No, no, you don't get it. People like that only want the rest of us to go back and live in the Stone Age. They, of course, will be exempt, on the grounds that it was their idea to begin with.
What kind of masochist sits in the front row at the Cinerama? Pixellation has got to be the least of your problems after two hours of eyestrain, whiplash, and motion sickness.
I'm sure there were plenty of African Americans that didn't ask for Martin Luther King to advocate for them. That doesn't mean they didn't need it or benefit from it, just that they weren't conscious enough to recognize their need.
Wow. The degree of arrogance embodied by that statement is simply jaw-dropping.
I honestly don't know what to say (and you won't hear that from me very often, believe me). You win this one.
Nader is a Consumer Advocate, and since our society is extremely bent towards Capitalist ideals, that effectively makes him an advocate for the people (you knnow, the people whos money the government is spending).
Really? That's funny. I'm a consumer, and I don't recall asking for an advocate.
It's a troll. Think about it -- we wouldn't be able to see the stars if the Sun's gravity well were strong enough to deflect extrasolar electromagnetic radiation.
There is absolutely no basis for that statement in reality. Although the researchers and doctors dealing with the evolution of drug-resistant bacteria would certainly prefer it that way...
Remember using HP-IB (the IEEE-488 Interface Bus stuff) as a way to connect all sorts of things together? (It was pretty cool for what it did, and actually did make sense in the test-equipment world, but as a computer interface it meant you had to buy all the peripherals from HP.)
Now that the story's off the front page, it's probably safe to blow off the anonymous-posting feature, an idea dating back to a time when the churches put a lot more than Slashdot karma at stake for the heretic.:)
St. Augustine was basically the heir to St. Paul's "better chastity than marriage, better marriage than Hell" mentality. Google came up with this accurate but admittedly-one-sided summary of Christian sexual morality, http://www.al-islam.org/m_morals/chap1.htm, written by someone who has an Islamic axe to grind. I don't know much about Islam, but it's not relevant in any case: the psychosexual issues the author raises are, as far as I know, quite valid.
My understanding is that Augustine was what Christians would call a "reformed homosexual." When the object of his affection died, it prompted his own Damascene ephiphany in which he rejected the passions of the flesh in favor of immersion in a higher spiritual calling. Nowadays, we just spend a week locked in our room playing Quake when we get jilted, but things were different back then, when intellectual and moral crises lurked around every corner.
Unfortunately, just like Paul before him, Augustine proceeded to project his neuroses on the rest of Christendom. The Church has spent millennia cultivating a distorted sense of sexual morality and human nature, telling us that some of our most fundamental biological impulses are sinful and shameful, barely worthy of tolerance in limited circumstances (marriage) and only worthy of repression elsewhere. I have a problem with that.
Speaking personally, I was raised in a heavily Christian (Southern Baptist) environment, albeit in a non-churchgoing family. In my youth, I spent a lot of time reading both Testaments and looking for the answers to the usual questions that pop up during adolescence and puberty. Are women a Good Thing or not? Is it OK to ask God for a new Camaro? How many times per week can I jack off without staining either my sheets or my soul? While my childhood was short on genuine moral crises, it was saturated with contradictions: what was up with all the French kissing on the church bus on the way back from the Petra concert? Why was the state of the new girl in town's virginity the chief topic of discussion at Bible camp, along with the near-theological question of who would be the first among us to settle the issue once and for all?
The trouble was, it was easy enough for me to dismiss St. Paul as a party-pooping congenital loser, but Christ Himself was something else. He seemed like a smart guy, a fellow who really had His shit together. As the article above points out, He didn't talk much about the old in-out, in-out, but when He did, He came straight to the point. But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.
That was a problem. Not much room for pubescent rationalization there, friends and neighbors.
Eventually, I came to realize that Christ demanded I choose between my own nature as a human being, or an ideal made apparently unachievable by the biological code His own Father built into me. That kind of thinking was obviously dangerous: according to the church, it was the sort of argument you could expect when someone tried to recruit you into Satan's posse. But since I had never bought into the whole organized-religion thing to begin with, it wasn't hard for me to walk away from the whole idea of Christianity with a clear conscience. I didn't have much at stake besides the fate of my soul... which, once I realized was only a metaphorical gun held to my head by people who were flesh and blood like myself, was easy enough to get past.
Priests of celibate orders, on the other hand, have more than their souls in this precarious moral balance. Their careers, lives, vows, and identities are inextricable from Pauline and Augustinian morality. That's what I meant by my flippant "2,000 years of chickens coming home to roost" remark. The human mind is a powerful thing; when you hold it to unreasonable or impossible standards, you shouldn't be too surprised to see it fail in catastrophic ways.
For instance, there are plenty of scientists who claim to be Christians (as opposed to Christian Scientists). Should those scientists be stripped of their professional accreditation because they believe in the eventual return to Earth of a 2,000-year-old dead Jewish guy?
If you think so, then be prepared to lose the benefits to society of a number of otherwise-intelligent, thoughtful people.
If you don't think so -- if you believe that one's religion should not disqualify one from being considered a "scientist" -- then what's the difference between a scientist who is a Christian and one who believes in other unprovable, irrational propositions such as clairvoyance or astrology?
A great many people, including some of history's most successful scientists, have their pet irrational beliefs. It probably doesn't make sense to use someone's New Age-y beliefs as the chief yardstick of their scientific literacy.
Everybody in the neightbourhood except for one person signed for it.
Unless your neighborhood has a higher-than-normal population of licensed civil engineers, that's about the worst imaginable way to determine where stop signs should be placed.
I'm not saying either or both signs are unnecessary in your particular case because I (obviously) have never seen the intersection and am not a traffic engineer myself, but in general, if you find that a traffic-control device is being disregarded by a large percentage of drivers, there's usually an explanation other than "they're all a bunch of homicidal idiots." Stop signs placed in residential neighborhoods without a valid engineering study are a classic example.
It may seem like you and your neighbors are really blazing new frontiers in traffic safety, but at some point, you should be asking yourselves, "Is it really a good idea to condition drivers to ignore stop signs?"
Then the stop sign almost certainly shouldn't be there in the first place. It was probably placed as a "traffic calming" measure in violation of the guidelines in the Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD).
This sort of thing is becoming more and more common as neighborhoods decide to crack down on those "evil speeders." Like unreasonably-low speed limits, superfluous stop signs do nothing for traffic safety, pedestrian safety, or respect for the law in general.
Either way, the issue has nothing to do with Segways on sidewalks. If you wouldn't try to run a four-minute/mile pace on a given sidewalk, then chances are, you won't try to do it on a Segway either.
Would you really feel safe sprinting on a city sidewalk on a regular basis?
You, along with half the other posters to this story, seem to be laboring under the misapprehension that Segways have only two speeds: 0 MPH and 14+ MPH.
That's not my understanding.
Any special reason why you're convinced that lots of Segway riders will be suicidal enough to do 14 MPH on a crowded sidewalk? I mean, do you see people roaring down your neighborhood streets at their car's top speed? No? Well, then it won't be a major issue with Segways, either. Most people know when they're going too fast for conditions, regardless of the vehicle.
My point, which seems to have escaped some people, is that for better or worse, $100 million is no longer considered much money. We are nickel and diming NASA to death over peanuts.
For the price of a ticket to see Mission to Mars, the collective base of US taxpayers can finance a real mission, or at least a good try at one. But instead, we choose to complain about "*my* money being wasted" (your words). We as contemporary Americans do not seem to place a significant value on the amounts of money being discussed, until NASA has an accident with it.
... you're closer to the truth than you probably realize. The budget on Brian de Palma's awful Mission to Mars was US $90 million... more than 75% of the budget of an equally-flawed but substantially better-intended real-life mission.
When Hollywood drops a bomb, nobody cares. When NASA loses a similar amount of money trying to advance human knowledge, it's practically the end of the world. Congressional inquiries are launched, indignant editorials are published, and modern-day Great Society pundits bemoan the tragic waste of funding that could have gone to their own pet causes.
This is the unfortunate reality of publicly-funded space exploration. It's perhaps the ultimate embodiment of the "bread and circuses" social phenomenon that attended the fall of Rome. Never mind the urban myths -- think of the money NASA could have saved if they actually had hired Stanley Kubrick to stage the Apollo missions in the Nevada desert. Apparently, that would have been good enough for us.
Is anyone else worried about the fact that this increases background noise radiation across the entire spectrum? Won't this cause a massive health risk?
Uncalled for religious discrimination, yes. Atrocity, no.
Maybe, maybe not. I used that term because as scientists in the public eye, the editors of a major, consumer-accessible science magazine have a special obligation to behave in a way that's above reproach, scientifically speaking. When they fail to do so in such a blatant manner, it's at least a potential "atrocity" on the Pons and Fleischmann scale -- an event with substantial negative implications for the reputation of science as a whole.
Heck, one of the three inventors of the transistor was practically a card-carrying Nazi, but that didn't stop the Nobel Committee from awarding them their justly-earned physics prize. If a committee with a substantial contingent of Jews and ethnic minorities could deal with a certified asshole like Shockley, it wasn't unreasonable for the SciAm editors to do the same for a man who, in addition to being a well-known and popular science writer, has a reputation as a decent, agreeable, and generally unlikely-to-embarrass-his-associates fellow.
Their action might have been more justifiable if Mims had a history of espousing his Christian views at inappropriate times and places. But he didn't. So in a sense, they punished him for thoughtcrime.
As an AC pointed out earlier, SciAm's behavior was neither "scientific" nor "American."
That's a pretty good one, too. Before encountering radioshacksucks.com awhile back, I never realized that the proper term for the (relatively few) useful electronic components sold by RS is "force feed."
Apparently, RS employees worldwide are united in their hatred of the laborious restocking and inventory-maintenance process that brings us those $1.98 bubble packs of assorted LEDs.
They quickly learned, however, that Mims was an supporter of so-called Scientific Creationism, a movement that attempts to include the creation story of Genesis in biology curricula as a scientifically viable account of human origins.
This is actually a pretty sad story. Mims's treatment at the hands of Scientific American is an atrocity on par with anything the medieval Catholics could have come up with, at least without resorting to pitchforks and thumbscrews. They certainly guaranteed that at least one agnostic (myself) will never burden their subscription department with correspondence.
That's certainly true of the stores, but http://www.radioshack.com might surprise you. They have got a SERIOUSLY good web operation. Check it out if you haven't already.
It wasn't that many years ago that Microsoft, along with just about everyone else in the PC business with an ounce of common sense, launched a jihad against Intel's NSP (Native Signal Processing) initiative.
NSP was the logical response to Intel's realization that CPU cycles in the Pentium era were becoming less and less valuable to the end user. They considered it a task of strategic importance to soak up extra cycles wherever they could be found... never mind that game developers still needed every cycle they could find at the time. Had NSP succeeded, it would have had a wide array of effects on the PC hardware and software businesses, almost all of them too ugly to contemplate. The nascent market for high-performance 3D and environmental audio hardware would likely have been crushed under the treads of Intel's marketing machine, and WinModems would have taken over the scene years earlier than they did. The development of online gaming technology would have been pushed back indefinitely, pending the ubiquitous adoption of broadband (which, obviously, has yet to happen).
Of course, MS's primary interest in killing NSP was to keep Windows from having to run as just another NSP client. Owning the boot process from BIOS to bluescreen was as important to them in 1994 as it is now. But now, it appears that they've taken leave of their technical senses as well as their ethics. If this is anything like Intel's earlier push to run modem data pumps on the CPU -- and to be fair to MS, the article is by no means clear on this point -- then 802.11 fans, and consumers in general, should fight it where they find it.
Slashdot Mirror
No, no, you don't get it. People like that only want the rest of us to go back and live in the Stone Age. They, of course, will be exempt, on the grounds that it was their idea to begin with.
What kind of masochist sits in the front row at the Cinerama? Pixellation has got to be the least of your problems after two hours of eyestrain, whiplash, and motion sickness.
I'm sure there were plenty of African Americans that didn't ask for Martin Luther King to advocate for them. That doesn't mean they didn't need it or benefit from it, just that they weren't conscious enough to recognize their need.
Wow. The degree of arrogance embodied by that statement is simply jaw-dropping.
I honestly don't know what to say (and you won't hear that from me very often, believe me). You win this one.
Nader is a Consumer Advocate, and since our society is extremely bent towards Capitalist ideals, that effectively makes him an advocate for the people (you knnow, the people whos money the government is spending).
Really? That's funny. I'm a consumer, and I don't recall asking for an advocate.
16,000 volts? On the grid? Score:5, Informative?
Kill me now.
It's a troll. Think about it -- we wouldn't be able to see the stars if the Sun's gravity well were strong enough to deflect extrasolar electromagnetic radiation.
Adaptation comes after multicellular life.
There is absolutely no basis for that statement in reality. Although the researchers and doctors dealing with the evolution of drug-resistant bacteria would certainly prefer it that way...
Dude, Mars is a desert. Get over yourself.
Remember using HP-IB (the IEEE-488 Interface Bus stuff) as a way to connect all sorts of things together? (It was pretty cool for what it did, and actually did make sense in the test-equipment world, but as a computer interface it meant you had to buy all the peripherals from HP.)
Good thing nobody told National Instruments.
Now that the story's off the front page, it's probably safe to blow off the anonymous-posting feature, an idea dating back to a time when the churches put a lot more than Slashdot karma at stake for the heretic. :)
St. Augustine was basically the heir to St. Paul's "better chastity than marriage, better marriage than Hell" mentality. Google came up with this accurate but admittedly-one-sided summary of Christian sexual morality, http://www.al-islam.org/m_morals/chap1.htm, written by someone who has an Islamic axe to grind. I don't know much about Islam, but it's not relevant in any case: the psychosexual issues the author raises are, as far as I know, quite valid.
My understanding is that Augustine was what Christians would call a "reformed homosexual." When the object of his affection died, it prompted his own Damascene ephiphany in which he rejected the passions of the flesh in favor of immersion in a higher spiritual calling. Nowadays, we just spend a week locked in our room playing Quake when we get jilted, but things were different back then, when intellectual and moral crises lurked around every corner.
Unfortunately, just like Paul before him, Augustine proceeded to project his neuroses on the rest of Christendom. The Church has spent millennia cultivating a distorted sense of sexual morality and human nature, telling us that some of our most fundamental biological impulses are sinful and shameful, barely worthy of tolerance in limited circumstances (marriage) and only worthy of repression elsewhere. I have a problem with that.
Speaking personally, I was raised in a heavily Christian (Southern Baptist) environment, albeit in a non-churchgoing family. In my youth, I spent a lot of time reading both Testaments and looking for the answers to the usual questions that pop up during adolescence and puberty. Are women a Good Thing or not? Is it OK to ask God for a new Camaro? How many times per week can I jack off without staining either my sheets or my soul? While my childhood was short on genuine moral crises, it was saturated with contradictions: what was up with all the French kissing on the church bus on the way back from the Petra concert? Why was the state of the new girl in town's virginity the chief topic of discussion at Bible camp, along with the near-theological question of who would be the first among us to settle the issue once and for all?
The trouble was, it was easy enough for me to dismiss St. Paul as a party-pooping congenital loser, but Christ Himself was something else. He seemed like a smart guy, a fellow who really had His shit together. As the article above points out, He didn't talk much about the old in-out, in-out, but when He did, He came straight to the point. But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.
That was a problem. Not much room for pubescent rationalization there, friends and neighbors.
Eventually, I came to realize that Christ demanded I choose between my own nature as a human being, or an ideal made apparently unachievable by the biological code His own Father built into me. That kind of thinking was obviously dangerous: according to the church, it was the sort of argument you could expect when someone tried to recruit you into Satan's posse. But since I had never bought into the whole organized-religion thing to begin with, it wasn't hard for me to walk away from the whole idea of Christianity with a clear conscience. I didn't have much at stake besides the fate of my soul... which, once I realized was only a metaphorical gun held to my head by people who were flesh and blood like myself, was easy enough to get past.
Priests of celibate orders, on the other hand, have more than their souls in this precarious moral balance. Their careers, lives, vows, and identities are inextricable from Pauline and Augustinian morality. That's what I meant by my flippant "2,000 years of chickens coming home to roost" remark. The human mind is a powerful thing; when you hold it to unreasonable or impossible standards, you shouldn't be too surprised to see it fail in catastrophic ways.
Any links available to that text in Chinese?
For instance, there are plenty of scientists who claim to be Christians (as opposed to Christian Scientists). Should those scientists be stripped of their professional accreditation because they believe in the eventual return to Earth of a 2,000-year-old dead Jewish guy?
If you think so, then be prepared to lose the benefits to society of a number of otherwise-intelligent, thoughtful people.
If you don't think so -- if you believe that one's religion should not disqualify one from being considered a "scientist" -- then what's the difference between a scientist who is a Christian and one who believes in other unprovable, irrational propositions such as clairvoyance or astrology?
A great many people, including some of history's most successful scientists, have their pet irrational beliefs. It probably doesn't make sense to use someone's New Age-y beliefs as the chief yardstick of their scientific literacy.
The Japanese were about to surrender and the US government knew it. The war would have ended without the nukes.
Ah. That explains why it took not one, but two nukes to get our point across. They were about to surrender anyway, but not just yet, I guess.
Everybody in the neightbourhood except for one person signed for it.
Unless your neighborhood has a higher-than-normal population of licensed civil engineers, that's about the worst imaginable way to determine where stop signs should be placed.
I'm not saying either or both signs are unnecessary in your particular case because I (obviously) have never seen the intersection and am not a traffic engineer myself, but in general, if you find that a traffic-control device is being disregarded by a large percentage of drivers, there's usually an explanation other than "they're all a bunch of homicidal idiots." Stop signs placed in residential neighborhoods without a valid engineering study are a classic example.
It may seem like you and your neighbors are really blazing new frontiers in traffic safety, but at some point, you should be asking yourselves, "Is it really a good idea to condition drivers to ignore stop signs?"
Then the stop sign almost certainly shouldn't be there in the first place. It was probably placed as a "traffic calming" measure in violation of the guidelines in the Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD).
This sort of thing is becoming more and more common as neighborhoods decide to crack down on those "evil speeders." Like unreasonably-low speed limits, superfluous stop signs do nothing for traffic safety, pedestrian safety, or respect for the law in general.
Either way, the issue has nothing to do with Segways on sidewalks. If you wouldn't try to run a four-minute/mile pace on a given sidewalk, then chances are, you won't try to do it on a Segway either.
Would you really feel safe sprinting on a city sidewalk on a regular basis?
You, along with half the other posters to this story, seem to be laboring under the misapprehension that Segways have only two speeds: 0 MPH and 14+ MPH.
That's not my understanding.
Any special reason why you're convinced that lots of Segway riders will be suicidal enough to do 14 MPH on a crowded sidewalk? I mean, do you see people roaring down your neighborhood streets at their car's top speed? No? Well, then it won't be a major issue with Segways, either. Most people know when they're going too fast for conditions, regardless of the vehicle.
My point, which seems to have escaped some people, is that for better or worse, $100 million is no longer considered much money. We are nickel and diming NASA to death over peanuts.
For the price of a ticket to see Mission to Mars, the collective base of US taxpayers can finance a real mission, or at least a good try at one. But instead, we choose to complain about "*my* money being wasted" (your words). We as contemporary Americans do not seem to place a significant value on the amounts of money being discussed, until NASA has an accident with it.
... you're closer to the truth than you probably realize. The budget on Brian de Palma's awful Mission to Mars was US $90 million... more than 75% of the budget of an equally-flawed but substantially better-intended real-life mission.
When Hollywood drops a bomb, nobody cares. When NASA loses a similar amount of money trying to advance human knowledge, it's practically the end of the world. Congressional inquiries are launched, indignant editorials are published, and modern-day Great Society pundits bemoan the tragic waste of funding that could have gone to their own pet causes.
This is the unfortunate reality of publicly-funded space exploration. It's perhaps the ultimate embodiment of the "bread and circuses" social phenomenon that attended the fall of Rome. Never mind the urban myths -- think of the money NASA could have saved if they actually had hired Stanley Kubrick to stage the Apollo missions in the Nevada desert. Apparently, that would have been good enough for us.
Is anyone else worried about the fact that this increases background noise radiation across the entire spectrum? Won't this cause a massive health risk?
No.
Uncalled for religious discrimination, yes. Atrocity, no.
Maybe, maybe not. I used that term because as scientists in the public eye, the editors of a major, consumer-accessible science magazine have a special obligation to behave in a way that's above reproach, scientifically speaking. When they fail to do so in such a blatant manner, it's at least a potential "atrocity" on the Pons and Fleischmann scale -- an event with substantial negative implications for the reputation of science as a whole.
Heck, one of the three inventors of the transistor was practically a card-carrying Nazi, but that didn't stop the Nobel Committee from awarding them their justly-earned physics prize. If a committee with a substantial contingent of Jews and ethnic minorities could deal with a certified asshole like Shockley, it wasn't unreasonable for the SciAm editors to do the same for a man who, in addition to being a well-known and popular science writer, has a reputation as a decent, agreeable, and generally unlikely-to-embarrass-his-associates fellow.
Their action might have been more justifiable if Mims had a history of espousing his Christian views at inappropriate times and places. But he didn't. So in a sense, they punished him for thoughtcrime.
As an AC pointed out earlier, SciAm's behavior was neither "scientific" nor "American."
That's a pretty good one, too. Before encountering radioshacksucks.com awhile back, I never realized that the proper term for the (relatively few) useful electronic components sold by RS is "force feed."
Apparently, RS employees worldwide are united in their hatred of the laborious restocking and inventory-maintenance process that brings us those $1.98 bubble packs of assorted LEDs.
They quickly learned, however, that Mims was an supporter of so-called Scientific Creationism, a movement that attempts to include the creation story of Genesis in biology curricula as a scientifically viable account of human origins.
This is actually a pretty sad story. Mims's treatment at the hands of Scientific American is an atrocity on par with anything the medieval Catholics could have come up with, at least without resorting to pitchforks and thumbscrews. They certainly guaranteed that at least one agnostic (myself) will never burden their subscription department with correspondence.
That's certainly true of the stores, but http://www.radioshack.com might surprise you. They have got a SERIOUSLY good web operation. Check it out if you haven't already.
It wasn't that many years ago that Microsoft, along with just about everyone else in the PC business with an ounce of common sense, launched a jihad against Intel's NSP (Native Signal Processing) initiative.
NSP was the logical response to Intel's realization that CPU cycles in the Pentium era were becoming less and less valuable to the end user. They considered it a task of strategic importance to soak up extra cycles wherever they could be found... never mind that game developers still needed every cycle they could find at the time. Had NSP succeeded, it would have had a wide array of effects on the PC hardware and software businesses, almost all of them too ugly to contemplate. The nascent market for high-performance 3D and environmental audio hardware would likely have been crushed under the treads of Intel's marketing machine, and WinModems would have taken over the scene years earlier than they did. The development of online gaming technology would have been pushed back indefinitely, pending the ubiquitous adoption of broadband (which, obviously, has yet to happen).
Of course, MS's primary interest in killing NSP was to keep Windows from having to run as just another NSP client. Owning the boot process from BIOS to bluescreen was as important to them in 1994 as it is now. But now, it appears that they've taken leave of their technical senses as well as their ethics. If this is anything like Intel's earlier push to run modem data pumps on the CPU -- and to be fair to MS, the article is by no means clear on this point -- then 802.11 fans, and consumers in general, should fight it where they find it.