IIRC, Mars is geologically (or "areologically," if you prefer) dead -- obviously it had significant volcanic activity a long time ago, as evidenced by Olympus Mons, but none that we've ever detected going on now or in the recent past. So fluctuating methane levels, while they don't demand a biological explanation, certainly seem to point that way.
Well, this way for cheap publicity (and desire to play god). There are plenty of other viruses that can be used as a template, but they chose the most inappropriate one. Reminds me of one of the first attempts to make a HIV vaccine in 1989. In that case some of the HIV surface proteins were introduced right into the region of genome instability of the polio virus. Forgot exactly which journal did I read that article, but I am still having shivers when I think about it.
Oh, for God's sake. (So to speak.) I guarantee you they're not using HIV for publicity -- a cure for cancer would guarantee publicity enough, no matter how they do it. And "playing god" has nothing to do with it either, unless you define any attempt to cure disease as such.
They are using HIV for the very simple reason that there are no other known viruses which operate exactly the way HIV does, and because they believe HIV provides a unique opportunity to target cancer cells. If you go hunting elephants, you don't use a.22 -- you grab a rifle that has a reasonable chance to do the job.
Well, as a Democrat, I remember a time when the Democrats were in control of both the White House and Congress, and I was feeling very optimistic and warm'n'fuzzy about my party, and a lot of Republicans were talking about the devastation of their party and how they had to compromise and accomodate themselves to the new political realities... and all of a sudden the most visible Republican politician in the country was this screaming firebrand, who was stereotyped as a far right-winger (he wasn't, really, but both his supporters and his opponents seemed to like to paint him that way) who had A Master Plan to lead his party back to power.
And as a Democrat, I was rubbing my hands with glee. This guy is a nutcase, I thought. He'll take the Republicans down into permanent ruin. They're finished. I can't believe they let this guy get this much power. Heh heh heh.
ethical standards about what we want to achieve and how far we are willing to go
It is ethical to engage in research which may heal people suffering from horrible diseases. It is unethical to throw up roadblocks to such research based on vague fears about Things Man Was Not Meant To Know.
What makes the Web the Web is hyperlinking, period. Using an image at another site on your own page isn't the same thing.
I kinda sorta halfway agree with you about "deep linking" in its original sense: if there's a really good page at http://www.bigco.com/foo/bar/spam/eggs/x/y/z.html, and you want to have a link on your page that says "Click here to read this really good page," it's really dumb for BigCo Inc.(R)(c)(tm) to force you to link to the main page at bigco.com so people have to navigate through their site to get to the page in question. That kind of thing is a violation of the spirit of the Web, I agree. But neither BigCo nor (more often) some guy running a site out of his basement on a 256k DSL line is obligated to be your image hosting service.
Seriously, that's why I added "... not in the sense you're thinking." It's "news" in the most general sense, in that it's a source for information about what's going on in the world. But it's not a news organization the way the other examples I mentioned are, and if it tried to conform to the same standards they do, it would be pretty damn boring.
No, I really don't think I did -- and I say this as a pretty solid leftie myself. The Economist's biases are plain in their writing, but they're more hyper-capitalist than "far right" in the sense I think that term is usually defined. Note that they've written favorably not only of F/OSS but also of other such "liberal" causes as drug legalization, and have (finally) started to look skeptically on Bush's foreign adventurism. Generally, they favor whatever they think will be good for business, which does not necessarily equate to what's good for the guys with the jackboots and high collars.
Or what Fox would be like if, instead of being run by right-wingers from top to bottom, they switched positions every fifteen minutes: first have the news as reported by a fascist, then by a communist, then by an anarchist, then by a Randroid, then by a monarchist...
and/. editors have to remember to remove personal notes from the stories.
Why?
Folks,/. is not a news organization, not in the sense you're apparently thinking. It's not The Economist or the NYT or Reuters or even, God help me, USA Today. It's basically a blog, where people write in with things they, in their personal opinions, consider interesting, and other people respond with their own opinions. If what you want is Just The Facts, Ma'am, then read the "Technology" section on the Yahoo newsfeed.
... for the flood of right-wing complaints about the "liberal media." Expect challenges to the "most insightful English-language news publication" from devotees of the Washington Times and Little Green Footballs.;)
Pre-emptive strike: when The Economist, which is the leading voice of center-right journalism, speaks favorably of F/OSS, it's time to drop the "communism" line and come up with something else, folks.
Oh, really? How many officers or senior NCO's have been court-martialed, or even Article 15'ed, over what happened at Abu Ghraib? Do you think that any will be, ever?
Okay, maybe "without even a black mark" was an exaggeration -- I'm sure there were some reprimands. But if we're sending junior enlisted to prison, those in the chain of command above them, who knew what was happening and almost certainly ordered them to do it, should pay at least an equal penalty
I think you're missing the point: it's not about the ideology, it's about the people following it; more specifically, to what level and what degree.
A bit of perspective here: my father's family are Russian and Lithuanian Jews, and a good 2/3 of them simply vanished in the Holocaust. I'm very glad that the Allies after the war prosecuted the top Nazis, and that later, they and other countries (particularly Israel, for obvious reasons) put a great deal of time and effort into tracking down the ones who escaped. But -- and I don't think I'm alone in this -- the last few prosecutions made me acutely uncomfortable. I really don't see the point in tracking down old men who were brainwashed teenagers then and putting them on trial for something that took place more than half a lifetime ago. Presumably there are a fair number of them still alive, and you know what? I don't care. It's over. Let it go.
BTW, I'm also a Desert Storm vet, and I'm as shocked and horrified as anyone at what happened at Abu Ghraib. But what pisses me off is the whitewash, where they hang a few enlisted grunts out to dry, and the officers and senior NCO's, who IMNSGDHO had to not only know what was going on, but in fact explicitly encourage it, get off without even a black mark in the personnel files. I also believe quite strongly that the appropriate investigations and prosecutions should take place quickly; five or ten years would be much too late. "Justice delayed is justice denied." And if we can't get it done in a reasonable time, then it will be necessary, however distasteful we may find this necessity, to let it go.
The analogy here should be obvious. By all means, prosecute the top people for the crimes of the Polish Communist regime, which were indeed many and terrible. But the low-level informants, the ones who took a few extra zlotys for passing on a name or a photo? For God's sake, people, it's over. Let it go.
Why do folks constantly reinvent the same thing? No or little borrowing. All customized.
You know, I have to say that reuse is overrated, in any language you can name. I will only use someone else's code -- whether it's a single function or an entire project -- if it's well-documented and shows predictable, easily understood behavior. Very often it is easier to reinvent the wheel than to try to fit someone else's wheel onto the car you're building, especially if that wheel seems to be a good all-around wheel, but in fact shows a nasty tendency to come off when driving between 63 and 71 mph while bearing slightly to the left with a northwest wind under a waning quarter moon. On Tuesdays.
Re:Tablespork, you must have been the only one
on
Apple Updates PowerBooks
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Every single time any CPU (x86, PowerPC, SPARC, whatever) gets faster, someone always asks the question, "Does anyone really need this?"
... if you are absolutely, positively sure that physics research is what you want to do with your life. Your debts, if they're student loans, can be deferred while you're in grad school. (And if they're not student loans, then get all the loans you can and put them toward paying down your other debts -- 3% student loan interest beats 15% credit card interest any day of the week.) In the long run, you'll come out ahead, financially, professionally, and personally.
OTOH, if you're not absolutely, positively sure, then just get a job and work hard and make as much money as you can for a while, and then after a few years, when you've paid down your debts and hopefully have some money in the bank, you can decide if you really want to commit yourself full-time to research.
In any case, don't worry about being typecast, IMO. Grad school admission committees aren't going to look at your work history and say, "Oh, this guy's just a programmer, we can't possibly teach him physics." If anything, they'll be more impressed by a wide variety of experience -- not to mention that there is a desperate need, in just about every scientific field, for researchers who also know how to program. And once you have your Ph.D., nobody cares what you did for a living beforehand. One of my best professors put himself through school, from day one as a freshman to the day he got his doctorate, as a short-order cook. Nobody in the department ever asked him to fry up some bacon and eggs.
I am under the impression it may be best to work on your masters while being employed.
There are advantages and disadvantages to this. I'm just finishing up my M.S. on this plan; while it's allowed me to maintain a fairly luxurious (by my standards, anyway) lifestyle while I've been in school, it's also been a hellish amount of work, and I haven't been able to devote as much energy to work or school as I'd have liked. The way I look at it is that any graduate degree worth getting is hard, and any job worth doing is hard, and so it stands to reason that doing both at the same time is going to be really hard.
I'm glad I did it, but... next year I'm going to be starting on my Ph.D. studies, and I'm going to be doing it full-time on a research assistant's stipend. This means cutting my income roughly in half, which in turn means downgrading my lifestyle by a fair bit -- and you know what? I'm okay with that. I've lived on a lot less money than I make now before in my life, and I can do it again. It will be worth it to get some sleep every once in a while.
Yes, exactly. Business is about the easiest thing you can major in, in any college, at any level. It's "education" for people who want a degree but are scared of using their brains.
A number of people who were in my undergrad CS classes with me took upper-division B-school courses. They always got A's, and didn't have to work very hard for them, either. Now imagine how your typical management major would do walking into an upper-division CS course.
Um, "Arab" is an ethnicity, not a religion. The majority of Arabs are Muslims, of course, but there are also Christian Arabs, Jewish Arabs (yes, really!), Zoroastrian Arabs, Hindu Arabs, and, one assumes, atheist Arabs, although those who live surrounded by the aforementioned groups probably tend to keep pretty quiet about it.
And you know, while it's almost certainly true that most Arabs are Muslims, I'm not sure that the reverse is true. Indonesia is the world's largest Muslim country; there's also Bangladesh, Pakistan, and large portions of India. That's a hell of a lot of people, almost none of them speaking Arabic as a native tongue.
PC is a disease that infects both Left and Right; it may please right-wingers to pretend otherwise, but that's the way it is. F'rinstance, it's terribly PC for people who never had the guts to join the service themselves to go on loudly about how they "support the troops."
Slashdot Mirror
Ah hah, I didn't know that. Thanks!
IIRC, Mars is geologically (or "areologically," if you prefer) dead -- obviously it had significant volcanic activity a long time ago, as evidenced by Olympus Mons, but none that we've ever detected going on now or in the recent past. So fluctuating methane levels, while they don't demand a biological explanation, certainly seem to point that way.
Well, this way for cheap publicity (and desire to play god). There are plenty of other viruses that can be used as a template, but they chose the most inappropriate one. Reminds me of one of the first attempts to make a HIV vaccine in 1989. In that case some of the HIV surface proteins were introduced right into the region of genome instability of the polio virus. Forgot exactly which journal did I read that article, but I am still having shivers when I think about it.
.22 -- you grab a rifle that has a reasonable chance to do the job.
Oh, for God's sake. (So to speak.) I guarantee you they're not using HIV for publicity -- a cure for cancer would guarantee publicity enough, no matter how they do it. And "playing god" has nothing to do with it either, unless you define any attempt to cure disease as such.
They are using HIV for the very simple reason that there are no other known viruses which operate exactly the way HIV does, and because they believe HIV provides a unique opportunity to target cancer cells. If you go hunting elephants, you don't use a
Well, as a Democrat, I remember a time when the Democrats were in control of both the White House and Congress, and I was feeling very optimistic and warm'n'fuzzy about my party, and a lot of Republicans were talking about the devastation of their party and how they had to compromise and accomodate themselves to the new political realities ... and all of a sudden the most visible Republican politician in the country was this screaming firebrand, who was stereotyped as a far right-winger (he wasn't, really, but both his supporters and his opponents seemed to like to paint him that way) who had A Master Plan to lead his party back to power.
And as a Democrat, I was rubbing my hands with glee. This guy is a nutcase, I thought. He'll take the Republicans down into permanent ruin. They're finished. I can't believe they let this guy get this much power. Heh heh heh.
That politician's name was Newt Gingrich.
ethical standards about what we want to achieve and how far we are willing to go
It is ethical to engage in research which may heal people suffering from horrible diseases. It is unethical to throw up roadblocks to such research based on vague fears about Things Man Was Not Meant To Know.
Any questions?
What makes the Web the Web is hyperlinking, period. Using an image at another site on your own page isn't the same thing.
, and you want to have a link on your page that says "Click here to read this really good page," it's really dumb for BigCo Inc.(R)(c)(tm) to force you to link to the main page at bigco.com so people have to navigate through their site to get to the page in question. That kind of thing is a violation of the spirit of the Web, I agree. But neither BigCo nor (more often) some guy running a site out of his basement on a 256k DSL line is obligated to be your image hosting service.
I kinda sorta halfway agree with you about "deep linking" in its original sense: if there's a really good page at http://www.bigco.com/foo/bar/spam/eggs/x/y/z.html
"Usenet news," anyone?
Seriously, that's why I added "... not in the sense you're thinking." It's "news" in the most general sense, in that it's a source for information about what's going on in the world. But it's not a news organization the way the other examples I mentioned are, and if it tried to conform to the same standards they do, it would be pretty damn boring.
You mis-spelled "far".
No, I really don't think I did -- and I say this as a pretty solid leftie myself. The Economist's biases are plain in their writing, but they're more hyper-capitalist than "far right" in the sense I think that term is usually defined. Note that they've written favorably not only of F/OSS but also of other such "liberal" causes as drug legalization, and have (finally) started to look skeptically on Bush's foreign adventurism. Generally, they favor whatever they think will be good for business, which does not necessarily equate to what's good for the guys with the jackboots and high collars.
Exactly! Its more like Fox news...
...
Or what Fox would be like if, instead of being run by right-wingers from top to bottom, they switched positions every fifteen minutes: first have the news as reported by a fascist, then by a communist, then by an anarchist, then by a Randroid, then by a monarchist
and /. editors have to remember to remove personal notes from the stories.
/. is not a news organization, not in the sense you're apparently thinking. It's not The Economist or the NYT or Reuters or even, God help me, USA Today. It's basically a blog, where people write in with things they, in their personal opinions, consider interesting, and other people respond with their own opinions. If what you want is Just The Facts, Ma'am, then read the "Technology" section on the Yahoo newsfeed.
Why?
Folks,
... for the flood of right-wing complaints about the "liberal media." Expect challenges to the "most insightful English-language news publication" from devotees of the Washington Times and Little Green Footballs. ;)
Pre-emptive strike: when The Economist, which is the leading voice of center-right journalism, speaks favorably of F/OSS, it's time to drop the "communism" line and come up with something else, folks.
Yes. Even without all the other shit we're doing over there, that alone pretty much guarantees generations more of hatred and terror.
That's not what happened.
Oh, really? How many officers or senior NCO's have been court-martialed, or even Article 15'ed, over what happened at Abu Ghraib? Do you think that any will be, ever?
Okay, maybe "without even a black mark" was an exaggeration -- I'm sure there were some reprimands. But if we're sending junior enlisted to prison, those in the chain of command above them, who knew what was happening and almost certainly ordered them to do it, should pay at least an equal penalty
I think you're missing the point: it's not about the ideology, it's about the people following it; more specifically, to what level and what degree.
A bit of perspective here: my father's family are Russian and Lithuanian Jews, and a good 2/3 of them simply vanished in the Holocaust. I'm very glad that the Allies after the war prosecuted the top Nazis, and that later, they and other countries (particularly Israel, for obvious reasons) put a great deal of time and effort into tracking down the ones who escaped. But -- and I don't think I'm alone in this -- the last few prosecutions made me acutely uncomfortable. I really don't see the point in tracking down old men who were brainwashed teenagers then and putting them on trial for something that took place more than half a lifetime ago. Presumably there are a fair number of them still alive, and you know what? I don't care. It's over. Let it go.
BTW, I'm also a Desert Storm vet, and I'm as shocked and horrified as anyone at what happened at Abu Ghraib. But what pisses me off is the whitewash, where they hang a few enlisted grunts out to dry, and the officers and senior NCO's, who IMNSGDHO had to not only know what was going on, but in fact explicitly encourage it, get off without even a black mark in the personnel files. I also believe quite strongly that the appropriate investigations and prosecutions should take place quickly; five or ten years would be much too late. "Justice delayed is justice denied." And if we can't get it done in a reasonable time, then it will be necessary, however distasteful we may find this necessity, to let it go.
The analogy here should be obvious. By all means, prosecute the top people for the crimes of the Polish Communist regime, which were indeed many and terrible. But the low-level informants, the ones who took a few extra zlotys for passing on a name or a photo? For God's sake, people, it's over. Let it go.
Why do folks constantly reinvent the same thing? No or little borrowing. All customized.
You know, I have to say that reuse is overrated, in any language you can name. I will only use someone else's code -- whether it's a single function or an entire project -- if it's well-documented and shows predictable, easily understood behavior. Very often it is easier to reinvent the wheel than to try to fit someone else's wheel onto the car you're building, especially if that wheel seems to be a good all-around wheel, but in fact shows a nasty tendency to come off when driving between 63 and 71 mph while bearing slightly to the left with a northwest wind under a waning quarter moon. On Tuesdays.
Every single time any CPU (x86, PowerPC, SPARC, whatever) gets faster, someone always asks the question, "Does anyone really need this?"
And the answer, ultimately, is always, "Yes."
... if you are absolutely, positively sure that physics research is what you want to do with your life. Your debts, if they're student loans, can be deferred while you're in grad school. (And if they're not student loans, then get all the loans you can and put them toward paying down your other debts -- 3% student loan interest beats 15% credit card interest any day of the week.) In the long run, you'll come out ahead, financially, professionally, and personally.
OTOH, if you're not absolutely, positively sure, then just get a job and work hard and make as much money as you can for a while, and then after a few years, when you've paid down your debts and hopefully have some money in the bank, you can decide if you really want to commit yourself full-time to research.
In any case, don't worry about being typecast, IMO. Grad school admission committees aren't going to look at your work history and say, "Oh, this guy's just a programmer, we can't possibly teach him physics." If anything, they'll be more impressed by a wide variety of experience -- not to mention that there is a desperate need, in just about every scientific field, for researchers who also know how to program. And once you have your Ph.D., nobody cares what you did for a living beforehand. One of my best professors put himself through school, from day one as a freshman to the day he got his doctorate, as a short-order cook. Nobody in the department ever asked him to fry up some bacon and eggs.
I am under the impression it may be best to work on your masters while being employed.
... next year I'm going to be starting on my Ph.D. studies, and I'm going to be doing it full-time on a research assistant's stipend. This means cutting my income roughly in half, which in turn means downgrading my lifestyle by a fair bit -- and you know what? I'm okay with that. I've lived on a lot less money than I make now before in my life, and I can do it again. It will be worth it to get some sleep every once in a while.
There are advantages and disadvantages to this. I'm just finishing up my M.S. on this plan; while it's allowed me to maintain a fairly luxurious (by my standards, anyway) lifestyle while I've been in school, it's also been a hellish amount of work, and I haven't been able to devote as much energy to work or school as I'd have liked. The way I look at it is that any graduate degree worth getting is hard, and any job worth doing is hard, and so it stands to reason that doing both at the same time is going to be really hard.
I'm glad I did it, but
Bingo. The most important line in the article, IMO, and one that every techie should have burned in his brain:
"Remember that managers are essentially secretaries who can fire you."
Yes, exactly. Business is about the easiest thing you can major in, in any college, at any level. It's "education" for people who want a degree but are scared of using their brains.
A number of people who were in my undergrad CS classes with me took upper-division B-school courses. They always got A's, and didn't have to work very hard for them, either. Now imagine how your typical management major would do walking into an upper-division CS course.
Um, "Arab" is an ethnicity, not a religion. The majority of Arabs are Muslims, of course, but there are also Christian Arabs, Jewish Arabs (yes, really!), Zoroastrian Arabs, Hindu Arabs, and, one assumes, atheist Arabs, although those who live surrounded by the aforementioned groups probably tend to keep pretty quiet about it.
And you know, while it's almost certainly true that most Arabs are Muslims, I'm not sure that the reverse is true. Indonesia is the world's largest Muslim country; there's also Bangladesh, Pakistan, and large portions of India. That's a hell of a lot of people, almost none of them speaking Arabic as a native tongue.
If so, whether the Earth revolves around the Sun or vice versa is still up for debate in the U.S.
Based on the successes the creationists have been having lately, I expect it will be soon.
PC is a disease that infects both Left and Right; it may please right-wingers to pretend otherwise, but that's the way it is. F'rinstance, it's terribly PC for people who never had the guts to join the service themselves to go on loudly about how they "support the troops."
:) You're welcome. Like I said, I don't want to come across as a prick; I just don't have a whole lot of time.
Taking pi out to 100 places does you no good if the other numbers you are using are only good to two decimal places.
;)
Very true, but the image data is also quite precise. We're not wasting bits, I can assure you.