Talk to a graphic artist some time (or, depending on what quality of monitor drivers you're using, explore your own monitor settings.) Setting the white point properly -- i.e., deciding what temperature "white" on your monitor corresponds to -- is vitally important for sophisticated image creation and processing. A difference of a few degrees Kelvin can change the whole color balance of your image. If you have these controls on your machine (on a Mac you definitely will, on a PC you probably won't unless you've installed Photoshop or something equivalent, and I don't know about Linux) play around with them and you'll see what I mean.
Western European "socialism" is a long, long way from government control of the economy. It's more a set of policies on the part of the government to control the less humane tendencies of capitalism -- "capitalism with a human face," one might call it, if one were in an ironic mood.
And apparently, so are the people of China, who if current trends continue will soon have cures for all kinds of diseases which will continue to kill and cripple Americans.
Well. Actually, we're not arguing about socialism vs. capitalism; we're arguing about socialism (the government controls the economy) vs. fascism (the government chooses a few large corporations to control the economy, and everyone else can go to hell.) China is getting steadily less socialist because socialism generally doesn't work very well; the US is sliding into fascism because that's what capitalism tends to become if We The People don't pay attention. Real capitalism is an infinitely better choice than either, but right now nobody seems to have the will or interest to maintain it. News flash: capitalism is hard work.
What does all this have to do with science? Simple. Science flourishes in a zeitgeist of free inquiry and skepticism. Neither socialist bureaucrats nor fascist oligarchs are friendly to such a zeitgeist, because it threatens their power. Both socialism and fascism tend to be profoundly conservative, in a sense that has little to do with the traditional left-right dichotomy. It's a sad irony that Communist China is doing a better job of breaking the stranglehold of that kind of conservatism than the US is.
Jesus Christ, it was a joke. Of course there were murders, including murders in schools, before thirty years ago (the worst case of school violence in US history took place, IIRC, in the 1920's.) That was the point the parent poster was making -- in a rather ironical way, which is something you obviously missed.
A little OT, but I've got to say it ...
on
Linux and Biometrics?
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· Score: 3, Informative
I really hate how the meaning of the word "biometrics" has been narrowed in popular usage to mean, "Face scanning for security purposes." It used to be used to refer to anything having to do with biological measurement, including biostatistics, medical sensing, etc. -- e.g., check out the UCHSC Biometrics graduate program. But from now on, everyone will only think of it as referring to Big Brother.
... is that it doesn't matter what you said. The DOJ did a deliberately slapdash job of assembling and responding to the comments because... wait for it... they don't care. They've been determined to let Microsoft go with a slap -- no, not a slap, a gentle pat -- on the wrist ever since GWB took over the White House. You could have written a letter saying, "I have absolute proof that Bill Gates eats babies for breakfast and Steve Ballmer is really Osama bin Laden," and they'd still have written (in Word, on their Windows PC's) "That's our settlement and we're sticking by it."
A.) Education is only a right from the ages of 5 to 18. (or longer if you're held back)
In America, that's true. In many other countries, it's not.
B.) This is America. America is still a capitalist country (Not that I'm about to ask it to change) In order for anything to survive in a capitalist country, it has to be run as a business, or it has to have people with very strong ideals backing it. (ie: the open source movement)
Or it has to be accepted as a public good, which the people of the country are willing to pay for in other ways (taxes, charitable donations, whatever) than direct pay-for-service. Religion, the military, and some kinds of transportation (e.g. highways) are examples of necessary public goods which we as a society have decided are too important to leave entirely to market forces -- and so is education up to the age of 18, and to some degree afterward (most people with college degrees, after all, got those degrees from schools that are at least partly state-supported.) This is an argument about degree rather than kind. The US has never been entirely a capitalist country, libertarian fantasies aside.
C.) The primary goal of schools is never "To make money"- if it were, the people involved would be in a different business. This, however, does not stop the people involved from trying to make money. (See B.)
Actually, there seem to be a lot of people these days who are in the "education business" primarily to make money. Most of them are concentrating on K-12 education right now (there exist a number of charter school corporations run by slick MBA's who are quite obviously in it for the $$$) but their mindset is starting to filter upward into the colleges and universities.
Look, I'm not complaining about OpenCourseware at all; I think it's a great idea, and I agree with you that motivation is the most important route to gaining knowledge. I'm just saying that unless We The People keep our eyes open to the changes in the way schools are run, we'll find that knowledge is becoming more expensive, not less, with OC and suchlike being the exception rather than the rule.
Yep. And as long as the Beatle's music is considered important enough by enough people (which is probably at least a few centuries, maybe longer -- "Bach, Brahms, Beethoven, and the Beatles" isn't a joke) it will continue to be transfered to whatever the storage media of the time are. That's the point that I think everyone crying "put it on paper" is missing: Of course electronic media are perishable, and of course whatever snazzy new high-capacity storage medium you're using right now will probably be obsolete in a decade, but as long as you can and do transfer from one medium to another, preferably backing up in multiple locations on multiple types of media, your data is more likely by far to survive for the ages than a single paper copy somewhere would be. That such effectively infinite copying and storage is possible is one of the wonders of the electronic age -- we just have to be smart enough to take advantage of it properly.
However, let's not lose sight that Education is a business and not a right.
Actually, there's a pretty strong argument that education is a right, and that while it certainly can be run as a business, it shouldn't be. A friend of mine who is, ironically, the chairman of the Economics department at a rather conservative college, has a stock rant about how the business mindset is a cancer which has metastasized from business per se into other areas of American life where it doesn't belong, like politics, religion, the military, health care, and -- ta da! -- academia. I think his view is a bit on the gloomy side (hey, they don't call it the "dismal science" for nothing) but I tend to agree with his core idea: that business is business, and everything else isn't business, and that trying to run non-business institution like schools as businesses is bad for the core mission of the institution, which in this case is education.
All that being said: yes, schools have to get money from somewhere, especially private schools (is MIT private?) It is, therefore, perfectly reasonable for them not to give away on the Web everything they provide to tuition-paying students. But a school whose primary goal is making money is not an educational institution worth anyone's time, no matter how prestigious its name.
By that analogy, RMS is software's Ralph Nader -- a very smart guy who did some great things in his time, but who is now a stiff-necked, arrogant pain in the ass who does his cause more harm than good by putting ideology above results.
A lot of NASA people (including my father, who worked on Apollo and Skylab) have talked about how they were inspired by science fiction, and tried to make what they did as much like [fill in favorite SF book, TV show, or movie here] as possible. The problem is, of course, that there's a lot of basic science (as opposed to engineering) that needs to happen before we can even think about a Star Trek future. Warp drive and transporters aren't just neat future tech; at this point, they're fantasy, not SF. The fundamental discoveries required to make such devices might happen tomorrow, or in a thousand years, or never.
Reading the DOJ response, though, it's obvious that it doesn't matter who said what. They basically took all the objections and said, "You're wrong, we're right, and we're going to go ahead with the settlement, and if you don't like it, tough shit." Of course, given that their ultimate boss (Shrub Bush) was installed in the White House by a very similar process ("We don't care who you actually voted for, we're going to do what we want, and if you don't like it, tough shit") I suppose it's to be expected.
Apparently you didn't read the article very carefully. A) this is a primary election, not a general election, and b) this guy's a Republican, not a Democrat; he is running for the right to be the Republican candidate for Governor of California. My point was that I would love to see this guy as the Republican candidate, because that would pretty much guarantee a Democratic victory.
As a Democrat, I sincerely hope this guy wins the primary.:) Probably not going to happen, though, as you say.
Obviously the only way to be sure ...
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T-Rex A Slow Mover
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· Score: 2
... is to clone a T. Rex and turn it loose among a bunch of difficult-to-catch prey animals, and observe what happens. (I suggest the next Republican national convention -- those politicos may not be terribly fast, but they sure are slippery and elusive.) Now, I've got this fossilized mosquito I pulled out of some amber...
Wow, you really don't get it, do you? Microsoft broke the law. What's at issue now is their punishment for doing so. Governments do all sorts of things to criminals that would be "totalitarian" if done to innocent people: deprivation of property, liberty, and in extreme cases, life.
The simple fact is that whatever happens to Microsoft, it will be getting off extraordinarily light. Arguing about the release of source code to legally constituted authority is like arguing about whether a bank robber should have to spend a week in jail as well as paying a $500 fine.
I've worked with a lot of other people's code over the years, and I've noticed the people without solid math backgrounds (e.g., self-taught hackers, and grads of CS programs without a strong math component) tend to write code that is less organized, harder to debug, and less reusable than the code written by those with strong math backgrounds. You don't have to know a lot of math to write code that works (in most applications) but having what academic mathematicians call "mathematical maturity" will almost certainly make you a better and more elegant coder.
AFAIK, this is still the situation: Sun develops the Windows and Linux JVM's entirely in-house, while Apple has to develop the Mac JVM by itself with some "cooperation" from Sun. if M$ had to develop its own JVM's... well, never mind, it wouldn't bother. And although there's certainly some impressive OS/FS Java stuff out there (e.g. Kaffe) it still helps an awful lot that Sun does most of the work for the platform.
I've always been puzzled by Sun's attitude toward this.
That's probably because Arabic is the liturgical language of Islam -- it's sort of like, you could have traveled all over Medieval Europe speaking nothing but Latin, but you wouldn't have been able to have too many casual conversations.
The Founding Fathers (who were toasting the King's health on the eve of the signing of the Declaration of Independence) were, in fact, going to war to defend and secure for themselves the "rights of Englishmen," rights which were theirs by virtue of citizenship in the British Empire, and of which they were being deprived. Why did the American Revolution produce such a civilized form of government while most other colonial revolutions throughout history have collapsed into bloody chaos? Because it was, in essence, Englishmen doing the fighting on both sides.
booze ain't good for you, but it's okay in moderation, unlike tobacco
Actually, cigarettes are safe in moderation; several studies have shown that there's a safe level for tobacco just like there is for just about every other drug. The anti-smoking lobby doesn't like to acknowledge these studies, but they're out there if you care to dig. (And before you ask, no, they weren't sponsored by R.J. Reynolds.) "Safe" in this context means that the effect of using tobacco vanishes into background noise, not that it's actually good for you -- i.e., if you smoke fewer than n cigarettes per day, your chances of getting lung cancer, emphysema, etc. are no statistically no higher than a non-smoker's chance of getting the same diseases.
As it turns out, the value of n is very low -- somewhere around 5. Now, you may say that most smokers smoke considerably more than 5 cigarettes per day, and you would of course be right. But the "no safe level" argument is propaganda, not science.
Re:Why is military stuff always on Slashdot??!?!
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The Future of MREs
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· Score: 2
Read the other comments on this story and you'll find that there are a hell of a lot of vets here, and a fair number of active-duty as well. My experience of war was up close and personal (I was a medic in Desert Storm) and I don't think I'm the only one. Maybe you'd like to look beyond the stereotyping -- "geek" and "soldier" are not only not mutually exclusive, they're actually correlated.
As for why -- technology for killing is still technology, and therefore interesting to geeks. And sometimes that technology, regardless of its original intended purpose, turns out to be pretty damn cool all around. Everyone knows how DARPANet became the Internet; do you also know that modern emergency medicine is almost entirely based on battlefield experience in Korea and Vietnam, or that modern commercial air travel grew directly out of the WW2 bomber industry?
Re:ughhh... not everyone eats meat
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The Future of MREs
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Does that also mean the military shouldn't provide Jewish, Muslim, and other minority religion chaplains for soldiers who follow those faiths? You can take "you are not special" too far. As long as it doesn't interfere with accomplishing the mission, taking care of GI's as individuals as well as part of a team is a very good idea.
Happy soldiers are better soldiers. The idea that enforced misery makes better soldiers has historically been a popular one in a lot of armies, but every time the US military has come up against one of those armies, we've beaten the hell out of them (e.g., the Iraqis. The Iraqi POW's I took care of lived better under our care than they ever had in their own army in peacetime. Probably one reason they were so eager to surrender.)
-- US Army infantryman 1987-1989, US Air Force medic 1989-1997
Man, kids today are spoiled.:) When I was in the infantry (1987-89) there were like eight different "menus", and two of those were the beef and pork patties, which looked and tasted pretty much identical: like baked sand. We used to call them "Alpo crackers" for obvious reasons. I had lousy luck -- I remember one time, we were downrange for two weeks, and I think I got nothing but beef and pork patties for ten days or so. This probably explains why after a couple of years I crosstrained to be a medic.
Slashdot Mirror
Talk to a graphic artist some time (or, depending on what quality of monitor drivers you're using, explore your own monitor settings.) Setting the white point properly -- i.e., deciding what temperature "white" on your monitor corresponds to -- is vitally important for sophisticated image creation and processing. A difference of a few degrees Kelvin can change the whole color balance of your image. If you have these controls on your machine (on a Mac you definitely will, on a PC you probably won't unless you've installed Photoshop or something equivalent, and I don't know about Linux) play around with them and you'll see what I mean.
Western European "socialism" is a long, long way from government control of the economy. It's more a set of policies on the part of the government to control the less humane tendencies of capitalism -- "capitalism with a human face," one might call it, if one were in an ironic mood.
And apparently, so are the people of China, who if current trends continue will soon have cures for all kinds of diseases which will continue to kill and cripple Americans.
Well. Actually, we're not arguing about socialism vs. capitalism; we're arguing about socialism (the government controls the economy) vs. fascism (the government chooses a few large corporations to control the economy, and everyone else can go to hell.) China is getting steadily less socialist because socialism generally doesn't work very well; the US is sliding into fascism because that's what capitalism tends to become if We The People don't pay attention. Real capitalism is an infinitely better choice than either, but right now nobody seems to have the will or interest to maintain it. News flash: capitalism is hard work.
What does all this have to do with science? Simple. Science flourishes in a zeitgeist of free inquiry and skepticism. Neither socialist bureaucrats nor fascist oligarchs are friendly to such a zeitgeist, because it threatens their power. Both socialism and fascism tend to be profoundly conservative, in a sense that has little to do with the traditional left-right dichotomy. It's a sad irony that Communist China is doing a better job of breaking the stranglehold of that kind of conservatism than the US is.
There are now a whole bunch of ...@home projects going on, and I don't think the Berkeley folks have complained about any of them.
Jesus Christ, it was a joke. Of course there were murders, including murders in schools, before thirty years ago (the worst case of school violence in US history took place, IIRC, in the 1920's.) That was the point the parent poster was making -- in a rather ironical way, which is something you obviously missed.
I really hate how the meaning of the word "biometrics" has been narrowed in popular usage to mean, "Face scanning for security purposes." It used to be used to refer to anything having to do with biological measurement, including biostatistics, medical sensing, etc. -- e.g., check out the UCHSC Biometrics graduate program. But from now on, everyone will only think of it as referring to Big Brother.
... is that it doesn't matter what you said. The DOJ did a deliberately slapdash job of assembling and responding to the comments because ... wait for it ... they don't care. They've been determined to let Microsoft go with a slap -- no, not a slap, a gentle pat -- on the wrist ever since GWB took over the White House. You could have written a letter saying, "I have absolute proof that Bill Gates eats babies for breakfast and Steve Ballmer is really Osama bin Laden," and they'd still have written (in Word, on their Windows PC's) "That's our settlement and we're sticking by it."
In America, that's true. In many other countries, it's not.
Or it has to be accepted as a public good, which the people of the country are willing to pay for in other ways (taxes, charitable donations, whatever) than direct pay-for-service. Religion, the military, and some kinds of transportation (e.g. highways) are examples of necessary public goods which we as a society have decided are too important to leave entirely to market forces -- and so is education up to the age of 18, and to some degree afterward (most people with college degrees, after all, got those degrees from schools that are at least partly state-supported.) This is an argument about degree rather than kind. The US has never been entirely a capitalist country, libertarian fantasies aside.
Actually, there seem to be a lot of people these days who are in the "education business" primarily to make money. Most of them are concentrating on K-12 education right now (there exist a number of charter school corporations run by slick MBA's who are quite obviously in it for the $$$) but their mindset is starting to filter upward into the colleges and universities.
Look, I'm not complaining about OpenCourseware at all; I think it's a great idea, and I agree with you that motivation is the most important route to gaining knowledge. I'm just saying that unless We The People keep our eyes open to the changes in the way schools are run, we'll find that knowledge is becoming more expensive, not less, with OC and suchlike being the exception rather than the rule.
Yep. And as long as the Beatle's music is considered important enough by enough people (which is probably at least a few centuries, maybe longer -- "Bach, Brahms, Beethoven, and the Beatles" isn't a joke) it will continue to be transfered to whatever the storage media of the time are. That's the point that I think everyone crying "put it on paper" is missing: Of course electronic media are perishable, and of course whatever snazzy new high-capacity storage medium you're using right now will probably be obsolete in a decade, but as long as you can and do transfer from one medium to another, preferably backing up in multiple locations on multiple types of media, your data is more likely by far to survive for the ages than a single paper copy somewhere would be. That such effectively infinite copying and storage is possible is one of the wonders of the electronic age -- we just have to be smart enough to take advantage of it properly.
Actually, there's a pretty strong argument that education is a right, and that while it certainly can be run as a business, it shouldn't be. A friend of mine who is, ironically, the chairman of the Economics department at a rather conservative college, has a stock rant about how the business mindset is a cancer which has metastasized from business per se into other areas of American life where it doesn't belong, like politics, religion, the military, health care, and -- ta da! -- academia. I think his view is a bit on the gloomy side (hey, they don't call it the "dismal science" for nothing) but I tend to agree with his core idea: that business is business, and everything else isn't business, and that trying to run non-business institution like schools as businesses is bad for the core mission of the institution, which in this case is education.
All that being said: yes, schools have to get money from somewhere, especially private schools (is MIT private?) It is, therefore, perfectly reasonable for them not to give away on the Web everything they provide to tuition-paying students. But a school whose primary goal is making money is not an educational institution worth anyone's time, no matter how prestigious its name.
By that analogy, RMS is software's Ralph Nader -- a very smart guy who did some great things in his time, but who is now a stiff-necked, arrogant pain in the ass who does his cause more harm than good by putting ideology above results.
A lot of NASA people (including my father, who worked on Apollo and Skylab) have talked about how they were inspired by science fiction, and tried to make what they did as much like [fill in favorite SF book, TV show, or movie here] as possible. The problem is, of course, that there's a lot of basic science (as opposed to engineering) that needs to happen before we can even think about a Star Trek future. Warp drive and transporters aren't just neat future tech; at this point, they're fantasy, not SF. The fundamental discoveries required to make such devices might happen tomorrow, or in a thousand years, or never.
Mine didn't show up either. The bastards.
Reading the DOJ response, though, it's obvious that it doesn't matter who said what. They basically took all the objections and said, "You're wrong, we're right, and we're going to go ahead with the settlement, and if you don't like it, tough shit." Of course, given that their ultimate boss (Shrub Bush) was installed in the White House by a very similar process ("We don't care who you actually voted for, we're going to do what we want, and if you don't like it, tough shit") I suppose it's to be expected.
Apparently you didn't read the article very carefully. A) this is a primary election, not a general election, and b) this guy's a Republican, not a Democrat; he is running for the right to be the Republican candidate for Governor of California. My point was that I would love to see this guy as the Republican candidate, because that would pretty much guarantee a Democratic victory.
As a Democrat, I sincerely hope this guy wins the primary. :) Probably not going to happen, though, as you say.
... is to clone a T. Rex and turn it loose among a bunch of difficult-to-catch prey animals, and observe what happens. (I suggest the next Republican national convention -- those politicos may not be terribly fast, but they sure are slippery and elusive.) Now, I've got this fossilized mosquito I pulled out of some amber ...
Wow, you really don't get it, do you? Microsoft broke the law. What's at issue now is their punishment for doing so. Governments do all sorts of things to criminals that would be "totalitarian" if done to innocent people: deprivation of property, liberty, and in extreme cases, life.
The simple fact is that whatever happens to Microsoft, it will be getting off extraordinarily light. Arguing about the release of source code to legally constituted authority is like arguing about whether a bank robber should have to spend a week in jail as well as paying a $500 fine.
I've worked with a lot of other people's code over the years, and I've noticed the people without solid math backgrounds (e.g., self-taught hackers, and grads of CS programs without a strong math component) tend to write code that is less organized, harder to debug, and less reusable than the code written by those with strong math backgrounds. You don't have to know a lot of math to write code that works (in most applications) but having what academic mathematicians call "mathematical maturity" will almost certainly make you a better and more elegant coder.
AFAIK, this is still the situation: Sun develops the Windows and Linux JVM's entirely in-house, while Apple has to develop the Mac JVM by itself with some "cooperation" from Sun. if M$ had to develop its own JVM's ... well, never mind, it wouldn't bother. And although there's certainly some impressive OS/FS Java stuff out there (e.g. Kaffe) it still helps an awful lot that Sun does most of the work for the platform.
I've always been puzzled by Sun's attitude toward this.
That's probably because Arabic is the liturgical language of Islam -- it's sort of like, you could have traveled all over Medieval Europe speaking nothing but Latin, but you wouldn't have been able to have too many casual conversations.
The Founding Fathers (who were toasting the King's health on the eve of the signing of the Declaration of Independence) were, in fact, going to war to defend and secure for themselves the "rights of Englishmen," rights which were theirs by virtue of citizenship in the British Empire, and of which they were being deprived. Why did the American Revolution produce such a civilized form of government while most other colonial revolutions throughout history have collapsed into bloody chaos? Because it was, in essence, Englishmen doing the fighting on both sides.
OT, but I've just got to comment on this ...
Actually, cigarettes are safe in moderation; several studies have shown that there's a safe level for tobacco just like there is for just about every other drug. The anti-smoking lobby doesn't like to acknowledge these studies, but they're out there if you care to dig. (And before you ask, no, they weren't sponsored by R.J. Reynolds.) "Safe" in this context means that the effect of using tobacco vanishes into background noise, not that it's actually good for you -- i.e., if you smoke fewer than n cigarettes per day, your chances of getting lung cancer, emphysema, etc. are no statistically no higher than a non-smoker's chance of getting the same diseases.
As it turns out, the value of n is very low -- somewhere around 5. Now, you may say that most smokers smoke considerably more than 5 cigarettes per day, and you would of course be right. But the "no safe level" argument is propaganda, not science.
Read the other comments on this story and you'll find that there are a hell of a lot of vets here, and a fair number of active-duty as well. My experience of war was up close and personal (I was a medic in Desert Storm) and I don't think I'm the only one. Maybe you'd like to look beyond the stereotyping -- "geek" and "soldier" are not only not mutually exclusive, they're actually correlated.
As for why -- technology for killing is still technology, and therefore interesting to geeks. And sometimes that technology, regardless of its original intended purpose, turns out to be pretty damn cool all around. Everyone knows how DARPANet became the Internet; do you also know that modern emergency medicine is almost entirely based on battlefield experience in Korea and Vietnam, or that modern commercial air travel grew directly out of the WW2 bomber industry?
Does that also mean the military shouldn't provide Jewish, Muslim, and other minority religion chaplains for soldiers who follow those faiths? You can take "you are not special" too far. As long as it doesn't interfere with accomplishing the mission, taking care of GI's as individuals as well as part of a team is a very good idea.
Happy soldiers are better soldiers. The idea that enforced misery makes better soldiers has historically been a popular one in a lot of armies, but every time the US military has come up against one of those armies, we've beaten the hell out of them (e.g., the Iraqis. The Iraqi POW's I took care of lived better under our care than they ever had in their own army in peacetime. Probably one reason they were so eager to surrender.)
-- US Army infantryman 1987-1989, US Air Force medic 1989-1997
Man, kids today are spoiled. :) When I was in the infantry (1987-89) there were like eight different "menus", and two of those were the beef and pork patties, which looked and tasted pretty much identical: like baked sand. We used to call them "Alpo crackers" for obvious reasons. I had lousy luck -- I remember one time, we were downrange for two weeks, and I think I got nothing but beef and pork patties for ten days or so. This probably explains why after a couple of years I crosstrained to be a medic.