Ideally, NASA will keep doing the big projects that are too expensive for individual universities (I doubt even Harvard has the money to build something like the Hubble on its own, and no grant is going to be big enough) and which don't have immediate profit potential for industry (in the very long run, there's a lot of money to be made by sending people Out There, but it will take decades, not quarters, to develop) while encouraging smaller, faster projects to be done by academia and industry. Basically NASA should be a trailblazer for missions no one else has the resources to do -- but which will hopefully, eventually, become routine.
That's the idea, anyway. I want to believe that it will work out that way. But considering the way things have gone since the glory days of Apollo, my optimism is damn near gone.
Boeing and Lockheed Martin, which manufacture and sell the Delta and Atlas expendable launch vehicles, have kept any aspirations of becoming NASA's space station truckers under wraps.
"As long as it's a level playing field, we're open to compete with them any time and anywhere," said SpaceX's Williams.
The necessary sample size is determined by the population parameters. 300 may or may not be a large enough sample; anyone know offhand what the population variance for IQ is?
Oh, I understand the idea; I just think it will fail horribly. Raising prices on the most popular music won't encourage people to spend their money elsewehere -- it will encourage them not to spend their money at all, pirate the stuff they know they want and ignore the rest of the catalog. Which means the popular artists make less money, and the less popular artists make... um... lemme do some calculations here... carry the two... oh yeah, ZERO.
"Isn't 99 cents too much to pay for music that appeals to just a few people?"
No, apparently it's not.
This is a striking example of how dumb the "popular=good" meme is. When I buy music, or anything else, I don't care what it's worth to other people; I care what it's worth to me, whether I'm one of a hundred, a thousand, a million, or a billion.
Aaargh. Why the hell are people trying to fix something that's not broken? (Well, okay, I know why the RIAA is trying; what's this guy's excuse?) Tiered pricing, supply-and-demand pricing (hey economist guy: the supply is unlimited!) or any other fancy pricing scheme that requires people to pay more than 99 cents per song doesn't work. 99 cents per song, OTOH, does work. That's what online music buyers have decided, en masse, they'll pay for legal music downloads. Charge more and piracy looks a lot more appealing that paying for it. That's the reality.
Not to mention that it just makes sense: buy one song, pay x, where x is some reasonable amount (say... oh... just for example... 99 cents); buy two songs, pay 2x, etc. People want their music, they don't want to have to solve an accounting problem to figure out how much they'll pay for it. "Ten songs, ten bucks, plus I save a dime. Cool." That's how people want to buy music, and that's why iTunes has succeeded while every other pay-for-download system has pretty much crashed.
Stock market pricing is one of the stupidest ideas I've ever heard WRT the music industry... and you know, given the long sad history of stupidity in the music industry, that's saying a lot.
Because there are two opposing tendencies at work. One is that any organization (business, governmental, religious, etc.) tries to expand itself, both within its current domain and by moving into others. The other is that most organizations work best when, in fact, they do one thing well rather than by doing lots of things poorly -- and preferably at a smaller scale than that of the megacorporations, because any organization that big inevitably spends more of its resources on administration than it does on production. In a rational economy, we'd see a bunch of small-to-medium-sized niche businesses all competing with and selling to each other; but of course organizations are run by people, specifically bureacrats, who are not rational, especially when they're acting in the service of their own bureaucracy. To paraphrase Jefferson, no one who wants to run anything should be allowed to do so -- but those are the types of people who inevitably end up running things, because no one else wants to job.
I do know the theory of evolution and the theory of probability...
Your argument shows quite clearly that you don't know the theory of evolution. Hint: the dumbed-down, strawman version you present here is standard creationist propaganda.
And for that matter, "I know probability theory" (Keanu says: Whoa!) is a pretty ambitious statement. If you haven't (at least) studied it intensively at the graduate level, you probably don't have the first clue. Very very smart people spend their entire working lives trying to figure out how probability really works.
... of someone who's very knowledgeable in one technical field (in this case, particle physics) assuming that this knowledge carries over into another, almost unrelated technical field (in this case, computer science.) I'm sure that Dr. Carrigan is a very, very smart guy, but odds are he uses his computer as a tool without a whole lot more understanding of its inner workings than that possessed by the typical business user.
Jebus Crispy. If I were going to design a parody Web site to make fun of overpriced consulting firms that do nothing but spout buzzwords and suck up their clients' cash... that's the site I'd make.
I'm an American, is what I am, which means that if I try to drink as much as the typical Scotsman, I'll fall down spouting some unintelligible babble centered somewhere in the North Atlantic.
That law must have been changed at some point. Last time I was in Scotland, I drank... um... quite a bit... of heather ale. The hoppy ales still predominated, of course, but it seemed like at least half the pubs had heather ale on tap. Good stuff; I do love my hops, but I'll certainly take a pint or five of heather on occasion.
There aren't any. XML databases are a dumb idea, and they will never perform as well as regular relational databases. The best thing you can do is store your data the regular way, and use an application layer to read and write XML as needed.
(Okay, that was a flip answer. Here's a serious one.)
The timescale for major evolutionary change in multicellular life is so enormous that we're not going to see bacteria evolving into fish. However, I've noticed that when creationists use this argument, which turns up in many different forms, they have no idea how diverse microbial life actually is. When you say "they evolve, but they remain a bacteria," I think you have no idea just how different from each other various forms of bacteria actually are. There's more difference, in fact, between various strains of bacteria that we have observed evolving into each other than there is between a fish and a human being.
Any "balanced" exhibit would come down firmly on the side of Darwin to the total exclusion of the others. Both ID and Young Earth creationism are so full of crap that there's no way to present them accurately and scientifically without alienating the creationist (including ID) crowd. Asking for a "balanced" Darwin exhibit that gives fair play to creationism is like asking for a "balanced" Hubble exhibit that gives fair play to astrology.
Re:"Sorry. Pop Culture Reference. Won't Happen Aga
on
Movies in Fifteen Minutes
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· Score: 3, Insightful
But isn't pop culture by its very nature, not something which one may have an impressive grasp upon.
No.
We swim in pop culture (by its very nature, yes) but that doesn't mean we necessarily understand it. People who do understand it -- which is a necessary part of being able to satirize it well -- can be quite impressive in their knowledge.
Anyway, ancient Greek authors weren't always "ancient," if you see what I mean. Sophocles was the pop culture of his day. I'd say that being able to understand the culture you actually live in takes just as much work as understanding one that's now frozen in time.
Oh, please. Any/. story with any geographical implications whatsoever is going to be full of all kinds of regional stereotypes. And I say, as a non-Southerner but with pretty deep roots in the South, that this Southern persecution complex is getting kind of old. The Yankees burned down the old plantation home a long time ago; get over it.
Re:Slackers, timid kids and smart kids.
on
The Prodigy Puzzle
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· Score: 1
Yeah, I noticed that, and it's something geeks do a lot -- kind of a less melodramatic version of, "They laughed at me, they called me mad, I'll show them, I'll show them all!" We like to imagine that after high school the rules are different, that brains and hard work are rewarded while social skills and good looks and talents not directly applicable to the working world (e.g. athletic ability) don't count any more.
But you know what? It's not true. That dumbass jock who tormented you when you were in high school? Now he's got an MBA, and he makes twice as much money as you and is quite possibly running (or thinks he's running) your company. That ditzy-but-gorgeous cheerleader who cut you dead when you finally got up the guts to ask her out? Now a trophy wife for an older version of the jock. That pothead slacker who snickered at you for actually carrying books around? Well, okay, probably still a pothead slacker (unless he's making a living in, um, pharmaceutical supply) but he's also probably a lot happier and less stressed than any of the rest -- the jock, the cheerleader, and you.
This may sound bitter, but it's not. The key is to do something that you think is worth doing, and accept that in most cases, that's all the reward you're going to get. Sure, you might get a prestigious fellowship or some other kind of professional recognition -- but probably not, and even if you do, that's not going to hold anyone's attention for more than ten seconds when the NCAA championships are on TV. So what? As long as you're making a decent living and using your brain, you can just keep on doing it, and rest secure in the knowledge that it's your work that builds the world the rest of those people are just living in, whether they ever know it or not.
The point is that in 500 years we know we will not be in the technological situation portrayed in the movie, and this, amongst many other things, makes it completely absurd.
Well, let's see. 500 years ago, a well-designed sailing ship was the peak of transportation technology; arquebuses were the stealth fighters and smart bombs of the day; no one had any idea what caused disease other than an "imbalance of bodily humors;" calculus hadn't been invented (or discovered, depending on your POV); books were not only the only means of long-term information storage, but were so expensive as to be completely beyond the reach of the common man... etc. I think that honestly, there are very few scientific and technological advances that you can forecast for 500 years out and not have at least a decent chance of being right.
Alien was a horror movie, and Aliens was a war movie; both of them were IMO very very good examples of their respective genres, but they're only tangentially science fiction. Of course, that's true of an awful lot of cinematic SF. Star Trek, for all its sins, is one of the few TV/movie SF worlds that is really about the future rather than just happening to take place there.
What these fashionistas clearly don't get is that all of this stuff about How You're Supposed To Dress At Work is completely arbitrary. People make it up. If people decide a suit and tie is the appropriate clothing for work, then that's the appropriate clothing for work. If they decide a t-shirt and jeans is appropriate, well, ditto. There is no natural law that says one is "professional" and the other isn't.
Whenever anyone starts talking to me about ties, I talk to them about powdered wigs.
Slashdot Mirror
Ideally, NASA will keep doing the big projects that are too expensive for individual universities (I doubt even Harvard has the money to build something like the Hubble on its own, and no grant is going to be big enough) and which don't have immediate profit potential for industry (in the very long run, there's a lot of money to be made by sending people Out There, but it will take decades, not quarters, to develop) while encouraging smaller, faster projects to be done by academia and industry. Basically NASA should be a trailblazer for missions no one else has the resources to do -- but which will hopefully, eventually, become routine.
That's the idea, anyway. I want to believe that it will work out that way. But considering the way things have gone since the glory days of Apollo, my optimism is damn near gone.
Boeing and Lockheed Martin, which manufacture and sell the Delta and Atlas expendable launch vehicles, have kept any aspirations of becoming NASA's space station truckers under wraps.
"As long as it's a level playing field, we're open to compete with them any time and anywhere," said SpaceX's Williams.
Level playing field. Any bets on that?
</cynical>
Well, yes, that would help the situation quite a bit.
The necessary sample size is determined by the population parameters. 300 may or may not be a large enough sample; anyone know offhand what the population variance for IQ is?
Oh, I understand the idea; I just think it will fail horribly. Raising prices on the most popular music won't encourage people to spend their money elsewehere -- it will encourage them not to spend their money at all, pirate the stuff they know they want and ignore the rest of the catalog. Which means the popular artists make less money, and the less popular artists make ... um ... lemme do some calculations here ... carry the two ... oh yeah, ZERO.
"Isn't 99 cents too much to pay for music that appeals to just a few people?"
... oh ... just for example ... 99 cents); buy two songs, pay 2x, etc. People want their music, they don't want to have to solve an accounting problem to figure out how much they'll pay for it. "Ten songs, ten bucks, plus I save a dime. Cool." That's how people want to buy music, and that's why iTunes has succeeded while every other pay-for-download system has pretty much crashed.
... and you know, given the long sad history of stupidity in the music industry, that's saying a lot.
No, apparently it's not.
This is a striking example of how dumb the "popular=good" meme is. When I buy music, or anything else, I don't care what it's worth to other people; I care what it's worth to me, whether I'm one of a hundred, a thousand, a million, or a billion.
Aaargh. Why the hell are people trying to fix something that's not broken? (Well, okay, I know why the RIAA is trying; what's this guy's excuse?) Tiered pricing, supply-and-demand pricing (hey economist guy: the supply is unlimited!) or any other fancy pricing scheme that requires people to pay more than 99 cents per song doesn't work. 99 cents per song, OTOH, does work. That's what online music buyers have decided, en masse, they'll pay for legal music downloads. Charge more and piracy looks a lot more appealing that paying for it. That's the reality.
Not to mention that it just makes sense: buy one song, pay x, where x is some reasonable amount (say
Stock market pricing is one of the stupidest ideas I've ever heard WRT the music industry
Because there are two opposing tendencies at work. One is that any organization (business, governmental, religious, etc.) tries to expand itself, both within its current domain and by moving into others. The other is that most organizations work best when, in fact, they do one thing well rather than by doing lots of things poorly -- and preferably at a smaller scale than that of the megacorporations, because any organization that big inevitably spends more of its resources on administration than it does on production. In a rational economy, we'd see a bunch of small-to-medium-sized niche businesses all competing with and selling to each other; but of course organizations are run by people, specifically bureacrats, who are not rational, especially when they're acting in the service of their own bureaucracy. To paraphrase Jefferson, no one who wants to run anything should be allowed to do so -- but those are the types of people who inevitably end up running things, because no one else wants to job.
I do know the theory of evolution and the theory of probability ...
Your argument shows quite clearly that you don't know the theory of evolution. Hint: the dumbed-down, strawman version you present here is standard creationist propaganda.
And for that matter, "I know probability theory" (Keanu says: Whoa!) is a pretty ambitious statement. If you haven't (at least) studied it intensively at the graduate level, you probably don't have the first clue. Very very smart people spend their entire working lives trying to figure out how probability really works.
... of someone who's very knowledgeable in one technical field (in this case, particle physics) assuming that this knowledge carries over into another, almost unrelated technical field (in this case, computer science.) I'm sure that Dr. Carrigan is a very, very smart guy, but odds are he uses his computer as a tool without a whole lot more understanding of its inner workings than that possessed by the typical business user.
Jebus Crispy. If I were going to design a parody Web site to make fun of overpriced consulting firms that do nothing but spout buzzwords and suck up their clients' cash ... that's the site I'd make.
Heh.
I'm an American, is what I am, which means that if I try to drink as much as the typical Scotsman, I'll fall down spouting some unintelligible babble centered somewhere in the North Atlantic.
The globe is known for being a horrible, LEFTIST newspaper.
Perhaps you need to change your definition of "leftist" to fit reality.
That law must have been changed at some point. Last time I was in Scotland, I drank ... um ... quite a bit ... of heather ale. The hoppy ales still predominated, of course, but it seemed like at least half the pubs had heather ale on tap. Good stuff; I do love my hops, but I'll certainly take a pint or five of heather on occasion.
There aren't any. XML databases are a dumb idea, and they will never perform as well as regular relational databases. The best thing you can do is store your data the regular way, and use an application layer to read and write XML as needed.
show me a bacteria that has become a fish
Go fishing.
Catch a fish.
There you go.
(Okay, that was a flip answer. Here's a serious one.)
The timescale for major evolutionary change in multicellular life is so enormous that we're not going to see bacteria evolving into fish. However, I've noticed that when creationists use this argument, which turns up in many different forms, they have no idea how diverse microbial life actually is. When you say "they evolve, but they remain a bacteria," I think you have no idea just how different from each other various forms of bacteria actually are. There's more difference, in fact, between various strains of bacteria that we have observed evolving into each other than there is between a fish and a human being.
Any "balanced" exhibit would come down firmly on the side of Darwin to the total exclusion of the others. Both ID and Young Earth creationism are so full of crap that there's no way to present them accurately and scientifically without alienating the creationist (including ID) crowd. Asking for a "balanced" Darwin exhibit that gives fair play to creationism is like asking for a "balanced" Hubble exhibit that gives fair play to astrology.
But isn't pop culture by its very nature, not something which one may have an impressive grasp upon.
No.
We swim in pop culture (by its very nature, yes) but that doesn't mean we necessarily understand it. People who do understand it -- which is a necessary part of being able to satirize it well -- can be quite impressive in their knowledge.
Anyway, ancient Greek authors weren't always "ancient," if you see what I mean. Sophocles was the pop culture of his day. I'd say that being able to understand the culture you actually live in takes just as much work as understanding one that's now frozen in time.
Oh, please. Any /. story with any geographical implications whatsoever is going to be full of all kinds of regional stereotypes. And I say, as a non-Southerner but with pretty deep roots in the South, that this Southern persecution complex is getting kind of old. The Yankees burned down the old plantation home a long time ago; get over it.
Yeah, I noticed that, and it's something geeks do a lot -- kind of a less melodramatic version of, "They laughed at me, they called me mad, I'll show them, I'll show them all!" We like to imagine that after high school the rules are different, that brains and hard work are rewarded while social skills and good looks and talents not directly applicable to the working world (e.g. athletic ability) don't count any more.
But you know what? It's not true. That dumbass jock who tormented you when you were in high school? Now he's got an MBA, and he makes twice as much money as you and is quite possibly running (or thinks he's running) your company. That ditzy-but-gorgeous cheerleader who cut you dead when you finally got up the guts to ask her out? Now a trophy wife for an older version of the jock. That pothead slacker who snickered at you for actually carrying books around? Well, okay, probably still a pothead slacker (unless he's making a living in, um, pharmaceutical supply) but he's also probably a lot happier and less stressed than any of the rest -- the jock, the cheerleader, and you.
This may sound bitter, but it's not. The key is to do something that you think is worth doing, and accept that in most cases, that's all the reward you're going to get. Sure, you might get a prestigious fellowship or some other kind of professional recognition -- but probably not, and even if you do, that's not going to hold anyone's attention for more than ten seconds when the NCAA championships are on TV. So what? As long as you're making a decent living and using your brain, you can just keep on doing it, and rest secure in the knowledge that it's your work that builds the world the rest of those people are just living in, whether they ever know it or not.
The point is that in 500 years we know we will not be in the technological situation portrayed in the movie, and this, amongst many other things, makes it completely absurd.
... etc. I think that honestly, there are very few scientific and technological advances that you can forecast for 500 years out and not have at least a decent chance of being right.
Well, let's see. 500 years ago, a well-designed sailing ship was the peak of transportation technology; arquebuses were the stealth fighters and smart bombs of the day; no one had any idea what caused disease other than an "imbalance of bodily humors;" calculus hadn't been invented (or discovered, depending on your POV); books were not only the only means of long-term information storage, but were so expensive as to be completely beyond the reach of the common man
Alien was a horror movie, and Aliens was a war movie; both of them were IMO very very good examples of their respective genres, but they're only tangentially science fiction. Of course, that's true of an awful lot of cinematic SF. Star Trek, for all its sins, is one of the few TV/movie SF worlds that is really about the future rather than just happening to take place there.
No one has ever claimed that dinosaurs only ate each other.
Precedent, gentlemen, precedent.
YES, exactly.
What these fashionistas clearly don't get is that all of this stuff about How You're Supposed To Dress At Work is completely arbitrary. People make it up. If people decide a suit and tie is the appropriate clothing for work, then that's the appropriate clothing for work. If they decide a t-shirt and jeans is appropriate, well, ditto. There is no natural law that says one is "professional" and the other isn't.
Whenever anyone starts talking to me about ties, I talk to them about powdered wigs.
Stalking Horse.
Ah, that's it. Thanks.