That's what I was thinking. American rugged individualism VS Chinese collectivism. I know many people who complain that Chinese students all get together in a huddle every night in college to do their homework, seeing the practice as cheating instead of collaboration. The plagiarism is a problem, but it probably follows from cultural differences as well. In America, taking ideas from one source is plagiarism, taking from many is research.
Thank you so much for posting this. I find the Supreme Court transcripts fascinating and agree with critics who argue the Supreme Court cases should be broadcast live on C-SPAN since they are infinitely more fun than watching an empty House do nothing all day.
On the topic of the Supreme Court debating scientific issues, it's interesting that the National Academies Press publishes a manual intended to educate judges on how to evaluate scientific evidence. The anecdotal evidence implies that not many of them read it.
I donated money to this project because it sounds like a hard-SF storyline that focuses on technology and a positive vision of humanity's future. We need more of that.
Where I differ with the people working on this project is the idea that CGI is somehow inherently a bad thing. CGI has lowered the bar for people to make science fiction films because the effects are so cheap and greenscreens make them so easy to implement. 20 years ago, a special effects-laden film cost far more to make and the studios made sure there was a marketable plot and storyline to ensure its success. Today, Hollyweird can churn out movie after movie on cheap, so a lot of films that we would once consider B-movies now have A-Movie special effects (Transformers, the glut of superhero films, etc) so it's getting harder and harder to know what's going to be a great film from previews alone. CGI and an overabundance of funding has produced this state of things, but great films are still being made that use CGI.
Like I said, I support this project because I support Hard SF, but it does sound a little snobby to claim their foregoing of CGI will make their film better. It reeks of misguided nostalgia.
To quote Buckminster Fuller, "Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value." The fact that you apparently take great pride in your ignorance is not as disturbing as the fact that there are millions of people just like you, people who think it's their right to throw paint and used motor oil into "properly managed landfills." You're deluding yourself and poisoning the rest of us.
When we talk about "mandatory" recycling or composting we are talking about one more bin to throw things in that the trash people will pick up. Is it really such and incredible #$%&ing inconvenience for you to throw plastic bottles into one container and food waste into another? Are you really that incredibly unfathomably unconscionably lazy or are you just too incompetent to properly sort your waste into three different categories or is it just that you are so ridiculously self-centered that you really think having to sort the waste you dump into your local community is some kind of violation of your human rights?
I met people like you at the hobby shop where I used to work when I put out a recycling bin. Some of the teenagers actually refused to throw their cans in the bin claiming I was forcing my hippy environmentalist beliefs on them and it was their right to not have to throw an aluminum can into a separate #$%&ing bin. I don't believe this is about civil rights, it's about an absurd over-inflated sense of entitlement. My stereotype of people who think like you is that you live in a rural community or sprawling suburb. Luckily, people who live in the city understand there are small inconveniences, like throwing food into a separate bin to reduce strains on overflowing landfills, that we accept to make life easier for all of us.
What's funny is that even people on the Right can't tell you why they hate Soros so much. The man is a self-made billionaire who grew up in Hungary during the time of Nazi Germany, and is one of the most successful capitalists in the world. He is largely credited with being crucial to the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe, where he pumped millions of dollars into supporting pro-democratic programs and independent media. On top of that he is an incredible philanthropist contributing millions of dollars to organizations all over the world in support of spreading democracy, egalitarianism, and toppling oppressive regimes.
As far as I can tell, the reason they hate him is because he made getting George Bush out of office his top priority in 2003, arguing that America, as leader of the world, was taking the world off course with the War on Terror. He also supports death with dignity through assisted suicide and drug policy reform. The man is obviously a monster.
I was actually impressed with the idea of automatic spending cuts, especially with Republicans putting their sacred cow of Defense spending on the table. I was certain the committee wouldn't reach a deal since they previously rejected the Democrat's offer of 3 to 1 spending cuts to revenue increases and with Obama finally showing some backbone, so I was really curious to see how the automatic cuts would go into effect legislatively.
Turns out the next step will be making sure those cuts don't happen. Because, while Congess can't agree on how to cut spending, they can apparently agree on how to keep spending in place.
I wish America had a system that allowed viable third party candidates... but, as it stands now,Americans will have to choose between corrupt and corrupter in 2012. We are so screwed.
It would have been nice to include a little deeper history in this article, like maybe talking about the Jargon File, the dictionary for old school hackers that's filled with fascinating history about the technology and innovations behind some of the terms we still use online today.
Or would that detract from the idea that cultural-shifts resulting in lexical shifts is some kind of totally new and unexpected phenomenon?
It was extremely problematic for people debating online, as my conservative friends suddenly had their link go dead, while my liberal friends suddenly had the same story but with a headline supporting their position. It was the same exact story, but since nobody RTFAs, the headline was the most important piece of evidence in the debate.
I post this example, not to dredge up some off-topic flamewar about OWS, but because it seems like a pretty clear cut case of how we don't want news agencies operating. I read a comment on Slashdot recently that the reason we aren't allowed to modify our comments is to prevent users from editing out things in order to accuse others of strawman attacks. If you screw up a fact, you post a correction. It seems News Organizations owe us the same courtesy.
I closed my Netflix account during all the price-hike hoopla and really haven't missed it at all (started reading a lot more). So I guess I'll do what I do with TV shows (since we don't own a TV) and wait until they're out on DVD or streaming somewhere else for free online. I'm patient enough to do this with Futurama, so I can wait for more episodes of this awesomely twisted show.
...I could see the appeal of something like this. I have had to work with some incredible assholes in my time, and it's a situation that puts incredible stress on people in the workplace. We hired one guy who made everyone completely miserable with his confrontational, in-your-face style, and no one knew how to deal with him because we were all introverted geeks. It took months to get him fired because it was so hard to articulate what exactly his offenses were beyond simply, "He's an in-your-face jerk."
I could see this software being useful in a very limited scope for situations just like this. It's like software for monitoring browsing habits in the workplace... good managers use it sparingly when there's an employee underperforming who always seems to be checking his email, bad management uses it to squeeze every last little bit of productivity out of its workers.
The same principle of judicious use applies here. Management can use it to solve some special cases, or they can go Big Brother with it and make everyone miserable.
There was an art piece at the MOMA's Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit titled "Victimless Leather" which involved growing a batch of stem cells into the shape of a tiny jacket. The piece eventually had to be "killed" when it grew out of control... as stem cells tend to do (and why their promise is over-exaggerated because they give you cancer).
I appreciate people working on innovations like this, but we are decades and decades away from getting anything practical out of it. The meat we get from mother nature has billions of years of natural selection going into it, making it grow more efficiently. We co-evolved with it, meaning we are selected to make to the most efficient use of its nutrients. It's going to take a lot of time in the lab to match the nutrition and efficiency of muscle meat produced from 3.5 billion years of evolution.
I couldn't find it at the time I wrote this post, but a decade ago I stumbled upon an essay by Martin Carcasson that really blew my mind in how sophisticated it was in tackling the issue of of having informed debate in America. I couldn't find the original essay, but I did find is now a Professor at Colorado State and has continued writing articles on the subject. I only glanced through a few of them, but his writing continues to be very insightful. I've downloaded the essays to read later. Really advanced and insightful stuff.
I'm a Dilbert fan without being an Adams fan, but I like some of what he's written in this opinion piece, which is essentially about creating a more informed and more engaged voting public. What I read into this is that we already have a fourth branch of government, it's the American people, and government should make it easier for them to play a part into it. I think that's admirable.
At one point in the essay, Adams talks about an online forum where people can debate ideas and learn about issues. It reminded me of Dr. David Brin's Disputation Arenas, where people can publicly debate an issue in a moderated forum, maybe have referees to flag logical fallacies or off-topic statements, figure out what everyone can agree on, set those aspects aside and figure out where the ideal mean lies for us as a people.
Gotta say it takes some cahones for the administration to maintain a site like this. On the first page of open petitions are "We demand a vapid, condescending, meaningless, politically safe response to this petition." and "Stop Lying." I give Obama points for efforts like this, even though some of the petitions I see there are valid enough to make me detract even more points. I highly doubt this site will continue to exist in future administrations.
It sounds like you're screwed and your music collection is no longer accessible. MSN Music Store, Yahoo! Music Unlimited, Wal-Mart... FTFA it sounds like when each one of these services was discontinued, the customers were warned that all the music they purchased would no longer be accessible. This is why I crack the DRM off every ebook I buy from Amazon (I know I should go to the B&N Nook) and why I won't "buy" streaming movies from them that get stored in their cloud.
Too bad the article only covers music. There are so many half-brained lessons from the history of DRM in other media. Remember DIVX from 1998 the DVD you bought and then had to pay each time you wanted watch it? And don't even get me started on video games, where DRM has condemned so many great titles to the graveyard of unplayability.
Someone posted a link to this search engine in a previous thread, and I have to say, despite it's faults, it has become my search engine of choice. The results it provides aren't as good as Google's, but the !bang syntax has been incredibly convenient. If I want to search Google I type: "!google search for this" if I want to search Bing I type: "!bing search for that". I can do the same for Amazon, Flickr, Java, Google Images ("!images"), and lots of other sites.The keys typed that I waste on "!google" I save in page loads by not having to go to all of these sites and type in my search there.
As useful as this function is, I do hope duckduckgo.com improves their search algorithm.
Had a great example of this at the Coast Guard base where I used to work. USCG needed its fleet of H65 helicopters upgraded. Our base could upgrade each helicopter engine for less than $100k; however, some Senator in Mississippi tied up the funding until the USCG base in his state got some helicopters to upgrade too. We upgraded 30 helicopters at $100k each, the base in Mississippi upgraded 3 helicopters at $1 Million each.
My understanding is that this sort of thing can't happen anymore and, in fact, one of the reasons for the recent deficit limit showdown was because there was no way to bribe any of the Congress members with pork to convince them to switch sides... the cynic in me has trouble believing this.
This is based on decades and decades of social experiments throughout history. Scientists have studied the adults who were born during the 1918 influenza epidemic and have seen they have a lifetime of cognitive and health issues. We also see these adverse health effects from the Dutch famine of 1944 and the Romania Abortion Ban that led to an unsustainable influx of children to poorly-supplied orphanages, and even more recent studies of children who were in utero when their mothers encountered the stress of natural disasters are just a few examples of scientists stepping in to observe the long-term effects of tragic circumstances, and the effects clearly last a lifetime.
Let me be clear about this because the science is clear on this: growing up in poverty results in a lifetime of major health and cognitive development issues. People too easily forget that there is a strong scientific imperative behind social welfare. If society allows poor children to go malnourished or grow up under intense stress, then society pays for the rest of that person's life through health care costs, imprisonment, and other maladaptations.
An ostrich egg is 13-15 centimeters and is considered a cell; however, I think the scientists here are referring to this species being the largest single-celled organism. The ostrich egg isn't an organism and, IMO, doesn't qualify as life since it doesn't consume energy, reproduce, etc, but simply provides and environment for the multicelluar life to grow within it. It is definitely a single-cell, however, and so the article is technically inaccurate in its verbiage.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what I was thinking. American rugged individualism VS Chinese collectivism. I know many people who complain that Chinese students all get together in a huddle every night in college to do their homework, seeing the practice as cheating instead of collaboration. The plagiarism is a problem, but it probably follows from cultural differences as well. In America, taking ideas from one source is plagiarism, taking from many is research.
I would argue that if Andrew Brietbart is a "profession journalist," then the journalistic standards don't mean anything.
What outrages me isn't that a blogger got hit with defamation, it's that journalists don't. What Crystal Cox did was clearly unethical, but it sounds to me that her actions would be perfectly legal if she was part of a news organization. So Andrew Breitbart can fabricate photos of OWS protesters defecating on cars, edit a clip of a USDA official to make her look racist against white people, and send out videos of ACORN officials edited to make it look like they are giving criminal advice on conducting a child prostitution rings (when two DA's found otherwise), and that's all perfectly okay because all of this disinformation and defamation is being executed by "professional journalists"???
The idea that journalists are somehow licensed to defame others is what offends me about this ruling.
Thank you so much for posting this. I find the Supreme Court transcripts fascinating and agree with critics who argue the Supreme Court cases should be broadcast live on C-SPAN since they are infinitely more fun than watching an empty House do nothing all day.
On the topic of the Supreme Court debating scientific issues, it's interesting that the National Academies Press publishes a manual intended to educate judges on how to evaluate scientific evidence. The anecdotal evidence implies that not many of them read it.
I donated money to this project because it sounds like a hard-SF storyline that focuses on technology and a positive vision of humanity's future. We need more of that.
Where I differ with the people working on this project is the idea that CGI is somehow inherently a bad thing. CGI has lowered the bar for people to make science fiction films because the effects are so cheap and greenscreens make them so easy to implement. 20 years ago, a special effects-laden film cost far more to make and the studios made sure there was a marketable plot and storyline to ensure its success. Today, Hollyweird can churn out movie after movie on cheap, so a lot of films that we would once consider B-movies now have A-Movie special effects (Transformers, the glut of superhero films, etc) so it's getting harder and harder to know what's going to be a great film from previews alone. CGI and an overabundance of funding has produced this state of things, but great films are still being made that use CGI.
Like I said, I support this project because I support Hard SF, but it does sound a little snobby to claim their foregoing of CGI will make their film better. It reeks of misguided nostalgia.
To quote Buckminster Fuller, "Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value." The fact that you apparently take great pride in your ignorance is not as disturbing as the fact that there are millions of people just like you, people who think it's their right to throw paint and used motor oil into "properly managed landfills." You're deluding yourself and poisoning the rest of us.
When we talk about "mandatory" recycling or composting we are talking about one more bin to throw things in that the trash people will pick up. Is it really such and incredible #$%&ing inconvenience for you to throw plastic bottles into one container and food waste into another? Are you really that incredibly unfathomably unconscionably lazy or are you just too incompetent to properly sort your waste into three different categories or is it just that you are so ridiculously self-centered that you really think having to sort the waste you dump into your local community is some kind of violation of your human rights?
I met people like you at the hobby shop where I used to work when I put out a recycling bin. Some of the teenagers actually refused to throw their cans in the bin claiming I was forcing my hippy environmentalist beliefs on them and it was their right to not have to throw an aluminum can into a separate #$%&ing bin. I don't believe this is about civil rights, it's about an absurd over-inflated sense of entitlement. My stereotype of people who think like you is that you live in a rural community or sprawling suburb. Luckily, people who live in the city understand there are small inconveniences, like throwing food into a separate bin to reduce strains on overflowing landfills, that we accept to make life easier for all of us.
What's funny is that even people on the Right can't tell you why they hate Soros so much. The man is a self-made billionaire who grew up in Hungary during the time of Nazi Germany, and is one of the most successful capitalists in the world. He is largely credited with being crucial to the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe, where he pumped millions of dollars into supporting pro-democratic programs and independent media. On top of that he is an incredible philanthropist contributing millions of dollars to organizations all over the world in support of spreading democracy, egalitarianism, and toppling oppressive regimes.
As far as I can tell, the reason they hate him is because he made getting George Bush out of office his top priority in 2003, arguing that America, as leader of the world, was taking the world off course with the War on Terror. He also supports death with dignity through assisted suicide and drug policy reform. The man is obviously a monster.
Jon Stewart also had a fantastic takedown of right-wing conspiracy theories about Soros.
I was actually impressed with the idea of automatic spending cuts, especially with Republicans putting their sacred cow of Defense spending on the table. I was certain the committee wouldn't reach a deal since they previously rejected the Democrat's offer of 3 to 1 spending cuts to revenue increases and with Obama finally showing some backbone, so I was really curious to see how the automatic cuts would go into effect legislatively.
Turns out the next step will be making sure those cuts don't happen. Because, while Congess can't agree on how to cut spending, they can apparently agree on how to keep spending in place.
I wish America had a system that allowed viable third party candidates... but, as it stands now,Americans will have to choose between corrupt and corrupter in 2012. We are so screwed.
D'oh... Just saw that the /. summary made such an historical reference with MUDs, etc... My complaint was about the article...
It would have been nice to include a little deeper history in this article, like maybe talking about the Jargon File, the dictionary for old school hackers that's filled with fascinating history about the technology and innovations behind some of the terms we still use online today.
Or would that detract from the idea that cultural-shifts resulting in lexical shifts is some kind of totally new and unexpected phenomenon?
I couldn't figure out a way to fit it into the summary, but I was bothered by the way Reuters recently handled their story claiming George Soros was funding Occupy Wall Street (OWS), first running a headline claiming a connection but with a story that offered very spurious evidence of monetary support for the movement, and then taking that story down under heavy criticism from other news sources and reposting the exact same story with a headline absolving Soros of any connection to OWS with a new link, while simultaneously killing the link to the old story without any explanation.
It was extremely problematic for people debating online, as my conservative friends suddenly had their link go dead, while my liberal friends suddenly had the same story but with a headline supporting their position. It was the same exact story, but since nobody RTFAs, the headline was the most important piece of evidence in the debate.
I post this example, not to dredge up some off-topic flamewar about OWS, but because it seems like a pretty clear cut case of how we don't want news agencies operating. I read a comment on Slashdot recently that the reason we aren't allowed to modify our comments is to prevent users from editing out things in order to accuse others of strawman attacks. If you screw up a fact, you post a correction. It seems News Organizations owe us the same courtesy.
I closed my Netflix account during all the price-hike hoopla and really haven't missed it at all (started reading a lot more). So I guess I'll do what I do with TV shows (since we don't own a TV) and wait until they're out on DVD or streaming somewhere else for free online. I'm patient enough to do this with Futurama, so I can wait for more episodes of this awesomely twisted show.
...I could see the appeal of something like this. I have had to work with some incredible assholes in my time, and it's a situation that puts incredible stress on people in the workplace. We hired one guy who made everyone completely miserable with his confrontational, in-your-face style, and no one knew how to deal with him because we were all introverted geeks. It took months to get him fired because it was so hard to articulate what exactly his offenses were beyond simply, "He's an in-your-face jerk."
I could see this software being useful in a very limited scope for situations just like this. It's like software for monitoring browsing habits in the workplace... good managers use it sparingly when there's an employee underperforming who always seems to be checking his email, bad management uses it to squeeze every last little bit of productivity out of its workers.
The same principle of judicious use applies here. Management can use it to solve some special cases, or they can go Big Brother with it and make everyone miserable.
There was an art piece at the MOMA's Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit titled "Victimless Leather" which involved growing a batch of stem cells into the shape of a tiny jacket. The piece eventually had to be "killed" when it grew out of control... as stem cells tend to do (and why their promise is over-exaggerated because they give you cancer).
I appreciate people working on innovations like this, but we are decades and decades away from getting anything practical out of it. The meat we get from mother nature has billions of years of natural selection going into it, making it grow more efficiently. We co-evolved with it, meaning we are selected to make to the most efficient use of its nutrients. It's going to take a lot of time in the lab to match the nutrition and efficiency of muscle meat produced from 3.5 billion years of evolution.
I think a Link to the Original Images is preferable. These are much larger, there are more of them, and some are javascript rollovers.
I think a Link to the Original Images is preferable. These are much larger, there are more of them, and some are javascript rollovers.
I couldn't find it at the time I wrote this post, but a decade ago I stumbled upon an essay by Martin Carcasson that really blew my mind in how sophisticated it was in tackling the issue of of having informed debate in America. I couldn't find the original essay, but I did find is now a Professor at Colorado State and has continued writing articles on the subject. I only glanced through a few of them, but his writing continues to be very insightful. I've downloaded the essays to read later. Really advanced and insightful stuff.
I'm a Dilbert fan without being an Adams fan, but I like some of what he's written in this opinion piece, which is essentially about creating a more informed and more engaged voting public. What I read into this is that we already have a fourth branch of government, it's the American people, and government should make it easier for them to play a part into it. I think that's admirable.
At one point in the essay, Adams talks about an online forum where people can debate ideas and learn about issues. It reminded me of Dr. David Brin's Disputation Arenas, where people can publicly debate an issue in a moderated forum, maybe have referees to flag logical fallacies or off-topic statements, figure out what everyone can agree on, set those aspects aside and figure out where the ideal mean lies for us as a people.
Gotta say it takes some cahones for the administration to maintain a site like this. On the first page of open petitions are "We demand a vapid, condescending, meaningless, politically safe response to this petition." and "Stop Lying." I give Obama points for efforts like this, even though some of the petitions I see there are valid enough to make me detract even more points. I highly doubt this site will continue to exist in future administrations.
It sounds like you're screwed and your music collection is no longer accessible. MSN Music Store, Yahoo! Music Unlimited, Wal-Mart... FTFA it sounds like when each one of these services was discontinued, the customers were warned that all the music they purchased would no longer be accessible. This is why I crack the DRM off every ebook I buy from Amazon (I know I should go to the B&N Nook) and why I won't "buy" streaming movies from them that get stored in their cloud.
Too bad the article only covers music. There are so many half-brained lessons from the history of DRM in other media. Remember DIVX from 1998 the DVD you bought and then had to pay each time you wanted watch it? And don't even get me started on video games, where DRM has condemned so many great titles to the graveyard of unplayability.
Thanks for the excellent tip! I found this article on how to do it in Chrome. Much appreciated. : )
They didn't simulate zero-g. A zero-gravity environment results in an average 1% loss of Bone Mineral Density per month (PDF) and muscle atrophy; however, these detrimental effects on the body might be countered by putting astronauts in a centrifuge for some time each day. We have seen plenty of astronauts experience extended periods of time in zero-g and in isolation though. The record for the longest space flight is held by Valeri Polyakov, who spent 437 days traveling 300,765,000 km orbiting the Earth on the Mir space station and who said his experience showed that “it is possible to preserve your physical and psychological health throughout a mission similar in length to a flight to Mars and back.”
Someone posted a link to this search engine in a previous thread, and I have to say, despite it's faults, it has become my search engine of choice. The results it provides aren't as good as Google's, but the !bang syntax has been incredibly convenient. If I want to search Google I type: "!google search for this" if I want to search Bing I type: "!bing search for that". I can do the same for Amazon, Flickr, Java, Google Images ("!images"), and lots of other sites.The keys typed that I waste on "!google" I save in page loads by not having to go to all of these sites and type in my search there.
As useful as this function is, I do hope duckduckgo.com improves their search algorithm.
Had a great example of this at the Coast Guard base where I used to work. USCG needed its fleet of H65 helicopters upgraded. Our base could upgrade each helicopter engine for less than $100k; however, some Senator in Mississippi tied up the funding until the USCG base in his state got some helicopters to upgrade too. We upgraded 30 helicopters at $100k each, the base in Mississippi upgraded 3 helicopters at $1 Million each.
My understanding is that this sort of thing can't happen anymore and, in fact, one of the reasons for the recent deficit limit showdown was because there was no way to bribe any of the Congress members with pork to convince them to switch sides... the cynic in me has trouble believing this.
This is based on decades and decades of social experiments throughout history. Scientists have studied the adults who were born during the 1918 influenza epidemic and have seen they have a lifetime of cognitive and health issues. We also see these adverse health effects from the Dutch famine of 1944 and the Romania Abortion Ban that led to an unsustainable influx of children to poorly-supplied orphanages, and even more recent studies of children who were in utero when their mothers encountered the stress of natural disasters are just a few examples of scientists stepping in to observe the long-term effects of tragic circumstances, and the effects clearly last a lifetime.
Let me be clear about this because the science is clear on this: growing up in poverty results in a lifetime of major health and cognitive development issues. People too easily forget that there is a strong scientific imperative behind social welfare. If society allows poor children to go malnourished or grow up under intense stress, then society pays for the rest of that person's life through health care costs, imprisonment, and other maladaptations.
An ostrich egg is 13-15 centimeters and is considered a cell; however, I think the scientists here are referring to this species being the largest single-celled organism. The ostrich egg isn't an organism and, IMO, doesn't qualify as life since it doesn't consume energy, reproduce, etc, but simply provides and environment for the multicelluar life to grow within it. It is definitely a single-cell, however, and so the article is technically inaccurate in its verbiage.