It's their job to protect us from all types of stuff the general public has never heard of.
That is what it tough about the position they are in. They can't tell you about the stuff they protected you from because it would be classified. Maybe the incidents are few and far between, or maybe they happen every week, but they're not going to be allowed to talk about it. They have a big PR issue right now and there is not a lot they can do to directly address it. Unless you want to argue that nothing should be classified, the best they can say is "trust us" and you need to make sure there is appropriate oversight to what they do.
No, my mistake. I mistook samzepus as the submitter, not the editor. You are correct. However, I did see two Schneier-related posts in the submissions section. Sorry for the confusion, and you are right, it looks like your original title was altered.
No, there were two submissions, yours and this one by samzenpus. Evidently this got picked over yours. I voted this one down in the submissions area because of the annoying question mark.
AntiSol seems to be arguing that the US shouldn't spy on anyone, including foreign countries. That seems to be a pretty unrealistic stance to take, even among the many persistently idealistic people around here.
I am curious to what extent you feel national intelligence should be conducted. None at all? Limited somehow? If so, how? It may or may not be true that "a gentleman does not read the letters of others," the history of our species suggests otherwise.
It isn't a mostly climate science meeting. The AGU is mostly about the Earth sciences (there is a Solar and Heliospheric Physics section), and all the sections have their focus sessions (geodesy, ocean sciences, volcanology, etc.). However, it is probably safe to say that a good deal of the people doing climate science are members of the AGU.
A friend of mine winter-overed twice in Antarctica. They would play soccer at the South Pole and every now and again they would have to throw the ball in the microwave to warm it up and re-inflate it. Also, on New Years Eve they would go out every hour and have a drink at midnight in a different time zone.:P
That, and now that he has won the Prize, he can do whatever the hell he wants with his career, including never publishing again in his life. There are plenty of universities who would love to hire him so that they can claim X number of Nobel Prize winners on faculty.
I'm not so sure what he is complaining about is a big problem because not too many places can keep chasing the fad topics. To keep your lab alive, you need to establish some kind of expertise. It is after you've set up a self-sustaining lab that you can afford to repeatably chase after the hot topic du jour. In other words, you've most likely got your tenure.
I can't say how familiar I am with the machinations of those particular journals, but I think most of the blame for the things that cause the issues you mention lie with the colleges and universities who put so much emphasis on publication counts and impact factors.
An interesting aside, to me at least, is that I only recently installed Ghostery and when I went to the article linked in the summary, I was notified of 88 different tracking entities that were blocked. Eighty-eight on one web page!
I was looking for some information on the Caché scripting language, and now a lot of my banner ads are for the women's clothing retailer of the same name.
I don't necessarily have an issue with these things being posted. I have an issue with the tyranny of the self-righteous where you are not allowed to even question the relevance to this site. Witness the moderation on the OP and some of the responses to it. The question was polite and did nothing to malign nor slight the story, it just questioned whether this site was the proper place to post this story.
but if you really didn't want to disrespect the passing of Mandela, you should of just not posted.
I completely disagree. It isn't being disrespectful at all to question why this should be posted to a tech site. I'd much rather have someone question the relevance of something here than have them shamed into silence by people who feel strongly about some non-technical topic.
I was basically responding to the first sentence of the summary.
Apparently I'm also a rather slow typist. After skimming the link to see if it answered my question, and typing the above, my post looked like it was the first one. I suppose there is no browser refresh after the post is submitted...
I'm not talking about the cost argument, or the corporate welfare comments. I'm talking about the denigrating tone used with "mediocre engineers." So are you suggesting that if you're an excellent engineer who wants to work on some really cool shit like big-assed rockets and launching stuff into space (maybe that doesn't tickle your fancy, but some people think that is pretty cool stuff), and you can get a job doing that and get, by your estimate, paid 10 times what you could get doing some other engineering job, you're going to look at that and say, "you know, I don't like how that industry is set up and I'm going to leave this field and do something else."? Are you saying there were no decent engineers working there before around 2000, or that SpaceX sucked up all the excellent engineers and left only the mediocre ones behind? How many people are on the engineering staff at SpaceX? That was the sum total of all the excellent engineers in the rocket industry, and they all switched employers? You can make the same kind of corporate welfare arguments against a place like the Jet Propulsion Lab; they have a lock on outer space missions and fight fiercely both scientifically and politically to make sure nobody else gets to run those missions. And all this time I thought they did some pretty good science, but they apparently must be a bunch of hacks and jokers by your argument because no self-respecting scientist or engineer would want to work for a place like that.
You don't like the monopoly on the rocket industry? Fine. I don't like it either. It is the same for any project of that size. But to cast shit blindly upon the thousands of people who work at places like that, to me, is arrogant, dumb, and ignorant.
Bottom line is STS was as much as ULA pork/jobs programs is today.
I wouldn't put up much of an argument on that point. However,the costs don't compare very well directly. If SpaceX also designed a human-compatible orbiter capable of reentry and providing life support for two week missions, and factor in the safety factors and all the extra regulations that comes with a manned mission, then their costs would go up significantly. If you got rid of the orbiter and converted it to a dead lift vehicle, then I imagine the STS costs would come down quite a bit. It isn't clear to me how well they'd compare. The comparisons with the Delta 4 is more straight-forward given that you're talking about payload mass and desired orbit.
Slashdot Mirror
It's their job to protect us from all types of stuff the general public has never heard of.
That is what it tough about the position they are in. They can't tell you about the stuff they protected you from because it would be classified. Maybe the incidents are few and far between, or maybe they happen every week, but they're not going to be allowed to talk about it. They have a big PR issue right now and there is not a lot they can do to directly address it. Unless you want to argue that nothing should be classified, the best they can say is "trust us" and you need to make sure there is appropriate oversight to what they do.
Click on the "submissions" link in the upper-left margin, and then click "older" and you'll see your original submission there.
No, my mistake. I mistook samzepus as the submitter, not the editor. You are correct. However, I did see two Schneier-related posts in the submissions section. Sorry for the confusion, and you are right, it looks like your original title was altered.
No, there were two submissions, yours and this one by samzenpus. Evidently this got picked over yours. I voted this one down in the submissions area because of the annoying question mark.
They forgot to mention that you need to be driving 500 mph for these to be most effective.
AntiSol seems to be arguing that the US shouldn't spy on anyone, including foreign countries. That seems to be a pretty unrealistic stance to take, even among the many persistently idealistic people around here.
I am curious to what extent you feel national intelligence should be conducted. None at all? Limited somehow? If so, how? It may or may not be true that "a gentleman does not read the letters of others," the history of our species suggests otherwise.
Never mind. I figured it out.
I don't get the connection between the title and the summary.
Distribute a few kg Plutonium as a dirty bomb over a city and there is plenty of death ...
The long-term studies of people who have inhaled or ingested plutonium do not support this statement.
It isn't a mostly climate science meeting. The AGU is mostly about the Earth sciences (there is a Solar and Heliospheric Physics section), and all the sections have their focus sessions (geodesy, ocean sciences, volcanology, etc.). However, it is probably safe to say that a good deal of the people doing climate science are members of the AGU.
Sorry, winter-overed in this context means you were down there a whole year as opposed to just the summer months when all the researchers come down.
A friend of mine winter-overed twice in Antarctica. They would play soccer at the South Pole and every now and again they would have to throw the ball in the microwave to warm it up and re-inflate it. Also, on New Years Eve they would go out every hour and have a drink at midnight in a different time zone. :P
That, and now that he has won the Prize, he can do whatever the hell he wants with his career, including never publishing again in his life. There are plenty of universities who would love to hire him so that they can claim X number of Nobel Prize winners on faculty.
I'm not so sure what he is complaining about is a big problem because not too many places can keep chasing the fad topics. To keep your lab alive, you need to establish some kind of expertise. It is after you've set up a self-sustaining lab that you can afford to repeatably chase after the hot topic du jour. In other words, you've most likely got your tenure.
I can't say how familiar I am with the machinations of those particular journals, but I think most of the blame for the things that cause the issues you mention lie with the colleges and universities who put so much emphasis on publication counts and impact factors.
An interesting aside, to me at least, is that I only recently installed Ghostery and when I went to the article linked in the summary, I was notified of 88 different tracking entities that were blocked. Eighty-eight on one web page!
So many people call every Nobel prize the Peace Prize.
I was looking for some information on the Caché scripting language, and now a lot of my banner ads are for the women's clothing retailer of the same name.
I don't necessarily have an issue with these things being posted. I have an issue with the tyranny of the self-righteous where you are not allowed to even question the relevance to this site. Witness the moderation on the OP and some of the responses to it. The question was polite and did nothing to malign nor slight the story, it just questioned whether this site was the proper place to post this story.
but if you really didn't want to disrespect the passing of Mandela, you should of just not posted.
I completely disagree. It isn't being disrespectful at all to question why this should be posted to a tech site. I'd much rather have someone question the relevance of something here than have them shamed into silence by people who feel strongly about some non-technical topic.
Actually, the structure of the OP's comment was quoting a John Lennon song.
How badly would the drivers have had to been beaten for it to be more proportional?
I was basically responding to the first sentence of the summary.
Apparently I'm also a rather slow typist. After skimming the link to see if it answered my question, and typing the above, my post looked like it was the first one. I suppose there is no browser refresh after the post is submitted ...
Unless the efficiency is high, you're basically paying more to charge your car than if you just plugged it in.
I'm not talking about the cost argument, or the corporate welfare comments. I'm talking about the denigrating tone used with "mediocre engineers." So are you suggesting that if you're an excellent engineer who wants to work on some really cool shit like big-assed rockets and launching stuff into space (maybe that doesn't tickle your fancy, but some people think that is pretty cool stuff), and you can get a job doing that and get, by your estimate, paid 10 times what you could get doing some other engineering job, you're going to look at that and say, "you know, I don't like how that industry is set up and I'm going to leave this field and do something else."? Are you saying there were no decent engineers working there before around 2000, or that SpaceX sucked up all the excellent engineers and left only the mediocre ones behind? How many people are on the engineering staff at SpaceX? That was the sum total of all the excellent engineers in the rocket industry, and they all switched employers? You can make the same kind of corporate welfare arguments against a place like the Jet Propulsion Lab; they have a lock on outer space missions and fight fiercely both scientifically and politically to make sure nobody else gets to run those missions. And all this time I thought they did some pretty good science, but they apparently must be a bunch of hacks and jokers by your argument because no self-respecting scientist or engineer would want to work for a place like that.
You don't like the monopoly on the rocket industry? Fine. I don't like it either. It is the same for any project of that size. But to cast shit blindly upon the thousands of people who work at places like that, to me, is arrogant, dumb, and ignorant.
Bottom line is STS was as much as ULA pork/jobs programs is today.
I wouldn't put up much of an argument on that point. However,the costs don't compare very well directly. If SpaceX also designed a human-compatible orbiter capable of reentry and providing life support for two week missions, and factor in the safety factors and all the extra regulations that comes with a manned mission, then their costs would go up significantly. If you got rid of the orbiter and converted it to a dead lift vehicle, then I imagine the STS costs would come down quite a bit. It isn't clear to me how well they'd compare. The comparisons with the Delta 4 is more straight-forward given that you're talking about payload mass and desired orbit.