- carrying money and biases with them.
Yes, I think it's a fair comparison, because the people making the decisions on which DBMS to use generally don't care about open-source vs. proprietary (or if they care, they care in the wrong way, but that's a whole 'nother discussion.) What they care about is how much the software costs; and MySQL (and Postgres, yes) costs exactly the same as the free proprietary crippleware: $0. So it's a perfectly fair comparison of "value for your non-dollar."
No, "not to start a flamewar" is old-school. These days, the tactic is to say something that you can be reasonably sure will get modded up to +5, but trying to make yourself look rebellious and daring by prefixing it with, "I know I'll get modded down for this, but ..."
AFAIK, there's no real advantage to dual-core in a desktop; the whole idea of dual-core is to get, more or less, dual-CPU performance with single-CPU power consumption. For desktops, regular dual CPU's will be a lot cheaper and just as effective for a long time to come.
Or am I missing something here?
He's doing well in some areas but -- obviously -- not so well, to put it mildly in others. That's the problem with high-tech censorship; there's no identifiable voting bloc in Congress that's opposed to it. You can pretty much count on the liberals to stand up against press censorship, and the conservatives to stand up against religious censorship, and assorted ad hoc coalitions of left and right to stand up against political censorship; but when it comes to That Weird Geeky Stuff, there are no good guys. Left and right are equally in the *AA's pocket. There are a couple of individual politicians who do seem to have some spine on this issue, but there aren't enough of them to make a difference when the votes are counted.
... but I'm not optimistic.
Outside the government, it's pretty much the same story. The EFF fights the good fight, but they're small potatoes. The really big, influential civil rights groups which should be up in arms -- the ACLU and NRA both come to mind -- apparently don't have any understanding of how technological issues affect their core missions, and so the EFF is left pretty much on its own.
I'd like to believe that one of these days the *AA will just push a little too far, and Joe Sixpack will rise up in revolt
The primary determinant for how much energy the bullet receives is how long the bullet stays in the barrel, giving the powder time to burn; this is why, for instance, a carbine has a much higher muzzle velocity than a pistol firing the same round. (On the other side of the coin, you could make a pistol chambered for rifle rounds, but it wouldn't be terribly useful; most of the powder would escape from the muzzle and burn up in the air, creating a hell of a muzzle flash but no extra velocity.) So a lighter bullet will have a higher muzzle velocity, but it probably won't be enough higher (increasing as the square root of 1/mass) to give it equivalent energy to a heavier bullet. Barrel length and powder burn speed are the most important factors. Typical rifle rounds are in the 22 to 30 caliber range, while typical handgun rounds are in the 38 to 45 caliber range, and while the rifle bullets are longer, they still run a bit lighter on average than the handgun bullets -- but they have much, much higher muzzle velocity and energy.
.45 pistol round, about the biggest practical pistol caliber for most people, which will usually be about half again its weight. Guess which one hits the target harder?
...) One problem with small, fast bullets is that they can go right through the target, leaving a hole almost exactly the size of the bullet*, and not actually doing that much damage. Bullets which deform inside the target dump all their energy right there, and therefore have much more "stopping power." This is one reason, perhaps the primary reason, why the M16, despite having evolved into a pretty reliable weapon over the years since its disastrous first iteration in Vietnam, remains controversial. Many infantrymen, whose lives depend on "one shot, one kill," and medics, who see the results up close and personal (I've been both) believe that our troops would be better served by the older, heavier style of military rifle round. Not necessarily the 7.62 x 51 mm (NATO), which is overkill for anything but a sniper rifle or a machine gun, but say the 7.62 x 39 mm (Warsaw Pact) used in the AK. There's some benefit in being able to carry more ammunition with the smaller rounds ... but more benefit in being sure that the guy on the other end of your sights is going to go down when you hit him.
.45 ACP) are about the best single-round choice for self-defense there is, because not only will they take down the target, if you miss they're much less likely to go through three walls and kill your neighbor's toddler. Even better is a short-barreled 16-ga. shotgun.
You're right about lighter bullets losing velocity faster, of course, but it's not as much a determinant as you might think -- consider the difference between a 7mm rifle round, which is a mid-sized hunting round, and a
Now, all that being said, deformation on hitting the target is a good thing. (Er, good from the shooter's POV, not the target's
* Forget all that crap you hear about "cavitation" and "small hole going in, big hole coming out." It's a myth, based on studies of firing bullets into blocks of gelatin which do not behave, in the least, like human (or animal) bodies. If you're looking for a weapon for self-defense, you will always be better off with a bigger bullet, as long as you can handle the weapon. Period. And big slow bullets (e.g.,
China isn't meaningfully Communist any more, and hasn't been for some time. It's totalitarian-capitalist -- and as much as those of us who live in (more or less) capitalist (more or less) democracies might like to believe otherwise, totalitarianism and capitalism can get along perfectly well together. The deal is, basically, "We'll let you make money as long as you keep your mouth shut; otherwise we'll have to kill you."
Conclusions about the convergence of China and the US are left as an exercise to the reader.
HR "translates" that to "Must have Object-Oriented Perl experience."
And then the PHB's in charge of HR translate it to "Must be a Black Belt(tm) in Object-Orientated(tm) Perl process methodologies."
GMAFB. Every time I see a comment complaining about "groupthink" on Slashdot, whether generally as in this case or about some specific issue (Microsoft supporters, political conservatives, and Intelligent Design believers seem to be the most common whiners about this, but I'm sure I could think of others if I tried) it gets modded up to +5, Insightful -- thus demonstrating that the problem doesn't actually exist.
/.ers to think certain ways? Sure; we're mostly young techies, which tends to go along with being anti-Microsoft, politically libertarian, and scientifically minded. But the claim that all or even a large majority of /.ers hold this set of views, and the further claim that opposing viewpoints are mindlessly suppressed, is simply not supported by a scan of any story dealing with any of these issues.
Are there tendencies on the part of
Um ... that's not the broken window (usually just "window," not "windows") fallacy Znork was talking about, I think. This is.
The general principle is that, on bases in the US, civilian laws (local, state, and federal) apply as long as they don't conflict with military law or regulation. So on Minot AFB in North Dakota, where I spent much of my tour, AF personnel could be prosecuted by civilian authorities for violating ND law, on or off base, as long as there wasn't a military law or regulation saying their actions were okay -- such as, e.g., the regulation allowing the base commander to allow people under 21 to drink; for a more extreme example, the base cops and some flightline personnel could shoot to kill anyone who even looked like they were threatening the security of the nuclear weapons stores, which is behavior that is generally illegal on routine civilian guard duty.
... And civilians who committed crimes on base had to be turned over to civilian authorities; the base cops could arrest them, but they weren't subject to military law, and the base didn't have any civilian courts.
In reality, it was very rare for active-duty personnel to be prosecuted by civilian authorities for anything they did on base, since almost everything that's a crime under civilian law is also a crime under military law with much harsher penalties, but theoretically it could happen; off base, it was actually pretty common, particularly when it came to drinking and fighting
Overseas it's even more complicated. In friendly countries, such as the UK, where I also spent a fair amount of time, there's an agreement between the US and the host country called a SOFA, or Status Of Forces Agreement, which spells out the degree to which service personnel are or are not subject to local laws. And I do recall a case in which a guy who smuggled an Iraqi AK-47 back from Desert Storm was prosecuted by the British authorities for violation of their firearms laws, which are much stronger than those either in civilian US law or under the UCMJ (Uniform Code of Military Justice). However, it's worth noting that he was arrested by a British cop while trying to sell the weapon off-base; and again, while theoretically the AF could have turned him over to the British authorities for prosecution even if he'd never taken it off-base, they probably wouldn't have.
In unfriendly countries, of course, only military laws apply; no one is going to argue that Cuban law applies at Guantanamo Bay! (Or any other kind of law, apparently, but that's a whole 'nother discussion.)
The usual IANA(M)L disclaimers apply: I had to know something about military law in my roles both as a medic and as an NCO, but all this is off the top of my head, and it was a while ago. But as I remember it all, that's pretty much the way it worked.
> Funny, it's usually the right-wingers who insist you can't have morality without religion.
I've never seen proof of this.
[shrug] I don't know if it's ever been "proved," in the sense of a large-scale study of the correlation between right-wing political beliefs and the belief in religion as the source of morality; I do know that I've seen many, many right-wingers argue this position, and rarely (though not never) seen left-wingers do the same. Actually, that's a study I'd like to see.
> stupid, allegedly "moral" standards which have nothing to do with actual right or wrong tend to arise from religion
Such as?
Such as the idea that there's some inherent danger in mainstream movie theaters showing NC-17 movies.
Also such as: gay people getting married is a threat to straight people's marriages, students should learn creationism in science class, it's an appropriate use of the FBI's time to invesitgate "obscene" material on the internet, et bloody cetera.
In the Air Force, at least, when I was in (1989-1997) it was at the base commander's discretion whether to allow 18-20-year-old airmen to drink (on base only; if you went off base and drank, and violated local laws in the process, you were liable for both civilian and military penalties.) However, over the years I was in, the tendency was to get steadily more restrictive -- when I was under 21, I could drink on almost any base I went to, but by the time I got out (at the age of 27) there were very few bases where under-21 personnel could legally get a drink.
So, of course, they drove off base, got shitfaced, got into accidents, and the whole thing ended up creating enormous amounts of problems that just didn't exist when they could go do their drinking at the NCO club and then stumble home. (And as a medic, working in the base ER, I got to see the results of this up close and personal.) Ditto the situation on college campuses. Treating people like adults with respect to sex, money, and work but like children with respect to alcohol is one of the dumbest ideas society has ever come up with.
Most of the more "leftist" types I see on slashdot always thinks that moral standards in the community on any level is automatically associated with a religious group.
Funny, it's usually the right-wingers who insist you can't have morality without religion.
I think the leftist assumption is not that community moral standards arise from religion, but that stupid, allegedly "moral" standards which have nothing to do with actual right or wrong tend to arise from religion -- and in the US, at least, that assumption is usually correct. Believers and unbelievers alike agree that, e.g., murder, rape, and robbery are wrong, because those cause obvious and direct harm to other people. But it's almost universally believers who try to prevent other people from doing things that don't affect the believers' lives in the slightest.
Can't predict with any degree of certainty wether it will rain or snow a few days from now but they can predict that a crack in the ground now will form an ocean in a million years. In the middle of a desert. Ok.
...
Idiot.
First of all, this has nothing to do with climatology. But even if it did
I can't predict with any degree of certainty where, when, or how you're going to die. I can, however, predict with a fair degree of certainty that in a million years, you'll be dead.
Do you see the difference now?
How many bugs does Microsoft Office have? Or, more to the point from Joe User's POV, how many irritating behaviors does it have, whether they're technically "bugs" or not? More than OpenOffice? Fewer? About the same?
All I know is, MS Office is almost physically painful to use for anything more complex than the simplest tasks. If OpenOffice can beat this "standard," it's doing well.
[snort]