I frequently travel between California and Ohio also, but can't afford the time for a train.
I took a steel mock-up of a bomb on an airplane once, on the way to a data collection at Fort Irwin. TSA didn't even ask to open the bag. But they confiscated one of my drill bits on the return trip.
The 'ammo box' option won't work, because it doesn't address the underlying problem. It will just replace one group of kleptocrats with another, more violent group which will almost immediately start abusing their power.
Also, "The fact that they're children holds little meaning to me." suggests that you do not in fact understand the subject, or else you're not being very honest about it. Rape of a child has very different effects than the rape of an adult, since the child's mind is in a much earlier stage of development. Its easier for the child to recover in some ways, and much, much harder in others. If you don't have a special protective reflex in relation to children, then I stand by my assertion that you don't care very much about other people and/or don't understand the subject very well.
I don't need to be able to read minds to have a good idea what they're thinking, because they have expressed their arguments in great detail, and I accept those arguments at face value.
OK, so we agree that rape isn't good, and I'll assume that you have some understanding of what rape amounts to psychologically, not just a reflexive distaste from a distance. How do you propose to help protect people from rape? When I refer to the "think of the children" mocking, that's what I'm referring to, mocking. If you have actual ideas that address the anti-pedophile concerns, that's much different.
You didn't present any such ideas in your response here, such as in response to to the reforms I suggested. Maybe you just didn't have time or interest, that's fine. But if the anti-censorship extremists aren't going to take the time to pony up real, honest arguments, then other people will rationally regard them as assholes. Your suggestion that 'decency' is subjective is consistent with the general attitude I'm referring to though. Yes of course there is a subjective element. There is also an objective element. How about acknowledging the objective side of 'decency' also, instead of always blowing it off as subjective?
I said nothing about banning technologies. On the censorship/anti-censorship spectrum, I'm fairly far towards the anti-censorship end. And I loathe right wing politicians, especially the religious national security types. I apologize if I unjustly smeared your view in my brief and "general" characterization of people who make your argument. But so far you haven't said anything that separates you from the others that I had in mind.
If you would like to argue about it more, I'm willing to do that. Otherwise, I was speaking to the other guy, and assuming the thread was probably stale enough that my post wouldn't attract other attention, so have a nice day.
As I see it, people who mock 'think of the children' generally do not care much about other people. Children do need to be protected. Yes, child pornography laws become ridiculous when applied to romances between teenagers. But almost every time this topic comes up on slashdot, a not insignificant number of the posters express sympathy for full blown pedophilia. If they had any decency and understanding of the subject, they'd argue for pushing the legal limit down to about 13, while creating more nuanced consent laws to protect older teenagers from date rape. But they don't do that, they use the problems at the age boundary to justify behavior that is hell on children.
The trend seems to be positive though - as evidenced by your '5 informative'.
Though I probably can't help with your job situation, if you're in Oregon, Idaho, California, or Ohio, I'd be happy to do what I can.
North Korea, with Russian equipment, mostly overran south Korea prior to US involvement. Then the US overran most of north Korea, then China got involved and it settled in the middle, with the US still maintaining bases in South Korea. South Korea is relatively 'free', and North Korea is still pretty screwed up. That's not getting 'run out', in contrast to Vietnam.
Korea would probably be less screwed up than North Korea had the US not gotten involved. China wouldn't feel like it needed a dysfunctional puppet nation as a buffer, and North Korea wouldn't have the 'external threat' fantasy. But South Korea is still way better off than the North, and better off than Vietnam by most measures.
In another thread yesterday, someone was modded up for suggesting that lobbying be made illegal. Lobbying is how people who are directly affected by legislation provide expert feedback to congress. Its absolutely essential, even though reforms are needed such as to prevent congressional insider trading. Unfortunately there's no way to absolutely prevent corruption. We're a democracy, and most people are in fact willing to sacrifice justice for the sake of their own personal gain. All we can do is try to pull in the right direction.
I agree. However, the surveillance business has become a lot more lucrative than it used to be, at least for the upper levels of management, since more and more of the work is done by private contractors with revolving doors. They're not constrained by the GS pay scale, and most of them have ridiculous overhead rates that funnel a lot of money to a few people. Guys in the government award contracts to their buddies at the private companies, then the private companies hire them at high rates later, for the sake of their insider connections. Sometimes they've already got hiring agreements when they're on the government side managing contracts with the same companies. Its pretty disgusting. Since most of the contracts are secret, there's almost no oversight. And congress is in on it too, with insider trading.
Granted that this is a lot less serious problem than has been seen in other countries, I still think it ranks fairly high on the list of national problems.
A lot of people don't understand that getting to 'space' doesn't mean much unless you have enough energy to get out of the gravity well, or at least up to a useful orbit. Unscrupulous 'visionaries' have been capitalizing on that misunderstanding for years.
The grandparent's assertion that Chinese political censorship is "much less harmful" than American commercial censorship, and his suggestion that people who disagree value 'stuff' over human life, is nonsense on stilts. My impression was that's what the AC was pissed about, not the statement that most Chinese support censorship.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to the 'maintaining order' argument, knowing something about how big a problem disorder has been in the past, such as with the Taiping rebellion. But it appears to me that much of the censorship is more about shielding corrupt bureaucrats from accountability. Also, much of the 'maintaining order' talk appears to me to be code for 'keeping provinces like Tibet inside China', which is part of why its so hard for political freedom to get any traction. (Obviously I'm not Chinese. My household is about 70% Chinese.)
As an example of this....Standard math books for Chinese kids three years old contain math that I didn't see until the third grade. My oldest son is far enough ahead that his American school decided to move him ahead a year, but he's way behind in his Chinese workbooks.
In some ways I think the situation has improved though. Although standardized tests are watered down compared to when I was young, there are good school districts now if you can afford to live in one. I can't say the instruction is very good, but at least the classes are hard.
Because we value life and intelligence, and if some of us don't have kids, there will be no more human life?
The thought that intelligent, responsible people should know better than to reproduce implies that only unintelligent, irresponsible people should create the next generation. That's not exactly a recipe for success.
There have always crisis in history, wars, famines, plagues, collapses of empires, but people continue on.
A population collapse would add to the problems. The fact that some parts of the world are having more than enough kids doesn't offset the problem in more developed parts of the world. The US, as an example, would have a declining population without immigration. A wealthy, educated population can incorporate poor, uneducated immigrants, but can't well replace itself that way entirely.
Yes, its kind of crazy that it took hundreds of millions of years for oil to accumulate in the earth, and people are set on burning it in a couple of hundred. A foolishness that people will suffer for, and unfortunately the people who suffer the most won't be the ones who contributed the most to the problem. But how rational is the thought that we should all just throw up our hands and commit suicide?
Yes humanity is screwed up, and there's no excuse for it, to the extent that we're intelligent to know better. But if you think that humanity invented selfishness and misery, perhaps you should get out and study nature more.
The basic problem, I think, is that the number of technically knowledgeable people on the Web stays roughly constant (the number of STEM grads in the US has been flat for 25 years, for example) but the total number of people is still increasing.
I think its probably worse than constant for English language sites, because a large percentage of those people prefer Chinese sites and/or do not have interests outside their own research area.
When marketing the 'private space industry', the word 'space' is often used as if there's some equivalence between rising out of the stratosphere and attaining a useful orbit. The reason past space programs involved gigantic rockets with huge tanks of fuel, is that's how much energy is required to get very far out of the gravity well. No amount of engineering advances can change this much. People also use the word 'private' as if its a synonym for 'makes sense in the market'. But in this context its more of a synonym for 'conning gullible people out of money without being constrained by the federal GS salary system.' My opinion is if you want to do real space related engineering, go to somewhere like MIT that has JPL connections, and forget about 'private' space industry. Space related engineering doesn't even potentially make sense for private industry beyond launching communications satellites with conventional rockets. A somewhat superficial exception is private companies that do engineering for government space projects, but that has always been how the space program worked. Most of the real engineering was done by employees of companies like Lockheed Martin, with government funding. Although significant contributions were also made by good engineers and scientists at NASA, the role of NASA was largely administrative.
These days most NASA centers do a lot of pretend/junk science, and are very depressing places to work if you have much ambition or integrity. JPL is significantly better than most, and has had many good projects like the Mars rovers and some scientifically useful telescopes. I'm not sure what the prognosis is for the long term though.
So where can a person go for real information and/or actual thinking on any topic? Even the best posters on/. appear to me to be mostly posturing, with nobody actually learning anything from the discussion.
Socialism involves government control of the places where people work, and taking care of most people's welfare. Wall Street isn't really a business in the conventional sense, making money through the control of resources and other physical property. Its mostly skimming money off the top by manipulating stock as a kind of currency. Although theoretically they own the means of production, they aren't really oriented towards doing anything with it, they leave that to other people who find it easier to just send it overseas. So I think corruption is a somewhat more appropriate word than socialism in this case. Though granted that socialism comes with quite a bit of built in corruption also.
I think Wall Street is pretty much big business now. Big business found they could make more money by manipulating stock prices than by controlling physical resources, so they mostly gave up the latter. This is why so many of our big companies are falling apart, nobody's really running them any more, the management isn't paying attention to much except for their stock options and delegating stuff to offshore.
Its true that religion, as conventionally understood, is toast once you start thinking critically and recognize that all the theological authorities were bluffing. And you may stop questioning after a while, because you get frustrated and give up, or smugly decide that you know everything, or maybe just because you're busy pursuing other things that are more important to you. But I think that if you don't give up, after a few years you're likely to find that atheism doesn't quite cover everything either.
The scientific method is really good for studying things that are controllable, or which hold universally in a relatively obvious way, so that you can conduct controlled experiments, and publish results that other people can rigorously verify by repeating your experiments. Uncertainty is dealt with only insofar as it conforms to a clearly defined distribution, with everything being decomposed into caused and 'random' components. Some people maintain that anything real can be modeled in this manner, but I don't think that's really a very rational position. Furthermore, as a practical matter, even things that are theoretically amenable to scientific study may be so maddenly difficult to deal with that they don't get studied. Some problems are easy to deal with because they lend themselves to linear approximation, other problems are more difficult, and others are pretty much mathematically intractable. Every researcher has to decide what is a good bet as a line of research and what is not. If they don't make good choices, they fail to sustain a flow of funding, and effectively cease to be scientists, becoming lecturers, lab techs, or software developers instead. So by natural selection, the scientists that are left tend to be the ones who don't try to study flaky problems. Furthermore, even things that look promising to study have to be funded, and the people who control the funds tend not to pay for research unless doing so appears likely to benefit them personally, even if the research interests them and they believe its 'real',
An open minded person who is aware of all that may still remain an atheist, because atheism may continue to be the way of thinking that the most plausibly matches their experience. But through the course of life a lot of other people encounter too many subtle things that don't quite fit that assumption. Of course it would still be absurd to make up a bunch of strongly held assertions about 'God', or to let other people do it for us. But we may nevertheless soften our atheism quite a bit, or even come to personally 'know' some non-scientific things with some confidence, based on our personal experience. Furthermore I don't see anything wrong with faith as a kind of working hypothesis, even though it carries a penalty of ignorance if you forget its a hypothesis.
Slashdot Mirror
I frequently travel between California and Ohio also, but can't afford the time for a train.
I took a steel mock-up of a bomb on an airplane once, on the way to a data collection at Fort Irwin. TSA didn't even ask to open the bag. But they confiscated one of my drill bits on the return trip.
The 'ammo box' option won't work, because it doesn't address the underlying problem. It will just replace one group of kleptocrats with another, more violent group which will almost immediately start abusing their power.
Also, "The fact that they're children holds little meaning to me." suggests that you do not in fact understand the subject, or else you're not being very honest about it. Rape of a child has very different effects than the rape of an adult, since the child's mind is in a much earlier stage of development. Its easier for the child to recover in some ways, and much, much harder in others. If you don't have a special protective reflex in relation to children, then I stand by my assertion that you don't care very much about other people and/or don't understand the subject very well.
I don't need to be able to read minds to have a good idea what they're thinking, because they have expressed their arguments in great detail, and I accept those arguments at face value.
OK, so we agree that rape isn't good, and I'll assume that you have some understanding of what rape amounts to psychologically, not just a reflexive distaste from a distance. How do you propose to help protect people from rape? When I refer to the "think of the children" mocking, that's what I'm referring to, mocking. If you have actual ideas that address the anti-pedophile concerns, that's much different.
You didn't present any such ideas in your response here, such as in response to to the reforms I suggested. Maybe you just didn't have time or interest, that's fine. But if the anti-censorship extremists aren't going to take the time to pony up real, honest arguments, then other people will rationally regard them as assholes. Your suggestion that 'decency' is subjective is consistent with the general attitude I'm referring to though. Yes of course there is a subjective element. There is also an objective element. How about acknowledging the objective side of 'decency' also, instead of always blowing it off as subjective?
I said nothing about banning technologies. On the censorship/anti-censorship spectrum, I'm fairly far towards the anti-censorship end. And I loathe right wing politicians, especially the religious national security types. I apologize if I unjustly smeared your view in my brief and "general" characterization of people who make your argument. But so far you haven't said anything that separates you from the others that I had in mind.
If you would like to argue about it more, I'm willing to do that. Otherwise, I was speaking to the other guy, and assuming the thread was probably stale enough that my post wouldn't attract other attention, so have a nice day.
As I see it, people who mock 'think of the children' generally do not care much about other people. Children do need to be protected. Yes, child pornography laws become ridiculous when applied to romances between teenagers. But almost every time this topic comes up on slashdot, a not insignificant number of the posters express sympathy for full blown pedophilia. If they had any decency and understanding of the subject, they'd argue for pushing the legal limit down to about 13, while creating more nuanced consent laws to protect older teenagers from date rape. But they don't do that, they use the problems at the age boundary to justify behavior that is hell on children.
The trend seems to be positive though - as evidenced by your '5 informative'.
Though I probably can't help with your job situation, if you're in Oregon, Idaho, California, or Ohio, I'd be happy to do what I can.
It means the mix big-endian and little little-endian in the same architecture.
The earth is trying to get away
From the New Agers in Santa Fe
North Korea, with Russian equipment, mostly overran south Korea prior to US involvement. Then the US overran most of north Korea, then China got involved and it settled in the middle, with the US still maintaining bases in South Korea. South Korea is relatively 'free', and North Korea is still pretty screwed up. That's not getting 'run out', in contrast to Vietnam.
Korea would probably be less screwed up than North Korea had the US not gotten involved. China wouldn't feel like it needed a dysfunctional puppet nation as a buffer, and North Korea wouldn't have the 'external threat' fantasy. But South Korea is still way better off than the North, and better off than Vietnam by most measures.
I'm aware of those distinctions. A federal republic is a form of representative democracy.
In another thread yesterday, someone was modded up for suggesting that lobbying be made illegal. Lobbying is how people who are directly affected by legislation provide expert feedback to congress. Its absolutely essential, even though reforms are needed such as to prevent congressional insider trading. Unfortunately there's no way to absolutely prevent corruption. We're a democracy, and most people are in fact willing to sacrifice justice for the sake of their own personal gain. All we can do is try to pull in the right direction.
I agree. However, the surveillance business has become a lot more lucrative than it used to be, at least for the upper levels of management, since more and more of the work is done by private contractors with revolving doors. They're not constrained by the GS pay scale, and most of them have ridiculous overhead rates that funnel a lot of money to a few people. Guys in the government award contracts to their buddies at the private companies, then the private companies hire them at high rates later, for the sake of their insider connections. Sometimes they've already got hiring agreements when they're on the government side managing contracts with the same companies. Its pretty disgusting. Since most of the contracts are secret, there's almost no oversight. And congress is in on it too, with insider trading.
Granted that this is a lot less serious problem than has been seen in other countries, I still think it ranks fairly high on the list of national problems.
A lot of people don't understand that getting to 'space' doesn't mean much unless you have enough energy to get out of the gravity well, or at least up to a useful orbit. Unscrupulous 'visionaries' have been capitalizing on that misunderstanding for years.
The grandparent's assertion that Chinese political censorship is "much less harmful" than American commercial censorship, and his suggestion that people who disagree value 'stuff' over human life, is nonsense on stilts. My impression was that's what the AC was pissed about, not the statement that most Chinese support censorship.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to the 'maintaining order' argument, knowing something about how big a problem disorder has been in the past, such as with the Taiping rebellion. But it appears to me that much of the censorship is more about shielding corrupt bureaucrats from accountability. Also, much of the 'maintaining order' talk appears to me to be code for 'keeping provinces like Tibet inside China', which is part of why its so hard for political freedom to get any traction. (Obviously I'm not Chinese. My household is about 70% Chinese.)
As an example of this....Standard math books for Chinese kids three years old contain math that I didn't see until the third grade. My oldest son is far enough ahead that his American school decided to move him ahead a year, but he's way behind in his Chinese workbooks.
In some ways I think the situation has improved though. Although standardized tests are watered down compared to when I was young, there are good school districts now if you can afford to live in one. I can't say the instruction is very good, but at least the classes are hard.
I can't fathom why anyone's having kids.
Because we value life and intelligence, and if some of us don't have kids, there will be no more human life?
The thought that intelligent, responsible people should know better than to reproduce implies that only unintelligent, irresponsible people should create the next generation. That's not exactly a recipe for success.
There have always crisis in history, wars, famines, plagues, collapses of empires, but people continue on.
A population collapse would add to the problems. The fact that some parts of the world are having more than enough kids doesn't offset the problem in more developed parts of the world. The US, as an example, would have a declining population without immigration. A wealthy, educated population can incorporate poor, uneducated immigrants, but can't well replace itself that way entirely.
Yes, its kind of crazy that it took hundreds of millions of years for oil to accumulate in the earth, and people are set on burning it in a couple of hundred. A foolishness that people will suffer for, and unfortunately the people who suffer the most won't be the ones who contributed the most to the problem. But how rational is the thought that we should all just throw up our hands and commit suicide?
Yes humanity is screwed up, and there's no excuse for it, to the extent that we're intelligent to know better. But if you think that humanity invented selfishness and misery, perhaps you should get out and study nature more.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/house-republicans-keeping-the-faith/2011/11/01/gIQAP8EPdM_story.html?hpid=z3
And the patent reform bill passed both houses a month or so ago.
The basic problem, I think, is that the number of technically knowledgeable people on the Web stays roughly constant (the number of STEM grads in the US has been flat for 25 years, for example) but the total number of people is still increasing.
I think its probably worse than constant for English language sites, because a large percentage of those people prefer Chinese sites and/or do not have interests outside their own research area.
When marketing the 'private space industry', the word 'space' is often used as if there's some equivalence between rising out of the stratosphere and attaining a useful orbit. The reason past space programs involved gigantic rockets with huge tanks of fuel, is that's how much energy is required to get very far out of the gravity well. No amount of engineering advances can change this much. People also use the word 'private' as if its a synonym for 'makes sense in the market'. But in this context its more of a synonym for 'conning gullible people out of money without being constrained by the federal GS salary system.' My opinion is if you want to do real space related engineering, go to somewhere like MIT that has JPL connections, and forget about 'private' space industry. Space related engineering doesn't even potentially make sense for private industry beyond launching communications satellites with conventional rockets. A somewhat superficial exception is private companies that do engineering for government space projects, but that has always been how the space program worked. Most of the real engineering was done by employees of companies like Lockheed Martin, with government funding. Although significant contributions were also made by good engineers and scientists at NASA, the role of NASA was largely administrative.
These days most NASA centers do a lot of pretend/junk science, and are very depressing places to work if you have much ambition or integrity. JPL is significantly better than most, and has had many good projects like the Mars rovers and some scientifically useful telescopes. I'm not sure what the prognosis is for the long term though.
So where can a person go for real information and/or actual thinking on any topic? Even the best posters on /. appear to me to be mostly posturing, with nobody actually learning anything from the discussion.
We did essentially this in my high school physics class in 1987.
I use firefox, and it runs out of memory and crashes maybe once every couple of weeks. I don't use any extensions.
Socialism involves government control of the places where people work, and taking care of most people's welfare. Wall Street isn't really a business in the conventional sense, making money through the control of resources and other physical property. Its mostly skimming money off the top by manipulating stock as a kind of currency. Although theoretically they own the means of production, they aren't really oriented towards doing anything with it, they leave that to other people who find it easier to just send it overseas. So I think corruption is a somewhat more appropriate word than socialism in this case. Though granted that socialism comes with quite a bit of built in corruption also.
I think Wall Street is pretty much big business now. Big business found they could make more money by manipulating stock prices than by controlling physical resources, so they mostly gave up the latter. This is why so many of our big companies are falling apart, nobody's really running them any more, the management isn't paying attention to much except for their stock options and delegating stuff to offshore.
Its true that religion, as conventionally understood, is toast once you start thinking critically and recognize that all the theological authorities were bluffing. And you may stop questioning after a while, because you get frustrated and give up, or smugly decide that you know everything, or maybe just because you're busy pursuing other things that are more important to you. But I think that if you don't give up, after a few years you're likely to find that atheism doesn't quite cover everything either.
The scientific method is really good for studying things that are controllable, or which hold universally in a relatively obvious way, so that you can conduct controlled experiments, and publish results that other people can rigorously verify by repeating your experiments. Uncertainty is dealt with only insofar as it conforms to a clearly defined distribution, with everything being decomposed into caused and 'random' components. Some people maintain that anything real can be modeled in this manner, but I don't think that's really a very rational position. Furthermore, as a practical matter, even things that are theoretically amenable to scientific study may be so maddenly difficult to deal with that they don't get studied. Some problems are easy to deal with because they lend themselves to linear approximation, other problems are more difficult, and others are pretty much mathematically intractable. Every researcher has to decide what is a good bet as a line of research and what is not. If they don't make good choices, they fail to sustain a flow of funding, and effectively cease to be scientists, becoming lecturers, lab techs, or software developers instead. So by natural selection, the scientists that are left tend to be the ones who don't try to study flaky problems. Furthermore, even things that look promising to study have to be funded, and the people who control the funds tend not to pay for research unless doing so appears likely to benefit them personally, even if the research interests them and they believe its 'real',
An open minded person who is aware of all that may still remain an atheist, because atheism may continue to be the way of thinking that the most plausibly matches their experience. But through the course of life a lot of other people encounter too many subtle things that don't quite fit that assumption. Of course it would still be absurd to make up a bunch of strongly held assertions about 'God', or to let other people do it for us. But we may nevertheless soften our atheism quite a bit, or even come to personally 'know' some non-scientific things with some confidence, based on our personal experience. Furthermore I don't see anything wrong with faith as a kind of working hypothesis, even though it carries a penalty of ignorance if you forget its a hypothesis.
No, that's what he gets for not recognizing the fundamental difference between a 'rocky world' and a small ball of ice.