When was the last time you ever heard a politician say, "government is inefficient, and here is how we can make it more efficient!"
Clinton did say that, and he did a pretty good job of it, too. Of course, the effort was mocked and obstructed by the Republicans, who promptly undid everything the Clinton administration had accomplished as when Bush took office.
I've long felt that lawyers should be subject to the same outcome as their client. Don't want to get electrocuted, don't represent a murder. Don't want to end up a million dollars in the hole? Don't represent a doctor who's clearly guilty of malpractice.
This might actually be a good idea, as long as it goes both ways. If a prosecutor fails to prove guilt in a death penalty homicide case, the prosecutor gets the chair. If a malpractice lawyer loses a case where his client is suing for half a million bucks, he gets to pay the doctor half a million bucks. Etc. I'll bet you'd see a lot fewer frivolous prosecutions and lawsuits that way.
Unfortunately, idiots like you who have no understanding of the basic principles of the justice system would mostly be unaffected.
As for FAT vs. NTFS, how many people know the difference between disc and drum brakes? I don't know if knowing about filesystems is a requirement for using a computer - or that it even should be.
Should be? No. Is? Yes. Disc vs. drum brakes make a certain amount of difference to braking performance, but having drum brakes won't make it easier for people to steal your car, or cause it to suddenly stop working while you're driving. Modern computers are simply not comparable to modern cars. They're more like the Model T -- reliable and affordable enough to be useful to a lot of people, but still not something you want to depend on without a decent set of tools and a fair amount of mechanical knowledge.
Informed consent is an absolutely necessary part of any human subjects research. Not telling the participants that they're being studied is something that just doesn't wash these days; Tuskegee and similar monstrosities led to a real change on that score.
Even if you could do such a study, it still would not be double-blind, by definition. "Double-blind study" isn't just a buzzword, it's a specific set of protocols.
No matter how pro nuclear power one is, it's really, really hard to support licensing and approving operating permits for an outfit who apparently can not read the blueprints for their own nuclear power plant.
It's not hard at all. Read some of the other comments to this story and you'll see it's quite easy for some people. There's a crowd that, any time any safety issue relating to any nuclear plant is mentioned, react with howls of "OMG the liberal socialist greenies want to take our clean safe never-has-any-kind-of-problem-EVAR nuclear power away!!!" They're pretty much the other side of the same coin as the "nuclear power is dangerous 'cause it's got atoms in it!!!" types, and just as ignorant.
I think perhaps GPP was a comment on the absurdity of corporate naming schemes. "We can't just be 'the power company,' we need a name that proactively maximizes stakeholder value by black-belt leveraging of core mission parameters... I know! Entergy! It's like 'energy' but with a 't' for extra six-sigma network impact!"
Here on Slashdot we have a pretty low standard of evidence - when somebody is 'wronged' by big business or the government, their claims are assumed to be gospel truth.
It's not 100%, of course, but the truth is that when it's big guy vs. little guy, "big guy is in the wrong" is usually the way to bet.
What you say in your reply post is entirely reasonable. But casting it as a "restatement" is disingenuous at best. Your original post was a broadside against scientific practice; now that you've been called on it, you're retreating and saying "well, what I really meant was..." when you're actually saying something quite different and much more limited.
Scientists see results in their studies that they are looking for. Not accounting for, sometimes painfully obvious, faults in their conclusions, or reasoning.
Like the studies that link accidents and cellphones. Not accounting for the possibility that neglectful and distracted drivers that will get into accidents will probably now use cellphones as well as drink, eat, and read a book or put on makeup. It's outside their scope of the experiment so it isn't a possible contributing factor.
If you think scientists don't know what "confounding factors" are, or don't try to account for them in their analyses, then you don't know enough about how science is done to have an informed opinion on the subject.
More likely that would cause evolution to happen faster there since there would be much more competition for resources. Survival is what drives evolution.
Except it doesn't work that way. The ocean is a far more hospitable environment for life than anywhere on land, and we see a much greater variety of aquatic life than terrestrial. On land, tropical rainforests are probably about the most hospitable environments for life there is -- and surprise, we see much more variety there than we do in cooler and drier areas.
Competition for resources happens everywhere; whatever the resources available, the creatures living there will reproduce until they reach the limit of a sustainable population. It's the availability of resources that drives species diversity.
A satellite such as you describe would be both tremendously expensive, and (quite justifiably) regarded as a weapon. And dealing with the amount of junk currently in LEO, we'd need not one such satellite, but a lot of them. There's also the problem of what counts as junk -- the US, Russia, and China certainly, and several other nations probably, have a number of satellites that have no public record of their existence, but which are very much active and functional. If anything the garbage-sweeping satellite doesn't have in its database is classified as "junk" and destroyed, it would end up taking these satellites down, and the owners might get... testy.
It's a smear only in a very specific context: Lomborg and his ilk are, unfortunately, often identified as "skeptics" in the press. They're no such thing, of course -- "denier" or "denialist" is much more accurate* -- but when you have a bunch of people spouting pseudoscientific garbage who are handed the "skeptic" label as a gift, it's inevitable that those who point out the garbage will appear to be "smearing skeptics." The only answer appears to be to point out as often as possible that they aren't skeptics by any reasonable definition of the word. There is simply no amount of evidence that will ever or could ever convince them. Their ideology trumps any data in their minds.
And not only is this the way they think, they assume that everyone else thinks that way too; thus the constant accusations of quasi-religion ("warmism") leveled against people who actually study the data and try to figure out what's happening to the environment. Arguing with denialists is closely akin to arguing with religious fundamentalists. Anything that is not of (their interpretation of) God must perforce be of the Devil. They just can't acknowledge that there are other worldviews that don't fit into their box.
*Since "denier" is often prefaced with a word beginning with "H," those who get called "deniers" often take refuge behind Godwin. "Denialist" works nicely, and in fact may be the most accurate term since it describes an ideology rather than just an action.
The internet isn't wrong (at least not in this case.) Your reading of what it says is.
First of all, if you actually read the definition of "low-discrepancy sequence" in the article you link to, you'll notice that it is not equivalent to the phrase you used, "each item in your possibility list has equal chances of occurring." Equal probability is necessary, but not sufficient.
Second, and more importantly, at the end of the first sentence of the second paragraph, there appears the phrase "in the case of a uniform distribution." This is the key to understanding the article. A uniform distribution is one, and only one, of an infinite number of distributions; and in any other distribution, outcomes do not occur with equal probability. Normal (aka Gaussian), Poisson, binomial, gamma, Weibull... perhaps you've heard of some of these? Numbers sampled from any of these distributions are random; none of them is more or less random than the others.
Most computer RNGs generate uniform pseudo-random numbers, this is true, because it's very easy to convert a uniform sample into a sample from any other distribution. But the underlying distribution has absolutely nothing to do with any definition of randomness -- if you come up with a device that quickly and efficiently generated true random numbers from, say, a Poisson distribution (which IIRC is what the cosmic-ray-detector RNGs use) it will serve just as well.
True random means that each item in your possibility list has equal chances of occurring.
This is so utterly, completely, absolutely wrong that it's "not even wrong."
Please, for God's sake, read up on the concept of random variables before you attempt to make any judgement whatsoever about anything having to do with random number generation.
Those are both well-defined types of random sample: the deck of cards is "sampling without replacement," and the die is "sampling with replacement." The probabilistic rules for both are well understood.
Now, add the usual Microsoft bashing on slashdot ("Seven is just as insecure as Vista", "MS played a role in the SCO affair", "IE is still insecure", "activation/WGA is a hassle", "security features are easily defeated").
Dismissing those statements as "bashing" does not make any of them less true.
It's a common enough rhetorical trick: any time someone raises a point in an argument for which you don't have an answer, dismiss it as "bashing" or "propaganda" or "biased" or "discredited" and try to move on. Never mind the actual merit of the point; if you can make it seem somehow unfair, then you don't have to put the thought into answering it. What's depressing is how often this trick actually works.
That's the kind of thing that has to be examined in person, I think. A local university or museum will have someone who can take a look at it, and will probably be glad to do so.
Many primitive stone tools look like plain rocks at first glance, but there are distinctive chip and wear patterns on tools that just don't occur by chance. An expert will be able to tell you very quickly if you're dealing with an actual tool or just a rock that's assumed a suggestive shape.
No, there's a big difference. Nupedia, as I understand it, was asking experts themselves to write the articles. Wikipedia asks the article authors to cite the experts. In this, it's very close to standard academic writing practice.
Well, first of all, the Constitution doesn't say that all men are created equal; the Declaration of Independence does. (Lots of Americans get those mixed up too.) The former is, in theory the supreme law of the land, while the latter is a document of great moral authority but no legal authority. But yes, it was written by a slaveowner, and that paradox occupied a great deal of the nation's early existence. It kind of came to a head in this little dustup a century and a half ago. Since then, we still haven't fully dealt with the consequences.
The basic problem is, you ask ten different Americans to tell you what "freedom" means, and you'll get eleven different definitions. Some are concerned almost exclusively with economic freedom; as long as they can make money, they're happy, regardless of what else may be going on. Some focus on social freedom: who they sleep with, where (or whether) they worship, what substances they can put in their bodies. Some are concerned primarily with freedom from foreign military threats; pretty much everyone agrees this is a prerequisite for the other freedoms, but there are and always have been many who take their concern with it to fanatical extremes -- they forget that in order to defend our freedom from those who want to take it away, we must have freedom left to defend.
And no matter what kind of freedom people are most worried about, a regrettably large number will say, in effect, "I've got my freedom, screw yours." Thus those fighting for the Confederacy, and their latter-day counterparts in white sheets and pointy hats, could claim in all seriousness that they were fighting for freedom: their freedom, and the fact that preserving their view of freedom meant denying it to large numbers of the people who lived in their society didn't bother them at all. Thus the flag could be defined as the symbol of freedom, and freedom limited to those who wished to pledge allegiance to it. Thus any act, no matter how vile, that was anti-communist could be defined as serving the interests of freedom.
Personally, my definition of freedom includes not only my freedom to do what I want to do, but others' freedom to do what they want to do, including things that I personally have no desire to do. But this definition is far from universally accepted. I don't think this is an exclusively American problem by any means, but it does seem like we're a bit better at others at fooling ourselves into thinking we're implementing a universal definition of freedom, while picking and choosing our freedoms carefully in practice.
if you have to ask this question on/. you'd better not start
Every single Ask Slashdot story gets a response like this, and it's always a jackass thing to say. The whole reason Ask Slashdot exists is to allow technically competent people to share their expertise, and help others get up to speed. "RTFM n00b" responses like this are a major contributor to the negative geek stereotypes we all claim to hate, and in this specific case, a major barrier to Linux use. If you like seeing yourself as a member of a small, impenetrable elite possessed of special and arcane knowledge, go right ahead, but don't expect the rest of us to play along.
To be fair, he was introducing himself in the context of a discussion about younger teenagers going to college, so it's not unreasonable for him to lead with his experiences in the subject.
A community college does not have that environment.
That's a pretty bold blanket statement you're making there.
It varies a lot by the CC. There are some CCs that are essentially two more years of high school, filled with losers who want to be able to say they "went to college" but who have no desire to learn any more than they have to in order to get the minimum passing grade. There are others that offer intellectual challenge and rigor equal to that found at the best four-year colleges and universities, and if you don't believe that, then you simply haven't learned enough about the issue to have an informed opinion.
Many, many high school graduates, to say nothing of the HS juniors and seniors who will be taking advantage of the program discussed in this story, would do much better at a good CC than they would at Enormous State University. Campuses are smaller and have more of neighborhood feeling. Classes are smaller and taught by professors who see teaching as their primary mission, rather than a distraction from research. Classmates are an interesting mix of people from various age groups, many having significant life experience, rather than a bunch of other 18-year-olds who haven't figured out that they can't coast in college the way they did in high school. Life after class isn't dominated by the toxic "Greek" life and athletic obsession that eats up so much resources at ESU.
It isn't for everyone. There are students who can graduate from high school and be ready for the challenges at ESU, or even Harvard or Stanford, from day one. Good for them. But like a lot of 18-year-olds, I screwed up my first try, and years later CC offered me a way back into the academic world. Given that I'm now within a year of my PhD, you can probably guess that I don't feel academically deprived by having an associate's degree to my name.
Slashdot Mirror
When was the last time you ever heard a politician say, "government is inefficient, and here is how we can make it more efficient!"
Clinton did say that, and he did a pretty good job of it, too. Of course, the effort was mocked and obstructed by the Republicans, who promptly undid everything the Clinton administration had accomplished as when Bush took office.
I've long felt that lawyers should be subject to the same outcome as their client. Don't want to get electrocuted, don't represent a murder. Don't want to end up a million dollars in the hole? Don't represent a doctor who's clearly guilty of malpractice.
This might actually be a good idea, as long as it goes both ways. If a prosecutor fails to prove guilt in a death penalty homicide case, the prosecutor gets the chair. If a malpractice lawyer loses a case where his client is suing for half a million bucks, he gets to pay the doctor half a million bucks. Etc. I'll bet you'd see a lot fewer frivolous prosecutions and lawsuits that way.
Unfortunately, idiots like you who have no understanding of the basic principles of the justice system would mostly be unaffected.
As for FAT vs. NTFS, how many people know the difference between disc and drum brakes? I don't know if knowing about filesystems is a requirement for using a computer - or that it even should be.
Should be? No. Is? Yes. Disc vs. drum brakes make a certain amount of difference to braking performance, but having drum brakes won't make it easier for people to steal your car, or cause it to suddenly stop working while you're driving. Modern computers are simply not comparable to modern cars. They're more like the Model T -- reliable and affordable enough to be useful to a lot of people, but still not something you want to depend on without a decent set of tools and a fair amount of mechanical knowledge.
Informed consent is an absolutely necessary part of any human subjects research. Not telling the participants that they're being studied is something that just doesn't wash these days; Tuskegee and similar monstrosities led to a real change on that score.
Even if you could do such a study, it still would not be double-blind, by definition. "Double-blind study" isn't just a buzzword, it's a specific set of protocols.
No matter how pro nuclear power one is, it's really, really hard to support licensing and approving operating permits for an outfit who apparently can not read the blueprints for their own nuclear power plant.
It's not hard at all. Read some of the other comments to this story and you'll see it's quite easy for some people. There's a crowd that, any time any safety issue relating to any nuclear plant is mentioned, react with howls of "OMG the liberal socialist greenies want to take our clean safe never-has-any-kind-of-problem-EVAR nuclear power away!!!" They're pretty much the other side of the same coin as the "nuclear power is dangerous 'cause it's got atoms in it!!!" types, and just as ignorant.
I think perhaps GPP was a comment on the absurdity of corporate naming schemes. "We can't just be 'the power company,' we need a name that proactively maximizes stakeholder value by black-belt leveraging of core mission parameters ... I know! Entergy! It's like 'energy' but with a 't' for extra six-sigma network impact!"
Here on Slashdot we have a pretty low standard of evidence - when somebody is 'wronged' by big business or the government, their claims are assumed to be gospel truth.
It's not 100%, of course, but the truth is that when it's big guy vs. little guy, "big guy is in the wrong" is usually the way to bet.
What you say in your reply post is entirely reasonable. But casting it as a "restatement" is disingenuous at best. Your original post was a broadside against scientific practice; now that you've been called on it, you're retreating and saying "well, what I really meant was ..." when you're actually saying something quite different and much more limited.
Scientists see results in their studies that they are looking for. Not accounting for, sometimes painfully obvious, faults in their conclusions, or reasoning.
Like the studies that link accidents and cellphones. Not accounting for the possibility that neglectful and distracted drivers that will get into accidents will probably now use cellphones as well as drink, eat, and read a book or put on makeup. It's outside their scope of the experiment so it isn't a possible contributing factor.
If you think scientists don't know what "confounding factors" are, or don't try to account for them in their analyses, then you don't know enough about how science is done to have an informed opinion on the subject.
More likely that would cause evolution to happen faster there since there would be much more competition for resources. Survival is what drives evolution.
Except it doesn't work that way. The ocean is a far more hospitable environment for life than anywhere on land, and we see a much greater variety of aquatic life than terrestrial. On land, tropical rainforests are probably about the most hospitable environments for life there is -- and surprise, we see much more variety there than we do in cooler and drier areas.
Competition for resources happens everywhere; whatever the resources available, the creatures living there will reproduce until they reach the limit of a sustainable population. It's the availability of resources that drives species diversity.
A satellite such as you describe would be both tremendously expensive, and (quite justifiably) regarded as a weapon. And dealing with the amount of junk currently in LEO, we'd need not one such satellite, but a lot of them. There's also the problem of what counts as junk -- the US, Russia, and China certainly, and several other nations probably, have a number of satellites that have no public record of their existence, but which are very much active and functional. If anything the garbage-sweeping satellite doesn't have in its database is classified as "junk" and destroyed, it would end up taking these satellites down, and the owners might get ... testy.
It's a smear only in a very specific context: Lomborg and his ilk are, unfortunately, often identified as "skeptics" in the press. They're no such thing, of course -- "denier" or "denialist" is much more accurate* -- but when you have a bunch of people spouting pseudoscientific garbage who are handed the "skeptic" label as a gift, it's inevitable that those who point out the garbage will appear to be "smearing skeptics." The only answer appears to be to point out as often as possible that they aren't skeptics by any reasonable definition of the word. There is simply no amount of evidence that will ever or could ever convince them. Their ideology trumps any data in their minds.
And not only is this the way they think, they assume that everyone else thinks that way too; thus the constant accusations of quasi-religion ("warmism") leveled against people who actually study the data and try to figure out what's happening to the environment. Arguing with denialists is closely akin to arguing with religious fundamentalists. Anything that is not of (their interpretation of) God must perforce be of the Devil. They just can't acknowledge that there are other worldviews that don't fit into their box.
*Since "denier" is often prefaced with a word beginning with "H," those who get called "deniers" often take refuge behind Godwin. "Denialist" works nicely, and in fact may be the most accurate term since it describes an ideology rather than just an action.
The internet isn't wrong (at least not in this case.) Your reading of what it says is.
First of all, if you actually read the definition of "low-discrepancy sequence" in the article you link to, you'll notice that it is not equivalent to the phrase you used, "each item in your possibility list has equal chances of occurring." Equal probability is necessary, but not sufficient.
Second, and more importantly, at the end of the first sentence of the second paragraph, there appears the phrase "in the case of a uniform distribution." This is the key to understanding the article. A uniform distribution is one, and only one, of an infinite number of distributions; and in any other distribution, outcomes do not occur with equal probability. Normal (aka Gaussian), Poisson, binomial, gamma, Weibull ... perhaps you've heard of some of these? Numbers sampled from any of these distributions are random; none of them is more or less random than the others.
Most computer RNGs generate uniform pseudo-random numbers, this is true, because it's very easy to convert a uniform sample into a sample from any other distribution. But the underlying distribution has absolutely nothing to do with any definition of randomness -- if you come up with a device that quickly and efficiently generated true random numbers from, say, a Poisson distribution (which IIRC is what the cosmic-ray-detector RNGs use) it will serve just as well.
True random means that each item in your possibility list has equal chances of occurring.
This is so utterly, completely, absolutely wrong that it's "not even wrong."
Please, for God's sake, read up on the concept of random variables before you attempt to make any judgement whatsoever about anything having to do with random number generation.
Those are both well-defined types of random sample: the deck of cards is "sampling without replacement," and the die is "sampling with replacement." The probabilistic rules for both are well understood.
Now, add the usual Microsoft bashing on slashdot ("Seven is just as insecure as Vista", "MS played a role in the SCO affair", "IE is still insecure", "activation/WGA is a hassle", "security features are easily defeated").
Dismissing those statements as "bashing" does not make any of them less true.
It's a common enough rhetorical trick: any time someone raises a point in an argument for which you don't have an answer, dismiss it as "bashing" or "propaganda" or "biased" or "discredited" and try to move on. Never mind the actual merit of the point; if you can make it seem somehow unfair, then you don't have to put the thought into answering it. What's depressing is how often this trick actually works.
That's the kind of thing that has to be examined in person, I think. A local university or museum will have someone who can take a look at it, and will probably be glad to do so.
I knew someone was going to say that.
Many primitive stone tools look like plain rocks at first glance, but there are distinctive chip and wear patterns on tools that just don't occur by chance. An expert will be able to tell you very quickly if you're dealing with an actual tool or just a rock that's assumed a suggestive shape.
No, there's a big difference. Nupedia, as I understand it, was asking experts themselves to write the articles. Wikipedia asks the article authors to cite the experts. In this, it's very close to standard academic writing practice.
Thank you.
Well, first of all, the Constitution doesn't say that all men are created equal; the Declaration of Independence does. (Lots of Americans get those mixed up too.) The former is, in theory the supreme law of the land, while the latter is a document of great moral authority but no legal authority. But yes, it was written by a slaveowner, and that paradox occupied a great deal of the nation's early existence. It kind of came to a head in this little dustup a century and a half ago. Since then, we still haven't fully dealt with the consequences.
The basic problem is, you ask ten different Americans to tell you what "freedom" means, and you'll get eleven different definitions. Some are concerned almost exclusively with economic freedom; as long as they can make money, they're happy, regardless of what else may be going on. Some focus on social freedom: who they sleep with, where (or whether) they worship, what substances they can put in their bodies. Some are concerned primarily with freedom from foreign military threats; pretty much everyone agrees this is a prerequisite for the other freedoms, but there are and always have been many who take their concern with it to fanatical extremes -- they forget that in order to defend our freedom from those who want to take it away, we must have freedom left to defend.
And no matter what kind of freedom people are most worried about, a regrettably large number will say, in effect, "I've got my freedom, screw yours." Thus those fighting for the Confederacy, and their latter-day counterparts in white sheets and pointy hats, could claim in all seriousness that they were fighting for freedom: their freedom, and the fact that preserving their view of freedom meant denying it to large numbers of the people who lived in their society didn't bother them at all. Thus the flag could be defined as the symbol of freedom, and freedom limited to those who wished to pledge allegiance to it. Thus any act, no matter how vile, that was anti-communist could be defined as serving the interests of freedom.
Personally, my definition of freedom includes not only my freedom to do what I want to do, but others' freedom to do what they want to do, including things that I personally have no desire to do. But this definition is far from universally accepted. I don't think this is an exclusively American problem by any means, but it does seem like we're a bit better at others at fooling ourselves into thinking we're implementing a universal definition of freedom, while picking and choosing our freedoms carefully in practice.
if you have to ask this question on /. you'd better not start
Every single Ask Slashdot story gets a response like this, and it's always a jackass thing to say. The whole reason Ask Slashdot exists is to allow technically competent people to share their expertise, and help others get up to speed. "RTFM n00b" responses like this are a major contributor to the negative geek stereotypes we all claim to hate, and in this specific case, a major barrier to Linux use. If you like seeing yourself as a member of a small, impenetrable elite possessed of special and arcane knowledge, go right ahead, but don't expect the rest of us to play along.
To be fair, he was introducing himself in the context of a discussion about younger teenagers going to college, so it's not unreasonable for him to lead with his experiences in the subject.
A community college does not have that environment.
That's a pretty bold blanket statement you're making there.
It varies a lot by the CC. There are some CCs that are essentially two more years of high school, filled with losers who want to be able to say they "went to college" but who have no desire to learn any more than they have to in order to get the minimum passing grade. There are others that offer intellectual challenge and rigor equal to that found at the best four-year colleges and universities, and if you don't believe that, then you simply haven't learned enough about the issue to have an informed opinion.
Many, many high school graduates, to say nothing of the HS juniors and seniors who will be taking advantage of the program discussed in this story, would do much better at a good CC than they would at Enormous State University. Campuses are smaller and have more of neighborhood feeling. Classes are smaller and taught by professors who see teaching as their primary mission, rather than a distraction from research. Classmates are an interesting mix of people from various age groups, many having significant life experience, rather than a bunch of other 18-year-olds who haven't figured out that they can't coast in college the way they did in high school. Life after class isn't dominated by the toxic "Greek" life and athletic obsession that eats up so much resources at ESU.
It isn't for everyone. There are students who can graduate from high school and be ready for the challenges at ESU, or even Harvard or Stanford, from day one. Good for them. But like a lot of 18-year-olds, I screwed up my first try, and years later CC offered me a way back into the academic world. Given that I'm now within a year of my PhD, you can probably guess that I don't feel academically deprived by having an associate's degree to my name.
Remember, before Bell Aircraft came along and just did it, scientists opined that breaking the sound barrier was impossible too.
No they didn't. It was understood since the nineteenth century that the "sound barrier" was an engineering problem, not a scientific one.