we're at a point in technology or whatever that we could, POSSIBLY, destroy the planet in a literal sense
We reached that point over sixty years ago -- during the Manhattan Project, there was thought to be a possibility that the first atomic detonation would start a runaway fusion reaction in the atmosphere. If that had happened... well, okay, the planet itself would still be here, but it would be a sterile rock, which is close enough to "destroyed in a literal sense" from a human perspective. They knew the risk was there, but they didn't let it stop them then, and we shouldn't let it stop us now.
To the mods who think my parent is insightful: could you please spell out to me what the insight is?
The "insight" exists in the minds of people who don't want to put forth the intellectual effort to understand sample size and power calculations, and who find the misuse of statistical jargon convenient to dismiss study results that make them uncomfortable. The authors could have used just about any sample size and we'd still see the same comment... unless it was so large that nobody could reasonably quibble on that point, in which case the wilfully ignorant would fall back on "correlation is not causation," of course.
What you're saying is that you don't want to be bothered to (a) read the article and (b) calculate for yourself whether or not the sample size is large enough to determine significance of the claimed effect, so you're going to go with your gut feeling rather than crunching the numbers. And then tell people who point this out that they're just "defensive whiners." Classy.
"Common knowledge you can find in most microbiology or immunology textbooks" doesn't generally get a publication in Nature.
I've worked with one of the authors (Rob Knight) of the most recent paper, so I have some idea of what their research entails. Basically they were expecting to find some diversity in bacterial populations between individuals, but the amount they found was the big surprise -- there is more genetic diversity between the gut bacteria population of any two randomly selected people than there is between two soil bacteria populations in a deep sea trench and on a mountaintop! How strongly the bacterial populations predict leanness vs. obesity was also far beyond any previously published result.
What that page barely mentions is the massive change in computing that occurred during the 60's and early 70's. It gets all of two sentences: "Vacuum tube electronics were largely replaced in the 1960s by transistor-based electronics, which are smaller, faster, cheaper to produce, require less power, and are more reliable. In the 1970s, integrated circuit technology and the subsequent creation of microprocessors, such as the Intel 4004, further decreased size and cost and further increased speed and reliability of computers." Which is certainly true as far as it goes... but neglects to mention that this advance was largely driven by demand from NASA.
At the beginning of the Apollo program, computers were no more than giant calculators. By the end, they were recognizably on track to becoming today's machines. And it was because of the computational demands of sending men to the Moon that this happened.
Yeah, I'm kind of surprised that (as of this posting) nobody else reading the story picked up on that. Taking surreptitious pictures of LEOs doing bad things was the first thing I thought of, and it's an obvious use for the law.
As another poster pointed out, most obscene photos taken of people without their consent ("upskirt" shots, etc.) are probably taken in crowded, noisy places such as train stations and nightclubs, where the click won't be audible anyway. A cop beating the hell out of someone, OTOH, might very well hear the click of someone taking a picture... especially if the victim has already reached the point where he's not making much noise.
Sure, but I don't see any reason to assume that's what happened here. The simplest explanation is that the person who submitted the story really liked the book, and wanted to tell people about it.
Mainly, I was just snarking at the AC who probably has no idea how much work it is to write a novel and get it published. Reviews are nice, but getting the damned thing out there in the first place is the most important and difficult part by far.
Re:Why people watch movies..
on
Daemon
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Oh, that bugs the hell out of me too. It's really the same kind of error: the people making the movie or TV show just don't know anything about X, so they just grab a convenient stereotype for X, whether X is a person, a type of technology, a profession, or even a whole society. Techies, scientists, medical personnel, and soldiers get this treatment a lot, and those are the ones I pick up on, but I'd guess that a lot of other types of people get it too, and react similarly. Cops and lawyers are obvious examples -- and for American movies and TV, pretty much anyone from any country that isn't the US, not to mention Americans from any part of the country that isn't New York or LA.
Where do I apply to get my fiction mentioned here too?
Write a novel. Get it published. Then see if someone on/. wants to review it.
Let us know how that works out.
Re:Why people watch movies..
on
Daemon
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
For the enlightened on/.: please tell me that you are capable of sitting down and enjoying a film without nitpicking - if it bothers you, then IGNORE it.
Honestly, it depends on how much of it there is. One or two pieces of techno-babble, particularly if they're in service to the plot, fine. Someone mentioned the cell phone sonar setup in Dark Knight; there's an example of something that makes basically no sense, but it was fun and it helped move the story along, so what the hell. But when it's done over and over again (e.g. Star Trek's fictional subatomic particle of the week) or when real science and/or technology would work for the plot just as well, it gets more difficult to ignore. "Willing suspension of disbelief" is not the same as "believe six impossible things before breakfast."
I'm a veteran, who served as both an infantryman and a medic; I've also been a software engineer, and am now a scientist (specifically bioinformatics.) So between the all the bad military stuff, bad medicine, bad tech stuff, and bad science in movies and TV, I end up cringing at gratuitous bullshit a lot. Pretty much any "exotic" field like the above that you put in your story, there's a good bet that someone in your audience -- a fair portion of your audience, actually -- is going to catch the really dumb mistakes and bitch about them. Also being an occasional SF writer, I try to consult with people who have some experience in the field whenever I'm writing about something too far outside my expertise. Most people are happy to talk about what they know, and getting a couple of small details right instead of drastically wrong can greatly improve the story for those in the know, without losing the general audience.
I was just looking for a general idea of why the Chinnese consider "May you live in interesting times" a curse.
So it doesn't matter to you whether or not it's an actual Chinese curse? You're perfectly happy to go on spouting the "'may you live in interesting times' is a Chinese curse" line, even when it's almost certainly not?
Wikipedia is supposed to be a resource for people who want to learn facts, and those who want to help others learn facts. How well it succeeds in that goal is certainly up for debate, but attitudes like yours have no place in the debate.
Of course, if you can't figure out why it's supposed to be a curse, you're probably not capable of learning much of anything.
Hah, good point. OTOH, I'm pretty sure that even right after I joined Slashdot, I didn't post "Hey, why are you guys talking about X when Y is more important" links all over every single damned story. It's a type of trolling, and like most troll techniques, the reasons for it are, I suspect, kind of inexplicable to anyone who doesn't have that particular compulsion.
Which is kind of HungryHobo's point. Communism is a vicious, violent ideology which, if put into practice, leads to grotesque suffering on a grand scale... but locking people up for expressing communist views is still both unnecessary and wrong. Ditto fascism, fundamentalist Islam, or whatever else the Bad Guy Flavor Of The Month is.
There are a lot of stories that appear on/. in which I have absolutely no interest. (The same could be said by practically anyone here.) So you know what I do when one of those stories comes up on the front page? I don't click on it. Easy, simple solution -- let the people who do care about that particular story talk about it, and go find something I care about to read and comment on instead. Everybody wins. It's not that hard a concept to grasp.
You seem to be saying that any attempt to restrict free speech leads to dictatorship. But in practice, there has never been a country with 100% unrestricted free speech. So where does that leave us?
Where we've always been -- in the middle of the struggle between those who wish to exercise their right of free speech, and those who wish to take it away. However distasteful the words of the first group may be, and however well-intentioned the actions of the second.
I do not claim that restrictions on speech inevitably lead to tyranny. I do claim that: first, such restrictions are a powerful tool for tyrants; second, those who use such tools tend to become tyrants whether they mean to or not; and third, the best way to keep this from happening is to keep pushing against such restrictions wherever they appear.
In contrast to political rhetoric, in real life it's quite possible to build a good home on what looks like, from the point of theory, to be a "slippery slope".
If you build your house on thin soil on a mountainside, it may last for decades, but you shouldn't be surprised if one day it ends up in pieces at the bottom of a canyon. Banning candidates from political office is kind of the political equivalent of this practice: it's not quite tyrannical in itself, but it is a powerful tool for tyrants and tempts those given such power into tyranny even if that's not what they start out intending to do.
In light of this discussion, your.sig is quite ironic. "Simple, neat, and wrong" indeed.
"Reverse engineering" is a pretty broad phrase. It can mean anything from taking an actual working example of a machine and figuring out how to build it, to the kind of thing you're talking about, observing what a machine does and figuring out how to build something that does the same thing (whether or not the internal mechanism is the same.) I'd say what Coster-Mullen did falls right in the middle of this range, so calling it "reverse engineering" is fair.
is this more interesting than this The web browser is a dead end
Jesus H. Christ, you're sock-monkeying that link all over the place. The answer clearly is, yes, to a lot of people, whatever story you're posting on is more interesting than that particular journal entry. Deal with it, will you?
According to Amazon, his book was published in 2002. If they were going to lock him up, they've had plenty of time to do so already.
Of course, it's a good thing for him his name is John Coster-Mullen instead of, oh, say, Ahmed al-Rashad. You can pretty much guarantee that in the latter case, even if all the other circumstances were exactly the same, he'd have been disappeared a long time ago.
To paraphrase Churchill, free speech is the worst form of public discourse, except for all the others that have been tried.
Look, if we could censor only those people who advocate "religious rule, genocide, or similar," that would be great... but who gets to decide what falls into those categories? You? Me? Glorious Leader? No, that's too personal. How about a committee of anonymous bureaucrats? Hey, I like that idea -- we could give it a catchy name, like, say, "The Committee for Public Safety," or maybe, "The Committee for State Security." Because that always works out so well.
There is no one person, and no group of people, good and wise enough to be entrusted with that kind of power. Good people, with the best of intentions, given the authority to decide what kind of political speech is and is not acceptable, will inevitably turn that power to evil. One day they're locking up the obvious loons, the next day they're locking up the maybe-loons, and by the third day it's anyone who disagrees with censors in the slightest. Because how can you disagree with us? We're Good! Good people don't do Bad things! If you disagree, you must be Bad!
Free speech is messy. It's often unpleasant. Sometimes it's actively dangerous. But the alternative is worse.
All of that information is already available. Every Senator's and Representative's vote on every bill is a matter of public record, AFAIK. And candidates for office generally have opposition research teams dedicated to digging up every embarrassing vote, or even political statement, their opponents have ever made.
Here's a hammer, I dangle it above your toe, let's test the theory.
No, all you're doing with that is repeating the observation that things fall. The theory of gravity is a lot more than that. Consider that "things fall" is an observation which we have been able to make pretty much forever, but we didn't have a theory of gravity which did a decent job of describing the way the observed world work until Newton. Similarly, the sorts of observations which led Darwin to write Origin of Species are fairly easy to make, but developing the theory took a long time and a lot of work.
Slashdot Mirror
we're at a point in technology or whatever that we could, POSSIBLY, destroy the planet in a literal sense
We reached that point over sixty years ago -- during the Manhattan Project, there was thought to be a possibility that the first atomic detonation would start a runaway fusion reaction in the atmosphere. If that had happened ... well, okay, the planet itself would still be here, but it would be a sterile rock, which is close enough to "destroyed in a literal sense" from a human perspective. They knew the risk was there, but they didn't let it stop them then, and we shouldn't let it stop us now.
To the mods who think my parent is insightful: could you please spell out to me what the insight is?
The "insight" exists in the minds of people who don't want to put forth the intellectual effort to understand sample size and power calculations, and who find the misuse of statistical jargon convenient to dismiss study results that make them uncomfortable. The authors could have used just about any sample size and we'd still see the same comment ... unless it was so large that nobody could reasonably quibble on that point, in which case the wilfully ignorant would fall back on "correlation is not causation," of course.
I'm just sayin, ya know?
What you're saying is that you don't want to be bothered to (a) read the article and (b) calculate for yourself whether or not the sample size is large enough to determine significance of the claimed effect, so you're going to go with your gut feeling rather than crunching the numbers. And then tell people who point this out that they're just "defensive whiners." Classy.
"Common knowledge you can find in most microbiology or immunology textbooks" doesn't generally get a publication in Nature.
I've worked with one of the authors (Rob Knight) of the most recent paper, so I have some idea of what their research entails. Basically they were expecting to find some diversity in bacterial populations between individuals, but the amount they found was the big surprise -- there is more genetic diversity between the gut bacteria population of any two randomly selected people than there is between two soil bacteria populations in a deep sea trench and on a mountaintop! How strongly the bacterial populations predict leanness vs. obesity was also far beyond any previously published result.
What that page barely mentions is the massive change in computing that occurred during the 60's and early 70's. It gets all of two sentences: "Vacuum tube electronics were largely replaced in the 1960s by transistor-based electronics, which are smaller, faster, cheaper to produce, require less power, and are more reliable. In the 1970s, integrated circuit technology and the subsequent creation of microprocessors, such as the Intel 4004, further decreased size and cost and further increased speed and reliability of computers." Which is certainly true as far as it goes ... but neglects to mention that this advance was largely driven by demand from NASA.
At the beginning of the Apollo program, computers were no more than giant calculators. By the end, they were recognizably on track to becoming today's machines. And it was because of the computational demands of sending men to the Moon that this happened.
Yeah, I'm kind of surprised that (as of this posting) nobody else reading the story picked up on that. Taking surreptitious pictures of LEOs doing bad things was the first thing I thought of, and it's an obvious use for the law.
As another poster pointed out, most obscene photos taken of people without their consent ("upskirt" shots, etc.) are probably taken in crowded, noisy places such as train stations and nightclubs, where the click won't be audible anyway. A cop beating the hell out of someone, OTOH, might very well hear the click of someone taking a picture ... especially if the victim has already reached the point where he's not making much noise.
Sure, but I don't see any reason to assume that's what happened here. The simplest explanation is that the person who submitted the story really liked the book, and wanted to tell people about it.
Mainly, I was just snarking at the AC who probably has no idea how much work it is to write a novel and get it published. Reviews are nice, but getting the damned thing out there in the first place is the most important and difficult part by far.
Oh, that bugs the hell out of me too. It's really the same kind of error: the people making the movie or TV show just don't know anything about X, so they just grab a convenient stereotype for X, whether X is a person, a type of technology, a profession, or even a whole society. Techies, scientists, medical personnel, and soldiers get this treatment a lot, and those are the ones I pick up on, but I'd guess that a lot of other types of people get it too, and react similarly. Cops and lawyers are obvious examples -- and for American movies and TV, pretty much anyone from any country that isn't the US, not to mention Americans from any part of the country that isn't New York or LA.
Where do I apply to get my fiction mentioned here too?
Write a novel. Get it published. Then see if someone on /. wants to review it.
Let us know how that works out.
For the enlightened on /.: please tell me that you are capable of sitting down and enjoying a film without nitpicking - if it bothers you, then IGNORE it.
Honestly, it depends on how much of it there is. One or two pieces of techno-babble, particularly if they're in service to the plot, fine. Someone mentioned the cell phone sonar setup in Dark Knight; there's an example of something that makes basically no sense, but it was fun and it helped move the story along, so what the hell. But when it's done over and over again (e.g. Star Trek's fictional subatomic particle of the week) or when real science and/or technology would work for the plot just as well, it gets more difficult to ignore. "Willing suspension of disbelief" is not the same as "believe six impossible things before breakfast."
I'm a veteran, who served as both an infantryman and a medic; I've also been a software engineer, and am now a scientist (specifically bioinformatics.) So between the all the bad military stuff, bad medicine, bad tech stuff, and bad science in movies and TV, I end up cringing at gratuitous bullshit a lot. Pretty much any "exotic" field like the above that you put in your story, there's a good bet that someone in your audience -- a fair portion of your audience, actually -- is going to catch the really dumb mistakes and bitch about them. Also being an occasional SF writer, I try to consult with people who have some experience in the field whenever I'm writing about something too far outside my expertise. Most people are happy to talk about what they know, and getting a couple of small details right instead of drastically wrong can greatly improve the story for those in the know, without losing the general audience.
I was just looking for a general idea of why the Chinnese consider "May you live in interesting times" a curse.
So it doesn't matter to you whether or not it's an actual Chinese curse? You're perfectly happy to go on spouting the "'may you live in interesting times' is a Chinese curse" line, even when it's almost certainly not?
Wikipedia is supposed to be a resource for people who want to learn facts, and those who want to help others learn facts. How well it succeeds in that goal is certainly up for debate, but attitudes like yours have no place in the debate.
Of course, if you can't figure out why it's supposed to be a curse, you're probably not capable of learning much of anything.
While there are spammers and others who wish to manipulate wikipedia, there is also a strong leftist bias to the site.
[[citation needed]]
Hah, good point. OTOH, I'm pretty sure that even right after I joined Slashdot, I didn't post "Hey, why are you guys talking about X when Y is more important" links all over every single damned story. It's a type of trolling, and like most troll techniques, the reasons for it are, I suspect, kind of inexplicable to anyone who doesn't have that particular compulsion.
Which is kind of HungryHobo's point. Communism is a vicious, violent ideology which, if put into practice, leads to grotesque suffering on a grand scale ... but locking people up for expressing communist views is still both unnecessary and wrong. Ditto fascism, fundamentalist Islam, or whatever else the Bad Guy Flavor Of The Month is.
There are a lot of stories that appear on /. in which I have absolutely no interest. (The same could be said by practically anyone here.) So you know what I do when one of those stories comes up on the front page? I don't click on it. Easy, simple solution -- let the people who do care about that particular story talk about it, and go find something I care about to read and comment on instead. Everybody wins. It's not that hard a concept to grasp.
You seem to be saying that any attempt to restrict free speech leads to dictatorship. But in practice, there has never been a country with 100% unrestricted free speech. So where does that leave us?
Where we've always been -- in the middle of the struggle between those who wish to exercise their right of free speech, and those who wish to take it away. However distasteful the words of the first group may be, and however well-intentioned the actions of the second.
I do not claim that restrictions on speech inevitably lead to tyranny. I do claim that: first, such restrictions are a powerful tool for tyrants; second, those who use such tools tend to become tyrants whether they mean to or not; and third, the best way to keep this from happening is to keep pushing against such restrictions wherever they appear.
In contrast to political rhetoric, in real life it's quite possible to build a good home on what looks like, from the point of theory, to be a "slippery slope".
If you build your house on thin soil on a mountainside, it may last for decades, but you shouldn't be surprised if one day it ends up in pieces at the bottom of a canyon. Banning candidates from political office is kind of the political equivalent of this practice: it's not quite tyrannical in itself, but it is a powerful tool for tyrants and tempts those given such power into tyranny even if that's not what they start out intending to do.
In light of this discussion, your .sig is quite ironic. "Simple, neat, and wrong" indeed.
"Reverse engineering" is a pretty broad phrase. It can mean anything from taking an actual working example of a machine and figuring out how to build it, to the kind of thing you're talking about, observing what a machine does and figuring out how to build something that does the same thing (whether or not the internal mechanism is the same.) I'd say what Coster-Mullen did falls right in the middle of this range, so calling it "reverse engineering" is fair.
is this more interesting than this The web browser is a dead end
Jesus H. Christ, you're sock-monkeying that link all over the place. The answer clearly is, yes, to a lot of people, whatever story you're posting on is more interesting than that particular journal entry. Deal with it, will you?
According to Amazon, his book was published in 2002. If they were going to lock him up, they've had plenty of time to do so already.
Of course, it's a good thing for him his name is John Coster-Mullen instead of, oh, say, Ahmed al-Rashad. You can pretty much guarantee that in the latter case, even if all the other circumstances were exactly the same, he'd have been disappeared a long time ago.
To paraphrase Churchill, free speech is the worst form of public discourse, except for all the others that have been tried.
Look, if we could censor only those people who advocate "religious rule, genocide, or similar," that would be great ... but who gets to decide what falls into those categories? You? Me? Glorious Leader? No, that's too personal. How about a committee of anonymous bureaucrats? Hey, I like that idea -- we could give it a catchy name, like, say, "The Committee for Public Safety," or maybe, "The Committee for State Security." Because that always works out so well.
There is no one person, and no group of people, good and wise enough to be entrusted with that kind of power. Good people, with the best of intentions, given the authority to decide what kind of political speech is and is not acceptable, will inevitably turn that power to evil. One day they're locking up the obvious loons, the next day they're locking up the maybe-loons, and by the third day it's anyone who disagrees with censors in the slightest. Because how can you disagree with us? We're Good! Good people don't do Bad things! If you disagree, you must be Bad!
Free speech is messy. It's often unpleasant. Sometimes it's actively dangerous. But the alternative is worse.
I think anyone intending to create religious rule should be disqualified from being elected.
So you're saying we have to ban the Republican Party?
Oh, sorry, we're talking about Egyptian politics, not American. Never mind. Carry on.
You may not be able to see the connection, but attitudes like yours led directly to the rise of the Taliban.
All of that information is already available. Every Senator's and Representative's vote on every bill is a matter of public record, AFAIK. And candidates for office generally have opposition research teams dedicated to digging up every embarrassing vote, or even political statement, their opponents have ever made.
Here's a hammer, I dangle it above your toe, let's test the theory.
No, all you're doing with that is repeating the observation that things fall. The theory of gravity is a lot more than that. Consider that "things fall" is an observation which we have been able to make pretty much forever, but we didn't have a theory of gravity which did a decent job of describing the way the observed world work until Newton. Similarly, the sorts of observations which led Darwin to write Origin of Species are fairly easy to make, but developing the theory took a long time and a lot of work.